Her Last Breath

by Hilary Davidson

  “You’re telling me that my father had Mirelle killed,” I said quietly.

  “To be clear, I am not your father’s confessor. He never made a direct admission of guilt to me.”

  “But you know him. You put the story together.”

  “He didn’t tell me what he was going to do. I would never have allowed it.” Klaus stared into his glass. “It wasn’t the first job Nastya did for me. I had to tell her parents she was dead. It was . . .” His voice trailed off. “Your father broke our relationship. I couldn’t trust him anymore. Say what you will about the Stasi; we had rules. Your father doesn’t.”

  “My father didn’t just murder her. He framed me for it. He made me believe I was a killer.” The idea was new and raw in my mind. I’d always had an uneasy relationship with my father, but my main antagonist had always been Juliet. I had blamed her for every awful thing. In my mind, she had fangs and horns and a forked tongue. How many times had I complained to my father about how evil she was, only to have him agree with me? It was as if he wanted me to hate my sister.

  “He wants to control you, Theo. Your father and I have very different ideas about life, but the main one is this: I know I am a criminal. Your father believes he is a businessman. I have always kept my children far from my work. Your father, on the other hand, wants you to follow in his footsteps.”

  “He convinced my family that I was a killer. Juliet believes it. Ursula. Caroline.” My voice choked on my wife’s name. No wonder she’d wanted to divorce me. Now that I finally understood the depths my father had sunk to, my brain could barely process all the consequences. Mirelle’s death had changed me; I never wanted to hurt anyone again, to be in a state where I could lose control. But it had also damaged every important relationship I had. I couldn’t fully trust anyone, ever.

  “My sister should know better, after the life she’s had with your father,” Klaus said. “But Ursula stopped speaking with me long before this happened.”

  “She once told me you forced her to move into my father’s house.” My brain was still spiraling around the implications of what my father had done, but I wasn’t going to miss the chance to understand this piece of family history. Ursula had been in my life as long as I could remember, even before my mother had walked out.

  “I suppose I did. Ursula was young and shiftless, and your mother . . . well, she was always a character, and she had a rough time after you were born. Ursula was supposed to help out with you and your sister,” Klaus said. “I never imagined she would have an affair with your father. I certainly never told her to marry him. That was her own mistake.”

  “She was the reason my mother left,” I said. “Juliet despises her for that.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Should I? Ursula took care of me from the time I was young. My mother left and never came back. If anyone was at fault for the affair, it was my father.” It was true that I blamed him for it. But now there was so much more that I had to condemn him for.

  “He was older, but that did not make him wiser.”

  “My father had you hire Mirelle to pretend to be my girlfriend. Then he killed her and made me think I was a monster,” I said. “He deserves all the blame. For everything.”

  Klaus drank some wine. “I know it is a horrible shock, but I want you to understand it from your father’s perspective. He has only one son, and this precious boy was bent on self-destruction. Can you imagine the grief that would cause? The heartbreak?”

  “Don’t tell me that my father gaslights me because he loves me.”

  “I don’t think your father knows what love is,” Klaus says. “It’s why he tries to control you.”

  “He’s been holding Mirelle’s death over my head for years,” I said. “It’s how he got me to come work for him.”

  “That only went so far,” Klaus pointed out. “You quit when you discovered he was laundering money through some of the hotels.”

  “He’s using it right now to get custody of my son.” Technically, it was Juliet’s name on the documents, but as ambitious as my sister was, I understood now that my father’s fingerprints would be found on them. He had either put Juliet up to it, or was using her as a shield.

  Klaus peered at me. “How? He can’t tell anyone what you did. Scratch the surface, and what he did will become clear.”

  What Klaus said was true, but my mind was traveling in other directions. My father had known that I’d come back early from my trip to Bangkok. I’d scheduled it that way so I’d be able to see Dr. Haven with no questions asked by my family, but somehow my father knew I’d stopped by my house at five in the morning. His home was across the street, of course, so it wasn’t strange that he might glimpse something out the window. But now that I knew how demented he actually was, I wondered how far he’d gone in invading our privacy.

