Carolina Moon

say all right to me in that patient tone, when your eyes are telling me I’m a liar.”
    Because her breath was starting to hitch, he rose and went to her. “I’ll go with you.”
    She stared at him another moment, then just went into his arms. “God. Oh God.”
    “We’ll go on down and tell the chief. I’ll stay with you.”
    She nodded, held on another minute. And she accepted that after she was done in Sherry’s apartment, he might never want to hold her again.

22
    “Y ou need anything before we go in?”
    Tory was still fighting to calm her nerves, but met Carl D.’s gaze levelly. “What, like a crystal ball? A pack of tarot cards?”
    He’d gone in the front as she’d requested, and unlocked the patio door from the inside, cut the seal, and stepped out where she waited with Cade.
    There was less chance of being seen going in through the rear. The killer had known that, too.
    Now Carl D. pushed back his hat to scratch his wide brow. “Guess you’re a mite put-out with me.”
    “You pushed where I don’t like to be pushed. This isn’t going to be pleasant for me, and could very well be useless to you.”
    “Miss Tory, I got a young woman about your age lying on a table down at the funeral parlor. County ME’s got his job to do on her. Her family’s coming down tomorrow morning. Wouldn’t call any of that pleasant for anybody.”
    He’d wanted her to have that picture in her head. Tory acknowledged it with a nod. “You’re a harder man than I remember.”
    “You’re a harder woman. I guess we both got reason.”
    “Don’t talk to me.” She opened the door herself, stepped inside.
    She’d braced herself, and concentrated on the light first. The light in the room as he’d flicked the switch. The light Sherry had permeated through the air.
    It was a long time before she spoke. A long time, while what was left in the room slid inside her.
    “She liked music. She liked noise. Being alone just wasn’t natural to her. She liked to have people over. Voices, movement. They’re all so fascinating to her. She loved to talk.”
    There was fingerprint dust on the phone. She didn’t notice that it smeared her own fingers as she trailed them over it.
    Who was Sherry Bellows? That had to come first.
    “Conversations were like food to her. She’d have starved to death without them. She liked to find out about people, to listen to them talk about themselves. She was very happy here.”
    She paused, letting her fingers brush over picture frames, the arm of a chair.
    “Most people don’t really want to hear what people say, but she did. Her questions weren’t a ploy to wheedle an opening to talk about herself. She had such plans. Teaching was an adventure to her. All those minds to feed.”
    She walked past Cade and Carl D. Though she was aware of them, they were becoming less important to her, their presence less real.
    “She loved to read.” Tory spoke quietly as she wandered toward a cheap, brass-plated shelf filled with books.
    Images floated through her mind of a pretty young woman tucking books on the shelf, taking them out, curled up with them on the chair on the patio with a big, shaggy dog snoring at her feet.
    It was easy to blend into those images, to open to them, become part of them. She tasted salt—potato chips—on her tongue, and felt a lovely wave of contentment.
    “But that’s just another way to be with people. You slide into the book. You become a character, your favorite character. You experience.
    “The dog gets up on the sofa with you, or in the bed. He leaves hair everywhere. You swear you could make a coat out of the hair he sheds, but he’s such a sweetheart. So you run the vacuum most every day. Turn the music up so you can hear it over the motor.”
    Music pulsed inside her head. Loud, cheerfully loud. Her foot tapped to it.
    “Mr. Rice next door, he complained about that. But you bake him some cookies and bring him around. Everyone’s so nice in this town. It’s just where you wanted to be.”
    She turned from the bookshelf. Her eyes were blurry, blank, but she was smiling.
    Cade’s heart skipped a beat as her smoky gaze passed over him. Passed through him.
    “Jerry, the little boy from upstairs, he’s just crazy about Mongo. Jerry’s just as cute as a bug and twice as pesky. One day you want a little boy just like him, all eyes and grins and sticky fingers.”
    She turned in a circle, her lips curved, her eyes blind.
    “Sometimes in the afternoon