If She Only Knew Read online

  For the first time since leaving the hospital, Marla accepted the fact that she was tiring; that she hadn’t yet regained all her strength. Her head was thundering and she needed some time alone, to lie in her own bed, fight the pain and try like crazy to make some sense of this life that seemed so foreign, to force herself to recall any jagged little piece of memory. “Maybe I will lie down,” she said after taking one more look at her baby. Suddenly bone-weary, Marla walked to her room and kicked off her shoes.

  Eugenia closed the shades. “Rest now,” she suggested.

  “Thanks,” Marla said as she eyed the elevated bed with its lace canopy.

  You don’t live here; you’ve never lived here. This isn’t your house; this isn’t your bed. No way. The thought seared through her brain, but Marla ignored it; she was just too damned tired. She would remember. Soon.

  “If you need anything else, anything at all, just use the intercom here, it’s one of those plug-in types, but it works well.” Eugenia motioned to a bedside table and pushed on a black button. “Carmen?” She lifted her finger.

  “Yes, Mrs. Cahill,” came the reply.

  Eugenia pushed the button again. “We’re fine. Don’t need anything . . .” she said, lifting an eyebrow at Marla who caught the signal that if she wanted anything now was the time to ask. She shook her head and her mother-in-law spoke toward the box again. “I was just showing Marla how to reach you. Thank you.” Eugenia lifted her finger.

  This is a test, only a test. The words flew through Marla’s mind, but she couldn’t remember where she’d heard them before. And right now, tired and aching, she didn’t give a damn.

  “I’m staying in tonight,” Eugenia said. “Is there anything else you’d like? I see the juice is already here. No doubt it’s got your dose of medication in it.” She motioned to the night table where a tall glass of orange juice was sweating on a lace cloth.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, just let Carmen know. Now, lie down and don’t worry about a thing.”

  Fat chance. It seemed as if all she did was worry about who she was, the accident, her family, her damned memory. Her head was thundering again. “Where’s Cissy?”

  Eugenia fumbled with the pearls at her neck. “Well, I let her go over to a friend’s. She waited around for a while, but you were late . . .”

  “Red tape at the hospital. Some foul-up with the release forms,” Marla said, remembering her own impatience at being detained even a second longer than she needed to have been.

  “Anyway, I shouldn’t have let her go over to the Thomases, but you have seen her the last couple of days and frankly, I was tired of her grumbling about being bored and all . . . I didn’t let her go riding, and Lord did I hear about that.” She clucked her tongue, as if the thirteen-year-old was already too much to handle.

  “It’s all right.”

  “I’ll make sure she’s home when you wake up.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Glad you’re back, Marla.” Eugenia smiled as she shut the door and Marla let out her breath. She drank from the glass of juice and winced at the bitter taste. The pain medication. Good. In a few minutes her head would stop aching. Maybe her mother-in-law was right. Maybe things would be better after a good night’s sleep in her own bed.

  Stripping down to panties and bra, she tumbled into the bed and felt the cool sheets caress her skin. The bed was comfortable, the soft down quilt heavenly and her eyelids felt as if they each weighed a ton.

  Exhaustion overtook her. She was grateful to forget about the questions that had been plaguing her ever since she’d woken up from her coma. Everyone was right; she was just confused. That was it. Because of the accident. That had to be what it was.

  Otherwise everyone was lying to her.

  The lab coat was a couple of sizes too big, but it didn’t matter. It was all the camouflage he needed. One of the burn ward nurses hadn’t shown up for duty tonight as her car had been disabled, her cell phone stolen and the other two were run ragged as the hospital was searching for staff to fill the void.

  By the time they managed that, he’d be finished.

  The lights were too bright for his liking, but there wasn’t much he could do about that, and he shoved a pair of tortoiserimmed glasses onto his nose. Slipping into his role of intern easily, he walked with confidence. The name tag on his lapel and picture were of Carlos Santiago. He figured no one would notice that the image on the card didn’t match his face as he strode with the authority of someone who knew what he was doing. That he belonged.

