Unsound (A Lei Crime Companion Novel) (6 page)

“I don’t think that’s a good idea without you going somewhere. Perhaps a spa, or a rehab place? You need some TLC.” His hands were still massaging mine.

I felt something happening, a dim tingle of something warm, as if those hands were rubbing two sticks together to light a fire. I suddenly knew that this man, my colleague for the last seven years, someone I’d never been attracted to before, could make me feel very good indeed.

I yanked my hands away. “Rehab. Geez.”

“I’m just saying you need support. You shouldn’t be alone in this big house.”

“I agree with you there.” I stood up, and it was a mistake. I felt my knees buckling, and I sat back down on the couch. “Could I get that Advil now?”

He stood up. I looked up at him from the new vantage point of two divorced people, alone and lonely in a big house at night. He was tall, with the solid burly bulk of a Hawaiian man in the middle of his life, his buzz-cut black hair threaded with gray. Probably prediabetic, needed to lose some weight—and yet all I could think about was how warm that bulk would make me feel.

My mind provided a contrasting picture of the ex, with his careful workouts and Pilates and golf. Every inch of his body was cared for and tweezed. He took his own blood pressure and weighed his food. His icy blue eyes and ash-blond hair matched mine. We were like Aryan bookends, and I’d never questioned that our fit was perfect.

That made me sad on some profound level.

Bruce returned with the bottle of Advil. I poured four into my palm, threw them back with a coffee chaser. I’d finally remembered what had gotten me so upset in the first place.

“I’m still worried about the stalker thing. Something new happened.” I told him about Alison and the dog collar and Mrs. Kunia’s mug. “So I don’t know. Mrs. Kunia hasn’t called—I just checked my phone. And Alison’s not credible. I mean, I love her, but she’s got compulsions, and she could have had a slip right in front of me.”

He just sat down across from me in the good leather armchair the ex used to watch TV in and gazed at me.

“I’ll sleep out here on the couch,” he said. “And I want you to go on leave as of tomorrow and go somewhere safe and get help. If you don’t do it yourself, I’ll document this and get you fired.”

I recoiled as if slapped. “You would never know about this if you weren’t my friend. I can’t believe you’d kick me when I’m down.”

“I’d know about this. I had to send two officers out to your house to respond to an alarm for a colleague I care about who may have a threatening client. I get out here to find you could have burned down your house or been crushed by a falling flagpole—in your underwear, suicidal and drunk. This is not a rough patch. This is an intervention.”

His raised voice brought the hairs up on my arms, and his brown eyes were hard as pebbles in an icy stream. This was the police chief I knew and respected, whom I’d watched deal with every kind of disorderly behavior from officers and perpetrators alike. He was no pushover.

“Okay. Damn.” My mind was too fuzzy to decide what to do, but I could see the necessity of getting away for a few days. “I’ll go somewhere, take some days off. Now can I go to bed?”

“You need help, a program or something. At least a spa.” He flipped his hand. “One of those celebrity beauty things or something. You could have massages every day and a personal chef.”

My mind was too spongy to respond with anything coherent. “Okay.”

I’d figure a way out of this tomorrow.

“Can I get it in writing?”

I looked up, and that crinkle of humor was back in his eyes. “Ha-ha. I’ll show you where the sheets and blankets are.”

I wasn’t even embarrassed when he had to help me back to bed. I’d just been through an intervention, and there was nothing to hide anymore. Apparently things were bad, and I really did need help. There was a measure of relief in admitting it.

Morning wasn’t kind and neither was Hector, disliking being shut up with me. His yowling at the door got me up and staggering across the overlarge room to open it and let him out into the house, where he could exit via his kitty door. Down the hall, I glimpsed the upright shape of Bruce sitting on the couch. He turned and grinned at the sight of me.

“Morning, sunshine.”

I bit back a curse word and shut the door.

