"Think Twice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Scottoline Lisa)

Chapter Six

Alice backed up against the front door of Bennie’s house, edging away from the growling dog. She dropped her bags, shaking as the dog sniffed her sneakers, pressing his nose against the droplets of blood. He growled louder, and when his black lips curled so his teeth showed, she forgot her fear and kicked him. He yelped and sprawled backwards, his back legs slipping out from under him, then her instincts took over.

She went after him, kicking him again and again, connecting twice with his chest, but he ran yelping from the living room. She chased him to the back of the house, where there was a dark kitchen. She flicked on the light, and in the corner was an open door to a basement. She could hear him falling down the stairs, whimpering, so she slammed the door closed behind him. She leaned on the doorjamb, panting and listening. If the dog knew what was good for him, he’d bleed to death. She didn’t need a complication like that right now.

She’d never been in Bennie’s house and looked around. The kitchen was modern and clean, with white enamel cabinets and shiny black-and-red granite counters. Dog photos lined the windowsill, and a framed rowing poster hung above a rectangular cherry table, set aglow by a glass pendant lamp shaped like a red teardrop. She returned to the living room and checked it out; tan couch with dark end tables, a matching coffee table, an entertainment center that held books, a TV, and a stereo. Bottom line, it was a nice room, but it wasn’t her taste at all.

She would have gone for a leather sectional sofa, maybe in black, and cool glass tables with chrome edges. She would have had a much bigger TV and a larger house, for parties. The two of them couldn’t be more different, and if they hadn’t gotten the blood test, Alice never would have believed they were related, much less twins. She had hardly believed it when she found she had a twin, especially one as useful as a lawyer, supposedly brilliant.

Their father appeared out of the woodwork, when she was in jail, to tell her about Bennie. It turned out that he’d been following both his daughters’ lives, even though he never showed himself. He was trying to save her life, and it came at just the right time, before her trial. She went online and read everything she could about the famous Bennie Rosato, and when they sat face-to-matching-face, she claimed to love hazelnut coffee, sports, and big dogs, just like Bennie.

Alice had even pretended to care about their mother, because any idiot could see that Bennie was all about old Carmela. Just like she could hear in Bennie’s questions that she wanted to know about the father who left them alone with a mentally ill mother. So she fed Bennie what little information she had about him, filling in the blanks with fantasy. She leaned on the twin thing, which put Bennie on the defensive from day one. She made Bennie feel guilty because she hadn’t been abandoned, even though Bennie had the worse childhood of the two, taking care of that crazy mom and flat broke. She’d even tried to convince Bennie that she’d been born underweight as the result of something called “twin transfusion syndrome,” where twins share the placenta in the womb, so one twin’s blood goes to nourish the other. So it was fate that she would end up standing in Bennie’s house, about to take over her life. It was Bennie’s own fault, for being such a sucker.

Alice went to the front door, picked up the messenger bag, took out Bennie’s wallet and checkbook, then grabbed her black cloth bag and headed upstairs.

She had banking to conduct, after all.