He’d visited Adam in the hospital, full of good cheer. Would Adam mind recovering quietly in Florida, he’d wondered, away from the prying eyes of the press? Would he mind doing it under an assumed name, just for a while, mind you?
Naturally, Adam had said yes. Family loyalty and all that.
“Jared? You okay?”
“Sorry.”
“You were like a million miles away.”
“I was just reminiscing about some old friends.”
“Anybody you want to talk about?”
“No. They’re long gone.”
She reached over and gently touched his good hand. “Maybe not forever.”
“Maybe not,” he said, but of course he knew better.
19
Dirty Laundry
“I have to admit I was surprised when you called me, Summer.” Caroline settled demurely on Austin’s couch. “You said you had a proposition?”
“It’s about Diver.” Summer sat on the chair she’d carefully situated right next to the couch. She glanced—subtly, she hoped—at the laundry basket by her feet. Tucked inside one of Austin’s shirts was the tape recorder Diana had lent her.
Before Caroline’s arrival, Summer had tested it out several times, talking at a normal tone of voice from various locations in the room. It had only picked up her voice when she was within a few feet, and even then the words had been muffled and hard to follow.
“So, have you found Diver?” Caroline asked hopefully.
Summer smiled. “Well, that sort of depends.”
“Depends?”
“Diver told me all about you, Caroline. How you know about his…history. And how you want a piece of the insurance money in exchange for clearing his name.”
Caroline stood up. “I don’t think you have any idea what you’re talking about,” she said sharply, crossing her arms over her chest.
“No, no, wait,” Summer said, hearing her voice rising. She cleared her throat. “Just listen for a second.” She went to the window and made a point of shutting it, then returned to her seat. “I do know where Diver is, Caroline. And I’m willing to tell you, for a price.”
Caroline narrowed her eyes. “What kind of price?”
“I want a piece of that money too.”
Caroline stared at her in disbelief for what seemed like several hours. “Well, you certainly don’t mince words, do you?” she finally said, allowing a faint smile. “And here I had you pegged as such a sweet little thing, Summer. I had no idea.” Caroline clucked her tongue. “Your own brother. My, my.”
Summer swallowed hard. She shrugged, trying her best to look casual. “There’s no love lost between Diver and me. Besides, there’s plenty of money to go around. The insurance money from his mom’s death, plus there’s got to be a big bundle coming from the fire. Split two ways or three, there’s still plenty.”
Caroline watched her suspiciously for another moment. Then she leaned forward. “So where is he?”
Summer cast another nervous glance at the laundry basket. “What?”
“Where is he?” Caroline said, louder this time.
“Not so fast,” Summer said. “We need to talk percentages here. It seems to me, since I’m the one who’s making this work, I should take half. You and Diver can split up the rest however you want—”
“Please! No way are you getting half the money!”
Caroline walked toward the kitchen, away from the laundry basket. She got a drink of water, then paused in the doorway.
Summer felt her heart banging around in her chest. It was too far. She hadn’t tested the kitchen area, but she was certain the tape recorder wouldn’t pick up anything from that distance.
“If we’re going to discuss this, Caroline, let’s do it in the living room,” Summer said in a slightly choked voice. “Someone might hear. The kitchen window’s open—”
“No, it isn’t,” Caroline said dismissively. She arched an eyebrow and locked onto Summer’s gaze. “Look, Summer, if you think you can muscle your way in at this late date, you’ve got another thing coming. This only works if I can convince the authorities that Diver’s innocent.”
Summer grabbed the laundry basket and slid down to the far end of the couch, closer to Caroline. She pulled out a wrinkled T-shirt and carefully began to fold it.
“How domestic,” Caroline observed with a sneer. “I guess you and Austin are still an item after all, huh?”
“What? Oh, this. I told Austin I’d do his laundry in return for borrowing his place.”
“Does he know about Diver?”
“Nobody knows. Not even Marquez.”
