by Diane Capri
My sorrow for him and for Margaret coursed through my body and caused me to shiver involuntarily. There was nothing I could do for Ron. Nothing anyone could do. I felt every bit as helpless as I really was.
We talked a few minutes longer, until another guest demanded my attention and I was forced to return to my hostess role, when I’d have preferred to stay with Ron and Margaret. I made a silent vow to spend more time with them both as I made my way over to help another elderly guest find a comfortable chair. But I never got the chance.
Later, I stopped into the Sunset Bar and glanced up to see the television reporter interviewing Gil Kelley, the current King of the Minaret Krewe, outside on the street along the parade route.
“What do you think of our parade, King Kelley?” the reporter asked him. Gil’s answer was drowned out by an upsurge of laughter inside the Sunset Bar.
Gil’s makeup, created here this morning, was particularly good. He had a wicked looking slash wound down the left side of his face with fake blood oozing out of it, and one of his front teeth was blacked out, giving him a snaggle-toothed appearance. Gil’s black hat, colorful yellow silk blouse, tight black pants and long sword were realistic enough. His all-too-real shaggy grey hair and paunch completed the expensive, if stylized, version of pirate wear. In his costume, he looked nothing like the president and majority shareholder of Tampa Bay Bank, which he actually was.
“Isn’t he dashing?” his wife, Sandra Kelley, said when she saw me watching Gil on television. Sandra herself was dressed in the twenty-first century version of a promiscuous wench’s costume, an off-the-shoulder red blouse and a full yellow skirt that matched her husband’s blouse. She wore several strands of cheap red and purple and green Gasparilla beads around her neck.
“Yes,” I smiled down at her, “he certainly does.” I nodded emphatically. “Or were you talking about Gil?” We both laughed.
“You and George are so good to have the Krewe here,” she said.
The comment seemed genuinely pleasant and thus unlike Sandra Kelly. “Are you having a good time?”
Sandra frowned daintily, a slight downward bend to her plucked black eyebrows over the bridge of her pert nose. The snide Sandra we all knew well resurfaced. “I was. Until he came in.” She inclined her head toward a man I didn’t recognize talking with Ron Wheaton, who seemed more exhausted. He was leaning against a wall and appeared to need the support.
“Who is that?” I asked Sandra.
“It’s Armstrong Otter. The one and only.” The disdainful tone conveyed her opinion precisely. There were two famous jewelers from the small beach community of Pass-a-Grille across the bay. One was the highly regarded Evander Preston. Armstrong Otter was the other.
Not wanting to encourage Sandra Kelly’s brand of vicious gossip, I said, “I don’t know Mr. Otter.”
“So much the better,” she snapped. “If Otter crawled back under whatever rock he slithered out from, all of Tampa would be better off.”
Sandra’s ire encouraged me to examine Otter more closely. He and Ron Wheaton appeared to be engaged in a serious conversation, although I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Of course, Ron was one of the kindest souls on the planet. He would have been pleasant to Jack the Ripper.
The same could not be said of Sandra Kelley. At least, no one who knew her said so. I’d never liked Sandra and every time I saw her, she reinforced by initial distrust. I took her venom with a side order of antidote as I excused myself to attend to our other guests.
Or so I told Sandra Kelley. What I really did was to escape in the opposite direction when I saw my newly-minted stepmother headed my way. The absurdity of having a stepmother more than ten years younger than me struck me again.
The onslaught of guests, my lack of sleep and exercise today, and the stress of seeing Dad cozying up to Suzanne finally overcame me. It was only early afternoon but I was exhausted. I figured no one would notice if I ducked out, so I trudged up the stairs to our flat, dodging people seated and standing everywhere, until I reached our bedroom. Thankfully, even though there is a television in our room, no one had camped out there. I locked the door and collapsed on top of the damask comforter, in the mistaken certainty that nothing more serious than my father’s new wife could possibly happen for the rest of the day.
