He reached like a blind man into the brown paper bag for another beer. He’d bought a six-pack and was on his fourth or fifth, he couldn’t remember which. This one was warm as piss, but he guzzled it anyway, not bothering to lift his head or open his eyes. It spilled out the side of his mouth and dripped down his neck.
He heard tittering laughter and smelled coconut oil. A couple of teenage girls walked past, too close, trying to be annoying as they kicked sand over him. The tide was rising. Cold, spreading waves lapped at his feet. Only a few hours before, he had been quite isolated on the vast expanse of beach. But now the world was closing in around him, and even the boozy blur couldn’t protect him from this feeling of claustrophobia.
After Marina had left his house yesterday, Jeremy had been desperate for a confrontation. Anything to keep him from thinking about the betrayals. A bottle of Jack Daniels had loosened his natural restraint. He had driven to the MIU campus. It was sick, perverse, but he needed to see her again.
He had raced around the parking lots looking for her beat-up car, honking crazily as students and professors watched with expressions
of curiosity or fear. But after circling several times, he realized she wasn’t there. That he was never going to see her again. That it was over.
Exhaustion overcame him and all he wanted to do was sleep. But he couldn’t go home. Home had become the place where bad things happened. He checked into one of the fleabag hotels off Washington Avenue and passed out on sheets that stank of sweat and liquor. He awoke to the squealing of brakes and clanking of a delivery truck and realized he’d slept through the night and the morning. He had a dozen voice mails and text messages— a few from Robbie, but most from Elise.
His sister was worried, but he didn’t know what to say to her. How could he explain what their father had done? What Marina had done? So he bought a six-pack of Corona, walked down to the beach, stripped down to his boxers, and lay down on the sand to let the sun burn him out.
His cell phone was vibrating against his leg. He shielded the brightness from his eyes as he read the caller ID. Elise. It was time he spoke with her.
“Jeremy?” She was crying.
“Are you okay, Ellie?” The blurriness in his head cleared. He sat up.
“Dwight. Dwight came to the house. He said he was filing papers against you for the guardianship. Please, Jeremy. Don’t let him do this.”
A flock of small black birds hovered in the air surrounding him like bats.
“Jeremy, do something. Stop him.”
“Do what?”
“Come home.”
“I can’t. I’m no good for you. Maybe it would be better if—”
“No. I won’t live with Dwight. I hate him.”
The wind shifted and the black birds settled around him in the sand.
“I’m no good, Elise. Don’t you understand? I’m all broken.”
“Come home and we’ll talk about it. Please, Jeremy. I’m so frightened staying here without you.”
He drank the dregs of the last warm beer. “Go to Grandpa’s. Take Geezer with you.”
She was crying hard. “But I want you. Please, Jeremy. Don’t leave me.”
The birds rose in the air, making a terrible squawk. He turned off the phone and lay back down in the searing sun.
Chapter 31
Robbie drove slowly up and down each street on South Beach looking for a red car. Jeremy’s father’s car. She’d seen it in the garage a couple of times and knew the beautiful old classic would be easy to spot.
After getting to Jeremy’s house and finding no cars in the driveway, she had driven to the beach to check out her hunch. After all, wasn’t South Beach a likely place for a twenty-something to play hooky?
Jeremy hadn’t shown up for work yesterday or today. Hadn’t called and hadn’t answered his phone. She didn’t know why she just couldn’t let it go. She pictured him leaning back on a conference room chair, running his fingers through his hair. So distracted. So intense. It wasn’t that she was attracted to him. No. Nothing like that. It was more that his presence comforted her. Almost like having Rachel back.
And then today, she was going through the Castillo Enterprise reports and she remembered something Rachel had said. But there was no one to talk to about it. No one she could trust. So she called Jeremy over and over, until finally she got in her car and came here.
She turned off Washington Avenue onto Seventh Street. A group of adolescent girls wearing bikinis with towels wrapped around their waists were laughing and pushing each other. Just ahead, a red car
was poorly parked, its rear sticking into the street. Jeremy’s car. There were several papers shoved under the windshield wiper.
