Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2) (16 page)

And all that explains why one short week later, I was back on St. Marcos, alone again in Annalise. Or it mostly explains it. But the rest of it was a natural result of all that happened before.

Derek’s attorney filed for an emergency hearing while we were in D.C. The most honorable Judge Sylvia Nichols had no sympathy for our newlywed status. As she ruled that Taylor had to reside in Texas, the screen of my iPhone filled with Rashidi’s picture. I hit Decline and heard the judge order Taylor to stay within a hundred miles of Corpus Christi until the attorneys had duked it all out. God, I hated lawyers.

“If you need to return to ‘the islands’ for your ‘honeymoon’ you could simply agree to hand Taylor over now and get on the next plane out,” Judge Nichols said in a take-no-crap voice.

Ouch. I sat up straighter on the bench and tried not to look like a woman who was sad about canceling her trip to St. John. A series of texts from Rashidi hit my phone like torpedoes blowing holes below my waterline.

When I finally got to Rashidi’s texts, I found that he’d stopped by Annalise and discovered fire damage and a broken window in the music room, apparently from an electrical short caused when a hole was drilled in the exterior wall. The shutters were in ashes.

His last message said, “Crazy can’t help, I leaving. Sorry!” He’d be in San Juan for a month teaching in the master’s botany program at the University of Puerto Rico. I was running out of options.

On the way out of the courtroom, Nick held my hand so tightly I imagined I could hear my bones cracking. I didn’t pull away. I could be strong.

“Give us a minute,” he said to his parents, and pulled me aside.

“We have to stay here, Katie, you know that, right?” He stroked my hand with his thumb.

“I do.” I took a deep breath. “And it’s only going to be for a few months. We lived apart for two months before.”

Nick look confused. “What do you mean, live apart?”

I told him about Rashidi’s news. “I have to get back and get repairs made. I can’t leave her unsecured.”

“
I?
”

“We, Nick, we. It’s too risky. I need to be there.”

His eyes darkened.

I tried again. “When the custody proceedings are over, you and Taylor can come back.”

He pulled his hand away. “You can hire a house-sitter, Katie. They can oversee repairs.” He ran his hand roughly through his hair, front to back.

“But it’s not that easy. I poured every cent I had in Annalise, I gave up a successful career, and I invested
myself
in her as well. So, if I let Annalise go to hell, and oh yeah by the way meanwhile have no income, and you’re hardly working while we rack up enormous legal bills . . . well, that’s crazy.”

“We just got married. We promised to be together. And we’re supposed to be on our honeymoon,” Nick countered.

“Yes, we’re supposed to be on our honeymoon. But instead, we’re packed in a tiny house with your parents, fighting a drug dealer for custody of your sister’s kid. I fully support you, but I have obligations of my own. We can see each other every few weeks. Grown-ups do it all the time.”

Nick turned up the heat but lowered his voice. “You know what, Katie? I think you’re absolutely right. I’ll stay here and fight for Taylor, and you go back and plant some flowers in the beds by the gate and sing karaoke with Ava.”

My voice was loud and so shrill it hurt my own ears. “That’s not what this is about! And if that’s what you think of me, well then—” I sputtered out on that thought and launched recklessly into the next. “Real nice, Nick. I guess you are who I thought you were before. Cold. Heartless. Hurtful.”

Nick’s words came out in cracks like gunshots. “You’re making a scene, in public, with my parents standing twenty feet away from us. Tamp down that Irish temper and quit making a fool of yourself and me.”

And he walked away from me without another word. I was boiling, but there was nothing I could do but burn like an empty pot on a stove.

We spent a tense evening in the Kovacs’ small house. Nick’s parents’ bedroom was on one side of us, and Taylor was in Teresa’s on the other. He wouldn’t talk to me and we went to bed angry. I lay awake all night, thinking that at some point he would put his arms around me and we would make it better. With every sleeping breath he drew measured against every moment I lay awake, I grew more upset. By morning I was fried. Nick woke up stiff and uncommunicative, and he didn’t come around. I became aware that a dark place in me thought Taylor could stay with his parents and Nick could come back to St. Marcos with me.

I called for a taxi on the day I left. Nick walked me to the door.

“I need you, too, you know.”

“You can handle Taylor with your parents’ help.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said.

I knew it wasn’t, but by then it didn’t matter. Cinderella rode away from her prince in a pumpkin, alone.

The morning after I got back to Annalise, I planted new bougainvillea by the gate under a brilliant pinkish-red sunrise unlike anything I had ever seen before. I stood back to see how the flowers looked. Wrong, I decided. They just looked wrong, nothing like what Nick and I had imagined.

