Electra cut me off with a well-aimed stare to my bruised temple. “Yes, that I can see,” she said. “How you say this happen again?”
“Oh, um. I don’t think I did, exactly,” I said, chewing my bottom lip. “I sort of . . . fell down, I guess.”
Electra’s eyebrows bowed to make two perfect arches. “Mmm, I see,” she said, her voice a mixture of concern and compassion.
And that was when I realized that she was family too, and I needed her.
“Electra, have you ever had to stop yourself from doing something.” I glanced out at the boys again. “Something every natural impulse in your body was telling you to go after?”
She adjusted her gaze to follow mine. “Sure, we all have to make sacrifice for the ones we luv,” she said then directed her focus back to me. “But you no forget, God make us the way he do for a reason. We all have purpose. When time is right, he let us know.”
I had promised Anna-Beth I would back away from my investigation regarding Unidentified Woman 1; and yet new questions had already surfaced, tugging at me to discover the answers. The spicy-mint scent of the oils reached out from Electra’s cloth, reaffirming the danger I’d put myself in today. It would take all the strength I could muster to squelch my compulsion for answers. The idea settled like a nest of angry bees to the pit of my stomach. I leaned forward with a small gasp and pressed both palms to the center of my ribcage.
“Miss Marlie?” Electra gazed down at me with a concerned look. “You okay?”
“Fine,” I lied.
“You need to rest now,” she said, taking one of my hands and placing it over the compress to keep it in place. “You sit back, close eyes. You feel better in no time.”
Stretching, I looked around at my surroundings. Gone were the tall glass windows and floral seating. In its place I was surrounded by a vast expanse of beach, the waves rolling over themselves with a gentle whoosh. A raised section of warm golden sand served as my pillow. Overhead, white gulls flapped against a light breeze. Lying back, I gazed up into the clear azure sky. Like a blanket of peace, it fell over me until my heart was so light I couldn’t remember what it felt like to worry.
“I’m home,” I realized, closing my eyes to sink fully into the bliss.
“Wake up, sleepy head,” a gentle voice urged.
Who was interrupting my rest? I looked up but couldn’t see who the voice belonged to. His face was shadowed against the backdrop of the bright sky, but still, I knew him. A smile slid across my lips. “No, I don’t want to leave this perfect spot.”
Leaning close, he pressed a kiss to my forehead and then my mouth. The touch brought a name to my lips. “Finn,” I hummed, yearning to feel his kiss again, to share this paradise with him.
“Finn?”
As if I’d missed an unexpected step and nearly fallen, the curtness of his reply caused me to start. My eyes burst open. A small yelp escaped from my lips.
“Whoa, sugar.” Daniel reached out to steady my shoulder. “You were dreamin’,” he said, with a placid smile. “Should I be concerned about this Finn?” He cocked a mocking brow over playful eyes.
I pulled in a long breath and pushed up to sitting, taking a quick look around as I re-acclimated myself to my surroundings. The sunroom, Tennessee. Then, rolling my mind back, I thought about Detective Ripley, the elbow hitting my temple, Anna-Beth, Iphiclesians, and the boys working in the yard. I was in Nashville. Disappointed, I wished I could have stayed in my dream just a little longer.
Why did Daniel have to wake me? “Um, no.” I rubbed the sleep from my eyes glad that I’d never told Daniel about Finn. “Of course not. It was just a dream.”
“Marlie, are you feelin’ all right?” Daniel asked, studying the bruise on my temple.
“Yeah, sure.” I took his hand and pressed a kiss to his knuckles. “It was no big thing. I just tripped is all,” I minimized with a rueful smile.
Straightening, he slipped his hands into the pockets of his trousers, regarding me a pensive moment. “Yes, Electra said somethin’ about that. You missed supper. Are you hungry?”
His question brought me all the way back to the present. “The boys?” I bolted upright, the pain in my temple shooting across my forehead. “Did they eat?”
