Late Rain (22 page)

He called her back four days later.

He introduced April Rayne to Corrine Keyes from Charlotte, North Carolina. Tim Farrell produced a birth certificate, social security card, high school diploma, driver’s license, employment record complete with references, and two street addresses for former residences.

Farrell had done freelance work for various state and federal agencies and stole or pirated whatever forms he needed for reconstruction. Her social security number came from his practice of combing the archives of various city halls for those who had died far enough in the past to escape digital upgrades, and the street addresses fit homes that eventually were sold and torn down in Charlotte’s development frenzy. A third grader, he told her, could hack into the school system’s files. The references for the companies Corrine Keyes had supposedly worked at were friends of Tim’s who would vouch for Corrine’s work record if they were ever contacted.

She paid him the ten thousand dollars.

Her mistake had been in agreeing to sleep with him. Given the persona he projected, she’d figured him for a squirter, a premie, who could be dispatched in short order, and so she hadn’t paid the attention she should have when they were back at his apartment and he offered her a drink. By the time the fourth cut from Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
came on, she knew he’d put something in the drink when she tried to move her legs and couldn’t.

She woke the next morning in a slow-motion panic. Little by little and in no particular order, pieces of memory of what Tim Farrell had done after he’d drugged her started crowding in, and with effort, Corrine waste-basketed the images and dressed and managed to leave before Farrell awoke, and by that afternoon, Corrine Keyes was on her way to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She wanted a place full of tourists for groundcover.

She eventually landed a job waitressing at one of Sonny Gramm’s supper clubs.

Four months into the job, Corrine Keyes worked a bachelor party in the banquet room and met Buddy Tedros. She married him three and a half weeks later.

That should have been it, a close-enough to a happily ever.

Except Stanley Tedros wouldn’t accept her as part of the family, and he wouldn’t accept James Restan’s buy-out offer.

And now Wayne LaVell could with one phone call hold Corrine hostage to her history by threatening to resurrect April Rayne and turn her loose in Corrine’s life.

Corrine had no intention of letting that happen.

The evening air had grown cooler, but Corrine remained where she was, lying on her back on top of the picnic table and looking up at a cloudless night sky and wide swathes of stars, and she almost prayed; but if that’s what it was, the words had dissolved on her lips before she had the chance to speak them, and she was left with what Betsy Jo Horvath, April Rayne, and Corrine Keyes had always known too, whether they liked it or not.

If you looked at anything long enough, you’d end up seeing right through it.

THE REMOTE WASN’T ONE. Jack Carson thought that’s what he’d been holding and pointing at the television, but instead it was something else entirely, a tape recorder, one that was compact and thin and expensive.

He wondered how it had ended up in his shirt pocket.

The television was off, and it was strange to be in the living room because the television was always on when he was there.

In the afternoon quiet, he listened to the house, its shifts and creaks, the rush of water through pipes, the occasional squeak of a ceiling fan in its rotations.

Jack smiled.

He liked the feel of the house and the afternoon. Jack had always thought working construction was like having a conversation with whatever he was building.

You couldn’t make something without leaving a little bit of yourself behind.

Jack looked at the tape recorder in his hand. He cleared his throat.

The windows were open and the screens gridded in soft light, and Jack caught the smell of the tide rising, and he started building the sentences in his head that answered what his daughter and Buddy Tedros had kept asking him. The question was like a job he’d been hired to do, Jack painstakingly taking the words and lining them up and then moving them to where they belonged and then building another sentence that followed the last one—Jack seeing them in his head, each word in each sentence like a line of cement blocks for a foundation of a house someone had contracted him to build—and Jack ignored the sound of an old man’s voice haltingly speaking in fits and starts and concentrated instead on what he was doing because, finally, that was how any job got done, and along the way Jack Carson found the clarity and grace he’d known as a young man when he’d backed his words with good work.

EARLY APRIL WAS A HUSK.

