“You think I’m crazy.” Her voice was a thready, incredulous whisper. She stared numbly at the fussy flower-sprigged wallpaper, the embroidered pictures of pastoral scenes on the walls and the stack of Agatha Christie mysteries piled on an ornately ugly coffee table in front of the plaid sofa. “You’ve got to believe me, Matt! When I left here this morning that ceiling was painted sky-blue with white clouds I’d sponged on this weekend. The walls were a lighter blue. I was making canvas cushions for my furniture, I had photographs of my parents on the wall, and my plants were growing on the windowsill. Somebody’s made it all different! You have to believe me!”
Her last few words were an urgent entreaty, and though he tried to soften his response, he knew it was the last thing she wanted to hear. “That doesn’t make any sense, Jenna.” He kept his voice quiet, hoping to soothe the raw anguish in her eyes. “What reason would anyone have for doing that?”
Instead of answering him, she held his gaze unwaveringly for a moment as if giving him one last chance to change his mind. Then whatever hope she still had ebbed visibly out of her and she turned slowly away. Walking to a half-open door, she flicked on a light switch. Matt remained where he was, his hands clenched at his sides, watching her as she looked in, switched off the light and turned back to him, her voice toneless. “Everything’s changed. My futon’s gone, the quilt my mother made for me when I was a little girl—it’s all disappeared. And you don’t believe me, do you?”
“Would anybody like a nice cup of tea?” Mrs. Janeway had hobbled back into the room. At the doorway, West surveyed the scene with a tight grin and Matt suddenly felt a violent urge to knock the smile from his face. But Jenna didn’t even spare the man a second glance. Her attention was directed at the old lady, and her head was tipped to one side, quizzically.
“It’s all an act, isn’t it?” She gave Mrs. Janeway a coldly appraising look, and the older woman halted in her slow progress across the room, her faded eyes sharpening as she met Jenna’s glance. “You must be useful for something like this—who’s going to suspect a sweet little old lady of being a crook?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, dear.” Mrs. Janeway smiled sympathetically. “Mr. West says you had some idea that this might have been your apartment once, but that’s just not possible. I’ve been here for over fifteen years now, and as you can see, I have all my little treasures and comforts around me. This has been my home since my husband passed away, God rest his soul.”
The old voice held a wistful tremor, but instead of rousing Jenna to pity, what little composure she had left finally cracked. “You’re lying! This is my home! You’ve stolen the first home I ever really had, you—you criminal!” She shook the can of cat food at West, standing in the doorway. “And you’re in on this with her! You rented me this apartment a week ago, and you know it!”
Suddenly her gaze went blank and she stared frantically around. “Where’s Zappa?” Her voice rose. “What did you do with him?”
“What’s she talking about?” the old lady said in a loudly whispered aside to Matt, as if Jenna was incapable of understanding her. “Who’s this Zeppo person she’s looking for now?”
The wrinkled face held an expression of saccharine pity, but behind the bifocals her eyes twinkled with avid interest, and suddenly Matt realized that he didn’t like Mrs. Janeway either. But whether he liked the woman or not, they’d intruded on her long enough. He turned to Jenna.
“We have to go. I know you’re upset right now, but—”
“Zappa! Not Zeppo—Zappa! My cat! Or do you think this is a delusion, too?” Now the tears that she’d been holding back spilled over, and those thick dark lashes were spiky and wet as she held out the dented can as if it was some kind of clinching proof. “He’s Siamese; he’s a little chunky around the middle, and his tail’s covered with sky-blue paint from when I was sponging the ceiling.” Her voice shook. “And you’ve made him disappear, too!”
From the doorway West’s glance caught Matt’s and he winked. “Like I told you,” he said in a stage whisper. “Miss Looney Tunes.”
Matt’s heart sank.
Chapter Two
“He called me crazy. Miss Looney Tunes.” Jenna sat across from Matt in the nearby coffee shop where he’d hustled her after the fiasco at her apartment. Her gaze looked as if it could start a flash fire on the cracked Formica of the tabletop between them. “And you’re thinking the same thing.”
She never should have let him persuade her to walk away from West and that deceitful old woman who called herself Mrs. Janeway, she thought in angry self-recrimination. She should have refused to leave, at least until she’d found out what they’d done with Zappa. Except that in the middle of her near-hysterical outburst she’d caught a glimpse of the expression, quickly veiled, on Matt’s face and for a moment she’d felt as if she’d actually taken a physical blow.
His expression had frightened her. Suddenly she’d realized that she’d lost her only ally, and that the man she’d thought was on her side wasn’t even able to meet her eyes.
He wasn’t meeting them now.
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said a shade too heartily. There was a container of paper-wrapped toothpicks on the table, and he’d already mangled two of them. Now he stripped the wrapping off a third and snapped it in half. “It’s obvious that you’re a little confused, but that could be the result of a lot of things—stress, for example. It could be an aftereffect of the mugging.” The third toothpick lay in pieces by his coffee cup as he fell silent.
Right from the start he hadn’t known what to make of her, she thought despondently. She’d seen him glancing dubiously at her ankle bracelet and tie-dyed dress, and even on the phone this afternoon she had the sinking feeling she’d come off as a flake. When she’d met him, she’d realized that Agent D’Angelo was just as alien to her as she appeared to him.
It was no wonder he’d felt uneasy with her. It had been almost inevitable that he’d jumped to the conclusion that she was suffering from some kind of delusion.
The phrase “just the facts, ma’am,” could have been coined for him. He was the perfect FBI agent, from his unobtrusive but well-cut suit right down to his gleaming shoes. Maybe he was just a little too good-looking to pass unnoticed in a crowd, but even there he’d done his best to conform. Not a strand of that thick black hair was out of place, and that sensuously full lower lip that seemed so at variance with the rest of the hard angles of his face was usually thinned in a tightly controlled line. It must have taken him years to submerge his own personality so completely, Jenna mused. Now he probably didn’t even have to think about it.
But he’d slipped up once, and for a startling moment she’d seen past the conservative facade to the original Matt D’Angelo. The man she’d glimpsed had looked at her with a sudden flare of heat in those cool golden-brown eyes, and for a heartbeat his gaze had lingered searingly on her, as if he couldn’t stop himself. Then he’d pulled back with a visible effort, and she’d almost been able to see him convincing himself that what he’d experienced hadn’t been real.
Just like he was trying to persuade her now.
“Refill?” The waitress, a tired-looking woman in her late forties with a name tag that said Marg pinned to her uniform, was standing beside them with a full coffeepot in her hand and a mechanical smile on her face, but as she looked at Jenna her expression changed to one of interest.
“Beautiful dress, honey.” Almost reverently she reached out and her fingertips brushed the thin multihued