16

Caleb

James R. Blakney & Associates, PC was the only firm I’d consider with something like this—since it was me with the request and James doing the investigating—because I didn’t trust anybody else when it came to my private business more than I trusted my best friend.

We met at boarding school when we were ten. Both of us dumped at a private institution where rich mothers and fathers sent their sons when only the most exclusive prep school would do. I remember standing in line for the phone we all had to share, so I could call my parents and beg them to let me come home.

When it was my turn, I made the call and got my mother on the line. I wanted to talk to my dad but she told me he couldn’t come to the phone right then. I let her know how much I hated living at school, and how badly I missed my brothers and my baby sisters. I begged and pleaded to be allowed to go to a day school and live at home, but she just told me to stop crying and that I was embarrassing her. I often wondered if I’d been able to catch my dad on the phone that day, if things might have turned out differently. Dad was reasonable. Mom was not. She let me know in no uncertain terms that I was staying put, and wouldn’t be coming back home until Isaac showed up at the end of November to bring me there for Thanksgiving. Then she told me it was for my own good and hung up on me.

Some of the other boys witnessed me crying and taunted me. They called me a baby and pushed me around before I ran off and hid behind one of the school buildings and cried some more. When I lifted my head up later, I discovered I wasn’t alone. The boy who was right below me alphabetically in the class was sitting a few feet away. James Blakney. I asked him why he was there. He told me he’d called his parents the day before for the very same reason as me. James had gotten his father on the line. The same cold, hard message was delivered to him, only it came from his dad instead of his mom. We bonded that day and found out that boarding school didn’t suck so badly when you had a friend to share it with.

That was twenty-one years ago, and boarding school had been exchanged for Harvard eight years later. Then it was grad school—Harvard Law for James and Harvard Business for me. Now our companies took the place that school had filled when we were kids. Not much was different between us today than it’d been back then, I thought as I walked through the doors of his law firm.

“He’s free now if you want to go on in, Caleb.” His legal secretary had known me since I was a kid, from back when she’d worked for Judge Blakney, James’s father.

“Thank you, Mrs. Kennedy.” I gave her a wink.

“Aren’t you ever going to call me Marguerite?” she teased back.

“No, ma’am. It wouldn’t be courteous for me to address you as anything other than ‘Mrs. Kennedy’ on account of my oath. A scout is always courteous.”

“Still with the Boy Scout thing, Caleb, after all these years?” This was our little game.

“That’s right, Mrs. Kennedy. I try to always remember to conduct myself like the Eagle Scout I am.”

James looked at me weirdly when I entered his office and sat in the buttery-soft leather chair reserved for clients. Right now I was a client.

“What has this girl done to you, my friend?” he said, after a minute of staring.

“How much time do you have?” I answered.

“That good, huh?” He didn’t look convinced.

I removed a piece of lint from my pant leg before replying. “The word good is insufficient and lacking in details to help you understand what she has done to me.”

He gave me another thoroughly weird look before opening the file on his desk. It contained the information he’d found since I’d called him from the car, after I’d dropped Brooke at Harris & Goode this morning.

“Three hours isn’t enough time to get a whole lot, but I’ve got some baseline stuff for you and it’s a start. Brooke Ellen Casterley, twenty-three years old. Birthday, seventeenth May, when she will turn twenty-four. Born at King George Hospital, Essex, England to Susanna Casterley and Michael Harvey. Here’s her birth certificate.”

James slid it to me across the desk. “And the husband?”

“He was a bit more of a challenge, but I found his name on the public marriage record filed when he married Brooke. Marcus Kyle Patten, age twenty-nine at the time of the marriage, thirty years old at the time of his death. Born in Salem, Mass., died in Chatsworth, an affluent LA suburb, just seven months into the marriage. Here’s his birth certificate.”

He slid that one over as well. “How did she meet this guy do you think?”

“I think I can make a good guess there. They met at Suffolk University where she was an undergrad, and he was probably just finishing up law school. Patten passed the Massachusetts state bar exam two years ago in February. He married Brooke a little over a month later in April.”