By late afternoon each day, the sky took on a jaundiced cast, and the wind carried a fine, constant sanding of pine pollen that coated everything it came in contact with a pale green. Weather reports were an exercise in redundancy, the temperatures spiking and breaking records, and there was no sign of rain. Competing winds moving in from the plains and the Gulf broke and scattered whatever storm cells developed.

Everything baked.

Tempers were short and grievances long.

The first wave of students for spring break receded, and the city braced itself for the second.

Reverend Redd Benton, taking the weather as a sign, had come into town for an End Times Revival.

Ben Decovic’s shift had been a petri dish of petty complaints and grudges that kept feeding on each other, and his reserves of patience had been sorely taxed by the time the white boat of a Continental ran the light at the intersection of Gilchrist and Ashe and he pulled it over a half block later.

The driver powered down the window as Ben walked up. He was a small man in an ill-fitting summer-weight suit. His black hair appeared frozen, and there was a thin lopsided isosceles triangle of a mustache running to the corners of his upper lip. On the passenger side was a heavyset man with an unfortunate comb-over and a wide round face, his cheeks blotched and filigreed with broken capillaries.

“Problem, Officer?” the driver asked.

“The last light,” Ben said, “you ran the red.” He asked to see license and registration.

“It was yellow,” the driver said.

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken, sir,” Ben said. “It was red before you reached the intersection. You’re lucky to have avoided an accident.”

“I know my primary colors, Officer. It was yellow.” Ben asked, once again, for license and registration.

“We’re on the way to a meeting with the mayor,” the driver said, “and I am a close acquaintance of a number of your fellow officers, including Chief Newell.”

“It’s nice to have friends, sir,” Ben said.

The driver unlocked the seat belt and rummaged for his wallet. The heavyset man on the passenger side touched the knot in his tie and watched Ben with eyes that gradually emptied of all expression.

“You don’t know who I am, do you?” the driver asked.

“I will as soon as you hand over the license and registration,” Ben said.

The driver did.

Sandwiched between the license and registration card was a folded one-hundred dollar bill, a sharp crease bisecting Franklin’s face.

The driver pointed at Ben’s uniform shirt. “You take blue and add yellow,” he said, “and I think you’ll find you get green.”

Ben handed back the bill, license, and registration and said, “Not always, Mr. Balen. I think you’ll find it depends on the shade of blue.”

Raychard Balen laughed. He turned to the heavyset man. “I think we have ourselves a Boy Scout here, Wayne.”

“Appears so,” the man said.

Ben started writing out the ticket.

“Your name, Officer,” Balen asked. “I want to be sure to mention you specifically next time I get together with Chief Newell.”

Ben handed him the traffic citation. “It’s on the bottom line, Mr. Balen.”

Balen glanced down and laughed again, harder this time. “Well, well, well,” he said. “It appears, Wayne, not only do we have a Boy Scout here, we have an
ambitious
Boy Scout, one who likes to vacation outside his job description.”

Balen paused and tilted his head, studying Ben. His smile was small and yellow. He began slowly waving the ticket back and forth between them.

“Maybe running that light wasn’t such a bad idea after all,” Balen said. “Now, Officer Decovic, I have a face to put with the name.”

“Yes sir, you do,” Ben said. “And now, so do I.”

THE CALL CAME THROUGH, but not the one Corrine Tedros had been expecting. Anne Carson, not Wayne LaVell, was on the other end of the line, and she was asking to speak to Buddy.

“I tried the office,” she said, “and then thought he might be at home.”

“He’s out of town for the day,” Corrine said. That was another sore spot. She’d not been able to steer Buddy and get both feet moving in the direction of James Restan’s buy-out offer. Buddy was still going forward with idea of implementing Stanley’s plans to oversee production, distribution, and marketing of Julep himself. In the meantime, people all over the country continued to drink Julep and clamor for more.

“It’s important,” Anne said. “Have him call me please as soon as he gets back.”

Something in Anne Carson’s voice put Corrine on alert, and she had the feeling she already knew the answer before she went on to ask, “Is this about your father?”

