“Katie? This is Michele Lopez.”
“Michele! I’m so glad to hear from you. I’ve been so worried about you, and I am so sorry about Adrian. I think about you all the time. I hope you got our flowers. I’ve emailed you too, but I’m not sure I’m using the right address. Oh, God, I’m rambling. How are you?”
She had my email address right. I just hadn’t answered it yet. I looked at my desk blotter and saw I had doodled Adrian’s name. I ran my finger across it. “Thank you, I got them. I’m surviving, sort of. It’s hard.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“He’s actually the reason I called. I need your help—both of you, I think.”
“Absolutely. He’s right here. Should I put him on the phone with us?”
I agreed, and Katie put Nick on speakerphone. When he said hello, I was flooded with relief. He sounded helpful and confident, and just right. So unlike Detectives Young and Marchetti. I was glad I called.
“I want to hire the two of you for a consultation. I’ve got a big problem.”
I told them the story and briefly sketched out my theories. Nick took the lead, but he and Katie traded off talking for half an hour. They prompted me with more questions and answered mine, and together we fleshed out my plan. My heart raced—but not with tension this time. With anticipation, with confidence and determination.
“Thank you so much, guys.” My voice caught. “You can’t imagine how much you’ve helped me.”
Katie said. “Call us if you need anything, Michele. You’re a forever friend to me.”
Her words warmed a lonely place in me. “You’re a forever friend to me, Katie.”
Nick cleared his throat. “Be careful, Michele. And be sure about this before you start. Sometimes you find out things you’re better off not knowing about your loved ones. Don’t let anything you find take away what you know is real.”
“I won’t. I mean, I’ll try not to.” We ended the call.
I understood Nick meant well, but I knew Adrian, the good and the bad. There was plenty of bad, of course. He was a bear if he didn’t get enough exercise, he never arrived anywhere on time, and his sarcasm drew blood. Adrian was vain. Dios mío, was he vain. His scraggly blond hair hung perfectly scraggly, he chose clothes that said “I don’t care” when he did, and he worked hard to maintain an exact balance of lean to muscle. He talked endlessly about the minutiae of his training schedule. And when he got down and lost sight of his half-full glass, he saw an empty glass crushed and ground back into sand.
Yet for all his faults (and mine, for that matter), he was open with me, and I with him. We read each other’s email and blind-copied each other on personal correspondence. We shared a desktop at home. We opened each other’s mail. I picked up his phone and read his texts and he mine sometimes. He couldn’t be that open with me and yet hide something that would hurt me. He just couldn’t.
Yet still a connection existed between him and Rhonda, and I didn’t know what it was. There were secrets Adrian hadn’t shared. Nick was right to caution me. Suddenly, a chill shook me and my empty house shrieked like there were banshees in the corners.
No, not banshees. Banshee. One of them. Only one had appeared before Adrian died, and I would find that hag, platinum blonde or not, and she would regret she ever came to know Adrian Hanson and his little clawed butterfly.
A clawed butterfly wouldn’t sit in an office with the blinds drawn and hug herself. She would get up and fight. I whirled my chair back to the computer and my list. Time to do battle.
Chapter Twenty
The first item on my plan involved figuring out what Adrian had last worked on, and who with. I added fan mail to this item and started searching. After I’d exhausted the desktop files, I moved to his laptop, jump drives, and the files and papers in every drawer in the house.
The desk files were interesting. In an overflowing file Adrian had marked as Mail in blue highlighter, I found some pictures from fans showing off their assets. A woman in a tiny red Brazilian bikini. A man in a silver Speedo. Heat rose in my cheeks. He should have shown me these, I thought. But I wondered what good it would have done. I knew the groupies were out there. I also knew Adrian didn’t pay them much attention. Nick’s warning filled my head again: Sometimes you find out things you’re better off not knowing.
Most of the mail was from lonely people sending hopeful letters to a handsome athlete who wrote about what they wished they had. I found a few from Connor Dunn, all very friendly, thanking Adrian for his inspiration and for his “My Personal Best” piece. No bug-eyed lunatics or obsessed schizophrenics jumped out at me, and no Rhonda Dale or Ford Tauruses.
