by Jenna Rae
Two weeks before Tori’s birthday, the harbormaster called Brenda to tell her Bernice was ready and berthed. She left work early and stopped by to check on it. She grinned, seeing the dark, beautiful mahogany and crisp white paint and cheery Moroccan bedding and curtains she’d chosen to suit Tori’s tastes. She made sure everything was perfect for the coming surprise. Then she went to the grocery store for steaks, flowers, and dessert before she headed home for the smaller surprise of a special dinner.
That was when she walked in and caught Tori cheating.
She had yet to go back to Green Hand Marina. Though she knew it was unreasonable to do so, she still tied the two things together. Boating and cheating, cheating and boating. Would they always feel inextricably linked in her mind? She hoped not. That particular conflation could make living in a coastal town miserable.
After she caught Tori en flagrante, she sank into despair and self-pity. Andi offered support and kindness and dragged her to a grief-group meeting, where they listened to participants talk about the deaths of their loved ones. Within minutes Brenda was restless and wanted to leave.
“Stay. It might help you get some perspective,” said Andi, her voice gentle. Ashamed, Brenda agreed.
The group’s facilitator, an earnest woman in her twenties, tapped her forehead and nodded sagely as she looked around the room. As she moved, her cluster of necklaces clinked and tinkled. “Open your third eye,” she said, her voice high and thin. “Move beyond your emotions, your physicality, your grounding in the now. Transcend. Journey above what you can see and feel. Close your lower eyes and open up as a spiritual seer. Go on, close your eyes and access truth. Don’t judge, don’t try to control what is, just accept it. Acceptance, my friends, acceptance.”
Brenda had shot a sardonic glance at Andi, who glared at her and then lowered her lids. Finally, to avoid being called out, she closed her eyes. She felt foolish and resentful and silly, but she tapped her forehead. A wave of dizziness came over her.
Without perseverating about it, she decided to actually follow instructions. Within seconds, she felt her breathing deepen and her shoulders relax. The decade she’d spent with Tori came rushing back to her, a diaspora of memories. She felt lifted and weightless and, for the first time in weeks, calm. She felt her body as a thing separate from her mind, had a moment of formlessness, panicked and snapped her eyes open. The facilitator—Penny? Patty? Perri?—had been watching with a placid but attentive expression, so Brenda blinked them closed. The weight of her bitterness and hurt and guilt and anger felt like outsiders instead of elemental components of her being, and the relief of this was so great she sank into it and sighed in surprising, fleeting joy.
Then she was back inside her normal self and again felt heavy with feelings. She worked to regain that moment of peace but could only feel the slightest easing. It was still an improvement, she noted. After a minute or two, the young group leader had summoned them back into the real world in the gray little room in the community-center basement. As Andi and Brenda walked out, she felt Andi’s gaze on her.
“What?”
Andi shrugged and smiled. “You look…I don’t know, more like yourself than you did an hour ago.”
“Thank you,” Brenda said. “I only went to humor you, but it was a gift. You’ve given me countless gifts. I don’t even think you realize how many. You are the truest friend I’ve ever had. Thank you.”
Andi had nodded and turned away, trying to hide her tears, before elbowing Brenda and suggesting they go out for burgers.
Though Brenda never went back to the group, feeling like an intruder because her loved one had left her but was very much alive and well, the moment stayed with her. She knew it was possible to step outside her feelings and perceptions, and that felt like a safety valve she could at least try to rediscover. That was exactly what she needed to do now.
“Acceptance.” She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. She felt more clearheaded but nowhere near as detached from her emotions as she wanted to be. Maybe she needed to accept not always being able to achieve peace.
She went by Peterson’s house again, debating the advisability of breaking in to check his place for clues. It suddenly struck her as odd that they’d never exchanged house keys. After some vigorous knocking and bell ringing, she decided to try another approach.
“Okay, Peterson, if you have an emergency key, where do you keep it? Hmm?”
