Calvin pulls his lips in until they disappear behind his teeth. Finally, he says, “Rest assured, we will do everything in our powerto get to the bottom of it. Now, unless I’m mistaken, I think you have some work to do.”
I nod and get to my feet, closing the door softly on Jessica’s concerned expression.
An investigation is the last thing I need, even without the current predicament. Some stranger digging into my sordid past, drudging up my embarrassing criminal history, those years in foster care when one opportunist after another tried to take advantage of me, knowing there must be a trust fund out there. I changed my name at the first opportunity. But before that, when I was connected to Solidago and my grandfather as its only survivor and his only heir, I was plastered across the news. The grisly fire burned for hours on the TV screens of America as if fed by a continual stream of fuel, though the Certified Fire Investigators could never identify its source. ButIknew. My mother had told me once without realizing what her words would come to mean.
“Secretly, all women burn, Judeth,” she said the day she found me setting fir cones alight with a flick of my fingers behind the house. “For desire. For revenge. For independence. For answers. For a power that has been continually denied them and a gaze that penetrates deep enough to truly witness them. For children wanted and children lost. For the future, then the past. To be a woman is to be a fire.” She peeled her eyes away from the coast in the distance to stare down at me. “But the Cole women are an inferno. If you’re not careful, it will devour you, heart and soul. That’s what happened to your grandmother. She burned right through the world until there was nothing left for her.”
I’d been warned not to use my abilities, not to let anyone see, least of all my grandfather. But there were long days where I might have forgotten that she was my mother at all if not for the gift we shared, and I couldn’t resist playing with it. “How do you stop the fire?” I asked.
She drew a breath and looked into my eyes. “You can never stop the burning, Judeth. You can only hope to control it.”
No one could understand why the rest of my family and ourstaff didn’t flee the flaming house that night. But the power I unleashed was unlike anything I’d felt before. It had its own agenda, raging and snaking, moving in ways I’d never hoped to command. I’d found a clear path out, but the flames closed behind me. In the end, I hadn’t been able to control it.
As I head back to my corner desk, I want to hug Sue, ask to see pictures of her son. But I don’t dare. Sue has said even less to me than I have to Aaron over the years, and that’s how I should keep it. Friends are a luxury I can’t afford. Not after Dara. And it might seem obvious if I started chumming up to her now. Calvin already has his suspicions.
Dara’s freckled face swims before me. The red braids she always wore, so tightly plaited they gave her an automatic brow lift. The prim way she would hold the cigarettes I stole from Nina’s purse and cough out a plume of smoke, purpling behind it. She was soft, full of easy smiles and simple dreams, a bright cloud of a girl. When I last saw her, I’d just turned sixteen. My grandfather had begun to notice me in ways he never dared to before. For the first time, I felt the urgency behind my mother’s command to avoid him. Dara and I twirled through the goldenrod that day until our skirts were yellow with pollen, then raided Nina’s stash of cookie tins, lazing in the pantry, nibbling like church mice. Finally, she uncrossed her legs and stood, needing the restroom. By the time I left the kitchen calling her name, nearly a half hour had passed.
The door to the great room flung open and Dara pushed past me, bolting outside as if the devil himself were after her. My grandfather stood in the doorway watching, a dark glint in his eye, tucking in the hem of his shirt.
I locked myself in my room that night and every night after, knowing full well that Dara was only a consolation prize. The old man had told me as much himself only a week before, in an encounter so disturbing, I’d all but squeezed it from my memory. He didn’t name Dara, of course. But he didn’t have to. I should have known the risk we were taking.
Seven days later, Nina brought the news with her from Bandon. Dara’s body had washed up on the beach, a bottle of Elavil emptied into her stomach.
I can still remember the way her lips pulled down at the corners as she ran past me, the white dotting her cheeks as if someone had taken a straw to her face and sucked all the color out. I tried to reach her after that afternoon, but she stopped answering my calls, stopped meeting me by the back of the house. I would see her in my mind after she died as I imagined she looked when they found her—face waxen and drooping from the bones, eyes flat as glass panes with nothing behind them, the shame more than she could bear.
Three weeks later my grandfather cornered me against the broad surface of my grandmother’s dresser in the room I’d been warned to stay out of, the door left unlocked and cracked open by a careless housekeeper. Three weeks later I fled into the high winds whipping across the goldenrod, feeling the heat at my back. Three weeks later my mother was gone. They wereallgone.
The money I placed here last night—it was never really for Sue. It was for them, for Dara. The laptop I stole for Julia, the tire Aaron still doesn’t realize I had changed for him while he was in the office stressing over a deadline—all for the ones who died in my place. Every tiny act of kindness I can pull off. Every animal I feed at the shelter. Every small favor. My mother haunts me, her final moments, her eyes like lit Sterno cans, but my mother chose her path. The rest were victims of circumstance, especially Dara. I’d offered her up to my grandfather on a silver platter by letting her into our house after what he said to me, and he destroyed her like he destroyed everyone.
I don’t regret the loss of Macallister Bates, even if he was my blood. As far as he’s concerned, I did the world a favor. But I carry the rest with me—Nina, Scott our groundskeeper and his assistant Jack (who turned my book in), Elle and the new hire, Dawn, as well as Grady and Paul, the “security” detail and drivers who werelittle more than glorified thugs. They’re a memorial in my brain, the weight of their deaths sucking at my conscience.
I am nearly to my desk when the office phone beside me rings. It’s the one they keep on Jiang’s desk, but Jiang isn’t anywhere in sight. The shrillness of a landline is something I don’t think I will ever get used to. Almost out of spite, I reach over and pick it up. As I bring the handset to my ear, a lacy fretwork of goose bumps rises across my skin. “Hello, Pacific Creative.”
“Well, well, well. If it isn’t the good little copywriter hard at work. Hasn’t anyone ever told you, Jude? No good deed goes unpunished.”
I recognize the seductive lilt of her voice immediately—the woman under the bridge. “How did you get this number?” I whisper. “Are you following me?”
I can practically hear her smiling through the phone. “That’s no way to say thank you after everything I’ve done for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone had to obscure those cameras. You can’t just go around leaving a digital footprint, Jude. Not when you’re one of us. We have interests to protect.”
I spin around, making sure no one’s listening, then duck down and whisper into the phone, “That wasyou? You got me into trouble. There’s going to be an investigation.”
“There already is,” she says harshly. “And it’s not the one you’re concerned about. Seems like you’ve got your priorities confused, but don’t worry, I’ve got the missing footage right here. Think of it as collateral. The price for sharing our darkest secrets with you.”
“Are you threatening me?” I breathe into the handset. Calvin said it was “a glitch.” I didn’t think there might still be footage out there, in someone else’s hands.
“I’m motivating you,” she replies. “Helping you maintain your focus. You’re on deadline, after all.”
“And if I don’t want to play your games? If I’m not interested in being in your circle?”
“I have a lot more than this at my disposal,” she growls. “Don’t test me, Jude. We’re just getting started.”
I take a breath. “Two more days.”
“By sunset,” she adds. “Step carefully, kitten. We’re watching.”
