“I’m coming right over,” her dad insisted.
“No,” Darby said, swiping at her tears with the back of her hand. “Sean won’t be back until tomorrow. I’m going to get organized and pack. Then, if it’s okay with you two, I’ll come over first thing in the morning.”
“If it’s okay?” her mother parroted. “Don’t be silly. You never have to ask to come home, honey. I’ll come over to help you.”
“Thanks, Mom, but I just need some time to sort through some stuff.” And clean up.
“Yeah? What if the bastard comes back?” her father demanded. “What then? Has he done this before? Is that why you’ve been avoiding us the past few months? You need to have him arrested. Now. Tonight.”
Darby pressed two fingers to her temple. The peppering of questions was precisely why she wanted some time by herself. “No, he’s never hit me before.” She lied. They didn’t need to know about the slaps or back-handed blow-ups. “Don’t worry. He won’t come back. He’s already on his way to the airport.”
“How can you know that?”
“He’s got an early meeting with a potential investor in New York.” And Roxanne in his bed. “He won’t bail on that kind of opportunity. The restaurant needs an infusion of cash.”
“I’ve seen the bank statements, Darby,” her father said with unfiltered disdain. “You’ve been infusing a lot of cash into that place. What’s he been doing with all of it? Forget it. I don’t really give a damn. Screw Sean. Wait until I get my hands on that piece of crap. He won’t need any money where he’s going.”
“Calm down,” her mother inserted. “The last thing Darby and that baby need right now is you going off picking a fight with a man more than half your age. Honey, what can we do?”
“You’re doing it. I’ll come by first thing in the morning. Before work, if that’s okay?”
“Would you stop asking?” her mother admonished. “This is your home.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you sure you’re okay, Darby? What about the baby? Maybe we should take you to the ER just to make sure.”
“I’m okay. We’re okay.”
“Not if he hit you.”
“He just slapped me,” she fibbed, not wanting to give them a rehash of the actual events. That could come later, once she was safely ensconced in their home.
“Just?” her father scoffed. “Just slapped you?”
She massaged the back of her neck. “Let it go for now, Daddy,” she said. “I don’t really want to talk about it and the baby is fine.”
She heard her father let out a long breath. “Well, I can’t think about anything but that creep of a husband you’ve got. What kind of man hits his wife? His pregnant wife?”
“It’s over now.” Darby breathed in deeply. Feeling discomfort in her chest, she realized she’d cried hard enough to make her ribcage sore.
“It’s far from over,” her father countered. “I want to know exactly what that bastard did to you.”
“I’m totally exhausted right now but I promise to tell you everything in the morning. Promise. I should be there before seven.”
“Darby?” her mother asked, her voice so soft and gentle that Darby felt warm tears well in her eyes. “We love you, honey.”
“I know. And I’m going to need all that love, mom. I can’t, won’t live this way. And I certainly won’t raise my child with Sean and his violent temper. Tonight made that perfectly clear to me. My marriage is over.”
* * *
Out of sheer exhaustion, Darby managed a few hours of fitful sleep before the alarm blared her awake at 5:45. Her back ached from sweeping more than two dozen dustpans full of glass-contaminated food and china from the floor, then depositing it in the trash can in the garage. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she realized it was a stupid thing to do. But the realization couldn’t overcome the automatic reaction to eradicate all evidence of the fight. She didn’t do it for Sean. No, on the off chance that her parents or an old friend dropped by, she didn’t want to explain why the walls were splattered with salmon.
Covering for Sean had become a habit. A very bad one. As she tossed off the comforter she’d never really liked, she vowed it was the last time she’d make excuses for him. When she entered the adjacent bath and looked at herself in the mirror, she discovered she was smiling for the first time in, well, forever.
Rubbing her eyes, then her cheeks, she asked herself, “How did you turn into this person?” Holding her hair in a makeshift ponytail, she brushed her teeth and then splashed a handful of water in her mouth. After washing her face, she tossed her nightshirt into the hamper and got the pair of scrubs she’d set out the night before.
