Just Before Sunrise (23 page)

Garvin found his way up and around to the little hilltop where Sarah Linwood had her house. He didn't consider why he was there or what he expected to accomplish, just that he had to do something. He'd opted out of going back up to his house to look for traces of Vic Denardo. There would be none.

And staying with Annie Payne hadn't been an option. He needed distance. Waiting for her at her gallery had been torture. He'd been in San Francisco trying to talk himself out of barging in on Sarah Linwood when the call came from Yuma. The arrow of fear had struck hard and deep, the doubts, the questions. What if Denardo had decided to coerce Sarah's whereabouts out of Annie? What if he'd hurt her? Garvin had grown used to worrying about no one but himself. His life was more comfortable for him that way. Easier.

His life was neither comfortable nor easy with Annie in it. Yet he was having trouble imagining returning to the life he'd had before her.

He jerked his car into a parking space, pulled on the brake. Seeing her had been a different kind of torture than waiting. He'd sensed layers of strength and vulnerability and secret desires all mixed up together, motivating and scaring and thrilling Annie Payne, launching her into her new life in San Francisco, into her dangerous deal with a reclusive artist she didn't know. She would take him as he was or not at all. She wouldn't try to soften his hard edges. No. Annie Payne would leave his hard edges up to him to sort out—or she'd tell him to go to hell.

He jumped out of his car and pounded up to Sarah's little pink bungalow, San Francisco sprawling, sparkling, one hundred and eighty degrees around him. He knocked hard on the front door. "It's Garvin MacCrae, Sarah. Open up. We need to talk."

She had her door locked this time, probably for no reason, just as she left it unlocked for no reason. It was a few minutes before she pulled it open, regarding him with a fatalistic attitude found faintly annoying. The penchant for drama was still there, beneath the weird clothes and artist's discipline. "I was just washing up," she said, and left the door standing open as she gave him her back and withdrew inside.

Biting back a sharp response, Garvin noticed the chill as he entered the house and wondered if Sarah didn't bother with heat or even might have had the windows open. Given her eccentricities, neither would surprise him. But she seemed unaffected by the cold. Using her cane, she returned to her kitchen sink and turned on the faucet. She grabbed a bar of cheap soap and stuck it under the hot, steaming water. She seemed absorbed in the process, almost transfixed by her own hands as she soaped them up.

"I can't seem to get any work done lately," she said without looking around at him. "I suppose it's to be expected."

"You've had a lot on your mind. Your homecoming—"

"That's not what's distracting me." She rinsed her hands one at a time, surgeonlike. "I'm worried about Annie."

"Because of Vic," Garvin said, feeling his own knot of fear.

She nodded, grabbing a towel. She had on a paint-splattered denim smock over brown stretch polyester pants, her socks two different shades of pink, her white Keds scuffed. As far as Garvin knew, Sarah Linwood still had access to the funds in her personal trust. Whether or not she reunited with her family, she wasn't penniless.

She dried off her fingers one by one, almost ritualistically. "I really can't believe Vic killed anyone."

Garvin didn't respond. She settled back against the sink, letting it support her weight. Her brow furrowed in the silence, making her seem plainer, older, but in spite of her bizarre clothes, her obviously troubled state of mind, he could detect vestiges of the woman she'd been. There was a sudden quiet dignity about her, a self-control. The crankiness of only moments ago had vanished.

"That doesn't mean," she went on, "that he's innocent, just that I don't see him killing my father over the relatively small amount of money that was involved. Father could be an ornery old bastard, but Vic knew that going in."

"You don't think he had a motive to kill Thomas?"

"No." She fixed her level gaze on Garvin. "And I didn't supply him with one."

Garvin acknowledged her words with a curt, neutral nod. He ventured deeper into the kitchen area, noting the jars and coffee cans of soaking brushes and other artist's tools neatly lined up on the sink, the paint-stained rags drying on a folding clothes rack. A large wastebasket overflowed with cast-off drawings, a tangible sign of Sarah's frustrating day.

"If my arthritis flares up again," she said, watching him, "I could end up unable to paint."

Surprised at her matter-of-fact tone, Garvin glanced at her. "Does that bother you?"