  What a joke.

  He’d never belonged anywhere. Had always been on the outside looking in. Well now he wasn’t only looking, he was fucking pounding on the window.

  Near the burn ward, he lingered in an alcove, then waited until the overworked nurse on duty was called into a room. As she disappeared through the door he crept on silent footsteps to Charles Biggs’s room.

  Lying in the bed, the man looked like a monster. Any skin that was visible was red and oozing. Bandages swathed part of his body. He was unmoving, tubes going in and out of his body, an IV dripping pain medication and God-only-knew-what else into his bloodstream.

  Too late.

  Biggs wasn’t going to make it.

  He eased to the bedside of the unlucky bastard. That’s what you get when you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Too bad, Biggs.

  Biggs drew a rattling breath into his scorched lungs.

  You cost me, you son of a bitch, he thought, then took a small, rubber sheet from his pocket and placed his gloved hands over Biggs’s mouth and nose. The man stiffened, tried to gasp in another breath, struggled in his unconscious state.

  His muscles strained with the effort of holding the big man down, but it was over before it really started. Charles Biggs had been loitering on this side of death’s door for much too long. He just helped the bastard over the threshold.

  As he moved silently away from the bed and the damned monitors started beeping wildly, he smiled and walked on silent footsteps to a back stairwell. He opened the door and disappeared down the concrete steps.

  The way he looked at it, he’d done the sorry son of a bitch a favor. A big one.

  He stepped out of the stairwell on the first floor and ran into a nurse running full tilt in the opposite direction.

  “Excuse me,” she said, her gaze flying to his name tag, then up to his face. A quizzical expression crossed her features. “Carlos?” she said. “Hey!”

  He turned quickly. Dashed through the glass double doors and prayed the woman didn’t get too close a look at his face, as he nearly tripped over an elderly woman being pushed in a wheelchair.

  “Son of a bitch,” he growled, stripping off the lab coat and cutting across traffic. He glanced back, saw the nurse at the door. She was talking animatedly to another woman. Her fingers were jabbing in the direction of the street. Still running, he rounded a corner, ignored the pain in his ankle, crossed another couple of streets and found his Jeep just where he’d left it.

  Adrenalin surged through his blood as he climbed in, flicked on the ignition and, sweating despite the cool temperature, nosed the Jeep into traffic. He lit a cigarette and left the hospital behind. His heartbeat slowed as he put some distance between himself and the hospital.

  He’d nearly gotten caught.

  But hadn’t.

  Grinning to himself, he glanced down at the white lab coat with its ID tag and the picture of Carlos Santiago staring up at him. He jabbed his cigarette onto the tag and the smell of charred plastic filled the Jeep.

  “Muchas gracias, amigo.”

  “Had Marla been drinking on the night that she lost control of the car?” Nick asked. He and Alex sat in an Irish pub a few blocks from his hotel. Alex was on his second scotch and water. Nick was nursing a beer.

  “Nope. She’d just gotten out of the hospital.”

  “What about Pam?” Nick asked, wondering about the woman who no one seemed to know. Marla�
�s friend.

  “No one knows what she’d been doing but there was a little alcohol in her bloodstream. Not much.” From the booth where they sat, Alex’s gaze followed a couple of guys who were throwing darts near the back of the bar.

  “Marla and she were close?”

  “As close as Marla gets I suppose,” Alex swirled his drink. Ice cubes danced in the weak light. “She didn’t have a lot of friends.”

  That surprised Nick. “She sure as hell got a lot of cards and flowers.”

  “It’s expected. We’re pretty high-profile around here.” Alex yanked at the knot of his tie and Nick wondered if his brother ever wound down. Competitive to a fault, Alex had always been a classic type-A personality, following in the old man’s footsteps as if they’d been made by God Himself. Never questioning, always proving to the bastard that he was indeed more than qualified to be Samuel J. Cahill’s heir. A football scholarship to Stanford, undergraduate degree there and then law school at Harvard. Alex knew how to play the game.

