CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jeanette lay wakeful, not even bothering to toss and turn. She lay flat on her back like a mannequin. Arms straight at her sides. Staring blankly at the dark ceiling.

Finally, when she turned her head and the clock told her it was three in the morning, she gave it up as a lost cause and got out of bed.

In nothing but a shortie satin nightshirt, she padded through the house switching on lights. She was unconcerned about peeping Toms. All of her windows not only had curtains and shades, but the glass was either tinted, frosted, or covered with a layer of pebbly film to make seeing in an eye-straining chore.

She had far more house than she needed. Five bedrooms, three and a half baths, sunken living room, formal dining room, entertainer's kitchen, furnished basement rec room with a full-wall river rock fireplace. Fenced and landscaped backyard with a redwood gazebo and a hot tub. Three-car garage.

What the hell, she could afford it. For a while there, she'd been doing five or six jobs a year, tax-free, at fifty grand a pop.

Her house was sparsely but expensively decorated, with the sleek lines and spare designs of modern furniture. The art on the walls was all abstract except for one Thomas Kinkaide full of pale colors and ethereal light.

A cleaning service came twice a week, as did a landscaper – he refused to be called anything so prosaic as a mere gardener – to keep up the yard. The neighborhood had a homeowner's association to keep everything nice, and a gate to keep the riffraff out. The lots were large, the houses spaced to provide cherished privacy. All Jeanette usually saw of her neighbors was the occasional upscale car backing out of a driveway, the occasional spoiled brat biking lazily along one of the curving streets.

Five bedrooms, and she only used one for sleeping. The others weren't even guest rooms, as she never had guests. One was a well-equipped home gym, one was an office where she kept her computer and files, the sunniest one in the southeastern corner was devoted to houseplants and herbs.

The last and smallest of the bedrooms was kept vacant. She went in there now, the hardwood floor satiny beneath her feet, and looked around at the eggshell-white walls.

The baby's room.

There was no baby. There never had been a baby. There hadn't been so much as a close call along the lines of a missed period or broken condom.

It wasn't as if she had any plans to start a family, any urge to become a mother. Yet, somehow, whenever she tried to think of doing something else with this room, she got a knot in her stomach.

Her own family life had been fragmentary and unreliable. Her parents had gotten married right out of high school, her father a Navy man who had knocked up his wife every time he came home on leave.

Jeanette's earliest memories were of cardboard boxes. The family had moved three times before she started kindergarten. Then her father had died – killed in a senseless training accident at a base near San Diego – and her mother Diane had been left with four young children, no job, little education and hardly any skills.

She tried getting work, no easy task for a young white woman in a region of the country where immigrants and illegals were willing to work for next to nothing. After paying a babysitter out of what pittance she was able to earn, there was hardly enough money left for to keep Jeanette and her siblings fed and clothed.

Some friends with good intentions set Diane up on dates, but not many men were keen on a widow who had four kids. Except for one. Chuck. He had been very keen on Diane … not in spite of her kids but because of them.

Even at eight years old, Jeanette had known that there was something wrong with Chuck. That it wasn't right for him to volunteer to give the girls their baths, offering to scrub their backs, wash their hair. He'd often told them what pretty little girls they were, and how much he wanted to be their special friend.

With her, it had never gone beyond talk. She didn't know whether he'd done more to Carrie and Deena, her sisters. All she knew was that she had been overjoyed when he and Diane broke up and Chuck was out of their lives.

Finally, swallowing her pride, Diane had been forced to fall back on relatives for help. She tried first with her father-in-law, but Hank Kurrell was a no-good drunk who lived in a rundown trailer huddled in the dusty foothills at the edge of a dying town on the wrong side of the San Bernardinos. Hank had shown no interest in the welfare of his grandchildren or daughter-in-law. To get rid of Diane, he had supplied her with an old car, enough cash to fill up the tank with gas, and the address of his sister, Cecilia, up in Oregon.

Aunt Cece, as she insisted she be called, was an enormously fat woman who wore flowered housedresses and kept parakeets. She had agreed to take them in, so Diane had packed them all into the car for the long ride north.

Cece worked in a candy factory which, to the severe disappointment of the Kurrell kids, was nothing like the one they'd seen in the famous movie. No edible gardens, no Oompa-Loompas, no benignly psychotic man in a purple velvet suit. Just ordinary workers, most of them women, most of them fat, packaging candies off of a conveyor belt.

For a while, with Aunt Cece, things had been okay. Not great; the house was small and Jeanette had to share a room with both of her little sisters while Mitchell slept on a cot in the laundry room. The parakeets twittered and cheeped twenty-four hours a day. But, for the first time since their father's death, they'd had enough to eat. Too much to eat when it came to candy. Cece got Diane a job at the factory and there was money for new clothes from K-Mart, and weekly trips to McDonalds and the movie theater.

It took almost a whole year of living with Aunt Cece for their bad luck to catch up with them. When it did, it came with a vengeance.

One day, when Jeanette was at the kitchen table doing her homework, her sister Carrie burst in, her face ashen and tear-streaked. Mitchell, their little brother, had been hit by a car.

He'd been playing catch, and Jeffy Ryerson had thrown the ball too hard. Without stopping to look for traffic, Mitchell had dashed into the street after it. The driver of the car had stopped long enough to see what had happened, and then, while Carrie, Deena, the Ryerson kids and Lottie Hessman watched, leapt behind the wheel and roared off.

Then, like dominoes, the rest had begun to fall. The shock of Mitchell's death had most likely contributed to Aunt Cece's stroke. Perhaps while visiting Aunt Cece in the hospital, Deena, always the frailest of the four, had gotten bronchitis that became pneumonia. The medical bills and the cost of the nursing home ate up what little they'd been able to save and Cece's house had to be sold to cover the rest, leaving Diane and the girls homeless again.

