Useless Bay(24)

I reassured her that I felt fine, and finally she left to make coffee and sandwiches for the people searching for Grant.

“All right. I’ll go. But only because you’ve got more sense than some of your brothers, and there’s work to be done. You’ll call me when the doctors come back with your prognosis?”

I told her I would. I told her I felt fine. I did not tell her that I felt normal.

The truth was, I was scared of what the brain scans would turn up. I was sure that at least part of my brain had turned to jelly, and I wanted to put off Mom’s reaction to it as long as possible.

After all, nobody with a normal brain would’ve seen what I saw the night before: the man sitting on the log . . . the woman coming from the sea . . . Lyudmila becoming an incandescent light. And then the woman standing over me, whispering something in my ear, something important that, try as I might, I couldn’t remember.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember but couldn’t tune out the beeping from the machines I was hooked up to. What had she said?

After a while, I gave up trying and focused on the wall-mounted TV. I watched the manhunt for Grant Shepherd, the one that Patience and I should’ve wrapped up by now.

The news listed Yuri Andreevich Bulgakov as a “person of interest.” Everybody liked him for Lyudmila’s murder and Grant’s disappearance. His motive was supposed to be money.

Nobody had seen him since Sunday afternoon. The newscasters hinted he might have a link to the Russian mafia, which pissed me off. I mean, just because he was Russian didn’t mean he was carrying out hits on people. True, he owned that Kalashnikov, but I figured that was more out of habit than anything else.

Yuri was just too sad. When he was off duty and dipping into the cornichons and the vodka, he would stare a little too long at the big house and start singing verses of Russian folk songs. He would get a faraway look, massage Patience’s wrinkles, then turn to Henry and me and say, “Ah, to be young and in love.”

He loved Lyudmila with a doomed, Russian kind of love.

I always assumed that was enough for him.

I didn’t know where he’d gone, but I hoped he was okay.

I had been lying in my bed in the ER for about seven hours when Sammy showed up.

“Sammy, thank God. Have you guys found Grant yet?”

He shook his head no. His face had a weight to it I’d never seen before, and I knew at once that it was bad news.

“I need to tell you about Patience,” he said.

He handed me a bag of clean clothes. Then he sat with me and waited for the results of the MRI. As he did, he recited the facts.

“Whoever did it used the Kalashnikov, Pix. Remember? Yuri’s gun? We know it was that weapon because of the caliber of the bullet. They still haven’t recovered the gun yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

“Whoever did it would’ve shot her at close range. The first bullet would’ve made her jump. You remember how vocal she was? There would’ve been a great big aroo. But she wouldn’t have felt the other thirty-two. Thirty-three bullets total, Pix. Thirty-three. That’s some seriously twisted shit right there.”

I know not all brothers are like this. Some might have said she wouldn’t have felt a thing or gone on about burying her under the azaleas that would bloom lovely and pink in the summertime, like that shit would’ve consoled me.

But not my Sammy. Sammy was all about statistics and records. So he counted the bullets. He told me the facts. He let me draw my own grim conclusions.

Sammy had no way of knowing my part in all this. That I’d hidden the Kalashnikov when Henry and I had been alone searching the guard shack for Yuri and clues to where Grant had gone. I remembered how big the gun had been and how I hadn’t wanted it lying around where anyone could swipe it and use it on some little kid. That gun had scared me, so I stashed it out of sight in the Scotch broom.

But the fact that it had been found and used meant that someone had been watching us—had been watching me.

The night before, when we’d fanned out to look for Grant, we’d all been in a position to be picked off by that Kalashnikov one by one—Lawford, Frank, Henry, me—who knows how many more.

But no. Whoever had been watching us had deliberately taken out the dog—the one with the well-trained, professional nose.

I didn’t know what that meant, but I was going to find out. And when I did, I was going to shoot the bastard who did it with thirty-three slugs myself.

That’s how I felt like mourning.





twelve


HENRY


I was right about agent Armstrong. After we found what was left of Pixie’s dog, things started happening.

He began to notice what we hadn’t, the first of which was to wonder why, when we’d searched the house and the garage and even the guard shack, no one had thought to search the Breakers.

“The Breakers is shut tight,” Dad told him. “The only time we open it is if we have guests. And we haven’t had any in months.”

“What if Grant wanted to play hide-and-seek there?” I suggested, mostly to myself, but agent Armstrong seized on the idea.

“Let’s open it up and take a look around,” he said.

“Okay,” Dad said. “But I don’t see why. Grant doesn’t hide unless one of the Grays is abetting him. Usually at their house.”