Deceptive Innocence, Part Three (Pure Sin) Read online

  I let my arms wrap around his neck and press myself into him. As he leans me back my legs wrap around him. I sigh when his mouth finds my neck and smile when his breathing transforms from deep to shallow. I arch as I feel his hands on the small of my back, feel my shirt bunch as he pushes it up. I love the way the sunrise reflects in his eyes. So many complex colors and shades. Some soft, some violent, all of them perfectly beautiful.

  I pull his pajama bottoms from his hips, down his thighs, to his knees in an unhurried fashion before grasping the fabric with my toes and using my feet to remove the cotton from his legs. Then I lie back as he frees me from my jeans. I can feel his erection pressing against me and there’s something beautiful about that too, something both primitive and graceful about his desire as I open myself up to him and he pushes inside.

  I buck my hips and let my hands run up and down his back as I lick his ear, kiss his cheek, whisper the word yes.

  We’re in sync now, dancing to a melody that’s so much more tender than any we’ve ever danced to before. He kisses me again and we continue to move. Each thrust moves him a little deeper inside and I feel myself expand for him, I feel myself getting wetter. The room is growing brighter by the second as the sun rises in the sky.

  I will not have this man as my enemy.

  His hand slides between us as his fingers find my clit, bringing this loving ecstasy to a new height.

  I will not destroy him.

  “Warrior.” The word is there, mixed up in his moan as he rotates his hips against me, as he continues to toy with me, bringing goose bumps to my skin. Warrior. He says it with such affection and passion.

  But for me, the word has the edge of a curse.

  I raise my arms, hold his face in my hands, and as he looks into my eyes he momentarily stops, studies me as I respond with the only healing word I can think of . . .

  “Lover.”

  Once more Lander moans and he again goes into motion, rocking my body with his, kissing that spot on the base of my neck, the spot that makes me descend into blissful madness.

  I feel myself moving to the brink. The sweet tension inside my body is being pulled so taut I know it’s about to break, and when it does, when I finally call out his name, I feel the throb of him as he fills me.

  Everything has changed.

  chapter four

  We walk back out into the world only an hour later, me in the worn jeans and sweatshirt I arrived in, he in a wool gabardine suit and silk tie. If Lander’s tired, he shows no sign of it. He strides confidently into the sun like he’s Icarus with a tougher set of wings. But me? For the first time in years I feel timid. How long have I allowed anger to extinguish any uncertainty that dared to spark?

  But although the lion’s share of my heart still belongs to anger, a small sliver of it belongs to something—or someone—else. That sliver is weakening me and now uncertainty has a fighting chance.

  Lander kisses me gently before jumping into a cab, pressing into my palm enough money so I can take one too. I have to get back to my apartment and change before rushing to take my place at Jessica’s side. Well . . . perhaps not rush. She expects me at ten a.m., but it’s unlikely she’ll even look at a clock before ten thirty. It usually takes her at least that long to recover from whatever ordeal her husband and children have put her through on their way out the door.

  I actually relish the cab ride home. It gives me time to think, which I desperately need. As my car bumps along I consider the facts.

  Fact: My mother didn’t shoot Nick Foley.

  Her fingerprints weren’t even on the damn gun! Of course, the prosecutor explained that away by positing that there were no fingerprints because someone wiped it down. But if my mother had had the presence of mind to do that, then why didn’t she also refrain from prostrating herself over Nick’s dead body? When she called the police, she had his blood all over her shirt. And really, if she was trying to cover her tracks, why would she bother calling the police at all? No one was on the street that night. I was the only one who saw her enter that house. She was the housekeeper, so even if they found a few of her hairs around the room, it wouldn’t have been damning. Why didn’t she just leave?

  Of course, the answer is that she didn’t leave because it didn’t occur to her that she might be considered a suspect. It’s not the kind of thing that occurs to innocent people in a moment of grief. It’s a shame I didn’t think all that through when I was ten, but it’s a travesty that her public defender didn’t think it through either.

  Fact: Jessica Gable is a liar.

  On the stand she claimed that she heard a gunshot less than five minutes before my mother called the police. The police told me that I probably hadn’t heard the shot because I was listening to my music, but at the time I hadn’t realized that Jessica lived five houses down. I was right across the street. If Jessica could hear the gunshot from that distance I should have heard something. My music hadn’t been that loud. Jessica also claimed she had heard my mother and Nick arguing on the street several days before the murder. She said my mother was threatening him. None of the other neighbors witnessed that particular argument, which was odd, but not as odd as the idea that Nick would have an argument with his mistress in front of his house for all to see. It was ridiculous, and if my mother’s attorney hadn’t dialed it in, the jury would have realized exactly how ridiculous Jessica’s claims were.

  Fact: Travis is an asshole.

  Even his brother knows it. And he helped set up my mother. There’s no ambiguity there, at least not for me. Just because I didn’t see what was going on then doesn’t mean I can’t see it now.

