He was pleased with his progress on the book. The first draft was written. Since it was going to be his last true crime book, he wanted it to be solid, something he and Sara could both be satisfied with. And the sooner he was done, the sooner he would have a legitimate reason to contact Sara, which he really wanted to do. He wanted desperately to hear her voice, just to talk, but he had to give her the space she needed.
Even if it sucked.
There was a knock on his door. Probably his landlord. He had been hanging around the building for two days overseeing some repairs.
“Come in,” Gabriel called, no intention of getting up. He was extremely comfortable on the floor.
The door opened and he heard, “Gabriel?”
It was Sara. He whipped his head to the side and saw her standing in his doorway, smiling tentatively. It was really her, Sara, standing in his doorway and wearing jeans. He’d never seen her wear jeans before, and he liked the way the denim showed off her legs. Her hair was up in a bouncy ponytail, her skin fresh and clear, the shadows under her eyes lighter. She seemed to have gained about five pounds, and overall she looked very healthy. The best he’d ever seen her. She looked amazing.
“Sara,” he said, unable to prevent a smile from breaking out on his face. Damn, it was so good to see her. He had missed her intensely.
Yet her smile was fading as she looked at him, glanced around the room. “Are you okay? Why are you lying on the floor?” She stepped over an empty pizza box. “And it looks like you’ve stopped cleaning since I left.”
That was probably true. He sat upright and drew his knees up, surveying the room with its many piles of papers, laundry, and food wrappers. “I’m a disgusting pig when I’m writing a book. It’s just part of my process.”
“Part of your process is to stop taking out the trash?” She picked up the pizza box and three soft drink cans and walked into the kitchen.
“Yep.” He stood up and shook his hair off his face.
She reappeared empty-handed and gave him a smile, gazing up at him from under her eyelashes. Pointing to his shirt, she said, “And you stop doing laundry?”
Glancing down, he realized there was chocolate on his T-shirt. “Yep.” Then because chocolate and pizza boxes and papers didn’t matter when he was faced with her in front of him, in the flesh, he reached out and touched her arm with just one finger, sliding it down her warm, smooth skin. “I’m so glad you’re here. I missed you, babe, a lot.”
The softness in her eyes and the wide, genuine smile were both reassuring. “I missed you, too.”
It wasn’t enough, to say those words, it didn’t even begin to encompass what he meant. How could he explain that while he had been doing so well, working so hard, and reaching outside of himself for the first time in years, he had missed her? That he thought about her every day, that he longed to hear her voice, smell her cinnamon scent, touch her soft skin and hair. That he ached with want and loneliness to just see her, be with her, feel her. Words weren’t enough, would never be specific or emotional enough to convey the depth of his love, his passion, his yearning for her.
She stepped in closer to him, dropping her purse onto the floor. Gabriel stood still, wondering how close she would get, aching to touch her, to take her in his arms and feel her body, her skin, her hair, her very existence. He wanted to own the right to hold her, to know that when she walked into a room, her connection was to him, that no matter who she was with or what she did, her relationship with him was the most important in her life.
Moving in alongside of him, she brushed his hair off his shoulder and murmured in his ear. “Don’t worry, I know you can’t touch me.” Her lips ran along his jaw, a gentle caress. “I just want to be near you. I want to love you. I want to be with you.”
Longing, intense and worse than any need for absinthe had ever been, arose in him, and he couldn’t prevent himself from leaning his head back, moving away, needing space before he grabbed and took, and through his weakness ruined the beauty of who Sara was and what they shared. “I love you too, Sara, in ways that I can’t even describe. I look at you and I can’t believe that I can feel this much for someone.”
He wanted to say more, needed to remind her that what he wanted and what he had to do were two separate things, but Sara stopped him.
“You don’t have to say it,” she said. “I know. I’m here knowing it. It’s okay, for now. I want to be with you and see where it takes us.”
An unpleasant thought suddenly flooded over him. Maybe she was back because she had made love to him in Florida. Maybe she had returned because she
had
to have him, because compulsion had demanded she be with him. “Was this a choice? Or were you driven to be here?” He didn’t know how else to ask without insulting her.
