Chapter 14: Sideways in Plain View
Roxy,
Check these guys out. They're a new band from LA. The lead vocalist is from Charleston. You might have heard of them down there. I have a feeling you'll like they're stuff, so if you feel up to working on a piece just let me know.
Hope Italy is treating you guys well. Make sure you send us some pictures. And take care of that baby!
Peace Kiddo,
Jack
The absolute furthest thing from my mind was work, especially work that I did for fun. Sorry Jack I saved the message and went on checking my email, deleting ads and spam for what felt like forever, until I ran across a name I didn't recognize in my inbox.
C. Arentino.
I sipped at my coffee and clicked to open the message. It was simple when I read it, three clear lines, stating exactly what this mystery person wanted, or for that matter, didn't want.
Roxanne Hayden, you don't remember me and if I can help it you will never have to. There is only one reason I've reached out to contact you again, and that is so you will know that your perfectly safe life, is in jeopardy. I may have missed yesterday, but I will kill you eventually.
My fingers on the mug weakened and I choked as it fell and broke on the tile floor. What in the hell…I hurried and clicked back to the inbox page again, to focus on that name, C. Arentino. Who the hell is that? This has got to be a joke. My eyes hunted back and forth on the screen violently, searching for clues that weren't even there. Just three lines, one convincing enough, I will kill you eventually. As opposed to what, their failed attempts at it already?
The date was for that same morning, December 30, 2008, which meant that whoever this was, had been fully aware of my survival the day before on the cliffs, and even more so, of my rescue and escape from home to here. Or else, they wouldn't have sent it, especially at 5 am on a Wednesday.
Right, right…?
My feet shook nervously on the coffee stained floor, causing my legs to tremble the same, which in turn brought a striking pain to my left knee, where the bone was worse off than I had realized the night before. I looked down and saw that the bandage Roux had put on was worn from sleep and that my anxious movement was causing blood to seep through.
"Damn."
I pushed away from table and my laptop, and hobbled as best as I could to the kitchen sink. The cloth was almost entirely wet and I had nearly gotten the gauze off of my knee, when I heard a tired inquiry.
"What's going on? What was that noise?"
Mort inched closer slowly, rubbing his eyes and yawning.
"I dropped my coffee. And my knee is bleeding again, that's all."
This alerted him and he met me suddenly at the sink, lifting me up to the kitchen counter and taking over the task of stopping the bleeding himself. He continuously wet the rag, held it with a warm pressure to the red gash and sighed.
"I'm sorry I woke you up."
He looked at me then, with weary but smiling eyes.
"You didn't. I was getting dressed anyway when I heard the crash."
I pointed off at the table, "It broke in a million pieces. There's coffee everywhere."
"I'll clean it up, don't worry."
He added tighter pressure around my kneecap and I pulled the messy gold and brown hair out of his face, satisfied in seeing his eyes in full. I wasn't sure whether to tell him about the email or not. I guess I should have, considering the subject matter and the fact that the person seemed serious. But I don't give in to threats through Yahoo so easily.
Mort rinsed the bloodied cloth out while I reached down the counter for the bandages and medical tape he'd bought on our way back the night before. I tried to lean over and dress the wound myself, but he took control of that too and lifted my leg higher as he wrapped the gauze around at least a dozen times, smiling here and there.
"I don't even want to know how you managed to get down all those stairs alone."
I grinned, "Flamingo legs, remember? I work best on one at a time."
He laughed and finished taping the wound before lifting me off the counter and carrying me safely across the glass covered floor to the couch. He laid me down carefully and half fell on top of me, running his hand up my good, right leg with curious fingers.
"I'm just glad to have them both back here with me now."
"You mean 'wrapped' around you."
"Well yeah," he grinned and leaned down to kiss me roughly when I hung on his neck and lifted my good leg up and over his hip, pulling him to me closely. He groaned against my mouth as our middles meshed together violently, pleadingly, and then ruined the moment for me when he whispered with little breath and a sad tone, "I heard bullets on the phone yesterday."
I traced over his mustache and lowered my eyes.
"Someone fired a gun, above my head. I couldn't see them."
"And then you fell?"
I nodded, sighed angrily and he helped me to sit up on the couch, consumed by his arms.
"We're being followed."
"You think so?"
"Yeah," his fingers twirled through my long hair, "I knew they would come eventually."
There was that word again, eventually, and I couldn't help but to turn my head around to where my laptop and the email sat open across the room. Mort turned to look with me, interested in whatever seemed to have captured my attention so quickly again.
"What is it?"
I ignored him, staring at the distant screen, not sure whether I should show him. Would it make a difference really, whether he knew or not? What could he do to protect me that he hadn't already, or that I couldn't continue to do for myself?
"Rox, what?"
"It's uh…" I paused when I heard a phone ring, Mort's phone.
"Tell me."
"You should get that."
He stared at me, half as interested in the phone as in the startled look on my face. But he got up and went to answer it, shouting back, "Hold your thoughts, I still want you to tell me what's wrong."
He reached the counter, leaned on it and opened his phone as I watched on nervously.
