by Earl Emerson
After we regroup, Echo says, “I’ve been meaning to tell you how sorry I am about your brother. I’ve been thinking about you a lot, because I know it must be horrid for you to lose your brother and his girlfriend like that. I can’t even imagine.”
“Thanks, Echo.” Six weeks ago—is it six weeks already?—Shelby Junior crashed his Porsche. It still breaks me up to think about it. Nobody knows for sure how it happened. Middle of the night on the twisties on Mercer Island. Raining. New car. Tires not broken in yet. Probably showing off for Melissa. They didn’t even find the wreckage until late in the afternoon of the next day. The car upside down in a ravine, both of them with broken necks. And now Mom is beside herself and Dad’s immersed himself in work. Kendra’s been in shock since it happened. I guess Trey has been some comfort to her, which means the little bastard’s good for that, even if he’s good for nothing else.
We’re headed for the old gardener’s cottage in one of the gullies on the island, almost invisible until you’re right up on it. For years I suspected the cottage was the old man’s hidey-hole, where he parked his lovelies so Mother wouldn’t find evidence when she came out to the island. Shelby Junior used it for the same thing and used to call it the sex shack.
We crest a rise in the road, and the moon comes out so we can see the sweep of the rutted Jeep road as it sags down to the cottage, and I think to myself, if they’re planning a surprise, they’ve messed things up because they left the lights on in the cottage.
“We need to be quiet,” Echo says.
“Okay,” I say, playing along.
As we get close, Echo stops me by the old chopper pad and says, “Wait here.” And then it’s the dangdest thing, because she doesn’t knock at the door or walk in the way you think she might, but creeps up alongside the wall where the light is spilling out of the main room and peeks in the window. I should never have come out here in the middle of the night with her.
She stares through the window, and then she turns and runs back through the broken yard and bumbles headlong into my arms. I straighten her up and she clings to me, her head against my chest, and I realize she’s bawling like a baby. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. You and I have to leave this place. Forget I ever brought you here. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean…”
“Wait here,” I tell her.
“No,” she says, grasping at me. “Don’t go. This was a mistake. I wanted you to like me. I thought…Please don’t go over there.”
Her desperation only fuels my desire to see what she’s talking about. I shake her off and creep up through the overgrown yard. There’s some music in the cottage, which explains why they didn’t hear us talking outside. Two lamps are lit. There is a couch in the living room, and there are two people on the couch. A man and a woman. The first is my little brother, Trey. The second is the woman everybody knows I’m going to marry, India. They’re naked.
I watch for a while, perhaps too long, and then I blunder back through the dark, where Echo collapses against my chest again, and together the two of us walk off a ways in the dark and fall to the earth, sitting side by side in shock. Echo continues to weep while I turn my head away so she cannot see the look on my face. Trey, you little black bastard.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” Echo says. “I thought…”
“You must have known something was going on or you wouldn’t have brought me out here.”
“I didn’t think it was this.”
“Has it been going on all summer?”
“I don’t know. They’ve been…flirting. I thought they were…like, just making out.”
“They’re making out, all right.”
“I’m sorry, Stone. I really am.”
We sit for ten minutes, and then the lights go off in the cabin, and a few moments later India comes walking along the path and passes not fifteen feet in front of us, walking toward the big house. Trey is nowhere to be seen until I turn and spot him heading in the other direction, a tall shadow in the moonlight. He makes for the bluffs along the path that zigzags down to the beach.
I head for the cottage with an insatiable need to see evidence: the rumpled couch, the drinking glasses, whatever.
“Where are you going?” Echo asks. “Don’t go. Don’t leave me. I’m scared.”
I stop and she clings to me, her budding breasts against my chest. She folds her head against my chest, but I push her away and walk off. I’ve never been this angry in my life. I have no idea what I’m going to do. She follows, clasping my arm, and I keep thinking the little fool is in love with me. The wrong sister is in love with me. She brought me out here thinking we’d find India and Trey playing spin the bottle or some other innocuous game, thinking I’d see how India doesn’t deserve me, and then like magic I’d be in love with her instead. What a little idiot. I could kill her for this.
17. THE FUNNIEST THING EVER
TREY>
There are times when I can be an unapologetic jerk. It doesn’t help that my best friend thinks it’s funny when I disgrace myself, or that he encourages it by cooking up stupid stunts that for some reason I feel compelled to execute. Nor does it help when he reenacts them to endless gales of laughter from my brother, Johnny, milking the entertainment value out of them for months afterward. It almost makes the personal humiliation I suffer worthwhile, as if it’s somehow more honorable and hilarious to be a jerk than to be otherwise, and of course that contrarian attitude appeals to my basic nature, which is part of the reason Rumble is my best friend. Like me, Rumble spends a lot of his life cutting against the grain.
Advice is only that, advice, and nobody twisted my arm to take Rumble’s. I certainly don’t act on any of his investment suggestions, which if I had, would have pushed me to the brink of insolvency more than once.
