“She was taking several prescriptions. It’s unclear whether that affected her heart.”
To my ears, he sounded defensive. My spine stiffened. “What exactly was she taking?”
“She went on an antidepressant after Teddy was born. I know she had prescriptions for anxiety and insomnia and headaches. Heartburn too.”
I knew Caro had suffered from migraines and postpartum depression, but I had trouble believing the rest. My sister had always been a healthy person. “When did she start taking antianxiety meds?”
“I don’t know. She never discussed it with me.”
“What about illegal—”
He cut me off before I could finish my question. “I’m sure Caroline would never. As far as I know, red wine was her hardest vice.”
“I didn’t mean my sister. I meant you,” I said, determined to rattle his calm front. “You used to be an addict, right? Have you taken anything illicit lately?”
“No, not in years.” He looked genuinely surprised by the question, and I couldn’t blame him. My father had regularly transformed into a monster under the influence of alcohol, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Theo made a similar werewolf-like switch. I was still struggling to reconcile what I knew of Theo—a stand-up guy who worked for a nonprofit that repatriated stolen artifacts—with the man Caro had written about in her letter. “I had a double scotch at lunch,” he added sheepishly. “I wasn’t sure how to get through it otherwise.”
He sounded honest, but I had to be skeptical. “I never saw a copy of the autopsy report. Would you be able to give me one?”
“There was no autopsy.”
That jolted me. My sister’s death was a terrible shock, and I’d been wallowing in grief instead of demanding answers. That had changed with my sister’s message. Everything had changed. “Why not? Isn’t that automatic when a person dies suddenly?”
“Only if there’s evidence of foul play.”
I swallowed hard. “What if there was, Theo?”
He stared at me blankly. “Was what?”
“Foul play.” I leaned forward. “What if someone killed her?”
Theo and I stared at each other for a wary moment. He nonchalantly adjusted one gold cuff link. Again, I could see the edge of the scar on his wrist. Caro didn’t confide much, but she’d told me he was covered in scars.
“You think the man she was seeing did . . . something to her?” Theo asked.
That answer was not on my bingo card. I’d expected him to downplay my suspicions, not invent a suspect. “What man?”
“Caroline wasn’t just out for a jog the morning she died,” Theo said. “We both know that, don’t we? She was meeting someone.”
His voice was quiet, but the words stabbed at my heart. He was actually accusing my dead sister of cheating on him.
“There was no other man,” I snapped. “She would never do that.”
“She wanted a divorce,” Theo shot back. “Why would she ask for that if no one else was involved?”
It was my turn to stare dully at him. Finally, I croaked out, “Divorce?”
A shadow crossed his face. “I thought perhaps you knew.” Theo turned his eyes to the window. “Caroline played everything close to the vest. She never really confided in anyone, did she?”
“When did this come up?”
“A couple of months ago,” Theo said.
“Did you agree to it?”
Theo’s answer was so quiet I almost missed it. “No.”
The car gave a jolt, and I realized we had crossed the broad, grand gates of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. It’s now or never, I told myself. There was no graceful way to do this.
“Maybe Caro wanted a divorce because she found out about your first wife,” I said.
“What did you say?”
“Is your first wife buried here in the Thraxton family plot?”
He glared at me without answering.
“You’re not denying she exists, are you?” My voice was getting louder.
He glanced at his watch and looked out the window. I wanted to grab him by the lapels of his expensive suit and shake him until the truth rattled loose out of his skull.
“Where’s your first wife buried, Theo?”
“How is that any of your business?”
The last shreds of any doubt fell away. My sister’s message wasn’t crazy. There had been a first Mrs. Theo Thraxton, even if that secret was lying in a cold grave.
“I don’t know, Theo. Caro’s dead. Your first wife is dead. Isn’t that what police call a pattern?”
In a heartbeat, the air between us froze into ice. I knew he’d never speak to me again. But that didn’t matter. He’d said enough.
