Drop Dead Lola

by Melissa Bourbon

  The head nurse, Camille, looked to be in her forties. She had a hint of wrinkles fanning from the outer edges of her eyes, but otherwise I might have even placed her in her later thirties. She wore a headband similar to Reilly’s, only black. It held her dirty blonde hair back from her face. Her scrubs were navy blue. A lanyard identifying her as hospital staff hung around her neck.

  I wished Reilly had one to add to the authenticity of her part. I turned to her, then stopped. A blue cord hung around her neck with an All Saints’ Hospital ID dangling from a plastic loop. Of course. Reilly would not have been Zoey Barkow without having a Zoey Barkow ID.

  Camille was surprisingly accommodating to my requests. “Really? You can just move her, no problem? We can have the room?”

  “To catch a killer? Absolutely. It’s pretty exciting, right? We’ve never had an almost murder victim in our unit. We’ve certainly never helped solve a crime. We’ll do whatever we can.”

  She was true to her word. An hour later, I had a hospital gown over my clothes, a black nylon hair net on my head, and an oxygen mask, which was not actually hooked up to a tank, dangling around my neck. I reclined in the bed Marnie had been in that morning, now made with fresh sheets. Jack sat on the bed next to me. “You look smokin’ hot.”

  I patted the hair net. “Aw shucks.”

  His smile dimmed and he grew serious. “You’re sure about this?”

  I cocked my head, lifting my eyebrows at him. “You know the answer to that, don’t you?”

  He stroked his chin. “I can venture a guess. It would go something like, I can take care of myself, Callaghan. You’ve witnessed that firsthand.”

  I knocked his arm with the back of my hand. “Exactamente, mi amor.”

  He leaned in to give me a kiss. “I’ll be outside.”

  “Don’t let anyone see you,” I said.

  “I won’t.” He handed me a magazine. “Keep yourself busy.”

  He left the room and I started flipping through the magazine. Ad after ad after ad. I flipped through what felt like a hundred pages, past the table of contents, then hit some more ads. Flip. Flip. Flip. I checked the time on my phone. Four forty-five. If someone—anyone—was going to come try to do in Marnie…again.

  I scanned a few more pages. It didn’t matter what the magazine was, the ads seemed to be the same. Perfume. Organic juice. 23andMe. Vodka. I looked for an interesting article, but kept flipping back to the ads.

  It came to me, slowly at first, then with clarity. DNA testing. Leti’s bachelorette party. Karen and Katherine, the owners of the pole dancing studio, had done DNA testing. And they’d found each other. Ricky had told me that Philip was ready for family life. So much so that he had gotten his finances in order, was ready to marry Gemma, and had genetic testing done. Could Philip have discovered something through the testing he did?

  The envelope. I pulled my phone out from under my side where I’d tucked it out of sight and fumbled with it until it was right side up. I looked up Gemma’s number and dialed. The second she answered, I launched into my request. There was no time to waste. “It’s Lola—” I started, but she interrupted me.

  “I’m sorry, Lola who?”

  Ay caramba. “Dolores. It’s Dolores Cruz.”

  “Oh. You go by Lola?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “That’s way better than Dolores,” she said. “Like, seriously.”

  Dios mio. What was it about the name Dolores that people didn’t like? “It’s a family name,” I said, wanting to move on from this conversation. “Listen, Gemma. Do you still have Philip’s mail?”

  “Um, yeah?”

  Oh, thank God. I hurried on. “I just remembered that there was something from a lab.”

  “Yeah, I think there is.”

  “Can you open that one? I think…I think it’s important.” I didn’t know why exactly, but I felt it in my gut.

  Her demeanor changed. “What do you mean important. About Phil’s murder?”

  She’d said murder instead of death or suicide. “Yes.”

  “Okay. Um, I just finished a perm so—”

  “A perm? People still get those?”

  “Yeah. Not a lot, but some people. Usually teenage girls. Some in their early twenties. And some older women. Spirals. Reverse perms. Not a lot of hairdressers like to do them anymore, but I do.”