She looked up first because Peterson knew that most people would check low before high. There were a few obvious places. She found nothing in the homemade birdhouse tucked into one of the eaves. The rough box was a gift given to him long ago by his younger daughter, years before his girls stopped speaking to him. She retrieved a screwdriver from her glove box and took off the large number plate near the garage door, but that was a bust too. Down low were several potted plants, the requisite briar roses in a neatly trimmed hedge, a series of solar-powered path lights, and a small stone frog. She checked each of these, though they seemed too obvious for his tastes.
She closed her eyes. He was fastidious, detail-oriented, and smart. He’d been a cop for thirty years and like so many police officers, a budding juvenile delinquent before that. He was very good at outthinking criminals. So where, if at all, would he hide a key?
If he had an emergency key, he didn’t hide it right by the front door. She walked around the accessible front half of the house, searching along the fence line under his neatly trimmed boxwoods and carefully pruned briar roses and Japanese maples. She found nothing but a few ladybugs and a praying mantis. Finally she gave up. She would give it a little more time. Back at the car, she sat and rubbed her tight forehead.
Something nagged at her and she wasn’t sure how to determine what that something was. The department’s brass, the powerful elite, the humble extortion victims, Briarwood Watchdogs, Dan Miller… There was something there, right behind the veil of unknowns. Everywhere she went in Briarwood, she saw Miller’s fingerprints. She felt there must be some insight, some critical piece of information she should have seen already and had somehow missed.
She tapped out an email to Darius Brown, apologizing for making yet another request of him and asking him if he’d had a chance to take a peek at Dan Miller and Briarwood Watchdogs. What exactly she was asking, she wasn’t even sure, but the security company and its CEO seemed to have a finger in every pie in town.
She kept thinking of what Andi said, something about how Watchdogs had cameras all over the city but they had never noticed Donnelly walking around with bags of cash after leaving the small businesses on the south end of town.
She slid her phone into her pocket and sat in her car in front of Peterson’s empty house. She wished she could rewind the last several years. There were many, many things she would do differently. Would she start up with Tori all over again, knowing how it would turn out? She rubbed her forehead again. Yes, she would. Given a second chance, she’d try to do a better job of making sure Tori actually felt that love instead of looking elsewhere for it. The ugly end of their relationship didn’t erase the things she valued about Tori or about what they’d shared.
However much Briarwood had changed in the last twenty years, she wouldn’t give up on her swollen little city either. It was, for those who could afford its safer sections, a nice place to live. People worked and paid their taxes and raised their kids and took care of their yards and went to dance recitals and soccer games and gave money to charity and did all the stuff decent people everywhere did. Sure, Briarwood had growing pains, but didn’t every expanding city?
“Nobody’s all angel, kid, and nobody’s all asshole.”
She heard herself mutter the words in a startlingly good imitation of her mom’s voice. She flipped down the visor and stared at her reflection in the small mirror. The sun, dropping slowly behind her, made her distorted image impossible to see, and she raised the visor again. Where inside Brenda had her mother’s voice come from? Was it all the weird costuming
that made her feel haunted today?
She tried to push her personal feelings aside. For all her posturing, her mom had been an idealist, ever disappointed in the vagaries of the people around her. Over time, she’d traded her pie-eyed optimism for at least the posture of cynicism but had been constitutionally incapable of actually addressing reality.
When Brenda had leaned in to light Teresa Fortune’s cigarette and smelled the combination of smoke and raunchy perfume and cheap makeup, she’d felt a wave of déjà vu. Now she understood why. She’d felt stiff, courtly, a little embarrassed and a little put off.
It was a familiar cocktail of reactions. She was around five when her mom taught her to light cigarettes and mix drinks. For months, her mom joked to everyone in the Oroville trailer park about how great it was, having her own personal bartender.
Her mom’s then-boyfriend, Mike something, laughed at her mom’s little joke in the less-than-nice tone that characterized most of his utterances. Then he snapped his fingers at Brenda and pointed at the fridge, explaining he wanted her to fetch him a beer whenever he snapped his fingers. She looked at her mother, who shrugged and averted her gaze with a nervous laugh. Brenda bristled but obeyed. When she brought Mike the cold, sweating can, he grabbed her lower lip and told her to stop pouting. She took a deep breath and waited for him to lose interest, but her cheeks burned and she was hot with anger.
