Kiss Kill Vanish (40 page)

The door swings open and the skinny one walks back in. He nudges his glasses farther up his sunburned nose and sits in the chair closest to the mirror. The AC vent is still blasting cold air at me.

“No,” I say.

“So then. The fire. We have a report from an eyewitness saying they saw a young male sneaking onto the yacht.”

“Okay, so maybe I didn't set the fire.”

“Tell me who did.”

“Why would you assume that I know?”

He pauses. “This investigation is pretty big. There's a huge team of people who've been working on it, spanning several different agencies, and apparently one of the FBI agents seems to think you do know who set that fire.”

I turn to stare at the mirror. It's large, covering nearly the entire wall, but I let my eyes travel over it slowly, smiling as I go. “I don't think your FBI agent really wants to get my whole story.”

Pearson frowns and scratches a flaky patch between his eyebrows. “Let's move on to something else. Do you want to tell me why you were holding a gun to your head when the coast guard arrived at your father's house?”

“No. Is pretending to threaten to kill yourself a crime?”

“Pretending? You're claiming you aren't suicidal?”

“I'm definitely not suicidal. I promise.”

He looks heavenward, a prayer for patience passing between his eyeballs and the ceiling. He plays the part so well. I bet he has a teenage daughter. Maybe several.

“I was mad at my father,” I say.

“Why?”

“I don't know. For taking away my credit card?”

He mutters something under his breath I don't catch, then pushes back his chair, making an ugly scraping sound. “What was that?” I ask.

“I said damn lucky.”

Lucky. Too much. I'm suddenly too tired and the game is too taxing. I want them to leave me alone so I can stop pretending to be an idiot and curl into a ball on my own bed and cry. “I don't feel very lucky,” I mumble.

“And why is that?”

“According to you guys, my father is going to spend the rest of his life in prison, and I get to walk around with that shame of who he is for the rest of my life. What's lucky about that?”

Sympathy crosses his face, then he scrubs his stubble with his hand and wipes it away. “Well, for whatever reason”—he glances at the mirror—“the FBI doesn't want to press you on your story. But if you had anything to do with what went down tonight, you're more than lucky. You're smart.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

He takes his notepad and tucks it under his sweat-stained armpit. He stands but doesn't leave, waiting for me to acknowledge what he's said.

I examine my imaginary nail polish again. “Can I go home now?”

“Yeah. But it'd be a good idea for you to stay in Miami for the next week or so in case we need to talk to you. Your cooperation is important if you want to avoid charges. Do you have someone to take you home?”

“I can call my sister.”

“Right. And Valentina,” he says, “if you did have anything to do with it, you should know you did a good thing. The Cruz organization is responsible for some of the most horrific—”

“Stop.”

He looks startled.

I push my chair back and it makes an angry scraping sound, but I don't say another word. I shouldn't have to explain why I don't want to hear what he has to say about my father's legacy. My name. My life.

He nods.

Leaving Miami takes longer than it should. Lola turns into a mother hen, practically forbidding Ana and me to look out the windows for fear of having our pictures end up on TV. That's not even possible—our pictures are already everywhere—but she's too mortified to be reasoned with.

Humiliation. That's the death blow for Ana and Lola, maybe almost as painful as realizing Papi will never see the light of day. Everybody knows.
Everybody.
How many of them knew before, I wonder? But that seems unimportant to my sisters—like it's so much more shameful having your father incarcerated than having him be a known drug lord.

In quieter moments, though, I wonder if Ana and Lola aren't lost in a darker tragedy. Maybe the public scorn is something benign for them to hate. It's safer to wail about our social demise than to mourn our mother and learn to hate Papi, too. The detective only hinted at what Papi had done to her, but my sisters aren't stupid. Lola was old enough that her loss has a face and a touch and a smell.

She doesn't talk about that, though. She talks about how mortifying it is to be online gossip fodder. She talks about escape.