Robbie scooted her car around the block to a small parking lot, then hurried back to Jeremy’s car. He had gotten two parking tickets, one from yesterday and one from today. This was disturbing. Why had he left his car here?
She went down to the beach, looking at every tall, athletic man she passed. Most were shirtless, their bathing suits low on their hips. Robbie was wearing a blue silk dress and pearls. They must have thought she was crazy. And maybe she was. She took off her heels and walked barefoot in the sand.
The surf was in, narrowing the beach and creating a smaller area for her to search.
At Fifth Street, she saw him. He was lying directly on the sand in only his boxers. His clothes were crumpled up in a pile. There was a brown bag next to him and an empty beer bottle beside his outstretched hand. He was asleep— or dead.
How dare he do this? His mother’s murderer was free and he was lying here in a drunken stupor?
She rammed her foot against his leg.
“Hey,” he shouted, sitting up suddenly. “What the fu—” Then he recognized her.
“What are you doing, Jeremy?”
“Jesus. Did you honestly come out here to kick and yell at me?”
“You deserve a lot worse.”
He lay back down on the sand and closed his eyes. He was badly sunburned.
“I’m taking you home,” she said.
“No thanks, Mom.” He didn’t open his eyes.
“I’m not your mother. If you recall, your mother’s dead. You were trying to find her murderer.”
He opened his eyes and slowly sat up. “That was harsh.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how else to be. I can’t understand why you’re doing this to yourself.”
“Maybe it’s none of your business.”
“Please, Jeremy. I need to talk to you about something your mother told me. It’s important.”
“I’ve had my fill of good-looking women trying to help me find my parents’ murderer.”
Robbie sat down in the sand next to him. A breaking wave spread over the sand, wetting Jeremy’s feet. He didn’t move.
“I can see that something bad’s happened,” she said finally. “And I understand that you don’t want to talk about it. But even if you’ve given up, I want you to know I haven’t.” Robbie got up and wiped the sand from the back of her dress.
He let her pull him up. The hair on his legs and arms was golden against the reddish brown of his skin. She handed him his clothes. They stank of booze and sweat.
He dressed and followed her to her car without speaking. What could have happened to him in the last couple of days to bring him down so low?
Robbie drove up Washington Avenue.
“Where are you going?” he said, as though awakening from a stupor.
“To your house, so you can shower and change.”
“No,” he said.
“No?”
“Not my house. Anywhere but my house.”
Chapter 32
He hadn’t wanted to leave the beach, but now that he was here, Jeremy felt a sense of peace— a brief reprieve. Robbie lived on the other side of Coconut Grove from his grandfather, but he couldn’t recall ever being in this part of the Grove, nestled within a thick hammock. The inside of Robbie’s townhouse was mainly white. Not the stark, overwhelming white of the Castillos’ mansion, but a soft, floating whiteness like pillows and clouds.
He wanted to sink down into her sofa and go to sleep.
“The shower’s in here.” She held a door open. “There’s soap and clean towels. Let me know if you need anything else.”
The bathroom was mirrored and Jeremy’s reflection bounced around the room like a nightmare— the sunburnt nose, red eyes, the stubble on his chin and cheeks.
There was a light knock on the door. “Are you all right, Jeremy?”
“Yeah.”
The door opened a few inches and Robbie’s hand appeared. “Give me your clothes and I’ll run them through the washer on the quick cycle.”
He stripped down and passed her his shirt, pants, and boxers. His eyes caught hers. “Thanks,” she said, and slammed the door closed.
Jeremy showered, then wrapped a towel around his waist and
stepped into the living room. Everything was carefully arranged: magazines in a neat stack, a collection of blue vases in size order, unused red decorative candles on top of the glass coffee table. Stagnant. It felt stagnant.
He backed away into a small office. Unlike the living room, this room seemed alive in its disorder. There were more books than shelf space and they were stacked unevenly by subject, rather than size. He took a book off a shelf. Homer’s
Odyssey
. The pages were yellowed from age. He tried to remember, had Odysseus ever made it home after his odyssey? He put the book back.
On Robbie’s desk, which was covered with piles of papers, was a photo of a pretty dark-haired woman. “Your mom?” he asked, aware that Robbie had just come in the room.
