Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2) (19 page)

It was my husband: sweaty, dirty, and holding seriously wilted flowers. Somehow, he was standing in our kitchen glaring at my ex-boyfriend when he was supposed to be two thousand miles away.

“Nick!” I screamed.

Nick was radiating fury. “Get away from her.”

“What are you going to do, hit me?” Bart asked.

Yes, I thought, that’s exactly what he is going to do. A thrill ran through me and I felt a flicker of guilt, but I didn’t stop Nick. Bart more than had it coming.

Nick walked calmly across the kitchen. Without setting down the flowers in his left hand, he punched Bart in the face, his fist fast as a whip. “Yes,” he said as Bart hit the floor.

Bart rolled onto his side. “Asshole,” he said. He wiped blood from under his nose and looked down.

Nick’s tone was menacingly calm. “I barely hit you. But if you want, I can try again.”

“I’m going,” Bart said. He looked from Nick to the broken mayo jar to me. His eyes were red-rimmed and slitted. He scrambled to his feet and walked rapidly toward the front entrance to the kitchen, breaking into a run and almost falling. He caught himself on the door, threw it open, and bolted out.

Nick walked after him as far as the doorway. “You’d better run,” Nick called. “And if you ever come back, I promise, I’ll kill you.” He turned back toward me, looking like he meant it. “I may hunt him down and do it anyway.”

I ran over the broken mayonnaisey glass and leapt into Nick’s arms. I wrapped my legs around his waist and crossed my heavy work boots behind his back and started talking so fast that nothing I said made any sense. He kissed me all over my head, face, and ears while he stroked my Little Orphan Annie hair.

Within a few moments my babbling turned to tears and I let him rock me gently back and forth, the flowers tickling the back of my neck now.

“You did it again, you know,” I said.

“What did I do, love?”

“You showed up on St. Marcos with no warning. This is the third time.” Hiccup.

“I’ll quit if you want me to.”

“Never.”

“The way you’re crying, you’d think this had been a Category Five storm. Shoot, Katie, they say the sustained wind speed here never made it over a hundred and forty-five miles per hour.” He nuzzled me roughly against the side of my head.

“Baby, it may have only been a Category Four hurricane, but it’s definitely been a Category Five month.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Oh, I’m going to, believe me, after I tell you what a terrible person I am, and how sorry I am for leaving you in Corpus Christi.”

“Shhhhh, don’t be sorry. I’m sorry.”

“No, we should be together, Nick. Nothing in the world is more important to me than being with you.”

He hugged me tight and set me on the counter but I kept my arms and legs around him as he set the flowers down behind me. He said, “All I could think about when I saw that storm was that I was a jackass, and I needed to get here as fast as I could. But Mom and Dad had driven to San Antonio to the opera, so I called Emily—”

“You called Emily? She’s in Dallas!”

“I called Emily and she said if I could get Taylor to Dallas she would keep him for the weekend.”

“But you have a court order to keep him within a hundred miles of Corpus Christi!”

“Are you going to let me tell this story or not?” Nick retorted, but he smiled.

I made a zipping gesture over my lips and flapped my hand for him to continue.

“When I told her about the court order she said she’d be on the next plane to Corpus. I made it to Puerto Rico, but not before they shut down the St. Marcos airport.”

“I could feel you getting closer!” I told him about the crashing picture frame.

He nodded. “I’m not surprised that you can feel me. I didn’t know I could throw pictures off tables, though. I’m pretty awesome.”

I socked his arm. “It was strangely comforting. But go on, tell your story.”

He kissed me hard on the lips. “I searched for a helicopter pilot or a boat captain who could take me across, but I got nada. I decided to go down to a marina and look for a boat to charter. The first marina I tried, I went into the bar and started asking around. This guy turns around and says ‘Nick Kovacs? Is that you?’”

“Oh my God! You’re kidding!”

“I’m not. It was one of my surfing buddies from high school, Bill Thomas. He’s even crazier now than he was then, and I tell him what I am trying to do, and he says no problem. He’s the captain on the fishing boat of a dot-com millionaire who hightailed it to the states when the weather got bad.”

I shook my head, and kept my mouth shut only by intense effort.

“I ran to buy you some flowers—which is a story in and of itself, finding flowers on the morning after a hurricane—and headed to bunk down on the boat. Meanwhile, Bill keeps drinking all day. About three in the morning, he wakes me up and says it’s time to go.”

“You left in the middle of the night on an ocean with hurricane-sized waves? Are you nuts?”

“I haven’t gotten to that part yet.”