I got lost in some of his old articles and columns. I clicked on the links, hypertexting my way back in time. “Endurance Eating, Despite Your Spouse” popped up on the screen, a tongue-in-cheek comparison of the ideal triathlete’s pre-race diet to the food served in our home. He exaggerated our household idiosyncrasies, but it made him accessible, and better than someone writing dry “10 Foods To Avoid During Triathlon Training” articles. I clicked the “You Might Also Like” suggestion at the bottom of the article. “My Personal Best.” The one Connor mentioned. I read the opening paragraph:
The beauty of triathlon is that anyone can reach a personal best at any age, on any day, on any course. I’m 41, and this year I set a personal best for the Half Iron distance, when I had always thought of myself as a sprinter, first as a college freestyler and then as a triathlete who just missed the Olympics in both. It’s the same with life. At any age, on any day, in any situation, you can reach further than you thought possible. At 41, I discovered I was made to go the distance, and I married my Butterfly—she’s my partner and my personal best, no matter what the contest.
Damn this man. Damn him for coming along and ruining me for anyone else. For making himself a liar, not just about forever, but about personal bests. He was wrong. I had nothing left to strive for, no expectations to exceed. I was my personal best with him, and there was nothing to reach for now. Butterflies migrate south, to a better place, but that’s where it ends. It just ends.
I jumped up and shoved my rolling chair back from the desk so violently it tipped over backwards and crashed to the floor. Chingase. I couldn’t wallow. That woman could be following Sam right now. I didn’t have the luxury of wallowing. Claws out, girl. Claws out.
My next item was Adrian’s pockets. Dios mío. I was already in hell, and the only way out was through Adrian’s closet. I stomped into our bedroom and opened the closet door with my eyes closed.
The Adrian smell—Old Spice, sunscreen, rubber swim caps and tennis shoes—enveloped me. I straightened my back and started on the right-hand side with his shirts. I moved as fast as I could, trying to keep it clinical. Then I came to the linen shirt he wore at our La Grange wedding. I rubbed my cheek against it before I checked its pocket. That was enough to draw me into my task, and I began to swim through the clothes, gliding from one sensation and memory to another. I pressed my lips on the burnt-orange stitched “Hanson” on the breast pocket of a threadbare white shirt. I caressed the camouflage board shorts he loved to wear after a shower. I squeezed the dry mesh of his racing flats in my fingers, remembering their heat and dampness when he would throw them triumphantly in the back of the 4Runner, with me on his heels transferring them to the dirties bag.
I moved on in a trance, plunging my hands into memories I’d avoided for a month and coming up with little treasures: dry-cleaner receipts, gum wrappers, and in the pocket of the khaki shorts he had on when he met me for lunch at Beaver’s on the last day of his life, a note about a paintball location for Sam’s birthday, hard to read after its tumble in the washing machine. When I’d dried the last of my tears on the Baylor hoodie he wore to Bears games with me, I walked out of the closet. No hotel receipts. No threatening notes from jealous husbands. No phone numbers in lipstick on bar tabs. I gently pulled the door shut behind me until it met the frame, then gave it a firm tug. The
finality of the soft clunk as it latched into place set me off again.
I snagged a box of Kleenex on my way back to the office and set it by the monitor. I looked down at my plan as I dabbed my eyes. Internet searches were next.
For the next hour, I Googled Adrian’s name and mine, but it proved futile. With so much publicity since the book launch and his death, the volume of material overwhelmed me. I didn’t have anything useful that could narrow my search, either. Certainly adding Rhonda Dale didn’t help my results or my attitude. I eyed the search results and imagined slicing each article out of the Internet with my obsidian-tipped wings. It helped a little. I tried using the word Taurus with Adrian, but got only horoscopes and astrological charts. I switched search engines again and again, but Yahoo et al yielded nothing more than Google.
