Darker Than Any Shadow

Chapter Forty-seven

By the time the first responding officer arrived, Gabriella had bound Frankie with a dozen of Trey’s ties, including one that acted as a gag. She had been surprisingly efficient at this, executing several knots that even a former Girl Scout like myself didn’t recognize. She’d muttered extravagant Gallic curses while she did so, stringing the sibilant vulgarities together like rough pearls on wire.

I held a package of frozen peas to my head and tried to speak coherently to the uniformed cops standing in front of me. I explained what had happened, over and over again, all the while checking my phone out of the corner of my eye.

Trey hadn’t called back. When I’d finally gotten through to him, he’d asked if I were okay, if I’d called 911, if I were being taken to the hospital. All the pertinent questions. And then he’d told me he was on his way and hung up.

Business as usual. It was reassuring in some ways, but heart-emptying in others.

The cop reread my statement. “And then you hit her one final time with the soup pot?”

“No. That was Gabriella.”

“The suspect was tied up at this time, correct?”

“Correct. But she was trying to escape, so it seemed prudent.”

This was a big fat lie. Gabriella had delivered one final blow merely for the satisfaction of it. I”d made her promise we’d keep that one to ourselves.

I looked around the apartment. “Where is she anyway?”

“She went to the station to make an official statement.” The officer checked his notes. “She said to tell you she’d bring an herbal poultice by later.”

Great. Just what I needed.

“Did y’all find Lex’s box?”

“In the supply closet. It’s been processed and taken downtown.”

“Did you find out why she wanted it so desperately?”

“No, ma’am. That’s for the detectives to figure out.”

Suddenly, the door slammed open, and Trey blew in like the proverbial whirlwind. His head whipped side to side, scanning the room until he spotted me on the sofa. He slipped past the two officers at the door and the indignant detective trying to catch his attention, evading them as expertly as a matador. He covered the space between us in two seconds and dropped onto one knee right in front of me.

I adjusted the bag of peas so I could see him. “So much for doing things your way.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Dizzy? Nauseated? Any trouble seeing?”

He pressed two fingers against the side of my neck. I reached up and pulled his hand down.

“An EMT looked me over. He says I should have the injuries documented, but I’m fine for now.”

Trey didn’t seem to be listening. He was examining my face, my neck, my hands. At the rate he was going, we wouldn’t need to document anything—he would have every scratch and scrape memorized.

I saw Garrity out of the corner of my eye. He had his badge out and was working his disarming patient authority on the officer at the door. Suddenly there was another figure right behind him—the concierge, highly distressed.

“Mr. Seaver,” he said, “you cannot leave your car like that! It’s an extreme hazard!”

Trey shot a look at Garrity. Garrity flashed his badge at the concierge. “I’ll take care of it in a second, all right? Let the man see his girlfriend.”

The concierge grimaced and folded his arms. But he didn’t argue with the badge.

I was flabbergasted. Trey never abandoned the Ferrari, especially not where god-knows-what could happen to it. I looked him right in the eye, and for the first time since he’d burst in the door, he met my gaze directly.

And what I saw there took my breath away. His eyes burned like I’d only seen during high arousal, clean blue flame. I recognized it, yes, from the heat of passion, but not like this. And I knew what I was seeing was Trey, all of him, no persona, no safe wall, the real beating-heart whole of him.

I hitched in a breath, but still the tears came. He held my face, thumbs light on my temples. He was a little shaky from the adrenalin afterburn, but rock solid underneath. I snuffled my wet face into his neck, and with no prompting, his arms went around me.

“It’s not just sex,” I mumbled against his skin.

He froze. “This is about sex?”

“No, it’s not. That’s the point.”

“But—”

And then I kissed him full on the mouth, which hurt a little, but then he kissed me back, real gentle, and then it was a little about sex. But mostly it was the other thing, the big good thing. And when the kiss was done, he sat beside me on the sofa, one arm around my shoulders. I leaned into him, my warm good-smelling rock.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Garrity saunter over. He perched on the arm of the sofa.

“We took GA 400 at one hundred and twenty miles per hour. I thought I was going to die in a pile of twisted flaming metal, I kid you not. And then he drove the thing right up on the welcome mat and took off at a run into the building with the concierge yelling bloody murder at him. Didn’t even lock the doors. I’m surprised he didn’t leave the keys in it, like, hey Atlanta, anybody want a free Ferrari?”

I looked at Trey. He shook his head, frowning. “We never got above one-seventeen.”

