Deep Blue

by Jules Barnard

  “What?” The dark voice comes from Jaeger. “How is Kate involved?” On the surface, his question sounds concerned, but the edge is threatening, as if he’d like nothing more than to have another reason to wring Kate’s neck.

  “Leo said he’s seen Kate at parties his roommate threw. He said his roommate was into stuff, but he didn’t explain. I honestly didn’t care at the time. But what if he was referring to drugs? Kate’s boyfriend is involved in that stuff. I don’t know why Brad would put something in my drink, but he wasn’t supposed to be there yesterday. Do you know what I’m saying?” At the moment, I can’t tell if anything coming out of my mouth makes sense. My head is not exactly sharp.

  The lines around Jaeger’s mouth turn white. “What is Leo’s number? His full name?”

  I direct Jaeger to my purse, which the hospital placed beside my bed. He finds my phone and Leo’s number. He seems reluctant to leave and kisses my forehead. “I’ll just go outside for a minute to make the call.”

  I nod and he walks out the door.

  Mom takes his seat. “That boy’s been sitting here since I arrived. I was at the end of the bed because there was no room beside you. Didn’t have the heart to ask him to move.”

  She’s right. There’s a screen and no chairs on my right. Jaeger had the only spot for visitors.

  “Do not be fooled by his overgrown size. He was terrified. We all were. The doctor said he was optimistic, that with your general health you’d recover, but until you woke, I didn’t know, honey. I didn’t know.” Her head dips, mouth pressed to our clamped hands. Her shoulders rise and fall on quiet sobs.

  This is crazy. Why did it happen?

  Tyler walks in with paper coffee cups in his hands. Surprise crosses his features, his shoulders dropping as if a great weight has been released. He sets the cups on the table beside my bed and without a word, bends over and hugs me, his arm shaking where it rests along my neck.

  He pulls away and draws in a breath through his nose. “What’s up, Calzone? Glad you’re feeling better.”

  Jaeger returns a second later, followed by a police officer. “Someone notified the police.” His voice is stiff and sounds dangerous. “They went to your work and traced you to the hospital.”

  I smile wearily at the officer. Jaeger looks ready to rip the guy’s head off.

  I tell the officer everything I know, which is essentially not helpful. No, I didn’t take Percocet. I don’t do drugs, nor do I keep a stash in my purse—apparently, the paramedics who arrived at the scene found ecstasy and Percocet in a side pocket of my purse when they searched for allergy records and prescriptions. No, I tell him, I don’t know why anyone, including Leo and his roommate Brad, would give me drugs without my knowledge.

  The officer leaves, saying he’ll make inquiries, but his tone is flat, as if he thinks it’s a waste of time.

  He doesn’t believe me.

  I’m still processing this and what it means when Gen rushes through the door in her sweat pants, a tank top—probably sans bra, given it’s the one she wears to bed—and a light cropped sweatshirt. Her hair shows signs of bedhead and she’s not wearing makeup, meaning lip balm. She has clearly come straight from bed.

  “You’re awake,” she says on a sigh of relief. Lewis follows her into the room, and my mom and brother exit to make space.

  What is going on with these two? Why would Lewis come with her? Oh, God. I fainted at work … Lewis must have told Gen. The entire office must know what happened. Am I going to lose my job? Dammit! I just got it and I really like working for Sallee Construction.

  Why would someone do this to me? I can’t believe Leo would hurt me. That leaves Brad, the generous, somewhat creepy roommate. If the mocha is to blame for how the drugs ended up in my system, he was the one who bought it for me. But Brad barely knows me. What did I ever do to him?

  I’m so confused, and my head hurts like it tumbled in rough surf for a few hours. The blankets of my bed are stifling. I swat Gen’s hands away when she tries to tuck them in.

  “Cali,” she says. “How did you get mixed up in this?”

  Great, apparently everyone believes I’m a druggie. I roll my eyes and defend myself. I do it several more times until the hospital decides it’s safe to release me four days later. My fever is gone and my lungs, though not clear, are improving as long as I take it easy in bed.

