Born Under a Blond Sign

by V. J. Chambers

  “And I want to believe you. You have no idea how much I want to believe you. But it all points to you. Everything points to you. You’re the one who got the gun. Gilbert didn’t get it. You did. Do you deny that?”

  “I never got any gun.”

  “Chloe Avery says you did.”

  “Well, she’s lying.”

  “Why would she lie?” I pleaded with him with my eyes to give me some reason why she’d lie. “I thought she was your friend. Isn’t she your friend?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “But what, Cal? What?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”

  “Make me believe that. Tell me that there’s no connection between you and Charlene Jarrett.”

  At the mention of that name, Cal winced.

  “Damn it,” I muttered. “It was the two of them you wanted to kill, wasn’t it? Just them. Because they betrayed you. Your brother for taking your girl, and your girl for choosing someone besides you. And so you were going to shoot them, but then the other people were there, and you shot them all.”

  “No,” said Cal. “I didn’t do that. I would never hurt my brother.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. “You did,” I whispered. “All along, it’s been you.”

  “There’s no proof of that,” said Cal.

  I was seized by the sudden urge to sob.

  But I held it in.

  “There isn’t,” he insisted. “There’s no proof.”

  There was Chloe Avery saying she saw him with the gun. There was the fact he’d been in a relationship with Charlene Jarrett. Crane had seen them together, and other people would have as well. There was the fact he had no alibi. I might not have fingerprints or DNA, but I had enough.

  “You did it, Cal.”

  “No,” he said.

  I wished I could believe him. I really wished that I could.

  But I couldn’t, so I just blindly felt behind me until I caught the door handle with one hand. I turned it, and the door gave way behind me.

  I tumbled out of his office and got the hell out of there.

  * * *

  “You’re not serious,” said Miles, crossing his office to shut the door behind us. “I thought this crap with my family being suspects was over. You said that Cal didn’t even know about the energy shake.”

  I’d come directly to the police station after leaving Cal. I knew that I had to tell Miles right away.

  “The energy shake wasn’t his motive,” I said. “It was a girl. He and Gilbert were both involved with the same girl. That’s why he did it. Chloe saw him getting the gun.”

  Miles shook his head. “No. You said—”

  “I know what I said, but I was wrong.”

  “There was that Peterson girl,” said Miles. “That crazy girl who was threatening someone’s mother. What about her?”

  “Miles, it’s Cal,” I said. “He did it. He’s been lying about it this whole time. You know it’s true. You know he’s capable of it.”

  “No.” He clenched his hands into fists.

  I moved toward him.

  He held up both his fists. “Don’t.”

  “Miles—”

  “Go away.”

  I drew back, hurt.

  He turned his back to me for a minute, and then he whipped back around, and his eyes were wet. “What do you expect me to do, Ivy? Arrest my own damned brother?”

  “I…” I didn’t know what to say.

  “After what just happened with Gil, do you have any idea what this would do to my family?”

  “I know. It’s awful, but—”

  “No,” he said. He unclenched his fists and buried both his hands in his hair. He started to pace. “No one knows about this, right? You didn’t alert the media or something?”

  “Well, I know,” I said. “Chloe Avery knows. Brigit knows. Cal knows. And I was just at his office, so other people might have heard—”

  “But it’s not official or anything,” he said. “And the department has already ruled on this. They aren’t even investigating it. So, we’ll just… we’ll keep it quiet. We won’t do anything.”

  “Miles, no, you can’t.”

  “I can.” He stopped moving and gave me a defiant gaze.

  I sucked in air through my nose. “That’s not what we do. We bring justice. And you’re going to let Cal get away with it?”

  “He’s my brother.”

  “And he killed your other brother.”

  Miles’s face crumpled. “No. No, that can’t be right.”

  My voice was soft. “But it is.”

  “Get out,” he said.

  “Please, I—”

  “Get out!”

  “Miles, I know this isn’t easy, but if you would just listen to me, you’d see that I was only trying to help you.”

