Her Last Breath

by Hilary Davidson

  “You met her?”

  “I was at their wedding,” he said.

  I didn’t remember meeting him there. I’d mostly lurked in the shadows, eventually ducking out early. Jude had been Caro’s only bridesmaid.

  “Theodore mentioned you’re friends with Theo,” I said.

  “We were best friends in college, but Theo has never forgiven me for doing legal work for his father.”

  “Really?”

  “There’s some antagonism between the two of them,” Laraya said. “I pointed out to Theo exactly how many Filipino lawyers the white-shoe firm of Casper Peters McNally has: just me. They hired me on his father’s recommendation. But Theo sees it as a sort of betrayal. ‘You’ll get caught up in his web’ is how he put it. He says his father always expects interest on any favor he does.”

  I was tempted to ask Laraya about the money-laundering allegations, but I knew that was pointless.

  “Did you know Theo’s in Berlin right now?”

  “Are you kidding?” He shook his head. “Damn it. That’s what I get for trying to help.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry. I should keep my big mouth shut,” Laraya said. He was quiet for a minute. “Do you have any idea why things went so wrong between your sister and Theo?”

  “Caro never talked about it.”

  “Well, neither of them talked to me about it.” He gave me a small smile. “I always wondered. They were so close at one time.”

  “All I know for sure right now is that my sister gave me a small fraction of the truth.”

  “I don’t want to sound like a cynical lawyer,” he said. “But I think that’s all anybody ever gives anyone.”

  CHAPTER 28

  THEO

  Mehmet Badem’s address was in Prenzlauer Berg, an area I knew all too well from my student days. Drugs and fetish clubs existed in every Berlin neighborhood, but if you wanted something dangerous, you were sure to find it there. Badem’s address was east of Mauerpark—a reminder of where part of the Berlin Wall once stood—and the charming boutiques and cafés of the Schönhauser Allee.

  His building looked industrial, with four boxy floors and an African restaurant on the main level. There were two dozen apartment buzzers, and I pressed them until someone answered. “Anlieferung,” I said, hoping that was the right word for delivery—my German had always been lacking—and I was buzzed in.

  Badem lived on the third floor, and he answered when I knocked. I had immediately recognized his photograph, but if I’d encountered him on the street, I wouldn’t have realized it was the same man. He’d been a solid muscular type at one time, but he had morphed into a skeletal wreck. His skin was sallow and sagging, and his eyes were sunken. His dark hair was streaked with gray and slicked back.

  It was like looking in a dark mirror. If I’d continued to use all the drugs I’d once been on, I had no reason to believe I’d look any better.

  “Mehmet Badem? Entschuldige.” I wanted to apologize for showing up at his door unannounced, but I could only get as far as saying excuse me in German. “Ich bin . . .”

  “I know you,” he answered in English. He stared at me intently, barely blinking.

  “My name is Theo,” I said. “You used to work for my family at the Thraxton Hotel.”

  Badem’s eyes widened, and his mouth made a squishy gurgle. “Oh, shit,” he murmured.

  “I heard you had an accident at the hotel a few years ago . . .”

  He stepped back, as if I’d pushed him. I used the opportunity to step inside, quickly shutting the door behind me.

  “That’s right.” Badem took another step back.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  “You’re a Thraxton. You know what happened,” he said, never taking his eyes off mine.

  “All I know is that there was an accident five years ago. What kind of work did you do?”

  “Security,” he said warily.

  Of course it was security.

  “Cigarette?” he asked me.

  “No, thanks.”

  He retreated further, picking up a pack from the sofa and lighting a cigarette. He may have looked like a wreck, but his apartment was relatively tidy. I took in the big-screen television, video-game console, and new laptop; he wasn’t well, but his pension seemed to be supporting him. An annoyed yip came from one of the cushions. A mutt with mottled black-and-white fur sat up and started barking at me.

  “Shhh, Snoopy,” he chided.

