His leanly muscled physique punctuated the badass-ness of distressed jeans and a threadbare baby blue T-shirt that had nothing to do with a department store and everything to do with life lived on the rugged side of humanity. Whether from the color of the shirt or the force of her reaction, Rin suddenly thought about the wildly disturbing waiter from Restaurant Barcelona.
“Luck.” The name croaked from her dry throat.
The blacked-out full-face helmet the driver wore concealed his identity. The man didn’t look in her direction. That stony disregard clenched her stomach. Rin wasn’t conceited about her looks, but she was beautiful. For better or worse she favored her mother as much as identical twins mirror one another. When she crossed a street, men and women rubbernecked and catcalled way too often. But not this guy.
Rin licked her lips, clutched her bag, and did a Carrie Bradshaw dash up the sidewalk and into the building. The perfume of the infirm hung thick in the air. At least it took care of the ridiculous heat pooling between her legs. It also gave her appreciation for the energetic rattling of her heart.
“Ms. Lee?” Jeanine lifted her hands in praise. Her rose cheeks and gaping smile kept Rin from worry. She rushed from behind the tall desk. “The senator is having a great day. He recognized me twice this morning.” A quick wave and even faster feet urged Rin to follow. “I tell you, it made my week. It’s been a while since he’s come back to us. I’m pleasantly surprised to see you, and I know he’ll be overjoyed.”
In spite of all the recent drama a smile arched Rin’s mouth. She put her Nines to work on the linoleum, knowing she’d pay for her track-and-field training in them today and not caring. Paw-Paw came to bat for her. She’d run to West Virginia and back to see the light of recognition in his eyes.
“Senator Lee, I have a special visitor for you.” Jeanine rounded the corner to her grandfather’s room and stopped so abruptly Rin crashed into her back.
“I’m sorry,” Rin said.
The nurse froze in place.
“What is it?” Rin asked, scared to hear the answer. She peered around Jeanine’s torso. Her grandfather sat slumped to the side in a chair facing the window. “No,” she cried before she could cap her emotions.
“Why don’t you wait outside, Ms. Lee?”
Rin dipped below the nurse’s arm and burned the skin of her knees sliding to a halt next to the desk chair. This was her chair. The place she sat during every visit to hold his hand and watch him sleep.
“Paw-Paw?” She grabbed his frail, icy hand and brought it to her cheek. A sob shook her, but she bit the awful sound back. God, but she hated old people. Old people insisted on dying and, damn it to hell, it hurt.
Jeanine placed two fingers on his carotid. “He has a pulse. A strong one.” She sighed. “Senator?” Her petite hands patted his shoulder. “Senator,” she hollered.
Former US Senator Cotton Lee blinked his green eyes and lifted his head as though it weighed thirty pounds. The smoke of cataracts lightened the depth of that old Irish color. “Cara?” his worn voice quavered.
“No, Paw-Paw, it’s Rin.”
The rumpled skin of his brow deepened its crease. He pulled his hand away gently. “I’m sorry, pretty lady. You look just like my daughter.”
“I am your daughter’s daughter. Your granddaughter,” Rin pressed. He turned away and stared through the glass out onto a small lawn rimmed with flowers.
“I apologize for the scare, Ms. Lee.” The nurse smiled. “Sit with him awhile. Talk. Maybe he’ll come back. Maybe he won’t. But don’t give up on him.”
“Never.” Rin swatted at her tears and pulled a chair from the far wall.
“I’ll be making rounds with the doctor soon. If you need anything, someone will be at the desk.”
“Thank you.” Rin forced a smile until Jeanine turned to go. “Will you please pull the door on your way?”
“Of course,” she said, tugging the door in her wake.
Rin’s gaze danced over her grandfather. His red hair had long since faded to a dingy white. His stout frame had narrowed with time. But what feats he’d accomplished in his day.
The People’s Senator. He’d been the only senator of his time—probably ever—who didn’t trade-up. Not on his house. Not on his car. Not on his wife. He’d lived in DC’s Trinidad neighborhood as a speck of white lint on the sleeve of the community for years before de-segregation became a movement—in part to his efforts in politics and his district.
