by Nancy Rue
But the lawn that stretched from the street to the circular driveway like endless galaxy-to-galaxy carpeting looked dewy and fresh, as if it didn’t dare succumb to the humidity that threatened to suffocate Sully. The house, too, looked cool and oblivious to their suffering.
Sully took off his ball cap so he could see it more clearly. Holy crow. The place was enormous. It cascaded down a terrace in three stories that had to comprise ten thousand square feet. Screaming white in the sunlight, its even whiter shutters framed countless sparkling windows, and its flower boxes spilled over with vivid blossoms that should have been withering in the heat.
A covered breezeway led from one end of the house to another building, a long one with matching paint and shutters and individual balconies at each window that taunted Sully with their shade. That must be the “guesthouse” Sonia constantly invited him to. Sure beat the Motel 6 he’d tried to sleep in the night before.
He elbowed his way gently through a knot of reporters and camera people to get to a higher spot on the street. From there he could see the back lawn sweeping past a patio and tennis courts. Straight down to the river.
He turned abruptly. Dang. He’d forgotten that the Cumberland cropped up everywhere in this town.
“Here she comes!”
Sully shaded his eyes and watched a silver Cadillac Escalade make its way down the hill from the main road of what the dramatic entranceway had announced as Fairvue Plantation. It was so new, Sully hadn’t been able to locate it on MapQuest. The original plantation house, if there had actually been one, couldn’t compare to Sonia’s mansionette.
Two annoyed-looking cops held back the spectators as the Escalade eased up the driveway and stopped in front of the house. Sully half-expected to see a SWAT team stationed on the balconies, or at the very least a muscled bodyguard emerging from the front seat. But besides the police officers, the only person who looked the least bit interested in security was a squarish-looking woman in a pearl gray suit, who stepped down from the veranda and surveyed the crowd from behind sensible sunglasses. She had to be somebody official. She didn’t even appear to be sweating.
The driver finally opened the back door of the SUV, and a young woman, who virtually disappeared when she turned sideways, got out first. Sully didn’t recognize her as part of Sonia’s staff, but then, he hadn’t seen Sonia in a year. This child was probably still in high school then. She had the ubiquitous Bluetooth in her ear and chattered away as she stood back to let somebody else out of the car. The crowd gave an audible mutter of disappointment when it turned out to be a plumpish, dark-haired woman in black who immediately turned her back to the cameras.
The woman leaned into the car as if she were pulling something out and then stepped abruptly aside, swaying unsteadily and grabbing for the side to keep from tumbling to the driveway. No one seemed too concerned about her as two long legs stretched from the vehicle and brought with them Sonia Cabot.
Or, at least, Sully thought it might be Sonia. The woman wore a large, floppy-brimmed hat that reminded him of something out of an old Katharine Hepburn movie. It covered most of her face, which had a decided tilt downward and didn’t seem to move. That wasn’t typical of the Sonia Cabot he knew.
But it was Sonia. The willowy figure, the flowing, gauzy-looking white thing she wore, the graceful way her hand floated up to greet the crowd even with her face pointed toward the ground.
One group behind the tape called out greetings: “Sonia, we love you!” “We’re praying for you!” “Welcome home!”
But sharper voices prevailed: “Ms. Cabot! Ms. Cabot—will you answer a few questions?”
Sully looked down at those who were straining cameras and microphones past the police officers. Unlike her well-wishers, they wanted to see something they could broadcast on the six o’clock news with the warning, “The images we are about to show may be disturbing to some viewers.”
Sonia stopped at the bottom of the front steps, and for a horrified moment, Sully thought she was going to give them that chance. Sonia, don’t do it. Don’t let them have a field day with your pain, not before you even know it’s there.
She didn’t go to the crowd that beckoned to her, however. She spoke to a man who’d come out of the house with the unmistakable Roxanne and pointed him toward the reporters. Sully recognized him as Egan Ladd, Sonia’s manager. He couldn’t mistake the prematurely white hair and the smooth get-up.