  My hair was wavy. I’d always wanted spiral curls, but it hadn’t occurred to me to get a perm. I tucked the idea away in the back of my mind. Something to consider. “Can you get the letter?”

  “Yeah. The boxes are in my car. I was going to take them to Phil’s parents. I thought they might want some of his things.”

  “That’s great. Can you go get it now? I’ll wait.”

  The phone dropped and I heard the sound of her retreating feet against the floor. Two minutes later, there was a thump as she dropped what could only be one of the boxes she’d shared with Jack and me. I listened as she popped the box top open and rifled through the contents. “I got it,” she said a few seconds later.

  “What’s the name of the business?”

  “The Roots Lab.”

  “That’s it!” My pulse kicked up. That was the name of the ad I’d seen in a magazine at my parents’ house. This could be the breakthrough I needed. “They do DNA testing.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. They advertise on TV. Phil was doing genetic testing,” Gemma said. “I thought it was about us having kids. That sort of thing, but…”

  She was thinking what I was. That maybe he’d discovered something about his family.

  “…oh wow…do you think he had twelve brothers and sisters, or something? Like that Vince Vaughn movie?”

  I thought about the guys on the baseball team. I’d talked to Gustavo, Ricky, Seth, and Michael. I hadn’t been able to come up with a motive, but what if…”

  Inexplicably, a picture of Marnie Haskell’s family tree popped into my head. If I wasn’t careful, my family tree could end tonight. But I wasn’t going to let that happen. I was going to have my ancestors immortalized on archival paper that I’d frame once Jack and I had our family. Just like Marnie Boyden Haskell had. I’d do what it took to protect that woman and to keep the rest of her family intact.

  My heart pounded. “What does the letter say?”

  The paper crackled as she unfolded it. “It gives the login information to read the results online.”

  “Gemma, can you—”

  “Already doing it.” The ping of a computer starting up carried through the phone line to me. A few seconds later, I heard her fingers tapping against the keyboard.

  I tapped my fingers impatiently against the bedsheet. “Anything?”

  “Give me a minute. I’m signing in.”

  “Can I help you?”

  My head jerked up. Reilly stood at the doorway of the room, blocking the entrance.

  “I heard Mrs. Haskell is awake,” a man’s voice said.

  I crinkled my brow trying to place the voice. It was one of the ball players. I knew it was, but which one?

  “Family only,” Reilly said, channeling what I assumed was her very best Zoey Barkow impression. She glanced over her shoulder and raised her eyebrows at me.

  I rotated my finger, then with my phone in one hand, I drew my hands apart telling her to stretch. She winked at me, grabbed the handle of the door, and closed it, blocking her and whoever had come to visit from my view.

  “I got it. Lola?”

  Gemma’s voice was faint coming from the phone clutched in my hand. I put it back to my ear, but I was only half listening. Something was on the edge of my brain, struggling to surface. The answer. I had the answer. I just couldn’t quite summon it.

  “Oh my God,” Gemma said. “Oh. My. God. Philip has—had—a…a…brother.”

  The names of the
ball players I’d searched on the Internet. One had drawn a complete blank. No history, until, that is, I’d searched with his middle name. But not his middle name, I realized. His actual surname.

  “Who?” I asked, but I already knew the answer.

  “Seth Matthews,” she said. “Seth is Phil’s brother?”

  Seth Boyd. He’d known that Marnie Boyden Haskell was his mother.

  Chapter 21

  Just as we’d planned, Reilly disappeared, which left full access to my hospital room. The door opened inward, slowly. I slipped down in the bed until I was flat, making sure the oxygen mask was on my face. It wouldn’t hide my identity for long, but hopefully for long enough. I had pressed Record on my phone and had placed it under the edge of the pillow.

  “Hi Mom,” a man’s voice said. Seth’s voice. He sounded light-hearted. Jovial, even. But I knew there was a darkness underneath it.

  I stirred under the covers but didn’t open my eyes. Didn’t respond. I couldn’t believe he couldn’t hear the pounding of my heart in my chest, but he seemed oblivious.

