Third Degree

  “I’m sorry you’re hurting,” she said. “But there’s no reason for it. I wish you’d believe me. I would never do anything to hurt our children. Never.”

  “Get up!” he yelled, almost jerking her arm out of joint.

  She scrambled to her feet. Warren seemed about to drag her somewhere, but then he shoved her back down on the sofa.

  “I’m so stupid,” he said. “How could it take me so long to see it? My blood sugar must be in the basement.” He sat on the ottoman and started pecking at the computer again. “You can buy just about anything on the Web these days. I read an article in USA Today about identity theft and computers. Apparently, hackers have these programs called password crackers that will crank away for fifty hours in a row, if necessary, trying every possible combination of numbers and letters until they break into your e-mail account, or whatever. I’ll bet for the right price, I can download one of those cracker programs right into your little Sony.”

  Laurel had mistakenly invested in the idea that the gun was the greatest danger in the room. This new digital wrinkle destroyed that illusion. Her computer was the real weapon, or rather the detonator that could trigger the use of the gun in earnest. If Warren actually got into her Hotmail account, he would have Danny’s name almost instantly. Soon after, he would read every piece of e-mail that had passed between her and Danny during the eleven months they had been together. There were even photos embedded in some of those messages! Some were intimate, others not, but every one had the power to shatter what remained of her husband’s sanity.

  “Here we go,” said Warren, a note of triumph in his voice. “Merlin’s Magic. Sounds like just the ticket. Two hundred eighty-nine bucks, and they won’t even let you download a trial version. That means they know their program works, and they know the kind of situation someone’s likely to be in when they need it. A one-shot deal, with a lot riding on the outcome.”

  Just as she began to hope that Warren would have to get up to retrieve a credit card, he said, “I’m going to use your PayPal account to buy this. Isn’t that sweet? One click, and we’re in business.”

  Laurel closed her eyes while his fingertips clicked the keys. How many minutes until the kids got home? If she jumped up and raced for one of the house phones to call 911, would Warren shoot her? Even if he didn’t, had things deteriorated to the point that an armed siege was the best solution? They have, she said silently. As long as the kids aren’t in the house—

  “All done!” Warren said brightly. He cut his eyes at her. “You might want to rethink your denial. It’s only a matter of time until I read those e-mails. And remember, confession is good for the soul.”

  My soul is my own business, thank you, she thought, looking past him to the heavy vase lying against the wall. But if you turn your back on me before the kids get home, adultery might end up being one of the lesser sins marked against my name.

  CHAPTER

  10

  “I have to tell you something, Vi,” Nell whispered. “I don’t want to, but I think you need to know. You deserve to know.”

  She and Vida were sitting in the reception area of the office, and Nell had rolled her chair over next to her sister’s, away from the big patient window. JaNel, the lab tech, had passed by in the hall a couple of times, so Nell kept her voice low.

  “Well, don’t take all day,” Vida said. “There’s work to do. I’m listening.”

  Nell felt her lower lip quivering.

  “Go on, baby girl. Whatever it is, I can take it.”

  I hope so, Nell thought. I dearly hope so. “I think Kyle is cheating on you, Vi.”

  Vida stared back in silence. “With who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did you see? Or hear?”

  “I heard him talking on his cell phone.”

  Vida glanced over her shoulder at the hall door, then leaned closer. “When was this?”

  “Day before yesterday. Back in the surgery room.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, the conversation was pretty intimate. He had that tone, you know?”

  “Lovey-dovey?”

  “Mm-hm. It seemed obvious that he’s involved with whoever it was. And I—”

  “Listen, honey,” Vida cut in. “I don’t doubt you. I’m sure Kyle’s poking God knows who all, and I wish he wasn’t. But let me tell you something you’re gonna learn one way or the other someday. They all do it. Every damn one of ’em. That’s the way men are. They live for tail, and they’re gonna chase it whether they’re married or single or whatever. It’s a natural law, like freakin’ gravity. Like the sun rising in the east. Soon as they get their ashes hauled, they’re trying to figure out how to get away from whoever did the haulin’. Unless they need you for something else. And that’s why I’m not worried.”

