Always You (2 page)

Sitting in the direct line of Grayson’s penetrating stare, Chiara wished more than ever that she had just stayed in information systems with John.

“Thank you, Mr. Emmitt,” she muttered graciously.

“You’ve always demonstrated unshakable loyalty to your USITI family, Chiara,” Grayson continued. “I trust you’ll turn to us, should you need to, in the coming days.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand what’s going on.” She sat up straighter, but avoided Grayson’s unreadable stare, opting instead to keep her eyes on his severely slicked back iron-gray hair.

“Chen Zhou was found dead in his apartment this morning, apparently from an accidental drug overdose. Did you know that Chen was taking Valiaz and Mitrazepam?”

“Wh-What?” Chiara faltered. “Drugs?”

“Valiaz is an anxiolytic and Mitrazepam is an hypnotic,” Grayson coolly explained. “Apparently Chen was being treated for anxiety and insomnia.”

Chiara shook her head. As her mind grappled with what Grayson was saying, she tried to remember ever seeing Zhou take medication, any medication. A firm believer in herbal and natural remedies, Zhou was the one who had taught her the Ayurvedic concept of
vata
,
pitta
and
kapha
, the three
doshas
that governed all metabolic activities. If Zhou had trouble sleeping, he’d been more likely to take melatonin than Tylenol. As for anxiety, until their last night in Tokyo, Zhou had been one of the most easy-going, laid back people Chiara had ever known.

“The body was discovered by Chen’s sister,” Grayson continued. “She was supposed to have met him for lunch on Tuesday, and when he didn’t make the appointment, she became concerned. I blame myself for this catastrophe, Chiara. Chen was behaving strangely after this latest junket to Japan, and I failed to delve deeper into the situation after our meeting Monday morning…”

Grayson continued to speak but Chiara’s own thoughts blocked his words from her ears. Zhou was dead? He’d killed himself? It was impossible, too impossible, no matter what Grayson said. Chen had acted out of character in Tokyo, but he’d been in control, for the most part. He’d made sense. Nothing of what Grayson was saying was making any sense.

Grayson spoke in his usual toneless fashion, as though he were reading stock reports rather than giving her the details of the gruesome death of her partner, and Chiara forced herself to listen to him.

“We here at USITI had our suspicions, but we saw no need to drag you into the mess Chen was making of his life,” Grayson said, “but now I wish that we had. Did you ever see Chen abusing drugs, Chiara?”

The numbness that had settled into her ebbed a bit, to allow a renewed burst of shock. “Chen didn’t do drugs.”

“Security cleaned out his office this morning and found unprescribed Valiaz.” His unblinking stare held Chiara in place. “I was as surprised as you are to learn that Chen was not only using, but that he would bring such filth into our home at USITI.”

“But, Mr. Grayson—”

“I understand your shock, Chiara. He was your partner, after all. If he could hide his habit from you, then how could anyone else foresee the inevitable disaster to come?”

She stood up on shaky knees and paced around her chair. “This doesn’t make any sense at all, Mr. Grayson.” Her voice shook with unshed tears as the reality of Chen’s death sank deeper. “Zhou and I have spent more time with each other than with anyone else over the past few years. We’re friends. How could he have hidden a drug habit from me? How could he have performed his job so well if he were an addict?”

“I have no answers for you, Chiara. All I have is the evidence from Security. I understand that this is distressing to you, but I have to ask you a few more questions about Tokyo.” Grayson sat forward, tenting his hands on the desk. “Did Chen mention anything to you, anything at all, about his future plans with USITI?”

“He wasn’t interviewing elsewhere, if that’s what you’re asking,” Chiara almost shouted. Zhou was dead, and all Grayson cared about was whether or not Zhou planned to quit?

“I have reason to believe that Chen was engaged in activities that would undermine the integrity of USITI’s products,” Grayson said, his voice a degree or two cooler. “While I am indeed saddened by his tragic demise, I have a company to run, and I need to know if Chen’s actions in Tokyo have put my life’s work at risk.”

Hot tears squeezed from Chiara’s eyes and she blinked them away. “He got drunk in the bar on our last night, but other that, he seemed fine. He didn’t do anything else out of the ordinary.” She used the heel of her hand to scrub away a fresh fall of tears. “I’m sorry, Mr. Emmitt. I’m shocked. I…this is unbelievable. Zhou…” She covered her mouth with one hand and wept openly; all the while her mind replayed her last encounter with Chen.

Grayson spent a long moment studying her, narrowing his eyes as though he could peer directly into her skull and read her thoughts as they were born. Apparently satisfied with her response, he dropped his gaze. “I’m sorry to have been the one to tell you about Chen, but I thought it best that you heard it from me, rather than on the midday news. You’re going home for the holidays, yes?”

She nodded. Words couldn’t squeeze past the hard, heavy lump in her throat.

“Perhaps that’s best, for you to get away for a few days. Take as much time as you need, Chiara.” He turned to his right to face his computer monitor, and Chiara took that as a sign of dismissal.

“Thank you, sir.” She started for the door, but halfway across the cavernous office his voice stopped her in her tracks.

“You should be scared.”

She jerked around to face him, her breath frozen in her chest. “I-I’m sorry, Mr. Grayson?”

His lips pursed in mild annoyance before he repeated himself slightly louder and more clearly. “I said you should be there, at Chen’s funeral. It will be the day after tomorrow, on Saturday. Chen’s family is handling the arrangements. You should be receiving the details in a company e-mail scheduled to go out this afternoon.”

“Y-Yes sir,” Chiara managed. “I’ll be there.”

“Chiara?” Grayson called once more. “Your sister Kyla had a baby recently, yes?”

She nodded as she dried her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve. “A girl. Niema. She’s six months old.”

“She was rather large at birth, wasn’t she? Nine pounds, four ounces?”

A shiver crept along Chiara’s spine. Niema’s newborn photo sat on one end of her desk, along with the photos of her other nieces and nephews, but Chiara couldn’t recall ever mentioning the baby’s birth statistics to anyone other than Chen Zhou and John.

“Family is important, Chiara, and I’m glad you’ll be spending some time with yours. I hope you’ll see what’s important and what’s worth risking. Chen failed to do that. I’d like to think that perhaps, in the end, he realized the error of his ways.”

“Zhou was a good man, Mr. Grayson,” Chiara insisted quietly. “I never saw him take pills, not once, in all the time I knew him. And you couldn’t have asked for a more loyal employee.”

Grayson tented his hands on his desk. “I admire your faith in your coworker. However, I’m afraid I can’t afford such emotional generosity. You see, Chiara, Chen failed to turn in an important piece of hardware upon your return from Japan.”

Baffled, Chiara soundlessly wondered what Grayson was referring to.

His icy gaze boring through her, Grayson explained. “The R-GS master chip. It’s missing.”

As always, Abby had a full house for Christmas Eve dinner. Cars lined both sides of the street of her mother’s block, but Chiara’s expert parallel parking ability had enabled her to squeeze her sporty rented Mazda between a gargantuan SUV and a station wagon four houses down from her mother’s.

She tucked her formless suede handbag under the passenger seat before she got out of the car and activated the alarm. She then pulled her white fox fur coat closer about her and started for her mother’s house. The cold night was bright with starlight and a dusting of new snow that put a fresh face on the seven inches that had fallen two days earlier, assuring St. Louis a white Christmas. Chiara’s rabbit-lined reindeer-hide mukluks left indistinct footprints in the sprinkling of snow as she crossed the street and stepped onto the sidewalk. She wondered who was in attendance this year, not that she would recognize too many of her mother’s and sisters’ guests. She hadn’t spent too many Christmases at home in recent years, and as she climbed the seven steps to her mother’s front walkway, she realized how far out of her family’s loop USITI had taken her.

How far I’ve
allowed
the company to take me
, she amended. She turned and sat on the top step leading to the porch, her back to one of the brick support pillars.

The mukluks and her coat had been purchased in a small town near the Kuskokwim River, one of the colder regions in Alaska during the winter months. Her clothing was warm enough to keep the chill off the Yup’ik salmon fishermen who lived on Nunivak Island, and as Chiara shivered, she realized the chill came from within. Ever since her conversation—inquisition was more like it—with Grayson, she’d had a hard time keeping warm. And keeping calm.

Though Grayson had stuck himself to her hip throughout Zhou’s funeral four days ago, he’d said nothing to her the whole time. The hopeful part of Chiara wanted to believe that Grayson’s silence was out of respect for her grief. The rational part of her felt otherwise. That part of her knew that Grayson was watching her every move and listening to every word she spoke.

Everyone in sales and public relations, as well as a few other miscellaneous USITI employees, had attended the traditional Chinese funeral. Zhou’s family had been there, his parents and siblings looking otherworldly in their white mourning apparel. Zhou’s coffin was covered in wreaths of flowers bedecked with ribbons, a testament to the respect people had for Zhou and his family’s status. Chiara herself had burned incense for Zhou, along with a pile of money, to honor Zhou’s ancestors and to make sure that he had enough money for the next world.

Other than to straighten the tiny white lilies Chiara wore in her hair, Grayson hadn’t made the slightest effort to interact with anyone at the ceremony. Even now, five days after the funeral, Chiara cringed at the memory of the black suit and red silk tie Grayson had worn to the funeral. Grayson had seen to Chiara’s schooling in the cultures of the countries in which she did business, but he’d never bothered to learn a thing about them himself. Had he taken one of his own cultural sensitivity seminars, he’d have known that “Zhou” was Chen’s first name, not his surname, and that the color red at a Chinese funeral is taboo, a symbol of disrespect toward the deceased.

Chiara thought that she’d cried all the tears she could, but sitting on her mother’s front stoop listening to the sounds of her family in the warm house triggered fresh waves. As a part of life, death made sense. But Zhou’s death remained utterly senseless, no matter how hard Chiara tried to find a reason for it. From their years of working and traveling together, Chiara and Zhou had become closer than most spouses, even closer than siblings; Chiara safely assumed that she knew him better than anyone. It was impossible for her to make herself believe that Zhou had overdosed, accidentally or otherwise.

Grief consumed her, and all she wanted to do was fling open the front door and melt into her mother’s embrace.

The big, wide front windows, opaque with condensation, blurred the figures moving behind them and the splashes of color provided by the Christmas tree lights. The tall, shadowy figures in the living and dining rooms were adults, probably enjoying coffee and dessert. The shadows in the little room off the dining room, her mother’s tiny library, were shorter and more active, indicating that Chiara’s nieces and nephews were probably assembled within it. Conversations spilled from the slightly open windows, and listening closely, Chiara picked out individual voices in the dining room.

“There ain’t no Chinese tap dancers an’ you ain’t never gonna see no Chinese tap dancers,” came a loud male voice that slightly slurred its words.

“Come on, Hippolyte,” responded a voice Chiara recognized as that of her brother-in-law, Lee. “Asian people have excellent body mechanics. Think about martial arts.”

The drunken voice boisterously harrumphed. “Kung Fu ain’t ’bout rhythm, it’s ’bout reaction. That’s why you don’t see no Chinese tap dancers. You just proved my point, boy…”

“Clarence!” Chiara jumped at her sister Ciel’s voice, which had an unusually sharp edge to it. “You get right on upstairs and check things out!”

“I’m in the middle of a game, Mama,” Clarence complained from what Chiara marked as the library.

“You better get up to that bathroom,” came Ciel’s dark, motherly warning.

“Why do you want him to go to the bathroom?” Lee asked, clearly intervening on his son’s behalf.

Chiara barely heard Ciel’s growled response. “Because he smells like he wiped sideways. Now get him up to the bathroom before I go in there and choke him. He told me he took a shower today, and obviously he didn’t…”

“Catch him, Keren, he’s got Mama’s salad tongs,” Cady said, her voice full of laughter.

“Come here, Sammy,” Keren called gently.

Chiara pictured him hoisting her little nephew up in his arms and gently prising the salad tongs from him.

“He says it’s his bionic hand,” Cady explained, her voice close to the front door. “Lee’s been teaching him all about
The Bionic Man
.”

“And
The Six Million-Dollar Woman
!” Sammy piped in.

“There he goes,” Cady laughed over the thunder of Sammy’s footsteps, which retreated deeper into the house. “That child of mine wears me out. I’d be all set if
Sesame Street
came in pill form…”

Chiara tuned out the voices of her loved ones and turned her thoughts inward. As much as she wanted to see everyone, she was in no hurry to do it all at once, with God only knew how many strangers surrounding her. Zhou’s funeral and the rest of the work week had left her drained, and while she knew that only the care and concern of her family could fill that emptiness, she couldn’t bear to face them with a houseful of strangers present.

She shivered and drew her warm coat closer about her. She was an outsider now, made so by her dedication to USITI. She had stayed away too long and traveled too far.

She thought about going back to the car and waiting there for the crowd to thin, but she didn’t really want to hide out in the tiny rental any more than she wanted to sit on the cold stoop. Movement equaled warmth, so Chiara fastened her coat about her, flipped up her wide, rabbit fur-lined hood, and went back down to the sidewalk. Pulling on her white wool gloves, she started down the street, toward Tower Grove Park.

* * *

Each step closer to the park gave Chiara a profound sense of déjà vu. Her feet traveled a path she hadn’t taken in months, past houses that seemed so much smaller and shabbier than she remembered, yet still achingly familiar.

She passed the tiny brick house that had belonged to Mrs. Lafayette, who’d turn her water hose on you if she caught you snitching fruit from her heirloom cherry tree. Chiara had a vague recollection of her mother mentioning Mrs. Lafayette’s death a few months back, but apparently that hadn’t stopped the life-size plastic nativity scene, complete with a black Mary, Joseph and Jesus, from making its annual appearance on her snow-covered lawn.

The house next to Mrs. Lafayette’s had its usual candy cane motif, with the more recent addition of a giant inflatable candy cane ridden by a teddy bear in a Santa hat. The best house, though, was near the corner of Alfred and Magnolia Avenues, right across the street from the park. This was the house that neighbors never failed to complain about, the one that people came from all over St. Louis to see.

While other families were displaying jack o’ lanterns and cutouts of bats to celebrate Halloween, the Mahoneys—led by Almadine Mahoney, the daughter of a genuine hell-and-brimstone-breathing Baptist preacher—shunned all things associated with All Hallow’s Eve. She commandeered her husband and two sons in a project that began on October 31 and ended on Thanksgiving: the preparation of their home for its showy Christmas display.

Every angle and window of the two-story brick house was traced in light, but Almadine didn’t stop there. Every bush, tree and fixture on the property, as well as the driveway, was also draped or outlined with tiny white lights in preparation for Thanksgiving Friday, the day Almadine invited a select number of friends and neighbors to her home for what her sons John and George called “The Ignition.”

Chiara crossed the street in front of the Mahoneys to get the full effect, and she wished that she’d brought her sunglasses with her. She laughed out loud, convinced that she’d seen the Mahoney house from the airspace above St. Louis as her flight had come into Lambert Airport.

When they were kids, John would complain about how the light from his own house kept him awake at night, and he couldn’t wait until New Year’s Day, which the Mahoney men celebrated by taking down all of the Christmas lights.

There were a number of cars in the Mahoney driveway, but Chiara couldn’t pick out John’s. If his mother had had her way, and she always did, John’s sensible Saab was parked in the garage, squeezed between Mr. Mahoney’s fat Cadillac and Almadine’s prissy Mercedes. Almadine Mahoney would have wanted to leave as much driveway space as possible for the select guests she’d invited to her annual Christmas Eve dinner and prayer meeting.

John was somewhere in that house, probably playing waiter to his mother’s guests. Chiara refused to call them friends. Almadine wasn’t the kind of woman who fostered warm friendships. She cultivated strategic alliances.

It would have been easy enough for Chiara to go up to the front door and knock. Almadine would have done her best to make her welcoming grimace look like a smile, and she would have admitted Chiara to the house as a demonstration of her Christian fortitude and generosity. But she would have glued herself to Chiara and John, to prevent even the remotest possibility of what she called “hanky panky” between them.

Of course, what Almadine didn’t know was that she was too late. Chiara and John had hanky-pankied in just about every room of that house but for the one Almadine shared with her husband, car dealer, Bartholomew Mahoney.

The living room drapes were pulled wide and Chiara easily spotted John’s father, his pencil-thin mustache neatly trimmed, his bald spot gleaming like a freshly glazed cinnamon bun. His bulky figure was wrapped in one of the traditional holiday sweaters his wife forced him to wear. This latest one was equipped with a tiny white blinking light affixed just below his collar. The light was the Christmas star shining its brightness over the embroidered nativity scene stretched over Bartholomew’s flabby torso. The heads of the three wise men peeped from Bartholomew’s armpit, but the baby Jesus in his manger was sandwiched between two rolls of belly fat.

Almadine, her stick-thin figure perched stiffly in a leather and brass wing chair, held court beside her husband, who had a bottled beer propped on one knee and a plate piled high with food on the other.

Chiara glanced at the upper left corner of the house where a soft square of golden light warmed the night. If John had managed to escape his mother’s gathering, he was probably holed up in that room, his old bedroom, which Mrs. Mahoney had turned into an office three minutes after John’s departure for George Washington University.

In the old days, Chiara would have hidden in the shadows and crept to the side of the house and used Cecile Brunner to help her scramble up to the second floor. It had taken years for Chiara to realize that Cecile Brunner was not a person, but a variety of rose that Almadine had spent years training to climb a twenty-five foot trellis on the side of the house.

“Cecile Brunner’s not doing well this year,” Almadine would mutter to herself as she mixed her special fertilizer blend in the backyard. Or, “Cecile Brunner looks better than ever!” Almadine would crow. Thanking Cecile Brunner for her helpfulness in reaching the second floor of the Mahoney home undetected, Chiara would scale the trellis like a circus performer and tap on John’s window.

Accepting the fact that she wasn’t fifteen anymore and with no assurance that John was even in his room, Chiara didn’t feel like climbing the trellis or even ringing the doorbell. Shoving her hands into her pockets, she moved on, crossing deserted Magnolia Avenue to disappear into the park, and easily found her way to the paths she knew best despite the camouflage provided by the fresh fall of undisturbed snow.

Her mukluks left the snow virtually undisturbed as she moved among the poplars and silver birches, the silent sentries saluting the night, their bare branches making puzzlework of the purple-black sky. Chiara had seen much of the world and had left her eye prints on ancient wonders, yet her snowy neighborhood park remained one of her favorite places on earth.

She passed the darkened stone tennis clubhouse and its courts where she and her sisters had spent exactly one Saturday afternoon striving to become candidates for Wimbledon; she paused at the snow-frosted wading pool where the Winters girls had spent dozens of hot summer days. Almadine associated swimming with public nudity so she never allowed her sons to play in the shallow waters, but that had never stopped John from sitting on the edge of the pool, his jeans rolled up to his knees, kicking water at a frolicking Chiara.