See How She Dies (7 page)

“London's missing!” she screamed. She was at the breaking point, nearly hysterical, not making a lot of sense. “I don't give a damn about your brother getting his ass in trouble again!”

Witt stepped between his son and young wife. “We don't know anything. Not yet. Let's not go jumping to conclusions.”

“That kid's always had a mean streak,” Katherine said. “I didn't want to believe it, but I wouldn't put it past him to—”

“Enough!” Witt turned his attention on his oldest son, who had watched the exchange with a hint of amusement on his lips. “You think this is funny?” he roared.

“No.”

A muscle ticked in Witt's jaw. “You act as if you know where your brother is.”

“Probably meeting a girl,” Jason replied, then shrugged indifferently. “He's always horny. My guess is he's spending the night with someone he picked up.”

Katherine looked stricken.

“Come on, Dad. Don't pretend you don't remember how it was when you were seventeen and horny as hell. Zach just wanted to get laid.”

Witt could barely remember, but he didn't give a damn. Not now. Not when London was missing.

 

Sirens.

Somewhere in the distance sirens screamed through the night. Horns honked, people shouted, and the pounding in his head wouldn't fade. Slowly Zach opened an eye. The floor tilted and for a second he didn't know where he was. He tried to move and pain ricocheted down his arm. He was woozy and his head felt as if it weighed a ton.

Gritting his teeth, he got to his knees and saw the dark stain of blood—his blood—on the cheap carpet. The room swayed. He was dizzy, his mind a blur, until he saw his bloody reflection in the mirror over the bureau. The Orion Hotel. Room 307. Sophia. All at once he remembered everything—the pretty girl, the hoodlums barging in and nearly killing him.

Why?

Because the thugs had thought he was Jason.

That bastard. He'd been set up. By his own brother. Zach pulled himself upright and staggered into the bathroom. His head throbbed, his gut ached from being kicked and his shoulder felt as if it were aflame, but somehow he managed to twist on the faucets and splash some water onto what had once been his face. He looked like hell. His eyes were already beginning to blacken and swell shut, blood crusted in his nostrils and clotted over his lips. One cheekbone was crushed, and a clean slice ran from the top of his head and down to his cheek.

His monkey suit, the tuxedo Kat had bought for him, was torn and stained with blood.

Shame and rage grappled with each other as he glared at his reflection. Jason had lured him with a hooker—a lousy hooker—and then let Zach take the fall. Jesus, he could have been killed.

But he hadn't been. He was alive and though he'd probably have to be stitched up at a hospital, he'd survive long enough to beat the living shit out of his brother. With a white terrycloth rag emblazoned with a black “O,” he cleaned his face, wincing when the warm water touched the knife wound. He didn't dare mess with his shoulder, couldn't afford to have it start bleeding again. Besides, he had to leave quickly. No way did he want to try and explain what had gone on here or give the thugs another chance at him. He'd have to sneak back into the Hotel Danvers and up to his own room without being spotted by anyone.

That shouldn't be too hard. According to his watch, it was almost four-thirty, nearly dawn. Witt's party should have wound down to nothing. Anyone who was still awake would be too drunk to notice Zach slinking in.

And then he'd hunt down his older brother and beat the piss out of him. Jason had a lot to answer for.

He slipped out of the room unnoticed, took the stairs to the first floor, and while the desk clerk had his back turned, Zach crossed the lobby, hurried past the magazine stand where some old coot was hoping to sell the early edition of the newspaper, and was out the door.

A summer storm had hit. Warm rain lashed from the sky, puddling on the sidewalk and drizzling down the back of Zach's neck. Ducking his head against the wind, he started back toward the Hotel Danvers. He hunched his shoulders—his legs felt as if they were made of rubber.

As he rounded a corner, he noticed the police cars, six or seven of them, parked in front of the hotel like vultures hovering over a dying sheep. Blue and red lights flashed against the side of the building and a dozen uniformed officers milled around the grounds.

Zach stopped dead in his tracks.

