The Shop (28 page)

Jolie tried to find a way out of her grandfather’s room, but they were locked in. The basement windows were too narrow to get through. Whatever their captor had pushed up against the door was too heavy to move.

She wondered why he didn’t just kill them.

She would have.

Jolie went through his actions so far. He had shocked them by throwing the chair through the window. He’d taped them up quickly, paying particular attention to her because he knew she was a cop.

Control and intimidation.

Everything he did from the moment he broke through the window had been calculated to keep them off balance, cowed. He wanted them to depend on him, and only him.

Which meant he wanted them for something.

Jolie glanced at Franklin, who sat against the wall, his feet out in front of him, his head pressed into the corner. Riley beside him. She’d stopped crying, stopped talking. Maybe she was in shock. As Jolie watched, Riley burrowed herself deeper into her father’s body, so he had to raise his chin and rest it on the top of her head.

Jolie wondered if Franklin knew their captor. Something in his body language. A certain…familiarity. She thought back to the scene between Riley and the man in black, the way she talked to him.

There was something in her voice—resentment?

No. She was affronted.

Riley told her father to order their captor to leave, but Frank did nothing.

Could this have been planned? Done for their benefit? Like a play?

Ridiculous thought, but it nagged her. What if it was for their benefit, and then it went wrong?

She needed to get Frank talking. There was plenty to talk about, so she started with the subject that brought her here.

“Franklin, what happened to Nathan Dial?”

He didn’t respond. But Riley glared at her.

“Franklin? Did the vice president kill Nathan Dial?”

“Leave my dad alone!”

“Franklin?”

He looked at Jolie with the eyes of a resentful child. “What do I care? My life is over. My wife is dead, I’ve failed my own family…” He stared at the floor, every line in his body saying,
I give up
.

“No, you haven’t, Daddy. It’s
her
fault.”

Jolie would have loved to hear Riley’s take on why it was her fault. “Just tell me, Franklin. For the family’s sake. Did the vice president kill Nathan Dial?”

He gave her a look of annoyance. “What difference does it make now? That’s all water under the bridge.”

“Not for his family it isn’t.”

“Who cares? He was a godless homosexual.”

“His family cares. Did it ever occur to you, Franklin, that all of this might be connected?”

Kay said, “Jolie, what are you talking about?”

“You heard him. The vice president killed a young man named Nathan Dial.”

“Vice President Pintek? You can’t be serious! I don’t believe that for one minute. Is that why you came with me? You didn’t want to help with Riley, you wanted to sneak in here and interrogate my uncle!”

Franklin said to Jolie, “What do you mean, connected?”

“The VP is dead, Frank. Grace is dead. Somebody wants to cover this up. More than you already did.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” But there was something in his voice that told her she was close to the truth.

“What did you do, Franklin? Take your boat out in the middle of the night? Chain him to an anchor and dump him in the bay?”

Kay clapped her hands over her ears. “Shut up! Shut
up
!”

“Frank, is there more I don’t know?”

“There’s nothing.”

“Why now? Why did the VP die now? You had it all covered up—”

“I’m not talking to you.”

“You leave us alone!” Riley shouted. “You’re just jealous because we never wanted you, we—”

Jolie tried to keep her voice level. “A boy was killed, Frank.”

Kay glared at Jolie. “I don’t believe you! Frank wouldn’t do that.”

“What about the guy who took us hostage, Franklin? Is he a part of the cover-up?”

“How would I know?”

“I think you know him. I think you planned this.”

“You’re crazy.”

Something jabbed her shoulder. A crooked finger, ending in a yellowed nail.

Her grandfather, the senator. His hawk nose was inches from her face, eyes like shiny black beetles. “I’ve been stewing about this for a long time, and I just can’t let this go.”

Jolie opened her mouth to reply, but he was ahead of her. “How could you
do
it?”

“Granddad,” Kay said, her voice unusually high. Alarmed. “Granddad, that’s not Dorie, that’s your granddaughter, Jolie, remember? She’s grown up, she’s a policewoman…”

He ignored Kay and grabbed Jolie’s shoulders. He launched into a tirade, spittle flying from his mouth, a jumble of angry words. For a moment Jolie couldn’t comprehend what she was hearing.

Then she understood.

“What kind of mother tries to kill her own child?
”

Landry kept watch on the causeway and on the bay. Several cars went by on Route 30, but none slowed near the turnoff to the causeway. But when he looked into the bay again, there were more boats. A flotilla of them—and they weren’t fishermen. They were photographers.

A car door slammed, the sound carrying across the water—a Channel 7 news van parked on Cape San Blas road just outside the gatehouse. More cars coming, a line of them, like cars let out of a stadium parking lot after a football game. Parking on both sides of the highway, cameras out, large and small. A Tallahassee network affiliate satellite truck, this one WCTV.

He looked back at the boats. Pleasure craft, jammed with people. Jammed with people with cameras. No helicopters, though. He doubted any city news affiliate within five hundred miles of here could afford a helicopter.

If this was the raid, it was elaborate—a cast of thousands.

This was a storm all right. A media storm.

