He chooses his next words as carefully as he would insert an IV in an infant. “Nova said she saw something in the shed, right before you went in.” Blake scans the room for anything matching Nova’s description of a strange flower that just isn’t quite right, but he only sees the vanity bedecked with perfume bottles, and the nightstands stacked with paperbacks and copies of New Orleans Magazine. The sumptuous bedroom is still fresh from the housekeeper’s last visit after Caitlin left for Spring House… but no flower.
“She wasn’t sure what it was,” he says. “But she said she saw it on the floor of the shed, and whatever it was… it was glowing. She thought it might be some kind of flower.” His delivery at this point is sloppy and abrupt, he knows. But it is the quickest way he can think of to mask his stunned reaction to Caitlin’s bloody definition of justice.
“She was probably drinking along with the rest of the help.”
“So… no idea what she’s talking about?”
“None,” she says. “You’re here because of something Nova said?”
“Of course not. I’m here because it’s… you.”
She doesn’t turn to face him, but she is sitting upright, staring at him through the mirror, her hands clasped against her knees, her entire body braced as if she fears his next words might constitute a small, sharp strike to the center of her scalp.
“Do you think I killed him?” she whispers.
He wants to say, No. You couldn’t have. But that answer is too logical, and it will reveal how thoroughly he’s done his homework because of that very suspicion. Several witnesses placed her too far from the shed for her to have been involved in whatever took place inside. And he knows Jane Percival hasn’t said anything to implicate Caitlin, and that if she had, Caitlin would probably be in an interrogation room with her lawyer at this very moment. Indeed, Jane Percival has said nothing the detectives want anyone to hear; she remains in custody, and there’s no trace of her account in any of the increasing number of news reports about the bloody disappearance of a hero cop known for solving an infamous hate crime when he was just a Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputy.
“Of course not,” Blake says. It is not his most convincing delivery, the words weighted down by forethought. But it’s better than more hesitation, he figures.
Caitlin doesn’t figure the same, because she says, “I appreciate you coming,” yet there’s anything but appreciation in her voice. It actually sounds like a dismissal.
“You thought I wouldn’t?”
“I’d like to be alone now,” she says, confirming his feelings, “if you don’t mind.”
Even though it was the impression he got in the first place, he is still surprised by how wounded he is by his curt dismissal, meted out, it seems, because he has refused to rejoice in the prospect that Troy might have been murdered by the same woman he cheated on her with.
“I’ll call you tomorrow.” And she is done with him.
“OK…”
His only exit is through the double doors, and when he recalls the speed with which Caitlin inexplicably drew them shut just a few moments before, he springs into action. Too quickly, apparently, because Caitlin senses he’s got some agenda other than a hasty departure and begins calling out his name, her voice immediately shrill with fear.
“Blake!” she shrieks by the time he’s passed through her father’s study and is standing on the threshold of the solarium.
The flower isn’t glowing, but there is a wrongness to it that makes him hesitate. At first Blake thinks it might just be its placement, all by itself in a sundae glass in the middle of the wicker table. But he’s got plenty of experience not allowing a patient’s paranoid delusions to change his opinions of needles and scalpels, and at the moment, that’s exactly what Caitlin is—just another patient. And this is just a flower, he’s sure of it. He closes the distance between him and the sundae glass and picks up the stem as gently as he can, given how quickly he’s entered the solarium.
“Blake! Don’t!”
In what feels like the same instant, Caitlin pulls him backward by one shoulder and slaps him across the jaw. Like an afterthought, the flower’s stem slips from his right hand which has gone as slack as his jaw.
The shock is as total and paralyzing as that moment years before when it became clear the patch of darkness racing across the levee’s crown toward the spot where he and John Fuller had been making out just seconds before was not, in fact, a trick of the eye, that it had arms and legs, that it was moving in a single direction with purpose, that it had a weapon.
Caitlin’s slap seems to have unleashed a flood of adrenaline in her; she is bright-eyed and alive suddenly, after moving through what appeared to be a drugged fog, and once again a jolt goes through him, the odd attraction mixed with revulsion. And as the sting of her palm fades from his cheek like a muscle going lax, Blake confirms to himself what he had thought just moments ago: that while the woman standing a few feet away may have, at one point in time, been his closest friend in the world, she is now but a shadow of Caitlin Chaisson, a wavering reflection on moving water.
But there’s no real comfort to this realization, just a cold vacancy inside that makes him dizzy. He is halfway down the front walk of her house when he hears her calling out to him. She’s standing on the front porch, and as some young and tender part of him opens to receive her apology, she extends one hand and opens her palm.
“The key,” she says.
He speaks before he measures his words, his sneakers slapping the brick walkway, and as he closes the distance between them, Caitlin doesn’t close her open hand or lower her extended arm, but her eyes widen in muted surprise.
“You were the first one I remember seeing,” he is saying. “In the hospital room, when I came to. Before I could even remember what happened. Before they told me John was dead. You were there and you were holding my hand, and you were brushing my hair off of my forehead, and you were saying whatever you needed to say to keep me from going back there in my mind. That’s how I know you didn’t do it, Caitlin. Because you saw what murder does. You saw it in me every day for years. You can probably still see it if you look closely enough. Anyone can.”
He’s so focused on her expression that he’s startled when her fingers graze his cheek. “Oh, Blake,” she whispers. “All you know is flesh and bone.”
These words hurt him more than her slap did, and he’s not sure exactly why. When she plucks the key from his hand, he finds himself frozen in place and staring after her as the heavy front door drifts shut.
Caitlin Chaisson has been changed inexplicably by a sudden event that currently lies outside his realm of understanding, and this realization gouges him more deeply than any false accusation she might have leveled against him in the past.
15
Halfway home, Blake pulls his smartphone from his pants pocket and manages to scroll to the number for one of the detectives who interviewed him that morning, all without taking his eyes off the street.
He realizes, too late, he’s programmed the man’s name into his address book under “Baldy.” Who the hell will he ask for if the number connects him to dispatch?