The Truth Hurts

by Nancy Pickard

  “I can do what I have to do.”

  “Now I have no choice, but that’s why you did it, right? Now I have to take them home. If I don’t, she’s threatening to come down here to get them herself. Dammit, Marie!”

  “Dammit, yourself. I want them safely out of here.”

  He is furious with me. But even though I feel like the world’s biggest traitor, I’m sure it was the right thing to do.

  “Franklin—”

  He turns on his heel and strides away from me.

  “I’m going to get the kids ready to go,” he snaps.

  I bite back tears and stay behind.

  My anonymous “murderer” says he wants Franklin to abandon me. One way or another, he is about to get his way. I hate that part of this. But what else could I do? Franklin’s E-mail to Paulie Barnes was, I believe, a terrible misjudgment, and it frightens me. The children’s distress at the hawk banding station was painful to behold, and worse for them to experience. Even if no physical harm has come to them, the children will be better off away from here, away from me.

  Certainly their mother shares that opinion.

  • • •

  Before they leave, Franklin speaks to me in the kind of tone of voice a person uses when they care about you, but they’re so mad they could kill you. “You’re not staying here by yourself.” He doesn’t phrase it as a question. “You’re following us home.”

  “Of course. I don’t want to be here alone.”

  “What about when you get home?”

  “I’ll make arrangements.”

  “For protection?”

  “Yes. I’ll be fine, Franklin.”

  “Find a way to let me know that for sure.”

  “Of course.” I want to embrace him, but I don’t. “I’m so sorry.”

  “This is not your fault.” There is a slight crack of smile. “At least, the general situation is not your fault.” Even that slight thaw freezes up again. “You realize you’ve fixed it so I can’t come around, don’t you? We’ll be very lucky if she doesn’t go back to court to try to get my visitation rights to depend on whether or not I try to see you. She’ll portray you as a dangerous person for her children to be around and claim that the court can’t trust me not to have them around you.”

  “You’re the lawyer,” I tell him, alarmed. “Make it not be like that.”

  He laughs, though he’s clearly not amused. “Make the world not be like this, you mean.”

  “Yeah. Look, this will end. Life will go back to normal. She’ll lighten up.”

  “I don’t know why you’d say that, Marie. Where’s your evidence? She never has before.”

  It hits me that this could be true: even when this strange episode is safely concluded—as it has to be!—Truly may well consider me to be a continuing threat to her children’s safety, just by virtue of what I do for a living. I’m not even sure I disagree with her. She already has that opinion of their father’s chosen branch of the law. At this moment, I may actually be saying good-bye to these three people in a more lasting way than I can bear to consider. For a moment, my chest fills with grief for many losses in my life. I don’t want there to be more, not these three more losses, not of this good man standing in front of me looking so upset. Why, I haven’t even had a chance to win his daughter over yet. I know I can. Just give me a chance, universe, just give me another chance.

  “Give me the stuff you brought down,” he demands.

  The evidence in my briefcase, he means, and the cassette tape in my glove box. When he sees me hesitate, he explodes. “Goddammit, Marie, I’m the only person in law enforcement that he’s allowing you to see. If you don’t let me check that stuff out, who will? If nothing else, you need me to keep a clean chain of evidence. If you give it to your private investigator, it’s going to get contaminated, and then it’s going to be worthless if we ever need it at trial.”

  Although I think that’s an undeserved slur on Erin McDermit, I know he’s right, basically. Hating the fact that he has to be involved even so indirectly as this, I go get what he wants and give it to him so he can have them checked for fingerprints: the FedEx envelope, the letter, the book, the cassette tape.

  “I’ll forward copies of the E-mails to you,” I promise him.

  “I’ve got copies of your books, you don’t have to give me those.”

  “You’ve read all my books?”

  I knew he’d read the one he was in and the ones I’ve written since then, but I never knew he’d also read the ones that came before that.