“Good. You need to keep it that way.” Caroline sipped at her water, considering. “Look, here’s my best offer. I’ll take sixty percent. You and Diver split the rest.”
Summer pulled out another T-shirt, folding it on her lap. She didn’t want to overplay her hand, and she knew she wasn’t exactly Meryl Streep. When her senior class had performed Hello, Dolly! Summer had been cast as Crowd Member Number Seven.
“Diver owes me, Caroline,” she said. “I just talked to my mom today. She and my dad got their final divorce papers. If it hadn’t been for Diver, well…they might still be together. You understand what I’m saying? I’m owed.”
Caroline pursed her lips. “Okay. We’ll do it this way. Fifty to me. Forty to you. Ten to Diver. It’s not like he has a lot of leverage, right?”
“Excellent point.” Summer’s voice sounded a little too eager. She cleared her throat again. “Okay, then. I can live with that.”
Caroline joined Summer on the couch. The laundry basket sat between them. The little red light on the tape recorder glowed from under a shirt sleeve. Quickly Summer rearranged the clothes.
It suddenly occurred to her that it wasn’t like she’d heard anything worth taping yet, anyway. Was this a total waste of time?
She wondered, in a searing flash of doubt, if she’d been wrong about Diver all along.
She reached for another piece of clothing. “You know, I do feel kind of funny about this,” she said. “I mean, profiting off a man’s horrible death.”
Caroline tapped her fingers impatiently. “Somebody’s got to take the money,” she said. “It’s just sitting there in some bank, getting dusty.”
Summer sighed. “But I mean, Diver killed someone, Caroline. Don’t you think he should pay for what he did?”
Caroline blinked in disbelief. “You don’t actually think…oh, man, you are brutal! Summer, you poor demented fool, Diver didn’t kill his daddy.”
“He…didn’t?”
“Please! Diver? Sweet little Diver, with those beautiful baby blues of his? That boy couldn’t kill a mosquito.” She grinned. “It’s funny, though. When I told him I’d go to the cops and tell them how I saw him trying to save his daddy, I sort of got the feeling Diver thought it was a made-up story. He was listening to me like a kid who wanted to believe in Santa Claus, you know?”
“I don’t think he remembers very much about the fire.”
“Well, I guess not!” Caroline said. “Truth is, I saw that boy run back into the fire three, four times easy, trying to save his no-good daddy, lord knows why.”
“But why didn’t you say anything at the time?”
“I was just a kid, Summer. Like anyone would have listened to me?” Caroline shrugged. “I suppose the truth of it is, I’d always had this mad crush on Diver, and he’d pretty much always treated me like the dorky little girl next door. I didn’t exactly feel like I owed him any favors, you know?”
“But they accused him of murder.”
Caroline shifted uncomfortably. “Well, it wasn’t like he stuck around. It didn’t matter what I saw, one way or the other.”
“How do you think the fire started, then?”
“They said something about finding flammable liquid at the scene, and Diver’s daddy—I guess I really shouldn’t call him that since, let’s face it, he wasn’t—he was always refinishing stuff out on th
e porch. Painting, that sort of thing.” Caroline hesitated. “Our yard was right next to Diver’s, and we’d had a big barbeque that night. After the fire happened, I heard my daddy talking to someone about how he hadn’t put the coals out properly. It was windy that night. I suppose one thing led to another and…well, I guess it doesn’t really matter now, does it? The point is, everybody just assumed Diver did it. He had plenty of motive, after all. His daddy beat the hell out of him practically every day. And after the fire Diver vanished. It made sense for everyone to blame him.”
“I suppose it did, at that.”
“So.” Caroline glanced at Summer out of the corner of her eye. “Where are you going to spend all that nice green stuff?” She reached for a T-shirt from the laundry basket. “I guess the least I could do is help you fold—”
“Don’t!” Summer cried, yanking the shirt away. “I mean, you know. There’s underwear in there. Austin would kill me.”
