Burning September (3 page)

And like the case of Mr. Brown, Professor Rasmussen had proved a treasure trove of important introductions, extra scholarships, and useful trade information.

Everyone serves a purpose
, says Caroline.  You just have to look hard enough to find theirs. 

“You’re an art professor and a lawyer?”

“I’m an art professor who had her own nasty custody battle and a brother-in-law who’s a lawyer.  But never mind that.”  She opened a desk drawer and selected a file.  “Before everything happened—before semester started—Caroline sent me some of your work.  Had she told you?”

“No.”

“Well, she was looking out for you.  Must have taught you well, what she sent is impressive.”

“Thanks.”  Though I wasn’t ever as interested in the arts as Caroline.  It turned into an obvious hobby because she was all I knew as far as role models, and what did she do?  She bled art.  Turned everything into a gallery of some sort.

“I want to offer you something freshman aren’t usually in the running for.  It’s nothing fancy, just a TA position.  Unpaid, but you’d have the opportunity to sit in on classes you wouldn’t get into because of seniority and waiting lists and prerequisites.”

The part of me that Caroline owned recoiled in a dark and dusty back corner of my mind.  Accepting handouts was typically unacceptable. 
Life isn’t a soup kitchen, Kat. 

But hadn’t she accepted handouts left, right, and center when it helped her get ahead?
 
Hadn’t she told me so herself? 

And as though Professor Rasmussen knew the circles in which my thoughts spun, she smiled gently. “It’s not charity if the job’s given to you based on merit.  You’d learn a lot.  Think about it.”

***

Mr. Ferret sends his regards, Kitty Kat, and your lunatic sister hopes you’re too busy with a class or something to answer the phone.

Guess what?  My lawyer deemed me worthy of a visit.  He just left.  Seemed more interested in getting my loony bin records than me, since he only said two words,
hello
and
bye
.  Maybe I’m about to find out firsthand why everyone and their mother hates lawyers. 

Well give me a call tomorrow if you need help with homework or something, God knows I’ve got nothing else to do. 

I love you,
milaya
. 

***

Early evening found me the same as usual—a pile of books blanketing the surrounding carpet, and the tarot deck I kept idly shuffling in my hands. Maybe Caroline was onto something, claiming people clung to old delusions in the face of crises.  Maybe when you got right down to it I wasn’t any better than the hopeful new divorcees who clamored about Caroline’s gypsy tent at the fair, praying tarot would bring answers and good news.

I cut the deck and turned one card over. 
Death
.  Fits, though, just ask Brian, I thought for one wild moment before I remembered the whole institution was bullshit.  Coincidence then, though a rather large and accurate one.  But
Death
didn’t mean it in the literal sense—though it could be, as any tarot swindler will come up with any number of reasons to explain its appearance.  More often it meant change, transformation, sudden and unexpected. 

Ace of Cups.
  Give me a break, I had no patience for Cups and their romanticism, how could I when life was crashing around my ears?

The King of Swords
—

My pointless perusal dropped like a curtain over a lit stage at that knock on the front door.  I don’t like hearing knocks on my front door.  It never means anything good.  There was a knock before a police officer informed Caroline and me of our father’s death, one when CPS came to collect me a day afterward, another when we were told of Brian’s demise, though of course Caroline had been expecting such.  A subsequent knock when they hauled her off.  Presumably there was a knock before the coroner came to pack my mother away in a body bag.  I couldn’t remember. 

But to my knowledge nobody had died, I hadn’t murdered a man, and there was no one in the house with suicidal ideations, so I climbed to my feet and answered the door.

The knocker looked nothing like a cop or a girl scout selling cookies.  Those would have made more sense, because nobody with a briefcase and expensive shoes ever came around
this
condo complex in
this
crappy area of Orange County.

“Katya?”

I clung to the door like one of those koala bears I used to snap around my pencils in grade school.  “Yeah?”

