Her Last Breath

by Hilary Davidson

  “Juliet told Caroline about Mirelle, and Caroline told her sister. Were you afraid word would spread?”

  “You can go to jail forever for all I care. I have Teddy now.”

  “Did you kill Caroline?”

  “No. I loved her,” he said quietly. “If you think I harmed her, you’re out of your mind.”

  “I’d be mad to believe there was a person you wouldn’t hurt.”

  He contemplated that. “Caroline was better than my own children. She was the kind of woman who thought before she made a move, considering the consequences not only to herself but to those around her. You and your sister always were a pair of ingrates, you especially. Juliet loves to embarrass me, and she argues over everything. You divorced yourself from this family. Everything I raised you for, everything I made you to be, you abandoned. Caroline was never like that. She was loyal.”

  “Here’s what I think happened. Caroline was distraught to learn about Mirelle. She wanted answers, and when you talked to her, you told her I was responsible. But here’s where it gets tricky, Father. I think that dramatically changed her feelings about you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Her dear father-in-law had covered up an innocent woman’s murder,” I said. “Caroline couldn’t accept that. She couldn’t live with that. She must’ve looked at Teddy and wondered what way you would twist him. No wonder she wanted full custody of him. She needed to get him away from this house of monsters.”

  He watched me impassively, but a muscle next to his eye quivered.

  “You killed her,” I said. “You murdered Caroline.”

  “Theo, you’re an idiot if you think that.”

  “You’ve harmed so many people in your life. You’re a poison that seeps through our veins—mine, Juliet’s, Teddy’s. You have no conscience, no principles. To you, money is the only god. There’s no purpose to anything you do except to enrich yourself and hurt anyone who stands in your way. You murdered Caroline because she was going to expose you for the thieving fraud you are.”

  “Haven’t you heard a word I said? That would only harm Teddy, in the end.”

  “What did you do to Caroline?”

  “Nothing! Trust me on that.”

  “I can’t trust anyone in my life,” I said. “That’s how you raised me, to be always suspicious of other people’s motives. You impressed on me, when I was still a child, that the only reason people would want to get close to me was for money.”

  “It’s a good lesson to keep in mind. But Caroline wasn’t motivated by money. She believed in family loyalty.”

  “There’s a problem with blind loyalty when you mistake a monster for a man.”

  There was a thud behind me. I hadn’t heard Harris open the door of the study, but his heavy footsteps were unmistakable.

  “I heard shouting. Are you all right, sir?” Harris asked.

  “Theo’s deciding whether he’s up to the task of taking me down,” my father said. “And—spoiler alert—he’s not.”

  “It’s time for you to leave,” Harris said.

  “This doesn’t end here,” I promised. “I quit the business for many reasons, but the main one is that I want to see justice done, and I will. For Caroline. For Teddy. For Mirelle.”

  My father chuckled. “Good luck with that, Theo.” He rose and left the room.

  After my father left, Harris glowered at me. “I already told you to go.”

  “I met with an old colleague of yours while I was in Berlin,” I said. “Mehmet Badem. Remember him?”

  “A drug addict,” Harris said. “People like that are better off dead. They’re worthless.”

  I took a step closer to him. “You’ve been doing my father’s dirty work for twenty years now. Does that ever disrupt your sleep? Do you ever feel guilty?”

  “You’re a fine one to talk. Do you have any idea what hell you put your father through?” he demanded. “He’s done everything for you, and you pay him back with betrayal.”

  The loathing he had for me was so strong I could sense it; it was like steam rising from his skin.

  “You’ve wanted to beat me to a pulp since I was a teenager,” I said. “Why haven’t you?”

  “Your father wouldn’t like it if I hit you first.”

  “Is that all that holds you back?” I asked. “Fine.”

  I punched him in the stomach. My fist connected with hard muscle, which was exactly as I expected. Harris grunted.

  “There you go,” I said. “Now you can tell my father that I hit you first.”