“But they lived in California and Marcus died there. Why take the Massachusetts bar exam and not California’s?”

“I’m still working on that, but Brooke probably knows what she’s talking about if she said the family operated in criminal activity. I’m thinking they needed an inside man versed in the law. Like the mob always sends their brightest bulb in the box to law school. Best way to keep all that money out of the hands of the IRS.”

“The family is organized crime?” I asked.

“Looking that way. They own storage unit rentals. Hundreds of them all over the state. Could be a nice cover for smuggling: drugs, guns, anything that’s controlled, plus a legit business helps to hide the money laundering activities they need to do. Oh, and this Marcus Patten had some anger management issues while in law school, and sounds like maybe a drinking problem, too. An aggravated assault charge was filed for a bar fight that turned vicious, before it was then quietly dropped. The family probably paid off the victim—that and maybe he was fearful of losing the other eye. Marcus ripped into the guy’s face with a broken beer bottle and left him blind on the left side. He reads like one crazy motherfucker.”

“Jesus, this guy and his family sound like Sleeping with the Enemy meets Sons of Anarchy.”

“I know. It’s a miracle your girl made it out in one piece.”

She nearly didn’t.“While we’re on the topic of crazy people, how is Janice?”

“I wouldn’t know, and I’d like to keep it that way, thank you very much. Besides I told you a few days later at lunch that I didn’t fuck her, I just let her into my apartment. Which was the worst, most terrible idea ever. Why didn’t you come down there and save me from her, bro?”

“Hey, I warned you to the best of my ability. I even let you know about the picture she sent me.”

His face fell at my mention of the picture. “That picture of her sucking cock? It wasn’t a picture of my cock. I don’t know what she sent you, but it wasn’t a picture of her and me. I did not let her anywhere near my dick even though she offered. Several times.” He grimaced. “I really wish you hadn’t deleted it so I could take a look.”

When we’d met for lunch a few weeks ago James had been adamant about no sex with Janice that night. I’d deleted the picture mere minutes after Janice sent it, so there was no way to verify whatever twisted plotting she was up to. “I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t think it through in the heat of the moment. I just wanted to cut ties with her, and then warn you before I got rid of the evidence. Maybe it wasn’t you in the picture. Maybe I just assumed it was because I knew she was with you when she sent it to me. I didn’t analyze the fucking thing.”

“You know what they say about assuming things, Caleb?”

“Yeah. I made an ass out of you and me. Sorry about that. My heart was in the right place though—I thought of your dad and didn’t want it to blow up on you . . .” I let that ominous cloud of paternal doom descend for a moment before deflecting. “How wasted were you?”

His eyes narrowed at the mention of his father. The judge. James’s relationship with his dad was about as warm and cozy as mine was with my mother. “On my fucking ass, apparently, because I don’t remember much about the preliminary activities that led to her showing up at my place,” he said bitterly.

“I broke up with her after we came back from the American Cancer Society benefit and she went ballistic. By the time she left the penthouse, she’d given me the black eye and trashed my bathroom like something out of fucking Fatal Attraction.”

James dropped his head and shook it back and forth. “She told me about that, I remember now. She went to town on the bathroom, thinking of things to do to mess with your head. Like toothpaste on the walls, and towels in the toilet, and destroying a whole box of condoms. Which sucks, because the good ones are expensive.”

Destroyed condoms?“Janice didn’t mess with the condoms. I checked the cupboard where I keep them and the box hadn’t been touched.”

“Well, that’s good then . . .” He trailed off and tilted his head as if he was trying to remember. James had a really good memory, too, even while under the influence, so I tended to believe him when he said something important. And this was fucking important.

“James, what did Janice say?”

“She said she hated you, and that you would be sorry you ever fucked her over. Then she told me about trashing your bathroom and all the shit she did in there, and how much fun she had doing it. She said she wished she could see your face when you found out what she did to ruin your life.”

