by Lisa Unger
I get him a water in a paper cone from the fountain and take him into the back, where it’s cooler. We have an ancient air-conditioning unit that barely works in the window. He sits down hard across from Paul.
“I thought you might like an update,” he says. “I heard from my buddy at the precinct.”
Paul and I exchanged a look. It was tricky. There were things that I knew now, that Paul had always known, that Boz didn’t know. Boz didn’t know that Paul had organized the original heist. I had not been linked to Didion’s murder.
“Josh Beckham has been released with time served,” said Boz. “You probably heard that. Because he was a juvenile at the time of the initial incident and he was acting under duress from his brother. Your testimony that he tried to help you escape, and the testimony from Claudia Bishop that he came to the house to try to keep his brother from coming for the money helped him. Now he’s free to take care of his elderly mother.”
I am happy about that, as happy as I can be.
“We know that it was Rhett Beckham and John Didion who were guilty of murdering Chad and Heather, and the crimes against you, Zoey. And that it was Mike who hired them that night.”
Boz stops to look between us.
“So I guess what everyone’s thinking is that your father organized or helped carry out that heist and hid the money. Mike, we’re supposing, felt that he didn’t get a fair shake and that’s why he sent Didion and Beckham to Chad’s place.”
Paul nods, looking solemn, rests his head in his palm. And my body is tense suddenly. Boz didn’t come out here to tell us things we already knew.
“But—you know,” he says, looking back and forth between us. “With everyone dead—Mike, Didion, Beckham—there are things we just may never know.”
Poor Boz. This thing had been haunting him for years.
Paul found me that night because he’d installed the Find My Friends app on my phone. He’d installed the app on my phone when he started to suspect that I had killed Didion. When he figured out where I was that night, he’d ducked out of the hospital and took a car service, following my blue blip on the screen of his phone.
“With Seth gone, and that phantom bag of money, too,” said Boz, shaking his head. “He’s the only person who Mike may have talked to. And the money, the bag it was in. Maybe there might have been some DNA evidence even after all these years.”
“They still can’t find him,” said Paul. “That’s amazing.”
“All that cash, untraceable bills,” Boz said. “He could be anywhere.”
Seth. He was the piece that didn’t fit into the puzzle. I couldn’t believe he’d go to work for Mike. Also, that money. I’d seen it there next to Mike when we were both lying on the ground. Could Seth have taken it and Paul not seen him? Paul claims that it was there one minute, but that he was so consumed, thinking that I was dying in his arms, that he never noticed that it was gone. The idea that Seth would take it and run off. It did not fit. But what else?
“There were other people involved,” says Boz. “Must have been. We know that. I’m sorry. We just may never know who.”
We all sit for a moment, listing to the whoop-whoop of a police siren passing down below.
“Do you think you can live with that?” asks Boz.
A long moment passes among the three of us.
“I think we have to,” says Paul.
It’s then that my eyes fall on a picture I’ve been looking at all my life. It was hanging over Mike’s head as he sat at his desk as long as I’d been coming here. Paul, my father, Boz, and Mike all in the stern of a boat. Florida, I think it was. They’re holding a marlin, a big one, grinning ear to ear. My dad has a beer lifted at the camera, the water a glittering green all around them. That’s when I get it. The third man in the heist. Boz.
We have all made mistakes, done wrong. Boz, Mike, and Paul, police officers charged with the duty to protect and serve, organized the robbery of a drug dealer. Maybe Paul did it to help my father. Maybe he did it for some other reason. Boz and Mike were likely just greedy. Like most cops, they had an idea of who was good and who was bad in this world. And robbing a drug dealer to help another officer in trouble maybe didn’t seem like such a bad thing.
Paul had an affair with my mother, his best friend’s wife.
Even Mike didn’t know how bad things would get when he hired Didion and Beckham to get what he thought belonged to him.
