Page 23 of Almost Dead (The Cahills 2)

“I wouldn’t say that, exactly.” Cissy shook her head. “I wasn’t that crazy about her, growing up, and she thought I was just okay. Believe me, she was all about a male heir for the family. It was ridiculous, so antiquated, but because of it, I only tolerated her when I was a kid. As a teenager I would have rather been anywhere else, and we lived with her. It was the worst!” She looked away for an instant, her features tightening with emotion. “But over the years we got closer, and then B.J. came along and Gran went nuts. Another boy, I suppose.” Her lips twisted wryly, and Jack hated the pain he saw in her eyes. “You know, I sometimes wonder how she would have reacted if he’d been a girl.” She looked up at Paterno. “Probably not the same. How is that for unfair?”

Paterno lifted a shoulder. “From what I see, not many families are perfect.”

She snorted, glanced through the window to the dark night beyond. Absently she rubbed her arms, as if a sudden chill had swept over her.

“Where are the rest of the family now?” Paterno asked.

“Around here it’s just me,” she said a little defensively, the way she always did when anyone pried too deeply about her family. She was prickly where they were concerned, and Jack didn’t blame her. “There’s my aunt and uncle, who are raising my brother in Oregon. You remember them.”

Paterno nodded. “You got a number?”

Absently petting the dog, she rattled off the phone number from memory. “Of course, there’s my mother too.” She looked through the window to the dark night beyond, almost as if she expected Marla’s visage to appear in the rain-drizzled glass.

Paterno quit scribbling long enough to click the top of his pen as he thought. “Don’t you have some cousins, or half cousins?”

“My father’s cousins.” Her jaw hardened at the mention of the man who had sired her. Though Alex Cahill had been dead for years, Cissy had never forgiven him for neglecting her while he’d been alive. “Gran always called them the black sheep.” Cissy scratched the little dog behind her ears. “Monty, er, Montgomery, is still in prison, but his sister, Cherise, is around. I think her last name is still Favier. It’s hard to keep up. She’s been married a few times.”

The policeman nodded, as if he actually knew who she was talking about. Jack didn’t. Sometimes it seemed the longer he knew Cissy, the less he knew about her.

“They never got along with the rest of the family. I think they thought my grandfather did something underhanded and cut their grandfather out of the family fortune. Monty and Cherise never got over it.”

“Did your grandfather? Cut them out?”

She lifted a shoulder, and Jack realized she was trying to hold on to her patience. He saw the tension in her body, the slight narrowing of her eyes. She didn’t like Paterno and didn’t like his questions. “I don’t know. Gran would remember….” Her voice trailed off, and she cleared her throat. “Look, I really don’t know what more I can tell you.”

Paterno nodded and acted like he’d heard it all before, but it was news to Jack. The detective asked a few more questions, asking Cissy to check and see if any valuables were missing when she returned to Eugenia’s, then finally left. Jack walked him to the door and noticed that the KTAM van wasn’t blocking the driveway any longer.

Good news, at least for now. But it wouldn’t last long. Sooner or later, Lani Saito, or someone else who smelled a story, would be back.

He closed the door behind Paterno and watched as the policeman walked to his Caddy. Once satisfied that the detective wasn’t coming back, Jack returned to the living room, where the fire hissed in the grate and Cissy sat in the chair, petting the dog, still staring out the window. “So,” he said, picking up a framed picture of B.J. on his first birthday, one candle burning on a cake placed on the tray of his high chair. His eyes seemed twice their size as he stared at the cake in awe and amazement.

“So what?” she asked, not even looking at him.

He replaced the five-by-seven on the table. “Are you going to throw me out again?”

“Am I going to have to?”

“You don’t have to.”

She hesitated, as if there were just the tiniest chink in her armor. She slid her gaze to one side, and he had the good sense not to walk close to her, try to touch her, offer unwanted consolation and sympathy. “You keep pushing me.”

“No, Ciss, you’re the one pushing. You’re pushing me away.”

“And you know why,” she declared, throwing her arms up in defeat. “I am so tired of fighting. You can stay, Jack, on the couch—on one condition. No…make that two…on second thought, three conditions!”

Before he could argue, she held up a finger. “First, you leave early in the morning. You do not pass ‘go,’ you do not ‘get out of jail free,’ you do not expect to move in, and you just get the hell out before I get up.”

“Okay.”

A second finger shot skyward. “You walk the dog tonight.”

“The dog hates me.”

“Tough!” The third finger joined the others. “Before you leave, you find a way to fix the damned furnace.”

“You’re not calling a repairman?”

“It’s Sunday. The thermometer in here says the temperature is hovering below sixty-two, and the thermostat is set to seventy.”

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