  He sat in the guest chair, with his back to the door, leaning back, stretching out his legs, and propping his feet on the end of the bed. I heaved an internal sigh of relief. He wasn’t going to discover who I was quite yet.

  “Guess it’s weird to hear me call you mom,” Seth said. “Since you abandoned me, and all. Decided to keep your other kids though. That was a shock, let me tell you. When people say in movies that their whole life has been a lie, man, I always called bullshit on that. Like, seriously? You lived your life. The one you were given. If there’s stuff you learned after the fact, it doesn’t change shit. But now…now I get it. My whole life, Mom, has been a lie. Thanks to you.”

  I stirred again, but just barely. Just enough to make him aware that I—or Marnie—was listening, but not enough to make him think I—or she—could talk.

  “Do you want to know how it happened? How I found out?”

  I moved my head from side to side, slowly. Deliberately. I wanted to know, but would Marnie? Would she want to face this truth and her part in her son’s death?

  “Ah, I’m sorry. You don’t want to hear the story?”

  Again, I shook my head.

  “That’s too bad. It’s a good one. Oh, oh, awesome. You changed your mind? Okay, I’ll tell you.”

  I hadn’t moved. The guy was playing with Marnie. Teasing her to make her suffer as he felt he’d suffered.

  “Apparently Philip, one of your other sons—one of the sons you kept—did one of those ancestry DNA tests. Spit in a test tube, he told me, sent in the sample, and a few weeks later, they sent him back the results. Results that showed that I might be his half brother. It was so easy for him to find me. He never once stopped to ask himself how I’d feel about learning the truth. That my mother had given me away, but then had gone on to have three. Other. Kids. It never occurred to him that I might not be happy about being found. About being the kid you didn’t want.”

  As I listened, I experienced a pang of regret for Seth. The betrayal he’d felt had to be very real and very heartbreaking. I imagined Marnie’s reaction and I let a small sob escaped from my lips.

  Seth dropped his feet to the ground with a thud. “Are you crying for me? Or for you? Or for…Phil?” He paused long enough to drive home the point that Philip wasn’t here anymore.

  As I imagined Marnie would, I made a choking sound deep in my throat. It wasn’t hard.

  Seth stood. His voice had turned brittle. “You want to know the truth? Once I found out I was adopted, I wanted to learn everything about you. Who you were, what you liked, how you lived. Then I met Phil and he told me everything about your family. The family you made sure I wasn’t a part of.”

  His body loomed over the bed and he stared down at me. I prepared myself, ready to leap out of the bed and go on the attack, but he didn’t move. His eyes were unblinking, and I realized that he was in his own angry world at the moment. He wasn’t seeing me, Lola, he was only seeing Marnie.

  His tone turned almost apologetic as he continued. “I hope you understand how I felt. Phil didn’t want to share you with me. You know that day we came to your house, I wanted to tell you who I was. He talked me out of it. Said we needed to wait. He didn’t even tell his fiancée. I couldn’t figure out why, until I realized that it was you. You’d given me up, and he assumed that meant you still wouldn’t want to see me. He was protecting you. The day he died, he told me he wished he’d never done the DNA test. He wanted things to go back to the way they were. As if they ever could.

  “That storm blew in and I set it all up. He agreed to meet me at the park because I said I’d leave you alone. That I wouldn’t upset the apple cart of your family. He didn’t suspect a thing. He did a little Ecstasy.” He laughed. “Of course he didn’t know he did. I guess I should say that I gave him a little X. Made things a lot easier.”

  He’d grown quiet through his monologue, but I sensed him becoming unhinged. “It’s not like I had a bad life, Marnie. I hope you don’t mind me calling you Marnie. I just can’t bring myself to call you Mom. My parents are good people. If they knew what I’d done, it would kill them, but Marnie, I can’t forgive you. So a little X for you.”

