Sophie’s Last Stand

by Nancy Bartholomew

  “Put a sock in it, Darlene,” I said, and pushed past her back into the house.

  Ma was talking to Pa in Italian, so fast and low that I had trouble following anything she said, but she made it easy on me by switching to English as I entered the room.

  “You are coming home with us,” she said. Her arms were folded across her chubby middle and her expression said that the matter was not open for discussion.

  “Ma, I am fine. I’m not leaving. The insurance company is sending out someone today and I need to be here. Joe’ll take me to get a rental car later and I’ll be good to go.”

  “You are living in the presence of death,” Ma said.

  “No, they carted the body off yesterday. Death has departed.” I gave the look right back to her, strong, like I wasn’t moving an inch.

  “I’ll check in on her,” Pa said, but only because he hadn’t heard about Nick yet. They’d be on me once that piece of news leaked out.

  “Joe’s gonna check on me, too, Ma.” I wasn’t going to lie and tell them the car thing was due to spontaneous combustion, but I wasn’t going to tell the entire story, either. This might be called a sin of omission, but better that than moving in with my parents.

  Joe walked in, saying, “That’s true, I’ll be right here. Besides, I’m only five minutes away if I do go home. Don’t worry.” He put his hand on Ma’s shoulder. “Ain’t nothin’ gonna happen to Sophie. Capishe?”

  He was looking over the top of Ma’s head at me, then toward the front door, nodding his head imperceptibly in that direction.

  “Ma, you guys should go back home and Darlene should go on to work. Sophie’s a big girl. She’s fine. I’m looking out for her. Ma, why don’t you make the braciola, eh? I’m coming for dinner. I’ll bring Angela and the kids. Sophie, you’re coming, too, right?”

  I took the hint. “Yeah, yeah. Ma, there’s no decent food here. Look, all I have is a microwave. The stove isn’t even hooked up yet. What kind of life is that?”

  Ma sniffed. “That is why a good daughter stays in her parents’ home.”

  “Ma, I did that already. Then I got married. I moved out on my own ten years ago. It’s too late for moving home again.”

  The hand, quicker than the eye, whacked me hard. “Stunade! It is never too late to respect your mother,” she said.

  “Dinner, Ma. I’ll be there for dinner.”

  “Good morning!”

  We all turned. Gray Evans stood in the doorway. He was giving Ma the smile, the one that had melted my heart just yesterday, the smile I was trying to avoid thinking about.

  “Hey, y’all,” he said, his voice like molten chocolate. “I knocked, but I figured you didn’t hear me and wouldn’t mind….”

  “What? Get the man a cup of coffee and some cake! Where are your manners?” Ma cried. She was struggling to stand and do it herself, but Joe’s hand was still clamped firmly on her shoulder. Gray moved into the room and over to the table to meet my mother and father.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Gray Evans.” He didn’t add that he was the investigator working on the murder case.

  “The detective,” Darlene said with a sigh. “You know,” she added, looking at Ma, “the detective.”

  Gray didn’t seem to hear her. He was shaking Pa’s hand and pulling up a chair, flirting with my mother and making it seem totally genuine, like he didn’t have a care in the world and this was a social call.

  I watched him, taking in every detail about his appearance. This was the first time I’d noticed the gold shield clipped to his waist, or seen the holster and the thick, black gun protruding from his side. He wore another white shirt, but the pants were a charcoal-gray and the tie today was navy. When I handed him his coffee, his fingers touched mine. A current of electricity seemed to jump from his hand and I willed myself not to feel it. He radiated heat and musk, and it was all I could do not to reach out and lay my palm on his shoulder.

  “So,” Ma was saying, “you know who burned my daughter’s car?”

  Gray shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “Vandals, eh?” Pa was asking.

  Gray looked him in the eye, a look Ma couldn’t see because Gray was turned to face Pa, but I saw it. It was the look between men when they wish to keep their secrets for later.

  “Maybe,” Gray stated, and that was enough for Pa.

