by M. J. Lowell
Reckless Games
By M.J. Lowell
Copyright 2014
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
- Robert Frost
Chapter One
I am a connoisseur of grief. I know the kind that sneaks up like a silent tidal wave of darkness, washing out light and sound, washing out every sensation but pain. I know the kind that pierces like daggers, and the kind that squeezes your heart until it could crumble to dust and blow away. I know the kind that’s like a piece of sea glass, worn smooth over the years, its edges no longer sharp but its weight always there, inescapable, relentless, a dull gnawing ache that can never be soothed.
I would have said I knew every type of grief.
And then I met Rhys Carlyle.
It was December, and the bitter wind licked at my body, teasing me with its frigid fingers, so indifferent to my layers of wool and down I might as well have been naked. I was staked out on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street, across from the twin stone lions flanking the entrance to the New York Public Library. A red carpet cascaded down the library’s marble staircase, cushioning the Louboutined footsteps of the girls in Givenchy and Vera Wang evening gowns and their tuxedo-clad escorts. The perfect Barbie and Ken doll couples paused every few feet, posing for the photographers before parading up the steps and into the annual Young Lions gala.
It wasn’t snowing, but the air carried the sharp bite of winter mixed with New York City’s unique seasonal tang, a blend of the roasting chestnuts sold from street carts, engine exhaust, and icy pavement. I glanced with envy at the drivers in the line of black Town Cars moored along Forty-Second Street, cozy inside their plush heated cocoons, tapping away on their phones with fingers that, unlike mine, weren’t numb with cold despite two pairs of gloves. The next time I followed someone, I decided, I’d only do it when the temperature was at least a few degrees above freezing.
Not that there would be a next time, not if I could help it. But as far as the here and now was concerned, I didn’t have a choice.
When he’d died six weeks ago, my father left me with a broken heart, his 1965 Vespa, and an endless list of unanswered questions. Valentina, my best friend since the second grade, would have said it was the broken heart that brought me here tonight, and that was partly true. But I was also here because of the questions, and because of everything else I knew about the man my father was.
Because I knew he hadn’t killed himself, no matter what people said. There was no way he would have done that, never, not after—
Not now, I told myself. I didn’t want to think about that now. All I knew was it just wasn’t anything he ever would have done. And even if he had been desperate enough to take his own life, he never would have done it the way they said, by swallowing a handful of sleeping pills and washing them down with whiskey.
Of course when I tried to explain all this to the police, they chalked it up to the ravings of a grieving daughter, a twenty-one-year-old girl who’d do anything to avoid accepting an agonizing reality. I almost couldn’t blame them – after all, they didn’t know my father, not like I did.
So I set out on my own to find the truth, starting with the alarmingly high stack of bills that had gathered unopened on my father’s desk. And it was there I found the first piece of the puzzle: in the three weeks before he’d died, my father had called Rhys Carlyle nearly a dozen times from his lab.
Why would my father, a chemist and inventor who specialized in polymers so obscure that I didn’t even try to understand them – why would my lovable but hopelessly dorky father have spent so much time talking to People magazine’s Ninth Sexiest Bachelor?
Across Fifth Avenue, Rhys Carlyle’s black Tesla roadster was still parked right in front of the Public Library. He’d palmed the valet a pair of crisp hundred-dollar bills to keep the car waiting for him there. The Tesla was the reason I’d nearly missed him tonight, when he’d pulled out of the garage at the Bowery Hotel. I’d been following him for the better part of a week, and every time he’d left his place at the Bowery it was in his chauffeur-driven silver Bentley, and every time he’d had a woman with him. Not the same woman – never, in fact, the same woman. The only thing they had in common was that they were all glamorous voluptuous blondes, and they were all married to men who weren’t Rhys Carlyle.
But tonight he was alone and he was driving himself. Was it just his driver’s night off? Or, as I so desperately hoped, was there something more interesting going on, something that would make all of the hours I’d spent risking frostbite worth it?
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” Val had asked a few days ago over our ritual Monday morning coffee at Brooklyn Roasting Company. “What are you trying to find?”
“Proof.” I thought of the phone bill I’d pinned to the corkboard at home, with the calls to Rhys Carlyle highlighted in yellow.
Val toyed with the plastic lid from her latte, spinning it on the scarred tabletop between us as a faint furrow formed between her perfectly arched brows. “Proof of what? You can’t honestly think Rhys Carlyle’s going to just up and confess to killing your father.”
“I don’t know what to think. But those phone calls my father made to him are all I have to go on, the only thing out of the ordinary.” I stilled the coffee lid with my index finger. “Please, Val. I know it’s a long shot, but I need you to be on my side.”
