Her Last Breath

by Hilary Davidson

  CHAPTER 9

  DEIRDRE

  I lay awake for a long time that night, staring at the ceiling in the dark and listening to the rumbling of my landlord’s washing machine. Saira prowled around the house at night, sometimes vacuuming or mopping or scrubbing the walls until two or three in the morning. Wilson, the tenant in the room next to mine, was half my size but snored like a foghorn, and I caught every blast through the paper-thin drywall. Finally, I gave up pretending to sleep and reached for my computer.

  There were two messages I needed to send. The first was to the mysterious X, and I typed the email address Todd had given me into a new message. Hi, I’m Deirdre Crawley, I wrote. I’m Caroline Thraxton’s sister. I know she sent you a message to read after she died, and I want to talk to you about it. Can you message me back? Or call? Thanks. I added my phone number and pressed send.

  One down. The next one would be harder to write.

  I turned on the light and reached for the photos my sister had given me. Flipping through them, I found the one of Caro and the man I didn’t know. With Ben, at the Clarkson/Northcutt house in High Falls, New York. I studied his face. He was handsome in a bland way—clean-cut hair, well-tanned white skin, chiseled features, perfect teeth—and I found myself squinting at his image, trying to picture him in black shades like the man who’d been watching Caro’s funeral from afar at Green-Wood. It could’ve been him, but that was just a guess.

  There was a lot about Ben Northcutt online. He was the definition of Intrepid Reporter, having been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He’d written three books on politics, drugs, and terrorism in South America, focusing on the years he spent living in Colombia and Argentina. His website linked to articles he wrote for Esquire and GQ and the New York Times and the Guardian, and I devoured one after another. There were plenty about political corruption and the drug trade, but the ones that stayed with me were haunting, especially a series about human trafficking for slave labor in the mines of Venezuela and Colombia. Others were about the rehabilitation of child soldiers who still struggled with PTSD, gangs in Bogotá who used zombifying drugs on their victims, and the excavation of a World War II–era Nazi hideout in the middle of Argentina.

  The bottom line was that Ben seemed like a badass. Even his author photo—unsmiling and serious, next to a pile of human skulls—was kind of thrilling. I took a deep breath and tapped out the world’s dullest email—Hey Ben, this is Deirdre, Caroline Crawley’s sister, I really need to talk to you—and gave him my phone number. There was nothing I could do but wait.

  It was tempting to read more of Ben’s work, but I remembered I meant to look up Caro’s. When she’d graduated from SUNY’s journalism school in New Paltz, we weren’t speaking—I was seventeen then and living with Reagan and her mom—but I’d kept track of Caro online, reading some of her articles for women’s magazines and travel sites and mocking them. It had been another two years before we’d spoken to each other, and right around that time she’d published a profile of Theo Thraxton in a glossy magazine I couldn’t recall the name of. It came up quickly online. The title was “Thraxton Heir or Modern-Day Indiana Jones?,” which was objectively terrible by any measure. It was part of a “30 under 30” article, and it was short. But I remembered it was filled with curious nuggets that didn’t usually turn up in puff pieces. I clicked on it and found a photo of Theo in a full-body neoprene wet suit, standing next to a broken stone head with seaweed on it. I started reading.

  The Thraxton name is synonymous with luxury. With a hotel empire that operates in 38 countries, you would imagine that Theodore R. Thraxton Junior—or Theo, as he prefers to be called—has his hands full as the company’s vice president and CEO of global operations. But Thraxton, 27, has an unusual side hustle, repatriating stolen antiquities to their home countries.

  “The truth is, I never wanted to be in the hotel business,” Thraxton admits. “That was my father’s dream for me, and I failed on my first try when I was studying in Berlin.” But Thraxton went on to enroll in Harvard’s ambitious MBA/JD program, where he graduated near the top of his class.

  “My intent wasn’t to practice law,” Thraxton says. “But I grew up seeing how people manipulate the law to get what they want. It’s not a level playing field. I wanted to understand how to navigate the system.” His first success happened last year, when he helped the Thai government recover several pieces of Ban Chiang pottery—believed to be at least 2,000 years old—from an American museum that would prefer not to be named.

