The Man Behind The Mask. Barbara HannayЧитать онлайн книгу.

      To my favorite animal lover, Margo Jakobsen, and her beloved, the true Prince of Pomerania, Phaut.

CHAPTER ONE

      BRENDAN GRANT AWOKE with a start. At first he heard only the steady beat of rain on the roof, but then the phone rang again, shrill, jangling across his nerves. His eyes flicked to his bedside clock.

      Three o’clock.

      He felt his heart begin to beat a hard tattoo inside his chest. What good could ever come of a 3:00 a.m. phone call?

      But then he remembered, and even though he remembered, he reached over and touched the place in the bed beside him. Two and a half years later and he still felt that ripple of shock at the emptiness. Becky was gone. The worst had already happened.

      He groped through the darkness for the phone, picked it up.

      “Yeah?” His voice was raspy with sleep.

      “Charlie’s dying.”

      And then the phone went silent in his hands.

      Brendan lay there for a moment longer, holding the dead phone, not wanting to get up. He didn’t really even like Charlie. They were going to start breaking ground on the lakeside living complex, Village on the Lake, tomorrow. His design had already attracted the attention of several architectural magazines, and based on the plan, the project had been nominated for the prestigious Michael Edgar Jonathon Award.

      Still, as always, before they broke ground, and even after, he struggled with a feeling of it not being what he had wanted, missing the mark in some vague way he could not quite define. He recognized the stress was beginning. He was a man who needed his sleep.

      But with a resigned groan, he sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and sat there for a moment, his head in his hands, listening to the rain on the roof. He was so sick of rain. He certainly didn’t want to go out in it at three in the morning.

      Then, with a sigh, Brendan reached for his jeans.

      Ten minutes later, he was on Deedee’s front stoop, hammering on her door. Her house was a two-minute drive from his. Brendan turned and looked out over his neighborhood. They both enjoyed locations on “The Hill,” still Hansen’s most prestigious neighborhood, and even on such a ghastly night the views were spectacular.

      Through wisps of mist, he could see the whole city, pastel-painted turn-of-the-century houses nestled under mature maples, clinging to the sides of steep hills. Beyond the houses and the cluster of downtown buildings, lights penetrated the gloomy gray and reflected in the black, restless waters of Kootenay Lake.

      Brendan turned back as the door opened a crack. Deedee regarded him suspiciously, as if there was a possibility that by some mean coincidence at the very same time she had called him, a home invader—Hansen’s first—was waiting on her front stair to prey on the elderly.

      Satisfied it was Brendan Grant in the flesh, she opened the door.

      “Don’t you look just like the devil?” she said. “Coming out of the storm like that, all dark menace and bristling bad temper. I used to say to Becky you had to have Black Irish in you somewhere. Or pure pirate.”

      Brendan stepped in and regarded his grandmotherin-law with exasperated affection. Only Deedee would see a devil or a pirate in the doer of a good deed!

      “I’ll try to contain the bristling bad temper,” he said drily. The darkness he could do nothing about. It was his coloring: dark brown eyes, dark brown hair, whiskers blacker than night. It was also his heart.

      Deedee was ninety-two, under five feet tall, frighteningly thin. Still, despite the fact it was 3:15 in the morning and her cat, Charlie, was dying, she was dressed in her go-to-church best. She had on a pantsuit the color of pink grapefruit. A matching ribbon was tied in a bow in her snow-white curls.

      Would Becky have looked like this someday? If she had grown old? The pain was sharp, his guilt so intense it felt as if a knife had been inserted underneath his ribs. but Brendan was accustomed to it coming like this, in unexpected moments, and he held his breath, waiting, watching himself, almost bemused.

      Pain, but no emotion. A man so emotionally impoverished he had not shed a single tear for his wife.

      Sometimes he felt as if his heart was a tomb that a stone had been rolled in front of, sealing it away forever.

      “I’ll get my coat,” Deedee said. “I’ve already got Charlie in the cat carrier.”

      She turned to retrieve her coat—pink to match her outfit—from the arm of a sofa, and he saw Charlie glaring balefully at him from a homemade carrier that looked like a large and very ugly purse.

      Charlie’s head poked out a round hole, his ginger fur stuck up in every direction, his whiskers kinked, his eyes slit with dislike and bad temper. He made a feeble attempt to squeeze his gargantuan self out the tiny opening, but his quick resignation to defeat, and the raspy breathing caused by the effort, made Brendan aware that tonight was the end of the road for the ancient, cranky cat.

      Deedee turned back to him, carefully buttoning her coat around her. Brendan picked up the cat carrier with one hand and crooked his other elbow. Deedee threaded her arm through his, and he nudged open the door with his knee, trying not to be impatient when the rain sluiced down his neck as she handed him a huge ring of keys.

      “Lock the handle and the dead bolt,” she ordered, as if they were in a high-crime area of New York City.

      Both locks were sticky, and Brendan made a note to come by and give them a squirt of lubricant the next time he had a chance.

      Finally they turned toward his car, inched down the steep stairs that took them from her front stoop to the road. When they reached the flat walkway, he tried to adjust his stride to Deedee’s tiny steps. He was just under six feet tall, his build lithe with a runner’s sleekness rather than a bodybuilder’s muscle, but Deedee made him feel like a giant.

      A bristling pirate of a giant.

      Brendan found himself wishing she would have called one of her children to accompany her on this late-night trip to the vet’s office. But for a reason he couldn’t quite decipher—it certainly wasn’t his graciousness—it was him she turned to when she needed anything, from a lightbulb changed to her supply of liquid meal replacements restocked.

      Deedee was not a nice little old lady. She was querulous, demanding, bossy, ungrateful and totally selfcen-tered. It had occurred to Brendan more than once that she called him because no one else would come. But Deedee was his inheritance from his late wife. Becky and Deedee had adored each other. For that reason alone he came when she called.

      Finally, he had both the cat and Deedee settled, the animal on the backseat, the woman in the front. The carrier did not look waterproof and he hoped the cat would not have an accident that would