“I realize that, but I can’t help you,” Linda insisted. “We don’t have any skeletons in our closet. I’d tell you if we did.”
Serena watched her eyes. There was nothing furtive behind them. “Do you have any ties to Reno? Have you visited there recently?”
“Reno? Not in years. There are plenty of casinos around here if I want to drop a nickel in a slot. Why?”
“We think whoever did this was in Reno a few weeks ago. We found a receipt in the car. There may be a connection. Do you have friends or family there?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
Serena nodded. “If you think of something, or if anything unusual happens, I hope you’ll let me know.”
“Of course I will, but I really think you’re wrong about this. I just don’t see why anyone would deliberately hurt our family.”
“That’s what scares me,” Serena acknowledged.
“Why?”
“Because it means we may not find this person before he kills someone else.”
EIGHT
Stride and Serena made it home separately just before midnight on Sunday. He had been awake for almost twenty-four hours, but he was still too wired on caffeine simply to tumble into bed and sleep. The two of them barely turned on the lights before leaving again and taking Stride’s Bronco west into the hills. It had become a nighttime ritual for them. They followed Charleston until the houses ran out, before the road wound into Red Rock Canyon. He steered the Bronco off the paved road and climbed a rocky slope to the high ground. They turned around and parked, doors open, windows open, with the night air blowing through the truck and the expanse of the Las Vegas valley stretched out below them. The tracts of suburban homes inching up the street, eating more of the empty space week by week, were dark.
Even in July, when the daytime heat was ferocious, the night cooled in the hills, enough that the breeze sailing down over the peaks behind them made it bearable. Now, in the early fall, there was a hint of chill, like a Minnesota evening without the fragrant scent of pine. He could see literally the entire city, its myriad lights creeping out like vines in all four directions until they finally ran out in the darkness of the desert. Cutting through the middle was the fiery glow of the Strip, taller and brighter than anything else around it, a multicolored, bedazzling belt across the city’s fat belly.
From far away, without the sunlight, the valley sparkled. There was no orange rim of smog floating over the city like a smoke ring. The casinos were jewels.
Stride twisted his upper body and stared at Serena’s face in silhouette. He knew she felt him watching her. This was the time when it was just the two of them, peaceful, in love, free of the city. “You are way, way too beautiful,” he told her.
“If you want sex, you’re going to have to do better than that,” Serena replied, laughing.
“But that was my best line.”
He smiled and stroked her dark hair, in a way that told her he wanted her. He knew, when they got home, they would be too tired to do anything but sleep, and he very much wanted to make love to her.
She leaned across and kissed him. “Haven’t we proven it’s not safe for a man in his forties to do it in a truck? Last time, you almost threw your back out.”
“It was worth it.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she told him.
Serena pulled her T-shirt over her head. Her hair was mussed and sexy. She unhooked and wriggled out of her bra, then stretched her shoulders back. She reclined her seat and began peeling down her jeans. Her skin was firm, her breasts milky white like oyster shells in the pale light. He climbed over her and felt her fingers on his clothes.
He was back in his own seat a few minutes later, sweaty and sore. “Ow,” he said.
“Your back?”
“Back, arms, legs.”
“I told you so.”
Stride dangled his foot out of the truck and rubbed it against the loose dirt. He hoped that a scorpion wasn’t scuttling nearby, or that a rattlesnake wouldn’t choose that moment to slither from the rocks. Those were the real night creatures, doing what came naturally, unlike the human ones below them in the valley.
Serena lay next to him, bare and disheveled. She made no effort to repair her clothes. Her eyes were lost, focused into the hills. She touched her skin idly with her fingertips. “Think the novelty of this is ever going to wear off?”
“Us having sex?”
“Yeah.”
“I hope not.”
“I’m ready to go again,” she told him.
“You’re on your own.”
Serena gave him a mock sigh. “Did it ever wear off with Cindy?”
Stride smiled as a picture of his late wife flashed in his brain. “No. She was like you. She couldn’t get enough.”
“Oh yeah, I’m a sex fiend. I’m just glad vaginas aren’t like piercings.”
Stride looked at her. “What?”
“You know. Closing up from lack of use.”
He threw his head back and laughed, and Serena joined him. Her head fell against his shoulder, and he slipped an arm around her. They sat silently for a few more minutes, lulled by the wind.
The longer they sat, the more he felt her go away somewhere. That was how it usually happened. When they got close, and she felt safe with him, she took another step into her past and pulled another ghost from her closet.
It was a compliment, she told him. She had never done that with anyone else. Her secrets were like notes plugged up in bottles that she had long ago tossed into the sea. Now, one by one, they were drifting back to shore.
He knew only sketches of what she had gone through. Raw facts. She had told him what had happened to her as a teenager in clinical terms, like a doctor reciting from someone else’s file. Her mother used her as a whore to pay for drugs. She got pregnant, she had an abortion, she ran away. End of story. Only those kinds of stories never ended.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked.
Serena took a long time to reply, and he wondered if she would drop it and go back to something safe, like work or music or the lights in the valley.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Deidre,” she said.
Deidre was the girl who had come to Las Vegas with Serena when she escaped from Phoenix at the age of sixteen. Serena had never told him much about her. Only how she died.
“Strange, huh?” she went on. “I really haven’t thought about her in years, but she’s been in my dreams lately. I fall asleep, and there she is.”
“She got AIDS. That wasn’t your fault.”
Serena rubbed her shoulders as if she were cold. “The thing is, I never went to see her. Maybe there was nothing I could do, but I didn’t have to let her die alone. I mean, she saved me. Back in Phoenix? She saved me. I was being abused night and day, and she helped me escape. I loved her, Jonny. I really loved her, those first few years we were together. But I just let her die.”
“You don’t need me to tell you that isn’t true, do you?” Stride asked.
Serena shrugged. “No. But it keeps coming back to me. You’d think by now it would all be gone, dead, not a big deal. But I can’t switch on part of myself with you and keep the rest shut off.”
Stride frowned. ‘’How can I help?”
“I’m not sure you can.”
“So I guess one alternative is to shut me off, too,” he said.
“Sure it is. But that’s not what I want. I just have to learn how to deal with all this-and keep you around.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She turned to him, unconvinced. “I know how you feel about this place. I’m worried that you’ll hate this city more than you love me. You’ll go back home to Minnesota, where your heart is.”
“My heart’s here with you.”