“Yes, hours ago,” Daniel said with a chuckle. “They’re upstairs readin’.” Leaning down, he took my chin in his hand. “Why don’t you sit tight while I warm us both a plate,” he offered, dropping a kiss to my lips. “We can eat out on the veranda, just the two of us for a change.”
“Sounds perfect.”
He headed back through the sunroom toward the kitchen.
“Daniel?”
He paused at the door and looked over his shoulder. “Yeah?”
“Does Gentry have a twin?” I blurted.
His face registered a mild look of surprise. “No,” he said. “What would make you ask such a strange question?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably just that weird dream I was having. Forget it. It does sound odd now that I said it out loud.” I shook my head, pressing my fingers to my temples as if readjusting my fanciful brain. What was I thinking? Thankfully, he dropped the subject and disappeared through the doorway. I swung my feet onto the floor and shuffled out through the French doors and into the balmy Tennessee evening.
The lightest of breezes tickled the tips of my hair. The warm humid wind dampened my skin like a moist breath. Along the tree line, fireflies, or lightning bugs as the locals called them, danced lazily around the foliage. The spark the little insects gave off was more of a flicker than a flash and always left me feeling a smidge melancholy. As much as I loved to watch the graceful ballet of the firefly, I always looked forward to the dramatic lightning of an actual thunderstorm. While others might fear the fury that nature could unleash, I found the lightning strikes and the beating rain exciting. It was like the storm’s energy reached inside me with a power I feared, and admired at the same time—much the same way I felt about my new family.
Anna-Beth had been right in admonishing me to focus on Daniel and the boys. It was time I fully embraced my calling as a wife and mother, to carve out a new future and take advantage of the possibilities that fate had lain at my feet. From this moment on, I would be more careful. I would put my family first.
Only along with my affirmation also came doubt. How could I fully embrace the firefly when the lightning was what I craved?
Chapter Twenty-three
See ya in a couple of weeks, Madrastra,” Bodie said. Lately, he’d taken to calling me step-mom in Spanish. I loved it. After hugging both boys, I reminded them to behave and then left them safely deposited at the University of Kentucky’s athletic dorms where they would stay while attending baseball camp.
The trip from Lexington back to Nashville was uneventful, and by my closest estimation, I would make it home in record time. “Life is Good” said the tire cover on the CRV rolling down the interstate in front of me. At the moment I had no definable reason to disagree. Still, my life felt unsettled and I worried that the secrets Daniel and I were keeping from each other could potentially rip our family apart. When I got home I would press Daniel, once and for all, for answers to the rumors surrounding Gentry’s death. Hopefully, whatever else he was hiding would follow. We needed to be in this together if our marriage, our family, was going to survive.
From my car’s stereo speakers, Miranda Lambert was singing Over You, a forlorn tune that spoke about loss and the inability to move on, when the ringing of my phone lapped over with a call from my sister.
Pressing the button on the steering wheel, I called out, “Hey Maureen,” into the speaker above my dash. “How’s my sweet little baby nephew?”
“Built like a brick and growing chunkier by the day,” she said, her voice filling my RX with an audible sigh. “I swear this kid would eat a cheeseburger if I let him. I don’t even know why I bother getting dressed. Most of the time I’m either breastfeeding or pumping. This baby’s had more action i
n the last few months than my poor, neglected husband has in the last year.”
I crinkled up my nose at her blatant honesty. “Ew! Maureen, that’s just,” I really wasn’t sure how to describe her over sharing of information “. . . weird.”
“Oh lighten up, Marlie. It’s just a little mommy humor. Cut me some slack. I’ve not had more than three hours sleep at a time in I don’t know when. My belly looks like a melting jelly bowl, and it’s been two days since I had a shower,” she said like I was the one who needed to get a grip. “How are you?”
My husband belonged to some surreptitious group that may have had something to do with his first wife’s death, my best friend turned out to be the secret agent who’s hunting them, and I was kidnapped yesterday, all of which I’ve been forbidden to talk about. So how was I—scared, befuddled, not sure which way is up?
