He looked older than he had the last time I’d seen him, and he’d gotten skinnier. His hair had been cut recently, and his beard was neatly trimmed.
“Jax,” he said, enveloping me in a hug. Lexie had started calling me Jax back when we were kids, so our names would match. It’d never caught on with Mom and Gram, but my father took to it, called us “The X girls.” “Oh Jesus, Jax.” He squeezed me tighter. He smelled like gin and Aqua Velva, a combo that melted me in a deep, primal way, and brought me right back to piggyback rides and scratchy daddy kisses. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”
“I know,” I said, squeezing back, feeling like I was hugging a skeleton. Ted had always been a little on the thin side, but this was concerning. “Come on, let’s get you to Sparrow Crest.”
“Can we stop for a bite on the way?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. But when I pulled into a McDonald’s drive-through ten minutes later, he shook his head.
“There’s a Mexican place down there,” he said, pointing to a giant neon margarita glass flashing in the window. His hands trembled slightly;it wasn’t food he wanted. I hesitated, thought of what Diane said:He’s never going to change.I could have tried to put off the inevitable by pulling into the drive-through and getting him a burger and fries, but he’d find a drink with or without my help. I resolved that, on this trip, I wasn’t going to be the booze police. The last thing I wanted to do was pass judgment; I’d done that with my sister and look where it led me.
I pointed the Mustang toward the Mexican restaurant.
The place was nearly empty—it was only a little after eleven, too early for the lunch crowd—and decorated with piñatas, fake cactuses, walls made to look like adobe. Mexican music, heavy on the horns, played from speakers in the ceiling. We got a table in the back corner, and my father ordered us both house margaritas before I’d touched a menu.
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, Jax, Lexie whispered in my ear.
“I’ve gotta drive,” I reminded him.
The drinks came, and he took them both. I bit my tongue and said nothing. Still, he waved his hand, pooh-poohing me. “These are mostly sugar water. I need fortification before going to that god-awful house.”
He hated Sparrow Crest, or as he called it, “Dracula’s castle.” He loathed it even though he and Mom had been married there, in the gardens. The story I heard later was that Ted wanted to elope, but Gram had insisted, so in the end, Dracula’s castle it was.
“Imagine it, loves,” he said, telling Lex and me the story when we were little. “The organ playing, sounding more like a funeral march than ‘Here Comes the Bride,’ the bats swooping down from the belfry.”
“There were no bats, Ted,” Mom corrected, shaking her head, laughing. “And Sparrow Crest doesn’t have a belfry.”
“Well, the attic, then. There were too bats, and they came swooping down from the attic, got all tangled up in your mother’s wedding veil. They joined up with the spiders and the ghosts, and the vampires—never have there been such strange guests at a wedding. I won’t even tell you what happened when it was time to cut the cake!”
I ordered loaded nachos for us to share. I wasn’t hungry, but my father could use something to absorb all the booze. “Have you been sick?” I asked.
“You look great, too, Jax,” he said.
“Seriously, Ted. You kind of look like hell. Are you okay?”
He leaned back in his bench seat. “One of my kids just died, Jax. And I’ve been on a cleanse. Macrobiotic. I’ve been dating a woman—Vanessa. She wants to purify my body and soul.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and dropped his voice. “So what do we know? What happened to Lexie?”
“She went off her meds…”
He took a long sip of the margarita, twirled the plastic straw, rattled ice cubes, ran his finger along the edge of the glass, picking up salt. “She shouldn’t have been all alone in that place,” he said. “That house…” He shook his head.
“Gram left it to her. And Lexie loved Sparrow Crest.”
“She had a hard winter there, Jax,” Ted said. He looked at me icily, his eyes saying,Not that you would know.
“Diane said she was doing well,” I said, defensively.
“Diane saw what Lexie wanted her to see,” Ted said. He stared at his drink, then looked up at me. “When was the last time you talked to her, Jax? Really talked to her?”
Guilt gnawed at my insides like an angry rat. I didn’t answer.
“She called me,” my father said now. He sounded hesitant. Like he wasn’t sure he should be telling me. As if he was betraying some confidence, even now. He’d always been like this when talking about Lexie. He was protective of their relationship, of the secrets they shared.
“When?”
“Three nights ago. The night before she… before it happened, I guess.” He settled back in his vinyl bench seat.
“How did she sound?”