"Not really. I just think it's ironic. I wonder who I am my entire life—for a long time I didn't even have the courage to wonder. When I try to find out, I bring scandal onto my family, and possibly even murder. Then I develop rheumatoid arthritis. I can't help but wonder if I'd never asked the question, if I'd never tried to become who I am, if any of this ever would have happened."

"Is that what this is?" Garvin could hear the coldness in his voice. He gestured, taking in the small house, the near poverty in which she, a San Francisco Linwood, lived. "Your penance?"

Sarah smiled sadly. "No. No, Garvin, this is all just an extension of who I am. Not who I've become. Who I
am.
It's not that I'm trying to pretend to be poor when I'm not. I see no nobility in poverty, or in wealth, either, for that matter. I just don't care. How I live isn't a statement about anything. It's just how I live."

"Your work—"

"I want other people to see it, react to it. I want that very much, Garvin. I won't pretend I don't." She reached for her cane, leaned up against the sink. "I don't know if you understand how confused and angry I was five years ago. I was in the grip of a gambling addiction I didn't understand—insisted upon denying. I
liked
to gamble. It felt so good. And Vic—" Her features softened. "I was in love for the first time in my life with a man my father couldn't abide."

"You were a grown woman," Garvin said, not without sympathy.

"Yes." Clutching her cane, she moved slowly from the sink. "Yes, I was. But that never seemed to make any difference, did it? I'm not like you, Garvin. You knew Father only tolerated you because you were on your way up and just didn't give a damn what he thought. And because of Haley. He adored Haley."

"She seemed to understand him."

Sarah nodded, still moving slowly, painfully. "Vic used to advise me to get out of San Francisco. 'Hit the road,' he'd say in that way of his. 'Forget the old fart.' But I never asked him to intervene, I never asked him to kill—" She raised her eyes to Garvin, tears shining on her pale, wrinkled cheeks. "He was my father. I loved him."

"Then why did Vic go to him that night? If not on your behalf, if not for money—"

"I think he went to talk sense into Father."

"About you?"

"Vic—in his own way, Vic was trying to help me with my gambling addiction. It's been my worst fear that he went to Father that night to talk to him about ways to help me, and they ended up arguing..." Her voice trailed off.

"And Vic ended up killing him," Garvin finished for her.

She nodded.

"From what he's said to Annie, he seems to think you set him up. Any idea why?"

"No."

"It doesn't mean he's innocent. It could just mean he thinks you set him up to take the fall. You knew in advance he was going to kill your father, you let him do it, and you made sure he would be the police's chief suspect."

"But why would I do that?"

Garvin shrugged. "Guilt. To take the heat off yourself. Maybe no reason."

She sank into a cheap wooden chair at her table and stared out the window. "I didn't put him up to killing my father. I didn't know he would do it. I don't even know that he did do it." She turned to Garvin, her gaze vivid, penetrating. "I don't want to believe that he did."

"If he didn't," Garvin said, "then who did?"

She shut her eyes and slumped back in her chair, and he looked around at her finished canvases, felt their power, that pull of nostalgia and betrayal, hope and despair. They were impossible to ignore, demanding his attention, insisting on a response. Before Vic Denardo, gambling, family murders, and five years on her own, Sarah Linwood had been easy to ignore, had never demanded anyone's attention or insisted on anyone's response. But could she have killed her own father and niece? Could she have arranged to have them killed?

Her jaw set, and she opened her eyes. "What do you want from me, Garvin?"

"There's a dinner tonight," he said.

Sarah paled, swallowed visibly, and nodded for him to go on.

"The foundation established in Haley's name is holding its annual dinner." He moved closer to the table, looming over her, deliberately not sitting down. "I think you should go. It's a small, private affair, but just public and formal enough that people will be on their best behavior. Then everyone will know that Sarah Linwood's back in town. It won't be Annie's secret anymore."

She nodded, grim-faced and so pale Garvin thought she might faint. She ran a trembling hand over her mouth, and a small moan escaped. "Garvin...My God, you don't know what you're asking of me. I should never have come home. Never."

"Sarah, I'm not going to say I can understand what you've been through. I can't. Whatever your role in the murders, or Vic's, whatever I believe or suspect—I'm not going to stand here and judge you, tell you I understand when I don't." He leaned over the table. "But I know this, Sarah. Annie Payne has seen enough of Vic Denardo."

