Forgotten Spirits
Page 9
“Do what?”
“Clear your throat while I was talking on the phone.”
“You’re mad at me because I cleared my throat?”
“Yes, because I think you did it on purpose.”
Vinnie’s expression was blank.
“Never mind.”
“Oh,” he said as it dawned on him. “Was that your boyfriend?”
She hated the way he kept saying that word. Glaring at Vinnie, she said, “Yes, and I don’t want him getting the impression there’s anything going on between us because there isn’t.”
He threw his hands up. “Fine.”
“You were about to tell me why you came here.”
He began trying to explain his half-baked decision to cancel his appointments and drive to Minnesota. “I was worried about you, you know? When Big Al got himself killed, we all wondered if it had to do with the money. You can’t have forgotten all those phone calls. You were as certain as I was that he’d been knocked off by the mob, maybe a bookie.”
This conjecture was old business. In the beginning all six of them had speculated ad nauseum about whose money they’d found in the cooler bag, and whether the rightful owner would know they’d taken it and split it six ways. Then Vinnie got beaten up and wound up in the hospital. After that, they’d scattered to the four winds, where they tried to build new lives.
But then Big Al got run down on the streets of Las Vegas. Foxy preferred to believe Al’s death had been a simple hit-and-run. Now, it all came back to her, and she felt a familiar flutter of fear in her throat.
As Vinnie described his recent actions, Foxy kept recalculating. Had Vinnie been stalking her or was he just being Vinnie, acting out of misguided passion, making knee-jerk decisions without considering other, saner options? Without doubt, he’d committed a criminal act breaking into the house. What else had he done?
But if Vinnie was not the one making the calls and hanging up on her, as he claimed, then who had? And who’d been standing below her house on the sidewalk, staring up at her house, if not Vinnie?
Picking up his dishes she turned her back to him while she washed them. With the water running, no one spoke, giving her time to think. Someone other than Vinnie had been stalking her, she was sure of it. Even though he was bundled up, the man standing below her window had not had Vinnie’s proportions. Whether the phantom caller was trying to figure out if she was at home or was simply calling to instill fear in her, she didn’t know, but either way, that person intended harm, and Vinnie was not throwing off those vibes at all.
She shuddered, thinking about last night. Maybe Elvis was picking up on Vinnie’s presence across the hall, or maybe it was another presence altogether. She felt her panic rise. She wanted to tell Vinnie, but not until he explained how and why he’d wound up in the vacant apartment.
Vinnie grabbed a towel and dried the plate she’d just washed, and Foxy felt nostalgia sweep over her. Trying to stay in the here and now, she said, “Vin, I’m just trying to understand. You came on Friday around supper time, and I wasn’t home, right?”
He bobbed his head as he thought. “Right.”
“So you waited on the porch and smoked a cigarette. I saw the Lucky Strike butt in the ashtray.”
He looked chagrined. “I’m not too good covering my tracks, huh?”
“Not so much.” They wandered to the living room. Sitting side by side on the loveseat, Foxy twisted her unruly hair into a bun and secured it with the black lacquer chopstick she’d left on the end table.
She kept asking questions, moving his account past Friday and into Saturday—yesterday. He told her how he’d returned while she was at Robin’s only to discover the city plow had dumped a load of snow on his illegally parked car.
“You’re lucky they didn’t tow you.” It made sense that someone from out of state would fall victim to St. Paul’s snow emergency rules. They were aggressive about keeping roads clear for the plows, even if it meant burying some cars and towing others.
“There was no way I could dig it out without a shovel. I thought you might have one. When I didn’t see one by the front door I tried the back.
Vinnie’s stories always seemed plausible, at least on first impression. When he got to the part about using a knife to open the window, Foxy got a chill to think how easily he’d gotten in. She’d been living with false security all along.
An old fear settled in. There was no safe place, no one to protect her. There never had been. She pulled away from him, folded her hands in her lap and watched his face intently. “You didn’t take the shovel, though, did you?”
“I was cold. I just needed to warm up.”
She encouraged him to continue.
“That back entry isn’t the most comfortable place. But I did find a bottle of whiskey.”
She stared at him and the pieces fell into place. “You broke in to get a shovel to dig out your car, but you stole a bottle of booze instead?”
“You don’t need to jump down my throat. I’ll replace the damn thing.” He gave the old look he used to give her, like she was his warden or something, but then his features softened into a look of contrition. “Yeah, I saw the whiskey, and decided to find a warmer place to drink it. I guess I drank just enough not to give a rat’s ass about shoveling my car out.”
She sighed heavily. “Yeah, I get that you drank yourself into a coma, but—”
“Ah, c’mon, Foxy, that’s not the way it was. I wasn’t tanked at all, but as soon as I started to get warm and comfortable, I got sleepy.”
She shook her head, amazed after all these years at the way his mind worked. “And then?”
“And then I guess I fell asleep. It was dark when I woke up. My cell phone needs a charge, so I couldn’t tell what time it was when I heard you come back.”
