Unsound (A Lei Crime Companion Novel) (5 page)

I drove down the long driveway to the house. Automatic lights had come on with the timer, and one pointed at the limp American flag dangling from the pole. Once again I was irritated, seeing it. I’d always hated the way going up that driveway made me feel—pretentious, plastic. A California transplant, not someone embedded in Hawaii like I’d become. This was in the jungle, in Hilo, not a country club—but the ex had preserved that feeling in the layout of a house I wasn’t sure I loved anymore.

I didn’t have to have that damn flag out there if I didn’t want to. There was a lot in the house I didn’t really like and never had. Tonight might be a good night for purging. The hunger for a drink hit me hard as I unlocked the door, along with a wave of anger.

Anger at the ex, for turning my life upside down without permission.

Anger at
Constance, for leaving me to muddle on without her.

Anger at the stalker or whoever the hell he was.

Anger at what I was becoming—not myself. A shaky, drinking shadow.

I’d always been a shadow—
Constance’s shadow. Richard’s shadow. I toed out of my shoes and set my purse and phone on the side table.

Hector greeted me loudly.

“Hey, buddy.” I fed him before I strode to the wet bar—I still have some self-control. But after the second shot of Patrón gave me my sea legs back, and the third and fourth made me start to feel clear again, I decided I’d do a little bonfire.

Richard had already cleaned his shit out of the closets, but he’d left a lot of knickknacks behind, the kinds of things that would have reminded the Acrobat that he had another life before her—things like family photos, golf trophies, cuff links, and a gold watch I’d given him for our anniversary.

I took a big shopping bag out of the kitchen and began scooping his stuff into it: the aforementioned gifts, his family’s ancestral Bible (maybe God would strike me with a lightning bolt), photographs framed in silver of us as a family. I filled the shopping bag with anything of his I could find and a lot of mine too—those stupid stiletto heels he’d wanted me to wear when we had “kinky” sex; the golf shirts and glove I’d worn to please him on the course, golf being a game I found boring and pointless; scarves and purses that he’d alternated giving me on birthday and Christmas the last ten years.

There were twenty of those. I’d never used them, and he hadn’t noticed.

I thought I’d been happily married—but come to think of it, had I been? I didn’t remember being really happy since those early years, both of us building careers, sharing a passion for Chris and our identity as a family. The smart, accomplished, and good-looking Wilson family.

Coming home from work in the evenings, we’d sit on the deck of our little starter home in
Hilo to compare stories. Richard had always said the law was full of psychopaths, and I’d agreed. Come to think of it, things hadn’t really started their slow drift until Richard became obsessed with work and building Hidden Palms. We’d had a few good years here in the beginning, I thought, dumping a rack of his less-favored ties into the shopping bag—but I didn’t think I’d paused long enough to really wonder until it was too late and he was pole dancing with the Acrobat.

The jewelry he’d given me and the anniversary watch I’d take to the pawnshop. I hadn’t totally lost my marbles.

I carried the bottle of Patrón, the lighter fluid, and the barbeque lighter outside and set them on the steps in the darkening evening. A light wind tossed my hair as I hauled my loot out into the turnaround in front. The fronds of the palm trees clattered like applause. Hector followed me and sat on the top step watching, his tail twitching back and forth, as I made a big pile at the base of the flagpole.

I stopped periodically to slug Patrón. It went down smooth and kept me fueled.

“It’s therapeutically important to make a ceremony of endings and beginnings, Hector,” I said, lowering the American flag, draping it over the pile of items. “I’m going to make a ceremony here. This is the ending of my marriage and of putting up with anything I don’t like in my home and my life. This is the beginning of the new, liberated me.”

I realized I was wearing one of those polo shirts, a lot like a golf shirt, and it didn’t feel right anymore. I tore off the shirt, unzipped my sensible twill skirt. “I don’t think this is really my style. I don’t know what my style is, but this is not it.” I tucked the clothes under the flag. I was warm from the booze and enthusiasm and didn’t even feel the cool night air pucker up my nipples.

“Hector, you’re the witness to my declaration of independence!” I squirted lighter fluid over the pile and held the barbeque lighter out to touch it.

The flames burst up in a fireball, scorching my hand, and I realized I was burning both the American flag and a Bible. My heart pounded with terror, and I shut my eyes and waited for the lightning bolt.

None came.

I was standing close enough to the fire that it warmed me in my underwear, and I sat down on the grass and finished the bottle while watching the flames. But even drinking couldn’t stifle my sense of loss this time.

My identical twin, Constance. The one that sparkled bright, the one with the flair. She was gone, and I was the pitiful broken-down divorcée that was left. It just wasn’t right, or fair. It felt like a crippling weight—I was living for both of us, and what a failure at that I’d become.

Constance
. What a misnomer for that gossamer spirit, that whirligig of impulsivity. She’d been a natural performer, and even though we looked the same with our slim build, blue eyes, and blond hair, it was always Constance friends called for, Constance who sang in the talent show, Constance who won awards for everything from art projects to dance numbers.

I’d never resented it. Her successes lit me, standing in her shadow, and that was more than enough. I enjoyed that she did everything well—somehow that meant I didn’t have to, that I already knew I could.

That was only one of the mysteries of being a twin.

Chris had asked for a brother or sister many times over the years. Richard wouldn’t have been opposed, but I was adamant. “No, Chris, you’re better off as an only child,” I’d said.

“Why, Mom?”

I’d never been able to explain that the pain of the loss of a sibling was so much worse than never having had one at all.

I must have passed out, because rain was falling on me. Big, fat, cold raindrops.
Hilo rain is powerful when it gets going. Rain was hitting me in the eyes, collecting in all my nooks and exposed crannies.

