My Sister's Keeper (36 page)

“
Can I trust you to take my car and not wreck it?”

She smiled sheepishly. “What time do I need to be back?”

“
I’ll ride with Mom today if you’ll promise to bring it back tonight.”

She smiled. “Okay.”

We kissed and just when things seemed headed toward a repeat of the night before, we heard mother stirring upstairs. Sydney jumped out of bed, dressed, took the keys to my car, and kissed me goodbye.

After she’d gone, the house felt hard and empty. My footsteps echoed off the walls and I became acutely aware of the pain in my swollen ankle as I limped upstairs to check on Mom. Through the door, I could hear her crying and it crushed my heart. I knocked twice, but after hearing no response opened the door ajar and looked in. Mom was seated at a window in her robe with her head down on a table. I pushed the door back and entered.

“
You okay, Mom?”

She raised her head, covered her eyes with a hand, and sobbed. I dragged a stool up next to her and rubbed her back.

“
Why?” she cried. “Will somebody
please
tell me
why?”

I looked out the window at the backyard below where Martha and I had played together as kids. “I don’t know, Mom. God works in mysterious ways.”

“
Don’t give me that…
crap!
If there was a God in heaven, he would have taken better care of that child. She never did anything bad to anybody. She is an
angel.
One in a million!” Her voice dissipated into babbles and sobs.

“
I know, Mom. I don’t understand it either.” I wrapped both arms around her and held her.

“
I used to sit up here and watch the two of you out there playing in the yard when you were little. Chasing each other ‘round the yard, climbing trees, and swinging from the branches. I can see it just as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.” She sniffled and wiped her nose. “But I knew it wouldn’t last. Nothing turns out good for me.”

“
What are you talking about, Mom?”

“
I’ve always had a dark cloud hanging over my head, Richard.”

“
Now, Mom, you know that isn’t so.”

“
No, I mean it. My life has been cursed from the beginning.”

“
Mom!”

“
If I got a new dress, it would snag on something and get torn first time I wore it. If I got a dog, it’d get run over. Every good thing that ever came along in my life has turned bad.”

“
It’s not true, Mom. You stop thinking like that.”

She sniffled and wiped her nose. “Charlie’s wreck, Martha’s first accident, and now
this
one. She could be brain-dead.” She pressed a tissue to her eyes. “Gus is dying and you’re in all that trouble.”

I sighed. “Look, somebody needs to be there when Martha wakes up. Don’t you think we should get dressed and get back over there?”

“
If
she wakes up.”

“
She’s going to wake up, Mom, and things are going to get back to normal. You’ll see.”

She turned to the window. “Yes. Back to
normal
.” She dabbed the tissue into each eye.

I closed my arms around her, kissed her forehead, and helped her into the bathroom where she blew her nose and wiped her face with a wet cloth. I left her there, took her car, and ran over to my house for a shower and change of clothes. The swelling in my ankle was getting worse and it killed me to walk on it.

When we arrived at the hospital, we looked in on Martha first. She was still unconscious. Blood had soaked through her bandages here and there, but her breathing looked strong and steady. The doctor stopped by and told us that she had a serious concussion and that they’d given her medication that would keep her unconscious until the swelling went down.

“
How long’s that going to take?” Mom asked.

The doctor gripped Mom’s shoulder. “Could be weeks.”

After we’d spent a few minutes with Martha, Mom asked me to go upstairs and tell Dad what had happened. “Ain’t no way I could bear to tell him myself,” she said. “Couldn’t get the words out without bawling like a baby. He’ll just get mad and upset if I do it.”

FROM THE FOOT OF HIS BED, I watched the peaceful rhythm of his sleep and questioned the logic of telling him anything at all, knowing it could possibly kill him.
But what if she dies?
I had to tell him. I owed him that.

I moved cautiously on my swollen ankle to the chair next to the bed and sat with my head bowed. All of a sudden my exhaustion caught up with me. I couldn’t get things organized in my head. I didn’t know where to begin.

“
What are you doing here this time of morning?” he asked, his voice smooth and gentle.

I leaned forward resting my elbows on my knees. My head hung low and my voice was hoarse. “I came to bring you some very bad news, Dad.”

“
They’ve arrested you for the murder of that girl?”

I sighed. “Worse than that.”

The slow beeping of his heart monitor skipped a beat. “What then? Have I been fired? Ha! That sounds like something that jackass would do.” I covered my face with my hands while he babbled on. “Call the house and fire me while I’m on my deathbed so he won’t have to send flowers to the funeral. What a tight-ass. I made that air-head a millionaire. For what?”

“
Dad…”

He breathed heavily. “Shit, maybe you got the right idea after all, boy. Work for your damned self. Can’t get fired if you work for yourself.”

I drew a deep breath and sighed. “Martha’s been in an accident, Dad.”

His head rose off the bed. His red-rimmed eyes bore into me. The beep on the heart monitor sped up. “What kind of accident?”

“
Her wheelchair rolled out into the road. A bus hit her.”

His mouth fell open and his head plopped against the pillow. He drew the back of his right hand up against his thin gray hair. The heart monitor began to gallop and his left hand began pounding angrily against the mattress. “Is she…”

“
She’s in a coma.”

“
Damn!” A tear trickled from his eye. His voice grew louder. “How much more will that baby have to endure, for Christ’s sake?”

“
She went through surgery last night and she’s in intensive care now.”

His hand slapped harder and his heart rate climbed above one hundred thirty beats per minute. “Hasn’t she had enough, goddamnit? What the hell’s it gonna take?” When his heart rate hit one-sixty, an alarm sounded on the monitor.

My voice cracked as I choked back tears. “Dad?”

A nurse rushed through the door and tried to calm him as he flailed about pounding his fist. “God-almighty-damn!”

