Ephemeris, Ch. 8-A post-For Better or Worse (6 x 23) Caskett multi-chap WIP
Title: Ephemeris, Ch. 8
WC: ~2300 this chapter, ~16,000 total so far
Summary: "It's him. It's the absurd little details she's missing. Connections. True things and the stuff he makes up out of whole cloth. The pathos and intrigue. The way evidence becomes a story."
She needs them in the city. It's too dangerous for the two of them alone out here. Too isolated, whether or not the house is being watched, with Cross and God knows who else out there.
But leaving won't be any easier for them than going home to the loft. She knows. Kate knows.
Jenny and Ryan repair to the back porch to give them some privacy and Kate steels herself to ask. She's expecting . . . not a fight, exactly. Something worse. A fragile kind of plea that she'll give in to, and she can't. She needs them in the city.
But it doesn't play out like that. There's no argument. No plea. Alexis is stoic. Martha's weariness shows in the droop of her shoulders, but they both nod. They both say of course and murmur that it will be good to get back to the loft. Good for the three of them to be together.
They each touch her shoulder and climb the stairs side by side. They go to pack the essentials without another word. It takes the wind out of Kate's sails.
It makes her burn-the assumption that of course she'll stay at the loft. Of course they'll be together. Because she doesn't assume, however close they've grown. However they show her that she's family day in and day out. Still, she doesn't assume, and this is how she fell in love with him. This reflexive generosity. The openness and care they all turn on the world.
She drifts back to the study, abuzz with too much energy. Too much fight and nothing to do with it. She should dismantle the board. Pack up the sheets to take with her.
Ryan has already snapped careful photos on an outdated digital camera. They'll deal with them offline-careful as they need to be-but she should take these, too, if only to put the room to rights. There are people who look after the house and it's not . . . she should pack it away.
Something stays her hand, though. It feels more like surrender, and she's already asking them to leave the place that's done so much for them. The place filled with things he left unfinished.
She paces instead. The length of the board. The width of the room. She takes in Ryan's handwriting. Her own and the neat labels he's placed next to things transcribed from their conversation. L-B-E-R. She likes it. The idea and the effect. It's more like a real board at the precinct, somehow. It captures something of the process. Not just facts and speculation, but their different voices. Shades of meaning in the different ways they see the same things.
She likes it even though he's missing. Even though that hurts more than mostly blank pages and the gaps between them. There are more than there should be, and that's not just the case itself. The fact that they're dealing mostly in negatives. It's him. It's the absurd little details she's missing. Connections. True things and the stuff he makes up out of whole cloth. The pathos and intrigue. The way evidence becomes a story.
She takes up the pen again. She marks in one tentative C, then another and another. She fills them in next to things she knows from. After Paris. After Ted Rollins. But next to other things, too. Her biggest logical leaps. Intuition that she'd never allow on a precinct board, but it's here. Fixed on paper because she needs it to be. Because he's missing.
"Not easy to keep him quiet, is it?"
Kate nearly jumps out of her skin, even though Alexis's voice is soft. Even though she's hanging back in the doorway. The pen clatters to the floor. She stoops for it, buying time. She hadn't meant for Alexis to see this. Martha either, really, but Martha has her own ideas, and she's been in this from the beginning. Alexis, though . . . Kate doesn't know how it might take her. Her father's would-be murder laid out like this.
"Not easy." She comes up with the pen and uncertain smile. "It's good, though. We've always been a good team. Are you and Martha just about ready?"
Alexis nods. "Gram's just making calls the housekeeper and the caretaker."
She moves closer to board. Careful, rather than hesitant. Her fingers rise to brush the sheet with his name on it. Kate holds her breath, but she moves on almost immediately. Her hand lingers at the blue square and there's something-a shadow crosses her face that Kate doesn't think she'd have registered a week ago-but she moves on.
