DOUBLE KNOT Read online

  “Well.” Mother crossed her legs. “Somebody could have said so.”

  Confusion and angst had been Jessica’s only two channels since we’d walked in the door of 704 and they crashed into each other right then and there on the white linen sofa as Fantasy’s words hit home: Her husband was the reason she was trapped in 704.

  “So, what is Max doing?” Jess’s dark eyes made several rounds against ours, seeking answers none of us had, finally landing on mine. “What is going on?”

  “That’s just it, Jess,” I said. “We have to work together to figure out what he’s doing and what’s going on.” I placed the picture of No Hair in front of her. “Do you know this man?”

  Her head bobbed. “Mr. Covey.”

  “Right,” I said. “He’s our boss.”

  Jessica’s head continued to (spin) bob.

  “They have him, Jess. Your husband and his pilot, whatever they’re up to, they need you, us, and our boss out of the way.”

  Jessica picked up the picture of No Hair and examined it. “So, why isn’t Mr. Covey locked in here with us? Why is he in the submarine?”

  And just like that, we located No Hair.

  “So?” Jess shook No Hair’s picture. “What is going on?”

  “Jessica.” I took the picture from her. “You’re the only one who knows.”

  “What?” Her arms flailed through the air. “I don’t know!”

  She knew more than she thought she knew. She just told us where No Hair was. “Think, Jessica,” I said. “If this is your husband’s pilot, and together they’ve locked us in here, it means Poppy,” I pointed to the sun deck, “was working for or with your husband. Maybe if we can connect her to him, we’ll figure it out. Think, Jess. Think.”

  “Think?” She bounced balled fists off her temples. “I can’t.”

  “Picture Poppy in a different place,” Fantasy suggested. “In different clothes, with different color hair. Think about her voice. Have you ever heard it before?”

  “She’s someone your husband is associated with, Jessica,” I said. “Maybe she was one of his clients. Think. Think hard.”

  “You two hold your horses.” We’d forgotten Mother. “She can’t hear herself think. Give her a minute. And you,” she said to Jess, “stop hitting yourself in the head.”

  Time stopped and the ship stopped.

  We stared at each other in disbelief.

  The Caribbean Sea calm, Probability an engineering masterpiece, the weather fair, it was easy to forget we were in constant motion. Until we weren’t. It wasn’t a jolt, a halt, or anything discernable. It was utter and complete stillness.

  “It’s so quiet.” Jessica’s eyes drooped, her head began wobbling, then boom. Fantasy jumped up and caught her before she face planted into The Compass. She eased her back. Jessica’s tongue lolled.

  We stared.

  “If that doesn’t beat all.”

  Mother reached for a fifth of whiskey on the table between us and drank straight from the bottle, then passed it to Fantasy, who tipped it back. I fell against the sofa cushions, giving the babies more room. They took advantage of it and one pushed the other into my ribs. I let out a woof of surprise.

  “What’s the matter with you, Davis?”

  I waved her off. Nothing, Mother. Just your two grandchildren fighting for space in your daughter’s body.

  The silence and calm were disquieting; the silence and calm were welcome.

  We waited patiently on Jessica. She woke abruptly, her legs flying up and out, then she bolted upright. “Poppy works at the bank.”

  Yes, she did. As soon as the words came out of Jess’s mouth, I realized I’d seen Poppy too, and I remembered when and where. An image of her posture, her athletic prowess, her speed, and her blonde ponytail pushed its way from the back to the front of my memory. Six weeks ago, I’d spent that hour with the Knot on Your Life slot machines at the Bellissimo. No Hair and I walked in the front door of the slot staging room, which held wall-to-wall slot machines being programmed by the Cayman bank. I remembered the Pea in a Pod sweater I was wearing that day (I grew out of the next), and a ponytailed flash running across the room and out the back door that had caught my eye. The flash was the broken-neck blonde we just stuffed into the lesser of Bianca’s two trunks.

  * * *

  We tore up Poppy’s stateroom. We tossed it like a crime scene. We found a laptop between the mattress and box springs, a Beretta PX4 with LaserMax sights in a lockbox under the bed, and central nervous system depressants in a zipper bag between towels in Poppy’s bathroom: Temazepam, Paxil, and Ketamine.

  “What is all this?” Mother shook the amber containers.

  “Knockout drugs,” Fantasy told her.

  “Good thing she wasn’t making our drinks.”

  I sat beside Mother on the foot of the bed with the laptop. I cracked it open and pushed the power button. The screen lit up with nothing. The laptop had power, but no operating system. I tried a little of everything.

  “What’s wrong?” Fantasy asked.

  I turned it over. I shook it. I cast a spell on it. (No, I didn’t.) “Everyone look for a flash drive.”

  “Who?” Mother asked.

  “This?”

  Fantasy held up a ScanDisk Cruzer USB flash drive.

  “Where’d you find it?” I held my hand out.

  “Inside her pillowcase.”

