“Let her go?” I didn’t mean for it to come out as loud or desperate as it did. “She just tried to kill us, Bradley.”
“No, I did not.”
“Shut up, Fantasy.” The reverb from the gunfire in the small elevator hadn’t started to stop. I had to yell over it to hear myself. “Cuff her, Daddy! She works for the enemy! Shoot her! Shoot her in the foot! Shoot that gold jacket off of her!” I pressed my palms to my ears to stop the sirens. “What’s the matter with you, Fantasy?”
“Let her go, Samuel,” Bradley said again.
Daddy’s head bounced between me, telling him to shoot Fantasy, and Bradley, telling him to let her go.
“Double crossing turncoat traitor!” I lunged in her direction.
“Post-partum agoraphobic ostrich!” She lunged back.
(What?)
Bradley stood, backed Daddy off, then helped Fantasy up. “She works for me, Davis. At Blitz.”
(What?)
“Fantasy works for me,” he said again. “At Blitz.”
She rose to her full six feet and sneered down at me. I sneered right back up, and to my husband, I said, “I’m never speaking to you again.” I clambered to my feet. I didn’t know if the elevator worked or not, since Fantasy had blown it to smithereens, but I crunched my way through the mirror shards and gave it a go. We went home, the elevator and I, leaving the two liars—my husband and my former best friend, plus my dumbfounded father—staring at me. As the doors closed, Fantasy yelled, “And stop sending your crazy ex-mother-in-law to Blitz.” Then I heard my deceiving husband say, “What?” My father echoed, “What?” When the elevator spilled me out at home, I looked out to the right and saw the front doors wide open, then left, down the hall to the living room, where Baylor was directing Biloxi PD detectives, uniformed officers, and several people wearing coroner jackets.
Robin Sandoval.
I held the elevator door open and kicked my glass-shard shoes behind me, hopping out barefoot, and made my way to the nursery, where my mother quietly rocked between the cribs.
“Is everything okay here, Mother?”
“It sure is. You go do what you have to do, child.”
I went straight to my bedroom, locked the door, peeled out of my clothes, and climbed into bed pulling the covers all the way over my head. Let them sort it out.
I didn’t know how he got in. It was his bedroom too, so I couldn’t very well kick him out, but I could stay under the covers and let him think I was asleep.
“It’s eight o’clock, Davis. I know you’re not asleep.”
I’d been seething for an hour, only reaching my arm out once to flip on the baby monitor. When I closed my eyes, I couldn’t see anything except Robin Sandoval’s dead body swinging on my terrace, and when I opened them, I couldn’t see anything except Fantasy in a gold Blitz jacket. My husband was in both images.
“Davis. Talk to me.”
He sat down on my side of the bed and I rolled right into him. If I moved, he’d know I was awake. I froze against him, angrily taking comfort in it.
“Davis, come out from under the covers.”
“Go away.”
He yanked the covers off me and said, “I like your pajamas.”
I crawled over his lap, stomped across the room sidestepping our destroyed wedding portrait, off the wall because the sprinklers had drowned it—how intuitive—then into the closet where I grabbed the first thing I could land my hands on, a ridiculously loud t-shirt, a gag gift from my sister. It would do. I pulled it over my head, sidestepped the broken picture of formerly happy us again, and got right back in the bed taking my covers with me. “I have nothing to say to you, Bradley, and I don’t want to hear anything you have to say to me unless you know what happened on the terrace with Robin Sandoval. Otherwise, leave me alone.”
“Robin was working with federal investigators, Davis.”
No.
No no no.
“She’s was working with the feds even when she worked for us.”
My brain raced.
“She was a whistleblower,” he said. “And we’ve been trying to figure out what whistle she was blowing.”
The obvious whistle was Blitz.
“And we’re not so sure it was Blitz.”
“We?”
“We,” he said.
That would be my husband and his spy.
An hour passed. Or five seconds. It felt like an hour. I couldn’t help myself. “What was she doing upstairs? Why was she even here?”
“Which one?” he asked. “Robin or Fantasy? I have no idea what Robin was doing on the roof. If you’re asking why Fantasy was here, I’m sure you already know.”
“I’m not so sure,” I said. “About you or her.”
“She was trying to save Robin.”
“Mission not accomplished.”
“She’s working alone, Davis. She has no backup.”
Something I was so very well aware of.
“She did everything she could.”
The silence was absolute, until Bradley spoke softly. “I needed help, Davis. The situation at Blitz was more than I could handle. Fantasy stepped up. It’s that simple.”
It wasn’t anywhere near that simple and he knew it.
“Now it’s time for you to step up,” he said. “Help us.”
“Us who, Bradley? You and your double agent you forgot to mention?”
“And how is that different than you sending Bea Crawford to spy for you and not mentioning it to me?”
“You not telling me is an entirely different thing than me not telling you.”
“Again, Davis, how?”
I sat that one out. I couldn’t believe Bradley and I had been on the same Blitz track—neither of us telling the other—me with Bea and him with Fantasy. It was an unprecedented breach of trust between us that had been going on for who knows how long, and with that, Blitz had even weaseled into my marriage. They were well on the way to taking our livelihoods; would they take our marriage too? Were we ruined? Like our wedding portrait? Could we be saved? The portrait, maybe not. A wire from the frame had cut straight through the middle, ripping us apart. The marriage, we’d see.