“Thank you, Paw-Paw. Thank you for never giving up on me.” Rin shrugged off her briefcase and jacket and shoved them into the seat next to her. Then she scooted her chair a bit closer. “You may not remember me, but I know you remember Cara.”
“Yes, my Cara.” A grin pulled at one side of his mouth, while the damage of his stroke held the other prisoner. As if Alzheimer’s wasn’t enough to contend with. He turned into himself like her shaky breaths didn’t rattle the gray hairs on his speckled and slightly bruised arm.
That withdrawal sliced her to the bone. Rin cradled her face in her hands and sucked long breaths in an effort to steady her tattered nerves.
“I have a confession,” she whispered. When he didn’t respond after an arduous minute, she continued. “I hated you. It wasn’t your fault, of course, but I needed someone to blame. Someone alive.” Rin wiped the drops from her chin and leaned back. “I rationalized it in my head and made you pay for my mother’s and father’s sins. Truth is, I’m pissed at my mom. If she hadn’t screwed that man and stolen me away without telling him I even existed, he wouldn’t have come for me that day.
“If he hadn’t hit her and ripped me from her arms, she wouldn't have shot him.” The mess of red haunted her to this day, but the look in her mother’s eyes had scared her more. Desperation muddled with rage, topped with mortal fear. “If the courts had not threatened to take me away, if you hadn’t insisted on a party to lighten the mood and reassure your constituents, my mom wouldn’t have taken her life.”
Her wet fingers covered her mouth. “Some company I am, huh? But it gets worse Paw-Paw. So much worse. You always said your daughter wouldn’t take her own life, and she wouldn’t leave me, unless she had business to attend. You said all this contrary to the evidence: an eye witness—that’d be me—and a pulverized body of a woman the same height, weight, age, and hair color as my mom, wearing the same clothing she wore to the party.”
She scrubbed her palms down the front of her slacks. “Why would you say that to a little girl who’d just lost her mother? Why would you give hope when all it did was hurt me? I despised you for that. Sure, I said it was because you made me live in the hood with exactly one fifth of another white girl for ten square blocks. But I’d have lived in Antarctica, if I wasn’t given false hope that withered and died a thousand times over in my soul.”
A tiny tear trickled from the side of his eyes. “I’ve given up hating you. You’re the only family I have. The only person on earth I can trust completely…and you can’t even understand what I’m saying. But, Paw-Paw, you’re not the only one who believes Cara Lee isn’t dead. There are people close to me who are trying to find her and I don’t think it’s to catch up on old times. I think they want to hurt her.”
Nothing. The senator’s eyes didn’t flash in recognition. In fact, a hint of drool collected at the corner of his mouth. Rin crossed the tidy room, snagged a washcloth from the bathroom, and wet it. She returned and wiped at his drooping lip.
“Versions. Everyone had their own version of the story,” he rasped. “She jumped because of unrequited love. She jumped because she couldn’t deal with life. She was pushed. People forced her to jump. But there are no versions to the truth. Just find the truth.”
“Paw-Paw?”
“See I…” A cough drew his shoulders.
“Here.” Rin grabbed the plastic cup with a lid and straw combo and held it to his mouth.
He shoved it away. “See I A,” he croaked.
Realization stole her breath f
or several seconds. “Yes, they are CIA.”
“Your mother,” he heaved a breath and hacked.
“My mother…what?” she whispered.
“Your mother was…” His pruned lips firmed in a smooth, almost straight, line. “She was too brave to kill herself and too smart to be forced to do it.”
She blinked. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Too much will get you hurt.”
“I need to know,” she begged.
“Not all of it. But some things,” he admitted. “Your father was a bad man. He didn’t force her, but their union,” he choked on the word, “wasn’t voluntary.” A fat tear, and then another, slipped from her grandfather’s eyes.
Rin muffled her disbelief.
“He deserved killing,” Cotton Lee, a staunch opponent of the death penalty, growled the words.
“You really don’t think she’s dead?”
His intellect glazed.
