Surrender to Sin

by Michelle St. James

  “Your father had an excessive amount of alcohol in his stomach,” Doctor Kowalski said. “But very little in his bloodstream.”

  Abby considered his words, trying to divorce herself from denial and expectation. It was hard to imagine her father breaking his sobriety, especially when things had been going so well, but it wasn’t unheard of: alcoholics fell off the wagon all the time.

  She needed facts, not emotion.

  Emotion was always dangerous, and she had the strange feeling that that had never been more true than at this moment.

  “Are you saying my father had had a lot to drink right before the accident? Before it had time to hit his bloodstream?” she asked.

  “That was my first conclusion, but then I looked more closely at the police report.” He glanced down at the open folder in front of him. “We don’t know exactly how long your father’s truck was in the ravine before it was spotted, which makes it difficult to pinpoint the exact time of the accident, but we do know the cause of death was head trauma. We can assume that it happened during the accident, which gives us some indication of what time it occurred.”

  “Go on.” Abby was almost holding her breath, sensing another shoe about to drop.

  “Based on factors discovered in the autopsy, we estimate the alcohol would have entered his stomach some time immediately before — or even after — his death.”

  Abby shook her head. “How is that possible?”

  “My question exactly.” The doctor drummed his fingers on his desk. “Average absorption time for alcohol into the bloodstream is a minimum of about thirty minutes. The bottle recovered from the truck wasn’t large enough to account for the amount of liquid we found in the stomach, which means he would had to have started drinking before he left the ranch, where I understand he worked.”

  “But the ranch is a half hour from where he went off the road,” Abby murmured.

  “And if he’d started drinking before he left, why hadn’t some of the alcohol hit his bloodstream,” Max said.

  It wasn’t a question. The details didn’t add up, plain and simple.

  “Are you saying…” Abby drew in a breath. “Are you saying someone forced alcohol on my father after the accident?”

  She had a flash of her father, battered from the accident that had sent his truck into a ravine on the side of the road.

  Someone coming upon him when he was hurt and needing help.

  Someone hitting him over the head until he was dead or unconscious.

  Someone forcing alcohol down his throat before leaving him to die alone in the dark.

  “I’m not saying anything of the kind,” the doctor said. “I’m reporting my findings. It’s all I can do. The investigative work is up to the police.”

  “But your findings indicate that Abby’s father had consumed more alcohol than was in the bottle in his truck,” Max clarified. “And any alcohol he would have consumed at the ranch would have hit his bloodstream by the time of the accident, all of which points to the possibility that someone forced alcohol down his throat shortly before or even after his death.”

  “By my estimation, those things are probable, yes,” Doctor Kowalski said. He shook his head. “Although I should say that in my twenty-two years as a pathologist, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Abby was glad Max had spelled everything out. She wasn’t sure she could have done it, not because she didn’t understand what the doctor was saying, but because she couldn’t believe it.

  Because it was so horrifying, so perverse, she didn’t dare speak it.

  A house can’t heal you… neither can playing nice with the man who hurt you.

  You don’t know how to let go of the past.

  Jason’s words echoed through her mind. She hadn’t told Max about her run-in with him outside the grocery store. They had been having a nice dinner — a dinner she didn’t want ruined by the specter of Jason — when the call came about her father’s accident.

  And afterwards… well, afterwards what was the point?

  “Someone killed him.” She barely recognized the voice as her own.

  “Between the location of the blunt force trauma and the… inconsistent blood alcohol findings, I’d say it’s possible this was a homicide,” the doctor said.

  “Can we get a copy of the autopsy report?” Max asked.

  Abby looked at him, surprised by the coldness in his voice.

  “There’s an official request form,” the doctor said, reaching for a piece of paper and a pen. “If Miss Sterling will sign it now, I’ll do what I can to see that it’s expedited.”

  Abby took the pen and signed her name automatically. There was a voice of reason in the recesses of her mind. It was telling her she should be angry and horrified and determined to make Jason pay for this, the most heinous of all his actions.

  But she could barely hear it screaming through the image of her father, alone and hurt, forced to endure the final humiliation of dying like the drunk he was trying not to be.

  Max stood and helped Abby to her feet. “You’ll send the report to the police?”

  “As soon as this meeting is over,” Doctor Kowalski said.

  Max nodded. “Thank you for this information. The funeral home will be sending someone for Mr. Sterling this afternoon.”

  Mr. Sterling.

  It was a small show of dignity from Max that she appreciated. That was all her father had wanted in the end — a little dignity.

  She held Max’s arm, afraid she wouldn’t make it down the long hall of the morgue otherwise. She didn’t start sobbing until they stepped out into the sun.

  Eighteen

  Max sat on the sofa with Abby’s feet in his lap, the fire crackling in the living room’s stone fireplace. It was quiet, the terrace doors closed against the chill, the TV off, Abby long since asleep.

  He’d drawn a bath for her when they got home from the morgue and then ducked into his office to bring Nico up to speed. He didn’t know what he’d expected from the other man, but after a long pause Nico’s voice had come hard and cold across the line.