I looked across the road at the deserted shantytown. Wrong there, too. Ever since I first saw Annalise, the shantytown had been home to multiple generations of a gentle Rastafarian family. They were gone now, and all that was left behind was a housedress flapping in the wind on a clothesline and the blackened carcass of a yellow school bus.

I headed back to the house. I was expecting the glass worker to arrive any minute to install the new window, then I wanted to drop in on Crazy on the way to pick up Ava. She was dragging me to Jump Up that night. I wasn’t up for the crowds and street vendors, mocko jumbie dancers on stilts, or rum-fueled open houses at all the shops, but Ava had stressed the life or death nature of my presence, although she refused to tell me why.

I got to Crazy’s just before the supper hour. The scrappy old man ignored my inquiries into his health, asking instead, “Where the boy and the mister?” through the left side of his mouth. He sounded stronger.

“Texas.”

“So why you here, then?”

“It’s a long story.”

He chuptzed and said, “Red skies at morning,” then shooed me with his left hand. “Lotta, I ready for my nap,” he called.

As Lotta walked past me to put a pillow behind her husband’s head, I whispered, “What did he mean about the red skies?”

She sniffed. “Red skies at morning, sailors take warning.”

“Which means what?”

“He saying bad t’ings coming.”

The things one doesn’t learn growing up landlocked. I got back in my truck and put my face in my hands. I didn’t want to see myself through Crazy’s eyes. I didn’t want to think about my mother giving up law school to raise my brother and me and telling everyone she met for the rest of her life she was the luckiest woman in the world. I wanted to think about the nights she cried because my father didn’t come home from work. The times I heard her asking him why his job was more important than her. I didn’t want to be my mother. I wanted to be the most important thing.

I pointed my truck toward Ava’s. With each turn of the wheels, going with her seemed like a worse idea. We weren’t even going to be performing. I pulled into her long driveway and rolled up to her house. I didn’t even have time to put the truck in park before she had bounded out her door and across the grass.

She jumped in and said, “We late.”

“Hello, Ava.”

“We meeting Trevor at the Boardwalk before Jump Up. He said he have an offer for us.”

I tried to care, I really did, but I couldn’t. Nick had called us karaoke singers, and it still stung. Ava continued to tell me about Trevor and all he could do for us, but I tuned her out and concentrated on not thinking about Nick, which only made me think about him more. I wondered what he was doing, and if he was thinking about me, too. The next day was Derek’s first visit with Taylor, and Nick had to be eaten up with worry. I was so lost in my reverie that I managed to make it all the way from Ava’s through the excited throngs congregating in Town to the Boardwalk Bar without consciously interacting with her or taking any notice of the world outside my head.

Ava searched the bar for Trevor, who wasn’t there. Surprise, surprise. I hadn’t seen the man arrive anywhere yet when he said he would. I wasn’t thirsty, but I armed myself with a sparkling water with cranberry and a lime. As soon as I turned away from the bar to rejoin Ava, Bart lurched into me. He grabbed my free arm as we collided. I held my bright drink high away from my blue linen shift. At least I wasn’t wearing white.

“Katie, I was just coming to talk to you.” He snuck under my raised arm and pulled my body to his in a tight hug, trapping my other arm against my side. I craned my head back to avoid his face and mouth and levered my elbow out with a sharp thrust to break his grip, then ducked out of his hold.

This wasn’t the Bart I used to know. His eyes were bloodshot and he had lost a ton of weight. He had a seedy Don Johnson stubble going on, à la
Miami Vice
, and stringy hair. The only time I’d seen him like this while we were dating was when he was nursing the third day of a wicked hangover. It wasn’t a healthy look then, and it sure wasn’t now.

“Leave me alone, Bart,” I said. I caught sight of Ava just fifteen feet away. She’d found Trevor and the flavor of the week and was deep in conversation. I started toward them.

“Stop,” Bart said. “I need to tell you something.”

“Can’t it wait?” I said, closing my eyes. Nick was right. I should never have come back here without him. What was I thinking?

“I heard you left him.” Bart reached a hand toward my face.

I blocked it. “Left him? You mean Nick? No, I didn’t.”

I stalked across the bar toward Ava. Her eyes widened at my glower and she clutched my arm hard and introduced me to a tall blonde who looked far too corn-fed for Trevor’s taste. No leather or spandex, no stilettos, no slits up to there. Something about her seemed almost likeable, but it made me cringe at the same time.

Ava said, “Here she is. Katie, this is Trevor’s friend Nancy. Nancy, Katie.”

“Hello, Trevor. Nice to meet you, Nancy.”

