“How about you, then? You moved on? You nearly died.”
He twisted uncomfortably in the chair, lightly touched his abdomen with his free hand. “I’ve been better.”
He drank some more beer.
A Cadillac came charging up the street, turned into the driveway, and parked. Nathaniel Braithwaite got out, slammed the door, spent about half a minute brushing dog hair off his clothes, and approached the house. As he mounted the steps to the porch, he slowed when he saw Cynthia and her guest.
“Oh, hey,” he said. He glanced at Vince, nodded.
“Hi,” Cynthia said. “Nathaniel, this is my friend Vince. From high school. Vince, Nathaniel.”
“Nice wheels,” Vince said.
Nathaniel smiled. “Thanks.”
“Always liked Caddies. But not so much now. They’re trying to turn them into Kraut cars. I liked them when they were big and long and had huge fins on them. Like the ’59. Bit before my time, but that was a car. Thing spanned two zip codes.”
Vince craned his neck, took another look at the car, then cast his eye back at the house. Cynthia could guess what he was thinking. Nathaniel had a pretty nice car for someone renting a room in an old house like this.
“What line of work you in?” Vince asked.
“Used to be in computer software,” Nathaniel said.
“Not anymore?”
“I’m taking a break from all that.”
Vince, motioning to Nathaniel’s pants, said, “If you’re having an affair with a collie, you’re gonna have to do a better job hiding the evidence.”
Nathaniel looked down at himself. “Occupational hazard.”
Vince cocked his head, waiting for an answer. Cynthia didn’t feel it was her place to explain what Nathaniel did for a living now.
“I walk dogs,” he said.
“For what?” Vince asked. “Like, for a hobby?”
He shook his head, forced out his chin defiantly, struggling for dignity. “It’s what I do. I go to people’s houses through the day and take their dogs out for a walk.”
Vince moved his tongue around in his mouth.
“That’s your job?” he asked. Not in a patronizing way. Just interested. “Must pay good to be driving a car like that.”
Nathaniel dug his upper teeth into his lower lip and said, “Hung on to it from my software days. Look, nice to meet you.” He offered Cynthia an awkward smile. “Catch you later.”
He went into the house. They both listened to his feet stomping up the stairs to the second floor.
Looking at the street, taking another draw on the bottle, Vince said, “I’m guessing there’s a story there.”
Cynthia thought back to that day in the moments after she returned to her apartment after having a glass of wine with Nathaniel. Thought about Nate asking her to help him get out of an arrangement he had with her high school friend.
What the hell had Vince gotten Nathaniel into? Cynthia had no intention of talking to Vince on his behalf. Nate was on his own. There was a part of Vince that Cynthia still liked, but she had no illusions about the man.
Helping Nate extricate himself from an arrangement with Vince would be like one fly letting itself getting snared in a spider’s web to save another.
She thought about that, and other matters, as she rested her back against the large oak tree, her arms folded across her chest, half a block down from the house she intended to return to soon. Cynthia had parked her car around the corner so it would not be spotted.
She wondered where Terry’s car was and why it was taking him so long to pick up Grace and bring her home.
This was Cynthia’s favorite spot. She could stand here by this tree, and if a car showed up in the distance coming from either direction, she could scurry around to the other side and not be seen.
How many nights had she done this? Pretty much every night since she’d moved out.
Cynthia needed to know everyone was home safe.
She wanted to phone Terry, ask what was keeping him, whether Grace had run into a problem, but how did she do that without giving away the fact that she was spying on them?
So instead, she waited, took out her cell to check the time. How long had it been since she’d been on the phone with Terry? Nearly an hour and a half? Where the hell could—?
Wait.
A car was approaching. It looked like Terry’s Escape.
She moved around to the other side of the tree, waited for the car to pass her. It was Terry’s car.
He was behind the wheel. And there was Grace beside him.
She watched the car turn into their driveway. Cynthia wondered what sort of trouble Grace had gotten herself into. Drinking maybe? But when she got out of the car, she seemed to be walking okay. But she didn’t look well. Her head was hanging low. Her clothes were a mess, as if she’d been rolling around on the ground in them.
Something was wrong.
But at least she was home.
Cynthia watched until they were in the house, then walked back to her car and returned to her apartment. But she had a difficult time getting to sleep.
She kept wondering what Grace had done.
Twenty-seven
Terry
“What happened?” Grace asked as we walked back to my car out back of Vince’s beach house. “What’s going on?”
“Get in,” I said.
I let Grace handle her own door this time. I was keying the engine as she got into the passenger seat.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked. “Did Vince know what’s happened to Stuart? Was Stuart with him? Are we going to the hospital? Are we going to Stuart’s house? What about—?”
I slammed the heel of my hand against the steering wheel. “Enough. No more questions.”
“But—”
“Enough!” I put the car in drive and did a U-turn on East Broadway. “We’ll talk at home.”
Grace turned away and pressed herself up against the passenger door. I glanced over, noticed her shoulders trembling slightly.
We were back at the house in five minutes. We got out of the car like two people coming home from a funeral service. Moving slowly, not talking, wrapped up in our own thoughts. She stood next to me while I fumbled with the key to let us in.
“Kitchen,” I said.
She walked ahead of me like a condemned prisoner. I pointed to a chair and she sat down compliantly. I pulled out a chair and sat down across from her.
“There’s no point in looking for Stuart,” I said.
Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh my God.”
“It looks like Vince, or his crew, or both, were in the house between the time you left and when we got back there. They cleaned the place up. They’re going to go back, finish up, fix the window.”
“But what—?”
“Whatever happened to Stuart, Vince has taken care of it.”
Grace’s face was flushed. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What do you think it means?”
You want to protect your kids from bad things, but sometimes there’s no way. Especially when they’re the ones who got themselves into the mess in the first place.
“I think it means he’s dead,” I said.
She put her hands to her face, covering all of it save for her frightened eyes. “I shot him,” she said, the words coming out muffled. “I killed him.”
“That part’s less clear,” I said. “I don’t have all the information when I say this, but I don’t think so.”
She brought her hands down. “Why?”
“A few things. One, from what you’ve said, it’s pretty clear someone else was in the house. Two, if you’d fired that gun, I think you’d have known it. The kickback, when you pulled the trigger — it would’ve knocked you on your ass. I think you may have been — maybe you still are now — suffering from a mild form of shock when things started getting scary in that house. So your perception of things is skewed. You don’t really know what went down.”