by Wendy Wax
Once again, the shrug. The smile. The hint of amusement at having so effectively set and sprung his trap. “And who would really believe that if I decided to have an anonymous tip called in? Perception, Nik. It can be far more convincing than reality. But I don’t want to do that. I just need you to pick up cash and bring it to me.”
“I won’t do it.” She stood. “I should have known better than to come here. You’re crazy if you think I’m going to get involved in this.”
“You’re already involved whether you want to be or not. And I’m not crazy.” He sighed and ran a hand over his face. “I’m desperate.”
“Desperate? For money? Here? What are you going to do with it?”
“Shhh. Keep your voice down. Or I’ll really be in trouble.”
“What are they going to do to you? Take away your television time? Make you work an extra hour in the library?” Anger bubbled inside her. “You’ve ruined hundreds of lives and bankrupted countless charities. And now you’re threatening to incriminate me when I’ve done nothing wrong except love and believe in you.” She stood and prepared to leave. “I don’t really give a shit what you want or what you think you need money for.”
Malcolm stood, too, though he was careful not to make any sudden movements. “There’s a hit out on me,” he whispered. When she didn’t respond, he continued. “It turns out more than one of my investors was representing a drug cartel. I have to give them back what they lost. Or I’m dead.” He looked genuinely shocked.
“I can put them off for a while, but not indefinitely.”
“How ironic. Did you know that one of your clients tried to kill me down in Miami? Does the name Parker Amherst IV ring a bell?”
“No, afraid not. The world is full of nut jobs, isn’t it? I’m sorry.” His voice turned pleading. “I know you hate me. You have reason to.” He paused. “I get that you’re glad to see me rotting in jail. But I guess I’m hoping you don’t want me dead.”
She simply stared at him. She no longer trusted her ability to determine whether he was telling the truth. If, in fact, he ever did. For all she knew this was just another scam. She settled her purse on her shoulder.
He reached a hand out and she shrank away. “I know you, Nik. You’re trying to tell yourself I’m making this whole thing up so you can just walk away. But I’m not.” He looked her straight in the eye. “I apologize for threatening you. But desperate times call for desperate measures.” The smile he gave her was half sad, half cocky. As if he couldn’t decide what would work best on her. “I’ll give you some time to think it over. But if I don’t get a yes from you soon enough to call off the bad guys, I’ll have to leak the location of the safe-deposit boxes to the authorities.” The smile turned more menacing. “And I wouldn’t say anything to your boyfriend about this. Government employees have to be squeaky clean these days. Even a hint of impropriety can torpedo a career.”
She wanted to rip the smile from his face. Wanted to shout and scream her anger at him at the top of her lungs. Instead she turned on shaky legs, then fled—at least as much as one could “flee” in a prison. Back through the obstacle course of clanging steel doors and to the front desk, where she managed to retrieve her driver’s license. Desperate to get outside and into the fresh air, she motioned for Maddie to follow her.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Maddie asked when they hit the sidewalk.
“I was afraid I was going to throw up or pass out,” Nikki panted. Right before she bent and did exactly what she’d been afraid of: heaving the contents of her roiling stomach onto a small patch of grass and then crumpling none too elegantly beside it.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Renée knew that stress did different things to different people. Some drank to excess or turned to drugs, while others cleaned or redecorated. Many people tried to stick their heads in the sand. Renée found solace when her hands were covered in dirt.
As the appointment with the sketch artist grew closer, she replanted and rearranged her flowerbeds, caught each dead frond as it fell from its palm, and pounced on every weed that had the temerity to break ground. As she pruned and pinched and fertilized, she began to imagine the plants and flowers trembling at the sound of her footsteps on her garden’s cut-stone paths.
She watched her garden disappear behind her that morning as she left to pick up Annelise for the drive to the county sheriff’s office, where they were to meet the forensic sketch artist who was going to try to create a composite of Annelise’s alleged long-ago intruder.
“I sat up all night making sure I remembered every detail of what that man looked like,” Annelise said, her hands fluttering, her excitement building so that the closer they got, the more animated her sister became and the slower Renée drove.
The sketch artist that Officer Jackson brought out to meet them was a sunny young woman with wavy brown hair, almond-colored eyes framed in thick brown lashes and a dimple creasing one cheek.
“Annie.” She’d smiled, reaching out to shake hands. “J. J. tells me he grew up right near you all.” She chatted amiably for a good while clearly bent on getting them to relax. Annelise, normally so prickly with strangers, was doing exactly that, while Renée felt herself withdrawing, her answers to the woman’s pleasantries growing shorter and shorter, like a morning glory closing up for the night. She’d assumed that Annelise would work with the artist and that Renée would be shown whatever they came up with, but when the pleasantries were over, Annie had given them a friendly smile and invited both of them to come with her.
“Aren’t you worried we might corrupt each other’s memories?” Renée asked as they took their seats across from where Annie had set up. Not that she had any to corrupt.
“No. We’re looking for as much detail as possible.” She dimpled. The girl really was adorable. “Sometimes sharing the process can be even more productive.”
