Hydraulic Level Five (1) (41 page)

“Isn’t that what he’s doing with the yuppie chick? Playing the revenge game?”

I stared over at Caroline and Samuel, where Samuel dug a soda out of an ice-filled cooler for her. “I don’t think so. Samuel doesn’t play head games like that.”

“Why else would he bring her? Come on, Kaye, it’s obvious the guy’s not into her. The way he looks at you…” Hector bit his tongue, his eyes growing angry.

“What do you mean?”

“He looks at you like he wants to nail you seven ways till Sunday, and I don’t like it.” I had to laugh at his dirty twist on that old expression. His ire only grew. “I just don’t want you to break your heart over this guy,
mamacita
.”

I stopped laughing. Hector was truly worried about me. Sighing, I pressed my face into his shoulder. “It was broken a long time ago, Hector. If anything, I’m trying to mend it. Thanks for your help with that all these years—the kayaking, the ski trips, the jokes. I’m not sure I ever told you how much it means. You’re a great friend to me.”

“Friend,” Hector grumbled, messing my hair with his big hand. “You are gonna kill me, Trilby. But I can be a friend…” A sly smirk spread across his face as he stood and stretched. “If you let me try to pick up Samuel’s hot date.”

I snickered, imagining the horror on Caroline’s face when my bald and goateed, tattoo-sleeved, pickup-driving friend hit on her. I smacked his butt in payback.

“Go get ’er, tiger.”

“Sam, did you put baby powder in the air vents?” I caught Molly’s words as I joined my friends crouching like thugs behind Angel’s hatch-back that evening. The sky had fully darkened, and it was prank time.

“Remind me why I’m the only person who can pull that one off?”

“Because Danita can’t kill her own brother when a twelve-foot high cloud of powder whooshes in her face. Besides, you’ll be long gone to New York by the time she’ll have a chance to exact revenge.” Molly tossed me a box of condoms and told me to get to work.

The bridesmaids and groomsmen were blowing up condoms like balloons and stuffing them in the hatch-back’s interior. If we tried anything after the wedding reception tomorrow, Danita would “string us up by our ta-tas and hoo-hoos,” as Cassady so elegantly groused.

“And she can’t exact revenge from a distance? You know she will.” He looked at me with an unfathomable expression.

“Oh, go write about it in your padlocked diary,” Molly mumbled.

Somewhere below, Hector put the moves on Caroline to keep her out of my hair for a bit, bless him. Not quite what he had in mind for the evening, but having Samuel’s dour-faced, disapproving date hovering would suck the joy right out of our mischief.

“Did you stick a potato up the exhaust pipe yet?” I buttoned up my sweater. Santiago giggled like a girl, already trashed. I ignored him.

“Done.” Molly held up an empty Ziploc bag. Flaming stapler, she’d even labeled it.

“You know, having you for friends is enough to convince me to never tie the knot,” Cassady commented. “Almost feel sorry for Angel and Danita.”

“Don’t. Hey, Sam, tell Cassady what they did to you at our wedding.”

Samuel thought, and then a slow smile lit his face. “You see those four little teenagers over there?” He pointed to the fire pit. “Well, they’re Angel’s cousins. They were probably seven or eight when we got married. Anyway, they attended our wedding as Danita’s and Angel’s ‘plus-ones’—counting each cousin as a ‘half.’ Angel paid them to go around to Kaye’s out-of-town relatives, point at me, and say, ‘That’s my daddy…don’t you think he’s pretty?’ I kept getting cold-shouldered by my new in-laws and I couldn’t figure out what I’d done. So this?” Samuel gestured to our latex handiwork. “This is tame.”

Molly knotted off a condom balloon and tapped it through the window. It floated down and settled next to the brake pedal. “Don’t forget about him.” She pointed an accusing finger at Santiago. “He told Kaye’s college friends Samuel was the biggest prick at Lyons High.”

Santiago had the class to blush. “Yeah, I was a real jerk back then.”

She flung a condom at his face. “You were just jealous of Samuel.”

