Chaos

CHAPTER 45

LUCY IS IN KHAKI cargo pants, a CFC polo shirt, a baseball cap and dark glasses. She’s near the big magnolia tree with its circular bench, and Desi is standing woodenly next to her. He’s holding what looks like an iPad, barefoot and in Miami Dolphins shorts and T-shirt, and he’s wearing something blue around his neck.

I duck back into the quiet gloom of the hallway as I realize it can’t be Lucy who’s with Desi, and my heart lurches as if I almost stepped on a snake. She’s in Maryland, and even if she magically were back this soon, the androgynous-looking person with short strawberry-blond hair is too thin to be my niece. I realize who I must be looking at as my heart pounds out of my chest, and I go to an app on my phone, turning the cameras on for the house and the property.

I duck into the pantry, where there’s a flat-screen monitor on the butcher block. I zoom in on the backyard, tilting and panning, hoping Carrie Grethen doesn’t know what I’m doing. She should have heard me drive up but maybe she didn’t. Maybe she knows someone is inside the house watching but she might not, and I check every zone monitored by cameras, making sure I don’t see anyone else on the property.

So far it seems Carrie is here alone, and I think of what I assumed was a white construction van parked on the side of the road just past our driveway. I saw it when I was pulling in, and I’m on edge, worried that any second Carrie’s going to notice the cameras move. But she isn’t looking. Her attention is all over the place. On Desi and also straight up at the sky and down at the tabletlike device he’s holding, and across at my sister and Janet, who are out of frame but I know they must be sitting there. I just heard Dorothy’s voice but I didn’t catch what she said.

I turn up the audio on the HD cameras as high as it will go.

“… I don’t want to,” Desi tells Carrie as he shakes his head no. “I don’t want to sting anyone.”

“Of course you do.”

“It’s bad to hurt people.”

“Let me show you how much fun it is. Just click on that arrow key pointing at the word enable. It’s in green on the display, and when you touch the key the color turns red because the TC is armed. A Tailend Charlie. Do you know what that is, son?”

“I don’t want to play with you anymore. And I’m not your son,” he says, and Carrie smiles radiantly.

“When you find out who you are it will be like discovering you’re royalty. Prince Desi.” She places a hand on his shoulder.

“You’re scaring me,” he says.

“But why are you doing this?” It’s Dorothy talking again, and I try to find her with the cameras. “I thought we were friends.”

It would be like her to think she could persuade Carrie Grethen to cease and desist, to give up and go away or even more preposterous to believe that Carrie would like her and want to be friends. Of course my narcissistic sister would assume she’s a match for someone who has caused misery and destruction for decades.

I lock in a camera on Dorothy and Janet sitting tensely in chairs some twenty feet from the magnolia tree. A small table with their coffees and bottles of water is between them. Both of them are in scrubs that they probably got from me, and neither of them moves. Their hands are in their laps, but I don’t see any sign of restraints. Dorothy’s eyes are wide, and the morning light isn’t kind on her overfilled Botoxed face while Janet is quiet and steady.

I already know Janet doesn’t have a gun. If she did she would have handled Carrie by now, and all of us have had to develop new habits with firearms now that a child is in the mix. I manipulate the cameras some more and I see the drone, what looks like a big black whirling spider with eight rotor blades hovering at the top of the magnolia tree. That’s the high-pitched whining I was hearing. It’s not construction at the neighbor’s house.

I send Marino a text:

MAYDAY. She’s at my house in backyard. Hostage sit & drone.

I don’t call 911. I can’t have regular patrol cars roar up. That’s not how one deals with something like this, and it’s sneaking up on me what Carrie is doing. She wants Desi to be inducted into her infernal family. She wants him to hurt someone, to kill someone with her weaponized drone.

Remember Sister Twister? Bet you won’t miss her.

Carrie is going to kill Dorothy, and then she’ll get rid of Janet. That leaves only Desi, and it’s clear to me what she’s planned to do as I think of her spying on Natalie. I wonder if Carrie was really spying on the boy.

“But why?” My sister never does know when to shut up, and Desi is a small statue holding the flight controller. “I don’t understand. We had such a nice conversation on the plane,” she foolishly says, and now I know.

Carrie must have orchestrated it so that she would be with my sister on the flight from Fort Lauderdale last night. No doubt she was sitting right next to her in first class, and that’s probably why the alarm is off in the house and Carrie is in my backyard. Dorothy probably let her in just like she would some other new friend she’s made, and my sister never meets a stranger.

