What's in a Name? Page 9

  “It hurts to go back. Don’t make me. Please?”

  The pain in her voice cut more deeply than Scumbag’s knife. “My brain might be firing on half a cylinder, but if I understand where you’re coming from, maybe I can help think of a solution.” He set his hand next to hers. “Take my hand. Squeeze as hard as you need to. We’ll do this together.”

  “I can’t.” Her voice trembled, but her hand inched over, making tentative contact with his fingers.

  “We can. We will. Together.” An involuntary shudder ran through him. His fever had shifted to chill mode and he clenched his muscles against the shivering.

  Kelli whisked her hand away. “You need more ibuprofen. I’ll get it.” She wriggled away and padded toward the bathroom before he could say anything.

  Teeth chattering, he dug through his duffel for something warmer to wear. His fingers wrapped around his bottle of Scotch. He could use a drink. He set the bottle on the night table and struggled into his sweatpants and shirt. Pain, chills and fever notwithstanding, he wasn’t going to let Kelli off the hook. He needed to hear her story—and she needed to tell it.

  Kelli returned with the pills and two plastic cups of water, handing him one while she sipped from her own. She looked calmer, with her hair damp around her face from washing away the evidence of her crying jag. He saw her eye the Scotch.

  “Help yourself,” he said. “I think we could both use a drink.”

  Without answering, she gulped the rest of her water, then poured herself a generous shot. After taking three ibuprofen, he did the same. Kelli crossed the room and slouched into the chair. He watched her pound back half her drink. She set the cup down, wiped her mouth and stared at him.

  He took a sip of his own drink, feeling the warmth course down to his belly. He wanted her back beside him and cursed himself for giving her an excuse to get away. “Sit with me?”

  “It’s easier here.” She raked her fingers through her hair. “I don’t know where to start. Everything got too complicated.”

  “How about the beginning? Maybe what your mother named you when you were born?” Crap, he wanted the light on so he could see her face. But he knew why she’d moved away. Hiding—from herself as much as him.

  “My real name? Karen Christine Abbott. But that turned into Casey by the time I was three and it stuck.” Her voice was a detached monotone, void of any feeling.

  “So, you were Casey Wallace.”

  “After I married Charles, yes. But after the accident, I fell apart. Totally.”

  She stared into space. He waited and finally, she spoke again.

  “Charles said I’d been working too hard. Maybe I had. I normally worked from home, to be with Luke. But the last few jobs had some out-of-town work and Charles didn’t like me being gone so much. That Luke had to be left with a sitter.”

  “Those can be tough choices,” Blake said.

  She leaned forward in the chair. “You know, sometimes things seem to be going right, turning for the better and then someone yanks the universe out from under you. The last job I was on, the company decided they didn’t need me after all and paid me half my fee for my trouble.”

  “Why did they let you go?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t care. It meant I could go home, take time off and mend some fences.”

  He waited out another long silence.

  “I decided to make up for my so-called neglect, and the three of us went on a picnic. We had a great time and I told Charles I wasn’t going to take any more out-of-town jobs until Luke was older. On the way home, I remembered we were out of milk, so we stopped at a convenience store. Luke was tired of being stuck in his car seat so Charles brought him in to pick out a treat. They were in front, looking at toys by the counter, and I was in the back at the dairy case.”

  She sipped her Scotch. “I don’t know exactly what happened next. According to the reports, some thug came into the store. He had a gun. Told the guy behind the counter to empty the register or he’d shoot everyone. Apparently the store had been held up five times in six months, and the clerk pulled a gun from behind the counter. All I remember was a whole lot of noise, a whole lot of blood, and Charles and Luke lying beside a pile of potato chip bags.”

  The pitch of her voice hadn’t changed. It could have been a public radio newscaster reading a report. Until her hand moved toward the table at her side and threw the cup, whisky and all, across the room.

