Athena Force 8: Contact by Evelyn Vaughn Page A

Chopin, one that had ended with them writing each other off for good. Not just because of how bad her behavior had made her look in front of Greg, who wasn’t just her boss but someone whose opinion she very much valued.
    Not even because of the time she’d spent in the horrible atmosphere of the police station, turning pages of mug shots that carried energy of countless victims before her—though that had been its own ordeal.
    She felt sick because, without knowing what her mother would confess, Faith had apparently read enough, subconsciously, to know she wouldn’t like it. She’d suspected that, avoided that, for far too long. Her increasing awareness of Tamara’s secrets was partly why she’d moved out.
    And now it was time to face them.
    The Garden District was the most elegant representation of old New Orleans, a showcase for mansions and arching oak trees. Moving there from Kansas City had been like stepping into a version of Gone With the Wind in which the north had lost. From the streetcar stop, Faith passed several stately homes—the Deveaux Villa, the Bernard House—before she reached the Manning Mansion, a showplace surrounded by iron fencing, fronted with Doric columns and accompanied by a cluster of historic outbuildings. One, which used to be the white-bricked carriage house, had been adapted to a separate residence at about the same time the Mannings had traded their four-footed horsepower for the kind that took gasoline.
    That’s where Faith’s mother lived, where Faith had lived during her college years. Mr. Manning had old money and political clout, but he wanted to be an author…except, he had no interest in actually writing. Tamara was a talented writer. She sometimes wrote as Tammy Betts, but her favorite job was ghosting for clients such as Manning. When her agent hooked the two of them up, room and board in such a prestigious neighborhood had been one of Tamara’s main reasons for taking the job.
    As long as Michael Manning’s historic murder mysteries kept selling, Tamara had one hell of a zip code. She still couldn’t understand why Faith didn’t value locale the way she did. But there were some things Faith had never understood, either.
    Such as why her mother, clearly a talented writer, never took her own byline. And now, why a simple phone call from a police detective, on personal business, had thrown her into a panic.
    “I told her who I was,” Roy had insisted, annoyance at her accusations turning into temper. “I asked if you were there. She said ‘no,’ I said ‘thanks for your time.’ What’s the big deal?”
    “The big deal is, you scared her half to death!”
    “I noticed. And I gotta tell you, someone who scares that easy is guilty of something.”
    Which was exactly what Faith hadn’t wanted to hear, exactly why she couldn’t be reasonable with him, exactly why she’d pushed him into giving up on her.
    Because she knew, in her heart, that it was true. Her mother was guilty of something—worse, something concerning Faith. She didn’t want to hear it. Not from anybody. The consequences…
    Was it wrong to not want to know certain things?
    “Consider that and the way you are,” Roy had said.
    “What do you mean, ‘the way I am?’”
    “That not-liking-to-be-touched business. Makes me wonder what happened to you, if maybe you got touched wrong. Makes me wonder if you even know it, or if you were so young, you forgot. Makes me wonder if your mom hasn’t forgotten squat, so she gets freaky when a cop calls. And that makes me wonder if she’s the sort of woman who brings home guys who don’t just abuse her but spread the joy. That’s what I mean. But hey, what do I know? I just do this for a living.”
    And this from a man who’d never even met her mother! Faith had told him exactly what he could do with what he did for a living, and that had been the end of that.
    Except for the fact that she couldn’t dismiss his accusations as easily as she could