Shadow Tag, Perdition Games
Page 23
“We’ll get through this,” she said. “I promise.”
Reece turned away before she saw the torment on his face. He regretted not heeding Bryce’s advice. He should have left well enough alone. He shouldn’t have put the apprehension of a faceless vigilante over his career.
His selfish hypocrisy tasted bitter.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Journal
IN THE WEEKS that followed the sheriff’s visit, Basile Landry tried my family in the court of public opinion. The verdict was absolute.
He defamed my sister’s reputation until she became the whore of Babylon, a wanton simpleton who preyed on unsuspecting boys. Not a soul would believe Virgile had raped Pearl. Basile cast aspersions on my character as well, portraying me as a violent and unstable delinquent. His alma mater rescinded my basketball scholarship with no explanation. Basile then went on to malign my father’s military career, establishing doubt over his patriotism by insinuating he had fraternized with Taliban supporters during his deployment. The furniture he designed with exquisite care went unsold.
With an election forthcoming, the sheriff would eventually concede and launch a full investigation into our family. When that happened, they would arrest me for murder, find Pearl’s body, and charge my father with concealment of death. With no family to care for her, authorities would take my mother from our home and institutionalize her. Without the seclusion of the bayou to comfort her with false memories of a genteel past, she would die a slow and mentally agonizing death alone.
My father understood the risks to our family as well as I did. Although we never discussed the future, I watched helplessly as his depression grew and he aged decades before my eyes. He made no further effort to instill an iota of normalcy to our lives. He didn’t brush my mother’s long platinum hair or sing her Cajun folk songs. He cared for her with clinical efficiency but surrendered to the darkness of our living nightmare.
I once again hunted and fished to feed our family, relying on the bayou to sustain our lives. The three of us would sit at the table in oppressive silence as twilight ebbed over the Teche, the pinkish light flashing through the high branches of the cypress tree. Like a helpless baby bird, my mother would open her mouth each time my father pressed a spoonful of food against her lips, her face void of expression and her eyes mercifully vacant.
The inequity of what was happening to my victimized family leached the vibrancy from the colours around me. I could no longer hear the music in the bayou’s night sounds. An evening breeze no longer felt like a gentle kiss from Pearl against my neck. Because of me, we existed in purgatory, waiting for the authorities we feared to drag us into perdition.
A month after the sheriff’s first visit, my father asked to speak with me. We sat in matching rockers on the front porch and he handed me a thick manila envelope.
“Do you remember how to find Cyril?” he asked. “His compound is where it was when you sold him the nutria tails.”
I stared in silence at the envelope that lay on my lap like a ticking bomb.
“Basile won’t give up, Blu. Nor will his surviving son.” Dad’s eyes lingered wistfully on the high branches of the cypress tree. “You have to run. I can buy you time and plant doubt. Cyril will get you documents. I sold the truck. There’s enough money there to pay him.” He nodded to the envelope.
“Where will I go?” I asked.
“North. Get across the border,” he said. “Pick a city large enough to swallow you—Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver. Make a life. Do it for Pearl.”
Tears welled in my eyes. “They’ll find her when they come.”
“The angels have Pearl, child.” He reached over and placed his warm hand on my chest. “Her spirit is infinite. Pearl lives in your heart for eternity. She is your shadow now and will always be with you.”
“I can’t leave her,” I said.
“You can and you will.” He handed me a leather-bound notebook. “Remember us, Blu. Write our story. Someday, you’ll find someone who will understand what we had to do. With understanding comes forgiveness. Don’t come back, not ever.” His eyes were dark and intense. “Understand? Do not come back here, child.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered through my tears.
He clasped my hand in both of his. “No, I’m sorry. I failed my blood and that’s my greatest regret. You have to survive, Blu. You’re all that’s left of us.” He stood. “Take the boat. When your documents are ready, Cyril will take you as far as Houston.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Always remember I love you. Everything I’m doing is to protect you, not to punish you.”