"Hello? Oh hey, man."
I hugged one of the throw pillows to me and sat with a questioning face. His answer was mouthed from across the room, Sam. I smiled for a moment, happy to know that he'd finally reached us, but it was all put to a fast end when I saw Mort's smile fade away.
"What are you talking about? She's right here."
I slowly rose from the sofa then and moved toward him in a worried stumble.
"Mort, what happened?"
He just looked at me and went on talking to his brother.
"That doesn't make any sense, Sam. Roxanne's fine."
The anger increased in his eyes and he moved past me quickly, heading for my laptop. I was too weak and too well injured to stop him, but he didn't seem to pay any attention to the email and instead went right to work at typing away and scanning other pages, shaking his head in a strangely horrific way the whole time.
"This is…what the hell? Why would they publish this bullshit without confirmation?!"
I limped with a tired wince or two toward Mort, and grasped his leaning back to steady myself and see over his shoulders at the computer screen. I was expecting to see all kinds of things, something about the Klein mafia being abroad again, something wrong with his or my own book sales or hell, even something odd about the American government having been taken over by terrorists and that we wouldn't be allowed to return to our country, ever.
Anything really, except what I did discover, standing there, leaning on my shivering husband.
New York
Bestselling Novelist and Rolling Stone Journalist,
Roxanne Rainey, Found Dead in Childhood Home
Tashmore Lake, New York
February 12, 1978 - December 29, 2008
I didn't even notice Mort had settled me down into the chair, or that he had walked away shouting into the phone and pounding his fist on things. Not until I snapped out of the trance that the florescent computer screen and the bold faced words were causing me to fall into. They were so realistic, so truthful, so commanding of attention despite them being false. At least, I assumed they were false, since I could very clearly feel the pain in my leg, and the beating of my heart and the staggering of my gasping breath. But I again assumed, that very soon, within seconds even, these made up facts might become partly truth, especially if I couldn't remind myself how to breathe.
Found Dead. Someone found me? They found my body? Ridiculous.
I let the article below my black and white photo seep into my brain at least somewhat, trying to determine what it could all mean, and who had decided to play this cruel trick on me, on us.
America's beloved sweetheart author, mother of two and wife to world renowned mystery writer, Morton Rainey, was confirmed to have been found dead in her grandparent's home on Tashmore Lake in upstate New York, early yesterday evening. The home was where the young bestseller spent her summers as a child, and where five years ago, the real life terror and inspiration for her first novel, Hide and Seek Out, is known to have begun.
Roxanne, 30, and husband Morton, 36, were assumed to have been vacationing privately at the residence this holiday weekend, with their 4 ½ year old twins Max and Madeline. The state of the three others is not yet confirmed, and all calls to the Rainey's publicists and agents have gone unreturned thus far.
There is also no evidence yet whether her death is connected to the publicly known and Hollywood enacted string of events that put the couple in danger previously with the Chicago based, Klein mafia. Updates will be further provided by The New York Times as facts are verified completely. An autopsy is scheduled for tomorrow, December 31, 2008.
An autopsy. So they know I'm dead, but they don't know what killed me, or how, or when really. Isn't this just wonderful.
I sat trying to piece together what I could with a half functioning brain, and didn't stop until I heard Mort come back into the kitchen again, demanding answers of someone else, someone new on his phone. I turned around in my chair carefully, watching how his arms flew above his head, how his fist met the marbled countertops with frustration and confusion. And when he was quiet and listening to someone on the other line, he looked up with reddened eyes and found mine across the open space. We stared at one another for what felt like a lifetime, not sure what to say or do.
He soon moved around the island counter though, shuffled barefoot in his jeans and holey Journey t-shirt. His hair was a mess, like always, with one, no two, no three thick waves of it hanging in his eyes untouched. The details he emitted were wild and I noted every last one of them. I was good at focusing on details in the middle of utter chaos. Like the way the muscles of his chest barely moved under the thin cotton of his old grey shirt, the way his jaw cracked at the seams with hesitation and minimal stress relief, and the way he knelt down in front of me on the glass and coffee covered tile floor, with one hand on my leg, the other holding my cheek and his shoulder pinning the phone still to his ear.
I saw a million things all at once, things that a dead person shouldn't be able to see.
"Yes." He finally answered back, the fierceness rising in his tone again. "I'd like to speak to your editor in charge please…Ed-i-tor, I want to talk to whoever is running your goddamn office. Do you understand?"
I could hear a timid, almost frightened young woman's voice on the other line and then he shot back at her, "This is Mort Rainey. The writer whose wife apparently died in my bed last night without my knowing about it."
I wished I could have laughed, the way he spoke to her, the sarcasm that radiated from his pouty lips when it came to things like this. Although, it never came to things as absurd and freakish as this.
"Un-fucking-believable." He shook his head low with a growl and I held his hand reassuringly. "Times' bastards. From impossible crosswords to this…"
Okay yeah, that one made me giggle past the frightened tears a little.
He looked up at me and brought my face down to his closer, whispering, "I'm going to fix this."
