Red, White and Dead Part 44

"Why?"

"Well we don't actually have an appointment. I'm not even sure where he is, but I'm going to find him because I want to go see him. I want to demand that he tell me a few things. So I guess in a way I understand what you're talking about here, wanting to know what's going on, because I feel that way, too, with Dez."

"Okay," she said. "I get it. But Dez is the one who got you in this trouble. Don't you think you should stay away from him?"

Michael leaned around her, grabbed his s.h.i.+rt off the arm of the chaise.

"You said you were staying away from him," Lucy said.

"I would but listen, Lucy, Dez is taking care of me." He waved around their house. "I have questions for him yeah, but Dez is why we have this place. Dez is in some ways why we have this great life."

"A great life that you're about to leave for jail."

He shook his head. "He's helping me out with the case. I just want more specifics on that. And even if I go to jail, Dez will always take care of me. He'll take care of you, and our family."

"How do you know that?"

"Because he's told me. And in the System your word is your word."

"The system? What do you mean?"

He shook his head. "Listen Luce, I'm going to nail him down on a few things, but what I'm trying to tell you is that you can trust Dez. I can trust him. We can trust him."

"But you said that Dez had nothing to do with Advent Corporation. So if he's had nothing to do with that, how can he help you at all with this case?"

Michael looked up at her. She s.h.i.+fted a little and fell to the side so that they were now sitting face to face, not her looking down at him, but two people, husband and wife, looking directly at each other, stripped of all their clothes and of everything else.

That moment seemed to go on and on, and in that moment, Michael lost his bravado, the sh.e.l.l he'd worn around her for years now.

"Okay, hon," he said, "let me tell you how it is." He sounded like he used to, when he used to want her opinion, used to seek her out about everything in his life.

Lucy said nothing, just nodded and placed the side of her head against the chaise lounge as if waiting for someone to read her a story.

Michael told her how Dez had started Advent Corporation, a sh.e.l.l corporation, he said, which he needed because of some long-ago, bulls.h.i.+t debt that still stained his record. He told her how Dez had then removed himself from the paper trail concerning the corporation, how he'd enlisted Michael to use the funds from Advent to help him start another business. When Michael escaped official jail time, he continued, and that's what everyone expected to happen, then Michael would be Dez's right hand man. Dez had brought them so much already, Michael pointed out, and he would continue to bring them so much more. It's just would require some waiting.

Lucy said nothing at first then she began to ask questions. As they talked, she died a little because now she was hearing the truth. Michael was involved with Dez, and Dez was involved with some kind of shady "system" that involved sh.e.l.l corporations and the funneling of money, and although she tried to point it out numerous times, it appeared Michael almost didn't understand the illegality of it all.

She didn't let her mind register that her husband, for all his original bravado, was not as confident or competent or intelligent as he had always appeared. She did, however, register the fact that he had lied to her, for years, and with his incompetence and his lying, he had sunk them all, put his family in a black hole from which it could take years to get away from. The more he talked, the more she felt despair beckoning. This was not the minor corporate messiness she had once thought. This was huge.

She tried not to think of what this would mean for the kids. Would they be 'stained', as he'd said Dez was, by what their father had done? She didn't let herself go toward those ramifications at all, she just veered to the questions that Izzy had told her to ask. And within ten minutes, she had answers to them all.

Epilogue to the Novel We all go back to my mother's house. All of us. My dad too.

It feels strange, but no one seems to know what else he should do, where he should go. Even he seems at a loss-my father who seemed ready with an answer in nearly every situation-now seems lost, younger, a little faded. When we get to my mother's home on State Street, she and Spence disappear upstairs to their room. It is now Charlie and me and our father. Our father. It's dreamlike, bizarre, especially in this setting-my mother's house.

We get something to drink and the Charlie and I start to sit at the bay window overlooking my mother's backyard, but it is the place that we sit with my mother and Spence. It feels wrong to be there with my father.

Charlie senses this too. He gestures with a gla.s.s of ice tea. "Let's go in the study".

My mother's study is where she does the work for her charity-The Victoria Project. It offers a.s.sistance to mothers who are widowed. My father sits on a chair and looks up at the bookshelf. There, on a high shelf, are his books that my mother kept after he died. My father chuckles, but doesn't look as if he actually finds anything funny.

Charlie and I glance up at the books then back at him.

"Do you want those back?" Charlie asks.

My father shakes his head, still looking up. "That was another life." He drops his eyes from the book, looks at me, then at Charlie. No one knows what to say now that the danger is gone, now that the ghost is sitting among us.

My mother and Spence enter the room then. It's obvious my mother has been crying. Usually, such a sight would alarm and trouble both Charlie and me. My mother becomes depressed, 'melancholy' she sometimes calls it, often and usually the tears are the first sign of the encroaching cloud, the looming mood that will tinge all that comes near. But instead of seeming flat, withdrawn, and slipping away from all of us, my mother, despite her pink-rimmed eyes, seems crackling, angry, alive.

She sits behind her desk which gives her a commanding presence in the room. My mother is not usually commanding. Spence sits at the chair to her right and places a hand on her desk in a show of support.

My mother looks at her first husband. "What do you plan to do now?"

He blinks a few times then offers a small shrug. "I don't know." He shakes his head and once more chuckles without mirth. "I have always known what to do with my life, even when it required leaving all of you." He takes us all in with his gaze.

Spence drops his eyes momentarily as if not wanting to intrude on this family scene, but then immediately lifts them back up and protectively scans the faces of the people he loves.

"But now," my father continues, "I don't know what to do."

My mother looks at him with an uncharacteristic steely stare. "I knew you weren't dead. I knew it. I knew it." She shakes her head, her jaw set firm, eyes flas.h.i.+ng with that strange anger. "I knew you weren't dead. Do you know what that did to me? I lost myself because of that battle, because of the battle in my head that said you were alive when everything else said you were dead."

My father shakes his head, mute. None of us knows what to say. We all stare at my mother who seems so vibrant, twitching with emotions and questions.

She opens her mouth, her eyes glaring again, then shakes her head. "We all need to process this. We all need to think." She sounds very authoritative, and again none of us know how to respond to this new Victoria McNeil, or perhaps this is the old Victoria McNeil.

"You'll stay in town for a while," she says. There is no question mark at the end of her statement, and she gives my father a look that shows she will tolerate no dissension.

My dad, the one who had kept the Camorra on the run, the one who has managed to stay alive when so many others have died, looks relieved that someone is issuing the orders now. He looks at us, taking us all in, and he nods.

ISBN: 978-1-4268-3744-9.

Also by Laura Caldwell.

RED BLOODED MURDER.

RED HOT LIES.

THE GOOD LIAR.

THE ROME AFFAIR.

LOOK CLOSELY.

THE NIGHT I GOT LUCKY.

THE YEAR OF LIVING FAMOUSLY.

A CLEAN SLATE.

BURNING THE MAP.