(Who was I kidding?)
(Life without Bradley wouldn’t even be a life.)
(Why was there a wire in our wedding portrait?)
He said, “The fact that you didn’t want to know made the decision not to tell you an easy one.”
“That’s just insulting.”
“Davis, the girls were born and your world stopped spinning.”
“So this is my fault?” I sat up so I could see his face. “Are you even halfway suggesting that mothering our daughters is a bad thing?”
“No one, least of all me, faults you for loving our daughters.”
I gave him one point, then dove back under the covers. It would be a long time before he earned the other ninety-nine—the girls and I could move into a condo on the twenty-fifth floor—but at least he wasn’t, on top of everything else, implying that me parenting our daughters was something I shouldn’t have been doing.
Then it occurred to me I’d live very close to Bea Crawford if I moved to twenty-five, and living close to Bea was something I’d had enough of for one lifetime. Which reminded me I had Bea hiding out at Blitz. Which made me think of Wheels Up. Which made me think of Takeoff, and Blitz swiping my game; all roads led to Blitz, and the wire cutting our wedding portrait in half was from the frame. It was dark, twisted, about ten inches long, and it was from the frame.
“Davis.” My husband stopped my train of thought just as it was about to leave the station. “There’s a difference between being a good mother and locking yourself away from everyone and everything because you can’t be convinced Blitz wasn’t your fault.”
This again.
; “Davis, Richard was the blind trust.”
What did he say about Mr. Sanders?
“Richard owned the sanctuary property on the Bay,” Bradley said. “He was the blind trust.”
Wait a minute.
“He’s the one who missed it. Not you. None of this was your fault.”
It was Mr. Sanders’s fault?
“Or, for that matter, his. Richard donated the land to the state, who turned around and sold it to Blitz.”
Why hadn’t anyone told me?
“When he realized what had happened, it was too late.”
I said nothing, my brain too busy processing the incoming information.
“Davis,” my husband said. “No one is to blame. Had Blitz been one step ahead of us this whole time, we could take a little of the responsibility. A little. But they’ve been ten steps ahead, and that’s a force of nature for which no one is to blame. They’re corporate geniuses. They have unlimited resources. They have a bank in their back pocket, politicians in all the others, and a big crystal ball.”
Bradley kept going, something about sending Fantasy in undercover to plug the enormous funnel of information from here to there and try to find the source of Blitz’s bottomless well of cash, but I was only halfway listening.
Because someone else was all the way listening.
Then Bradley launched into a speech about how he could barely worry about Blitz for worrying about me, and the only real comfort he’d had since the girls were born was Fantasy. She was the one who’d told him to hang on, let me work through it, deep down I was fine, that whatever was going on with me had nothing to do with him or the babies. “You’ve given the role of stay-at-home mom an entirely new definition, Davis. You’ve got it down to an art form.”
I would have been greatly offended had he not said art form.
I bolted upright from the covers, startling him. I put a finger to his lips. “Stop,” I mouthed. “Stop talking.”
Bradley’s face went blank, then curious. He spoke through my finger. “Let me say one more thing.”
“Make it quick,” I whispered. “And keep it down.” I thought about it a second. “Wait.” I shot left, to his side of the bed. I held the covers up and patted the sheets, inviting him in.
His face went from curious to stunned. “Right now? Seriously?”
I rolled my eyes. “No, Bradley. Not that.” Which, when the implication of what we were discussing hit me, made me dizzy. I leaned up, my lips to his ears. “Get under the covers to talk to me.”
He was too confused to move.
I jumped past him for a second time, grabbed the me half and the him half of our wedding portrait and crooked my finger. He hesitantly followed me to the sitting room.
“Davis,” he stammered. “What is wrong with you?”
I was on the floor ripping our wedding picture to shreds.
“Stop.” He grabbed for my hands, and when he did, he saw them too.
Cameras. Wires. Tracking devices.
It was House.
My mother appeared in the sitting room doorway with her cell phone in one hand and a baby monitor in the other. “Davis? Are you wearing underpants?”
I tugged my t-shirt down. “Yes.”
“You might want to think about underpants that fit. I can see every bit of your rear end.”
“Mother.” Bradley and I were on the floor, me destroying our wedding portrait and Bradley examining the frame. We could discuss my underwear later. “What is it?”
“Caroline, are the girls okay?” Bradley asked.
“Sleeping like little angels.” Mother shook her phone. “It’s your Daddy on the portable phone. Bea Crawford is in jail.”
Holy shit.
Twenty-Two
My parents drove a Subaru Forester. It was four years old, jasmine green, had 32,000 miles on it, and seated five. We had eight stuffed in it, including two baby girls in Petit Bateau footie pajamas. It was half past eight on Friday night and we were driving, if you could call it that, coasting in neutral was more like it, east on Beach Boulevard, Biloxi’s Casino Row, which the girls had never seen, and you’d have thought we were at Disney. Our first stop was Sal & Mookie’s Pizza, three blocks and a left on Lameuse Street, where we dropped all our cell phones except Mother’s in the dumpster behind the restaurant.
