“This is it.” She side glances up at me with long sigh.
It’s obvious she’s trying to put on a brave face for Iris, maybe even for me. After my deluge last night, she’s really been trying to keep her emotions in check. And I feel like a bastard for letting my frustration out. I can’t even excuse it with the turn of events because I should’ve done a better job of sucking it up to make sure she stays above water.
We’re back in the kitchen, and even though she hasn’t drunk the coffee we picked up on the way over, she’s pulling some grounds from the freezer and spooning them into the coffeepot before she tops it up with water and puts it on the stove.
“I should’ve had the gas cut off or something,” she mumbles, shaking out a dishcloth that was hanging on the front of the oven. “After the wake…I just…I couldn’t come back here. You probably think it’s stupid and irresponsible but—”
“Avery.” I round the island and stand behind her, staring out of the window overlooking the side yard. “I’ve never thought any of those things about you.”
“It’s okay if you did because I certainly have.” Shrugging, she pats my arm as if to tell me to set her free.
That’s never going to happen, though, and as such I clutch the edge of the counter tighter. “About last night. In the car…”
“Don’t, Garrett.” Leaning back, Avery rests her head on my chest, below my chin, lolling it from side to side as she tells me, “Don’t apologize for saying how you feel.”
A long heavy breath pushes from her. It’s heartbreaking how palpable her anguish is between us. It makes me wish I could take back my thoughtless outburst, and the reality that I’ll never be able to undo any of it…it’s crushing. The words are out, and I can’t take them back.
Turning to face me, Avery fusses with the buttons of my shirt for a moment. “You’ve listened to me when I’ve been hurt, scared, hopeless, and so many other things that I…” Worrying her bottom lip, she inhales deeply before simply saying, “I’m sorry I dragged you into this ordeal. And before you say it isn’t, because you have this thing about protecting me, and—”
“It’s not a thing. It’s a living, breathing need.”
“Regardless, I am sorry because any other person would have been easier to love and to be with.”
“Any other person isn’t you. You didn’t drag me into anything, sweetheart. I saw you and…and I found myself. I found something that has been missing all my life. Right up until the moment I laid my eyes on you.”
“God.” She smiles with a light chuckle. “You are so good at making me forget about all the shit with that mouth of yours.”
“Where’s Iris?” I ask, sitting her up on the counter. “My mouth is always at your disposal.”
A laugh vibrates all the way through her as her thighs press to my hips. With her lips gaping and glistening after she licks over them, I can’t resist the urge to kiss her. The light trill of her happiness lowers to a rumbling groan as my tongue sweeps over hers. Warm hands bracket the curve of my neck while mine mold to her hips. And while I drink my never-sated fill of her, nothing else matters. It all goes out of the window.
“Get a room!” Iris calls from behind us with a loud snicker.
When we pull away, Avery holds my stare with a gorgeous blush warming her cheeks. My chest squeezes at the sight of her beguiling grin. Her usually pinks lips are slightly darker and swollen from the nip of my advances.
“We should focus on what we’re doing here,” she murmurs while leaning closer, fingertips skimming over my jaw to my lips as she strokes the tip of her nose over mine. Up and down, side to side. “You’re a wicked distraction.”
“Me?” Feigning shock, I lift her off the counter and put her on her feet just as the coffee kettle starts whistling.
“There are many things you can pull off,” Avery chuckles, taking the pot off the gas and moving it to the back of the stove. “Innocence is not one. Now, come on, time to get to work.”
“Yeah! I want to go home.” Iris tugs at my hand as I follow them through the house, all the way up to the top floor.
We head into a small room that overlooks the bald maze running from the side of the house all the way to the back of the property. Conifers protrude from a few of the dead ends with the large center having a tall birdbath fountain and large black iron benches that look like half cages woven through with naked branches and vines.
“Mom used to call it the room with a view,” Avery tells me, looking around the whitewashed paneled walls.
Paintings of the ocean and beach make up stunning oil canvas collages on two out of the three walls. A large floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall bookcase surrounds the double-width doorway facing the french-style doors that run the width of the room and Juliet balcony.
“In the end, she was too weak to leave these four walls. The pain meds were just as bad as the chemo would have been.”
Oddly, there’s nothing but peace when she talks of her mother. Almost as though she’s relieved she’s not here. I can’t blame her, though; lung cancer is a bastard. Any cancer is, but the way that particular type takes you in the end…
The thought of Robert’s end hits me again, and the longer I go without telling her, the more it feels like a dirty secret. Even if I’m trying to protect her.
“Sorry, I…this room…”
“It’s my favorite,” Iris says, going straight for the baby grand to one side of the glass wall. “Can you play the piano?”
“Not very well.” An understatement given I was an absolute shit during all the private lessons my mom demanded I take when I was Iris’s age.
“Pop was the best, but Mommy is good too.”
Avery chuckles, pulling the key that was in the file from her pocket and heading back toward the wall of books. Pressing the edge by the far side of the wall, she pops the four bottom shelves open.
“Dad always said that the safe in his office was far too predictable to keep what was important secure.”
“I can see where he was coming from.” I move closer but keep enough away that I can’t see what’s inside.
