Isaac’s current wife was a dimpled delight who seemed to find the entire world a joyous place. Of course, I was of the opinion that Mellie’s “sneaky cigarettes” had nothing to do with tobacco. As far as I was concerned, only someone who was as high as a kite would strip naked then dance in their backyard in the middle of winter.
“Didn’t Calvin report them about the dog?” I put down my fork.
“Council officer came, gave them a fine, and they didn’t give a toss. I have a mind to report them to the Law Society.”
“Not sure allowing your dog to do his business where he likes will be of interest to the Law Society.”
My father gave me a strange smile. “You’d be surprised. The Fitzpatricks aren’t holding pot parties every weekend anymore, are they?”
I’d forgotten that. Unlike with Mellie’s amusing shenanigans today, “old” people zoning out on pot hadn’t been of much interest to my teen self. But my father was right—the weekly debaucheries had come to an abrupt halt some months before my mother’s disappearance.
Her disappearance was the defining point in my life. I remembered the time before and after with crystal clarity. But I didn’t recall the exact date the parties had stopped because I’d never paid that much attention to them in the first place.
But it reminded me of something else. “Didn’t their old dog …” I left the sentence unfinished, even though Pari appeared distracted by the task she’d set herself of carefully cutting the skin off her piece of chicken.
My father nodded, confirming he remembered the dog had been found run over on the street. “It was half senile by then anyway.”
We didn’t speak further until Shanti had hustled Pari from the table.
My father leaned back in his chair, an after-dinner tumbler of cognac in hand. “Police tell you anything else? I had a missed call from the woman cop, but didn’t get a chance to reply.”
I shared the confirmation about my mother not being the driver, watching him with laser focus the entire time.
His fingers tightened around the tumbler. “No one could’ve known she took that money. Even I didn’t know until twelve hours after she walked out. And I searched the house top to bottom. Only place it could’ve been was in the car.”
I had hazy memories of him swearing as he’d torn the house apart. With my leg still hurting from that injury, I hadn’t helped—but I hadn’t minded when he’d come into my room and turned it inside out. Desperate for proof that my mother hadn’t left me, I’d wanted him to find the money. “You tracked down her safety-deposit box, too.”
“At least I got back a few diamonds. She had nowhere else she could’ve stashed the money.”
“She trusted Diana.”
“I thought of that—but Diana would’ve come forward when I laid the theft charge. No way she’d have allowed Nina to be smeared.”
He was right; Diana just wasn’t the kind to allow something like that to go unchallenged. And if my mother had given her the money for safekeeping, then hadn’t contacted her as agreed, she’d definitely have kicked up a stink.
“Who do you think would have had reason to take the money? Hypothetically speaking.”
“Your mother was a slut.” Bullets shaped like words. “You knew it, too. No point pussyfooting around it.”
I said nothing, just waited to see where my father intended to go with this.
“She probably hooked up with the wrong person and he killed her for the money she stole.” A shrug. “Don’t ask me, boy.”
Boy.
A signal that I was to end the conversation and go back to my place in the world. Far beneath my father. I thought about confronting him again about the scream I’d heard that night, but knew better than to do so without something to use as leverage.
Ishaan Rai hadn’t become such a successful businessman by crumpling in the face of challenge. He’d lie without hesitation, tell me I’d imagined it—because what proof did I have aside from a decade-old memory?
Fractured, confused memory.
“Good night, Dad,” I said, and if there was an edge of mockery in the address, he was too focused on his cognac to care.
When I ran into Shanti on the stairs, I said, “Avoid him tonight.”
Her face blanched. “He’ll be angry.”
“He’s on the way to getting drunk again—he won’t remember.” She’d still bear the brunt of the emotional fallout tomorrow, but she was used to that type of thing and seemed to consider it my father’s right as her husband.
Poor Shanti. No one had told her that her fairy-tale wedding to a rich man from abroad was one of the original dark tales and not the sanitized cutesy version.
I watched from the stairs as she reached the bottom landing. Though she hesitated outside the door that led to the dining area, she turned in the other direction … just as glass shattered against one of the dining room walls.
It was as if my father couldn’t stop himself from re-creating his final night with my mother.
I continued on to my room, then locked the door behind me before entering the closet once again. The right yearbook was midway down the shelf that held the detritus of my high-school life.
Carrying it as well as my old notebook out to my desk, I sat and ate a handful of sweets from my sugar drawer. Yeah, I wasn’t about to confess this little habit to Dr. Jitrnicka when he was still only “cautiously optimistic” that my booze addiction was in the past. But unlike with the alcohol, I could only take a certain amount of sugar before it became nauseating—I’d had no limit when it came to alcohol.
Drawer now shut, I flipped through to the section on notable sporting events.
There it was: Riki’s grim face, his hand clenched around his medal as he lifted it high.
22
The caption gave more information than I’d remembered: Ariki Henare after his gold medal discus performance at the New Zealand Secondary Schools Athletics Association championship. Ariki dedicated his victory to his mother, who is currently fighting cancer: “I hope this makes her proud.”
