I put my head in my hands and let myself be pelted by rain. Where the hell was Grant?
I was going to murder the little twerp myself when he showed up.
When I looked up, Lawford and Frank had materialized, and they looked somber. At least, I assumed it was Lawford and Frank. I was a little stressed and their faces blurred in the rain. Lawford had his Taser out and Frank was rubber-gloved and carrying a first aid kit.
“Where’s Sammy?” I said. Even after all this time, understanding their quirks and knowing their scars, I still sometimes had to guess at who was who.
“Dunno,” Lawford said. “Probably still out searching with Meredith. They went off together hours ago. I don’t think anyone’s heard from them.”
They waited for the next morsel of information.
“Tell me you’ve got my brother.”
“Grant? Not yet. We’d hoped you and Pix had scared him up.” Frank was the one who spoke first.
I shook my head. “It wasn’t him we found.” I pointed to where Lyudmila lay under dark skies, the tide ebbing beyond her. I couldn’t see her, but I knew her face was blanched and crusted with sand. Her eyes were open. She didn’t even blink them against the rain.
Pix had given up working on her and was now swimming the bay, looking for “loose ends,” as she called them, which I think meant the corpse of my little brother, which might have drifted away. She thought the killing might have been some kind of two-for-one special.
But I didn’t want to think about that. I was too cold to think. I’d put my shirt back on once I’d gotten out of the water, but it did little to warm me since it was wet from the rain, too.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to warm up.
Meanwhile, Frank had trotted over to where we’d left Lyudmila on the beach. He put two fingers to her neck, then closed her eyes with his hands the size of hulls. He shucked off his yellow oilskin raincoat and draped it over her.
Most people would’ve thought this a kindness, but not me. I was pissed. He didn’t even try to resuscitate her. I mean, he was Frank Gray. I once saw him try to give CPR to a field mouse that was so dead it’d been partially digested by a barn owl.
“That’s it? You’re not even going to try?” I now had three Grays. I expected miracles. Where was my god-damn miracle?
Frank said, “I’m sorry, Henry. She seemed like a really nice lady.”
“Where did you find her?” Lawford said.
“In the boat. By the buoy. It had been sunk. They were really catching crabs.”
I guess I’d said that last part aloud. Lawford blinked. “Pardon?”
“It’s a rowing term. You know, when you scoop or get out of sequence with the guy in the stroke position? And we found the boat by where the crab traps usually are? Get it?”
Frank took a penlight out of his first-aid kit and inspected my good eye, then he pried the bad one open and looked at it, too.
That hurt.
It may have been dark out, but I saw Frank mouth the word shock to Lawford.
“We think you should sit down over here, out of the rain. The smart thing now is to get Pix and the dog and start looking for your brother on land.”
Those were the first sensible words I’d heard in hours. When Pixie said she was going to swim the bay a little longer, it hadn’t seemed very smart to me. As I said, I was too numb to think. But now it occurred to me that if she were right, Grant’s body might soon be lined up next to Lyudmila’s on the sand, and I really didn’t think I could see that.
Maybe, if we were lucky, he’d just wandered off and been kidnapped again.
There was precedence. Dad and Lyudmila had a foundation, and they thought it was important to show us how the rest of the world lived. They were always taking us to Haiti or Africa or South America. As the smallest of us and the one most prone to running off, Grant made an easy target. In Sudan, I caught up with him “playing” with boy soldiers who showed him how to chop down trees with a machete. Their machetes got closer and closer to Grant’s head until I paid them off with American dollars. Then there was that time in Venezuela, the express kidnapping center of the world, where Grant had learned to play Texas hold ’em and acquired a taste for guinea pig on a stick with some kind of narcotics peddlers wearing tattered uniforms with epaulets. Again: The solution had been American dollars.
I prayed that this time wasn’t worse, that he hadn’t been given the same treatment as Lyudmila. I’d always been able to fix him with a payoff before. I hoped I could now.
Yeah . . . denial is a powerful thing.
“Henry,” Lawford said. “I need to ask you some questions. Can you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“When we left the house, Pixie was with you. Where is she now?”
“Swimming in the bay.”
“Why would she do a stupid thing like that?”
“No clue. I think she wanted to rule out that Grant hadn’t . . . drowned, too.”
Frank shook his head. “Your stepmother didn’t drown, Henry. Someone just dumped her in the water to hide what they really did to her.”