Damage Control: A Novel Read online

  We stroked in rhythm, glancing down each time our oars hit the water, afraid we’d see that gray snout breaking the surface, mouth gaping open with three rows of huge teeth. But the water remained calm.

  As we neared shore, the surfers were huddled on the sand, several already on cell phones, watching us anxiously. When we hit the shallows, they ran to pull the kayak in to safety. Someone wrapped a towel around me but I couldn’t stop trembling.

  “That was amazing,” Luke told the assembled surfers. “A fucking great white. Who’s going to believe that? We could have gotten killed.”

  And he laughed uproariously.

  * * *

  We sat in the Paxtons’ kitchen wrapped in towels and drinking hot coffee, replaying the scene, describing our glimpses of the great white predator. If that was a juvenile, I hoped I never saw an adult. Luke seemed energized and filled with strange radiance.

  He placed a carton of orange juice and two glasses on the table, then took my hand.

  “I’m glad you’ve come back into our lives,” Luke said. “And it feels right to have you here. Anabelle needs the moral support and I . . .”

  Miranda walked in, trailing the smell of lavender soap.

  “I was hoping you were Lincoln’s nanny,” she said. “Anabelle’s still asleep and that child is driving me—”

  She broke off as she saw Luke holding my hand.

  “Been for an early morning swim?” Miranda asked.

  Then, not waiting for an answer, she said, “You two better get cleaned up before we sit down to breakfast.”

  * * *

  I showered, then fished a colorful Guatemalan scrunchy out of a woven basket and pulled my hair back in a sleek ponytail. I threw on a little makeup, then finished my toilette with a second Adderall, admonishing myself that I’d cut back as soon as this case wrapped up.

  When I went down to breakfast, Luke had disappeared, and I didn’t want to draw attention by asking where he was. I settled for the solace of a chocolate croissant.

  Labor Day was coming and things must have been slow, because Henry was working from home.

  By nine a.m., I’d talked to Faraday, who told me to stay put, made numerous calls, scanned the papers, and gone to check on Anabelle, who was having breakfast in bed.

  She sat propped up on pillows, pale and wan as the Lady of Shalott.

  “How are you doing this morning?”

  She gave me a rueful smile. “For a moment just now I forgot completely. My brain floated in glorious nothingness. Then everything crashed down again like a fifty-foot wave and I was drowning.”

  I sat next to her.

  “They say that as time goes by, the normal moments stretch out longer and the crashes soften and get shorter.”

  “I crave that. I want to blot out everything. To feel nothing.”

  “There are prescription pills . . .” I began.

  “I can’t take pills. Not with my history.”

  I gazed at the cozy turret we’d turned into a reading nook and the wooden balcony from which we’d watched the shimmering sea. I’d always felt like a princess here, or at least a lady-in-waiting.

  Villa Marbella had been our castle, filled with light and shadow, alcoves and dumbwaiters and secret passageways, and maybe even a dwarf named Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold in a secret room. In those early days of our friendship, it was easy to forget the reckoning at the story’s end: Rumpelstiltskin had demanded a child as payment. And only the queen’s quick action, carried out by a loyal courtier, had saved her firstborn.

  “I could set up an appointment with your doctor, if you’d like to talk to someone who understands these things better than me,” I said.

  “That’s okay.” Anabelle sighed.

  Wanting to distract her, I recounted our close brush with the young great white in Luke’s kayak.

  She gave me a strange look. “Luke came by and took you kayaking? Where is he?”

  “It was dawn. I think he’s left for work now.”

  “He didn’t come up to see me,” Anabelle said, with that same mix of petulance and sisterly propriety I remembered from high school.

  “Maybe he did and you were asleep.”

  “You’re defending him.”

  She gave me a searching look, and I knew that now was not the time to tell her there were sparks flying between us.

  Instead, I pulled out our high school yearbook and it fell open to a Halloween photo from senior year, Anabelle dressed as a Freudian Slip with her arm around Raven, who was costumed as Death, the cute Goth Girl from Sandman. Already, I was MIA from the scene.