Without another word, he stood, stepped inside the house, and abandoned me to my dreary future. The door to my childhood home closed firmly behind him.
I descended the stairs with nothing but this leather-bound journal and the manila envelope of money. I slipped the envelope into my breast pocket. The bleakness of a life without my family loomed miserably before me. Yet, I could muster no remorse for having executed Virgile Landry. My only regret was my inability to identify his accomplice.
Halfway to Cyril’s camp, I cut the engine and let the boat drift along the still water. An overwhelming sense of having missed something vital consumed me. I sat quietly, emptying my mind and focusing on the birds’ rhapsody. The water lapped gently in a two-four beat against the sides of the mud boat. My father’s haggard face rose in my mind. I saw his eyes locked onto a ladder leaning against the cypress tree. I heard the serenity in his voice that had been absent for months. I saw the button-down shirt he had been wearing and the corner of a folded piece of white paper that had peeked from the breast pocket.
A bustle of egret wings broke the spell. I watched as the elegant white birds lifted majestically into the sky. Their long necks were extended in graceful curves as they soared above me.
I understood what my father planned to do.
He would make the ultimate sacrifice to protect me, if only long enough for me to escape Basile Landry’s reach.
The engine caught on my second try, and I frantically turned the boat around and pushed the throttle to maximum speed. The boat bounced across the water and the old engine screeched in protest. I had been gone too long, and as each moment ticked past, my despair tightened.
I rounded the bend to our house and saw him. Tears mixed with the beads of moisture from the bow wave splashing against my face. The engine sputtered and died and the boat drifted toward the bank.
The ladder still leaned against the leathery trunk of the cypress tree. Lying neatly at the base of the ladder was my father’s prosthetic.
He’d attached a thick-coiled rope to an aged branch that would hold his weight. His single foot hung two feet from the top of Pearl’s stone crypt. He twirled with a macabre elegance in the soft wind.
Staggering to shore, I dug a knife from my pocket and clamped it between my teeth as I climbed the ladder. My father’s black eyes bulged from their sockets and bands of red tainted the whites. His grey, bloated tongue lolled from blue lips. Streaks of blood from his shredded fingertips stained the coarse fibres of the rope around his neck. He’d choked to death, primal instinct driving him to claw at the rope that strangled him.
As the last filament of rope surrendered under the sharp blade of my knife, his body fell on the top of the stone crypt. I scrambled down the ladder, pulled him gently to the ground, and cradled him in my arms, weeping over what I had driven him to do.
It had begun under this cypress tree, when my parents had danced to music only they could hear on the night before my father deployed to Afghanistan. Virgile had watched Pearl from the cover of this cypress tree, coveting her beauty and then pilfering what he viewed as his entitlement. The ancient tree protected my beloved Pearl, and now, its gnarled branches had taken my father’s life.
There was one thing left to complete the fiery ring of destruction that had besieged my family so many years ago when my grandfather had denied his kin.
I swathed my father in a white linen sheet, buried him beside Pearl’s tomb, and laid a blanket over the freshly turned soil.
In the house, I clothed my mother in her favourite seafoam silk dress with the yards of billowing chiffon. I quietly wept as I recalled our trip to Savannah when I was ten. She sat still and blissfully unaware as I brushed her platinum hair until it was a glittering sheet down her back. I led her to the porch and took her hand. Together we descended the grand staircase my father had constructed for her. She passively followed me to the white blanket I had laid beneath our cypress tree. She sat and tucked her legs under her dress. As she gazed across the bayou, a radiant smile lit her face. She reached up and clasped my hand in hers. I knelt beside her and held her waifish body against me. I loved her with a frightening intensity and had one gift left to bestow upon her.
“There is a Georgian jewel with antebellum architecture on East Gaston Street in Savannah,” I whispered. “Old Savannah’s finest are arriving for a ball hosted for the most sought-after debutante in the Confederate. There isn’t a man in the world impervious to your beauty and charm.” My tears darkened the silk of her dress and I reached up to caress the warmth of her face.