“We need a computer,” I said.
“We need car seats,” said our driver, the father of the loose twins in the backseat.
Mother and I were sitting on top of each other in the front passenger seat. July was on Baylor’s lap with Bex and Quinn buddy-buckled in the middle, squirming all over the place, being tickled by Fantasy, who was stuffed behind Bradley.
All four windows were cracked so we could breathe.
“Try to keep the girls out of sight,” Bradley said. “All we need is to be pulled over and charged with child endangerment.”
“Go the back way,” Baylor said. “Lamey Bridge Road.”
“Good idea.” Bradley took the slowest right turn known to man.
The girls had toddler car seats, gently, or I should say never, used, but not in my parents’ car. We didn’t take the time to track down the car seats, which would have meant calling Crisp, and there was no calling anyone from anywhere in our home except for the sitting room or the nursery, the only two rooms not wired for House, and even then, no doubt our phones were bugged and had been bugged since House was installed before the girls were born.
At the end of several scribbled notes to each other, which we then ate (no, we didn’t), Bradley and I realized that if for no other reason than the safety of our daughters, we had to get out. Right then. I scribbled a note—DON’T ASK ANY QUESTIONS AND DON’T SAY ONE WORD—then dodged the authorities still lingering around the crime scene and ran through the house flashing the note under noses, gathering up our family and crew announcing, “Pizza! We’re going out for pizza!” And here we were, in the only vehicle we knew wasn’t bugged, when everything else, and by everything else I meant every single thing even remotely associated with us, probably even the coffeepot, was a surveillance device for Blitz.
“Why does she need a computer so bad?” Fantasy asked.
I turned to my husband. “Tell her so I can unfriend her.”
Bradley caught Fantasy’s eye in the rearview mirror. “So she can unfriend you.”
“I think you two should shut up,” Baylor said.
“Who two?” Bradley asked.
“Those two,” Baylor said.
Fantasy leaned over my babies. “You shut up, Baylor.”
“Everyone shut up,” our driver barked.
“Goodness gracious sakes alive, this language in front of my granddaughters,” Mother said. “And their mother, half naked.”
I wasn’t half naked. I was wearing a hot pink t-shirt with Mama Jugs spelled out in rhinestones across the front and my Burberry rain boots I’d worn for the sprinkler cleanup. Which weren’t a great match for the t-shirt, not that anything else would have been, but they were what I grabbed on our way out the door.
“Where are we going?” Baylor asked.
“To Best Buy,” Bradley said.
We passed Blitz, lit up like Sing Sing, and got a good look at it, because Bradley was driving two miles an hour.
“Does Best Buy sell car seats?” July asked.
“Let’s say they do, July,” Fantasy said. “Where are we going to put them?”
Mother said, “When I was a child, there weren’t even seatbelts. Much less baby seats.”
“There isn’t another car on the road, Bradley. Can we speed up just a little?” I asked.
“The roads are empty because Blitz is giving away ten Range Rovers tonight before they unveil Davis’s game,” Fantasy said. “Must be present to win.”
I turned around. “I can�
��t believe I was ever friends with you.”
“Save that shit for later,” Baylor said.
Mother clapped her hands over her ears and sang “Blessed Be the Name.”
July asked Baylor to please watch his language in front of Mrs. Way and the babies.
Bradley stopped for the yellow light on Promenade Parkway just as it was turning, casting a deep red glow on us. The only comments were, “Aaaaaagh!” and “Muuuuuuh!” until Baylor, who must have been losing circulation, said, “Pull over, Brad, and let half of us catch an Uber.”
Mother asked me, “Do you remember May May Simon?”
I said, “Later, Mother.”
“Baylor.” Fantasy leaned in and I was so close to her I could smell her Bobbi Brown Beach shampoo. “Ask Davis why she thinks she has to have a computer at a time like this.”
“Ask her yourself, Fantasy.”
“It’s like old times.” Bradley had one eye on the road and the other in the rearview mirror on his daughters.
“A computer isn’t going to help.”
It felt like maybe Fantasy was speaking directly to me.
“You can unfriend me later.”
She was speaking directly to me.
“Right now we have one dead body and two missing federal agents,” she said. “We need to find them before we all end up in jail with your buddy Bea.”
“They’re saying Bea Crawford stole pictures,” Mother said. “Imagine that.”
Honestly, I’d forgotten.
“Uh…” I said.
“What?” Bradley asked.
“Well...”
“Spit it out, Davis,” Baylor said.
“Bea might have stolen pictures and the two missing agents are probably in the hospital.”
“What?” Fantasy asked.
“Which hospital?” Bradley asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“What happened to them?” Fantasy asked.
I told Bradley to tell her I wasn’t exactly sure.
Bradley caught Fantasy’s eye as he rolled Mother and Daddy’s car to a stop in front of Best Buy. “She says she’s not exactly sure, Fantasy. And by not exactly sure, she means it has something to do with Bea Crawford.”
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