  “Cute dog,” I said, even though the bundle of fluff was baring its fangs. It was small and probably harmless, but I still had to fight my instinct to flee.

  “He gets nervous,” Badem said. “Strangers, you know. He doesn’t like them.”

  “I have a few questions for you.”

  The dog barked again.

  “I’ll put him in the bedroom,” Badem said, scooping the pup into his arms. “Then we can talk.”

  I walked to the window and stared at the bustling street outside. My first year of school in Berlin, I’d been in Prenzlauer Berg most nights once I discovered it. BDSM clubs were a dime a dozen, but this area was where I’d discovered bloodplay. As often as I could manage, I would pay pretty girls to open my veins. It was how I slipped away. At a certain point, whenever I bled enough, my mind shut down. That was when the voices in my head stopped, when I am full of hidden horrors was silenced. No matter how much I worked with Dr. Haven to recover my memory, I never expected to get those moments back—after all, they were dark voids where time and place had no meaning. That had been the entire point.

  I stared out the window, wondering why I’d always been so desperate to escape from myself. In my sessions with Dr. Haven, she’d gently guided me into conversations about my parents and how their divorce and my mother’s subsequent abandonment of Juliet and me had affected us. But I didn’t blame my mother; I believed she’d run away to save herself. My stepmother had said, Marriage to a Thraxton is sheer misery. I didn’t doubt that.

  At that moment, I could hear Mirelle’s voice. What could be more romantic than getting married, Theo? Let’s run away and do it. It will be our little secret. I had agreed immediately because I couldn’t imagine life without her. We’d only been together for a short time, but I’d stopped going to clubs because of her; she understood bloodplay and yet was kind and warm and nonjudgmental. But standing in that apartment, overlooking my old bleeding grounds, something about the memory curdled. Mirelle had been everything I wanted, but she never asked for anything back. It was as if she existed for my happiness, and as a young man, I’d accepted that as my due.

  Lost as I was in my thoughts, I heard the sharp click behind me and turned away from the window. Mehmet Badem was standing behind me, pointing a gun at my chest.

  CHAPTER 29

  DEIRDRE

  I’d never felt so lost. I didn’t have a job, and in spite of Hugo Laraya’s assurances, the notion of suing my former employer made me green around the gills. I didn’t have a sister anymore, and my conversations with Ben and even Jude gave me a queasy sense that, even though I loved Caro, I hadn’t really known her well. I didn’t have anyone to talk to honestly about my sister. Reagan cared and wanted to help, but she mostly knew Caro through the filter of what I’d told her. Jude was the opposite: she understood Caro, but wanted to filter uncomfortable information away from me. And Ben had refused to answer my question about their relationship, which only made me believe that my sister really had been stepping out on her husband.

  There was only one thing I could think of to do: get as much information as I could directly from Caro herself. I got on the 7 train at Grand Central and headed east.

  When I was a little kid, I actually liked hanging out at my father’s garage in Willets Point, also known as the Iron Triangle of Queens, a stone’s throw from the old Shea Stadium. He let me sit behind the steering wheels, pretending I was a Formula One race-car driver. But it had been a long time since I’d gone over willingly. The
place had a newish sign—CRAWLEY’S REPAIRS—soaring above the rusty Quonset hut, but otherwise, it hadn’t changed, even though the area around it was being redeveloped. Naturally, my father was the holdout against progress.

  I didn’t see him as I approached. I was in the broad driveway, breathing from my diaphragm, steeling myself to see him, when I noticed his legs sticking out from underneath a car, the knee-high socks he insisted on wearing rolled down to his ankles, a weird habit he’d always had. It made me think of the beginning of The Wizard of Oz, and how the Wicked Witch of the East was crushed.

  I tried to speak, but my voice felt rusty. It had been years since I’d said a word to him, and I didn’t know how to start.

  I hesitated for so long that he had time to finish whatever repair he was making and slide out from under the car. There were smudges of grease on his hands and forehead. He jolted as if he thought I was a ghost and banged his head against the car.