My humiliation is different. I've already been gone for months, been a different person during my self-imposed exile in Montreal. Maybe that's what makes this embarrassment minor. Not even minor. Nonexistent. Or maybe it's that I'm too busy feeling something else.

While my sisters lick their wounds and wander around our home wondering how much of their lives will be seized by the government, I call Marcel. I call him again and again and again. Each time I honestly believe he will pick up—I'm not sure why, after the first day of failed attempts—which means each time he doesn't is rich with fresh devastation. I leave a message the first time, and the second, but after that I can't make myself talk to a machine and pretend it's him. It's not him.

The silence drives me crazy in increments. One day becomes two, becomes three, becomes four. First, I'm just a little insane, imagining him driving north through that first night with his ankle broken, arm broken, face bleeding, and who knows what else. I see our trip here in reverse. Does he stop at a hospital right away? Or does he take my advice and not stop at all? How terrified was he,
is
he, that Victor Cruz or one of his enforcers is behind the headlights in his rearview mirror?

By the time I've worked through all the details I can think of, I'm practically senseless with worry. I lie on my bed and stare at my phone, debating whether calling Marcel's parents will result in an immediate international search, or whether they'll pass the phone to him as if nothing has happened.

I'm a complete lunatic by the time I'm considering the worst: Marcel is dead. He was bleeding internally after the beating from Fernando and Jose, and he died in agony on a highway in Georgia. But even if he had no ID on him, Ana's car would have been found. It hasn't been. Ana is still carless and pissed off at me for it. The fact that Lola wouldn't let her go anywhere if she did have a car is irrelevant.

But if he isn't dead, and he somehow made it back to Montreal, and there's no other physical force preventing him from answering his phone or calling me, then that would make sense. Terrible sense.

If he's alive, he's lucky to have survived his brush with the Cruz regime. He must be thinking that. He must be thinking about Lucien.

I don't think about kissing Marcel. Not consciously. When that memory finds me it's against my will, while I'm asleep or zoning out to Lola's paranoid nattering.

We meet with Detective Pearson again, all three of us together. I'm prepared to play dumb, but I don't have to. The questions are too easy, like he doesn't think we know anything or he doesn't care if we do.

“That's all?” I ask as he stands to leave, ignoring Lola's glare.

“That's all.”

I frown, not sure whether to ask the question I've been worrying over since Papi's arrest.

“We don't need you to testify,” Pearson says.

He's not the idiot I'd thought he was last time.

“Good,” Lola says tersely. “Because we wouldn't. Let's go.”

She's wrong. I might.

Ana and Lola stand, so I do too. If they've got enough on Papi without us, then that's probably best. The collection of murders permanently burned into my mind is too much to share, and Marcel's bloody face, his twisted, beaten body as he limped away from me, is just as bad as all the others.

I have to find him.

We go home and eat stale cookies and make plans. Lola and Ana are convinced the only cure for their blistering shame is Aruba, so I sit with them and pretend I'm going to go with them, pretend the Bahamas are still the place I want to be, pretend that a month on the beach will be long enough for the reporters to stop calling and the photographers to get bored with milling around the gate and leave.

After I'm done pretending, I go up to my room and pull up a list of hospitals in Montreal. It's a long shot—him making it all the way home in that condition—but where else would I start? According to the internet, in Montreal alone there are at least a dozen places where he could've been treated.

I waste the first call asking if Marcel LeBlanc is a patient.

“We can't tell you that, miss,” the receptionist tells me. Her French accent, flattened from what sounds like years of telephone receptioning, makes me oddly sentimental. “Privacy laws, yes?”

“Oh. Right. Yes.”

On the phone to the second hospital, I ask for my call to be transferred to Marcel LeBlanc's room.

“Of course,” the operator says at first, but then, “I'm sorry, we don't have a current patient by that name.”

“No
current
patient? Does that mean he was there?”