"You're going to bring me back from the dead?"
I was glad then, to finally see a tiny smile from him. "That's what husbands are for, babe."
"Right," I murmured back and kissed his lips softly before the woman returned to the phone.
"Great," Mort replied to her toughly, "Connect me to the fuck-up already."
Two hours. I gave the New York Times two hours of my life, added onto the countless hours I'd ever wasted on their crosswords. I sat on the phone with the editor, the publisher, and just about every person who'd ever invested a single penny into the printing of their internationally distributed news. I gave every one of them a piece of mind too, before finally being assured that the story would be re-written with a public apology and extensive coverage (five star reviews included) of Roxanne's next novel.
It wasn't near to being enough, but I was tired of talking to them.
I ended the conversation, cleaned up the plenty sticky mess of coffee on the floor, and then went for a difficult hunt through the villa for the supposed ghost of my wife. She wasn't downstairs, on the balcony or on the veranda, and upstairs was deathly quiet too.
I called for her, "Rox?" But got no answer in return.
Something on the floor near the front door though, a paintbrush, gave me somewhat of a clue. I raced out of the house and onto the gravel, vine grown drive to see the Ferrari still sitting there. So she walked…I looked back and forth around all sides of the property and saw only one of the men from the villa down the road. He smiled and walked toward me on the path through town, but I stopped him.
"Sir, hi. I'm sorry. Did you happen to see a woman, my wife, walking nearby anywhere?"
I gestured and his eyes followed where my hands flew around. He shrugged at first and I sighed, but then, as if he had been struck with a memory, his eyes lit up and he pointed in the direction down the path he was following.
"She went that way, signor. With," he made the movement of a brush stoke with his hand and smiled at me.
"Paint. She went to paint?"
"Si, si."
I nodded gratefully and patted him on the back. "Grazi, thank you!"
And then I ran down the dusty and overgrown path to where I could hear the distant sound of the ocean for at least a mile or more. She'd lost her cell phone on the cliffs the day before, or I would have called her. So I went on nothing more than the local man's words and pointed finger, until I saw movement through the thick green rose bushes, and heard music blaring wildly.
Bon Jovi. At least some things still make perfect sense.
I shook my head with a laugh and bolted into the clearing where she stood, with her back turned and facing a small perched canvas on the rocks overlooking the south Mediterranean bend. She was focused, intent on the swirling motion of her brush with the blue and green paint she had splattered against the white. I hadn't seen her paint in a few years. It was a trade she picked up long before I knew her, one that was always settled somewhere in the back of her mind, but seldom emerged unless it was provoked with stress or fear.
Seems like a perfect day for her to pick up a brush again.
I caught my breath and walked quietly in from behind her, hands on my hips, eyes wandering over her shoulders to watch what she was doing. Her bare feet kicked up leaves and sandy dirt, her jeans were covered in paint already, and her back, where it was revealed by her draping purple tank top, called out to me.
So I walked towards it, like a fly to light, and gently touched my hand to her skin. She didn't jump nervously. She just leaned into the sensation, breathing in and out, as I stepped closer and wrapped my arms completely around her waist.
"Sweetie? You okay?"
She rested her head on my shoulder, the brush moving limply from the canvas.
"I think I've been better."
"Yeah. Me too."
"At least the world still thinks you're alive."
I kissed her head and hugged her tighter with a laugh.
"They're going to publish a re-write tomorrow. And endorse your work for the rest of your life."
She laughed then, shaking her head at the complete silliness of the entire thing.
"I'm surprised your brother is the only one who's freaked so far."
"Time difference. Don't worry…the calls are well on their way."
"Right."
She shrugged and stood up straight again with her brush, steadying her weight on the good leg and re-focusing on the canvas with the intensity of a Jedi. I smiled and sat on the rocks, eyeing her curiously as she went about stroking the white with colors, doing nothing but thinking and humming the words coming from the old radio beside me.
I wasn't sure when I missed the onset, but after a few minutes, I could hear her crying and looked up to see the tears streaming down her face in the afternoon sunlight. She tried to wipe them away with the few paint free spots on her hands, but I pulled her between my legs instead and did the honors with the tug of my old shirt.
"Someone wants me dead," she mumbled under the cotton and my roaming hands, "Someone's trying to get rid of me, Mort."
Great, what do I say to that? Do I tell her about the paper I found attached to the rock the night we fled? Do I tell her that it's all I've thought about since we got here? Shit.
"I'm not going to let them."
Her face tossed back and forth in my hands.
"It won't matter what you do. Eventually…"
"There's no eventually." I replied forcefully, holding her face still to look straight down at me. "I'm going protect you, I've always protected you. I won't let these bastards anywhere near you."
"But they--"
"Sh." I covered her mouth with my hand and pulled her against my chest, swarming her with my arms for safety and trying to calm her sobbing. "If they want you, they're going to have to go through me first. And there's no way that's happening. You hear me?"
There was no response, just a tilting, crying head on my shoulder that agreed in utter silence.
"Whoever's doing this, can just fuck around with me instead."
