Chaos

CHAPTER 23

THE HOLSTER IS STRAPPED above her boot.

I can’t tell what she’s carrying but it’s probably her Korth PRS 9mm. There’s no telling what she has in her car, a high-capacity pistol for sure and possibly a lot more firepower than that.

“I don’t know if he was driving or being driven somewhere but his tone made me think he wasn’t alone.” Lucy plants the palms of her hands behind her on the edge of the counter.

Hoisting herself up, she sits, resting her back against a cabinet, her booted feet dangling, the pistol’s black holster peeking out. She folds her strong graceful hands in her lap, and I’m aware of the plain platinum Tiffany wedding band on her left ring finger.

None of us were invited when she and Janet were married in a civil ceremony on the Cape last year after Natalie died. But as Lucy and Janet both explained, they didn’t do it to prove their love and commitment. They didn’t need to prove it to each other or anyone else, they said. They did it because they intend to adopt Desi.

“You called Benton for what reason?” I ask. “And when was this?”

“A little while ago. After I listened to the latest from Tailend Charlie,” she says to my dismay.

“Why on earth would you bother him about that with everything else going on?” I can’t believe it.

“There are new developments you’re unaware of. Some old developments have resurfaced too. It’s important or I wouldn’t bother you.” Yet as she says this I have my doubts.

There’s something Lucy isn’t telling me. I can see it in her face. I can feel it. Benton is involved, and I ask her again if he’s okay. She says he’s really busy, and I reply that all of us are. Then she proceeds to explain that Tailend Charlie’s latest audio clip was sent at the usual time, twelve minutes past six P.M. More than three hours ago, and my frustration boils over. I don’t see why this merits our undivided attention in the middle of a death investigation.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” I say to her. “But that’s not new information, Lucy. Every one of his crank communications is sent at six-twelve P.M. As you continue to point out, it’s intentional, and let me guess? The new recording is cookie-cutter identical to the others except for the content of the message. In other words the recording is canned and precisely twenty-two-point-four seconds long.”

“And two-twenty-four was the street address of your house when you and Mom were growing up in Miami.” Lucy isn’t going to back down from what she’s decided without the benefit of real evidence.

“Two-twenty-four and twenty-two-point-four aren’t the same thing at all.”

“Symbolically they are.”

“I’m not sure we should be so quick to assume intentional symbolism.” I pick my words carefully so she doesn’t get defensive. “The time stamp of six-twelve, the length of two minutes and twenty-four seconds, could be nothing more than meaningless remnants of programming code.”

“And six-twelve also is the exact time the bullshit nine-one-one call was made to the Cambridge police,” Lucy reminds me as if she didn’t hear what I just said.

“That’s true. But all of it could be coincidental…” I don’t finish because I know it probably isn’t.

I check my phone again. Nothing from Rusty and Harold, and I send Marino a text:

How are we doing?

“Listen, Aunt Kay,” Lucy says to me as I look down at my phone, waiting for an answer from Marino. “I don’t like to admit that I was at a disadvantage because of multiple things happening at once.”

She pats down the pockets of her flight suit, sliding out a small tin of her favorite cinnamon mints. They rattle softly as she opens the lid, offering them to me, and I think about her choice of words. Multiple, as in many. There’s something she’s not going to tell me, and I take a mint. The fiery-sweet flavor rushes up my nostrils, making my eyes water.

“When we talked a couple hours ago I was preoccupied with the nine-one-one call.” Lucy tucks the tin back in a cargo pocket, buttoning the flap. “I was tied up with trying to figure out what the hell happened, who was behind it and why. I can’t do everything at once.”

“Not even you can.” I move the mint to the other side of my mouth and take a sip of water.

She goes on making her case, claiming that early this evening we were attacked simultaneously on multiple fronts-and she uses that word again.

Multiple.

“The timing is deliberate. I believe we’re talking about connected attacks that involve the same person or persons. And that suggests to me there are more on the way,” she adds.

But the real problem isn’t what’s been done or might be next. Or how. Or why. It’s the who in the equation, and all along I’ve maintained it’s obsessive and dangerous to assume that behind every aberrant act is the same diabolical puppeteer.

I’m not naïve about Carrie Grethen. I’m intimately familiar with her nefarious proclivities and treacherous capabilities. I know what it is to be physically mauled by her, almost die at her hands, and work her crime scenes and autopsy her victims.

So it’s not as if she’s an abstraction to me. But unfortunately she’s not the only horror show, and I open the text that just landed. Marino writes:

A clusterf**k. Stay put for now. Nothing U can do.

I wish he hadn’t called the scene out here a clusterfuck. I hope that doesn’t come home to roost at some point.

“Suffice it to say that what little I could decipher in the audio file was worse than usual.” Lucy continues telling me about the latest harassment from Tailend Charlie. “It’s too close for comfort, and no telling about the rest of it.”

“What does Benton say?” I ask.

“I wasn’t going to get into it with him on the phone, not with other people around, especially a bunch of suits,” she answers, and I puzzle over how she can know who he’s with if he didn’t say. “And I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring up the stuff about Natalie,” she adds to my astonishment.

“You mean Janet, not Natalie.” I assume Lucy has misspoken.

“I mean Natalie,” Lucy says. “You’ll get it when you start thinking about her last few months, when Janet and I were frequently in and out of Virginia. Then you and Benton were with Natalie a number of times late in the game when she was in hospice in particular, and if you think back to some of the things she was saying? They take on a very different meaning now, a disgusting one.”

“I can’t fathom why you and Benton would be talking about her in the context of everything else.” I feel a flutter of uneasiness as I wait for the rest of the story.