Jeanette had never met her maternal grandparents. She got a birthday card each year, with an impersonal signature and a dollar tucked inside. On Christmas, the Barnes grandparents always sent a box addressed to all the kids. It invariably held one of the standard board games – checkers, Chutes and Ladders, Candy Land, Aggravation, Yahtzee – plus a package of store-bought holiday cookies. In return, Diane sent Sears Portrait Studio pictures of the children.

Diane called them when Mitchell died, and even in her own grief, Jeanette had been able to hope that maybe this tragedy would have some good, and bring them together as a family. She'd been wrong. Big Jim and Lucy had not come to the funeral. They had sent a flower arrangement as impersonal as the signatures in the birthday cards and that was all.

The family returned to southern California, where Diane worked two jobs to make ends meet. Jeanette was left in charge, though she found it impossible to discipline her wild sister, Carrie … and didn't have the heart to be too strict with poor sickly Deena.

Carrie smoked and drank, and hung around with older boys. It came as no real surprise when, at thirteen, she ran away from home and was never seen again.

Deena's lungs never fully recovered from her bout with pneumonia. On a school field trip, she had suffered an asthma attack and suffocated to death while her horrified classmates had looked on.

Perhaps those final tragedies had used up the last of the bad luck. Things had turned around for Jeanette and her mother after that. Diane got a good job at a ski resort up in the mountains, and there, in that small town that thrived during the winter season and slumbered the rest of the year, Jeanette made her first real friends.

It was also where she had made her first kill.

And somehow, she had ended up here. In this comfortable neighborhood and this wonderful house. With more money than her mother had ever dreamed of.

Jeanette looked again around the empty, unfurnished room.

The baby's room.

If there ever was a baby. If she ever dared try.

What did she want with a family anyway? It would only bring trial and struggle, grief and despair. Her mother had been so glad to be quit of the reminders of that whole ugly mess that Jeanette hadn't heard from her in years. Diane had happily settled into a new life with a new husband and two stepsons.

In her darker hours – like now – Jeanette wondered if there was a curse on the Kurrells. It would explain a lot.

Though she kept the house at a comfortable temperature year round – energy bills be damned – she shivered.

God, she hated these trips down memory lane, but lately she found herself taking them. Hashing over the past, remembering the poverty and the misery and the grinding hopelessness.

As much as she'd tried to put it behind her, it was all still there. The endless tweeting clamor of Aunt Cece's parakeets. Chuck smiling through a haze of whiskey fumes, telling her what a pretty little girl she was. Carrie screaming about the car, about Mitchell. Trying to sleep on the trundle bed, hearing Deena gasping, and waiting, just waiting for the time when her sister wouldn't be able to get a breath. Her mother, puffy circles under her eyes, aged into a hag before her time.

Not me, she'd told herself again and again during those long, wretched years. That won't happen to me.

And it hadn't. She had avoided her mother's fate. Rather than have children and watch helplessly as they died, or went bad, or grew away and apart and indifferent, she had this empty room. The baby's room for the baby that wasn't. That would never be.

This was her life, such as it was. A little hollow, maybe. A little empty. But hers, a damn sight better than anything she'd been able to reasonably hope for as a child. Her life, and she liked it.

If that damned skateboard kid didn't ruin everything.

Jeanette couldn't stand the prospect of losing what she had worked so hard to attain. The money was part of it, but her reputation was on the line too.

How could she dial one of the contact numbers that would put her in touch with Rayburn and his associates? How could she tell them what had happened? She would look like a hundred different kinds of fool. Letting her purse get stolen? They would be disgusted at her carelessness.

What was she going to do?

Finish the job, that was what she was going to do. If she was clever enough, she could do it and have Rayburn's people be none the wiser.

It would mean losing a quarter of the money. That hurt, but it wasn't going to kill her, especially when she had been promised double her usual fee. She would still stand to clear seventy-five thousand, no matter how you sliced it.

But how was she going to finish the job? They wanted her to use that specific gun. The one from the collection. The target's own gun.

She could get around that hitch somehow. It might be difficult, but it wouldn't be impossible.

Jeanette went downstairs to the kitchen. An entertainer's kitchen, the real estate agent had called it. A feature that was lost on her, for she never entertained.

Her large refrigerator and cupboards were kept well stocked. Perhaps excessively so, obsessively so. She supposed it was some holdover from her childhood, when there had so rarely been enough to eat. An overcompensation.

She took out the makings of a ham sandwich, supplemented it with carrot sticks and a glass of milk, and carried her post-midnight meal back up to her bedroom.

It wasn't the money and it wasn't the gun. If either or even both of those things had been the real problem, Jeanette wouldn't have worried.

The target. He was the problem.

Whoever he was.

There it was in a nutshell. She had not so much as glanced at the name of the man she was supposed to be killing. She didn't know who he was, or where he lived, or what he did for a living.

All she knew was that the photographs had shown a fit, healthy blond man who looked to be in his mid-twenties, but could really be as old as forty if he was diligent about his health. And that he had a sailboat, or had at least once in his life gone sailing.

Not a lot to go on. Not nearly enough to get her started.

If she contacted Rayburn, he could provide her with copies of the file. But would he? Would he agree to do it without wanting to know why she needed it? Unlikely. He'd want to know. He'd want an explanation.

No, the only thing she could do would be to retrieve the original information. If she got it all back, gun and folder and all, she wouldn't have a problem. She could carry out her assignment and no one would ever have to know.

She needed to get her stuff back.

Which meant finding the skateboard kid.

Somehow. Anyhow.

Come hell or high water, she would find that skateboard kid.

**