Lost in the Storm:

by Mark Stone

“It’s right here,” Peter said, pointing to a smallish two-story brick home at the end of a cul-de sac with his good arm.

  I balked a bit as I pulled to a stop in the driveway. It was a nice place, for sure. It was no Storm House though, not by a long shot.

  “This your weekend place or something?” I asked as Peter and I got out of the car. I tossed him the keys, which he caught deftly and stuffed them into his pocket.

  “You have a skewed view of my reality,” he said, turning and heading toward the door. Right before he reached the front step, he kicked over what I saw was a faux rock in the yard. Leaning down, he picked up a spare key.

  I shook my head. This seemed so strange to me; that my spoiled, silver-spoon-up-hisass brother would have a hide a key in his front yard.

  It was just so damned normal.

  “I left my keys at Father’s house last night,” he explained, perhaps reading the look on my face. “It’s not like I’ve had a chance to go and retrieve them.”

  He turned, headed up the steps and opened the door.

  “Come on then,” he said from the threshold. “Unless, of course, you’re waiting for some of the housewives to come jogging by so you can arrest them too.”

  There was scolding in his voice, but I ignored it. Instead, I steeled myself and prepared to enter the home of a man I’d hated since we were children.

  As I did, I found the place to be infuriatingly normal. Not at all what I’d expected Peter Storm’s place to be like.

  Though the house was clean, neat, and almost twice the size of the now smoking rubble I grew up in, there were no outward signs of excess. No chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, no priceless vases sitting on marble slabs in the living room, no butler ready to take my coat. This was just a house. There was a flat screen television on the wall, a decorative red rug on the floor, and a picture of Peter with a pretty blond woman sitting on a counter.

  “That’s your wife, I take it,” I said, pointing to the image.

  “Joanne,” he confirmed, nodding at the portrait. “We’ve been married almost ten years now.”

  “I didn’t see her at the funeral,” I said. “Or picking you up at the jailhouse.”

  “She’s tending to her own mother up in New York. The woman is quite ill, and I didn’t see the need of pulling her away from that.” He shook his head. “It’s not like there’s anything she could have done if she was here anyway.”

  I stayed silent, but that sentence told me almost everything I needed to know about their relationship. When my mom died, I leaned on my friends. I leaned on my grandfather and on Charlotte. Peter didn’t feel like he could do that with his own wife. Otherwise, he wouldn’t believe her to be so unnecessary in times of hardship.

  “Does she know about Isaac?” I asked, deciding to go right into the meat of things.

  He sighed heavily, turning to me. “What do you drink?”

  “Beer mostly,” I admitted.

  He grimaced. “What else do you drink?”

  “Whatever you’ve got,” I said, watching him move toward a mini bar and pull out a bottle of scotch and two glasses.

  “Neat?” he asked.

  “Of course,” I answered.

  He poured two glasses neat, and picked one up. “I’d bring you yours, but you kind of made it impossible for me to do that,” he said, motioning to his injured arm.

  “I’d apologize, but I don’t think you’d believe me,” I said, walking over and picking up the glass.

  “That’s because I don’t think you mean it,” he said, taking a swallow.

  “Then I guess we’re both right,” I answered, following suit. The scotch was dry and amazing as it trickled down my throat, the sweetest of burns as it coated my injured gut.

  I remembered, too late, I probably shouldn’t have been drinking right now. Rebecca Day had prescribed me more than a few medications, but what was done was done.

  “Are you going to answer the question?” I asked, setting the glass down.

  “I thought you said this wasn’t an interrogation,” he answered, finishing up his drink.

  “It’s not,” I said. “I just want to know what to tell my nephew the next time we speak.”

  “You’d have to ask his mother about that,” Peter admitted, grabbing the scotch and pouring another glass. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” I interjected, a flame of anger flaring up inside me.

  “Please,” he scoffed. “Is that what you think? You think I haven’t been watching you every bit as intently as you’ve been watching me? You don’t think Father compared everything I did to the goddamned lost son? To the other one?”

  Something strange, like sadness, bubbled up in me. “I didn’t think he talked about me at all, to be honest.”

  “He didn’t,” Peter answered. “But I could tell. Nothing I did was ever good enough for that man. Nothing I was could ever compare to what he thought he was supposed to have, and I’m sure a piece of him thought he could have had it with you. So yes, Dillon. I watched you as we grew up. I saw that fire in your eyes and all that nonsense. I even kept track of you in Chicago as you went off to fight the good fight.” He filled his glass. “You went to take down corrupt criminals, and I bet you saw our faces in every one of them.”

  “You’re giving yourself too much credit,” I answered.

  “Am I?” he asked. “You’re the one in my house, Dillon.” He took another drink. “Don’t get me wrong. I can understand why you’d feel that way. Looking up on that hill, I bet you think it would be nice to grow up the way I did, with everything handed to you.”

