When the Tiger Kills

by Vanessa Prelatte

  Maeve was holding the door open for him, and he thanked her as he entered the house and made his way down the steps. When he reached the bottom, he crossed over to the couch. Depositing the crutches on the floor beside him, he sank down onto the couch with a sigh of relief.

  Ty had followed him down and strolled over to the refrigerator behind the bar. Pulling out two cold ones, he popped the tops and walked over to the couch, offering one to Brody before seating himself in the adjacent recliner.

  “You want a snack or something?”

  Brody shook his head. “Not right now. Isn't your mom coming down?”

  “She said she had to make a phone call, so she went over into Dawn's study. After that, she's going to find Mrs. T. and talk to her about dinner. She said something about asking my cousin Lotti over to join us.”

  “Isn't she the one who's taking care of your little sister?”

  “Yeah. She just got out of a bad marriage and needed a job, so Dad hired her to be sort of a nanny for Echo.” And that, Ty thought, was enough said about Sloan Lewellen. While he himself had maintained a good relationship with both of his parents after their divorce, the same couldn't be said about Brody. When he'd found out that Sloan was splitting from Maeve and marrying someone young enough to be his daughter, Brody had called Maeve and offered to kick the living shit out of Sloan. His mother had declined the offer, but Ty knew that his friend had still not let go of the resentment he felt toward Sloan.

  To change the subject, he gestured toward Brody's leg. “Doctor Gellraien pulled a few strings to get you into surgery on Thursday. After you're out of the hospital, you can come back here to recuperate. I have a home gym back there" – he inclined his head to the left – "where you can do all the physical therapy you need.”

  “What about your wife? How's she going to feel about having a long-term house guest, one who she's never even met before?”

  “Dawn and I already talked about that. She says that you're always welcome here.”

  “She could change her mind. What if she decides that she doesn't like me?”

  “Well, she will like you. What's not to like? And if she doesn't, she can always avoid you by staying over on the D-side.”

  “The D-side?”

  Taking a last satisfying pull from the bottle, Ty finished his beer, stood, and three-pointed it into a strategically placed recycle bin. Then he turned back to answer Brody's question.

  “The D-side stands for Dawn's side. It may look like one house from the outside, but ours is actually two houses – a sort of duplex.”

  “Why do you need two houses?”

  Ty wandered over to the pool table and began pushing the multicolored balls around idly. “It's like this. I'm crazy about Dawn. We're crazy about each other, in fact. But after we got married, we discovered that we weren't so crazy about living together.”

  He picked up a stick, racked the balls, positioned the cue ball, and broke. As the balls scattered across the table, he continued, “Just one example – the house we lived in right after we got married had a nice, spacious home office. We set it up so we could both use it – desks, chairs, computers, everything we needed; but Dawn never used it. She was always using the dining room table as a desk. And sometimes the paperwork overflowed onto the kitchen table. It drove me crazy. Meanwhile, I hired Mrs. T. as a sort of cook/housekeeper without talking to Dawn about it first. That drove her crazy. And there were other things too.”

  Since one of the balls had landed in a pocket on his first break, Ty settled in for a game of Fifteen in a Row. He aimed for the four ball, connected, and watched with satisfaction as it slid smoothly into the pocket. “Anyway, we decided to get some professional help. Couples counseling, that sort of thing. After we talked everything out, we realized that we wanted to live together, but that we each needed our own space. So we built this house. My mother helped us out with some of the design and the decorating, and on the original plans for the house, she labeled one side the 'D-side', and the other the 'T-side'. And the names stuck.”

  “She let your mom help with the decorating?”

  Trust Brody to zero in on that, Ty thought. “Yeah. She and Mom hit it off right away. Dawn had never done much decorating before, and since my mother's an interior decorator, she offered to help. They actually had a lot of fun together, choosing the stuff for each side of the house.”

  “What about you? Didn't you get a say?”