He grinned like an upside-down rainbow. “We get out of the marina, and he’s running without lights, because the Coast Guard isn’t allowing boat travel yet. He keeps drinking; I get seasick. He’s singing at the top of his lungs, and I am heaving up and down with the boat over the eight-foot waves, wondering if I have died and gone to hell. Twelve hours later, we tie up to the pier on the west end of St. Marcos. I don’t have any food or liquid left in my body, but he’s fit as a fiddle. I hop off the boat and look back to wave goodbye, and that’s when I see the name of the boat for the first time.”

He paused.

“And the name of the boat was?” I asked.

“The name of the boat was
My Wild Irish Kate
.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, it was. The boat’s name was Kate.”

We stared at each other, feeling it, the unexplainable power of our connection. You couldn’t stop what was simply meant to be. I put my face on his chest and leaned into him. He looped his arms around the small of my back and finished his story.

“So it took me three hours to hike up to your place. The forest is naked, no vines, no bush. Animals are wandering around, all the fences are down. And when I got here, you had company,” at this he kissed my nose, “but here you are, you and Annalise, and you did great.”

I dropped my ear to his heart, speaking rapidly in time to its comforting beat. “Oh, Nick, I didn’t do great. I was so scared, and a tree fell and bashed in the window where there were no shutters except I tried to put up plywood, and Annalise saved me by slamming the door, and I’ve been asleep for nearly two days, not to mention the voodoo palm reader telling me I’m the Empress, and all I could think about was that I was trapped here and I couldn’t get to you, couldn’t let you know I was alive, and that nothing was real anymore without you here.”

Nick looked at me as if everything I had said made perfect sense. “I’m here now. Where’s that smile?”

I gave him one, a real one, an “I’m so happy my husband is here” smile. He picked me up and carried me into our bedroom, and we spent the next few hours under the mosquito netting, finding the rest of the way back to each other.

We woke the next day to Queen’s “Under Pressure.”

I sat up in a panic. “What’s that?”

“My new ring tone.”

Apparently, cell service had been restored. Nick answered. It was his attorney, Mary, calling to let him know the court had issued some instructions. He put her on speakerphone. The news was not great.

“Judge Nichols has given Derek a six-month period to prove his fitness as a parent if he passes the paternity test.”

“What do we do now?” Nick asked.

“You sit tight in Corpus Christi,” Mary answered. Which was hard to do from St. Marcos, but I decided not to cloud the issue. “Any reason to doubt he’ll pass the test?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Nick said.

“Then expect to be in Corpus at least another six months, maybe longer. The court can decide to extend the evaluation period. It’s even possible that at the end of the evaluation, you could win custody but Derek would have continued visitation.”

“That’s not even what he wants!” Nick exclaimed.

“Maybe for the right amount, Derek would give up his rights as a father permanently,” Mary suggested.

Nick and I stared into each other’s eyes. I said, “I’d hate to spend the money Teresa left for Taylor’s future that way. The best thing for Taylor is for us to keep Derek from getting custody of him. But I think we’d spend far less money in six months than it would take now to make him go away.”

Nick nodded. “The risk is worth it.”

Mary said, “It’s your call. There is a value, though, to avoiding the negative impact this will have on your life.”

Man, she had that part right. But that was the impact on us, two grown-ups. We had to think about Taylor. I had to start thinking about Taylor.

I sucked in my bottom lip, then said, “We’re OK, Mary.”

We thanked her and said our goodbyes. Nick hung up the phone and gripped both of my hands. “Six months, Katie. That’s a long time. If you need to stay here, we’ll make it work.”

I flicked my hair behind my shoulder. “Nick Kovacs, do you want me to be your wife or not?”

He frowned. “I thought you already were.”

“Well, wives and husbands should live together.” I took full credit for my change of heart and left out the “according to my new friend the psychic” part. “Let’s get the hell out of here. I’ll find a house sitter, and we’ll put Annalise on the market.”

Nick shook his head. “You don’t need to sell her.”

Truthfully, the thought of parting with Annalise made me feel sick, and I wasn’t sure how much of that feeling was coming from me and how much from the jumbie. But I also wasn’t a halfway kind of girl. Or woman. “We don’t really know if we are ever going to be able to—or want to—come back. It could take a long time to find the right buyer. Let’s plan for the worst and hope for the best.”

Now Nick made my arguments from a week ago back to me. “But it’s your house . . . it’s more than that, it’s
her
. . . and you worked so hard . . . you gave up your career . . . you moved halfway around the world . . . you spent so much of your
money
. . .”