  I was a month away from my tenth birthday and my mother was cleaning Nick Foley’s home while I found little corners of the house where I could stay out of the way. When my mother said that Mr. Foley needed to show her what cleaning needed to be done in the second-floor bedrooms, I took the paper and pencils he gave me and went down to the first-floor dining room. When I heard the doorbell ring ten minutes later, I didn’t think much of it, nor did I contemplate the sound of Nick stomping down the stairs, cursing to himself as he did. I remember hearing the door open, but I don’t think I really started paying attention until I heard the contempt in Nick’s voice when he said the name of the man who stood in his entryway . . .

  “Travis.”

  That was so many years ago. I suppose it makes some sense that the police wouldn’t believe me when I recounted the conversation seven years later. “Memories are unreliable,” the police officer had told me. “It’s the hearsay of a ten-year-old,” said the defense lawyer who refused to take up the case.

  All true, but I would bet my own life on the accuracy of this particular memory.

  If she were still alive, I would bet my mother’s life too.

  “This is how business is done,” Travis had said, his voice carrying from the living room where he and Nick were talking. “Every industry, every company has its own religion. And this is HGVB’s religion. It’s our code.”

  “Religion?” Nick had asked incredulously. “Nothing that’s going on here is going to earn any of us a seat in heaven.”

  There had been a slight pause in the conversation before I heard Travis’s low voice float through the house again. “Heaven is a corner office and a seven-figure salary,” he had said. “And you don’t get there through good works. You chose this church and now you have to live by its rules. You need to obey. I’m telling you now, Nick, any other path will lead you quickly to hell. And that’s not a metaphor.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you’re going to hell and if you don’t play ball, someone will send you there before you can even say the words ‘whistle blower.’”

  The words had sounded so silly and foreign to me. Companies didn’t have religions . . . did they? And how could heaven be an office? And what the hell was a whistle blower? I had imagined a high school PE coach with devil horns blowing his whistle at all the young sinners he hop
ed to send to hell while on the other side of the gymnasium a heavenly angel sat at a desk studying some business papers. The whole thing made me giggle . . . which is what brought Travis into the dining room: he had heard me. I remember the look of alarm when he entered the dining room and the calm that had washed over his face when he saw that the person in the room was only a child. “A little young for you, isn’t she, Nick?” he had asked as he turned his back to me.

  Nick, who was now in the doorway, had flushed. “I’m—”

  “Fucking her mother?” Travis had finished for him.

  I remember how white Nick became upon hearing those words. It was a silent but damning confirmation of Travis’s accusations. And I remember my heart dropping to the floor.

  I hadn’t known. Until that moment I hadn’t grasped what was going on—right under my nose—between Nick and my mother. Travis had barely looked at me, wouldn’t even recognize me later, and yet with those three words he had stripped me of a protective layer of innocence.

  If Travis hadn’t said that last part, I might not have been able to recall the rest of the conversation at all. It would have been just a jumble of silly words I didn’t fully understand and I would have tossed out the memory before I even reached seventh grade.

  But he did say it, and so I do remember that conversation vividly. And now that I’m older I see that conversation differently, because now I know what a whistle blower is.

  More importantly, I know what a death threat is.

  Sometimes I wonder if Travis already had a plan before he made that visit, or if finding me in the dining room had gotten him thinking, opening his mind to newer and darker possibilities. Perhaps he had run right home to Daddy and told him how he had found a perfect scapegoat. How he had found a way for the Gables to get away with murder.

  I do sort of wish I had told my mother about the encounter. Maybe then she would have been more suspicious when Edmund Gable called her out of the blue and asked her to clean his house. But even that’s unlikely. She would have had to know that Travis was Edmund’s son for the alarm bells to ring. How would she know that? I certainly didn’t.

  So Travis needs to pay and so does Jessica and so does Edmund . . . and I have to find a way to make that happen before Micah can stop me.

  But what about Lander? Am I really so ready to give him a get-out-of-jail-free card? Based on what? Am I giving him brownie points because he doesn’t like his father very much? Because he had a sad childhood? So did Travis. So did 80 percent of the people I’ve ever met in my entire life. But most of those people don’t go around setting up innocent people for murder.

  But it’s Lander.

  I wince at the dreamy tone of my own internal voice. Outside the wind is picking up as we drive into Harlem, blowing through the hair of the gentrifiers and old-timers alike. It’s oddly unifying. White, black, or brown, today we’re all going to have a bad-hair day.

  It’s odd, but I actually have a lot in common with the Gable boys. Deceased or absentee mothers, a difficult childhood, a chip on the shoulder. But while I can kind of relate to Lander, Travis seems like he’s from a different species.

  The cab moves out of the nicer areas of Harlem and closer to my neck of the woods. Now the cars on the side of the road have all seen better days. Scattered glass can be seen on the pavement where one of those cars was once parked. The chain stores that have moved into South Harlem are a lot harder to find here, up near 155th Street. There are fewer leaves blowing around and more litter. The change of scenery reminds me of how separate I am from the world I’m invading.

  With a little restructuring of my plan I can protect Lander from the worst of it. But still, when all’s said and done Lander will have lost his brother and his sister-in-law. Not necessarily to death, but definitely to a kind of obliteration. And since I’m going to ruin his father, he may be unemployed in addition to being called upon to raise his niece and nephew.

