“Thank you.” She took the glass from him. “I don’t generally drink much.”
“I noticed. Unless you like to finish the bottle once it’s open.”
She tried to smile, but she winced with pain.
“Hey,” Jeremy said, putting a sofa pillow under her leg cast. “No smiling.”
She sipped the brandy. She’d taken off her jacket at the hospital. They must have forgotten it there. Her white blouse was damp from perspiration and the bloodstain on her collar looked like a giant ladybug. “You were sweet to take me to the hospital and bring me home.”
“Right.” He sat down next to her. “Was I also sweet to get you mixed up in something that almost got you killed?”
“I was stupid. I shouldn’t have gone down there alone.”
“I won’t argue with that.” Now didn’t seem like the right time to tell her the falling file cabinet hadn’t been an accident. With the painkiller, she probably wouldn’t remember much of their conversation. He’d talk it over with her in a couple of days and warn her. There was no chance she’d go back to work anytime soon in her current condition.
She leaned back against the sofa. “You don’t look like your mother at all.”
“Nope. I’m practically a carbon copy of my dad. At least physically.”
“But you’re a lot like your mom. Did you know that?”
He sipped his brandy. The rain had started back up and was pattering against the skylight just above them. The white cat jumped up on the sofa and made a nest in his lap.
“It takes a while, Jeremy.”
“What does?”
“Getting over the pain of loss.” Robbie closed her eyes. Her head rested against his shoulder. “I still haven’t gotten over losing my own mother.”
Jeremy slid his arm around her. She snuggled against him. In her hair, he could smell the day’s exertion mixed with violets.
“I miss her so much. And now I’ve lost Rachel, too.”
The rain picked up force and pounded against the skylight in rhythmic waves.
“I’m here,” Jeremy said.
“Yes, you are.” She touched his cheek.
Her eye was practically swollen shut, but she was still beautiful. Gently, he took her hand away from his face. They were friends— just friends.
“Sometimes the hurt gets so bad, I don’t know what to do,” she said.
“I know, Robbie.”
She pressed closer to him. “The rain,” she said sleepily. “Do you like the rain?”
“Sometimes.”
“I like the way it sounds when I’m inside. It makes me feel safe.” She burrowed her face into shirt. “I feel safe with you, Jeremy. Did you know that?”
He took the glass out of her hand and put it on the coffee table next to his. “You should get some sleep now.”
“Stay with me tonight.” She took his hands between hers.
Her hands were warm. So warm. “It’s late, Robbie. You’ve had a rough night.”
She pulled his face toward her. Her lips rooted against his. Warm and soft. “Please,” she said.
“Oh God, Robbie.” The candle guttered and the shadows against the wall grew. “You don’t know how much I want to.”
“Then stay with me.”
He kissed her fingertips.
“Please, Jeremy.”
He drew her against him and stroked her hair. The cat jumped out of his lap.
“Close your eyes,” he whispered.
“Make love to me,” she said.
“Shhh,” he said, stroking her hair. “Shhh.”
It was still raining when Jeremy pulled onto Lotus Island. A drizzle that barely justified the windshield wipers, but enough to make the roads hazardous. He’d passed two accidents on the way home from Robbie’s house. As Jeremy had driven by the flashing emergency lights, he had slowed down more than he might have a few months ago when he still smugly believed he and everyone else who populated his little world were invincible.
Robbie had fallen asleep after two, but he’d sat with her for another hour or so. He had shifted her position so she was stretched out on the sofa and left a second pillow under her leg to keep it elevated. He kissed her forehead before he left. He yearned for her, but it wasn’t right. Tomorrow she would be devastated. How ironic. If he hadn’t cared about her so much, he would gladly have made love to her. But he couldn’t risk losing her friendship. He’d already lost so much else.
He pulled the Lexus into the driveway. His attention was caught by a strange configuration of shadows near the Corvair.
The driver’s door was open. The dome light wasn’t on, but that made sense. The battery often lost its charge. But why was the door open?
Something dark and substantial was hanging out of the open car door like a rolled carpet.
He turned over the inert form. A cry of shock roared out of him. “Noooo.”
