Still Lake - Anne Stuart [29]
She’d lost him. “Who will be?”
“Both of them,” Grace said firmly. “I won’t have it any other way. So tell me, young man,” she continued with one of her rapid shifts of conversation, “why did you come here? It’s the murders, isn’t it?”
She’d ensconced herself on the old sofa, her fluttery garments draped around her, giving him time to school his answer.
“What murders?”
Grace’s cackle verged on the macabre. “You know as well as I do what murders. You saw him.”
“Saw who?”
“Saw whom,” she corrected him, sounding like his seventh-grade English teacher. “The killer. You saw him.”
“What makes you think it was a him?”
“He,” she corrected him again in her daft, cordial voice. “Semen.”
He blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Semen. The girls had just had sex. Women don’t produce semen.” She smiled sweetly.
“No, they don’t,” he agreed, rattled. “Grace, it’s the middle of the night. I really think I ought to take you back home.”
“Oh, would you? That would be so kind. I’m sure Sophie is terribly worried about me. She does worry, poor girl. She needs a man.” She eyed him speculatively. “I’m not sure you’d do, though.”
“I wasn’t offering.”
“You don’t need to,” Grace said. “You’re an intelligent man—I can tell as much from a glance, and any intelligent man would find my Sophie worth the effort.”
“Effort?”
“But I don’t think you’ll do. I think perhaps you should go away.”
He struggled to follow her line of reasoning. “Why?”
“Because you saw him,” she said with a touch of asperity. “And he’ll have to kill you. Go away.”
“Who will? Who would have to kill me?” He should have known better than to ask her. She looked and sounded perfectly reasonable, sitting there in the middle of the night in her bathrobe and flyaway gray hair, but she jumped from one subject to another the way a hummingbird sampled flowers.
Grace rose, suddenly majestic. “Take me home, young man. It’s getting late. Sophie will be quite cross with you for keeping me out so long.”
Griffin sighed. “With any luck your daughter will never know you’ve been out wandering. Let’s just hope she’s asleep when we get back there.”
“I wasn’t out wandering. I was paying a social call.” Grace rose, smoothing her skirt as if it were layers of crinoline. “You shouldn’t underestimate me. I know exactly what I’m doing.”
He looked into her soft, hazy blue eyes, and for a moment he thought he saw the sharp glint of intelligence there. It must have been a trick of the shadows. Or was it? Was Spacey Gracey really as spacey as she wanted people to believe?
“Maybe you do,” he said.
She was a little woman, much smaller than her luscious daughter, and the look she cast up at him was almost coquettish. “I’d tell you to button your shirt but I’m rather hoping you’ll distract Sophie with that nice chest of yours.”
Shit. He began buttoning the soft flannel shirt he’d grabbed. He hadn’t even been thinking about the tattoo, but Grace would have been hard put to see it with the shirt over him. The snake coiled over his left hip, usually hidden by clothing, but he wasn’t wearing a belt and the jeans hung low on his hips. If he’d moved the wrong way the shirt could have exposed the tattoo. Not at all what he wanted. He looked completely different from the man who’d been dragged away for murder twenty years ago. But the tattoo was still the same.
He should have had it removed. Would have, too, except that Annelise had always hated it, and it had become a matter of principle. Besides, he had a sort of affection for it. The tattoo was part of who he was, who he had been, and you couldn’t escape from the past. It made you who you were today.
He wasn’t sure how pleased he was with the kind of man he’d grown into. But he wasn’t ready to wipe out the rebellious young drifter completely with a bit of laser surgery. Not until he found out the answers to the questions that haunted him.
His life had always been dogged by luck, both good and bad. Bad luck to have