Reckoning and Ruin (8 page)

Chapter Seventeen

I sat in my car for a long time before I went in, sucking down the weakest cigarette I'd ever put between my lips. It was the best I could find at the corner store, and it was like smoking a dust bunny, but it eased the jitters and soothed the pounding in my head. I'd kicked the habit once, I would kick it again. Tomorrow. Not today. Today the sky was brilliant blue, the sunlight tart as lemonade, and since I didn't have a blanket I could crawl under, a haze of smoke would have to do.

My phone still hadn't rung. Normally Trey called within five minutes of an argument, sometimes before I'd even exited the lobby. Suddenly going to Savannah felt like a desertion. A necessary one perhaps, but a desertion nonetheless. Rationally, I knew he was better off in Atlanta, that Marisa would keep him in line at least from nine to five, and that he had the apartment and the Ferrari and the suits.

And Gabriella.

I took another drag and thumbed him a quick text: I'm sorry. And then I waited. And waited some more. Trey never took more than a minute to text me back—he kept his phone in hand all the time. Unless he was showering or sleeping or…

I checked the phone again. Still nothing. I jammed the pack of cigarettes in the glove compartment, shoved open the car door. I took one final hit, letting the smoke linger in my mouth, then dropped it to the asphalt.

Inside the shop, the only sounds were the humming of the fluorescents and the quiet chirp of the security system. The square was deserted except for Raymond Junior's barbecue joint. He was hosting a birthday celebration for someone in his reenactment group, and I could hear laughter and country music. He'd invited me to come, and I'd declined, but suddenly wandering over and grabbing a beer or two, maybe something stronger, seemed like a fine idea. I opened the front door….

And an envelope fluttered to the mat.

It was cream-colored, rectangular and innocent, my name written on the front in a flowing feminine hand. My heart skipped a beat. It was the same kind of envelope I'd gotten in February at the History Museum. I looked left, then right. The square was empty. I listened hard and heard nothing except the sound of Waylon Jennings across the grass. No retreating footsteps. No car screeching away with squealing tires.

I tore open the envelope. Like before, there was a photograph, only this time it wasn't of me—it was Hope. She looked nervous, her shoulders hunched. Another person was speaking with her, back to the camera, blurred and out of frame. Short brown hair streaked with sunlight, a brown leather jacket. Male? Female? Hard to tell from the half-shoulder. One thing was clear—neither Hope nor the person with her knew they were being photographed.

A single line was written on the back:
She liked what
'
ere she looked on, and her looks went everywhere
.

“What in the double hell?” I whispered.

The last envelope had been handed to me by a woman, her black hair cut in a sleek bob. She'd disappeared before Trey could pull to the curb, so I was the only one who'd seen her. And now this, also anonymous…unless.

I scurried behind the counter, sparing a look at the deer head with its covert camera. Its glass-eyed gaze was dull and lifeless. No red light. I suppressed a surge of disappointment and snatched at the keyboard. I typed in my password and logged into the system, then pulled up the archived footage. I scrolled backward until I saw a figure at my door. Someone I recognized, all right, but not from the History Center.

I grabbed my phone. “Raymond, you came over here and stuck an envelope in my front door.”

“Yeah?”

I could barely hear him for the noise. I raised my voice. “Who gave it to you?”

“Nobody.”

“What do you mean, nobody?”

“I mean, I found it on my car. Had your name on it. I took it over to your place, but you weren't there, and I had this shindig to deal with, so—”

“So you left it.”

He hesitated. “Yeah. Was that a bad thing? I swear, I didn't know, I thought it was just one of your customers got the address wrong or something, I didn't—”

“It's okay.”

I looked across the square at his ramshackle restaurant, bustling now. Lots of people coming and going, reenactors and spouses and parents and children, noise and commotion.

“Hey, you okay over there?” he said. “This ain't some stalker, is it? I promised your uncle I'd look after you.”

“I'm fine. Just let me know if you see anybody unusual over here, especially a woman. Short black hair, slim.”

“Pretty?”

“I guess so.”

He laughed. “I'll keep an eye out then.”

After he hung up, I stared out the window at his party for a while. Then I went upstairs to my bedroom and pulled a plastic storage bin from under the bed. The original photo was right where I'd left it. I shook it free from its matching envelope and held it side by side with the new image. The handwriting was a perfect match. First the New Testament and now poetry of some sort. Vaguely familiar poetry.

I picked up my phone and typed the line into the search box. Bingo. “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning. It was a short poem, a monologue, and I had no idea what it meant. For the first time, I regretted skipping literature class in high school. But I knew how to fix that. I may have missed most of senior English, but my best friend Rico hadn't.

