Firetrap (8 page)

16. THE SURPRISE PARTY

STONE CARMICHAEL, NINETEEN YEARS EARLIER
>

It's after midnight, and we're stumping along in the dark, with only the spotty moonlight illuminating our path. It's a secret, she says, leading me out into the darkness. I have a vague feeling, mostly because I haven't seen India in over two hours, that the girls have hatched some sort of grand surprise for me. India's little sister, Echo, is leading me out here in the darkness. Fifteen years old. Just a kid.

A surprise party would not only explain India's disappearance for the past couple of hours but might also be her way of making up for being miffed with me lately. Heck, I've been gone almost three weeks, and I know India is irked that I didn't call more often. True, they get a new movie every night and have every toy known to man at the estate: boats, scuba gear, all-terrain vehicles, dirt bikes, the underground pool for lap swimming—but being stranded on the island has to get a little stifling for someone of India's temperament. I wouldn't put it past her to spring a surprise party for me out at the gardener's cottage, where the old folks wouldn't know about it. Too bad I'm too drunk to appreciate it.

“Come on,” I urge Echo. “Tell me what this is all about.”

“Can't tell,” replies Echo. When the moon disappears, I can barely see her walking alongside me in the dark, but when it comes out, I see her pale hair float alongside her head like the sheet on a ghost.

“This has something to do with India, doesn't it?”

“Yes. Maybe. You remember what I was saying the last time you were here?”

“No. Echo, it's been three weeks.”

“I was saying the last time you were here that India and you aren't really that well matched. Don't you remember? We were in the pool. Your mother had just left, and we were alone.”

“That's silly. We're a perfect match. All my friends say so. And you're still trying to break us up, aren't you?”

“I'm not trying to break you up. I just sometimes think…”

“What do you think, sweetie?”

“Well…I just sometimes…Stone? Let me ask you this. And I'm not talking about anybody we know. How much of an age difference is too much? If a guy's going to be older than his…girlfriend, how much of an age difference would you say is too much? I'm only asking out of curiosity.”

I'm trying to do the math in my head, knowing the beer sloshing around in my stomach isn't helping any, trying to figure out how to tease her even though she's asked for a straight answer. I'm twenty-six and Echo is fifteen.

“Let me see. The cutoff point would be ten years. Why do you ask?”

“My mother and father are still very much in love, and they've been married almost twenty years. And my mother's fourteen years younger than my father.”

“Sure your mother's telling the truth about her age?”

“Oh, Stone. You are just so…” She pushes me playfully and I push her back; then we continue walking.

“Where are we going?” I say.

“The old cottage.”

“What's happening out there? You're not going to try to seduce me, are you, Mrs. Robinson?”

“Of course not. Don't be gross.”

She gets quiet and we keep walking. If it wasn't dark, I would be able to see her blushing. It's no secret that Echo has a childish crush on me, just as it's no secret her sister India and I will someday be married. While we haven't made it official, everybody knows we're destined to tie the knot. And now here I am walking across the island with her little sister in the middle of the night. It's August and warm, though a breeze is coming up over the bluffs from Puget Sound to discourage the mosquitoes and lift my spirits. It is only when I stumble and fall to my hands and knees that I realize how truly drunk I must be. And why not? I'm on the island with friends. At the family summer estate. Why can't I get a little tanked?

“Are you all right? Stone? Are you hurt?” She's helping me to my feet, touching me a little longer than necessary, just as she always does when she gets the chance. I begin to get the feeling she really is trying to seduce me, that the surprise we're headed for doesn't involve anybody but her and me. If so, it will
not
be good.

India and Echo. Exotic, rare, almost goofy names, though I've come to love the name India. Daughters of entrepreneur Harlan Axelrod Overby, who got more than a handful when he married that Nordic model ex-hippie, who ended up nearly bankrupting him. Not that Harlan couldn't bankrupt himself with his own bad investments and lack of business sense. He's done it twice that I know of, Father bailing him out both times just because they've been best chums ever since their school days, which both of them go on about ad nauseam—as if we haven't heard all their ancient tales of glory a million times. I know he comes from good stock, and maybe he was a big shot back in the dark ages when they were in school, but Overby's been playing out of his league ever since. I wonder if he'd have any money left at all if it weren't for the opportunities Father throws his way.

