Her Last Breath

by Hilary Davidson

  “Ursula, you remember Deirdre,” Gloria said. “Caroline’s sister.”

  “Yes, of course. How are you, my dear?” Ursula surprised me with a kiss on the cheek. She smelled like pressed powder and juniper.

  “Hi,” I said awkwardly. After what I’d just heard, I was expecting her to push me down the steps.

  “There are cookies,” Teddy said, tugging at Ursula’s dress. “I smell them.”

  “I caught the scent as soon as I came in. Gloria is such a fine baker.” Ursula said it with enthusiasm, but it was clear no cookie had passed her lips this century.

  “How was the zoo?” Gloria asked me.

  “Cookieeeeee!” Teddy insisted.

  “Okay, but just one. You don’t want to spoil your appetite for dinner.” Gloria shook her head as he raced by her. “That boy really loves cookies.”

  “The park was great,” I said. “Teddy could hang out there all day, every day.”

  “Teddy is lucky to have a nice auntie who wants to spend time with him,” Ursula said. “Unlike his other auntie.”

  That made everything clear—they’d been talking about Theo’s sister, not me.

  “What’s Juliet done now?” I asked.

  “In English you have this one word, troublemaker,” Ursula said. “But in German, we say Unruhestifter, Klatschbase, Provokateur, about a dozen more. Different words for different trouble.”

  “Which one is Juliet?”

  “All of them,” Ursula said. “But I like Stänkerin best.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. After what Adinah Gerstein had told me about Ursula going through Caro’s room, I wasn’t going to trust her. But I’d been pawing through my sister’s belongings too. Maybe I couldn’t throw stones.

  “Auntie Dee, you’re coming to dinner?” Teddy called down the hall while munching on a cookie that probably wasn’t his first.

  “Your grandpa invited me yesterday.”

  “Don’t let her come over here,” Ursula hissed at Gloria.

  “Okay,” Gloria answered uncertainly.

  “What did Juliet do?” I whispered.

  “There are ongoing conversations about custody,” Ursula said, her eyes on Teddy. “Which do not strike me as appropriate.”

  We crossed the street and walked up the steps to the other Thraxton house, the one I’d never been inside. It’s unbelievable, Caroline had claimed. Like a museum. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s ridiculous anyone lives like that. She hadn’t been exaggerating. A butler answered the door. Past the foyer were a pair of massive stone lions guarding the broad hallway. They looked ancient, like something on display at the Met.

  “Trains!” Teddy said.

  “Of course, darling,” Ursula said. “Go and see the trains. Grandpa has them set up for you.”

  Teddy skidded around one of the lions and vanished.

  “Don’t worry—he knows this house inside out,” Ursula said. “Care for a drink?”

  She led me into a parlor. The house was so much larger than Theo and Caroline’s. With the hallways leading east and west as well as north, I was willing to bet this mansion had swallowed real estate on either side of it. This wasn’t so much a house as a palace. Oddly, the lighting was turned down low, as if the Thraxtons were watching their energy bill. Because it was so dim, I didn’t immediately realize someone else was in the parlor when Ursula walked me in.

  “Well, aren’t you the little ray of sunshine, Deirdre?” cooed a sly voice from the corner. In the gloom, I spotted Theo’s sister on a settee, her plush body spilling out of a tiger-striped dress.

  I was wearing jeans and black leather boots with a draped and shirred black top, my version of church-and-family-dinner attire. “If I’d known I was going on safari, I would’ve worn khaki.”

  Juliet smiled like she’d caught a canary.

  “Why are you still here?” Ursula asked her.

  “Because my father is keeping me waiting.” Juliet gave her a snooty once-over and looked at me. “Did you know that Ursula used to be our nanny?”

  I glanced at Ursula, who was staring daggers at Juliet.

  “Yes, she lived in our house, and she loved borrowing all of my mother’s finery—her shoes, her jewelry, even her husband,” Juliet said.

  Ursula made a muffled sound, like a wounded animal, and fled the room.