  “Don’t,” I warned, more anger piling up inside of me now. “Don’t give me that ‘poor little rich boy’ routine. We’ve all got problems. We’ve all got pain. I know that already. I get that your father didn’t love you enough and that he was hard on you and that maybe you wanted to escape and a whole bunch of other cliché crap that I don’t give a shit about. Grow up, Peter. That’s not what I came for. People are dropping dead. My grandfather’s house was burned to the ground, and you’re connected to all of it somehow. So I don’t care that your father was hard on you, and I sure as hell don’t care that he never gave a damn about me. I care about saving people. I care about making sure that what happened to Lionel and Rusty, what almost happened to my grandfather doesn’t happen again.” I took a deep breath. “And yes. I care about making sure your son doesn’t grow up the same way I did. Because let me tell you something, Peter. You’re not the only person in this room with pain to share.”

  “I tried to make it right,” he said after a long moment.

  “You asked her to have an abortion,” I reminded him.

  “I was a married man, Dillon. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. How about not screw somebody else,” I suggested. The thought of Charlotte and Peter together flashed through my mind and suddenly my stab wound wasn’t the cause of the worst pain in me anymore.

  “It was a mistake,” he said. “It was one night, one time. Joanne and I were going through a rough patch. We’d been trying to conceive for so long. The doctor had just told us that it wasn’t going to happen, that Joanne was incapable of having a child, which meant I was as well.” He shook his head. “Do you have any idea what sort of failure father would think I was if I couldn’t give him a grandchild?”

  “So you decided to knock somebody else up?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.

  “Of course not,” he answered. “I decided to drink my sorrows away at that hole in the wall bar where Charlotte works. “ He shook his head. “She hated me at first, said I was a horrible person and that I never treated you the right way.”

  A pang of recognition and hurt ran through me. They talked about me that night. Somehow, that made it worse.

  “I drank too much. She drank too much too and then, suddenly, she didn’t hate me anymore.” He shook his head. “Not until the next morning, and then I hated mys
elf right along with her. When she came to me and told me about her condition, I panicked. I wanted to save my marriage. I wanted to make it work. I didn’t want to be like father, throwing women away like they were old magazines. So I tried to pay her off. I told her I’d give her half a million dollars if she had the abortion.”

  I felt like I’d been slapped in the face. This was a kid, a person now. He had a face and a heart and a past. He had a future, dammit, and he wouldn’t have had any of that if Peter had his way. I thought about my mother, wondering if my father had ever given her a proposition like that. I was almost shaking as I responded. “You’re a son of a bitch,” I muttered. “Don’t you think I know that, but what choice did I have? I couldn’t leave my wife. I love Joanne, I made vows to her, and I owned a quarter of the company at that point. If she left me after I got another woman pregnant, our prenuptial agreement wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on. I’d be giving everything Father worked for away. I couldn’t do that.”

  “So you abandoned a child?” I asked, my jaw tightening. “I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?”

  “Don’t say that,” Peter answered, swallowing hard. “I tried to do what was right. I tried to be there. I tried to support him, but Charlotte hated me so much. She said she didn’t want her son anywhere around my family. The only person she’d even let near him was Angela’s daughter, and I think that was because she hated us as much as Charlotte did. She said all Storms were bad Storms.” He blinked and looked over to me. “All except one.”

  I felt conflicted. If Charlotte thought I was a good person, a good Storm, then why sleep with the other one? Why betray me like that? It was complicated, and it was sad.

  “You could have gone to the courts,” I suggested, refusing to let go of my anger and actually have to feel for Peter.

  “I could have,” he admitted. “But-but what if she was right? What if the boy was better off without me, without us? You didn’t have any of that, and look at you. You’re successful. You’re honest. You’re good, Dillon. You’re an honest to God good Storm.” He looked to the floor. “I started to think that maybe that was why Joanne couldn’t have children, because they would have to be raised the way I was, in this family. Maybe God didn’t want that again.”

  I blinked and took another swallow of scotch. Meds be damned. I didn’t know what to say. So I did the only logical thing I could and moved on to pressing matters.

  “Our father listed me as his next of kin,” I said, thinking back to what Rebecca told me. “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he was angry with me,” Peter answered instantly. “That shrew of a wife he had was having an affair with the pool boy.” He shook his head. “Probably a dozen other people too. I’d known about it for years, but I just finally got the proof. When I confronted him with it, he got upset. He told me I was making it up and that I didn’t want him to be happy. He said I was a failure and he’d find someone better to leave his life’s work too. He had told me this before, of course. It had practically become a running theme with us. He would get angry with me and then threaten to disinherit me.” Peter shrugged. “He got angry with Angela too, but then he forgave her. I went back to him, and it was like he had forgotten about the whole thing. That was when I started to believe he might be losing it. The fact that he went so far as to actually make you ‘next of kin’ this time only served to prove that.”

  A knock came on the door, and Peter eyed it wearily. “That’s probably my lawyer, here to come up with a convenient reason to show you out. Please let him in. I need to get changed.”

  He finished off his second drink and disappeared off into the bedroom.

  I walked to the door, twisting the handle and pulling it open.

  As if speaking of the devil would make him appear, Angela stood in front of me, dressed in bright colors with sunglasses in her tall hair.

  “I was expecting the other brother, but I’m not going to complain,” she said, eyeing me up and down, while chomping on gum. Now that I knew about her extracurricular activities, it was hard for me to look at her as a grieving widow, not that she was making much an effort to come off as one.