Marina’s head fell backward from where her throat had been slit. Her eyes were open as though she’d been startled and her small round mouth was pursed in surprise.
Marina. No, not Marina.
He rested her head on his lap. Her dark sweatshirt was soaked through with blood. The hood was pulled up over her hair, but a few bronze strands had escaped. “Marina, who did this to you?”
Marina’s cheek was cold. Blood no longer flowed from the gaping slit in her neck. Her body was rigid. She must have been killed hours ago.
The police. He had to call the police. Someone had murdered Marina.
He gently lowered Marina to the ground. He took off his jacket, rolled it up, and placed it under her head like a pillow. Why had she come here tonight?
Vaguely, he was aware of a car stopping, someone’s horrified voice, a door slamming, then the car screeching off.
Jeremy stroked Marina’s hair under the hooded sweatshirt. He held her hand. So stiff. So unlike his Marina. Blood from her cut artery had sprayed over her chin and cheeks.
The car door. The door of the Corvair was open. Had she put something in the car?
Jeremy tentatively peered inside. The mess of fabrics didn’t make any sense to him. Then he recognized her canvas satchel. It had been sliced open, its contents strewn over the driver’s seat.
The blanket. The Peruvian blanket she’d brought from her childhood home. That they had made love on so many times. It had been folded, but now was crumpled and stained with blood. She’d brought him the blanket? Why?
On the seat was a small, red metal box. A toolbox. He felt its weight in his hands. He’d bought the Father’s Day present when he was thirteen. “This is great, Jeremy,” his father had said. “Tools-to-go.”
So his dad had left the toolbox at Marina’s place. He expected to feel a surge of anger, but the knowledge of his father’s love affair with Marina no longer seemed important. Marina was dead. They were both dead.
He put the toolbox down and shook out the blanket. The damp wool released a smell that brought him back to another time and place. Damp wool and sweat and cooking grease and Marina’s fluttering tongue.
Why would someone have wanted to kill her?
A white envelope fell from the folds, landing in a pool of blood. “JEREMY” it said in all capital letters. He wiped it off against his jeans and shoved it in his pocket just as he heard the sound of sirens. Flashing lights appeared on his street.
The rain was coming down hard now. He thought of Elise hiding behind the curtain of rain when he’d found her at the park hours earlier, the hood of her sweatshirt up over her hair.
He looked back down at Marina, the dark hood framing her face like a nun’s habit. And with a jolt of recognition, he realized Marina hadn’t been the intended victim.
Elise was.
Chapter 45
The next few hours were a jumble for Jeremy. People coming, going, asking questions, taking photos. He remembered perversely the family photos of the four of them. “Okay, everyone. On the count of three,” his father would shout, the timer blinking as he raced back to his family throwing his arms around his wife and daughter while Jeremy stood off by himself, “everyone smile.”
But these pictures of Marina wouldn’t make it into anyone’s photo album.
Judy Lieber touched his arm. “Sorry I got here so late. I was at my son’s house in the Keys when I got the call.”
She had a son? Somehow he’d pictured her working 24/7, no family, no outside commitments. Just being a detective. But that’s exactly what he’d done with his own parents, imagining their lives revolved around him alone.
“Why don’t we go somewhere quieter?” She led him away from the crowd of curious neighbors and the crime-scene crew out to the back patio.
The sky was lightening to the east, a pale crisp blue that seemed incongruous with the blur in Jeremy’s own head. The rain had stopped. When had that happened?
“I know Detective Kuzniski has already asked you questions,” Lieber was saying, “but I prefer speaking to you myself.” She was
wearing old jeans and a sweatshirt, as though she’d been too rushed to change into her customary detective clothes.
He was suddenly itching for a cigarette. The unfiltered kind Marina had introduced him to— that he’d stopped smoking when he’d discovered her deception.
“What do you think she was doing here?” Lieber asked. “The blanket, the toolbox— do they mean anything to you?”
“I think.” His voice caught in his throat. “I think she meant to say good-bye to me.”
Lieber glanced at the brownish smudge on his pants. “Did you see her? Talk to her?”
“I wasn’t home when she got here.”
“Where were you?”
“With Robbie Ivy, one of the auditors at my mom’s firm.”
“I know who Robbie is.”