Her eyes narrowed. “If you’re asking if I’m going to beg like Rochelle or those other women, the answer is a big fat no. I won’t beg to be with you. I love you, I want to move in with you, but you’re never going to hear pleading coming from my lips. If you don’t want me or this, I’ll go back to Florida and I’ll move on. I’ll be perfectly fine.”
Apparently he had insulted her anyway. The longer she spoke, the feistier her words became, and Gabriel tried not to grin at her. It was a relief to hear her getting offended at the very idea of begging him for anything. And he knew she would go on without him. She was a survivor.
“Sorry. Just checking.”
Giving a huff of exasperation, she whacked his arm, which startled him. Sara had never been playful with him, and he liked it. So he laughed, his pleasure that she was standing next to him, that she loved him, full and rich and overflowing.
Sara watched Gabriel laugh as a grin spread huge and wide across his face, the deep timbre of his voice loud in the quiet room, and she was overwhelmed. She didn’t think she had ever actually heard him laugh before, and God, it was a sexy thing. Not pretty, and maybe even mildly obnoxious, but sexy as hell because there was joy on his face. A happiness that she had never seen there before, and she realized she hadn’t been aware of its absence until she saw and heard it. She burst out with her own laugh.
“It’s not funny,” she told him, and it wasn’t. Yet somehow it was. And it felt amazing to laugh with him. “Now clean this apartment up. I’m not moving into this filth.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, reaching for the nearest empty soft drink can, but then ruining the effect by sticking his tongue out at her.
Which was so casual, so free, so out of character yet somehow so Gabriel that she laughed even harder. It was right, it was good, it was so hopeful, the sound of their laughter intermingling, that the questions didn’t matter. The ambiguity, the mysteries, the unknown, didn’t really matter as much as it did to just be together, to share this moment, this day, this life with each other.
Sara spotted Angel lying in the sun spot on the floor, and went to greet her kitten. The cat purred as she scooped her up, and with Angel in her arms, she stepped back out into the hall and pulled in the suitcase she’d left outside the door. Rolling it inside the apartment, she let go of the cat and the handle and picked up another empty pizza box. It boggled the mind to consider how many pizzas he could have possibly consumed in five weeks, and she grabbed a napkin stuck to the box and wiped at the grease spot it had left on the table. It was then she saw the sketchbook shoved to the back of the table, opened to a drawing in pencil of her chewing her lip, studying a paper in her hand. Sara flipped the page and found another of her lying in bed on her side, back visible, wearing a T-shirt, the sheet up to her waist. Then another of her dancing in her miniskirt, legs bent, arms out, a sassy smile on her face. And one of her naked, sitting with her knees to her chest, her eyes shiny and filled with love, lust.
Sara glanced over at Gabriel, unable to speak.
He was watching her. With a small smile and a shrug, he said, “I told you I’ve been busy.”
She could definitely live like this.
“I thought the same thing,” Gabriel said to Sara later, over Cajun food he had snagged from a restaurant up the street. He suspected he was talking a lot, frequently with food in his mouth, which wasn’t classy or attractive, but he was so damn glad she was back that the words were tripping over each other to get out of his mouth. He had the sense that he needed to say everything as quickly as possible in case she disappeared and he never had another chance.
They had spent the afternoon companionably shoveling out his mess, and now while they ate they were dissecting the questions that still remained in the murder cases.
Sara shook her head and picked up her water, sitting on the sofa with her legs crossed. “I just can’t see why Marguerite would murder four generations of women without a more concrete reason. I mean, I sincerely doubt my grandmother was having an affair with Rafe.”
“Here are my concerns,” Gabriel said. He had given a lot of thought to the conclusion of Marguerite as murderer as he’d written the book during the last few weeks and there were still some seriously loose threads dangling. “Why would Raphael buy the house on Dauphine? That seems incredibly random for a man who never admitted he was aware of Jessie’s relationship to Anne. Nor did I ever consider Raphael at all emotionally involved with Anne. Secondly, you said there was a Bible verse on that absinthe bottle. Given what Raphael was quoted during the trial as saying, that seems like too large of a coincidence. Why would both Marguerite and Raphael be using Bible quotes?”
