Her Last Breath

by Hilary Davidson

  “Anything special?”

  “Small things I’d forgotten. Shots of us in matching outfits that Caro probably wanted to burn.”

  “Sometimes being reminded of little moments like that is the greatest gift. Caroline was a person who made every day seem special. It’s an unusual talent.”

  “She made everyone feel special, whether or not they deserved to.”

  He smiled. “Well put. You have a similar sense of humor, you know. Caroline was very careful about what she said, but if you knew her well, she was a riot.”

  That was true. Caroline was decorous to the point of dullness in public, but she was sharply observant and could be sarcastic in private.

  “What brought you here today?” he asked.

  I didn’t want to tell him about my plan to raid the pantry. “I don’t have anywhere else to be right now. I just got fired from my job.”

  “Fired?” His brow knit in concern. “Why? What happened?”

  “Honestly? I kicked the shit out of a slimeball who groped me.”

  “Deirdre!” He was clearly shocked. At first, I thought it was my choice of words, but I was wrong. “Are you going to sue? Do you have a lawyer?”

  “No.” I didn’t want to add the obvious, that I was never going to be able to afford one.

  “You do now.” He extracted a case from his pocket. I assumed it was a wallet, but when he opened it, there were only business cards inside. He removed one and handed it to me. “This is one of mine. He’s young but he is brilliant. Don’t hold it against him, but he was a classmate of my son’s. You should call him.”

  I glanced at the name embossed on the front. Hugo Laraya, Attorney at Law, Casper Peters McNally. “I can’t afford him.”

  “You don’t need to pay him a dime. He’s on retainer here.”

  “Thanks.” I stuck the card in my pocket.

  “Do you need money? I’d be happy to help.”

  I could feel my face flush. I wasn’t used to taking charity, and the spreadsheets on Caro’s memory card made me wonder if his finances were on the up-and-up.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I don’t want to intrude if you’d prefer solitude,” he said. “Theo was in here yesterday. He’s already flown off to Germany. Berlin, I believe.”

  That made my head swivel. “He left already? Did he take Teddy?”

  “No,” Theodore said. “Teddy has had enough upheaval. I won’t permit someone as unstable as my son to disturb his life.” There was steel undergirding his words.

  “Why would Theo take off like that? Why Berlin?” I’d never been outside the US, but the city was synonymous with decadence in my head. In fairness, that was from watching Cabaret and Babylon Berlin.

  “I know he’s my son, but I find it impossible to understand him or the choices he makes. Theo is used to doing whatever he wants,” his father said quietly. “I can only blame myself for that.”

  Mentally, I flipped a coin. Tell Theodore what I knew? I decided yes and took a deep diaphragm breath.

  “Caroline told me Theo killed his first wife.” It came out abruptly, more brutally than I intended.

  The old man winced, as if I’d kicked him. “I knew she’d found out. We talked about it.” He sighed. “Do you mind if we sit down? It’s hard going over this territory.”

  I moved to take a seat in Caro’s chair behind her desk. Her father-in-law sat down in the cushioned chair in front.

  “I can tell you what I know and what I believe,” Theodore said. “There was a period in his life—early on in college—when Theo was using drugs and engaging in . . . destructive behaviors, let’s call them that. First, you should know that the woman’s death wasn’t intentional. I truly believe that. Theo and she were participating in some kind of, ah, game . . . while they were high. That was how she died.”

  He clearly meant a sex game, and I was torn between wanting details and needing to vomit. “What was her name?”

  “She went by Mirelle and Marianne and a couple of other aliases. I never knew her last name. She was a gold digger who got her hooks into Theo. But then she died.”

  I couldn’t exactly blame him for taking his son’s side, but the cold way he dismissed the woman as a gold digger set my teeth on edge. “What happened afterward?”

  “I put him into rehab.”

  “What about the dead woman?”

  “What about her?”

  He sounded surprised, and I stared at him in horror. His son had killed someone—accidentally or not—and the life of the dead woman was irrelevant to him. He didn’t even think about it.

