Chaos

CHAPTER 26

IN MIAMI OVER THE holidays last year, I got my fill of hearing about my sister’s wonderful generosity and what a simply scrumptious doll she is, to quote Bryce.

It seemed that every time he and I had business to discuss over the phone, the topic of conversation managed to bounce back to Dorothy. If he thought she was in earshot, he’d tell me to pass along how much they were enjoying the tequila. Or he’d yell hello as if she could hear him. Or he’d ask me to convey a comment or a question. It was rather awful.

“Oh, what’s the name?” Bryce snaps his fingers several times on the computer display. “This really fancy Patrón and it came in a leather box? And she has this fantastic recipe with agave nectar and fresh lime juice, straight up like a cosmo in a chilled glass, no salt. I told her I would practice so we can have her over while she’s in town. And as you can imagine, the six of us had way too much fun.” He rolls his eyes. “Just ask our cranky neighbor.”

“Which friends are you talking about? Who were you drinking tequila with?” Lucy wants to know. “And when did you tell my mother this?”

Bryce recites four names I’ve heard him mention often over the years as Lucy begins typing information into search fields. My slightly tipsy chief of staff continues to defend what he perceives as the tarnished honor of his best pals, who he’s known “since forever?” He says it like a question.

“And you know what? I can promise you they have nothing to do with the lying piece of shit who made the nine-one-one call about Doctor Scarpetta abusing me in public,” he adds with feeling.

“I didn’t abuse you.” I remind him to pay attention to his choice of words. “Please be careful what you say, Bryce.”

“I’m just repeating what was reported to the police by some jerk-off concerned citizen.” His face is sincere with his fixed blue stare and spiky blond hair.

“When did you tell my mother you would make her margaritas?” Lucy steers him back to that.

“Well today’s Wednesday. So I guess it was Monday night when we were going over her flight info and other things.”

“And the fake tattoo? Where were you when you were messing around with that last night?” Lucy asks. “And who saw?”

“Wow! Get out the rubber hoses! Or these days, the waterboard? In our living room. There was nobody else there. We were safe and sound in our own home. It’s too hot to go out and I’m not one for making scenes. Not that a fake tattoo and margaritas are a felony, last I heard.”

“What time was it?” Lucy asks.

“Let’s see. It was after dark obviously, and we’d eaten. I’m thinking around the same time it is now. Nine forty-five, ten o’clock. Maybe as late as ten thirty, which is about when I realized to my shock that the tattoo wasn’t temporary as advertised? It wasn’t going to come off easily, and I’m thinking of contacting the company about it and complaining.”

“So let’s talk about nicknames for a minute,” Lucy says.

“Well I’m sure I have a lot of them. And maybe I don’t want to hear what some of them are?”

“I’m actually talking about your chief,” Lucy says to him as she looks at me.

When she quizzes him about nicknames from my childhood that he might have overheard, he asks, “Like what?”

“You tell me.” Lucy isn’t going to give him certain unseemly details if he doesn’t already have them.

“She might have been called a know-it-all.” Bryce frowns the way he does when he’s thinking hard. “But that’s to be expected, I guess. No insult intended,” he adds for my benefit, I assume.

“Let me know if you think of anything else,” Lucy says to him. “Any comment, no matter how innocent. Any person you know who might have passed along something without realizing it.”

He promises he will, and with a click of the mouse he vanishes from the monitor.

“That narrows it down but doesn’t make me feel any better.” Lucy swivels her chair around, facing me as I recheck my phone for updates. “If this business with the fake tattoo had gone on in a bar, a restaurant or somewhere else in public?” she says as I read a text from Harold:

Tent up and ready for you.

“It might make more sense that someone could have been watching. But in the living room of his own home?” Lucy is saying.

The scene is waiting. I tell her I’ve got to go, and then I ask her to see what she can find out about Elisa Vandersteel. I tell her briefly about running into the woman who I fear is now dead, and if Lucy is surprised, she doesn’t show it. But I catch a flare in her green eyes like light touching an emerald.

“How did you get the name?” She goes into interrogation mode, and I tell her about the British driver’s license.

“Where was it and why are we thinking that’s who she really is?” she then asks.

“On the fitness path between the body and the bicycle. Marino can e-mail you a picture of it.”

“Most cases aren’t complicated, Aunt Kay. Most end up being pretty much what they appear to be. But this one isn’t going to be simple.” She sounds reasonable but beneath her calm words is a threatening undercurrent, and I get up from my chair.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.” It sounds so trite.

I sound naïve, almost laughable, because there’s always something Lucy isn’t telling me. There’s plenty I don’t tell her either, especially about Dorothy.

“I have a hunch about something. That’s as much as I’ll say right now.” Lucy stares at me the way she does when she doesn’t want me asking her anything more about a particular subject. “I’ll be back with you when I have info I can confirm.”

I remember what she said earlier. She referenced multiple things happening at once, and I inform her about the phone call Marino got allegedly from Interpol. All Lucy has to say about it is more of the same.

“Lucy, don’t be so quick to decide everything is Carrie.” I come right out and say it.

“I haven’t decided anything,” she replies, and I feel her stubbornness like a slab of concrete beneath thin carpet.