  Nell sat quietly, working through her sister’s logic. She’d known Vida was hard, but she hadn’t thought her sister would be willing to put up with infidelity to keep a man at her side. Most of all, she hoped Vida was wrong about men—at least a few of them. She considered keeping back the rest of what she’d heard, but if she did, she’d regret it later. She could see Vida standing outside her apartment one night waiting for Dr. Auster’s Jaguar to swing by and pick her up, like a black carriage come to sweep her off to a castle. But that Jaguar would never arrive. It would be long gone, to pick up some princess who fit more smoothly into the castles of the rich and conscienceless.

  “Let me finish, Vi,” she said, louder than she’d intended. “Please.”

  Vida laid a comforting hand on her knee. “Go on, baby.”

  “It wasn’t just sex talk, okay? He apologized to the person, and then he said he had to keep putting up with—with somebody—for a while longer, before he could leave and be with whoever was on the phone.”

  Something changed in Vida’s face. She had the look of someone walking along a path as night fell, one moment sure she knew the way home, the next knowing she was lost. “Keep going,” she said in a flat voice that told Nell her walls had gone up.

  “Dr. Auster said, ‘I hate servicing that little . . .’ ”

  “That little what?” asked Vida, her eyes as dead as marbles. “You can say it.”

  “ ‘That little redneck,’ ” Nell whispered, and Vida flinched. “Then he said, ‘But she scares me.’ Next was something else I couldn’t hear, but then he said, “ ‘But by then it’ll be too late for her to retaliate.’ Or something like that.”

  Vida’s face had lost its color. “And you think he was talking about me?”

  Nell couldn’t bring herself to drive the last nail home. She shrugged. “I can’t say for sure.”

  “I will castrate his sorry ass,” Vida hissed. “That no-count son of a bitch. After all I’ve—oh, never mind. Serves me right for believing a man about anything.”

  “Was I wrong to tell you?” Nell asked anxiously.

  “You had to tell me, baby. Blood’s thicker’n water. Thicker than anything. It’s sure thicker than what comes out of a man. Christ almighty.”

  Nell watched her sister adjusting to this new reality. Vida usually projected an air of coarse vitality, but at this moment she looked like a road-weary woman from a Depression-era photograph. Nell had tried—subtly—to suggest a few things to soften her older sister’s appearance. Skin lotion, for one thing, which Nell applied religiously every night before bed, and all during the day on her face. Decades of smoking had turned Vida’s face into a hard carapace with a yellowish tint, and her hair, once a lustrous brown, had become dry and frizzy and always stank of cigarettes. When she went out at night, she dressed one notch up from white trash: halter tops and blue eye shadow worn like some sort of mask—not to mention the line of mascara under her lower eyelid, circa 1985. Vida’s great claim to fame was winning a televised wet T-shirt contest in Destin—she’d beaten 150 other competitors—but two children and ten thousand cheeseburgers had deflated her prized assets and hidden her waist in a roll of hard fat. It wa
s testament to her black sense of humor and lively personality that Dr. Auster—who had his pick of twenty-something nurses—had looked past her obvious flaws.

  “What are you going to do?” Nell asked softly.

  A hard glint appeared in Vida’s eyes. “Don’t you worry about that. I can take care of myself. Always could, you know that.”

  Nell was afraid to be honest about her other fears, but she knew she had to speak up if she was to help in any way. “I’m worried about Dr. Shields, Vi.”

  Vida looked long and hard at her. “He’s a lot better man than Kyle, isn’t he?”

  Nell nodded soberly.

  “You’ve got a thing for him, don’t you?”

  She closed her eyes and nodded again.

  “Jesus, girl. Have you done the dirty with him?”

  Nell shook her head vehemently.

  “You swear?”

  “I swear. He’s never touched me.”

  “Do you talk to him? Secretly, I mean? On the phone? E-mail, like that?”

