Blood Bond (12 page)

Joe sighed. So it wasn't going to be easy, but that was nothing new. He was accustomed to being caught in the middle, when it came to his family. And it was his own fault—as well as his parents had adapted, as broad-minded and decent as his brother and Sakeena were, it seemed as though he was always pushing them a little past their comfort zone. Dating a Jewish girl had been his greatest provocation yet.

“You know I really appreciate you coming over there with me,” he said. “I promised the kids.”

Finally, Amaris's eyes softened. That usually did the trick, bringing the kids into it. Joe felt a little guilty for playing her that way.

“Let's get them the good stuff,” she said. “At Cold Stone.”

“But the line is always so long—”

“It's worth it.”

He wasn't about to argue.

“You know,” she said a few minutes later, “if you just hated your family like a normal person, this would be a lot easier.”

Joe couldn't help smiling at that. “Not to criticize, but did you ever consider that things might go easier on you if you hated your family a little less?”

Amaris kicked his shin gently under the table and grinned at him. “It's un-American not to hate your parents. Come on, they turned me into what I am, spoiled and overindulged, like you always say. I'm entitled to be bitter about it—they've stolen my serenity.”

Joe had, in fact, never called her spoiled or overindulged. But it was rare for Amaris to admit what she knew to be true. He chalked it up to a softening of her mood.

“Bitter doesn't suit you, Amaris,” he said.

He was rewarded with her bare foot in his lap during dinner.

AMARIS'S WARM
feelings for him evaporated quickly when they were seated in Sakeena's kitchen. The children, having given sticky good-night kisses to Joe and polite handshakes to “Miss Jessel,” had gone upstairs with their mother for a quick cleanup and tuck-in.

“So, Amaris,” Omar said formally. “How is the web design business?”

Joe cringed—he'd made the same error himself, early in their relationship. Amaris was touchy about her title; sometimes she called her business “content delivery” and sometimes it was “online community building,” but one thing she was not was a web designer. Her lack of technical skills she chose to view as a badge of distinction. In theory, her girlfriends took care of the details while she piloted the big picture.

“Quite well,” she said in a clipped voice.

“Sakeena is taking a computer class herself,” Omar went on gamely. “At the community center, with some friends from the mosque. On Thursdays. They are going to create a site for the women's club.”

“How is Madiha's karate going?” Joe interrupted, casting about for a way to head off the direction of the conversation. “We were so busy talking soccer with Taj, I forgot to ask.”

“Fantastic,” Omar said, breaking into a huge grin. Joe relaxed. Getting Omar talking about the kids never failed. “You should see her in her little
gi
. Sakeena! Where are those pictures? Of Madiha at the performance?”

Sakeena, coming into the kitchen, got a packet of pictures from a drawer in the immaculate desk tucked into a corner of the kitchen. She rifled through and plucked one out. Sitting down next to Amaris, she offered the photograph.

“Oh, sweet,” Amaris said, and Joe congratulated himself on his change of subject. “That tiny little yellow belt—precious!”

They managed to stay on the polite side of the conversation through a second cup of tea. When Sakeena and Omar walked them to the door, Joe's relief was like the lifting of a weight from his shoulders.

They stood together in the glow of two sconces that looked, to Joe's untrained eye, like they belonged on a New England saltbox rather than yet another giant stucco six-bedroom house. It was not lost on him that the front porch of the Englers' home was nearly identical to his brother's. Even the placement of the garage, three wide bays to the right, was the same.

He wished briefly he could tell Omar about the case, the strange way Marva affected him, the unaccustomed desire to protect her when by all rights she was a suspect. About the energy that surrounded Gail, a little too bright and a little too brittle, that made him feel as though he should have foreseen disaster coming. About his certainty that she was not only missing, but doomed.

In Fremont, sharing a bedroom in their parents' small condo, he and Omar had stayed up long past their bedtime in the dark, talking and laughing and telling jokes.

“Perhaps you'll come again soon,” Sakeena said to Amaris, her voice suddenly formal and shy. “For dinner.”

Please,
Joe telegraphed to Amaris with all his might.
Please don't screw this up.

“That would be nice,” his girlfriend said stiffly.

It wasn't until he'd driven her back to her car that he brought it up. There were few cars left in the parking lot, and Joe let the engine run while they said good night. He'd begged off going home with Amaris, grateful that she'd let it go without much fuss.

“So Sakeena has warmed up to you,” he said tentatively.

Amaris shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“She's trying. We're all trying. It just takes time.”