  He worked himself off the bed and limped to her side. He tried to scoop her up, but he simply didn’t have the strength. She looked up at him, her eyes huge and bright and everything inside him went hollow. He slipped her arm around his waist and she got up and walked back to the bed with him. This time she pulled all the covers back and sat alongside him, their sweats the only barrier.

  “You’re lucky to be alive,” he whispered.

  “If I’d been a better mother, we’d all be alive. If I hadn’t been out of milk, we would never have stopped in that store.”

  “You can’t blame yourself.” He took her hand and she didn’t pull back.

  “Guilt doesn’t listen to logic.”

  Images of his father, of his brother, flashed through his mind. He looked at Kelli until they went away. “They caught the guy who did it, right?”

  “He was dead. The clerk shot him. Forensics figured out whose gun shot who, that the punk was high on meth and had a record, but what difference does it make? They’re all dead.”

  He squeezed her shoulder. “Go on. It’s better to get it out.”

  “Somehow, I got through the funeral and all the legal crap by pretending it wasn’t me. It was like someone else could take over my body when I had to do something. But I couldn’t stay in that apartment. Every time I turned around, there was something to remind me of … them. I wanted to run and hide. So I did.”

  “But your family?”

  “My mom died the year after Luke was born and my stepdad remarried and moved away not long afterwards. Charles’ folks—I don’t think they cared. I was tolerated—someone they put up with in order to see their son and grandson. I think it was easier for them to deal with the loss by blaming me.”

  “So you decided to become Kelli Carpenter?”

  “No. That came later.” Her voice was barely a whisper now. “First, I tried to forget who I was. I even had a nose job.”

  He turned her face to his and ran his finger down her nose. “That explains why it was so hard for me to see Casey in you. She had a fine nose—not the sort one would think of having fixed.”

  She relaxed a little. “Well, I needed the surgery because of a deviated septum, but having the surgeon tweak the shape helped me forget who I used to be. There was a different person in the mirror. It helped.”

  He squinted at her. “Nope. I still don’t see you as the woman in the magazine picture.”

  A hint of a smile came back. “I’ll bet I know which one. I was three months pregnant in it—I had boobs then.”

  “Tell me more. How did Casey become Kelli?”

  “Did those files Hollingsworth gave you say what I did when I was Casey?”

  “Nothing specific—only that you worked with computers.”

  She gave a cackle that might have been a laugh. “Yeah—that I did. Founded a computer security company. Trust me, I was good. I’ve been hacking since I was twelve. It was no trouble to transfer funds from my bank accounts and get new ID under my maiden name. As far as anyone could tell, my company closed its doors. Casey Wallace got on a plane to South America and never came back.

  “I took my computer and not a lot else and went to a small town in New Hampshire. We’d vacationed there when I was a kid and it felt … safe. I was Karen Abbott, thinking I could go back in time and everything would be good again.”

  Blake took another sip of whisky and offered the cup to Kelli. Karen. Casey. She downed the rest and he refilled it. “Go on.”

  “There are still holes in those next few months. I have nightmares, or
flashbacks—I can’t tell. I stayed there for months. Hiding. From me, mostly. Trying to forget.”

  “You never really forget, though, do you?”

  She shook her head. “No. It just stops hurting quite so much. And then one day, I was ready to live again. I moved back to California, enrolled in Berkeley and studied environmental biology. As different from my other job as possible.”

  She swirled the plastic cup in her hand. “The real Kelli Carpenter was my roommate at Berkeley. She decided to do missionary work in Africa. She fell in love with someone in her group and wrote she wasn’t coming back. I met Robert. I’d finally recovered enough to allow someone to get close. Let myself think I loved him. Wanted—needed someone to love me, to love someone. Fill the emptiness.”

  She gave a muffled sob. “It was semester break and we were camping down in Mexico, near Ensenada. Just the two of us. A secret getaway.

  “I … don’t know when things got … out of hand. We’d been hiking. And fishing. I’d cooked dinner. All normal. After we ate, he … changed. Everything was different. He was an animal.”

  His breathing accelerated and he struggled to keep it steady.