“Why would she pretend to be dead for so long? Why does the CIA want her dead?”
Rin swallowed past a knot, but before she could form another question, Cotton Lee’s gaze thinned to slits and his head shook back and forth. “My Cara. She’s no longer with me. My Vanessa’s gone too.”
And just like that, so was he. “Paw-Paw, can you tell me about Cara? Please, a little more?”
“Not much to hold on to these days,” he warbled.
She sandwiched his chilled hand between hers. “Hold on to me.”
6
The dried exoskeleton of a common housefly caught in a slender web wafted in the air current at the edge of the vent above her desk. In the three hours and fifty-five minutes that she’d watched it since lunch nothing about it had changed… While so many things about her life had hooked a u-ey and left her choking in a plume of dust and smoke.
The electronic chirp of her desk phone sent a ripple of shock through her. Rin looked at the time on her monitor and then at the phone. Damn those four minutes. She snatched the receiver.
“Department of Defense, Accounts Analysis, Darinda Lee.”
“Babe,” Nate’s upbeat voice filtered through the line.
Her impulse control sure was getting a workout today. Instead of slamming the phone in his ear—the only benefit of having a desk phone—she strangled the hard plastic. Anger churned, but she managed to breathe through the worst of it. “Hey. You never call me at work. Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, Zach’s team has a big game tomorrow night and he needs some help seeing the weakness in their defense. So, I’ll be home late tonight.”
“But you’re a football coach, not basketball.”
“Defense is defense, babe. And you’re talking to the champ.”
She only hoped he had a weakness she could exploit. Drilling an opponent’s weak spot was the only thing that had kept her alive during junior high and high school. His overinflated ego deserved her attention. “Doesn’t it take offense to win a game?”
“My offense is getting stronger.”
“I’ll hang out here. I have a pile of work to do.”
“See you tonight.”
“Whip ’em into shape,” Rin said because she hoped she wouldn’t see him tonight and she couldn’t bring herself to say so. Not that she had much of a choice but to see him.
Alive, angry, and confused beat dead by a marathon’s length.
She’d planned a mad dash to the Pentagon Library, but being in this place with eyes on her everywhere she went—even to pee—set her skin crawling. How easy would it be for Nate to get the footage and see her snooping? Besides, she knew where the best records of her mother’s accident were held, and they weren’t in a library.
Rin collected her briefcase and hot-footed it through the maze of cubicles, corridors, and robust security measures. When she exited the main gate on foot and made it to the bus stop in time to slip through the closing doors, the tension cramping her shoulders eased…because she left good-girl Rin at the corner.
A swipe of her SmarTrip card afforded her a back-row seat sandwiched between young black men. Her slouch of utter exhaustion mimicked their own I-don’t-give-a-shit-postures. They eyed her as though she’d been beamed from a hovering spacecraft. Rin bit the inside of her lip. “What? Never seen a white girl before?”
The guy on her left laughed.
The college athlete—she’d bet money—on her right planted his size 13 spit-shined white Dunks on the floor, leaned forward, rested his forearms on his knees, and turned his head until they were nearly eye level. “Never on the bus to our neighborhood.”
“I’m older than you. So, that makes it my neighborhood.”
“Callin’ bullshit,” the big guy boomed.
“Then you’ll get your Dunks dirty.” She smiled. “Graduated from Spingarn.”
He gave a hearty laugh.
“No shit?” his friend asked with wide eyes.
“None.” She swiped her hand level in the air.
“I’d have given my sac…” he coughed. “I really wanted to play there. My grandpa played for the green wave with Ollie Johnson,” the big guy said.
“All-American two years in a row,” Rin marveled.
“She knows her stuff,” Leftie nodded.
“What are your names?” she inquired.
“He’s Darius,” the baller said, “and I’m Antonio.”
“Nice to meet you, Darius and Antonio.” She shook their hands in turn.
“I’m guessing you’ve moved on to bigger and better things?” Darius asked. “Don’t hear tales of the elusive albino trottin’ round the neighborhood.”