  But that’s not going to happen, because the police are waiting.

  Jaeger puts a body-lock arm around my waist and exchanges a few heated words with the lead officer, but it’s no use. Aside from the fact that the paramedics found the drugs in my purse, someone called the police. Anonymously, they said I possessed illegal drugs. That’s why the police showed up at my office and later the hospital. No wonder the officer who questioned me didn’t believe me.

  Jaeger, Gen, and my family follow me to the police station, but I’m immediately separated from them, arrested, and strip-searched—most humiliating experience ever—and taken to a holding cell. The space I’m in is empty with the exception of a bench and a stainless steel toilet bowl. I lie on the hard bench in shock and because I’m exhausted. The popcorn sound coming from my chest has gone away, but my lungs wheeze and feel heavy, and I have a nasty cough.

  Physically I’ll recover, but then what? I don’t know why anyone would do this to me, but it’s like Drake blackballing me all over town. Someone wanted to screw me over, and they did, and there’s nothing I can do about it. My own family and best friend didn’t initially believe me when I told them I hadn’t intentionally taken drugs. It didn’t take long to convince them, but they know and trust me. How will I convince the police the drugs aren’t mine when all the evidence points to me?

  An officer opens the metal door to my cell several minutes later. “Bail’s been posted. You’re free to go. For now.”

  My mom, Tyler, and Jaeger wait at the front of the police station.

  Jaeger’s the first out of his seat. He pulls me into a tight bear hug and releases me for a moment so I can embrace my family. He tucks his arm around my waist, holding much of my weight as we leave the building, all of us uncharacteristically quiet. I should tell Jaeger I’m fine, that I don’t need a crutch, but his strength is welcome because mine fails me. I’ve always thought emotional and financial dependency on a guy led to disaster, but I don’t mind it so much with Jaeger.

  “They’ve set a court date,” my mom says from the front seat of Tyler’s car. Jaeger and I are in the back. I’m sitting in the middle seat, my body plastered to him, his arm wrapped around me like a bungee cord.

  Even with all this love and support, the truth of the matter disturbs me. The police think I’m guilty of drug possession. How will I get out of this? My eyes burn and blur, my raspy chest giving away my emotions as my breaths quicken and sputter.

  “Babe,” Jaeger lifts my chin. “I’ll find out who did this to you.”

  I nod. Somehow, as scary as everything is, I believe him. Because we chose each other and that makes us right. What we have is real and empowering. I was the rock in my other relationships, but Jaeger is the boulder I cling to in the middle of the deep blue lake.

  A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

  —Henry David Thoreau

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Big surprise—I’m out of a job for a while. I don’t blame John Sallee; he had no choice. In his defense, he gave me unpaid leave until my court hearing. John can’t ignore the charges against me, but he’s optimistic they’ll be dropped. Which is good of him, considering he’s only known me a few weeks.

  Jaeger walks through the gate to our backyard. I’m on the lounge chair I moved from our patio—now bedroom—to the dirt. I actually enjoy this vantage point better; it places me square with nature. I’m thankful for the little things these days, like beautiful trees, a tasty jar of green olives, and time with my boyfriend, while
everything else flushes down the crapper.

  Jaeger lifts me, sketchpad and all, and plants himself in my spot on the chaise, sprawling me along the length of his body. My muscles tense at first, bracing for balance, then settle in comfortably. I pick up my pencil and resume the sketch I’m working on. The Jaeger lounge is my new favorite furniture.

  He plants his hands on my hips, fingers caressing the indent of my waist. I wiggle as his warm palms send chemical signals to my girl parts.

  A low growl rumbles from his chest. “Easy, or you’ll find yourself beneath me, your work tossed across the yard.”

  I chuckle. That’s not a threat, that’s something I’m looking forward to and plan to make happen just as soon as Gen leaves for work. A week has passed since my prison time—I’m a full ex-con now—and I’ve regained the bulk of my energy. With heavy antibiotics and bed rest, I recovered fairly quickly once I was home. All things considered, I’m freaking lucky to be alive. In the meantime, Jaeger has hired a private investigator to look into the drugging. It’s so police reality show. I’ve gone from a bad eighties chick flick parody to reality TV.