“Someone tried to kill her.”
“Robbie?” Lieber widened her eyes. “That’s a pretty extreme statement.”
“She was in the PCM file room. A cabinet toppled over— the one with the Castillo Enterprises audit papers. It crushed her.”
“Crushed her?”
“Well almost. It hit her head and broke her ankle. I took her to the hospital, then back to her house.”
“So she’s okay.”
“Pretty much. She’s on painkillers. She’ll probably sleep through most of today.”
“And what makes you think the falling cabinet was deliberate? Did she see someone push it?”
“No, but it was weighted to fall. When I pulled it up off her, it felt like the top drawer had been loaded down with lead.”
“You confirmed this?” She was taking notes copiously. “Did you see the lead?”
“No.” He was annoyed with himself for not following through. “I needed to get Robbie to the hospital.”
“That was the right thing to do, Jeremy.” She kept writing. “Can you give me the exact location of the file cabinet?”
“Not exact. It was about halfway back into the file room. You’ll see it out of line. And Robbie was bleeding, so there should be blood on the floor.”
She glanced again at his pants pocket. “And you believe your parents’ murder is somehow connected to the incident in the file room?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Why?”
“Because Robbie was getting closer to the answer. We’d been in the file room the other night. Someone booby-trapped the file cabinet knowing either Robbie or I would be back to look through the old Castillo audit papers.”
“Then what about Marina? Did the murderer also believe Marina was onto him? And how could he possibly know Marina would be coming here tonight?”
“It wasn’t Marina he intended to kill.”
“What do you mean?”
“He thought Marina was Elise.”
Lieber stopped writing. She pushed her hair away from her eye. “I know you believe the murderer has targeted Elise, but you need to help me out here, Jeremy. How could he have made that mistake?”
“The sweatshirt. Elise was wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt, just like the one Marina had on. And they all saw her wearing it.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“On the yacht, when she found the papers, Elise was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. Enrique and Liliam Castillo and Bud and Irv all saw her.”
Lieber finished writing something on her pad and closed it. She seemed to be in a rush. “You’ve been a big help. Why don’t you go
to your grandfather’s house and get some rest? I’ll try to get some more cars over there to keep an eye on things.”
“I think I’ll just stay here.”
She shook her head in that disapproving way his mother had, put the pad into her handbag, and made her way through the backyard to the front of the house. He heard her car pull out and speed away.
He was dizzy when he stood up. Dizzy, sick, disoriented. A lot like he’d felt when he’d come home after his parents had been killed. He stumbled past the crowd of neighbors who stood behind the yellow crime-scene tape. They were staring at him, but he didn’t turn to meet their eyes. What were they thinking? A cursed house? A cursed family? Three deaths— murders— in less than two months.
Why weren’t they stoning him? “Get out of our neighborhood! Leave us alone with your blood, violence, and drama.”
He tripped as he walked. Drunk. They must think he’s drunk.
“Jeremy.” Out of the corner of his eye, he could make out Liliam and Enrique Castillo. He quickened his pace.
There was a crime-scene group gathered around an old yellow Toyota a short distance from the park. Marina’s car. She’d left it here. Had the murderer seen her walking from the park and thought it was Elise leaving her hiding place in the banyan tree?
Jeremy stepped through the soggy park ground, wet leaves sticking to his sneakers. Dizzy. He was so dizzy. He crawled into the “grotto” where he and Elise had huddled together the evening before. It was damp and smelled too fresh, like someone had tilled dirt and thick red worms, exposing what should have been kept buried.
He rested his head against a protruding root. A ray of morning light pushed past the dense trees and found its way into his hiding place.
Marina’s letter seemed to be throbbing against his leg like the telltale heart in the Edgar Allen Poe story.
The folded envelope was stuck together. He pulled the two corners apart. Marina’s blood had spread from the crease outward creating a symmetrical pattern, like a Rorschach test. It reminded Jeremy of butterfly wings.
And he thought about the butterfly tattoo at the base of her neck. How he would lick it and taste her salty sweat. He tore open the sealed envelope. Sealed with her own saliva just hours before. He pictured her small round mouth, the tiny crease between her eyebrows, her wild, wonderful hair.