  “What happened to her body?” I asked. “People must’ve wondered about her. About where she went, and if she was okay.”

  “I don’t really know,” Theodore said. “I believe the police looked at it as a break-in. My son had cash and drugs in the apartment . . .” He heaved out a long sigh. “I put Theo in rehab hundreds of miles away. I’m ashamed of that now. I helped Theo evade responsibility for that girl.”

  “Do you want to do that now?”

  Theodore’s eyes caught on mine. Neither of us could look away.

  “If Theo had something to do with my sister’s death, would you help him get away with it?”

  “No,” Theodore said firmly. “I thought he’d settled down when he married Caroline. I hoped he had. I believe he did, for a certain time. Then he reverted to form.”

  “Caro wasn’t killed in a game,” I said. “Do you think Theo did something to her?”

  “It doesn’t seem possible, but . . .” He closed his eyes. “Caroline wanted a divorce. I understood why. Theo wanted custody of Teddy. That’s why . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “What?”

  “I haven’t told anyone this,” Theodore said. “But I saw Theo at their house before Caroline died.”

  “Wasn’t he out of town?”

  “He wants people to think that,” Theodore said. “I confronted him about it yesterday. He denied being there, but I know he was lying to me. He was at the house.”

  “Are you positive it was him?”

  “Absolutely. I was awake at five in the morning. Theo came by and went into the house. He was only there for a few minutes. I got a very good look at him on his way out. It was him.”

  “You need to tell the police,” I said.

  “Tell them what? That Theo went to his house at five in the morning? Caroline was still alive when he left.” Theodore shook his head sadly. “I’ve had paranoid thoughts about his visit. What if he did something to one of Caroline’s medications? I have no proof at all. Only fears.”

  “What about security cameras? He must be on them.”

  “The security system had been disabled,” he said. “Obviously both Caroline and Theo had the codes.”

  “Do you think Theo was involved in my sister’s death?”

  “I don’t want to think that.” He rubbed his eyes. “When I confronted him, I thought he’d give me an explanation for being there. It could have been anything. But Theo lied about it. I can’t think of any innocent reason why he would do that.”

  CHAPTER 22

  THEO

  My flight over the Atlantic was miserable. Awake, I obsessed about what Teddy had said to me when I told him I had to go away for a couple of days. You’re leaving again? Okay. Bye. Asleep, Caroline’s face floated through my mind. I don’t want to be married to you anymore. Why is that so hard to understand, Theo? Get out of my house.

  All of my options were awful ones.

  More than once, I pulled the letter I always carried out of my pocket. Reading it over always made me question my sanity.

  Dear Theo Thraxton,

  I am writing with reference to an article about you published in Verve Magazine. In it, you are quoted as saying, “The most dramatic episode of my life was when I was three years old and fell into the tiger enclosure at the Berlin Zoo.” As I hope you know, Zoo Berlin (as we call ourselves) has some 20,000 species of animals spread over 3
3 hectares. At the moment, we have no large felines as our Predator House is under major renovation, and those animals were rehomed to other zoological gardens. However, I felt it necessary to investigate your claim, as it would be unfair to rehome without warning an animal that had attacked a child. At that point, I learned that no such attack ever occurred here.

  I am unsure what motives a person would have to fabricate such an attack, but I hope that you will retract this claim. Zoo Berlin has always made the safety of our animal residents and our human visitors a top concern. There are people who believe zoos are inherently unsafe and unfounded claims such as yours give them fuel for their fire.

  Thank you for your attention to this matter.

  Sincerely,

  Ute Neumann

  I had never bothered to contact the letter writer, but her message had turned my life upside down. I remembered the day of the attack—at least, I recalled walking through the zoo with my mother, hand in hand. Some pieces were fuzzy—my mother had purchased a stuffed tiger, the most macabre souvenir in the world, for me—but others were clear as day. The sharpest moment was falling into the enclosure. Somehow, I had clambered to the top of it and dangled over the edge for what seemed like forever, to my mind. Finally I fell, and the tiger pounced on me in an instant, ripping into my flesh.

