“I wasn’t going to tell you,” Kay told her.
You almost did.
“I didn’t think it would be something you’d want to know.”
No, thought Jolie. Who’d want to hold that conversation?
“That’s why I left yesterday. I couldn’t say it.”
But it was all out in the open now, wasn’t it?
Belle Oaks wasn’t a retirement facility. It was a home. Belle Oaks was an old mental hospital upgraded and changed to accommodate people with psychological and neurological problems. Schizophrenics and bipolars, people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. The suicidal. Belle Oaks was a private hospital where the rich sent their family members to be warehoused.
Dorie had lived to be fifty-eight.
Fifty-eight.
Kay told her Jolie’s mother died last year, of a heart attack. In Tallahassee, only a hundred miles away.
And Jolie never knew it.
“She didn’t know who anybody was,” Kay told her. “She suffered brain damage when she fell.”
Jolie asked Kay for all of it, and Kay told her all of it.
Jolie’s mother’s instability and anger. How she’d fly into rages. How she’d become increasingly dissatisfied with her life. Her growing regret about everything she’d thrown away to marry Jolie’s father.
Their side of the story.
According to Kay, the one thing that kept her going was the Petal Soft Baby Soap contest. The company flew mother and daughter to New York and shot the commercial there.
It was all Dorie could talk about. But more and more she confided in her older sister, Kay’s mother. How she missed her family, how she missed Indigo. How disappointing her life was, except for the Soap Baby.
Then it ended. The baby soap people tried a different kind of advertising campaign, and life became unbearable again.
The rages started back up.
Jolie’s mother hated her life. Maybe she hated Jolie’s dad.
Maybe she even hated Jolie.
Jolie’s back was getting tired. She stood up, did some stretching even with her taped hands, and then leaned against the wall. The room smelled of bathroom cleanser, and underneath the cleanser smell was the faint odor of urine. The cloying smell of roses over-lying all of it. In the other room, people talked in hushed tones. Jolie heard the word “she” a lot. She tuned them out.
The reason Jolie was still here, the reason she was alive, was because her father had lost his job at the ironworks factory. He came home in the middle of the day to find his wife sobbing and screaming as she held her baby underwater in the bathtub.
And Jolie wondered why she’d freaked out in the tub.
There was a struggle, and her dad saved her. In her thrashing, Dorie slipped on the tile, fell, and hit her head.
Emergency surgery and a coma followed.
Jolie closed her eyes. She could hear the murmuring in the other room. They were talking about it. Weighing every nuance, turning over every lie.
Dorie regained consciousness, but when she did, she had the intellectual ability of a seven-year-old. No more rages, though. Those were gone.
The rose smell got stronger, seemed to seep under the door along with the voices. A sickly sweet smell. I named a rose for you.
Jolie’s dad called the only people who could really help him: the family. They sent a private ambulance. They got the best doctors. Had plenty of conferences in the waiting room, at the house on Indigo Island. A plan was made. Dorie Haddox Burke died of an aneurysm, sudden and heartbreaking for her family.
Jolie remembered the photo in their family album—a white coffin under a mound of white lilies.
Her father, who hated to see even a butterfly die, must have been relieved to spare her a story like that. The story that went like this: Your mother didn’t want you. Your mother hated you so much she tried to kill you.
So instead he knitted the fabric of their lives together into a new story. A new story with a sad ending. It was always “just the three of us.” A loving father, a loving mother, and the child they doted on.
Jolie left the bathroom and went up to Kay. “You knew it all this time, and you never told me?”
Kay looked helpless. One of the few times she was at a loss for words.
“All this time?”
Kay opened her mouth to speak, stopped.
“Save it,” Jolie said, tired in her bones. “I can’t think about this right now.”
57
Mike Cardamone parked the old Subaru several blocks away from the safe house. The Subaru rattled and the oil light stayed on permanently, but he’d picked it up yesterday for cash from a man who was as secretive and paranoid as himself.
He put the sunscreen in the windshield, locked up, shouldered his duffle, and started walking.
The subdivision was empty in the steaming heat of summer. Blinds were closed. Cars locked up in garages. Abandoned houses on every street. It was not yet seven a.m., but the heat was already oppressive, and by the time he reached the house on Sea Oats, he was wringing wet.
He stared at the house, 8459 East Sea Oats, closed-up and blank-faced. It gave him a bad feeling. He continued around the block, went into the alley, and hopped the wall. After making sure the neighbors were nowhere in evidence, he unlocked the back door.
A fly zoomed out, clipping his cheek. And another, followed by the smell. Underlying the smell of the hot, closed-up house was the bloated stench of death.
He stepped back out into the yard. They’d need a cleanup crew pronto. But even as he punched in the number, Cardamone realized he had to go in.
He had to know what happened here.
The cleanup crew on the way, Cardamone reached into the duffle and pulled on a jumpsuit, plastic booties, a shower cap, and gloves.
He started with the hallway and checked the back rooms. The corpses were no shock; he’d expected to find them there. Jackson, Davis, and Green were recognizable from the photos he remembered. Professional job. He was only surprised by the third one, Green. Green, of all people, had put up a fight. Glued to the floor by his own gore. Arterial blood had arced up and out, spraying the walls.
Do not go gentle into that good night…
His mother’s favorite poem.
He searched the rest of the house with mounting unease.
Where was Peters?
Another surprise—two bodies in the garage. Neither one of them was Peters.
With a shock, he recognized them: Salter and Bakus.
So where was Peters?
On his way back to the rental house, Cardamone’s thoughts raced. He needed to discipline himself, think this through. The house would be wiped clean. No worries there.
But where was Peters?
A couple of phone calls confirmed what Cardamone already knew: there had been no raid on the compound off Cape San Blas.
Could Peters have done all this?
Cardamone searched his memory banks. Peters’s real name was Cyril Landry. Had Landry connected up with Franklin somehow, or was there someone else?