I sent him a quick text: Call me, poet man. ASAP.

And then I waited. But no return texts came from any direction. I thought of going back to the car, getting the rest of the cigarettes from the glove compartment. Instead, I stuck both photographs in my tote bag. Then I went to the closet and got down a cardboard shoe box. I took off the lid, brushed aside the dried wrist corsage from prom and the tassel from my mortarboard.

The photograph was on top, rubber-banded with others from the same afternoon. It was a shot of me on the beach at Tybee Island, denim short-shorts and a halter top barely containing my more illicit parts. I sat on the hood of my Camaro, the chrome glinting and gleaming. I grinned…but not for the camera. For the man beside me.

John. With his stormy eyes and rock star hair and wicked grin. Even in the photo I could see myself preening in his gaze, happy to be looked upon with such ferocious desire. His eyes were like the sun, and when he turned them on me, I felt myself stretching and reaching and growing like a flower. But all suns eventually disappear below the horizon. Night always comes, one way or another.

I thought of Trey, back in his black and white apartment. The man I loved, something I could say in my head even if it didn't trip lightly off my tongue. He loved me too, with a love that was sturdy and deep-rooted. The girl in the photo would have been crushed by it.

I put the photo in my bag next to the ones from my mysterious informant. It was the only picture I had of John, and I knew I'd need something to show people.
Have you seen this man?
When I got back downstairs, I saw the red lights behind the deer's eyes flare to life. My phone vibrated almost simultaneously with an incoming call. I snatched it up.

“Trey?”

“I'm sorry too. Very much.”

His voice was calm, but not flat. Back to himself again. I knew the other Treys were there, though, that one or the other was only a swing of the pendulum away.

I hopped up cross-legged on the counter. “It seems like we've been saying sorry a lot recently. Like every day.”

“I know. I'm sorry about that too.” He hesitated. “Are you still going to Savannah?”

“Yes. But only for one night. Just long enough to check in with a few people who know John, see if they can shed some light on his current absence. See how Hope's story pans out.”

Silence at Trey's end. I thought of my latest mysterious delivery, but kept that development to myself. Nothing good could come from throwing such a thing in his lap, not now anyway.

“Besides,” I continued, “we're both on edge. Some time apart might be a good thing.”

He made a noncommittal noise.

“You know I'm right.” I kept my voice nonchalant. “Hey, what did Gabriella want?”

“Gabriella?”

“She was in the parking lot when I left.”

“She was? Why?”

I took advantage of the phone connection to concoct a bit of subterfuge. “She wanted to check on you. Didn't she go up?”

“No.”

I listened for any deception in that simple response. I heard nothing but puzzlement in his voice, however. And as much as I wanted to quiz him further, spill my guts about my encounter with his angry ex, I decided that particular conversation would keep, along with the rest of the things I wasn't saying. He was calm again, collected. I needed him to stay that way until I could get back to town.

He exhaled softly. “Call me tomorrow night?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you. And be careful. Please.”

My heart warmed. “I will. You be careful too.”

“I will. And Tai?”

“Yes?”

“That indiscretion on my desk? It wasn't insignificant. Not at all.”

I flushed at the memory. He'd stretched way out of his comfort zone that night, and he'd done it because I needed him, which was the part that had been out of my comfort zone.

“It wasn't insignificant for me either,” I said.

We exchanged good nights, and I felt better as I climbed the stairs to my bedroom. One part of me was satisfied. But another part kept whispering in my ear. Forty-five minutes it took him to call me back.

Forty-five freaking minutes.

Chapter Eighteen

Rico didn't even say good morning. He opened the door, saw me standing there with a dozen Krispy Kremes and two coffees, then turned his back and shuffled toward the kitchen table. I kicked the door closed behind me.

“What? Not even a thank you?”

He flopped himself down at the table, his ebony eyes bleary and bloodshot. “For what? Robbing me of an hour of sleep? You coulda called instead of just showing up.”

“You didn't text me back last night.”

“I was at a poetry slam. Didn't get in until four.”

“Oh. Sorry.” I sat opposite him and shoved a coffee his way. “Don't you have to be at work in a little while though? I mean, it's not like you were going to sleep all day.”

He grumbled something and stuck his nose in the coffee. His voice was thick with sleep, rough like steel wool, and his skin was lighter than I remembered, more au lait than café. We'd been best friends since middle school, bonding on the margins, and then he'd fled Savannah as soon as he graduated. And while my moving to Atlanta had put us closer in distance, we seemed to have gotten further apart in other ways.

