DOUBLE KNOT (26 page)

“Mother, listen to me.” I grabbed her forearms. “Go to the kitchen, close the door,
and stay there until one of us tells you it’s clear to come out. Do you understand?”

She understood. I turned around to find Bianca on her back, her head hanging off the
foot of the bed. We looked at each other upside down. “David.” She wasn’t screaming.
In fact, I could barely hear her. “Please don’t leave me.”

“I won’t, Bianca.”

TWENTY-SIX

No Hair had secured DeLuna to a sun chair and the chair to the iron bistro table,
the same table we sat around two (years) days ago when our V2s went down. DeLuna’s
hands were cuffed behind the chair, his feet strapped to the frame. He wasn’t going
anywhere, and if he did it would be over the deck railing with a chair and a table
to splat on the deck below. He was bound, gagged, and out of the way until Jess, just
up from a nap, stared at the butt of the Hi-Point 9mm peeking out of Mother’s pocketbook
too long. No Hair stepped out of the salon to talk to Mr. Sanders, leaving Jess staring
at Mother’s pocketbook so long she came up with a bright idea. And now she had her
bright idea pressed against her husband’s left temple.

Bianca was in the middle of the bed on all fours, soundtrack,
The Blair Witch Project
.

I looked at the second hand on my watch, knowing another contraction would hit her
in twenty seconds, long enough for me to step out on Mother’s balcony and access the
situation on the sun deck. I slid open the doors, keeping one foot in the bedroom
with Bianca, the other firmly planted on the deck. A welcome gust of Caribbean breeze
blew through me and hit Bianca in the face.

“Oh, thank you, David.”

Words I’d never heard pass the woman’s lips.

The next words from her lips were, “MY LOINS HAVE IGNITED! IGNITED! I’M ON FIRE! HIT
ME WITH A HOSE, DAVID! PUT OUT THE FIRE! THE
FIRE
!”

“Bianca?” I waited for the storm to subside before I spoke. “You need to rest between
contractions. And
please
try to pipe down.” Because you have no idea what’s going on right outside this door,
one of your outbursts might trigger more bloodshed, and you’re totally out of trunks.

I stuck my head out the door.

“Young lady, you don’t want to do this.”

No Hair was negotiating with Jessica.

“I do. I want to so hard.”

I couldn’t see or hear DeLuna.

“Have you ever shot a gun?” No Hair asked her.

“No.”

“It’s messy, Jessica. It’s ugly,” No Hair told her. “You’ll be covered in his blood.”

Jess looked down at her rhinestone anchor.

“Let me have the gun.” No Hair extended an open palm. “Give it to me.”

My heart jumped in my throat when Jess turned to answer No Hair and the gun went with
her, the death end flailing in No Hair’s general vicinity.

“JESS!” I drew her attention and the gun away.

“So, Davis?” I could see the sun glinting off the gun. A flash of it hit me in the
eyes. “I’m going to kill him!”

“JOOOOBAA! JOOOOBAA! J
OOOOO
BAAAAAA!”

Someone help me.

“Jess?” Fantasy stepped onto the sun deck from my stateroom. Now we had her surrounded.
“Let’s rest a minute. Close our eyes and think about it. Maybe sit down, relax, and
talk about it.”

I smelled a lullaby on the way.

“
HEE
YA HEEYA HEEYA HEEYA!”

(Squatting. She was up on her haunches. I cut my eyes to see Bianca squatting in the
middle of the bed, rocking on her feet, side to side, chanting to the childbirth spirits.)

Nothing was working. No Hair couldn’t talk the gun away from her and Fantasy couldn’t
put her to sleep.

It was up to me.

“JESS! 2008! The financial crisis! What happened in 2008?” I shouted over “HEEYA HEEYA,”
the wind, and the deck.

Her dark hair whipped around her head, the 9mm finding everyone when she used her
gun hand to push it out of her face. Fantasy gasped and No Hair dove out of the line
of fire.

“
The collapse
!” Jess waved the gun through the air. “
The bailout
!”

And with that, Jess’s anger was temporarily redirected.

“WHY?” I asked,
The Exorcist
playing out behind me.