  That tiger stalked me in my sleep.

  The letter was a shock, but I set it aside at first, thinking my family had simply made a mistake in the telling of the story. Perhaps it had been a different zoo, and I’d confused it because my tiger’s collar was marked “Zoo Berlin.” When I started poking at the story, I’d found no zoo with an incident that matched my memory. What I’d discovered were various tales of tigers owned by wealthy families attacking a guest. None of them fit my recollection, and that made me realize what my family had told me was a lie.

  It wasn’t the reason I left Thraxton International, but when the time came to choose the path I wanted to follow, that made it easier. My mistake was in thinking that Caroline would want to leave with me.

  My flight arrived in the middle of the morning. I checked myself into the first hotel that came up in the app I checked. It was called the AC Hotel Humboldthain, named for the rustic park immediately to its south. It was technically in Mitte—the central district of Berlin—yet in Gesundbrunnen, an area that was traditionally working class and not terribly touristy. The remains of the infamous wall and Checkpoint Charlie were a world away. It wasn’t an area I knew, but it had a transit hub that could get me almost anywhere in Berlin.

  My room had a knotted-pine floor, moody black-and-white portraits, and stark black furnishings with crisp white linens. First thing, I took a long, hot shower. Afterward, I caught sight of myself in the bathroom’s mirrored walls. I stared at my largest scar. It was strangely compelling, this red welt that ran from the hollow of my throat straight down to my navel. As a student in Berlin, I’d gotten a tattoo—three lines of text penned by Christopher Marlowe, divided by that sinister red line:

  Hell hath no limits / nor is circumscribed

  In one self place / for where we are is hell,

  And where hell is / must we ever be.

  I had other scars on my body, jagged gashes on my torso from the animal attack. Ironically, the long, straight scar was what had saved my life—it was the surgical scar from when doctors had operated on me. Away at boarding school in England, I had been part of a group of boys who dared each other to do frightening things, cutting deep into skin or exposing flesh to flame. There was bluster in it, a determination to broadcast how tough we were. Only the pain, for me, meant something more. It tamed the dark side of my brain, the one that whispered, I am full of hidden horrors, the beastly demigod demanding a sacrifice. Even in that disturbed band of miscreants, I stood out. Everyone was fascinated by the scar that bisected me as if I were a lab specimen. It was a comment on the powers of childhood imagination that when I told other boys an Aztec cult had tried to sacrifice me to a tiger, this seemed like a reasonable explanation.

  Dressing quickly, I pushed the scar out of my mind. I’d given myself two days to revisit the past. I was all too aware that my leaving New York—and my son—would only provide fodder for my sister’s case against me. For the briefest of moments, it occurred to me that Dr. Haven could be setting me up. After all, she had encouraged me to leave New York, which was a boon to Juliet’s plotting. Stop being paranoid, I warned myself. But paranoia was my only defense against my family.

  I took the U-Bahn south to the Brandenburg Gate, as if I were a normal tourist. As a student, I’d only seen it at night, when the eighteenth-century colonnade was wrapped in golden lights. During the day, I found myself staring at the very top, with the four-horse chariot driven by the goddess of victory. I’d spent eighteen months in Berlin, and I’d never managed to visit the Reichstag, a block to the north, nor the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a block to the south. I had, however, spent a decent amount of time in the Tiergarten, Berlin’s answer to Central Park.

  I stayed on the major boulevard that bisected the park—the Strasse des 17 Juni, named for the East Berlin uprising. If I wanted to re-create my time in Berlin, I would have to follow the park’s rambles, past fountains and stone works of art. But I’d often been high when I’d wasted days in the park. The Soviet War Memorial was on the boulevard, and I had a far clearer memory of it, because that was where my father’s business partner, Klaus von Strohm, liked to meet. Your father wants me to check up on you, but I promise not to do that too much, he’d said just after I’d started at the university. What is the point of living in Berlin if not to be a bit decadent?