She felt her face pinch up into what Vinnie used to call her “school marm” expression. “And yet, for some reason, you didn’t come down the hall to tell me you were here.”
His laugh was mirthless. “Yeah, right! Can you imagine what would’ve happened if I’d jumped out of the apartment when you came up the stairs? For God’s sake, think about it! I would’ve scared you out of your skin!”
“As opposed to what happened when you decided to lurk outside my door and set off the motion detector?”
Elvis jumped onto his lap and put a paw on his chest. “Is he telling me to shut up?” Vinnie asked.
As annoyed as she was, Foxy chuckled.
“You gotta believe me. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
It was all so typical of Vinnie, she had to believe it.
“I had it all figured out. As soon as it was light, I was gonna slip down the stairs to the front door and ring the bell, like any self-respecting visitor. When that alarm went off, I almost had a coronary!”
They faced off, she not wanting to let him off the hook, and he not willing to concede he’d mishandled everything. It was all too familiar. It made her stomach hurt to think of how much energy they’d spent over the years in just this kind of standoff.
“Vinnie, why did you really come here?”
In the years they’d been together, she’d gotten pretty good at spotting his lies. There was always some tell, like a quick flick of his tongue across his lip, or a downward cast of his eyes. Most often, he’d used anger to divert her from a subject he didn’t want to discuss.
What he did now was to look her in the face, a little too deliberately, she thought, and say, “Honey, I already told you. I wanted to tell you about Sierra in person.”
“I already knew about Sierra.”
The look on his face confirmed she was right to grill him. He sat back, stretching his long legs in front of him. “You know how you said that money was going to come back and haunt us?”
She nodded.
>
“Well, I think you were onto something.”
* * *
Robin had decided to forego mailing Christmas cards this year, but was having an attack of remorse for sending out a mass e-mail. She decided to address a few cards left over from last year to those on her list who didn’t have e-mail. When the phone rang, she sidestepped the laundry basket full of wrapped presents and caught it on the fourth ring. She saw the caller was her older daughter, Cass, who was finally checking in, as Robin had asked, to let her mom know she and her boyfriend had safely arrived at his parents’ house.
“Mom?” Cass’s voice sounded like it came from the child she hadn’t been in more than a decade. “Are you in the middle of something?”
With someone else, this might have been a polite opener, but with Cass, it meant something was wrong. Robin was immediately on guard. “What is it?”
“I’m okay.” Her voice was shaky. “Well, not okay, exactly. We got to Nick’s house, I mean his parents’ house, yesterday afternoon, but we had a really awful drive.”
“You didn’t have an accident, did you?”
“No, we didn’t have an accident, Mom,” she chided. “The roads weren’t great, but that wasn’t the problem. Nick and I fought the whole way there. As a matter of fact, I think we just broke up.”
“Oh, honey, everybody has fights.”
“Mom!” Cass’s tone was sharp. “We broke up, okay?”
Her heart sank. Over their lifetime, she’d done all she could to keep her daughters from harm, but there was no way to protect them from broken hearts. Robin asked what had happened.
Her daughter didn’t answer.
“Honey?”
“I’m here. I can’t even talk about it.”
She waited a beat, and Cass said, “Nothing happened.”
Robin knew her response had to be neutral. “I see.”
“Well, obviously something happened,” Cass said, as if she hadn’t just declared she couldn’t talk about it. “I was nervous enough meeting his parents without him pecking away at me. Everything he said just made it worse.”
Robin could hear sniffling and nose blowing. “Maybe he was nervous, too.”
“Mom! Please do not take his side! It’s like he was going through a checklist. Intelligent, check. Professional parents, check. Blonde hair, check. Orthodontics-enhanced teeth, check. And then he started to coach me on how to behave and what to wear, like I was going to embarrass him in front of his perfect parents. He just went on and on, and so I finally asked if he was ashamed of me.”
Robin had always had a penchant for stepping in and trying to fix everything with her daughters. Over and over she’d discovered it was counterproductive, so this time she said nothing. Instead she pictured confronting arrogant, pretty-boy Nick and telling him he’d never find anyone that could hold a candle to Cass Bentley.
“I actually thought we’d wind up getting married and having kids! He may have a doctorate, but he has got to be the biggest, most self-centered dumbass on the face of the earth! And I’m an even dumber ass for thinking he was anything other than a colossal, arrogant prick.”
“I’m so sorry.” Robin took a deep breath, and reminded herself this was the hyperbolic language of breaking up. In time, Cass’s rage would subside and everything would seem less tragic. “Just hop on a plane and come home, honey. We’ll cover the cost. You know we would love it if you’d spend Christmas here.”
The wrenching sob at the other end reached into Robin’s chest and squeezed her heart.
“It’s not gonna happen, Mom. I already called the airlines. Planes are stacked up from here to Chicago, and people are crazed trying to get wherever they’re going for the holidays. There aren’t even any rental cars to be had.”
“How about a bus or a train.”