  Ty managed to shrug as he knocked another ball into the pocket. “I don't care that much about colors and furniture and things like that. Mom knows my tastes, so she'd bring me a sketch and I'd say, 'Fine, Mom,' and that was that. Except down here. I picked out everything down here personally.” He paused his game to look approvingly around his domain before concentrating on sinking the nine ball.

  “What about the other side?”

  Damn. The nine ball spiraled along the top of the pocket and then spun out again. End of game. He put the cue stick away and walked to the far wall. Leaned against it and grinned like a small boy. “Let me show you,” he said. He pushed a button on the wall, and it began to retract, revealing the rest of the basement.

  Brody lifted his eyebrows and whistled with appreciation. “Holy shit, Lew. You've got yourself a freaking sports bar down here.”

  Ty smiled as his friend used the nickname he had acquired in the Air Force. He crossed over to the other side, waving his hands at his creation. “Dawn wanted her own exercise equipment upstairs next to her bedroom, and she doesn't watch much television, so she gave me a free hand down here. On both sides.”

  Brody had no doubt of that. The right hand wall on the other side of the basement had a huge flat screen TV mounted on it, surrounded by at least six more smaller TV's. A long bar ran down the length of that wall with at least a dozen bar stools facing the TV’s. He could see some classic arcade games against the far wall, as well as a ping pong table, an air hockey table, and a Foosball table. Against the rear wall, a basketball hoop had been set up, and he caught a glimpse of a putting green as well.

  “Soon as you recuperate from your surgery, we'll throw a party. Invite Vin and Sam, Ozzie, Barney, Ash, Hank, Sully – everyone. We'll have the biggest blow-out the state has ever seen.”

  Brody's lips curved into something that was almost one of his rare smiles. “You've got it all figured out, haven't you, Lew?”

  Ty flopped down into the chair next to him again. “We'll get Mom to handle the food part of it. Remember the Super Bowl party she organized for us a couple of years back? This one will be even better.”

  Brody took another sip of his beer, which he was nursing along. “What about Dawn?”

  “She won't have a problem with anything. Like I said, she and Mom are tight.”

  “If they get along so well, why isn't she here, while your mother is visiting?”

  “She's working on a big case right now. College kid got pushed over a cliff, and his girlfriend was apparently abducted. Dawn's been working night and day to find the girl. Mom understands. Once the case is closed, Dawn will be around a lot more, and they'll spend some time together. But as long as there's a chance that the girl is still alive? Dawn will pretty much come home to sleep and maybe have breakfast. That's it.”

  “And you're okay with that?”

  Ty shrugged. “She's a cop. I knew that when I married her. The hours go with the job. Besides, if it weren't for the fact that she's a cop – I don't think I'd be sitting here right now. Those guys, the ones who kidnapped me? They never had any intention of letting me go once the ransom was paid. They'd have killed me. I'm alive today only because of Dawn. She put her own life on the line to get me out of there. In fact, it was touch and go there for the both of us for a while. But we pulled through, together. That's not something I'm ever likely to forget.”

  *****

  Maeve disconnected the call, picked up her glass of wine, and stared into its depths thoughtfully. She'd talked to Mrs. Tilner and told her to take the night
off. She, Maeve, would take care of dinner.

  Ribs, she'd decided. Both Ty and Brody loved them. Provolone sticks, some wings, and pepperoni-stuffed zucchini for appetizers. Man-food for her son and his friend. A loaf of crusty bread, a big Caesar salad, baked potatoes, some green beans almondine, and strawberry shortcake for dessert would round off the menu nicely. She'd decided on some Chicken Marsala as well, in case Lotti didn't care for ribs.

  William, the manager of one of her favorite restaurants, had been delighted to hear from her again. He'd have everything delivered to her son's address in plenty of time for dinner, he'd assured her. So nice doing business with Mrs. Lewellen again.