  Draper will pay.

  Max had never been more sure it was true. There was no doubt in Nico’s voice, no bravado or machismo.

  It was a statement of fact.

  A promise.

  He’d kept an eye on Abby in the tub while calling the funeral home she’d chosen to arrange for the pickup of her father’s body. Max was worried about her, worried about the hollowness in her cheeks and the shadows under her eyes, the stillness that had replaced her energy and movement.

  There had been no directives from Abby’s father regarding his wishes in the event of his death. She'd chosen cremation and a simple service generously hosted by the owners of the ranch where he’d worked.

  After her bath, Max had set her up on the couch with the fire and a blanket. He made pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and her favorite cream sauce, then made a show of eating his own food while she picked at hers.

  Taking care of her was a relief, both because it gave him a way to feel useful and because it had allowed him to push aside the cold wasteland that had opened up inside him when they’d been talking to the pathologist at the morgue.

  Now Abby was asleep, stretched out on her back, and Max couldn’t run from his thoughts anymore.

  And if he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, why were there no lacerations on his face, his arms? At the speed he was traveling, he likely would have been thrown from the car, or at the very least, thrown around inside the car.

  Max had thought immediately of his father when Doctor Kowalski had explained the inconsistency. His father had also died in a car accident on a dark desert road. He hadn’t had any alcohol in his system — that had been a special touch just for Abby — but there were similarities.

  Max’s father had been stone cold sober when he’d run off the road on a straight stretch that a twelve-year-old could have driven. But like Abby’s dad, he’d been found without a seatbelt.

&nbs
p; The windshield had broken, which had caused enough injury to Donald Cartwright’s face that his lack of a seatbelt was plausible to the police.

  But it had never been plausible to Max, because his father had always worn a seatbelt. Max used to tease him about it. His father put it on if he moved the car from one parking space to another and left it on when he cut the engine to wait for Max before he was old enough to drive.

  That his father would be driving through the desert at one in the morning without a seatbelt had been the biggest of all of Max’s questions about the night his father died.

  In the end, the autopsy report had indicated a heart attack — enough reason for his father to drive off the road when there was no evidence anyone had been around — and the lacerations on his father’s face had supported the finding that he hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt.

  His father had been in good physical health, but after Jason’s takeover of Cartwright Holdings, he’d been depressed. He had been sixty-four years old at the time of his death, old enough that recent stress could have contributed to a heart attack in an otherwise healthy man.

  But the seatbelt had never sat right with Max.

  And now he knew why.

  Now new questions pushed at his consciousness. Had his father really had a heart attack? Or had he been given something to make it look like a heart attack in the same way Abby’s father had been force-fed alcohol? Had his father been conscious when he went off the road? Had he been aware that someone was orchestrating his death?

  Had he been in pain? Had he been afraid?

  Max pushed the questions down, grateful for the weight of Abby’s feet on his lap. Grateful for the necessity of taking care of her, seeing her though the next few days and all that would entail. Grateful for the desire that remained to build a future with her.

  Because without her, there was a good chance he would be on his way to the Tangier, heavily armed and determined to shoot his way into Jason’s suite, even at the expense of his own life.

  He forced himself to call on the patience he’d cultivated under Nico’s tutelage. Acting on his desire to eviscerate Jason in the moment would be a mistake. This was when patience counted — when you wanted to toss off its binds, throw caution to the wind, and rage and rage and rage.

  The ringing of his phone pulled him back to the present. He slid Abby’s feet off his lap and stood, pulling the phone from his pocket and looking at the display.

  Unknown.

  He hurried onto the terrace before the ring could wake Abby, stepping outside and shutting the door to the house.

  “You’re dead,” he said into the phone. “You are a fucking dead man walking."

  “No greeting?” Jason’s voice greeted him from the other end of the phone. “Still lacking in the social graces, I see.”

  Max turned his back on the city in the distance and leaned against the railing.

  “I should have known,” he said. “All these years… I should have known it was you.”

  “Still looking back instead of forward,” Jason said. “You and Abby have that in common.”

  Rage flooded Max’s body, so pure and so hot it wiped out his vision. “Say her name again and I’m going to take my time when I kill you.”

  “You’ve always had a flair for the dramatic.” Jason’s voice was earnest, like they were still teenagers, sitting in Max’s room and debating the merits of their favorite band. “That’s your problem — everything is emotional, reactive. All of your advantages, all the money and good parenting and stability, can’t make up for an inherent lack of discipline.”

  “I’m not interested in your opinion, on this subject or any subject. I just want to know why you did it,” Max said. “To Abby. To me. We were friends. You were like a brother to me.”

  “We haven’t been friends for a long time, probably for a lot longer than you’re willing to admit. In fact, I’d venture a guess I was always a charity project for you, a way for you to feel benevolent, superior.”