  He crossed the office, opened the door, and stood next to it. He was silent, his face like stone.

  I took a deep breath, ready to say something, but I looked up at him, and nothing came out.

  Finally, I just left, like he wanted me to.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “Well,” said Crane, “there’s nothing like accusing someone’s family of murder to ruin a relationship.”

  “Hey,” said Brigit, “her relationship isn’t ruined. Miles is just upset. Understandably upset. But everything’s going to work out.”

  I downed a shot. “I don’t know about that. Maybe you haven’t been paying attention, but things do not ‘work out’ for me, at least not usually.”

  We were at The Remington, and it was late evening, just starting to get dark outside. So much for not having a hangover tomorrow. I was pretty sure that if I stopped drinking now, I would have one in two hours. And I had no intention of stopping drinking right now. None at all.

  “Look, are we utterly sure, without a shadow of a doubt, that it’s Cal?” said Brigit, “because there have been so many suspects this time around, and we’ve jumped from one theory to another.”

  “We’re sure,” I said. “There’s no other way it could have gone down. I knew it was Cal when he yelled at me that he hadn’t killed his brother out of nowhere, before I even accused him of it. I knew it, then, but I didn’t want to believe it. Last time, with Gunner, I kept digging, and eventually I found out that it wasn’t him. I didn’t want to have slept with another murderer.”

  Brigit made a face. “I still can’t believe that you slept with Ralph the Hatchet.”

  I grimaced. “Can we not bring that up, please?”

  “When did you do it? Because I thought that when you ended up at that hotel, he tied you up in this room on a bloody bed. Don’t tell me you did it there.”

  “No,” I said. “It was before that. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Before that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He came through town and came to the bar, and then we went back to his truck and—I really don’t want to talk about this.”

  “Do you do that kind of thing often? Just fall into bed with complete strangers?”

  “They aren’t strangers. I meet them at the bar,” I said.

  “Oh, well, that’s a huge distinction,” she said.

  “Shut up, Brigit.”

  She smiled a little. “See, if you’re mad at me, you’re not feeling sad.”

  I sagged in my chair. “I can’t believe that Miles isn’t going to arrest Cal.”

  “That’s his brother,” said Crane. “I understand it.”

  “But it’s what we do,” I said. “We bring murderers to justice. If we don’t do that, then we aren’t who we say we are. We can’t let Cal get away with it.”

  “Well, if you really wanted to, you could probably take the evidence to Miles’s superior, couldn’t you?” said Brigit.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And then Miles would never speak to me again.”

  Everyone was quiet.

  “More drinks?” said Crane brightly.

  “I’m good,” said Brigit. “I don’t have the
tolerance that you guys have.”

  My cell phone rang.

  Miles?

  I looked to see.

  No. I didn’t recognize the number. I could let it go to voicemail…

  But what if it was Miles calling from a different phone?

  I got up. “I’m going to go outside so that I can hear,” I said, gesturing to my phone.

  Crane and Brigit nodded.

  “What do you want to drink?” Crane called after me. “And no more piss beer.”

  “Whiskey sour,” I yelled back, as I navigated around the tables in the bar to get to the door. I answered the phone. “Hello?”

  “Ivy, it’s Cal,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.

  I stiffened. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “I need to talk to you,” he said. “Come see me.”

  “No,” I said. “No way.”

  “See, I thought you’d be like that,” he said, “so I have some insurance here with me. I have my one and only brother left, Miles. I wanted him to talk to you so that you could hear him, but I think I hit him too hard on the head. He’s bleeding.”

  My heart stopped. “What the fuck? Where are you? What did you do to Miles?”

  He laughed. “Oh, that got your attention. You’re just like the others, Ivy. My brothers matter, but you don’t care about me.”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “I’m going to tell you where I am,” he said, “but I need you not to hang up the phone and call the police. If you do that, Ivy, then please believe that I will kill your precious Miles. I don’t have anything to lose at this point.”

