P. Parrish - The Little Death

“Do you know who and where you are?” Louis asked.

BYRNE. FUCKIN HOSPITAL

There was nothing wrong with Kavanagh that a little pressure wouldn’t fix. He’d start with something Kavanagh couldn’t pretend not to remember.

“We know you were at Tink Lyons’s house the night before you were taken to the pen. Do you remember getting beat up by her husband?”

NO

“Do you know why you were at her house?”

Kavanagh stabbed at his board to reiterate his answer.

“Do you even know Tink Lyons?”

NO

“Do you have any idea how you were injured?”

NO

What the hell was going on here? Was it possible Kavanagh’s brain had shut completely down? Had the women given him a powerful drug that blocked his memory? Is that how they had subdued him?

But if that was what had happened and he really didn’t remember anything, why wasn’t he asking Louis questions? What kind of person wouldn’t want to know?

“Okay, Kavanagh,” Louis said. “I’ll leave you alone, but you’re going to be getting visits from lots of other people. Cops. You need to think about telling them the truth.”

Kavanagh stared at his board.

Louis turned to leave, then caught a glimpse of something on the windowsill, a potted flower. It wasn’t red; it was white. But it was definitely an orchid. He went to the window. No card or label, nothing to tell him what shop it had come from or who had sent it. He looked back at Kavanagh.

“Who brought this orchid to you?” Louis asked.

DONT KNOW

“Did Senator Osborn come to see you this morning?”

WHO THAT

“Did anyone come to see you? A guy named Greg, maybe?”

NO

Louis looked back at the orchid. It was the most bizarre thought he’d ever had, but he knew it was true, because the evidence was right there in front of him-and in Kavanagh’s preposterous lapses of memory.

He looked back to the bed. “How much did she pay you?” Louis asked.

Kavanagh turned his head only enough for Louis to catch the flash of guilt in his eyes. Then he looked away.

“How much?” Louis pressed.

Kavanagh scribbled on the board.

DONT KNOW WHAT U MEAN

Louis walked back to the bed. “These women killed three men before they tried to kill you,” he said. “You were nothing to them but a toy that they got tired of and threw away.”

Kavanagh had his head down and a white-knuckled grip on the marker.

“Good God,” Louis said. “That woman left you for dead in a stinking cow pen. You’re going to let her get away with it?”

Kavanagh’s head came up, and he looked slowly to the orchid, his eyes dull. For a long time, the only sound in the room was the wet rasp of air through his tube.

Louis studied Kavanagh’s profile, trying to imagine what he might have looked like when he walked into Carolyn Osborn’s bedroom in a white Armani shirt, carrying a red orchid.

But now…

Split lip, broken nose, one eye pooled red, deep cuts stitched closed with knotted black thread. And forever with the voice of an old man. If he could speak at all.

How much was that silence worth?

Louis turned to leave, but as he reached the door, he could hear the squeak of Kavanagh’s marker moving across the board. He turned back.

Kavanagh held up his board.

WHERE MY CAT???

For a moment, Louis felt a twinge of pity. But it evaporated when he thought of Rosa Díaz, Burke Aubry, and all of the nameless people waiting for the young men they loved to come home. He was tired of these selfish people whose only concern was for whatever money and comfort they could wring out of other people’s lives. And that now included Byrne Kavanagh, who was willing to shelter a murderer so he could make a few bucks.

Kavanagh punched the board.

WHERE MY CAT???

“Don’t know,” Louis said, and left the room.

Carolyn picked up the pencil and leaned toward the mirror. She carefully outlined her top lip but then her hand began to shake, and she let the pencil fall to the dressing table. She pressed her palms to her forehead and bowed her head.

She didn’t hear Tucker come in and pick up the pencil from the floor. When he set it in front of her, she looked up.

“You’ve got to stop this, Carolyn,” he said.

She looked up into his eyes in the reflection of the mirror.

“It’s barely noon,” Tucker said. “How much have you had to drink?”

“Nothing.”

He gave her a look of disgust.

“I told you, I am not drinking,” she said.

“Are we going to go through this all over again?”

She shook her head, closing her eyes.

“Carolyn?”

Silence.

“Carolyn, look at me. We were able to keep it quiet last time, but I don’t know if I can-”

“Tucker, just leave me alone,” she whispered.

Tucker was quiet. She hoped he had moved away. But then he said, “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.”

She didn’t open her eyes until she heard the bedroom door close.

Finish your makeup. Get dressed. Go downstairs. Get in the car. Go on.

But the woman in the mirror didn’t want to move. The woman in the mirror was still back there in the dark, crouched in the weeds, watching, watching, watching.

Running to the cow pen and watching Sam slit Byrne’s throat. Then hiding behind the fence, clutching the gun but unable to bring it up and point it at Sam and do what needed to be done. That had been her plan, to go along with what Sam wanted, let her kill Byrne, and then just kill her and get away. That had been her plan from the moment she got the call from Bianca to come to the flower shop. Because she knew that everything had fallen apart and that she had to take control of the situation.

But then the cop in the yellow raincoat had appeared, and she watched in horror as Sam shot him. She didn’t know why the cop was there or what was happening. Then the other man had appeared, that black man who had been at her house, the one who had been asking all those questions all over the island. She had watched as he chased Sam into the dark.

She had heard the pop of a gun somewhere back in the woods, but she was too frozen to move. Then the black man emerged from the shadows, and she watched him walk into the headlight beams, face bleeding, gun at his side.

She knew Sam was dead. There was no one left to talk, no one left to betray her, no one left she needed to control. So as the moon emerged from the clouds, she used the light to find her way out to the asphalt road. She ran with burning lungs down the dark road to the cinder-block store with the name MARY LOU’S over the door.

Greg’s blue Camry was parked in shadows. It had all been set up before they got to the flower shop, because by that point in this whole mess, she couldn’t be sure what Sam was capable of doing. Greg said nothing when she got in his car, just put the gun under the seat and drove north on the deserted road.

They were ten miles east of Clewiston by the time they passed the first Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office cruiser going the opposite way, lights blazing, sirens wailing.

The next morning, Greg had brought her a copy of the Palm Beach Post . It was the front-page story, bumping the big news of the day-a train hitting a truck- down the page. It took two days for the Shiny Sheet to catch up, with a small story on the front page, leaving out most of the details. But there was a color photograph of Tink and Dickie Lyons taken years ago at the Cancer Ball.

Tink, poor Tink.

Carolyn had always understood she could never control Sam. But she was certain that once everything was over, once they got back to the island, she could bring Tink under her sway.