The Alibi Man (32 page)

chapter
67

         
THE MOON
was bright as Lisbeth walked along the dirt road. She didn’t know what time it was. Time didn’t matter. She had been walking for quite a while, though, she thought.

She had never walked into the wild countryside alone. The idea would have frightened her. But not Irina. Irina would have laughed at her fear of snakes and alligators, and teased her into going. Irina knew how liberating it was not to feel fear. Lisbeth was only just beginning to learn what that meant.

She knew where she was going because the location had been described in great detail over the last few days among riders and barn hands, on the news. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, to go to the place where Irina had been found, where her body had been destroyed. It was no less a holy place than any other for her.

She had worshipped Irina. Irina, so smart, so sophisticated, so bold, so brave.

She had loved Irina as she had never loved anyone in her life. She had needed Irina. Irina had been her big sister, her best friend, her…her mentor. Irina had been everything Lisbeth was not.

Lisbeth had tried her hardest to follow in Irina’s footsteps—to be casual, and careless, and carefree, and elegant; to look life in the face and grin a wicked grin.

It would have been so perfect, if only it could have been just the two of them.

Funny, she thought. When she came to South Florida she had such very different ideas about what she wanted from life. She had wanted what she had been taught to want—a husband, a family—even though she had known from past experience with men that there were no happiness guarantees, that love could be a hateful, frightful thing.

And she had learned that lesson all over again…and again…and again….

Irina had taken her under her wing. Irina had been her one true friend and her protector—or so she had thought.

Never in her life had Lisbeth been with—or thought she would ever be with—another woman. She had been raised to believe that was wrong. But with Irina she had felt right, and safe, and, Midwestern guilt aside, happy.

Lisbeth paused along the trail to bend over and cough and to struggle to fill her aching lungs with air. She sat down for a moment’s rest on a cypress stump.

The night was clear and warm. Teeming with life, if a person cared to notice. She did. She listened to the frogs and the squawks and ratchet sounds of the marsh birds.

It was, of course, the animals that could be neither seen nor heard that came with the most danger in them. Love was an animal like that. And jealousy. And hurt.

Lisbeth sat on the stump along the oily black canal, waiting for them to come to her.

chapter
68

         
“BARBARO TOLD
me Irina wasn’t shy about her plans to entertain the boys that night,” I said. “Lisbeth begged Irina not to go, but Irina went anyway.”

“You think Lisbeth came back later to confront Irina?” Landry said. “That was when Barbaro saw her.”

He pulled into the drive and parked next to my car near the cottage.

I felt a terrible sense of urgency as I got out of the car. The fatigue that had taken hold of me burned off on a new rush of adrenaline.

Lisbeth was alone somewhere. I had a feeling Lisbeth had been alone a very long time. I thought that was perhaps the source of my sympathy for her—that I looked at Lisbeth Perkins and saw in her all the things that life had burned out of me long ago.

I called her name as I went inside, knowing she wouldn’t answer.

Sick as a dog from what she had gone through the night before, her Midwestern work ethic still had not allowed her to leave a mess in a host’s home. She had made the bed and fluffed the pillows.

The note was propped against the spring-green velvet bolster, in Lisbeth’s happy, loopy, girlish handwriting.

I read the message, my heart sinking deep inside me.

She thanked me for helping her.

She thanked me for being a good friend to Irina.

She apologized for everything she had done wrong, for every shortcoming she had, for every good thing she wasn’t.

She wrote down the names and phone number of her parents in Michigan.

She said good-bye.

chapter
69

         
SHE FELT
so calm now. So at peace. She had fought the decision, but now that it was made, it was the only thing that made sense to her.

Elena had told her to work off her guilt, not wallow in it. In a way that was what she was doing. She was paying back in kind.

She had been looking forward to the party that night. It should have been fun. She and Irina would dance and flirt and bat their eyelashes and guys would buy them drinks, but Lisbeth had already decided she would leave early. She was done with Mr. Brody and his friends. She didn’t want that life anymore.

But Irina did. Or so she had said that night when Lisbeth wanted to go home.

“I want a rich husband, Lisbeth. You know that. And you know which one I want.”

“But, Irina, you know he won’t marry you—”

“He will. You’ll see. I’m pregnant. I just found out.”

The pain was so sharp it took Lisbeth’s breath away.

“What?”

“I’m pregnant. I’ll tell him later tonight.”

“For God’s sake, Irina, how could you possibly say it’s his? You’ve been with more guys than you can count in English.”

Irina’s eyes flashed with anger. “How dare you say that to me, Lisbeth? You fuck all of them too!”

“Not anymore. I’m done with them.”

“Well, good for you, Miss Goody Goody. I am not done. Bennett Walker will divorce his crazy wife and marry me. I’ll make sure of it.”