  Smooth move. Poppy had separated the hardware from the software on the off chance one of us found her laptop. I popped in sixty-four gigabytes of computing and began what would be a slow crawl to the deep web. Not so I could shop for a kidney or join a crime ring, but so I could hide. If ever there was a time I didn’t want anyone tracking my cyber movements, it was right now. I was in a desperate hurry to communicate with anyone in any position of authority, anyone on this ship who could help us, not to mention my husband, but not at any cost. Because the cost would be our lives. I had to work smart and slow, which meant the deep web, off the grid, far below the surface, and don’t ever go there. Mother watched me while Fantasy shook out Poppy’s Probability uniforms. We had Jess pilfering through the closet. “So, what am I looking for?”

  “Anything.”

  “Anyone recognize this?” Fantasy shook a black cord.

  “That’s my phone plugger,” Mother said.

  “Look at this.” Jess opened a thick red folder she found in the closet. “It’s me.”

  “What about you?” Mother asked.

  “Everything.” She turned a page. “So, everything. Even about my father.”

  “Tell me what it says when you get to me.” Fantasy was halfway under the bed.

  “Don’t tell me what it says about me.” I was back in the laptop.

  Jess turned another page, then spoke to my mother. “So, are you sick?”

  I moved as quickly as my bulky body would let me. “Let me have that, Jess.”

  * * *

  Mother stirred whole milk with a wooden spoon in a saucepan. She folded in chocolate sauce. She whipped cream. She served it up in a beer mug, and cradling it in both hands, held it out to me. My eyes tingled with nostalgia. “Oh, good grief,” she said. “You’re crying over cocoa?”

  No. And if I actually let go and had a good pregnant cry, it would be for the babies I was sure I’d give birth to in Probability 704. It would be for my husband, halfway across the world, who had no idea. It would be for my father, who didn’t know my mother was in danger. Or for my mother, standing in front of me. I could have easily cried right then for her, for the thirty-four years we’d wasted sniping at each other, for what she’d been through, for what she might still have to go through. Or for No Hair, speaking of going through, who was somewhere near me and, at the same time, as far away from me as anyone else was and I
hadn’t found a way to get to him yet. Or maybe I’d cry for Fantasy, throwing in the towel on her marriage, or maybe for the two dead people on the sundeck, or for Jess, who was just as much a victim as the rest of us, or for the naked African children. All brought on by a hot mug of chocolate kindness from my mother. But the truth is, if I did let my guard down and have a good cry in my cocoa, it would be out of weariness. I was worn out. I was exhausted beyond all reason. I was dead on my (fat) feet. Which was preferable to being dead in a Louis Vuitton trunk.

  We were fresh out of trunks.

  It was eight o’clock and the four of us were lined up in sun chairs as far away from the private sun deck as possible and under blankets and a million stars. I’d never seen so many stars in my life. Ever. Probability remained at a standstill in the middle of the Caribbean Sea and we had no idea why. The chickens were in the refrigerator; even I had no appetite. My three companions were sipping whiskey—bourbon, Scotch, and tequila. I think they’d have been shooting doubles if we didn’t have such a long night ahead of us, but seeing as how we did, they were comfort drinking only.

  “So?”

  “So, what?” Fantasy asked Jess.

  “What’s next?”

  “We have several possibilities.” I was at the bottom of my hot chocolate and all over the laptop we’d found in Poppy’s room. We had our resources on the tables between the chairs: Mother’s useless but charged cell phone, the dead V2s, $50,000 in Probability casino chips, and, of course, The Compass.

  “What are they?” My mother asked.

  “I’ll crack Poppy’s computer in a minute,” I said. “And hopefully I’ll be able to communicate with someone. If that doesn’t work, we wait for the ship to start moving again so we can use your phone to call for help.”

  “What if the ship doesn’t start moving again?”

  A terrifying proposition.

  “Then we’ll wait until after the Tie the Knot wedding when the casino opens and get a flare up the wall.” I went in the back door of the laptop’s software programming and found control userpassword2.

  Jess raised a hand. “I volunteer myself as tribute.”

  “What is she talking about?” Mother asked.

  “It’s a line from a movie, Mother.”

  “So, I’ll climb that wall.”

  “Wearing your housecoat?” my mother asked.

  “My clothes will fit you, Jess,” Fantasy said. “You need to put some clothes on.”

  If someone had told me this morning that Fantasy would be offering clothes to Jessica tonight, I wouldn’t have believed a word of it. Not that I’d have believed at breakfast that Burnsworth and Poppy would be dead before dinner. What we’d been through in this one day of surviving 704 would make friends of even the worst enemies. Part of it was knowing we had to work together or we’d never get out, but mostly, it was widespread shellshock.

  “And because my clothes will fit you,” Fantasy said, “you can’t climb the wall. You’re too tall.”

  “Earlier today, we actually considered sending Poppy up the wall,” I said.

  “So, that’s not happening.”

  All four sets of eyes went in the direction of the sundeck past the pool.

  “You know what that’s for?” Jess asked.

  “Sex,” my own mother said. “That’s where people go to have sex.”

  “Mother!”

  “What, Davis? You think I don’t know these things?”

  I finally hacked far enough in to change Poppy’s password. I hit Enter. “I’m in.”

  “Hot damn,” Fantasy said. “For God’s sake, get the police.”