I ran my finger over the words, then rechecked the dates against the entry in my notebook. The timeline matched. Hemi had been sleeping with my mother while his wife was battling cancer.
Riki had known.
Of that I had zero doubt—not after the conversation in the garage. He hadn’t been SAS ten years ago, but as a discus champion, he’d been big and strong. My mother would’ve been no match for him had he decided to strike out.
He’d had a motorcycle back then, too. Not hard to follow my mother’s car from the Cul-de-Sac, flag her down on the loneliness of a road made dark and claustrophobic by the forest, then force her into the passenger seat.
It was a mistake to assume she must’ve been overwhelmed in the Cul-de-Sac. She could’ve survived whatever had made her scream and leave the house, only to be attacked farther on, far from anyone who could help her.
Far from me.
Rain began to hit the windows with a rattling clatter that indicated hail, the tiny beads of ice collecting on the balcony before vanishing as my mother had done that dark night.
I woke with a gritty, groggy feeling that told me I’d been dreaming all night, hovering on the edge of sleep but never quite getting there. To add to that, my foot ached like I’d beaten it with a hammer. Groaning, I just sat in bed for long minutes until I could get myself moving.
Shoving aside the thin blanket I’d pulled on at some point last night, I swung my good leg out of bed. “What the hell?” The bottom of my foot felt stiff, wrong. Frowning, I lifted it to see a dirty sole.
Not the dirty of picking up a few bits of fluff while walking barefoot on wooden floors, or the dirty of running down the drive without shoes. This was the dirty of walking barefoot on soil and grass. A blade of the latter was stuck to the pad below my big toe, the green drying to a kind of brownish olive.
Cheeks cold with a burn, I glanced at my mo
on boot … to see blades of grass and streaks of dirt on the nearest side. When I managed to get myself up and limped off to the bathroom using the cane, the full-length mirror had a nasty surprise for me: the bottom of the boot was filthy. But most heavily on one side.
As if I’d been dragging my leg along the ground instead of using the cane.
That cane, when I lifted it to check the bottom, was clean. Putting it carefully to the side, I grabbed a fresh trash bag off the roll I kept on the counter. Dr. Binchy—no, Dr. Tawera—had made it plain that I was to keep on the boot to shower.
The best way I’d found to do that was to stick the leg, boot and all, into a garbage bag, and tape it off at the top. It wasn’t foolproof, but if I kept the shower short, the boot stayed dry. Today, I spent most of that shower seated on the stool Shanti had quietly placed in there.
If only the media could see me now.
My heart thudded as I scrubbed. Afterward, towel wrapped around my waist, I sat on the closed lid of the toilet and used disinfectant wipes to clean my other foot and the moon boot. It wasn’t exactly easy. In the end, I resorted to dropping the wipes on the floor and rubbing the sole of the moon boot on them.
It took five wipes, because they kept getting rolled up and tangled, but I got the sucker clean. After disposing of the wipes, I went into the bedroom and pulled off the blanket to look at my sheets. A couple of streaks of dirt, but nothing major. A quick moment of thought and I pulled them off.
It left me sweating.
The maid service usually did this. After removing the sheets, I spent a bit of time making sure that the fitted sheet was lined up with the top sheet at the dirty section, then found an old fountain pen that leaked. I emptied the ink over the stains, the blot of black erasing all evidence.
Evidence of what, I didn’t know.
All I knew was that the service would have no reason to wonder how I’d managed to spill ink onto my sheets. I’d done it before, when I was fresh out of the hospital and working in bed. They’d bleach the sheets and it’d be fine.
Putting new sheets on properly was beyond my limited physical capabilities, but I managed to throw on a top sheet before I chucked the dirty sheets in the laundry basket. I also made sure to text the owner of the maid service:
Sorry, Mary. Got ink on the sheets again. Left them in the laundry basket.
The reply came as I was dressing, my mouth dry despite the water I’d drunk in the interim:
More money for me.
Usually, I would’ve grinned at the sharp reply. I liked grumpy old Mary. I wasn’t so sure about Shanti’s feelings when it came to the other woman—I was fairly certain Mary intimidated my father’s wife, but Shanti didn’t allow that to stop her from ensuring Mary and her crew did their jobs to the highest specifications.
“I used to be a maid as a young girl,” Shanti had whispered to me once, the confession a dirty little secret among the rich set. “In the house of a rich sahib who used to drive a shiny white car. I know how a house should be cleaned.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen when I started. My father said I’d had enough schooling.” No sorrow or anger in those words, just acceptance. “I wanted to work anyway.”
It was only then that I’d realized the lengths to which my father had gone in order to get a wife who was never going to challenge him. My mother’d had a full high-school education—and she’d hungered for more. In all the media coverage thus far, no one had mentioned how she’d managed to complete a finance degree in the years after moving to New Zealand.
I wondered if my father had indulged her at first because it reflected well on him to have a sophisticated and beautiful wife who could also charm his associates with her mind. By the time he realized he didn’t want an educated wife aware of her own agency, it was far too late. There was no putting the genie back in the bottle.