She pressed a button on the wall and a half-minute later, another nurse entered with a syringe. I didn’t have to be told he’d be out for the rest of the day.

THE BANK CLERK held out her hand. “Your key, Mr. McGillikin?” She was youthful with long curly hair streaked with highlights, an early tan, and thick eyebrows. Scott’s eyes dropped to the gap in her blouse—open just enough to expose the top of a breast—then to his billfold. Digging into a hidden slot, he extracted a small brass key and laid it in the palm of her hand. Her eyes rose to his. “Aren’t you the McGillikin that my daddy’s built that new yawl for?”

“
Is your daddy named Walker?”

“
Lenny Walker.”

“
Then I guess I’m the one.”

She smiled. “That’s—
by far—
the best sailboat he ever built.”

“
Is it?”

“
Oh, yes. It is. And I should know. I take them all out for their maiden voyages and I took yours up the river a couple of Saturdays back. It handles like a
dream
. Best boat I ever sailed.”

“
That’s good to know. I’m taking it out for my first run today.”

“
God, I’d love to go with you. I’d rather be sailing than anything.” She leaned closer and whispered. “Especially this.”

The fragrance of her perfume filled his head. “I know exactly what you mean,
Miss
Walker?”

She nudged him with her shoulder and winked. “You can call me Tiffany.”

A thin smile cut across his face. “Tiffany. I like that. How old are you, Tiffany?”

“
Old enough to handle that big toy of yours.” She cut her eyes at him, flipped her hair back, and inserted the keys into a pair of locks high on the wall. His eyes roamed to her breasts then to the back of her skirt as she reached up with both hands, turned the keys together, and withdrew a large safety deposit box from its vault. “Hey, this is heavy,” she groaned. “What’ve you got in here? Gold bars?” He smiled in spite of the pain that shot up his left arm when the box pressed against an open wound under his sleeve. “Take your time, Mr. McGillikin. Just let me know when you’re finished. And if you ever need anyone to crew with you, just give me a call.”

“
Thanks. I’ll do that.”

When she’d gone, he carried the box into a private chamber, set it next to his briefcase, and locked the door. From the box he removed three passports—each with his photograph, but a different name—a Beretta 9mm semi-automatic pistol with a silencer, a full box of ammunition, and close to two hundred thousand dollars in cash. He stuffed it all into his briefcase on top of a photograph of Ashleigh Matthews, the one person to have pulled one over on him—a score he intended to settle if it took him the rest of his life.

He locked the briefcase, signaled Tiffany that he’d finished, and crossed the street to another bank where he transferred $2 million dollars from his clients’ trust accounts to an offshore account in the Cayman Islands along with several million more from his lucrative Internet porn business.

He returned to the first bank, asked Miss Walker if she’d like to join him on a year-long cruise to Central and South America, and waited as she grabbed her purse and walked out on her job.

49

D
ETECTIVE SAM JONES and his partner Crabby Staten stepped from their car and were met by a pudgy fifty-year-old with a two-day beard and a jaw full of chewing tobacco.

“
We jus’ put this asphalt down Monday,” the man slurred in a deep southern drawl. “And a piece of it caved in t’day when somebody drove over it. We figur’d we had us a water leak, but when we dug in, this is what we found.”

The two detectives stepped to the edge of a hole that had been cut into the asphalt, looked down, and saw the crown of a man’s head exposed in the bottom. A wisp of water misting behind it washed a trench around the body.

“
Anybody missing on your crew?” Sam asked the man.

“
Nope.”

“
Where’s the cutoff to that water line?”

“
Got no idea. We jus’ do the paving.”

Sam pulled the tail of his long coat up around his waist, stepped into the hole, slipped on the wet clay, and stumbled down to the body. Regaining his footing, he snatched a ball-point pen from his breast pocket, bent over the exposed head, and dug the dirt back from the man’s face.
Dark complexion. Thin mustache. Mexican?

Sam scaled back up the slope and—with the help of the foreman’s beefy hand—climbed out. “Notice anything unusual around here the last few days?”

The man spit a stream of tobacco juice toward the curb and adjusted the wad in his cheek. “One of the guys said somebody’d messed with his backhoe over the weekend.”

“
Where is it?”

“
That’s it down yonder.” He indicated a machine parked two blocks away.

“
And the man that runs it?”

He pointed to a crewman propped nearby with his arms folded across his chest. He wore dark wraparound sunglasses under a
Caterpillar
baseball cap, and his hair was pulled back in a three-inch ponytail. “Thanks,” Sam replied, stamping the mud off his shoes as he walked toward the backhoe operator. While Sam took a look at the machine, a public works superintendent showed up, studied a survey map, and backtracked to the nearest water turn-off valve. Shortly thereafter, the misty spray ceased and the forensic team arrived to begin the work of extracting the body.

WHEN SCOTT AND TIFFANY arrived at the docks,
Steal Away,
the sleek, black, fifty-five-foot Lenny Walker original,
pulled anxiously at its mooring lines at the far end of the dock. Its two masts towered above all other sailboats in the marina reaching for the sky. The crowd in the bar had moved to the windows just to admire it and take bets on to whom it belonged. Scott could feel the jealousy in their eyes as he and Tiffany headed down the pier.

Although he’d learned to sail smaller boats, Scott was not capable of handling this one by himself. He’d assumed he’d have a few months to spend on the Intracoastal Waterway learning to sail it with Sydney’s help before taking it out into the Atlantic. But now, with Tiffany handling the boat, they could be in Abacos—their first port of call—within a few days. He would be a multi-millionaire
free
to come and go as he pleased, to live life to its fullest, to explore the world the way man was intended—seeing, tasting, touching, and taking whatever and
whomever
he pleased. He’d slip away under the cover of darkness dumping his garbage at sea.