The Ninth Step (2 page)

In his hand.

His.

At least she thought it was. It was dusk now, the light was vague, plus she hadn’t seen his handwriting in six years.

Livie put her feet down flat.

“What’s wrong?” Charlie asked. “You look like you swallowed a grasshopper.”

Livie picked up the envelope and held it closer to her face. “It’s from Cotton,” she said.

“
The
Cotton? The famous elusive sonofabitch Cotton O’Dell?”

Livie nodded.

“Well, are you going to open it?”

#

She didn’t.

After Charlie left, she set the letter along with the rest of the mail on the marble-topped island in the kitchen and went out to the chicken coop murmuring apologies as she lifted the hens from their nests and gathered their eggs. She was in the potting shed rinsing them and the last of the carrots she’d pulled out of her garden when her cell phone rang.

She glanced at the caller ID, made a rueful face and flipped open the phone. “Oh, no,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” Kat hissed. “I’m here, in the foyer. Mother and her latest are waiting in the bar. Our dinner reservation is in ten minutes. Please tell me the valet is parking your car, that in one second I’m going to see you come through this door.”

“I’m at home,” Livie told her sister. She looked down the length of her dingy overalls. “I haven’t even changed from work. I completely forgot. I’m so sorry.”

“How could you?” Kat kept a rein on her distress, but it rang clear to Livie nonetheless. “I reminded you this morning. You can’t do this to me.”

“There was this dog,” Livie said and she went on to explain about Razz. “It just totally left my mind. Tim’s with you, isn’t he?”

“Tim is working late, which loosely translated means he’s pissed at me.”

“About?” Livie asked, but she knew. Between Kat and Tim, the hot marital issue was always money.

“Short version? A pair of tennis shoes I bought for Stella.”

“He stood you up for tennis shoes?”

“Why not? You’re standing me up for a dog.” Kat paused. “They were Prada, okay? He’s mad because they were Prada. He doesn’t think his seven-year-old daughter should have designer tennis shoes.”

“How much, Kat?”

“Two hundred give or take.” Kat tried to sound nonchalant, but her voice wavered. She sighed. “I can’t talk about this right now. Mom and the new boyfriend are tapping their shoes and since I appear to be the sole attendee at this little soiree she arranged to show him off--”

“What’s he like?”

“Suave, debonair. A line four miles long.”

“So this one can actually put sentences together? How much younger this time?”

“Incredibly, he’s her age, I think.”

“You’re kidding. You don’t suppose this could be about more than the sex this time?”

“Umm, it’s doubtful. This one’s married. But don’t say you heard that from me.”

“Married,” Livie repeated. “That’s-- Mom hasn’t ever-- I mean what about his wife?” Livie felt herself wanting to protest that it was wrong. She touched the corner of her mouth, not liking herself, the impulse to judge.

“I think the wife’s a long-time invalid or something. I guess, you know, there’s not much to choose from when you’re over sixty. At least Mother goes out,” Kat added after a pause, “which is more than I can say for you, tootsie.”

You live like a nun.
Livie waited for Kat to say it. She’d dubbed Livie’s place The Cloister right after Livie had moved in three years ago. Kat had even found an artist to letter the name on a chunk of old barn wood. As a joke, she’d said. Ha-ha. . . .  Livie’d stuck the lettered plank behind the potting shed door. She didn’t find it terribly funny, probably because it wasn’t terribly accurate.

 “I don’t guess there’s any way you could get here before dessert?” Kat asked.

“Honestly? I’m worn out. Charlie and I started the renovation on the Bonner dairy farm. I drove you by there, remember? Last week.”

“That old Victorian monstrosity?”

“Bones, Kat. The house has great bones. It’ll be gorgeous when Charlie’s finished. It’s my part, the grounds, I’m not so sure about. I’ve never done a landscaping job this huge. I’m sort of regretting I let Charlie pull me in on the job.”

“It’ll be gorgeous too, Livie. Every garden you’ve ever done is beautiful.”

“But this is a hundred acres and the client wants all of it cultivated. Meditation gardens, a labyrinth, three ponds.” Ponds, Livie thought, what a misnomer. It was how the client, Dexter French, referred to the bodies of water on the property that he intended to operate as a bed and breakfast, but at least one of them was the size of a small lake.

