As Kay said, they were young and in love. They didn’t have much money. They were about to have their first and only child. But the place was too old. The story was too old. Whatever had breathed life into the love story between her mother and father was gone.
She must have dozed off, because the bathwater was stone cold. Jolie hitched herself up a little; she’d slipped down so her chin was almost in the water. The candle had burned low.
She looked across the tub at her knees, rising up like islands. That was when it hit. A hurtling torrent of stark, raving fear. Her heart wanted to burst. Heat suffused her face. The fight-or-flight mechanism kicked in. She couldn’t stand to be in the tub another minute. She grabbed the sides and hoisted herself up. Her shin bumped and scraped the side as she scrambled out of the tub. Slipping, almost going down.
She grabbed the towel from the rack. Made it out the doorway. Shaking so hard she could barely work her legs. Her brain buzzed and stuttered. She couldn’t think.
The chasm opened. She felt the pull. Step in and disappear for good.
She made it to the kitchen. Shivered in the sun streaming through the window.
Twenty minutes later, she went back in the bathroom. The sight of the full tub threw her heart into overdrive. She punched the drain fixture and retreated to the kitchen.
Something was very wrong with her. Mental-illness wrong. First the pond, scaring her for no reason. And now the tub. Jolie knew she would not fill that tub again. Forget the lighted candles, the bath salts. She hoped she wouldn’t react to taking showers, because then she’d really be in trouble.
After spending an hour Googling panic attacks and water phobias, she came to a conclusion. Panic attacks, it appeared, were tricks. Something unknown triggered the fight-or-flight reaction, and the body reacted, fooling a person into thinking he was in mortal danger. So the next time it happened, she would tell herself, calmly, that she wasn’t in danger.
Mind over matter.
Right now she had two choices. She could sit here frozen in fear. Or she could work the case.
The case seemed to be wrapping up in a satisfactory way. Maddy’s confession had sealed it.
But there were still things about the case that didn’t add up. Amy Perdue, for instance. Amy was Maddy’s employee—she worked at one of the apartment buildings Maddy owned. And Jolie was about eighty percent certain that Amy knew of Maddy’s cover-up of her husband’s suicide. That could be the reason for Amy’s fearful behavior in Bizzy’s parking lot, and the reason she’d driven to Maddy’s house at seven in the morning on the day Maddy’s husband died.
But Amy Perdue was also Luke Perdue’s sister.
Luke died in room nine. Chief Jim Akers died in room nine.
For the first time, she wondered if she’d got it right. The coincidences piled up, yes, but all of them led to the same place. They led to a case solved. They led to a solid confession.
But why did she feel as if she were missing something?
Jolie went over the facts of the case in her mind. They seemed solid. But…
She needed to make sure.
It was time to talk to Amy.
14
First thing you saw when you reached the outskirts of Gardenia was the pulp mill, which looked like a giant scorched shuttlecock. Beyond the pulp mill was a labyrinth of gray buildings and industrial pipes. Sometime in the late nineteenth century, the sign “Iolanthe Paper Company” had been affixed to a trestle above the main building. The sign, lit by two dim lamps from above, featured a beauty with long flowing hair and tiny wings—Iolanthe, Queen of the Fairies.
Iolanthe was Big Paper in the Land of Big Paper. Jolie’s family, the Haddoxes, sold out in the early seventies, laying the groundwork for two Haddox senators and a plum cabinet job, culminating in regular visits by the vice president.
Hard to be unmoved by such grandeur, but Jolie managed to keep a sense of perspective.
The Royal Court Apartments weren’t royal at all, but just a regular stucco rectangle two stories high. Cramped little balconies fronted sliding glass doors.
Jolie didn’t turn in the first time, but drove around the block and came back up the side street. On that first pass, she spotted a car parked alongside the outer wall of the apartments next to the office. A 1960s-era convertible. Cherry red, cherry condition. The writing on the trunk said
The sky was baleful red, the last light of day. As Jolie drove in from the right side of the parking lot, a wind blew in all the way from the Gulf, hot and pregnant with rain and dust, foul-smelling from the paper mill. An ill wind, rattling the tall palms out front like sabers. It buffeted the car as she slowed. The door to the office was wide open, and the wind caught angry voices and kited them into the ether.
A dark shape materialized in the doorway. As Jolie watched, it bent into a lurching run toward the U-Haul—a tall man, awkward running style, one arm folded across the other.
Hurt.
Young.
He could have been hit, knifed, or shot. She would assume whoever was inside had a gun, or a knife, or both.
Jolie stopped the car on a diagonal partway between the office and the U-Haul. Got out, crab-walked her way around the open door, and crouched behind the engine block. From there she could see both the office doorway and the U-Haul.
Glad she’d thought to wear her vest.
Another gust of wind and the office door blew shut. The angry diatribe continued.
She concentrated on the wounded man, now hunkered down by the front right tire of the box truck.
She identified herself and shouted, “You by the U-Haul truck. Sit down. Sit down now.”
The man complied, trying to keep his hands out toward Jolie despite the injured arm.
“Cross your legs. Do it now.”
He did.
“Put your good hand on top of your head. Do it now.”
He did it—painfully.
“Do not move.” She keyed the mic and got the Palm County dispatcher—Lonnie—and blurted out the code for officer needing assistance. She told Lonnie the subject inside had a weapon and asked for paramedics. Keeping her SIG trained on the man sitting by the U-Haul, Jolie also kept an eye on the office door. On the radio she heard distant chattering sounds—Palm County on another frequency. Another voice, another code. That would be the Gardenia PD. They’d be closer, even though technically it was not their jurisdiction. On her drive over, Jolie had checked to see if the Royal Court Apartments was inside or outside the Gardenia city limits. They were outside.
Which made this hers.
Lonnie said, “Palm County and Gardenia PD are on their way. What are you wearing?”
Lonnie was asking so they wouldn’t mistake Jolie for the bad guy. “Jeans, a white tee, navy windbreaker.”
“All units are responding.”
The guy sat on the asphalt Indian-style as Jolie had instructed him. In the sodium arc lights she could see his dark blood, slick and shiny, where his shoulder met his forearm. She worried he would bleed out. She wanted to instruct him to take his hand off his head and stanch the wound as hard as he could with the palm of his hand, but she couldn’t do that. The units would be here in minutes, but Jolie found herself counting down the seconds. One- one-thousand, two-one-thousand.
Time stretched. Adrenaline, at first quicksilver running to her extremities, started to recede. She had to be sure her strength and resolve wouldn’t go along with it. Hoped she wouldn’t be here alone long enough for her body