  “Museums tend to be careful about the provenance of pieces today, but that wasn’t always true,” Thraxton says. “It’s part of the legacy of colonialism, holding on to other people’s heritage.”

  Perhaps it’s not surprising that Thraxton is such a high achiever at a young age—his mother, Penelope Archer, a legend of the London stage, won her first Laurence Olivier Award when she was eighteen for her starring role in Romeo and Juliet, and his father, Theodore Senior, famously bought his first luxury hotel with cash he won at a roulette table in Monte Carlo. “I come from a dramatic family,” Theo admits. Asked about his own drama, he demurs. “The most dramatic episode of my life was when I was three years old and fell into the tiger enclosure at the Berlin Zoo,” he says. “I’m lucky to be alive, even with all the scars. Drama, I can do without. I’d just like to do some good in the world.”

  I read the piece over twice. Other articles mentioned Theo, but they were boring business stories about Thraxton International’s global expansion. More recently, pieces quoted him on issues like the campaign to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece. None of it was personal. I found a New York Times “Vows” column about Caro and Theo’s wedding, but I couldn’t bring myself to click on it just then. There were a couple of tabloid photos of the two of them together at charity balls, and then several of Caro splendidly dressed, but always alone. “Socialite Caroline Thraxton Chairs First Annual Gala for Domestic Violence Charity” popped up, and I noticed the byline belonged to Abby Morel, the reporter who’d tackled me at the church. I scanned it, but it was mostly pictures of rich people in fancy clothes. The charity in question was the Diotima Civic Society. It had come up the last time I’d argued with Caro—maybe a year ago—about how she’d become a corporate drone.

  You always wanted to be a journalist, I’d said. So why are you stuck doing publicity for a hotel chain?

  I was a journalist for a while, and it was terrible, Caro had answered. I got to write puff pieces under my own byline, or work like hell for someone else’s byline and let them take credit. In both cases, I worked for peanuts.

  But journalism was your dream.

  It was, but a lot’s changed since then. Caro didn’t make a direct reference to the years we’d lost touch, but that floated between us uneasily. I’m doing more good now than I ever did as a journalist. Diotima wouldn’t be able to do their amazing work without funding.

  That’s great for now, I’d snarked, but the hotel chain probably won’t survive the pandemic.

  Caro had smiled at that. You’d be surprised how well it’s doing.

  I closed my laptop and turned off the light. My heart squeezed so tight remembering my sister that it physically ached. I’d been roughed up in and out of the dojo plenty of times, but no other pain ever hurt that much.

  CHAPTER 10

  THEO

  My sister-in-law’s words haunted me at the gravesite. Caro’s dead. Your first wife is dead. Isn’t that what police call a pattern? It had come out of the blue, her rage so sudden and swift that I couldn’t even process it.

  She had caught me off guard. I wouldn’t allow that to happen again.

  But her words followed me for the rest of the day. Even in my bedroom that evening, they echoed in my mind. I found myself staring at the framed photographs that covered one wall. There was one in particular I couldn’t take my eyes off: Caroline and me together on a boat. In the background was the sparkling deep sapphire of the Mediterranean and a cloudle
ss azure sky. Caroline wore a mint-green bathing suit with a matching cover-up, disguising any hint of her pregnancy. I was barefoot but encased in a blue neoprene wet suit. We were both grinning, drunk on the blissful freedom of our honeymoon. Everything was perfect for a time.

  Then it all changed.

  I stared at that hopeful image, wondering where we had gone wrong. It had happened slowly and then very quickly, like a boulder picking up speed as it crashed downhill. When I ran our time together through my mind like an old newsreel, I could pinpoint the moments of crisis and bad decisions. I didn’t want to think about the ones I’d made; it was so much easier to be angry at Caroline for the harm she’d done.

