“Your sister was good with a gun,” David said. “Kayla didn’t shoot a living thing. She had her moral limits. But she had great aim.” He downed the rest of his drink and stood. “I need a refill.”
Kayla leapt to her feet and nabbed his glass. “I’m getting up for water. You sit.”
“The bottle’s empty. Open a new one.”
How did he manage his liquor so well? Kayla had always wondered. His voice continued to sound controlled and intelligible.
“I keep more in a closet in the garage.” He pointed. “Go through the trapdoor and climb down. I’m having work done on the staircase.”
“Trapdoor?” Kayla feigned ignorance.
“In the hall by the kitchen beneath the throw rug. When your sister was little and came to visit—” He worked his lip between his teeth. “When she was here, she loved to play hide and seek and would shinny down the ladder and take cover in the garage.”He reached for the poker by the hearth. “I’d let her think she’d duped me.”
Kayla had loved those games.
In the kitchenette, she filled her uncle’s glass halfway with water and set it on the counter. Then she kicked the throw rug aside and lifted the rope handle of the trapdoor. A wealth of memories surfaced as the musty scent wafted from the passageway. Her uncle had built the garage into the hill to save on construction costs. Permits had been ignored.
She descended the rungs, her shoulders bumping the walls. When she reached the floor and switched on the garage light, a flood of memories swept over her. Months ago, she urged her uncle to get rid of his junk, but he didn’t listen. The space was as jam-packed as ever. Six sets of steel file drawers housed records of all the surgeries he had ever performed as well as copies of each magazine article written by or about him. She had read and filed most of the documents. She hoped the moisture-proof cabinets would preserve his legacy.
After crossing to a closet and fetching a bottle of Jack Daniels from a fresh case—if she could have, she would have made this the last bottle he ever drank—she returned to the kitchen and poured a smidgen of liquor into his glass. The water turned a light ocher.
She took the drink to her uncle. “Are things at work going okay?”
“I have two kids waiting for available hearts.” David’s face turned grim as he stoked the fire. “You’re lucky. A model never has to be bothered with the heaviness of the world.” He took a sip of his drink and threw her a sharp look. “You watered this down. Don’t do that. Don’t baby me. Your sister never would have coddled me.”
“She told me she thinned your drinks all the time.”
David regarded the whiskey, then Kayla, and shook a finger at her.
Ashley’s phone jangled. Kayla was thankful for the intrusion. She crossed to her purse and fetched the phone. “Hello?”
“Ashley, darling.” Margaret Thornton’s authoritative voice rang out. “Maybelline needs to move up the shoot. They want you at the Palace of Fine Arts at seven a.m. tomorrow.”
“A shoot? Tomorrow? I can’t. I?—”
David bounded to his feet and took the telephone from Kayla. “She’ll be there,” he said into the mouthpiece. Kayla tried to snatch the phone back, but he eluded her and ended the call.
Swell.Not what she needed. Two people micromanaging her. Add in Eve, and she had a regular three-ring circus.
“You need to get back to a normal life, sweetheart,” David said. “Work heals.”
Kayla paced the room, her skin itching with anxiety. Model? She couldn’t step into one of those photo booths at the mall without feeling as if the darned contraption would crack when she smiled. “I can’t.”
“I’ll come for support.”
“No, I?—”
David held a finger to her mouth. “Please, Ashley, say yes. Kayla and I . . .”
She registered his hangdog face and sagged. They were supposed to have target practice soon. “I’ll do the job on one condition. You go to sleep right now.”
“Sure.” David waggled his glass. “This tastes like rot anyway.” He shambled into his bedroom.
Kayla followed. “Give me back my phone.”
Like an impish child, he shoved the phone beneath a stack of files on his desk, the same ones that had been there a few days ago when Kayla had helped him prepare his conference presentation. How he maintained decent medical records wasbeyond her. An image of Taylor Simmons and his organized desk flooded her mind. Did a doctor’s genetic makeup doom him to be messy while an accountant’s DNA predestined him to be orderly?
“Tuck me in,” he ordered. Fully dressed, he climbed under the covers.
