Double Cross (33 page)

BOOK: Double Cross

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To save us trouble, I’d stopped at a quick shop on the way from the airport and picked up a prepackaged bundle of firewood. We weren’t looking for an authentic experience. I’d had all the authenticity I could take from this place. Within a few minutes a small flame spread from the loosely clumped tender and licked at the slender bottom layer of logs. We sat close to each other on a log facing the fire. I pulled my feet up beneath me and hugged my knees. In the distance, across the lake and the bluffs, the radio tower still blinked, as it had that night, just before—.

I squeezed my knees tighter to my chest. I didn’t want to think about it; but what else was I supposed to think about? We were here, and we hadn’t come to sing camp songs. I’d brought Mom with me to show her, to help her understand why I’d turned out the way I had. Maybe it would help—if not her, then possibly me.

We’d made progress, Mom and I, since the night the police and medical technicians carted Stanley out of the Mason house. For one thing, she’d put him behind her quickly. In fact, she hadn’t even visited him. If she had any intention of doing so, she would have to hurry. He had confessed to everything, and the folks at Huntsville Prison were awaiting his arrival. The only question was how long his stay would be. The sentencing would take place in February. In the meantime, he was being held at Dallas County Jail’s medical ward until he was fit enough for transfer.

Stanley’s confession hadn’t come immediately. When the Southlake Police discovered two key bits of evidence, though, he and his attorney began looking for the best plea deal they could make. The first item was a single piece of paper seized from a desk in the whorehouse in Southlake. It demonstrated something that none of us would ever have imagined: Stanley wasn’t just a john, and he wasn’t being blackmailed. He was an owner. Twenty-five percent of the prostitution operation belonged to him. The extortion ring that Katie was investigating had no connection at all to Stanley. It had just provided a timely excuse that he seized upon when he desperately needed an explanation. It bought him time to figure out how to get rid of Mom and me.

The second piece of evidence was less stunning, but just as dark. Elise’s computer had been empty because Stanley had erased it. Or at least he thought he had. Fortunately, he was a chemical engineer, not a computer wonk. The police hired an expert who restored Elise’s files and found the bottom half of her suicide note. It hadn’t been a suicide note at all, but a note of explanation that she assumed would be read after she left town. Standing alone, the first half looked conveniently suicidal. Stanley had seen the possibilities immediately when he picked up her laptop at her house.

He was an opportunist and he used what luck provided him. He’d told the truth, up to a point. She really had threatened to expose him, and she really had offered him money stashed in the Cayman Islands if he would agree to leave the country. But he hadn’t gone to her house just to pick up her computer. He went there to kill her. If he could make it look like a suicide, so much the better.

As for the money in the Cayman Islands, Brandon found it hiding in plain sight. After the police solved the case, Brandon asked if he could look at the flash drive I’d taken from Elise’s car. It contained only her past two years’ tax returns. Brandon studied the returns for hours, looking for a clue. Then he noticed that her Social Security number was different on each return. And he noticed something else—each number had ten digits instead of the usual nine.

Elise was a sharp one. She never intended for Stanley to get the ministry’s money. There were two Cayman Islands accounts, not one, and she hid the true account numbers on the face of her slightly revised tax returns. Once Stanley was out of the country, she apparently intended to contact Brandon from wherever she was hiding, disclose the blackmail and embezzlement, and give him one of the account numbers. Stanley’s short-notice trip to Venezuela with her computer would have confirmed her story and damned him.

Elise must have figured that with Stanley and a logical explanation in hand, the police wouldn’t even bother looking for her. The discrepancy between the embezzled amount and the amount in the single account wasn’t likely to pose a problem. After all, who would believe Stanley’s story about how much cash she had already delivered to him? The police would just assume he’d spent the missing amount or stashed it somewhere. Elise would be gone, and the money in the second account would be hers.

I had to tip my hat to her. It probably would have worked. If Stanley hadn’t decided to kill her.

As for the rest of us, I had worried that Mom would be forced to move in with Kacey and me. Fortunately, though, Stanley was right about the patents. They still had some value. The university was willing to buy them quickly, but at a deep discount. The sale provided enough cash to keep the mortgage company off Mom’s back while she sold the house in Southlake and found a smaller place. She expressed an interest in looking for something close to us. I was guiltily ambivalent.

After things settled down, Kacey, Mom, and I spent Christmas Eve together—an unlikely threesome gathered around the tree. Kacey did everything she could to make it work, from teaching herself to cook her first holiday dinner to asking about Mom’s favorite Christmas carols and playing them while we ate. Kacey’s mother died when she was young, and she wanted desperately for Mom and me to connect again.

In her own dysfunctional way, I think Mom worked at it, too. She brought a garish, red-and-green striped ball for the tree. “Christmas should be colorful,” she said, as she hung it at eye level. True to form, her tone left little doubt that the dazzling ornament was an unspoken judgment on our subdued, white-ribbon theme. She also brought identical gifts for Kacey and me: how-to books that contained a new age road map to our inner quiet place—hot tub not included. I wondered whether it had been just too daunting for her to try to find a unique gift just for me, her daughter. I let it go, though. If I wanted a relationship, I would have to absorb the slights quietly and focus on the big picture.

