Reckoning and Ruin

by Tina Whittle

  So that was how he’d survived our separation discombobulation-free. And there I was thinking he’d gotten some new Zen technique, or some new tea, or some mega herbal relaxant thingies.

  He sat very close but not touching, his spine straight, shoulders square. His eyes were on my face, however, a hesitant searching look from under his lashes. “They told me you couldn’t identify the shooter.”

  “That’s what I told them.”

  “Yes, but…is that true?”

  I couldn’t speak for a few seconds, like my heart was stuck in my throat. “Please don’t ask me that.”

  “Tai—”

  “Please.”

  Trey tilted his head so that he could track my eyes, my mouth, the whole truth or the lack thereof. Then he nodded once, final and decisive, turning his face toward the crime scene.

  Jasper’s body still sprawled on the pier. No sheet for him until the forensics team finished up. I tried to feel something, and couldn’t. Shock will numb, I knew that, but it wasn’t only shock I felt. There was a profound sense of relief, of pieces moving back into place. Of order, maybe even justice, slowly taking form. And something else, something undeniable.

  “I wanted to kill him,” I said.

  Trey kept his eyes on the crime scene. “I know.”

  “I wanted to really bad. But then suddenly he was gone, and I’d lost my chance, and I got so mad when I realized I’d just sat there and listened to him die instead of slicing his throat with that piece of glass and—”

  “Tai. Listen to me.” Trey turned back to me, his voice soft. “If you’d had to kill him, it would have been the right thing to do. It might even have been easy, at the time. But it’s better that you didn’t. For many reasons.”

  I knew he was right. He understood the psychological repercussions better than most. But I knew that in a crowded world of seven billion, someone’s existence could be justified in two ways—either of personal value, or value to humanity. And no matter which way the needle trembled on that dial, Jasper didn’t deserve to live. And I regretted that I wasn’t the one who’d put him down.

  I leaned my head on Trey’s shoulder. “I know. Still.”

  Trey reached for my hand just as his phone rang. Marisa most likely, ready to breathe fire. Or Garrity, ready to take my head off. Or Gabriella, ready to smudge away the negativity. Or Eric, insisting that he rush right down and psychoanalyze Trey and me back to full mental health.

  Trey put his phone to his ear. “Yes?”

  He looked puzzled. I mouthed who is it? at him. Boone, he mouthed back, standing up.

  “She’s fine,” he continued. “Yes, right here, do you… No, I can’t. Because it’s an open crime scene with three victims.”

  Victims. That was cop speak, but it wasn’t the right word. Did Ivy count as a victim, she who’d shot John in cold blood? Or Shane, who’d helped her dump his body into the river? Jasper certainly didn’t make the cut. And now here was Boone on the phone, Boone who wouldn’t need evidence to figure out who’d done it, but who’d keep that secret as surely as I was.

  Trey kept talking. “I understand, but…” And then he went pale. “I’m sorry, what did you say?” He listened, blinking in confusion. “I can’t…I don’t…Don’t you think you should…”

  I heard coughing at the other end of the line. Trey stood up and started pacing, his fingers drumming a nervous rhythm on his thigh. My stomach dropped. Whatever this was, it was serious, and I wasn’t sure I had it in me for another shoe to drop.

  “Trey?”

  He waved me quiet, his eyes tight, forehead wrinkled. “Yes. I see your point. I’ll do my best. Goodbye.” He stopped pacing and lowered the phone, staring at it like it was going to rear up and bite him.

  I tried to keep my voice calm. “Trey Seaver, you tell me what’s going on, and you do it right now.”

  He looked up. “The authorities have blocked access to the house until they close the crime scene. They’ve already taken Boone’s papers and admitted them into evidence, including his most recent will. Which means the information there is no longer confidential. It’s a part of the investigation now.”

  “And?”

  “And you will be questioned about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re in it. Boone divided his estate down the middle, half to you and half to Jefferson.”

  I couldn’t breathe for a second. “He did?”

  “Yes.”

  I was still confused. “Okay, that’s completely out of the blue, but why should the cops care? Jasper wasn’t getting one red cent, so nobody can claim I did him in so I could get his share of the money. And Boone’s not on death’s door or anything, so…” I grabbed Trey’s arm. “He’s not, is he? You said he was okay, so—”

  “Tai—”

  “Tell me!”

  Trey sat beside me, his expression tender and bewildered. “Boone’s okay. What I’m trying to tell you is…he says you’re in the will because he’s your father.”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  One week later, we laid John to rest in the Atlantic Ocean, past the seventh wave as the Celts were fond of saying. Captain Lou took us out on a Sunday morning, with fair skies and a following wind. Train said words, plain simple ones that promised grace for the present and peace ever after. Hope stayed silent for the entire journey, her eyes dry and distant. When she shook out the box, the grit and ash flailed in the wind, graying and coarsening it, then swirled onto the water, becoming a part of the sea and sky. And of us, I supposed.