“So you got my text?” I said.

He nodded, pulled his bathrobe tighter around his beefy frame. “Still not sure what you're wanting to know.”

“Tell me about the poem.”

Rico picked up a doughnut and took a bite. “Your stalker knows the classics. That's Robert Browning, from ‘My Last Duchess.'”

“I got that much from Wikipedia. What does it
mean
?”

“It's a confessional monologue from a killer. A murder poem.”

I pushed down that sinking feeling. “Oh crap.”

“You got that right. The line you quoted refers to the victim, who was free with her looks, who liked things somebody thought she shouldn't like. Cherries, donkeys, flowers. That's what got her killed.”

“But what's that got to do with Hope?”

“Knowing Hope? That woman wants to have something in each hand and something else in pocket, you know what I'm saying? And there are people who don't take kindly to that.”

“Enough to kill?”

“People die for less every day.”

I snagged a doughnut too, still warm, the glaze still oozy. “You know what I think? I think Hope's got herself a helper. And I bet it's that person in the photo with her.”

“Shouldn't you be more worried about the person who took the picture? You know, the stalker?”

“I prefer to think of them as a confidential informant.”

Rico scoffed. “Yeah? What are they trying to inform you of?”

“That's what I plan to figure out. And I'm starting in Savannah.”

The sunlight filtered weak but warm through the drawn blinds, and I heard gentle snoring in the bedroom. A new boyfriend? One night stand? I suddenly realized how very little I knew about Rico's current life. But I was OTP—Outside The Perimeter—and city folk like Rico did not venture into the hinterlands beyond I-285.

He reached for another doughnut. “Savannah, huh? Figured you'd had enough of that town.”

“Believe me, I thought so too.”

I filled him in on the situation. Outside the window, the Old Fourth Ward was cranking into gear. Vibrant, cultured, Atlanta's crazy quilt of history and renaissance. No wonder he stayed out all hours with his poet friends, his hip hop friends, his cool friends. But Monday morning came for everyone, including spoken word poets with nine-to-five IT jobs.

I toyed with my coffee cup. “I've decided to go right to the source first.”

“Which is?”

“Jasper himself.”

Rico almost dropped his doughnut. “The hell you say?”

“He's got something to do with John's disappearance, I know he does, and the only way I can figure out how is if I see him face to face. He can't wiggle out of my questions or hide behind his spanking new lawyer then.”

“You know you're not supposed to be talking with him. If the prosecutor finds out—”

“She won't. She's got no reason to be checking the visitation list.”

“If she gets word you're in town, damn straight she'll check it. Assuming they don't already have you on some ‘do not get within ten feet of Jasper Boone' list down at the lock-up.”

“I'll deal with that when I get down there.”

Rico shook his head. He reminded me of a shaggy bear dragged out of his cave. “Why you gotta do this alone?”

“You know Trey. He can't go off-grid to save his life.”

Rico arched a skeptical eyebrow. “Pffft. You don't know what he can do until you give him a chance.”

“I know what he's done every single time before, and past behavior is, as Trey himself says, a reliable predictive indicator. Plus he's acting like a cop again, like an entire police unit rolled into one control freak human being.”

Rico made a noise.

I put down my coffee. “What did you say?”

“I said, the man may have his issues, but when it comes to control freaking, he ain't got nothing on you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I'm talking 'bout you. You claim to be all flexible and roll-with-it, but that's bullshit. You're about as flexible as a tire iron. You gotta have things your way, and you push until that happens.”

“It's called being assertive.”

“It's called being a pain in the ass.”

“Takes one to know one.”

He held up both hands. “Don't kill the messenger, baby girl. And I'll tell you something else. Y'all are arguing, true enough. And Trey may say this is because you're about to do something dumb ass—which you might be—and you may say this is because he's acting like an uptight prick—which he might be—but there's something else going on. There always is with you two.”

The alarm clock in the bedroom went off, beeping frantically. I heard a muffled groan, a hand slapping it quiet. Rico looked in that direction, looked back at me. Kept his mouth shut. I refused to ask. If he didn't want to share, I wasn't going to pry it out of him.

“I gotta get a shower,” he said. “And you need to get done down there and get back up here so we can sit down and talk. You hear me? I miss you, even if you are a pain in the ass.”

“Yeah. I know.” I popped him on the shoulder. “Stay where I can reach you until I get back, okay? I have a feeling this isn't the last I've heard from my poetry-spouting confidential informant.”

Rico's eyes were solemn. “You are probably right. Which should be bothering you a whole helluva lot more than it is.”