by Meg Gardiner
The night of the killing Chenille phoned him in a panic, saying that Pete had gone over the edge. He knew he was infected with rabies, and that she was behind it. Betrayed, and fearing that the Remnant’s zealots would rally behind Chenille, Pete had phoned Brian.
Why Brian? Holt gave the only plausible explanation: Peter Wyoming knew that Chenille wanted Luke for herself, and that once she got him she would not hesitate to destroy Tabitha. Facing death with a strange burst of nobility, he had tried to protect Tabitha by seeking help from her husband. He had decided to sell his wife to the enemy.
But Chenille reached Holt in China Lake, telling him to stop Pete from talking or they’d all end up in federal prison. Holt was alarmed, and furious that Chenille had lost control of the situation. But above all, he was enraged that Peter Wyoming planned to tell everything to a fighter pilot. Holt was about to go down, and a fighter puke would get the credit for blowing the theft ring.
Stop Pete, Chenille said. There was a gun in Brian’s closet. Make it look like Brian did it, like it was a crime of passion, of frenzy.
And he did. Pinning the crime on a naval aviator, screwing the fighter jock who would have turned him in, that was just the poisoned icing on the cake.
It was an old story. Avarice, fear, ambition, and jealousy have always made a murderous combination. Read the Bible; it’s full of the stuff.
Brian was in the hospital for a month. His wounds were severe. He faced a long recovery and extensive rehabilitation. The doctors did not predict permanent physical damage, although the damage to his flying career was another matter. The navy had informed him that they intended to convene an inquiry about the scam involving the Sidewinder. His future as an officer, and an aviator, was clouded.
But he said it was worth it, every bit of what he’d done, even if he never flew an F/A-18 again. Luke was safe. No regrets. And I believed him. Still, he looked diminished when I saw him, and not just from the wastage brought on by injury.
Grief had decimated him. Despite Tabitha’s disloyalty, confusion, and disastrous actions, he mourned her passion, her beauty, her heroism. Knowing that in her final moments she had lifted Luke to safety, he now tormented himself for failing to prevent her death. He lay there reliving those minutes in the cabin, over and over, eyes lost to sight, locking on outcomes forever out of reach. If I had gone for Paxton sooner. A second earlier. A finger snap faster, I could have grabbed the shotgun from him. Could have stopped the whole thing right there. If only.
I couldn’t pull him out of it. Our parents arrived and couldn’t either. Finally Jesse talked to him, nobody he would have listened to a month earlier but the only man who could speak to him with authority. Not because he’d driven him down the mountain, but because he knew about chance and the irrevocable pain it inflicts. He talked about the Fucking Facts of Life. About death taking the person beside you, and leaving you breathing but damaged so badly that you fight against believing it. About the futility of reminiscence, which was a way of talking about acceptance. Perhaps someday Brian will hear it.
Jesse had to have surgery on his fractured leg, more pins going into bones that had already set off airport metal detectors, and he was treated for a severe kidney infection and dehydration. He checked himself out after two days, saying he hated hospitals worse than being held captive, and that the food had been better in the fallout shelter.
He came to stay with me. He’s the one who told me that I had to stop running so hard every day, that I’d lost too much weight. And he’s beside me when I wake up shaking. In the nightmare I reach for Tabitha’s hand, feel her fingers touch mine as she stretches up the face of the rock. Her skin feels like electric silk. Her eyes are bottomless and black, full of calm freedom, certain of me. The tree slashes down and it’s a dragon’s tail, embers flying from it like stars, and it sweeps her away. When I sit up shouting, Jesse pulls me against his side. Sometimes we make love, a hungry brand of sex that convinces us we’re still alive. Sometimes he lies staring out the window. He has his own incubus. It feels like a trigger and sounds like gunfire, looks like a throat ripped open, and it says, Your decision.
The last time I had the dream, he told me, ‘‘Take this nightmare to a priest. You should.’’ He ran his fingers through his hair. He didn’t have a priest.
I said, ‘‘And maybe you should talk to Brian.’’
He took a bottle with him when he went.