After applying just a hint of make-up, she closed her cosmetic case and added that to the suitcase before zipping it shut. It didn’t make much sense to pack all her clothes. Most of them didn’t fit right now, so she’d worry about that later. When she applied for the restraining order she could get the judge, or magistrate, or whatever you called them, to give her some time alone at the house to get the rest of her stuff. But for now, for today, she was content to take just what she needed for a week. By then, Sean would be back, he’d be served with the restraining order and she’d be on her way to being divorced.
The word was enough to send a shiver down her spine. No, she didn’t—couldn’t—stay married to Sean. But she’d never failed at anything before. Never.
Darby was smart enough to know that when it came to abuse, past behavior was the best predictor of future behavior. Given that Sean was getting worse by the day, counseling wasn’t a realistic solution. No, she had to get out now. Before he killed her and the baby, a threat he’d made on more than one occasion.
After loading two suitcases into the back of her Grand Cherokee, she backed her car out of the driveway. Automatically she reached for the clicker attached to the passenger seat visor and pressed the button. The door descended about two feet before coming to a grinding halt. Then it bounced as the motor continued to whirl.
Sighing heavily, Darby got out of the car to see what was causing the malfunction. It took a minute, but she finally spotted a length of telephone wire looped around one of the slats. “Just what I need,” she grumbled as she stood on tiptoe, trying to slap the wire out of the way. Darby gave up after three tries.
Like the house, the three-car garage was as neat as a pin. For once, Sean’s insistence on order in all things worked to her advantage. The step stool was tucked between the shelving and the hot water heater. Even knowing that Sean wouldn’t have an opportunity to react to any scuffmarks, Darby lifted the awkwardly shaped stool and maneuvered it over to the garage door. Once she had some height, it was simple to dislodge the cord. As designed, a safety feature of the door sent it backward, crawling up and along the ceiling. The phone cord disappeared into the void between the ceiling and the door. Oh well, she thought as she walked back to her idling car. Sean would take care of it. He didn’t let things like strangely dangling cords—especially ones that impeded the garage door from working properly—go unattended.
The sun was just bleeding over the horizon as she drove the fifteen short miles to Palm City, the area where her family had owned a home since the 1890s. While the location hadn’t changed, the homes certainly had. Her however-many-greats grandparents had built a modest, single-story wood frame dwelling smack in the middle of the original Hayes orange grove.
As the modest grove grew and expanded, so did the size and expanse of the home. She smiled with equal measures of respect and pride as she passed the remains of that first homestead. The only reason part of it was still standing was because of the adjacent cemetery. As common practice until the mid-1970s, all Hayeses had been entombed on that small strip of land. Part of the deal when the groves were sold off to a developer was that the family cemetery would be fenced and appropriately maintained. He’d kept his word.
Darby’s stomach felt like a sack of unacquainted cats. She had always been so meticulous
about her life. Driven, some would say. After her stint in the Army, she’d gone to college, then to vet school, and by age twenty-eight she had her own business with an impressive client base. How could all those aspects of her life be so right and her marriage be so wrong? Yes, intellectually she knew that leaving Sean was the safe and only option, but some small crumb in her brain kept harping on the failure aspect of throwing in the towel after less than two years of marriage. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but she couldn’t risk the baby’s safety, especially now that Sean was getting more violent with every encounter.
Traffic was light as she crossed the bridge over the St. Lucie River. The fresh scent of the ocean air dissipated under the weight of diesel fumes wafting up from the marinas below. Once upon a time in the not so distant past, all of the land on Monterey from Willoughby Road west had belonged to the Hayes family. Little by little, as snowbirds migrated from the north and population swelled up from the south, the groves had been sold off, leveled and replaced by gated communities, indistinguishable stucco homes, strip malls, and golf courses.
Martin County was in transition. More building, more families, less agriculture.
