The conversation stalled. A first between the two of us. “Well?” I coaxed.
“It’s tempting. Rosa and Jennie are getting sick of me, and even Macayla seems to be giving me the crusties.”
“If you’d rather, I can come get you.”
“I can manage. But late. Say, two o’clock?”
I hung up the phone, my chin collapsed against the hard surface of my desk with a jolt and I burst into what was a sea of landlocked tears.
I cried for Kate and her butchered abdomen. And for her daughter, trying to find her own way with an unwanted baby growing inside her intact fertile womb. I cried for my dead mother, and Naomi, and at least one unwitting victim—the private eye I had engaged.
And I grieved because I had finally planted my roots in a place I could call home. The savage and ravage of Economics-101 was digging up those roots. An insolvent Ari Christenson had to sell out.
Why did I feel like the loser?
Chapter Fifty-Nine
The Row
At twenty minutes past two I heard the sputtering muffler of Kate’s yellow Volkswagen barreling toward me and the red plaid blankets I’d spread out in front of the stables. Rudy asked if he could prepare two horses for riding.
“Thanks, but I don’t think so. Ms. Vander Ark is still healing. I think even the gentlest of horse rides might be too much for her. Comprendo?”
“Yes, Senorita. Si. But, I bring them out to corral, brush them down. They look pretty for you.”
Rudy could make me forget about everything evil in the world. “That’s very kind of you. Gracias.”
His lips tightened, his coal eyes searched out mine behind my lightly shaded sunglasses. “Are scares over?”
“Scares?”
“You know. Bad stuff. Dead flower. Bad electric.”
“I think so, Rudy. I really think so.”
“I hope, because I leave with Ari. He say new owner maybe won’t give me work. I can’t watch after you anymore.”
I never considered I was being looked after; not since my mother died had I felt ‘looked after’. Then again, Rudy was always there when I needed him. He was there when I found the dead rose. And the threatening note. He was even with Ari when they heard my screams as I touched the electrified burner.
Rudy’s ruddy blush found its way across dark cheeks before he could turn and rush off to bring the horses out for our viewing pleasure.
Kate lifted herself out of the driver’s seat. The shock must have registered on my face as my jaw dropped.
She looked at me with cynic amusement, bouncing back with a quirky smirk. “I told you I wasn’t ready for town.”
Her trendy boots and Maui Jim sunglasses were Kate Vander Ark, all the way. What lurched out of place was the tent-like wool gabardine caftan, billowing in the light breeze and yet clinging to what was skeletal to her already slight self.
She caught my stare. “I can’t tolerate anything clinching around my waist. Not even my favorite jeans,” she said.
Mindful of her fragile body, I embraced Kate with open arms. Still, she shuddered. I felt like I was extracting fragrant oils from an orchid and Kate was the delicate petals I crushed.
“Look at you,” I said. “You’re alive, you’re out of your house. And you’re beautiful as ever.”
“Let’s not go there. Just say I’m getting by.” She walked over to greet the horses Rudy had led out from behind the stables.
Kate gave a clipped wave to Rudy, then looked back at me. “So, trouble in paradise?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I see this place is up for sale.”
“Ari’s moving to Nevada.”
She raised both eyebrows, squatting down beside me on the blankets. “Hard to believe. He’s a Trinidad institution. Why would he sell?”
Because his sugar daddy has tarnished the platinum spoon. “The better question might be, how is he going to sell? He has it way overpriced, like it was a ranch in Malibu Canyon.” I poured two glasses of the cabernet sauvignon.
Kate’s eyes narrowed. “Time-out. There’s something way different about you. You look like you’ve just come back from a week at a spa rather than enduring the months of crap you’ve had to deal with. Me included.”
Rudy was within earshot behind us, brushing out the chestnut mane of the resident Arabian. I cut my voice to a shy whisper. “No time-out needed. Probably my after-sex radiance.”
Kate chuckled. “You must be kidding. What have I missed? Who’s the lucky guy?”
“You don’t know?”
“Hey, I’ve been out of the loop for a couple months now. Instead of missing in action, I’m missing the action.”
“It’s Jonathan. I guess when he spent so much time with us, well, we connected.”
Kate’s eyes measured her confusion. “Who—us?”
“In Mexico. You don’t remember?”
Kate shook her head.
“He was with Macayla and me the whole time we stayed with you.”
She took a sip of wine and reclined against a forward corral post. “You’re sitting there telling me you’ve been sexing it up with Jonathan Marasco? Why is it you get the good ones?”
Rudy didn’t have command of the English language, but from his grin I figured he got the idea. I scowled back at Kate, “Shhhh. Hey, you had your chance. You didn’t like him.”