“She said that? Janice said she was ruining my life?” Something wasn’t right here with this story. “James, bro, you have to remember for me. A minute ago—why did you say she destroyed a box of condoms?”

James rubbed his head with the tips of his fingers. “Because—she said she did, Caleb. She told me about using a pin or a brooch from her dress and how she poked holes in them—”

Oh, my God. That is exactly the kind of psycho shit Janice would do, too. The bitch put them back in the box all neat and tidy so I wouldn’t suspect.

I jumped up from the chair in his office and grabbed the copies. “Bro, I’m glad I stopped in here today, but I gotta go. Thanks for the intel on Patten so far. Keep digging.” I nodded to the file on his desk and left him sitting there still rubbing his head looking disturbed.

As I waved good-bye to Mrs. Kennedy, I remembered the wisdom in keeping up to date with one’s friends.

You never know what important news they might have to share with you.

Jesus. Christ.

I had Isaac drive me straight from my meeting with James back to the penthouse. Ann had already cleaned the bedroom, and the trash was long gone down into the bowels of the building’s incinerator most likely, so I couldn’t check the condoms I’d used last night. I went for the box and emptied it out onto the counter. The packages were black so it wasn’t easily noticeable, but when held to the light, there were holes dead center in about three-quarters of them. Not every condom had been pierced, but a lot of them had.

I started opening condoms and filling them with water from the sink. Drip, drip, drip, right through the tips of the ones that had been poked. Janice, you fiendish cunt.

Well, fuck.

This was not good news.

I should probably tell Brooke, and I was fucking livid at my freak of an ex-girlfriend.

The more I thought about it, though, the more certain I was about not telling Brooke. It was a sordid tale of the twisted person I’d been with right before I met her, as well as the sleazy life I’d been living. I knew Brooke would be repulsed by all of it. But most of all, I was ashamed for Brooke to see me in such a horrible light. She always thanked me for being a gentleman, and I loved that she thought well of me. I was afraid to lose that earned respect in her eyes.

I rationalized the facts. I’d used five of the condoms from this box—four last night and one this morning. If I went with the seventy percent rule, three point five of them were damaged when I used them. But my selection had been totally random when they were spilled around the bathroom and later returned to the box, so it could have been more like two damaged condoms out of the five. Without the actual ones to inspect, I couldn’t be sure. What were the odds Brooke was even in the fertile time of her cycle? She might already be on birth control for all I knew. We hadn’t discussed it yet.

So, if there was some leakage, it still wasn’t like I’d come inside her bare. A few drops max. I hadn’t noticed any leaks when I removed them, but then I didn’t pay too close attention, either, because sex is always messy, and you just want to get the damn thing off your cock as quickly as possible.

I hate this.

But I loved Brooke.

And I wanted her to love me back.

Telling her about Janice, and what she’d done, would poison the beauty of last night. I couldn’t allow that to happen. Thank fuck the locks had been switched out. I didn’t need Janice showing up and confronting Brooke, and something told me she might try it when she returned from Hong Kong. This proved just how unstable Janice was, and I needed to figure out how best to deal with her. Because I wasn’t just going to let this one go. She’d crossed way over the line with this shit.

I made a decision. I gathered up all of the mess and trashed the whole lot of it.

I went into my home office and logged on to Target.com. I ordered new condoms and selected the option to pick up in the store. I forwarded the confirmation to Victoria and told her to pick them up and bring them to the penthouse. I didn’t obsess over the awkwardness of my request, either. She was my personal assistant, and I paid her very well to do a job. If I needed her to pick up condoms, then her job that day was to pick up condoms—what I was fucking paying her to do.

Jesus, I was tense. I needed Brooke to de-stress me with her own particular brand of magic. X-rated images danced through my mind at the thought of exactly how she could accomplish it, too.

Aaaaaand that just led to wondering about what was happening tonight. We hadn’t discussed it, and I imagined she would want to go home to her own house. A fucking depressing thought. I didn’t want her on the Blackstone Island Ferry anymore. The weather was unpredictable and could sink a boat in minutes under bad conditions. The risk to her safety made me mental.

