Jennifer Greene - Secretive Stranger

“Hard not to.”

“I know. Women prejudge her, too. I’m just saying…she’s a true-blue kind of person.”

In Sophie’s judgment, Cord mused. “And Jan, the friend you did manage to reach. She’s the real tall glass of water, looks like she dresses at an art museum? The one who starts shooting the bull before she’s even said hello?”

Sophie opened one eye then. “She was great to me when I first moved here and knew nobody.”

Which meant, Cord figured, that she didn’t think a whole lot of Jan, either, but wasn’t about to knock someone who’d been good to her. “She was a friend of my brother’s?”

“Cord, every woman in the neighborhood knew your brother, and more than ninety percent, I’d guess, made a play for him. I never kept track of who he slept with. I didn’t care. Still don’t.”

She changed subjects. “I don’t want to be gone for too long.”

“We’ll be back in a couple hours, no more. Are you hungry for anything special?”

“I couldn’t possibly eat a thing,” she assured him.

Uh-huh. He used his cell to order takeout. In less than an hour, he’d picked up the brown bag, spread out a stadium blanket from the trunk and had Sophie installed on the grass with a view of the Washington Monument. She plowed through the War Sui Gui, then the Shrimp Fried Rice, then two egg rolls and a little Steak Kow.

Cord started to worry if he’d bought enough. The blanket wasn’t much protection against the cold ground, but her jacket was warm enough for the Arctic, and overall, she just seemed to calm down. “I love the Washington Monument,” she said-or tried to say. Her mouth was pretty full.

“Yeah, me, too. Hate politics. Hate a lot about Washington. But when I look at the monument lit up at night…”

“It gives me shivers. Good shivers.”

It didn’t give him shivers, but something was right about this place, this time, this country. Her. Him. Although, once she’d inhaled all that food, she lost some of that lost look and started talking.

“Both those policemen knew you,” she said in an accusing tone.

“Yeah, of course they did.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“Because they’re the ones who told me about Jon’s death. I’ve spent more hours with them than I’d care to count.” When she tucked up her legs and didn’t respond further, he pushed with a “What?”

“There’s something you’re not telling me. Something everybody’s not telling me. Something’s…wrong.”

“Of course there is. Two serious crimes took place in your apartment building in less than two weeks.”

“That part, I get. What I don’t understand is why I keep getting the feeling the police are hiding information from me. As if they know something about who might have vandalized my place, but for some reason they don’t want to tell me the whole story.”

There were others out, enjoying the night. People always loved seeing the monuments at night, and lovers traditionally used the strolls around the mall to snuggle together. Yards away, Cord heard the hum of conversation, a woman’s whispers.

The only whispers he wanted to hear, though, were Sophie’s. Her hair looked like a spill of silver in the starlight, her eyes liquid dark. Magical. He wasn’t the kind to believe in magic or spells…yet, there was something he couldn’t explain when he was with Sophie. For one thing, he knew perfectly well the cops didn’t want him telling her the truth.

Yet, how could he possibly protect her if she didn’t understand more of the bigger picture?

“Sophie…I think the police don’t totally trust you.”

Her response was an immediate chuckle. “Of course they do. Everyone trusts me!” She pointed to her face, as if it would be obvious to anyone looking at her that she couldn’t fib without broadcasting it to the universe.

But when he looked at her face, all he could think of was wanting to kiss it. To see her eyes widen with vulnerability. To see those soft red lips part, to let him in. Just him. Only him.

Hell. Where had that come from?

He tried to get back on track. “The police think you might have some idea what the thief wanted from your apartment.”

“How am I possibly supposed to know what that could be?”

He said patiently, “From what Bassett said…you had a stash of money in your cookie jar. A hundred bucks. No one took it. You had some jewelry, but no one took that, either. Computer, TV, electronics-all the stuff thieves go for was still there. So the thief had to want something else. And maybe that ‘something’ is related to my brother’s death-because why else would the two traumatic incidents take place in the same building, within two weeks of each other?”

She cocked her head, looked at him with such empathy. “Cord, I understand why you want there to be a reason for your brother’s death. The fire that killed my parents…it haunted my sisters and me for years. We just wanted there to be a reason, some way to make sense of what happened, something we could blame. But there was never a reason, not that anyone could find. I know it’s hard. I know. Even if you weren’t close to your brother, I totally understand why you feel pushed to find a reason for his death, something that mattered. Something that could help you put closure on the loss…”

Guilt felt like a coffin nail. He hated not being able to totally fill her in. Sophie still didn’t know Jon’s death was a murder. The authorities had honest reasons for keeping the cause of death quiet, but that failed to appease his conscience. Her warm compassion bit. He knew he hadn’t earned her sympathy.

“Sophie…” He’d brought a bottle of wine with the take-out dinner. Maybe wine wasn’t precisely legal out there in the open, but she stopped looking so white and anxious after a couple of paper cups. He poured her a little more. “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you. About any reasons you can imagine why someone might have broken into your place. Think.”

She took another sip. “Well…my foster parents left me a nest egg. At the time they took me in, they were considered too old to adopt, by the rules then. But they created a trust for me, because they knew…” She gulped again. “They knew I had nightmares for years, about losing my home, my parents, my family, everything. They didn’t want me to be afraid that could ever happen again. So they wanted me to have something to fall back on. But, Cord, I can’t imagine anyone knows about that but my sisters. I’ve traveled too much with my job to have accumulated much, and I’m pretty sure no one would say I run around looking wealthy.”

He definitely wouldn’t say that. She ran around in clothes and colors that made her look nondescript-and he was beginning to understand why. She didn’t want trouble. She did everything but stand on her head to not attract trouble, any kind of trouble…so this whole mess had to be her worst nightmare.

Her revealing the business about her nest egg showed that she trusted him-was risking her trust on him.

That alone revealed her innocence to him, in both senses of the word. The more he knew her, the more time he spent with her, the more beautiful he could see she was. The wrong kind of beauty. The dangerous kind of beauty. The true-blue vulnerability in her eyes was the kind that could attract the worst predators. And Cord sure as hell couldn’t be the only man who saw beneath the silly clothes and glasses to the Sophie underneath.

Impatiently, he said, “Come on, Soph. There has to be something else.”

This conversation was getting nowhere-at least not in the direction it was supposed to go. The more Cord believed in Sophie’s innocence, the more he realized that the guilty party, the one who murdered his brother, was still out there free. And Sophie was a stop sign in the way.