With obvious reluctance Ladd approached the crowd, while the dark-haired woman tried to get Sonia up the steps. Sonia didn’t move.
It was so much like watching a made-for-TV movie, Sully would have been amused if he hadn’t known the players.
The reporters jockeyed forward, and the police looked back over their shoulders.
“I can answer any questions you have,” Egan called to them.
They had plenty.
“Does she plan to keep her commitment in Indianapolis?”
Not if Sully had anything to do with it.
“Has support for her ministry dwindled since the crash?”
Vultures.
“How does she feel . . .”
Why did they always go there?
“. . . about the investigation being conducted by the FBI?”
Sully jerked his head toward the voice. What investigation?
“What can you tell us about that?”
So far Egan Ladd hadn’t been able to get a complete sentence out. Sully craned his neck and heard him say, “That is a routine investigation required since 9/11,” just as another voice, unprofessional in pitch, yelled, “Hey—what’s under that mask?”
The other reporters whipped their heads in the direction of the shout, and Egan took a visible step back.
“Why don’t you take it off and let us see the ‘miracle’?”
The voice came from a guy in a ball cap and a sleeveless T-shirt. He probably weighed about a hundred and twenty, and most of that appeared to be tattoo ink. Sully hadn’t seen a bona fide redneck in a long time.
The kid tried to push his way past one of the policemen, who grabbed him by both scrawny shoulders.
“You’re a fraud, Cabot!” he shouted in a raucous voice that grated across Sully’s eardrum. “My mama died ’cause of you. You’re a fraud—and now you’re a freak! Serves you right!”
Most of the cameras were now on him, their microphones picking up the guy’s swearing. Sully heard Sonia’s voice coming from the porch, rich even in a shout of, “We’ll pray for you.” No microphones turned her way.
Egan marched away from the police line and the reporters. The dark-haired woman and the young Miss Thing turned Sonia toward the house. Her head came around awkwardly, and the floppy hat toppled off. The crowd gasped as, in the instant before the darkhaired woman retrieved it and stuck it back on, a half-bald head, puzzled in raw-red pieces, was revealed. The formerly proud-maned Sonia Cabot looked as if she’d been scalped, and a hundred people had just seen it.
And not only them.
“Who is that?” someone in the crowd yelled. “Is that her daughter?”
Sully squinted at the open front door. A child stood there, a round little girl of about six, with hair the fudgy brown Sonia’s had been. She appeared to be frozen, as was Sully himself, until a scream came out of her that silenced even the worst of the stalkers below.
Sonia’s entourage swept her and the child through the front doorway. Below Sully, reporters scrambled, and the handful of people who had called out their support searched each other’s faces in horror. Redneck Boy spit out one more projectile expletive and was pushed by the two officers straight into the path of the woman in the gray suit. She flashed a badge.
Sully stood still. That’s only a taste of it, Sonia, my friend. Don’t bite off any more. You have enough to deal with inside your own house.
He let the crowd begin to disperse before he ventured down the street. He’d come back in an hour or two, give her a chance to settle in and calm down.
&nbs
p; He was halfway to the car, mind reeling, heart breaking for Sonia, when someone touched his elbow. He looked down at a red head.
“I think Sonia could use a friend right now,” Roxanne said. “Come on with me.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When the door slammed behind us, I didn’t know what to do first. Evidently, nobody else did either.
Bethany still screamed, chubby hands over her face as she backed across a marble floor and into an ornate floor-to-ceiling mirror.
Sonia shouted over her, “Who let her out there? Where is Yvonne?”
Marnie still tried to straighten the hat I’d smashed onto Sonia’s head after I knocked it off in front of what seemed like five thousand people. Egan just stood there, a blotch of red high on each cheek of an otherwise pasty face. Roxanne was nowhere to be seen.