  He moved closer to the bed and palmed the oxygen mask. My heart pounded like a battle drum in my chest. This was it. Seth was taking his revenge on Marnie, but the jig was up. I grabbed ahold of his forearm and jerked my body, forcing it to slide away from him and off the bed. He was left holding the oxygen mask. His mouth gaped and he stared. “You’re not—”

  I snatched my phone from the bed and shoved it in my back pocket, then ripped off the hospital gown. “No. I’m not.”

  His entire demeanor changed in a split second. He went from stunned to steaming rage. He hurled the plastic mask at me. I ducked out of the way, but it skimmed my shoulder before crashing against the window.

  “I expected more from you as a ball player,” I said, positioning myself into a ready stance with my knees bent and my arms cocked at my sides.

  Seth went for it, hurtling himself over the bed and lunging straight at me. I dodged out of the way, grabbed one of his arms, and in a lightning flash move, I twisted until it was cocked behind his back. I plowed my knees into the backs of his and he collapsed.

  The door to the hospital room swung open with as much force as Jack could muster against the pneumatic mechanism. He rushed in, followed by Brooke, in full uniform. Nurse Reilly, in her butterfly scrubs, brought up the rear.

  Before she asked a single question, Brooke snapped handcuffs on Seth and yanked him to standing. She looked at me and I held up my cell phone. “Got it,” I said. Kung Fu was much handier than a gun, at least for this PI.

  She nodded and gave me a slight smile before calling for backup. “You have the right to remain silent,” she began as she dragged Seth out of the hospital room.

  Chapter 22

  Jack and I sat side by side on the couch in his industrial apartment, each of us with our laptops open on our legs. The windows were open and a cool April breeze wafted in between the slats of the blinds.

  “That Drake song,” I said, the lyrics in front of me.

  He didn’t look up, but kept typing on his computer, finishing up the final touches of the story he’d been working on for the last two weeks. “What about it?”

  “It makes sense now. At least I think it does. Aaron was a friend of Seth’s—”

  “Only from Seth’s time on the team.”

  “Maybe they bonded since they were both new,” I said.

  “Probably,” he said, not looking up from his keyboard.

  “That Drake song.” It had to have been a message. “When the team did the memorial for Philip, Seth must have known Aaron was on to something, right? ‘All of my let’s just be friends/Are friends I don’t have anymore/Guess it’s what they say you n
eed family for/’Cause I can’t depend on you anymore’—it had to be a warning to Aaron. A message that Seth had found his family, even if he was going to destroy them.”

  “Makes sense, in a twisted kind of way.”

  “He is a twisted guy,” I said, “but I do feel bad for him. He didn’t ask for his life to change.”

  “Pros and cons to those DNA tests,” Jack said. “I don’t think I’ll ever take one. What if my dad has other kids out there? What if they feel like Seth does? Too risky. I know I’m Irish-American. That’s enough for me.”

  I didn’t know how I felt about genetic testing. Part of me wanted to know how much European I had in me. How much of my genetics came from the indigenous people of Mexico? Maybe I’d do it someday. Or maybe Gracie, or Antonio, or Roberto would. I was pinching pennies at the moment, getting ready to move out on my own. I couldn’t spare ninety-nine dollars to spit in a test tube.

  My computer pinged with an incoming email. I immediately clicked it open.

  The screen had filled with a photograph of…¡hijo de tu madre! It was me, in full living color. The photos from the boudoir shoot, only I hadn’t done a session. I felt heat rise to my cheeks. I was standing at the foot of a bed. My robe had fallen open giving a full view of the stockings, garters, and teddy I’d been wearing. I had my phone to my ear with one hand, and the splayed fingers of the other hand were running through my hair.

  Jack’s gaze strayed to my computer screen. “Whoa. What’s that?”

  “A, um, photo shoot,” I said. I started to close the computer, but Jack was too quick. He set his aside and grabbed mine, scrolling to the next photo. This one showed me leaning against the foot of the bed. My head was back and my hair cascaded down my back. The teddy plumped up my cleavage, and with the lighting Megan the photographer had used, it looked sultry and steamy, like I was a character in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

  He looked from the photos to me, then back to the computer, then he cracked a grin. “Is this what you were doing with the bachelorette party when I picked you up Saturday night?”