“Yes.” Robbie was still wearing the blue dress and pearls she’d had on at the beach.
“You resemble her. Does she live down here or in Boston?”
She let him study the photo for a few seconds, then she put it back on her desk. “She doesn’t live anywhere. She died a few years ago.”
“Gee, Robbie. I’m sorry.” How little he knew about her— her family, friends, interests. And yet she had decided to help him.
“Let’s go out to the patio.” Clearly she didn’t want to talk about her mother. “I don’t actually cook, but I made you a cheese sandwich and some coffee. I figured that might absorb some of the alcohol in your system.”
Sometime between leaving the beach and now, it had gotten dark. A fat candle sputtered on the wrought iron table in the hedged-in patio.
The pattern of light triggered an unwelcome memory. Marina. “Would you mind putting that out?” He gestured toward the candle.
Robbie looked momentarily confused. “No problem.” She blew out the candle. It was still bright enough to see, the sky lightened by
the downtown glow and a moon that appeared between the drifting clouds.
He ate the sandwich in four bites and washed it down with the coffee.
“I guess my cooking’s better than I realized. I’ll make you another.”
“You don’t have to.”
“It’s no big deal.”
A white cat rubbed up against his bare leg. How long could he stay like this? Numb and swaddled. Not having to think.
Robbie put a platter with two more cheese sandwiches in front of him, refilled his coffee mug, and sat down. Her slender neck and pearls reminded him of his mother. “Do you mind if I talk to you?” she said. “I didn’t know who else to go to.”
“Sure,” Jeremy said.
“It has to do with Castillo Enterprises. I keep thinking there’s some connection between the Olympus Grande— one of its hotels— and your mother’s death.”
Another connection. Jeremy had been down this road enough times with Marina to know not to take this seriously.
“Last year, I noticed the revenues coming from the Olympus looked odd,” Robbie said. “I told Bud about it, but he brushed me off. Then I mentioned it to Irv and he told me to stick to the audit program.” She scratched the cat’s head. “This year, when Rachel took over, I brought it up to her. She hadn’t been involved with the Castillo audit in years, but she still remembered every detail.”
“And she agreed with you?”
“Rachel looked over the reports and said the numbers couldn’t be right. They were way too good.”
Jeremy picked up some crumbs on his plate with his finger. He was getting that surge of optimism he’d experienced with Marina. But how many false theories had she led him through?
“What’s wrong, Jeremy?”
“I’m not sure I see the point of this.”
“The point is that maybe your mother figured out something she was murdered for. She was killed the day before she was planning to go to the Olympus.”
“But visiting major assets is a standard audit procedure, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” Robbie said. “Standard for someone on the staff to do the site visits. Not the partners.”
Site visit. He could envision his mother’s handwriting on the workpaper binder from eighteen years ago.
“But only the partners went to the Olympus,” Robbie said. “Bud or Irv— never a staff auditor.”
“Maybe they liked the golf, the beaches, the fun in the sun.”
“Maybe they did,” she said. “But what if it was something else?”
He was getting sucked in. “So the only auditors who have ever been out to the Olympus have been Bud and Irv and, years ago, my mother? No one else from PCM?”
“That’s right.” She seemed disturbed. “We need to talk to them— Bud, Irv, Enrique Castillo.”
He felt a cold panic. He wasn’t going to do this again. “What do you mean we? I don’t work there any more.”
“Sure you do. You can bop into Bud’s office, apologize for disappearing for a couple of days, and maybe ask him a couple of questions.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m finished playing amateur detective.” As he stood up, his towel loosened. He grabbed it around himself.
“Your clothes are almost dry.”
“I don’t care if they’re wet. I’m leaving.”
“What’s the matter with you?” She shook her head in disgust. “Fine.” She went inside. A moment later, she threw his damp clothes at him. They fell to the floor.
“I don’t see what you’re getting so huffy about,” Jeremy said.
“And I don’t get all this new drama in your life, Jeremy. First you’re looking for your parents’ murderer, then you’re not. You’re too busy getting wasted. And when I have something of substance that I think we can go on, you’re not interested. You’re out of here.” She picked up the empty platter and the coffee mug.