  “Why would you say that?” I demanded.

  Juliet shrugged. “Because it’s true.”

  I was never someone who backed away from fights, but I couldn’t imagine hurling such nasty words at anyone. “That was cruel.”

  “How would you feel about the woman your father was having an affair with?” Juliet asked. “Especially after he married her and tried to make you call her ‘Mommy’?”

  “Did that really happen?”

  “Your mouth is hanging open, Deirdre. Not your best look. But yes, it happened.”

  “My sister never told me about that.”

  “Your sister didn’t have a clue.” Juliet examined her nails in the low light. “Mind if I ask you a question? Did some part of you despise your sweet sister?”

  “How could you even think that?”

  Juliet shrugged carelessly, clearly delighted to get a rise out of me. “I know we’re supposed to love our families, but I find it difficult. I don’t even like mine.”

  What had Ben said? The entire Thraxton family is a criminal organization. “Maybe your family is particularly unlovable, Juliet.”

  She laughed at that, holding up her glass as if toasting me. “That could be true,” she said before taking a drink. “But if we’re honest with ourselves, nature is red in tooth and claw. We’re supposed to pretend our siblings are our allies, but the secret is that they can be our worst enemies.”

  In spite of myself, I was intrigued. “Is Theo your enemy?”

  She patted the cushion next to her, signaling for me to sit down. “I’ll tell you something about him if you tell me something about your sister.”

  That was tantalizing, but before I could speak, I heard footsteps in the hallway.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Juliet. I had to . . .” Theodore noticed me and smiled. “Deirdre! How delightful to see you.”

  “Thanks for inviting me to dinner.”

  “Ugh, you roped her into a social visit? Poor thing.” Everything Juliet said was dipped in acid, but she gave me her sly smile. “If you ever want to compare notes, I’m game. Call me.”

  “You could stay, if you want,” her father told her.

  “No, thanks,” Juliet said. “We never had family dinners when I was growing up. I may be allergic to them. But we do need to finish talking business before I go, Father. We have a cockroach problem. Again.”

  “Juliet! I can’t believe you said that.” Theodore shot me a worried glance.

  I had a cockroach problem in my dungeon room, but mentioning it didn’t feel helpful.

  “We had this exact headache two months ago,” Juliet added.

  “I apologize, Deirdre,” Theodore said. “I didn’t realize we’d be delving into such unsavory territory. Why don’t you wait with Ursula and Teddy?”

  “I’ll do that,” I said.

  I ducked out of the room and walked down the hall. I couldn’t slip out of my boots to tiptoe back, so I crept as quietly as I could on the carpet.

  “How much did it cost us last time?” Theodore asked.

  “A quarter of a million. Caroline said to go ahead and pay it, because we didn’t need any bad publicity in this market.”

  Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I didn’t think they were talking about bugs.

  “What’s your instinct this time?” he asked her.

  Before I could catch Juliet’s answer, Teddy popped into the hallway. “You have to help with the trains,” he told me.

  He had terrible timing, but I couldn’t disappoint him.

  Ten minutes later, Teddy’s grandfather strolled in as the engine was whipping around the track.
/>   “Everything okay?” I asked.

  “Fine, fine. Juliet will handle it. She’s very capable.” He sighed. “I feel guilty, leaning on her as I do. She works very hard. I always expected Theo would join her in the business. But he dumped us all to go adventuring and do what he wanted.”

  Maybe he wasn’t that into money laundering, I thought, but I kept it to myself. I didn’t know how I felt about Caro’s involvement. It was baffling to me. “That’s too bad.”

  “I don’t mean to sound bitter.” He sighed. “When you have children, you have no way of knowing how they’ll turn out. You believe they’ll be like you. Your blood is running through their veins. But they can reject everything you taught them and become something you barely recognize.”

  I wasn’t the best audience for this. I had no relationship with my father, and I didn’t regret it. “People talk about nature versus nurture,” I said. “But I don’t think genes predict who you’ll be. They give you some characteristics, but they don’t define you.”

