City of the Dead Read online

  Textile, for God’s sake. Chastity could barely get her clothes hung up, and Faith had to rank hers like a department store. All lined up fastidiously and most smelling of that old lady perfume. Chastity couldn’t get over the idea that her sister had grown old.

  She checked shoeboxes to find designer labels. She opened the jewelry case on one of the shelves to find it full of expensive necklaces, earrings, and rings. And, of course, the obligatory pearls. Every piece, she knew, the real thing. After all, hadn’t she spent the last years amassing her own treasure?

  Okay, so hers was of garnets and peridots instead of emeralds and rubies, but to each his own. And Chastity’s treasure was her very own, which no one could ever take back or take away.

  She cupped the strand of pearls in her palm, as if she could divine her sister’s essence from them. Then she just put them down. They were pearls. Not a crystal ball. So she closed the jewelry case and bent to open Faith’s drawers.

  And suffered another setback.

  She blushed. She, Chastity Ann Byrnes, who had ended up turning tricks before her sixteenth birthday, blushed.

  But then, Chastity hadn’t ever been Faith, which might have accounted for the surprise.

  Faith’s room might have been a riot of color when she was a girl, but her life had been perfectly circumscribed. Her clothes had been a bit girlish, actually. Immature, even as she’d reached her twenties. They reflected older now, classic and tailored and boring. But the lingerie Chastity found certainly wasn’t.

  Precisely folded away like silk slips, Chastity found crotchless panties, fishnet stockings, and more than one red leather corset, with all the less than mainstream accoutrements. And were those marabou feathers?

  Good God, Chastity thought. I’m the one with the addiction, and I never wore this shit. It was straight out of Frederick’s of Hollywood. If not the Marquis de Sade school of seduction.

  And there went Chastity, blushing again, as if she’d never seen anything like this before. Hell, she’d seen it on the street as they were leaving the Eighth District police station. Of course, she’d seen it on a man, but that wasn’t the point.

  She quickly checked the other drawers, for the first time feeling like a voyeur. Sliding her hand in underneath the clothes, she searched the insides, the bottoms, and backs, and then she shut everything away again. She explored the rest of the room for books, for collections, for pastimes. Sewing or crafts or magazines.

  There was nothing. It was as if she were in a hotel room, ordered and faceless and decorated in careful anonymity. Faith didn’t really live in this room, Chastity thought. She couldn’t.

  But where else could she live?

  Chastity sucked in a deep breath and came away with a faint whiff of that damn bleach. Her hand in her pocket, she turned toward the little salon that opened off the bedroom. Might as well get the rest of this farce over with. Then she was going to get the hell out of here and never come back.

  Chastity grew immeasurably more uncomfortable as she picked through her sister’s private correspondence. She felt worse because, again, she couldn’t get a handle on anything. There were condolence cards in a pile in the corner of a glossy cherry desk, with tidy little sticky notes in Faith’s perfect schoolgirl penmanship about return correspondence. There were brochures for charitable events and newsletters from schools. Normal, quiet things.

  No bills. No personal notes or letters. No checkbook or savings book. No computer for e-mail.

  There was a mauve leather telephone book that looked as if it had just been rewritten the week before. No erasures or scratch-outs, no notes or hasty additions. Chastity pocketed it.

  Faith’s purse. She must have had it with her. Chastity wondered if they’d thought to track her checkbook, which would have to have been in it.

  Chastity searched through the desk and found only supplies in tidy little compartments. Paper clips, pens, pencils, stamps. Handmade stationery. A drawer with greeting cards categorized by event. Birthday. Wedding. Condolences. Easter.

  Good grief, did people send Easter cards?

  In the last drawer, Chastity found a string of neon beads along with a beautifully feathered mask in purple, green, and gold. Mardi Gras colors.

  She wondered what Faith had worn them with. Or, considering what she’d found in that dresser, if she’d worn them with anything at all.

