Chapter Twenty-three
Collin met me in the lobby at 6:30, looking as cool as I was overheated, his cheeks still pink from the shower. I knew he worked out at the downtown YMCA every day when he got off shift and he took exceptional care of his body. He would have made a good Marine, run-marching in combat boots and scaling obstacles. It would do me a world of good to follow his example. We got in the car and he led the conversation.
Without turning to look at me, he said, “I heard you had a bad day.”
I tried to laugh. It came out as a pathetic snort. “You’ve turned on the news, then?”
He kept his eyes on the road. “And seen you on YouTube, too. I called Emily,” he added.
I rotated my head and my neck popped once, twice. “Then you’re fully informed.”
Now Collin cut his eyes over to me. It was almost as if he’d patted my leg. “If it makes you feel any better, he’s a bad man who deserves to be in prison. I told you a few days ago: fleas.”
That he had. And God, was he right. I didn’t trust myself to speak.
“But did you learn anything?” Collin asked, channeling Dad.
My voice came out high-pitched, whinier than I wanted it to sound. I wanted to suck it back in for a do-over. “Learn what? That I hate criminal law and never want to walk into a Dallas courtroom again? That it only takes fifteen seconds to disgrace your dead father’s memory in front of the entire city he loved?”
“Well, yes, but no. More along the lines of elemental truths. That hell hath no fury like a lover scorned. A lover scorned is a witness turned, every single time.”
“I messed up, Collin.” I held in my tears, but my lower lip trembled. Traitor.
“Yep. Sounds like you had a breakdown.”
“More like a nuclear meltdown.”
“Agreed. But you’re still alive. That’s something.”
The word “alive” triggered something in me. “Collin, Zane picked me because of Dad. He wanted me because of who Dad was. And because Dad was dead, he couldn’t fight back against the message that it sent to the jury for me to take Zane’s case.”
Collin reached up to his bottom lip and pulled it with his thumb and forefinger. “That’s pretty awful. I’m sorry,” he said.
“If only Dad were here,” I replied, and a sob caught my voice halfway through. “This never would have happened if Dad were here.”
We drove in silence. The sun was high in the sky and starting to fall, burning through the smog of an ozone-advisory August day. Collin pulled up to a red light. We were landlocked in a sea of cars, two thousand miles away from St. Marcos and the ocean on its shores. I had left there only five days ago. It might as well have been forever. This trial had consumed me, and I hadn’t even followed up with the investigator. The light turned green. On our right a yellow stucco two-story house caught my eye. Annalise. Maybe I could find another Annalise. There were other houses on St. Marcos. Plenty of them on the East End, according to Doug. That almost made me smile.
Collin pulled into the drive-through for Popeye’s Fried Chicken.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m dying to get fried chicken grease on your white carpet and watch you squirm. That’s all I want for my birthday,” he said.
“Asshole,” I said. I really loved my brother.
He laughed.
Fifteen minutes later, we were sitting cross-legged on my carpet scarfing dark meat spicy and downing large iced teas. Actually, we were sitting cross-legged on towels on my carpet. I wasn’t about to let Collin get chicken grease on the Berber.
After I finished my chicken and was shoveling in red beans and rice, I told him about Nick. More than I had ever told him. Collin listened with every bone in his body. I came to the penultimate moment between Nick and me from today, and I got out my phone.
“I’ve been too scared to look at it, Col,” I confessed.
He held out his hand. “I can do it for you.”
I shook my head back and forth, fast. “No, I have to do this myself.”
I scrolled through Nick’s messages. He hadn’t lied. He’d left word for me in every possible medium. I suspected I would find them on my home voicemail, too, but I spared myself for the moment from enduring his voice. Then I came to an email from an hour ago, after he’d walked away from me at the party.
To:
[email protected] From:
[email protected] Subject: I’m sorry
I waited for you in my office. I thought you were following me. I wanted to talk to you. To tell you I’m sorry. I was too harsh today. A shit. Again. It’s as much my fault as yours. I should have gotten hold of Emily when I didn’t hear back from you, but things got crazy in my life that night and I forgot.. I know I’ve failed you as a co-worker and as a friend. If I’d have acted like a friend, I would have done what Emily did, and I would have found you. I would have helped you. I am ashamed of myself, because somewhere inside me, I knew you needed help.
