Page 22 of A Sublime Casualt
“No way.” I take the tray and head for the stairs. “You’re hallucinating.”
“Never mind about any of that. Tell Charlie I said hello. And I hope she doesn’t sue us for those skull fractures!”
* * *
Charlie rollsover as soon as I close the door behind me, and her lips expand with wicked intent. “You brought breakfast.” She sits up, her T-shirt already back in place, but the V-neck dips low and affords me a view of her pale skin.
I glide in next to her with a glass of OJ. “It’s officially brunch.”
“Is that how you do it? Smooth, Stavros. Real smooth.” She leans over and plants a kiss on my cheek, and I turn my head and steal one from her lips instead.
“Do you think I’m easy?” she breathes the words right over my mouth. It breaks my heart to hear her ask the question.
“I think you’re beautiful, smart, talented as hell with that mouth of yours, and way too nice to ever beeasy.” I pull back and examine her, that wide-eyed look of anticipation in her eyes breaks my heart. “Yes, you’re easy to get along with. You’re the most easygoing person that I have ever met. You’re easy to be with. What you are not is cheap. And if I did anything to make you feel like that, I cannot apologize enough.”
She shakes her head and lands a finger over my lips. Her eyes sparkle with tears. “You said all the right words. You always do.” She takes a sip from her juice. “I have a confession.” Her lips press tight as she conceals a naughty smile. “I spoke with Miles Wallis, and you will never believe what he said—what I saw.”
I land my glass back onto the tray with a thud, expelling a wave of juice over the lip. A part of me is shocked, a part of me wants to get upset over the fact she did this without me, but the wiser part saysto hell with it. “Tell me everything.”
And she does. Charlie fills me in on the fact she paid him a visit at Del Sol, told him she was a part of some paranormal society at Conrad, and he ate it up like a bag of LSD-laced Cheetos. She lets me know that he confessed to being Lizzy’s dealer, something I had confronted her about and she blatantly denied. Charlie says they had an open relationship that Miles implied there was someone else.
“There’s one more thing.” Her eyes widen a notch, and I want to pause a moment from the heartbreak of talking about my sister and count the gold flecks in her eyes instead. She takes a deep breath, and her chest rises and falls. “He implied that your sister was short on cash.” She ticks her head to the side as if alluding to something.
“Lizzy was rolling in it.” True. She was a walking bag of money for a while there. She was a clotheshorse who loved the high of new things.
“Not according to Miles. He said she lost her position at the firm, then burned through her finances. In order to keep herself in handbags, she had to resort to something—something darker that he claims your mother knew about.”
“What?” I bang my head lightly over the wall. “Charlie, this guy is a nutcase. He spread horrible lies about my sister. You can’t believe a word he says. I really wish you didn’t go.”
“He wasn’t lying about the DMs. I saw them. They came straight from your sister’s account. It was her handle and her avatar. Anyone can steal an avatar, but her handle is unique. Trust me, it looked real, and Miles isn’t clever enough to fake it.”
I shake my head. “Neil said it wasn’t there.”
“No offense, but Neil probably isn’t as in tune to technology the way he should be. A third grader could have verified it. I bet he didn’t even know how to open them.”
A groan comes from me. “Shit.” My stomach boils at the thought. I’m going to shake some sense into Neil when I get a chance. “It was probably an oversight.” But I don’t believe it. Charlie is right. He couldn’t figure out how to open the DMs in the first place. “What did Miles claim my mother knew?”
Her mouth opens and closes as if she’s changed her mind. I reach over and take up her hand, kissing each of her fingers in turn without taking my eyes off her. “Tell me, Charlie. I’m dying here.”
Her eyes close a moment, and if I didn’t know better, it’s regret I see sweeping across her face. “He implied that she was taking pictures of herself. You know, special pictures—for money.”
“Shit,” I mutter. “I really am going to kill him.”
“He called her customersdirty dudes. He said something about your mother walking in on her.”
“No way. My mother would have ended my sister’s life if that were true.” I blow out a hard breath. Could that have happened? Was there even a remote chance that Lizzy would stoop so low?
“Theo”—Charlie leans in with a pained look in her glassy eyes—“last night, while you were bedroom hunting, your mother said something to me. She said that after she and Thomas divorced, your sister hit hard times. She said she had disgusting habits and implied they sponsored her love of handbags.” She tries to get something else out but swallows it down instead.
“No way.” I sink deeper into the mattress. “It can’t be true, Charlie.” I shake my head, trying to banish the thoughts, her words from my mind. “My God, if it is true, who was she?”
“I don’t know.” She moves the tray farther down the bed and slides into my arms, her forehead wrinkled deep with concern. “But when I scrolled through Miles’ phone, I found a conversation Lizzy and he had about him delivering pot to the St. Regency—inDunbar. Is that somewhere she was staying after her divorce?”
“Dunbar?” My mind spins for a minute. “No. She came here right after she and Thomas split. She moved in with Miles for a short time, but that was just a few weeks, and then she split her time between here and a small apartment she rented in Wakefield. She was just getting settled there. I can’t imagine why she’d stay in Dunbar. It’s only an hour drive, less without traffic.”
She glances to the window, her thoughts racing ahead of me. “So it splits the difference between Redgrass and Wakefield. Maybe she was splitting the distance with someone? Thomas maybe? How far is Dunbar from Des Moines?”
“About that, halfway.” I grimace before telling her what my sister said downstairs. About how I didn’t believe a word of it, but now I don’t know what to think.