  “You think she should move home?” Pa asked.

  “Hey, what did I say?” I interrupted before Gray could answer and possibly ruin my life by accident. “I’m fine. I’m staying here. There’s no danger.”

  But Pa was watching Gray. The detective’s eyes never wavered. “I’ll make sure she’s safe,” he said. “If I think she isn’t, I’ll bring her to you.”

  Marone a mia, you’d think I didn’t exist. You’d think this was the old country. Here they were, two men, discussing my whereabouts and living arrangements like I wasn’t even in the room, like I didn’t count.

  Gray took it a step further and saved himself from certain death at my hands. “Sophie’s a smart woman,” he said. “She took care of herself up North and didn’t seem to fare too poorly. I’m thinking a little town like New Bern won’t be too much of a challenge. She’ll be all right. And, like I said, I’ll be around.”

  He looked at me then, as if it was a statement of fact, as if I hadn’t ever said, “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

  Gray stood, smiled and said, “I do need to ask Sophie a few more questions, just nitpicky details and the like for our records.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go sit out on the front porch.”

  “No need for that, honey,” Pa said, standing up and assuming control of the family. “Your mother and me have to go.” He gave Darlene The Look. “You’d better get to work.”

  Ma, utterly charmed by Gray, didn’t whisper a murmur of protest. “Mr. Detective,” she said, “you eat real Italian ever?”

  Gray gave her everything he had—the smile, the eyes, the works. “Home-cooked Italian? No, ma’am, I can’t say as I ever have.”

  Ma looked scandalized, turned to me and said, “Tonight you bring your detective home for supper, eh?” She didn’t wait for an answer. In Ma’s world, she commanded and we obeyed.

  “Well, Ma, maybe he’s got plans.”

  “No, I don’t have any plans,” Gray answered. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to impose….”

  “Good. It’s settled then,” Ma said, smug in her superiority over my paltry attempt to head off what had to be certain disaster.

  Tonight I would be taking Gray Evans to my parents’ house for dinner, alone with him in a car, forced to sit next to him, to feel the energy between us, doomed, as Darlene would say, by destiny and my mother.

  I shook off the thought of sitting inches away from Gray Evans. “Like a fish needs a bicycle,” I muttered under my breath. Hearing him chuckle, I realized I’d spoken too loudly.

  Pa got everybody moving. Joe personally escorted Darlene to her car, while Gray hung back, carrying mugs and plates to the sink.

  “Don’t,” I said. “I’ll get them later.”

  Gray kept on working. “I don’t mind.”

  But I do, I thought. I mind.

  Order was restored in the kitchen in only a few minutes. Gray poured himself another cup of coffee, easy and relaxed in my home, and then sat down across from me.

  “Joe gave me the note. There probably won’t be any prints on it. It’s been handled, anyway, so that’s not going to give us too much.”

  “I guess I touched it before I realized what it was,” I said.

  “Who looks in their mailbox expecting threats?” he answered. But he peered at me like this was more of a question, as if he were wondering if there’d been others before this one.

  “Nick blames going to prison on me. I know,” I said. I spread my hands, as if warding off Gray’s protest. “It was his own fault, he broke the law, but because I testified, he blames me.”

>   “That’s crazy,” Gray said.

  “No, that’s just Nick. He has his own little reality where he never accepts the blame for his actions. In Nick’s world, he was right and I was wrong.” I looked at Gray and thought, what the hell, give him the whole picture. What did I have left to lose? Any chance of a relationship was long gone in my mind. Besides, I reminded myself, this man was taken, even if he didn’t act like it.

  “Nick had a secret life. I thought he was an accountant. He left for work every morning and didn’t come home again until dinnertime. He ate supper and he went back to the office—at least, that’s what he always told me, and I had no reason to doubt him. He had no other life, no friends, no hobbies, no other interests really, other than work. The only socializing we did was with my friends or my family. So it was a total shock to me when the federal agents came to our home with a search warrant.”