  I looked up. “Ever hear from Raven?” I asked.

  “Oh, my God!” Anabelle’s eyes did a weird flutter. “We lost touch ages ago. Sometimes I think about looking her up. It’s so easy with the Internet. But I don’t know if she’s even still alive and . . .” Anabelle was sheepish. “It wouldn’t be good for my sobriety if she’s still . . . you know . . .”

  “I wonder if she’s still in love with Luke,” I said. “When I heard through the grapevine that they’d broken up, I was afraid she might do something crazy.”

  Suddenly, I was curious to know what had become of melancholy Raven, who wrote sestinas to Luke in crimson ink mixed with her own tears.

  “She and I had a falling-out soon after they broke up,” Anabelle said. “I took Luke’s side—he is my brother, after all—and she couldn’t stand it. So that was that.”

  I shivered in sympathy for Raven. I knew what it felt like to be exiled from the kingdom. Even now, the old insecurities rose like ghosts. I struggled to suppress them and a small demon seized my tongue.

  “Maybe you should invite Raven over one evening, and the three of us can eat Doritos and M&Ms and talk about old times as we watch the sun set over the water.”

  Anabelle nodded but her mouth set in a stubborn line that said she’d do no such thing.

  The memories fizzed and bubbled in my head.

  “Remember the green flash?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  The green flash was a rarely glimpsed treasure—an emerald jewel of color that glinted for a second on the horizon as the sun plunged into the sea.

  Even though I knew perfectly well that it was an optical phenomenon caused by light refraction, I preferred Anabelle’s explanation.

  “You used to say it was the naiads, signaling to us from under the sea. You said it was the changeling time, when day became night and all matter was in flux. When the borders between worlds became as porous as the stones we found at the bottom of the ocean cliffs.”

  Anabelle’s eyes tilted back in her head. She was still sitting there, but she was suddenly far away.

  “I remember perfectly. Last night I even dreamed of it. The sun was setting over the water and I was swimming out to the green flash so it could take me. I know there are other worlds. There have to be. This one is just too painful.”

  The hairs on my arms prickled, but there was no breeze.

  From downstairs came a gurgling shriek.

  We both jumped.

  But it was quickly followed by childish laughter and the slap of small tennies on a hardwood floor.

  “I know everything’s raw and painful,” I said, “and that’s normal. But this is the world we’re stuck in, at least for now. And Lincoln is here. He loves you so much.”

  Anabelle’s hands twisted the sheets. “And I can’t face him right now. I want to stay in my room and never come out. Thank God Inez is here, because Mom is utterly useless.”

  “Give it time,” I said. “Your mom, by the way, put fresh sheets on my bed last night.”

  Anabelle glanced at me with surprise. “That was unusually thoughtful of her.”

  “When she walked out of the guest room, she had a box with her. Looked like it was full of old photos and newspaper clippings.”

  “Yeah, she’s been feeling nostalgic lately.”

  “How so?”

  Anabelle shrugged. “
I caught her sniffling over the photo of an old boyfriend the other day. From her debutante days. He jilted her. She was waiting for him in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in New York the night she met Dad. The other guy stood her up, but once she met Dad, Mom didn’t care. It was love at first sight, stars, a twenty-one-gun salute. They eloped three weeks later.”

  “Anabelle, does your family have any guns?”

  “Mom bought one a few years back, when she started doing mannequin art. She’d take them out into the desert, duct tape tomatoes to various body parts, then shoot them. It was kind of stupid, if you ask me, but the critics liked it.”

  My body was humming with so much electricity I thought I might levitate.

  “She got rid of the gun, though. Said she didn’t want it around the house.” Anabelle gave a gruntled snort. “Just those bloody mannequins.”

  She slid out of bed and walked around listlessly, moving from her record collection to the window to the bookshelves, running her fingers along the ones we’d devoured as teenagers—Francesca Lia Block, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Jack Kerouac, Anaïs Nin, even her old Norton Anthology of English Literature from junior year that held our favorite Keats poem, “The Eve of St. Agnes.”