  The one thing she did find out about her sister in this room was the fact that she was a catalog shopper. The entire bottom shelf of the bookcase was stacked up with them. Bloomingdale’s and Saks and Talbots and Nordstrom. Jewelry and kitchen utensils, knickknacks and garden supplies and furniture. Chastity saw what looked like some fifty catalogs, and she didn’t think there was a duplicate in the bunch. Amazing.

  The rest of the bookcase was taken up with the kind of leatherbound classics somebody buys in bulk as decor rather than pastime, and one row of old, well-thumbed historical romances.

  She was just dropping the last magazine back on the shelf when her phone rang. “Take Me Out“…wouldn’t she just love to.

  “Hello?”

  “Chastity? It’s Max.”

  Chastity decided that no matter what had happened in her life, she was still way too Catholic. Just the sound of his voice made her feel guilty, as if she were trespassing here. Which she was, of course. But it was at Max’s invitation, after all.

  Sort of.

  “Yes, Max. What’s up?”

  The sound of his voice also reminded her that somewhere in this house were Max’s private papers. The bills, the receipts, all the phone and credit card receipts she’d asked him to pore over.

  Should she look at them again, too, just to be sure?

  “I’m heading back to the house,” he was saying. “Would you mind meeting me there?”

  “Not at all. How long before you arrive?”

  “Oh, about fifteen minutes, I think.”

  Chastity checked her watch and turned for the door, which was when she noticed the occasional table next to the wall. A picture frame lay on its face at its edge.

  “That’d be fine. I’m here now, Max.”

  “Okay, then. Bye.”

  Her phone still to her ear, she instinctively reached over to right the frame. She picked it up and turned it over.

  She saw what it was and dropped it.

  A photo. It was just a photo. Clattering to the marble floor of Faith’s bathroom that lay just beyond, it landed faceup so that Chastity couldn’t pretend she hadn’t seen it. It landed so that she could see herself staring up from twenty years ago.

  She should have expected it, really. The moment she’d decided she had to go find her sister, she should have known she’d end up seeing this damn picture again.

  Not just of her. Of all five of them, posed for some church directory thing in their good clothes and plastic smiles. Her mother, looking pale and rabbity with her thin brown hair and overbite. Faith, staring at the camera as if challenging it. Hope, so overweight that the family doctor had tried to coerce her into an eating disorder unit. Chastity, the baby. Six years old and already hollow-eyed. Already terrified of water and looking for something she’d lost.

  And her father. Square-jawed, broad-shouldered, gray-haired, his eyes so pale that he looked psychic. Smiling out from all those years ago with that odd little smile of satisfaction Chastity swore she’d wiped from her memory ten years ago.

  The monster under her bed.

  She’d made it through the smell of bleach and lavender. She’d walked right past that sterile, institutional furniture. She damn well wasn’t going to lose it over a picture on the floor.

  She’d been seeing a shrink for seven frickin’ years. She had a suitcase full of great antidepressants back in her room at Kareena’s. She should certainly be able to make it through a surprise flash from the past without embarrassing herself.

  Funny. It had been another ten years before everything had disintegrated. And yet this was the picture she’d always kept
in her head of all of them. Probably why it churned up her stomach so much. Because she’d been such a baby, and she could already see the devastation in her eyes.

  But she wouldn’t puke over it.

  She would not.

  Deliberately swallowing back the bile that inevitably greeted the sight of that photo, she lifted the picture and carefully set it back on its face on the table, right next to the bouquet of silk daffodils in a cup. Then she made the mistake of looking into Faith’s bathroom, which waited beyond.

  A sea of marble. A forest of mirrors. And in every mirror, a reflection of her father. There were at least a dozen different pictures of him, framed, collected, and kept along that empty counter. They must have been culled from every scrapbook her mother had ever put together. Saved and hoarded and cherished, he stared and smiled and smirked at her from a dozen different angles.

  Here in the bathroom. Across from the bathtub, for God’s sake.

  Chastity barely made it to the toilet before she vomited all the way down to the gin she’d had the night before.

  She vomited and then she ran out of that house as if she were one step ahead of an explosion.