I checked the time. I had four hours before my three o’clock meeting with Scarlett at Juniper, when ESPN would be taping footage of me for their Kona coverage. I decided to tackle finances. My knee hurt something fierce, so I popped some Aleve and propped my foot on a chair, balanced an ice pack on my knee, then got to work.
The first two hours yielded nada except a headache. Adrian managed our money well. It never came easily to me, but he’d studied finance and accounting in college and worked in audit for nearly ten years. He turned to writing because he discovered a love for connecting with people, for saying the right thing, just right. It became a passion for him, like triathlon. I combed through our accounts from the past six months, on money in and money out, unfamiliar names, unusual transactions.
As I started to understand his system better, I adjusted my approach. We kept joint checking and savings accounts, but we had separate retirement accounts and premarital accounts. Adrian had a savings account for what was left of his inheritance from his former wife after we bought our Meyerland house. I knew this because we’d gone over our assets when we did our wills. We never touched that account or my premarital savings; they were emergency funds.
I found all the records for our modest joint savings account and my premarital savings account, but I couldn’t find any trace of his. Nothing at all. No statements. Nothing online. Two hundred thousand dollars had vanished like it never existed.
I called the bank. Adrian closed that account three months ago.
The news exploded like a shotgun blast in my brain. Closed? Adrian closed a $200,000 savings account without telling me? I scanned the bank statements arrayed before me. Nothing. There was just nothing about it in the last three months. As I pawed through file folders it got worse. There was nothing about this account anywhere. Never. Not even before June.
It had existed, though. We’d talked about it. I’d seen it. Its tax statement came in the mail every January. So either my husband destroyed the file or he hadn’t kept one. But of course he kept one. He even had files for closed credit cards. There had been an account, and there had been a file, but they were just gone, like every other damn thing I’d counted on.
“Oh, Adrian, what the hell did you do?” I wailed.
I had to think, not act like a scorned little woman. This could be significant, it could be my first big clue that could break this whole thing wide open. And that meant I could prevent Sam from ending up a victim, too. So, how did the money disappear? Drugs? Gambling? I didn’t think so. A woman? Not unless you counted Rhonda Dale’s story, which I didn’t. Blackmail? I couldn’t imagine what for. As I chased theories, a tiny, weak place in me whispered, “What if he was planning to leave you?”
Nick was right. Sometimes you don’t want to know. My husband, my shiny blond Adonis, looked tarnished now.
When my phone rang, I jumped out of my chair. I’d lost time again. I felt like I was fighting for traction in slimy mud, sliding backwards down a hillside toward a deep, black, bottomless hole. I fought harder. I snatched up the phone and read the display: 3:15, Scarlett calling.
I skipped hello. “Shit, Scarlett, I’m sorry, I just saw the time.”
Her voice hissed. “Michele, this is ESPN. They are not happy.”
If they’re unhappy, they might not give me the airtime Brian needs to sell books and you need to justify your fee, I thought. “I can be there in fifteen minutes. Can you stall them?”
“I’ll try. Is your makeup done?”
“It will be when I get there.”
She hung up.
I grabbed my makeup bag and purse and sprinted for the Jetta, painting my face at every red light between my house and Juniper with trembling hands. I parked and hurried in, trying not to limp, hoping my makeup wouldn’t melt before I got inside. The door opened right before I reached it.
“Thank you.” I ran through without looking to see who opened it—then screeched to a stop so fast I thought I heard brakes squeal.
The reception area looked like a lunar landing pad under a ray beam. Light kits angled overhead were trapping everything beneath them in a hot yellow light. The couch and chairs had disappeared and in their place loomed tall chrome stools. Ten feet away from them, a faux office had been set up with a black metal desk, black metal chair, and computer monitor. A big black camera on a truck pointed at me and I flinched.
“Michele’s here,” Marsha shouted, then lowered her voice to a normal timbre. “Scarlett and the producer are in your office. And I hate to bother you with this, but Connor Dunn called again. He said it’s important.”
“Thanks.” I tried to walk sedately through the strange set, but I couldn’t. I started running again, down the hall and to my office, even though the starts and stops had my knee screaming in protest. Shut up, knee, I told it.
