Saving Grace (What Doesn’t Kill You, #1): A Katie Romantic Mystery

Chapter Four

  “You have any better excuse for not returning my calls than this?” Collin said in a stern big-brother tone. I forced my eyes open long enough to see him gesturing around the living room of my once-beautiful apartment. Collin was my Irish twin, my elder by eleven months. We finished high school the same year, though, because my dad, a good Texan, had insisted on holding Collin back a year to help him gain a size advantage on the football field. Thus we had been classmates as well as siblings. Even so, Collin had always acted paternal toward me, especially in the past year after we’d lost Mom and Dad.

  I opened my eyes a slit, enough to see the mess. I supposed it didn’t look good. I’m usually particular to a fault about my surroundings. Collin has always called me OCD, but I don’t agree. I vacuum backwards because I don’t like how footprints look on the rug. I arrange my clothes by season and subcategorize them by function and color, because who doesn’t? And while not everyone combs the fringe on their throw pillows, I think they should. Tangled fringe. The horror. Those last few weeks, though? Well, not so much.

  There were—gasp—fast food wrappers on the kitchen table and a couple of empty V8 and Ketel One vodka bottles out on the counter. It wasn’t unsanitary by Dennis the Menace standards, but, if you knew me as well as my brother did, it was troubling. My PJs were yesterday’s work clothes, and the clothes from the days before lay in an undrycleaned heap beside the couch—the couch on which the throw pillow fringe was taunting me with knots and clumps. The television blared Bon Jovi’s “Runaway” over a Direct TV ’80s rock music station. An almost-drained Bloody Mary mocked me from the coffee table, where it sat by my red Vaio laptop, a bottle of Excedrin, and my iPhone.

  I sat up in as dignified a manner as I could manage and smoothed out my clothes. “Why didn’t I hear the alarm when you came in?” I asked him. Collin had a set of keys to my place, but my alarm should have beeped when he opened the door.

  Bluntly, Collin said, “I guess you were too drunk to remember to set it. Or maybe you had a visitor that left late?”

  He looked around for a second glass, but I’d been drinking alone. Collin started picking up my mess.

  “Collin, I’ll do that,” I said.

  “Nope. You go freshen up,” he said. “I’m taking you to breakfast. That’s an order.”

  I stared at him woefully. He was wearing his usual 501 jeans with a Hooters t-shirt, and he radiated “I’ve got no problems.” I didn’t want to go to breakfast with him. I wanted to curl into the fetal position. I wanted to sleep and be alone. I wanted to be so still that I didn’t exist.

  He looked at me, motionless on the couch, and something he saw made him put down the trash and come back over to me. Taking my hand, he pulled me to my feet. He held my stiff body in a bear hug, rocking me gently for a moment. Uh oh. At first, I tried to hold it in, but then I folded and sobbed on his big shoulder. Sobs became snorts, then hiccups, then shuddering breaths. He tilted my head back with a big thumb under my chin and looked into my eyes, appraising me.

  “Go take a hot shower. We’ll eat somewhere casual, but I’m leaving—with you in the car—in twenty minutes.” He chucked the side of my chin with his knuckles. “Chop chop. You know I’ll come in after you if I have to. Don’t make me do it.”

  With a soft push, he sent me down the hall to my bathroom, and then I heard him resume cleaning. Tears rolled down my nose and cheeks. Ye gads, I would have to drink gallons of water at breakfast, because at the rate I was crying and with the amount of vodka I had consumed last night, I was on the brink of a major dehydration headache.

  Forty-five minutes later, we took our seats in the Mockingbird Lane IHOP. It was a favorite place from our childhood, but today I noticed that it had a lot of garish orange in its décor, and I liked it a little less because of it. Collin surprised me when he requested a table for three, but I didn’t expend the energy to question him. I understood when I saw Emily’s pageant hair at the hostess stand. She walked toward us in pleated navy-blue pants and a silky yellow shirt cinched with a leather belt that matched her brown pumps.

  “Hi, Katie.” She looked at me for a moment, then averted her eyes.

  I lifted a limp hand in greeting. Great. Another person to see me in this state. I had shunned my image in the mirror before I left the condo, but the brief glimpse I got was enough. Wet ponytail. An old track suit and t-shirt. Puffy-eyed and sallow. Ick.

  We avoided talking by staring at our menus until the middle-aged waitress, who really should have worn a one-size-larger uniform, came for our order. My stomach muscles tightened as she walked away. I almost stopped her to add an orange juice I didn’t want to my order, but I didn’t. No use delaying the inevitable. Collin had assembled us for a reason, and something unpleasant cometh.

  “Emily and I have been talking, and she filled me in on what’s happening with you,” Collin said.