  “Deirdre?” he asked, as if I were a mirage. A smile crept across his face. “I’m so glad you . . .”

  “This isn’t a social visit,” I said sharply. “I need to see the last message Caro emailed you.”

  The smile faded. He wiped his hands on a rag he pulled out of his overalls. It seemed to hold all his attention. “I can’t think when that was. We never used email much.” His Irish accent was strong, as if he’d just come over from Belfast. Thirty-plus years of living in Queens hadn’t softened it at all.

  “I know you got a message from Caro the day of her funeral,” I said. “I have to see it.”

  He frowned at me, his eyes squinting in concentration as if taking in a problem he could never solve. “How could she email after she died?” He got to his feet.

  “She used a service called . . . never mind. Caroline set up some messages to go out in case she died. I got one. You did too.”

  “I don’t have much use for that internet nonsense. But I can check.” He tossed the rag on the ground and turned on his heel.

  We went through a door that led to a small room at the side of the building. His office was exactly the way I remembered it. There was a small plywood desk and a pair of towering bookcases he’d cobbled together himself. His computer was an ancient beige plastic desktop. It actually screeched when he started it, like a pterodactyl was hiding inside.

  “This might take a minute,” he muttered, putting on his reading glasses.

  On the wall was a framed portrait of my mother on her wedding day. Underneath it was a shadow box with a single red rose. I recognized it immediately. It was one of the flowers that had topped my mother’s coffin. My mother had died of cancer just before Teddy was born. I couldn’t blame my father for that. But I hated him for everything else.

  “Okay, it’s fired up,” he said.

  I edged around the desk so I could see his screen. “Go to your email.”

  Another minute ticked by while his Hotmail account loaded.

  “You still use that?” I asked.

  “Why not? It works.”

  There was nothing from Osiris’s Vault in his inbox. True to his minimalist spirit, my father had only a dozen emails in the folder, so it wasn’t hard to tell. “Check your spam,” I said.

  He clicked on that folder. It was empty.

  “You must have another email address.”

  “This is the only one.” He made a startled yelp. “Hold on, there’s another for the business. Let me try that.”

  I waited, staring at the walls because it took him forever to log in. “Sorry, I don’t usually use this account,” he said. I ignored him, examining the framed photographs on his desk. There was one of our family together when I was a toddler and Caro was six, and another of my sister and me hugging.

  “Did you put these photos up because Caro died?” I asked him.

  “No, they’ve been there awhile now.”

  “Why do you have photos of me on your desk?”

  He stopped typing and turned his eyes to meet mine. “Because you’re my daughter.”

  “We don’t have a relationship.”

  He turned back to the computer. “That’s your choice. I respect it. But it doesn’t matter whether you’re speaking to me or not. You’re still my child.”

  “Don’t try to use the psychobabble you used on Caro with me,” I warned. “She was the forgiving type. I’m not.”

  “You’re not going to like this, but you’re more like me than Caro ever was.”

  “Just find the message,” I snapped.

  “I’m not saying that to hurt your feelings,” he added. “I know what it’s like to be angry. To not know how to deal with that rage.”

  “Shut up. You don’t know anything about me. We’re biologically related, but I don’t think of you as my father. To me, you’re just the man who used to beat up my mother.”

  There was a stone-cold silence in the room.

  “I was a different man when I was drinking,” he whispered. “I can’t tell you how much I regret it.”

  This wasn’t a new argument. He’d always blamed alcohol for his rages, even back when he was still drinking. He liked to pretend it covered up his true nature, as if it were a disguise controlling the man who wore it. But the opposite was true: Alcohol unmasked the real man and his black heart. It revealed his true identity, like a horror-movie monster pulling off its human mask to reveal slime and tentacles. The darkness underneath was always there.

  “Just find the message,” I repeated.

  I watched him go through company emails. Nothing from Osiris’s Vault.

  “Maybe it’s in the mail at home?” he suggested.

