Page 29 of Oleander

“Uh, yeah. I’ll pop by in a day or two to see if you need anything.” She reached for him and hugged him tightly. His face blushed, turning the caramel of his skin a different color. She didn’t reach for Eric and he knew why. Gracyn had a crush on Rod.

They waved goodbye and walked silently to the SUV, all the while Eric whistling and smirking. Mama Irene would be proud of him. When they were in the car, he turned to Rod. The other man raised a finger, not looking at him.

“One word, just one word and I swear I will find a way to wrap you in fire hose so tightly you won’t get out.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“What did you find from the videos?” asked Eric.

“Only that someone was in that cottage on the night she died. But it appears to be after she died. You can see her clearly on the rocking chair.”

“What the fuck happened?” they all asked to themselves frowning.

The night of Dorothy’s death…

As the civil trial neared, protesters gathered outside the iron gates of the Burton estate, unaware that Hollis Burton had not slept there in almost three years.

They left twenty-seven pairs of work boots along the road, each tied to a photograph of someone killed on Platform Nine. Rain filled the boots overnight. By morning, volunteers had emptied them, dried the photographs, and returned them to their places. The mansion’s windows remained dark, lending the protest the appearance of a vigil before an enormous, unseeing face.

Hollis lived six miles offshore aboard Imperium, a two-hundred-foot mega-yacht with a helipad, a glass elevator, and a master suite larger than the house in which most people had grown up. From the upper deck he could see the city only as a pale seam between water and sky.

He had purchased the yacht after Dorothy refused to join him on a world cruise. By then they had already lived apart for more than two decades. She had left the Burton estate for a modest cottage in bayou country, keeping her maiden name, her own accounts, and a life deliberately beyond the range of his staff.

Hollis later moved aboard Imperium permanently, telling reporters he preferred the freedom of the water. Dorothy had told him the vessel suited him: magnificent, expensive, and incapable of putting down roots.

Their marriage had been an arrangement between families that needed one another’s connections. He was fine with it. She was beautiful, educated, and refined. She did not feel the same about him. That was an ego hit he wasn’t prepared for.

The night after Dorothy’s funeral, Imperium rolled gently at anchor while Hollis watched live footage of strangers chanting before his unused mansion. The yacht’s crew had learned to move around him without sound. Fresh orchids appeared. Whiskey appeared. His shirts returned pressed and empty of scent.

Luxury had once seemed to him the purest proof of freedom; now every polished surface reflected an old man whom no one approached unless paid. At eleven, he ordered the tender ashore and a car south toward the bayou. He told the captain he needed documents from Dorothy’s cottage before the property passed to Roderick and the renovations began. He did not say that entering the small home she had chosen over every Burton luxury felt like trespassing inside a verdict. Nor did he disclose that he wasn’t welcomed at the cottage even when she was alive. She was his wife until the end. This was his right.

On the morning of her funeral, Hollis’s general counsel had leaned across the limousine seat.

“If she preserved what we think she preserved, the company won’t survive discovery,” said his longtime friend and counsel.

“The company will survive,” Hollis had said.

“Then you may not.”

That was why, only hours after the funeral reception ended, Hollis unlocked Dorothy’s cottage with a key supplied by a trustworthy adversary.

The place stood on short pilings beside a slow brown channel, sheltered by live oaks and curtains of Spanish moss. Its porch boards were worn silver. Inside, the rooms were small enough that Hollis could hear the refrigerator cycle from the front door.

Roderick had not yet taken possession, and none of the changes planned for the cottage—new wiring, a raised foundation, a wider back room—had begun.

Dorothy’s life remained intact: mud-stained boots beside the door, library books stacked under a lamp, a chipped blue cup drying by the sink. Her study occupied a narrow room overlooking the reeds. The desk was bare. Her computer was gone. A shallow filing cabinet held tax returns, household invoices, and warranties arranged by expiration date.

In the bottom drawer he found an envelope addressed in Dorothy’s severe block letters: HOLLIS. For one disorienting instant, the sight of his name in her hand produced something like relief. She had anticipated him. She had, in the last days of her life, still been thinking of him. Then he remembered what Dorothy’s attention had become, and the relief tightened into fear.

Inside was a single index card.

You always believed a thing ceased to exist when you stopped looking at it.

He tore the card in half, then in quarters, then set the pieces on the blotter and stared at them. Dorothy had kept Martin because, she once said at a charity dinner, ‘One Burton in a marriage is sufficient.’ Everyone had laughed. Hollis had laughed loudest.

Later, in the car, he had asked whether humiliating him amused her. She had watched the city slide over the dark window.

“Not nearly as much as watching you help.”