He pauses. “I'm sorry, but I can't give out that information.”

“When was he discharged?”

“Miss, that information—”

“He
was
a patient, though.”

“By
law
, I can't confirm whether he—”

“No, I get it. Sorry.”

I exhaust the list. He's nowhere. It's been two days since Ana reported her car stolen (all the chaos and upheaval surrounding Papi's arrest bought me three days of excuses before I made up a story about leaving it on the causeway with a flat tire). But if he made it to Canada, it's less than a long shot. Maybe he made it to an airport and flew . . . anywhere.

I could wait.

I could wait like I waited for Emilio, paralyzed by fear and shame and passivity, starving and cold and useless. But I'm not that girl anymore. I don't hide in closets, and I don't stare at water stains, waiting for my hero. I'm the hero. But I still don't know what to do.

The mandolin appears from nowhere with nothing. It's just there on the porch one day when I'm going out to search for an avocado that isn't yet rotten. Based on the label and the packaging, it came on a UPS truck, but there's no return address to tie it to Emilio's apartment, no letter.

An anonymous apology. I take it in.

My sheets are slippery. I move a little and slide so far, like I'm floating, and it's not good or bad but different. Everything is. Home should feel more like home. The sheet below me feels silkier than water, the one on top smooth like wind. I shouldn't feel trapped by something so loose and light that it might not even be there at all.

I sleep, I think, or I have my eyes closed long enough that when I open them again it takes a while to find the lines of my dark room. It's all curved: the beveled poles of my canopy bed, the oval mirror, the stoic slope of the armoire. Nothing is straight. Sometimes, irrationally, I miss the harsh right angles of my upturned crate and the broken-faced clock.

But my eyes adjust, and the decoratively bowed becomes familiar again.

I can't hear Lola and Ana anymore, so they must've gone to bed. Seven days have passed since Vizcaya, and on every single one of them I've fallen asleep to the sound of my sisters talking across the hall in Lola's room. Tonight, like the other nights, I started out in there with them, but I can only take so much before I start to suffocate. I didn't say much tonight, just lay across the foot of Lola's bed and nodded at the appropriate times. Their woes are justified. I should be more sympathetic. But I've already processed the sting of Emilio's betrayal and mourned the darkest side of Papi's life.

They're worried about money. It's not like I'm
not
worried about money, but I'd already cut myself off from Papi's filthy wealth. There are worse things than poverty.

Papi's bank accounts have been seized, and FBI agents have been traipsing in and out carting off Papi's computers and files and safes. Lola thinks it's only a matter of time before they start taking our belongings—the valuables, at least. I doubt she really knows, but I don't call her on it either. I listen and nod and commiserate.

I think about Marcel. All the time. All the time. All the time.

Once my eyes are fully adjusted, I roll onto my right side and stare at my Degas sketch. Three ballerinas. It's mine, or I've always thought it was, but now that I'm staring at the charcoal figures warmed only by moonlight, I'm unsure. It feels like it's mine, even if all the other art in this house has become tinged with the ugliness of what I know.

Papi bought the sketch because I begged. We were at an auction house in London, one of the first I remember, and despite his detailed explanation of its overvaluation and the unlikelihood of resale at anything close to cost, I wanted it. The economics meant nothing to my seven-year-old mind.

“But can we buy it anyway?” I asked him.

“Tell me what you like about it,” he said.

I frowned. I was sure there was one right answer, but I didn't know it. I liked that it made me feel sad—nostalgic, if I'd known the word. It made me want to close my eyes and dream those dancers real, but I couldn't close my eyes and risk losing them. It made me feel like I knew a secret, but that reason made the least sense of all.

Papi watched me as I frowned at the sketch. I remember his face-crinkling smile when I turned to him and shrugged.

There's something in that smile for me now. It's the one I'm going to remember, the one I'm going to intentionally recall when the facts of his life make me doubt he was ever sincere about art or about me.