When the car stopped, Theo got out and slammed the door behind him. I knew I should’ve been afraid of what he could do to me, what he could get away with, but I was powered by a cold rage of my own. He was responsible for my sister’s death. Even if it killed me, I’d get justice for her.
CHAPTER 6
DEIRDRE
The gravesite felt like a minefield. There was a glowering Theo on one side and my father simmering on the other. I was glad when Theo’s father came up to me.
“How are you holding up, Deirdre?” he asked. He was a dapper man—whenever I saw him, he was always fully suited up. He was shorter than his son, and his blue eyes were paler and his hair was iron gray instead of black, but the resemblance to Theo was still strong. It was the personalities that were polar opposites: Theo was as withdrawn as his father was gregarious.
“Not well,” I admitted. It didn’t seem right to tell him that his son was the reason why, at least not within Theo’s earshot.
“Same here,” he said. “When you feel up to it, I’d love for you to come over.”
“Your son won’t want to spend time around me.”
He shot a glance Theo’s way. “He doesn’t get a vote. Anyway, he’s not invited. I was thinking you, me, Teddy, and Ursula for dinner.”
Ursula was Theo’s stepmother. She had a serious drinking problem, which made me wary of her, but she’d always been nice enough.
“Sure. I’d like that.” I looked around. “Teddy’s not here, is he?”
“No. I thought it would be too much for him.”
I nodded at that. It was almost too much for me.
The service started, led by the same priest who’d officiated at the church. I didn’t want to think about my sister being lowered into the dank, wormy ground. Instead, I focused on Theo, whose eyes stayed fixed on the angel guarding the family plot. She was a graceful stone maiden with wings so finely carved you could make out the pattern of her feathers. Her face was obscured as she wept over a white marble block with THRAXTON carved in bold letters. The graves were subtly marked with small stone plaques.
After Caro’s casket was lowered into the ground, the family was supposed to take handfuls of rose petals and sprinkle them into the yawning pit. No one wanted to do it. Theo stayed back, as did his father and mine. For the first time, I realized Juliet was absent; it seemed in character for her to refuse to set foot in Brooklyn. In the end, no one touched the rose petals but Caro’s friend Jude Lazare and me. We threw in one handful after another. They were dark red against the burnished mahogany of the casket.
Like blood, I thought.
After the brief ceremony, my father stormed off. Watching him out of the corner of my eye, I noted that he didn’t even speak to the priest, which showed how overcome he was by burying his eldest child. I looked around for anyone I wanted to talk to and spotted Jude. She was standing at the top of one of Green-Wood’s rolling hills with another woman, and I walked up to join them. As I did, I noticed a man in the distance, watching us. He was tall and sandy haired, casually dressed in jeans and a gray shirt. He wore dark sunglasses, and I expected to see a camera in his hands, but they were jammed into his pockets. Caro wasn’t a celebrity, but she was well-enough known in New York to garner tabloid interest.
F
or a split second, I wondered if I knew him. There was something vaguely familiar. But he was sly and picked up on my approach without looking directly at me. He turned his back and rushed off.
On instinct, I started after him. Theo’s accusations were still reverberating in my head. No way had Caro been cheating on him. My sister wouldn’t do that.
Jude’s voice broke into my thoughts and stopped me in my tracks.
“She was going crazy, and she needed help.” Jude’s back was to me, but the breeze carried her voice over clearly. “But not the kind of help you give.”
The woman facing her was African American, tall and willowy, with graying braids coiled atop her head like a crown. But her voice was too soft for me to make out. All I heard were a few disjointed words, maybe catching every fifth one. “Don’t . . . help . . . let . . . forget . . .” It was impossible to eavesdrop properly.
“That’s not true, and you shouldn’t have encouraged her.”
I stepped closer and heard the tail end of the soft-voiced woman’s retort: “ . . . listened to her.” But my movement caught Jude’s attention, and her head swiveled my way.
“Deirdre,” Jude said, moving toward me and pulling me into an awkward side hug. “How are you doing?”