I felt the laugh coming, marbled with hiccups, irresistible. It worked its way into my throat, and I laughed even as I cried, but I didn’t let go of Trey, not for one second.

But then I heard a familiar voice in the doorway. It was Rico.

“Goddammit all to hell,” he said, his voice a guttural growl of anger, fear, relief. He came over and hugged me, tears sparking in his eyes. “Your boyfriend left me. I had to hitch a ride with some cop.”

Trey didn’t deny it, or apologize. He didn’t take his hands off me either, even as I clung to Rico, patting his back. Garrity shook his head, but damn if he didn’t look all choked up too. It was right pathetic, the four of us, like some weird testosterone-curdled Hallmark commercial.

And then my phone rang. Garrity leaned over and took a peek. He held it out to me. “It’s your brother.”

I accepted it with a sigh. “May as well get this over with.”

***

Eventually the APD cleared out, taking Garrity with them. Rico stayed behind and helped Trey clean up soup, then collapsed in the armchair, checking his cell phone every thirty seconds, waiting for Padre to call with the competition results.

He used his phone to play snippets of his performance. I knew he was critiquing himself, trying to find the edge where he could have delivered a little sharper. The words flowed as he backed the video up, repeating certain phrases over and over again. The minutes ticked by, the finals long over, the tabulation begun, the results still unknown.

Trey brought pills and sat next to me on the sofa. I put my head in his lap and curled into a ball. The small particular sounds of Rico’s performance and the apartment itself echoed in my ears, and I slipped into that hazy zone between consciousness and sleep, but my brain still scrambled hamster-like on its wheel.

Trey put a hand on the back of my neck. Somewhere in the distance, I heard a rumble of thunder layered with Rico’s words, the cadences repeating, sing-song and hypnotic.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I mumbled.

Rico put his phone away. “Take your pills. Go to sleep.”

“I can’t. We still don’t know why.”

“Yes, we do. She was a homicidal, self-obsessed psychopath. Lex crossed her. Debbie too. End of story.”

I pushed myself upright, and a wave of dizziness assaulted me. The room swam a little, as bendy and melting as a Dali painting.

Trey frowned. “You shouldn’t—”

“I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not. Lie back down.”

I reached over and took him by the shoulders. He flinched, but didn’t pull away. Or smack me. Both good outcomes.

“You can’t stand it either, I know you can’t. I can feel it rattling around in your head too. It doesn’t make sense yet. Lex felt threatened enough to pull a knife on Frankie. Why was she that infuriated? What did she think was in that box?”

Trey didn’t reply. But I saw his index finger start that restless rhythm.

“It had to be something tangible. Lex didn’t fly without a net. He always had something solid to match his threats.” I ticked off on my fingers. “A switchblade in the pocket, an ankh in the desk, money under the mattress. He wouldn’t have just thrown words at her, he would have…oh god.”

And then suddenly it made sense. I got light-headed with understanding. Trey leaned closer, perturbed.

“Tai?”

“I was wrong, that’s exactly what he threw at her.”

“What?”

“Words!” I slumped forward and put my head in my hands. “Damn it! Why couldn’t I have figured this out before the cops took the box!”

“What’s so important about the box?”

“Not the box, the words! I need those words!”

Trey pointed toward his office. “The words are right there. In the file cabinet.”

I stared at him, baffled. “The cops took all that as evidence.”

“They took the originals. But I made copies the night you went to Java Java.”

It took a second for what he was saying to dawn on me, but when it did, I grinned so wide the corners of my mouth ached. Of course he made copies.

I grabbed his face and kissed him. “You are absolutely perfect, did I ever tell you that?”

He looked a little stunned. “I…no.”

I pushed myself to standing, still wobbly, but determined now. Rico jumped up as I hopped toward Trey’s work station, Trey following at my heels.

I steadied myself against the file cabinet. “Where?”

Trey pulled open the top drawer and ran his fingers along the indexes. It took him two seconds to find a folder labeled Lex Anderson/ Box Contents/ Miscellaneous Writings/ Duplicates.

He handed it to me. “Here.”

I plopped myself on the floor and pulled out the photocopies, sorted chronologically. I ran my finger along the handwritten lines. “I thought these were keepsakes, but they’re not. They’re evidence.”

Rico looked confused. “Of what? My apartment is filled with poem-covered trash too.”

“I know! That’s why I didn’t get it at first. I thought it was about the words—and it is—but not only the words.” I waved frantically at the bedroom. “Go play the DVD, the team retrospective.”

“The one Padre brought?”

“Yes, yes, that one! Fast forward to Frankie’s part.”

