AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Yelling. Donni stared down at it uneasily. “What did he look like? The other man.”
“I don’t know. Tall, dark-haired. Like I said, I’d never seen him before. He didn’t tip, either. Good-looking ones never do,” she said, rather sourly.
Shit, Donni thought. None of her husband’s friends were what she would callgood-looking.
“Hey, Ms. Blake?” Denise broke into her thoughts. “Do me a favor—don’t come back here okay?” She wiped a rag over the clean counter. Donni noticed her nails had been painted orange and filled in with what looked like sharpie to make little jack o’ lanterns. “This is my mom’s place, you know. If she sees you, she’ll freak.”
“How as she doing?”
“I bet you can imagine.”
Donni picked up her drink, fighting the urge not to look under the lid. But Denise seemed to know what she was thinking because she smiled, and while it wasn’t exactly hostile, it still lacked warmth. “I told Harold not to spit in it. One good tip deserves another.”
???????
He watched her put her dog in the back of the car and get behind the wheel of her Honda. Her eyes flicked to the rearview mirror as she carefully backed out of the cypress-lined drive. It looked like she was staring right at him through the window, even though he knew she wasn’t. It was a surprisingly fierce look for such a gamine face.
She drove a remarkably unflashy car for a rich man’s second wife. He knew his father had tried several times to buy her a better one—something sporty that would make her recognizably his. But for some reason, she had always refused. She spent God-only-knew how much on clothes, but for some reason, she drew the line at the car.
“Just get the car,” he’d said to her once, at sixteen. She’d been taking him somewhere and her big sunglasses had been holding her hair back and she was wearing a white sleeveless blouse that was blinding in the sun. It was one of the few times he could remember her out of black; it infused her brown skin with a honeyed luminescence. “I’ll drive it if you don’t want it.”
“I’ll tell you a secret, Raffi,” she’d said. “A person who drives an expensive car is always hiding something.”
“Like the flask you keep in the glovebox?”
She’d laughed and leaned over to ruffle his hair. The nearness of her and the warm brush of her fingers had made it feel as if the floral notes of her perfume had sprouted vines and were piercing his lungs with their small barbs.
“Stay out of my glovebox,” she’d said. “And no. If someone defines themself by the car that they drive or the things they own, it often means that they see other people as things, too. That’s what I meant. It all comes down to status.”
No wonder she’d driven his father crazy. He didn’t understand anything he couldn’t buy.
I don’t want your money, she’d said. But what she really meant was that she didn’t want to be owned. Perhaps twenty years with his father had made her leery of carte blanche.
Rafe bagged up the pasta salad and went to the guest room to shower and get dressed. As the water ran, he stayed alert, one ear cocked towards the door. Listening for Donni, yes, but perhaps also for someone with more sinister intentions. The last time he’d been alone in this place, someone had bashed his head in and tried to burn him alive. He might not be the real target but that didn’t mean he wanted to wind up dead in the crossfire, either.
After washing off, he changed into his last clean pair of jeans and a green shirt, tossing the rest of his clothes into the washing machine. The motel hadn’t offered such facilities. Nothing like staying in a dump to remind you how quickly a luxury could start to feel like a necessity.
He checked the doors and windows, making a casual pass through the house.No sneaking around, no more going through my things.But she hadn’t said anything about his father’s.
Rafe let himself into his father’s office. The desk was mostly bare now, much of its contents reduced to ash and a charred mark on the master bedroom floor. His eyes lingered on the wooden chair where he had made Donni come with his mouth. A pleasant heat filled him, tinged with darker, more twisted emotions.
Once, as a teenager, he’d walked in on his father pawing at her in this very room. They’d come back from some uptight soiree and she was wearing big earrings and a little dress with ruching that made it that much easier for his father to slide it up her thighs. Donni had seen him first and tried to push him away, but then his father had glanced over, met his eyes, and deliberately splayed his hand over her flesh, moving his hand higher, like a lion defending its prey.
You couldn’t take her with you, he thought grimly, resting his hand on the back of the chair.But I think you’re still trying to drag her down to hell.
The office didn’t smell like the rest of the house, which was all lemon cleaner and scented candles and whatever it was inside those little glass vials Donni kept on the nightstand. Here the air was heavy with Scandinavian hardwood, pipe tobacco, and his father’s cologne. If rooms could sweat, the flocked wallpaper would reek like the whoremaster of an old bordello.
Rafe walked to the cedar bookshelf, which was packed with various odds and ends. Few of them were books. There was his father’s wedding photo with Donni, with her hair loose and pinned back by a single white rose. She was wearing a white slip dress glittering with crystals and looked so young and hopeful that he felt it like a lance in his heart.
The lower shelves were packed with various objects of curiosity. Carved wooden animal sculptures from Africa clustered together with ceramic vases and a cloisonne ball in a rosewood setting that you could spin like a globe until the gold and enamel flowers blurred into a sea of blue.
Below this, on the bottom shelf, was an antique kaleidoscope that Donni had given his father. It was made of brass and glass. He had coveted it instantly and had been angry when his father had told him that it wasn’t a toy before shutting it up in here and letting it gather dust. Rafe lifted it easily in his adult hands now, holding it to his eye before spinning the wheel at the end, causing fractal bursts of colors to splinter off and dance like the lights at a carnival.
This, he thought, setting it carefully down,is coming with me.
But his goal wasn’t the kaleidoscope, but the books. There weren’t many, just five stacked in a haphazard arrangement that suggested they’d been chosen for the colors of their spines. Rafe carefully slid a chunkier one out from the middle and flipped it open to reveal a hollow center, just as he’d seen his father do a couple times before when he’d left his office door open a crack, unaware of the green eye that watched him suspiciously through the gap.
Rafe had seen his father store countless things in here over the years, things he had wanted to keep hidden from both of his wives. Bags of weed, pornographic playing cards, even wads of cash. Now there was just a notepad, and when he flipped through it, there were lists of passwords written in his father’s heavy hand. Eventually, he landed on a four-digit code that looked like it could be for the safe.
