April headed silently to the kitchen.
She browsed the refrigerator shelves for a moment while Thorn took a seat at the kitchen table.
“I’ve got turkey and cheddar. I can make sandwiches.”
Thorn said that would be fine. She offered him beer, wine, or water and Thorn took the Heineken. She poured herself a Chardonnay and set his open beer in front of him, then put together the sandwiches and took her seat across from him.
“You turned your obit in?”
“I did.”
“Without talking to Frank?”
“I did it my way.”
Thorn ate some of his sandwich, tried not to guzzle the beer.
“Can I see it?”
“I don’t have a copy. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow.”
“Why’d you do that, April?”
“You don’t understand, do you, Thorn? You’re smart in so many ways. Like I said before, you’re sensitive for a man. But you’ve got these blind spots.”
“I’m not arguing that.”
“Somebody has taken my writing, the one thing in my world, beside the boys and Mother, that gives me sustenance. And they’ve tainted it. They’ve turned my words into some perverse, violent poetry they use for their poisonous end. I feel like I’ve been robbed of one of my most precious possessions. The thing that gave me my identity, my purpose.”
Thorn waited, watching her tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. She looked down at her untouched sandwich, shaking her head.
“So you went to work to reclaim some of that.”
“Yes.”
“And the idea I proposed, using this as a trap, you wanted no part of that.”
April lifted her eyes and gave him a weary smile.
“You do try,” she said. “I’ll have to say that. You may not get it exactly right, but you try to understand.”
Thorn got up and poured himself a glass of water, drank it down, and returned to the table. April reached out and took his right hand in hers and laced her fingers around his, squeezing hard. Then she drew her hand away and hid it in her lap. She lifted the hair from her neck and let it drop.
“I never really knew who you were. We had those few hours together, and then I was pregnant, and the boys came. And I never knew the person who fathered them. I knew your name, where you lived, a glimpse of your world, but I didn’t know you. So there was something missing all these years, a sense of what our family was about.”
“What did you tell the boys?”
“The truth. A one-night stand. A handsome stranger swept me off my feet. That’s what we called you, ‘the handsome stranger.’ We’d tell stories about you, concoct wild tales of what you were doing, what dragons you were slaying, all the exotic places you’d seen. You were a game we played, an invention that kept us entertained. Long, elaborate stories. Garvey’s role was to put you in mortal danger, some terrible monster coming for you, suspending you on a fraying rope over a burning pit, and the boys always found a solution, a magical power you had that allowed you to escape. It was fun. It was our private family game.”
“So the other men, the suitors in the photos with the boys, they must have had a hard time competing with the handsome stranger.”
She smiled.
“It was hopeless. No one could live up to the stories we invented. I didn’t realize the consequences of it while it was happening. I just thought we were having fun and being creative, and I was giving the boys an emotional foundation, a father substitute. But what we were doing was making you into an impossible ideal. Nobody could compare to the handsome stranger. The others would stay around for a while, then every one of them figured it out sooner or later, that they were in competition with some supernatural rival they could never beat.”
“You could have driven down to Key Largo and told me.”
“You could have driven up to Miami and looked me up.”
“Did you think I was going to do that? Did you expect that?”
She took a bite of her sandwich, looked off toward the window onto the back porch where the bird feeder hung.
“Sometimes, when the boys and I were making up stories about the handsome stranger, I’d feel a sense of longing. I’d feel hurt and abandoned and even angry sometimes that you never reappeared. It wouldn’t have been hard to find me. My byline was always in the paper. But finally I gave up on that fantasy, or that illusion, or whatever it was. It seemed juvenile and self-destructive. It kept me stuck in that same emotional place, a high school kid mooning over some brief encounter.
“I don’t know how old they were, the boys, maybe ten or eleven, but one day at breakfast, we were sitting right here where we’re sitting now, and when Flynn started in with a handsome stranger story, I told him to stop. I’d never done that before. I’d always played along, been amused, enjoyed it in a silly way. But I told him to stop. And he must have heard something in my voice. Both of them must have heard it because we never did that again. Never after that day. Flynn just stopped the story and got back to his food and we never spoke of it again.