“Here, take these,” she instructs me, holding out a couple of mahogany cigar boxes. When I take them, she pulls another bigger box out. It’s rounded with pastel blue panels decorated with intricately carved shells and mermaids all around it, the scaled mother-of-pearl top clasped with a small lock.
“Bingo!” She blows out a breath when she inserts the key. “My grandmother bought me this for my tenth birthday to keep my treasure.”
Heading to the small writing desk, she sits at the chair and opens the trinket box. A small, carved mermaid dives into the ruffled blue silk in circles, over and down.
The fond nostalgia that lights her face is entirely enthralling as she listens to the music. Avery must realize I’m watching her because she looks up at me and says, “My dad used to wind it four times after he put me to bed, and I would always fall asleep before it was finished.”
“What is it?”
“La Mer by Debussy, or rather a section of it. She had the movement especially made for this box. It’s why it sounds a little choppy in the middle—it was hammered out by hand. One of a kind.”
“It sounds so…”
“Peaceful?” Avery asks as I put the boxes she handed me down to one side of the desk. “My grandmother was old-fashioned; she believed in giving gifts that meant something. She used to say that the things we treasure are the ones we have to search for. Always dig deep, she used to tell me, and I would ask, for what?”
Brushing a strand of chestnut hair from her face, I ask, “What did she reply?”
“Everything.” With a shrug, she pulls up a trim of silk to reveal a row of stud earrings that grow in size. Pointing at the minuscule sapphires, she tells me, “Those were for my tenth birthday. The emeralds were for my fifteenth, and the pearls were for my sixteenth. I only got my first diamonds when I turned eighteen.”
The diamond drops are bigger than
the rest, and as she fingers the gems, she adds, “She passed away before my twenty-first birthday. It’s why this cushion is empty.”
Closing the top of the box with a sigh, Avery turns the key until the lock clicks shut and then presses it all the way to the rounded top before twisting it again so that the sides pop open.
“This was my favorite part about this box,” she chortles, pulling out the jewelry pouches that sit inside the drawers until she finds the one thing that clearly doesn’t belong there.
The levity on her features draws, leaving a serious stare. “The reason it went in the safe up here was because I would play with it all the time, and Mom used to worry that I would break it. Until I married, this was the only home I’d ever known, and by then she was gone, and the reminders as small as they might be, they felt like constantly open wounds back then.”
“And now?”
With another shrug, she pulls the USB stick from the tray and holds it up between us. “My perspective’s changed. As much as she was in pain, she got to go peacefully. In the end, the drugs helped her let go. It wasn’t like that for him, was it?”
My heart jumps into my throat, its pulse choking all my thoughts and my words. “Avery…”
“Come on, Doc. I have a PhD in Marine Conservation.” After a deep breath, she whispers, “You can’t protect me from the truth. It might hurt like a bitch, but it’s nothing compared to—” She stops abruptly as the tinkling of the piano keys behind me pauses. “I can handle it.”
“Okay.”
“You said I don’t know what crossed your mind, but…” A haunted look shadows the sunshine I love, the light that Avery radiates. “I’m at the point where…”
“You want justice.”
A tight scoff pushes out of her. “No.”
“No…”
“I want to see someone bleed. Maybe it’s wrong, but I don’t care.” Spinning the USB drive in her hand, she says, “I left my laptop in the car.”
While she puts the music jewelry box back in the safe, I head back to the rental car and grab it. I’m dashing back up the long steps to the house when movement in my periphery halts my momentum. The familiar Suburban rolls slowly away from the open gate while one of the asshole agents stares at me out from behind his ridiculous sunglasses. It’s not even sunny.
Taking the last couple of steps up to the stoop, I don’t look away as I wait for them to disappear from sight.
“What are you looking at?” Iris comes to stand beside me, looking between me and the gate. “You’re being weird.”
“I am not!” I wrap my arm around her waist and hoist her up, carrying her under my arm to her hysterical giggles. I close the front door and make sure it’s shut properly.
“Okay! Okay! Put me down!” she snorts as I take the marble steps up to the parqueted first landing. “You’re not being weird. I swear you’re not!”
“It’s too late now, champ! You can’t take it back…”
“But I do,” she coughs with laughter. “I do. I promise.”
By the time we reach the top floor and I put her on her feet, she’s threatening to pee herself.
“Don’t do that,” I tell her, opening the door to the bathroom beside her grandmother’s sitting room.
Iris walks straight in; she’s gotten so comfortable that she doesn’t even close the door as she heads for the toilet.
“Make sure you wash your hands, okay?” I remind her as I walk away, back to Avery.
Pausing in the open doorway, I watch while she listens to the music. She’s standing by the safe in a trance while she stares up at one of the shelves blankly. When I come closer, I realize that she’s studying all the photos on that particular shelf. There are so many different frames, but there’s one in particular she keeps going back to. There’s something about the way she’s studying the small circular frame held up by a smiling cherub. The photo itself is too dark for me to make out any of it until I’m standing behind her.
“My uncle,” Avery murmurs, stroking over the angel. “He was killed in a boating accident when I was a baby. I don’t remember him, but Mom used to tell me about him all the time. They were twins.”