  His eyes lit up. He grabbed my throat with both hands—with the quivering eagerness of a man whose dream was finally coming true—and shoved me against the bookcase. He lifted me up so that I rested lightly on my toes. I’d expected him to draw blood quickly, but he seemed intent on causing more permanent damage.

  I grabbed a stone statuette and smashed it into the side of his face. Harris staggered back.

  “Sorry, I’m a little out of practice,” I said, my voice strained. “I used to do this a lot.”

  I struck him again, and there was a sickening crunch from his mouth.

  “That was for Mirelle,” I said. “Believe me, you deserve far worse.”

  As I walked out of the study, Harris was spitting out blood and a tooth onto the fine Persian carpet.

  CHAPTER 41

  DEIRDRE

  The smart play was to head home, rest, and plan a new line of attack for the next day. Or I could go to Ben’s and demand answers. Since when had I ever been smart?

  I’d tried to get into his Tudor City apartment before and failed. I knew from that first visit there were no alternative entrances. Before I got on the subway, I reached out to the Snapp network of marathoners, asking if anyone had ever dropped off bags at the building. By the time I got to Forty-Second Street, I had a helpful answer. I bought a pair of large paper bags at Walgreens and headed east to Tudor City. I ducked under the scaffolding latticed in front of Ben’s building and smiled at the masked doorman.

  “Hi, I’m Deirdre from Snapp. I’ve got a delivery for the Palansky family in 11C. I have keys.”

  He nodded, and I hurried to the elevator. I headed up to the eleventh floor—where the family lived—and took the stairs up to the thirteenth floor and knocked on Ben’s door.

  I heard him rattling around inside for a minute before he opened the peephole. We had a silent staring contest—I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there. Finally, the lock turned, and he opened the door. “How did you get up here?”

  “You want your neighbors to hear this?”

  He let me inside. Ben’s apartment looked like it was auditioning for a Ralph Lauren commercial. The living room was light and airy, with white walls topped by elegant moldings. A series of arched windows granted a view of the New York Public Library in all its glory. Every piece of furniture looked like an antique; across one wall was a towering row of bookshelves. I expected a Labrador retriever to bound in at any moment.

  “Wow, this was your parents’ pied-à-terre? Nice digs.”

  “Who told you that?”

  I thought back; it had been Jude, but I didn’t feel like revealing that. “Who knows? But you really lucked out.”

  “I guess anything seems nice when you live in a basement,” Ben said.

  “You’ve got no right to be pissed off at me. You’re the one who’s using information my sister gave you to make money for yourself. I guess the bottom really has fallen out of the journalism business. Why are you still trying to extort money out of the Thraxtons?”

  “You are blundering into everything and making a mess,” Ben said. “You don’t know what you’re doing, and you’re too arrogant to admit it. Caroline wanted me to do this, and I’m going to do it. You’re not going to stop me.”

  “How does this help Caro?”

  “Her in-laws deserve to suffer. Believe me, they’re going to.” He gave me a dismissive once-over. “All you do is run around and play detect
ive. You haven’t figured anything out yet.”

  “I know this isn’t your first try at extortion. You shook the Thraxtons down for money a couple of months ago, and my sister advised them to pay you,” I said. “You two were in a scheme together.”

  “Caroline begged me to help her,” Ben snarled at me. “No one else would do it. She wanted to get away from the Thraxtons. Not just Theo. All of them. She said they’d ruin Teddy if they got the chance.”

  “You extorted a quarter of a million dollars out of them as a nest egg?”

  “It’s tough to disappear these days,” Ben said. “You need a lot of cash to make it happen.”

  “What are you saying? You were being a Good Samaritan and helping Caro escape?”

  “We were going to escape together.”

  For a moment, everything seemed to freeze. He has to be lying, I told myself, but it made too much sense. Caro had used dirty Thraxton money to do good in the world, but at some point she’d realized her son would pay the price for it. Yet, she hadn’t said anything to me. She’d sent me those photographs, but . . . I couldn’t imagine she’d leave me without a word.

