Retribution: The Second Chances Trilogy Book Three (33 page)

“Nothing! Excuse me all to Helena, but the way you’ve been driving this trip’s taken forever and I was just trying to pass the time with something that didn’t have the intensity of prepping for admission to law school and maybe I should’ve been spotting punch bugs or naming farm animals that start with the letter ‘x’ instead of qualifying people for revenant status and don’t think that lets you off the hook because even though it wasn’t a long absence, you could be one too, you
did
come back, you know, and now that I think of it, Laurel could be one because
she
came back in a sense—she came back to what she most believed in and what she really wanted to be . . . I wonder what the collective noun is for revenant? . . . Wait, I’ve got it, a resurgence! No, a rejuvenation, a revitalization, a resurrection . . . A re-
vival
of revenants. That’s it!” She chortles with satisfaction and blows kisses to an imaginary audience.

He’s as close to helpless laughter as he’s been in he can’t think when. Amanda is rivaling Colin for imaginative wordplay and surpassing herself as a chaser of gloom. She’ll be thanked profusely when they’re alone—right after he places a call to Detective Grillo to determine if it really is too late to unfuck the situation.

Grillo’s reportedly not in when Nate places a call from the Dorchester to the Weald Guest House in Middlestone. “No, no message. I’ll try later,” Nate says to a desk clerk who informs that later lasts another ten minutes, that the switchboard shuts down at eleven and won’t operate again until seven in the morning.

“
Shit
,” Nate says instead of goodbye and hangs up.

That brings Amanda from the bedroom, where she was undressing

“Problem?” She says. “Anything I can do?”

“Yeah, keep doing what you were doing while I watch,” he rather grunts. Seven in the morning will come soon enough.

Colin watches Laurel tell her brothers and sister goodnight from the distance he’s maintained throughout most of the evening. Not that he’s been aloof or all that physically removed—he’s been instantly available if needed—but he has felt like something of a fifth wheel whenever focus shifted to the double burial conducted today.

All of the Chandlers have repeatedly thanked him for arranging the transfer of their deceased parents to what they refer to as neutral ground. Neutral ground, to distinguish from the biased ground where their reviled grandmother is buried. But to Colin, neutral ground distinguishes the two hard-won plots at St. Margaret’s from the place he had in mind when the transfer idea first struck. He was thinking of a spot here on the estate, near to the specimen copper beech Laurel so loves, a spot Emmet talked him out of lest a gravesite be contested one day in a property settlement. Just like a solicitor, that.

The goodnights are taking forever because they all know these are actually goodbyes being said. There’ll be no time for this sort of thing in the morning when university schedules not only dictate a quick return to the States, but necessitate an obscenely early departure for the airport.

Colin enters their sphere and adds his voice to the farewell chorus before Laurel shoos the three visitors up the back stairs much as she would Anthony if he dawdled too long. She returns with him to the kitchen table for the dregs of tea gone cold and the last few crumbs of an Eccles tart. His close scrutiny reveals her on the edge of too thin even for a rock star’s taste, too near to pallid to be explained away by the extraordinary number of rainy days they’ve suffered lately. And her dark eyes gleam a spark too bright and her smile beams a bit too brave to be entirely believable.

“You cannot possibly imagine how glad I am to have my parents so near to the place where I embarked on my greatest happiness,” she says, her expression taking on full believability. “I know . . .” She flutters a hand at him, “I know they’re not
really
there—you won’t hear me talking to them, nothing like that—but I know whenever I visit that spot I’ll feel their presence . . . I absolutely know I will.”

Her statement is no more fraught with emotion than any he’s heard today and that includes a stunning pair of eulogies by a girl who never knew the one parent and remembered the other mainly as a broken old man. But for some reason, what Laurel said just now is getting to him in a way Emily’s tender remarks and the gruff-covered tributes made by Laurel’s brothers failed to do. Maybe it’s the wedding reference that’s stirring him, making him see her the way she was before tragedy took over.