“Twins…” I whistle, trying to find a way of bringing some levity back because I hate the way her somberness feels in my chest. It’s this awful stabbing and throbbing ache that feels like cracking concrete.
“I always wanted a sibling, but I don’t know…I guess they didn’t want any more children. Sometimes it got really lonely.”
“I’d say you got lucky not to end up with a clown like Mark for a brother.” That makes her chuckle, so I carry on. “He always liked to push my buttons.”
“I think he still does.”
“He once cellophaned the toilet in the night so that in the morning…it’s was gross. Like that time he put craft glue in my body wash and it looked like my skin was peeling. It fucked my hair so bad that Mom thought she would have to cut it all off.”
“Oh my God!” Avery laughs freely, and I’m almost grateful to have that story to tell her.
Perhaps there are some things in life that happen for a reason. Seems as though Mark’s stupidity that I have cursed most of my life actually served a purpose. If only to simply make my sunshine shine again.
“I got him back—”
“How?” she asks before I can finish, sitting back at the writing desk and taking her laptop out of the satchel that’s still hanging from my shoulder.
Opening it up, she’s a little shaky. It’s evident from the way she’s rapping her nails lightly over the keys and bouncing her leg. While I know her jitters are only going to get worse, I try to keep her good humor going as I tell her, “I told her where he kept his favorite grown-up reading material.”
“Oh!” Surprise lightens her drawn brows when she glances up at me in question because Mark’s told her his version of this story a couple times now. “I thought it was—”
“For cookies?”
“Yeah.”
“No, it was payback for my hair. The cookies were to appease me for having to let her cut a few unsalvageable inches off it. It took me forever to grow it out.”
Avery’s laughing again, her chest vibrating with her mirth as I hand her the USB adapter for her to be able to check the drive. As much as this place is stunning and although both and Avery and Iris look at home for the most part, there are moments where they seem lost. Especially Avery. She looks around as though looking for something she’s misplaced. I think a part of her is waiting for her father to appear.
“Photos?” she asks, confused, and I glance at her screen. We spend a while going over all of them. There are only seven photos, but as we go through them over again, it feels like more. “Why would he leave me photos of random people? There’s no explanation or anything.”
“The documents in the file made no sense either.” I tell her about the random printouts. “But none of it is random. I’m guessing they all link together.”
It seems as though Robert has left her a puzzle rather than “freedom.” Last night we spent hours going over the papers in the file. Nothing but random lists, mostly numbers. Apparently, numbers were Robert’s thing, according to Avery and Priscilla. Although the rest of us are baffled and mildly irate with the entire thing, Charlie is happier than ever.
“My head feels ready to explode if I’m honest. I’m not sure what any of this means; all I know is that it can’t be good, and I’m not sure how to handle it.”
“Well, we have Mark and Charlie and all their resources and contacts. I know I keep saying this, but we will figure all this out.”
Shutting her MacBook, she stands and pulls out the drive. “At what cost?” she asks, trying to think of where to put the USB stick. Finally dumping it in the satchel, she grabs the boxes from the desk and puts them back in the safe along with the jewelry box.
“I’m reeling right now.” Her tone makes it very clear that she’s pissed. A kind of pissed that I haven’t seen before. When
she turns to me, closing the safe and secret compartment behind her, she sighs. “He’s dead, and that is obviously why.”
“Avery…”
“You can’t deny that. You and I both know that whatever he was doing with all this is the reason someone—” She stops. With a visible swallow, she comes back to me. “All this time I’ve only ever wanted to protect my baby, and now I’ve got this thing on my hands that could ruin everything I’ve done. We had a new life and…and it was—”
“Is, sweetheart. You have a new life, and it is going to be fine.” My assurance does nothing to soothe her.
“I should run this past Mike. He’ll know what to do. Maybe he’ll make sense of it because I’m perplexed. Some of those people on those pictures, I’ve never met in my life, and others I didn’t know existed until now. I didn’t even know my father knew them.”
“Maybe he didn’t.”
“Then why are they in those pictures with him?”
“I don’t know, but—”
“Exactly. It’s why I need him to help figure this mess out before anyone else gets hurt.” With that she cups my jaw, taking a step closer until I can press my lips to her forehead.
A soft, pained hum rumbles from her at my kiss. “It feels as though I have everything to lose and nothing to gain from this. For a moment I thought he’d left me a way out. So much for freedom,” she scoffs.
“I think the best thing to do right now is head home and talk to Mark and Charlie about this.” I already know she’s not going to like what I’m about to tell her, but it’s no longer about what she likes. If Avery feels threatened, as though she’s in danger, this is about keeping her safe. “You should keep this as quiet as possible. The more people you bring into it, the more dangerous it could become. It could spiral out of control.”
“I know you don’t like Mike. I saw the way you were looking at him last night and the way you spoke to him. You don’t know him like I do.”
“I don’t need to know him because—”
“You might not trust him, but I do. My father did too.”
And maybe that’s why he’s dead. Although I don’t say it out loud, the thought earns me a glare from her.
Endurance: A Salvation Society Novel Page 32