So it all had been real. There was no God. If there was, this would have all just been a bad dream. I’d burned the ex’s family Bible and the American flag, been rained on and almost clobbered by a flagpole, and worst of all, I’d agreed to go to rehab.

In the shower again, hoping that would make some sort of difference to the worst hangover I remembered in years, I thought strategy. My strategy was . . . well, I couldn’t think of one, but I had to do something to get out of town and dodge a possible stalker—and live down the gossip at the station from my divorcée bonfire—and maybe even admit I had a drinking problem.

I seemed to remember doing that last night. I must have been really drunk.

I got out and made the mistake of glimpsing myself in the mirror. I hurried past that and into the bedroom, stopped in front of the closet.

I wanted to dress in my style. Only I didn’t know what that was. I knew only that the row of polo shirts and chinos of various types just wasn’t it anymore. That look was left over from my life with the ex.

I pulled on pair of yoga pants and a long shimmery, silky blue tee. I felt comfortable and easy in it, not like I’d just come off the country club golf course—something I’d never do again if I could help it.

I brushed my wet hair as I headed down the hall. “Got coffee?” I asked Bruce. He held up his mug in reply. “Good.”

I went into the kitchen, struck by how big and excessive every single copper-bottomed pan I never used was. This
Architectural Digest
kitchen wasn’t me, either. I got out my favorite mug, a delicately hand-thrown pottery one with a raku glaze Chris had made in a ceramics class and given me for Christmas.

Yes. This was still me.

It was a weird new landscape ahead, and I didn’t have anything to navigate with but an internal compass—my intuition—saying
yes
and
no
. The difference was, I was finally listening.

I filled the mug with black coffee and headed back into the living room. “Did Hector go out?”

“Hear the blessed silence?” Bruce asked.

“Yeah, he has a way of making his needs known.” I sat down on the leather armchair this time.

Bruce looked rumpled, his slacks creased. He’d taken off the short-sleeved button-down he’d had on when he arrived but had kept on a thin white undershirt. His thick, muscled forearms were propped on his elbows as he two-finger typed onto a laptop. I spotted a couple of tribal tattoos on the insides of his arms, and I found that intriguing, wishing I could see what they were—and where they went.

“I’ve found three possible rehabs for you. One’s on
Maui, two on Oahu.”

“Oh.” That was a cold shower on my momentary interest. I took a big swig of coffee, promptly burned my tongue. My eyes still felt gummy in spite of the shower, and my head throbbed rhythmically with the beat of my heart. “I’m fine. I can stop drinking anytime. I just haven’t wanted to. After last night’s debacle, I want to. No need for all that.”

“I seem to remember that we had a deal.” Bruce looked up. He had a big square head and his neck was nearly as wide. The brown of his skin contrasted with the silver of his buzz-cut hair. He narrowed hard cop eyes at me. “You go, or you get fired.”

I opened and shut my mouth a couple of times. Heat flooded me in an ugly flush—I knew what it looked like when that happened, great crimson blotches mottling my fair skin, beginning on my chest and rising up my neck into my cheeks like the mercury on a thermometer.

“Fuck you,” I whispered. “I don’t deserve this.”

“Yeah, you don’t. But it happened anyway—your husband left you, your son went to college, and you’ve developed an alcohol problem. I care about you, Caprice—or I wouldn’t be here sweet-talking you into doing the right thing.”

“Sweet-talking? Shit!” I exclaimed. I wished I could pace around, maybe throw something, but I felt limp and kind of like a Chihuahua barking at a bull mastiff. I buried my nose in my coffee cup, trying to think of something smart and psychological to say. “I think you’re projecting your mother issues onto me.”

He just snorted, turned the laptop for me to see. “That all you’ve got? Pick one. You’re going.”

“No. Let me do it on my own.”

“You’re too far gone. I’ve got years of experience with this. I know what I’m talking about.”

“I see. You do have mother issues. Was she an alcoholic?” Old psychologist trick—deflect attention from self with something angrifying. Sure enough, his big hands tightened on the laptop like he wanted to throw it at me.

