Fear Familiar Bundle (159 page)

Eugene appeared at her elbow with a cut-crystal glass of the rich chocolaty liquor. "To your health, my dear." He produced his own glass of ruby red liquid, lifted in a toast.

Jennifer sat up, clinked glasses, and savored the taste of the liqueur.

To her astonishment, Familiar leapt from the sofa and attacked the stacked manuscript pages of Eugene's book. With two swats, he had the four hundred pages scattered across the floor.

"Now, Familiar." Disapproval made Eugene's voice harsher than normal. "If you're angry with Jennifer, take it out on her. Not on my book." He bent to gather up the pages and Familiar made another dive, pushing them completely out of order. Clapping his hands together, Eugene scatted the cat. "He is a torment tonight."

Jennifer got down to help put the manuscript together. For several moments they worked in silence, until Eugene held up a fistful of pages. "One's missing," he said. "Page ninety-five."

A guilty flush crept up Jennifer's neck. Tilting her face down, she hid behind the curtain of thick, dark hair.

"It was in the manuscript when I was at the library." Eugene stood, his face perplexed. "I read that page, came home and put the manuscript down right on this table and it hasn't been moved since." Awareness made him arch his brows. "Except for the few moments that I left it on the steps at the library when Tommy and I went around the building to examine the black hawthorns in the cemetery." He cast a glance at Jennifer. "There was a page of my manuscript at the library, where Tommy disappeared, wasn't there?"

Jennifer nodded, then finally met his gaze. "I took it. I found it and I took it, before anyone else saw it."

"That's tampering with evidence." Forgetting the manuscript at his feet, Eugene took a seat on his favorite chair beside the bay window and a fireplace. "You could be in serious trouble, my dear."

"It was an instinctive action." She wasn't trying to apologize, not really. "It was there, I saw the implications, so I took it. I knew you were innocent and I knew that page would make you look guilty."

Eugene sipped his port, his fingers stroking the brocaded arm of his chair as he thought. "Only trouble is, there might be a clue to Tommy's whereabouts in the manuscript."

"Meow!" Familiar leapt from under the coffee table onto Eugene's lap. "Meow!" he insisted.

"Familiar agrees," Eugene said, completely unperturbed by the cat's behavior. "In fact, that's why he knocked the manuscript over, to let us know about the clue."

"I think he was tattling on me." Jennifer gave the cat a dark look.

"Well, someone has to keep you honest." Eugene looked directly at her. "Stealing evidence."

"Protecting you," she countered.

"But I've done nothing wrong. I don't need protecting."

Jennifer started to speak, then stopped. There were times when Eugene Legander had too much trust in the basic goodness of humankind. He couldn't really believe that someone would set him up, out of jealousy, hatred, or whatever base motivation. It was just difficult for him to accept that some people were rotten.

"You're going to have to tell the police what you did." There was no arguing with Eugene's tone.

"Not in this lifetime." Jennifer put her glass on the table. "I acted out of an honest impulse to protect you. If I so much as hint that I disturbed evidence, it will only make you look twice as guilty, and possibly me, too."

"Jennifer, there might be something on that page that would help the police find Tommy. Whatever risk of embarrassment we run, it's certainly worth Tommy's and Mimi's lives."

It was exactly the thing that nagged at her. There was nothing on the page that would lead to the children. She'd read it over several times. Not a single thing. All it would do was implicate Eugene, and now her.

"There might be fingerprints." The writer had stood up and was pacing the floor.

She cowered at the thought. She'd crumpled the paper up and stuck it in her jacket pocket, never thinking it might contain some valuable evidence. No, she hadn't thought of that until much later.

"Where is it?" Eugene asked.

"In my jacket, in the car." She got up, also. It would be better to get this over with. She went out and fished around in her pocket until she found the ball of paper. Back inside, she held it out to Eugene.

"Oh, dear," he said, seeing the condition. He sat down and started to smooth it out on the sleek surface of the coffee table.

Before he could get it unwadded, Familiar was on the table patting it with a paw. "This isn't a toy," Eugene said.