“Well, who wouldn’t be? He could have had half the girls in Lyons in the backseat of his Subaru if he’d wanted, with that pretty face.”

Molly landed an elbow in Santiago’s ribs. “If he’d wanted to. But he didn’t. You still are a jerk, aren’t you?”

Samuel became incredibly interested in unrolling a condom and blowing it up. I jumped in to finish the “man-pretty” story, saving him.

“Anyway, my great aunts and uncles and cousins kept coming up to me, asking if Samuel had been married before. I was so confused, replying, ‘Nooo, he’s only twenty-one.’ Then I caught Angel and Danita busting their guts by the greenhouse and put two and two together.”

Samuel cracked a smile.

Later, after a near case of latex poisoning, I munched on a plate of shrimp mole and churros when Samuel made his way over and plopped into Hector’s vacated chair. That odd expression was back—mouth and eyes tight. He wasn’t happy; I could tell as much. I glanced down the beach where Hector replenished his beer.

“So I hear you’ve been skirting our one-question rule.”

Crap. Sofia’d talked. “What makes you think that?”

“Kaye, come on. You could have talked to me about my arrest in North Carolina. You didn’t need to pry it from my mother.”

“Your mother was more than willing to talk.” I waved a fork in Sofia’s direction. “And for the record, I would have talked to you, but you were busy breaking in your running shoes with your new best friend.”

A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “If I didn’t know better, Neelie Nixie, I’d think Caroline’s behavior on the camping trip isn’t the only problem you have with her.”

Ooh, he
knew
I hated that nickname. “You think? Let’s see…she knows far too much personal info about me and isn’t afraid to throw it in my face, she struts around with this elitist attitude that is, frankly, off-putting. Oh! And don’t forget how she ditched my PR agency for some West Coast media machine who doesn’t know a thing about the Boulder area.” I grabbed a churro and snapped it in two, imagining it was one of Caroline’s spindly arms. A waft of shrimp mole hit my nose, and I grimaced, dropping the food. Dammit, my appetite was gone. I dumped the plate in a trash bin and stalked off toward the rocks stacked along the creek, away from the crowd.

Samuel followed. “Kaye, don’t get upset. All I’m saying is that you can come to me if you have questions.”

“I didn’t know it was taboo to talk to your family now.” I scooped a rock from the water, smudged away wet clay, and saw it was ribboned in pale pink like the Rose of Sharon shrubs that bloomed along my mother’s property line.

“Talking to my family isn’t taboo. But digging up an old arrest record is rather shady, don’t you think?” He gave me a pointed look.

My hand froze over the stone. “How did you know about that?”

“I didn’t. It was a hunch, but I guess I’m right.” He frowned, scratching his neck. “What could you possibly want with my arrest record?” The deductive wheels churned in his mind as he fitted puzzle pieces together.

My phone buzzed. Saved! I glanced at the screen—it was Jaime. Oh thank you, thank you, bitter divorce attorney. I place the pretty rock in Samuel’s hand with a promise to chat later and walked farther down the creek.

“This is Kaye.”

“Well, hello to you too, sugar-booger. How’s your straight date?”

“He’s competing in another pissing contest with Samuel. You know, the lesbian thing is sounding better and better. I should have invited you as my wedding date.”

“Hector Valdez is a walking penis, and there you have it. Someone needs to teach him how to take down opponents with his brain instead of caveman grunting.”

I stepped into the slimy creek bed, letting currents break over my feet. “What did you find out?”

“Okay, Trilby, brace yourself, here’s what I dug up on this Togsy person. Lyle Togsender, age thirty-one. Originally from Raleigh, but moved to Boulder for his undergrad at CU. Get this—he was also in NYU’s Creative Writing grad program, where he shared an East Village house with several other writers. Namely, one Samuel Caulfield Cabral.”

Shared a house…“Crap! The guy who answered the door at Samuel’s brownstone—that was Togsy! I
knew
he looked familiar. So Samuel met Caroline when she was visiting her boyfriend at the East Village house.”

