Twice Kissed - Lisa Jackson [102]
“I don’t think so, Thane,” she said, refusing to be seduced by words she’d wanted to hear so many years ago. “I think you showed up because you needed my help. Period.” She walked back to the desk and plopped down in the chair, then caught sight of Mary Theresa’s Rolodex. “Who did the detective say was the last person to see Mary Theresa?”
“A cashier at a gas station. But that doesn’t seem to have panned out. Anyway, Henderson also said something about the guy making a mistake and being someone always on the lookout for cheap publicity. There were some time discrepancies as well.”
“Whether the clerk saw Mary Theresa or not, the last person to really talk with her was you, right?”
“That we know about,” he allowed.
She stared hard at him. “And, before she met with you, she saw the people she worked with, right? Craig Beaumont and the other people at the station. Maybe her secretary.”
“As I remember it.”
“Me, too.” She flipped through the well-used cards and as she did, the names she’d heard from Mary Theresa jumped out at her: Craig Beaumont, Syd Gillette, Robert Inman, Dr. Michelle Kelly, Maggie and Becca McCrae, Wade Pomeranian, Thane Walker…along with names she didn’t recognize at all.
Eyeing the telephone and answering machine, she pushed the play button and listened to several hang-ups as well as calls from the television station; her agent, Ambrose King; Eve Lawrence; Detective Henderson; and the first of her own desperate telephone messages. “Mary Theresa, this is Maggie. If you’re there please pick up…Mary Theresa?…Oh, okay, Marquise, are you there?” A pause. “Look, I, um, I got a message from you—you know the kind you used to send—well, at least I think I did, and I need to talk to you, so please call me back. I’m still at the ranch in Idaho…”
“What kind of a message?” Thane asked as the recorder clicked off and Maggie felt like a fool.
“Nothing.” She shook her head.
“No, you said that you received a message.” He crossed the room to the desk and pushed the play button again. To Maggie’s mortification, they heard her desperate plea all over again. “What did you mean?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Like hell, lady. I think you just made the point that we were in this together and we shouldn’t keep secrets, so what kind of message?”
“Let it go. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”
She tried to breeze past him, but his fingers locked around her wrist and he spun her to face him. “Try me,” he suggested, his face so close to hers she could feel his heat, smell that same particular scent that was uniquely his.
“Drop it, Thane.”
“Not on your life.” His eyes held hers—steely blue and calculating. The fingers around her wrist tightened.
“All right,” she said, ignoring the fact that her breath seemed to disappear deep in the back of her throat. She hesitated, but her heart was pumping, adrenaline surging through her blood. “Try this on for size, cowboy. Every so often—well, more like once in a blue moon—Mary Theresa and I…we communicate, I guess that’s the only way to say it, but we do it without speaking.”
“Without speaking?” His eyes narrowed as if to see deeper into her mind and find out if she was lying to him. He was studying her so closely she wanted to move out of his line of vision, but she was trapped, her arm held fast.
“That’s right. And I’m not talking about letters or e-mail or sign language, Walker. This is mental telepathy.”
“Bull.”
She raised a knowing eyebrow. “You asked.”
“Yeah, well, try again.”
“It doesn’t work often and it only works one way.”
“How’s that?” he said, skepticism deepening the craggy lines at the corners of his eyes.
“Mary Theresa can throw some kind of inner voice and I…I can hear it.”
“Just you?”
“Just me.”
He snorted in derision.
“It doesn’t matter how many miles we’re apart, I can still hear her.”
“Sure.”
“You asked,” she reminded him.
His smile was cold as deepest winter. “So what have you been ‘hearing’ from her lately?”
“Not enough.”
“But something.”
She licked her