  She made it to the front lawn before realizing she had nowhere to go. James was somewhere questioning taxi drivers. Chastity was supposed to call him when she was finished, and she’d left her purse with her cell phone back in the house, which she was not going to walk back into today if a tornado struck and it was the only shelter left in Louisiana.

  So she collapsed on the manicured lawn in the wilting thick heat, and she shook and she waited.

  It was so quiet here, stifling after the thick stew of energy in the city. There were no people, no animal sounds, no grown trees to rustle in whatever breeze they got. Just humidity and silence and the encroaching shadows of those badly designed McMansions, one right on top of another. Chastity bent her knees up close. She wrapped her arms around her legs, rested her head on her knees, and closed her eyes. Then she just sat there in the sweltering silence and pretended she was anyplace else in the world.

  Pretended like hell she’d never stumbled over that bathroom.

  Jesus, it was one thing to deny the truth. It was another to immerse yourself in the nightmare.

  “Excuse me, can I help you?”

  For a second, Chastity thought she was hearing things. She was, after all, still struggling hard to keep her stomach in place and her legs from carrying her in any direction at all.

  “Hello?”

  But there it was again. Chastity opened her eyes to find that one of the denizens of the neighborhood had come to check her out. Tucked into a bright red Mercedes convertible was a bottle blonde, about forty and showing signs of second-rate plastic surgery. Her smile was anxious and her attire a hot pink terry cloth sweat suit with rhinestones across her chest that spelled BITCH.

  “You can turn up the air-conditioning out here,” Chastity suggested.

  The neighbor threw off a nervous smile and gave a couple of pats to her ponytail. “For a minute,” she said, “I thought you were Faith. But you’re not, are you? Faith would never sit out here.”

  And Chastity swore she’d never go back inside.

  “No,” she said instead. “I’m Faith’s sister.”

  “Really?” She seemed even more nervous, checking herself briefly in the mirror, as if reminding herself she was there. “I didn’t know she had a sister. I’m Barbara Rendler. I live…over there. It’s not as nice a house, is it? I’ve always envied Faith her house.” She threw off a quick, confessional smile. “Well, I’ve always envied her Max, really. He’s so good to her. Have you seen her clothes? Oh, I’d die for those clothes. And, of course, her jewelry. Max has such a perfect eye. Faith always says she’s the doll he likes to dress up. Isn’t that cute?”

  Chastity thought it was creepy, but she figured she’d hear a lot more by just smiling along. “My name’s Chastity,” she said. “I’m down here helping Max find Faith.”

  Wide eyes, a couple of quick nods. “Oh, I heard. He’s just so distraught. I was over a couple of days ago to check on him. How’s he doing, really? He puts on such a good front, but you just know he’s frantic. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense, does it? Who in her right mind would leave all this?”

  Another quick smile, sweet and needy and anxious.

  But Chastity was suddenly distracted. It was the jewelry statement. Suddenly Chastity realized just how right Barbara Rendler was.

  “Um, Barbara, could you tell me something?” she asked. “Did Faith have more than one strand of pearls?”

  “Who’d need to?” Barbara asked with a self-conscious titter. “Especially when they’re Mikimotos. Perfectly matched. Like I said, Max has great taste in jewelry.”

  But Faith, photographed in those same pearls, had been at a luncheon where that necklace had been the uniform of the day. And yet she had elected not to wear hers. In fact, she’d left them right there in the top tray of her jewelry box.

  Sitting out on that brittle, hard lawn, Chastity reassessed the rooms she’d searched that afternoon. And she realized that she was right. Those pearls meant something.

  But she realized something else she hadn’t picked up on before. Something she might have noticed if she hadn’t been sucking down toxic chlorine fumes.

  “Oh, why here’s Max now!” Barbara Rendler crowed, distracting her. “Max! Oh, Max!”

  And indeed, Max had just pulled his silver BMW into the driveway. His gray hair was unmussed by heat or anxiety or hard work, his cream shirt and purple tie faultless. Chastity thought about what she needed to ask him and wondered if old Barbara would lend her a cell phone to call James for a timely rescue.