I stuck my face up to his, almost nose to very prominent nose. “You are home to me. Annalise is a house, and money is only money.”

His smile was as wide as the Gulf Coast, crooked and sure. “I love you.” He pulled me into his lap in one swift motion.

I tried to ignore the sensation of dark, unhappy eyes watching us.

Despite our dramatic decision to depart, we didn’t get anywhere in a hurry. Things started smoothly enough, though. We tackled the little issue of the tree in the music room early the next morning.

Nick operated the chainsaw and I removed the chunks. As we uncovered the window opening, I saw that the wind and tree had wrenched the window frame out. The exposed concrete blocks under the frame had crumbled.

“This is odd,” I said when Nick turned off the saw. “I thought the whole house was made out of cinder block filled with poured concrete. These blocks aren’t filled, here by the window.” I pointed to pieces of pulverized block on the floor.

Nick looked down inside the block wall with me. “Sure enough.”

I pushed on the edge of a block and it crumbled under my hand. Something glinted in the sunlight. “What’s that?”

Nick had seen it, too. He took a closer look. “Rebar, maybe?”

“Too shiny.” I stuck my hand into the opening, then thought better of it. Centipedes and all, ew. I went into the great room and retrieved the fireplace poker. I hadn’t used it for a fire yet, but it seemed perfect for sticking down narrow dark holes. I inserted it and heard an intriguing clink.

“Not concrete, anyway,” I said, and continued probing. I felt something loose, so I used the claw side of the poker and pried the edge of it up, then carefully dragged it out of the hole after a few false starts. A dirty round object tumbled over the top of the block and landed on the tile floor. I scooped it up in my hand. It was narrow, metallic, and seriously scratched up.

“I’m going to clean it,” I told Nick.

He followed me into the kitchen, where I moistened a kitchen towel and scrubbed at the concrete dust and dirt. As the layers of yuck came off, I saw gold, a latch, and engraving. It was a pocket watch, and despite the grit and grime, it was newer than I would have guessed. Definitely not an antique. I couldn’t get the latch to release, though.

“Let me try,” Nick said.

I handed it to him, and he cleaned the concrete out of the cracks with the tip of a steak knife, then pried the two round sides away from each other. It opened slowly, a clamshell hiding its pearl.

Inside on the right was an exquisite clock face with roman numerals marking the 12, 3, 6, and 9. The time read 11:29, and the second hand was frozen in place. On the left was a picture. A remarkably well preserved picture, given that it had been buried inside a wall for ten years. A dark-skinned woman with straightened hair was posed for a studio portrait with two young girls wearing cornrow braids. One girl looked maybe ten, and the other five.

A slow smile stole up the corners of my mouth. “Nick, you are holding ‘my treasures’ in your hand.”

“Meaning?” he asked, scraping more gunk out of the ridges and valleys of the pocket watch.

“Jacoby told me there was a rumor going around that the original owner buried his treasures in the walls of this house. He thinks we’ve been the victims of fortune hunters. But I don’t think it was that kind of treasure at all.” I took the watch from his hand and snapped it shut, and I rubbed my thumb across the engraved words on its front. My Treasures. I opened it to the picture.

He joined me now in the smile. “Somehow we need to get that word out on the criminal grapevine ASAP.”

“Yah mon.”

“It’s a good-looking watch.” He handed it to me.

“That it is. And just think, the fortune hunters were only one cinder block away from finding it on their last attempt. I’ll be back in a moment.” I went to my jewelry box in our bedroom and pulled out a jeweler case that held a brooch my Grandma Connell had given me. I nestled the watch in the satin lining beside the brooch and snapped the lid shut.

I rejoined Nick, and we finished up our work in the music room and set upon our next Herculean task: chainsawing our way out of the rainforest. It took the rest of a full and sweaty day. It wasn’t an experience I would care to repeat, but we felt able to leap tall buildings in a single bound by the time we were through.

Afterwards, we drove to Ava’s, passing plenty of houses that didn’t have roofs anymore. A telephone pole had fallen through the roof of a house only a mile away from Ava’s. Those that had roofs sometimes didn’t have windows. Still others had lost trees. And everywhere, everywhere the brilliant colors of plant life had disappeared, as if the island had been scorched down to the bare brown earth.

When we arrived at Ava’s, we found her grilling all the meat from her refrigerator and drinking piña coladas from a pitcher. “Everything spoil unless I use it up now,” she explained. “I just got back from the funeral, and I need something to take my mind off things.” She shook her small caramel fist at the innocent-looking night sky that was clear and twinkling with a million stars.