  “That’s an excellent point. It’s been on my mind since Theo ran off. It doesn’t seem like he even wants to be a father.”

  I glanced at Teddy. He didn’t look like he was listening, but he was a smart kid. He got every word. “It’s a really tough time for everyone right now.”

  “Of course. But I worry that Theo is going to do something dangerous. What if he took Teddy away to Europe? Can you even imagine that?”

  “That would be awful.” Teddy was my living link to my sister. I’d never let him go.

  “I’m so glad you feel that way,” he said. “Juliet is filing some paperwork to keep Theo from taking Teddy anywhere unsafe. It would be helpful to have a sworn statement from Teddy’s favorite aunt.”

  His words sounded sweet, but something sinister twisted beneath them. Hugo Laraya’s caution echoed in my head. You’ll get caught up in his web—that was what Theo had warned his friend. I was starting to sense delicate threads of spider silk attaching themselves to me. Theodore Thraxton had told me terrible things about his son. He had taken my suspicions about Theo and amped them up a thousandfold with the information he’d given me. What if he had done exactly the same thing to Caro?

  “Whatever you need,” I said blandly, turning to watch Teddy play. Caro had wanted to escape from all the Thraxtons, Adinah Gerstein had said. That included her father-in-law. I was starting to understand why.

  CHAPTER 37

  THEO

  My mistake had been in thinking I’d need two days to accomplish what I needed to in Berlin. In reality, I’d only needed one. But the airline wouldn’t allow me to change my ticket, which meant I had another day to kill before I could go home.

  “I have a particularly strange question for you,” I said to Klaus as we left the hidden restaurant he’d lured me to. We were strolling companionably down the zigzagging alleyways.

  “Go ahead.”

  “You know I have scars all over my body,” I said. “Some were self-inflicted, but some have been there as long as I can remember. My father always said I was attacked by an animal in a zoo. Did he tell you this story?”

  “A version of it,” Klaus said. “That you were attacked. No mention of any zoo.”

  “Then what attacked me?”

  “He never said.”

  “You didn’t ask him?” I was startled. “Why not?”

  “The reason your father and I have worked together—successfully—for so long is that neither of us asks too many questions. This was one of those cases. He was terrified that you might die. He didn’t need me saying, ‘Why did you let this happen?’”

  We were at the street by that point. “Can I give you a lift?” Klaus asked.

  “I’ll make my own way back.”

  “Bon voyage tomorrow,” Klaus said. “Will you do me a favor?”

  “How did you know I was flying . . . never mind. What is it?”

  “Tell Ursula I’m sorry for being a bastard,” Klaus said. “I have done many unfortunate things, but that is the one I regret.”

  “Why don’t you tell her yourself?”

  “She won’t listen.” Klaus sounded sorry for himself. “Years ago, she asked me for help, and I refused. I told her she’d made her bed and she had to lie in it. It was wrong of me.”

  “What help did she need?”

  “She wanted to leave your father,” Klaus said. “But I cared more about my friend’s feelings than I did about hers. I never thought about Ursula’s troubles. I told her she had to stay, and she did.”

  It was after eleven when I got back to my hotel, but that meant it was only five o’clock in New York. I called Gloria to check up on Teddy, and then I called Dr. Haven.

  “I need to tell you everything I’ve found out,” I said. The words tumbled out of me, with parts of the story in the wrong order, but Dr. Haven listened patiently. At one point, I heard an awful sob and realized belatedly that it had bubbled out of my chest. I was enraged, but I also felt empty and betrayed. I was used to a lack of trust with everyone in my family. I was familiar with the eternal chess games, and I knew that I was just a pawn to my father. But the fact that he would commit a crime and make me believe I was responsible for it was a nightmare I could never wake up from.

  Eventually I ran out of words. My face was wet. My breath escaped in tiny gasps.

  “Theo . . . this is like something out of a horror movie,” Dr. Haven said finally. “I don’t know what to say. I’ve seen family members do terrible things to each other, but this is beyond that.”