“Remember the fights you and Mom used to have when you were kids?” Lucy adds to my confusion. “Remember what you nicknamed her after you got really pissed off?”

“SISTER TWISTER. BECAUSE OF her wicked pinching in addition to her other ambushes. Twisting and yanking your hair or cutting it off in your sleep or who the hell knows. Although to hear her tell the story it was you who was the nasty fighter.” Lucy reminds me of what I’ve not thought about in years.

“Dorothy’s always been quite the fiction writer.” That’s as much as I’m going to say.

I’ve spent most of my adult life being extraordinarily circumspect about what I tell Lucy about her mother.

“We’ve got to figure out who might know what went on in your house when the two of you were growing up in Miami.” Lucy plugs her phone into the charger on the countertop she’s perched on.

“Who besides my mother and Dorothy? And me obviously? No one comes to mind but I’ll give it some thought.” I open a closet and find a dark blue CFC windbreaker to put over my scrubs because I’m getting chilled.

“I suspect that certain things are connected and have been for a lot longer than we’ve realized,” Lucy says. “Going back to summer before last when Natalie was dying, and longer ago than that.”

“Such as?” I zip up the windbreaker, and it’s so big it hangs midthigh. “What things?” I open the stainless-steel refrigerator reserved for beverages and edibles, no evidence allowed. “Water or Gatorade?”

“Starting with I no longer believe her death was the private family matter we thought it was. Gatorade would be good. In a bottle, not a can.”

“Cool blue or lemon-lime?”

“There should be orange.”

“Natalie’s death wasn’t private?” I question as I root around for orange Gatorade. “As in someone was spying on her? I’ve not heard you mention this before as if it’s a certainty. I know only that Natalie was very paranoid. She worried she was being monitored.”

“She should have been worried. That’s what I’m getting at. I think someone was attempting to spy during her most intimate final weeks, days, hours, moments with all of us.” Lucy’s green eyes blaze. “I can’t say for sure how far it went because none of us were expecting surveillance or looking for it. So things could have been missed.”

“Because we didn’t take Natalie’s fears seriously enough,” I say.

“No we didn’t. And what I can’t swear to now is whether there were any other devices in her house or later in hospice. I wasn’t looking for them.”

“Any others?”

“Besides Natalie’s computers, specifically her laptop.” Lucy opens the bottle I handed to her. “But we can’t be sure what else might have gone on. I wasn’t conducting counterspy sweeps every time I went to Virginia. Janet wasn’t either. We didn’t think we had a reason.”

“And now you’re sure there was spying going on?” I ask, and Lucy nods. “As Natalie was dying?”

“During some of it, I’m guessing. We may never know how much.”

“It would take a very special type of degenerate to do something like that.”

“And we know exactly who fits the bill. I have a very strong feeling she’s up to something really special this time.”

She means that Carrie is, and I’m back to the same suspicion, only more strongly. Something else has happened. But she’s not sharing that information with me for some reason, and I keep thinking about Benton. She was talking to him earlier. I don’t really know about what. Lucy isn’t going to say a word if he’s told her not to, and I herd her back to what started this conversation.

I ask her if Natalie might have been aware of the nickname I coined for Dorothy when we were kids. Might she ever have heard someone mention Sister Twister?

“If so, I don’t know about it.” Lucy tilts back her head and takes a swallow of Gatorade.

“I’m wondering if the subject may have come up in Carrie’s presence years ago when she, Janet, Natalie and you were still friendly with each other.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I can’t see any other explanation for how some anonymous cyber-menace would know unpublished personal details about my family. Unless it came directly from the source,” I add.

“You mean unless it came from Sister Twister herself. My mother the mad pincher,” Lucy says, and I don’t correct her.

It’s not true that pinching and pulling hair were Dorothy’s real crimes but I’m not going to tell Lucy that. I’ve never elaborated on just how sneaky, untruthful and violent my sister could be, grabbing an arm, an ankle, and twisting the skin quick and hard in opposite directions. What was called a snakebite or Indian sunburn back then was her specialty.

When executed with sufficient skill and force, it’s quite painful and leaves little evidence beyond a redness that early on I learned not to complain about. If I did, Dorothy simply would say that I had a sunburn. Or I was suffering from an allergic reaction. As usual I was wrongly accusing her. I was trying to get her into trouble, and when questioned, she would concoct the most elaborately imaginative falsehoods to explain my inflamed sore flesh.

If I was sitting near the windowsill reading, and my arm or ankle got burned, she’d tell our mother. Or the sun hit me at a certain angle while I was sleeping. Or I must be coming down with a fever, a rash. Possibly I got a spider bite or was developing an allergy to gardenias, to mangoes. Or I was “coming down” with cancer like our father.

Dorothy got exponentially bolder and out of bounds as he got sicker. She decided he wasn’t able to stick up for Daddy’s pet anymore, rendering me defenseless, she assumed. I wasn’t. But I didn’t tattle or retaliate with corporal punishment.

There are better ways to deal with bullies, and in some respects I’m actually grateful to my sister. Thanks to her I learned the art of silence, the power of listening and the added potency that comes with waiting. As our father used to say:

A volte la vendetta é meglio mangiata fredda.

Sometimes revenge really is better served cold.

“What I’m wondering is if my sister might have mentioned the silly nickname to Natalie, to Janet.” I suggest this to Lucy because I’m seriously beginning to wonder who Dorothy has been talking to-not just recently but over the years.

“I don’t know,” Lucy says, “but there’s no way Mom ever passed on that story or anything else to Carrie.”

“Not unless we’re mistaken in what we’ve always assumed about the two of them not knowing each other. Are we absolutely certain of that?”

“They’ve never met and Mom knows nothing about her.” Lucy’s adamant, and I’m going to push harder.