“Isn’t sixty-four years a little long for a face to stay in someone’s memory?” she’d asked dubiously while Annie sat down, positioned the sketch pad, and picked up a pencil.
“It depends. Sometimes the more traumatic the event the more it’s embedded. It’s not an exact science, but people are often surprised about how much they actually saw and remembered. Prompting helps. And I have a catalogue of facial features for comparison if we need it.” She gave them one last reassuring smile. “Ready?”
Renée wasn’t. But Annelise leaned forward in her chair and nodded.
“General physical description?” Annie prompted.
“Tall,” Annelise said immediately. “Big.” She hesitated, thinking. “But his clothes kind of hung on him. Like he might have been bigger originally.”
Renée looked at her sister, amazed at her certainty and the crispness of her answers.
“Hair?” Annie prompted.
After another hesitation Annelise said, “Light colored and—short.” She looked at Annie as if waiting for an argument, but Annie nodded and smiled. “It was close cropped. Like in a crew cut,” Annelise continued. “His forehead was kind of shiny in the moonlight. I . . . his hairline was high.”
The artist’s hand moved constantly; they could hear the brush and scratch of the pencil on the paper as she drew. “Jaw?”
“Square.” This time Annelise’s reply came more quickly. “Powerful.”
“Set of his eyes?”
“Wide. Deep set.” Annelise looked down at her hands briefly before her head jerked up in surprise. “I don’t know why exactly, but I feel like they were blue!”
Annie’s pencil kept moving. “Slant or no slant to the eyes?”
Annelise paused to think. “No slant.”
“The nose?”
“Straight. Narrow.”
The pencil moved more quickly. “Cheekbones?”
“High and . . . angled.” Her voice grew more certain even as Renée mentally leafed through celeb
rities and public figures that might have infiltrated Annelise’s fertile imagination and provided flesh and bone for the “intruder.”
“Lips?”
“Thin but . . .” Annelise’s eyes closed. Her forehead furrowed in concentration. “Wide.”
Renée’s heart constricted as she watched her sister. Annelise’s eyes remained closed, her chin tilted slightly upward. A small eager smile flitted over her lips as she pulled the strange man everyone had told her had never existed out of her memory so that Annie could put it on the page and thus into reality. Renée felt trapped. Pinned in a web of expectation she knew she couldn’t fill or escape. The search for answers that seemed to be freeing Annelise wrapped hands around Renée’s throat and squeezed the breath out of her lungs. Each feature Annelise added built the image forming in Renée’s mind.
“Can you think of anything else?” Annie asked, her pencil flying over the page. “Any identifying marks? Scars? Tattoos?”
A shimmer of something surfaced then disappeared. Renée drew a deep and ragged breath. Annie was watching. “Renée?” she asked expectantly.
Renée shook her head.
“Don’t censor yourself,” the artist said, her pencil still moving. “Everything you need is already there. It’s just retrieving it that takes some effort.”
“I don’t have anything to retrieve,” she said as that thing, whatever it was, danced out of reach.
“Just say whatever comes to your mind.”
Renée closed her eyes as Annelise had and tried to see. But whatever it was continued to elude her. When she opened her eyes and shook her head in frustration, Annelise was watching her, her eyes clearer than Renée could remember.
“All right,” Annie said. “I’m going to show you the sketch so far. I’d like you to tell me what looks right and what doesn’t so that I can make adjustments.”
She turned the sketch pad around. They both held their breaths as they studied it.
“Okay, what feels right?”
“The hairline,” Annelise said, her voice going breathy and childish as if she were actually five again. “And his jaw.” She studied the sketch. “But his face was narrower in there.” She gestured toward the cheek area with fluttering fingers.
Renée looked at her sister as Annie made the adjustments. She didn’t know how Annelise could possibly remember this kind of detail, in a room lit only by the moon, from a glimpse at the age of five. But Annelise was intent, earnest, her answers spontaneous. Clearly she was not making things up.
“And I think . . .” Annelise hesitated, closed her eyes again.
Annie turned the pad into sketching position.
“I think he did have a tattoo. A jagged one down the side of . . .”
“. . . his neck,” Renée finished, surprising everyone including herself. Her fingers traced the lightning bolt that began just below the jawline.
Annie’s pencil moved rapidly over the page, sketching, shading. A few moments later she turned the composite back so that Renée and Annelise could see it.
“That’s him,” Annelise said quietly, the childish hesitation gone. “That’s the man I saw.”
Renée stared at the face. She had seen this man or someone who looked a lot like him. This knowledge was a kick to the stomach, hard and unexpected. Her sister had told the truth and Renée had refused to believe it. She had driven a wedge between them that had lasted a lifetime because she could not, would not, consider the reality of a deadly stranger in their home. Preferred to believe that her stepmother had caused their father’s death and then fled. Why had that seemed easier to believe? She had seen that face before. But it hadn’t been the night that her father died. It was in one of the pictures in her stepmother’s hidden photo album.