“Nothing’s going anywhere or it’s all booked. You think I didn’t check already?”
“Oh, sweetie!”
She sniffed. “He made it perfectly clear he’s just not as invested in the relationship as I am, and he—” Her voice got a hitch in it. “And here I am, stuck here with his stupid, pretentious family. It’s beyond awkward. It’s agony.” She started to sob.
“We need to get you back here, honey. Let me brainstorm on it. I’ll call you back after I’ve talked to Dad. We’ll figure out something, okay?” An idea was already bubbling around in her head.
Cass’s voice got small again. “Okay.”
As soon as they hung up, Robin planned what she would say to Brad.
* * *
“Absolutely not!” Brad slapped his magazine down on the arm of his recliner. “I know you think you’re invincible, but you are not driving out west by yourself. It’s a thousand miles, at least.” He took a gulp of his drink.
“Actually, it’s just over nine-hundred, but—”
“You’re missing my point. The whole idea is nuts.” He leaned forward, tented his hands under his chin and looked her in the eye. “You know I’m right.”
Sinking onto the hassock next to him, Robin sighed. “I just wanted us all to be together for Christmas.”
He picked up the remote and clicked from basketball to the weather channel. “Do you see that?”
“I see the Denver area should be clear by tomorrow afternoon. I’ve got it all mapped out. If I take I-90 and drop down on 83, I’ll miss the storm altogether. Look.” She pointed at the television screen. “If I run into snow at all, it would be around Sioux Falls, and if I had to I could hang out there until it passes.” They watched the time lapse projection of the storm. It appeared to be heading south of the Twin Cities. “Look, just light snow. Good grief, Brad, I drive through heavier snow than that all the time.”
He was silent for so long, she knew she’d lost the argument. When she pictured poor Cass, forced to spend Christmas with an angry ex-boyfriend and his judgmental family, her heart was heavy. She dreaded having to call her back and tell her nobody would be coming to her rescue. She stood to make the call.
“I’ll go,” Brad said.
“What?”
“I said I’ll go. I’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
“Really? Good, we’ll go together.”
“No. You stay here.”
“Brad, it’s not necessary. You can hold down the fort. I know how much you’ve been looking forward to two weeks off. When did you ever take a two-week vacation? You’ve been talking about sitting around in your pajamas and doing nothing.”
He shook his head. “I’m going.” When he made up his mind about something, it was almost impossible to dissuade him.
“The least I can do is go with you. You can sleep in the car.”
“And the least I can do,” he said, standing to face her, “is to be there for my daughter. For once.”
Robin stared at him.
“You’ve always been there for the girls. You’re their rock. I don’t have to tell you the burden has been uneven.”
“It wasn’t a burden,” she assured him, but she couldn’t argue with the fact she’d been there for their daughters. In the early years when Brad was obsessed with building up his practice, none of them expected him to be a very involved father, and the pattern had become ingrained.
“I can count on both hands how many concerts and plays and soccer games I attended. How many did you go to, not to mention parents’ weekends and other college events you went to all by yourself? You’ve done everything for them. Let me be the hero this time.”
She hadn’t considered until now how her devotion to her girls might have pushed him away. “Thank you!” she gushed.
“Look, you’ve busted your butt with all the Christmas preparations. Now you can just kick back. Read a couple books, rent some movies, hang out with your friends.”
Chapter 11
Carrying a shovel over her shoulder, Foxy shook her head. “A thin leather jacket, flimsy gloves, and alligator shoes! For crying out loud, Vin, what were you thinking, coming to Minnesota in December dressed like that?”
He didn’t answer immediately, and when he did, he gave an embarrassed shrug. “I was just thinking about you.”
She didn’t want to meet his eyes. Her own stung, and not just from the cold. Not only had she handled things with Bill Harley clumsily, pushing him to the back burner the minute Vinnie had shown up, but now she’d offended Vinnie as well. She felt like a clod.
He didn’t seem to hold it against her, though. They chattered away, their breath forming clouds that rose from their mouths and hung in the chill air.
“Sun dogs!” Foxy said suddenly, raising her mittened hand to point at the glowing parentheses around the sun. “That means it’s cold.”
“I don’t need no stinkin’ sun dogs to tell me it’s cold!” he said, taking the shovel from her and throwing an arm over her shoulder.
She laughed.
He pointed to the sky. “They look like pieces of a rainbow.”
“Kind of the same thing. The sunlight bends when it passes through ice crystals in the atmosphere. That’s what my father taught me. He used to call them sun ghosts.”
“Can we knock off all this talk of ghosts for a while?” He pulled her close and said, “This cold doesn’t bother you, does it?”
“You really aren’t made for Minnesota, are you?” she teased.
He bit his lip and let his arm drop.
Once more she seemed to have found a tender spot and pushed on it. The thing was, they had enough history between them that almost anything had the power to wound deeply or spark an argument. She leaned against his arm to let him know she’d intended no harm. Feeling an old longing, she reminded herself how easy it would be to light other sparks.