Cassandra exhales slowly and I can tell that I may be getting through. "Yes, she was here," she says. "She seemed to have a good time. She met a guy, he went by the name Lincoln."
The eager smile on Dante's face suddenly drops. "He went by the name Lincoln?" he asks. "What did he look like?"
"Kind of like you, tall, broad shouldered. In fact, the two of you could be brothers. That's not his real name, is it?" Cassandra asks.
Dante doesn't reply, he just stares into space somewhere behind her.
"Can you tell me about what happened last night? What did you see? When did she leave?"
"She met Lincoln right at the beginning of the party. They were hanging out the whole time and then, I don't know, they went into one of the rooms in the back. The party officially ended around five. Some people went out for breakfast. I am not aware of what Allison or Lincoln did."
"So you don't know when she left?" I ask.
"Sometime after five."
I swallow hard; that was hours ago.
It's early afternoon now and she's still not back. "Was Lincoln with anyone else? Like his girlfriend?" I ask. "Wife?"
"No. He came by himself. Listen, I have to go. I have to clean up and set up for the afternoon. But I didn’t tell you any of this,” she adds.
“Thank you,” I mumble. “One more thing. Do you think that Allison might be coming back?"
"Usually we have a rule that you attend only one party a week, that way we have a good variety of people circling through."
Cassandra’s phone rings and she ushers us out, saying that she has to take this call.
Out on the doorstep, when the door closes in our face, I look up at Dante who looks crestfallen.
"It may not be him," I say. "I mean, the guy could be using an unusual name."
"She said that he could be my brother."
He rubs his temples.
"Yes, but that doesn't mean that he is your brother. Your brother was at home with his pregnant wife. He didn't leave her to go to this party."
"Yeah, I never thought that he would, but now I don't know."
"We can't just doubt him because of this whole story; we have no idea who Allison met last night."
"He was by himself," Dante says, raising an eyebrow.
"Yes, but you of all people know that it is possible to get into this place on your own."
He shakes his head.
"Let's go back," I say, taking his hand.
"Go back where?" he asks.
"I'm going to call her again, but I just want to, I don't know, maybe drive around a little and check the cottage again.”
"No," Dante says, "I need to talk to Lincoln."
29
Dante
Jacqueline insists on going back to the rental and walking around the town aimlessly looking for her friend, but I can't wait.
I need to know now the answers to the questions that I seek. When Cassandra said Lincoln's name, I had some doubts at first. No, it wouldn't be my brother. There's no way. It's just some guy using a cool name to draw attention to himself or away from who he really is.
But when she looked at me closely and said that he could be my brother, that just changed everything. Lincoln and I don't really look like we could be related on the outside, not if you look from far away.
But if you look closer, if you really look, past the hair color, skin color, I'm much more olive skinned than he is, then everything changes.
That's what I saw in Cassandra's eyes, the realization that we may be related. I drive back to the house pressing on the accelerator and weaving through traffic.
I can't get there fast enough.
No matter what I do, it's not enough. After my uncomfortable conversation with my mother and her threats to call the police, you'd think that she'd leave and go back to Cape Cod. But no, when I walk back into the house, I find her swimming in the pool.
I wave a brief hello, and she smiles, climbs onto a lounge chair and opens her book, taking a sip of a cocktail.
The arrogance of my family is hard to explain to strangers and so, I never even try.
"Where's Lincoln?" I ask Marguerite who is washing an apple in the sink.
She looks refreshed after the shower and the nap, and she has her own novel and non-alcoholic cocktail set up to drink on the kitchen table.
"He's upstairs, working. Why?”
"I just need to talk to him."
Our eyes meet and hold there for a moment. I consider how much her life would change if she found out.
My brother has always been so faithful and honest, but the truth is that no one ever knows what's really going on in people's heads, lives, and marriage.
I only see them as a couple. I see them only from the outside. But ever since Marguerite got pregnant, she and I have gotten close. Much closer than we ever were before and now I consider her my friend, a close friend at that, and I cannot stand my brother doing this to her.
I hop upstairs, skipping three steps at a time and find him in their bedroom sitting on the bed with a laptop across his legs. He's dressed in a button down shirt and boxer shorts fresh from a shower. A half drunk glass of bourbon sits on the end table next to him.
"Hey, I was going to ask you about this one stock," he starts to say as soon as I enter the room.
"Where were you last night?" I ask.
"What are you talking about?"
"Where were you last night?” I repeat the question, closing the door behind me.
"You mean, after Mom came?"
I nod.
"Here. I was here all night."
"Yeah, I don't think so," I say, looking at him.
I don't need proof, I can just look at him and tell that he's full of shit. "What if I told you, you were at The Redemption?"
"What's The Redemption?" he asks without missing a beat.
No hesitation, no pause.
"It's a club for singles and couples who like to meet other singles and couples. You know what it is."