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CAST OF PRIMARY CHARACTERS
Judge Wilhelmina Carson
The Six Bills
William Harris Steam, III (Trey)
Willetta Johnson Steam (Billie Jo)
William Walter Westfield (Walter)
William Richard Gutierrez (Ricky)
William Lincoln (Linc)
John William Tyson (Johnny)
William Harris Steam, IV (Harris)
Eva Raines Steam
Willetta Steam (Billie)
Wilhelmina Steam (Willie)
William Steam, Jr. (Bill)
Mary Steam
Prescott Roberts
Ursula Westfield
Janet Gutierrez
Court Personnel
Chief Ben Hathaway
Chief Ozgood Livingston Richardson (Oz or CJ)
Augustus Ralph
Wilhelmina Carson’s Family
George Carson
Kate Austin Colombo
Leo Colombo
Jason Austin
PROLOGUE
Tampa, Florida
August 1972
SHE WASN’T QUITE SLEEPING when she heard him arguing with someone outside. He slammed the front door and came into the small rented house on South Packwood Avenue they’d lived in since their child was born. He was drunk. And angry. He stumbled around in the living room and fell a couple of times. She heard him curse under his breath; loud enough to penetrate the old plaster walls. She withdrew into her thin sleep shirt and burrowed down deeper under the covers, as if she were the child instead of her two-year-old son in the next room.
The third time her husband fell down, he knocked an old ceramic lamp off the end table closest to the kitchen. She heard the lamp crash to the floor and shatter. The light bulb must have been turned on because it gave the little “poof” of an explosion they sometimes make when they break. He let out a stream of curses as he rose to his feet and shuffled loudly into the kitchen. He was swearing at the pain, so he must have hurt himself in that last fall, the one that broke the lamp.
She heard him open the refrigerator and heard the beer bottles clank as he took one out, and then set it down, hard, on the counter. He stumbled again and knocked over one of the chrome kitchen chairs with the red vinyl seats. They’d bought those chairs at a yard sale from one of the neighbors when they’d first moved here from the college dorm where they’d met and fallen in love. She remembered the day vividly because it was one of the earlier, happier times.
When the chair crashed to the floor, he bellowed aloud in fresh outrage, jerking her back to the moment. She shook, involuntarily, with fear. She heard him pick up the chair and set it down heavily, leaning on it, maybe, so that it scooted away from him, scraping along the floor. She could hear his constant stream of angry words, but tried not to listen to them. She prayed he’d be quiet, that he’d stop cursing, pass out or something.
He stayed in the kitchen for a good long time. She heard him get another beer from the refrigerator and her heart sank. She knew what was coming. Soon, he’d stumble his way into the bedroom where she lay shivering in the cool morning air and the darkness. He would reek of booze and pot. He’d want to have sex and she wouldn’t be able to keep him off her.
Unless she could get away. Trying to leave while he was in the house would mean she’d have to be quick. If he saw her, he’d never let her go. Absently, she rubbed the fresh bruise on her wrist where he’d grabbed her and held her too tightly before.
She got up from the bed and slipped into the pair of jeans she’d worn for the gig earlier that night. She slid her feet into cheap vinyl thongs, remembering the glass t
hat would be all over the living room floor from the broken lamp. She looked around for a warmer shirt, and could only find one of his lying dirty and crumpled in the corner. Since it was better than nothing against the chill, she slipped the shirt on. Her nose wrinkled in disgust at his permeating smell as the shirt engulfed her in his stifling embrace, squeezing her breath away.
Now she hastened across the narrow hallway, carefully, as silently as she could with the flip-flop noise the thongs made every time she took a step. She crunched up her toes to keep the shoes quiet, and made her way into her son’s room. Miraculously, the boy had slept through the noise of the crashing lamp and the sounds coming from the kitchen. She was grateful. She’d seen too many tears in the sensitive little boy’s eyes, heard too many of his cries during all the similar evenings that had passed before this one.
She bundled the baby up in a blanket and carried him into the living room. Sneaking past the door to the kitchen, she picked up her car keys but had to leave her purse. The child was heavy and awkward. She couldn’t carry anything more.
