34

 

The storm passed us, moving on through the bayou as the morning light edged the dark skies upward. Sometime during those hours the hurricane whirled itself back out to sea, leaving rain and weakened winds in its wake.

I woke in Jake’s arms.

Michelle lay next to us, silent and shocked, but alive.

I tried to sit up, but pain shocked through my shoulder. I sucked in a breath, wincing through the hurt.

“Shh,” Jake murmured and eased me back against his chest. “Help is coming any minute, just be still.”

It wasn’t quite any minute. It took half the day for them to find us.

Toughie and Girard floated in the still surging current and yelled our names. When they found us, they looked like they thought a joke was being played on them. They couldn’t believe we’d survived.

During the ride home, Toughie kept glancing back at me, a small smile on his lips.

Girard saw to my flesh wound and the cut on Michelle’s neck. He patched up the wound on Jake’s shoulder.

Jake hovered close to Michelle and me, a silent guardian.

When Girard was done, Jake took the blanket from him, draped it over Michelle, and hugged her when she looked up at him with sorrowful eyes. She had a lot of healing to do.

With an uncle like Jake, and a mother who loved like Citrine, she’d be OK.

Toughie looked back at me again and I caught his gaze, raised my eyebrow.

“You OK?” I asked Toughie.

“Just never seen anything like it, Red,” he said finally.

“What’s that, Toughie?” Jake came over to me and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders.

“So much trouble and triumph in one small package,” Toughie said under his breath.

Jake turned to him, wrapped his arm around me, and gave me a crooked grin that sent flutters through my chest.

“You have no idea,” Jake teased.

 

****

 

I learned a lot over the next two days in the hospital.

La Foudre, busy with recovering from Hurricane Erin, didn’t much care about what came out of those terrible moments in the shack, but the rest of the nation did.

Jake kept the reporters out of my room and funneled information to me. With no working television in my room, I had to rely on news from phone calls and visits.

My mother came to see me in the La Foudre hospital. She arrived with flowers in hand, and I hoped we could make peace over our actions and words last time we were together.

She nodded to my arm in a sling and frowned. “Does it hurt much?”

“You should see the other guy,” I joked and knew my morbid humor would spur her to talk, even if to correct me.

She tossed a newspaper on my lap, the North County Chronicle.

“What’s this?” I picked it up. It stung more than a little to get scooped by my own paper.

“Susan Lockhart is talking to anyone who will listen,” My mom intoned angrily. “Too bad she didn’t do that earlier.”

“She was afraid of Everest, I think.” I unfolded the paper with my good hand and saw Park Davis’s name on the exclusive article. I sighed.

Ouch.

“At least she’s setting the record straight.” My mother pulled a chair over and sat down. Brushing the wispy red tendrils from her forehead, she shook her head, a sad look on her face. “Apparently, she approached Randy during an art class they shared and asked him to help her prove Grossman Chemical Engineering had covered up the fact that her father’s death was a result of their negligence.”

I remembered the article in the Tulane student paper about Randy being on a safety commission grant and told my mother.

“That’s probably what gave this Susan Lockhart the idea that Randy would help her.”

“She would have known, anyway,” I corrected with a sad smile. “He was a Drake.”

“Yeah.” My mom watched me read. “It’s a pretty good piece, Riley.”

I skimmed the article by Davis. He interviewed Susan in her New Orleans jail cell.

“Says she already had an infatuation for Everest and volunteered with his organization in New Orleans when she dropped out of Tulane.”

“She introduced your brother to him believing they could work together since they traveled in the same circles.”

“She hadn’t been too far off.”

I didn’t mention that even my mother had sought out Everest’s help not too long ago.

Willow shrugged, wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I knew she was thinking the same thing.

“The MP3 you lost, the FBI recovered it from that…that man who attacked you and it corroborates Susan’s story that she and Randy discussed ways to get Grossman Chemical to admit their illegal activity. That’s when Grossman’s head of security started harassing them. Randy and Susan closed down their social network accounts and stopped going to classes out of fear he’d hurt them.” My mother cried softly. “Why didn’t he ask for help? Why did he do this alone?”

“Randy thought someone was trailing him, reading his email, listening in on phone calls. That’s why he wrote a letter to me.” I nodded slowly, finally understanding the depth of my brother’s desperation. “He was so scared he coded it in Latin.”

“And the post card?” Willow asked, her eyes rimmed with tears. “He hid that behind one of his drawings knowing you’d find it.”

“If Everest hadn’t messed up the drawing, if he hadn’t made it look like a crazy man’s bizarre images, I would have found it sooner.” I took in a ragged breath. “He had me so fooled, Willow. Everest had everyone fooled.”

“Yes, but if Randy hadn’t hidden the sketchbook and you hadn’t found it…” she wiped her eyes with the pads of her thumbs. “I doubt the FBI would have taken a second look, but you did. You believed in him.”

“I had no idea the trouble he was in. If it wasn’t for John—”

Willow arched a brow. “Who?”