“Banks didn’t support transparency for hedge funds! Mortgage bankers didn’t obtain
financial statements! Subprime loans were out of control!” No Hair took a tentative
step toward Jess. “Mark to market accounting rules weren’t followed! And there was
no regulation of credit default swaps!” No Hair and Fantasy closed in on her as Jessica
got the last of the Banking Collapse of 2008 off her chest. “Anti-predatory state
laws were
overridden
!” Jessica DeLuna, dark hair flying, wearing a rhinestone anchor and one silver shoe,
wielding a gun, screaming at the top of her lungs for all of the Caribbean to hear,
unleashed the financial devastation anger she’d held for years.

“But what was the
real
problem, Jess? Whose fault was it? What went
wrong
?”

I don’t remember moving, but I was all the way out of Mother’s room at the edge of
the balcony. “Where was the
failure
, Jess?”

“Leadership!” Jess waved the gun through the air to make her point. “Total and complete
lack of
leadership
!”

“POOOKALOO! POOOKALOO! POOOOKA
LOOOOO
!”

“You’re the leader, Jess!
You
have to lead! Put that gun down and take back your bank!”

“My bank! My bank!
My
bank!”

Just then, Max DeLuna weighed in. He couldn’t have managed words, and if he did say
something through the gag she understood, I didn’t hear it. He must have sneered—at
her, at the idea. It was just a flash, but the end result destroyed our collective
attempts at defusing the situation, and the barrel of the gun was making an impression
on Max DeLuna again. Right between his eyes.

“You
bastard
,” she said.

Now that I heard.

“Jess!”

She wouldn’t look at me.

“If you shoot him—” I gave every word the time and attention it deserved, “—he won’t
go to prison for what he’s done.
You
will.”

In the end, it wasn’t the prospect of her life over just for the satisfaction of ending
his, or the idea of returning to Hawaii and taking her rightful place at her father’s
bank that loosened Jessica’s grip on the gun. It was Anderson Cooper. My cat launched
through the air like a missile to catch Jess’s soaring hair. Jess screamed, Anderson
screamed, and the gun hit the deck to skid and spin to a stop at Fantasy’s feet.

The reading chair on Mother’s balcony caught me when I stumbled back. My head was
thick with the close call, my heart hammering, and it was with glazed eyes I watched
No Hair and Fantasy scramble to lock everything and everyone down.

“Davis?”

Then I began hallucinating.

“Davis, honey?”

It was my husband.

* * *

I thought she might be singing a Christmas carol.

The lyrics to Bianca’s song sounded like, “
On Dasher, on Dancer
!”

She was actually belting out the word
Ondine,
opera style, hitting a very impressive range.

We were as far from Bianca’s birth plan as could be imagined in any of her wildest
dreams or my worst nightmares and there was no going back. Bianca was bringing her
baby into the world aboard
Probability
.

After the kiss to surpass all other kisses in the history of kisses, Bradley Cole,
my husband, the father of my twins, told Bianca he liked her t-shirt on his way to
Mother’s powder room, where he rolled up his blue oxford sleeves and scrubbed.

My legs were too weak to hold me up, so I sat on the bed beside Bianca and found her
hand. She asked me why I was crying—I didn’t know I was—her breath ragged, her blond
hair plastered to her face, her icy green eyes seeking mine. After her next contraction,
during which she fractured all the bones in my hand, she told me to stop crying, because
she might reconsider my employment at some point in the future.

“What, Bianca?”

She started to repeat it, but said, “UUUUGAAAKK! UUUGAAAAKK!
UUUUGAAAAAAKKKK
!” instead.

Bradley lifted a chair over our heads, placed it at the foot of the bed, grabbed Bianca
by the ankles and pulled.

She let out a woof.

“Let’s do this, Bianca.”

At the door, Baylor, a head taller than the rest of the spectators seeing way more
of Bianca than they wanted to, said, “Dude.” Then introduced himself to Arlinda.

(Really? Right now?)

Bradly asked for volunteers from the audience. “Caroline? Fantasy?”

Mother and Fantasy climbed on the bed with us. Each took a Bianca knee.