  “Theo?” Klaus prompted. “You look a million miles away. What’s wrong?”

  “Klaus, do you think there’s a chance that my father killed Caroline?”

  “What? Why would he? He thought the sun rose and set with her. What reason would he have to do her harm?”

  My mind went back to the last time I’d seen Caroline. At five in the morning, I’d unlocked the door to our house, creeping upstairs quietly. I’d needed to pick up a couple of things for my session with Dr. Haven, including the threadbare tiger my mother had bought for me at the Berlin Zoo. To my shock, Caroline had been up. Do you want to come up now, Ben? I can’t wait. We’re really doing this, aren’t we?

  I’d frozen in place on the staircase, but she’d already heard me. She opened her door. There was fury in her eyes when she saw it was me. What are you doing here?

  I live here, in case you’ve forgotten, I said.

  I didn’t want to think about what happened next.

  “Caroline was seeing someone,” I said.

  “I don’t think your father would care,” Klaus said. “He cheated on his first wife with his second wife, then on his second wife with your mother, then . . .” He took a drink. “The only person I know who hated your wife is your sister.”

  No matter what Klaus said, an idea was taking hold in my brain. Perhaps my father did care about Caroline; it didn’t matter—his affection was like poison. He was using her death to his advantage, and that suggested her death hadn’t been accidental at all.

  CHAPTER 35

  DEIRDRE

  It was time to head into the lion’s den. In the days since Caro’s death, I’d seen Teddy exactly twice, including at the funeral. When I rang the doorbell, my heart was divided between a determination to do right by my sister and the crippling weight of guilt. It didn’t help that a pair of horned gargoyles snarled at me from the second story. I felt like they were onto my ulterior motives.

  The nanny, Gloria Rivera, answered the door, smiling as she recognized me. “Deirdre! It’s good to see you.” She sounded genuinely delighted to find me on the doorstep. “Teddy will be so happy to see his auntie.”

  “How’s the little guy doing?”

  “Okay.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “He’s lonely, poor thing. His father’s away, and he doesn’t really understand that his mama isn’t coming back.”

  “I have trouble believing she isn’t coming back, and I’m supposed to be a grown-up.”

  “Deeeeee!” shouted Teddy from the top of the staircase. He ran down, stopping at the fourth step from the bottom and jumping, flinging himself onto the landing on all fours.

  “Teddy! No crazy stunts!” Gloria scolded him.

  “I’m a frog,” Teddy said. “Frogs jump.”

  I hugged him. “Be careful, froggy.”

  “I can jump from the fifth step,” he said. “Want to see?”

  “He’s always pulling crazy stunts,” Gloria said.

  Teddy let go of me and dashed up the stairs. “Come play, Deeeeee!”

  “I’m going to make some lunch,” Gloria said. “It’s grilled cheese, because that’s all he’s eating right now. I
can make something else for you.”

  “Grilled cheese is great, thanks.” All the better for my purposes if she was busy in the kitchen. “Where are you, Teddy?” I called out as I climbed the stairs. The house was filled with beautiful archways and moldings, and I’d always wanted to explore it, but Caro usually insisted on meeting at her office or a restaurant. I’d hardly ever been in the house.

  “Daddy’s room,” he answered. I followed his voice, then pushed a heavy wooden door open and found Teddy jumping on a king-sized four-poster bed. “Pirate Island!” Teddy announced.

  Theo’s room had the dark, wood-paneled charm of a men’s club. It felt like there should be mounted stags’ heads staring down in disapproval and cigar smoke swirling overhead. The walls were covered in framed photographs that looked like expensively styled snapshots. Theo and Caro sitting on a sailboat. A pair of kids on skis—Theo and Juliet, I figured. Teddy crawling across a manicured lawn with a teddy bear dangling from his mouth by one furry ear.

  “That’s me!” Teddy said.

  A carved wood Jacobin chair with a tall back sat in front of the window, next to a small reading table. Otherwise, the room was disturbingly normal with its chest of drawers and opulently carved bedside tables. It wasn’t monastic, exactly, but it wasn’t fussy either.

