Panno waited a moment, to see if either Alena or I had any further questions, though I suspect, if we'd had, he wouldn't have answered them. Then he leaned forward, scooping the photograph in his right hand, making it vanish beneath the breadth of his palm. There was damage to his knuckles, scarring from one or more punches that had hit teeth, perhaps, rather than jaw. He slid the photograph carefully back into the inside pocket of his jacket, then got to his feet.
"I'll take you to him," John Panno told us.
Alena was staring at a point on the carpet, her brow furrowed. She glanced up to him, then moved the look to me, and I could see she was more puzzled than curious. Her association with Trent was negligible, and her only dealings with the man had left her unimpressed. It was Natalie she had bonded with. It was Natalie who might have become her friend if she had lived.
"Come on," Panno said. There wasn't impatience in his voice, just the command. "He knows you're here. I've already called him. He's expecting you."
"All right," I said, giving Alena my hand and helping her out of the chair. "Let's go see just how much Elliot Trent hates me."
CHAPTER
Elliot Trent hated me quite a bit, it turned out. I knew this, because the first thing he said to me was, "You don't deserve to be alive."
He said it softly, and he said it with conviction, and he said it in my face, and when I didn't respond immediately, he repeated it.
"You don't deserve to be alive," Elliot Trent said.
The last four years or so since I'd seen him hadn't been kind, and Panno was right: It was the last three of them that had really done the trick. He still stood ramrod straight, still had the head of steel-gray hair, the same eyes, but they were sunken now, in a complexion that had gone sallow, and that beneath the porch light of his beach house home verged on jaundice. New lines had multiplied from the old on his face, and the sunken eyes, while still sharp, were shot through with broken veins. They burned with ferocity and hatred, and they dared me to answer him, and since what he had said to me twice now was probably very true, I didn't respond.
He grunted, contemptuous, then turned and led the way for Alena and me to follow into the house. Panno took up the rear, and like everything else he'd done, there was nothing threatening to it other than his position.
As if Alena and I would have agreed to come this far only to make a break for it at the last moment.
Trent led us down a hallway, turning off into an open sitting room that afforded a view of the beach through three large bay windows. The walls had that whitewash-plank feel to them, the trim along the windowsill painted in a moss green. Everything in the decor and coloration should have been cheerful, but instead it felt melancholic, the way beach houses always do. There was a desk against one wall with a PC, switched on, and shoved beneath it was a plastic milk crate stuffed full of papers. Two framed photographs flanked the computer on either side, and at first I thought both were of Natalie, then realized only one was; the other was a portrait of his late wife.
Trent moved into the room, then turned, staying on his feet. He motioned to the various seating options, the easy chairs and the love seat, then put his attention on Panno.
"There's chili on the stove, get some food in you."
"We feeding them?"
Trent snorted.
Panno left the room the same way we'd entered it, leaving Alena and me standing at its entrance. Trent waited another few seconds, then repeated the refrain for a third time.
"You don't deserve to be alive." This time, I was sure that, along with me, he was including Alena in the declaration.
The view from the windows was spectacular. The house was off a street called Loder Avenue, and I could look out the windows and see the darkening beach in the sunset, the barrier islands disappearing beyond in the diminishing light. Come hurricane season, Trent would have a front-row seat.
Alena surprised me by speaking up, saying, "I am sorry for the loss of your daughter, Mr. Trent."
Trent's mouth worked slightly, as if he was searching for his teeth with his tongue.
"Was it your bullet?" he demanded. "Is that what you're trying to say to me, it was your bullet that killed her?"
"We didn't kill Natalie," I said.
"Yes, you did." It was a growl. "You didn't shoot her, but you sure as hell did kill her."
"You're wrong," I said. "And if you think that I had the power to make Natalie do anything she didn't want to do, you're deluding yourself. She went her own way, and she always did. She walked away from you and Sentinel. If she had wanted to, she would have walked away from me, too."
"But she didn't." Trent glared at me. "She chose you over me, and you let her die."
I should have let it pass. He was her father, and it was his grief, and if anyone was entitled to rage at the injustice of it all, it was Elliot Trent.
"No," I said. "You don't get to accuse us of that, me of that. You've got your guilt because you think you drove her away, you lost her, you're welcome to it. You earned it. You don't like me, fine, you never have. You hate me-fine, maybe I've earned that, too. But I don't own Natalie's death, and neither does Alena, and if that's what you've been waiting eight months or three years or all your goddamn life to say, then we're done here."
I turned my back on him, started out into the hall. After a fraction, I heard Alena moving to follow me.
"Don't you leave," Trent said.
I didn't stop.
His voice was hoarse, and pained with the strain of the volume he put upon it. "Dammit, Atticus, don't leave!"
Panno had appeared in the hallway to my left, coming out of the kitchen. He'd removed his jacket, and I saw that his T-shirt was actually a muscle shirt, missing its sleeves. There was light from the archway, and it spilled out, and I could make out a tattoo on his upper arm, a Chinese dragon in faded color. He had a bowl of his dinner in one hand, was eating a spoonful of it with the other. He didn't look like he was going to try to stop us.
"You don't blame me for that," I said, without looking back at Trent. "You don't blame Alena, and you don't blame me."
Behind me, I heard the creak of a chair, the sound of him taking a seat.
"No," he said, and he sounded as tired as I'd felt this same morning. "No, all right. That's fair."
I turned, and Alena and I moved back into the sitting room. Trent tracked us as we came back, then indicated the love seat. Alena took it, and I followed.
"It's hard to remember that she was precious to people other than me," Elliot Trent said. "And it's difficult to accept that she was precious to people I dislike as much as the two of you."
"Just had to throw that in there, didn't you?" I said.
"I'm not going to pretend." He pointed at Alena with his right index finger, as if trying to stab her in the heart. "She's a murdering bitch, and you're her partner now, or so they say. Even if you weren't, I know what you did for her, I've learned that much, at least. She's a killer, no matter how she tries to change her stripes, and now you're one, too. Two of The Ten, sitting side by side in front of me. If you think I like that, it's you who's delusional, not me."
Beside me, Alena didn't move. She wasn't looking at him, instead focused on the view out the bay windows. The room felt like it was growing darker, despite the lamps that burned on the wall and in the corner.
"You've gone to a lot of time and a lot of trouble to speak with us, Mr. Trent," Alena said. "Perhaps you'd like to come to your point?"
"In a moment. Given the time and the trouble I've taken, I'm allowed an indulgence or two. I've been waiting for this for almost three years."
"Panno said it was eight months," I said.