  Her voice was choking now and the words weren’t flowing as quickly. “He grabbed me. Ripped my shirt. Started getting rough. Said I’d like it. I said no, but he kept … kept—”

  Blake could imagine what Robert must have done. His teeth clenched at he thought.

  “I don’t need the details. I get the idea.”

  “I don’t remember the details. He wouldn’t stop.” She was gone now, somewhere else. Well inside herself. He doubted she knew she was crying.

  “Shh. It’s okay.” It could never be okay.

  As if she hadn’t heard him, she continued. “We’d been drinking. Wine. Too much, maybe. I grabbed the bottle. He grabbed it back. It hit something and broke. I held on and … so much blood. I caught his carotid, or jugular, or something.”

  “Self-defense,” he whispered.

  “Maybe, if you’re thinking straight. But there’s no statute of limitations on murder, and I don’t have enough faith in the system to risk it. Especially in Mexico. All I could think of was running away. That’s what I’d done before. I ditched his car about five miles from the border. Then I walked across in Tijuana with all the rest of the tourists, took a train to San Diego, and a bus back to school.”

  “Nobody missed him?”

  She continued in the same monotone. “It was pretty rough terrain—I got rid of his wallet, shoved him into a ravine. Figured by the time anyone found the body, assuming the animals didn’t get it first, I’d be gone.”

  He took her hand. Unlike his own, hers was steady. “His car?”

  She shrugged. “I left the keys. Some locals probably made good use of it. Robert hadn’t told anyone we were going, so if—when—anyone noticed he was missing, they had no way to know where to look. He was a flunky in some big accounting firm. I’d never been to his office, never met any of his colleagues. I don’t think anyone knew we were seeing each other.”

  The ache in Blake’s chest wasn’t due to his injury. Words couldn’t get past the thickness in his throat. He pulled Kelli into his chest and massaged her neck. Let his fingers graze her jawline, then move up to her temples.

  She gave him a weak smile. “You sure you want to stick with me? Men in my life have a way of dying violent deaths.”

  “To quote a friend, ‘like white on rice’.” He rubbed circles on the palm of her hand with his thumb. “Keep going.”

  “Since Kelli had decided to stay in Africa, and I knew everything about her, I took over her identity. I cut my hair, dyed it brown, started wearing tinted contacts and glasses. Any records will show Karen Abbot dropped out of school and disappeared. Kelli Carpenter transferred from Berkeley to UCLA.”

  She rotated the glass in her hands. “I became an expert at hiding, being a loner. Jack Stockbridge respects that and doesn’t pry. But there’s this constant fear someone will find out I’m a murderer and that’ll be the end.”

  “Enough.” He took the whisky from Kelli. “You need to sleep. So do I.” He made a tentative move to leave the bed. Knowing it was the only thing to do, knowing Kelli knew it, he still felt disappointed when she didn’t cling to him, when she mumbled good night, turned away from him and curled into a ball.

  He pulled the covers over her. “Good night.” He sipped what was left of his Scotch and stared at the ceiling for a long time before he fell asleep. There were connections, answers in there somewhere. Maybe they’d figure it out tomorrow. His last thought was that she’d called him Blake, not Windsor, when she’d needed someone.

  Chapter Nine

  At six, Kelli woke up to use the bathroom and tried to get back to sleep, but last night’s conversation—okay, breakdown—was stuck in a loop replaying in her head. Something didn’t make sense, but she couldn’t figure it out. Hollingsworth and Robert? Hollingsworth and Thornton? Robert and Thornton? Scumbag and Robert?

  She heard Blake’s rapid breathing, interspersed with quiet moans and went to his bedside. A palm to his forehead told her his fever was up again. His eyelids flickered, but didn’t open. She eased the covers down and his shirt up. He was soaked with sweat. She peeled back a corner of his dressing and looked at his injury. The upper portion of the cut seemed to be healing well enough, but at the bottom, three of the butterfly strips would need replacements. The area around them burned hot beneath her hand.