Opening the door quickly, holding her breath, she made it out to the porch. He hadn’t seen her, although she’d had to dash right past the open archway between the kitchen and the small living room. She didn’t try to close the door behind her. No time. She hurried out to the driveway and laid her still-sleeping son on the back seat.
She shouldn’t have returned to the house for her purse. If she’d just left without her purse, he would never have seen her at all. They wouldn’t have struggled with the knife. He wouldn’t have fallen. She hadn’t thought she’d hurt him. He was so much bigger than she, so much stronger. How could she have hurt him?
But she got out. She quickly returned to the car, started the engine, and sped away, leaving a storm of dust in the dirt driveway.
Hours later, after she’d wrestled free of her fear and mustered her courage, she returned to the house. By then the sun was well up over the horizon. Clear blue sky promised a perfect new day, she hoped.
Maybe he’d still be sleeping. Or awake and hung-over, but not so terribly angry. In her daydream, he apologized. Hugged her and held his son. He’d maybe take them out to breakfast, later. The little boy liked to go to the Old Meeting House and eat pancakes with blueberry syrup and whipped cream. He liked the little link sausages and the coffee with cream and sugar that he drank just like his daddy. They’d be the close, loving family she’d always imagined— the family they had been for a while before her husband had become so popular with his fans.
But that never happened. Instead, when she came back to the little house, she found him still lying on the floor where she’d left him hours before. She checked, but he wasn’t breathing. Bewildered, without knowing how it happened, she stood over her dead husband, her clothes covered in his blood, her hand holding the knife that killed him. She clutched the old shirt closer around her body, seeking comfort now in the smell of him, as if he still hugged her.
She had only pushed him to get away. Their struggle couldn’t have hurt him so badly. There was so much blood. It covered everything. Blood was everywhere in the small house.
Horrified, through her tears, she saw her son run to his father. “Daddy, wake up,” he said, laying his small head on his father’s bloody chest until he, too, was covered with the gooey mess.
PART ONE
GOOD INTENTIONS
CHAPTER ONE
Tampa, Florida
Mother’s Day
Thirty years later
WHEN DID EVERYTHING BEGIN to unravel?
“Begin at the beginning,” my mother used to tell me. But where was that?
If I could have found that spot, the point where it all started, maybe I could have changed the outcome. Maybe they would all still be alive.
All except Trey. I felt better that there was never anything I could have done for Trey.
What I remember as the beginning was Mother’s Day. The day I met Trey’s son.
I’d like to claim that I walked into the unexpected party with a sense of tragedy that belied Tampa’s beautiful spring afternoon, but really I was only feeling slightly out of sorts. I had envisioned a quiet interlude drinking lemonade and eating watercress sandwiches on Kate Colombo’s shady garden patio. The reality was quite different.
When I arrived at her home, the driveway was full of cars, and street parking was as scarce as an innocent felon. After circling the block several times, I had finally given up and parked six blocks away in the garage on South Rome in Olde Hyde Park Village.
Sunshine and temperatures in the low eighties, along with the promise of a casual brunch, had convinced me to forego my usual comfortable clothes in favor of a sundress and sandals with high heels for the short drive along the Bayshore and into Hyde Park.
Act in haste, repent at leisure, I chastised myself—at the time only for my wardrobe—as I hiked my way back to Kate’s. My feet hurt and I’d begun to glow by the time I had walked from the parking garage in my foolish heels, under sunshine more sweltering with each step. The fashionably big spring hat I’d set on my head before I left home only made me feel hotter, despite my ultra short haircut. Once back at Kate’s, I looked around for a place to stash the beastly thing.
The day continued to surprise me. Instead of a quiet afternoon, I’d blundered into an all-out party, consisting mostly of Kate’s new husband’s fashionable young friends. I saw messy, spiked hair in colors Mother Nature never intended. Tight, black leather miniskirts and belly shirts barely covered lithe bodies standing in every corner. Multiple piercings and tattoos made the guests resemble hip magazine tableaus not found in my social circle. I felt off balance, old and oddly out of place in Kate’s home, one of the few spots where I usually felt completely welcome and at ease.
