Twice Kissed - Lisa Jackson [165]
“Aspirin, Mag. Don’t worry. Shit, I bet this headache is because of the damned pills I was given. I was getting pretty tired of being up there, let me tell you, but Eve kept telling me that each day I stayed away would only make my reappearance all that more newsworthy.” She laughed mirthlessly. “Guess who was played for the fool?”
“All of us.”
M.T. took another long swallow from her glass before tossing the rest of the water into the sink.
“You think Eve would kill two people for money? I met her…” Maggie shook her head. “That’s way too drastic.”
“She’s nuts, obviously.”
Maggie remembered the cool businesswoman she’d met with the other day.
“Okay—let’s assume for the moment that Eve’s back was against the wall and she…killed Renee to cover her tracks or because…because she thought you’d somehow escaped,” Maggie said, not believing her own words. “What happened then?”
“I’ll tell you on the way to the car. You have one, right?”
“A rental.”
“Good. Don’t want to use mine. Not yet. Not until I know what’s going on for sure.” She started for the front of the house. “When Renee didn’t come back after a couple of days, I got worried and started hiking out. My head was clearing up and I knew something was wrong. Really wrong. I was really pissed because I was in the middle of no-goddamned-where. Fortunately some kids were snow-mobiling and they found me, took me to the road, and I walked until I found the highway where some trucker out of Salt Lake picked me up.” She sighed. “The worst part of this is that no one recognized me. Here there was supposed to be this massive manhunt for me, and Eve was certain I’d catapult myself into instant fame—become a goddamned American icon and the three people who saw me didn’t know who I was. The trucker left me off at a restaurant outside of town—that’s where I saw the newspaper and learned about Renee. I took a cab here and even the stupid cab driver didn’t figure out who I was.”
“I don’t think that’s the worst part,” Maggie said, remembering all too vividly her sister’s egomania. “I think we’d better call the police,” Maggie added, walking toward the phone.
“Later. When I get my story straight.”
Maggie was thunderstruck. “What’s to get straight? You’ve got to tell them the truth. Period.”
“And blow all this? All the work? All the built-in publicity?” Mary Theresa asked, shaking her head. “Are you crazy? Maybe we can say this was all Renee’s idea and—”
“Stop it!” Maggie stopped dead in her tracks, and yanked hard enough on Mary Theresa’s arm to whirl her around. “It’s over. All over. Don’t you get it?”
“Don’t you?” Mary Theresa asked, dropping her bag. “I can’t give up my life. My career.”
“You don’t have to give it up…just change the course.” She met her sister’s gaze in the half-light, the only illumination the weak light from the street lamps that pierced the windows. “You’ve done it before. Often,” Maggie pointed out, then couldn’t keep from blurting out the question that had been nagging at her since she’d first seen her sister again. “Why did you throw your voice at me—why did you blame Thane for all of this?”
Mary Theresa sucked in her breath. She eyed her sister and shook her head slowly. “You really want to know?”
Maggie wasn’t certain. There were so many emotions, so many years, so many lies and deceptions all tangled up in Mary Theresa’s life with Thane, and yet she had to know the truth, hadn’t come all this way to close her eyes and bury her head in the sand. “Yes, M.T. I want the truth. All of it.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“There’s activity at Marquise’s house,” Hannah said, striding into Henderson’s office in the middle of the night as if she did it every day. Which she often did. Her lipstick had faded, her eyes were weary, but she was still pretty, even when she was all business. “Jane Stanton, Marquise’s neighbor, called, said there’s a car in the driveway. Jane’s certain that she saw a few lights when she was trying to get one of her menagerie in for the night.”