  She looked at the furrows in Blake’s brow and her fingertips automatically reached out and massaged his temples. Why had she started thinking of him as Blake? After unloading everything last night, she supposed it made sense.

  His breathing evened out and she saw him relax. Saw the slight upturn at the corners of his mouth. She eased her hands away.

  “Don’t stop. Feels good.”

  “I see you’re awake.” She turned on the light over the bed. “I need to fix your bandages.”

  His eyes opened. He blinked, then sat up and pulled his shirt over his head, then tossed it on the floor. She gave him an exasperated look and he grinned.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing. Do your Florence Nightingale thing and get it over with.”

  She pressed the tape back against his chest. “You want a bath first? Cool you down. No point in getting fresh bandages wet.”

  “Will you come wash my back?”

  “Joke all you want, but I’ve got the iodine, remember?”

  He grimaced. “Ouch.” He got out of bed and stumbled on unsteady legs to the bathroom.

  She got out the first-aid kit and the tube of Neosporin she’d bought. That, plus ibuprofen, were the best she had and she hoped they’d keep the fever, pain and infection at bay. What Blake needed was a couple of days in bed, sleeping, not riding in a battered pickup.

  Pickup. Crap. If Ned Decker, or whoever he was, had been sent by Hollingsworth, or had any connections, he might have put a lookout order on the truck. And she was running out of cash. Her stomach rumbled and a wave of dizziness shimmered over her. She needed to eat. They both did.

  She stood outside the bathroom door, listening to the sound of splashing. “You all right? Try not to get the cut too wet.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Hungry?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Some, I guess.”

  “Will you be okay if I go get us some breakfast?” She heard water gurgling down the drain. And the stifled gasp of someone trying very hard not to let on he was in pain, or the least bit weak. She felt the door resonate. He must have fallen against it. She went and sat on the edge of her bed, waiting.

  The door opened and he emerged, hips wrapped in a towel. You’d think he’d have learned to take some underwear in with him. Her eyes lingered a moment too long before she snapped her gaze to study the cheap print on the motel wall.

  “What are you thinking?” He moved past her and sat down on the other bed. “You were a million miles away
.”

  “Nothing.” Heat rushed to her face. Oh, just admiring your body—right.

  He leaned against the headboard, tucking the sheet around his hips. “I don’t think so. But why don’t you get the torture part of the morning behind us?” He smiled and she went to work.

  The smile vanished. She watched him grit his teeth when she pulled the rest of the tape off his chest. Heard the gasp when she peeled away the loose butterfly strips. He squinted his eyes shut when she worked the Neosporin into the cut and gripped the sheet when she resealed the incision with new butterfly strips. They both sighed with relief when she taped on a fresh dressing.

  He opened his eyes and they grabbed her again. She shook off her response.

  “Do I get a lollipop?” His expression was pure puppy dog now.

  She went to the shopping bags. “What about a Power Bar?”

  He feigned a pout.

  “Take ibuprofen. Drink fluids. I’ll get you some breakfast. There’s a coffee shop across the parking lot.”

  With one last glance over her shoulder, she left Blake and walked across the asphalt. She sat in a booth, sipped at a cup of coffee while she waited for their breakfast, and punched Stockbridge’s number into one of the new cell phones.

  “Kiddo, I’ve been worried sick about you. What’s going on? Did Blake Windsor do anything to hurt you?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, I think he’s on my side. But I’m going to have to ask you to trust me. I need some help. We need some help. Nobody can know where we are until I figure things out.”

  * * * * *

  Three hours later, Blake sat slouched in a hard plastic chair at the almost-deserted Jiffy Wash Laundromat. Other than a bored teenager behind the counter and a white-haired woman dividing her attention between People Magazine and a grainy soap opera on the wall-mounted television set, he and Kelli had the place to themselves. Kelli sat at a computer terminal, alternating between clicking a mouse, writing notes and talking on one of her new cell phones. At least one call was to Stockbridge—and he’d overheard one conversation in the truck, but he’d been too out of it to pay much attention.