“The Chicken Guy,” I explained. “If he hadn’t mailed me Randy’s letter in the first place…”

I didn’t want to entertain the idea that Randy would still be lost to lies and deception. I didn’t have to read Davis’s article to know what happened.

Everest, though initially involved with Randy for the same altruistic reasons, lost sight of the purpose behind Randy’s drive to help Susan.

Everest wanted fame. He wanted his organization to be known for championing the little guy. Everest wanted to be the David to Grossman Chemical’s Goliath, but things went terribly wrong. Especially when Randy sensed something was off with Everest and tried to back out of their plan.

It was Everest who forced Susan to make the calls to Park Davis at the paper and to Grossman Chemicals. He did it to get me off his trail. Everest, seeing Susan’s infatuation, talked her into spying on me and feeding him information. In turn, Susan recruited Michelle. All along, he’d been pulling strings, ahead of me at every turn.

Ahead of everyone.

Susan told me. She’d been allowed to write me a letter that Agent Harris hand delivered when he visited. Her words shed light on the events that led to that fateful night at the plant. She explained how she convinced Randy to go ahead with the fire demonstration, neither of them realizing that Everest had snapped, and doused the area they planned to use with magnesium in an effort to heighten the blaze and call national attention to their efforts.

His sights were set on the world stage, but he panicked when the explosion killed a third shift crew that had just started that night. No one knew they were going to be there.

When I arrived at the plant after hearing the phone message from Randy where he told me not to believe what they told me…I didn’t know at the time he was referring to Grossman Chemicals and their lies about how Susan’s father died.

His letter in Latin explained it all…

Sorrow follows me. In my right hand is lightning, in my left hand death. We are dominion. We are protectors. Understand our message.

Susan was sorrow and she followed after Randy, pursued him to help her. He used the skill of his trade—his right hand—that created the explosive meant to start a small fire. In his left hand was death, the secret he meant to expose. He and Everest were meant to be protectors, to prevent more deaths…the message was clear to me now, but I got lost somehow. I’d failed to understand Randy…his last words to me were not about him at all.

He’d wanted me to take up the cause, to write about the injustice suffered by Susan and her mother, the lies and intimidation by Grossman Chemicals. Randy believed I could help.

I never had the chance. When I followed a hunch to the plant that night…it was the last time I would ever see my brother alive.

But I remembered that night now. In the hours I lay awake since the hurricane, I remembered with startling clarity the events of those last moments of my brother’s life. He’d run back into the blazing building to try and save the workers and managed to push me to safety before the explosion killed him.

Willow put her hand on mine, pulling me out of my dark thoughts.

“Riles,” She looked at me with red, puffy eyes. Crying eyes. “We can still fix this. We can still save your career. I know that offer—”

“I don’t want those things anymore,” I said, and saw the wind go out of her. “I don’t want that life.”

She nodded slowly, her face pulled into a sad smile. I wondered if she already knew I felt this way, but needed me to say it out loud.

“What do you want then, Riley?” she asked, and honestly seemed to not know.

I put my hand over hers. “I guess I want to make my way as Riley, not as a Drake. I want to live, really live, for what I believe. At least, I want to try to.”

She searched my eyes with her own copper-colored ones and nodded slowly. “I believe you will, honey, I believe you will.”

Jake showed up the morning after my mother left. He had on his jeans and T-shirt and held his black hat as he looked down at me with that amazing smile of his. His crooked grin took my breath away.

He told me that Paul Lyle, the La Foudre coroner who fled in the wake of Dauby’s death, returned and agreed to testify alongside Susan.

“He had a lot to say,” Jake said as he sat on the edge of my bed and held my hand. “He said that Grossman’s head of security threatened him and his wife if he didn’t change the cause of death for Susan’s father.”

I tried to sit up, but my shoulder, torn by Jake in his attempt to keep me from flying off into oblivion, sent shards of pain through my chest, and I froze.

“And Grossman Chemicals?” I said after a few minutes.

Jake stood, pulled an ice pack from the hospital table and placed it gingerly on my shoulder. He smoothed my hair with his hand, his expression concerned.

“Ah, they cut ties with the guy. They’re screaming that they had no idea all this was going on.”

“Bet they’ll make a nice gesture,” I said and smiled. “My mother said she heard rumblings of a huge settlement for the families of the men who died in the explosion.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” I said sadly. “There’ll still be fallout for my family over Randy’s involvement, but my mother will smooth it out with the press. She always does.”

Jake nodded, his lips pulled into a thin line, thinking.

I tugged on his T-shirt sleeve with my thumb and forefinger. “Did you ever find out who set Dauby’s house on fire?”

“No. Either Everest, or Susan. Doesn’t really matter, now.”

“Everest caused so much heartache out here.” I bit my lip. “So much pain.”

Jake nodded, his dark eyes holding mine. “You wanted the truth…was it what you hoped it would be?”

I thought for a second, a tear sliding down my cheek as I considered his question.

I found out that Randy was a man who fought for those who weren’t strong enough to do it themselves, who acted out of honor, who believed in truth right up until the moment he left this earth.

“Yeah,” I said and smiled through my tears. “I don’t regret a second.”