“You’re Caroline’s sister?” The other woman turned to face me, her eyes warm and curious. “It’s an honor to meet you. I know Caroline adored you.”
That brought a lump to my throat. “Thanks.”
“I’m Adinah Gerstein,” she added, drawing her hands together as if she were praying and holding them over her heart. That had become a popular way of greeting people since the pandemic, and I liked it better than I ever had a handshake. “I have to tell you how sorry I am about Caroline. She was an amazing woman.”
“I need to talk to Deirdre,” Jude said. “Would you mind excusing us?”
“Of course.” Adinah quietly backed away, giving us privacy.
“I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk at the church,” Jude said. Her brown eyes were red rimmed, but otherwise she looked beautiful. She wore a simple black dress and jacket, and her dark curly hair was pinned back in a restrained bun. She wore no jewelry except a small silver crucifix. She’d been born in Haiti but raised in Queens; she and Caro had been best friends since middle school. “Be honest—how are you holding up?”
“Who was that woman?” I asked.
“Adinah runs Diotima,” Jude said. “Caroline gave them a lot of help from the time she was in college.”
I recognized the name immediately—Caro was devoted to the Diotima Civic Society—but I had something else on my mind. “What were you saying about Caro going crazy?” I demanded.
“Oh, no, that wasn’t . . . um, that wasn’t about her. I’m sorry if it sounded that way, Dee.”
“Oh.” I felt foolish. My confrontation with Theo had left me paranoid.
“There is something else that’s going to make you upset with me,” Jude said. “Your father asked me to give you this, and I said I would.”
She held out a small square box made of plain brown paper. It fit in the palm of her hand.
“Whatever it is, I don’t want it,” I said.
“Won’t you even open it?”
“Nope.” I didn’t want anything from my father, ever, and I didn’t plan to explain why. Even though they were close, I was pretty sure my sister had kept Jude in the dark about our father’s true nature. Why else would she still speak with him? “But I need to ask you something. Did you know Theo was married before?”
“What are you talking about?”
“He had a first wife. Caro didn’t mention that?”
Jude’s face was stunned and intrigued all at once. “She never breathed a word to me. Theo’s divorced?” She said the word with horror. Jude was a devout Catholic, and that fact reared its head at the oddest times. I considered showing her Caroline’s message. But we couldn’t talk about it with Thraxton minions nearby.
“No, she’s dead,” I admitted. “I asked Theo about her, and he stormed off.”
“To be fair to him, he’s dealing with a terrible loss.”
“I drove here with Theo, and he basically accused Caro of sleeping with another man.”
“That’s horrible,” Jude whispered. “What exactly did he say?”
“That she was meeting with another guy the morning she died. Can you believe that? It’s so obviously insane.”
“Right.” Jude blinked a couple of times. “Exactly. Insane.”
Her reaction bothered me. It didn’t seem like she thought the idea was that crazy. “Was Caro seeing someone else?”
Jude considered my question. “She never said that, but you know—aside from coparenting Teddy—they were basically living separate lives.”
“Do you remember when that started?”
“Maybe a year after Teddy was born? Right around the time Theo left the family business.”
“That’s how I think of it too,” I said. “Caro said Theo thought he was better than the rest of his family. But I remember thinking it was a lot cooler to be tracking down stolen idols like Indiana Jones instead of working for a hotel chain.”
“He spends more time in boardrooms than ancient temples,” Jude answered wryly. “Caroline felt like he was leaving her in the lurch.”
“Because of her postpartum depression?”
“She struggled hard with it,” Jude said. “Caroline told me her in-laws were really supportive of her, but Theo wasn’t. He wanted her to travel with him. Just bring the baby and go. Oh, and he wanted her to quit her job at his family’s company and become a journalist again. But Caroline needed help. Her in-laws stepped up. Theo didn’t.”
I recognized the truth of Jude’s words. Theo’s sister had never done much for her, but Theo’s father and stepmother had. I knew Caro genuinely loved them.