“I just dropped the boys off at baseball camp,” I said when I couldn’t think of anything less alarming to say.
“I asked, ‘how are you,’ not what are you doing,” Maureen said. “What’s wrong? And don’t say nothing. I might be sleep-deprived, but something in your tone and the way you avoided my question tells me something is wrong.”
“Things are fine,” I said, pouring a little too much sunshine into my voice. “I promise.”
There was a pause on the other end and I thought the call had been dropped, until Maureen piped up again. “Liar. What happened? Did you and Daniel have a fight?”
“Noo,” I denied, drawing out the word sarcastically.
“He’s cheating on you, isn’t he?” she said, the words shooting out like the next loaded bullet in her question arsenal. “Those politicians are all the same. They think they have the right to sample a little piece of everything they see.”
All of sudden, I felt very tired. “He’s not cheating on me,” I groaned.
“How do you know?” she asked.
My memory spiraled back to the Nashville Airport, the day Daniel had promised: “I can guarantee you that I will never belittle you . . . never be unfaithful. And you can be assured that I will make love to you as many times and as often as you will allow me to for the rest of our lives.”
I had believed him enough to give him a tentative yes. And even with all that had happened since our wedding, with all the unanswered questions, he’d been true to every one of those promises. But was he hiding some serious character flaws, twisted or depraved? Of that, I couldn’t be sure.
“Hello!” Maureen yelled into her phone. “Marlie, are you still there?”
I snapped back to the present. “Uh, yeah. Sorry,” I said, giving my head one firm shake. “I think the phone cut out there for a moment.”
“Well?” Maureen prompted. “How do you know he’s not cheating?”
“I just do, that’s how,” I said as I drove through the gate that led to the house. Out front, Daniel’s hired car sat waiting in the horseshoe drive, his driver leaning on the hood enjoying a smoke. My heart leapt with urgency at seeing that Daniel was home.
Circling around to the garage, I punched the button to open my door and put an end to my sister’s interrogation. “You’re going to have to trust me to handle my own marriage. Kiss the kids for me. Love to your husband and get some rest.” I made smooching noises and then disconnected the call before she could protest.
In the distance, a clap of thunder exploded. I pulled the RX into the garage and hopped out. Slinging my purse over my shoulder, I closed the garage door behind me and made for the house, dodging the first drops of rain.
Once inside, I stopped off in the powder room to check my hair and makeup and then headed for the study in search of my husband. We’d shared a nice dinner the night before where we’d talked easily about everything except what truly needed discussing. Two weeks without the boys. This was it, our chance to really connect, to share the unspoken truths that were keeping us apart. Making my way through the entry, my heartbeat grew faster with each step that brought me closer to Daniel. But as I hurried across the expanse of black and white tile, the combatant tone of the voices coming from the study had my pace slowing, my momentum giving out just shy of the threshold.
Leaning closer, I listened through the narrow crack between the doors.
Daniel’s question boomed like a cannon blast. “Then whose body is in my wife’s grave?”
My purse slipped from my shoulder, landing in a heap on the tile floor.
Chapter Twenty-four
Daniel, don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to.”
“What did you do, Paul?”
“Only what we both agreed to.”
Daniel persisted. “Then why is Marlie askin’ questions about a woman who is supposed to be dead? And mumbling in her sleep about someone named Finn?”
Afraid I’d be discovered, I lurched to the first step and padded as lightly as possible up the stairs to our bedroom. Curling my body beneath the vanity once more, I carefully slid the grate open to hear Daniel saying, “I buried Gentry once, I can’t do it again.”
“This is what I’ve been trying to explain to you,” Paul said. “Marlie’s out to sabotage you.”
Daniel’s response came after a long pause. “I don’t believe it.”