I would have given a lot to have Special Agent Deidre Schmacker step in and break the whole thing up, but she’d marched off the porch before we even got to the door. I grasped for some of her calm and found a thread of it.
Shoving past the ineffectual Egan, I got to Bethany and squatted in front of her, afraid that if I touched her she’d become even more hysterical.
“Bethany—remember me from the hospital? Can you look at me?”
She spread her pudgy fingers beneath the dark fringe of bangs and peeked between them with streaming blue eyes. She hiccuped silent sobs.
“It’s okay,” I said. “That’s your mom, see?”
“Hey, darlin’,” Sonia said. “It’s all right, it’s Mama. Come here and give me some love.”
Bethany screamed anew, and I looked at Sonia, waiting for her to come to her little girl.
“She’s too upset, Lucia,” Sonia said. She herself was tending toward a fetal position. “Please, just help her.”
I turned back to the little person who shook before me. She had stopped screaming, at least on the outside.
“Do you want to come with me, Bethany?” I said.
She didn’t answer, but she didn’t shrink away. As Chip would have said, I took that as a yes. Standing up, I looked for an escape route, but I had no idea where to go. I felt like I was in a hotel lobby.
“Marnie,” I said, “take Sonia someplace quiet where she can lie down and have some water.” I stabbed a glare at Egan. “Could you tell me where Bethany’s room is?”
Before he could answer, Sonia said, “Egan, tell them I’ll talk to one reporter from each network on the back deck in thirty minutes. We have to do some damage control.”
I bit my lip, my tongue, the inside of my cheek to keep myself from saying, You are seriously nuts. As baked and churned up as I was, I might have, if Deidre Schmacker hadn’t opened the front door, momentarily letting in the din from outside.
“Sonia,” she said, “I have first dibs on that interview.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
Sonia’s voice was even, but her shoulders sagged. If she didn’t lie down, there would be no amount of control for the damage.
“I have plenty to say to you,” the agent said. “And I’m happy to wait.”
The foyer we stood in went silent, except for a thin whimper from my niece.
“Can anybody tell me where Bethany’s room is?” I said.
“I can,” Bethany herself said.
She half ran to a wide, polished staircase, and I followed, leaving Sonia’s insane mess behind me.
When we reached the first landing, Bethany looked up at me and said, “Are you the new nanny? ’Vonne isn’t here.”
“No,” I said. “I’m just Aunt Lucia.”
Her red bow of a mouth drew up, as if that weren’t in her small storehouse of information. “Do you have any more candy?” she said.
I shook my head and felt one damp string of hair stick to my cheek. “No,” I said, “but we’ll see if we can find some.”
We’d barely resumed our climb when a woman appeared from somewhere and said, “I’m DiDi I’m the housekeeper I’ll take her you go get settled.”
I determined that if you were part of Sonia’s labor force you weren’t allowed to use commas and periods.
“I don’t want to leave her,” I said.
“She’s fine aren’t you Baby Girl you go.”
Bethany went dutifully after her.
By then the sweat that had traveled between my breasts in rivulets and puddled in my belly button had all chilled to my skin in the air-conditioning. I could have used a shower and about twelve hours to put some of the insanity into slots somewhere. But I’d made a promise, and if I wasn’t mistaken, most promises made to little Bethany Cabot weren’t kept. I was getting her some candy.
I was about to descend the stairs again in search of the kitchen, when Sonia’s driver met me with my bags. He’d changed into green fatigue shorts and working boots. The gardening gloves made me want to say, Let me guess you’re John Doe you’re the gardener you’re pruning the roses.
“These go in your suite?” he said.
“I guess so,” I said.
He seemed to know its location. I trailed him to a set of rooms on the second level and thanked him only vaguely—because I found myself before a wall of windows and French doors, where sunlight shimmered in from a large, sparkling body of water. I stepped around my suitcases and went to a windowsill so I could lean and look.
