Sandra Brown: Ricochet

But she wondered now why she had lied to her husband about it.

She poured the remainder of the unwanted milk down the drain and left the glass in the sink, where it would be conspicuous. Leaving the kitchen, she returned to the foot of the curving staircase in the foyer. There she paused to listen. The house was silent. She detected no movement upstairs.

Quickly she went down the center hallway and into Cato’s study. She crossed the room in darkness, but once behind the desk, switched on the lamp. It cast dark shadows around the room, particularly onto the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that formed the wall behind the desk.

She swung open the false shelf that concealed the wall safe and tried the handle, knowing already that it wouldn’t budge. The safe was kept locked at all times, and even as they approached three years of marriage, Cato had never entrusted her with the combination.

She replaced the shelf of faux books and stepped back so she could study the bookcase wall as a whole. Then, as she’d done many times before, she broke it down into sections, focusing on one shelf at a time, letting her gaze slowly move from volume to volume.

There were countless hiding places in this bookshelf.

On a shelf slightly above her head, she noticed that one of the leather-bound volumes extended a fraction of an inch over the edge of the shelf. Coming up on tiptoe, she reached overhead to further investigate.

“Elise?”

She whipped around, gasping in fright. “Cato! Good Lord, you scared me.”

“What are you doing?”

Her heart in her throat, she took the diamond pin from the pocket of her robe, where she’d had the foresight to place it before leaving the bedroom. “My brooch.”

“Is that all that’s keeping it on?”

It surprised her that her memory would replay Duncan Hatcher’s suggestive remark at this moment, when her husband was looking at her curiously, waiting for an explanation.

“I was going to leave it here on your desk with a note so you’d see it before you left in the morning,” she said. “I think some of the stones are loose. A jeweler should take a look.”

He advanced into the room, looked at the pin lying in her extended palm, then into her eyes. “You didn’t mention loose stones earlier.”

“I forgot.” She gave him a small, suggestive smile. “I got distracted.”

“I’ll take it downtown with me tomorrow and drop it off at the jeweler.”

“Thank you. It’s been in your family for decades. I’d hate to be responsible for losing one of the stones.”

He looked beyond her at the bookcase. “What were you reaching for?”

“Oh, one of your volumes up there isn’t lined up properly. I just happened to notice it. I know how finicky you are about this room.”

He joined her behind the desk, reached up, and pushed the legal tome back into place. “There. Mrs. Berry must have dislodged it when she was dusting.”

“Must have.”

He placed his hands on her upper arms and rubbed them gently. “Elise?” he said softly.

“Yes?”

“Anything you want, darling, you only have to ask.”

“What could I possibly want? I don’t want for anything. You’re extremely generous.”

He looked deeply into her eyes, as though searching for something behind her steady gaze. Then he squeezed her arms quickly before releasing them. “Did you have your milk?” She nodded. “Good. Let’s go back to bed. Maybe you’ll be able to sleep now.”

He waited for her to precede him. As she made her way toward the door, she glanced back. Cato was still standing behind his desk, watching her. The glare of the lamp cast his features into stark relief, emphasizing his thoughtful frown.

Then he switched off the lamp and the room went dark.

DUNCAN DIDN’T NEED THE LIGHTS ON IN ORDER TO PLAY.

In fact, he liked to play in the dark, when it seemed that the darkness produced the music and that it had no connection to him. It was sort of that way even with the lights on. Whenever he touched a piano keyboard, he relinquished control to another entity that lived in his subconscious and emerged only on those occasions.

“It’s a divine gift, Duncan,” his mother had declared when he tried to explain the phenomenon to her with the limited vocabulary of a child. “I don’t know where the music comes from, Mom. It’s weird. I just…I just know it.”

He was eight when she had determined it was time to begin his music lessons. When she sat him down on their piano bench, pointed out middle C, and began instructing him on the fundamentals of the instrument, they discovered to their mutual dismay that he already knew how to play.

He hadn’t known that he could. It shocked him even more than it did his astonished parents when he began playing familiar hymns. And not just picking out single-note melodies. He knew how to chord without even knowing what a chord was.

Of course, for as far back as he could remember, he’d heard his mother practicing hymns for Sunday services, which could have explained how he knew them. But he could also play everything else. Rock. Swing. Jazz. Blues. Folk songs. Country and western. Classical. Any tune he had ever heard, he could play.

“You play by ear,” his mother told him as she fondly and proudly stroked his cheek. “It’s a gift, Duncan. Be thankful for it.”

Not even remotely thankful for it, he was embarrassed by his “gift.” He thought of it more like a curse and begged his parents not to boast about it, or even to tell anybody that he had the rare talent.

He certainly didn’t want his friends to know. They’d think he was a sissy, a dork, or a freak of nature. He didn’t want to be gifted. He wanted to be a plain, ordinary kid. He wanted to play sports. Who wanted to play the stupid piano?

His parents tried to reason with him, saying it was okay for a person to play sports and also be a musician, and that it would be a shame for him to waste his musical talent.

But he knew better. He went to school every day, not them. He knew he’d be made fun of if anyone ever found out that he could play the piano and had tunes he didn’t even know the names of stored up inside his head.

He held firm against their arguments. When pleading with them didn’t work, he resorted to obstinacy. One night after a supper-long debate over it, he swore that he would never touch a keyboard again, that they could chain him to a piano bench and not let him eat or drink or go to the bathroom until he played, and even then he would refuse. Think how bad they would feel when he shriveled up and died of thirst while chained to the piano bench.

They didn’t cave in to the melodramatic vow, but in the long run, they couldn’t force him to play, so he won. The compromise was that he played only for them and only at home.

Although he would never admit it, he enjoyed these private recitals. Secretly he loved the music that was conducted from his brain to his fingers effortlessly, mindlessly, without any urging from him.

At thirty-eight he still couldn’t read a note. Sheet music looked like so many lines and squiggles to him. But over the years, he had honed and refined his innate talent, which remained his secret. Whenever an acquaintance asked about the piano in his living room, he said it was a legacy from his grandmother, which was true.

He played in order to lose himself in the music. He played for his personal enjoyment or whenever he needed to zone out, empty his mind of the mundane, and allow it to unravel a knotty problem.

Like tonight. There hadn’t been a peep out of Savich since the severed tongue incident. The lab at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had confirmed that it had indeed belonged to Freddy Morris, but that left them no closer to pinning his murder on Savich.