“I’m always on your side and you of all people should know that,” she said, impatiently rolling her espresso-colored eyes. “Who pulled up the info on Rhys Carlyle in the first place? And trust me, my boss would freak if she knew – that kind of research isn’t exactly what she expects from her paralegals. I just want to make sure you’re not wasting your time.”
“What else would I be doing with my time?”
She cocked her head to one side. “Getting a job? Going back to Boston and finishing your music degree? Maybe dating a normal guy instead of stalking Mr. Mysterio? You know, your basic building-a-professionally-and-personally-fulfilling-life kind of stuff.”
“I’ll do all that later. Besides, I have a job.”
“DJ-ing is not a real job, Miss Lucy Aileen Flannigan,” Val said, doing her best imitation of my father before switching back to her own voice. “Though stalking Rhys Carlyle is a major step up from swooning around after Sawyer.”
“I never swooned around after Sawyer,” I said. Swoon wasn’t the right word to describe how I felt about Sawyer, not when we’d been together and definitely not now. It was entirely too benign for a guy who’d inflicted so much damage.
The sudden eruption of camera flashes brought me back to the present with a jolt. I grabbed for my own camera and peered through the telephoto lens. Rhys Carlyle was leaving the gala, making his way back down the red carpet unaccompanied and all smiles. His expertly tailored Tom Ford tux emphasized his lean, athletic build.
I studied him carefully through the lens. Sure, he was handsome – more than handsome, with his close-cropped golden hair and rugged features – but there was something else about him, a cockiness in the set of his shoulders and an assurance in his stride that told a story I knew too well. Once I’d been taken in by shoulders like those, by a too-pleased-with-itself smile like his. Once and only once, but it had been enough.
That was over a year ago, I told myself as I felt the familiar panic tighten in my chest. And you learned. It won’t happen again.
I forced myself back to the present, my eyes on Rhys Carlyle as I mentally replayed what Val had told me.
“I scoured every database we have, but there’s next to nothing on the guy,” she’d said. “I’d heard he was notoriously private, but this is beyond private. All anyone says is he’s twenty-eight and grew up ‘rough’ in East London, which I guess means he wasn’t hanging out with Wills and Kate. He was engaged to a woman from one of those fancy British families with lots of names, Marina Essex-Jones – a gorgeous curvy blonde, naturally – but that ended a couple of years back. Since then no one can say who he’s really dating, let alone how many billions that video game company he started is worth. And every single gossip item is identical, word for word, which is impossible.”
“What do you mean, impossible?”
“I mean he’s paying someone a lot of money to control what gets out about him, or more likely what doesn’t get out. And nobody would do that unless he had something to hide. Something big.”
As he circled around to the driver’s side of the Tesla, I stashed the camera in my messenger bag and coaxed the Vespa’s engine to life. The Tesla took off down Fifth, but I let four cars go by before pulling into traffic a safe distance behind.
Time to find out what you’re hiding, Mr. Carlyle.
Chapter Two
He drove with easy confidence, moving smoothly between lanes with no wasted motion, deftly navigating the tangle of taxis and trucks and cars clogging the city streets as I did my best to stay a discreet distance behind. Soon my face was numb with cold, my hands clumsy and stiff on the handlebars.
We were stopped at a light when I felt my phone vibrate. I slid it from my pocket and stole a glance at the screen: the name Nicolas Barta flashed above a picture of Nico’s smiling face. The mixture of happiness and guilt it prompted was familiar these days, and momentarily made me question what I was doing.
Nico had come to New York from Hungary for graduate school three years ago, though his English was so perfect you’d never know he wasn’t born and raised here. He started out as my father’s research assistant, but he’d quickly become a surrogate son to my dad and a friend to me. I’d cried on his broad shoulders more times than I could count in the weeks since my dad’s death, taking comfort in his steadfast presence and the sympathy in his big brown eyes. He’d lost his parents, too, and our mutual experience of grief and loneliness had formed a strong bond between us, drawing us close.
And yet I was keeping a secret from him. Maybe it was because Nico always acted like an overprotective older brother and I worried he’d try to stop me, or maybe it was because I didn’t want to involve him in what was almost certainly a wild goose chase. Or maybe it was because this mission was something I had to do on my own rather than ask for help. Whatever the reason, I’d been reluctant to tell him how I’d been trying to unravel the mysterious connection between my dad and Rhys Carlyle.
The problem was, I hated the idea of lying to him. So I’d worked out a compromise: instead of lying, I’d been avoiding his calls. But I found myself missing talking to him, missing his easy and understanding companionship, and for a moment I was tempted to answer.
Then the light turned green, making up my mind for me. I hit Ignore and returned the phone to my pocket.