  Jaeger raises the side of my sketchpad. I’m drawing an abstract of a man pulling a woman from the water, using a million tiny shapes I favor for design. It’s possible the expression on the man’s face resembles the look Jaeger gave me after I woke in the hospital.

  “You’re amazing,” he says into the hair above my ear.

  I lay my pencil in my lap and link our fingers. “I’m a jailbird. You sure you want to keep associating with me?”

  His body stiffens, and not the good part.

  A shot of panic rattles my nearly healed lungs. “Jaeger?”

  “I spoke to the PI this afternoon.” His thumb rubs gentle circles along the top of my hand, and I relax a little. “He linked Brad to Kate’s drug-dealer boyfriend and notified the police. Brad’s got a long prior arrest history—petty theft, a couple of drug charges that had been dropped. He’s never served time, but he’ll go to prison for this.”

  I sit up and face him, my sketchpad flapping to the ground. “So Brad is for sure connected to Kate?” The idea seemed the most plausible when I relayed everything I knew about that morning and Leo’s connection to her, but somehow it’s hard to believe Kate would go this far.

  Jaeger picks up my pad and dusts it off. He sets it on my lap and pulls me close. “I’m so sorry, Cali. Brad confessed his history with Kate’s boyfriend this morning in exchange for reduced charges. He admitted to grinding up the Percocet and dumping it in your drink. An intermediary ordered him to do it, but Brad guesses the order came from Kate’s boyfriend. Brad owes the guy for something. He told the investigators he had no knowledge of why you were targeted, just that he was told to plant narcotics.”

  “But my drink—”

  “That was Brad improvising. He claimed he didn’t know you’d have a potentially fatal reaction to the drug.” Jaeger’s arm tightens around me. “He said he was covering his bases in case the drugs he dropped in your purse weren’t enough for an arrest.”

  Jaeger sits up and I roll on his lap like a buoy, his arms steadying me before I fall. “With Brad’s confession, my PI says the charges against you will be dropped. You’ll hear from the police soon and you’ll be able to return to work, but I’m not letting what happened go. It’s my fault Kate did this to you.”

  He’s trying to tell me something here, but all I can think is it’s over. They believe me now. I’m free!

  “I told the police about Kate, but the link to her is circumstantial. There’s no hard evidence she had anything to do with it.”

  “It’s suspicious, but Brad is going to jail. Pretty soon Kate will be out of your house too,” I say. “We can move on.”

  Jaeger’s expression tightens. “She ignored the eviction notice. Says she’s not leaving and that I can’t force her. She claims I told her she can live there rent-free and that she has a legal right to be there.”

  “What? How can she do the things she’s done and expect to get away with them?”

  “She won’t. She lied about the pregnancy and she’s behind the drugging.”

  I blink sharply. “We assume … there’s a link between Brad and her boyfriend, but …”

  Jaeger shuts his eyes for along moment before looking at me intently. “I never told you what she was like in high school.” The hand on his thigh clenches. “You have no idea how much her being here makes me crazy. I haven’t seen her in years and I thought I never would, but after what she’s done … I won’t let her ruin our relationship or hurt you again.”

  “You’re worried she will?”

  “She’ll try. She’s the same vindictive, selfish person she was when I knew her years ago.”

  “What did she do, Jaeger? I asked Tyler, but he didn’t say much. Just called her a bitch.”

  “That’s apt,” he says wryly. “When I first met Kate in my sophomore year of high school, I thought she was this sweet, quiet person, who worked part-time at an ice cream shop with a girl I’d just started dating. The girl was social and outgoing, until a rumor spread she was sleeping with one of the teachers.