“I don’t know if that was right or wrong. It probably hurt them. They probably felt a sense of loss about no longer having the handsome stranger to fantasize about. I don’t know. But that’s the last we spoke of you.
“Garvey came up with another idea. She started making up stories about the Marvelous Trio.”
“Trio.”
“She left herself out. Trying to keep the spotlight on us, mother and sons. The Marvelous Trio had magical powers too and Garvey put us in all kinds of awful situations, and the boys would play along, but it was never the same as the handsome stranger. Gradually, as the boys got older, the Marvelous Trio stories stopped and that whole storytelling thing drifted away.”
Thorn picked up the sandwich and put it down again. He looked around the kitchen, imagining the family gathered here, the young boys telling tall tales about him, making him into a hero, building some extraordinary version of a man that no one could ever match. He put himself in that long-ago kitchen, filling the role that had been left open for him. A role so far away from the one he’d carved out for himself.
“You never let me know about the boys,” Thorn said, “because you were angry and hurt. Was that some kind of revenge?”
She gave it a minute of thought, then said, “I don’t know. Maybe a little. But mainly once the boys and Garvey and I had built our family, our habits, our traditions, I didn’t want to risk all that by inviting somebody to the party who had so much power to disrupt it.”
“But I showed up anyway. You summoned me. Maybe it wasn’t conscious, but you wrote my name on that obituary.”
“I had no way of knowing what would happen. I didn’t summon you. I was thinking about you, yes. But I never imagined, or even hoped this would happen. You and me around the breakfast table.”
They finished their meal in silence, worked side by side at the sink to clean up. When the dishes were put away and the dish towel folded, she turned to him, close enough to touch, but not so close she was offering herself.
“Anything else?” she said.
Thorn stepped closer and opened his arms and April hesitated only a second, then stepped into his embrace, turning her head and resting her cheek against his shoulder. The smell of her hair, the fit of her flesh against his was both familiar and completely new. He heard something like a high wind coursing around them. As though the entire structure were being buffeted by a gale, testing its strength, making every plank, every wall shiver against its force.
She drew away and moved back to the table, touching her cheek with the fingertips of her right hand as if testing the solidness of her own tissues.
“Who did these things, Thorn? Who is it?”
“Sheffield thinks it was Dee Dee. And when the horror of what she was doing overcame her, she killed herself.”
“Is that what you think?”
“No. The person in the motel room with the baseball bat wasn’t Dee Dee.”
“She didn’t do it,” April said. “It definitely wasn’t Dee Dee.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m a hundred percent certain, yes.”
“And how do you know?”
April heard Garvey coming down the hallway, the rubber tips of her crutches squeaking against the wood.
“You’ll see. Tomorrow you’ll see.”
THE MIAMI HERALD
Monday, August 2
Daniela Diamond Dollimore, Actress with a Caring Heart
By April Moss
To her television fans Ms. Dollimore was a sex kitten with lethal skills, known by her stage name, Dee Dee, but to her many friends in local aid organizations she was Danni, a tireless worker and a young woman with a warm and caring heart.
On July 31, Danni Dollimore, 27, a familiar and welcoming face in the food banks and halfway houses of Miami’s inner city, drowned in a boating accident just south of Key Biscayne. “We were all shocked and heartbroken over Danni’s death. Her smile, her compassionate spirit were something special,” said Flora Marcus, director of Prayer House, the food bank and halfway house where Danni volunteered long hours.
“Diamond loved Spring Garden, the historic neighborhood along the north banks of the Miami River,” said Ruth Wertalka, a long-time aid worker who got to know Danni at Prayer House. “It’s a pretty area. Her boyfriend lived there, and Danni started hanging out there. But one day when she was out exploring the area, she strayed into Overtown and she was just shocked to find that a few blocks from the charming district she knew and enjoyed is an impoverished and crime-ridden ghetto.”