There was no reason to follow Rumble’s suggestion and take Estevez to a formal ball on a motorcycle. Maybe in the back of my mind I was nervous about seeing so many people from my past, stressed at the prospect of coming face-to-face with the family that raised me and then banished me. I’d read in the paper that they’d all be there. When it came to the family, I never really knew how deep my feelings ran, because I’d been doing my best to bury them for the better part of two decades. You’d think I’d have the common sense to make the evening perfect for the woman I was escorting, so that I would have at least one ally when all the pitchforks were pointed in my direction, but when in trouble, I try always to alienate everybody around me equally. It probably has something to do with being ditched by virtually everybody I was related to in one fell swoop.
Rumble worked the same shift I did, C, but he’d been on disability with a neck injury since the Z Club and hadn’t been back to work yet. Although he hadn’t fought the fire, he’d been there the next morning, and the Z Club had shaken him like nothing else ever had—seeing those bodies lined up on the sidewalk, knowing we’d lost a firefighter inside. The fire had broken the spine of his ambition in a way I suspected could never be fully mended. My silent prediction was that he was more or less finished in operations, that he would grab one of the office jobs the department offered. He wouldn’t do it right away, because he wouldn’t want people making the connection between the Z Club and his taking a desk job, but sooner or later he would do it.
“A woman like that,” he said. “On TV all the time. Thinks she’s hot shit. There’s no way she’s not playin’ you. You told me yourself you didn’t want to go to the ball. Why are you going? ’Cause she’s leading you around by the nose. You two ever get married, you’ll be wearing skirts and vacuuming the house.”
“We’re not getting married. I’m taking her to one function, and after that I’ll never see her again socially. Trust me on this.”
“She’s a fine-looking woman. You told me that your own-self.”
“Yeah, well, looks aren’t everything. She lied to me. She roped me into this bullshit investigation without asking me first. And she’s got a tongue that’s sharper than a snake�
�s fang. I can live without all of that.”
“Woman like that, the only thing for you to do is put her in her place at the beginning. Yeah. Pick her up on the hog. Pretend that’s how you pick up all your dates. Don’t even let her know you got that Infiniti.” Rumble almost rolled out of the easy chair in my basement laughing. He laughed, and so did Johnny, and in the end so did I, the three of us convincing ourselves that the funniest sight ever seen on the streets of Seattle would be Jamie Estevez riding the back of a hog in a formal gown while I motored along in my tux.
I went along with Rumble’s gag, believing all along I’d pick her up in my car, that there was no way I’d go over on the Harley; yet for some insane reason on Saturday evening when it came time to fetch her, I went out to the garage and fired up the Harley. God only knows what I was thinking. Or if I was thinking.
18. CINDERELLA RIDES A HOG
JAMIE ESTEVEZ>
For a moment I considered the possibility that he was drunk and was going to kill us both showing off. Trey was straddling the bike, cranking the throttle as we spoke, drowning out my words with the roar of the engine so that I had to repeat myself, peering at me through dark glasses he refused to take off, his helmet resembling a Nazi tank commander lid. I was angry for a few moments, too, and then I began to see the dark humor in it. It was a nice night, and the trip wouldn’t be more than two miles, and I liked bikes, something he couldn’t possibly have anticipated. In another world, where he didn’t abhor me so much, it might even turn out to be a story we would tell our grandchildren. Our grandchildren. What a laugh. This man detested me. If I didn’t know it before tonight, I certainly knew it now.
I crossed my arms and stared at him, waiting for him to shut the bike off so we could hear each other. Under my palm I could feel my heart beating, and for a couple of seconds I feared he was going to leave the motorcycle running and wait me out over the earthquake of noise, but suddenly the street was bathed in silence.
“Thought it would be an adventure for you,” he said. “You ever ride a bike before?”
“Of course.”
“Like this one?”
“Why? Did it used to be a pumpkin or something?”
“Pumpkin? That would make you Cinderella. What does that make me as your driver? A rat?”
“I believe the coachmen were mice.”
“Oh, I’m a coachman now?”
“I didn’t say that. I said mouse.”
“I guess I’m dressed like a coachman.”
“On the other hand, I think maybe they were rats.” He stared at me, apparently unable to come up with another riposte. “Are you drunk? Because if you’ve been drinking, I’ll ride up front and you can take the sissy seat.”
“Like you could handle this…”
“Care to make a wager on it?”
“No way I’m letting you kill yourself trying to prove a point. You’d really ride it, wouldn’t you?”
“Try me.”
“I haven’t had any alcohol in twenty-four hours.”
“So where’s my helmet?”
“Beans. Forgot the spare. I could go home and get it, but by the time I got back to ride you over there, we’d be late. Tell you what? You take a cab. I’ll meet you there.”
“I’ll tell you what. You go home and get the helmet, and I’ll wait here.”
He hadn’t been expecting an argument, had apparently thought I would turn down the bike ride so we would arrive at the ball separately. It was hard to believe he could be this rude and not be drunk. “You could take a cab. I’ll pay.”
“Not after you’ve offered me a ride.”
“Your problem is you want to run everything.”
“Look who’s talking. I’m not the one picking up his date for a black-tie ball on a motorcycle.”
“I would have called and warned you, except I lost your number.”