  “The rumors were graphic, the timing and circumstances difficult to refute. They fired the teacher and I stopped seeing the girl. She tried to defend herself. She told me the rumor was a lie, that she’d never slept with him. She claimed she’d never been with anyone. I didn’t believe her. She was pretty. She’d dated a couple of guys I knew by reputation. I just assumed … Anyway, I was stupid and self-involved with my training. I thought, if she could lie about being a virgin, what was stopping her from lying about the teacher?

  “The school administration believed the rumors too. It was a done deal. Six months later, the girl switched high schools and I never saw her again. I didn’t think about her after that. I’d already started dating Kate.”

  I think I see where this is going, and it makes me sick for Jaeger and the girl he dated. “Kate had something to do with the rumor?” I ask.

  “I didn’t know it at first. She told me she quit her job at the ice cream shop because her parents didn’t want her taking time away from her studies. I discovered a few months later through a mutual friend that she’d been fired for stealing. I confronted her about it, and she said she was embarrassed and that it was a little white lie. That if I loved her I wouldn’t make her feel worse. The stealing was one of several lies or omissions I caught her in throughout our relationship.

  “After Kate broke up with me, every doubt I ever had about her surfaced. During my knee recovery, I looked up that girl I’d been dating when Kate and I met. She told me Kate used her to get the job at the ice cream shop and then pumped her for information. About her. About me. She swore she never hooked-up with the teacher. That it was all a lie and that the only person who knew her whereabouts that day was Kate. She told me she always thought Kate had been the one to start the rumor, but she couldn’t prove it.

  “Cali, I’d been told the truth from the start, and I chose not to believe it. I trusted the one person I shouldn’t have.”

  Jesus. Kate is evil. “It wasn’t your fault. You were young and you didn’t know.”

  “I was naïve and selfish, only thinking about my goals. In the beginning, Kate didn’t complain about my training schedule, and she was sweet. But it was all a lie. By the time she broke up with me, I was recovering from my accident, a mess, and all I could think was good. I won’t have to be the one to pull the plug. The real Kate is jealous, cruel, manipulative … the list goes on.”

  I knew they had a history. I never imagined this. I can’t believe he let her live in his house after what she did in high school. But like he said, he thought he had the little girl to think about. He did it to protect the child.

  “I remained single a long time after that. Once I stopped drinking and hooking-up and actually dated women again, I remembered that good people exist. Kate is not the norm. And then I ran into you.” The corners of his mouth curve
up before a serious look replaces it. “I won’t let her come between us, Cali.”

  I rest my head under his chin and circle my arms around his waist. “What now? If she won’t leave, what do we do?”

  He scrubs his face, weariness playing around his eyes. “How do you feel about kicking out an unwanted guest?”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “So, how should we play this?” I ask.

  Crazy schemes fill my head. Hauling Kate by the hair, cat-fight style, and dragging her out of the house kicking and screaming after throwing her likely illegally purchased designer crap in the dirt. Spraying her and her fancy car with a hose until she leaves Jaeger’s property. Setting up booby traps inside the house. Or there’s the good, old-fashioned burning all her clothes in the outside fire pit and changing the locks trick. Jaeger would need a high-tech alarm system in case she tried to climb back in through a window. She’s a wily one; I don’t put anything past her. Of course, none of my ideas are as vindictive and cruel as what she did to me, but I’m not a crazy bitch.

  Jaeger pulls up to his house and I’m bouncing in my seat. This is some serious showdown at the O.K. Corral shit. “Well? What do you think? We need a plan before we go in.”

  His gaze flicks to Kate’s car. “I have a plan. Follow my lead.”

  Ohhh, a man in charge. So totally hot. “Check!” I scramble out of his truck and try to match his long strides to the front door. It’s like keeping up with walking tree trunks.

  Jaeger sweeps into the house, his eyes slowly taking in the room. Crumpled fast food bags lay scattered over tables and the floor. Clothing and trash dangle from the chandelier. Dishes are stacked to toppling in the sink, the counters covered in a rainbow of sticky-looking dried-up spills and leftover food. The place smells like a combination of expensive hair spray and rotting meat.

  Jaeger’s beautiful home is a disaster. What has Kate been doing?