Killer Swell

19

Carter left the funeral before I did, mumbling something about having to be somewhere. I didn’t ask where.

I hung around for a while, despite Randall’s threat. I scanned the crowd looking for people who seemed out of place, who maybe didn’t belong at Kate’s funeral, who looked like a walking clue.

I went zero for three.

I was heading for my car when I heard someone call my name. I turned around and saw Emily coming toward me.

“Sorry,” she said, as she reached me. “Didn’t mean to yell.”

“It’s okay. What’s up?”

She frowned, looking embarrassed. “I wanted to apologize for earlier.”

“Earlier?”

She nodded. “Walking away from you and Carter like that. I just got too upset.”

I watched the cars trickle out of the lot and down the hill. “I think you’re allowed to be upset, Em.”

“Well, thanks,” she said, rubbing the back of her neck. “But I don’t need to be rude, too.”

“You weren’t. It was fine.”

The corners of her mouth flared into a small smile. “Always the nice guy. Even after living through my family.”

“Even after.” I paused for a moment. “At some point, I’d like to talk to you, though. About what you told me.”

She turned and looked back at the church. “The thought of going back in there to help clean up isn’t exactly enticing.” She turned back to me. “How about now?”

“I didn’t mean we had to do it right away, Emily. It can wait a day or two,” I told her.

She waved a perfectly manicured hand in the air. “I’m fine. Really. I need to vent anyway. I’ll buy you a drink at George’s. Just let me grab my things.”

She hurried back to the courtyard and quickly reemerged with a sweater and her purse. She reminded me of a more sophisticated Kate. They were both attractive, but Kate had always been the little sister, looking up to her sister with a sense of admiration and awe. Emily had always been more into the fashion trends and a little more into risk taking, a very cool older sister who didn’t mind letting the little sister into her life.

I followed her BMW down the back side of Mount Soledad to the jammed up area at Prospect. La Jolla was a tiny strip on a cliff above the water, and traffic was ever present in the area. We parked up on Ivanhoe and walked back to the bluff-top restaurant at the northern edge of the La Jolla downtown district.

We walked out to the ocean terrace at George’s, a rooftop bistro that drew raves for both its food and coastal scenery, small tables with candles dotting the deck. The restaurant faced north, up along La Jolla Shores all the way to where the cliffs at Torrey Pines jut out into the Pacific at Black’s Beach. The sun looked tired, taking its time getting down in the west as we sat at a table near the railing.

“Pretty day for an ugly day,” Emily said, sighing.

“Agreed.”

The waitress appeared quickly and efficiently. Emily asked for a gin and tonic, and I requested a Jack and Coke. They were on the table in less than two minutes.

“So,” Emily said, twirling the small straw in her drink. “Pretty weird, huh?”

I nodded. “Definitely.”

She tossed the straw on the table, then sipped her drink. “I think I’ve gone through the emotional gamut. Sad, angry, irritated, confused, horrified, miserable. Did I miss anything?”

“Don’t think so.”

She shook her head, the sun reflecting off of the small pearls in her ears. “It just doesn’t feel permanent.”

I hadn’t seen Kate in over ten years, but I felt the same way. “I know.”

We sat there for a few minutes, nursing our drinks and watching the sun retreat behind the edge of the water. The breeze swept up off the ocean and felt cooler than normal. But maybe it was our mood.

“You didn’t believe me about Randall, did you?” Emily said quietly, setting her drink on the glass top of the table.

I shrugged. “Not that I didn’t believe you. I just didn’t get that feeling from him when we met. What you said surprised me.”

“He fools almost everyone,” she said, the disdain in her voice unmistakable.

“Even Kate?”

She laughed softly, sadly. “Especially Kate.” She finished her drink, pointed to it as our waitress walked by, and tried to smile. “The thing is, Kate was always the one you couldn’t get anything past. I’m the ignorant one. But this time, someone fooled her.”

I had never seen Emily as the ignorant one in the Crier family, but I knew firsthand how her parents could make you feel like something other than what you were.