  I wasn’t sure how Klaus defined decadent, but I went off the deep end. At boarding school, I’d smoked marijuana and taken mushrooms; in university, I’d quieted my nightmares and the voices in my head with ketamine and midazolam and opiates. It was a steep crash.

  The Victory Column—with its golden idol to military might—loomed in the distance, gradually becoming more prominent as I walked west. Zoo Berlin lay just a little to the southwest of it. As a teenager, I’d felt bold, returning to the city where I’d almost died as a child. But I’d never set foot inside its grounds again. I told myself this would be the trip when I changed that.

  But my priority was remembering my time in Berlin with Mirelle.

  Just beyond the western edge of Tiergarten was my university, built around Ernst Reuter Platz. After the first couple of months, I’d spent little time in its classrooms. They barely registered in my memory.

  I headed south, following Knesebeckstrasse to the boulevard of Kanstrasse, where signs pointed east to the zoo, a couple of blocks away. I didn’t know what I was thinking, choosing that area as my new home when I was eighteen. At that age, I’d firmly blocked out the past. Maybe I’d done it so successfully with drugs that the zoo didn’t register anymore.

  My apartment had been somewhere south of the boulevard. I couldn’t remember the name of the street until I came upon the sign for Niebuhrstrasse, which was filled with elegant buildings. It didn’t take me long to find it after that.

  I could still remember the day Mirelle had knocked at my door. Dark haired and pale, with rose-red lips, she looked like a fairy-tale princess come to life. Sorry to bother you, she’d said in French-accented English. I just moved here, and I lost my phone. Could I make a call?

  I remembered staring at her neck, which was encircled by a black choker with silver studs, much like the girls at the fetish clubs I was visiting. What caught my attention was a glass vial hanging on a longer silver chain. It was filled with something red. Mirelle had noticed my gaze.

  I’m secretly a vampire, she’d said with a coy smile.

  I could feel my heart pounding just from staring at the building, remembering it all. I had met her in October, near the start of my second year at the university. By the end of January, Mirelle was dead. I’d spent years pushing every memory of her away. But it occurred to me for the first time how
odd it was that this beautiful woman had simply landed on my doorstep one day. There was another detail that I recalled as I stared at my former home. I had told Dr. Haven that I’d come to inside my apartment, but that wasn’t true. I lived on the fourth floor, and I never closed the blinds at night, because I loved catching glimpses of the stars. But Mirelle’s apartment was on the first floor, and she kept the blinds closed for privacy. When I’d opened my eyes, the lights were on. I’d seen the blinds first, before my head turned and Mirelle came into focus.

  I wanted to step inside the building, but no one answered when I rang the office bell; the building never had a live-in superintendent when I lived there, so that wasn’t a surprise. I peered into the window of the room that had been Mirelle’s, afraid the police would come by at any moment and arrest me as a Peeping Tom. The lights were off, but I could see the floor was blond wood, not the dark that I remembered. Of course they’d replaced it.

  I remembered shouting Mirelle’s name. I’d reached for her, and realized the knife was in my hand. When I tried to move, it felt like I was weighted down. That could have been the drugs. But for the first time, I was sure that someone else had been in the room with us.

  CHAPTER 23

  DEIRDRE

  I had mixed emotions leaving the Thraxton International offices. Caro’s father-in-law hadn’t been anything other than kind to me, and I appreciated him telling me about Theo. But his casual dismissal of the woman Theo had killed—accidentally or not—left me unsettled. He regarded her like a piece of furniture. I knew he didn’t think of Caro that way, but he would only be an ally to a point. No matter what he claimed, he’d help his son out of a jam.

  I texted Ben, asking if he could meet me. He answered immediately, suggesting the café at Pershing Square. I walked down Park and through Grand Central Terminal, exiting at Forty-Second Street. Even before I crossed the street, I spotted Ben. He was sprawling in one of the café’s metal chairs, casually dressed in torn jeans, a green button-down shirt, and scruffy leather boots. As I got closer, I saw he was reading Ernest Hemingway. Clearly he had a manual on macho male journalist tropes.