I murdered a man in cold blood. I have taken to the streets, fancying myself a hero, a crime stopper, and there are more than a few people walking around this city with wounds that I have inflicted in the name of justice. But some people would just call me a vigilante, a thug no better than any other. Street justice is not justice, they might say.
Who’s right?
Paul turns, and his eyes fall on the picture I was looking at. When he turns back to me, he has his cop’s face on, blank, waiting, giving nothing.
“Can you live with it, Zoey?” asks Paul.
Boz and I lock eyes. “What choice do I have?” I ask.
After a moment, he gets up and moves toward the door. He turns and looks back at us.
“Hey, you heard about that girl they’re looking for? The vigilante. The one that they think killed Didion?”
“Helluva thing,” says Paul, putting his reading glasses on again. He turns back to the screen.
“They say she’s disappeared,” says Boz. “She hasn’t been around in a few months.”
I look at him and smile a little. I hear you, Boz. I get it. We all have to agree to live with, to let it go, or none of us can.
“Hope they never find her.”
“Me, too.”
• • •
LATER, I AM ALONE IN the school doing the glamorous work of washing towels and wiping down surfaces. The dojo is a sacred place and must be kept clean. The altar especially. For ours, I have chosen the laughing Buddha surrounded by children to remind me that this place is for turning kittens into dragons. As I wipe his shiny head, my phone starts to ring.
I look down and see that it’s Melba. When I pick up, she’s crying on the other end.
“Melba,” I say, alarmed. “What is it?”
“Do you know about this?” she asks. “Did you have something to do with it?”
My stomach hollows out. One of the girls? Something horrible that one of them did or was done to them.
“What is it?” I say, my throat tight. “Tell me.”
“I just heard from my attorney,” she says. Then she lets out a laugh. “The group home has received a donation of three hundred thousand dollars.”
Relief is a flood. I sink to my knees.
“Do you know what I can do for my girls with this money?” Melba asks, her voice joyous, a person who knows that the only true happiness in this life is doing for others. “Do you know how much it will help us?”
“That’s—so wonderful,” I say, even as my mind struggles for meaning, for understanding. “Do you know who sent it?”
“My lawyer said there was just a box of cash and a note on plain cardstock,” says Melba. “It just said: From one of the good guys.”
The world is a tilt-a-whirl, and I just barely hold on.
forty-five
Who brings her parents to a concert? No one except dorky only children (single children was the correct term because only implied paucity, according to her mother). Pathetic, single children whose parents were sadly laboring under the delusion that they were still half cool. Which they so were not.
Okay, even Raven had to admit that her parents looked pretty good—Claudia in a simple sheath dress with platform peep-toe red shoes, and Ayers in triple black with a nice Armani belt with a brushed nickel buckle. And they were happy. And Raven was—weirdly—happy. What had started as an extended sleepover, where Raven and Claudia were just staying with Ayers until Claudia got back on her feet, had turned into a formal announcement to Raven that they were getting back together and going to be a family a
gain.
And it was good, and weird. Because her parents, in her memory, had never been together, always separated. And some of the games she’d gotten used to playing no longer worked. But she could live with it.
“So,” Piper gushed. “Is it official? Is Troy, like, your boyfriend?”
“Um, yeah,” said Troy, coming up behind them. “It’s official.”
“Yeah,” said Raven, leaning into him “It is.”
Claudia and Ayers promised to give them a “wide berth,” whatever that meant, but there was no way they were going to see Above & Beyond at the Beacon Theatre without chaperones. Raven’s parents had paid for the tickets, too, seating themselves a few rows behind Raven, Troy, Piper, and her maybe-boyfriend Todd, who Raven didn’t really like.
Claudia and Ayers were at the bar, pretending they didn’t know her, and Raven excused herself to go the bathroom, waiting on the predictably endless line that was always.
“Hey, Raven.”
She jumped a little. It had been a few months, but she was still jumpy, having bad dreams about being locked in a tunnel, about fires devouring their apartment building. She dreamt about that bag of money, which had disappeared again, and the hideous face of Rhett Beckham. She didn’t like her parents to go out at night, and so they didn’t. This was the first night out for all of them in a long time.