  Hope left the boat before Trey and I did, but she waited for me to disembark. I sent Trey on ahead to the car, then joined her underneath the shade of a palm tree. She sucked in a long drag on her cigarette, blew it out slowly.

  “Did they suffer? The two who killed him?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “And Jasper?”

  “Yes. But not enough.”

  She took another lungful of smoke, dropped the cigarette to the sand. She ground it out with the heel of her sandal and left me standing under the palm tree. The personal protection detail that had brought her took her away again, and I knew that I’d seen her for the last time.

  Trey waited for me at the Ferrari. He’d insisted on wearing a suit, but once again refused to strap on his gun, despite the fact that his suspension was over and he’d be returning to Phoenix the next morning. He was talking on his phone when I arrived, and from the way he looked at me, I knew who was on the other end of the line.

  I got into the car without saying a word, shoved my sunglasses on my face. Trey got in, fastened his seatbelt.

  “I’m still not ready to talk to him,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Then why are you giving me that look?”

  He took the Ferrari gingerly down the dirt driveway. “There was no look. You have explained you don’t want to talk to him. I am fully supportive of that decision, as is Boone.”

  “Then why does he keep calling you?”

  “To check on you.”

  I made some noise. I’d tried to come to terms with this new complication, this life-wrecking, world-cracking revelation. It made no sense, and it made perfect sense. It connected the fragments, the unexplained pieces that didn’t fit anywhere. I’d tried to find my father in me, and had always failed. I had a sharp chin like he had, but it wasn’t the dimpled Randolph chin, and my eyes were gray-boned hazel instead of clear green. Eric used to joke that I’d somehow managed to screw up gene transmission. I winced at the thought of telling him the news, which I’d have to do as soon as the DNA confirmed what I already knew in my heart. Assuming the story didn’t leak before then. THE KKK KILLER DIDN’T KNOW HIS CAPTIVE WAS HIS SISTER. Film at eleven.

  My mother had been the epitome of the house-proud, tight-mannered Southern society matron. I’d never
seen her with a single hair out of place until she started dying, and the idea that this woman had had an affair with a bootlegging redneck like Boone boggled my mind. I remembered Gabriella’s crumbling tower, and her admission that she’d misread that card, that she’d seen it through Trey-colored glasses when it had been for me all along. Score one for the French chick.

  I watched the marsh roll by, fully ripe with spring now. “I’m going to sign my half of the estate over to Jefferson. When it’s time.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t want any part of it.”

  Trey didn’t reply. He knew this wasn’t true, that the marshland pulled at me, filled me with bittersweet longing, a peculiar nostalgia not for what had been, but for what could never be. It was more home to me than anyplace else in Savannah, but it was poisoned ground. It would shelter Boone through his final days, though, Jefferson and Cheyanne and the girls too. And then I could sever myself from it once and for all. I hoped so anyway.

  “It’s like who I was is gone, but I’m not even sure if I was that person anyway, and now I’m this other person, but I’m not sure if I’m that person either, and I realize none of this is making any sense to you, but—”

  “Of course it does.”

  “What?”

  “It makes sense. All of it.”

  Sometimes I got so caught up that I forgot this was his life too, only his before and after was much more violently rendered, a savage discrete line. Mine was fluid, a tide that washed in and carried out. Flotsam and jetsam, trash and treasure.

  I turned to face him. “So how do you do it? Be yourself when you’re not sure who that is?”

  He slipped me an enigmatic look. “I’ll answer that when we get back to Atlanta.”

  “Why then?”

  “Because you told me I needed to figure out a way to tell you this part of the story. And I have.”

  He was being perplexing and evasive, but I didn’t feel like cross-examining him. I was tired, and we still had four hours of travel ahead of us, through fields and small towns, past rebel flags and farm stands. And then would come the first glimpse of Atlanta, like a steel oasis, rising and falling behind green trees exuberant with spring. As if the winter would never come.

  I rested my head against the window, closed my eyes, and let the rhythm of the road lull me to sleep.

  ***

  I woke when Trey pulled off the interstate. My neck ached from being slumped over, but when I blinked into the light, I got confused. This wasn’t Buckhead. No smoked glass and gleam here. Instead we were on a tree-lined street in a residential area.

  “Trey? Where are we?”

  “Westview.”

  I sat up straighter. “This is where you grew up.”

  “Yes.”

  We passed the gates of Westview Cemetery, rolled to a slow crawl by St. Anthony’s, the church where his mom had worked, where he’d been an altar boy. I knew his childhood home had to be close. His mother had never learned to drive, preferring to take the bus or walk, only consenting to a car ride when it was her son behind the wheel. Trey remembered nothing of the accident. In his memory, he was picking his mother up from a visit with a sick friend one minute, then squinting into fluorescent overheads from his hospital bed the next. They didn’t tell him she’d died until weeks later, when they finally pronounced him capable of comprehending it.

  He turned onto a smaller street, narrower, the sidewalks running like tributaries alongside. The houses sat sturdy and no-nonsense, with squared porch posts and tidy lawns, azaleas blooming in riots of purple and magenta. He stopped abruptly in front of a brick cottage. Instead of getting out, he remained behind the wheel, index finger tapping, tapping, tapping.