Darby suspected her father held on to one modest grove near Indiantown for sentimental reasons. He’d grown up working the groves. It was more than an exercise in nepotism. William Hayes loved the business. The scent of orange blossoms in bloom; the occasional flurry of activity to fend off an unexpected frost; the rugged machinery weaving through the rows, slicing off the ripe fruit to send it off to market.
Though they ever said it, Darby suspected her parents had thrown themselves into the business because they were married for nearly twenty years before Darby came along. Grace Hayes had been over forty when she had Darby. William had been fifty-one at the time.
As she approached the small, paved driveway leading to her parents’ home, she saw several fire trucks parked at angles, blocking traffic in both directions. Automatically, Darby looked at the sky above the tree line, expecting to see a plume of dark smoke. Nothing. The sky was clear and blue save for a few puffy white clouds rolling in off the ocean.
A cold shiver crept up her spine. It appeared as if the emergency vehicles were in front of her parents’ house.
Panicked, she placed the car in park. Darby unhooked her seatbelt and wriggled out of the car. The minute her feet hit the pavement, she did her best to run at the same pace as her rapid heartbeat.
As she neared the fire trucks, she caught sight of a previously obscured ambulance, parked on the west side, its doors open. A man sat on the fender, sucking oxygen through a clear plastic mask affixed to his face.
Holding her stomach to lessen the effects of her vigorous movements, Darby jogged over to the ambulance. She’d moved beyond palpable fear to utter panic.
“You a doc?” the EMT asked, his fingers pressed to the pulse point of the police officer’s wrist.
“Vet,” she answered. “What happened?” She turned her head, getting on tiptoes in a futile attempt to see her childhood home through the thick shrubbery vining through the six-foot iron fence.
“Carbon monoxide,” the EMT explained. “Harry, here, got a few whiffs. The oxygen is just precautionary.”
Darby’s mind was spinning. Ignoring everything but the dread gripping her chest, she pivoted on the balls of her feet and started toward the house. She got all of maybe ten feet when a tall, lanky patrolman held up his hand.
“Sorry, ma’am. This is—”
“My parents’ house,” she finished, watching him blanch slightly. “What’s happened?”
Crooking his thumb behind him, he said, “I’ve got to radio the sergeant. Just a minute.”
The patrolman turned sideways and whispered muffled words into the microphone clipped to the shoulder of his beige uniform shirt.
“He’ll be right here,” the patrolman said. “Why don’t you come over here. Wait in the shade,” he suggested, pointing her toward a small area under a canopy of palm fronds.
Just as she took her first step, four men dressed in street clothes filed past her, pushing two gurneys. The fact that they were in no particular hurry, and that white body bags were neatly folded atop each gurney, confirmed her worst fears. Her vision started to spin and she got that rollercoaster feeling—like her stomach was dropping out. This couldn’t be happening. Darby clutched her stomach and felt warm tears slide down her cheeks.
Darby felt her knees buckle, then everything went fuzzy.
As if viewing the scene from underwater, Darby felt the patrolman lift her up and carry her to the ambulance. Gently, she was placed on a stretcher and the EMT who’d been working on the officer turned his attention to her. Though her head was spinning, she brushed his hands away.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re at risk for shock,” the EMT insisted. “Your BP is too low. We’ve got to get you to the hospital.”
“But my parents. Are they…are they…?”
“I’ll ask one of the officers to follow us to the ER.” He gently lifted her arm and secured a blood pressure cuff, then attached leads to her chest to monitor her heart. The sirens came on at the same time as he reached beneath her to secure a fetal monitor around her abdomen.
“I’m Pete,” he said as he fiddled with myriad machines in the ambulance.
“Darby,” she said, barely feeling the continuous stream of tears sliding down her cheeks. No one was telling her anything, but she knew. She just knew that her beloved parents were gone.
The EMT offered a weak smile as he donned a stethoscope and listened first to her heart, and then pressed the single-head stethoscope at various places on her bulging abdomen. “What’s your OB’s name?”
“Meredith Price. Why? Is there a problem?”