She didn’t recognize right away the guy standing in front of her, and then it slowly dawned. She felt a little flutter of nerves. That dark hair, those intense eyes. Andrew Cutter.
“I saw on Twitter that you had your test.”
She remembered that night, how mean he’d been to her. She talked to her mom about it, and Claudia had asked Raven to think about what Andrew’s experience might be. How angry he must be, how damaged. Raven thought about it, but she still hated him a little. He had dark circles under his eyes, looking a little more ragged out than she remembered him.
“I thought you unfollowed me,” she said.
“Twitter feeds are public.”
“Okay,” she said, not knowing what else to say. She wouldn’t have imagined he’d given her a second thought.
She looked out into the crowd for Troy. She could see the golden crown of his head above some of the others. “So, yeah I got my test.”
“We’re officially not related,” he said.
“Right,” she said. “Lucky you.”
He smiled a little, but it wasn’t a nice smile. “No,” he said. “Lucky you.”
Then he walked off, disappearing into the throng. She stood there shaking for a moment. Then, no. She wasn’t going to freak out and leave. She was going to find her friends, her boyfriend, and have a good time.
She was still unsettled a little when her mom came up behind her.
“Who was that?” Claudia asked.
Her mom had white glitter shadow on her eyes—which might be a little young for her. But she just looked happy, lighter, freer than she had in as long as Raven could remember.
“No one,” said Raven, in what she personally thought was a stunning act of maturity. She deserved some kind of a reward for how grown-up she was being right now.
“You gave him the death stare,” said Claudia. There was a little wrinkle in her brow, as though she detected something was not right. Mom radar, always on.
“I don’t talk to strange boys, right?” said Raven. “Isn’t that what you taught me?”
“Yes, it is,” said Claudia, kissing her on the head. “Good girl.”
She might tell them later, but not now, not tonight. Tonight, they were going to be happy, have fun. The shadow of Melvin Cutter was gone from their lives for good. She biologically belonged to Ayers and was surprised to find that it didn’t matter all that much. Because it was the life they shared that mattered, the hours they’d spent in the park, the million Band-Aids he’d put on her knees, how he carried her bloody tooth in his pocket all day while they were at Great Adventure and still remembered to put it in the little pillow so the Tooth Fairy would come. Those were the things that made Ayers her dad, not the blood running through her veins. She didn’t love him any more totally. But she would never have known that without knowing. A pall had lifted from her mind, from their life, and they were free to move into the future.
“I think we’re going to have a wedding,” said Claudia in the bathroom. Her mother had no issues whatsoever raising her voice so that Raven and everyone else could hear over their peeing. “Another wedding.”
“Okay,” said Raven pushing her way out of the stall and over to the sink. The thought of a wedding excited her, and also freaked her out a little. How many teenagers had to go to their parents’ weddings? It was—odd. Why couldn’t they just be normal? Her mother squished in next to her.
“So, I was thinking,” said her mom. “Will you be my maid of honor?”
Raven rolled her eyes. “Mom, that’s weird. I’m your daughter.”
“So what?”
“Mom.”
“So that’s a no?” Claudia pouted. She reapplied her lipstick, a deep berry plum. “I suppose Martha would do it. Again.”
“Mom!”
Claudia looked at Raven in the mirror, and Raven smiled. Claudia pulled her into a tight hug.
Raven laughed. “Of course, I’ll be your maid of honor.”
Claudia, embarrassingly, teared up a little. “I love you—so much.”
And all the other ladies in the bathroom broke into applause. It was New York, after all.
They danced that night, and cheered, and jumped around. Her mother was still working on the house, now repairing after the fire, but they weren’t going to live there. And Claudia was doing what maybe she was always meant to do: she was writing a book. Raven felt like every ugly thing was behind them. And even if it wasn’t true—it was true tonight.
forty-six
My head is still spinning as I return to Nate Shelby’s apartment. Tiger and Milo meet me at the door, wrapping around me, mewing. Milo reaches up and I lift him, nuzzle against his snow-white fur. I go into the kitchen and fill their food bowls, refresh their water. Then I head up to the roof. It’s slow going, but I make it.
