Now You See Her

The cruiser backed out of the driveway as Peter, his left arm stiff, walked to the door.

Peter?

Why was he here? Wasn’t he supposed to be in a frigging hospital bed!? Why the hell would they let him come home so soon? He’d been shot!

I backed away from the window, swallowing hard as his keys jingled at the door.

The lock clicked open as the knob turned.

Peter stopped like a kid playing freeze tag when he spotted me from the doorway.

I was frozen as well. Everything was strange, slightly off kilter. Even the light was wrong. It didn’t feel like sunset. It felt like the morning.

Peter closed the door behind him. Then his keys dropped from his hand as his blue eyes beaded with tears. He squatted and then collapsed onto the front hall tile.

“Those assholes at the hospital told me to stay, but no way,” he said, squinting up at the ceiling. “Soon as I woke up, I pulled that shit out of my arm and left. Fuck them and fuck those assholes who tried to kill me. I made it. I win. They lose. I’m home, Jeanine.”

I thought about everything then. All the strange things I’d seen. Everything Peter had been keeping from me. I knew that what Peter was up to probably wasn’t by the book, but I also knew that whatever it was, there had to be a good reason behind it.

Maybe he was in over his head, I thought suddenly. He did the finances. Maybe he’d made a bad investment and was trying to make up for it by doing something not exactly legal. Couldn’t his nocturnal activity be his way of trying to protect us?

After all, I, of all people, knew he wasn’t exactly a by-the-book sort of guy. Peter was a risk taker. He’d certainly taken a risk on me. If I didn’t like it, I shouldn’t have married him, right?

A pang of love and sympathy for him went through me then. I didn’t want him to go to work ever again. I wanted him to stay here in our house, where it was safe. To stay here in our sanctuary, where bad things were kept away and all mistakes were forgotten.

I walked over and sat down beside him. I held his hand as he buried his face in my hair and cried.

“I was so afraid, Peter,” I said. “I thought I lost you.”

Chapter 29

ELENA’S WAKE was the following evening at the Dean-Lopez Funeral Home on Simonton Street. Peter and I were instantly swamped by the block-long line of dress-uniformed law enforcement on the sidewalk.

Peter, too, was wearing his crisply ironed uniform, his hat pulled low over his eyes, his dress blue coat draped over his wounded shoulder like a cape. I walked beside him in my somber black dress, holding on to his good arm.

Hundreds of hands patted Peter softly on the back as we walked through the parted crowd.

“We’ll catch those bastards, man,” a bald state trooper with a twirly circus-strongman mustache said.

“Hang in there, buddy,” said a short black female cop in a Marathon PD uniform.

Down the other side of the block, a crowd of saddened black people were also filing into the funeral home. I spotted young black boys in starched white shirts and bow ties, young girls in what looked like Communion dresses. There was even a Creole band playing for the mourners from the flatbed of a parked pickup.

They were there for the store clerk who had been killed, a fifty-three-year-old Haitian immigrant by the name of Paul Phillip Baptiste, who was being waked tonight as well. It seemed like the entire island had turned out.

Peter nodded with solemn concern as the gathered mourners embraced him and gave him their condolences.

“I couldn’t get through this without you at my side, Mermaid,” Peter whispered to me as we finally entered the funeral home.

I gave his hand a squeeze. “Where else would I be, Peter?” I said as we waited in line to sign the viewing room book.

Yesterday had actually been wonderful. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d spent so much unbroken time together. We ate in, and when we weren’t in bed, we were watching the sunset. A couple of times it seemed as if he wanted to tell me what was going on, but then he changed his mind and the subject. I didn’t press him. I don’t think I wanted to know. I just wanted us to be together. The world be damned.

Besides, I knew he would tell me everything eventually. We were best friends.

There was one odd moment this morning. As I returned to the kitchen after drinking my morning coffee in the yard, Peter was standing with his back to me, speaking softly on the phone. I stopped, frozen in the doorway, when he suddenly raised his voice.

“Fuck your plans, Morley,” Peter barked in a tone that managed to be fierce and cold at the same time. I’d heard Peter speak that way only once before. The night he’d arrested me.

“You just be there,” I heard him say very distinctly as I went back outside. “I won’t tell you twice.”

It seemed odd that Peter would speak that way to his boss. I remembered Morley watching the house. It was hard to understand.

When it was our turn to pray, Peter and I walked together over to Elena’s closed, flower-covered casket and knelt down. There was a hush in the room behind us as people realized what was going on. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Peter remove his hat. After a moment, his face crumpled as if buckling under an unbearable interior torment, and I took his hat from him.

Peter and I became separated as he stayed and spoke with Michael Cardenas, Elena’s husband.

I shook hands with the priest beside him and some more people I didn’t know.

“Jeanine, there you are,” Gary, the chef from work, said as he scooped me up in a painful hug. “Can you believe any of this?”

“No, Gary. It’s just horrible,” I said looking around. “I don’t see Teo. Is he taking this very hard?”

“He’s gone,” Gary said, shaking his head. “It’s the craziest thing. Teo called me the night after the shooting. He said that he got a hotel job in the Dominican Republic and that he was leaving immediately. Elena’s death must have been too much for him to take. You had to hear him on the phone. I felt so bad for the guy. I went by his apartment with his check the next day, but the landlord said he was already gone. Left his clothes and everything.”

Peter’s hat dropped from my hand as I remembered the last time I’d seen Teo. It was the night I had tailed Peter. Teo had been behind the wheel of the Mazda with Elena.

Elena was dead, and now Teo was just gone?

As Gary greeted someone else, I turned toward the front of the room by the casket. Morley had arrived, and Peter was standing with him. They were speaking quietly but intensely.

“Mrs. Fournier?” someone said.

I turned around. For a moment, I panicked. Standing very close beside me was a handsome man with long, dirty blond hair and a Jesus beard. It was the Bjorn Borg look-alike who’d scared me outside the Hemingway Home when I was catering. That now seemed like a thousand years ago.

“Do I know you?” I said, taking a quick step back.

“No,” the man said in a voice deeper than I expected. “But I know you. Sort of.”

What the hell was this? I thought. “Are you a cop?” I said doubtfully.

“I’m actually an FBI agent,” he said, discreetly tucking a business card into my hand.

After a shocked moment, I looked at it. It had a raised FBI logo. “Special Agent Theodore Murphy,” it said, with a phone number.

“Why are you giving this to me?” I asked.

Continuing to scan the room, he shrugged his shoulders. “Nice to have help when you’re in a tight spot,” he said. He nodded at the card with his blond chin. “Hide it now before someone sees.”

“What?” I said. “Before who sees?”