Just the three of us
.

Jolie sat with her back against the wall, her legs stretched out in front of her. She’d relocated to the bathroom, where she couldn’t be watched. She felt like a traffic accident everyone had slowed down to see.

Jolie tried to put away her emotions, see it as a story that had happened to someone else. As a cop, she’d witnessed plenty of senseless carnage over the years. The sordid homicides, the lives turned upside down. A moment of blatant stupidity. An uncontrollable rage. If you looked at it as a cop would, you could be dispassionate about it. She should be dispassionate—it was a long time ago.

But she died of an aneurysm.

“No,” Kay had told her. “There was no aneurysm. She didn’t die. Not then.”

Then there was the move to New Mexico. Jolie didn’t remember the move to New Mexico, but she remembered the move back.

Her father had kept her away from them, the family. Only twenty miles away, but the gulf between them was immense. He didn’t forbid her from seeing them, but Jolie felt as if an invisible fence had been built around her. She couldn’t remember how she got the impression that the Haddoxes were wealthy and powerful and had no time for her. They couldn’t accept that her mother had married her father. She didn’t even know if her dad said these things, couldn’t remember an instance when he did, but Jolie arrived at these conclusions nonetheless. Maybe she’d been the one to fill in the gaps. A child who loved her father. Adored her father. She knew they had rejected him, and she took it personally. She knew he was an outsider, so she’d stood with him.

“I wasn’t going to tell you,” Kay told her.

You
almost
did.

“I didn’t think it would be something you’d want to know.”

No, thought Jolie. Who’d want to hold
that
conversation?

“That’s why I left yesterday. I couldn’t say it.”

But it was all out in the open now, wasn’t it?

Belle Oaks wasn’t a retirement facility. It was a home. Belle Oaks was an old mental hospital upgraded and changed to accommodate people with psychological and neurological problems. Schizophrenics and bipolars, people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. The suicidal. Belle Oaks was a private hospital where the rich sent their family members to be warehoused.

Dorie had lived to be fifty-eight.

Fifty-eight
.

Kay told her Jolie’s mother died last year, of a heart attack. In Tallahassee, only a hundred miles away.

And Jolie never knew it.

“She didn’t know who anybody was,” Kay told her. “She suffered brain damage when she fell.”

Jolie asked Kay for all of it, and Kay told her all of it.

Jolie’s mother’s instability and anger. How she’d fly into rages. How she’d become increasingly dissatisfied with her life. Her growing regret about everything she’d thrown away to marry Jolie’s father.

Their
side of the story.

According to Kay, the one thing that kept her going was the Petal Soft Baby Soap contest. The company flew mother and daughter to New York and shot the commercial there.

It was all Dorie could talk about. But more and more she confided in her older sister, Kay’s mother. How she missed her family, how she missed Indigo. How disappointing her life was, except for the Soap Baby.

Then it ended. The baby soap people tried a different kind of advertising campaign, and life became unbearable again.

The rages started back up.

Jolie’s mother hated her life. Maybe she hated Jolie’s dad.

Maybe she even hated Jolie.

Jolie’s back was getting tired. She stood up, did some stretching even with her taped hands, and then leaned against the wall. The room smelled of bathroom cleanser, and underneath the cleanser smell was the faint odor of urine. The cloying smell of roses over-lying all of it. In the other room, people talked in hushed tones. Jolie heard the word “she” a lot. She tuned them out.

The reason Jolie was still here, the reason she was alive, was because her father had lost his job at the ironworks factory. He came home in the middle of the day to find his wife sobbing and screaming as she held her baby underwater in the bathtub.

And Jolie wondered why she’d freaked out in the tub.

There was a struggle, and her dad saved her. In her thrashing, Dorie slipped on the tile, fell, and hit her head.

Emergency surgery and a coma followed.

Jolie closed her eyes. She could hear the murmuring in the other room. They were talking about it. Weighing every nuance, turning over every lie.

Dorie regained consciousness, but when she did, she had the intellectual ability of a seven-year-old. No more rages, though. Those were gone.

The rose smell got stronger, seemed to seep under the door along with the voices. A sickly sweet smell.
I named a rose for you.

Jolie’s dad called the only people who could really help him: the family. They sent a private ambulance. They got the best doctors. Had plenty of conferences in the waiting room, at the house on Indigo Island. A plan was made. Dorie Haddox Burke died of an aneurysm, sudden and heartbreaking for her family.

Jolie remembered the photo in their family album—a white coffin under a mound of white lilies.

Her father, who hated to see even a butterfly die, must have been relieved to spare her a story like that. The story that went like this: Your mother didn’t want you. Your mother hated you so much she tried to kill you.

So instead he knitted the fabric of their lives together into a new story. A new story with a sad ending. It was always “just the three of us.” A loving father, a loving mother, and the child they doted on.

Jolie left the bathroom and went up to Kay. “You knew it all this time, and you never told me?”

Kay looked helpless. One of the few times she was at a loss for words.

“All this time?”

Kay opened her mouth to speak, stopped.

“Save it,” Jolie said, tired in her bones. “I can’t think about this right now.”