Once the beer wasn’t cold enough because the electricity had been turned off that morning. Mike had already been upset about not being able to watch television. When she brought him a lukewarm beer, he grabbed her arm and wrenched it behind her back.
“You fuckin’ with me, baby bitch? Huh?”
“The power’s out,” she said through clenched teeth. “The fridge runs on power.”
Her mom cackled, “You need my little girl to explain any other shit, Mikey? She knows how to tell time and tie her shoes too. Maybe she could tutor you.”
Then the two adults went at it, screaming and throwing things. She didn’t stick around to see how it all turned out, because she knew how it all turned out and didn’t need to see any more of that. She lit out for the woods and stayed there until almost dawn the next morning, when she was sure they’d both be asleep.
Weeks later, just after her forgotten sixth birthday and a truckload of fetched beers, she figured out what to do about Mike.
She snuck out early in the morning with a garbage bag full of necessities that she hid under a bush in the heavily wooded hillside behind the trailer park. She unlocked the front door and screen, cleared a path through the piles of junk in the living room and waited. When it was time, she got ready and went to school as usual. That afternoon, she came home and again waited.
When at sundown Mike’s snapping fingers summoned her for the third time, she obediently got the beer from the refrigerator. She carried it over, stood behind the sofa and opened the beer.
The adults were watching television, paying her little mind. Her mom’s Southern Comfort on the rocks dripped condensation onto the worn corduroy of the sofa. Mike was fondling her mom’s upper thigh, pushing up her short shorts and orating about the stupidity of the people on the news. Brenda stood behind the couch and stared down at Mike’s lank, greasy, thinning hair. She took a deep breath and poured the entire beer on his head.
Then she ran as fast as her skinny legs could take her out of the trailer’s front door, up the hill and into the woods, far past where a wet, clumsy, overweight trucker could easily climb. She hunkered down in a remote spot fifty yards up, and there she camped for three days. She didn’t dare show her face until she saw Mike’s pickup truck, weighed down by his broken motorcycle and the plastic garbage bags that served as his luggage, jounce out of the trailer park’s entrance on the dusty dirt road while her mother screamed curses at him from the front door.
Even at that age she wasn’t naïve enough to think her mom kicked Mike out over her, but by then she already knew the signs of an impending breakup and had chosen her timing carefully. Her mom got very quiet right before she picked a fight with the latest loser to darken her door and stink up her sheets. Later, Brenda thought Mike hadn’t even been that bad. He’d never tried to get in her pants or really beaten her. He’d been a jerk, but hardly the worst jerk. It was only as an adult she’d realized the thing that had gotten her riled up about Mike was his need to humiliate her.
Just as Mike had, her mom’s boyfriends invariably failed to realize she was tired of them and continued to bumble along in blissful ignorance until the day she picked a fight and threw them out or fled with her daughter in tow. Mike had been on his way out for weeks, and Brenda’s decampment had only been a useful excuse to throw out the tiresome paramour.
Her mom had been wrong about a lot, but about one thing she’d been right: things were almost never a simple matter of good versus bad. Mike was a Vietnam veteran, a hero with a few medals stored carefully in a shoebox that ended up in a plastic bag in the back of his truck. Peterson was an alcoholic who served his community with dedication and skill. Tori was a lying cheat and a crusader for justice. Briarwood was a complicated ecosystem, just like anywhere else. A lot of people made a lot of mistakes, often because they didn’t know any better or because they’d been squeezed on too much to think clearly. That didn’t make them bad people. The folks in Briarwood were her people, for better or worse, and she wouldn’t give them up even if she could.
And Tori? She rested her head against the back of the seat. She felt her mouth smiling even as tears pushed against the corners of her tightly closed eyes and made her cheap mascara even slimier and stickier.