He extended a hand, blinking gilt-dipped lashes.  “I’m Kyle Cavanaugh.  Caroline’s attorney.  I was hoping to get some background information from you.  I wish we were meeting under different circumstances.”

I wished we weren’t meeting at all, but I shook his hand and shrugged.  “Okay.  Come on in, I guess.”

He smiled at his shoes as though at some inside joke I didn’t get, and followed me inside.  His immediate reaction was one I knew well, since everyone who stepped over the threshold reacted the same way.  Something between a gasp and a grimace. 

“Yeah.”  I nodded at the satin-lined walls, the ornate frames, the ruffled pillows that looked more like eighties prom dresses.  “That’s Caroline for you.  You won’t want to see the bedrooms.”

I studied him, this man who wasn’t interested in talking to Caroline.  If he wasn’t gay, he was an alien.  Not the illegal sorts Republicans bitch about—he had dark blond hair and skin that proved he didn’t trounce around farms or construction fields—the little green spaceship flying kind. 

Every man I’d ever met wanted to talk to Caroline.  Not that some were able.  I was long used to her, but from a distance watching them falter and sputter, I felt how her presence could make a room heady and oddly airless.  Maybe that was what all the stammering had been about. 

His eyes lingered on the photo of a ten-year-old me at the fairgrounds.  “It’s not something you see every day, I can tell you that.”  He nodded at the photograph.  “Is this you?”

“Yeah.  In another lifetime, it feels like.”  I knelt to collect the tarot cards.  The living room had enough ‘character’ without this guy thinking we were gypsy criminals.  “So.  What is it you want to know?”

“More about you would be nice.”

“You must know the basics,” I said between a pencil case wedged between my teeth, hoisting up an armload of textbooks.  “Caroline’s sister. 
Kat
is fine.  Freshman in college.  The end.”

He pried the pencil case from my mouth and tossed it on the sofa.  “What school?”

“USC.”  I kicked a pillow out of my way and dropped the stack of books on the coffee table. 

“My alma mater.  Class of 2009.”

“A baby lawyer.”  I blew a strand of hair out of my eye as I straightened up, my hands finding their way to my hips.  “This your first gig from the public defender’s office?”

“No.”  He retrieved the pillow and tossed it on the couch.  “So it’s just you and Caroline, then?” 

I pointed at the mantel, where my parent’s dusty mosaic tombs sat.  “Our mom and dad.  They’re very quiet housemates.”

“I know how you feel.  My parents are both gone.  It’s been a while, but it’s still hard.”

He deserved more sympathy on the orphan front.  My mother died before I really knew her, and while my father had been the sperm donor, he could hardly be classed as a parent. 

“And your sister’s eight years older?  Big age difference.  She must have been a surrogate mother.”

“That’s pretty much the size of it.” I swept a collection of healing crystals aside on the coffee table with my forearm and sat on the empty space.  The sofa was a tiny loveseat.  I didn’t want to sit that close to anybody I didn’t know.

“Funny how it’s only you with the Russian name.  I’d expect it to be the opposite, but you got the old world name instead of Caroline.”

“My parents were only here a year before they had her.  I guess they tried to Americanize themselves, but by the time I rolled around, they didn’t give a shit anymore.  At least that’s what Caroline told me.  What do we need to talk about?”

“Maybe we can go over what’s been written in the police reports and the statement you gave, to start.”  After considering the quilted couch cushions as though unsure if they were functional and not just for show, he sat and dug through his briefcase.  “We’ll work from there.”  Snagging a lone sheet of paper, he shook it out and said, “What do you remember about that day?”

It was hot, I remember that.  One of those days you want to peel your skin off and hang it on a clothesline, air it out a bit.  Humidity hung thick, heat waves shimmered off pavement, and anyone you might find wandering around outside looked a second away from passing out.  No pool in our broken-down condo complex, so children ran squealing through sprinklers their tired parents set up. 

