Strings Attached (29 page)

“Jeremy, dear, please sit down.”

She watched with concern as he shuffled slack-shouldered from the foyer into the living room toward the Chesterfield, then changed directions and planted himself in the club chair across from the picture window.

He drew his white-socked feet onto the cushion and wrapped his arms around his knees, hugging them to his chest. Eventually, he raised his head and looked out through the glass at the cobalt water beyond the cliffs, where he saw, much to his dismay, a dozen or so crisp white sails skimming near and far. Then a breeze skittered through the house, and his nostrils curled from the sickening perfume of orange blossoms that wafted through the doors and windows. His mood grew blacker at the witnessing of such natural harmony. Why did everything in this world seem to shine more brilliantly the darker his life became? Or was it just a simple matter of contrasts, like the way raw meat looks bloodier in the market when they put dark green parsley around it?

It grieved Katharine to see him so depressed, so completely deflated. He’d made so much progress since his arrival those few months ago; she’d watched him unfolding, blooming really, a little each day. And now it seemed as though Jeremy hadn’t made eye contact with anyone in the house for nearly a week.
Not since that terrible night.
It reminded her so much of when Jonathan had first come to live with her after being orphaned, and it was almost too much to bear. She’d seen now that lightning did, in fact, strike twice in the same place.

Especially when the same storm hangs around for decades.

“Is there anything on your mind?” she asked him finally.

“I was wondering if they’ve caught him yet.”

“No dear, they haven’t. But they’re looking everywhere. Give it time. They will.”

“Why can’t they find him?”

“Because he’s very smart.”

“I want to kill him,” Jeremy said.

“I’m sure you do.”

He lifted an accusing stare to meet her worried gaze. “I’m ready to know everything that happened. From the beginning. And don’t leave anything out.”

She nodded gently. “I’ll tell you, if you must know.”

“I need to.”

She pulled herself up daintily from the chair and drew in a breath, as if about to deliver a complicated soliloquy. This wasn’t going to be easy for her; she’d been dreading this moment since he walked through the door last October. But he needed—he deserved—to know. Even about the parts where she herself had failed them.

“As far as we know, this is what happened, based on Darius’s father’s sworn testimony, information from your mother, and the parts that I can remember myself,” she began. “This whole ugly situation can be traced back to when Jonathan could take no more of your mother’s cocaine use. He confronted her and gave her an ultimatum: that if she didn’t quit, he would take you away. That was just before she moved you up to Lake Estrella.

“Instead of giving up her filthy drugs or you, she told Jonathan about my husband having been involved in the drug trade from South America to Los Angeles, and if he tried to gain custody of you she would expose Bill. She thought this would frighten Jonathan into thinking she had the power to destroy our wealth, but she was wrong. Only Bill and I knew that my attorneys had drawn up an ironclad prenuptial before we married. The truth was that if the government found out about his drug trafficking, they would’ve seized his private bank accounts and things of that order. But they couldn’t touch anything of mine, which was, and still is, just about everything you see.

“Your father decided to confront Bill, which was a terrible mistake. He thought he could get him to pressure Tiffany’s drug dealer, your friend Darius’s father, Ari, into stopping her seemingly endless supply of cocaine. He refused, saying Jonathan’s marital problems weren’t his responsibility. Your father, in turn, told him that when he turned twenty-one in a few months and inherited his controlling interest, he would expose him and throw him out of the family’s corporations once and for all. He also threatened to open the books and find out exactly why the numbers weren’t adding up, and if anything looked suspect he would see to it that Bill spent the rest of his life in prison.

“Right about that same time, Ari was involved in a bad narcotics deal and lost the money with which he was planning to purchase his only competitor’s gas station down on the highway. He figured that if he had the only gasoline concessions in town, he could have his own little monopoly and could make enough money to get out of the illegal mess he was so deeply in. Bill agreed to buy the land and let him operate the concession, as long as he ‘fixed a situation’ for him. That was how he put it.