“Funeral? Whose?” I asked. She did look like she’d been crying.

“Oh, cheese and bread, you didn’t know! That why you not there.”

Foreboding crept over me. “What happened, Ava?”

Tears flooded her face, and she shook her head. She swallowed and said, “Jacoby. He die in the storm.”

“That can’t be! I saw him. He came by a few hours before it hit.”

“They find his body by his car, outside the projects, where an apartment collapse. His door open, he lights dem on. Just like him, always helping people dem.”

“But how did he die?”

She lifted her shoulders and let them drop. “It a hurricane. They say something knock him in the head.”

“Oh Ava, I am so sorry. And so sad that I missed his service.” I dropped into a lawn chair. Nick put his hands on my shoulders and kneaded them gently. “But why so quick?”

“That what his grandmother want. She the one who raise him and his brother. Now they both dead,” she said. She slumped into a chair beside me.

The danger of the storm seemed more real to me now than it had since it hit Annalise. I began to worry about the rest of the people I loved on the island. At least Rashidi was on the western edge of Puerto Rico, out of the storm’s path.

Finally, I braved the subject of our visit. “We’re headed back to Texas. With Rashidi gone, I have to ask if you could house-sit for a while, take care of the hounds, and let the workers in and out?”

Nick added, “We’ll pay you.”

Ava tipped her wrist forward to signify that it was a small thing we asked. She started replaiting her long braids, then said, “Of course I help you. But Annalise not likely to make it easy on you.”

I chose to ignore that. “Thanks, Ava,” I said.

“Who look after things when I meet you in New York?”

“New York?” Nick asked.

“Um, I’ll tell you about it on the drive, honey. Ava, we’ll play that by ear.” I didn’t have the heart to break it to her. I wouldn’t be going to New York. I’d tell her later.

Nick and I pulled to a stop outside the house Jacoby grew up in. I hoped we weren’t coming over too late. Lights shone from inside the house, though, which was good, because this couldn’t wait. Although I had only met his grandmother once, I knew I owed her a visit.

Her house was in the same neighborhood where Rashidi and I had spied on Junior and Pumpy. In the dark I couldn’t tell how her house had withstood the storm. There was no doorbell, so I rapped my knuckles against the frame of the screen door.

“Ms. Jacoby?” I called.

In only seconds, a tiny woman came to the door. “Ain’t no Ms. Jacoby here. I Ms. Edmonds. You wanting me, I expect.”

She looked as I remembered her, and not unlike an unscarved version of my Jump Up psychic. She had on a Sunday go-to-church-type outfit, a black gabardine jacket and matching shirt with big brass buttons. Her posture was erect, but with a slight tremor.

“I’m Katie Kovacs, and this is my husband Nick. I knew Jacoby, ma’am, and I came to pay my respects.”

“Nice to meet you, Ms. Edmonds,” Nick said.

“Likewise. Katie, friend of Ava’s?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, you got good manners, Katie. Jacoby tell me about you. Tell me he didn’t like you much at first, but that it turns out you saved Ava, that you good people.”

A cloak of grief fell over my vision. “I felt the same about him.” As I said the words, my eyes cleared. Oh, Jacoby.

She pursed her thin lips. “Sometimes it take someone from outside to see what those inside can’t.”

I nodded, unsure of what she meant.

“Come here, young lady.” She led me into her dark, tiny kitchen. “When my grandson die, they bring me all his things, from he car and he pockets. Some make sense. Keys, wallet, phone.”

She waited for a response from me, so I nodded again.

She opened her freezer and pulled out a large shrink-wrapped frozen fish. “But what you think of this? They say it from he truck, like he gone shopping before the storm.”

“But Jacoby’s allergic to fish, isn’t he?” He’d told me so at our wedding.

Ms. Edmonds stabbed her index finger in the air triumphantly and placed the fish back in the freezer. “Deadly allergic. So why he carrying fish?”

“I have no idea.”

“Me neither.” She shook her head. “Something to think on, though.” She looked at me, looked into me, and I squirmed.

“Absolutely. I will.”

We left and I felt unsettled. It made sense that hurricane debris killed Jacoby. I didn’t know how to reconcile his grandmother’s words, though, or the fish. But what could I do about it from Texas? Sorrow clamped my heart like a fist and it struggled to beat.

I was failing Jacoby, but it was time to go. Being with Nick and Taylor was the right thing to do, the only thing I could do, and the one thing I could not fail at anymore.