“You said before that he was playing around from day one,” I said. “Kate told you that?”

The waitress set two fresh drinks in front of us and scampered away.

“About six months in,” Emily said, pulling at the napkin under the drink, “she started getting weird signals.”

I sipped at the drink, the bourbon snaking a hot path into my stomach. “Like?”

“Paging him at the hospital and he took longer than usual to return the page,” she said. “Some hang-ups at home when she answered the phone. He lost a shirt she had given him. Just very un-Randall-like things.”

“What did she do?”

“Nothing at first,” she said, her thin eyebrows arching slightly over her brown eyes. “She just blew it off as, I don’t know, paranoia. But then she drove his car one Saturday. I don’t remember what for. She found an earring in the passenger seat that wasn’t hers.”

The stupidity of spouses who cheat never fails to amaze me. You always get caught and it always ends badly. Always.

“She called me and told me that she’d found it,” Emily said, still pulling at the napkin on the table. “I said to call him on it. It seemed pretty plain to me. I always liked Randall, but it just didn’t sit right, you know?”

I nodded and sipped at my drink, the ice dancing off the inside of the glass.

She shaded her eyes from the bright explosion of the sunset. “So she did. And the asshole admitted it. No protests, no denials, no misdirection.”

“What did Kate say?”

“She hardly said anything because he promised her it wouldn’t happen again,” she said, the bitterness spiking in her words. “He swore it was just a one-time thing. And she bought it.”

The Kate that I had known wasn’t much for second chances with people. You were either honest with her or you weren’t, and you didn’t get a do-over if you weren’t. But Randall had apparently qualified for a do-over.

“But it happened again,” I said.

Emily nodded and emptied her drink. “Yep. Different girl, same story. Every time she caught him, he’d admit to it, then promise never again, then screw someone else.”

“Why’d she stay with him?” I asked. “She knew he was messing around. That doesn’t sound like Kate.”

“It wasn’t, Noah,” she said, looking at me. “It wasn’t like her at all. But she kept saying she thought this would be the time he’d turn around. She didn’t want to get divorced.”

“Because she loved him?”

The waitress slipped another drink in front of Emily, who seamlessly grabbed it and held it to her lips, soft wrinkles forming at the corners of her eyes as she frowned. “That and she didn’t want to disappoint Mom and Dad. She enjoyed being the golden child.”

The waitress had slid another drink in front of me as well. It was clear from Emily’s tone that she viewed herself as the black sheep of the family. I had never gotten that impression when I’d been around the Criers a decade earlier, but I’d always been on the outside looking in. I wondered if she knew about Kate’s heroin use, but decided against bringing it up at that moment. She’d just buried her sister, and no matter how she viewed her status in the family, shattering Kate’s image might be too much for her to handle right now.

We watched the sun disappear completely, the ocean going from blue to black. All that was left of our view was the noise of the water kissing the base of the bluffs.

“I don’t know, Noah,” Emily said, shaking her head slowly. “I watched her get upset and angry. I became irate with her when she wouldn’t do anything about it. But I couldn’t make her leave him. There was something there and I never figured out what it was.”

“So it was always different women?” I said, focusing on my words, making sure the bourbon stayed quiet.

“Until the end, yeah,” she said, pushing her glass back and forth. “But the last few months, Kate gave me the impression that he might’ve developed a relationship with someone.”

“The impression?”

Emily wiggled her hand in the air. “She wouldn’t come out and say it directly. I think maybe it hurt too much. It was just the feeling that I had.”

“Do you think she knew who it was?”

Emily paused, staring at her glass on the table for a moment. Then she said, “Yeah, I do.”

We sat there, the breeze and fog surrounding us. I felt sorry for Kate, even though I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because I wasn’t able to help her or because it sounded like she’d gotten herself into a situation that she didn’t know how to get out of.

I had sympathy for Randall, too, but for him, I knew why. Because the next time I saw him, I was going to kick his ass.