Margaret Daley - Poisoned Secrets

“Great,” she murmured and thrust open her door. Safe.

She turned to close it, but Kane had already slipped inside her apartment. She rotated away from his probing gaze. It was bad enough she felt this seesawing between anger and hurt. She certainly didn’t want him to see it in her expression.

The sight of the disarray and stacked boxes accentuated her loneliness, a sense of abandonment. She hadn’t been prepared for this tangle of confusion twisting her stomach. In St. Louis she had thought she could handle this objectively as she did most things in her life. Wrong. There was nothing objective about this situation.

“Maggie?”

The sound of her front door finally being closed echoed through the apartment—her home now, hundreds of miles away from anything familiar. Why did I do this? Why couldn’t I be happy not ever knowing why my mother gave me up, what my heritage is? Lord, why do I have two mothers who don’t really want me? She desperately sought the strength she always gained when she turned to God for reassurance and comfort.

“Maggie, you aren’t all right.” Kane touched her hand, sending a bolt of recognition up her arm.

His nearness further eroded her self-confidence, making herself doubt her sanity for even considering this move. She’d gone through life insulating herself from others, and suddenly the walls were crumbling, her usual defenses no longer working. She stepped away, needing to put some distance between them.

His worried expression prompted her to say, “I’m fine. Why do you ask?” None of the nonchalance she wanted to project came across. She held herself so taut that her body ached.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it was the pale tone to your skin or the fact you didn’t even tell Kenny and Vicky goodbye.”

Feigning an interest in an open box, she lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “It isn’t every day I save someone’s life.”

“True. But my gut instinct tells me something else is going on here.”

She picked up a book and flipped through it as though she hadn’t a care in the world. “What possibly could be going on?” When she thought she had herself under control, she faced him.

He studied her, that piercing gaze of his roaming over her as though he could read her innermost thoughts. She prayed he couldn’t because after that scene in the Penningtons’ apartment she didn’t know if she could go ahead with her quest. She wanted answers, not a relationship with her birth mother. She’d already had one with her adoptive mother that hadn’t turned out well. Why subject herself to another?

But still, there were blank holes in her family history she wanted filled. Could she form a friendship with the woman across the hall and discover the answers without disrupting anyone’s lives, especially Kenny’s and Ashley’s?

Shaking his head, Kane massaged the back of his neck. “You know I usually make it a habit to stay out of other people’s business.”

“Safer, isn’t it?”

The intensity in his eyes trapped her. “Yes. Much safer.”

For a long moment she stared at him. She glimpsed his vulnerability, a flash of pain, and that touched her battered heart. She wished she could deny his potent effect on her, but she couldn’t. She wished she could deny the spark of interest she sensed in his eyes before he veiled it, but she couldn’t. Just as she couldn’t give up her quest when she was so close to finding some answers.

They both had their secrets. The barrier he had placed around his emotions was strong, possibly impregnable, and she had never been good at tearing down another’s defenses because she couldn’t get past her own, fortified from years of rejection.

She averted her gaze. “Did you take care of everything in here yesterday?” That ought to be a safe enough subject. His visual assault still tingled up her body. She kept her eyes fixed on a spot across the room.

He moved toward the front door. “I believe everything is good to go. If not, Edwina can take care of it.”

“Kane.”

He stopped and glanced back at her, his expression completely masked, no vulnerability evident.

“Yes, Maggie?”

“Thanks.”

“For what? The Penningtons are special to me. I should be thanking you for saving Ashley.”

“For your help today.” For understanding and not pushing, she finished silently.

He inclined his head toward her, then left. The door closing magnified the feeling of loneliness that had inundated Maggie earlier. She looked about at the chaos. She felt her life was like the items in the boxes, not one of them in its proper place.

Suddenly she needed to get away from the apartment. Walking into her bedroom, she dug through a box until she found her jogging clothes and her MP3 player. One of the best ways she had found to handle her stress was to exercise—hard. After donning her shorts, T-shirt and tennis shoes, she left to run until she was too exhausted even to think.

An hour later and bone tired, Maggie let herself into her apartment, removing her earplugs and placing her MP3 player on the table in the small foyer. The idea of a hot shower prodded her to move faster toward her bedroom even though her muscles ached from her grueling workout.

She entered the room, her gaze immediately fastening onto the boxes stacked against one wall. An unfamiliar scent accosted her nostrils. The hairs on her nape tingled. She started to turn.

Thud!

Something hard slammed into the back of her head. As she crumbled to the floor, the blackness swallowed her up.

Pain pulsated a pounding rhythm against her skull. Maggie reached up and touched the spot that throbbed. A sticky substance coated her fingertips. Although the darkness reeled behind her closed eyes, she slowly opened the lids. Light assaulted her, and she shut them immediately.

What happened?

Again she inched her eyes open, letting them adjust to the brightness that illuminated her bedroom. She held her hand up in front of her face and saw the red that covered her skin.

Someone hit me?

She remembered coming into her apartment and heading for her bedroom. After that, a blank slate greeted her probing. She was lying prone on the hardwood floor so something had happened. But what?

As though in slow motion, she twisted to her side to push herself to her feet. Halfway up, the room spinning before her, she clutched the small table by the doorway to steady herself. It came crashing down on top of her. The books she had stacked on it tumbled into her and sent her collapsing to the floor. She hit her head in the same place that hurt. Pain streaked outward in waves that threatened to drive her back into the black void.

Edwina Bacon shuffled toward her recliner in front of her TV when she heard a loud noise as if something above her in Maggie’s apartment struck the floor. After all that happened in the past month, the manager of Twin Oaks skirted her chair and made her way toward her front door. She jingled her keys in her pocket to make sure she had them and left her place.

With her hand on the ornate carved banister, she climbed the stairs as quickly as she could.

At Maggie’s place, Edwina rang the bell.

Nothing.

She pressed in the white button a second time then a third.

With a glance from side to side, Edwina removed her key ring and found the one to Maggie’s. If she wasn’t home, what caused that sound? If she was home, why hadn’t she answered the door?

Edwina inserted her key and paused before turning the handle. Memories of Henry’s death only weeks before inundated her. She prayed this wasn’t a repeat of what happened to Henry. For a few seconds she thought of going back down and calling Kane or her nephew at the police station.