The rain was starting to feel personal, like it had some kind of grudge against him.
“I think I was remembering feeling suffocated.” She seemed not to notice or care about the rain. “I don’t know. Maybe I was cheating on you? Maybe you found out? I think I wanted out and you weren’t happy about it. At all.”
He wanted the storm to just get on with it, to really let loose and get it over with, but it seemed liked it was already stopping. They weren’t in its path after all. He said, “I would never try to pressure you into anything.”
“See, I feel like we’ve had this conversation before.”
Him wanting more than she wanted from him?
Him caring more, or about the wrong things?
Yes, maybe that did feel right.
He went and sat on a low stone wall, pulled a weed that had sprung up between two rocks, releasing the smell of dirt into the air. Drops from trees shimmied the water in the pool, stirred some of its murk. “I’m starting to really not like this picture of who I was,” he said. “Jealous and angry?”
They turned at the sound of footsteps and voices.
Chambers was walking toward them, this time with his partner in tow.
“I’m really sorry, Lucas.” Chambers stopped a few feet away. “It wasn’t my call on this one. I’m sure you can argue self-defense, but the feds, well . . .”
His partner kept coming.
“You were right about the fingerprints on the gun . . . ,” Chambers said.
“. . . and there’s gunshot residue on a jacket that also has your DNA all over it.”
“. . . and the coroner put John Norton’s time of death as the day you all escaped.”
Escaped?
They didn’t escape.
“Lucas Davis,” Chambers’s partner said. “You are under arrest for the murder of John Norton. You have the right to remain silent . . .”
AVERY
Her cell phone rang during episode six of a web series she’d decided to binge-watch to kill time. At long last, Emma had remembered that her phone was a phone.
“Hey.”
Emma: “Are you watching the news?”
“No. Why?”
“Just turn on CNN.”
So now even talking sounded like texting.
Avery got up to stop her show and switched over to regular TV, then found CNN.
“. . . arrest made in the case of The Leaving . . . but perhaps not the arrest people expected or hoped for. The perpetrator of the crime has been identified as one John Norton, and he has been found dead. A gun with fingerprints belonging to returned Leaving victim Lucas Davis is alleged to be the weapon used and Davis has been taken into custody.”
Another guy said, “Now, I understand there is some speculation here, as to whether Davis might have also played some role in the death of Max Godard.”
Then the original guy: “I’m not sure there’s much to that theory but . . .”
Avery said, “I gotta go,” and hung up and turned off the TV and went up to The Shrine and looked through a desk drawer until she found the picture of herself—Smurfette—and Max and Lucas as pirate and sailor. She looked for signs. Signs that Lucas was not who she thought he was. Something maybe in his eyes that would reveal some dark side he had spent his life learning how to disguise.
She couldn’t see it, but also didn’t want her memory of Max to be tangled up with him, just in case.
She took the photo and went back downstairs and out to the lanai and to the grill, where a trigger lighter hung from a side hook.
She clicked it a few times before it lit, and then she ignited the corner of the photograph and watched as the image started to melt away.
There was no point in keeping a photo like that, in keeping a memory like that.
Not with him in it.
There would be no happy ending for any of them.
Maybe murderers could have soft hair.
And anyway: memories of ridiculous things like princesses and ballerinas and superheroes and pirates, all that nonsense? What place did they even have when you grew up? And what was wrong with peo ple—parents—for even allowing kids to dream about all that, for encouraging it?
She’d never be a mermaid or ballerina or magical fairy. No boy would ever fly or scale walls and swing from bridges. Growing up was about crushing every dream kids had—nonsense, empty dreams that we’d given them.
Burn, Smurfette, burn.
You too, Tink.
Throw Santa in there on a stake while we’re at it.
The flames were too fast.
She pushed open the screen door and dropped the flaming photo onto the dirt, startling a salamander, which scurried away. She picked up a nearby rock and hit the embers a few times, not wanting to burn the whole house down, though, really, it wasn’t the worst idea.
Scarlett
A woman in a pale-pink dress holding a feather duster answered the door. “Can I help you?”
“Oh.” Scarlett hadn’t been expecting . . . the help?
Thought about just walking away.
Back down the marble steps, past those two pillars.
Down the long path, past that Jaguar and that BMW, past the gardening crew pruning the flowering trees by the front gate, back to where she belonged.
But . . .