“No?” Paul chided. “First she came up with that misguided scheme that could have ruined your political future. If we hadn’t caught it early and found a way to spin it, you’d be through right now. All our hard work washed down the drain with one ill-conceived agreement. And then there’s the matter of the drugs and alcohol at the boy’s party.”
“The ballpark compromise was a good idea,” Daniel said sheepishly, and my agitation heated up a degree more. Why was he always kowtowing to Paul? “And what happened at the twin’s party wasn’t her fault. I should’ve been here.”
“Right. That’s just what she wants you to believe. How do you think a bunch of kids, who can’t even drive, got that beer to the party? And I bet she twisted her cockamamie ballpark idea until it seemed like the only moral option. She convinced you to compromise your integrity, and for what? School funding we both know will never make any significant difference. It was a suicide mission and you walked right into it.”
“No,” Daniel protested. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Come on, Daniel, that deal wasn’t us,” Paul said, now sounding resigned. “It wasn’t you. We’ve always been careful to maintain the highest of moral values so we can stick to the important issues without having to make excuses for past indiscretions—a perfect, untarnished record—that’s what we’ve always agreed on. But, like it or not, because of her, your reputation will be forever blemished.”
“You act like the scandal was part of some diabolical plan to take me down.”
“Maybe it was,” Paul said.
There was a long pause. I bit down hard on my lip to keep from shouting out in my own defense. How could my husband even consider that I would do anything to hurt him?
Daniel spoke next. “No, and I can’t believe we’re even considerin’ the possibility. This is crazy.”
“Is it?”
“Yes, there has to be another explanation,” Daniel said, and the voice inside my head screamed, Yeah, Paul is a psychotic control freak!
They fell into an extended quiet. The ebb in conversation held so long I felt lightheaded, until I realized I was holding my breath. I let the air out in a slow, silent stream as Paul spoke again.
“I’m sorry to bring this up again, but have you considered that she might be one of them?” he asked. “And then there’s the other possibility; she could be FBI.”
“You’re out of line,” Daniel said, and it sounded as if he meant it. “She’s a social worker; she’s not a spy for the government or anyone else. This time, I think I know what I’m lookin’ for.”
“Do you? Do you really? How can you be sure? I’ve said it before, you say you know what you’re looking for, and so it begs the question . . . how can she appear to be everything to
the contrary?” Paul said.
I closed my eyes, hoping Daniel wouldn’t believe it.
“No, she’s real,” Daniel said, but not forceful enough to encourage me.
“What would you say if I told you she’s tried this once before?”
What? A sickened feeling wormed its way under my skin and settled in for a long stay.
“Tried what?” Daniel asked.
“To impose herself into another Iphiclesian’s life. Finn’s life. He too was smart, well connected, being groomed by the Society for the presidency,” he said and then things on the other side of the vent got real quiet. “He trusted her too, he married her,” Paul paused again for emphasis. “That’s right. She was married, but I can see by the look on your face that she hasn’t told you. Interesting, isn’t it?”
“I knew she was with someone, someone of a considerable social position, and that he hurt her, but . . . Finn?” Daniel’s words trailed off as if lost on a path of disbelief.
A sharp pain sliced through my chest. Daniel knew Finn.
“I bet she left out the part about trapping him with a pregnancy. How she used the baby as leverage against his parents when they insisted their son have the marriage annulled?”
A fit of nausea crept over me. Holding my stomach, I curled tighter into a ball. Snapshots of memories rolled in front of my eyes like a rapidly cycling slideshow. The look of pride on Finn’s face when I’d told him I was pregnant. The look of infuriation on his parent’s faces when we shared the news. The bleeding I tried to conceal. The day he’d packed. My gut-wrenching pleadings. The annulment papers I’d been too weak physically and emotionally to sign. The tears that wouldn’t stop. Paul was giving Daniel a first-hand glimpse into the darkest corners of my soul. The secret places only I should be allowed to show him—if ever I dared to go there myself.
Daniel said. “No, that’s not Marlie. She’s not—”
Replacing Gentry Page 19