Pained by the hopelessness she saw in those first encounters in one of Miami’s toughest neighborhoods, Danni started looking for a way to give whatever assistance she could. How exactly she settled on Prayer House is not known, but everyone who met her there was thankful it happened. “I don’t want to lay it on too thick,” said Wertalka, “but Danni had an eye-opening conversion when she first bumped into Overtown, and it stirred her up like nothing ever had. She’d spent all those years as an actress, but she said it never gave her any real pleasure or satisfaction. Overnight she found her greatest joy came from feeding the hungry and giving hope and cheer to the hopeless.”
“All that TV foolishness, that prancing and primping, was just an act,” said Flora Marcus. “She left that nonsense behind when she came down here to her secret world. No makeup, jewelry or skimpy skirts, just jeans, baggy T-shirt and a great big smile for all our disenfranchised clients. Nobody knew she was a TV star. She just worked the chow line and slung the mop like everybody else. Every Saturday, regular as clockwork, she arrived in a Yellow Cab because she didn’t want nobody around here seeing her driving a fancy car. Last thing she wanted was to call attention to herself, just wanted to fit in with all the other volunteers.” On many Saturday nights when others in her profession were partying all night at South Beach clubs, Danni Dollimore would find a vacant cot in an out-of-the-way corner, and spend the night at Prayer House so she could be up early and get back to work.
Starting in April of this year, when Danni’s television chores increased, she found she could only steal away for a weekend now and then at Prayer House. According to Marcus, this change in schedule upset her, but Danni coped. “She’d get here at the crack of dawn, turn her cell phone off, and she’d stay till the very last minute when she had to get back to her high-flying life. Danni told us she felt like she’d finally found her purpose in the world. She had an infectious smile. People down here loved that girl. She had a beautiful soul.”
Born in Miami Beach, Daniela Diamond Dollimore seemed destined for a show business career. Her father, Gusman Dollimore, directed short films and independent TV specials for years before he took charge of the Miami Ops police drama in which his daughter starred. Danni’s mother, Betty Parsons, was also a professional actress whose credits include character roles in action films of the 70s. Ms. Parsons, now a Realtor living in Daytona Beach, discovered early that her daughter had a tender heart. “She didn’t just bring home the usual stray dogs and cats, Danni found snakes and iguanas, and more than once she brought home injured possums. She’d take them into her bed, hide them under her covers and I’d hear her in there talking to them, trying to console these smelly creatures. She just hated to see anything suffer.”
Home-schooled in both elementary and high school, Danni was a loner with limited exposure to other children. One of her rare friends from that time, Mitchell Masur, remembers her as a terribly shy girl. “She barely said a word when we saw each other on the sidewalk. She was a mumbler. But every once in a while I’d get a glimpse of the girl inside. Funny and kind of wild. Back then she had a pair of Rollerblades and the two of us would go out skating for hours, Danni just flying along, never saying a word with a huge smile on her face.”
“Like an ice pick in the heart,” said Bertie Mae Fields, one of the regulars at Prayer House. “That’s how I feel, losing Danni. Isn’t no fairness in the world if a girl as good as that, with all those great years ahead of her, can just up and die for no good reason. When she wasn’t working the food line or scrubbing pots and pans, she was trying to teach me to read. She’d bring me books every weekend. I loved that sweet young woman.”
A private memorial service will take place at the Spring Garden private home of a friend on Monday evening, August 2. In lieu of flowers donations to Prayer House will be gladly accepted.
THIRTY
THORN FOUND THE MORNING PAPER on the front sidewalk and took it back to the porch, where he read it with Boxley sitting erect beside him. When he’d finished the obituary, Thorn stared out at the quiet street.
