If ever you feel that frustrated again, and you start breaking things again . . .
I choose to believe it: Christian is on my side. He will come if he hears me.
But I have to pick my moment.
I have only one chance.
And if I’m wrong, there might be no chance at all.
Chapter 58
My glass is already in my hand, full with another double shot of rum, when Lincoln loses concentration and looks away for a split second.
In a liquid motion, I spill my daughter into Natasha’s arms—one, two, three, fly, she says as she goes—and I throw my glass to the floor and manage to reach the bottle before either of them can get to it.
I crack the bottle against the marble countertop. Again and again. Making as much noise as possible.
Glass shatters and splinters.
The cat bolts toward the studio, but I hope the necessary message was transmitted.
Natasha and the girls are hiding under the snack bar by the time I hit the bottle against the marble a third time.
Mick has me in a barrel hold now, and he’s dragging me toward the laundry room.
I’m sure the second agent will be back any second now, hearing the ruckus. I hope Natasha can get the girls out of the house.
My daughter is shrieking; I hear her cries over Mimi’s, over Natasha’s.
Please let Natasha be on my side.
I kick and wriggle, holding tight to the neck of the bottle, which represents my only chance at getting out of this house alive.
Mick shoves me through the louvered door to the studio.
And only then do I realize he’s cut, bleeding at the side of his abdomen. I must have grazed him with the neck of the bottle.
Good. His blood will be in the house, too. More evidence that he was here. No one can convince me it didn’t happen, that it was only in my mind.
Papa Hemingway is hiding under the shelves on the far wall. I charge toward the shelves, where my first attempts at pottery sit. One by one, I throw them to the floor.
Crash, crash, crash.
The cat takes off again.
When there’s nothing left to break, nothing left with which to summon the man who maybe placed a listening device on the cat’s collar, but definitely told me to smash something when I needed him, I point the jagged neck of the bottle at my father-in-law.
Mick staggers toward me.
I swallow over my fear. “This isn’t going to go the way you thought it would. So stop. Just get out of my house. I don’t know what you need me to know, and I don’t know what happened to that blue diamond . . . or the money.”
Yet he keeps coming at me. “It’s more than the money. It’s more than the diamond. I brought him on board, you see. I vouched for him. You could’ve just drained the bottle of rum when you got here. You would’ve saved me a lot of trouble.
The sound of a gunshot paralyzes me for a second, and the sonic boom of it rings in my ears.
Elizabella.
The world goes blurry through my tears, and the piercing tone in my eardrums has yet to subside. My knees weaken, and I stumble.
My father-in-law is too close now.
He pulls from its hook the wire tool with the knobby buttons on each end, and seemingly in slow motion, he wraps the device around my neck.
No one comes. Not Christian. Not the cops.
I was wrong.
But so was Mick, if he thought I wasn’t going to fight.
Visions of a blue table flash in my mind. Crystals of all shapes, sizes, and colors rain down on me.
My throat constricts.
I can’t breathe.
But I elbow and kick and stab with the remnants of the bottle.
“Veronica.”
He has me by the wrist.
“Veronica.”
My airway starts to open.
When the crystals fade away, reality slowly bleeds into view.
Guidry’s there.
Officer Laughlin.
A few other men in blue.
My father-in-law in cuffs.
“My baby . . .” I scramble to my feet and charge toward the kitchen.
Blood pools on my kitchen floor and trails down the travertine in the hallway, toward the front door. “It’s not her blood,” someone says. “It’s Lincoln’s.”
“Bella!”
“She’s out back,” Guidry tells me. “She’s safe, Veronica.”
I burst onto my back porch, where Natasha is seated, cigarette in hand, trembling. She’s talking with an officer. “I didn’t have a choice. He was going to kill us. When Veronica distracted him, I got the gun away from him, and I shot.”
Bella and Miriam huddle at her side, and my daughter leaps at me when she sees me. “Mommy. Mimi says it’s okay to be scared.”
I press my forehead to hers. “Nini says that?”
“No. Mimi.”
She’s growing up. She’s saying Mimi’s name correctly now.
“Mimi’s right. But Mommy’s here now.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Christian Renwick, clad in cargo pants and a ripped T-shirt. This time, I see something I’ve never seen on him before: a holster at his hip and a badge on a lanyard around his neck.
Chris raises his hand—the one with the scar—and offers a wave.
I wave in return.
“Let’s get you to the ambulance,” Guidry says.
I tighten my embrace on my daughter. Bella presses her cheek to mine.
“The boat,” I say. “Azul.” For a moment, hope flashes: maybe Micah’s still there.
“Impounded. We recovered a cell phone on the boat, registered to your name. Pretty safe to say whoever had access to that boat was the one making the calls.”
“Who owns the boat?”
“It’s registered to the company, Diamante. Diamond Corporation.”
“Micah?”
“Or his father.”
“Daddy kissed me bye-bye on the nose,” Bella says.
“He was here,” I say. “There was a ring he must have taken, along with the rest of the money from the safe-deposit box. Who else would’ve wanted to lure us here?”
“Renwick suspected he saw him, too.”
“What?”
A paramedic is taking my blood pressure.
“Twice,” Guidry says. “Once in the morning, during a walk with his nieces. And later that night.”
“The night I got the phone call on the beach?”
“Yes.”
“Christian saw him? At my house?”
Christian lied to me.
“Renwick also switched the rum left on your porch with the bottle you drank from tonight. We ran tests on the bottle left on your porch. The levels of benzos found are consistent with those in Gabrielle’s system. If you’d drunk that rum, you’d be sleeping for a while.”
“He said he was a writer. He should’ve told me.”
Guidry shakes his head. “A good undercover man never does. He cleared out when you saw his work.”
If Christian hadn’t been here, Mick would’ve come for me sooner. If he hadn’t put the device on the cat’s collar, no one would have known we were in danger. And if he hadn’t switched the rum, I’d be in a deep sleep by now. He saved me three times.
I meet Guidry’s gaze. “Thank you for putting Chris on the case.”
“Don’t thank me.” The detective shakes his head and backs away from the ambulance as the EMTs prepare to close the doors. “I didn’t do what I told you I’d do. I didn’t find your husband.”
Chapter 59
December 23
I’ve given the police every morsel of information I can muster, and they think my theory has merit: Micah was planning to escape his role in Diamante, to escape the insurmountable debt he’d put us in, to escape the web of lies he’d spun in regards to the children he’d fathered without telling me.
He’d spilled his blood in his car to thwart anyone looking for him—both those from the Diamante international shipping company and the authorities—or maybe even to fake his death.