"Maybe he's trying to show you the important part," Jennifer said, giving Familiar a look. "He's a rat fink."

His only response was a flick of his tail that caught her just under her nose.

"Wait a minute." Eugene held the page down and watched in fascination as Familiar slapped the top right hand corner. "Did you change the page number?" He shot a look across the room.

"I didn't change a thing. I just wadded it up." Despite her determination to keep a safe distance from Familiar, Jennifer leaned over to look. "Why would someone change the page number?"

"It's a clue."

"Meow!" Familiar leapt off the table and headed into the kitchen yowling a loud complaint.

"He's hungry." Jennifer shook her head. "He's finally got us stupid humans to understand the clue and now he's ready to chow down."

At the doorway of the kitchen, Familiar twitched his tail twice and licked his whiskers.

"Remarkable," Eugene said, getting up and following Familiar's disappearing tail.

"Don't give him anything except dry cat food." Jennifer was rewarded with an indignant meow from the cat, and she leaned back against the sofa and sipped her liqueur. The blasted cat was something special. But she had a major problem. If the page number was a clue to the whereabouts of the children, she was going to have to tell the authorities. And to do so, she'd have to admit she took the page, which would cast even more shadow on Eugene.

"Maybe Martha Whipple could
find
the page?" Eugene was standing ten feet away, staring at her.

"I hate to involve her."

"Just put the page in the library. She could find it there. I wouldn't enlist her in any deception. That wouldn't be fair, but she could discover the page and report it, which would serve the same purpose as you turning it in."

Jennifer sat up. "That might work. Except I'm not certain anyone would understand the importance unless they knew the page was left at the time and place Tommy was taken."

"Or you could give it to James, explain what happened and hope that he could explain it in the press." Eugene chuckled as he took his favorite chair. "Your enthusiasm is overwhelming. There's no easy way to do this."

She felt her newfound resolve evaporate. "That might work, too." She put her glass down and leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "Who do you think took the manuscript page?"

Eugene's brows drew together. "I was thinking about that in the kitchen when I was giving
le chat
a sampler of cheeses. He seems fond of the Brie. I did put the manuscript down for several minutes while I was helping some of the youngsters with their lizard lessons."

"I don't know if I want to hear this."

"I was demonstrating how still the lizard can be, and how they blend into the foliage. There were several chameleons outside the library, and I put them on different greenery, admonishing the children not to injure them. I was only out there a minute."

"And your manuscript was left unattended?"

"On one of the chairs."

"With Crush Bonbon right in the room." Jennifer didn't know if she was excited by the discovery or upset.

"Mr. Bonbon and a number of other people. I have to point that out, in all fairness."

"Parents. The library staff. Me. James. Who else?"

"Anyone could have been in the library. It is a public facility, and someone could have been in the stacks hiding, waiting for an opportunity."

"Was Tommy selected, or was he just convenient?" Jennifer felt her muscles involuntarily tense. Every time she really concentrated on the children, she felt so helpless.

"Deliberate. Both Mimi and Tommy were the would-be writers. They're the children who spent the most time with me."

Jennifer felt her apprehension grow. "Then if that's accurate, who's next?"

"Judith. Maybe Renee. Or it could be Stephanie."

"My God. We have to stop this. Listen to us, we're sitting here planning this out as if there's nothing we can do to stop this monster." She went to Eugene and sat on the arm of his chair. "We have to stop this, Eugene."

"I don't know if we can," he said, for the first time showing the desperation and despair he felt for the loss of the children. "God help us, I don't know what we can do."

James Tenet sat on Eugene's sofa and let his fingers stroke Familiar's silken hair. Jennifer, dressed in a soft peach suit complete with hose and heels, sat with her hands clasped in her lap, her features a study in contrition. The midmorning sun filtering through the semiclosed blinds seemed to bathe her in a celestial light, an image heightened by her pose.

"I wasn't thinking clearly. I just took the page from the steps and crammed it into my pocket." She spoke to her hands as if she were too timid to address James or Eugene.

Eugene produced the rumpled page and spread it out on the coffee table before James could say anything.