His anger turned to fear as he realized what had happened. Joey and his pal had probably left Zach and attacked his older brother right in his father's hotel! Jason was dead! Oh, God! Without realizing what he was doing, Zach started running, forcing his heavy legs forward, unaware of the sight he made, unafraid of the police with their riot sticks and guns. His footsteps pounded on the wet cement and he dashed across the cross streets, ignoring the early morning traffic, mindless of the brakes squealing and the horns honking as he flew toward the hotel.

Jason. Oh, God—

“Hey, you!” a loud male voice yelled.

Zach didn't pay any attention. He sidestepped between two parked cars.

“Kid, I'm talkin' to you. Stop!”

Zach was barely aware of anything except the fear that gripped him and a burning sensation in his shoulder.

“Police! Freeze!”

He skidded to a stop as the words sank in and whirled on the two officers who approached him. They emerged from one of the cars, their weapons drawn, no-nonsense written all over their features.

“Hands in the air! Do it!” Zach slowly raised his one arm. The other hung limply at his side. “Shiiiit, look at him, will ya, Bill?” the one with the loud voice said. “Looks like our boy here got himself into a fight. What happened to you? Haven't seen a little girl, have you?”

“What?” Zach figured they must be talking about Sophia, but he kept his mouth shut. Something wasn't right and he didn't trust the cops.

The stocky officer—Bill—smiled without a trace of humor in his suspicious eyes. “Don't you know who this is, Steve? It's the Danvers kid. The one who's supposed to be missing.”

“Zachary?”

“Yeah, so what?” Zach snarled.

The policemen exchanged glances and Zach's blood ran cold as ice. The tall one, Steve, said, “So where's the girl?”

The memory of her fight with her mother was vivid. It had started as an argument about a boy Adria had been seeing on the sly and accelerated quickly to a full-blown battle.

“The Lord thy God is a vengeful God, Adria—”

“He's not my God,” Adria, then eighteen, had said. “He's your God, Mom. Yours. But he's not mine!”

The slap had been one of the few blows Sharon Nash had ever inflicted upon her adopted daughter and it had stung deeper than Adria's skin; the pain had reached the thick hide that covered her soul.

“Don't you ever,
ever
talk like that again.” Sharon's breath, bitter from the coffee and tinged with the underlying odor of gin, had drifted over Adria's face. “Now, go wash up, and you forget about ever seein' that boy again. He's trash, y'hear. Trash. Just like his ma. Bad blood flows through his veins, girl.”

“And what kind of blood flows through mine?” Adria had demanded.

“We don't know—you don't need to.”

“Of course I do!”

“The Lord works in mysterious ways—he brought you to us for a reason. You're not to question His wisdom, y'hear?”

Adria had turned on her heel and fled to her little bedroom tucked under the eaves of the second story.

Years ago. But it seemed like yesterday and the argument seemed to ring through the tiny motel room near the airport.

She'd remembered the fight because of Zachary Danvers, another rogue, another man she should avoid. Though she'd only talked with him for a few minutes, she'd read all about him and his family,
her
family, and she hadn't been disappointed.

He was the black sheep of the family—kicked out of the house and cut out of his father's will more often than not. He did things his own way, didn't give a hang that he was born rich, and he was cursed with an irreverent spirit that just might want to help her find the truth.

Or maybe not. In the year before his father's death, Zach and Witt had seemed to bury the hatchet. Nonetheless, she knew instinctively that he would be her only ally in the family; the others appeared to be ready to pick at the old man's bones and take his fortune.

Maybe Zachary was like the rest.

If so, her battle would be harder than she'd thought.

She stared at her reflection in the mirror over the sink in the bathroom and bit her lip. Was she on a fool's mission? How could she ever hope to battle the powerful Danvers family? And why was Zachary Danvers—her half-brother, for crying out loud—so attractive?

Adria had always been drawn to the kind of men her mother despised—the rebels and misfits and loners whom Sharon Nash found repulsive. The Zach Danvers of the world.

Yet Zach was the one member of the Danvers family she instinctively turned to, the only one of her siblings she felt she could trust.
Trust!
She snorted a laugh at her own foolishness. Zachary Danvers was about as trustworthy as a hungry rattler with a trapped mouse. She walked into the bedroom and found a copy of the videotape that had led her to Portland and tucked it into her bag. As she snapped the purse closed, she wondered why she never seemed to learn that very important lesson about men.

