Flesh and Blood

“As I’ve said what probably happened is someone got hold of your card at a restaurant or in a store.” Benton turns another page and I trace the straight bridge of his nose, the curve of his ear. “That’s what Lucy thinks.”

“Four times since March?” But I’m thinking of our shower, the shiny white subway tile and the sounds of water falling, splashing loudly in different intensities and rhythms as we moved.

“And you also let Bryce use it when he places orders for you over the phone. Not that he would do anything reckless, at least not intentionally. But I wish you wouldn’t. He doesn’t understand reality the way we do.”

“He sees the worst things imaginable every day,” I reply.

“That doesn’t mean he understands. Bryce is naïve and trusting in a way we aren’t.”

The last time I asked my chief of staff to make a purchase with my credit card was a month ago when he sent gardenias to my mother for Mother’s Day. The most recent report of fraud was yesterday. I seriously doubt it’s related to Bryce or my mother, although it would fit neatly with the history of my dysfunctional familial world if my good deed were punished beyond my mother’s usual complaints and comparisons to my sister Dorothy, who would be in prison if being a self-consumed narcissist were a crime.

The gardenia topiary was an insensitive slight, since my mother has gardenias in her yard. It’s like sending ice to Eskimos. Dorothy sent the prettiest red roses with baby’s breath, my mother’s words exactly. Never mind that I went to the trouble to send her favorite flowering plant and unlike cut roses the topiary is alive.

“Well it’s frustrating and of course my replacement card will get here while we’re in Florida,” I remark to Benton. “So I leave home without it and that’s not a good way to start your vacation.”

“You don’t need it. I’ll treat.”

He usually does anyway. I make a good living but Benton is an only child and has old family money, a lot of it. His father, Parker Wesley, shrewdly invested an inherited fortune in commodities that included buying and selling fine art. Masterpieces by Miró, Whistler, Pissarro, Modigliani, Renoir and others for a while would hang in the Wesley home, and he also acquired and sold vintage cars and rare manuscripts, none of which he ultimately kept. It was all about knowing when to let go. Benton has a similar perspective and temperament. What he also absorbed from his New England roots are shrewd logic and a Yankee steely resolve that can endure hard work and discomfort without flinching.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t know how to live well or gives a damn what people think. Benton isn’t ostentatious or wasteful but he does what he wants, and I scan our beautifully landscaped property and the back of our antique frame house, recently repainted, the timber siding smoky blue with granite gray shutters. The roof is dark slate tile with two dusky redbrick chimneys, and some of the windows have the original wavy glass. We would live a perfectly charmed and privileged existence were it not for our professions, and my attention returns to the small copper coins not far from us, flaring in the sun.

Sock is perfectly still in the grass, eyes open and watching my every move as I step closer to the wall and smell the perfume of English roses, apricot and pink with warm shades of yellow. The thick thriving bushes are halfway up the vintage bricks, and it pleases me that the tea roses are also doing especially well this spring.

The seven Lincoln pennies are heads up, all of them 1981, and that’s peculiar. They’re more than thirty years old and look newly minted. Maybe they’re fake. I think of the date. Lucy’s date. Her birth year. And today is my birthday.

I scan the old brick wall, some fifty feet in length and five feet high, what I poetically think of as a wrinkle in time, a wormhole connecting us to dimensions beyond, a portal between us and them, our lives now and the past. What’s left of our wall has become a metaphor for our attempts at barricading ourselves from anyone who might want to harm us. It’s really not possible if someone is determined enough, and a sensation flutters inside my mind, deep and unreachable. A memory. A buried or scarcely formed one.

“Why would someone leave seven pennies, heads up, all the same date?” I ask.

The range of our security cameras doesn’t include the far corners of the wall, which leans slightly and terminates in limestone pillars completely overtaken by ivy.

In the early 1800s when our house was built by a wealthy transcendentalist, the estate was an entire block surrounded by a serpentine wall. What’s left is a crumbling brick segment, and half an acre with a narrow driveway of pavers and a detached garage that originally was a carriage house. Whoever left the pennies probably won’t have been caught on video and I feel the same uneasiness again, a remnant of what I can’t recall.