"No, I have no idea," he says with a shrug.
Suddenly, my confidence begins to waiver.
What if I'm wrong?
Could he actually be telling me the truth?
"Why would I go to a club like that?" he asks. "I'm married, I'm having a baby. Besides, I hardly have any time for work with all the doctors’ appointments and everything else that I have going on."
If he's lying to me, he's very good at it and I can tell why Marguerite would be so frustrated with him.
The earnestness, I practically want to slap it off his face, but I can't.
"So you were here all last night? You never left?"
He shakes his head no and shrugs.
"You wouldn't lie to me, would you?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about. Why would I lie to you about this?"
"You can tell me the truth. I'm not going to tell Marguerite," I say.
Now, it’s my turn to lie.
"I am telling you the truth. I was here, sleeping all night. You can ask her yourself."
"What if I told you that there's a camera on the front door and you left in the middle of the night and you came back a few hours later? What if I told you that something like this exists and that's why I know that you're lying?"
He opens his mouth to say something else but then closes it. He swallows hard.
"You're not going to tell her, are you?" he snaps and suddenly the facade of everything that he has been convincing me of falls away.
My mouth drops open and I wait for him to continue.
"You better not fucking tell her, okay? She's pregnant. We're going through a lot. I needed to blow off some steam, so I went to The Redemption, big fucking deal. You're the one who told me about it."
"I'm single," I say.
"There are people there who are married. It's no big deal."
I shake my head, unwilling to believe that he actually believes the shit that's coming out of his mouth.
"Those people ar
e in relationships where both of them agree to certain rules. You and Marguerite have no agreement."
As I open my mouth to say something else, Lincoln raises his hand and punches me in the mouth.
30
Dante
"What the hell was that?" I stare at him, my face throbbing.
"Don't talk to me about my wife!” he yells.
“So, you were there?" I ask. "You admit it?"
"Get the hell out of here. This has nothing to do with you."
He takes another step forward to get closer, and this time I make a fist and punch him. My fist collides with his torso.
I suddenly have a flashback to being a kid again and all the time that he tortured me, all of those times that he hurt me and pinned me down and forced me to get into fist fights with him.
I really hated him for a lot of my life, and now I realize that that pent-up anger in the pit of my stomach is still there.
We tussle and fight for a little while. He punches me in the stomach, I clock him in the eye.
I somehow get the better of him, pin him down, and hit him twice in the face.
His nose explodes with blood and I let up.
Lincoln mumbles something, and I walk to the bathroom and look at my bloody face in the mirror.
There's blood dripping out of my nose, and my knuckles have also been scratched.
This is not exactly something that either of us will be able to hide from the women downstairs.
"How is this any of your business?" Lincoln asks. "What I do in my personal life."
"I stood up for you to Mom. She's the one that's always been against your relationship, and I thought you got a raw deal. I thought that you deserve more. You know that I talked to Marguerite about the trust fund? You know that I told her to actually try to get that changed? There's no way that's going to happen if the judge finds out that you went to The Redemption."
"And how the hell is a judge going to find out?"
"Investigators," I say, enunciating every syllable. “Mom's lawyers are going to hire investigators, and they're going to look into every part of your life to make sure that your relationship is actually as great as you all say it is. But of course that's not going to happen. Of course they're going to find out about going to that club. You probably used your own credit card, didn't you?"
"I have another credit card that Marguerite knows nothing about."
"Yeah, but it's connected to your name and your credit report, and it would be as simple as that, and you know it."
He stands at the other Jack and Jill bathroom sink next to me looking at his beat up face.
"You didn't have to go so hard at me," he says.
I shake my head. "You're the one that started it. I did not come here to throw any punches."
"But you did." He turns toward me, pointing his finger in my face. "You think there's something wrong with me going to that club even though you've been there for who knows how long."
"And what, this was your first time?" I ask, tilting my head, ready to not believe him.
"I've only been there a couple of times in the last few months ever since you told me about it. I just couldn't stop thinking about it. It sounded really fun, something I haven't had in who knows how long."
"Why did you have to wait until Marguerite was pregnant?" I ask. "Because when you're together for as long as we have been, things get hard, challenging, you know? Boring. She's working all the time, or she was until she got pregnant, and I work even more. We're tired, exhausted. All we do is talk about work. Nothing else seems to be as interesting or stimulating. You know how boring it is to talk about money?"
"That's what you do for a living," I say, "and that's what I do for a living."
"Yeah, I know. I'll repeat my question," he challenges me. "Do you know how boring it is to only talk about money?"
"No, I don't," I say. "I have my own money problems though. And, I don't know. You shouldn't have lied to me."
"I saw your face," Lincoln says. "That was the last thing you wanted to hear. You wanted me to lie to you. You wanted me to be this perfect husband and soon-to-be father, when in reality, who knows? Maybe I'm a lot more like our dad than you would like me to believe."