I followed Rhys Carlyle downtown, heading south and then east and then south again. When he signaled to turn into the garage at the Bowery Hotel, I felt a surge of conflicting relief and disappointment. Relief, because if he was in for the night I wouldn’t miss anything when I left in an hour to do my set at Le Bungalow. Disappointment, because I’d been wrong. He didn’t have any special plan. He wasn’t meeting anyone or doing anything he hadn’t done on other nights. And I had no new information. Nothing else to go on.
I parked the Vespa across the street from the hotel’s main entrance and tucked myself into the recessed door of a shuttered boutique. Rhys Carlyle’s duplex suite was his home in the city, occupying a full half of the hotel’s second and third floors, complete with a landscaped private terrace, and I had a clear view of his windows. I settled in and waited for his lights to turn on.
I’d hoped the doorway would offer some protection from the wind, but if anything its bite felt even fiercer here than it had uptown. I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering as unbidden images floated into my head. Hot chocolate with mini marshmallows. Fuzzy slippers and fleece pajamas. An old movie flickering in black-and-white on the TV. That’s how I should have been spending my night. If only.
If only everything hadn’t changed. If only my life hadn’t morphed into a mockingly blank party invitation, demanding what, when, where, and why. Of course, the police thought they already had all the answers—
What: My father intentionally took his life with an overdose of sleeping pills;
When: October 31st between eight p.m. and midnight;
Where: The living room of our Brooklyn apartment;
Why: Because his latest invention was a failure and he was broke. The proof was in the pile of ashes in the fireplace, the charred remnants of the journal with his notes about the failed invention.
But I didn’t buy a single one of those answers. My father would never have committed suicide, and he definitely would never have done it in our home.
Because that’s precisely what my mother had done when I was ten. Taken too many pills and died, right in the living room, forcing us to think about her, about that, every time we walked into the apartment. An apartment we could never abandon because it had belonged to my grandparents, had been my father’s childhood home as well as mine. To leave would have meant abandoning every memory. And memories were increasingly the only thing we had.
I remembered the long weeks after my mother’s death, the shadows that seemed to fill the whole apartment, the hours my father and I spent in the living room, sitting on the couch together and adjusting to the new silence, two people instead of three.
It was on that couch that my father took my hand and said, “We’ll be okay, Lulu. It will be hard but we will be okay.” Where we’d told each other about our days and fought over curfews and if I really thought I was leaving the house in that outfit, where we played gin rummy and watched movies, where I tearfully told my side of the story whenever Val and I had a fight, where he pretended to conduct as I practiced my violin, where I slept on the nights he worked late in his lab so I’d know exactly when he got home.
It was where we could always find each other.
The couch grew worn and shabby, our shapes carving permanent indentations in the cushions as the years went by, his on the left deeper than mine on the right, but neither of us ever suggested replacing it. The couch was our safe haven, a monument to our survival. As hard as it was to fathom my father taking his own life in our home, it was impossible he would have done it sitting on my side of our couch.
And it wasn’t like my father hadn’t failed befo
re. He’d had dozens of ideas that hadn’t panned out, but he’d never killed himself over any of them. He’d never burned a single one of his journals, either. “Mistakes are the seeds of ideas,” was what he said on the first day of every class he taught. His journals meticulously recorded every mistake, whether it blossomed into an idea or not.
No, nothing about his death made any sense.
The windows on the second floor of the Bowery Hotel suddenly blazed with light. The French doors to the terrace opened and Rhys Carlyle stepped out and walked across to the railing. He’d stripped off his tuxedo jacket and black tie, and his shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, but he didn’t seem to notice the cold as he stared out into the night. Was he waiting for someone? My hopes flared again. Maybe I’d learn something tonight after all.
That’s when I heard heavy footsteps approaching, two men on my side of the street, maybe fifteen or twenty feet away. I pressed back into my doorway. The last thing I needed was for anybody to see me and question what I was doing there. They paused at the curb with their backs to me, surveying the Bowery Hotel across the street.
“—like a sniper’s wet dream,” one of them was saying, his voice hoarse with barely contained excitement. “Don’t see why I can’t take him out my way. He’d still end up dead.”
“Because orders are we do it when she’s there,” said his companion. “He wants her to see. Think about what she’s done.”
“Like with a dog, rubbing his nose in it when he craps on the carpet?”
“Exactly,” the second man said with a chuckle. “And in this case, the dog’s a bitch.”
The first man grunted in appreciation. They wore identical black leather coats and were careful to avoid the pool of illumination from the streetlight. One had on a knit skullcap and one was smoking a cigarette, but they were both tall and powerfully built.
“And why’s it got to be strangling?” the one with the cigarette asked.
“To make it look like an accident. Boss says this one is into some kinky stuff so it won’t be a stretch.”