  Franklin gives me a disgusted look. “You must have a very low opinion of me sometimes, Marie. Of course I’ve read all your books. You follow my trials, don’t you? What kind of man would I be if I didn’t show as much interest in your work as you do in mine? As a matter of fact, I was a big fan even before I met you. But I’d have read them anyway. I care about you, Marie, everything about you, what you write, what you do, what you think, how you feel. I don’t think you have a clue how much power you have to hurt me.”

  I feel stunned by this little speech, and frozen with sudden happiness and also shame. When I don’t say anything—I’m feeling so paralyzed with surprise by what he said—he turns away from me as if I’ve rebuffed him. By the time I move to catch him, to say, “Wait, Franklin, I feel the same way about you,” it’s too late. The kids are calling to him from their bedroom, demanding his attention, and he’s rushing away from me, hurrying to get them and to take them home.

  When they drive off, Arthur waves. Diana turns her face away.

  And I haven’t even remembered to ask Franklin what he plans to do if Paulie Barnes answers his E-mail.

  I go back inside the condo, feeling shell-shocked by love and fear.

  I lock up everything. Doors. Windows. Emotions.

  Right now, I can either worry about love or I can worry about our lives. It seems to me that I’d better worry about the one, or we may never get another chance to pursue the other.

  18

  Marie

  There are no more E-mails from my tormentor, at least not yet. Is this good news, or is it ominous? Why isn’t he yelling at me about Franklin’s E-mail to him? Is it possible that Franklin was right? Did he scare Paulie Barnes away already? For that, I would gladly eat crow.

  Before I pack to go home, I have one more thing to do.

  To get anything done, though, I have to push Franklin out of my mind.

  I force myself to think of Paulie Barnes’s terms: no law enforcement.

  But he didn’t say anything about private hired protection. After the incidents of the cassette tape and the hawks, I am now determined to set up something more for myself, beyond the simple watch at my gate that Erin promised to give me tomorrow. This is beginning to cost a small fortune. Even so, if Franklin and Truly will let me, I’ll gladly pay for guards for their children, too. But if I want closer guarding for myself, whom should I ask? How much protection do I need? A professional? One of Erin’s boys or girls?

  I guess that makes sense, but . . .

  I saw that movie with Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe, the one set in Ecuador where she hires him as a pro to get her kidnapped husband back. Too bad I can’t hire Russell Crowe.

  I have another idea about whom to hire, but it makes me nervous.

  There’s a guy, an ex-con, who is grateful to me. He has let it be known that he’d do anything for me, but he hasn’t been pushy about it. He’s a scary guy, but he has a kind of tact—or maybe taciturnity is the better word to describe it. He has kept a distance, contacting me only through proper channels like his lawyer and never surprising me or attempting to get near me. I never intended to take him up on the offer of any help I’d ever need, but desperate times . . .

  “Do it,” I tell myself.

  And so I place a call to his lawyer in Bahia Beach.

  “Marie!” Defense lawyer Tammi Golding and I became good friends when my last book threw us together in dramatic circumstances. I picture her at her
desk where she picked up my call: trim, dark-haired, about my age, short like me, smart as a criminal attorney needs to be to become as successful as Tammi is, and twice as fierce. “Funny you’d call. I was just thinking about you. I’ve got a new client to defend, a case that might interest you for a book.”

  “It’s always good to know my spies are looking out for my interests, Tammi. Especially if I get stuck for ideas. You never know, I might run out of murderers one day.”

  “I wish we all could.”

  “You’d be out of a job.”

  “You know what?” she asks, with a smile in her voice. That voice has a rasping, sandpaper quality to it that is oddly compelling to juries. “For the sake of humanity, I think I could handle it. What are you doing calling me? Aren’t you supposed to be in the Keys with my sworn enemy, the prosecutor?”

  “How do you know that? Does the whole world know?”

  She laughs. “I don’t know about the whole world, but the whole courthouse probably does. Don’t you know that you and the prosecutor are hot gossip?”

  I groan.

  “So why are you calling me? Did you kill him and you need a defense attorney?”