  “High profile but not well liked?” Nick asked as glasses clinked and conversation buzzed around them.

  “It’s hard to say. People tend to kiss ass when you have money.” Alex pinched his lower lip thoughtfully, then motioned to the waitress for another round.

  “So you really don’t know who your true friends are?”

  “Something like that.” Alex tossed back the rest of his drink and set his glass on the glossy table. He rubbed his face and looked a decade older than his forty-two years.

  “Cherise called me before I left home,” Nick finally admitted.

  Alex’s expression changed from congenial to guarded. “Don’t tell me. She whined about me not letting her see Marla.”

  “That was the gist of it, yeah.”

  “Shit.” Alex snorted, wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “She and Monty. They won’t give up. Like hyenas at a lion’s kill.” He frowned at the analogy. “Or better yet, wasps that won’t go away. They bug the hell out of you, make a lot of noise, and threaten to sting.” He tossed his brother a dark look. “I’ll deal with Cherise. And Montgomery.”

  The subject seemed closed and Nick had done his duty, so he slid lower on his spine and observed his brother. “I drove out to the scene of the accident,” Nick admitted.

  Alex didn’t show much reaction. “And what did you find out?”

  “Not much. But I can’t figure out why both vehicles broke through guardrails in opposing directions. The truck, well, that’s nearly understandable, just from the sheer weight and speed of the rig. It was, after all, going downhill, but the Mercedes . . . how did it manage to tear through that kind of steel?”

  “Good question.”

  “I saw the car,” Nick admitted. “Found a policeman who was more than happy to let me take a look in the yard where it’s being held.” His lips rolled in on themselves as he remembered the crushed metal, blood-stained seats and shattered glass. “It’s a wonder anyone survived.”

  “Marla’s always been tough. You know that.”

  The muscles in the back of Nick’s neck tensed. “Tough is one thing.” He stared straight at his brother. “Seeing the car made me almost believe that she had a guardian angel watching over her.”

  “Almost?”

  “I have a problem with organized religion.”

  “I remember.”

  “But no one should have survived that wreck.”

  One side of Alex’s mouth lifted. “Well, Marla’s always been lucky, hasn’t she?”

  Nick didn’t answer, didn’t want to go there. “Why do you think Marla panicked and lost control of the car?”

  “Hell if I know. She was always a decent driver. Never even a traffic ticket. I guess only she can answer that one . . . if she gets her memory back.”

  “You mean when,” Nick corrected.

  “Do I?” Alex smiled to a pretty waitress with a knockout figure and big brown eyes.

  She hardly looked old enough to be serving drinks. Dressed in a short skirt, white blouse and red bow tie, she picked up his empty glass, deposited another full one and left Nick a beer that he wasn’t quite ready for. But he didn’t complain. Figured he’d find a way to down it.

  “I’m not sure if she’ll ever remember anything,” Alex said. He met the questions in Nick’s eyes and sighed. “Sure, I play the game and tell her she will. Of course I do and Phil Robertson, her doc, he seems convinced that her memory will return, but right now, it doesn’t seem like it.” He took a long sip from his new drink and settled back against the tufted seat. “It’s just hard to predict.”

  Grudgingly, Nick had to agree.

  “And maybe I’m just sick of all this shit.”

  “Maybe.” Nick sipped from the long-necked bottle and wondered about the accident. Pam Delacroix had died instantly, Biggs had never regained consciousness. Marla remembered nothing, surviving in her own personal netherworld. “You never met Pam?”

  “Nope.” Alex reached into his jacket pocket, withdrew a pack of cigarettes and said, “I need a smoke. Wanna join me outside?”