“What?” she says. “You’re looking at me funny. Shouldn’t I be smiling? Shouldn’t I be happy?”

“Happy’s good. No complaints there.” He shakes off the wedding memories for now.

She blots up tart crumbs with a moistened finger as he knew she would, refuses his offer to get her something solid to eat, insists that one last swallow of cold tea will satisfy her thirst.

“What’s keeping you here, then? Something need squaring away before we go upstairs? Something I don’t know about?”

“As a matter of fact there
is
something you don’t know about. And that’s only because I just found out.”

Can’t be too bad, her smile’s still there. “And that is?”

“I don’t want to go ahead with this . . . this deception, because that’s what it is, a deception. If I’m going to break the rules, I’d rather say nothing of what we know about how Rayce died. I’d rather go with my initial instinct to suppress the information and—”

“Yeh,” he cuts in, “but wasn’t that because you were afraid how I’d react and as you’ve now seen—”

“That was the prime reason at the time, yes, but now I have other reasons. Now I’m afraid the fallout will be worse than this . . . this bomb we’re about to drop. And, of lesser importance, I’m afraid things have gone way too far with this protecting me from my sins of omission. Ridiculous, really, because I no longer have a professional reputation to protect, and even if I did, I’d be far better off telling the truth, admitting I held back evidence, explaining why, and accepting the consequences. Only in Emmet’s worst-case-scenario was I ever facing a jail term. A severe reprimand was a good bet, but as I just pointed out, that no longer matters so . . .”

“You’re preaching to the choir, as Amanda would say.”

“You’re thinking the same thing?” She lets her hope show.

“I’m heavily bent in that direction. The keeping quiet about what we know direction.”

“But you wanted to clear Rayce’s name, you wanted the world to know—”

“You think you’re the only one periodically gone mad with idealism? That was my idealism showin’ and once I thought it through a few hundred times I couldn’t see a point to it. Not when the world’s gonna think what they wanna think—as you’ve finally come to accept—and given fresh details to distort, Rayce’s fucked-up family’ll just be more dug in on the idea of me as enabler, facilitator, whatever they wanna call it. The only good I see coming of this is to the self-promoting detective bloke out to stick it to the higher-ups any way he can.”

“You caught that too?”

“After Nate brought it to my attention, I did, and I can’t say I’m keen about him grabbin’ his fifteen minutes of fame at my expense—at cost of what’s gonna trickle down on me in the process . . . Shit! Will you just listen to the rock star now gone mad with his own concerns? Am
I
not the fine one, callin’ the detective self-involved?”

“No, you’re not. No, not at all. You’re not being selfish to want to avoid a predictable media blitz or try to put it off as long as possible.” She jumps to her feet, makes for the phone niche at the other end of the kitchen. “I don’t suppose anyone thought to write down a number where Detective Grillo can be reached.”

“Nate would know.”

“I don’t want him involved, not yet. Now let me think . . . I heard someone say Grillo’s staying in a local guest house and I’m sure I heard Emmet say the name when he was explaining why they held the briefing in the church. Local guest house, so that would mean Middlestone, wouldn’t it?”

She pokes through two shelves of cookery books for the ever-wandering phone book before he finds it in a bureau drawer.

“A British word.” Laurel takes charge of the phone book, flips it open to the listings for hostelries and such. “I think it means forest or wild, something like—”

“Weald.”

“Yes! The Weald Guest House. Here it is.”

She reads the number aloud, he places the call. No answer. He tries again, this time reading the number himself. Again no answer. “Bollocks.” He tries one more time, still no answer after ten rings.

“Is a guest house anything like a bed and breakfast?” Laurel offers. “Might there be no phone service after a certain hour?”

“That’s as good a reason as any I’ve got, but still, wouldn’t you think . . .”