  I’m tempted to tell her how close I came to doing that earlier.

  “Not yet. Tammi, do you remember how Steve Orbach said he’d do anything for me?”

  “Yeah. He means it, too.”

  Steven Orbach is a twenty-eight-year-old man who murdered his mother when he was thirteen, a fate she richly deserved, and for which he served several years as a juvenile. Shortly after his release he was arrested for a second murder—one he didn’t do—and sentenced to death for it. His case consumed a lot of my last book, the one during which I got to know Tammi, because she was his attorney. When he was sprung from death row, Steve thanked me—and sued nearly everybody else. One day, when Tammi gets finished proving how badly they harmed him, Steve may be a rich man. Until then, he works day labor.

  “Does he need a job?” I ask her.

  “Not really. He’s doing construction, making fairly good money, and he seems content with that, or at least, as content as Stevie ever seems about anything.”

  “Oh.” I can’t quite get the words out to ask her.

  I used to refer to him as Stevie, too—until I met him on death row.

  “And he’d drop it in a minute if you asked him to, Marie. So would I.” Tammi insists that I saved her life, too, during that episode, and while that’s probably closer to the truth than any heroics I did for Steven, I’ve warned her that if she mentions it too often I’ll be forced to take it all back. “What do you need him for?”

  “I’ve been getting some nasty E-mails. It happens now and then,” I add, with a shrug in my voice so she won’t worry. “You know how it is, the nature of what I write attracts cockroaches. Usually, I just toss stuff like that or I delete it if it’s E-mail, and then I try to forget it. But this latest batch is more nasty and personal than usual and I just think it might be a good idea to get somebody to watch over me for a while.”

  “A bodyguard?” She sounds incredulous.

  “Well, yes.”

  “Damn, Marie, it must be bad for you to even think of this. What’s Franklin doing about it?”

  “Everything he can.”

  “He’d better, or I’ll sue his ass.”

  I laugh. “Aren’t you already suing him? So, Tammi, I need a bodyguard, but I want one who could pass for a gardener, or a driver, a houseboy, a personal trainer, like that.”

  This time, she’s the one who laughs. “Oh, my God, Marie, he’s going to love this. This will be his wet-dream job.”

  “Well, that’s the part that worries me a little, Tammi. Tell me that Steve’s gratitude toward me isn’t some kind of weird sexual obsession.”

  “He’s gay, Marie.”

  “What? Steve Orbach’s gay ?” Relief washes over me. “God, that’s wonderful.”

  Tammi laughs at my reaction. “I’m glad you’re so happy for him.”

  “But wait a minute, Tammi, he had sex with the girl he was accused of murdering.”

  “Yeah, well, he was just out of jail and hoping he was straight.”

  “But he’s not.”

  “Trust me. He’s really not. He just honestly thinks you’re the bee’s knees and that he owes his life to you. He’s a very serious kind of guy, Marie. Be glad you’ve got him on your side. You wouldn’t want him as an enemy. I can tell you that, just from dealing with him on these civil suits. The guy’s implacable. He does not quit when he thinks he’s right and he wants something. Do you want his phone number?”

  “Yes, but I want you to call him first, do you mind? So I don’t just spring this on him out of the blue—”

  “And so you have a layer of protection between you and him—”

  “You’re so smart. Tell him this would be a twenty-four/seven job, Tammi. He’ll sleep at my house, he’ll go where I go. If that sounds more like prison than opportunity to him, he should turn me down. Or maybe he’s got a boyfriend he won’t want to leave?”

  “I’ll find out. How long do you think you’ll need him?”

  “I don’t know. I hope it’ll be over soon. I’ll pay him well.”

  “Like he’d let you?”

  “You tell him there’s no job if I can’t pay him.”

  “I’ll tell him you’re even more implacable than he is when you want something and you think you’re right. Marie, he’s going to ask me why you want him, particularly him, for this job.”