I held my breath until Bradley came up for air. “She’s crowning. This baby’s coming.
Help her, Davis. Get behind her.” His incredible blue eyes met mine.

Which was when Bianca started singing Christmas carols.

I held my breath, Bianca belted out opera, until my husband made the announcement.

“It’s a…boy?”

Bianca fell back and collapsed into my arms. I pushed her hair from her face.

“It’s a
boy
,” he said. Mother helped Bradley wrap the beautiful little life in a
Probability
towel. “Bianca, you have a baby boy.”

Richard and Bianca Sanders named their son David.

* * *

Emmeline. My daughter’s name was Emmeline.

Having said goodbye to her when she was an hour old at the UAB Women and Infants Center
in Birmingham, Alabama, I said hello to her again eighteen years, two months, and
thirteen days later at my childhood home in Pine Apple, Alabama. It was forever, holding
on for dear life, lest the connection that had escaped us once slip away again, before
either of us spoke. And when we did, they weren’t exactly words. It would be four
hours later when Emi and I finally stepped out of my high-school bedroom. We let Mother
in and out with cookies, the Starbucks, and random pieces of life to share with Emi.
“This—” she landed a stack of photographs of my ex-ex-husband Eddie Crawford on Emi’s
lap, “—is who would’ve raised you.”

“
Mother
!” I grabbed them. “Are you trying to scare her to death?”

Between us, my beautiful firstborn, who I’d already told about my misguided attempt
to keep her by marrying the village idiot, tried to hide her amusement, her caramel
eyes dancing between me and my wildly inappropriate mother.

“Well, Davis, she needs to know what you saved her from.”

And who would ever save
me
from
her
?

Which is when I realized, the three of us on the pink eyelet bedspread Mother had
tucked me under as a child, I never needed to be saved from my mother. In fact, the
only path to being the mother I wanted to be, both from this point forward with Emi
and with the twins I would soon deliver, was
through
my own mother.

I wasn’t the only one acknowledging Mother’s maternal gifts. In the hours after young
David Sanders’s birth, while the rest of us were busy with the U.S. Consulate in George
Town as they took Max DeLuna and Colby Mitchell into custody to await extradition,
Mother stayed with Bianca. And from that moment ’til this one Bianca has called every
ten minutes. To speak to my mother. “I’m sorry, David. She knows more than you.” To
which Mother says, “It’s what’s been wrong with her all along, Davis. She never had
a mother who mothered her, so she’s doesn’t know
how
.”

The mothering came full circle three months later on a Thursday morning.

I woke up in labor, slow and steady, at the beginning of my thirty-eighth week. It
would be hours before my contractions were strong enough to leave for the hospital.

Bradley, in a flurry of last-minute overseeing operations of a $700 million corporation,
told us he’d be right back. “Reggie and Fantasy will be here in a minute, girls, and
Pine Apple, Alabama, all of Pine Apple, is on the way.” He sat on the edge of our
bed and laced his fingers in mine. “Promise me you won’t have our babies until I get
back.” He kissed my forehead.

“I promise.”

Emi took his place beside me with a watch in one hand, to time my contractions, and
The Compass
in the other. I didn’t even know I brought it home, the big blue leather-bound component
of our escape. Emi opened it to find the only physical evidence of our time on
Probability.
She showed it to me. We smiled at the picture of Mother in her Party Suit.

Emi flipped through. “This is so cool.” Her voice a whisper. “The dishwasher.”

“What?”

“Where they put the dishwasher,” she said.

“Let me see that, Emi.”

The white stone waterfall-edge countertop to the right of the sink disappeared with
the push of a button. And there was the dishwasher.

About the Author

Gretchen Archer is a Tennessee housewife who began writing when her daughters, seeking
higher educations, ran off and left her. She lives on Lookout Mountain with her husband,
son, and a Yorkie named Bently.
Double Whammy
, her first Davis Way Crime Caper, was a Daphne du Maurier Award finalist and hit
the USA TODAY Bestsellers List.
Double Knot
is the fifth Davis Way crime caper. You can visit her at www.gretchenarcher.com.