Until Dark - Mariah Stewart [107]
“What kind of trouble had you been in?” she heard herself ask.
“I used to push open the screen in my bedroom window and climb out on the sunporch roof, then up into that big magnolia tree.” He grinned at her devilishly. “Want to know what I did then?”
She wasn’t sure she did.
“I used to climb up as high as I could go, and just sit there in the dark, waiting for Mrs. Flaherty, our next-door neighbor, to get undressed for bed.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“You were eleven years old.”
“I’d been watching her for two years.”
Kendra was speechless.
“Not enough yet? How ’bout this? Before I left to go out west that summer, you gave me money from your secret savings stash so I could buy something from an old Indian man who had stuff to sell.”
“Where was it? My secret stash.” Her voice had grown raspy.
“Under the floorboards in your closet,” he said without hesitation.
She sat down across from him at the table, the box of pancake mix still in her hands. He’d thrown so much at her, verbally, that she was having difficulty processing it all. Everything he’d said had been right on the money, hadn’t it? Still something nagged at her, begging her recall.
Kendra again studied his face, again tried to remember her brother’s features in detail. What might Ian look like today? The shape of the eyes, yes, the eyes were round, they could be right. The nose, tilted at the end, but as she’d once told Adam, a common enough trait.
If indeed Ian was alive, how might his features have matured?
Time and again, Kendra had aged photographs on paper to determine what someone gone missing for years might look like now, as an adult. But could she mentally age the face of a child whose features she could see only in her memory?
Kendra knew faces. Did she know this one?
“Are you going to make those pancakes for me?”
She rose without answering and continued on with the task he’d given her, all the while concentrating on his features, trying to sketch the child’s face within her mind.
“By the way, whatever happened to the Flahertys?” He leaned back with the air of one who was right at home.
“They got divorced.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” he nodded, “since she was screwing some other guy every time old Mr. Flaherty was out of town on business.”
She turned to look over her shoulder at him.
“I used to watch that, too.” His tongue licked at the side of his mouth. “She could sure put on a show, that Mrs. Flaherty. Who’d have thought that Melinda and Mike’s mom was such a hot ticket?”
Kendra turned back to the stove.
“And the Cronins, across the street?”
“They’re still there.”
“Really? Well, that was a pretty desirable neighborhood, from what I recall.”
“If you’re really Ian, you’d know what happened to Zach.” She turned to face him. Would he know about the body Adam said had been found in the cave? And if so, would he know how it came to be there?
“Now, there’s a name I haven’t heard in years.” His eyebrows raised, as if genuinely surprised that she’d asked.
“What happened to him?” Kendra repeated.
“Like anyone cares what happened to Zach.”
“I care.”
“Do you?” he scoffed. “Why?”
“He’s family.”
“As if,” he snorted. “Zach was a dumb shit who knew nothing about anything and was never going to be anything other than what he was. A colossally dumb shit.”
“How can you say that? I thought you were friends.”
“Friends? Me and Zach? I couldn’t stand him.”
“Then why was it so important to you to spend a month with him every year? Two weeks out here, two weeks out there. You always looked forward to his visits.”
“Well, if anything ever made me feel like a genius, it was having stupid Zach around,” he sneered. “He knew nothing. I mean, nothing. Didn’t you ever notice how he watched everything we did, before he did it? Or how carefully he listened, to see how things should be said?”
“No, frankly, I did not.”
“Yeah, dumb question on my part. You never noticed him at all.”
“Why would I? He was years younger than me and was always pretty quiet, as I remember. Frankly, I never gave much notice to any of your