  “Nothing, Vi, I swear to God. He’s not like that.”

  Vida chuckled softly. “They’re all like that, once the right woman comes along. But I know what you mean.”

  “I’m just afraid he’ll go to jail.”

  Vida buried her face in her hands and rubbed it harder than Nell would have dared. Then she looked up and said, “I’ll be honest with you, sweetie. Until five minutes ago, that was the plan. Him or us, you know?”

  Nell waited without breathing.

  “But now . . . maybe it’s him or Kyle, you know?”

  A glimmer of hope. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure yet, baby. I need to think.”

  Nell was shivering. Vida took her hand and said, “How about this? Whatever happens today, I’ll make Kyle go over to Warren’s house and take out the stuff he put there.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Today?”

  Vida patted Nell’s knee. “Today.”

  “But what if Dr. Shields is home? Or his wife?”

  “Oh, Kyle’s slick enough to get it out even if they’re there. Some things he is good at, I’ll give him that. He’s a born con man.”

  “But where is the stuff? What is it? I don’t even know that.”

  The hardness returned to Vida’s face. “You don’t need to know. But I’ll tell you where it is. It’s in that room they have under the stairs. Did you know about that?”

  Nell shook her head.

  “It’s like in that Jodie Foster movie, only not so fancy. Where you go if there’s a tornado, or somebody breaks in. It’s a rich people’s thing.”

  Nell said, “I remember Mama used to throw us in the closet when a tornado came.”

  “That was me. Mama was too drunk to worry about any tornado.”

  Shame and love reddened Nell’s face.

  “Don’t think about it,” Vida said. “Anyway, Kyle went over to Dr. Shields’s house last Saturday night when they were all gone to the movies. He put the stuff behind some canned goods or something. But you just stop worrying. I’m going to take care of Kyle and make sure your boyfriend is safe, too. As safe as he can be in the middle of this mess, anyway. Safe as you and me.”

  Nell forced herself to smile. This was the best she could hope for.

  Vida leaned forward and hugged her tight, the smell of Marlboro Ultralights wafting from her hair. “You’re such a pretty girl,” Vida cooed with maternal pride. “Everything’s gonna turn out perfect for you. It has to.” She pulled back far enough to wink at Nell. “One of us deserves a happy ending.”

  Nell felt like crying, but she held it in.

  Vida stood and walked to the patient window, her hands accepting a form from a patient, but her mind already plotting her next move. Nell didn’t envy Dr. Auster’s next meeting with her sister. Vida was hell on wheels when she was angry—scarier than most men.

  Nell rolled her chair back to her computer, but the longer she stared at the screen, the less relieved she felt. Things were moving too fast, and yet not fast enough. What if the cops did something today? What if they searched Dr. Shields’s house before Dr. Auster went over and removed the planted evidence? Could she afford to wait for that? Could she even trust Dr. Auster to do what he was supposed to do, even if he promised Vida that he would? The answer to that question was an unequivocal no. Nell couldn’t leave Warren Shields’s future in the hands of his sleazy partner. She would have to take responsibility herself. After a quick glance at Vida, she opened her Hotmail account and began to type.

  • • •

  Two thousand feet above the city, Danny told his flying student to bank the Cessna northward and head away from the Mississippi River. They’d been in the air forty minutes, mostly on the south side of town, but Danny wanted to know if both cars were still parked at the Shields house. Laurel had not replied to his last text message, and he was worried that he’d made a mistake by sending it.

  A bad mistake.

  “You want me to go all the way to Fort Adams?” asked Marilyn Stone, a local attorney who’d dreamed for years of learning to fly.

  “No, let’s do our usual run out here. When you get to Avalon, execute an S-turn over Belle Chêne Plantation, then head back to the barn.”

  Marilyn nodded, her eyes on the GPS unit mounted on the instrument panel. “Why Avalon all the time? You buying a lot there or something?”

  “You never know,” Danny said with a forced laugh.