"Fuck you," I say, pointing my finger in his face. "Fuck you. You take that back. You're nothing like him. He's a loser and a drunk."
"Yeah, well, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.” Lincoln shrugs.
He turns to the sink, turns on the faucet, grabs a rag and starts to wash off the blood from his nose.
The fact that he even mentioned our father makes my whole body tense up. I don't know why I'm so invested in my brother and his personal life.
I'm really not, not forever, but connecting with Marguerite and actually the both of them over those last few months really made me have a lot more sympathy and empathy for her.
Besides, I thought that maybe I actually, or perhaps I just always thought that they were such a great couple, that I didn't want to see anything that would stand in that way.
I leave the bathroom and sit down on the edge of the bed. By some miracle, no one heard us fight. It's still clear by our faces that something happened, but at least now we can come up with some sort of story to make it seem plausible.
"What kind of trouble are you in?" Lincoln comes out of the bathroom and stands in the doorway. His face is getting puffy, and he needs to apply some ice. So do I.
"I don't know if you heard, but Mom found out that I took that $200,000 from my trust."
"You what?" He looks genuinely surprised.
I furrow my brow, uncertain if I can believe him. "You know. Marguerite told you, right?"
"Told me what?" he asks, taking a step closer.
"I thought that she told you, but I guess she didn't."
He looks at me with blank eyes, and I fill him in on paying for Jacqueline's mother's treatment.
"You have to promise me not to tell Mom," I say. "She knows that I borrowed the money, but I think she suspects that I'm gambling or something like that. I just don't want her to know. She likes Jacqueline, and I want to keep it that way."
"Wow. So you just paid all that money and you didn't even really know her?"
I think back to my obsession with Jacqueline. It's kind of hard to explain, and I don't even bother.
Besides, there's a secret that I'm keeping that I can't very well tell him either.
For now it seems good to just appear to be this totally chivalrous man willing help an almost complete stranger.
"Yeah. We went out a few times. We had fun, and she mentioned that her mom was going through that, so I looked it up and just paid the bill."
"Oh my God. That's crazy."
"Yeah, I know. It was a secret. She got mad at me when she found out."
"Wait, so you didn't even tell her? You didn't even capitalize on this generous gift?"
"No, I didn't want her to know. I just wanted to help her out."
"Wow. Man, you and I are very different," Lincoln says, shaking his head.
I don't know where to take the conversation with me here, but Lincoln does. I tell him about Mom’s threats if the money is not returned.
"Wow. That's harsh," he says.
"Yeah, it is."
"So where do I come in?" Lincoln takes a step away from me.
"I'm trying to figure it out with my work."
"There's no way you can do enough work or get enough clients in any legitimate way anyway, in such a short amount of time."
"I was waiting for a startup to come through with the sale, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen now. At least not for another couple of weeks."
"Listen, you need my help, just tell me."
"Tell you what?" I ask, looking up at him.
Our eyes meet. He gives me a little wink.
I know what he wants.
The problem is that I can't give it to him.
"Just ask."
"Well, is it a problem?"
I wait and swallow hard. "Can I borrow the money?"
"Yes, but I'll need something in return," he adds quickly.
I clench my jaw. I know what he means: not the details, but the general gist.
"This isn't the kind of work that I do anymore," I say after a long pause.
He narrows his eyes. "You're very good at it. I don't know why you'd stop."
"Because it's illegal. Because it could give me years behind bars. Do you need more reasons than that?"
"I noticed that you didn't mention that you don't want to."
"Look, of course, I don't want to. That's why I stopped doing that in the first place. And that's why I'm making money the legitimate way now."
"Yeah, but do you ever think about it? The past, all the fun that we had? It's not finance."
"There is monetary exchange, wouldn't you say?" I challenge him.
"Yeah, it's a little more fun than it was, right? It's a little more fun than just pushing papers around, analyzing stock, analyzing the quality of someone's investments, predicting whether or not they make money."
"I do quite well now," I insist.
"Listen, if you can't do this for me, I can't lend you the $200,000,” Lincoln says definitively.
"More like $350,000," I admit. "I don't just owe money to Mom. I borrowed a portion from some bad guys.”
"Bad guys? Now who's being cryptic?" Lincoln sits down on the edge of the bed. "What exactly are you up to?"
"Look, I told you I don't do that anymore, but that doesn't mean I don't have contacts, you know? I knew that I needed to borrow this money, and I did. So what?"
"So what? Well, let's just say you can pretend like everything you do right now is on the up and up, but we all know the world that our father created and where that money in the trust fund came from.”
I sigh.
"Mom would like to pretend that it's all clean, that it's all from investments, but you and I know the truth,” he continues. “You know exactly how much of that money is dirty and bloody."
Dark Redemption Page 13