“How about you? Would it be easier for you if it were about drugs?”
“No, but I was raised with the art. It was always in the house until Dad built the bunker.”
“Bunker?”
Grace describes an underground room at her father’s restaurant. “There aren’t many museums that have a facility so precisely engineered,” she says, “but I didn’t think a thing of it. Other dads were obsessed with collecting sports memorabilia, or they had boats and vacation homes and played golf incessantly. One of my friends’ fathers was a fanatic about mountain climbing. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was his hobby and my dad’s hobby was his art collection.”
The hobbies of wealthy men, Sophia thinks, men with an excess of money and time.
“They’d sit around at Grace’s Table with him smoking his high-dollar Cuban cigars, his smuggled cigars, and I know more than one of them bought Columbian art from him, too, stolen Columbian art, pieces they’ve held onto even while they’ve spread rumors and leveled their judgments of him. And me,” Grace adds.
“You feel they blame you.”
“I blame me.”
“Why?”
“My father was one of the most successful and powerful businessmen in this state,” Grace says, and if that’s her answer, it seems non sequitur.
Sophia makes a note: Self-blame? Why?
“He ran the largest chain of luxury hotels and restaurants in the southwest, but now....” What Grace began as a defense lapses into a deep sigh. “People ask me why as if because he’s my father I should know how it happened. How a wealthy, well-respected man gets involved in such a despicable business.”
“How do you answer them?”
“Greed. I tell them it was greed and lies and obsession. You have some and want more.”
A silence blooms like a bruise. Outside, someone calls out, a dog’s name, perhaps, or a child’s. Sophia hears the ring of the hammer. Thomas, she thinks, working on the fence. Obsession. She jots the word.
“It never occurred to me that Dad would lose his grip on reality. It was like finding out the Rock of Gibraltar had collapsed into the sea.”
“Can you explain?”
“You know about the codex.”
“From the news reports.” Sophia nudges her desk blotter. She has a quick image of herself, when this hour is over, racing into the house, searching Russ’s closet, every nook and cranny.
Grace mentions Rafe Salazar, the double sale of the codex, calling it a betrayal.
Sophia jots a note: Russ + Rafe Salazar = ?
Grace says Rafe was having an affair with the wife of a man who worked in his organization. “When this man found out, he wanted revenge. He knew Rafe had another buyer for the codex and he called my dad and told him exactly when to expect Rafe to come for it. The man knew Dad would never let Rafe—” Grace takes a moment. “This never gets easier, no matter how many times I tell it.”
“No,” Sophia says. “I can imagine that it wouldn’t.”
“It was supposed to be Rafe’s last big score. He was leaving the country with his wife and son and disappearing for good. Finding out must have broken Dad’s heart. He had a bond with Rafe that he never had with anyone else. I think more than anything, that’s what pushed him to—to shoot Rafe and then—then Jarrett walked in and found them, Dad holding the gun, Rafe dead on the floor.” Grace scoots her hair behind her ears. She says the same caller who tipped her dad also tipped the government. “If I’d only known that, known about the raid, but I didn’t. I didn’t know anything. I was so blind.”
Sophia leaves the space in silence.
“Sometimes I hate my dad and sometimes I hate Jarrett for killing him because I’ll never know why. What was the purpose of having all that stuff? Only to kill and then be killed?” Grace pats her chest. “Why couldn’t Dad love me? I was alive, his own flesh and blood.”
“You lost your mother when you were fourteen, right?”
“Dad was a single parent, I know. I know all about how difficult that is.” Grace looks away, looks back. “Do you know what I wish, I mean other than that this had never happened? I wish it was over and every time I do, I feel sick and ashamed and terrified because it’s the same as wishing Jarrett dead.”
“I think what you truly wish for is relief.”
“Here’s another thing, if the codex is out there,” Grace seems not to have heard, “and if it’s genuine, its worth is incalculable, and as long as those federal agents believe there’s a chance Jarrett can lead them to it, they won’t execute him.”