“You know, I have seen male unmentionables before.” Caroline shook her head, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were actually blushing, Summer! So, what are you going to do with your piece of the money? I’m thinking about buying a car.”
Summer reached down and clicked off the tape recorder. “I’m sure I’ll think of something.”
20
A Visit to Flipper
“I really appreciate this,” Diana said for what had to be the gazillionth time.
Marquez jerked her car into the left lane. “I believe you’ve already mentioned that.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with my Jetta. It was fine this morning. But the transmission was making this weird noise. Sort of like when the vacuum cleaner sucked up your sock the other day. Anyway, it’s really nice of you—”
“Shut up already, Diana.”
“I mean, I’ve never missed a day at the Institute. The kids get so they expect you to be there—”
“Look,” Marquez interrupted. “I am not doing this to bond with you. I am only driving you there so I can have the apartment to myself. I can spend a few minutes with you in the car or be stuck with you all day. Guess which one I chose?”
Diana rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay. At least let me pay you for the gas.”
“Just tell me this. What part of ‘shut up’ don’t you understand?”
Finally Diana seemed to get the message. They drove in silence for a while. After a few miles Marquez flipped on her blinker and turned down a long unpaved road bordered by sea grass and scrub pines.
Weird. The silence was almost worse than Diana’s babbling.
“To tell you the truth,” Marquez said, “I thought maybe you’d moved out when I got up this morning and saw you were gone.”
“I just went driving around. I couldn’t sleep.” Diana held her wind-whipped hair back with one hand. “Maybe I should, though. Move out. If that’s what you want.”
“If you move out, I can’t afford the apartment by myself. So no, I don’t want you to leave. Purely for economic reasons.”
“I’m touched.”
Marquez braked for a huge blue heron, slowly crossing the sandy road like a dignified old man.
“So, what are your plans today?” Diana asked.
“Why do you care?”
“No reason. I just figured you’d probably given up on the Diver search. I mean, at this point you just kind of have to wait and see if he calls or turns up, right?”
“Yeah. So?”
“And you don’t have to work till tonight, right?”
Marquez parked the car in front of the long, cedar-shingled Institute building. “What exactly is your point?” she demanded.
Diana reached for her purse. “Well, it occurred to me that I’m only going to be here an hour or two, and by the time you drive all the way home and then turn around and come back…maybe it would just be easier to stick around. There’s a lobby with some magazines, or you could hang out here in the car. Or you could, you know, watch the dolphins and the kids. It’s pretty interesting, actually.”
Marquez checked her watch and did the math. Diana was right, of course. “How did I get roped into this?” she muttered. “You’re rich—you could have just run out and bought a new Jetta.”
“So”—Diana swung open the car door—“want to come?”
“I’ll wait in the car.”
“But it’s so hot. At least come inside. It’s air-conditioned, more or less. And out by the dolphin tank there’s a covered area with bleachers where the parents sit. That’s pretty shady.”
“I’ll wait in the car,” Marquez repeated, shooting Diana her laser-guided get lost look.
“Okay, okay. But if you change your mind—”
“I won’t.”
Diana looked as if Marquez had somehow disappointed her. “Well, okay. I’ll try not to take too long.”
Diana headed into the Institute. Marquez sighed. If Diana wanted somebody to watch her play the saint, she’d have to find another audience. Marquez wasn’t buying.
She moved the car to the far end of the parking lot, where she could at least get a view of the beach. The big tank behind the Institute was partially visible, very large and crystal blue. A few adults in bathing suits roamed around. Diana was there, talking to another woman in a red tank suit. A handful of kids hovered near one end, towels draped around their shoulders.
Marquez cranked on the radio, flashed past some nice reggae-sounding tune, and locked it in. She lay back against the headrest and closed her eyes, but that was dangerous these days. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw Diver. Not some blurry, half-formed picture, but Diver, complete and in spectacular Technicolor 3-D, fully animated. Maybe it was because she was an artist. He was almost as real to her in her imagination as he would have been if he’d been sitting here, right beside her.