I don’t sit on the ledge like I used to. I sit in the center, on the tar paper that is still warm from the day’s heat, even though the sun is setting, a big red ball in the sky dipping below the city buildings. It is quiet, as quiet as this place will ever be. I can’t hear the wind, though it is blowing, just the traffic noise carrying up. Even when it grows dark, I won’t see many stars, the city is too bright. The city is alive, with a beating heart. I feel its pulse inside my own.
I try to make sense of the things that have happened today. What I know. What I suspect. What I may never know for sure. I draw in and release long, slow breaths, let my thoughts swirl and pass through me. The Buddha says, “There is no external refuge.”
Meaning, you cannot look into the outer world to feel safe, to feel at peace. You cannot look without for understanding, or for justice. You must look within.
I think about the money. A million dollars stolen from Whitey Malone. One hundred went to Mike and a hundred to Boz ten years ago. Paul took four hundred thousand after my parents were gone, and sealed up the other four hundred thousand in that space beneath the stairs. Slowly, over ten years he deposited it in my college account. It paid for my education without my knowledge; what’s left of it is being used at the school. Three hundred thousand was just given to Melba’s group home. That’s one hundred thousand still missing. Seth? Maybe he’s on a beach somewhere. Maybe the money’s doing some other good work. Or maybe Seth is at the bottom of a river somewhere, and someone else, maybe Boz, has a fatter bank account.
Can I live with it? Do I still have work to do? I don’t know.
The thinker panics. The watcher bides her time. The Red Hunter acts.
Is she dead, I wonder? Did The Red Hunter die in the warehouse that night? Was her only power rage? Now that my rage has cooled, now that a kind of justice h
as been served, will she find her way back to wandering the city streets? I don’t know.
• • •
BACK DOWNSTAIRS, HE’S WAITING IN the kitchen. Nate. I’m not the cat sitter anymore.
“There’s someone here to see you,” Paul said one day while I was recovering in the hospital. But Paul had come in through the door alone, with only his oxygen tank in tow.
“Your invisible friend.”
“No,” said Paul. “Yours. I found him in the hallway. Nate Shelby. He’s says you’re his cat sitter?”
“Nate Shelby?” I said. I am not vain by nature, but I had to wonder what I looked like after my recent adventures, convalescence, and depressed state.
“Bring him in?” asked Paul.
“Um,” I said, shifting up. “Okay.”
Nate came in carrying a bouquet of calla lilies which, I thought, seemed a bit funereal and much like those that adorned his lobby. But sweet.
In my mind, I’d created him tall and swashbuckling, long dark curls and leather pants. I imagined him in studios, angrily splashing paint on his huge canvases, or drifting though swank galleries with a beautiful woman on his arm. But in reality, he looked somewhat bookish—with short, shorn dark hair and glasses. His jeans were paint splattered. He was tall, lean in the waist and broad through the shoulders.
“How—?” I started. He had a kind, arresting smile. “What are you doing here? How did you know?”
“Well, you’re all over the news, for one,” he said. “And our doorman friend, Charlie, called to say that you might not be up to looking in on the cats. I had to come home anyway, so I thought I’d drop by while I was in town.”
“I had my uncle call him,” I said. “To say there had been an accident. Are they okay? Milo and Tiger?”
“I think they miss you,” he said. “But yeah, they’re okay. The more important question is how are you?”
“Um,” I said. I like the way his energy fit into the room. It was quiet. He sat in the chair by my bed. His eyes, they never left me. I could feel him taking in all the details, easily, without judgment. He was a watcher. An artist who wanted to see it all—all the lines and shadows, all the lights and darks. I found I didn’t have the urge to hide from him. “I’m here.”