“Do you think Theo would ever hurt Caroline?”
“Physically? No.”
The ache to show her Caro’s message was stronger than ever. What’s holding you back? I asked myself. No matter what, I hated airing my family’s dirty laundry.
“Did you know she wanted to divorce Theo?” I asked.
Jude was silent, pursing her lips. Her phone buzzed.
I was incredulous. “You knew?”
Jude touched my arm. “Caroline swore me to secrecy,” she said. “Even though she’s gone, I can’t talk about it.” She glanced at her phone. “I’m sorry, but I have to get going.” Jude worked for the mayor, and she always had other places to be.
She tugged me into another awkward half-hug.
“You know you can call me if there’s anything you need—at any time—right?” she asked. “Please take care of yourself, Dee.”
Jude took off across the green grass with unusual speed for someone in heels. I shouldn’t have been surprised that my sister had confided far more in her best friend than she had in me. Caro and Jude had been close all their lives. I was Caro’s baby sister, and there was a long gap in our relationship that we’d papered over but never really resolved. I could pretend it didn’t bother me, but the truth was the distance between us had always hurt like hell.
CHAPTER 7
DEIRDRE
Everyone else cleared out of the cemetery before I did. I watched gravediggers from a distance, filling in the void around Caro’s coffin, and I wanted to cry. I knew I should have shown my sister’s message to Jude, but I hadn’t been able to work up the nerve. It still felt unreal. I pulled out my phone and looked at the letter again.
The logical option was to go to the cops, but my experiences with the NYPD when I was a teenager made me never want to set foot in another police station. I knew they’d laugh at me if I went in armed only with that email. I needed more, and I had to dredge it up myself.
That meant starting with Osiris’s Vault. Under Caro’s words was some boilerplate legalese about privacy and opting out of future messages, which felt like a bad joke. But I kept scrolling and found the co
mpany’s address in the Bronx. I walked to the nearest subway stop, passing businesses offering headstone engraving and other funeral services. They certainly hadn’t vanished in the pandemic. I got on the R train and headed back into Manhattan, switching at Union Square for the 4 express train north.
The subway spat me out at Yankee Stadium. I’d heard that games would start up again, but the neighborhood was so desolate I wondered if a nuclear blast had gone unreported. The first couple of blocks east of the train were boarded up, some with restaurant signs forlornly hanging above. After I passed Walton Street, there were signs of life: people young and old in Joyce Kilmer Park, ringed around the fountain, and others congregating on the steps of the majestic Bronx courthouse. But after that it got eerily quiet again. Even the sidewalk was a mess, with broken concrete slabs and ringed with tall weeds. I turned left at Sheridan Avenue, which had fewer abandoned storefronts but more bail bondsman offices. It felt like a tumbleweed might blow by at any moment.
“This looks like a place where you’d find messages from dead people,” I murmured aloud.
The front door was shut tight, of course. This was the kind of place where you’d lock down a bag of chips. Next to the door was a rusty buzzer with company names and suite numbers. It looked like it’d been updated around the time I’d been born, when some eager beaver got a label maker. Osiris’s Vault wasn’t on the list, but something called Joy Spa was. I pressed some buzzers until a garbled human voice came through the intercom.
She let me in.
Inside, the hallway was blindingly bright with yellow walls. The result was pathologically cheerful, like someone thought they could drag sunshine indoors against its will. I spotted Osiris’s digs from down the hall, thanks to a blown-up image of their dead god—his skin a brighter green than his digital twin’s—attached to the door. There was a keypad lock, and on impulse I tapped in 9-5-7, the code my employer used on an identical lock—the numbers formed a little triangle. At a soft click, I pushed the door open.
Inside the offices, it looked like someone had sprayed Martian blood on the walls. Beyond an open doorway were seven people at computers in a socially distant hive that could’ve easily seated twenty. Images of Osiris were stenciled on the wall. Somebody really liked that graphic.
Her Last Breath Page 4