“Your father went to Lake Estrella to plead with Tiffany about not taking you away and to get additional information with which to incriminate Bill. Unfortunately, my husband thwarted his efforts.”

“But how?”

“Apparently, Ari had a brother with another service station in Crestline, which is a short drive from Estrella. Bill followed Jonathan from Tylerwood and radioed ahead to let Ari know when to cut him off. Then Ari slowed to a maddening pace and prevented him from passing, and finally Jonathan lost his composure, which wasn’t hard to do after what your mother and Bill had done with that photographer, and passed him at breakneck speed. As he went around a blind curve, he was driving too fast to see that Ari’s brother had moved a snowplow into the oncoming lane, so he swerved rather than collide with it and went over the cliff in one of the few areas where there was no guardrail. The entire filthy operation was orchestrated by Bill and coordinated with CB radios.”

“So Mom didn’t really have anything to do with it?”

“No, dear. Thankfully for you, she didn’t. But your friend’s father did. I hate to put it in such terms, but Darius’s father murdered yours.” She shook her head sadly. “And now look at the price he’s paying.”

“How much time will he spend in jail?”

“It’s hard to say, because he made a deal with the district attorney in exchange for testimony against Bill. I’m referring instead to what’s happened to his unfortunate son.”

“He’s been out of the coma now for three days.”

“I pray that he continues to improve. I don’t care what sins his father committed; no son should be visited by such cruel retribution.”

Jeremy stood and looked through the window at the flotilla of cormorants bobbing on the placid sea below. He still had more questions. He clasped his hands behind his back then turned slowly to her. “But what about my mom?”

“Her autopsy results haven’t been released yet. But what I can tell you is what we expected—she’d been drinking.”

“Goddamn her! Couldn’t she stop, just for me? Didn’t she love me more than her shitty booze?”

“Jeremy, you must calm down, and sit down. And please don’t speak of her in such a way. You see, a tape was made of a conversation between your mother and Mr. Mortson that night, and I’ll explain how that came to be in a minute. But what you should understand is that he pushed her that night, emotionally that is.
Deliberately.
Your mother had a terrible weakness, and Bill set her up to succumb to it.”

“But how?”

“I won’t embarrass you with the details of the recording—although someday you may wish to review it yourself. In fact, I believe it might be healing, when the time is right. Suffice to say that he made your proclivities known to her, and in the most base, defiling manner possible. And he implied that if your father were alive today, he might rightly blame your sexual ‘experimentation’ on her. It upset her so much that she returned to her old escape.”

“But how did he know about me? I never told anyone.”

“And for good reason, which we shall discuss at a later time.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked, glaring at her. “What’s wrong with now?”

“I mean, young man, that I haven’t the stomach just now to discuss the ramifications of your ‘situation,’ and what it means for us all in the long run. Please…just allow me to continue.”

He looked around nervously and opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it and sat down. Was he really ready to do battle with her about this?
Now?

“Very well.” She cleared her throat, and Jeremy saw the tears building in her eyes. “As I was saying about Mr. Mortson, he knew about your ‘situation’ because, as we just discovered, every e-mail transmission in this house fed into his computers. He knew what you were writing to your friends and they to you, where you were going, and with whom.”

“That explains why he said, ‘You deserve to have a night out with your chums’ when I was leaving that night. Do you remember?”

“Yes. I recall thinking at the time it was a queer choice of words, even for him.”

“He said that because Carlo calls me ‘chum’ all the time. I should’ve known something was wrong. Especially after that whole thing with my transcripts.”

“We all should have.”

Their eyes met. Katharine looked away. “So what about you, Aunt Katharine. How could you not have known about him, about how bad he really was?”

“Over the course of the past few years, I did.” She managed a wan smile. “Our marriage had begun disintegrating even by our third anniversary. But I hadn’t the talent or interest for the family businesses, nor the stomach, so I needed to keep Bill around, at least until I figured out what to do. And I told myself he might even really love me, to stick around with no possibility of his sharing ownership in our holdings; of course, I knew nothing of his embezzling—about his stealing from me, from us. So I braced myself and threw myself into the gallery and redecorating this…this
mausoleum,
and other such meaningless distractions.