  Anabelle’s fingers stopped at a large brown, ugly volume.

  “I forgot all about this.” She brought over the Oxford Treasury of World Literature.

  “I don’t remember that one,” I said.

  “That’s because it isn’t a book, it’s a safe. My grandfather gave it to me years ago.”

  Anabelle turned it sideways, revealing the gilt-edged pages as painted wood. “I wonder if I still have the key?”

  She walked to her childhood desk, opened the middle drawer, and pulled out a gold key on a green ribbon. She inserted it and turned.

  The book opened, revealing a $2 bill, a bag of grimy dollar coins and Kennedy half-dollars, beaded earrings, a quail feather, a long-matured savings bond, an expired passport, a dented, engraved gold locket, a corsage of rose petals that crumbled as Anabelle touched them, releasing a ghostly perfume, concert ticket stubs for X, Wall of Voodoo, the Clash, Surf Punks, and an amber bottle of prescription pills.

  Anabelle picked up the bottle. “Randall’s missing pills,” she said in wonderment.

  “You or Randall must have put them here for safekeeping and forgotten.”

  Anabelle’s nose wrinkled.

  “I haven’t opened this lockbox since high school.” She laughed ruefully. “I’d forgotten it was here. Trust me, I would have cashed out the bond and pawned the coins in a heartbeat back when . . .”

  “Then who—?”

  “Someone took the pills from my house and hid them here.”

  Anabelle unscrewed the plastic top and upended the bottle. Five white pills fell into her palm.

  Her mouth parted in surprise. “It was full three weeks ago.”

  My mind grasped for a connection.

  “Anabelle, did you know that the cops found a baggie of prescription pills in Emily Mortimer’s beside drawer?”

  “Yeah. So what? I didn’t know Emily Mortimer. She’d never been to my house. Or here.”

  Anabelle turned to me. “Unless . . . Do you think Uncle Simon brought that girl to our house when my parents were out of town? And they like, did it in my room, on my bed?”

  Maybe it wasn’t your uncle who had sex with her.

  Anabelle cocked her head. “But how would Emily have gotten hold of Randall’s pills? And why would she have brought them here? How would she have known about the fake book, and the key? Besides, if she was a drug addict, she’d never leave her stash here. She’d have it within reach. This I know.”

  “Has Simon visited you in Palos Verdes recently?” I asked. “A family gathering, perhaps?”

  “Never!”

  “When’s the last time your parents dropped by?”

  “Dad was there two weeks ago.”

  “Did you have the pills then?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know for sure?”

  “Because a few nights before that, I got Randall a Percocet and a glass of water. He’d just run a ten-K and he’d pulled a muscle.” She paused. Her lower lip trembled.

  I put my arms around her and we sat like that for a long moment. Then she got up to get a tissue. She blew her nose. “Randall,” she said, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”

  She heaved a sigh and rubbed her cheeks. “What were we just talking about?”

  “How your dad dropped by two weeks ago and that’s the last time you saw the bottle in your medicine cabinet.”

  “Oh, yeah. But you know, it’s not like I check the bottle every night. For someone of my disposition, that would be . . . extremely unhealthy.”

  “Has your mom visited you recently?”

  Anabelle gave a short laugh. “She’s much too busy making art and playing tennis to spend time with her only grandchild.”

  “So sometime between your dad’s last visit and today, that bottle of pills walked over here by itself.”

  Anabelle raised her tear-stained face. “What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m not sure. But it seems logical to think your dad might have something to do with this. Did he know about Emily’s little problem? Maybe he swiped the pills for her but hadn’t gotten around to giving them to her yet. So he hid them here.”

  Anabelle nodded slowly. “Dad knew about the fake book. But he saw Emily Mortimer the night she was killed.” Anabelle winced. “Why wouldn’t he have given her the pills then? Besides, they’re mostly gone.”

  “Maybe he was doling them out slowly.”

  Anabelle said, “I think we need to talk to Henry.”