Just because Zach might be her half-brother didn't mean he was safe. He was a predatory man, a man who would take any challenge, a man with a wild streak that he hadn't yet tamed, a man who wouldn't care one bit if she were his half-sister. There was an animal side of him—pure male and extremely lethal—that defied the bounds of kinship. He was sexy and rough and seemed about as stable as a blasting cap.

No wonder she was attracted to him. It had been the flaw in her character to be attracted to rough-and-tumble, irreverent boys and men all her life.

“You're an idiot,” she told her reflection as she stood barefoot on the tan carpet that had worn thin near the door.

So if she couldn't trust Zachary, who in the family could she trust? No one. Just as they couldn't trust her.

Half dressed in her lacy slip, she walked back into the tiny bathroom where her dress hung on a hook in the door. She'd found the dress in a boutique that handled “previously worn” items. A white, silky confection with a designer label, the gown fit her perfectly. She'd never owned such a creation before, never spent so much money on one dress—and a used one at that!

Her adoptive mother had been a frugal, God-fearing woman who didn't believe in women wearing ornaments of any kind—no jewelry save a gold wedding band or a gold cross suspended from a necklace and clothes that were practical, shoes that were sensible and sturdy.

Not so her father. Unlike his wife, Victor had been a dreamer, always expecting a larger crop than the land would yield, always certain that the next year, life would become easier.

And she'd believed him. When she'd discovered his secret, that he thought her to be London Danvers, she'd grabbed that gold-plated carrot he'd swung before her nose and held on with a death grip.

She'd done her research, read every clipping on the Danvers family and the kidnapping, searched through all the old papers in her father's desk, called her deceased Uncle Ezra's secretary, searching, digging through every scrap of information, praying she'd find some irrefutable evidence that either proved or disproved that she was the little lost princess. Ezra Nash, a lawyer known to bend the law, had handled the adoption. Either he hadn't bothered with records, or they'd long-since been destroyed, or there was a secret surrounding her birth that he'd wanted to keep hidden.

She'd fought the anticipation that had raced through her bloodstream when she'd learned that she might be London Danvers, that she might finally discover her true identity. She told herself the chances that she was the missing heiress were a billion to one, but in the end, she'd followed her heart—her father's dream—and driven her beat-up Chevy steadily westward to Portland, London's hometown. She'd nearly convinced herself that she was London Danvers, believed that she would finally find her family, and after the initial shock had worn off, they would welcome her with open arms. Now, as she tilted her head and screwed on the back of her zirconium earrings, she bit her lower lip. The teardrop earrings sparkled in the light, as if they were diamonds, but they were fakes, made to look like expensive jewels when they were really cheap and common.

Like you.

No! She wouldn't believe the speculation she'd heard all her life from the people in the small town where she'd grown up. Wouldn't!

She ran a brush through her hair and started working with the long, black curls. Wild, “witchy hair,” her adoptive mother had often called the long, riotous waves that Adria didn't bother taming, and she was right.

She planned to crash the party celebrating the grand opening of the Hotel Danvers. It was time to face the family. She'd tried to call Zachary Danvers after their first meeting in the ballroom, but hadn't been able to get past the hotel reception desk and though she'd left messages, Zachary hadn't seen fit to call her back. She hadn't bothered trying to reach anyone else in the family. She knew too much about them to try and trust any of them. Zachary was the one with the least to lose, the only one of Witt's children to make something of himself on his own; the others—Jason, Trisha, and Nelson—had, from what she'd read, been content to stay in Witt's shadow, doing his bidding, waiting, like vultures, for him to die.

But Zach was different and had been from the beginning when there had been speculation about his paternity. He'd been in trouble with the law and he and the old man had been rumored to be at each other's throats. When Zach was still in school, there had been a major blowup and rift, though she never found out why, and Zach had been thrown out of the house and disowned. Only recently, before Witt's death, had he been back with the family.

Adria figured that someone who had been on the outside so long would be her most likely ally. So far, she'd been wrong. So tonight, she'd make public her claims and if nothing else, get the Danvers family's attention.

 

She was a fraud
.

Zach could smell a fake a mile away, and this woman, this black-haired woman with the mysterious blue eyes and hint of irreverence in her smile when she claimed to be London, was as phony as the proverbial three-dollar bill.