She threw her neck back in mock disgust. “Neither did you.” Her smile did nothing to disguise the sadness in her eyes.
“You’re another institution in Trinidad, Kate. This whole town loves you. They’re all waiting. They need to know you’re okay.”
“Then they’re going to have to wait a little longer, because I’m not okay.”
I lifted the brass latch of the picnic basket. Oh my god! Like the latch of my father’s staircase safe. No. Not hidden. Not a secret. No Secrets! No more secrets!
“Earth to Breecie. You there?”
“Just had a fleeting thought. No biggie. I’m listening.” I pulled out the loaf of focaccia bread, varietal cheeses, and two chicken breasts while waiting patiently as only friends can do, for Kate to fill the silence with the words she held so close.
Her voice dropped again, to alto. “It’s not just the physical stuff, and believe me, that alone is almost unbearable. I have a Versace string bikini with the tags still on it I need to put up on eBay. Pronto.”
I pulled my sunglasses up on my head so I could see Kate, seeing me. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you were lucky. Things could have been a lot worse. They could have...”
“...They could have slashed my throat, ear to ear. Or my heart. But the thing is...” She took a sip of the wine and shifted her slight weight around. I saw further evidence of the pain it caused her. “They got to my soul. I mean, I was just so scared. I didn’t understand who had done this to me, or why. And I was on that damn respirator so I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t tell anyone how scared I was. I remember my fear turning to anger, but I was so doped up I couldn’t even be furious the way I wanted to be.”
“Wait a minute. You were in a coma when you were on the respirator.”
“I don’t know. I’m all mixed up. I just know I could feel things, and think things. Unimaginable things.”
Dread swooned over me for what I was about to say, alongside a swath of guilt for not saying it sooner. “There’s something I haven’t told you. About the men that attacked you.”
She fixed her stare on me. The only movement came from the droplets of wine forced from her glass when she abruptly stopped swirling it around.
“My father is responsible, Kate. He could have warned you not to get involved with Baird, even on the moral grounds he was a married man. He should have insisted you not go anywhere with him. He should have told Baird to leave you out of it but he opted not to.”
Kate sat for several seconds, staring beyond the plaid lines of the blanket as she dabbed away at the spilt wine. She let out an audible breath. “First, your
dad did tell Baird to stay away from me. And second, my fate is my own responsibility. George treated me like his stupid bimbo bitch, but I’m not any of those things. Just so you know, I knew he was married. I should have run away from him the moment I found that out.”
She was blaming herself? “That might have been a moral misjudgment, but it doesn’t warrant any of this.”
“I knew he was doing something illegal. Big time illegal. I just didn’t bother to ask questions. So you see, by choosing to look the other way, I was choosing to lunch with Lucifer.”
A massive Cooper’s hawk with its brazen rusty-barred breast swooped down low for his own picnic, quick to seize an unlucky rodent. It wasn’t an unusual sighting, but still managed to leave both Kate and I breathless in its innate instincts of survival.
Kate gazed upward until the creature lifted above us, becoming nothing but a pinprick against the glassy blue sky, then disappeared. Her voice held a new defiance. “I’ve decided my first visit to town, when I’m ready, will be to Widow’s Row.”
The announcement seemed jarring, even coming from Kate. At least it was something positive. “I’m sure everyone will be glad to see you there, shaking your bootie,” I said.
“Oh, no.” Kate choked and muffled a groan as she clenched her abdomen. She threw me a stern look to say she was okay. “I’m not talking about The Raging Bovine.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
She explained. Church. Second pew, center aisle, and only a gasping prayer away from the altar. Naomi Gaines had taken her there twice when she learned Kate was a widow.
No parishioner ever chooses a seat on Widow’s Row.
It chooses them, I suppose.
Chapter Sixty
A Cabin in the Woods
After pouring the last drops of wine—the ‘happiness’, into Kate’s glass, I lay down on my side, head propped against my palm. I noticed Rudy had corralled another horse, a black Morgan, and was combing out her tail with his fingers. I wondered if he could hear us, and if so, how much he understood. If he eavesdropped, it was because he cared so much.
“I think going to church is a great idea.”
“You just said you thought my going to The Raging Bovine was a great idea.”
“I want to see you get out of the house and with people, so they’re both good ideas. They aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Kate cocked her head, sending a blonde shock of hair swirling. “Don’t think hanging out at The Bovine’s going to be my thing anymore. I’m the first in a tribe of ‘born again virgins’. It’s my destiny.”
It almost sounded funny until I realized her reasoning was a perceived vitriolic reality. Her gentle smile twisted into a world of charred disparagement as she explained her certainty no man would touch her again. The thought haunted every minute of her waking day, and long into the nightmares that controlled her sleep. “It’s a familiar feeling, raring its nasty head once again.”