Livie carried the basket of eggs and carrots into the kitchen, set it down next to the stack of mail. Cotton’s letter sat on top. She picked it up, studying it.

I have a letter from Cotton.
Livie almost said it aloud. She imagined Kat’s reaction, something between blatant sneering and total disgust. Kat would ask Livie what it said and she would have to say she had no idea, that she was scared to open it. She set the letter down.

“You worry too much,” Kat said.

“You would too, if you knew Dexter. He changes his mind faster than Mom changes her boyfriends.”

“Hah.” Livie got the laugh out of Kat she’d been looking for. “That’ll be the day,” Kat said.

“I’m sorry, truly.” Livie apologized again. “I hate that you’re stuck with them by yourself.”

“You owe me.”

“I know. Can I pay you in eggs? I have dozens.”

“My sister, the farmer’s wife, only in your case, it’s sans farmer.”

“Cute,” Livie said.

#

After dinner, she sat at her drafting table with the drawings for the Bonner project spread out in front of her and tried to work, but she couldn’t get into it, and very soon, she gave it up, switched off the lamp and went through the house, locking doors. She retrieved the unopened letter from the kitchen, stopped in the dining room to flick the overhead light three times, a signal to Charlie that she was on her way to bed. Safe and sound. He insisted.

His kitchen light flashed. He was satisfied.

She took her shower, donned an old castoff dress shirt of Charlie’s and climbed into bed.

Picked up the envelope.

Studying it, trying to decide if it really was Cotton’s handwriting, wishing she didn’t care. Saying to herself:
I don’t need this.
 

It could just as well be junk mail, couldn’t it? Sometimes insurance agents hand addressed their fliers to snooker people into thinking it was something personal, the way Cotton had snookered her.

Nearly six years ago, on April 29
^th
when he’d left her standing at the altar. Well, not exactly at the altar, but in a small antechamber at the chapel where they were to have been married. In her tiara and tulle, her beaded white
peau de soie
gown belling at her ankles. Her mother, sister and all six of her attendants watching her covertly as the appointed hour for the ceremony to commence came and went.

One hundred and twenty guests had been waiting to see her walk down the aisle on her brother-in-law Tim’s arm. A classical chamber ensemble had been running through the music Livie had chosen as a prelude to the actual wedding march. She would never hear Debussy’s
Clair de Lune
without it elevating her heart rate.

Her gown now lay underneath Mrs. Rodriguez’s koi pond, the first one Livie ever installed. She’d cut up the silk petticoat and pieced a darling baby quilt appliquéd with a plethora of blue velvet zoo animals for her nephew Zachary, Kat’s youngest, when he’d been born three years ago. He still dragged it around. Livie’d given her tiara to Stella at the same time so she wouldn’t feel deprived. Whether or not the glittery crown was a suitable accessory for a favorite pink tutu depended on how regal Stella was feeling in the moment.

Other monogrammed pieces of Livie’s trousseau were scattered in gardens around the countryside. Sixteen embossed linen napkins kept the ground soggy underneath Mrs. Teasdale’s clump of bog orchids and the heavy table cloth that matched them supported a bed of granite chips at the base of the fountain in front of Mitchell and Vaughn’s Funeral Home in town. The fountain was comprised of a group of cavorting nude water nymphs, which Livie thought was an odd choice for a funeral home, but then Hamp Mitchell was a little odd anyway.

Several bed sheets, Egyptian cotton, king-size, 300 thread count, also monogrammed, underlay Livie’s own koi pond. She’d donated her wedding china and silver privately to the local battered woman’s shelter. It had suited her to recycle the gifts that her guests hadn’t allowed her to return.

She would have buried her heart if she could have.

Livie pushed her thumb hard under the flap, opening a ragged seam. She took out the single sheet of paper and unfolded it. Besides the opening address,
Dear Livie
, there were two words,
I’m sorry
.

For a moment the world stopped. Her breath caught; her hand rose to her throat and she examined the shadowy corners of her bedroom as if she might see Cotton there.

As if he might step into the light.