  So she waited right where she was, her silk shirt sticking in all the wrong places and her stomach still uncertain enough that she had to keep swallowing, while Barbara, the jealous neighbor, hopped out of her car to meet Max as he climbed from his.

  Barbara petted him like a toddler as she commiserated and promised casseroles and familiar company to keep him from brooding.

  Brooding? Chastity damn near burst out laughing. She wondered whether Barbara was the one who’d donated the romances to Faith and then wondered whether Max would take advantage of her neighborly concern. But Max looked more like a doctor being importuned by a pesky nurse than a man relishing his hungry neighbor’s attention.

  “Chastity?”

  She looked up to see him frowning at her from where he stood with Barbara’s crimson-nailed hand still on his arm.

  “I was saying hello to Barbara,” she told him as she climbed to her feet and tried to figure out a way not to have to go back into that house.

  “Well, I’ll leave you two,” Barbara chirruped and bounced on back to her car, still patting her hair and checking the mirror.

  Max was shaking his head before she’d even put the car into gear. “She’s well-meaning,” he demurred, heading up the sidewalk.

  She’s a psychic black hole, Chastity thought. But undoubtedly a font of information, if Chastity could figure out what else it was she needed to ask.

  Max had already reached the door. Chastity’s stomach did another death spiral.

  “I wanted you to meet me here,” Max was saying as he held it open for her. “The police called. They may have something.”

  Chastity sucked it up and followed him into the frosty foyer, chilled all over again by the air-conditioning and the house and the memories she’d spent ten years trying to bury.

  “Max,” she said, hand clamped in her pants pocket like a guy playing pocket pool, “I need to ask you a couple of things.”

  “Sure.”

  He was already into the refrigerator before Chastity managed to make it into the kitchen. The kitchen that smelled like air freshener and designer coffee. Thank God.

  Chastity looked around, trying to pull her thoughts together. It was when she noticed the calendar on the wall that she realized what else she hadn’t found in Faith’s office.

&n
bsp; Great detective she was turning out to be. One faintly familiar smell and she missed all the important stuff. Thank God nobody thought to scent the ER air with lavender.

  “Faith’s calendar,” she said. “It wasn’t in the salon.”

  “A calendar?” Max said. “It’s right here.”

  A calendar that was basically blank, with pictures of roses taking up most of the page. Chastity shook her head, not even reaching for the tea Max had poured. “No, her personal calendar. Date book. Faith is the most seriously organized person I know. She’d have a date book. Or a PDA.”

  Max frowned again, thinking. “Of course. No PDA. Faith never has succumbed to the technical revolution. She has a small daybook she carries everywhere.”

  Chastity slumped a little. “In her purse.”

  Max looked surprised. “Yes, of course.”

  “With her checkbook.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you haven’t had any activity in her checkbook?”

  He sipped at his tea and thought about that. “They didn’t ask me to look.”

  Chastity nodded. “One other thing. This may sound really stupid, but the house is so clean….”

  Not littered with fast food or unwashed dishes. Not untidy in the way a distracted man might leave it while waiting for his wife to find her way home.

  Max’s smile was sheepish. “It’s my way of coping,” he said. “When I can’t sleep. Faith always said it was pointless to have a service come in when I’d be scrubbing toilets at dawn while I was trying to work out a surgery.”

  “You clean to relieve stress?”

  “It’s a quirk of mine. All that time in OR, I guess.”

  “Well, then, you and Faith were perfectly matched,” Chastity assured him. “I can’t imagine a more orderly person than she.”

  Even so, this house continued to leave her seriously creeped out. And that was even without considering those photos.

  Chastity was about to ask about the pearls when the doorbell rang. Max said not a word. He just set his glass down and walked out to the front hall.

  Chastity followed, noticing that he was moving faster, more purposefully. She saw the two guys standing on the stoop in their rumpled suits and hip holsters, and knew that this was what Max had been anticipating. News. Anything to push him past the inertia of waiting.