  I hoped Emily had held some of it back, but I couldn’t fault her for caring about me. Or caving in to Collin. He was a cop, in the fine tradition of our father, and he’d never met a witness he couldn’t crack, he liked to say.

  Collin kept the floor. “We’re worried about you. You’re messed up. You’re hurting yourself.”

  He looked at Emily for confirmation and she stared at the white Formica tabletop. If I knew Collin, he’d dragged her into this little intervention, and if I knew Em, she was reluctant as hell. Emily was self-confident, but boat rocking was not her style.

  I didn’t have the strength to fight Collin on this, and I didn’t actually disagree with him. I was a train wreck right now, for sure. He had me at one of those rare moments when the tough-talking woman wasn’t around to defend the fragile girl inside me. She was probably still sprawled across my couch nursing her hangover.

  “You’re right,” I confessed. The words were dust on my dry tongue. “I need to get myself together.”

  “I think you should go to rehab.” Collin’s words sounded harsh, because that’s the only way words like “go to rehab” can sound.

  So this was how Amy Winehouse felt. And she was dead now. Something to think about it. Except I wasn’t Amy Winehouse.

  “I’ve been in the dumps, yes, and I’ve been drinking too much, but only for a few weeks. I don’t think that warrants rehab.” The thought of talking about my problems with all of those alcoholic people made me claustrophobic. AA may work for most people, but I don’t do group activities very well. Besides, I was not an alcoholic.

  “These last three weeks were especially bad, but you’ve been on this road for much longer than that,” Collin said. “Like a year. Can you cut back or stop? I’ll bet you’ve already tried that, haven’t you?” I avoided his eyes. “And I’ll bet it didn’t work.”

  “No, asshole, I haven’t,” I almost said. Almost. Instead, I said, “I haven’t tried. I know I can, when I’m ready.”

  My cheddar omelet came, but I wasn’t hungry. None of us touched our food.

  “I admit that I’d have trouble stopping here in Dallas if I did try. When I do try. But I know that if I could get out of my life for a few weeks, I could get this under control. I’m willing to start with that. Rehab’s not for me. Maybe if you’re pulling me out of a gutter someday, but not now.”

  “Fine. I’ll give you one chance, sis, so make it count. Do you have anything in mind?” Collin asked.

  I sucked in as much air as I could get, then forcibly exhaled until my stomach collapsed in. “St. Marcos. I need to get some closure on what happened to Mom and Dad.” I started to cry, then swallowed it. I opened my mouth to speak, and the tears started again.

  “Are you sure?” Collin asked.

  I nodded and used the clean side of my paper napkin to wipe my eyes. As I looked up, a young black woman caught my eye, partly because she was staring at me, and partly because she was barefoot in IHOP and her clothing looked a hundred and fifty years out of place. Now she had a problem. Drugs, from the look of it. A total rehab candidate. Not me. I wiped my eyes agai
n and when I opened them, she was gone. Nothing there at all. I was going nuts. I gulped air.

  I desperately needed to get away. This trip, this solo rehab or mini-sabbatical or whatever it was, would be a godsend.

  And so we agreed that I would go. Immediately. As in tomorrow. Yikes. A little sooner than I’d anticipated, but Collin insisted, and Emily promised to help me make it happen. Collin and I shook on it when he dropped me back at my condo, and Emily was right behind us.

  Emily and I rolled into work at Hailey & Hart mid-morning, after I had changed into a work-acceptable cream-colored summer pant suit. We didn’t get much done other than booking my trip and clearing my schedule for it. I talked to Gino about the vacation days, expecting him to argue with me, but he didn’t. He patted my hand. Ugh.

  “Time off will do you a world of good,” he said. “You’ve worked hard this year under difficult circumstances, and you need to recharge and bring your best self back.”

  Great. That was boss-speak for “you’re a hot mess, get the frick out of here.” Well, I was. A humiliated hot mess. Tomorrow wasn’t sounding too soon to get away from that after all.

  At Collin’s request, Emily babysat me overnight, leaving her husband home alone. Emily was a far better friend than I deserved, but once upon a time, I had played her role when Rich temporarily broke off their engagement. Life in balance.

  Late in the evening, I finally mentioned the name no one had uttered all day. “If Nick asks where I am, please give him the sanitized version.”

  Emily was sitting at a barstool, and I was standing across the counter in my kitchen. She leaned toward me. “Don’t even go there. Nick has acted like friggin’ Heathcliff to you ever since Shreveport. Come on, girl. Let it go.”

  I was getting a lot of veiled messages today. This one was “he’s just not that into you.” Ouch, but she was right.

  But could I leave my feelings about him here and truly go off to St. Marcos with a clear head? I tossed and turned in my bed all night, buffeted between images of my parents and Nick.

  ~~~