  I glanced down into my coffee cup and tried to pretend I was someone else, the woman telling the story and not the story itself.

  “I’m sure the local FBI office already told you this yesterday.”

  Gray nodded, his expression so kind I had to look away. “I’ve heard what they have to say—now I want to hear how you saw it.”

  “The agents in Philly showed me what he was doing. They showed me the Web site and the pictures. They showed me the things they found in our home, the cameras, the microphones hidden in the walls.” I could hear my voice starting to crack, to shake with the same uncontrollable tremors that happened every time I tried to talk about it.

  Gray’s warm hand covered mine, but I pulled back. I didn’t want to look up and see pity on his face or hear the words that everyone always said but couldn’t ever really mean.

  “I’m all right,” I said, and made myself go on. “There were pictures of me on the site—video clips, too. I was asleep, naked, and he snuck in and took pictures of me. He had hidden cameras in our bedroom, in our bathroom—” I broke off, choking on the words because I knew Gray could see in his mind’s eye what those pictures had shown, my most intimate, private moments, my life detailed for the world to watch, my ignorance earning Nick money and ultimately destroying my false sense of security.

  “That bastard,” Gray swore.

  “Whatever,” I said, shrugging. “It doesn’t change the fact that he blames me. I lose my world and he blames me.” I gestured to the note. “And now this.” I tried to laugh, but it rang hollow. “Guess it just goes to show, ‘No matter where you go, there you are.’”

  Gray reached out, touching the tip of my chin with his fingers, forcing me to look up at him.

  “Sophie, I’m not going to let him hurt you anymore,” he said. “You are strong and kind and good. You’re a survivor, not a victim. This is your new life, whatever you choose to make of it. No one has a right to take that away from you. I won’t stand by and let a scumbag like Nick Komassi destroy that.”

  I looked at him and felt my eyes welling up with tears. Deep inside I felt a flicker of hope ignite and catch, but the rest of me was thinking, It’s too late already.

  “Nick’s already ruined my life,” I said. “He started using drugs. He embezzled money from his clients at his accounting firm. It wasn’t enough that people kept coming up to me on the street and yelling at me, thinking I was in on it with him. It wasn’t enough that his partners in the firm think Nick stashed money away somewhere and that I know where it is. No, he’s somehow followed me down here and will make my life a living hell before it’s all over.”

  Gray had said this was my new life, whatever I chose to make of it, but he never put himself in the picture with me, and I couldn’t see how he would, even if we knew each other better. He would always know my life was other people’s pornography. What if we became a couple and one day ran into a friend of his who suddenly realized I looked just like the woman in the dirty movie he had stashed away at home?

  “Now,” Gray said, getting to his feet, “I’m going to take this note to the lab, file the report and start looking for Nick. In the meantime, lock the doors. If you go outside, make sure it’s where you can be seen. I’ll have the patrols increased around here, but keep your cell phone in your pocket, program my numbers into it and call me if you even feel funny. Don’t wait for trouble, don’t wait to be certain, call me if the breeze in your backyard so much as shifts direction. Okay?”

  I nodded and sighed. It all felt so hopeless.

  “Sophie, this is going to go away. I’m going to take care of it,” he said.

  “What makes you think you’ll have any success when the feds and the Philadelphia police haven’t been able to keep Nick contained?”

  Gray smiled. “Ah, but I have a motivation they didn’t have.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “I’m a gonna eat a real Italian food, made by a little Italian mama. I can’t let her little girl be troubled by goombahs, eh?”

  The Italian accent was terrible but it made me smile, and that’s what he seemed to want. “That’s better. You light up the room when you smile, Sophie Mazaratti.”

  “Yeah, and I light up the driveway when my ex blows up my car, and where does that get me?” I smiled, trying to deliver the wisecrack like I didn’t care, but hearing it fall flat as I spoke.

  “Hey,” he said, the Italian accent even worse, “count your blessings. That fire burned off half of the bushes along the driveway. That’s bushes you don’t have to pull now, right?”

  “Go!” I said, and felt my heart lift like a hot air balloon.