People had always been our greatest enemy. They had never understood my fantasy-prone mother’s eccentricities. Without understanding, I knew that cruelty would always reign. When the authorities came, they would institutionalize her in a bleak box where her fear and confusion would extinguish her essence. There was only one way to protect her.
Gently, I pressed the gun to her temple and pulled the trigger. Her head jerked sideways, and her warm blood sprayed across my face and chest, spattering the envelope that contained the money my father had given me. I moved her limp hand from my thigh and stepped into the still water of the Teche, screaming as her blood ran from my skin in narrow ribbons of diluted pink. The last of my humanity crumbled and floated across the top of the algae-covered water.
Everything I cherished was gone, everything except the ancient bald cypress tree.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Sam
SAM MOVED A snoring Pepin off her lap and reached for the remote to stop the movie. Twisting around, she grabbed her buzzing phone from the table behind her. She read the text and sat immobile, trying to reconcile Emily’s message. Her cheeks felt flushed and her stomach roiled. There had to be an explanation, other than the obvious. Sam had witnessed Aazar take Fadiya’s blood. He had no motive to substitute it in his lab or to forge the test results. Ketamine remained in the urine for over a week. Fadiya’s sample should have tested positive, yet Emily’s text claimed it was negative. It didn’t make sense.
Reece glanced up from stirring something on the stove. “What’s wrong? Who was that?”
“Emily,” she said. “Fadiya’s urine tested negative for ketamine.”
He frowned. “But it was less than a week ago that Aazar took his blood sample.”
She swallowed, the residual wine on her tongue tasting sour. “I know.”
“Who drew the sample?” he asked.
“Ophelia… I think,” she said slowly. “I know where you’re going with this, but why would she switch samples?”
“Did Ophelia take it to the lab, or did she give it to someone to deliver?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” A graphic image of Emily, flushing the original sample and replacing it with one of her own, flashed across Sam’s mind.
“Maybe the lab made a mistake,” Reece said. “They could have mislabeled Fadiya’s sample.”
“I suppose,” Sam said hesitantly.
He studied her from across the room. “You don’t think that’s what happened.”
The conversation she’d had with Emily two days ago replayed in her head. The doctor had been concerned about her professional standing. Sam wanted to believe the lab had screwed up, but she wasn’t sure how far Emily would go to protect her clinic and her life’s work.
“Labs do mess up,” she said, trying to give her mentor the benefit of the doubt. “I mean it’s possible, right?”
“Get your own sample tomorrow and have an independent lab test it.” Reece put down the wooden spoon he was holding and grabbed a teaspoon from the cutlery drawer. “Come and taste my filling.”
She trudged to the kitchen with heavy steps, her thoughts spinning with nasty suspicions. She couldn’t shake the sense that Emily had switched samples to protect her clinic from yet another scandal. The idea made Sam ill. Could she have misjudged her mentor so badly? She took a deep breath. Before she jumped to conclusions, she’d get a sample from Fadiya and have it tested. If it were positive, she’d confront Emily.
Sam dipped the teaspoon into the spiced ground beef and pea mixture. “It’s good,” she said. “What is it?”
With a flamboyant flick of his wrist, Reece lifted a moist tea towel off a baking sheet. Two dozen half-moon bundles with artistically crimped edges nestled on the tray.
“Jamaican patties for Eli,” he said with a big grin. “I learned how to make them to surprise him. I even made peach chutney.”
“Oh, well, they look delicious,” she said tentatively.
Confusion crossed Reece’s face. “What’s wrong?”