  The wall of photographs was the one element that distinguished my room from a trendy hotel, and I attempted to distract myself with them. There was one of a newborn Teddy, and another of my son building a sandcastle on a beach. One was of my mother in costume for a West End production of Antigone, her black hair coiled in ancient Greek style and held back by a gold diadem; even in a black-and-white photo, her eyes were piercing. There should’ve been photographs of us together before she divorced my father, but I’d never found them. Instead, my childhood was represented by a lone shot of my sister and me on skis, when I was five and she was nine, and another of us around the same time with my father and stepmother at their wedding. In both shots, Juliet scowled at the camera, while I looked dazed. There was a blank space where there had been a photograph of Caroline and me on our wedding day. I’d cut my right hand when I’d smashed the glass and broken the frame.

  That reminded me of what I’d done to my left hand in the church that morning. The wound was wrapped in a beige bandage now, but the pain underneath was sharp. How could I have been so stupid and selfish? My son needed me. I didn’t have the luxury of wallowing in pain and self-harm as I had as a student. I could never do that again.

  I crept down the hall to Teddy’s room. Since I’d put my son to bed, he’d already summoned me back three times. In the last instance, he’d been upset to the point of tears that he couldn’t find his floppy-eared stuffed rabbit, who had fallen on the carpet. Since his mother’s death, every loss—however temporary—hit him frighteningly hard. I cracked the door open and felt tremendous relief at the sight of my son, asleep, hugging Bunny tightly. Reassured, I closed the door and made my way back to my room. As I did, I heard a crash and a shriek from the kitchen.

  I hurried down the stairs to the first floor and headed to the back of the house. There was a stained-glass window with a red flower over the kitchen door, illuminated by the light inside. Opening the door, I found my stepmother kneeling on the floor, picking up the remains of a shattered wine bottle with her bare hands. Guilt surged through me; I should have checked on her that afternoon, but I’d forgotten to. An elastic bandage was wrapped around her wrist.

  “Ursula, are you all right?”

  “Theo! How are you keeping?” she asked with a bright smile, as if we were having a social visit. Her diamond drop earrings glittered in the bright artificial light, and there was red lipstick smeared on her teeth. She was wearing a somber black dress as if she were finally ready for the funeral.

  “What happened?”

  “I dropped a bottle, dear. Don’t make a big deal of it.”

  I heard footsteps behind me, and Theo’s nanny, Gloria, appeared, wrapped in a fluffy pink robe. “Oh, no! Are you okay, Mrs. Thraxton?”

  “I’m fine, fine. Just ungeschickt, as my husband always reminds me.” Ursula meant clumsy. Her accented English was so fluent people usually assumed she was British, but German words popped out of her mouth when she was dead drunk, as she very clearly was at that moment.

  “I can clean up,” Gloria offered.

  “No, I’ll do it,” I said. “Thank you for everything today, Gloria. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”

  Gloria leaned closer. “She’s been coming over all the time,” she whispered. “I think your father is cutting off her supply earlier and earlier.” She gave Ursula a concerned glance and retreated from the room.

  The wine was still spreading over the Italian tile floor. I looked for a mop and bucket and couldn’t find either.

  “There’s a dustpan in that closet,” Ursula said, as if she were the one who lived in the house.

  I retrieved it and cleaned up the mess as best I could. As I did, Ursula removed another bottle from the wine fridge. She carefully extracted the cork and poured a glass for herself.

  “How’s your wrist?” I asked. “Father said you had an accident this morning.”

  “I tripped and fell,” Ursula said. “It’s only a sprain. Your father likely told you I was drunk, but I wasn’t. Not very drunk, anyway. I was upset about Caroline.”

  “I’m glad it was just a sprain. You need to be careful.”

  “I wanted to ask how you are feeling, dear,” Ursula said, then took a long gulp of chablis.

  My stepmother had never been subtle. I suspected that my father, after his marriage to my mother—a volatile stage actress everyone described as complicated—was glad to be married to a woman who was straightforward in her wants. Ursula liked money, jewelry, and alcohol, though not necessarily in that order.

  “It’s been a very long day,” I said.

  “A long day, a long week, a long year,” Ursula said. “It never ends, does it?”

  Without asking, she reached in the cupboard for a tumbler and poured some wine for me. “No, thanks.”

  “You’re going to want it,” Ursula said. “What did you do to your hand?”