“I've just lasted longer than they expected. They thought you would have broken up with me by now.”

Joe didn't see the upside to arguing that point. He'd been with Amaris months longer than he'd lasted with any other relationship. He'd been foolish enough to think that fact would give his girlfriend a measure of confidence.

“And so they've taken the long view,” Amaris continued. “A dug-in strategy. I blogged about it, you should read it.”

“You blogged about our relationship?”

“No, of course not. I blogged about the administration's policy in Afghanistan.” She put a hand to his neck, caressing. “There are parallels.”

“You're too smart for me,” he murmured. “You should find a professor over there at Berkeley.”

Amaris leaned in for a kiss but at the last minute she only grazed his lips. “What makes you think I haven't already? Perhaps I'm on my way to see him now.”

“Mmm. Perhaps you are. What is his field of study?”

Amaris thought for a minute; in the glow from the streetlights her eyes looked both shiny and dreamy. “Mathematics,” she said finally. “He's brilliant. He's won a Nobel. They name theorems after him every day.”

“Ah, impressive,” Joe said. “He does sound like the better man.”

He didn't realize until after he said it that he'd given her an opening—agree, disagree, anything to move things out of edgy stasis.

But she didn't take it. She gave him a second glancing kiss and opened the passenger door without looking back.

BY THE
time he got home, he was exhausted. It seemed like he'd barely fallen asleep when the phone rang, but the clock said 5:40.

“Yes, this is Joe.”

“Found your desperate housewife, Bashir. Up on Diablo. Took a dive off Paintbox Point.”

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

IT WAS GORGEOUS ON
the mountain. Driving up through the layers of early morning fog, the valley disappearing in its shrouds below while the mountain rose in the brilliant sun, Joe remembered an ill-fated camping trip from his brief Boy Scout career.

His friend Yasir's father had appointed himself the leader. Mr. Sahotra took the training, emerging with a pressed polyester uniform shirt and a troop of eight eager boys, sons of his tea-drinking, cricket-watching cronies, ready to go camping on Mount Diablo, smack in the middle of Monte Vista County where they might otherwise have built a mall or another sea of tract housing.

Joe remembered the eventually scotched attempts to light a fire. The smell of the new tents and sleeping bags. The flashlights, the boys chasing each other in the twilight.

But most of all he remembered the early hours of the morning, the sounds from outside, scratching and snuffling and, at one point, far-off coyotes keening over a kill. He remembered having to piss but being afraid to leave the tent. He remembered feeling like fear was his new master, like he had failed on some fundamental level.

That was the end of his Boy Scout career. The troop itself disbanded shortly after that. Yasir went on to play soccer and did well enough that he had a brief career at UC Santa Cruz.

Now he was a physician.

Joe found the turnoff for Paintbox Point. He'd been here before. Everyone had been here before—it was a great place to bring a woman. It was practically foolproof. Hit it in the morning and you could watch the valley emerge through the dissipating mists, Walnut Creek and Clayton laid out like feudal villages far below. Or come at twilight and put down a blanket, smuggle in some wine, you couldn't miss.

Now, however, he had to jockey the Charger into position next to marked police cars and an evidence van. He picked his way across the stony path, regretting wearing his good shoes; the weeds were still damp with dew and he kicked up dirt.

“Good morning,” he said to the cop at the top of the grade. Good-looking kid, Walnut Creek insignia. Joe flashed his badge and extended his hand.

“They're all down there, sir,” the kid said with a trace of moroseness. Left behind to do nothing—Joe remembered the feeling.

He went rock to rock on the way down; stepping on the scree was the way to fall, bash a knee, or worse. And he was careful not to grab branches or foliage for balance. Poison oak was a year-round threat on Diablo.

At the bottom he could tell from a long smudge of dirt and a tear in Marty's pants that he hadn't been as lucky. The coroner's wrist bore an angry welt, and he was rubbing his hip.

Joe started to call out a greeting and then he saw her: spun out gracefully like the ribbon on a package, her body curled in a patch of sunlight, the sun glancing off that blond hair in a brilliant flash.

She was wearing an athletic top, really little more than a bra; powder blue with a design of darker blue. Her hands were bound in front of her by some sort of orange fabric, the ends fluttering almost gaily in the breeze. Her yoga pants were cut low on her waist; Joe could see her navel, winking like a girl's in her flat stomach.

Amaris wore a ring in her navel, white gold with a faceted pink bead. He occasionally took it into his teeth, tugging gently.

