Blood Always Tells, Hilary Davidson [good book club books .txt] 📗

“Don’t worry,” Desmond said. “I booked you for the weekend, and I’ll pay you for the weekend.” He glanced at her. “I’m still holding out hope for Sunday.”

“Okay, then.” That mollified her, at least a bit. “You remember it’s extra for house calls, right?”

He did.

Desmond could no more ask that sloe-eyed girl to make the drive with him than he could ask her to take the controls of a plane. Even if she were willing—and he had serious doubts on that front—you didn’t draw strangers into family business, and anyone who wasn’t family was a stranger. That was his grandmother’s rule, first and foremost. He adored his baby sister, but Dominique was a magnet for trouble. She’d never been a bad girl, not by a long shot, but she had a penchant for bad boyfriends and that led her into some hard places. He never heard exactly where until things went sideways into a ditch, though; Dominique didn’t ask for his help unless she was desperate. That was why he was willing to drop everything and go to her, but he’d never ask anyone else to do that.

So he made the drive alone, speeding along endless stretches of highway across Indiana and Ohio and into Pennsylvania. A series of composers kept him company on the ride. He started with Francis Johnson’s “The Princeton Grand March” and went from there. The music kept him alert—especially Edmond Dédé’s “El Pronunciatiamento,” which he played several times. The nineteenth-century Creole composer’s perfect balance of harmony and discord kept him on edge, yet distracted him from worry. Most of the time, at least. It troubled Desmond that his sister didn’t answer when he phoned her from a gas station near Akron. He tried Gary’s cell phone as well as her own, but the calls went straight to voice mail. He wanted to think maybe she’d gotten a little tipsy and carried away. Maybe she was sleeping it off now. But those beeps toward the end of their call meant the battery was dying, so she could be waiting on tenterhooks for Desmond to arrive and spirit her out. He wondered about calling the cops, but swatted that thought away. What could he tell them? Besides, if Dominique wanted them involved, she wouldn’t have called him.

He made excellent time, getting to the Delaware State Forest a little after eight in the morning after almost ten hours on the road. But it took him the better part of two hours to find the house. Dominique’s directions were good, given she hadn’t even seen the route to the house with her own eyes. She’d been sure an airport was nearby, and that narrowed down the possible area to the land between the Delaware State Forest and the grass landing strip at the Flying Dollar Airport in Canadensis, PA. If he were unlucky, he might have to go southwest in the direction of the Ponoco Mountains Municipal Airport. But he was sure he needed to look west of the forest. There were no landing strips to the east, not until you passed other state parks.

It all seemed sage in theory, but once he’d spent an hour driving through trees, his confidence wore down. There were too many dirt-road turnoffs and too few signs. After conversations with a gas station owner, a couple of hikers, the owner of a 1950s-era cabin, and the staff of the diner where he grabbed breakfast to go, he finally found the dirt path that led him to his quarry. Desmond knew instantly he’d found the right house when he pulled up in front of it: locals talked about the old mansion that had empty windows that stared back like accusing eyes. The other houses in the area were mostly modest, clean-lined cabins, not overbuilt monstrosities like this.

Desmond knocked on the front door and waited. Nothing. He searched for a doorbell but couldn’t find one. There was an old black Honda parked out front with mud smeared over its plate. Was that what Gary was driving these days? Quite a comedown from the Mercedes-Benz he was so proud of.

No one answered and Desmond started to wonder if he’d just driven some seven hundred miles on a wild goose chase. Gary’s heart and soul were in that car. If it wasn’t there, then he and Dominique probably weren’t, either. Curious and more than slightly annoyed, Desmond made a circuit around the house, peering into the windows that weren’t boarded up. The place was only sparsely furnished, but what little there was in the rooms looked attractive in an old-fashioned way. His mother would’ve politely called it quaint, but his grandmother would have deemed it pleasing. Even so, the house was ragged enough that a strong wind might just sweep it off its feet.

When he got around to the back, he saw a man slumped over the kitchen table. The window was made from panels of thick Coke-bottle glass that made it impossible to see inside distinctly. Desmond had met Gary a couple of times. The sleeping man’s coloring and build was a match, but his face was turned away and Desmond couldn’t be positive it was him. There was an open bottle of champagne on the table and a glass lying on its side, as if it, too, had passed out drunk.

Desmond rapped on the window. “Gary?” He knocked harder on the glass. “Wake up, man. Open the door.”

The man didn’t stir.

Desmond didn’t like the feeling that settled in his gut just then. He hurried back to the front door, ready to wrangle the lock, but it pushed open without offering resistance. It was the countryside, so why lock a door? Desmond hoped that was the idea. He didn’t want to consider the alternative.

Inside, the house smelled as if someone had busted open a can of lemon Pledge. He went straight back to the kitchen. “Gary?” He recognized the face and put his hand on the man’s back, noticing a phone on the