But he couldn't get her out of his mind. He'd tried, but she kept swimming to the surface of his consciousness, toying with his thoughts.

Already in a foul mood because of the grand opening, he poured himself a drink from the bar in the suite he'd called home for the past few months, the very same set of rooms he was to have slept in on the night London had been kidnapped. The suite on the seventh floor looked different now, as the decor reflected the turn of the century rather than the 1970s, but it was still eerie remembering that night. Witt had raged, Kat had wept, and the rest of the children…the survivors…had cast suspicious glances at one another and the police.

He ran a finger along the smooth surface of the window, then pocketed his hotel-room key. He didn't have time to reminisce and he resented Adria for brining back the pain of his checkered past.

Right now, Zach just wanted out. He'd held up his part of the bargain, which was to renovate the hotel, and now he wanted his due—the price he'd extracted from the old man before Witt had died.

It had been a painful scene. His father had tried to break the ice and admit that he'd been wrong about his faithless wife, but the words had gotten all tangled up and once again they'd ended up arguing. Zach had nearly walked out, but Witt had enticed him back.

“The ranch is yours, if you want it, boy,” Witt had declared.

Zach's hand rested on the doorknob of the den. “The ranch?”

“When I die.”

“Forget it.”

“You want it, don't you?”

Zach had turned and skewered his father with a stare intended to cut through steel.

“You always take what you want, if I remember right.”

“I'm outta here.”

“Wait,” the old man had pleaded. “The ranch is worth several million.”

“I don't give a shit about the money.”

“Oh, right. My
noble
son.” Witt was standing near the window, one hand in his pocket, the other wrapped around a short glass of Irish whiskey. “But you still want it. What for?” His white eyebrows had raised a bit. “Nostalgia, perhaps?”

The jab cut deep, but Zach didn't so much as flinch. “It doesn't matter.”

Witt snorted. “It's yours.”

Zach wasn't easily suckered by the old man. He was smart enough to know the ranch had a price—a high one. “What do I have to do?”

“Nothing all that hard. Restore the old hotel.”

“Do what?”

“Don't act like I've asked you to fly, damn it. You have your own construction crew in Bend. Move them over here or hire new people. Money's no object. I just want the hotel to look as good as it did when it was built.”

“You're out of your mind. It would cost a fortune to—”

“Indulge me. It's all I'm asking,” Witt said, his voice low. “You love the ranch, I'm fond of the hotel. The logging operations, the investments, they don't mean much, not to me. But that hotel has class. It was the best of its kind in its day. I'd like to see that again.”

“Hire someone else.”

Witt's eyes narrowed on his son and he swallowed the last of his whiskey. “I want you to do it, boy. And I want you to do it for me.”

“Go to hell.”

“Already been there. Seems as if you had something to do with that.”

Zach's throat tightened. He'd never seen eye-to-eye with the old man, but knew an olive branch when it was thrust under his nose. And this particular branch was attached by a silver chain to the deed to the ranch.

“Don't let your pride stand in the way of what you want.”

“It won't,” he lied.

Witt extended his big hand. “What d'ya say?”

Zach hesitated just a fraction of a second. “It's a deal,” he'd finally said and the two men had clasped hands.

Zach had started to work on the hotel and Witt had changed his will. The project to reclaim the Hotel Danvers and refurbish the old building to its earlier grandeur had lasted over two years, and Witt had died long before it was finished, never realizing his dream. Zach had been able to spend most of his time at the ranch, until a year ago. Then the job had become so involved that he'd been forced to move to Portland to ensure that all the finishing touches were just right.

Now, he tightened the knot of his tie around his throat. He had to get through the grand opening, check a few last bugs, and then get the hell out of Dodge.

What about Adria?

Christ, why couldn't he stop thinking about her? It seemed that she was always there, close to the surface of his thoughts, just as Kat had been. A curse, that's what it was. For, like it or not, she did resemble his deceased stepmother. That black hair, her clear blue eyes, her pointy chin and high cheekbones, replicas of Katherine LaRouche Danvers. Adria wasn't quite as small as his stepmother had been, but she was every bit as beautiful and had the same special grace that he hadn't seen in a woman since Kat.