“What do you mean?”
Her long eyelashes swooped back to the blanket. “When I was pregnant with Macayla. I mean, we were kids and all, but you never forget the feeling when someone you love finds you physically revolting.”
“He was stupid, Kate. You must have been a beautiful expectant mother.”
I might have said the wrong thing. Kate started sobbing; shedding the pent-up tears seemed to make room for even more determination to discount herself as a woman. She was creating her own cuscinetto system, effectively producing a buffer between her and any man because she was no longer a perfect ‘ten’.
Maybe this screwed up world that covets flawless model-like women destroyed more of Kate than the knife-yielding Russians did.
I held her next to me, somehow trying to squeeze the remaining tears out of her. She pulled away and collapsed back against the post.
“For the record,” Kate said after dabbing away the last teardrops, “your dad wouldn’t have persuaded George one way or the other. George knew those men were after us, and more or less told me so. We were coming home the next day, ahead of plans, then turning right around and flying to South Africa. He had friends in the mining business there, and said we’d be safe. Indefinitely.”
I remembered the doctor’s report. “That’s why you had the Lariam in your system?”
“Yeah. To prevent malaria.”
“It’s also a psychotic drug. Your doctors were concerned when they found it.”
“I’ve tried a lot of stuff to get a buzz here or there, but no psychotic drugs. Hell, I am psychotic.”
“What about Macayla?”
“You see, God does work in mysterious ways. I was about to make another stupid mistake with my daughter. I was about to leave her again.”
As the afternoon was waning into early dusk, Kate and I sprawled ourselves out further across the blankets. I ran up and fetched a second bottle of wine, determined to stretch out our time together as long as I could. When I finally got around to telling Kate about Baird, Adam and my father, she adopted a stern attitude.
“Have you called the police?”
That same odd disconnected feeling waved through my mind. “I decided to call you instead. Seemed like a better way to spend the day.”
“That’s not like you.”
“I guess a lot of things aren’t like me these days. But George Baird is dead, my dad is as good as dead because he’s never coming back to face up to what he’s done. That leaves Adam. He got married, you know.”
The crack in my voice betrayed my anger.
“That was fast. To that redhead?”
I nodded. “I saw a photo of them online. Honeymooning in Bermuda. Guess his campaign people decided he should be a married man, after all, before the elections.”
“So what about him?”
“I have my own little timeline worked out for him.”
“I know that grin on your face, Breecie Lemay. Whatever you have cooked up for your former dirt bag of a fiancé, I’m going to love it.”
Ari drove up to the house, hollered something obscene toward us about helping him sell the property if we’d lay out naked. Don’t listen to him, Kate. He has the sensitivity of rhinoceros dung.
Kate’s face clouded. “Was he in on any of this? I mean, those are Baird’s chinchillas, and Baird’s bulls.” She gazed over to the two magnificent horses. “Christ, those probably belonged to him, too.”
“I don’t think Ari knew much of anything except Baird covered his huge overhead on this place. Now he’s stooping so low as to complain these animals are running low on food and he doesn’t want to foot the bill to keep them alive. He called Baird’s Denver office before it closed down and learned no one wants anything to do with any of the man’s assets.” Which are now liabilities, I thought.
“You do know about Baird’s wife?” I asked.
“I’m sorry to admit it, but yes.”
“I’m guessing anything of Baird’s is a ticket to trouble, especially if any Russian wants a payday off from any assets they think Baird might own. He’s taboo. No one would even pay to bring his body home.”
“Shit. I can’t believe I never thought about that. What happened to him?” Kate pulled her hands to cover her face. “The man had his redeeming qualities, Breeze.”
I rolled my eyes to the heavens, ready to hear some sort of crock of bullshit. But Kate didn’t say another good word while I searched for the right ones. “Honey, from what I heard, honestly, there wasn’t that much left of him to ship anywhere.”
Kate appeared to contemplate the situation. “I came home on that air ambulance, not that I enjoyed the fancy ride, and my insurance company is still quibbling over the bill. But it begs the question, what happened to George’s King Air? He wasn’t modest, always bragging how it was worth big bucks. I was queening on it.”
“Queening?” Kate liked to make words up to suit her.
“You know, I felt like a queen.”
“Well, now that you mention it, that’s interesting. Ari did
say something about Baird’s plane, and a cabin somewhere. I got the distinct impression he wasn’t telling me the whole story. Said he didn’t know the whereabouts of either.”
“The cabin’s a dump.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Sure. That’s where he keeps—did keep the plane. Had his own landing strip out there.”
“Is it around here somewhere?”
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