  He looked down at the loess hills below and tried to settle his nerves. Athens Point was a beautiful place, and the verdant forests below reminded him why he’d chosen to return after his military career. Unlike so many places that he had lived, this city had a long and colorful history. Athens Point had been founded in 1753 by a classically educated Frenchman venturing downriver through the Natchez Territory. The land was inhabited by the Choctaw Indians, but they lasted only seventy years before vanishing into Oklahoma or worse places. Removal was accomplished the way Hemingway’s Bill Gorton went bankrupt, slowly and then all at once. After the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, all that remained of the Choctaw in that corner of Mississippi was a few names, like the one taken by the county, Lusahatcha (“Black Water”), which today seemed a misnomer since the great river stretching away behind the Cessna looked reddish brown under the sun. But the Mississippi River had many faces, and Danny had seen them all while growing up beside it.

  Unlike Natchez, thirty miles to the north, Athens Point had resisted the Yankee invasion during the Civil War. The town sent three companies to fight under Lee in Virginia, and those who remained behind held out until July 11, 1863, being forced to surrender after the fall of Vicksburg. While the Father of Waters thereafter flowed “unvexed to the sea,” as President Lincoln put it, the inland areas of southwest Mississippi remained vexed indeed. Gangs of Confederate deserters roamed the land, and marauding Union cavalry units under Colonel Embury Osband pillaged what remained of the state’s resources.

  For a hundred years afterward, the town’s hero was Jean Larrieu, a diminutive but feisty planter who shot six cavalrymen from the windows of Belle Chêne plantation before being cut down on his porch by a saber during a parley. A Union private had struck his wife, and Larrieu refused to let the insult pass. His statue still stood atop a column in the town square. Even today, antebellum city buildings bore the scars of the shelling that resulted from the town’s firing on Admiral Porter’s passing ironclads in 1863. A historical marker commemorated the seventeen citizens who perished in the fires that day, while beside it a second marker memorialized six African Americans who died in Lusahatcha County during the struggle for civil rights.

  The prejudice so prevalent in Danny’s childhood had diminished to a mild undercurrent between the races, but even today black and white remained largely divided in the physical sense. Black families tended to congregate in the city proper or to the south, while affluent whites and a few wealthy blacks buil
t shining new subdivisions in the forests along Highway 24 to the north. Avalon was the newest and most exclusive of these, patterned after subdivisions of the same name in Gulfport and Natchez. Apparently the developer intended to replicate his utopian concept across the state. Danny could just make out the serpentine bends of Larrieu’s Creek, which marked one boundary of Avalon.

  There, he said silently.

  Avalon had been tastefully carved out of forestland that had been locked up in the trust of an old Athens Point family for a hundred years. A massive wrought-iron gate greeted prospective buyers as they turned off Highway 24 onto Cornwall, a broad street that wound its way eastward through the upscale development. Only fifteen houses had been built so far, with a handful of others under construction. The smallest lots available were 6.5 acres. The Shields house was easy to spot from the air, because its acreage was bordered by a bend of Larrieu’s Creek.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Marilyn said, “I might want to try for an instrument rating after I get my VFR license.”

  Danny chuckled. “You’re always pushing, aren’t you?”

  She grinned. “I’m a trial lawyer. I guess it’s in my blood.”

  He knew she expected him to keep up the banter, but his mind was on the land below. He could see the Shields house coming up on his left. “Drop down to five hundred feet. I think I see a herd of deer.”

  Marilyn responded smoothly, and the Cessna quickly descended.

  “Good. Stay well clear of those houses.” Danny would have liked to let Laurel hear the plane, but if there was any chance that Warren suspected Danny was her lover, then drawing attention to the Cessna would be insane. Warren had flown this plane so often that he would recognize it at a glance. And since Laurel—or Warren, for that matter—had not responded to the two text messages he had sent her, he had to play things very cool. “Somebody complained to me at the hardware store the other day,” Danny added. “Asked if we’re planning to bomb the neighborhood.”