The familiar, awful ache came back, a sharp heaviness deep in her chest. Why the hell had she said yes to Diana? She wanted to be home in the cool darkness of her bedroom, hiding under the sheets.
Waiting for the phone to ring.
Marquez turned off the car and wandered around the beach outside the Institute. She could hear the musical laughter of the kids, the soft, reassuring voices of the adults. Every now and then a huge splash interrupted the steady ebb and flow of the voices. The dolphins showing off, Marquez figured.
She wasn’t sure what it was Diana did in there, exactly. She knew the kids came from troubled backgrounds or had emotional or physical problems. They played with the dolphins and that was supposed to help them, although Marquez couldn’t quite see what a big slimy overgrown fish, even if it did look like Flipper, could accomplish.
She sat on the front steps of the Institute building for fifteen minutes or so until she realized she had to find a water fountain or she’d die of thirst.
The lobby of the building was small and unpretentious. A wide window allowed a view of the dolphin tank. Marquez located a drinking fountain, then wandered over to the window. Diana was in the pool at one end, holding a little girl in her arms while a dolphin swam circles around them.
Marquez took a seat by the window. At least there were some well-worn magazines to look at. Of course, they were all granola magazines, things like Wildlife Conservation and National Geographic. On the plus side, the only models in these magazines had four legs and way too much body hair.
The front door opened and a pretty girl about Marquez’s age entered. She smiled at Marquez, took off her sunglasses, and went straight to the window. “She’s having so much fun,” she murmured. She glanced back at Marquez. “My sister. Stacy.”
Marquez gave a vague nod to show she was not particularly interested.
“You waiting for someone?” the girl asked.
“Yeah. Not one of the kids. One of the…counselors.” Somehow using that word to describe Diana was like calling a vicious Doberman “Benji.”
“They’re great,” the girl said as she sat across from Marquez. She had large green eyes set in a heart-shaped fac
e.
She was a little chubby, Marquez noted, but pretty nonetheless.
“That’s Stacy with that dark-haired counselor. Diana, I think her name is.”
Marquez watched as Diana lifted the girl she’d been swimming with out of the pool. The tiny girl was stooped over, emaciated. Her bathing suit hung slackly off a body that might have been made of twigs.
“What’s wrong with her?” Marquez blurted. She cringed at her own bluntness. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. She just looks so, you know, frail.”
“She’s anorexic,” the girl said matter-of-factly. “You think this is bad, you should have seen her a couple of months ago. She’s put on seventeen pounds since then. Coming here’s helped a lot, I think. And she’s seeing a therapist. She was in the hospital for nine weeks. We thought she was going to…” Her voice trailed off.
“But she’s so young.”
“Fifteen.”
Marquez went to the window. That delicate, breakable, line drawing of a human being was only three years younger than she was?
“I hate to drag her away, but she’s got a doctor’s appointment,” the girl said. “She loves coming here so much. It’s funny”—she started for the door that led to the pool area—“we had to practically drag her here the first few times. She was so afraid.”
Marquez watched through the window as the girl walked out to the pool, greeted Stacy, and helped her towel off. Diana helped Stacy put on a sweatsuit. It seemed ridiculous in the ninety-degree heat, but of course, Stacy was probably cold.
Marquez was cold a lot too.
It wasn’t the same thing. She wasn’t like that. She wasn’t ever going to be like that.
Stacy, her sister, and Diana entered the lobby. Diana didn’t seem entirely surprised to see Marquez. “Stace, this is my, um, my friend Marquez,” Diana said.
Stacy smiled shyly. Her lips had a bluish cast. Her blond hair hung in wet ropes.
“Hi,” Marquez said. “Looked like you were having a good time out there.”