Now he had a wife who wore demure saris to corporate events and stood in shy silence. My mother had worn the occasional sari—but hers had been glittering creations draped to magnify the dip of her waist and the flare of her hips. She’d looked like an old-world movie siren.
Until someone had doused the fire, ended her.
Dressed in a fine black wool sweater and a pair of jeans with the denim split open along my moon boot, I put on a sock and a shoe, then went downstairs. The air was cold on my exposed toes despite the house’s heating system. My stomach growled as I walked into the kitchen.
Everything looked normal.
My pulse began to settle. Whatever I’d done last night, it hadn’t rung any alarm bells. I’d probably just sleepwalked outside. Had to be a side effect from the painkillers I’d taken before I crashed.
About to reach for the cereal, I saw a covered plate on the counter, with a note on top that bore my name. I opened it to find French toast. It had gone cold, but I chucked it in the microwave, then drowned it in syrup and ate, following it up with a large banana.
Carefully peeling off the sticker that stated the banana was a product of Ecuador, I placed it on the underside of the fruit bowl, where Pari would find it. She collected fruit stickers in a little book she kept on her bedside table. Since our father never went inside her room, her idiosyncratic collection was safe out in the open. The last thing to go into my stomach was most of a bottle of Coke.
My foot throbbed like it had a red-hot poker shoved inside it.
Gritting my teeth, I considered the pain meds I’d left upstairs, but couldn’t make myself move to get them. My sleepwalking self had clearly put far too much pressure on my foot.
I did have my phone, so I went online to search out the fact sheets about my meds. Sleepwalking or sleep disturbance wasn’t listed as one of the side effects, but then again, I’d also suffered a head injury.
Who could predict the interaction between the two?
As I closed the browser, I wondered how I’d gotten back into bed without leaving a trail. I hadn’t seen anything on the steps. But Shanti did a quick vacuum every morning and the carpet was a dark gray that probably wouldn’t have shown dirt unless I’d left a clump. I’d have to see if she said anything about it.
Wondering if I’d left any other evidence of my nocturnal stroll, I went out the back door. The day was gray, the sun anemic at best. Shanti’s vegetable garden lay undisturbed to the left. Beyond it, I caught glimpses of royal blue, the pool—and its winter cover—mostly hidden by the heavy foliage planted around the mandatory pool fence. Masses of native greenery intermingled with pops of subtropical color.
A few of the hibiscus flowers were still blooming. Purple-red, and orange.
Since I hadn’t woken up wet, I must’ve gone right. I turned that way … and soon became aware of a low buzz of noise from the main Cul-de-Sac drive. I was heading around the side of the house in that direction when I spotted a couple of footprints coming off the lawn and onto the concrete path.
My cheeks burned with ice all over again.
A hard scrub with my good foot and the dirty footprints disappeared into dust. As for the security camera footage, I knew how to access that, how to erase it.
There.
“… Ishaan Rai!”
I reached the front of our property just in time to hear my father’s name shouted out in a furious female tone. The person who responded to that voice did so with far more calm, because I heard nothing else until I emerged from within the ferns, nīkau palms, and kōwhai trees that shadowed our drive.
Lily was the first person I saw.
Wearing her black work clothing, she stood about ten feet away with her arms folded. I could also see Margaret smoking as she stood at the end of her own drive dressed in a purple miniskirt, her top a mishmash of colors and her wrists loaded with bracelets. Grandma Elei, meanwhile, was looking out from her second-floor bedroom, but the commotion was taking place in front of the Fitzpatrick property.
Both lawyers—dressed for work in crisp
suits—were still home for some reason, and both were gesticulating wildly at my father’s house. In front of them stood Constable Sefina Neri. She had her back to me, but I could see the line of her profile. A police cruiser sat at the curb, where another officer in uniform was leaning inside through the window and speaking into the police radio.
Lily walked over when she spotted me.
I raised an eyebrow. “What’s going on?”
“Brett and Veda are saying someone poisoned their dog and demanding a full investigation.”
23
My hand spasmed on the cane, clenching tight. “How do they know the dog didn’t just drop dead?” I managed to ask through the crushed stone in my throat.
“I heard one of them shouting about foam around the mouth.” Lily looked back at the couple, her lips twisted up at one side. “I guess you have to be connected to get the cops to respond. I had a burglary one time and nothing. They get two officers for a dog that probably ate a bad mushroom—you know those two aren’t the kind of dog parents who regularly check their grounds for stuff like that, or even tell their yard service to get rid of anything dangerous.”
Yeah. No.
The police presence had nothing to do with connections. Neri might be a junior member of the homicide team, but she was still part of it. No one would dispatch her to take a report about a dead canine unless they thought it was connected to my mother’s murder.
“Did you hear Veda screaming your dad must’ve done it?”
I thought of our conversation at the dinner table, my father’s sly smile. And I thought of my dirty soles and aching, throbbing foot. “She should know better. He’ll probably sue her for libel.”
“Games of the rich.” Lily glanced at her watch with those dismissive words as Leonid emerged down the street with his twins in their stroller. Also with him was a very large man in a black suit and aviator sunglasses.
Quiet in Her Bones Page 12