Please let someone help you.
Nick
Before I could react, before I could process, before I could show Collin the message, my phone rang. It was from the 340 area code. St. Marcos. I answered.
“Are you sitting down, Katie?” a male voice asked.
My heart quit beating for a moment, frozen up in my chest like the engine in my car when I had let it run out of oil in college. “I’m sitting.” After Nick’s email and this introduction, I couldn’t have stood if I’d wanted to. I put my head down on my legs with my face between my knees to keep from blacking out.
“Congratulations, Katie. The other buyer’s deal fell through and the bank accepted your offer on Annalise.”
“Doug? This is Doug, isn’t it? I thought they rejected it?” I raised my head slowly.
Doug it was. “Surprise! They never even considered it. I hadn’t put an end date on it, either. So when the other deal fell apart, Ms. Nesbitt picked up your offer and faxed over an acceptance. Can you beat that?”
“No,” I said, and I was barely able to speak audibly. “No, I can’t beat that.”
“Come on, now, show some enthusiasm. This is huge,” Doug urged.
Was it my imagination, or did he sound amused? Maybe it was pity I heard instead. When my heart began to function again and my brain had received its normal supply of oxygen, I realized we were discussing the expedited closing provision I had requested in my offer.
“You should have a deed and keys—strike that. There aren’t any doors, so there aren’t keys, are there?” Definitely amusement that time. “Well, you should have a deed, anyway, in two weeks. That’s very fast by St. Marcos standards, practically unheard of.”
No matter how much I rallied, no way could I add much to this conversation. “Doug, can I call you back?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Congratulations!”
I thanked him and hung up. Collin stared at me.
“Give me a sec, Col.”
He grunted.
I processed the news. In two weeks, I would squander three quarters of a million dollars in cash on an isolated St. Marcos rainforest money pit and the 110 acres upon which it perched, which, unless I moved down there and took up full-time management of the finish-out, would remain an overpriced horse latrine and depreciate faster than the Titanic sank. I would not only blow a large chunk of my reserves, but also torpedo my job, lose any chance I might have had with Nick (You have no chance with Nick, you idiot) and throw away my entire support network. I was a thirty-five-year-old, single, probably alcoholic, soon-to-be-unemployed female attorney with no construction experience, and, more portentously, I was alien to the environment. An environment that might be involved in the island drug trade, and was just down the road from where my parents mysteriously died.
Wow. Double wow. I swallowed. Collin cleared his throat, hinting.
My phone rang again. Another from the 340 area code, but a different phone number. I hesitated, thinking about not answering it.
br /> “Go ahead, sis,” Collin said. “If it’s important, take it.”
I took the call. “This is Katie Connell.”
Now I heard crying on the other end. Soft crying. What the hell was going on?
“Who’s there? This is Katie. Talk to me.”
“Oh, Katie. It Ava. Last night. Last night something terrible happen.”
Her accent was so thick I could barely understand her. More crying.
“Ava? Are you OK? Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
“Last night, Eduardo told me to meet Guy at the suite on the hill behind the Porcus Marinus again.”
“Yes?”
“I went. And someone else got there first. And Guy—Guy dead, Katie. Sitting in the chair at the desk, slumped over. Someone come up behind him and slit his throat. He dead. Guy dead.”
She sobbed now, her breath in gasps, her wails wrenching me.
“Ava, oh Ava, I’m so sorry. What can I do? Is there someone with you? Can Rashidi or Jacoby come over?”
“I here with my parents. I call Jacoby when it happen, and he stall so I could get away from there. I just, I just—oh, I don’t know. Everything so crazy. I need to sleep. I can’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes, I see him there again, all that blood, his blood.”
This made my troubles seem petty. “I’m so sorry for him, and for you.”
“I call you. You the one I want to call. I hope you don’t think I’m crazy. I just, well, you my friend. It didn’t take me long to know that. First time I seen you, I knew you were different. So I call.”
And I realized that she was my friend. Out there on the edge, maybe, but a friend all the same, and she lived on the island where I had just bought a house. And just like that, I knew that I had to leave and start over there, and it couldn’t happen fast enough for me.
“I’ll be there soon, Ava. I’ll be there soon.”
~~~