  “Does Daddy know you jump on his bed like that?” I quietly opened a drawer and found white undershirts. Another contained boxer briefs. I drifted across the room before checking out the closet. Inside were boring rows of shirts, suits, and shoes, all open shelving. So. Much. Space. I peered through the open door of the bathroom to find a whirlpool tub. The contents of the medicine cabinet had nothing more sinister than face wash and shaving oil.

  “Sure. But I can’t jump on Mama’s bed.”

  After Teddy was born, it was clear Caro was sleeping in her own room, but I’d never seen it. I’d been given exactly one full tour of the house, and that was three months after the wedding. Caro and I started seeing more of each other after our mother died.

  Teddy leaped off the bed, thudding against the floor. There was no carpet in Theo’s room.

  I heard frantic footsteps downstairs. “Is everything okay?” Gloria called.

  “It’s fine!” I shouted back. To Teddy, I said, “Wow, I didn’t know frogs could be so loud.”

  Teddy smiled. “You have to jump with me. Ready?”

  We hopped out of the room. He bounded ahead of me, his leaps muffled by the carpeting in the hallway. He stopped in front of a closed door. “Mama’s room.” He touched the knob, but he didn’t turn it.

  “Let’s go inside.”

  “No.” He shook his head firmly, suddenly the world’s tiniest martinet. “Can’t go in.”

  I crouched down next to him so we could talk, frog to frog. “Why not?”

  “Mama,” he said. There was an ocean of heartbreak in those two syllables, a longing and a sorrow that brought tears to my eyes. Keeping the room sealed was like a magic spell, one that promised if everything were done right, Mama might one day return.

  “I miss her too,” I told him.

  His head hung forward so much that his chin touched his chest. He bumped the crown of his head against the door.

  “Careful.” I put the palm of my hand against his skull. His dark hair was like a silk curtain. “Careful, okay?”

  “When are you going to die, Dee?”

  “Not for a really, really long time,” I told him.

  “What about Daddy?”

  “Not for a long time either.” I hoped Teddy didn’t notice my lack of enthusiasm on the subject of his father. I stretched my arms out. “Hug?”

  He threw himself into my arms, pressing his face into my neck. There were so many things I wanted to tell him, but he was too young to hear them. Instead, we stayed like that, hugging for a long time.

  “Would it be bad?” Teddy asked.

  “What?”

  “To go in Mama’s room?”

  “No, sweetheart. Definitely not.” I felt like the devil, coaxing a three-and-a-half-year-old into breaking into his mother’s room, but I was dying to see inside. It wasn’t that I expected a clue to jump out at me. But if I’d learned anything over the past few days, it was that I didn’t know my sister the way I’d thought I had. I’d been fooled by the sheen of perfection that hovered around her. Not only had I missed the messiness hiding underneath; I’d never noticed it was there.

  I stood and opened the door, instantly inhaling the scent of Caro’s floral perfume. Her room was as stereotypically feminine as Theo’s was masculine, with a plush bed drowning in pillows, a pair of chairs dressed in pale-rose velvet, and wooden furniture with painted flowers. Bizarrely, it reminded me of her bedroom when we were growing up. I recognized the antique chairs as ones our mother had picked up at a flea market, only re-covered with new fabric. The painted chest of drawers with climbing vines and pink flowers had been plucked directly from her childhood bedroom. The familiarity wasn’t comforting. If anything, it was the opposite. Maybe I’d run too far from my own pretty pink childhood room by living in a dark dungeon-like cell, but the fact Caro had re-created her bedroom did not feel emotionally healthy.

  There were photographs in ornate frames around the room, and plaques mounted on the walls. One was from the New York City Mayor’s Office, another from the Diotima Civic Society. The latter looked more impressive—black lacquer etched with silver—and had a broken column with a female figure standing in front of it. Her appointment book was on her desk, and I sifted through it, but nothing important caught my eye.

  Teddy stayed in the doorway, eyes wide like saucers as he took in the room. “Nothing changed,” he murmured.