  “It’s an email! Not regular mail!” I shouted in frustration. “Look, you must have another email address. People sign up for them all the time and forget about them.”

  “I’ve used this one for twenty years,” he said. “The company one is newer, because I resisted having a website for so long. But these are the only two I use.”

  Exasperated, I pulled out my phone. “It would look like this. See?”

  There it was: Osiris’s Vault keeps all your data safe and secure, said the text at the top of the screen. Caroline Crawley wants you to read this letter.

  “That thing?” He looked astonished. “I deleted it immediately.”

  “What? Why? What did it say?”

  “I don’t know. I never opened it. But these vultures were calling me and showing up here asking if Caro was on drugs. I thought it was part of that.”

  “Open up your trash folder,” I ordered him.

  He did. There it was: Caro’s message. I pushed his hand out of the way and clicked on it myself.

  Dad,

  This is the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write. I’ve always felt like it’s my job to be cheerful and upbeat, but the truth is that I have been miserable for a long time. I’ve always hated face-to-face confrontations—or even conversations about difficult subjects—and that’s why I’m putting down these thoughts on (digital) paper.

  Having my own child has made me think so much about what influences you when you’re growing up. It’s made me think about you and Mom—for better and worse. When I think back on my childhood, it’s with resentment. There’s no way to erase the bad years, but I’m grateful for the ways you’ve changed. I wish you’d been the man you are now when I was growing up.

  I know Deirdre is difficult, but it’s up to you to make amends with her. I know you think she hates you and wants nothing to do with you, but it’s on you to get past that. We are the way we are because of how you were. If anything happens to me, I want you two to be extensively involved in raising Teddy.

  I love you,

  Caro

  Of all the things I was expecting, that message wasn’t it. I gawped at it. When I glanced at my father, I realized he was astonished too. We were a pair of fish who’d leaped into uncharted territory and discovered we couldn’t breathe there.

  “What do you think she meant?” he asked. “About being miserabl
e. Was that about Theo? She was always a happy person. Caro could light up any room.”

  “Happy isn’t the same as cheerful,” I answered grimly. “As she points out in the first paragraph.”

  “Was she still angry with me? I thought we were on good terms.”

  If he was looking for comfort, he was searching in the wrong place. I didn’t answer. I was too busy seething. I know Deirdre is difficult. Caro had always played the role of the good daughter, while I’d been cast as the bad one. Yet there she was, writing that she’d felt the same way I had as a child. We should’ve been each other’s allies. Instead, we’d been estranged for years. Maybe I was the difficult one, but I wasn’t the dishonest one.

  “What do you think she meant about resentment?” he added. “I thought we were close. I always told her she could tell me if she needed help.”

  That was the last straw.

  “Help, from you? You are literally the last person in the world anyone would turn to for help.”

  “Deirdre . . .”

  “She wanted you to know you were a shitty father who screwed up your kids. Caro played nice and made the best of it, but underneath it all, guess what?” My voice had gotten louder with each breath. I was shouting now. “She hated you as much as I do.”

  I stormed out of the room and slammed the front door behind me. What Caro had written in her letter was true—she had always avoided any confrontation. I thrived on it. But at that moment, I had to get away from him. I’d hoped to get a clue about what was going on with the Thraxtons. Instead, I’d seen Caro’s unvarnished truths about our family. Nothing could have prepared me for that.

  CHAPTER 30

  THEO

  “What are you doing?” I asked, staring down the barrel of the handgun. I wasn’t afraid so much as bewildered. I had hunted Mehmet Badem down to answer questions about the night Mirelle died, only to learn he’d rather shoot me than talk.

  Badem stared at me, his hand quivering slightly. “I know all about you,” he said. “I never went to the police. I never talked. Why would you come here? I will not let you kill me.”

  “All I want are answers,” I said, trying to sound confident and blasé, as if a gun weren’t pointed at my chest. “About the night Mirelle Beaulieu died.”