  “I’m getting in touch with my husband, then the Coast Guard,” I said. “Give me two minutes.”

  Jess leaned in. “You can make phone calls from the computer?”

  “Email, Jess. I had to break into Poppy’s computer the hard way and now I have to hack into the Bellissimo mainframe so I can send emails from a secure site.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “It’s my superpower,” I said.

  “So cool.”

  “She’s good with the cable television too.”

  “Thank you, Mother.”

  The browser on Poppy’s computer was Firefox, which saved me a ton of time on the way to the deep web, because if the Probability server was watching Poppy’s laptop for unusual activity, it might notice her downloading Firefox but it wouldn’t notice her on Firefox. She could be rolling through her Facebook newsfeed or window shopping at Killers R Us. From her Firefox browser I downloaded and installed TOR Browser Bundle (torproject.org) then filtered through to kpvz7ki2v5agwt35.onion. From there, wiki, index, php, then main page, enter, ta-da! I was deep and dark and had access to (all manner of places I didn’t want to go) the Bellissimo hard drive.

  Wouldn’t you know it. I couldn’t get past the encryption software I’d installed on the Bellissimo system.

  “Mrs. Way?” Jess leaned over me and the irony of it all, then spoke to Mother. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Can you?”

  “If you get it, like, you know that’s for sex,” Jess pointed to the (morgue) private sundeck, “why don’t you talk about being sick or her being pregnant?”

  There was no taking it back.

  In one breath, Jess managed to ask her everything the rest of us couldn’t.

  Mother took a breath so deep, it surely filled her toes with oxygen. She addressed her words to the stars. “I don’t talk about the cancer,” she said, “because it’s done. It was caught before it could do me any great harm and it wasn’t any bigger than a minute to begin with. To tell you the truth, I wonder if I really had cancer. Or if that was just the doctors having fits. But that’s done. I’m not sick and I’m going to be fine. So, what’s to talk about?”

  Not a muscle moved. Not one.

  “And I don’t go on and on about Davis making me a grandmother because she already has. Davis made me a grandmother forever and a day ago. And when she’s ready to talk about the child she already had, then I’ll be ready to talk about the two she’s going to have.”

  The dam burst and I broke into wracking raging sobs.

  FIFTEEN

  Throwing myself overboard would do nothing but punish the sea, so I dragged my sobbing self off the sun chair and blindly batted a path to my stateroom. I didn’t want to see anyone ever again. I didn’t want to talk to anyone ever again. And to tell the truth, I didn’t want to draw another breath. Ever again. I didn’t care if I ever got out of 704 or off Probability. None of it mattered in the least. And it never would. Ever again.

  Ever.

  But my babies chose that minute to stir and remind me of their father, and in the depths of my misery, I found a splinter of light and amended the rest of my life to include (breathing) my husband, my babies, and my cat. We’d live on an unmapped island. Or deep in a jungle. Or maybe this damn hostage ship would effectively cut us off from the rest of humanity. I didn’t want to see anyone else ever again. Not even my sister, Meredith. Or my niece, Riley. Or No Hair. Or Fantasy, Baylor, Bianca, or Mr. Sanders. Or even Daddy and That Woman he was married to. I especially didn’t ever want to see That Woman again, or anyone associated with her, any human she’d ever made contact with, anyone who’d ever laid eyes on her, again. Ever again.

  Ever.

  I made it through the sitting room and stumbled to the bedroom, but my journey and my plan came to an abrupt halt when I accidentally caught a glimpse of myself in the dresser mirror. My knees buckled at my own reflection. Instead of seeing the person I thought I was—Mrs. Bradley Cole, mother of twins, good wife, daughter, sister, friend—I saw the sixteen-year-old unwed mother who gave birth those eighteen years ago. Eighteen years and two months ago. Eighteen years, two months
, and five days ago. It was her in the mirror, the scared senseless stupid girl who didn’t really know where babies came from until she was carrying one. I wasn’t the contributing member of society I passed myself off as; I was the young stupid girl who thought she was doing the right thing. And I did. I did the right thing those eighteen years, two months, and five days ago. For myself.

  It was all about me then and it was all about me now.

  No wonder That Woman hated me so much.

  With the hard look at who I really was, I realized my plan would never work. I couldn’t reduce my world to my husband, my children, and my cat, because I didn’t deserve a husband and children. Or a cat. No part of me deserved Bradley—I’d known it all along—and I certainly didn’t deserve his children, and when it got right down to it, I didn’t even deserve Anderson Cooper. I made it to the hall leading to the dressing room door with the rest of my life mapped: I would deliver Bradley’s babies, pass them to him, then go away.

  I’d had it with trying to separate right from wrong. I’d had it with trying to live right, do right, be right. The wall it had taken me eighteen years and two months and five days to build had just crashed down at my feet. And with its destruction, I knew I’d have to live the rest of my life alone. I’d have to disappear. I’d live alone on the unmapped island, in the jungle, or on this damn hostage ship. All at once, I understood Fantasy wanting to get the hell out of everyone’s way. Because she didn’t deserve to be in it.

  Exactly.