Maybe, thirteen years after I lost my too-young mother to cancer, I should have been able to deal with her loss more effectively. Perhaps I should have developed a personal philosophy about her death that allowed me to go on with my life. I was thirty-nine years old, but I still felt like a gawky and exposed sixteen-year-old on Mother’s Day. A calm afternoon with Kate usually helped, but it was not to be.
As I made my way around Kate’s crowded house, I was thinking a lot about Mom. The familiar vivid nightmare that reprised the night she died had visited me again in the last hours before dawn that morning. Lingering unease clung to my body like the smell of lilacs that accompanied the dream. I was especially attuned to missing mothers. Or maybe I only think so now, in retrospect, as I try to sort out the events that followed.
“That’s Wilhelmina Carson. The flamboyant judge your brother was raving about last week,” I heard a short brunette say about me to her companion, as I made my way through the crowd around the punch bowl in the dining room.
I stopped for a cup of the fruity liquid and glanced surreptitiously at the speaker. Raving, hmmm? That could be a compliment. I used the hydrangea printed cocktail napkin to wipe my upper lip and dab at my brow. Threading my way through one pretty young thing after another, more males than females, I eventually made it to the back of the house. At the patio door, I looked for Kate and in a minute spotted her.
Kate was standing with her new husband, Leo Colombo, on the backyard patio, which was surrounded by her wild English garden. She wore a royal blue silk dress that matched her twinkling eyes and took years off her age. Kate looked relaxed and happy, as the two of them talked with some of their guests. Leo’s boyish chin was outlined by a ridiculous black goatee I hadn’t seen before. Dark, sultry eyes and wavy black hair were the stock-in-trade of the successful Italian model he had been years before Kate married him and moved him halfway around the world.
“What a hottie he is! They look so happy together, don’t they?” the punch bowl brunette lisped to her friend, around the stud in her tongue. They moved past me at the threshold, and into the backyard. Hottie? Where do these words come from?
“Leo told me that he and Kate are soul mates. How romantic,” her s
piky-haired chum with the nose ring sighed, causing the butterfly tattoo on her cheek to bat its wings.
I’d seen Kate very little since she had returned home from Italy a few weeks ago and I missed her. We used to talk almost daily before she married Leo. Now, she talked to him instead. But Kate had invited me to her home for brunch on Mother’s Day, as usual. I’ve spent every Mother’s Day with Kate since her best friend, my mother, died and Kate became the woman I loved like a mother. A new husband, hottie or not, couldn’t change that.
Kate saw me then and waved me over. “Willa, darling,” she said, as I bent down to receive her kiss on my cheek and allowed her to take my arm. She paused to introduce me to the other man standing with her and Leo. “This is Leo’s great friend, Harris Steam.”
I see now—that’s where the real trouble started.
CHAPTER TWO
“REALLY? YOU’RE HARRIS STEAM? It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” I said as I pumped his hand, trying not to sound like an overly enthusiastic admirer, even though I was.
Harris Steam was a local pop star who’d had a few hit songs that made it to the top of the charts. In the fickle way of the music business, he had since faded from the national scene, but that hadn’t made a dent in his local popularity. His fans here were rabid and faithful. His relaxed style of music combined a little reggae, a little folk, a little foolishness, and a lot of guitars. Think Jimmy Buffett, but with not as much success, or national fame.
Harris, slightly taller than my five feet eleven inches, was probably in his mid-thirties, a few years younger than me, although his music style appealed to a somewhat older audience. He looked like a wavehead, as they say in North Florida—a dim-witted “surfer dude” from the old beach movies that rerun sometimes on late night television.
Wraparound silver-framed sunglasses with reflective blue lenses hid his eyes, which were almost level with mine. Harris wore a wrinkled red Hawaiian shirt with the tails hanging outside his unpressed green shorts. His shoes were the popular Teva sandals that resemble a tire tread strapped loosely to the feet.