I sat up, smelling something horrible—something like melted plastic. I hit my head, opened my eyes. The timer lights had turned off, but the dim solar ones around the walkway were on, glowing like green mushrooms, and I saw that what I’d hit my head on was the flagpole. It had fallen over me where I lay on my back on the ground, and somehow it had missed pulverizing me.

I remembered the flagpole was made of resinous plastic. Perhaps making a bonfire at the base hadn’t been the best idea.

I got up, or rather rolled over onto my hands and knees. I felt sick, and I had the whirlies. I dry heaved but there was nothing there. The beginning of the mother of all hangovers was gathering behind my eyes.

I couldn’t even think about it now. I crawled up the steps and tried to open the door.

It was locked. Which was part of the new upgrade—if I didn’t lock the house, it locked automatically at
ten p.m. And it armed itself. We’d changed the code today.

Where was my phone, with the text with the new code on it?

Of course. Inside the locked house, in my purse, with my keys.

But no matter. I’d probably tripped the alarm when I moved into the sensor’s range, and help would be on the way in the form of local PD, whom Bruce had put on alert about my residence. I’d be there to greet them. In my underwear, in the rain, in front of a burned-down flagpole.

I stood up very carefully. There had to be something I could do. I teetered back down the steps and around the side of the house to the gardening shed. The rain seemed to ping off me like evil BB pellets, cold and painful. Mercifully, the shed wasn’t locked, and I stepped inside, into its warmish, dry, total darkness.

I spread my hands and stumbled forward, feeling the air in swooping motions, trying to remember with my battered brain where things were.

I connected with something tall, fabric-covered, that gave under my hand. I recoiled. Immediately my mind supplied the ex’s corpse, strangled and stuffed in my gardening shed as a “present” to me from my stalker.

I made myself reach my hand out, feel the object again, patting it.

Ah. Not the ex’s corpse, but a burlap bag of mulch. That was wishful thinking. I kept feeling forward. I knew what I was looking for—a blue plastic tarp I used to pile weeds on when I got the urge to tidy something. The gardening shed had been the yard guy’s terrain for a while now; no telling where it was.

I barked my toe on something metal—further investigation told me it was the mower, which I knew was parked at the back of the shed. So that meant on my left was the table where we stored various implements. Maybe the tarp was there, folded up.

The rain drummed relentlessly on the steel roof, an overwhelming timpani of sound. Musty smells of mulch and manure formed a substance in my nostrils and throat, activating my gag reflex again.

Suicide flickered across my brain, a viable solution, as my hand fell on the sickle. I could cut my wrists the right way—straight up to my elbows from my wrists—lie down in here, and it would probably be over by the time the cops found me. It almost seemed like a better idea than being caught in here in my underwear, still drunk, with the remains of my angry divorcée bonfire on my front steps.

My left hand curled around the sickle, lifting it, and just then my right hand touched the square plastic softness that had to be the tarp.

I took my hand off the sickle, shook out the tarp, hoping there were no centipedes, roaches, or cane spiders in its folds, and wrapped it around myself.

Somehow, dimly even through the rain and the cushioning darkness of the shed, I could hear the wail of sirens.

They were here.

I lifted the tarp over my head, tightened it around me like a crinkly plastic burka, and walked back into the rain to face the cops.

Bruce handed me a cup of coffee. His warm chocolate-brown eyes were crinkled with worry even though he smiled. “Quite the drama, Caprice. Didn’t know you had it in you.”

“I’m full of surprises.” I took the cup. He’d made it black, the way I liked. I closed my eyes as I sipped. Closing them was an exquisite relief since they throbbed like hot marbles.

“I can see that. So much for the security upgrade. You’re going to laugh about this someday.”

“I hope so. It’s hard to imagine that. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life.” I kept my eyes closed to avoid looking at him, but I could feel the heat of tears welling, bursting out from under my swollen lids. I was in my voluminous terry-cloth robe after a hot shower. The alarm company had given the responding officers the code, and they’d deactivated my new alarm while grilling me over my semi-nakedness and the fire reeking in my turnaround. It was hard for them to believe I’d done it all myself, and I’d had to call Bruce to get them to leave—but now he wouldn’t leave either.

“Doesn’t your wife wonder where you are?” I asked.

“Divorced,” he said. I opened my eyes. Things were a little blurry without my glasses, but I could see the compassion in them, the kindness. He’d always been a good friend, and I’d never felt any hint of anything toward him but collegial friendship. I’d assumed he was happily married—there were pictures around his office of his grandkids in soccer outfits.

“I didn’t know that. Well, then, maybe you know a little bit of what I’m going through—a rough patch. Entirely normal for me to be a little distraught.” I looked around. “I need some Advil. Like really a lot of Advil.”

“I think you’re drinking too much.”

I felt defensiveness rise up. “You’re in my home in the middle of the night. Yes, I got blasted and burned my ex’s shit and got locked out of my house. It’s embarrassing. But it’s never impacted my work, and I’ll get through this.”

“I think you need some help to get through this.” He reached over and took the mug out of my hand, set it on the table. His big brown hands chafed my small cold ones a long minute. “Do you have anyone you can call? I don’t want you alone out here.”

“I don’t want to be alone out here. And no, if I did, I would have called them.” I felt the tears return. Weak, self-pitying tears. “I thought about dying tonight. It scared me.”

“I’m not surprised you had those thoughts.” His mellow, calming bass voice worked its charm, and I felt like telling him everything, all of it. He didn’t get to be chief without some interviewing skills. “It’s okay. It’s a hard thing you’re going through.”

“It’s not okay for someone in my position to be in this state. I think I need to take some time off.” The words popped out of my mouth, and I immediately wanted to take them back. What would I do without my work? I’d have nothing to do all day but drink and burn stuff and cry. Suicidal thoughts circled like black crows.