  “Did you think Mama’s room would be different?”

  “Maybe.”

  I was ransacking my sister’s room like a clumsy novice thief. There was no diary, of course. Nothing was ever that easy. But it wasn’t a challenge to plunder her cavernous walk-in closet with its ball gown wardrobe. I found a Bible under a shoe shelf. Inside were slips of paper. I grabbed them like winning lottery tickets. In my family, if it was important, it went into the Bible. The one on top was a gold-banded white card written in elegant cursive:

  “The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes,” Mr. Rochester answered; “and you see it through a charmed medium: you cannot discern that the gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate, and the polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark.”

  By making the choice to stay you are participating in a crime.

  I recognized the quotation from Jane Eyre, because my sister had forced me to read that book. The line underneath it was what took my breath away. It was unsigned and undated, but I assumed it had to have been from Theo. The spreadsheets Caro had sent me made it clear something was wrong with the family business. Ben had told me the Thraxtons were laundering money. Was that what Theo meant by a crime? Was he the only person in the family who wasn’t involved?

  “You looking for it, Auntie Dee?” Teddy called out.

  “For what?”

  “The hiding place.”

  “Mama had a hiding place?”

  I set the Bible back in place and realized there was a small leather box behind it. Cartier was embossed on top, and inside was a pair of platinum earrings, panther faces glittering with diamonds, each with slitted emerald eyes that looked surprisingly fierce. A small strip of paper, no larger than a fortune cookie message, was tucked inside. The handwriting was different from the other note, cramped and spidery:

  Caroline, I know you hate extravagance, but I couldn’t resist. I am so proud of you and everything you’ve accomplished. Our family’s luckiest day was the one when you joined us. Ever fondly, Theodore

  Teddy bounded into the closet, and I instinctively snapped the box shut and shoved it back on the shelf. “You find it?”

  I looked around. Amid the dresses and shoes and hatboxes, I wondered if there was a secret alcove. “Where?
”

  “There.” He pointed at the chest of drawers in the closet.

  “In the drawer?”

  “No.” Teddy sounded exasperated. “Behind it.”

  The chest of drawers seemed too heavy to move. “I don’t understand, Teddy.”

  “Pull it.” He reached for the top drawer but was too tiny to reach it. “Pull.”

  I pulled it open.

  “All the way,” Teddy said.

  I slid the drawer out.

  “See?” Teddy said.

  I peered inside. There was no back on the chest of drawers. Instead, I saw a wall safe.

  “Do you know the code?” I asked. This was a new low for me, wrangling clues out of a small child.

  “Mama said it’s secret.”

  I tried Caro’s birthdate, then Teddy’s, then our parents’, and finally my own. Nothing worked.

  “Lunchtime!” Gloria called up the stairs. “Get the grilled cheese while it’s hot!”

  That made Teddy squeal. “Let’s go!”

  I slid the drawer back into place and closed the closet door. My heart was heavy as I followed Teddy out of the room. My sister’s secrets were tantalizingly close, but they remained out of reach for me.

  CHAPTER 36

  DEIRDRE

  In the afternoon, I took Teddy to the Central Park Zoo. We shared a love of sea lions, so that was a favorite spot. When we got back to the house, the front door was ajar. I paused at the foot of the steps, then turned to Teddy. “Promise to stand right here for a minute?”

  “Okay.”

  I crept up the stairs, wondering what was going on. Then I heard a sharp voice. “I can’t tell her not to come here. She has a right. She’s his aunt.” It was Gloria speaking.

  “I am ordering you not to let that woman in here. She is a monster and can’t be trusted.”

  My heart clenched tight. Were they talking about me? At that moment, I noticed Teddy creeping beside me. “Ammy!” he shouted. I followed him in.

  “Liebling!” A silver-haired woman with bones barely bigger than a sparrow’s reached down to hug Teddy. Her printed silk dress hung on her like she was nothing more than a hanger, and her crocodile handbag was wider than her hips. She looked for all the world like a lady who lunches, despite the fact she hadn’t been in the same room with solid food in weeks.