“Yes. He remembered. Can you believe it? He gave a description of the man he saw kill Mr. Tedros. It’s all on the tape. I wanted Buddy to know right away.”

Anne Carson sounded like a schoolgirl anxiously awaiting praise from her favorite teacher.

Corrine circled the dining room table and then sat down. She massaged her temples with her free hand. Her skin felt overly tight. She pictured the cop, Ben Decovic, standing over Anne Carson’s shoulder and smiling.

“Have you told anyone else about this?” Corrine asked.

“No, I promised Buddy I would call him first. I know how important this is to him. I figured he would take everything to the police.”

Ok, Corrine thought. She still had some room.

“Ms. Carson, I have a favor to ask you, but it would be better if I was there in person. Could we talk?”

“I suppose so, yes.”

“One other thing,” Corrine said. “Please don’t tell anyone about the tape until we do.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“You will,” Corrine said and hung up.

Corrine choked off her panic and went into the bedroom to change, dressing quickly, then drove to the main office of Maritime’s bank and hit her safe-deposit box. She’d been quietly diverting cash to the box since the first month of her marriage. Corrine was careful to keep the sums large enough for her purposes but small enough to avoid Buddy noticing. It was her breakout money, a hedge against repeating the lessons that Phoenix had taught her.

Traffic was heavy, and the drive to the North Shore neighborhood took longer than she’d planned, leaving Corrine both impatient and grateful, bouncing between unbidden scenarios in which every conceivable thing went wrong and slow stretches that let her work on angles for emptying the weight of the consequences crowding her.

She glanced at the brown envelope on the seat next to her.

That was it. The last of the break-out money. She’d spent most of it hiring out Stanley’s murder.

She had nowhere to go but where she was going.

The traffic crawled.

She thought of all the Sunday afternoons she’d been trapped across the dinner table from Stanley Tedros.

She thought about James Restan’s buy-out offer.

She thought about what she had and what she didn’t and the price tags on each.

And then she was in North Shore and climbing the stairs and standing before the screen door that Anne Carson opened for her and moving into the living room where Anne Carson had already set out glasses and a pitcher of sweetened iced tea, and Corrine felt something settle inside her.

She was ready.

One look at Anne Carson and the inside of the house had told her that.

Anne Carson, under the right circumstances, could have been beautiful, but everything about her suggested that she had settled long ago for pretty.

The house was not as bad as Corrine’s grandparents’ place in Bradford, Indiana, but despite all the attempts at camouflaging it, the Carson house, finally, was cluttered and claustrophobic, full of furnishings long past any real value and hiding behind a tired charm and the thin sentimentality of family history. It was a house that had never known money, and there was a quiet hunger at its core, which Corrine recognized.

The tape recorder lay on the coffee table to the right of the glasses and pitcher.

Corrine leaned over and pressed Play and listened to the old man stumble through a very accurate description of Croy Wendall and the murder of Stanley Tedros.

Corrine stopped the tape, then sat back and crossed her legs. Anne Carson poured them each a glass of tea.

“This is not going to be easy, Ms. Carson,” Corrine said.

“Just Anne, ok?”

Corrine nodded. “I love my husband very much. He’s a good man, but at bottom, I’m sorry to say, he’s a weak man. You know Stanley Tedros raised him after his parents were killed in a car accident, right? Buddy developed a very strong attachment to his uncle, and that attachment has blinded him to some very difficult truths.”

Corrine leaned forward, resting her hands on her knee. “Anne, for his own good, I would like to keep my husband ignorant of those truths.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you,” she said, frowning slightly.

“Buddy does not need to hear that tape,” Corrine said.

“But the man who killed his uncle, my father described him. How else are they going to catch him?”

“I hope they never do,” Corrine said. “For Buddy’s sake.”

Anne Carson shifted positions in the chair. “You don’t want the killer caught? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Stanley Tedros was not the man he appeared to be,” Corrine said, pausing to let the words gather their full weight, and then working at a credible facsimile of someone blinking back tears.