Mother once told me Elaine Overby called herself Freedom until she decided to go for the big money by marrying Harlan. She'd raised India and Echo with all sorts of bizarre notions. Playing eight musical instruments each. Caring for the poor in Bangladesh. Can you imagine, exposing her daughters to all that disease in the third world?

India and Echo, both clones of their mother. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Pale skin. Echo, more coltish; India, a little taller and more graceful. But different from each other, too. Echo, the chatterbox you can read like a grade-school primer; India, the silent one, full of mystery.

I excuse myself, leaving Echo alone on the path while I blunder through the tall Scotch broom to a place where I can relieve myself. I've had too much beer tonight by anybody's standards. What I need to do now is go back to the big house and hit the rack. It's been a rough night. First India pretends to be sick, which is her way of avoiding me, and then I get into that fevered political discussion with Renfrow, the aide-de-camp Father and Overby keep around to take care of all the most unpleasant chores. And the whole thing is, Why is he even here? Father knows none of us like him. And we like that girlfriend of his even less. Both of them riffraff. Renfrow so uncouth he doesn't even have the good grace to take his flatulence outside—or maybe she's the one filling the room with farts that smell like something dead that washed up on the beach.

After we regroup, Echo says, “I've been meaning to tell you how sorry I am about your brother. I've been thinking about you a lot, because I know it must be horrid for you to lose your brother and his girlfriend like that. I can't even imagine.”

“Thanks, Echo.” Six weeks ago—is it six weeks already?—Shelby Junior crashed his Porsche. It still breaks me up to think about it. Nobody knows for sure how it happened. Middle of the night on the twisties on Mercer Island. Raining. New car. Tires not broken in yet. Probably showing off for Melissa. They didn't even find the wreckage until late in the afternoon of the next day. The car upside down in a ravine, both of them with broken necks. And now Mom is beside herself and Dad's immersed himself in work. Kendra's been in shock since it happened. I guess Trey has been some comfort to her, which means the little bastard's good for that, even if he's good for nothing else.

We're headed for the old gardener's cottage in one of the gullies on the island, almost invisible until you're right up on it. For years I suspected the cottage was the old man's hidey-hole, where he parked his lovelies so Mother wouldn't find evidence when she came out to the island. Shelby Junior used it for the same thing and used to call it the sex shack.

We crest a rise in the road, and the moon comes out so we can see the sweep of the rutted Jeep road as it sags down to the cottage, and I think to myself, if they're planning a surprise, they've messed things up because they left the lights on in the cottage.

“We need to be quiet,” Echo says.

“Okay,” I say, playing along.

As we get close, Echo stops me by the old chopper pad and says, “Wait here.” And then it's the dangdest thing, because she doesn't knock at the door or walk in the way you think she might, but creeps up alongside the wall where the light is spilling out of the main room and peeks in the window. I should never have come out here in the middle of the night with her.

She stares through the window, and then she turns and runs back through the broken yard and bumbles headlong into my arms. I straighten her up and she clings to me, her head against my chest, and I realize she's bawling like a baby. “This wasn't how it was supposed to be. You and I have to leave this place. Forget I ever brought you here. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean…”

“Wait here,” I tell her.

“No,” she says, grasping at me. “Don't go. This was a mistake. I wanted you to like me. I thought…Please don't go over there.”

Her desperation only fuels my desire to see what she's talking about. I shake her off and creep up through the overgrown yard. There's some music in the cottage, which explains why they didn't hear us talking outside. Two lamps are lit. There is a couch in the living room, and there are two people on the couch. A man and a woman. The first is my little brother, Trey. The second is the woman everybody knows I'm going to marry, India. They're naked.

I watch for a while, perhaps too long, and then I blunder back through the dark, where Echo collapses against my chest again, and together the two of us walk off a ways in the dark and fall to the earth, sitting side by side in shock. Echo continues to weep while I turn my head away so she cannot see the look on my face. Trey, you little black bastard.

“I didn't mean for this to happen,” Echo says. “I thought…”

“You must have known something was going on or you wouldn't have brought me out here.”

“I didn't think it was this.”

“Has it been going on all summer?”

“I don't know. They've been…flirting. I thought they were…like, just making out.”

“They're making out, all right.”

“I'm sorry, Stone. I really am.”