Sophia doesn’t answer.
“There are people petitioning Governor Bush next week to let them speak to Jarrett about it. The execution could be set aside. It could.” Grace brings her flattened palms down on the armrests of her chair, but the gesture seems contrived to Sophia, as if it is Grace who is lacking conviction.
“You think I’m crazy,” she says. “Pathetic. Grasping at straws.”
“Not pathetic.” Sophia closes Grace’s folder.
“We’re out of time.”
“Yes.”
“No, I mean there’s no time left, period. It’s what I keep trying to explain to my family. Very soon, unless something changes, Jarrett will be gone.” Grace presses a knuckle to her mouth. “The children have to see their father and tell him good-bye. It’s all that matters now, but I can’t convince them, not by myself. I need your help.”
“In what way?”
“Will you speak to Thomas? If he agrees to visit then Brian and Megan will go too. Please? He seems to like you and you really are my last hope.”
Against her better judgment, Sophia says she’ll try; she says she can’t make any promises.
After Grace leaves she reopens Grace’s patient folder and sits staring at her notes, that word: Obsession.
She runs over it with her fingertip as if she might obliterate it and her discomfort. It’s something she should look at, settle within herself, if she’s going to do her job effectively and help this family. But she doesn’t want to look, to see the connection.
Tilley = Salazar = tie to Russ? She pens the note feeling what is becoming a familiar dart of alarm. Why hasn’t she told Grace that Russ had been acquainted with her father? But suppose Grace knows and has her own reasons for not divulging the fact?
Sophia tosses aside her pen. How can therapy continue under the circumstances? It would seem there is a breach of some kind. She might ask Phil, but only if she intends to raise the issue of Russ’s potential involvement with Louis Tilley. And what if her suspicions are groundless? The result of paranoia, her overactive imagination?
She thinks of her earlier impulse to search the house for the codex and can’t picture herself going through with it.
She thinks of Grace’s plea that she speak to Thomas.
She casts her eye over her jotted notes.
Everyone has something....
Chapter 12
Early Spring - 1954
The first time Terrence hit Sophia, he drove his fist into the meaty tissue above her right breast where the bruise wouldn’t show. It was early; they were in the kitchen where they ordinarily began their day. Terrence asked for a coffee refill, but Sophia was heating Dylan’s formula and asked him to wait.
“Hold on a sec,” was what she said. She didn’t think about it. She’d said the very same thing to him dozens of times. She lowered the flame under the pan filled with simmering water that was heating the formula and lifted the heavy ceramic coffee carafe from the warming plate. And that quickly she felt Terrence move in behind her. At first, oblivious, she smiled and almost turned in anticipation of his kiss, but something warned her. A sharp note in his breath perhaps, some disturbance in his aura. She would never know, but something raised the hair on her scalp in the moment before he spun her around and slammed his fist into her so hard the blow caused her to stagger. The coffee pot flew from her hand and exploded on the terrazzo floor.
Terrenc
e bellowed but whether in response to the sudden spray of hot liquid or his rage at Sophia wasn’t clear to her. She was so astonished at his behavior, even her own injuries weren’t clear to her.
Her palm would blister; the cut on her right heel would become infected, but she wouldn’t feel the pain of either wound for hours. She was like those cartoon characters, she would think later, the ones who after they suffered some unanticipated blow were depicted with stars whirling over their heads. What had happened? Terrence adored her. From the moment he had set eyes on her. Almost a year ago.
He’d been in line behind her at the supermarket and followed her outside; he’d asked for her name. She’d been flattered by his attention. Terrence was older and so suave in his manner. Not good looking exactly—he had curly red hair and light hazel eyes—but there was something compelling in those eyes, something very sexy in his demeanor that drew her. Plus he drove a Jaguar.
When he pointed it out, Sophia went up to it, she trailed her hand along its sleek, polished silver fender. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
He came to where she was and lifted her chin with his index finger. “You’re quite beautiful yourself,” he said turning her face this way and that. “Exotic. Something between Liz Taylor and Sophia Loren. Were you named for her?”