“But two years ago, I began working closely with the FBI to snare him, after an officer at one of the institutions we bank with noticed some irregularities. I made an effort to examine the reports more closely, but I couldn’t poke around too much or I might have aroused his suspicions—and besides, I wasn’t entirely certain of what to look for. As you have witnessed, my husband was…is a very crafty man.

“Over Christmas, I didn’t really go to Alaska, Jeremy, but back to Washington to review with the Bureau the most recent batch of evidence they’d collected. We couldn’t communicate out of this house because we rightly suspected that he wire-tapped every conversation. Even your mother and I were in contact via cell phone; we were collaborating during the latter part of her hospitalization.”

“You were?”

“Yes. I believe Arthur mentioned something to you about overhearing a conversation she and I were having about restraining orders and attorneys. I felt strongly that he shouldn’t have said anything, and this was something that he and I continually disagreed on. But he told you about our conversation with the hope that you would prompt me to include you in the investigation, but I refused to heed his advice. I felt it would put you in more danger if you knew, and now I see that I was wrong.” She narrowed her eyes and nodded. “One should always take a professional’s advice.”

“What do you mean?”

“Arthur isn’t a butler, dear. He’s an FBI agent. He was our bodyguard, yours and mine.”

“What?”

“They sent him to us after I opened the file. You were protected from Bill even when I was away. And your mother knew about Arthur’s role here, which is why she consented to send you to me.”

His head felt wobbly inside, but it all made sense. “But what about that night at the Frat House?
Where was he then?
”

“Oh, he was there. He just didn’t want you to see him, so you didn’t. In fact, he was standing by the door when Darius walked out in your father’s—in your jacket. Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to him until some time later that the boy could also be in danger, and by the time he arrived on the scene, the crime had already been committed. He blames himself terribly for what happened.”

“Arthur went to save Darius?”

“Who do you think found him and called for help? He saved your friend’s life.”

“But what…what about Arthur’s boyfriend—that whole story about his being killed in the September 11 attacks?”

“That…well, that’s unfortunately all true. Every bit of it. The Marines wouldn’t have him, but the FBI was happy to. After all, since their former chief, Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, was exposed as a homosexual transvestite, they had no choice but to revise their employment policies. No one wants the ugly finger of hypocrisy pointing their way, especially when it’s attached to your own hand.”

“So what’s Arthur going to do now?” he asked meekly.

“As long as Bill is a fugitive, he’ll stay here with us. It seems that he’s grown quite attached to you and is in no hurry to leave, so he’s requested to stay on. Besides, he says he’ll never be able to afford a house with an ocean view, and he’s begun dating some local fellow he met recently. A bartender named Nathan.”

Jeremy nodded. “But why did Bill want to kill me? I never did anything to him, and I didn’t know anything about the embezzling or the drugs and all.”

“From what Ari said, the instructions…” she choked down sudden tears, unexpectedly looking her age.

He went to her, wrapped his arms around her, and squeezed. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“No,” she sniffled, eye to eye. “You need to know. Bill’s instructions to Ari were to ‘beat in the kid’s brains but not kill him,’ to render you a helpless ‘vegetable’ and to ‘make it look like a hate crime,’ because ‘no one would ask questions about some little queer who was too stupid to walk around by himself.’ That poor man, Ari, was beside himself. He didn’t want to do it, but Bill threatened him with exposure and loss of his livelihood. So, reluctantly, he called up an old debt from three drug addicts who owed him money. He’s a simple man, you know. And he loves that boy dearly.” She pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes, then blew her nose with a honk.

“But to answer your question,” she continued, “Bill wanted to guarantee that, unlike your father, you’d never be in the position to cast him from the family’s table. And he probably would have killed you too except that it would have looked too suspicious, especially after what he was planning to do to your mother.”