  She was right; I took a long drink. It never ceased to amaze me that—no matter how inebriated she was—Ursula was the most meticulous person I’d ever met. No detail went past her unnoticed.

  “Did my father send you over?”

  “Absolutely not. Nor do I report to him.”

  “I used to think you were reporting to Klaus.” Ursula was the younger sister of Klaus von Strohm, my father’s business partner. Where my father was jocular and outgoing, Klaus was saturnine and stern.

  “My brother the Arschgesicht?” Ursula raised an eyebrow as she elegantly cursed him out. “I’m certain he hoped I would report back to him when I married your father. Men always think women exist for their service. They can fuck themselves.” She took a long drink. “Your hand, dear?”

  “I burned my hand on a candle in the church today.”

  “Only one candle?”

  “A few.”

  She finished her glass and set it on the counter. “I thought you stopped doing that years ago.”

  “I did. Today was the first time in a very long time.” This was the truth; I hadn’t sliced or burned my skin since Teddy was born. In the past couple of years—ever since I’d left the family business—I hadn’t even thought about it.

  “Are you taking drugs again?”

  “No. I haven’t since I went through rehab.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Ursula poured more wine into her glass. “Because that was a nightmarish time for us all.”

  “I know,” I said softly. We were silent for a minute. “I need to ask you something, Ursula. Did Caroline ever ask you about my first wife?”

  My stepmother nodded sadly. “She did. It was almost three months ago. She was a little bit sneaky about it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, my brain doing the arithmetic. Caroline had first mentioned divorce two months ago, but she’d never explained why she suddenly wanted one.

  “She came to your father’s house several times, looking for photographs.” Ursula took another drink. She and my father lived in a tremendous town house directly across the street from ours, but my stepmother only ever referred to it as your father’s house. The smaller town house Caroline and I shared had been a wedding gift from them. “One day, when no one else was around, she said to me, ‘Is there a photo album from Theo’s first wedding?’”

  I inhaled sharply. “How did she . . . ?”

  Urs
ula put up a hand. “I have no idea—I am simply telling you what I know, dear. Caroline caught me by surprise with that, but she was too clever for her own good. I said, ‘What photo album?’ Of course, I should have said, ‘What wedding?’ But it didn’t really matter. Caroline said, ‘Wasn’t Theo married before?’ and I said of course not. She persisted. ‘Isn’t that why he dropped out of university in Berlin?’ Ah, pardon me, she said college, not university. I asked who told her this baffling thing.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She tried to pretend you—yes, you yourself, Theo—had made some oblique reference.” Ursula rolled her eyes. “I grew up with a father and brother in the Stasi. This pretty little girl thought she could trick me?”

  I didn’t say it was likely because Ursula was drunk when Caroline tried to ambush her, but the thought crossed my mind. My stepmother could read me, though.

  “You are thinking it is because of the wine.” She lifted her glass and drank defiantly. “I have been keeping secrets for the Thraxton family ever since my brother placed me in your father’s house. I am a vault. I do not slip up. I did not spill a word about your . . . mistakes.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, and Mirelle’s face appeared, as if conjured from the back of my mind. There had been a time when I’d thought about nothing except her death, but I’d finally realized I had to keep moving forward, in spite of what I’d done. I could still do good in the world. I could spend the rest of my life making up for my mistakes. I am full of hidden horrors, whispered a voice, and I shuddered. There had been so much blood when Mirelle died . . .

  “It was a terrible time for you, Theo,” Ursula went on. “But it was an awful time for all of us. We thought we were going to lose you. Your father was terrified. You were like a wraith, so close to death . . .”

  “Can we not talk about that?” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Ursula said. “I know it’s hard for you. Of course you feel guilty. But that woman was the devil. She deserved what she got.” Ursula drained her glass and cocked her head at what was left in the bottle. After a nanosecond’s hesitation, she refilled her glass. “I loved Caroline,” she said quietly. Her pale-blue eyes were watery. That was a side effect of too much wine, but I knew she was sincere. “My loyalty is to you, and your father, of course, but I tried to help Caroline in my own way.”