Sophia shook her head, feeling self-conscious. Confused. Fat. Could he not see how fat she was? From having Dylan a few weeks ago. And she was blue, too, baby-blue, from tending a newborn and having to live with Aunt Frances, who complained constantly on the phone to Sophia’s mother that Sophia was worthless and lazy, no kind of mother for an infant. “I’m not running a home for unwed mothers,” Frances would tell Esther. “If Sophia doesn’t take responsibility soon, I’ll put them both on the street, so help me, God....”
Terrence still held Sophia’s chin. “You’re cover girl material,” he told her. And when she demurred, he insisted. “I’m a fashion photographer. You’ve probably heard of me. Terrence Lucky? Do you read the Star Telegram, look at Vogue?”
She shook her head.
“Mademoiselle, Glamour?”
“Photoplay,” she answered. “Photoplay and True Confessions,” and then she quickly qualified that with, “I’m living with my aunt. It’s all she has,” so Terrence wouldn’t think she was the one who was dull and unsophisticated. Those might be her roots, but they weren’t her destiny.
“Photoplay, hmm?” He smiled. “How old are you?”
“Nineteen,” she lied.
“Well, Miss Sophia, it is Miss, isn’t it?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “I make my living spotting looks like yours.”
He handed her his business card and said she ought to call him. He said he could make her famous. He said where he lived, a renovated loft in a pricey neighborhood near downtown Fort Worth. It was an easy bus ride from Aunt Frances’s house, but when Sophia left there the following week, it was in the middle of the night, after the buses stopped running.
And she walked carrying the baby and her suitcase to the phone booth near the corner of Elizabeth Boulevard and 8th Avenue. Terrence answered her call on the second ring and hearing the kindness in his voice, Sophia began to cry. She sank to the concrete floor of the small glassed-in cubicle, unmindful of the grime, the faded scraps of litter left by the numberless horde of callers who had preceded her, and while Dylan slept, soundlessly, in the cradle of her bent knees, she told Terrence about her life. Not the whole story because, as he said, what did it matter? It was the past, a closed book. Ancient history, he said. And when they finished talking, he came for her in his gleaming silver Jaguar. He held her tenderly, and Dylan too, and he promised her that he loved children, that he had room for them both in his loft, in his life.
Terrence promised Sophia that she could trust him.
And she did. Even after the first time he hit her. In the deathly ring of silence that followed, she thought it must be a mistake, an accident, but then Terrence drove two fingers into her shoulder. He was sick of her, he said, sick of the way she put Dylan’s needs ahead of his. Sophia was trying to make sense of his accusation when he shoved her again, hard; her backside collided with the granite countertop. Her jaws snapped shut catching her lip. “Does that brat pay your bills?” he demanded. “Answer me. Who pays your goddamn bills?”
“You.” Sophia made the word behind her hand, blood from her mouth slicking her palm. She searched his gaze and she wasn’t so much frightened as perplexed. Who was this man and what had she done to make him so angry?
Some of the heat went out of him. She felt certain of it, certain that he would apologize, but the noise in his throat wasn’t soft, wasn’t conciliatory, but harsh, a kind of growl. He raised his fist, menacing her again. She sank to the floor and stayed there, knees pulled to her chin, long after he slammed out of the loft.
It was hours before he returned. She was still in her robe, drinking wine. She’d dosed herself with Demerol too. Terrence seemed to have a never-ending supply. She’d even put a few grains in Dylan’s formula and he’d, thankfully, been quiet while she’d spent the day crying herself sick.
The sound of Terrence’s key in the lock set off fresh waves of panic. She wasn't dressed; her eyes were puffy from crying, her face, with its broken lip, was bloated and ugly. She perched on the edge of their bed waiting to be cursed, waiting to be told to get out of his sight. But instead, he went to his knees at her feet and laid a bouquet of white roses in her lap. “I'm sorry,” he whispered. “Call me pathetic, but I'm jealous of your kid. I wish it was just us.”