The sky was leaden and low and in the east the sunrise was muffled to a vague pink. The air smelled tense and electric from an incoming storm. Overhead in the lowering sky two parrots groused at each other as they made their morning rounds. The Siamese padded up the stairs, eased in beside Boxley, and rubbed its cheeks against the dog’s forelegs.
Thorn folded the paper in half and read the obituary again. Boxley turned his head to the side and settled his muzzle on Thorn’s left thigh. On the second pass, he found himself admiring April’s quiet way of disappearing while she brought to life a woman she’d clearly misjudged. Smoothly moving from quote to quote, words of people who’d known her best, building a compact portrait of a wounded child who found a way to hide in public behind the pose of a brainless nymphet.
Thorn and the dog and cat were still standing guard on the porch when April came to the front door and stepped outside. She had on dark brown shorts and a simple cream top with her hair pinned up. Her eyes moved languidly to his, dulled by the sleep she’d apparently missed.
“Coffee?”
“In a minute.” Thorn patted the rocker beside him, and after a moment’s hesitation, April came out and sat down.
“You’re angry at me.”
“Not mad, no.”
“Yesterday, Flora Marcus, the director of Prayer House, called my office at the paper and left a message. She saw on TV that Dee Dee drowned and wanted to be sure someone knew about her secret life, and that she got credit for her good works. I wouldn’t have discovered any of that if Flora hadn’t bothered.”
“Spring Garden, April, ice pick.”
She nodded.
“I thought the ice pick was clever,” she said with a weary smile. “Much better than a ‘bullet to the heart.’”
“You didn’t make that up. She actually said those words?”
“I don’t make things up.”
Thorn shook his head.
“At the Herald yesterday, I went over all the other obituaries for the last five weeks. I wanted to see how it could possibly be true, third word, every third paragraph. It was uncanny, some kind of terrible coincidence that those kinds of words landed in those spots. Not every obituary I wrote during the time fit the formula, there were lots of them with words that wouldn’t work, but the few he’s acted on are pretty clear. Knife, gun,
spear.”
“Why’d you do it, April? You made yourself the target.”
“What other choice was there?”
“Because you feel guilty? Because of what the news people said, that accomplice bullshit?”
“Do you want coffee? I know I do.”
She rose and walked to the screen door, then stopped and stared off at the distance.
Thunder rumbled far out at sea where the rosy gray dawn was darkening as though whoever was in charge of such things had changed his mind about lighting up another day. Thorn watched as the first pink hint of sunrise disappeared into the thick clouds until only charcoals and dark blues churned along the horizon. Around them the air was growing still and heavy.
“Garvey ordered pancakes for breakfast. Can I make you some?”
“You two are going to have to move somewhere until this is over.”
“She won’t stand for that, and neither will I.”
“It’s too risky, April.”
“Pancakes? Or eggs? Carbs or protein, what’ll it be?”
After the silent breakfast was done, Thorn went back outside to the porch and fumbled with Buddha’s phone until he located Sheffield’s cell number in her directory.
Thorn left a message on his voice mail and a minute later, “Hey Jude” was vibrating in his hand.
“You read the paper?”
“I read it,” Frank said. “What is she, crazy?”
“She feels responsible.”
“Look, they put me on administrative leave,” Frank said. “Pending the director’s decision, I’m off the streets, locked out of my office; they took my weapon, and if I’m not mistaken I’m also under surveillance.”
“They’re watching you? Why?”
“It’s Mankowski’s doing. Humiliate me, show me who’s boss.”
“You were wrong about Dee Dee.”
“I was.”
“We could use you over here for the next few days.”
Frank was silent.
“You there?”
“I told Mankowski about the newspaper thing, three down, three in. And just like I thought, she didn’t buy it. I laid out the whole situation, the Vibram shoes, the pinking shears, showed her the transcripts from the interrogations, the security videos, the whole deal. She blew it off, all of it. She’s starting from scratch, won’t even look at my notes. Says everything I’ve done is tainted.”
Dead Last Page 29