“Well you know where I’ll be. And I’m sure it comes as no surprise that it’s not looking like I’ll see my sister tonight.” I stubbornly avoid referring to her as Lucy’s mom or mother whenever I possibly can. “Please tell her I’m sorry Benton and I couldn’t pick her up-that both of us apologize.”

I almost say that we’re looking forward to spending time with Dorothy, that we can’t wait to have her over to the house, to cook for her and take her to the theater. But it wouldn’t be true, and Lucy knows it’s not. I can’t tolerate the idea of lying, especially to someone who’s been hoodwinked and mistreated by a parent who isn’t a nice person unless it suits. Maybe I’m not a nice person either because there are some things I simply can’t forgive. And I can’t forgive my sister. I won’t.

“Tell her I hope she isn’t too exhausted after what’s sounding like a not-so-pleasant flight,” is the best I can muster as I open the door at the bottom of a metal stairwell that brings back memories of riding the school bus.

I remember missing it because Dorothy thought it was amusing to change every clock in the house. She thought it great fun to hide my homework, and I would miss the bus because of that too.

“I’m going to work in here for a while.” Lucy’s voice follows me out into the hot darkness where the greedy night crouches, waiting for me like some insatiable entity cloaked in suffocating black.

THE HUMMING VIBRATION OF the truck’s generator, the sounds of traffic begin to recede into the inky distance behind me.

As I head back to a clearing I can’t see it anymore, just a dark void because of the black tent up ahead, acres away, I’m haunted by what I just heard. It’s been a while since I’ve thought about what happened ten months ago when Dorothy gave Bryce and Ethan a very expensive bottle of tequila.

I remember thinking it odd that she was suddenly extravagant with people she’d never shown any interest in, although typically my sister is quite the hit with gay men. She adores South Beach, and it adores her back. She finds it gratifying and entertaining to dress to kill, as she puts it, to hold court in gay bars, to march in gay pride parades or better yet ride on a float, preferably in a formfitting low-cut dress, showing off her eye-popping curves, waving to all her fans as if she’s Sofía Vergara, whom Dorothy idolizes.

Whatever Italian my sister learned as a child, she’s managed to forget so completely she can barely say ciao or order pasta, although she doesn’t bother with either. I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the way Dorothy decided she’s South American.

She’s fluent in Spanish and all things Latino. The Miami Sound Machine. The hip-hop scene. She loves Cuban and Mexican cuisine, and suddenly Bryce does too. I didn’t give her handmade aged tequila much importance until a few minutes ago.

I didn’t realize what it might signify and why would I? It’s not out of the ordinary for my sister to make grand gestures when the mood strikes. It’s not unusual for her generous acts to be at my expense. Not so coincidentally I was in Miami with Dorothy and my mother when Bryce and Ethan received the Gran Patrón, specifically the Burdeos, which of course is Spanish for “Bordeaux,” and that’s the type of barrels it’s aged in.

In other words, I heard all about it ad nauseam, and as I think back I recall assuming Dorothy’s motive was to outdo or annoy me, and so what? I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. But I find myself facing the ugly possibility that her Christmas splurge wasn’t random or whimsical.

It wasn’t simply her showing off and rubbing my nose in it. Not during the holidays or later at Easter, on Bryce’s birthday or Ethan’s and most recently and significantly Desi’s. She’s sent a deli basket, scented candles, potpourri, and treats for their pets. Desi got a Miami Heat jacket and a check, and I remember that Dorothy also called him.

All this when she didn’t used to give any of us the time of day, really. Certainly she never paid attention to my chief of staff on the rare occasion she would call me at work. Until not so long ago she was condescending and dismissive to Bryce on the phone. She had no interest in Desi until his mother died. Dorothy never wanted to come north for a visit until now, and I wonder how often she and Bryce talk.

I will myself not to think about this now. Each gritty step I take along the unpaved path draws me closer to a young woman who shouldn’t be dead no matter the cause. Still nameless and a mystery, she patiently awaits me inside a tent beyond the woods on the far side of the clearing.

Now that I’m seeing what Rusty and Harold have been struggling with for the better part of two hours, I understand what a job it was-or to quote Rusty’s favorite shopworn pun, what an undertaking. Several acres away, the rectangular enclosure could accommodate a small wedding or a funeral.

The pitch-dark boxy shape blocks out tall old trees and shrubs, and the vague stars and quarter moon. I no longer can see the smudged lamps, the lights reflected in the river or the spreading empire of Boston neighborhoods and skyscrapers on the other side.

As I walk closer it’s as if I’m reaching the end of the earth or diving in a shallow reef that abruptly drops off thousands of feet to the lightless bottom of the sea. I have the eerie sensation of floating in outer space, of being jettisoned to some awful remembered place where I don’t want to be. And what continues to enter my mind is something Benton began to say at the beginning of our time together what now seems a different life ago.

I remember his exact words long before we had any concept of how trite and understated they one day would prove to be:

Carrie Grethen hasn’t finished ruining people.

That was the simple prediction Benton Wesley, the FBI’s legendary profiler, made long before we knew who she was, long before she was apprehended. He continued to predict her malevolence after she was indicted and convicted, and he didn’t stop voicing his warnings when she was locked up on the women’s ward of Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center in New York City.