  “Caro wouldn’t leave me or our father like that.”

  “Nothing was more important to her than Teddy,” Ben said. “She was determined to protect him. But she was getting more panicked and anxious every day. I think when Theo showed up without warning, she lost her mind. She immediately wanted to run away with Teddy.”

  The real meaning of what he said dawned on me. “But not with you.”

  “What?”

  “She didn’t want to run away with you, Ben.” I thought of the two fake passports Adinah Gerstein had shown me. One for Caro and one for Teddy. Where did that leave Ben? “My sister was going to run away with her son. You weren’t part of that picture.”

  “Caroline needed me. She couldn’t do it alone.”

  I moved closer to him. “She wanted your help, but she didn’t want you,” I said. “You thought you’d be together, but to Caro you were just the means to an end.” It hurt to talk about my sister like that—as if she was willing to do wrong if she thought she had a reason to—but I had to admit the truth of it. The Thraxtons were up to their eyeballs in illicit money, and Caro had been okay with that as long as she could support a worthy cause.

  “You don’t know that. Caroline made a terrible mistake when she left me. This was our second chance.”

  “I understand why you want to think that, but you’re delusional,” I said. “All Caro was thinking about was Teddy. This wasn’t a romantic plan to run away, Ben. You know that.”

  I’d expected him to shout at me, but he got quieter. “She only backed out of it because she panicked.”

  “Backed out of it?”

  “I told you already—she freaked out that morning when Theo showed up. She told me she was leaving with Teddy as soon as she picked up their passports.”

  “She told you that the morning she died?”

  Ben wiped his face and nodded. “She was upset about Theo. She knew he’d been spying on her. She was genuinely afraid of him.”

  I felt like a ton of bricks had dropped on me. I’d believed Ben when he’d told me he hadn’t seen Caro that morning. His story made sense, because she hadn’t given him the memory card she was carrying. It had never occurred to me that they had met up that morning.

  “It never made sense to me, how Caro came down to your neighborhood but didn’t give you the memory card,” I said, thinking out loud. “I thought maybe someone followed her and stopped her. I blamed Theo, then his father. But it wasn’t them. It was you.”

  “Can you hear yourself talk?” Ben said. “Because you sound crazy.”

  “You were supposed to come up to Caro’s neighborhood. Then Theo showed up, and she came down to yours. You said she never showed up at your building. But this was all supposed to be on the down low. You were meeting her in the park, where there weren’t any cameras.” That was one of the last scenes on the video the police had, my sister walking out of the park, clutching her head and her chest. It was clear something was terribly wrong. Only it was worse than I’d thought.

  “What happened when you saw her, Ben?”

  “She told me she was taking off.” His voice was low and flat, as if our conversation had hammered him down. “I said I wasn’t ready, and she said . . . she said it was just her and the kid.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Do you even understand this, Deirdre?” His voice was anguished. “Caroline led me on. She made me think we would get back together again, if I helped her out with this. I did everything she asked. And she was dumping me. Again.”

  I was as horrified by his self-pity as much as his words. “What did you do?”

  “I grabbed her, okay? I was upset, and I wanted her to come to her senses. But when I let go, she fell back. She hit her head. She was dazed for a minute, but she got up again, Deirdre. She was fine!”

  “She was anything but fine.” My heart fluttered in my throat like it was trying to escape. “The cops showed me all the video footage. They figured she fell on the steps because of her heart. But she’d already hit her head. She was disoriented. That’s why she fell. That’s why she died.”

  “I told you, she got up! She was fine!” Ben shouted.

  The despair I felt in that moment was like a knife wound. Caro was dead and I couldn’t bring her back. It had been brutal to hear she’d had a heart problem she kept secret. But it was only one factor in her death. The first time I’d gone to see Villaverde at the police station, he’d told me the combination of her heart problem and the concussion had ended her life.

  “You killed her,” I whispered. “You killed my sister.”