Nancy leaned toward me, her blue eyes eager. “You’re the one Bart talks about?”

I closed my eyes and prayed for deliverance, then opened them and said, “It’s possible.”

She stepped closer and grabbed my arms. In a giddy voice, she said, “Bart is my brother!”

That could explain the cringe factor. I looked at Ava. Her mouth formed a perfect O.

Trevor said, “Nancy, why don’t you let us talk business for a moment.”

“I’ll get us some fresh drinks,” she said, and hurried off, quite the eager beaver.

Ava closed the gap left in the circle by Nancy’s departure. “Trevor want us to come to his studio in New York and cut a demo.”

Trevor sipped his drink, then said, “Your sound is unique. Great harmonies and the mixture of island and,” he waved his drink at me, “not.” Whatever that meant. “It would be better if you wrote your own songs, but I have a few I think you could do.”

Nick writes music, I thought. Nick. Why did I feel like crying instead of cheering? I managed to say, “Wow, that’s great.”

Ava narrowed her eyes at me, but Trevor nodded, oblivious to my reaction.

“So we’ll block a few days for you soon.” To Ava he added, “I’ll be in touch.”

“Irie,” Ava replied, which roughly translates to “everything is great” in proper English. Speak for yourself, I thought.

“Thank you,” I added, but I was the odd man out, the one whose answer was irrelevant to the proceedings. I wanted to go home.

Nancy returned with a drink for Trevor, then turned back to me and in two steps had deftly separated me from the flock. I bumped into a chair behind me and realized I was trapped.

“So, you’re dating my brother,” she said, blasting me with a shot of rum breath.

“No. I’m married to Nick. I
used to
date your brother.”

It took a moment to sink in. She brought her fist up to her mouth and pressed it against her lips. She shook her head. Her hand dropped. “Well, that changes things. My apologies. Can I ask you something?”

I tried to think of a polite way to say no, but she mistook my pause for a yes.

“Has Bart seemed OK to you? Like, I mean, oh, I don’t know, has he acted normal?”

I was too late to hold in my guffaw. “Are you kidding me? He’s completely different from the guy I met. Everything he’s done in the last few months is strange. He needs a shower and a change of clothes, a haircut, a shave, a long nap, and possibly a trip to Betty Ford. His eyes are weird. He wrecked his car. He stole my phone. He shows up uninvited and stoned. I could go on. Is that enough?”

Nancy bit her fingernail and I saw that all her nails were quick-short and her cuticles red. “I thought so. He only got the trust money for his restaurant after he finished rehab at Promises last time, so I was worried this would happen again.”

“Whoa, trust money? Rehab? I’m not in this loop.”

She leaned so close our heads were almost touching. More fumes for me, goody. “Bart’s always gotten by on his looks and charm, but when he got heavily into coke, my parents invoked a clause in our family trust that cut off his funds until he cleaned up.” Almost as an aside she said, “Our grandparents were loaded.” I nodded like I was in the know, but I was stunned. “He spent six weeks in rehab in Malibu. That’s how he knows Trevor, because one of Trevor’s musicians was there. That snake guy, Slither. As soon as Bart started getting checks again, he headed down here.”

“Oh, my.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

She knocked back a slug of her drink. “Hey, here’s my card. Call me if you need to, if, oh, I don’t know, I just want someone down here to have it.”

I took the card and stuck it in my handbag. “I will. Thanks.”

“I love Bart to death, I really do. He’s my big brother, what can I say? I came down a year ago, and it seemed like he really had it together. The restaurant was a huge success. Now I hear that people think someone was murdered at the restaurant. It’s all gotten so seedy. He keeps telling me it’s all still going great, but I don’t believe him.”

Her words were slurred, but the irony of her current state of intoxication while talking about her brother’s addictions was lost on her.

“You shouldn’t,” I said. “Listen, Nancy, are you here with Trevor?”

Her eyes dulled with liquor and confusion. “I am. Sort of. Why?”

It was none of my business. She was a big girl. Trevor was about to possibly produce a record for Ava and me. Shut up, Katie, I thought.

“Just curious,” I said. “But you should be careful in the islands. Being an outsider and all. Well, anyway, I have to run. Nice talking to you. Good luck with . . . everything.”

She looked fragile suddenly, corruptible. She gulped from the glass in her hand. Rum punch of some sort, from the look of it. Painkiller, probably. And then something ugly and painful jolted me. I was looking at a vision of my old self. I wanted to tell her to run, but I had no idea where to send her to escape herself.

I needed more air than that dark, smoky bar could provide, even one open to the boardwalk on one whole side. Ava had decamped to parts unknown, but she would have to take care of herself. I all but sprinted out the door.