  “He’s getting changed. Would you like to come in and wait?” I asked, moving to the side and making room for her.

  “Not on your life, handsome,” she said, smiling at me. “He left a message for me to meet him here at seven sharp, and I don’t wait around for anyone, much less someone I didn’t want to see in the first place.” She looked around. “Besides, bad weather is heading in. I need to get home.” I remembered the storm my grandfather had warned me about.

  As if on cue, a gust of wind plowed into us. I smelled a whiff of Angela’s perfume as it wafted toward me and I froze. I remembered it instantly. It was the same honey and lavender scent that was all over the man who tackled and stabbed me last night.

  “That smell,” I muttered.

  “Yeah,” she grinned. “I mix it myself. It’s a little side project of mine. Isn’t it amazing.?” She turned. “Well, I have to run, but I’ll be at home if you need a warm place to hide out from the weather.”

  She winked at me and then walked away.

  23

  I watched as Angela got into her car and drove off, heading down the street and closer toward the ever darkening skyline.

  My mind went into overdrive.

  The man who attacked me smelled just like her, just like a perfume she purported to have made herself, a perfume no one else would have access to.

  “You’re still here?” Peter said, walking into the room, dressed in a fresh suit with his hair neatly slicked back. “I’d have figured my lawyer would have found six different ways to get you to leave by now. Where is the bloodsucker anyway?” he asked, looking around.

  “That wasn’t your lawyer,” I said, swallowing hard and trying to piece everything together. “It was Angela. She said you sent her a message asking to meet her here today.”

  “To meet her?” Peter replied. “Please. I barely wanted her there last night. If not for the fact that father insisted on having an Irish wake in a house she technically still owns, I’d have been satisfied never to see the woman again for the rest of my life.”

  An Irish wake. That explained the seemingly ill-timed party Peter was having when we brought him in. It didn’t explain why she came here though. If Peter was telling the truth about not sending her a message to meet with him (and I believed he was), then why would she come? She was obviously connected to the man who stabbed me last night, that much was clear, but if she was responsible for all of this, then why change her pattern now? Sure, she’d have fit the bill at the hotel. Though the security cameras had been disabled during the night of his murder, we knew that the man likely wasn’t afraid of the person who killed him; a person who would have a copy of the key card to get into the room in the first place. We knew Peter had one. Was it really such a far stretch to believe he could get one too?

  Even if that were the case, she obviously sent someone to get me at Charlotte’s that night, and I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that she had a hand in starting that fire.

  It didn’t make sense. Peter hated her, and she knew it. If she wanted to kill him, why would she do it herself? Wouldn’t he be on guard with her, reserved and hostile? It would be easier to use one of her cronies, and it certainly would be less dangerous. This community was active. Undoubtedly people would see her come into it. Hell, there was a security guard for God’s sake. I mean, he didn’t seem very aware of who was in a car, but he obviously recognized them when they entered and exited frequently.

  A souring thought hit me. What if that was the point? What if the point wasn’t for Peter to be killed at all? What if the point was for Angela to be seen coming to visit him?

  I looked over at the far wall. Alongside a few paintings and photographs was a framed letter.

  I walked over to it, reading its contents.

  To my son and his wife,

 
May you continue the legacy of the great Storm family and be blessed with many legitimate heirs. This house is my gift to you on the day of your wedding.

  Your father.

  That was my father’s handwriting? I felt the letter in my pocket.

  My God. It all made sense.

  Frantically, I pulled out the letter I had been keeping in my dash, but moved into these pants and opened it up.

  “What is that?” Peter asked, looking me over. “Is that a warrant? Please tell me you’re not arresting me again?” He shook his head. “I should have listened to that damned lawyer.”

  “It’s not a warrant,” I said. “It’s a letter I received the other day. It’s the reason I’m here.”

  “What sort of letter?” Peter asked, his interest obviously stoked.

  “One from our father,” I said, and watched as his eyes went wide. “It basically says that, if I’m reading this, he’s dead. He couldn’t tell me how proud of me he was in life, but he hopes he can in death. He said he gave me nothing and he wasn’t leaving me anything in the will. He says that’s the greatest gift he could ever give me and he hopes I can find it in my heart to at least attend his funeral.” I swallowed hard. “Does that sound like your father?”

  Peter looked up at me, his eyes widening ever further. “What’s going on here, Dillon?”

  “Just answer the question, Peter,” I commanded. “You said he never talked about me except to use my presence as a stick to beat you with. Do you think he would have sent me this letter? Do you think he would have cared enough to have me at his funeral?”

  Peter looked over at me, blinking and breathing heavy. “I’m not trying to hurt you when I say this, but no. I don’t think he cared about you one iota.”

  A pang of old sadness, of ancient longing grabbed at me again, but I batted it away. I didn’t need my father’s approval when I was a kid and I sure as hell didn’t need it now.

  “Right,” I said, nodding firmly. “After you told me what it was like to live with him, that doesn’t surprise me. So I have one more question for you.” I said, handing him the written letter. “That’s not his handwriting either, is it?”