Luke was also staying with me while Brian recovered. He had a long way to go, but at least he hadn’t reverted to hiding in his closet. He had returned to school, and was seeing a child psychiatrist to help him deal with Tabitha’s death and the traumas he had endured at the hands of the Remnant.
Acceptance isn’t easy. Uncertainty is a devil. But that’s what I’m living with, because the vial Chenille smashed near my face, the substance she called the Apocalypse, could not be found. Toxicological tests on me couldn’t identify anything. No one knows what it was. I have to wait, and wonder.
The weather stayed hot straight through November. Thanksgiving afternoon, after dinner, Jesse and I took Luke to Shoreline Park. The wind was brisk, the sky endless, the grass emerald in the late sun. The ocean rolled cold against the cliff below. We brought kites, and they snapped in the air, dogfighting, neon bright. Luke raced up and down the lawn until his cheeks were flushed.
I spread a blanket on the grass and stretched out with Jesse. His leg was still in a cast. The sun shone on his face and reflected from his eyes. We watched Luke circle around the lawn, running with that smooth Olympian stride of his.
‘‘How about Eastertime?’’ he said. ‘‘Right here.’’
It was the first time since that day on the mountain that either of us had spoken about getting married. I said, ‘‘Could rain. How about the Old Mission?’’
‘‘A Catholic church? Sugar, treat me gently. That’s full-bore.’’
I lay back and gazed at the sky. ‘‘Your house, and a Gospel reading?’’
‘‘I get to choose the music.’’
‘‘No Hendrix.’’ He opened his mouth. I said, ‘‘Nope, no Clapton either.’’
‘‘Then you can forget Patsy Cline.’’
‘‘Motown?’’
‘‘Agreed.’’
Luke ran up to us, wrestling with the kite as he tried to sit down. He stared up at it. ‘‘What’s the longest string you can put on a kite?’’
‘‘I don’t know,’’ I said, ‘‘maybe a hundred meters? What do you think, Jess?’’
‘‘I guess. You want to send it way out there?’’
Luke was thoughtful. ‘‘If a kite flies high enough, can Mommy see it in heaven?’’
It was one of those moments when knowledge and emotion snap together with unexpected consequences. Feeling my heart ache, looking at his solemn face, what brimmed in my ears was a long-ago strip of Latin prayer, rising unbidden from memory.
In paradisum deducant te angeli. . . .
It was the burial prayer of the Catholic funeral rite. May the angels lead you into paradise. . . .
Luke looked at me calmly.
‘‘Yes,’’ I said to him. Something told me to try to believe it. ‘‘I’m sure she can.’’
He said, ‘‘That’s what I thought.’’
He gazed back up at the kite. My eyes went with his.
May the choir of angels receive you . . . may you have eternal rest.
May it be true. I watched the kite spin red, blue, red, the tail whipping silver. In its dance against the sky it was, perhaps, one of those bright beckoning spirits, soaring, bearing her home.
Read on for an exciting preview
of Meg Gardiner’s brand-new thriller,
THE DIRTY SECRETS CLUB
Available wherever books
are sold or at penguin.com
Fire alarms sang through the skyscraper, piercing and relentless. Under the din people poured across the marble lobby toward the doors, dodging fallen ceiling plaster and broken glass. Out
side, Montgomery Street crackled with the lights of emergency vehicles. A police officer fought upstream to get inside. The blonde was ten feet behind, struggling through the crowd.
The man in the corner paced, head down, needing her to hurry.
People rushed by him, jumpy. ‘‘Everything crashed off the bookshelves. I thought for sure it was the Big One.’’
The man turned, shoulders shifting. The Big One? Hardly. This earthquake had just been San Francisco’s regular kick in the butt. But it was bad enough. On the street, steam geysered from manholes. And he could smell gas. Pipes had ruptured under the building. The quake was Hell saying, Don’t forget I’m down here—you fall, I’m waiting for you.
He checked his watch. Come on, girl, faster. They had ten minutes before this building shut down.
A fire captain glanced at him. He was tall and young and moved like the athlete he was, but nothing clicked in the fire captain’s eyes, no suspicion, no Is that who I think it is? Out of uniform he looked ordinary, a plain vanilla all-American.