#

The sun was up, a bright yellow disc crayoned into a bold stripe of blue sky and Livie was standing at the kitchen sink eating a bowl of cereal when she heard Charlie’s truck rattle into the driveway, then the scrape of his boot heels on the back porch.

“Livie, gal, you decent?” He always checked even though he knew from countless other mornings that she was.

“I am,” Livie answered.  

“It’s nice out this morning. Good and dry.” Charlie found a mug, poured his coffee. “At least the weather’s cooperating.”

“Dexter’s already called and left a message.”

“He say what he wanted?”

“No, and I haven’t called him back. It’ll be some alteration, widen this, don’t plant that.” Livie dropped her spoon into her cereal bowl. She encountered Charlie’s glance, that hovering question. Scooted her eyes past him. But no, she couldn’t let it go on. “Look,” she blurted the word, “I know you aren’t happy about leaving me at Bo Jangles the other night.”

Charlie shot her a glance from under his brow. “You got home okay, that’s the important thing. I guess Joe brought you.”

She looked at the toes of her sneakers.
Joe.
His last name eluded her if he’d even told her what it was. What she did remember, vividly, mortifyingly, was waking up on Saturday morning with a huge headache to find herself naked in
Joe’s
bed. She’d left while he was in the shower, called a cab from the doughnut shop in a nearby strip center, then prayed all the way home Charlie wouldn’t catch her, that she wouldn’t be forced to explain. She was awfully afraid she would have lied, then she’d have hated herself even more.

“I just haven’t ever known you to drink so much,” he said.

“I don’t usually.”
I don’t know what got into me.
Livie could have said that, too . . . except she did know. It happened sometimes, but not in a long while. She set her spoon on the other side of her bowl.

Charlie leaned against the counter, drinking his coffee. Waiting.

Livie felt it. She cleared her throat. “You know Dexter wants to open by Labor Day, but if we have to continually pull out everything and redo it, we’ll be lucky to make it by Christmas.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Charlie said.

A dog barked in the distance and Livie thought of Razz. She hoped so much that he’d lived, that he’d made it through the night. She glanced at Charlie. “I appreciate that you were concerned about me.”

“You’re not mad?”

“No, you were just being considerate.”

Charlie looked relieved.

She put her bowl down in the sink, turned on the tap. “I opened the letter,” she said over the sound of the water.

“Was it from Cotton?”

“Uh-huh. It’s there on the island. You can look at it, if you want to.”

Livie turned off the tap and watched her motley crew of hens through the window, a collection of Barred Rocks, Silver Polish, White Leghorns, and her favorite Araucanas, peck at the feed she’d scattered for them earlier. The wind was out of the east, full of itself, blowing spring across the pasture where the honeysuckle bloomed wild along the fence. The air through the open window was so deliciously scented, it made her knees weak, made her think of Cotton and one long ago afternoon. . . .

“That’s it?” Charlie sounded incredulous and Livie felt somehow gratified. “
I’m sorry
?”

She turned drying her hands.

Charlie looked at the front of the envelope. “It’s postmarked Seattle. You sure it’s from him?”

She said she wasn’t; she didn’t know why. She said, “I don’t have anything left to compare the handwriting with.” She was remembering Cotton’s love notes. When they were dating, he’d left them for her everywhere, tucked under a flower pot on the doorstep of her Houston apartment, or poked into the pocket of her winter coat. The last note from him had been the postcard Nix had brought her, the one that had read:
Tell Livie it’s not her fault. Tell her to forget me. Tell her not to look for me. I’m not worth it
.

That had come the first part of May, four days after Cotton disappeared. After they’d had search parties out slogging through the countryside hunting for him. After the police had issued an APB, after they’d posted fliers and appeared on television.

By the following July, when the shock had worn off and her grief had hardened into anger, Livie, who’d been staying with her mother at the time, made a huge fire in the fireplace at her mom’s condo and burnt the card along with everything else Cotton had ever written to her.

Her mother had come home from her bi-monthly, day-spa appointment, freshly manicured, pedicured, coiffed, massaged and made up and, without a word, she’d set the air conditioner on sixty. She’d gathered Livie into her arms, unmindful of the heat and its effect on her careful appearance and the dinner date she had later. Unmindful of Livie’s tears soaking the pearl-buttoned front of her silk shirt.