We sit for ten minutes, and then the lights go off in the cabin, and a few moments later India comes walking along the path and passes not fifteen feet in front of us, walking toward the big house. Trey is nowhere to be seen until I turn and spot him heading in the other direction, a tall shadow in the moonlight. He makes for the bluffs along the path that zigzags down to the beach.

I head for the cottage with an insatiable need to see evidence: the rumpled couch, the drinking glasses, whatever.

“Where are you going?” Echo asks. “Don't go. Don't leave me. I'm scared.”

I stop and she clings to me, her budding breasts against my chest. She folds her head against my chest, but I push her away and walk off. I've never been this angry in my life. I have no idea what I'm going to do. She follows, clasping my arm, and I keep thinking the little fool is in love with me. The wrong sister is in love with me. She brought me out here thinking we'd find India and Trey playing spin the bottle or some other innocuous game, thinking I'd see how India doesn't deserve me, and then like magic I'd be in love with her instead. What a little idiot. I could kill her for this.

17. THE FUNNIEST THING EVER

TREY
>

There are times when I can be an unapologetic jerk. It doesn't help that my best friend thinks it's funny when I disgrace myself, or that he encourages it by cooking up stupid stunts that for some reason I feel compelled to execute. Nor does it help when he reenacts them to endless gales of laughter from my brother, Johnny, milking the entertainment value out of them for months afterward. It almost makes the personal humiliation I suffer worthwhile, as if it's somehow more honorable and hilarious to be a jerk than to be otherwise, and of course that contrarian attitude appeals to my basic nature, which is part of the reason Rumble is my best friend. Like me, Rumble spends a lot of his life cutting against the grain.

Advice is only that, advice, and nobody twisted my arm to take Rumble's. I certainly don't act on any of his investment suggestions, which if I had, would have pushed me to the brink of insolvency more than once.

There was no reason to follow Rumble's suggestion and take Estevez to a formal ball on a motorcycle. Maybe in the back of my mind I was nervous about seeing so many people from my past, stressed at the prospect of coming face-to-face with the family that raised me and then banished me. I'd read in the paper that they'd all be there. When it came to the family, I never really knew how deep my feelings ran, because I'd been doing my best to bury them for the better part of two decades. You'd think I'd have the common sense to make the evening perfect for the woman I was escorting, so that I would have at least one ally when all the pitchforks were pointed in my direction, but when in trouble, I try always to alienate
everybody
around me equally. It probably has something to do with being ditched by virtually everybody I was related to in one fell swoop.

Rumble worked the same shift I did, C, but he'd been on disability with a neck injury since the Z Club and hadn't been back to work yet. Although he hadn't fought the fire, he'd been there the next morning, and the Z Club had shaken him like nothing else ever had—seeing those bodies lined up on the sidewalk, knowing we'd lost a firefighter inside. The fire had broken the spine of his ambition in a way I suspected could never be fully mended. My silent prediction was that he was more or less finished in operations, that he would grab one of the office jobs the department offered. He wouldn't do it right away, because he wouldn't want people making the connection between the Z Club and his taking a desk job, but sooner or later he would do it.

“A woman like that,” he said. “On TV all the time. Thinks she's hot shit. There's no way she's not playin' you. You told me yourself you didn't want to go to the ball. Why are you going? 'Cause she's leading you around by the nose. You two ever get married, you'll be wearing skirts and vacuuming the house.”

“We're
not
getting married. I'm taking her to
one
function, and after that I'll never see her again socially. Trust me on this.”

“She's a fine-looking woman. You told me that your own-self.”

“Yeah, well, looks aren't everything. She lied to me. She roped me into this bullshit investigation without asking me first. And she's got a tongue that's sharper than a snake's fang. I can live without all of that.”

“Woman like that, the only thing for you to do is put her in her place at the beginning. Yeah. Pick her up on the hog. Pretend that's how you pick up all your dates. Don't even let her know you got that Infiniti.” Rumble almost rolled out of the easy chair in my basement laughing. He laughed, and so did Johnny, and in the end so did I, the three of us convincing ourselves that the funniest sight ever seen on the streets of Seattle would be Jamie Estevez riding the back of a hog in a formal gown while I motored along in my tux.

I went along with Rumble's gag, believing all along I'd pick her up in my car, that there was no way I'd go over on the Harley; yet for some insane reason on Saturday evening when it came time to fetch her, I went out to the garage and fired up the Harley. God only knows what I was thinking. Or
if
I was thinking.