James glanced down at the paper but instantly looked back up at Jennifer. "This is serious," he said. He made no effort to write anything in his notebook.

"It was an act of innocence," Eugene insisted loudly. "She saw the page, thought I'd dropped it, and picked it up."

James never took his gaze from Jennifer. "Is that true?"

She swallowed, then lifted her crystal blue gaze to meet his. "No. I saw the page, thought it looked terribly incriminating, so I jammed it into my pocket to hide it. That's the truth."

She looked as sweet as an angel, and that made him deeply concerned. He paused for a long moment before he spoke. "Incredibly stupid." James made the pronouncement and waited again. "I said it was stupid." He leaned forward, trying to catch her elusive gaze. She wouldn't look up at him. The sheet of silky hair covered everything except her nose, casting even her full lips in shadow.

When he failed to get any reaction, he gave Eugene a worried look. "I've never seen her so docile."

Eugene shrugged. "She's been like this since she came over this morning and insisted that I call you. She wants you to go with us to the police when we turn the page in."

"Me?" James swiveled his head to look at Jennifer. For one split second he caught a lively blue gaze peeking out from under the hair. "Aha! You're up to something! I should have known that this demure, modest creature who sat before me, so contrite, was a fake, a cheap imitation of the real Jennifer Barkley."

"Oh, give it a rest," Jennifer snapped as her head came up. "I'm practicing for the benefit of the police chief. I took the page and I want to give it to them now. We think there's a clue in it." She picked it up and showed him the page number that had been changed.

"Ninety-eight. What could that mean?" James studied the page but his gaze slipped over the top to find Jennifer. Her blue eyes were crackling with determination, and he found that he much preferred her alive, every cell hopping with energy and mischief— rather than slunk down like a kicked dog.

"If we knew what it meant, I wouldn't have to go turn myself in," she said, getting up to pace the room. The pale silk suit shimmered like molten peach light along the contour of each muscle as she strode to the door, turned and came back like a tiger in a cage.

"This is going to look terrible." James studied the page, reading it several times before he spoke again. "Even if you can pull off acting like a saint, Anna Green will buy television time for this, and Crush Bonbon will do a week-long show."

"I know." Jennifer twisted her hands in an uncharacteristic gesture of sheer anxiety. "But we have to give the police the information. What if it leads to the children? Even knowing how terrible this is going to be for me, and especially for Eugene now that I've mucked it up, I'm still going to have to do it."

James picked up the paper. "Maybe not." One expressive eyebrow lifted over his dark eye. The hint of his ancestry showed in the inscrutability of his eyes, suddenly shuttered.

"What's cooking in that brain of yours?" Jennifer asked. "What are you thinking?"

"That I can turn the page in. I can say it was sent to the newspaper, and I didn't realize the importance so I threw it away, had second thoughts, and then decided to give it to the police."

Jennifer exhaled her breath. "You'd do that. For me?"

His smile was slow to arrive, lifting one corner of a mouth that had taken on a very sensual cast. "Of course, it's going to cost you."

"How much?" Jennifer swallowed. She didn't necessarily dislike the look in his eyes. In fact, it sent her blood rushing, tingling along the most intimate stretches of flesh. It was one payment she might look forward to making.

"You aren't in a position to negotiate," James observed.

His enjoyment was too much. It was one thing to tease, but he was getting far too much satisfaction over her predicament. She leaned forward, her eyes boring into his. "You think this is funny, don't you, you sick, demented word hustler. This is just a chance for you to flex your power. Neanderthal! Cretin! Low-life blood-sucking— "

"Jennifer!" Eugene was laughing. "Wherever did you learn such colorful descriptive words. I do believe
you
should be writing a book."

"I'm going to tear his heart out and eat it with a spoon!"

"That one you stole from a movie," James said calmly. "
Robin Hood,
the Sheriff of Nottingham."

"Then I'll carve your liver with a fish scaler!"

James couldn't help himself, but just to be on the safe side, he firmly grasped her wrists before he answered. "That sounds very original. Except fish scalers aren't very sharp."