Cold Ridge. Carla Neggers
stove—it wasn’t much of an apartment. It was a one-bedroom unit on a narrow, crooked street off Inman Square in Cambridge, an eclectic neighborhood of working-class families, students and professionals. She’d painted the walls and her flea-market furnishings with a mix of mango, lime green, raspberry, various shades of blue and violet, whatever she thought would be cheerful and not remind her of the rich, woodsy colors of her log cabin in Cold Ridge.
The tiny cracker didn’t sit well in her stomach. Her mouth was dry. She was wrung out. She’d cried, she’d screamed, she’d barfed. Yep. What a rock she was. But she didn’t care. She wasn’t embarrassed by her reaction—she didn’t ever want to get used to coming upon a murder.
Manny Carrera had called the police by the time she got out to the street. He wouldn’t tell her a thing—why he was there, what he saw, nothing. Just that he was consulting for the Rancourts, whatever that meant. Then the police arrived, as well as Sterling and Jodie, their security chief, the media, onlookers. Carine and Manny were separated. He was as self-contained as ever. Definitely a rock.
“Think of it,” he’d said in the minutes before the police got there, “if you’d married North, you could be in flea-infested military housing right now.”
“Manny…I knew Louis. He—he was shot, wasn’t he? Murdered?”
“Carine, something you need to keep in mind.”
He hesitated, but she prodded him. “What?”
“Louis Sanborn wasn’t a nice man.”
He didn’t have a chance to elaborate, and she’d repeated his words to the detective when he asked her what she and Manny had talked about.
Louis Sanborn wasn’t a nice man.
Manny could have meant anything. It didn’t have to be ominous.
She switched off her kettle. Even tea wasn’t going to stay down. She wished she hadn’t called Gus. Talking to him was comforting on one level, because he was unconditionally on her side, but, on another level, it added to her tension—because he’d wanted to head to Boston. It’d been a near thing to keep him up north. She’d called him for moral support. She needed time to pull herself together. Gus would hover. He’d scowl at her living accommodations. He’d tell her she didn’t belong in the city.
He’d make her soup. He’d listen to her for as long as she wanted to talk.
Her doorbell rang, the noise sprouting an instant headache. Carine knew she was dehydrated, her reserves exhausted, but her first-floor apartment didn’t have an intercom or buzzer, which meant she had to stagger out to the front hall. Her old tenement building had three floors, with two apartments on each floor and a main door that creaked and stuck half the time, making it easy for people to just walk in.
Her sister gave her an encouraging smile and wave through the smudged glass panel. When Carine pulled open the heavy door, Antonia grimaced and shook her head. “Good God, you look awful.”
“Is that what you say to all your ER patients? I’ve been throwing up.”
Antonia felt her sister’s forehead, then grabbed her wrist. “No fever. Your pulse is a bit fast. Are you keeping anything down?”
“I just ate an oyster cracker.”
“Try a little flat Coke.”
“I don’t have any.”
Carine led her sister back to her apartment, but Antonia’s tight frown only worsened when she looked around at the kitchen and the spilled crackers. “Half the rats in Boston live better than you do.”
“What? It’s a great apartment.”
Antonia sighed. She was dressed elegantly in a black top and pants and a pumpkin-colored coat that brought out the softer tones of her auburn hair. It was shorter than Carine’s, not as dark. “You can only do so much with paint,” she said. “Why don’t you go home? Let Gus fuss over you.”
“I live here now. Don’t you remember your hand-to-mouth years in medical school?”
“That’s the point. I was in medical school. You’re just—I don’t know what you’re doing. Marking time.” She squatted down and scooped up a handful of the crackers, dumping them in the trash. “You weren’t going to eat them off the floor, were you?”
“Antonia—”
Tears welled in her sister’s eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m not being very sensitive or helpful. Oh, Carine, I’m so sorry about what happened. I’m supposed to take the shuttle down to Washington tonight. There’s some function tomorrow for freshman senators—Hank left this afternoon, before he heard about the murder.”
Carine nodded without comment.
“He’s tried several times to reach Manny. No luck.” Antonia tore open the refrigerator with more force than was required. “Do you have any ginger ale? Carine, what on earth is that? It’s blue!”
“Oh, that’s my Gatorade. I’ve been trying to do more exercise. It’s good for restoring electrolytes, isn’t it?”
“I wonder how they get it that shade of blue. Well, drink it if you can keep it down. It’ll help with any dehydration. Is there someone who can spend the night here with you? I hate the idea of leaving you alone—”
“I’ll be fine.” Carine manufactured a weak smile. “Go on and catch your plane, Antonia. I just want to crawl into bed. It wasn’t a great day for me, but I’m not the one who was killed. Poor Louis.”
“Did you know him well?”
She shook her head. “Just to say hi to.”
“What a nightmare. What is it about you and the month of November? Well, at least last year no one was killed. Look, if you need me to stay—”
“No! Go be the smart doctor wife to your handsome senator-elect husband. Wow Washington. Thanks for stopping by.”
Antonia smiled, but she didn’t look reassured. “You really won’t eat any crackers off the floor, right?”
“Promise.”
“Call my cell phone anytime, day or night. Okay? I can be on the next shuttle back here. Just say the word.”
Five minutes after Antonia left, Nate called from New York. He didn’t want to hear about crackers and blue Gatorade—he wanted to make sure Carine had told the police absolutely everything and wasn’t going to get involved any more than she had to be. She assured him she was being the good soldier.
“Good,” he said. “Keep it that way.”
Her brother, too wanted her to go back to Cold Ridge. He’d left their hometown, and Antonia had left, but they both still considered it home, their refuge. Carine, who’d never left, wasn’t as nostalgic about it, and she didn’t like the idea that she might run into Tyler North.
She promised Nate she’d take care of herself and hung up, pouring herself a glass of Gatorade. She hoped she kept it down, because damned if she wanted to throw up anything blue.
Ty made the three-hour trip to Boston in under two-and-a-half hours, but lost time in Inman Square and the tangle of five million streets that radiated out from it. He went past a fancy bakery, a hardware store, a lesbian bookstore, several churches, a mosque, service stations, a Portuguese restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, a Moroccan restaurant, a Jewish deli, a Tibetan rug shop and an Irish bar with a shamrock on its sign. He went down the same one-way street twice. Maybe three times. Where the hell was his GPS when he needed it? Never mind satellite navigation—he could have used a damn map.
Finally, he found his way to a crowded street of multifamily homes with pumpkins and mums on their front steps and foldout paper turkeys and Pilgrim hats in their windows. There were a few fake cobwebs strung to fences, left over from Halloween. A couple of strings