The Shop

road just outside the gatehouse. More cars coming, a line of them, like cars let out of a stadium parking lot after a football game. Parking on both sides of the highway, cameras out, large and small. A Tallahassee network affiliate satellite truck, this one WCTV.

He looked back at the boats. Pleasure craft, jammed with people. Jammed with people with cameras. No helicopters, though. He doubted any city news affiliate within five hundred miles of here could afford a helicopter.

If this was the raid, it was elaborate—a cast of thousands.

This was a storm all right. A media storm.

Just the three of us.

Jolie sat with her back against the wall, her legs stretched out in front of her. She’d relocated to the bathroom, where she couldn’t be watched. She felt like a traffic accident everyone had slowed down to see.

Jolie tried to put away her emotions, see it as a story that had happened to someone else. As a cop, she’d witnessed plenty of senseless carnage over the years. The sordid homicides, the lives turned upside down. A moment of blatant stupidity. An uncontrollable rage. If you looked at it as a cop would, you could be dispassionate about it. She should be dispassionate—it was a long time ago.

But she died of an aneurysm.

“No,” Kay had told her. “There was no aneurysm. She didn’t die. Not then.”

Then there was the move to New Mexico. Jolie didn’t remember the move to New Mexico, but she remembered the move back.

Her father had kept her away from them, the family. Only twenty miles away, but the gulf between them was immense. He didn’t forbid her from seeing them, but Jolie felt as if an invisible fence had been built around her. She couldn’t remember how she got the impression that the Haddoxes were wealthy and powerful and had no time for her. They couldn’t accept that her mother had married her father. She didn’t even know if her dad said these things, couldn’t remember an instance when he did, but Jolie arrived at these conclusions nonetheless. Maybe she’d been the one to fill in the gaps. A child who loved her father. Adored her father. She knew they had rejected him, and she took it personally. She knew he was an outsider, so she’d stood with him.

“I wasn’t going to tell you,” Kay told her.

You almost did.

“I didn’t think it would be something you’d want to know.”

No, thought Jolie. Who’d want to hold that conversation?

“That’s why I left yesterday. I couldn’t say it.”

But it was all out in the open now, wasn’t it?

Belle Oaks wasn’t a retirement facility. It was a home. Belle Oaks was an old mental hospital upgraded and changed to accommodate people with psychological and neurological problems. Schizophrenics and bipolars, people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. The suicidal. Belle Oaks was a private hospital where the rich sent their family members to be warehoused.

Dorie had lived to be fifty-eight.

Fifty-eight.

Kay told her Jolie’s mother died last year, of a heart attack. In Tallahassee, only a hundred miles away.

And Jolie never knew it.

“She didn’t know who anybody was,” Kay told her. “She suffered brain damage when she fell.”

Jolie asked Kay for all of it, and Kay told her all of it.

Jolie’s mother’s instability and anger. How she’d fly into rages. How she’d become increasingly dissatisfied with her life. Her growing regret about everything she’d thrown away to marry Jolie’s father.

Their side of the story.

According to Kay, the one thing that kept her going was the Petal Soft Baby Soap contest. The company flew mother and daughter to New York and shot the commercial there.

It was all Dorie could talk about. But more and more she confided in her older sister, Kay’s mother. How she missed her family, how she missed Indigo. How disappointing her life was, except for the Soap Baby.

Then it ended. The baby soap people tried a different kind of advertising campaign, and life became unbearable again.

The rages started back up.

Jolie’s mother hated her life. Maybe she hated Jolie’s dad.

Maybe she even hated Jolie.

Jolie’s back was getting tired. She stood up, did some stretching even with her taped hands, and then leaned against the wall. The room smelled of bathroom cleanser, and underneath the cleanser smell was the faint odor of urine. The cloying smell of roses over-lying all of it. In the other room, people talked in hushed tones. Jolie heard the word “she” a lot. She tuned them out.

The reason Jolie was still here, the reason she was alive, was because her father had lost his job at the ironworks factory. He came home in the middle of the day to find his wife sobbing and screaming as she held her baby underwater in the bathtub.

And Jolie wondered why she’d freaked out in the tub.

There was a struggle, and her dad saved her. In her thrashing, Dorie slipped on the tile, fell, and hit her head.

Emergency surgery and a coma followed.

Jolie closed her eyes. She could hear the murmuring in the other room. They were talking about it. Weighing every nuance, turning over every lie.

Dorie regained consciousness, but when she did, she had the intellectual ability of a seven-year-old. No more rages, though. Those were gone.

The rose smell got stronger, seemed to seep under the door along with the voices. A sickly sweet smell. I named a rose for you.

Jolie’s dad called the only people who could really help him: the family. They sent a private ambulance. They got the best doctors. Had plenty of conferences in the waiting room, at the house on Indigo Island. A plan was made. Dorie Haddox Burke died of an aneurysm, sudden and heartbreaking for her family.

Jolie remembered the photo in their family album—a white coffin under a mound of white lilies.

Her father, who hated to see even a butterfly die, must have been relieved to spare her a story like that. The story that went like this: Your mother didn’t want you. Your mother hated you so much she tried to kill you.

So instead he knitted the fabric of their lives together into a new story. A new story with a sad ending. It was always “just the three of us.” A loving father, a loving mother, and the child they doted on.

Jolie left the bathroom and went up to Kay. “You knew it all this time, and you never told me?”

Kay looked helpless. One of the few times she was at a loss for words.

“All this time?”

Kay opened her mouth to speak, stopped.

“Save it,” Jolie said, tired in her bones. “I can’t think about this right now.”

57

Mike Cardamone parked the old Subaru several blocks away from the safe house. The Subaru rattled and the oil light stayed on permanently, but he’d picked it up yesterday for cash from a man who was as secretive and paranoid as himself.

He put the sunscreen in the windshield, locked up, shouldered his duffle, and started walking.

The subdivision was empty in the steaming heat of summer. Blinds were closed. Cars locked up in garages. Abandoned houses on every street. It was not yet seven a.m., but the heat was already oppressive, and by the time he reached the house on Sea Oats, he was wringing wet.

He stared at the house, 8459 East Sea Oats, closed-up and blank-faced. It gave him a bad feeling. He continued around the block, went into the alley, and hopped the wall. After making sure the neighbors were