“Hardly possible since it was written on the same piece of paper as my address.”
He stared at me and I stared back, and I could tell he was going to brave this out, even though somewhere behind those black riding glasses he had to be embarrassed by the enormity of his faux pas as well as the crudeness of his attempt at sabotaging the evening.
“Tell you what,” I said. “You wait here.”
“You going to sneak out back and call a cab?” he asked. “Leave me in the lurch?”
“Why? Is that what you would do?”
I gave him my most withering look and went upstairs, picked out an old Bell helmet that was more spacious than my new one, then carefully worked my hair into it in a manner that would do the least damage. I threw a brush and a can of hair spray into my purse for repairs, and when I emerged onto Lenora Street wearing heels, a formal dress with wrap, and a motorcycle helmet, Trey Brown looked astounded. It was almost worth the discomfort to see the look on his face. He hadn’t been expecting me to return, and he certainly hadn’t been expecting me in a helmet.
We attracted a fair amount of attention on the streets of Seattle, a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a formal dress riding a chromed Harley-Davidson with an engine that sounded like bursts of cannon fire.
As we rode, I hugged him from behind—his torso as hard and knotty as a tree—and realized that no matter what my brain was telling me about this man, my insides were telling me something else. Like I said before, I have a long and sad history of falling for bad boys, and in spite of my best intentions, it was beginning to look as if Trey Brown might be next in line.
As we drove from the north end of downtown to the Mikimoto Mansion on Capitol Hill, I reviewed what I’d learned about Trey during the past eight hours. Earlier that day at KIRO, I ran into a researcher named Ferdie Miller, who’d heard about the project I was working on and told me Trey Brown had been a linebacker who played for the Huskies seventeen years ago.
“Nice kid,” Ferdie said. “Quiet. One of the fiercest competitors I’ve ever seen. You see a lot of guys play hard and hit hard, but you only see a few who you think are actually trying to kill the opponent. During his sophomore and junior years for the Huskies, he devastated the opposing teams, one of the best linebackers ever in college football—like he’d stepped right out of the pros and was out here picking off these kids for the fun of it. If he hadn’t blown out his knee, he would have been a top draft pick. Whenever he got pulled out of a game, you could hear an audible sigh of relief on the other bench. I saw him once…well, I’m getting off on a tangent here.”
“You know anything about his family?”
“I know his last year in high school he was living with his coach. I gathered he’d been in some sort of trouble.”
“Did you know his last name used to be Carmichael?”
“All I know is he came out of nowhere in the Central Area and played at the U.”
A computer search brought up torrents of information about the Carmichael empire, about various business dealings over the past thirty years, but almost nothing on a lost son named Trey. There were a couple of articles mentioning Shelby Junior, who died in a car accident nineteen years ago, listings of the surviving siblings as Stone, Trey, and Kendra, but no mention after that of a Trey Carmichael in any of the articles about the family. I wondered if Trey’s exclusion didn’t have something to do with the car accident that killed Shelby Junior. I had a feeling I would find out tonight.
Built in 1903, the Mikimoto Mansion had once belonged to one of Seattle’s founding families but ten years ago had been purchased by a wealthy Japanese businessman, who had restored it to its former grandeur and renamed it after his own family. Used often for business and community events, it was situated on John Street, sitting like a maiden aunt at a high school graduation in the middle of a block of high-rise condos, a gargantuan Victorian even by today’s standards.
Trey rode across the sidewalk, scattering the parking attendants like chickens, and then when one of the attendants put his hand out for the keys, Trey slipped them into his jacket pocket, grinned, and said, “I
n your dreams.”
“That was fun,” I said as we dismounted.
“The fun hasn’t started yet.”
19. REMEMBERING THE STEPHEN KING NIGHTMARE
KENDRA CARMICHAEL>
I wonder how many women can say they haven’t seen their crazy brother in almost twenty years. I’m not even sure he’s still legally my brother, because I never had the nerve to ask Father if you can dis-adopt somebody, or what else he might have done to make certain Trey didn’t have any claim on the family fortune. I’d always affectionately called Trey “my crazy brother” until that last summer when, for the first time in memory, other people started referring to him as “your crazy brother.” And I guess he did go crazy…just that once. At least I hope it was just that once. My feelings about him have been conflicted for nineteen years, and tonight, when I saw him step through the doorway in a tuxedo, I knew my feelings weren’t going to sort themselves out easily.
Trey was always a little wild, or as Mother used to put it, a tad adventuresome. And yes, adventuresome was probably a more accurate word in his youth, because he was bold in a way nobody else in the family was except for Shelby Junior, who, when he jumped off that ledge into the tidal pool in Jamaica on spring vacation, was followed almost immediately to everybody’s stunned surprise by nine-year-old Trey. Forty feet, I think we figured it later. Trey knocked himself out on impact when he flubbed the entry but wanted to go right back up and try again, as soon as Shelby and the others pulled him out of the water and revived him. Both my wild brothers…what a cruel shock to lose them within six weeks of each other, Shelby to the Grim Reaper and Trey to that Stephen King nightmare that unfolded and then revealed aspects of his personality that none of us could ever have guessed.