He took a step forward without thinking, a lurching step, and Marty held up a hand. “Easy there, cowboy. Steeper than it looks.”

Joe murmured an apology and fought a desire to look away. He felt a chill on his own skin, his bare forearms, and had an urge to cover Gail Engler's body.

But it was her face, lips parted in shock and green eyes staring toward the top of the cliff as though astonished at how quickly she'd come to rest at the bottom, that left him most unsettled.

In death, her resemblance to Marva was extraordinary.

BERTRISE AGREED
to go see Bryce while Joe took the bad news to Marva.

For the second time in three days, he hesitated at her door, wondering what he was doing there. He easily could have switched, gone to see Bryce and asked Bertrise to deal with Marva. Given the shaky ground he had put himself on yesterday at Starbucks, it would have been the professional thing to do, creating the distance he would need for a murder investigation in which Marva was bound to figure.

But he couldn't bear for Marva to hear the news alone.

“Oh my God,” she said when she opened the door. She put a hand to her throat, her voice like hell.

Before he got halfway through the sentence he'd prepared, she stopped him with a strangled sob.

He didn't think; he took her in his arms. For a moment he was lost in her scent, the feel of her unmanageable hair on his chin. Her body shuddered with grief, and she repeated, “No, no,” as though she could forestall the truth by pleading. Her hands dug into his back, drawing him against her almost violently, and though every alarm bell inside him was going off, Joe could not help responding to her body pressed against his.

Her tears spilled against his neck; her breath was hot on his skin. She clutched handfuls of his shirt and he felt her nails rake against his back. He imagined her holding him naked and he grew hard, and though he murmured that it was all right and that he was sorry, so sorry, he wasn't sorry at all and he didn't care about Gail. He knew he had to push Marva away but instead he pulled her closer against him and she allowed it, hurting him with the strength of her need for comfort.

And even the pain spurred him on.

“Marva.” He drew a deep breath, closing his eyes and trying to memorize her scent. “Marva.”

Finally, she relaxed her grip on him and he took a step back, gently taking her wrists in his hands. He held them between their bodies, hoping they would block her view of his arousal. As if she could notice such a thing right now—as if she could care. She had lost her sister. He'd taken advantage of her shock, her vulnerability. He was despicable.

He tried to arrange his features to reflect professional concern, nothing more. Her eyes, dry despite her grief, were the blue of a bruise, and she wrenched her hands from his with surprising force.

“It won't be all right,” she said. “How could it?”

THE RIDE
to the morgue was silent. Marva stared out the passenger window, lost in her own thoughts. Joe doubted she even registered his presence. He drove over the speed limit, as though they were on an urgent errand. But there was no need to hurry now.

At the morgue, Bertrise and Bryce were waiting for them. Bryce had shaved and was wearing a pressed button-down shirt and a stitched leather belt, pants that had a crease you could cut butter with. Joe wondered if he'd been dressed already when he got the call—surely a man would be unable to attend to the details of grooming after getting news of his wife's death?

Marva barely greeted Bryce, and she didn't embrace him. Instead she leaned against Joe for support. He made no move to stop her, despite the rush of guilt her touch inspired.

“You don't have to go in,” he said quietly, his arm around her waist. He could feel her ribs through the soft, washed fabric of her shirt. “Bryce can do that.”

“No. I need to see her.”

They filed in as a group. The attendant drew back the sheet and Joe watched Bryce look. His eyes narrowed and after a moment his chin wobbled, just a little. He extended a hand in the air—let it hover inches from Gail's face.

She looked like herself again. Joe wondered if the strange moment on the mountain, when he'd looked at her eyes, her cheekbones, her parted lips, and seen Marva instead—if all that had been a trick of the light. Even dead, Gail's skin looked far superior to most women's, flawless and pale. Her eye makeup was smudged, but her hair still fell in a sweeping sheet across the aluminum cart. Her hands, still bound with the orange ribbon, lay on her stomach almost in an attitude of prayer.

Bryce nodded.

Marva slipped a hand into Joe's and gripped hard, mashing his fingers together, cutting into his flesh with her nails. The sound in her throat was like nothing so much as the coyotes he remembered from that night twenty-five years ago.

Outside, in the sparsely furnished waiting room, he sat with her as Bryce signed the paperwork.

“Would you like me to drive you home now?” he asked. “Is there anyone you'd like me to call?”

Marva shook her head. Her hands were wrapped around the handle of her purse, her shoulders hunched. When she looked up at him, he could see that she'd come to a decision.

“I need to tell you about something that happened, Joe. It was a long time ago. Something Gail did.”