  “You said you felt as if who you were was gone, and that you were suddenly this other person. You said you didn’t understand. You asked how I did it. This is how.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  He opened his door. “You will. Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The basement of my mother’s house.”

  ***

  The dark inside looked tangible, like I could grab a fistful of it, the air cool and damp and mineral-scented. Trey disappeared inside. I waited at the door until he switched on the lights.

  The room was rectangular, with a small kitchenette at one end, barstools piled on top of a plain round table. Dozens of plastic bins were stacked like a weird cityscape in the corner, next to stereo speakers and a crate of dusty CDs. Photo albums lined the bookshelves, fake leather with gilt scroll trim on the spines. A framed and faded poster of the Atlanta skyline propped against the wall, the jutting spires of a Midtown that didn’t exist anymore.

  I stepped into the center of the room. “This is your mother’s stuff?”

  “No. It’s mine. This is where Garrity stored my things while I was in the Shepherd Center.”

  And then I understood. After getting out of rehab, he’d bought a high empty apartment, a couture wardrobe, and a black-on-black bespoke Ferrari. Then he’d jammed every shred of his former self into this basement, like a message in a bottle. Upstairs I heard footsteps, the patter of soft-soled sneakers, the equine clippety clop of heels.

  “She willed everything to the church,” he said, “with one provision—that I got to keep the basement. The upstairs serves as the St. Anthony’s parish house now. But the basement is still mine. Technically.”

  “Do you come here much?”

  He shook his head. “I started to go through everything once. But none of it seemed to belong to me.”

  He ran a finger along the back of a hunter-green velour sofa straight out of the eighties, shiny at the armrests. I sat down, patted the spot next to me. He sat too, gingerly, as if he expected the sofa to give way.

  “These things used to be mine. I don’t understand why they aren’t anymore. The doctors said that reconnecting with my possessions would help me recover. But it didn’t.”

  I couldn’t understand either. According to every theory I knew about cognitive recovery, he should have been using these belongings and the memories associated with them as a tool. They should have been paving bricks on his road back to himself.

  He sent his eyes to the floor. “The apartment. The wardrobe. The Ferrari. The job at Phoenix. Those things are useful, but they’re not me either. They’re…I can’t think of the word.”

  “Containers.”

  “Containers. That’s a good word. And this room is a container too. It will hold all of this until I’m ready.” He let his thumb brush the bone at my wrist. After a few more seconds, he interlaced his fingers with mine. “It seems as if you have a similar problem. You aren’t you anymore, at least not as you’d defined yourself before.”

  I felt the tears spring into my eyes. “Yep.”

  “Perhaps you should find a container too, something that will hold things until you can deal with them.” His eyes got very serious. “But you don’t have to deal with things until you’re ready. You’re the one who makes that decision. Nobody else.”

  I squeezed his fingers. “So you’re ready to dig into all this?”

  A look of horror flitted across his features. “What? Of course not. This is too…No, absolutely not. But I wanted you to know that even though I can’t tell this part of the story yet, you can still come here whenever you want. There is nothing off-limits here.”

  “No secrets?”

  “No secrets.”

  “Not even why you kept this couch?”

  He shot me a sideways look. “Okay. One secret.”

  I laughed, and he relaxed a little.

  “My current life is a container,” he said, “and I worry what might happen if it breaks. I think that’s another reason I wanted you to come.”

  “To test the container.”

  “Right.”
<
br />   “And is it holding?”

  He considered. “Yes. You’re here, I’m here, and I’m okay.”

  “Much better than okay, I’d say.”

  He lowered his head, but I saw the flash of pleasure in his eyes. He took another breath, this one shakier than before. He’d gone pale, like he was on the verge of passing out, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes. I was starting to get worried when he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his key ring. He laid it on the sofa exactly halfway between us.

  “What I’m trying to say is…” He raised his eyes, squared his shoulders. “All in, Tai.”

  The keys to the Ferrari. His most precious container. The one where he really did come alive, even if he kept that thrill tamped down below the speed limit.

  My mouth went dry. “Does this mean what I think it means?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “That I finally get to drive your car.”

  “That’s what it means, yes.”

  I wrapped my fingers around the keys. Then I leaned forward and kissed him. I kissed him like pressing down the accelerator, like revving the engine, with velocity and high-octane promise. I kissed him, and he responded in kind, a zoom-zoom kiss if there ever were one.

  I pressed my forehead against his. His eyes burned blue, half from arousal, I imagined, and half from terror. And then I took his hand, and we went side by side back into the bright spinning world.

  Author’s Notes

  Tai and Trey inhabit a parallel universe. Their world overlaps with mine, creating an interesting playground where the real-real and the book-real meet. You can explore my research for all five books on Pinterest, where I have boards about both Atlanta and Savannah (including interactive maps) plus other topics like the American Civil War and Trey and Tai’s accessories (a collection of my protagonists’ clothing, automobiles, and weaponry): www.pinterest.com/tinawh.