  “Well, to be frank, because he claims to be so devoted to me. And because he has lived through several rings of hell and now he isn’t afraid of anything except confinement. And because he’s one of the scariest dudes I’ve ever met, and he’s in incredibly impressive physical condition. And because he has spent his whole life with evil people, starting with his mother, and so maybe he’ll have a sixth sense about them, so he’ll know if one of them gets near me.”

  “You’ve convinced me. Now get off the phone so I can call him.”

  “Thanks, Tammi.”

  “Should I have him call you down there?”

  “No, I’m going home as soon as I pack.”

  “Good idea. I just heard that the fires have started up again around Homestead. You’d better get out of there while you still can. Should Stevie meet you at your house?”

  “No. Tell him I’ll call him just before I get there. Call me back right away if he says no, okay?”

  “He’s not going to say no. You take care of yourself, please.”

  “That’s what I want Steve to do for me.”

  The traffic is backed up from tourists like me who want to beat the fires before the roads are closed. It gives me too much time to think about endangered species again. The Florida Keys boast the only coral reefs in the entire continental United States, because reefs are more likely to form on the eastern sides of continents where the ocean currents are warmer. For centuries, treasure hunters have dived these reefs, looking for gold and other loot from sunken ships, and now tourists dive to stare at fish. Coral is a living creature, but the reefs that compose the Keys are all dead and fossilized. Out to the east the reefs are still alive, however, though they are in constant danger from people who might love them to death. Living coral is so delicate; a touch of a finger, a brush of a swim fin, a tear from a boat propeller, can kill it.

  I feel horribly like coral, myself. A vicious “treasure hunter” has already demonstrated that he can dive into my life with impunity; he can damage and plunder it. Already, he has touched with his destructive anonymous fingers . . . my assistant . . . my lover . . . the children . . . and my own sense of security and self-confidence in my world.

  “Why am I some kind of ‘treasure’ to you?”

  This time, I’ve put up the soft top on my car. I feel safer this way.

  The truth is, at this point I don’t necessarily look on “no news” from Paulie Barnes as good news. I fear that Franklin crossed an invisible li
ne and that one way or another we will pay for it. How and when and specifically to whom the damage will be done—that’s what worries me and leaves me waiting for that shoe to drop.

  I feel a touch of despair, a feeling almost of doom, as melodramatic as that sounds even to me. Dammit. I much prefer anger. Maybe it’s just that I am traveling alone in my little car. Seen from high above, I’d be only a speck along this highway. I think of celebrities who’ve been killed by crazy “fans,” and although I don’t put myself in their category, I wonder . . . one day, will reprints of my book covers say “Tragically and ironically slain by the very sort of killer she wrote about so well . . .”?

  I feel so damned vulnerable, and yet . . .

  “You are just one man,” I tell my enemy. “I am a team.”

  But morbid thoughts continue to obsess me as I cross back to the mainland. Right over there, in the Florida Bay, that’s where game warden Guy Bradley was shot years ago by men who were hunting the long breeding feathers of the great white egret. He was trying to protect a flock of the wading birds and the poachers killed him. Killed him for the feathers. Bradley Key is named after him. And up there in the Everglades, that’s where the U.S. Army hanged Chief Chekika, to punish the Seminoles for attacking white settlers. Chekika Recreational Area is named after him.

  So what might they name after me, I wonder in bitter and cynical amusement. Well, if tradition holds, that will depend on where I get killed. Will it be in the future Marie Lightfoot Sawgrass Swamp? Or maybe among the Marie Lightfoot Sand Dunes? The feather hunters pursued the egrets, herons, and spoonbills nearly to extinction, because on the nineteenth-century millinery market, their feathers were literally worth more than gold. The Native Americans were also murdered for economic reasons. But I’m not worth anything dead to anybody. He’ll never see a penny of any of the royalties from any book he may publish about my death; he has nothing to gain except, what? Pleasure? Some unknown revenge? A fame that he can’t even claim in public?

  “Motive, what’s your motive?”