"What time?" Sarah asked, her voice croaking.

"I can pick you up at seven."

"And Annie?"

"Cynthia invited her. Under the circumstances, I think it'd be best if she skipped this one."

"She won't want to, you know."

"No. She won't want to. I'm meeting her at her gallery to make sure she gets home safely. I'll talk to her."

"If I were you, Garvin, I would remember that Annie Payne has no illusions that she's anything but alone in the world. Her life's stripped all of that away." Sarah settled back, calmer. "Perhaps she's luckier than the rest of us."

Garvin thought of her standing in her gallery with her big dog and her eyes wide with fear, determination, anger. She was pragmatic and self-reliant, and she understood on a gut level that life was unpredictable and unruly. But he'd also sensed in her a secret desire to believe in permanence, to find something that would last through the next storm that swept through her life.

"I should have known," Sarah mumbled to herself, "that nothing good could have come from my return home. I should have stayed away—"

"Playing the martyr won't help now, Sarah." His harsh tone surprised him, but he couldn't afford to have her sliding into the swamp of self-pity and regret. It wouldn't do anybody any good, including her.

Her vivid eyes fastened on him without anger. "I could pack up and be out of here before seven o'clock. I'm still a rich woman, you know. I could find someone to get me out of here."

Garvin shrugged. "It's your choice. I'm not going to baby-sit you. But running won't help. Vic'll still need to be convinced Annie doesn't know where you are."

"You always were a hard-hearted bastard, Garvin MacCrae. I wonder if Haley ever knew that about you."

She hadn't, he thought. Not Haley. She saw what she wanted him to be.

"Well, I suppose we often see in others what we need to see." Sarah waved him off, suddenly impatient. "Go on. Let me think. Come back at seven. If I've decided to go, I'll go. If not—well, then, I won't. I know you could force me, but you won't. You're hard-hearted, Garvin, but you're not cruel. You wouldn't force me to see my brother against my will."

He put one hand down on her cheap table and leaned toward her. "Let me make myself clear, Sarah. Annie Payne has Vic Denardo on her case because of you. If I have to stomp on your sensibilities and do something I wouldn't ordinarily do, I will."

"You're in love with her," Sarah said, shocked.

Garvin refused to listen. "Seven o'clock."

He tore open the door and shut it hard behind him, aware of Sarah Linwood staring after him as if she saw through to his heart better than he did. Playing the artist, the observer. Deciding he was in love with Annie Payne.

"Hell," he muttered.

He headed out across the Golden Gate, up to his house, where there was no Vic Denardo, no Annie Payne, nothing but the isolated life he'd crafted for himself in the years since Haley's death. He didn't stay. He drove too fast down to the marina. Michael Yuma had sandwiches, coffee, and commentary about his friend's surly mood, his own mood nicely unaligned with Garvin's.

"Should be a fun afternoon," Yuma said. "Think I'll go find some paint to scrape."

Ten minutes later, Ethan Conninger found his way into the supply store, where Garvin was still nursing a cup of coffee at the counter. Ethan had on one of his conservative money-manager suits. Garvin couldn't imagine being cooped up in an office again. It hadn't seemed confining five and ten years ago, but now—hell, he thought, there were days his own skin seemed confining.

Ethan slid onto the stool next to him. "You're just the man I'm looking for," he said. "Got a minute?"

"About that. There's coffee if you want it. It's fresh."

"No, thanks. Look, I don't want to stir up trouble, but I talked to Cynthia today. She's planning to take Annie Payne to lunch next week. Let her think it's because she's taking her under her wing."

"But that's not the case," Garvin said.

Ethan shook his head. "I'm not saying Cynthia won't want to help her out if she proves legit. It's just the kind of thing she'd do. But right now, I think she's afraid Annie Payne's up to something."

"Like what?"

"Who knows? It's that painting, Garvin. Five thousand dollars-"

Garvin pushed his mug of coffee away. "I know." Ethan looked uncomfortable. "I have a feeling this thing's not going away anytime soon. Something's not right. I stopped by Annie's Gallery before coming over here. The police were just leaving. I didn't go in. Look, Garvin, I don't want to put you on the spot, but if you know anything—" He blew out a sigh. "I don't know why the hell I don't just mind my own business. Cynthia can take care of herself."