  If there was ever a time I expected rage to course through me, it was then. But all I felt was broken and exhausted. Hitting Ben wouldn’t be enough. He needed to be arrested. He had to admit his guilt to the world.

  At a cracking sound, my body lit up as if it were on fire. I was on the ground in a second, gasping for breath but unable to draw air.

  “Don’t deal with an animal without a Taser,” Ben said over the buzzing in my head.

  He dragged me up by the shoulders and propelled me to the open window. My eyes were still rolling in my head, but they settled on the New York Public Library in the distance.

  “Tudor City’s had plenty of suicides, people jumping from windows,” Ben said. “You’ll just be another one.”

  He shoved my quivering body out the window headfirst. I managed to widen my legs enough to keep from falling out, even though the rest of me was dangling in midair.

  “You just had to be difficult,” Ben said.

  He shot me with the Taser again, and I lost control of my body. For a split second, I was hurtling through the air, and then I was gone.

  CHAPTER 42

  THEO

  After my confrontation with my father and his henchman, I rushed to see Teddy. He was coloring at the kitchen table and barely looked up when I walked in. Gloria gave me a silent wave.

  “I’m sorry I went away,” I told him. “I won’t do that again.”

  He gave me a surly look. “Grandpa says you will.”

  My blood curdled in my veins. My worst nightmare was already underway. My son was being poisoned by my father’s lies.

  “I won’t,” I said, crouching down. “I love you. I’ll always be here for you, Teddy.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, going back to coloring.

  “He’s in a mood today,” Gloria said quietly. “He keeps asking when his mama is coming to get him.”

  “Thank you for taking care of Teddy while I was gone,” I said. “I’m well aware that you are long overdue to have time off.”

  Gloria waved her hand dismissively. “It’s not a problem. It’s an awful time for the family. And I love Teddy; you know that.”

  “I am eternally grateful. Just so you know, I’ll be moving Teddy out of this house as soon as I can find a place.�
�

  “You’re going to stay in New York?”

  “I don’t want to uproot Teddy and take him away from everyone he knows. Just my father. I am hoping that you’ll be willing to move with us, though. I don’t know what Teddy or I would do without you.”

  “And give up living across the street from the man who refers to me as ‘the Help’?” She beamed. “In a heartbeat. If you’re staying here, we’ll figure something out.”

  “Thank you, Gloria.”

  I headed upstairs to my own room. I didn’t have a plan. All I knew was that I couldn’t stay in that house any longer.

  That was when I heard a noise from Caroline’s room.

  I opened the door and found Ursula seated at Caroline’s vanity table, a tray of jewelry in front of her. She looked like an eager magpie. “Everything depends on it,” she said.

  “Ursula?”

  “You’re back, dear boy.” Ursula brightened when she saw me, as if a switch had been flipped. “How was your trip?”

  “Awful and illuminating, in equal measure. What are you doing?”

  “Sorting some things.”

  “Why?”

  “I put some things out of order,” she said cryptically, “and now I need to set them right.”

  “I saw your brother when I was in Berlin,” I said.

  “Klaus has been dead to me for years.”

  “He’s not quite as I remembered. He has changed. He wanted me to tell you he’s sorry for being a bastard. He said it’s his only regret.”

  Ursula laughed softly. “Ah, Theo, you are a dear boy, but you are gullible if you believe the leopard changes his spots.” She moved a couple of rings into a box. “I grew up in the Stasi. My father was a senior officer. Klaus followed in his footsteps. My mother drank herself to death, and now I follow in her footsteps. These paths are set for us when we are young. I often think, if only your mother had taken you and your sister away and started a new life. How different everything would have been.”

  “My mother got out,” I said. “But she left Juliet and me behind.”

  “No one gets out, Theo. At least not alive.”

  Ursula loved to make dramatic pronouncements, and it felt like the wrong time to mention that my mother had flown to Guam for a divorce. It had been uncontested by my father because she allowed him to have full custody of Juliet and me. My mother had saved herself, but not her children.