Rico did as I asked. I gave one paper to Trey. “Read this one, the one written on the takeout menu. And listen.”

He did. Frankie’s rich alto washed into the living room, a little halting, a little unsure. Trey read. Suddenly his eyes flashed my way.

“It’s the same poem.”

I smacked the floor. “Now look at the date on it.”

“Over a year ago.”

Rico came out of the bedroom and stood in the doorway. “That’s the threat he made up against Frankie, that she stole his poems?”

I shook my head. “This wasn’t like all his other threats—those were manufactured. This one was real. And it would have destroyed her reputation as a poet, probably gotten her kicked off the circuit forever.”

“Yes, it would have.” Rico didn’t seem convinced. “But Frankie wasn’t stupid enough to steal from a teammate. He was bound to notice.”

“She didn’t steal from Lex. She stole from Kyle.” I waved the papers. “Amber told me all about it in the hospital. Kyle made the rounds during the auditions—Jacksonville, Miami, Savannah…and Atlanta. Frankie was on the team then. She judged the auditions.”

Trey still looked puzzled. “But she had her own poems. And they were successful ones.”

“Not poems like these. Padre said she sucked at the sweet emotional stuff, but you’ve gotta have that in your repertoire if you want to compete, you told me so yourself. So imagine, one day Frankie’s judging this out-of-town newbie…”

I paused to let this scenario sink in. Kyle—hopeful, inexpert, a nobody—with his collection of sad sweet poems. Frankie—mercenary, blocked, opportunistic—with the poems she needed right in front of her, ripe for the taking.

“All she had to do was write them down and send Kyle packing. Which she did. I’m sure she never expected him to turn up again. And Kyle didn’t. But Lex did.” I looked at Rico. “You know as well as I do that this kind of plagiarism is the devil to prove. But Kyle had these scraps, dated scraps. So when he found out—”

“But how did he find out?”

“Amber said he studied poets obsessively, like you do. He must have seen one of her videos and recognized his words coming out of her mouth.”

“But what’s Debbie got to do with it?”

“Nothing! She stumbled into the argument, that’s all.”

“So why didn’t Frankie kill her on the spot?”

“Because Debbie made the perfect scapegoat. She herself was convinced she’d killed Lex. It wasn’t until she decided to throw the blame back on Frankie that she became dangerous. Until then, she’d been desperate to avoid the cops, with good reason, and Frankie could use that.”

We all went quiet. The puzzle pieces maneuvered themselves into place, the truth becoming clear. I spread the poems on the floor, a carpet of verse, a blackmailer’s tool, a poet’s secret history.

I shook my head. “One thing I don’t get—why didn’t Kyle turn Frankie in to the PPI committee the second he found out? Why create Lex?”

Rico came and stood beside me, his eyes on Lex’s words. “Because he was desperate to show her that he was the better poet, on stage, where it counted. But Frankie was gonna yank him from the team. These poems were Lex’s big gun. He pulled it.”

I sat there silently, surrounded by Lex’s words. In the end it hadn’t been vengeance that fueled him. Once he’d tasted the spotlight, Lex had been so desperate to stay on the team that he’d betrayed his teammates one by one. All for three minutes and nineteen seconds behind the mike.

“He fell in love,” I said.

“With who?”

“With Lex. In the end, he was willing to keep the whole thing a secret if he could have his moment on the stage.” I remembered his body, crumpled on the floor of the bathroom. “It didn’t turn out that way.”

The three of us were silent, Frankie’s words washing over us, Kyle’s words spread on the floor before us. But Lex himself remained a phantom—intangible, incorporeal—even in the end. I knew the rest of us were no different. Some of us used words, some used Armani, but we all hid our soft true parts under masks and layers. We were all masters of illusion.

Trey surveyed the living room. It still smelled like soup, and there was a bullet hole in the wall, scuff marks on the floor. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly.

“I’m going to make tea,” he said. And then he went into the kitchen.

I looked at Rico, but before I could say a word, his phone rang. He looked at it, looked at me. “It’s Padre.”

I held my breath and crossed my fingers.

He put it to his ear. “Hey, man, what’s the news?”

And then he smiled, really big. Tears welled in his eyes, and I started crying too, finally overwhelmed by the whole of my day. Which was, without a doubt, finally over.

I hobbled myself up and rested my head against his chest, my big beefy best friend. His arms went around me. Behind me, I heard the kettle in the kitchen, the quiet sounds of tea-making. When Trey came back in, he had a mug of oolong cooling in his hands.

“Do you want to call Cummings or should I?” he said. And then he waited for my answer.