Charlie had made jazz band. One of just three freshmen to be so honored.
Claire had been invited to the sleepover birthday party of the fall season and was eager to discuss pajama strategy.
It was, all in all, a banner day in the Dupree household. And Mitch was enjoying every trust-fund-limited second of it. For at least a short while, he could suspend disbelief, tell himself he was just on a business trip—a really, really long business trip to a convention without a hotel bar—and that he would not be returning to the bottom bunk of a two-man cell when this call was over.
Then Natalie got on the phone, interrupting Claire with an ominous, “Sorry, honey, I need some time with Daddy today.”
Claire chirped out a sugar-sweet good-bye—“Okay! Love you, Daddy!”—that practically pureed Dupree’s insides. Then he took a deep breath. Usually when Natalie needed time, it was something financial. Something bad.
“What’s up?” Dupree asked.
Quietly and without indulging the hysteria she was feeling—because the kids would hear if she broke down sobbing—Natalie related how a Mexican man broke into the house and held a knife to her throat until she surrendered the GPS coordinates for the hunting cabin.
“Did you call the police?” Dupree asked.
“Of course I did,” Natalie said. “They lectured me about the air conditioner. Like I needed that.”
“Are they even going to try to figure out who did it?”
“Doesn’t sound like it. They told me it was breaking and entering, which, duh, I knew already. They asked me if the guy took anything, and I said no, I didn’t think so. Then it was like they washed their hands of it. They said the only way guys like that get caught is if they try to pawn something later.”
Dupree nearly punched the wall. His wife was being threatened, and there he was, hundreds of miles away, totally worthless to her. If there was a more impotent feeling, he had yet to experience it.
“The cartel is just trying to scare us,” Dupree said.
“Well, congratulations to them. It’s working.”
“They won’t do anything,” he said, which he had to believe, because he’d suffer a breakdown if he didn’t.
She sighed loudly. “On top of that, I saw Jenny Reiner coming out of Nordstrom yesterday with two big shopping bags. To think her husband is free and you’re . . .”
“We can’t dwell on that. There’s nothing we can do about that.”
More impotence.
“I know,” she said. She knew this phone call was already running out of time, so she blurted, “I want to move.”
“We can’t afford it. And it wouldn’t matter where you went. They’d find you.”
“Mitch, I can’t live like this much longer. You have to do something.”
“Let me think about it,” he said.
“No. That’s not good enough anymore. There was a man sitting on my bed with a knife. What are you waiting for? For him to actually use it?”
“Of course not, I just—”
“I can’t take this anymore. I just can’t. I’m done.”
Then she hung up.
They still had a minute left.