  Chapter 5

  I will be the first to admit that I know basically nothing about renovating a house. It didn’t look that hard, not when the real estate agent showed me the “before” pictures, and then contrasted those with the house as it appeared today. It looked like a walk in the park, like all I had to do was pick out paint and wallpaper. Well, almost…

  This honeymoon lasted exactly one week, and then I sought professional help. I opened the phone book and let my blistered fingers do the walking. I knew enough to get several bids for each project. I knew to ask for references and proof of insurance. My downfall was that while I knew to ask for these things, I sometimes hired people just because I thought they were interesting. Not necessarily “nice” interesting, sometimes it was just that I felt sorry for them. However, “nice” did enter into it now and again.

  I hired my carpenter because he looked like Santa Claus. He twinkled and laughed. He even drove a red truck. But I hired him without so much as asking if he could drive a nail. I was lucky with him.

  I was not so lucky with my house painter. I hired him because he looked like James Dean, only shrunken, wizened with age and cigarettes. He could paint, all right, but not without complaining and whining every step of the way. Every morning I found myself meeting him at the door with a hot cup of coffee and a smile, just so I could entice him into working a full day. It never helped. He started after 10:00 a.m. and knocked off at 2:00 p.m., every single day.

  I found my newest employee while I was standing in the driveway inspecting the burned-out frame of my former car. A tall blonde with stringy hair and a tight sleeveless T-shirt was making her way slowly down the street, stopping at every house to stuff a flyer into each mailbox. I tried not to watch her, but it was impossible. She couldn’t walk in a straight line, and not because she was impaired, but because of her side-kick, a gray-black-and-white furball of a dog.

  The little dog pranced, leaping from the sidewalk into the street, darting past the blonde, crossing back across the bricks and into someone’s yard. The leash would become tangled around the blonde’s legs, drawing the entire procession to a halt as the girl slowly disengaged herself and tried to continue.

  “Durrell,” I heard her say, her voice impatient, “walk right, will ya? This ain’t no parade.”

  On they came, closer and closer, until finally they were even with the burned out car.

  “Dang,” the blonde said. “I thought I had it rough, but t
his sure beats my luck all to hell.”

  “Guess that’s why there’s insurance,” I said.

  The girl’s gaze shifted from the car to me and then up to the house and yard. “Here,” she said, “you might need this.”

  I took the flyer she offered and began reading. “Durrell’s Handy Work,” it read, hand done in barely legible block printing. “No job too big. Housework, repairs, yard work. Try us, you’ll like us.”

  I looked from the flyer to where she stood waiting. “Who’s ‘us’?” I asked.

  The girl smiled. “Me and Durrell, here. Honest. We’ve got lots and lots of experience. I can even get you references. Durrell’s my helper. He goes wherever I go. He’s no trouble and he’s right good at fetching stuff for me.”

  She looked down at the little dog. He turned his head and stared up at me. He had huge brown eyes, but that wasn’t what I noticed most about him. The odd thing about Durrell was he appeared to be grinning. His pink tongue lolled out of the side of his mouth, and his lips stretched back from his teeth into what can only be described as a huge doggy smile.

  “Durrell, fetch!” The girl balled up one of the fliers and threw it across the driveway.

  The dog watched the paper arc in the air and land with a soft bounce on the other side of the car. He looked back at his mistress, yawned and lay down at my feet, his furry head resting on my sneaker.

  “Durrell!” She looked up at me. “I don’t know what’s eatin’ him,” she said, clearly disgusted.

  “Performance anxiety, maybe,” I said. “It happens.” Durrell looked anything but anxious. Bored maybe, but not anxious.

  She threw her hands up in exasperation and turned instead to inspect my property again. “Looks like you got somebody doin’ the paintin’,” she said, nodding to the ladder that stood against the side of the house. Her tone was wistful, as if work had been hard to come by and my house was yet another missed opportunity.

  Durrell sighed, as if echoing her sentiments, and that was all it took.