  “I want to make sure that my father never gets anywhere near Teddy.”

  “There’s a lot of talk about grandparents’ rights, but they don’t exist,” Dr. Haven said. “Unless the custodial parent can be proven unfit.”

  I had no doubt that’s what my father was doing. The question pricking at my brain was whether he’d considered Caroline an unfit parent too. He was doing his damnedest to claim my son, and I could only wonder how far he’d go.

  “I know you don’t feel like you can trust anyone right now, but I want you to listen to me,” she added. “You need to trust yourself. Your father—your whole family—plays mind games, but that’s not who you are, Theo. Trust yourself.”

  That was easy for her to say, I thought ruefully after we hung up. She didn’t have a chorus in the back of her head whispering, I am full of hidden horrors. She didn’t live with the torment of not knowing what part of your own brain you could rely on.

  On instinct, I went into the bathroom. My razor was in my toiletry kit. I retrieved it and cracked the plastic against the marble vanity. The four blades that dropped out were tiny fragments; I held them in the palm of one hand. Each one reflected a small part of my face: an eye, a lip. I appeared as fractured as I felt inside. I’d grown up managing mental pain by balancing it with physical torment, but in that moment, I knew it was futile. I was a bundle of scar tissue, but the agony inside me never abated.

  The memory of the last time I’d seen Caroline came into focus. Do you want to come up now, Ben? I can’t wait. We’re really doing this, aren’t we?

  She was livid that I’d overheard her on the phone. What are you doing here?

  I live here, in case you’ve forgotten, I said.

  I don’t want to be married to you anymore, Caroline had said. Why is that so hard to understand, Theo? Get out of my house.

  I’d gone to my room, but I’d forgotten the reason I’d come home. Instead, I pulled the framed wedding photo of Caroline and me off the wall and stormed back down the hallway, smashing it against the doorframe. Shattered glass and wood were everywhere.

  I don’t give a damn what you do, I told her. You can keep the house, but I will never let you have Teddy.

  Caroline had stared at me with wide, horrified eyes. I went down the stairs and out of the house. That was the last time I saw my wife. The memory of it made me sick.

  I dropped the razors in the trash. One day, I would have to teach my son how to dea
l with pain. I couldn’t do it if I hadn’t learned to manage it myself.

  After sitting for a while, allowing regrets to wash over me, I picked up my phone and looked up a number I rarely called. Of course Juliet didn’t answer. I spoke to her voice mail.

  “This is Theo,” I said. “I’m in Berlin. I came here because . . . I’m trying to understand pieces of my memory that don’t make sense. I have a question for you. I know you remember the night Mirelle died. On the plane, you said I’d ruined your trip to Paris. The thing is, you shouldn’t have been in Paris. You had school.” I took a breath. “Here’s my question: Did you decide to come over to Europe yourself, or did Father surprise you with the trip? Because I’ve discovered he set me up that night. I think he set you up as well.”

  PART THREE

  He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  CHAPTER 38

  DEIRDRE

  On Saturday night, I slept in my own bed in the dungeon room, even though there was police tape on my busted door like it was a crime scene. I taped a couple of black garbage bags together to cover it up and collapsed on my futon. I was too confused about the thoughts churning in my brain to share them. Two days earlier, I’d been ready to nail Theo’s ass to the wall for murder. Now, I was looking at him in a different light, just as I was seeing my sister in a new way. I had a tendency to jump to conclusions, and I was realizing I’d leaped to some of the wrong ones.

  It didn’t help that I woke up Sunday morning to find an email from my brother-in-law: Deirdre, I’m at the Berlin airport now, about to fly. I get in Sunday at noon and I need to talk with you. Could we meet? Thanks, Theo.

  I lay on my futon, staring at the message for a while before crawling out of bed at eight. Sounds good, I wrote back. I’d like to talk. I’m free all afternoon. It was four hours until he landed, so I had time for more digging before meeting him face-to-face.