  “Sure.” They finished their drinks, and Alex insisted on paying by offering the waitress his credit card. After signing the receipt, and shrugging into his overcoat, he and Nick walked outside to an alley where several men were gathered, smoking, laughing, laying down odds on the 49ers’ chances for a playoff berth, barely glancing in Alex and Nick’s direction. Alex lit up and blew smoke from the corner of his mouth and Nick zipped his jacket against the chill that was San Francisco in mid-November. “All I know about Pam is what Marla told me, that she and Marla met at the club a few years back, though I never heard about it at the time.” He shrugged. “But that could be expected.” He looked up to the sky. “There have been times in our marriage that we didn’t talk a lot. We’ve separated a couple of times . . . oh, nothing official, but the marriage, well, it’s had a few bumps in the road.” He turned thoughtful, inhaled deeply on his smoke and Nick didn’t comment, didn’t want to tackle the dangerous subject of his brother’s marriage. “As for Pam, I’m not really sure. I assume that they played tennis together, and maybe bridge . . . but, come to think of it, I never heard her say she was going out to meet her. Other names I heard—Joanna and Nancy, I think. But not Pam.”

  “But you must’ve heard something since.”

  “From the insurance company and a lawyer for Pam’s estate. I sent flowers to the funeral, of course, donated to some charity in Pam’s name, but haven’t had much contact. She was divorced, and had gotten her real estate license I think, but she just dabbled at that. I think she lived off her ex. He’s some hotshot computer engineer who made it big in Silicon Valley. They had one kid, a daughter, and she was down at UC Santa Cruz.” He drew hard on his cigarette as the men clustered near the doorway laughed nearly in unison, as if someone had cracked a particularly hilarious joke. Traffic whizzed by. High in the heavens the moon was partially hidden by wispy, slow-moving clouds.

  “So what was Marla doing that night?”

  “That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Shit, I wish I had an answer to it. But the truth is I have no idea why Marla and Pam took a notion to go down there. For Christ’s sake, James was only a few days old and Marla just gets a wild hare and takes off down Highway 17 in the middle of the night? It was nuts.”

  “Maybe she’ll tell us when she gets her memory back.”

  “Maybe.” Flicking ashes onto the pock-marked street, Alex gazed up the hill, past the Victorian buildings of Haight Street toward the Cahill house, the place they had once, as children, thought of as home. As far as Nick was concerned, Alex could have the mansion and all the problems that came with it.

  Alex tossed his cigarette into the gutter, where it died quickly. A bicyclist darted in and out of the traffic and cars rushed through the narrow streets. “I wish I had met Pam,” Alex said. “Then maybe I could have made some sense of this. It looks like her family is suing us—their lawyer’s already called�
�but I contend that everything should be handled through the insurance company. Christ, what a mess.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets and nodded toward the street where he’d parked his car. “Just one of many, I’m afraid.” He flashed a mirthless smile at his brother. “And speaking of which, I have a few files in my briefcase—kind of an overview of the company,” he said, obviously anxious to change the subject. “I thought you might like to review them before you came down to the office.”

  “Probably a good idea,” Nick allowed as Alex used his keyless lock that opened the driver’s door of the Jag. He snapped open his briefcase and withdrew a small, slim case which he handed to Nick.

  “If you have any questions you can call me at the office, but I’d rather we didn’t discuss details in front of Mother or Marla or anyone at the house.” In the lamplight, Alex looked older than he had, his features more drawn. “I won’t kid you, Nick. The company’s got problems. Big ones. Mother knows there are some difficulties of course, but it would be best if we left it at that.”

  “What about Marla?”

  “Let’s keep her out of it. She’s got enough to deal with.”

  No shit, he thought, but said nothing and gave a curt nod of agreement.

  “Good. I appreciate it.” Alex’s face was grim. For the first time Nick realized that Cahill International might be in serious trouble, that Alex, as CEO was taking the heat. There was even a chance that he’d somehow screwed up, that the company was struggling because of his decisions. Alex clapped him on the back, his hand smacking against the damp leather of Nick’s jacket. “Thanks,” he said, and for the first time in his life, he sounded as if he meant it.

  Nick felt the Cahill noose tighten another notch. As he watched his brother slide into the Jaguar, punch it and roar up the hill, he only hoped that he hadn’t just agreed to become the fall guy.