She’ll bring anybody home and did all the time when we were growing up. She never asked. It’s always been her right to do whatever she wants, and this time it might cost her and all of us. My mind races crazily as I try to figure out what to do.

“I just can’t understand why you’re here being so awful, and after several drinks and our lovely conversation? I thought I had a new girlfriend, one who reminds me so much of my daughter, which is why we were so instantly taken with each other. And here I thought it was going to be such fun when I came north to see my grandson.” My sister is crying. “Desi? Come over here right now and let’s all go into the house like this never happened. And you just go on and leave us alone, do it now while you can,” she warns Carrie, whose answer is to take the flight controller out of Desi’s hands.

She moves the drone directly over my sister’s head, approximately six feet above her, and the flying blades stir her dyed blond hair, which is long and makes her look harsh.

“Just touch where it says enable,” Carrie says to Desi, and she holds the flight controller close to show him.

“Don’t do anything she says!” Dorothy cries.

“Shut up. Please,” Janet says to her while not taking her eyes off Carrie.

But Janet has no weapon. If she did, she’d know exactly how to use it, and even as I’m thinking this I don’t see a way out. Not in the usual sense of what one does in a dire emergency. It’s very hard to shoot a drone. They’re filled with empty spaces and even if you take out several rotor blades that doesn’t mean you’re going to stop it in time.

You’d need to take out the power source the same way you would an explosive device. But I don’t have a water cannon handy, and taking the lock off the pistol I keep out of reach on a top shelf of a kitchen cabinet isn’t going to help. Spraying bullets in a residential neighborhood is out of the question.

PAGE AND THE DOGS are nowhere to be seen or heard. I hope they don’t return from the groomer anytime soon, and my attention continues to land on the sports equipment rather sloppily tucked in the corner to the left of the door.

I see the fishing pole, and the baseball bat is wooden not metal. The baseball mitt is leather, and it, like wood and dry skin, is a good insulation against electricity. I also notice the empty hooks where Sock and Tesla’s leashes hang, and it prompts me to send a text to Page:

DO NOT return home until U hear from me.

Carrie wouldn’t hesitate to hurt anything we care about, including Page, including our pets.

“I’m going to show you,” Carrie is saying to Desi as I continue to monitor the backyard with the cameras.

I watch the spinning drone hovering over my sister’s head, and Carrie touches the display of the flight controller. The drone makes a vertical assent, and at the same time I see the conductors lowering, four of them so fine they’re barely visible, like thin gray pencil lines with something round and dark weighting each at the end.

Eerily the conductors vanish from view on and off. All I see are the round weights floating in space like tiny dark planets, and I think of the round burn on the back of Briggs’s neck.

“I’m going to show you something cool,” Carrie says to Desi, returning the flight controller to his unwilling hands. “But first you need to do something for me. An experiment. See the bottle of water on the table? Go pour it on Granny Dorothy’s head.”

“No.”

“Do it.”

“No.”

I pick up the fishing pole.

“You need to learn how to be brave. What’s wrong with you? It looks like I’m going to have to toughen you up.” Carrie’s face is transformed by anger. “See what happens when you’re raised by inferiors? Well that’s all about to change, Desi.”

I’ve been fishing a few times in my life, mostly with Marino, who went to great lengths teaching me how to cast. I’m pretty good with my hands, and I flip back the bail on the spinning reel as I walk out the back door. There’s a chance the spinning blades will cut the leader and the line but I also know that even helicopters avoid monofilament. Lucy is careful flying low over beaches because of kites and helium balloons attached to hundreds of feet of fishing line.

Carrie stops me as her face turns murderous and at the same time pleased. I pull back the graceful long pole and snap it forward with just the right flick of my wrist, I hope, and the rubber sinker sails up in an arc toward the top of the magnolia tree. Sunlight catches the graceful monofilament line as it rises high and bends, falling over the whirling dervish, and I wait for the spinning blades to cut the line.

But they don’t, and the drone jerks. At least one of the blades has stopped, and the sudden tugging cues me to start reeling as Carrie yells obscenities, the flight controller unable to override the lowest technology of modern time, a simple fishing pole.

“Run! Run!” Desi is yelling, and Janet is on her feet.

The drone careens like a wounded bird, and I reel and reel as Carrie’s furious strides close in on me. Reeling furiously, and the drone is no more than ten feet away, loud like a whirling fan, the conductors dangling not far over her head.

I tug down hard on the fishing pole at the same moment Carrie pulls out a big stiletto and the long blade hisses out. Then blood is flying everywhere. I hear someone screaming and what sounds like a transformer blowing, and then I’m on the ground. I smell burned flesh.