Ten feet short of my office door, I stopped and smoothed my wavy hair and was comforted by the fact that it always looks the same no matter what I do. I patted my face, trying to remember if I’d finished my makeup. I slowed my breathing and straightened the top of the sleeveless embroidered pantsuit I’d thrown on that morning before I went to the police station. White linen. A little rumpled. But couldn’t they do amazing things in editing?
I reached the door to my office, and I heard Scarlett before I saw her.
“Don’t you love these photos from their book launch? Adrian was a gorgeous man, and Michele has that underdog ethnic thing going for her. You know your business best, but if it were me, I’d consider this one.”
I stood in the doorway and watched her as she talked to a short man with a shiny bald head. He didn’t look familiar to me. He had to be with ESPN.
I caught a glimpse of the picture in question. Three people in the frame. Me, Adrian, and clinging to him from the side, Rhonda Dale. Scarlett was gripping it with blood-red talons. I heard a roaring noise in my head, like one of the brush fires that raced across the pastures near our house one hot, dry summer in my childhood. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. I smelled smoke.
Scarlett spoke in a half whisper. Colleagues in the biz. Conspirators. “We got such a great sales and media pop when we released this picture before. You could crop Michele out—that’s what we did—it has a lurid appeal that keeps people glued to the story.”
The desk in my office burst into flames. The pictures caught fire, their edges curled, the paper twisted as the fire animated them, shrank them, and turned them to ash. The fire reached for Scarlett’s fingers. I shook my head to dislodge my fantasy.
“Scarlett?”
She whirled. “Michele, you’re here! So sorry you got stuck in traffic. Let’s head down to the set and I’ll introduce you to everyone.” She tilted her head to the man. “This is—”
“You bitch.”
“Michele!”
“It was you. I don’t know how I could have been so stupid. Of course it was you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The email to the media. The picture that was attached to it. Your picture. That one.” I pointed at her hand, and she turned the picture so that the print faced the floor.
The fire reached for me now, and I wanted to fly away, far away
, away from Scarlett and the fire and this office. That or stay and claw the bitch’s eyes out.
“What’s going on here?” Brian asked, walking up behind me.
I turned to him with my claws unsheathed. “Ask Scarlett, and find my replacement.”
My feet retraced their earlier path. I gathered speed down the hall of pain, flames chasing me faster, faster, until the edges blurred and my feet lifted from the ground.
Chapter Twenty-one
I drove the Jetta away from Juniper like a woman possessed, my tires screeching as I left the parking lot. All I remember from the drive was pressing my foot hard against the gas pedal, and the squeal as I turned into my driveway. I stomped hard on the brakes and was thrown forward into the steering wheel when the car jerked to a stop inches from the house. I rubbed my forehead. I hadn’t even put on my seatbelt. While I huffed breaths to calm myself, I slammed the Jetta into park and turned it off. Silence wrapped around me like an embrace, and I held myself perfectly still.
When I realized sweat was rolling down my face, I got out of the car and walked into the house. I shut the door gently behind me. I tiptoed into the office, leaving the lights out and drawing the blinds as I went, and slumped into the black office chair. I tucked my wings in tight, cradling my body, rocking, slowly rocking in my chair.
A sob broke free from my chest, then another and another. I rocked and sobbed for I don’t know how long, my brain emitting a low hum, a buzzing that rose and fell with the rhythm of the needle at the end of one of Papa’s vinyl Everly Brothers records. I had nothing left, nothing except Sam. A harsher sob dragged my chest toward my knees. No one to help me. No one who believed in me. I started to sob again, but I swallowed it, and pictured my son. I scrubbed at my eyes. I couldn’t let Scarlett derail me like this. I couldn’t let anything happen to Sam. I had to think. I had to quiet the buzzing in my head, I had to use my brain. I rotated my shoulders back, and my arms rose and fell by my sides. Because that’s all they were. Just arms again, not wings. I stretched them out in front of me. Short brown arms.
Going for Kona Page 17