“Ahhh, no.” Jaime cleared her throat. “Now don’t go all soap opera on me, Trilby, because this really isn’t that big of a deal if you think about it. But Caroline wasn’t visiting. She
lived
in the brownstone. Actually, her daddy owned the home. Pretty swanky place.”

“I don’t remember her living there.” I retraced my steps through a house littered with trash, staggering party-goers, Samuel’s nearly-bare room…

No way. Tiaras. Stacks of books. Classic wicker furniture. I’d been in
Caroline’s
room. Who else’s could it have been? And if she’d lived there, she’d witnessed Samuel unceremoniously tell me to “fuck off.” Embarrassed fury flooded my skin. Of all the people I would
never
want to see the lowest, most heartbreaking moment of my life, Caroline was at the top of that list.

“There’s more. I found a change of address for Lyle Togsender from six and a half years ago. After that, I couldn’t dig up anything romantically linking Caroline and Togsy. My guess is they split around the same time you and your man-meat divorced.”

So Samuel and Caroline both became single in January, almost seven years ago. How long
had
Samuel known Caroline? If he’d been invited to live in her brownstone, he would have met her when we were in Boulder, especially if she’d ever visited Togsy there. Brown hair…black hair. It had been dark, only candlelight. Was it possible the woman I’d seen beneath Samuel had been Caroline? Horrible scenarios played themselves out in my mind, despite Sofia’s assurances that Samuel and Caroline weren’t together then. Black hair could have easily appeared brown in candlelight…What if they’d orchestrated their respective break-ups so they could be free to date each other? The possibility made me sick.

Caroline’s laughter echoed through the trees, and the cord of jealousy wound tightly in my gut snapped.

“Gotta go, Jaime.” I hung up on her protests and stormed back to where I’d left Samuel, only to find he had once again settled into Hector’s lawn chair. Seated next to him, in my chair, was none other than the black-haired, brownstone-owning Afghan hound, her sleek legs curled beneath her.

Heck no. She may have stolen Samuel, the book tour gig, and the Cabrals, but I’d be damned if she was going to take my purple lawn chair.

“You’re in my seat.”

“Do you mind if I sit here a bit? Just until I finish my conversation?”

Argh! Floozy was dead. “Get out of my chair.”

“Kaye,” Samuel cut in, “what’s the big deal? It’s only a chair.”

“There’s no need for rudeness,” the hound added.

That was it. Screeching, I wound back, ready to do some serious damage to the Manhattan yuppie even though I’d never thrown a punch in my life. Samuel leaped up and grabbed my elbows to keep me from tackling her, but not before Caroline rolled out of my chair onto the ground, pure panic on her face.

“Kaye, what’s gotten into you?” he hissed.

I yanked my arms back and rounded on him. “Was the woman Caroline?”

“What do you mean?”

“The woman you were a coke line and two pairs of underwear away from screwing in New York. Was it her?”

Caroline’s mouth dropped open, and she spilled a small, disbelieving laugh. Several people on the edge of the fire pit turned their heads at my loud words.

“
¡Válgame Dios!
Keep your voice down, my family is here.” Samuel placed a hand firmly on the small of my back and steered me away from the party. I stumbled along next to him, bare toes digging into the grass to keep up. He led me up to his roadster and dropped his arm, staring down at me with flaring nostrils.

“Talk,” he said.

Fricking monkey rump, I’d nearly attacked somebody. I had never been in a real physical fight before. “Caroline lived there in the brownstone,” I sputtered. “Togsy—the guy from CU—answered the door. Oh cripes, I’ll just ask. Were you sleeping with her?”

“No!” Samuel threw his hands in the air. “Yes, she was with Togsy. No, I wasn’t sleeping with her. Kaye, please be rational!”

How was I not being rational? My temper flared again. “Rational like you? Leaving our marriage because it was the logical thing to do? Rational, like locking me out in New York, asking your father to put me on a plane home without so much as a goodbye from you? You couldn’t even be kind in your note—just cold.”

“What note?” Confusion suffused his features, which only fueled years’ worth of hurt.

“The note you wrote to me, Samuel! You didn’t have the courage to give it to me in person, so you stuck it in my backpack while I was asleep.”

“I don’t—”