We needed to have a serious talk about a long list of things, but mostly I just wanted to be with her again tonight. I wanted to be with Brooke—pretty simple.

Now that I’d found her I couldn’t be without her.

Pussy. Pussy! PUSSY!

“And what is your point?” I said to my inner demons.

“I have a problem.” There’s something to be said for unburdening your true feelings to someone you care about, because the minute the words were out of my mouth, I felt instantly better. I knew Brooke’s beautiful voice would soothe me even if the building were in flames and crumbling down around me.

“Oh? Tell me about it.”

“Well, I met this beautiful girl, and she has completely captivated me in just a short time of knowing her. Last night . . . aaah, we shared the most amazing night together, and now I can’t stop thinking about her, or wondering when I can see her again.”

She laughed softly into the phone, and I pictured her lips as she did it. “You say this is a problem, but if you like her and she likes you, then why do you call it a problem?”

“Well, that is a very good question. Have I told you yet, how smart you are? If I haven’t, then I’ve been remiss, because I think you are very, very smart.”

“So do you have a problem or not?”

“Oh yes, I have an additional problem.”

“Will you share it with me, Caleb?” she asked with a hint of teasing.

“All right then. You won’t laugh at me?”

“Ahhh, I might possibly laugh, but not at you—only with you—because you are funny.”

“Back to my problem, Brooke.”

“Right, the elusive problem you can’t seem to spit out for the life of you.”

It was my turn to laugh. She could string the simplest of words together in a statement, but coming out of her mouth, it transformed into pure poetic prose. “I’m going out of the country on a business trip the day after tomorrow on a red-eye. And I want another night with her before I have to leave for a week, because I know I will miss her every day that I’m away.”

Silence. And then the soft sob I’d heard this morning when her emotions blasted her. Shit. I made her cry, again?!

“Brooke . . . baby . . . it’s okay.” I waited and tried to remember what she’d told me this morning, about how this—whatever the fuck they were: sudden emotional episodes—never happened to her before the accident.

“I’m fine,” she breathed back at me after what felt like an eon of time. “You just surprised me with another wonderful moment, Caleb. You should maybe slow that down a bit.”

I laughed again, and I felt so fucking relieved to know that if I was making her cry, at least it was the wonderful-moment kind and not the other. “I will try, but it’s probably impossible to limit my wonderful moments with you, Brooke.” Straight-up truth.

“I think I have a solution to your problem, Caleb. Would you like to hear it?”

“Yes, I’d love to hear it.” It sounded like she might take pity on me and stay over again. I mentally crossed my fingers.

“Well, I am going home tonight. I need to be in my normal environment and go about my usual routines. I visit Nan at physical therapy, and there is the wedding coming up, too, which I work on planning at night, and also getting her things packed up to move into Herman’s house in a very short time. She’s being released from the hospital this Thursday, and I’ll be taking the rest of this week off work so I can be home to prepare, and to help her get settled.”

“You are very busy,” I said, trying not to let her hear my disappointment at knowing she wouldn’t be sleeping in my bed tonight. She wouldn’t even be back to Boston at all before I left on my trip.

“Yes but busy doing things I love. It sounds as if you’ll be booked up as well, considering you have an international trip in a few days. Where are you going?”

“Abu Dhabi. It’s the World Sustainability Summit. I go every year.” I suddenly hated the idea of going this year.

“Well, I don’t know what commitments you have at work before you leave for Abu Dhabi on Wednesday night, but if you are free to take some time off, you could come and stay with me at the cottage . . . and experience south-end island life for a few days.” She paused in the silence. “If the idea is to your liking, of course.” God, I fucking love you.

“Yes, the idea is to my liking. Yes, I’m free to take the time.” No wasted words there. My heart was about to explode out of my chest, but I was answering her in coherent sentences at least.

“Will you come on the five-thirty ferry with me, or are you getting there on your own at a later time?” she asked softly.

“Oh . . . most definitely on the five-thirty ferry with you, beautiful,” I answered.