The blonde neared the doors. She stood out from the crowd, platinum sleek, hair cinched into a tight French twist, body cinched into a tighter black suit. A cop stuck out an arm like he was going to clothesline her. She flashed an ID and slid around him.
He smiled. Right under their noses.
She pushed through the doors and walked up, giving him a hard blue stare. ‘‘Here? Now?’’
‘‘It’s the ultimate test. Secrets are hardest to keep in broad daylight.’’
‘‘I smell gas, and that steam pipe sounds like a volcano erupting. If a valve blows and causes a spark—’’
‘‘You dared me. Do it in public, and get proof.’’ He wiped his palms on his jeans. ‘‘This is as public as it gets. You’ll supply my proof.’’
Her hands clenched, but her eyes shone. ‘‘Where?’’
His heart beat faster. ‘‘Top floor. My lawyer’s office.’’
Upstairs, they strode out of the express elevator to find the law firm abandoned. The fire alarm was shrieking. At the receptionist’s desk, a computer was streaming a television news feed.
‘‘. . . minor damage, but we’re getting reports of a ruptured gas line in the financial district . . .’’
The blonde looked around. ‘‘Security cameras?’’
‘‘Only in the stairwells. It’s bad business for a law firm to videotape its clients.’’
She nodded at a wall of windows. The October sunset was fading to dusk, downtown ablaze with light. ‘‘You plan to do this stunt against the glass?’’
He crossed the lobby. ‘‘This way. The building’s going to shut down in’’—he looked at a red digital clock on the wall—‘‘six minutes.’’
‘‘What?’’
‘‘Emergency procedure. If there’s a gas leak the building evacuates; they shut down the elevators and seal the fire doors. We have to be out by then.’’
‘‘You’re joking.’’
The wall clock counted down to 5:59. He started a timer on his watch.
‘‘Yeah. I was meeting with my lawyers when the quake hit. It limits damage from any gas explosion.’’ He pulled her toward a hallway. ‘‘I can’t believe you’re scared of getting caught with me. Not Hard-girl. ’’
‘‘What part of ‘secret’ do you not understand?’’
‘‘If we’re caught, they’ll ask what we’re doing here, not what we’re hiding in our pasts.’’
‘‘Fair point.’’ She hurried alongside him, eyes bright. ‘‘Were you waiting for an earthquake before you did this?’’
Good guess—this was the third minor quake in the last month. ‘‘I got lucky. I’ve been looking for the perfect opportunity for weeks. Chaos, downtown—it was karma. I figured, seize the day.’’
He rounded a corner. A glass-fronted display case along the wall had cracked, spilling sports memorabilia onto the floor.
She rushed past. ‘‘Is that a Joe Montana jersey?’’
His stopwatch beeped. ‘‘Five minutes.’’
He opened a mahogany door. Across a conference room the red embers of sunset caught them in the eyes. The hills of San Francisco rose in front of them, electric with light and packed to the rafters like a stadium.
He shrugged off his coat, took a camera from the pocket and handed it to her. ‘‘When I tell you, point and click.’’
He crossed the room and opened the doors to a rooftop terrace. Kicking off his shoes, he strode outside.
‘‘You complained I was using the club as a confessional. You told me I was seeking expiation for my sins, but said you couldn’t give me absolution,’’ he said.
Deep below them, the building groaned. She walked outside, breathing hard.
‘‘Damn, Scott, this is dangerous—’’
‘‘Your dare was—and I quote—for me ‘to offer a public display of penitence, and for Christ’s sake, get proof.’ ’’
He pulled his polo shirt over his head. Her gaze seared its way down his chest.
Now, he thought. Before his courage and exhilaration evaporated. He unzipped and dropped his jeans.
She gaped.
He backed toward the waist-high brick railing at the edge of the terrace. ‘‘Turn on the camera.’’
‘‘You came commando-style to a meeting with your lawyers?’’
Naked, he climbed onto the brick ledge and stood up, facing her. Her lips parted. Thrilled to his fingertips, he turned to face Montgomery Street.
A salt breeze licked his bare skin. Two hundred feet below, fire and police lights flickered through steam boiling from the ruptured pipe, turning the scene an eerie red.
He spread his arms. ‘‘Shoot.’’
‘You have got to be kidding me.’’
‘Take the photo. Hurry.’’
‘‘That’s not penitent.’’
He glanced over his shoulder. She was shaking her head.
‘‘Bad? You tattooed Bad on your tailbone?’’
His watch beeped. ‘‘Four minutes. Do it.’’
‘‘You’re a badass?’’ She put her fists on her hips. ‘‘You get all torn up about a nasty thing you did in college, and want to unload it on us—fine. But you can’t tattoo some preening jock statement on your butt and call it repentance. That’s not remorse. Hell, it’s not even close to being dirty.’’
Frowning, she stormed inside.
He turned around. ‘‘Hey!’’
Was she leaving? No, everything depended on her getting the photo. . . .
She ran back out, holding a piece of sports memorabilia from the display case. It was a jockey’s riding crop. He swallowed.
She whipped it against a potted plant with a wicked crack. ‘‘Somebody needs to take you down a notch.’’
He nearly whimpered. She wanted points, too. This was even better.
Snapping the crop against her thigh, she crossed the terrace. Evaluating the ledge, she unzipped her ass-hugging skirt, wriggled it down, and stepped out of it.
‘‘It’s time to make your act of contrition,’’ she said.
In the tight-fitting black jacket, she looked martial. The stilettos could have put out his eyes. The black stockings ran all the way to the tops of her thighs. All the way to—
‘‘What’s that garter belt made from?’’
‘‘Iguana hide.’’
‘‘Jesus, help me.’’
‘‘I have a drawerful. I got them in the divorce.’’ She held out her hand. ‘‘Don’t let me fall.’’
‘‘I won’t. I have perfect balance.’’ He felt crazed and desperate and God, he needed to get her up here, now. ‘‘I get paid four million dollars a year to catch things and never let them drop.’’
A wisp of her blond hair had escaped the perfect do. It softened her. He wanted her to put it back in place. He wanted her to put on leather gloves and maybe an eye patch. He pulled her up on the ledge beside him.
She gripped his hand. Her smooth stocking brushed his leg.
>
He could barely speak. ‘‘This is penance?’’
‘‘Pain is just one step from paradise.’’
She looked down. Her voice dropped. ‘‘Christ. This is asking for a heart attack.’’
‘‘Don’t joke.’’
She looked up. ‘‘No—I didn’t mean it as a crack about David.’’
But if David hadn’t dropped facedown with a coronary, they wouldn’t be here. The doctor’s death had created an opening, and Scott wanted to fill it. This was his chance to prove himself and gain admission to the top level of the club.
The breeze kicked up. In the lighted windows of the skyscraper across the street, people gazed down at the fire trucks. Nobody was looking at them.
‘‘Right under their noses,’’ he said. ‘‘Bonus points for both of us.’’
‘‘Not yet.’’ She handed him the camera. ‘‘Set it so we’re both in the frame.’’
He set the autotimer to take a five-shot series and set the camera on the ledge. His stopwatch beeped. Three minutes.
She planted her feet wide for balance. ‘‘What happens to guilty people?’’
Blinking, he turned around and carefully knelt down on all fours. ‘‘I’ve been bad. Spank me.’’
She slapped the crop against her palm. ‘‘What’s the magic word?’’
Relief and desire rushed through him. ‘‘Hard.’’
The camera flashed. She brought the crop down.
The pain was a stripe of fire along his backside. He gasped and grabbed the ledge.
‘‘Harder,’’ he said.
She whipped the crop down. The camera flashed.
He clawed the bricks. "Mea culpa. I’ve been very, very bad. More."
She didn’t hit him. He looked up. Her chest was heaving, her hair spilling from the French twist.
‘‘My God, you actually want to be punished, don’t you?’’ she said.
‘‘Do it.’’
She swung the crop. It slashed him so hard, he shouted in pain. She wanted to dish out punishment, all right, but not to him. She would use this to send a message to somebody else. The watch beeped.