  “No, Cal, that’s not true. I told Miles what you did, and he didn’t even want to arrest you. He cares about you. Don’t… don’t do this.” I looked through the window of the door into the bar, where I could see Crane at the bar, talking to the bartender. I wanted to catch his attention, somehow wordlessly let him know that I needed help, that he needed to call the police.

  “I don’t want to hurt him,” he said. “And I won’t. I won’t do it if you get here quickly. But if anyone else comes, if I so much as hear sirens, well, then I’m going to blow his head off.”

  “No,” I said. “No, Cal, please don’t.”

  His tone changed, and now it was severe. “Then get in your fucking car, Ivy, and drive here, right the fuck now.”

  I took an unsteady breath. “I’m a little bit drunk.”

  He laughed, high pitched and wild. “Oh, do you think I care about that? Get in the fucking car.”

  “Right,” I said. “Well, here’s the thing. My car is parked all the way back at my place, and I have to walk through town to get there. So it’s going to take me at least ten minutes to walk there.”

  “Get walking then.”

  I cast one last longing glance at Crane, willing him to turn and see me. I couldn’t do anything that made noise, and I couldn’t risk trying to actively get his attention.

  But Crane was back at the table now, setting drinks in front of Brigit.

  I turned away from the door and I started down the steps. My feet hit the sidewalk. “Okay,” I said. “I’m walking.”

  “Good,’ he said.

  I needed to keep him talking. If he was talking, he wasn’t hurting Miles. Maybe I could appeal to his sense of brotherly attachment. “What’s Miles doing right now?”

  “I told you, he’s knocked out. He’s not doing anything except bleeding from his head.”

  Oh shit. “Is he bleeding a lot?” What if he was bleeding to death?

  “I don’t know,” said Cal. “I don’t want to talk about Miles. He’s here, and I’m going to kill him if you don’t hurry the fuck up, and that’s all you need to know.”

  Shit. I started up the street. It was just beginning to get dark. The streets of Keene were lined with small trees that grew from squares in the sidewalk. The leaves on the trees were black patterns against a dark blue sky.

  “Cal, let’s just talk about this, okay?”

  “Nothing to talk about,” he said. “Not if it concerns Miles, or why you picked him over me.”

  There were people walking the streets. There were always people in Keene at this time of night in the late spring. College kids, roaming from one bar to the other, or families out for a late night stroll. I avoided all of their glances, hurrying up the street, clutching the phone to my ear.

  “Picked him over you?” I said. “You never wanted me anyway. You used me to get at Miles. That’s hardly something that would make me think you even liked me.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “You’re just like Charlene. You strung me along, but you never had any intention of being with me.”

  “I strung you along?”

  The main street of Keene was peaceful, almost bucolic. The storefronts all appeared quaint and historic. As I passed the old pharmacy (now turned into a specialty sewing shop which had kept all the antique signage and still actually served old-fashioned soda drinks), I decided that I hated its peaceful exterior. Miles was in danger, and I wanted my surroundings to reflect that.

  “You were horrible to me,” he said.

  I was angry, and I wanted to blow up at him, tell him that he was the one who was horrible, but I knew that he had Miles, and I didn’t want to make him any angrier than he was. The best idea was to calm him down somehow. “Look, whatever it was that I did to you, however I hurt you, I’m sorry, Cal.”

  Midway to my destination, the concrete sidewalks gave way to brick. All of the sidewalks in Keene had once been brick, but they’d fallen into such disrepair that they’d been dismantled and redone twenty years ago. Here, the walkway was uneven. Some of the bricks jutted up, some dipped low, some were missing. I had to watch my step.

  “Oh, now you’re sorry,” he said. “Now, when it’s too late.”

  “What do you mean too late?” I nearly tripped over one of the bricks. “Did you do something? Is Miles—”

  “Would you stop it with Miles?” he growled. “Forget about him.”

  Beside me, I passed a row of churches, each with a steeple towering higher than the last. Against the night sky, they were stern and stiff, like Miles himself. He couldn’t die. He just couldn’t. I wouldn’t allow it to happen.

