Kiss the Girls

of Château de la Chaize. I think that’s the name. It only cost nine bucks, but it’s decent wine. I bought it just for tonight, even though I didn’t know it at the time.” Kate smiled. “Three months ago when I made the purchase.”
    We sat on Kate’s couch in the living room. The place was neat but still funky. There were black-and-white photos on the walls of her sisters and her mother. Happier times for Kate. There was an amazing picture of her in her pink uniform at the Big Top Truck Stop, where she worked to pay her way through school. The waitressing job was part of the reason medical school had meant so much to her.
    Maybe the wine made me tell Kate more about Jezzie Flanagan than I wanted to. It had been my only attempt at a serious attachment since Maria’s death. Kate told me about her friend, Peter McGrath. History professor at the University of North Carolina. As she talked about Peter, I had the disturbing thought that maybe he was one suspect we had glossed over too quickly.
    I couldn’t leave the case alone,
not even for one night. Maybe I was just trying to escape into my work again. Still, I made a mental note to check out Dr. Peter McGrath a little more carefully.
    Kate leaned in close to me on the couch. We kissed. Our mouths made a perfect fit. We had both done this before, kissed, but maybe never as well.
    “Will you stay tonight? Please stay,” Kate whispered. “Just this one night, Alex. We don’t have to be scared about this, do we?”
    “No, we don’t have to be scared,” I whispered back. I felt like a schoolboy. Maybe that was okay, though.
    I didn’t know exactly what to do next, how to touch Kate, what to say, what
not
to do. I listened to the soft hum of her breathing. I let everything take its natural course.
    We kissed again, as gently as I ever remember kissing anyone. We
were
both needy. But we were so vulnerable at that moment.
    Kate and I went to her room. We held each other for a long time. We talked in whispers. We slept together. We didn’t make love that night.
    We were best friends. We didn’t want to ruin it.

Chapter 85

    NAOMI THOUGHT that she was finally losing the last pieces of her sanity. She had just
seen Alex kill Casanova,
even though she knew it hadn’t really happened. She’d seen the shooting with her own eyes. She was hallucinating, and she couldn’t stop the waves of delusion anymore.
    She talked to herself sometimes. The sound of her own voice was comforting.
    Naomi became quiet and thoughtful as she sat on an armchair in the darkened prison cell. Her violin was there, but she hadn’t played it in days. She was afraid for a whole new reason now.
Maybe he wasn’t coming back again.
    Maybe Casanova had been caught, and he wouldn’t tell the police where he kept his captives. That was his ultimate leverage, wasn’t it? That was his diabolical secret. His final edge and bargaining chip.
    Maybe he’d already been killed in a shootout. How could the police hope to find her and the others if he was dead?
Something’s happened,
she thought.
He hasn’t been here in the last two days. Something has changed.
    She desperately wanted to see sunny blue skies, grass, the Gothic spires of the university, the layered terraces at the Sarah Duke Gardens, even the Potomac River in all of its muddy-gray glory back home in Washington.
    She finally got up from the easy chair beside her bed. Very, very slowly, Naomi shuffled across the bare wooden floor, and stood by the locked door with her cheek pressed against the cool wood.
    Should I do this crazy thing?
she wondered.
Do I sign my own death warrant?
    Naomi could barely catch her breath. She listened for sounds in the mysterious house, any tiny, insignificant sound at all. The rooms had been soundproofed—but if you made enough noise, some sound carried through the eerie building.
    She went over what she wanted to say, exactly what she would say.
    My name is Naomi Cross. Where are you, Kristen? Green Eyes? I’ve decided that you’re right. We have to do something…. We have to do something together…. He’s not coming back.
    Naomi had thought this moment through clearly, intelligently, she hoped—but she
couldn’t say
the words out loud. She understood that plotting against him could mean her death.
    Kristen Miles had called out to her a few times during the past twenty-four hours, but Naomi hadn’t answered back. It was forbidden to talk, and she had seen his warning to them. The hanged