  Max thought about all the secrets he’d shared with Jason, all the hours they’d spent locked in intense discussion before Jason started spending more of his time at the Cartwright house with Max’s dad.

  “I’m sure it makes you feel better to think that,” Max said. “But it’s not true. You were my best friend.”

  “That’s a lie and you know it. Abby was your best friend. You were hers. It’s always been the two of you. I was just a prop, a crutch to give the two of you an excuse not to fuck in high school.”

  Max paged through the memories in his head, replaying moments he’d spent with Jason, all the times they’d spent with Abby. They’d been best friends, all three of them. There had been no hierarchy other than the one that had obviously lived in Jason’s mind.

  He shook his head. Jason was trying to unsettle him, trying to knock him off-balance on a day when he was already off-balance.

  “Bullshit. Playing the victim was your prop. Being the martyr was your crutch. I wish I’d known you felt so sorry for yourself all that time — it would have saved me the trouble of feeling sorry for you.”

  “Feeling sorry for Abby and me made you who you are. You’d be nothing without us, just another rich kid with more money than ambition, more privilege than discipline.”

  Laughter erupted over the phone. Max was surprised to realize it had come from him.

  “Something funny?” Jason asked.

  “What’s funny is that you’re finally being honest,” Max said. “And it only took trafficking women, burning down your best friend’s house, and killing two innocent people.”

  “Abby’s father wasn’t innocent.” Jason’s voice was cold.

  “What about you?” Max asked. “Are you innocent?”

  “I may not be innocent, but I am powerful, and I’d take that any day of the week.”

  “Even if it’s your downfall?” Max asked.

  “Even then.”

  “Good to know. Because it will be.”

  “And I suppose you’ll be the one to do the job?” Jason asked.

  “You got it.”

  There was a long pause before Jason spoke again. “Well, come and get me, brother.”

  The phone went dead and Max turned to face the city, imagining Jason standing at the window in the Tangier’s Presidential suite, surrounded by guards, under assault from all sides, moving pieces on his chessboard.

  Max opened the door to the house and returned to the living room. Abby was still asleep on the couch, the fire burning low in the hearth. He stood watching her, Jason’s words echoing through his head.

  Come and get me, brother.

  Jason might have an army of pawns. He might even have bishops and knights.

  But he didn’t have a queen — and Max would do anything for his queen.

  Nineteen

  Abby stood on the edge of the mountain and looked at the valley below. She and Max had traversed a steep narrow trail to reach the peak, the sun hot overhead, the desert still around them.

  It had been therapeutic after the activity of the past couple of days and the small wake held on the ranch where her father had worked, a generous offer that came right as Abby was agonizing over how to organize a service for a man like her father — a man with few friends, without a career that would guarantee attendance by coworkers, with no gravesite to gather around with flowers and prayers.

  The wake had been perfect, a casual cookout with her father’s coworkers and the family who owned the ranch, wizened cowboys mingling with easygoing wives and laughing children who ran through the crowd, oblivious to the fact that the occasion was a somber one.

  Tears had stung Abby’s eyes as people came up to talk to her in a steady stream — other employees of the ranch who’d been loaned money by her father, who had been given surprisingly wise advice, one who had even started going to AA.

  Her father had been liked and admired. She wondered if he’d known. If at the end he’d felt some measure of redemption for the life he�
�d lived.

  She hoped so.

  “You okay?”

  She looked over to see Max studying her.

  She nodded. “You were right. This is a good spot. A perfect spot.”

  He scanned the valley below. “It’s quiet.”

  The desert was stretched out in front of them, faint trails marked in the dust through the cactus and the sagebrush that blew stiffly in the warm breeze.

  “It’s peaceful,” she said. “I wish I’d been able to bring him here before he died. He would have loved it.”

  Tears streamed down her cheeks.

  Max reached out and put his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close enough to kiss her head.

  “He knows.”

  She looked up at him. “He knows what?”

  “Everything,” Max said. “He knows everything now.”

  Abby stifled a sob and turned into him, letting loose the waves of grief she’d been holding as they’d hiked up the trail.

  When she’d caught her breath, she slid her backpack off and reached inside for the simple urn holding her father’s ashes. She set the backpack on the ground and turned toward the expanse of sky in front of her.

  She wasn’t ready to let go. She wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

  They’d only just gotten to know each other. She’d never gotten to say all the things she wanted to say. She’d never gotten to tell him about all the times she’d hated him.

  Or about all the times she’d loved him.

  She hadn’t gotten to tell him she forgave him or to hear him say he was sorry.

  “I didn’t get to say it,” she said.

  “What?” Max asked.

  “Anything.”

  He tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “So tell him now.”

  She opened the lid on the urn and closed her eyes, tears pouring down her face.

  You were an imperfect man, an imperfect father, but you were my father.

  You did your best.

  I love you and I know you loved me.

  I forgive you.

  Be free.

  She opened her eyes, watching as a hawk tracked across a wide expanse of blue sky. It flew closer, swooping near enough that she could see its silky feathers ruffled by the wind.