“But, Irina, what about us? I love you.”

Lisbeth would never forget the expression on Irina’s face—a strange, painful mix of cruelty and pity.

“Don’t be foolish, Lisbeth.”

All that night Lisbeth had replayed that scene over and over and over in her head, each time hurting worse than the last.

In some versions she saw regret in Irina’s eyes, heard sadness in her voice. That was the memory she worked hard to keep—that Irina knew they couldn’t be together, and her cruelty in saying no was a kindness in disguise.

Lisbeth had gone home and paced her tiny apartment, crying and fretting, wishing she had said something different, that she hadn’t been so stupid and sounded so clingy. It didn’t matter what kind of arrangement they had. It didn’t matter if Irina had her rich American husband. Lisbeth knew firsthand that Bennett Walker had no objection to her and Irina being together. So what if he wanted to watch even?

God, how pathetic you are, Lisbeth,
she’d thought. But in the next second she felt terrified she had already blown it, and she couldn’t get to Players fast enough to mend the rift.

Everyone had gone on to Bennett’s house by the time Lisbeth got back to Players. She didn’t have a parking pass to get into the Polo Club, where Bennett lived, and wasn’t good at convincing the guards with half-truths about who she was and why she was there. She parked at Players and walked over.

But Lisbeth never went inside Bennett Walker’s house that night. Standing in the shadows, she was able to see in through the tall windows and what she saw had sickened her.

She had been at those parties herself, had done what Irina was doing, but somehow being on the outside looking in, with the soundtrack removed, she saw it all the more clearly for what it was. Degradation.

Only Irina wouldn’t have seen it that way. She was laughing and wild, beautifully, stunningly naked and proud, taking everything Bennett Walker and Jim Brody and his friends were giving her and begging for more.

Lisbeth didn’t know that person. That person would never have loved her.

Then the harsh words had come from within.

How stupid could you be, Lisbeth? How naive?

Words that had lashed her like whips many, many times in her life.

Why would she ever think she might be loved by someone?

The tears came like rain as she sat there waiting. She felt as if she were made of shattered glass. She could even see the lines between the broken pieces as she looked at her wrist in the bright moonlight.

She had spent hours that night sitting crouched against the side of Bennett Walker’s house, her entire being throbbing in pain.

Sometime before dawn Irina had come out to smoke a cigarette. She sat on one of the lounges by the pool, her long legs stretched out in front of her.

“I don’t know you,” Lisbeth said, standing beside the chair. She stared down at the stranger she had spun into a fairy princess. “How could you do that, Irina? How could you do that to me?”

“No one did anything to you, Lisbeth,” she said. “They all did it to me.”

Irina had laughed at that, a hard, cynical noise as discordant to Lisbeth as pot lids clashing.

“Grow up, Lisbeth,” she said.

Hurt beyond words, Lisbeth had gone behind the lounge. She crouched behind it, sobbing, her hands over her face.

“I loved you,” she whispered over and over. “I loved you, I loved you….”

The pain had built and built, the pressure of it threatening to crush her lungs, and her heart, and her head.

Slowly her hands had inched around the back of the chair and her fingertips had brushed Irina’s upper arms.

And then, without even realizing fully how, she had hold of the leather cord that hung around Irina’s throat with a medallion hanging from it, the necklace just like her own. They had bought them together at the horse show in Wellington.

And her hands tightened on the cord.

And the pain swelled.

And her vision went red.

And she thought,
All I ever wanted was for you to love me.

She cried aloud now, a sound so full of torment and raw pain it didn’t sound human. She cried for all she had lost—her heart, her innocence. She cried for all she would never have—a future, a family, love.

And when the crying stopped, there was nothing left. She was empty, finished. It was time.

With no emotion at all, she undressed. She pulled from the pocket of the borrowed jacket a small, very sharp knife she had also borrowed from Elena’s kitchen.

And with the tip of that knife, she opened a vein in her left wrist, and one in her right.

And she stepped down into the black water of the canal and poured her life into it drop by drop.

chapter
70

         
SOMETIMES,
our best just isn’t good enough—not for those around us, not for those who love us, not for ourselves.

Landry and I made it to the canal where I had found Irina in record time. But record time wasn’t good enough.

Landry hit the brakes, and I think we were both out of the car before it fully stopped.

I ran as fast as I could across the little land bridge to the far bank, where the glare of the headlights shone on the little bundle of borrowed clothes Lisbeth had neatly folded and left there to be found.

I called her name and turned around, as if she would materialize before my eyes.

Landry caught me before I could turn too far and see too much. And he pulled me hard against him and held me there as tight as he could, as I cried in the only way I could—with my soul.