And I did want a relationship. I became certain of that the moment she left her jacket for me out on that country road.

We attended Christmas Eve service at Kacey’s church near the SMU campus. It was a decision Kacey must have regretted. Those around us cast incredulous glances our way as Mom raised her voice in solitary accompaniment to the choir’s special numbers. Meanwhile, Kacey and I sank as low as we could in the pew. For Kacey’s sake, I resolved to steer Mom to a different church once she was settled.

The day after Christmas, I suggested to Mom that she come with me to West Texas. I wanted her to see the place where it had happened. Initially she objected, but she didn’t fight it hard. We decided to make the trip on December 30, because I had to be back to Dallas for New Year’s Eve. I’d agreed to meet Michael and some of his friends at a restaurant. It wasn’t exactly a date—at least not yet—but I was looking forward to it. Even I could see that I had been taking him for granted.

So, there we were, Mom and I, two nights before the New Year, sitting side by side, staring into the fire at the campsite where Dad died.

The sunlight faded quickly, and stars appeared in the sky, a few at a time. I rested my chin on my knees. “We looked at the stars,” I said.

“Who did?”

“Dad and I—that night. We were lying on our backs, right about in this spot.”

I picked a stick up from the ground near my feet. “He said that some people like the stars and some people like the lights. He liked the stars.” I drew a circle in the dirt with the stick. “He told me I liked the lights. It hurt me when he said that. I wanted to be just like him.”

“He was a good man. You are like him, Taylor. Very much like him.”

I tossed the stick away. “No, I’m not like him at all. He could have lived. He sacrificed himself to save me. No matter what I do, I’ll never be good enough to deserve that.”

She brushed her hands over the legs of her jeans. Then she tilted her head back. “Do you wonder why I sing at church when no one else is singing?”

This was so typical. I was talking about my dead father—her dead husband—and she had found a way to bring the conversation back to her. I turned my head away and didn’t respond.

She didn’t seem fazed. “I sing because despite all the things I’ve done in my life, God accepts me as I am. Grace is the one thing I don’t have to earn. In fact, I couldn’t earn it no matter what I did. It’s a gift from Jesus. Giving it made him happy, because he loves me more than he loves himself. And if nothing else makes me happy, that does. So I sing because it’s the least I can do to say thank you. I don’t care a bit what anyone else thinks.”

I turned to look at her. She braced her hands on the log and kept her eyes on the fire. “You don’t have to deserve what your father did for you. You can’t earn it. It was a gift. Giving it made him happy—because he loved you more than he loved himself, more than he loved his own life.”

“How could you know that? You weren’t there.”

Her voice remained steady. “I know what he did. I read the news stories. I’ve still got them.”

I studied her face. She had stopped in the airport restroom and scrubbed off her makeup. I didn’t know why. In the flickering light of the campfire, her skin was clear and clean and glowing. She was beautiful, so incredibly beautiful.

“You knew everything,” I said, “but you didn’t come back. I needed you.”

She rubbed the back of one hand with her thumb, as if trying to scrub something off. “I couldn’t.”

A few weeks earlier, I’d reacted to the same response with contempt. Now I was beginning to understand just how sick she’d been, how troubled she still was. So I sat there, silent, watching the fire.

I thought of Dad, and how much I missed him. And I thought of Kacey and how much I loved her—so much that dying to save her would have made me happy. Mom was right. For the past twelve years I’d been trying to earn something that was free, something I could never earn, no matter what I did. What Dad gave me was a gift, the same gift I would have been happy to give Kacey. The same gift Jesus gave me. That was what Simon had tried to teach me.

I thought I’d found the secret when I charged across the room at Stanley’s revolver in a hopeless effort to save Kacey’s life. And I had found it, but I hadn’t really understood it. Looking at it from the outside, what I had tried to do was make a sacrifice. But looking at it from the inside, from my heart, it was simply love, pure love. Like Jesus’ love. That was what made it a gift. That was what made it free. Maybe that was what gave us all the chance to be free.

Mom was too troubled to give me everything I wanted—at least for now. She understood the secret, that much was clear. I wondered, though, if she was capable of giving the gift as well as receiving it. I wondered what personal demons were holding her back.

We sat there looking at the sky, and after a few moments she said, “Not all fathers are like your dad.” She hugged herself and began to rock. “What a father does can change you, put you in a dark hole; a hole that swallows you and holds you down in the blackness for the rest of your life.”

I had barely any recollection of her father. He died when I was six. I tilted my head and watched her. Her cheek glistened in the fire light. It was wet. I reached over and brushed it with my fingers. “Did your father hurt you, Mom? Is that what happened?”

She straightened her back. “I loved him. I loved my daddy.”

My shoulders sagged. “Oh, Mom.”

I touched her arm. She flinched.

She ran a hand back through her hair. “I want to thank you for something,” she said, and it was clear she was changing the subject, that she wasn’t ready to tell me everything.

I let my hand drop from her arm. “What’s that?”

She reached over, took my hand in hers, and squeezed it. “You didn’t leave me.”