“You know, things are better than they were when we were in junior high, but a lily white dime…” He grimaced. “No offense.” Rin grinned and shook her head. “But a lady like you could attract all kinds of unwanted attention, especially at night.” Antonio rubbed his expansive palm on his saggy jeans.
“Let’s just say I know my way around trouble,” Rin offered.
Darius’s brow tightened. “What’s your name?”
“Darinda, but you can call me Rin.”
“You’re old man Lee’s granddaughter?” Antonio’s head whiplashed and he looked at her through a sideways glare. “Nah. You’re too soft.”
“Yeah, she pretty much ran Trinidad back in the day,” Darius awed.
Rin rested her head against the glass and closed her eyes against the flood of memory.
“Fuck,” one of them breathed.
The bus rocked its way over potholes, jerked its way to stops, and puttered on time and again. On the fifth stop, the young men shifted and the canvas of backpacks rustled. Rin roused. “Gallaudet, huh?”
“It’s not Kentucky or Arizona, but here they pay me to play a game I love.” Antonio shrugged on his book bag.
“And I get to bag all the bitc…babes he doesn’t have time for,” Darius admitted. “It works out.”
She situated her briefcase and, when the bus stopped, stood with the guys. On the street, Antonio presented his fist. “Do me a favor?” he asked.
“Depends on the favor.” Rin tapped it with her own.
“Smart,” Darius said, offering his clenched hand for a goodbye.
“Get out of here before dark,” Antonio demanded.
“I’ll do my best,” Rin conceded, tapping Darius’s hand. “Y’all are good boys. Stay that way.”
The guys nodded. Rin bowed her head and turned away from the college entrance. She walked up the sidewalk, staring across the road at the spired steeple and American flag atop Chapel Hall until it disappeared behind an oak. On this thoroughfare the lush green trees and the cars parked beneath them lined the road. Home. A surprising smile tugged at her lips. When visiting as a little girl she raced her grandparents between trees. She’d cut innumerable swirling successions of cartwheels on their lawn.
Continuous blocks of row houses sat across from the college’s wrought-iron fence, their barred windows and scum-covered brick as uninviting as ever. A few of
the units boasted chic paint jobs. The bright red doors had the effect of a stop sign on thieves. It said, ‘Young professional with more money than sense. A one stop shop. Come on in.’ Kind of like vacant houses did.
Green wavy grass peeked from the second block’s street corner—the only large plot of grass for several square blocks. Her grandparents’ lawn and painted yellow house with smart black shutters began the next row of homes. Shriveled corpses of mums and some other kind of flowers cluttered window boxes on every damn window. Rin shuddered at the evidence that life left the place nearly a year ago.
Regret clouded her vision. One missed Sunday dinner was now a missed opportunity to tell her MeMe goodbye. She blinked the moisture away, kicked off her heels at the curb, and hopped over the low stone wall onto nature’s carpet. Her pale polish and even paler skin contrasted against the earth. The world she lived in was ruthless concrete. She appreciated the suppleness of nature, but it was far less predictable.
She trundled through the yard. At the carport in back she brushed her feet off and slapped on her shoes. With a turn of a key in the deadbolt the ancient door groaned open. Rin hurried through the kitchen, living room, and up the stairs, ignoring the pangs of the past and its photo displays. When she reached the landing the wood shrieked under her weight. Gooseflesh stampeded over her skin. Not at the sound, but at the three closed doors that greeted her.
May. She’d been here two and a half weeks ago to clear the mail from the door slot and check on the place. And she hadn’t closed the doors. Why would she? The masses of wood cut off circulating air, creating a veritable second-story oven. A temperature spike of twenty degrees should have baked the sweat from her pores. Instead, a chill clung.
“If someone’s in here, now’s your chance to get the fuck out,” she hollered.
Nothing stirred.
Rin unwound the briefcase from across her body and hung it on the knob at the top of the banister. Then she pulled off her shoes and set them next to the bag. Without pondering the stupidity of not running out of the house, she flung the first door wide. At the foot of her grandparents’ bed, scrawled in red block letters, lay the word QUESTION.
Versions (The Blacklist Series Book 1) Page 4