“They look polished,” I add. “Obviously they are unless they’re not real.”

“Neighborhood kids,” Benton says.

His amber eyes watch me over the top of the Boston Globe, a smile playing on his lips. He’s in jeans and loafers, a Red Sox windbreaker on, and he sets down his espresso and the paper, gets up from the bench and walks over to me. Wrapping his arms around my waist from behind, he kisses my ear, resting his chin on top of my head.

“If life were always this good,” he says, “maybe I’d retire, say the hell with playing cops and robbers anymore.”

“You wouldn’t. And if only that was what you really played. We should eat fairly soon and get ready to head to the airport.”

He glances at his phone and rapidly types what looks like a one or two-word response to something.

“Is everything all right?” I hug his arms around me. “Who are you texting?”

“Everything’s fine. I’m starved. Tease me.”

“Grilled swordfish steaks Salmoriglio, seared, brushed with olive oil, lemon juice, oregano.” I lean into him and feel his warmth, and the coolness of the air and the heat of the sun. “Your favorite panzanella. Heirloom tomatoes, basil, sweet onions, cucumbers …” I hear leaves stirring and smell the delicate lemony fragrance of magnolia blossoms. “… And that aged red wine vinegar you like so much.”

“Full-bodied and delicious just like you. My mouth is watering.”

“Bloody Marys. Horseradish, fresh-squeezed key limes and habanero to get us in the mood for Miami.”

“Then we shower.” He kisses me on the lips this time, doesn’t care who sees it.

“We already did.”

“And we need to again. I feel extra dirty. Maybe I do have another present for you. If you’re up for it.”

“The question is are you?”

“We have a whole two hours before we need to leave for the airport.” He kisses me again, longer and deeper as I detect the distant rapid stuttering of a helicopter, a powerful one. “I love you, Kay Scarpetta. More every minute, every day, every year. What is this spell you have over me?”

“Food. I’m good in the kitchen.”

“What a happy day when you were born.”

“Not if you ask my mother.”

He suddenly pulls back from me almost imperceptibly as if he just saw something. Squinting in the sun, he stares in the direction of the Academy of Arts and Sciences a block north of us, separated from our property by a row of homes and a street.

“What?” I look where he’s looking as the helicopter gets louder.

From our backyard we can see the corrugated metal roof the green color of copper patina peeking above densely wooded grounds. The world’s top leaders in business, government, academia and science routinely speak and meet at the Academy’s headquarters, the House of the Mind as it’s called.

“What is it?” I follow Benton’s intense stare, and the roar of a helicopter flying low is coming closer.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I thought I saw something flash over there, like a camera flash but not as bright.”

I scan the canopies of old trees and the multiangled green metal roof. I don’t notice anything unusual. I don’t see anyone.

“Maybe sunlight reflecting off a car window,” I offer and Benton is typing on his phone again, something brief to someone.

“It came from the trees. I might have noticed the same thing earlier, caught it out of the corner of my eye. Something glinted. A flick of light maybe. I wasn’t sure …” He stares again and the helicopter is very loud now. “I hope it’s not some damn reporter with a telescopic lens.”

We both look up at the same time as the deep blue Agusta comes into view, sleek with a bright yellow stripe and a flat silver belly, its landing gear retracted. I can feel the vibration in my bones, and then Sock is cowering on the grass next to me, pressing against my legs.

“Lucy,” I say loudly and I watch transfixed. She’s done this before but never at such a low altitude. “Good God. What is she doing?”

The composite blades whump-whump loudly, their rotor wash agitating the tops of trees as my niece overflies our house at less than five hundred feet. She circles in a thunderous roar then pauses in a hover, nodding the nose. I can just make out her helmet and tinted visor before she flies away, dropping lower over the Academy of Arts and Sciences, circling the grounds slowly, then gone.

“I believe Lucy just wished you a happy birthday,” Benton says.

“She’d better hope the neighbors don’t report her to the FAA for violating noise abatement regulations.” All the same I can’t help but be thrilled and touched.

“There won’t be a problem.” He’s looking at his phone again. “She can blame it on the FBI. While she was in the area I had her do a recon. That’s why she was so low.”