Mother May I(99)

They never told us about other kinds of danger. Now I met my dear, sweet husband’s gaze, and I wondered how many perfectly nice men, grown up or grown old, had in their younger years lost a night, like Trey. Drunk or high or both. In packs or alone. And something happened. Once.

These days, in the high school where my nieces went, they had seminars for the boys as well, teaching them how to not be rapists. College, too, I assumed. Trey’s generation hadn’t. Mine either; Betsy and I had understood that not getting raped was our job. We had to behave right. To stay safe from bad men, yes. But those seminars had also made it our job to protect nice boys from raping us.

“What do you want to do?” I asked. I would not replay last night’s argument again in public, and he had come out swinging. He was saying he could not admit it or live with it. He was saying if I pushed him, I would break us. I could feel the heat of Lexie’s furious gaze. I would not betray her. I did not want to lose my marriage.

He said, “We should go to therapy together, is what I’m thinking. Talk all this through with a mediator.”

I felt an instant brightness. I nodded, hope surging back. Marshall had two more copies of that picture. A therapist would see in it what I saw. He or she could help Trey come to terms with it. Help him see. We could work through it.

“I think that’s a wonderful idea.” My phone buzzed against the table. I looked, anxiety jacking, but it was not Mom, or the girls, or even the night-shift bodyguards. “It’s Marshall.”

“Take it,” Trey said, gaze sharpening with interest. “Maybe they found Lexie Pine. Put it on speaker.”

I didn’t want to. Marshall calling me felt oddly private. But there might be news. I did as he asked. “Hi. I’m with Trey. Did you find her?”

“Yeah. The cops did anyway.” He spoke quietly, almost solemn. “You are, I promise you, one hundred percent safe now.”

I went hot and cold at once, relieved and afraid, wondering what she’d told them.

If I called her a liar, was I any better than Trey? I had given Spence those pills after all. I should own it. Owning my own bad choices was the exact thing I was asking Trey to do. A strange peace came over me then. I had decided. I wouldn’t hurl myself into confessions, but I would not, under any circumstances, call Lexie Pine a liar.

“Holy shit!” Trey said. He grinned at me, instantly giddy. “God, what a weight off! Where was sh— One sec, Marshall.”

The waiter was back with the olives. We all went silent until he set them down and left.

Then I asked Marshall, “Are you upstairs? We’re at Haven. Come down and tell us all the details.”

I didn’t want to be alone with my husband right now. His eyes were bright, as if his offer and my acceptance of counseling had solved us, and then this good news came, and now this was a date. I couldn’t be that girl, celebrating, toasting. He would take it as capitulation. I could not imagine allowing his lips on mine, or his hands on my body. Not yet. Not until he saw.

Marshall said, “I was out following a lead when I got the call. I’m thirty miles away. Sorry.” He sounded so somber.

“How’d they find her?” Trey asked, impatient.

Marshall said, “They took cadaver dogs up to Funtime. This morning, early, but I only heard now. They went to look for Geoff Wilkerson. And they found him. He was buried in a shallow grave in the gold-mine boxes, where the soil was soft and very loose. It was probably the only place where a woman as old and sick as Coral Lee Pine could dig a grave.”

That damped Trey’s joy down. Mostly. “That’s awful.”

“Yeah,” Marshall agreed. “Anyway, the dogs found Lexie, too. Same place. Pretty much right beside him.”

My eyes met Trey’s, blinking, and for a moment I didn’t understand.

Trey got it, though. “Lexie Pine is dead?”

Over his shoulder the glass doors swished open again. A gaggle of men in suits came out and walked toward the hotel. The dark garage behind them looked like a cave mouth, black and haunted, the gold of Lexie’s hair gleaming somewhere deep inside it.

Marshall said, “Yeah. No DNA confirmation yet, of course, but the body had her ID on it. ID and some heroin. The M.E.’s best guess is that she overdosed. Months ago.”

“Months ago?” I echoed.

Impossible. Coral had said that Lexie was watching me, that Lexie had been at the firm’s gala, secreted on a dark path or one of the shadowed bridges, making sure that Spence died. Coral had told me it was so.

I blinked. Perhaps she had been. Watching from somewhere. Watching from wherever little broken birds went when they died.

“Yeah,” Marshall said. “No official time of death yet, but it was weeks before Geoff disappeared.”

I was sick and dizzy hearing this. I remembered Coral telling me, Losing a child would be the worst thing. That’s what she’d decided, when she began to seek revenge. God help her, she’d truly known. The rehab had failed. Lexie had overdosed. The death of her only child was the thing that set Coral in motion.

“Holy shit,” Trey breathed. He picked up his glass and drained most of his drink.

The glass doors had not closed. That gold gleam shone. Now she was moving, emerging from the darkness into the fading sunlight.

Lexie. She was walking toward us. Marshall was wrong. He had to be wrong, because she was here. Lexie, lovely in an immaculate white dress that flowed around her slim, lithe body. Her smooth young face had no expression as she came, unhurried and businesslike, down the brick walk. She held a flat white clutch in front of her hips, clasped demurely. Her pale hair, tumbling in loose waves around her pretty face, gleamed in the setting sun.