The river was magnificent, wide and strong and bordered with gray and white layered rock stacked straight down in some places, sloped and giving way gently to the shore in others.
For a magical, liquid moment I could breathe, deep and full.
The only truly happy times of my childhood had been spent on the water, and Grandma Brocacini had been solely responsible for those. Whether we were feeding ducks on a pond in a Philly park or catching minnows in a stream in the Poconos or digging tiny holes to get to the sand crabs on the Jersey shore, I was laughing. Giggling, chortling, chuckling from some deep place in my young soul. It was probably the way most little girls carried on every day, but for me those times were brief, and even then, at five or seven or ten years old, I knew they were fleeting.
I decided not to unpack my suitcase. My small collection of clothes would have looked pathetic hanging in the walk-in closet the size of our master bedroom at home. Everything in the room—the multiple layers of queen-sized bedding, the wide chair, the window seat, and the chaise longue—was some shade of white. I didn’t want to touch anything for fear of leaving a sweat mark on it.
I went off on my quest for treats for Bethany.
On the same level was a home theater—which had neither a candy counter nor a popcorn machine. Another room was full of what appeared to be untouched toys and a TV only a few inches smaller than the theater screen. That area, too, sadly lacked snacks. I found four bedroom suites, two of which appeared to be unoccupied. One was apparently Bethany’s, because I heard Didi-the-housekeeper talking in a too-loud, I’m-speaking-to-a-kid voice.
I didn’t want to show up without the goods, so I took a back set of steps to the lower level, an area with a ping-pong table, a jukebox loaded up with Sonia’s own CDs, and a full kitchen. Hope soaring, I went through all the cabinets and the refrigerator, but found only bottled water and energy bars, which I knew from experience tasted like someone’s flip-flop.
Further inspection of the lower level led to another suite, which did appear to have someone staying in it, since a quick peek revealed clothes strewn across the bed and a towel on the floor. The only other room down there was a mini Gold’s Gym, complete with shower, dressing rooms, and sauna.
From there I went out onto the lower veranda. I’d already forgotten how Hades-hot it was. The sun threatened to blister my skin right through my black sleeves. Above me, on probably another porch, I could hear Sonia talking silkily.
“I’ve told you, I don’t get hate mail. Why would I?”
The next voice was unmistakably Agent Deidre Schmacker’s. “You’ve never heard anything from a Clay Burwell?”
“Who would that be?”
“Your heckler out there.”
“That poor sad thing.”
“He says your program kept his mother from seeking proper medical treatment. You don’t know anything about that?”
“It sounds to me like either his mama misunderstood what Abundant Living teaches, or poor Clay hasn’t been delivered from his grief. I suspect it’s the latter.”
“So he has never threatened you?”
“No one has ever threatened me. No one is out to hurt me, Agent Schmacker.”
I could imagine Sonia sitting up straight like a queen. If she even could at this point, from the way she was fading. I needed her lying down and hydrated. I looked around for a way to reach the upper deck.
I stopped when Schmacker said, “It may not be you they were trying to hurt. Otto Underwood could have been the target.”
“My precious Otto? That is even more ridiculous.”
I heard papers rustle.
“We’ve received his autopsy report as well as a full tox screen,” Agent Schmacker said. “They show that Mr. Underwood had cyanide salts in his system.”
In spite of the heat, I froze.
Cyanide?
“Poison. The ME initially found 70 percent of Mr. Underwood’s blood hemoglobin to be methemoglobin.”
I flipped through my mental textbook. It had been years since I’d studied anything related to hematology, but I remembered methemoglobin as a form of hemoglobin that couldn’t carry oxygen. Two percent was normal.
“That wouldn’t be surprising with smoke inhalation,” Schmacker said, “but as you’ll recall, I told you Otto Underwood never inhaled any smoke. He died before the plane ever hit the ground. He ingested cyanide.”
“There is absolutely no way Otto poisoned himself,” Sonia said. Her voice was tissue thin.