Sophia stared down at him. She tangled her fingers in his unruly curls. God forgive her, she'd wished the same thing herself.
When he pushed her robe from her shoulders, she allowed it. When he cupped her breasts in his hands and took first one and then the other nipple into his mouth, she moaned, feeling the instant heat of her desire.
And every time after that, when he hit her, she knew she deserved it. Didn’t she wish all the time she didn't have Dylan? It was unnatural; she was a freak. And not all the Demerol or the wine in the world would alter the truth about her or redeem her or cause her to forget.
Chapter 13
Friday, October 1, 1999 - 16 days remain
“Isn’t that Grace Capshaw’s car?”
Sophia follows Carolyn’s glance through the windshield as they turn into the driveway. When they left to pick out paint samples, only Cort’s white truck had been parked on the driveway’s apron. Now Grace’s black SUV is parked there as well and then Grace herself appears in the same moment Sophia is saying, “I just saw her this morning.”
She’s gesturing sharply at Cort who’s at her side. They’re obviously arguing.
“Uh-oh.” Carolyn brakes to a stop. “What shall we do? Wait till they see us?”
But they show no sign of that even when Carolyn cuts the engine and gets out. Sophia follows her reluctantly. She opens the back passenger door, retrieves the small carton that holds the samples.
“Thomas doesn’t need his privileges yanked,” she hears Cort say. “He doesn’t need a shrink talking to him either.”
“Don’t tell me what my child needs.” Grace stops near the office steps.
Cort walks in a distracted circle. “He needs space. He needs us to respect him enough to allow him to make up his own mind.”
“But when he’s grown, the guilt will kill him. Why can’t you see that?”
Cort stands still. “You may be right, but whether he visits his dad or he doesn’t, it should be his decision and he’ll have to live with the consequences, right or wrong, the way the rest of us will.”
Sophia straightens inside the cover of the rear car door. Carolyn is motionless beside the front fender. They might both have been invisible.
Grace bends her head to her hand, and somehow, Sophia intuits the terrible cost and tender risk of Cort’s gesture when he slides his palm along the bare curve of Grace’s upper arm to her elbow. “You can’t save him from every hard knock
in life, Gracie.”
She shakes his hand away. “Don’t call me that,” she says, but her voice lacks conviction.
Sophia has the impression that Grace would like nothing more than to have Cort hold her, she is that close to breaking. Her eyes are on his, her step toward him is almost imperceptible. The moment of intimacy shimmers, elongates. It is evidence of the bond Sophia has suspected, but she is uncomfortable as a witness. She slams the car door. Grace and Cort spring apart. Carolyn looks at Sophia startled.
She proffers the carton. “We have the paint samples,” she says pushing the pleasantry. “Grace, I didn’t expect to see you again until Monday. I hope nothing’s wrong.”
“I came to talk to Thomas,” Grace answers, walking toward Sophia. “He’s working on the fence.”
Sophia hears the ring of the hammer. Somehow she thinks she is not imagining the fury that drives the rhythmic blows.
“He was rude to me earlier. Very rude.” Grace underscores the words.
“You can’t take it personally.”
Grace raises her finger at Cort. “Don’t you make excuses for him, for a situation you know nothing about.”
Cort tosses up his hands. “You’re right, I don’t know shit except that I’m late delivering a bid and last I heard, somebody still had to earn the money to pay the bills, the lawyer bills and the shrink bills. Sorry, Doc.” He holds Sophia’s gaze and there’s something accusatory, even coercive in his eyes that sends a tremor of alarm running along her spine. It’s as if he’s asking: How dare you?
What? Sophia thinks. How dare I what? Stand aside and do nothing, she supposes. Like the driver who passes an accident without stopping to render aid.
But now Cort grins and while the grin is as wry as it is brief, it alters everything about his expression and Sophia can’t be certain at all of what was there before. More evidence of her paranoia, she decides. She’s seeing calamity lurking behind every bush, every paint brush.
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