Eli was a picky eater, probably somewhat due to his Asperger’s. He avoided certain textures, such as meat. Sam was cognizant of his proclivities and typically picked a pizza joint for lunch. If they shared a pie, it had to have sauce, caramelized onions, and cheese. Nothing else, or Eli would only nibble at the crust. He liked the boxed Jamaican patties because the meat was heavily processed, almost pureed, and the dough wasn’t flaky. Reece had thought he was doing a kindness and Sam wasn’t sure how to prepare him for the inevitable.
Rather than dancing around the issue, she took a page from Eli’s book and spoke directly. “He won’t eat them,” she said bluntly. “The filling in the boxed ones is mushy. The processed pastry is a denser texture. It doesn’t have peas.”
“What a waste of time.” Reece threw the wooden spoon in the sink.
He was still upset over the ugly confrontation with Gretchen and his ominous future in law, Sam realized. She got that, but his adolescent hissy fit didn’t sit well with her. Reece was spoiling for a disagreement, so Sam ignored it, deciding they could talk after Eli and Danny left.
“Danny and I will devour them,” she said eagerly and dug her spoon into the leftover filling. “I love West Indian food—you know that.”
“Does it need more curry?” he asked, somewhat mollified by her enthusiasm.
Sam glanced at the tray of assembled turnovers. It was too late to suggest a tad more curry so she smiled and shook her head. “Nope, the spice is perfect. Super yummy.”
“What’s Eli going to eat?” Reece asked peevishly.
She opened the sub-zero freezer and pointed at a box of frozen patties.
Reece sneered at them. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Her own temper was fraying now and it was a struggle to keep up her cheerful tone. “Don’t take it personally,” she said with a stiff smile. “It’s an Asperger’s thing. It isn’t Eli’s fault.”
Reece muttered something under his breath and poured syrupy chutney into a bowl. “Can you set the table?”
Sam was placing the last napkin when the doorbell rang. She shooed Pepin aside and opened the door for Eli and Danny. The puppy hurled his solid body at Eli’s legs. He scooped up the French bulldog and laughed as Pepin slobbered all over his cheek.
“Did you miss me? Yes, you did, and I missed you.” Eli looked over at Sam. “I would like to borrow Pepin. May I take him home tonight?”
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��What for?” Sam asked.
“He wants to teach him to swim,” Danny said, dumping her laptop bag by the door. “He bought him a lifejacket.” Her snarly expression suggested she didn’t endorse the idea of Pepin doggy-paddling around their immaculately maintained saltwater pool.
“I guess it’s alright with me.” Sam caught Danny’s eye. “Reece made Jamaican patties.”
“You can smell the curry all the way down the stairwell.” Danny peered over Reece’s shoulder at the tray of turnovers. “Eli won’t eat them.”
“I know.”
Reece shoved the tray into the oven and closed the door harder than necessary. He threw open the freezer and hurled a box of frozen patties onto the marble counter, causing Danny to flinch and jump back.
She held up her hands in an angry gesture. “Whoa! What’s your problem, dude?”
“Sorry,” Reece mumbled.
Danny shoved by him and took a can of Mountain Dew and a beer out of the fridge, glaring at him as she walked by. She handed her brother the soda and opened her beer.
“I found out some stuff about that doctor’s financial situation,” she said and flopped onto the leather recliner in the living room.
Sam followed her and sat on the corner of the sofa, reaching for her glass of wine. “Anything out of the ordinary?”
“Well, your mom was right. Adaline Beauregard’s grandfather established a trust in her name,” Danny said. “The old man died over a decade ago. The trust was in a South Carolina bank.”
“Makes sense,” Sam said, remembering that her mother had told them Adaline was from Charleston.
“Yeah, but things got weird five years ago,” Danny continued. “Money moved out of the trust through a web of complex transactions. Almost thirty-million dollars vanished.”
“Adaline died five years ago.” Reece sat down beside Sam, placing his hand on her knee. He mouthed Sorry with a weak smile.
She laid her hand over the back of his, silently signalling her forgiveness for his bad temper. “Mathias probably inherited the trust,” she said. “He must have liquidated it.”