  27

  Anabelle went downstairs to get her dad.

  I looked out the arched window that framed the sundrenched, aquamarine sea. Villa Marbella. Beautiful Sea. How many times had I stood here in an adolescent trance, trying to imprint this Impressionist painting onto my DNA?

  But the sandstone cliffs crumbled with each passing year. Sharks plied the coastal waters. Billionaires bought up the public beachfront, built mansions, and did everything but place severed heads on pikes to keep the public away.

  I was still musing about the shadows that lurk beneath the gleaming surface of things when the senator walked in with Anabelle. When he saw me, he did a double take.

  “Hullo, Maggie,” he said, slipping on his public face so seamlessly that if I hadn’t known his private one I would have thought he was happy to see me.

  “If you could excuse us a—”

  “She stays,” said Anabelle, arms folded across her chest. She leaned against the wall. “Oh God, I don’t know where to begin. Maggie, you’re the expert.”

  “I don’t know about that. But I’ll try. Senator Paxton, I’m hoping you could help us. We’re trying to figure something out.”

  The senator’s eyes slid from me to Anabelle, then to the window. “What’s this all about?” he asked gruffly.

  I pointed to the pill bottle on the bed.

  “Two weeks ago, someone removed a full bottle of prescription pills from the medicine cabinet in Anabelle’s house. Today she finds that bottle in her old room, hidden in a lockbox she hasn’t touched in more than ten years. But most of the pills are gone.”

  Senator Paxton’s mouth turned down. “How very strange. And you’re sure it’s the same bottle?”

  He walked toward the bed.

  “Don’t touch it,” I said. “The police will want to dust it for prints.”

  Paxton froze. “Dust it?”

  “Sure. They’re prescription narcotics. Just like the pills the cops found in Emily Mortimer’s nightstand. There might be a connection.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” He reached for the amber bottle.

  “Hmm.” The senator picked up the bottle and turned it around. If his prints hadn’t been on it before, they certainly were now.

  But maybe that wa
s the point.

  I wondered if I should call Faraday. But my doubts about Faraday, about Blair itself, grew stronger with each passing day. What would my bosses do with this information? And didn’t I owe some allegiance to this family? To at least hear Henry out privately before running off to Faraday?

  “Did you take Randall’s pills, Dad?” Anabelle asked.

  “Well, now,” said the senator, evading his daughter’s gaze.

  “Oh, my God, you did! Why, Dad? Were you going to give them to that . . . that girl?”

  Paxton looked stricken.

  “I didn’t give them to . . . oh, Anabelle. Please forgive me.” Her father put his arm around her. “This has all gone so wrong.”

  Anabelle shrugged off his arm and moved out of reach.

  “Maggie, would you mind leaving us?” the senator said. “I’d to talk to my daughter in private.”

  “No,” said Anabelle, hysterical. “I told you. She’s my friend and I want her to stay. Tell us the truth, Dad.”

  For a long moment, they stared at each other. The silence grew, swirling around them, arranging itself into monstrous shapes.

  “Senator, why did you bring Randall’s pills here?” I asked gently.

  Paxton reached out to his daughter again, but she flinched and faced the wall. The senator clasped his hands behind his back and walked to the French doors that led out to the balcony. The cool, tiled depths of the pool, the grape arbors, the gaily colored Chinese lanterns, the singing fountain—none of it gave any comfort now.

  “Anabelle,” Senator Paxton said, “this house has always been a retreat for you and your brother. We’ve tried to expose you to all the beauty this world has to offer, while shielding you from some of its harsher realities. I guess we can’t do that anymore.”

  He paused and we waited.

  Anabelle leaned her forehead against the rose-colored wall, slowly banging it.

  “You may recall that I got the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Vietnam War.” Henry Paxton sighed. “When my plane was shot down, I parachuted out, as you know. It saved my life but I landed badly. My shoulder was shattered. The surgeons put it back together and I’ve had a half dozen operations over the years, as you know. There have been times when it’s been better and times when it’s been worse. But there has never been a time when I’ve been without pain.”