“We’ll try again in the morning. First thing. There’s still time, you’ll see.” She puts a positive face on it and beckons him to follow her upstairs.

Life on the road taught him clockwatching only prolongs insomnia. Colin estimates another half hour to have passed when he gives in and looks at the bedside clock. Learning how long he’s been locked in this limbo of his own making doesn’t much matter, but learning how much longer he’ll have to tolerate it does matter. Matters a lot and it’s worse than thought, he’s sorry to see. Three more hours to endure before the very earliest he can take action. He rolls over, regards Laurel’s achingly desirable shape, untouchable for at least another week, and that decides him to leave the bed now. Now, before lust and frustration take charge. She stirs slightly when he smoothes the covers and slips away without so much as grazing her forehead or that choice spot just there in front of her ear.

From the dressing room, he grabs clothes and shoes at random and makes a clean getaway from the bedroom. Clean getaway, Laurel’s term, one he hasn’t thought of in a while. Not since it meant evading paparazzi instead of watchdogs of his own hire.

That realization catches up with him on the first floor, where his intentions of going to the studio are dashed. He can’t go there now, not unless he’s willing to be seen by any number of inquiring eyes and speculated about by too many gossiping mouths. Even circumspect Sam Earle might wonder why the master’s fled the master bedroom this hour of the night and if it portends another disaster.

“Bleedin’ Jesus,” Colin mutters as he scatters a construction of Simon’s Legos and bumps into one priceless antique after another in the semidarkness of the central corridor. Who needs motion detectors with all this shit strewn about.

He curses and stumbles his way into the great hall, where there’s enough ambient light to dress himself in the odd conglomeration of clothing that includes trousers to a track suit and a shirt better suited to a tropical island. The shoes he slips on are the tired old trainers he’d no more part with than the tuxedo he was wearing on the fateful New York day when Laurel stood out from the crowd.

The only thing standing out here is the piano he so seldom plays. He’s far enough from sleeping quarters he could risk playing it now if he had anything he felt like trying out—anything that was even faintly new or original. All the themes he’s explored lately have seemed puerile, derivative, or worse. How many tunes about first love, last love, found love, lost love, live love, and dead love are needed? How many lyrics contain some turn on the phrases “you complete me” or “you are the air I breathe” or “I can’t live without you?” Who by now hasn’t written of loneliness, disillusion, disappointment, and heartbreak from every possible angle? Enough with the rainy day and sunny day metaphors. And does the world really need another impassioned power ballad to reduce to elevator music and hear butchered by wedding singers?

Laurel’s little cat wanders in and he finds fault with it simply because no one’s ever given it a name. He picks it up, “From now on your name’s Purrhaps, goddammit. ‘Purr-haps,’ get it? Because you make that sound in your throat and because you’ve always been a ‘maybe’ because nobody’s ever committed to you.” He strokes the cat strenuously enough that the little creature is relieved to be set free.

Next, he paces off the broadest dimension of the vast space, attempts to project beyond these prison walls, beyond being the target of a world-class nutter and that wears out after three back-and-forths and a dead end where life beyond these walls is concerned.

Then he takes up a pose in front of the fabulously mullioned window, where he amuses himself by inventing names for a proposed supergroup made up of himself, Chris, and the two best-known survivors of Rayce’s original band: Dirge, Merge, Purge, urge, Surge—all offshoots of Verge—are too lame even for an emergency Jeremiah tale.

A belly-flop onto one of the couches isn’t as satisfying as Anthony makes it look. Nor is contemplating an outing to seaside with three or more bodyguards in tow and a trip to a safari park with more entourage than participants—the only relief activities under consideration right now.

He turns onto his back thinking he might be able to doze for a bit, but he has no better luck than he did the night he ran out on Laurel. That naturally starts him thinking about how willing she was to compromise her principals in order to protect him from himself, how willing she is now to pay for it, how much she’s already paid for it, because he will never believe the loss of the baby was unrelated.