  “I can’t forget about him,” I said.

  “That’s the only reason you’re coming to see me,” he said. “If it weren’t for Miles, you would have hung up on me and called the police.”

  Well, that was true, as far as it went, but I didn’t want to tell him that.

  I was starting to get out of breath. Keene was situated on a hill—not a steep one, but there was a gradual incline from the center of town, at the bottom, up to the edge of town, where my house was located. Walking quickly and talking on the phone had begun to make me pant a little. I had a little trouble as I spoke into the phone.

  “Cal, I’m concerned about you too,” I said, struggling a little not to gasp.

  “No, you’re not. You don’t give a shit about me. You think I’m trash. Just like my father did. Just like Charlene did. Just like Miles does.” There was a sob in his voice.

  “You’re not trash.”

  “I know what you think, so don’t try to deny it. Hell, I shouldn’t keep this asshole alive. I should shoot him right now.”

  “No!”

  “If I keep him alive, would you pick me over him?”

  “Cal…” What was there to say to this?

  “Fuck him,” he muttered. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  I had come to the stop light, the only one in town. It glowed red, casting shadows on the stately houses on either side of the street. All of them had probably been built in the 1700s, back when the town was settled. They had that look to them, boxy and yet somehow majestic. Traffic was stopped the way I was walking, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be coming from the other direction, so I paused to look for cars.

  Two coming from my left.

  “Okay,” I said.
“What do you want to talk about?”

  I waited.

  The cars whizzed past, the wind of their wake fluttering my hair.

  “I don’t want to talk at all,” he said.

  Three coming the other direction.

  They went by as well, more wind in my face.

  “Then why did you call me?” I said. “If you don’t want to talk, why bother?”

  I started to cross, and then I saw another car coming.

  I waited.

  But the light had changed. The car was slowing.

  I crossed the street.

  “Maybe I thought that you could change things. Maybe I thought that if I could do it in reverse, it would fix things somehow. Gil took Charlene from me. If I could take you from Miles…”

  “Would that make things better?” I said. “If I said that I was yours?”

  I was less than a block from my house now. On the other side of the stoplight, the houses were different. They were smaller, newer, most built in the twentieth century. They didn’t stand so tall, but rather squatted and sat. Some attempted to look presentable with well-groomed lawns and carefully landscaped flower gardens. But most didn’t. These houses were mostly rented by college students, so they didn’t bother to keep them looking all that nice.

  “You’d be lying,” he said.

  “No, I wouldn’t. If that’s what you need.”

  I passed one house in which the yard hadn’t been mowed in quite some time. The grass was tall, waving in the breeze that flitted through the twilight. It would have looked abandoned were it not for the lights glowing on the inside and the music pouring out of its screen door.

  “You’d be lying.” He was adamant.

  I was almost home.

  “Cal, please, I’m trying to help you.”

  “I don’t know how to fix it,” he said. “I didn’t think it through. I didn’t think it would really happen like it did. I brought the gun, and I went to find him—went to find them—but I didn’t really think…”

  I passed another house, this one obviously not a college flop house. There were tiny electric candles glowing in each window. The trim was light blue. There was a child’s tricycle in front of the garage.

  I was quiet. “It was an accident. You didn’t mean it.”

  “No,” he said, his voice unsteady. “I didn’t. I got there, and I took out the gun, and Gilbert saw it. He lunged at me, and we struggled over it, and he was saying to me to be calm, to stop, to think about it. He was saying that it was okay. Over and over, he kept saying that. ‘It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.’ And then the gun went off. Somehow, it went off. I don’t know how, because I didn’t mean for it to happen. I don’t think I had my finger on the trigger anymore. I think Gilbert… I think somehow… But he was bleeding. It was coming out everywhere. It was so red, and there was so much of it. And Charlene was screaming. She wouldn’t shut the fuck up, and all I could think was that I had to make her stop. I had to get her to quit making that noise. That damned fucking noise.”