She was snapped from her musing by a sound she’d heard before: that engine, that unfamiliar car engine she’d heard in front of her house. She whipped around and forced her streaming, burning eyes open so she could see the mystery vehicle, but in the sunset glare she saw nothing.
Banging awkwardly out of the low-slung Caliber, she darted on foot toward the nearest intersection, six houses away. Traffic was light even on the more traveled thoroughfare of Elmhurst Avenue, but of the seven cars heading south and the five heading north, four were light sedans.
Any one of them could have been the car in question, which could have turned off Elmhurst in the frustratingly long time it had taken Brenda to run to the intersection. She turned around and glanced down Peterson’s street, struck by the fact his house was the only one with no Briarwood Watchdogs sign in front of it. Shaking off the irrelevant detail, she snorted in irritation.
“I’m an idiot.”
Stalking back to the Caliber, she shook her head. She’d been blinded by her sentimental attachments for too long. She’d been treating the department and the city like old friends who deserved the benefit of the doubt. Wasn’t that exactly the kind of cronyism that led to soft corruption, which led to hard corruption? She was disgusted by her inadequacy and let her screeching tires communicate that disgust to the disinterested universe.
She drove home and paced the living room for several minutes before settling in at the kitchen table to write down her new plan of action. An hour later, she put down the pen and took a deep breath. Examining her strategy, she was struck by how much cooler her head was now she’d detached from the situation emotionally. How long since she’d been clearheaded like this? How long since she’d looked at things through her third eye? The grief group? She’d become sloppy, careless, arrogant in the way of her early years and too caught up in her own perceptions and assumptions to see the real edges and shapes of things.
She was yanked out of her self-castigation by a call from a number she didn’t immediately recognize. Her internal hard drive whirred as she tried to make the connection.
She shook her head, unable at first to conjure an image to put with the name. Shay Sheraton. Tami Sheraton’s sister. She wanted to meet with Brenda in person to talk about something. Not sure what she was walking into but unwilling to rebuff the only Sheraton who’d called her back, Brenda agreed to mee
t the sister for dinner.
An Internet search of Shay Sheraton gave her a preview of what face to scan for, and she studied the digitized image. The pretty, lightly freckled woman in a black suit was apparently some kind of attorney. She had red hair with lighter blond highlights. Staring down at the screen, Brenda studied the bright, dark eyes and smiling mouth of Tami Sheraton’s sister with some surprise at how she both resembled her late sibling and did not.
Brenda showered and changed into a pair of sedate gray slacks, sleek loafers and silver-blue blouse. Her garish hair made her roll her eyes, but she slicked on tinted lip balm and her simplest jewelry. She eyed her reflection in her bronze-framed bathroom mirror with some dismay. She looked old, tired, and pale. She grimaced at her image, wondering why she even cared what she looked like. As long as she presented as professional and appropriate, that was all that mattered, she reminded herself.
She strapped on her weapon and squared her shoulders. Meeting Shay Sheraton for dinner was about paying her respects and finding out if the slain officer had confided in her big sister about Donnelly or any other suspicions she might have had. But the flash of attraction she’d felt seeing the woman’s photo had unsettled her. It had made her feel for a moment as though she was heading out for a date.
She rolled her eyes at herself and strode out to the parking lot, queasy as a first-year deckhand. She’d find out soon enough whether this dinner would be an informal wake, a trial by verbal fire, or a potentially deadly shootout.
Chapter Eight
Dave’s Bistro was crowded despite the early hour, and Brenda scanned the crowd. She smiled to see that, and though she’d shown up fifteen minutes ahead of their five o’clock dinner, she wasn’t first to arrive.
Shay Sheraton was already seated at the center table in what locals referred to as the crow’s nest, a five-table enclave up a short flight of stairs. It was a little quieter, a bit away from the fray. Each cosseted diner had a perfectly framed view of the sun’s evening rays as they frosted picturesque Briarwood Harbor. To the south sat the boardwalk, to the north Green Hand, and ahead was the huge, city-run marina that housed most of the sailboats and smaller cruisers enjoyed by both locals and tourists.