Maddie was in the grocery store checkout late the next afternoon, a place with which she was intimately acquainted, when she saw the picture of her and Will on the cover of Fame, a tabloid that often featured photos of freakishly impossible half-animal, half-human oddities and first-person accounts of alien abductions. She stared at the grainy picture, which had been taken at dinner after Will’s concert, and read the headline, Middle-Aged Magic with Aging Boomer Groupie?
She moved closer in an attempt to read the first paragraph, which was filled with disdain for the pitiful nature of “star stalkers” who were old enough to belong to AARP. There had been fans down in Islamorada who’d thought Will could do better and the occasional snarky caption or headline, but as far as she knew, this was her first tabloid cover. She sincerely hoped it would be her last.
The picture was especially appalling given how attractive she’d felt that night despite the young girls in the greenroom.
That’s because Will made you feel that way. Not because you are, the voice—was it her subconscious?—said.
It’s just the angle, she countered.
Right. The voice was as disdainful as the article.
She shuddered to think of how much worse it might have been if her fashion intervention hadn’t happened. Unable to stop herself, she reached for the tabloid.
I wouldn’t do it if I were you, the voice warned.
Ignoring it, Maddie pulled the publication from the rack and opened it to where the article continued. Photos of Will at the next two concerts showed him with much younger women, all of whom stood far too close and gazed much too adoringly. Her heart stuttered at the shot of him and the guys in the band eating dinner in a restaurant afterward with those same young women draped all over them.
Told you not to look.
It doesn’t mean anything, she retorted. He’s not interested in those young girls.
Her subconscious raised a skeptical eyebrow.
He chose me over them in Durham.
What choice did he have? She imagined her subconscious rolling its eyes as it taunted, Besides, you’re not there now, are you?
Her subconscious had copped quite an attitude.
I have no reason to doubt him, Maddie protested, even as she remembered the hungry looks the women at the Lorelei had sent him. The thong in his pocket. His explanation that female attention was just “part of the gig.” Even Bitsy Baynard had not been immune.
Bitsy’s not a cute young thing, the voice countered. Which meant she was now not just talking to but arguing with herself.
Will is not looking for a cute young thing.
All men are looking for a cute young thing. You can’t expect a man to keep choosing a PB&J when there’s a smorgasbord of delicacies available. The voice had turned downright snarky.
Will loves peanut butter and jelly. She smiled at her memory of his delight in the first “handwitch” he’d shared with Dustin. Will says he’s been there and done that. That he’s had enough.
Do men ever really have enough?
“Are you going to buy that?” the grocery clerk asked, nodding to the tabloid now wadded up in her hand.
“Um . . .”
Go ahead. You can put it up in your room as a reminder.
“Um, no, thank you.” She laid the paper down, then used both hands to try to straighten out the wrinkles before placing it back on the rack.
Take that, she said to the voice as she pushed the grocery cart out of the store. Her subconscious was a royal pain in the ass.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Renée stood in her garden, a hose in her hand. She’d been operating on automatic pilot since yesterday’s session with the sketch artist and what had turned out to be a brutal drive home. They’d barely left the sheriff’s office parking lot when Annelise, who’d slid as far from Renée as her seat belt would allow, turned to her and bit out, “I told you so! All these years I told you so. But you always knew better!” There was no dampening of the eyes, no slow gathering of moisture. It was as if someone had slammed open a tap and sent a flood of tears streaking down Annelise’s contorted f
ace to carve out gullies of powder and rouge. “Do you have any idea what it feels like to never be taken seriously?” She’d emitted a harsh yelp of laughter. “No, of course you don’t. Not reasonable Renée. Always so calm. Always so in the right! If I hadn’t stopped you, the hotel would already be gone and no one would have ever looked into what happened!”
“I’m starting to fear for that plant’s life.” John’s voice yanked her back to the present. “Do they make life preservers that narrow?”
Renée looked down at the bird-of-paradise that she’d been watering and which was now practically swimming. “Hmmm?” She released the nozzle to stop the flow and took a step back. Her gardening clogs squelched in the mud patch she’d created.
“Are you trying to drown it or just sort of beat it into submission?” John’s tone was teasing as he came down the back steps, then walked toward her leaning heavily on the cane.
“Don’t come any closer. You’ll sink and I don’t know how we’ll get you back out.” The poor bird-of-paradise seemed to shrink away from her, just as Annelise had. Its beautiful orange flower hung heavy and limp. And no wonder. Plants were like animals in that way, sensitive to their owner’s moods. If talking to plants soothed them and encouraged them to grow, surely the excess of emotion that had been coursing through her veins had to have an effect as well. Renée took another step back, dislodging her feet from the muck, but unable to dislodge Annelise’s words from her head.
“I know you have a lot on your mind,” John said gently, reaching his free hand out to her. “But I know you don’t want to take it out on your garden.”
She held on to his hand as she stepped clear of the mud and toed off the clogs. She wiggled her toes in the grass. “I’ll have to resign as president of the garden club if I keep this up.”
“Your secret’s safe with me. And I don’t think the plants are talking.”
She smiled at her husband. The man who had been her rock, her constant, smiled back.