  She'd called Sloan next to arrange for some time off for Lotti. Sloan had been accommodating, which, to be fair, was what she'd expected. Next, she'd talked to Lotti herself and cajoled her into accepting the dinner invitation, no easy task. But she'd prevailed in the end, and Lotti would be arriving within the next hour or so.

  Satisfied with her efforts so far, Maeve took a sip of wine and considered Brody's situation. Dr. Gellraien had, with Brody's permission, consulted with his original doctor in New Jersey. It had turned out that the first doctor had only been covering himself from any chance of a medical malpractice suit when he'd mentioned the possibility of amputation to Brody. Full disclosure of all possible consequences of the surgery, no matter how unlikely, was necessary. The odds that complications might arise that required amputating the leg were actually quite small. Brody had studied the numbers and decided that he could live with the percentages, so the surgery had been scheduled for Thursday. Paul Gellraien had had to pull some strings and shift his own schedule around a little to accommodate Brody, but that's what friends were for. He had certainly come through for Maeve.

  She glanced around the study, remembering how much she and Dawn had enjoyed furnishing and decorating it together. The sage green walls harmonized neatly with the elegant coffered ceiling, done in a light buttery color and accented in white. The couch she sat on faced a fireplace, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side. They'd gone with neutrals for the couch and the matching chairs on either side of it, a soft, creamy eggshell color. More bookshelves lined two of the other walls in the room, and a large plant sat in one corner. They'd added a few touches of aqua, chocolate brown, and burgundy to the room as accents, and the final result was soothing, tranquil, calming. A necessity for Dawn, she thought, to have a place like this to retreat to at the end of a hectic day.

  She'd liked Dawn right from the first, but she would have welcomed her into the family no matter what her personal feelings were, given that she owed her son's life to Dawn. Maeve's warmth had broken through Dawn's natural reserve very quickly, and the two of them had become fast friends. She'd always wanted a daughter, and now Dawn had stepped into that role.

  A yawn escaped her. She looked at her watch and decided that she had plenty of time for a nap before Lotti arrived. Stretching out on the couch, she pulled one of the sofa pillows under her head. As she drifted off to sleep, she thought how nice it would be to spend some time with Dawn once she had closed the case she was working on. Maeve only hoped it would be sooner rather than later. Eventually, she had to go back to New Orleans...

  *****

  Lotti finished applying lipstick and studied the results. The new shade that her friend Bree had insisted she try complemented her ash-brown hair and gray eyes. She reached for the blush and applied some to her cheeks, then brushed on mascara and eyeshadow. When she was done, she stared back at the woman facing her in the mirror. She knew that her birth certificate recorded that she was twenty-six years old. Right now, however, she felt about sixty. She wandered over to the window and stared at the well-manicured lawn below.

  For the first ten years of her life, this house had been like a second home to her. Her father had been Sloan's first cousin, and the two of them were as close as brothers. After her father's death, however, everything had changed. Her mother had remarried, and they'd moved away. Her stepfather, Jerry, was an attorney who specialized in international law. Over the next few years, they'd moved around constantly. First, a year in Japan, then a couple in China. After that, they'd spent time in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. The constant travel had taken its toll on the marriage, though, and her mother had divorced Jerry shortly before Lotti's eighteenth birthday. Her mother had fallen in love with France during the time they had spent there, however, and had decided to relocate and make France her home. Lotti herself, meanwhile, had elected to come home to the U.S. to attend college. She'd only managed to visit with Sloan and his family a couple of times in all of those years.

  She'd met Riley at the beginning of her junior year in college. He'd seemed so perfect at first. He was senior, just a year away from graduation, and he'd been so attentive, so loving, so caring. The epitome of romance. He'd showered her with gifts, written poetry to her, convinced her that she was the center of his universe.

  After he had graduated from college, he'd taken her on a month-long trip to Hawaii. To celebrate, he'd said. She'd been intoxicated, madly in love with him. Originally, they'd planned to wait until she graduated the following year to get married, but he'd persuaded her to change her mind. Why wait? He'd get a job close by the University, he'd said, and she could spend her senior year as a married woman just as easily as a single one.