It's the next sheet over she stops in front of. UNIDENTIFIED MALE across the top in black marker and most of the page is blank. A few facts about the accident. A few lines of speculation. That's it.
"The man-the body in the car?" Alexis looks over her shoulder and Kate nods. She opens her mouth to explain. To tell her that there was nothing for the longest time. That she couldn't bring herself to write VICTIM on the page. That she doesn't like what that says about her, but Alexis goes on. "Who is . . . who was he?"
"We don't know, exactly." Kate hangs her head. Something unpleasant wriggles in her belly when she thinks how many times she's asked Lanie the same question. How she's pressed her and come at her from every direction, even though she knows how impossible it is. How Lanie has turned herself inside out trying to find something anyway. "A man roughly your dad's build and age. Similar enough to pass as him in an open and shut case. The man who . . . caused the accident, most likely."
There's more, but Alexis doesn't need to know that. Lanie's given her more about what Cross must have done to the body-to the car and the scene itself-after the fact. It's all slapdash. Unsophisticated, but functional. Good enough to reinforce what the plan must have been in the first place: To make it look like a one-car crash. A distracted driver, speeding on an isolated stretch of road. No evidence of foul play. No reason to suspect it.
"But who is he? What did he want?" Alexis shakes her head, her brows drawing together. It's curiosity, though. She's distant from it somehow. Like it's something she's reading. A story she's working out. Kate pictures the hundred times she must have done this with her father. The hundred stories they've told together. "Last year . . . Paris. They took Sara so it would be news . . . so he'd come." She stabs the next page over angrily. HUNT/CROSS. Not so much distance there. "Was that what he wanted?"
Kate swallows. She won't lie to her. It's not even that she wants to lie, but it's hard to give voice to. It's like that first awful moment again. The phone ringing and the realization that the waiting wouldn't end with her slamming her fists against the solid expanse of his chest. Tearing into him for scaring her like that.
"It's possible that he meant . . . that he worked for someone who wanted your father as leverage." Kate watches her own knuckles go white around the pen. "At first . . . when we found out it wasn't him in the car . . . that's what we assumed. I assumed."
"But they weren't trying to take him." Pale fingers drift back to trace the outline of the small blue square. "They were trying to kill him. Trying to make it look like an accident."
"That's . . ." Kate reaches out for the board, but her hand falls away. She wants to snatch the words up. She wants to burn them. "Given my run-in at the diner, it seems likely that's what they wanted, and Cross just . . . hijacked the plan."
"He killed the man who wanted to kill my dad."
Kate nods. A helpless gesture that Alexis can't even see. She's facing the board. Studying it.
"Why was he there?" Alexis turns to her. She's somewhere in between now. Somewhere halfway between needing to know for herself and just needing to know. Needing the story. "My dad's . . . if it wasn't about him . . . if it was supposed to just look like an accident, why was he even there?"
"The wedding." It's immediate. Matter of fact at first, and something Kate thinks she already knew-that they all must have assumed, but they hadn't gotten around to that part yet. She moves to add it to the board, but she's about to pack it up, isn't she?
And anyway, she's not sure where it goes. They've focused on how the accident played out. Where Cross would have gone from there.
Why now? That's still nagging at her. Why Cross is suddenly trying to shut her down when they're nowhere. They've gotten nowhere, haven't they?
She should know better, though. Why then? That's where the story starts, and they should all know better. The story matters. Rising action. Why Cross was there. Why that time and place.
The pen hovers over the board. The words travel up and tumble of out of her mouth. "He would have known about the wedding. He would have wanted to be . . ."
She's thinking out loud. She trails off too late. She remembers Castle's face. Cold fury. A rare moment in the middle-of-the-night, gone almost as soon as it had begun. He had a wall. Pictures of her. Years and years. Like a fucking stalker. But he never told her. Alexis. It's another thing he tried to spare her. Gone now. Another thing gone.
"He watches us." Alexis looks to her for confirmation, but she already knows. It's a statement, and there's nothing for it. