Winner Take All Read online

  Dale opened his eyes to discover that Erin was shaking him awake. But his head was pounding and the world was impossibly shattered.

  Erin tore back the covers and began dragging him out of bed. “Get up and help me!”

  Erin hauled him to his feet by sheer force of her indomitable will. Dale’s dismembered brain snatched frantically at images, all of them disconnected and painful. From the hallway, the smoke alarm gave off the high-pitched peeping of a terrified mechanical bird. In the distance he might have heard a baby screaming, which should have had him flying down the hall. But his legs didn’t seem to want to connect with his thoughts.

  Erin let him go, and he bounced off the bed’s corner post before slamming into the hardwood floor.

  His two old injuries both started flaming again. For an instant, as the pain thudded louder than the shrill peeping, he wondered if somehow the dream had managed to finally breach the barrier and enter his nighttime world.

  Erin slapped his face and screamed at him. “Move!”

  This was something she had never done. Not even in their worst moments, right after her arrival in Wilmington, two months pregnant and panic-stricken at becoming just another has-been, a woman who once was famous. Back when he finally realized his love could never compete with her voice and her career.

  Then he smelled the smoke.

  Dale lurched to his feet. He almost fell, but caught himself with a two-armed embrace of the bedpost. Erin was only half dressed and her hair hung tangled about her face. The baby was there in the room with them. Celeste lay upon a towel on the floor, squalling and kicking in panic. His daughter watched him with eyes that pleaded for him to pull himself together.

  “Hurry!”

  Then he saw the smoke.

  Somehow he managed to get into his pants. He struggled with a shirt Erin handed him, then flung it aside. He slipped into the first shoes he found, from two different sets and on the wrong feet. But it didn’t matter, because the smoke was pouring under the bedroom door.

  Erin had the baby in her arms, wrapped in a wet towel with another draped around her head. Erin handed him a third, but he couldn’t make it work and still see where he was going. So he tossed it down. Then he had to pick it up again after he opened the door and met a solid, billowing wall.

  The smoke was acrid and it burned. He peered down the hall but saw no flames. He started forward, pulling Erin along behind him. The smoke’s heat was something unexpected. His mind remained disconnected, like sparks flying up and disappearing into the final night.

  He moved on reflex alone. Dale entered the guest bedroom over the slanting sunporch roof and rushed to the window. When he could not get it open he broke it with a chair, tearing out the entire frame and terrifying his baby girl even further.

  He stepped onto the roof, almost lost his balance, then turned back for the child. Erin refused to hand her over, but instead let him help her step out. Together they scrambled around to the north side, where the smoke was less intense. They slipped over the lip of the roof and climbed down the trellis.

  They stumbled across the back lawn and down to where his yacht was moored on the canal dock. It seemed to take forever to quiet the baby, but it had to be done before he could even hear what Erin was saying. “You have to call the fire department.”

  Even now that his heart no longer threatened to shatter his ribs from the inside, he still could not make his brain connect properly to his tongue. “Automatic.”

  Though the word came out slurred and distorted to his own ears, it was enough to catapult Erin to her feet. “What?”

  “They installed a new security system after the break-in.”

  She turned panic-stricken eyes toward where flames began pushing through the kitchen window. “I can’t be seen here! Not by anyone, not now! The press will eat me alive!”

  Erin cupped his chin with both her hands, weaving her head so that it stayed centered upon his wandering gaze. Or perhaps it was merely his internal focus that moved. “You can’t take care of the baby in all this, not without a home. You understand that, don’t you? I’ll go and take the baby until things are settled down. Can you understand what I’m saying?”

  Dale was trying his best, but the drink still had his brain in a vise that squeezed all thoughts into a boiling mash.

  Erin took a moment to pull her clothes right. Then she picked up Celeste. Their daughter immediately started to fret. Dale’s one last coherent thought, before he slipped back into the welcoming blankness, was the fury that crossed his former wife’s face as the baby began to squall.

  CHAPTER

  ———

  2

  THE FIRST TIME she sees the darkness revealed, the child is seven years old. It will be another seven before she has a name for what she sees. If she has to name it now, it would be terror.

  She has to dress up for dinner, and beneath her sky-blue dress she has on a starched petticoat and white socks and polished black shoes. She wears a matching velvet-silk ribbon in her hair. Her mother comes in at precisely six-fifteen to make sure she is dressed. Her mother has a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. She leaves lipstick stains on the rim of her cigarette as she smokes. The ice tinkles in her glass as she stands over her daughter and surveys her above the rim of her drink.

  “Head up straight. Okay,” her mother says. “Now give me your best curtsy.”

  That usually means there will be important people for dinner. Tonight her mother has a flat void in her gaze. Her mother has very pale eyes. But sometimes they grow dark and shadow-filled. Like now. Instantly the child knows it is going to be a very bad night.

  The sick fear begins to flood her legs, and she flubs the curtsy. But her mother’s attention is already downstairs. She rolls herself off the doorframe and leaves without another word.

  The child knows something is wrong inside her family. People tend to think that a seven-year-old child is not worth noticing. So they show her things they assume she cannot understand. The child has a space behind the parlor sofa where she has built a little corner all her own. A wormwood table with legs narrow as fairy pillars backs up against the pale velour sofa. They know she is there, or at least they should. She crouches there almost every evening before dinner.

  There isn’t much the child can do for fun, dressed as she is. So she takes two of her favorite dolls and she slips beneath the Irish linen tablecloth. The table bears two crystal decanters, one for her father’s scotch and the other for her mother’s gin, along with a beaded silver ice bucket and a lead-crystal bowl filled with roses. Her little hideaway is filled with the scent of fresh flowers and light filtered through the damask. It should be a perfect fairy palace. She is supposed to only come in this parlor with her parents before dinner, or when her mother orders her to help serve tea to guests. But on rainy afternoons she sneaks in so she can create a world of soft light and perfumed bliss. But tonight the prince and princess do not transport her to a more beautiful and happy land. No matter how she moves them about or whispers words for them to say, her hands hold two plastic figures with lies for smiles.

  “You went out to the tracks again, didn’t you.”

  “Of course not.”

  The child’s fingers slip, and the plastic man with the sparkling crown and perfect teeth falls to the carpet. She picks him up and tries to concentrate harder. But the words from beyond the damask will not leave her alone.

  “I had a conference that took all afternoon.”

  “Where?”

  Her father rattles the ice in his glass and walks over. She can see her reflection in the polished toe of his hand-stitched broughams. “At the office. Where else?”

  “I called the office. They said you left before lunch.”

  “I went out for lunch with the boys, then we met in the conference room on the eleventh floor.” Her father poured and poured and poured. “You want me to sketch you a diagram of my afternoon?”

  As soon as her father moves away, the child c
an hear the tread of her mother’s high heels thunking softly across the Chinese carpet. As she refills her glass, smoke from her cigarette drifts down and under the damask. “I can’t believe this is the best excuse you could work up. Or maybe you just don’t care enough to try anymore.”

  “This is some welcome. Here I am, working on the biggest deal of my entire career, and you’re hounding me over where the conference took place.”

  “Harry, I spoke with Deveraugh.”

  “You called the chairman’s office? You got some nerve.”

  “No, Harry. He called here. Wondering if you’d taken sick.” A long drag on her cigarette. “Want to rethink your little tale?”

  When her father speaks again, his voice holds a hard edge from the whiskey still in his throat. “So I took a little time off. So what.”

  “How much did you lose this time? A thousand? Five thousand?” Her mother grinds out her cigarette so hard the crystal ashtray beats musically upon the sideboard’s top. “Ten?”

  “It’s my money.”

  “No, Harry. It’s our debt. Here I am, juggling bills like crazy, hoping we can make it through another month. And what do you do but go out and blow us deeper into the hole.”

  “Like you don’t know how to spend.” He sets down his glass, or tries to, but misses the table’s edge. The glass thumps on the carpet and rolls toward the child, spilling ice and the last caramel drops. “One afternoon at Saks and you can outspend the Pentagon.”

  A slender hand with fingernails dyed a deep blood red reaches for his glass. “You’re such a loser, Harry. Such a—”

  The child flinches even before the blow, as though she knows it is going to come, only not precisely when.

  The strike holds a musical quality. Bells chime and jingle, for her father has struck with the phone. Then more bells, for her mother careens against the sofa-table and drags off the damask and the crystal in her fall.

  She catches herself on her hands and knees, turns, and gives her child a single look. This look frightens the child more than anything else that night. For her mother is smiling, sharing with her daughter a furious satisfaction.

  Her mother rises and announces in a vicious hiss, “You will never touch me again.”

  She leaves the room without another word.

  Her father walks over, plucks his decanter off the floor, then stands in the puddle of spilled scotch as he fills his glass. Only when he ambles back to the room’s opposite side does the child crawl across the carpet and out the door.

  The next morning, her mother comes into her bedroom. The flat void is still in her eyes and her voice. Powder is caked over her features, and her hair is coiffed so that it falls across one side of her face and down her shoulder. But when she leans over, the child can see that the ear is very swollen. The skin around her eye and cheekbone is also puffy. Her mother grips the child by both arms. “If anyone ever asks you, we have a perfect family. Your parents are the best mother and father anybody could ever have.”

  “But—”

  She shakes the child violently. “Say it!”

  “A perfect family.”

  “And who has the best parents in the world?”

  “I do.”

  “Don’t you ever forget it.” Her mother rises and leaves the room.

  Later that day, the child throws the prince and princess doll into the trash. The maid, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador with three small children, hastily retrieves them. That night she and her husband spend hours talking about the strange habits of rich people, and how they teach the lesson of waste even to their young.

  THE PHONE RANG and Marcus Glenwood glanced out his window as he slid upright in bed. The stars were still a faint wash against the western border. He had been awaiting this call for over a month. Ever since Marcus had made the horrible error of asking Kirsten to marry him.

  That particular night had been a gift of fabled perfection. Not even Kirsten’s customary reserve had been able to resist the enchantment. After an intimate dinner they had walked Raleigh streets perfumed by a coming summer storm. When he had reached for her hand, she had responded by wrapping an arm around his waist, drawing close, and laying her head upon his shoulder. Not even that had been enough, however, and a second arm had reached across to form a ring of union around his middle. Then she had sighed his name, sung it almost, so comfortable with him and the night she had turned his name into a melody of promise. So he had asked her. Boom. Surprising himself almost as much as her.

  Kirsten had said nothing for a time, but even before the arms had retreated he could sense her withdrawal. The past four weeks had not improved matters. The further they moved to time’s relentless tread, the quieter she became, the more repressed. Which was why he had been dreading this call.

  So before Marcus answered, he took a moment to settle his feet upon the floor. He felt the coolness of time-honed wood and fixed himself firmly in the here and now. He stared out the back window at trees not yet detached from the night and hoped for wisdom. Then he picked up the phone.

  “Marcus, good, I was afraid it would be your answering machine and I didn’t have idea one what I was going to say. Are you awake?”

  It was a woman’s voice, and familiar. But his relief that the caller wasn’t Kirsten left him unable to identify anything further. “Totally.”

  “You know who this is?”

  He did then. “Judge Sears.”

  “At four-thirty in the morning it’s Rachel, all right? We need to talk.”

  Rachel Sears was a fragile-looking brunette with piercing emeralds for eyes. She was also a district court judge and a friend. In the past two elections, a number of women had shoved aside the dinosaurs who had come to assume the bench was theirs by right. These new judges were introducing a novel brand of compassion and judicial sharpness.

  Marcus took a hard breath. “I’m here.”

  “Yesterday a young woman caught me outside the court. She was crying and lost, and had two babies doing the frantic routine at her legs. You got the picture?”

  “Yes.” It was a common enough scenario. Single mother, poor reading skills, drawn to court by some legal document that terrified her. The bored Highway Patrol officer who pulled detail at the information booth downstairs, a duty they all loathed, likely as not had sent her to the wrong floor. In the central foyer by the elevators she would confront a series of yard-long computer printouts listing the day’s cases by courtroom, randomly assigned and not in alphabetical order. Between four or five hundred names in all.

  “She’s being evicted. I glanced over the document. Pretty standard stuff, failure to pay for ninety days, three warnings. Now she’s been locked out. Her belongings have been confiscated to pay back rent. But something about this one bothered me all night. Then an hour ago it hit me. Just by chance, I mean, this is in the million-to-one category, I had another eviction cross my desk three weeks ago. I’ve got the case file in front of me now. Similar deal, young single mom, preschool kids. The same southeast Raleigh address, thirty-four units in the complex. With me so far?”

  “Are you at the office?”

  “Came in to check the facts, see if my mind was playing tricks from lack of sleep. It wasn’t.” There came the sound of rustling papers. “The first woman refused a court-appointed attorney, she wanted to make sure she had a chance to tell her story in court. She accused the landlord of soliciting sexual favors in exchange for rent.”

  “Nothing new there.” Tenants facing eviction were a clan that shared information and tactics. Nothing frightened most landlords like the prospect of public shame.

  “Their details match to a surprising degree. Both mothers are black and in their late teens. Both claim they were offered nice apartments for half the going rate. Both say once they were settled in, the landlord propositioned them.”

  Marcus recalled the first time he had tried a case in Judge Rachel Sears’ courtroom. The woman had become a mother only six months prior to being elected to the ben
ch and was still fighting the postbirth weight battle. The robes had left her looking both dumpy and frail. Then she had seated herself upon the dais, and the skin of her face had pulled back so taut that her lips had almost disappeared, as though she was consciously shedding every vestige of laxity. From mother and friend to wielder of power.

  “I continued the case over to this morning. I also obtained the names and addresses of three other women who this defendant claims had the same thing happen to them.”

  A robin took roost just outside his open window, and mocked the dawn’s treachery with song. “You want me to obtain affidavits and confront the landlord in open court.”

  “The young lady gave her previous address as your side of Rocky Mount. I arranged for a shelter to take her and the children last night. But she needs someplace semipermanent.” Judge Sears read out the names and addresses. “Marcus, do I have to tell you anything more?”

  “This phone call never happened,” Marcus confirmed.

  He disconnected, took another breath, and dialed Deacon Wilbur’s number from memory. As he listened to it ring, his mind wandered back to his waking thought, and the fear that Kirsten’s call would be to say she was leaving him for good.

  He and Deacon collected the young woman and her babies, spoke with two of the other women, then headed downtown. By the time they arrived on the Wake County courthouse’s third floor, the babies were squirming and cranky.

  Her records claimed Yolanda was nineteen. The elder of Yolanda’s two children, a boy, was almost two and looked huge in her arms. The daughter was about six months old and far lighter in skin tone than her brother. Yolanda crossed the foyer with the blank-faced sullenness of one who was well used to living without hope.

  Marcus staked out the stairway while Deacon stood sentry before the elevators. Deacon Wilbur was a retired black pastor who revealed his seventy-plus years in the gaunt caverns at his temples. Deacon had never studied much besides the Bible; his formal schooling had ended at nine when his sharecropper daddy had ordered the boy to join him in the fields.