  By the time they'd returned from Hawaii, they were married. And then it had begun. Scarcely a week later, he had informed her that his father had offered him a job as a vice president in the family company. Its headquarters were located in Riley's hometown of Plantain, a medium-size city in southwest Illinois.

  “No problem,” she'd said. “I'll just transfer to one of the local colleges and finish out my senior year there.”

  He'd been delighted with her response and had offered to do all the paperwork for her, pay the tuition, everything. After some research, she'd decided to transfer to Merrimac, a small private college located in the heart of the business district in Plantain. Riley's office was not far away, which was extremely convenient. Maybe they could have lunch together on a regular basis.

  When she'd walked onto campus the first day, however, she was stunned. Although Riley had assured her that he had taken care of everything for her, there was no record that she was enrolled in the college. No tuition had ever been paid.

  She'd been furious. She'd marched into the front door of their home like an avenging fury and confronted him.

  He'd been so busy, he said. What with moving and starting the new job – he'd just forgotten about it.

  “That's no excuse!” she'd shouted. “I was counting on you!”

  He had responded by backhanding her. Afterward, he had stared at his hand as if it didn't belong to him, seemingly stunned.

  His voice full of contrition, he’d said, “I can't believe I did that. I'm so sorry, sweetheart. I don't know what came over me. It'll never happen again.”

  He'd taken her into his arms, embraced her, soothed the hurt away. He'd bought her roses, dozens of them, and expensive jewelry to “make up for it.” She could enroll during the winter term, he'd told her. It was all probably for the best, he'd continued. Taking a semester off would give her time to adjust to her new home, her new life.

  But when the winter term had come, he'd found another excuse for putting off her return to college. When she'd protested, he'd given her a black eye. And that pattern had continued throughout their marriage.

  Why did I put up with it for so long? she wondered. Even as the thought crossed her mind, she knew the answer. Pride. Pride and shame and that insidious type of brainwashing that the experts called Battered Woman Syndrome.

  The violence had escalated as the years went by, but she hadn't made any attempt to leave him. He'd told her that he'd kill her if she even thought about it. One day about a year previously, however, everything had changed. Riley had beaten her so badly that her entire body seemed to be one large bruise
. He'd forbidden her to leave the house while he was at work that day, but something had snapped in her. She'd wandered around the neighborhood, dazed, confused, until a man working outside in his yard had noticed her. He was an older man, gnarled and grizzled, and she'd never met him before.

  “Lady, somebody really did a job on you. You look like you could use a friend.”

  She hadn't even known how to respond. When he'd started to call the police, however, she'd begged him not to.

  “He'll kill me,” she'd said.

  Jim, as she discovered later was his name, had pondered that for a minute.

  “What about your parents?”

  She shook her head. “My dad's dead. And I can't tell my mother – she'd be so disappointed in me.”

  “Aunts? Uncles? Cousins?”

  She'd answered slowly, “Sloan. Sloan Lewellen. He's my cousin.”

  “Tell me your name, and give me his number.”

  She'd told him her name and recited the number without even having to think about it. She'd called it so many times during her childhood that she still had it memorized.

  Jim had called the house and gotten through to Sloan, who fortunately had been working from home that day.

  “Sloan Lewellen? My name's Jim Telfee. I'm calling from Plantain, Illinois, and I've got a lady here in my house who's scared to death and looks like she's been beaten within an inch of her life. Her name is Charlotte Nordgram, and she says she's your cousin.” He paused for a moment and said, “Just a minute.”

  He'd handed her the phone, and she'd said tentatively, “Hello?”

  “Lotti?”

  At the sound of his voice, something broke inside her. All she'd been able to do was whisper, “Sloan?” And then she'd started sobbing. Jim had taken the phone back and gotten her a drink of water. After she'd calmed down enough, she got back on the phone.