“I don’t know. That’s been the problem the whole time. Too many questions. And I want to know what happened to Rafe’s stuff in his condo. If he wasn’t involved with Marguerite, how did she know he moved out? And was he planning to take his stuff to the house on Dauphine Street? Why would he do that? And who sent the crime scene pics?”
“I don’t know either.” Gabriel abandoned his plate of food and went to his office. Bringing his laptop back into the living room and sitting on the couch next to Sara, he opened his pictures file and clicked on the folder that contained all the shots he’d taken for the book. He wanted a look at the house on Dauphine Street for some reason. Wanted to see if he could see Raphael in the top window. He cropped and enlarged the photo of the front of the house, but he didn’t see anything.
“You think it was Raphael in the window?” Sara asked.
“I don’t see who else it would have been. Did it look like him?”
“I don’t know. It was so quick, so out of context . . . I wouldn’t have expected to see him.”
Since Gabriel was already in the folder, he started randomly clicking through all the pictures he’d taken that day— of the street sign, the house, Sara on the street, Anne’s tomb— looking for something, anything he hadn’t noticed before.
“What’s that?” Sara touched the screen, right on the upper left of Anne’s tomb.
“It’s graffiti.” Which he didn’t remember being there when they had visited the tomb. He had thought the tomb was freshly painted. But there was clearly writing on it.
“What does it say?” Sara was squinting at the screen.
Gabriel clicked Edit and enlarged the photo. It was a little grainy, but they could read the words.
" ’In Him we have redemption,’ ” Sara read.
“Where have I heard that before?” Gabriel stared hard at it. “And do you remember that being on the tomb? I could have sworn there was no writing on the tomb when we were there. We would have noticed this . . . it’s not normal graffiti.”
Sara grabbed his wrist. “Gabriel. Where are the crime scene photos of my mother?”
“In my office. Why?”
“I have a terrible feeling . . . Will you go get them?”
“Sure.” He stood up, handing her his laptop. He had no idea what they would see in those pictures, but he agreed with her. He had a bad feeling too. None of this was right and none of it was a coincidence. There was an answer, he just had to find it. The envelope was in his desk drawer, and he undid the clasp, pulling out the graphic pictures. Flipping through them as he walked, he scanned them carefully, hoping to avoid showing Sara the horrific images if at all possible.
He didn’t see anything he hadn’t noticed before. It was true, the one shot looked like it had been taken from the window, which was odd, but he supposed possible for the police to have done.
Sara was holding her hand out. “Let me see them.”
Wanting to delay the inevitable and hopefully preserve her feelings, Gabriel turned the stack over and shuffled through them looking at their backs. There was writing on the backside of the one picture. “Hold on.”
Lifting it up, he looked closely. The writing was small, in the upper left-hand corner. “ ‘Through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.’ ”
Holy shit. Gabriel gripped the picture, glancing over at Sara. “These go together. The words on the tomb and this. That’s all one quote. ‘In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.’ It’s Ephesians.”
Her face had gone completely white. She dropped his laptop on the couch and jumped up. “Where’s that bottle?”
“What bottle?” Gabriel jammed the pictures back into the envelope. “I’ve seen that quote before, Sara.”
“So have I. On the absinthe bottle. Where is that bottle? The one I found on the doorstep.”
“I don’t know. I think I put it in the kitchen.” He couldn’t even remember what he had done with it, and his mind was distracted, shocked by the knowledge of where he had seen that same quote. He should have known. He should have pursued it.
She was already in the kitchen, opening cabinets. A second later she reemerged with the green bottle in her hand. Yanking the label off the neck, she handed it to him. “See? It’s the same damn quote.”
Gabriel read the paper tag, obviously printed on a computer. He couldn’t believe he had shoved the bottle into a cabinet without even looking at the stupid label. “Sara, I saw this quote too. On Raphael’s will.”