“I’m referring to my experience as a police officer dealing with hundreds of alcoholics through my years on the job,” he said, every word measured out and pinched off. “You’re too far gone to do it alone. Pick one.”

I was trapped. But maybe I could wriggle out of it if I went far enough away. I hate anything institutional, always have. I’d been on too many boards at those rehab and treatment places—there’s no mystique. I just couldn’t see myself believing the propaganda at the meetings and filling out little worksheets about my triggers.

“Okay.
Maui. Always wanted to see Haleakala,” I said. “You know that means House of the Sun.”

He went back to typing, then working his phone, and before I quite knew what was happening, I was in the bedroom packing a bag with the four or five clothing items I could find in the closet that felt like the “real me,” and I was getting into a taxi.

“Wait!” I stopped, the taxi door open. “Hector!”

“I’ll take care of him,” Bruce growled. “I’ll come out to this crazy-ass
haole
house and take care of him. I’ll keep an eye out for your stalker while I’m at it.”

“Oh my God. Thank you.” I trotted back and hugged him. I’d never done that before. His big arms closed over me, and I felt warm, safe, and tiny. I leaned my cheek on his chest, and the sound of his heart was big and slow and had a swish to it.

I never wanted to leave the sound of it.

“You have a heart murmur,” I said. “You should come. Do a spa treatment or something, take off some weight.”

“Sassy, you,” he said, and turned me, pushing me toward the taxi. “Call me and tell me how it’s going in a couple of days.”

In the taxi, I finally looked down at the paper he’d ripped off and stuffed in my purse with the particulars of the rehab place. Called Aloha House, it was a mixed-gender treatment facility in the “gracious natural environment of Upcountry Maui” and boasted “medically assisted detox, counseling, classes, and meetings.”

Screw that.

I could do this. I had another plan in mind entirely, an idea that had popped into my mind the minute I’d said “Maui.” Richard and I had always talked about a trip to a very special destination there, but we’d never actually made the time for it.

I turned away from a last sight of Bruce with Hector beside him and the melted flagpole fallen over into the driveway like a lost erection. Fortunately, I’d been able to squirrel a bottle of Grey Goose into my carry-on, and a little hair of the dog began to take the bite of the hangover away. After a few medicinal sips of vodka, I called Chris, needing to hear his voice.

“Hey, Mom.” He sounded right next to me, not thousands of miles away at University of California, Santa Barbara. I immediately pictured him on the campus, my old alma mater and that of the ex. Where we’d met, in fact.

“Hey, hon.” I injected my voice with mom-cheer. “How’s it going?”

“Fine.” He’d taken a reasonable first-year load, and now in the second semester, seemed to be finding his stride. “I’m on the way to practice.” He’d joined the water polo team, his comfort in the water a gift from growing up in Hawaii.

“Oh. Okay. Well, I just wanted to let you know I’m going to
Maui for a week or so.”

“Oh yeah? You never go anywhere for fun.”

I cleared my throat. “I might start. Anyway, this is a little—medical thing. I’m getting something done.”

“Boob job?”

“Chris!” I exclaimed.

He laughed. “Hey, why not, Mom? You’re still young. Why should Dad have all the fun?”

Why indeed.

His careless words burned like a whiplash. I wanted to hang up on him, but I didn’t. I breathed through it.

“Mom, you okay?” He seemed to be really tuning in for the first time. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong. I just don’t like to think of you alone . . . you know. Working. Feeling sad.”

“Well, that’s why I’m taking some time, taking care of myself,” I said carefully, wiping tears off my cheeks with little flicks of my fingers. “You’re right. I deserve some fun too, so I’m going to have some. I’ll call you when I get back.”

“Love you, Mom,” Chris said. “Dad is an asshole.”

“Yes, yes, he is,” I said. It was the first time I’d openly agreed with anything like that statement.