A Crack in Everything Read online

  “You can’t win. My wife…daughter…” He was talking to himself, to ghosts. “Betrayed me like you.” He lifted his hands to his face. A broken line of blood tracked down his cheek. “I wanted to kill the both of them.”

  “You’re crazy. You tore up the pictures. You trashed your own apartment.”

  He stared at his palms, nodded. “Lombard’s threats…I wanted to make sure you’d sue him. Couldn’t let him win.”

  I shoved him, and he stumbled, reaching out for me as he fell. Before he could grab me, I boosted myself up and clattered over the burners to the ledge around the firewall. Benny’s bucket stood five feet away filled with greasy water.

  Nino leaned across the knobs. “Come down, Susie. Mi dispiace. I’m not mad at you, I promise.” The old Nino, the one I thought I knew, was speaking to me now like a man in his cups, full of regret…but all I could hear was the bully, the liar, sweet talking me to death.

  I edged toward the bucket.

  “Get down here!” He reached for my ankle, but he was weaker now. “You traitor!”

  I took another sideways step. “Nino,” I said. “Why are you so full of hate?”

  He answered me in fire. One by one, the four back burners exploded at my feet. I grabbed Benny’s bucket and flung it over the flames. For an iridescent second they flared, then went out. Fumes wafted from the doused pilots, and I waited, lightheaded, but ready to fight if he tried to pull me down again.

  He looked past me, through me, his body shriveling inside his clothes. His sighs came like bleak winds across an ocean of misery. “Not you. I don’t hate you.” He turned on the front burners, four new rings of fire, and thrust in his hands.

  “No!” I stood paralyzed. The smell of burning flesh clogged my throat. “Don’t, Nino!” I climbed down and led him away from the stove. He tried to resist, but I took his elbow and steered him to the sink. While he stood there, still as a fevered child, I ran cold water over his raw red hands. Then I dialed for an ambulance.

  “We’ve already had a call,” the dispatcher said.

  Benny. He hadn’t turned away from my screams.

  I left Nino at a table and went outside. Under the arc lights, I saw that my palms were bloody, my shirt torn, and the warm pavement under my feet told me I had lost my sandals. There was no survivor’s euphoria to make me giddy tonight; only a kind of calm, as if I’d died and been reborn in this deserted Brookline neighborhood.

  A cruiser stopped in front of the restaurant and two uniformed cops got out.

  Officer Jowls stared at me. “You again?”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Women Mourn

  Ten degrees steeper and you’d call it a cliff, not that it stopped the beach brats. They climbed to the top and plunged down, rolling over and over until they hit the surf, then splashed their way back to a distant umbrella. I remembered how it felt. How, for the best spin, you crossed your arms and grabbed your shoulders and screamed all the way. How the sky and your head got mixed up. Sand in your mouth. The cold smack of the ocean.

  I hugged my knees. How come, I asked myself, I’m always on time, and everybody else isn’t? Michael was driving to Truro from Boston and should have been here an hour ago. At my borrowed cottage, the tunaless casserole I’d brought from home sat thawing on a counter, tonight’s dinner, almost ready to go. All it needed, Michael had advised, was a slug of sherry and a lobster garnish, a couple of two-pounders, fresh off the boat.

  By late afternoon the tide had turned, and I picked my way down the path, thinking about Deirdre who’d left me a message from a rehabilitation center in New York. She was doing well and would call when she got back. Nothing else. Don’t complain, don’t explain. Deirdre. At the shoreline, sand rippled away from my feet in wavy braids studded with sea glass and broken shells. One of these days I’d meet Deirdre, bring her here. I’d call the ocean healing waters. She’d like that.

  When I got back to the top Michael was waiting with a Thermos of iced coffee and an armful of peaches that fell into the grass when we hugged. We never did find all of them.

  “You smell like the ocean,” he said.

  “And you smell like dessert.”

  He gave me a kiss, and I gave him two, then had to wrestle myself out of his arms. “Margaritas at six,” I said. “So quick, tell me what you found in New Hampshire.”

  “Torie’s earrings. Her evening bag. A memory card with a video clip of the toxic spill. Enough to make it hard for Glenn to recant.”

  “What about the microtome blade from Lab 45?”

  “Not among Glenn’s trophies. My guess is you found the one he used on Torie, and he planted it there to incriminate Bart Bievsky. He’d already hidden his father’s watch in Bart’s car, for Johanna to find. It would’ve been easy to tag the blade with a strand of Bart’s hair or a drop of his blood.”

  “And I led Johanna straight to it. She must have figured it implicated Glenn. You’ll never find it.”

  Michael was quiet, and I knew he was thinking about lethal families, fatal friends. Things cops see.

  “Torie’s blackmail wasn’t only about toxic dumping, by the way. Her video is almost an aside. EPA found evidence of small nuclear spills, but as it turned out, the contamination never got past the internal drains.”

  “So what did else she have up her sleeve?”

  “Evidence that Johanna stole research from a colleague at Chestnut Hill College.”

  “The longevity gene stuff?”

  “Yes. There was a vial inside Torie’s evening bag, and a filmstrip. Johanna’s fingerprints are all over both.”

  “Stolen research and Johanna. Why am I not surprised?” There would be endless lawsuits, fleeing investors, civil and criminal penalties. “Now that could bring NGT down.”

  “Forget NGT,” he said, filling two paper cups with iced coffee. “Forget margaritas. Let’s just settle down here for awhile.”

  We sat near the edge of the hill, watching the tide run out. A menagerie of clouds, mostly swans and crocodiles, drifted overhead. “Like Adam and Eve,” I said. “Just us, and somewhere in the dunes, the serpent.”

  “You know Nino’s out of the hospital,” Michael said. Speaking of serpents, I guess.

  “And out on bail.” I pressed the cup to my cheek. “He’s in good hands. Gordon Brenner’s going with self-defense and maybe mental impairment from the blow to his head.”

  “Self defense, possibly. Renfrow more or less kidnapped him to Telford.”

  “Chaz didn’t figure on Nino’s rage. The sight of my name on the contract…” I shook my head. “Hard to believe Nino drove the Lexus home without attracting a statie. He hasn’t touched a car in years…which I suppose might work against mental impairment.”

  “That and the fact that nothing showed up on his hospital scans. Face it, Susan. Nino is going to do time no matter what his defense.”

  A breeze came up and whipped the long grass; a speck on the horizon became a trawler, a ghost boat gliding on steel water. The sight made me weepy. But I was sitting on a sand dune, the ocean at my feet. Here was no place to cry.

  Michael stroked my arm. “I’m sorry about Nino,” he said.

  I couldn’t speak to answer. My feelings for Nino were shifting like the clouds. I’d loved that old man, the gruff-but-kindly grandpa who’d never existed, really, except in my mind. So obsessed with betrayal, Nino had betrayed me.

  Women mourn…

  Michael wrapped an arm around me, and I held him close, closer maybe than I’d ever held Gil. The wind hummed in my ears. Michael’s warmth seeped down to my bones.

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