Caroline had taken to wearing a bathing suit constantly, since opening windows to tempt in a nonexistent breeze wasn’t working.  Our air conditioner had broken long ago, and the landlord hadn’t gotten around to fixing it. 

Summer was winding down, but the weather showed no sign of it.  First semester would start soon, and most of my time had been spent reading through my textbooks.  Caroline sailed in and out of the condo, shouting greetings and goodbyes each time.

Hey, forgot a towel, bye.  Hi, have you seen—oh there it is, see ya later, I’m just hanging out on the roof. 

She’d started smiling again, and my relief was enormous.  I knew she’d get over it, but some nights I’d start thinking the worst.  She’d given up on the tarot cards and decided she’d rather loathe Brian than pine for him. 

Good plan, I’d told her.  I’d start with hating that stupid beard.  She’d laughed from behind her laptop, on which she’d been typing up her latest article.  Pecking at the air above the keyboard, she screwed up her face and said,
Dear Brian, your face looks like a hairy fat woman’s vagina. 

Her hatred glittered like Russian vodka, irresistible and lethal in large doses. I didn’t understand then that that hatred she kept lovingly shining had a limit, and it was coming, sooner than I could have ever been ready for, the claw-marked doors of hell slowly cracking until they’d finally fling open and all these evil bats would flap out. 

Brian’s bungalow purportedly burst into flames around three in the afternoon.  Nailing down exact times wasn’t something I could do, as I hadn’t expected Caroline would need an alibi, but I saw her sometime after, sweaty towel draped over one golden forearm, book in hand.  One white strap of her bikini hanging loose off her shoulder.  Hair bound in a messy bun at the top of her head.  The bottoms of her feet black with grime, padding toward the kitchen. 
Hey again, want some iced tea, I can’t spend one more minute outside, it’s hotter than hell.
  

The air reeked of gasoline upon her reappearance, but I’d attributed it to the Circle K a half mile down the street.  And when the police asked their questions, I conveniently forgot. 

She was on the roof the whole time.  Every few minutes she’d come back inside, and once in a while I’d go up to ask her a question, and she was there every time I did, I swear.  Lying on a lounge chair, sunglasses on, reading her book.  No way she could have gone to Brian’s house and back.  There wasn’t enough time for her to swing it.  He lives half an hour away.  She’d have had to come back and get her keys if she were going over, and she was in a freakin’ bikini, where could she have hidden them without me noticing some suspicious bulge? 

But then I suppose even Detective Slater was smart enough to know that sibling alibis were never the most reliable.  I had every reason to lie, he said, and we both knew it.  But he didn’t know everything I knew.

“It wasn’t different from any other day.  Caroline was home with me, and when she wasn’t, she was on the roof reading and sunbathing.  Every so often she’d come back inside to talk to me and get something, or I’d go up there myself to see her.  She was right there, every time I did.  If she’d left for a long time I definitely would have noticed.  But she didn’t.”

“Then why do you think they suspected her?”

“I don’t know.  They’d broken up, her and Brian.  It’s as good a reason as any to think she did it.”

His ice-blue gaze held mine for a long time before he put the sheet of paper aside.  “You do realize I’m on Caroline’s side, right?  There’s two people you should never lie to; your doctor and your lawyer.”

“You’re not
my
lawyer.”

“Let’s not play semantics, Katya.”

“Kat.  I told you it’s Kat.”

“I like Katya.”  He paused again, chewing the inside of his lip.  “The only way I can plan the proper defense is if you’re honest with me.  I’m not buying your Helen Keller story.  You had to have seen something, heard something.”

“You can’t put someone on the stand if you know they’re lying.”

He scribbled something on a notepad.  “Depends on what that witness is lying about.  If it’s just an omission, well that’s a little different than lying point-blank, and much harder to prove.”  He depressed the point of the pen rapidly.  I wanted to smack it out of his hand.