HE TOOK
her to the station. Did it by the book, with Bertrise in the room and the recorder going. Marva rarely faltered as she told the story, and she didn't cry. It occurred to Joe that the source of her strength was that she didn't have anyone to protect anymore.

One night thirteen years ago, she'd been watching TV in her small apartment, only minutes from the San Diego State campus; she'd found an accounting job in town after graduating the year before, and stayed due to inertia more than anything else.

Aidan called, which surprised her, given the late hour. Aidan and Gail had been dating for a few months by then, and Marva had met him several times. The connection was bad, but not so bad that she missed the urgency in his voice when he told her Gail was in trouble and begged her to come fast.

She drove her Civic through the rain and left it double-parked in front of the sorority house. She ran for the front door, noticing she was still in her Dr. Scholl's only when the cold water slapped against her ankles. Aidan met her headlong in the hall—he'd gotten there first, the apartment he shared with another law student being even closer than Marva's.

Marva described the smell of vomit and urine strong in the air. She and Aidan found the girls huddled in the laundry room at the end of the basement, Jess Bartelak laid out on a pile of towels.

Joe did nothing as Marva spoke: didn't take notes, didn't ask questions, just listened. He waited for her to look at him, but she didn't. She focused on the digital recorder that sat in the middle of the table, occasionally glancing at Bertrise, whose pen scratched faintly on her notebook.

She said she was sorry that some of the details of the night were blurry in her memory. For instance, she didn't know who had actually called 911. They must have used the house phone, on the first floor—so strange to think that there was just the one phone back then.

Someone must have gone up and made the call. But it wasn't her or Aidan. Aidan had put Marva in charge of Gail, had physically guided Gail into Marva's arms, and made Marva promise not to take her anywhere. Marva sat on an old couch that had been dragged into the laundry room with Gail lying against her, bits of vomit in her hair. “I thought she was fine,” Gail kept saying. “How was I supposed to know?”

Marva knew about the hazing from when Gail had been a pledge, but this was worse, much worse. She wished she could believe it had been someone else who made Jess keep drinking, but she knew better. Gail had told Aidan she was alone with Jess when she stopped breathing.

It didn't take long for Gail to pass out, a tiny snore coming from her lips. Marva hadn't known whether to force her to wake up or let her sleep, so she'd done nothing, trying to tamp down her frantic worry as girls ran around trying to get rid of the evidence of the partying.

She could hear voices in the hall, Aidan's—how could he sound so calm?—and others'. She couldn't make out what they were saying, but Aidan was speaking slowly and distinctly—“nobody's fault,” she got at one point.

How long until the police came? Someone must have a record, maybe the emergency phone operators, if they kept things that long. Joe exchanged a glance with Bertrise—something to look into—while Marva kept talking. He didn't dare interrupt her.

Once the police arrived, with the ambulance right behind, it was chaos again, and the basement filled with people. Marva sat tight, just as Aidan told her to, while he directed the emergency workers and herded the girls into a loose group for the police, and it was almost like he was one of them, the uniformed officers calling him “Son” and thanking him for his help.

None of them—not the police, not the paramedics, not the other girls who came down the stairs to watch—saw what Marva saw: That Aidan shook Gail awake and helped her into the hall last, when all the other girls had filed or been half-carried upstairs, where police waited to talk to them. That he whispered in her ear as she slumped against him, her face pressed to his shirt. That he asked the EMTs to take her, too, saying he thought she had been unconscious. Marva had to resist running after the ambulance and begging to ride along with Gail. Only Aidan's sharp glance and covert shake of the head held her back.

Nobody but Marva noticed how Aidan spoke softly to Deanne, the sturdy girl, the one who looked the most sober, though who at that point could tell, and told her not to be afraid to tell the police what happened. How he helped her recount the story, filling in when she faltered.

Even now Marva wondered which of them—her or Deanne—figured it out first, as they followed Aidan's lead and the words tumbled from their mouths. Which of them was the first to understand that the story of the evening had altered, had shifted in the chaos of the arrival of the rushing uniformed men, and that it would not go back to the form it had first taken.

Marva described how hard she worked just to get Gail through the days that followed, while the police conducted their inquiry and Deanne Mentis was quietly suspended and sent home. An investigation was conducted on campus; the sorority's national leadership brought in attorneys. Marva moved Gail into her apartment. She and Aidan made sure that Gail was never alone, and slowly, Gail improved. She managed to pass all her classes, and Marva breathed a sigh of relief that they had all pulled through.