  To be fair, that’s probably enough. My heart rate increases as I evaluate new formations for my revenge, and I smile as I realize that, perhaps, if I do things right, Lander will never even know that I’m behind the chaos.

  chapter five

  As predicted, Jessica doesn’t even notice that I’m a half hour late.

  “Bell,” she says in a hollow voice that matches her cloudy eyes, “how are you this morning? I’m sure my email account is bursting at the seams with new Evites. I haven’t had a chance to even look at it in over a day. Could you see to that? Oh, and did you happen to run into Mrs. Jennings on the way up? A very fair-skinned Nordic-looking woman almost six feet tall? She just left here. She’s donating a diamond necklace to a silent auction to benefit the ballet. It was very kind of her, of course, but what I really want to know is what you thought of her new haircut! It’s perfectly awful; it makes her look even more manly than usual.”

  She yabbers on and on but never mentions or even alludes to my dinner with her husband, which she clearly objected to. And she certainly doesn’t bring up the last time we spoke, when she shut me down after I tried to push her to strike back at Travis. Maybe she’s forgotten all about that. It’s a real possibility when you consider the number of brain cells that have fallen casualty to her little internal drug war.

  I’m beginning to learn Jessica’s patterns. She spends her days floating around the penthouse, complaining about Travis to anyone who crosses her path—housecleaners, deliverymen—occasionally lapsing into intense moments of depression and sadness, only to be partially revived by another pill or spa treatment. But at least she’s predictable. And when you consider the craziness of what’s been going on lately, Jessica’s predictability is kind of soothing. When she takes a nap at noon I’m able to check the email account that I’ve set up for her, the one she doesn’t know about. Sure enough, the email I wrote from Travis to her is still there. I see no sign that anyone has been on this account other than me. There’s no trace of it in the browsing history, which hasn’t been wiped clean since the last time I erased it.

  And there are lots of responses to “Jessica’s” last post on a forum that deals with abusive partners.

  The responses are annoying to say the least. Using the alias I had assigned her, I had posted that my husband occasionally raised his fist as if he was about to hit me and then blamed me for making him come so close to losing control. I had written that he called me a cunt in front of our youngest child and once even told me that the world would be a better place if I wasn’t in it.

  Several of the women on the board had recommended couples counseling.

  People are pathetic.

  So after adding Jessica’s voice to a few conversations started by others in the online community, I write another post, this time saying that things have escalated. I tell them that I got a little drunk and provoked him unnecessarily, verbally taunting him and even snatching away his phone when I suspected he was about to text a mistress. This enraged my husband, who then grabbed me by the hair before pushing me up against the wall, wrapping his hands around my neck and choking me.

  In the end it doesn’t really matter what the other posters think. What matters is what the police find.

  Still, I’d like to make an impact. I’m creating a drama here; is it too much to ask for an appreciative audience?

  By the time Jessica wakes I’ve done everything I need to do and even ordered her lunch from a local spot that delivers. She sips unsweetened iced tea and pops amphetamines while we go over her social calendar.

  “Next week is the political fund-raiser,” she reminds me. “Travis has great hopes for this particular candidate, this Sam Highkin. He must have what it takes. I’ve never known Travis to bet on a horse that didn’t win.”

  “Is Highkin a good guy?” I ask.

  Jessica looks at me blankly.

  “I mean, do you like him? Is he decent?”

  “He’s a politician,” Jessica responds, as if that alone explains the state of his character. And she might have a point. St
ill . . .

  “Do you agree with his politics, then?” I press.

  Jessica shakes her head impatiently. “I don’t really follow that sort of thing. I know that if he wins his next race it’ll be helpful to Travis. And,” she adds thoughtfully, “I know that despite his being a virtual unknown I’ve managed to almost sell out the event at a thousand dollars a ticket. It’s the black tie, of course.”

  “The black tie?

  Jessica shrugs. “I suppose I don’t have many friends, but I do have the Gable last name. So when I send out an invitation it gets read. And when I announce that the fund-raiser is a black-tie affair, the wives start nagging their husbands to take them. Even within our circle there are really only so many opportunities to pull out your best full-length evening gown.” She sighs and shakes her head. “People simply don’t dress up anymore. We’ve become a culture of jeans and T-shirts. It’s really rather objectionable, don’t you agree?”

  “Absolutely,” I lie.

  “I mean, there’s no reason we have to dress like factory workers or schoolteachers, is there?” she continues. “Personally, I’ll be wearing Gucci. And my girl at Stuart Weitzman called to tell me about a new pair of metallic silver heeled sandals they got in. They’re accented with Swarovski crystal. Of course I had her bring them right over and when I tried them on I felt . . . transformed. They’re works of art, really.”

  “I’d love to see them.” You’d think she was describing a new level of spiritual enlightenment.

  Jessica jumps to her feet. “They’re divine,” she says. I detect a note of giddiness in her voice as she starts to lead me out of the room. I’ve never heard Jessica sound happy before, let alone giddy. These new pills must be good.

  But we don’t quite make it out of the room before my cell phone rings. I’d ignore it, but it’s the special ringtone I assigned to Travis.