He shook his head and patted her hand. “Not that I can see, except for those,” he said, pointing to the small red welts on her side. “Look a little like hives. Do you have any allergies? Eat anything new or different?”
Out of sheer habit, she lied, shaking her head. She wasn’t ready to admit they were just the latest in a long list of bruises and welts left by her husband’s beatings. She wondered if she’d ever have the nerve to tell the whole truth about Sean. It was hard to imagine, since she’d also have to admit that she’d chosen him. For that she felt a twinge of responsibility.
“Said you were a vet, right?” he asked rhetorically. “Any chance something at work might have caused an allergic reaction?”
“Not sure.” The truth lingered on the tip of her tongue. The taste was bitter but it was far overshadowed by concern for the fate of her family. “My parents?” she pressed.
The ambulance came to an abrupt halt outside the emergency room of Martin Memorial North. After being rolled into an exam area, Darby waited more than three frustrating hours badgering anyone and everyone about her parents. After what felt like an eternity, a representative from the Martin County Sherriff’s office poked his head through the flimsy curtain.
“Mrs. Grisom?”
“Darby Hayes Grisom,” she both corrected and replied as she leveraged herself up on the bed with her elbows. “What happened to my parents?”
“First, I’m Sergeant Joe Ciminelli. Secondly, is there anyone here with you?”
“No, my husband is on his way home from a business trip. His flight landed a little more than an hour ago.”
The sergeant’s brow furrowed. He ran his palm over his bald head, then hooked his hand at the back of his neck. His pale brown eyes were somber and fixed on a point just above her head.
“Is there anyone who could come to be with you?”
Darby’s whole body was stiff, braced for whatever news he seemed so reluctant to deliver. “No. Now, please tell me what happened to my parents.”
“I’m afraid there was an accident.”
Accident? What kind of accident kills two people? “Excuse me?”
Sergeant Ciminelli moistened his forefinger, then flipped through the small
notebook he’d pulled from his breast pocket. “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs. Grisom, but your parents passed away in their home sometime during the night.”
“How?”
“All indications are that the on-off switch on their car was left in the ‘on’ position. Carbon monoxide leaked into the home.”
“Impossible,” Darby said, emphatically shaking her head.
“Ma’am,” the sergeant began, his tone sympathetic, “I know this is a terrible shock, but tests conducted inside of the home confirmed a high concentration of carbon monoxide. Unfortunately, it’s a very deadly gas. Odorless, colorless. I know this probably isn’t much of a consolation, but in most cases, the victims fall asleep, then succumb to the fumes.”
Darby raised her hands, waving away his words. “I mean it’s impossible that my father would have left his car running. He checked things like that. He was very cautious. Nothing was ever neglected. Were you in the house?”
The officer shrugged his muscular shoulders.
“Did you see a single thing in need of attention? He washed the range hood every single day, for god’s sake. This wasn’t an accident. He was a detailed person. Practically anal about safety. He would not have left his car running in the garage.”
He reached for the small box of tissues and handed her one. Darby looked down at it as if he’d handed her a foreign object. She only vaguely realized she was crying. Tears of sorrow, yes, but salted with disbelief and frustration. “There has to be some sort of mistake. Something you missed.”
“Your parents’ neighbor was walking her dog and heard the engine running. She used her spare key to enter the house and, well, then she called police. She said your parents were lying comfortably in their bed.”
“Something is wrong,” Darby insisted.
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Grisom. There was no sign of a break-in. And now the medical examiner has confirmed the cause of death with blood samples taken from the dec—from your parents.”
Darby replayed the last twenty-four hours. Her parents’ death was just too coincidental. She’d reached out to them for the first time in her marriage and they’d been dead before morning. Somehow Sean must have known she would contact them. But how could he be in New York and Florida at the same time? Darby didn’t know, but she was certain he was behind this. There was no way her father would have been so careless with his new push button-start car. It just didn’t make any sense. Darby’s sorrow took on an edge of fury when the sword of certainty stabbed through her. “My husband killed them. He knew the garage access code. He must have taken a later flight or something.”
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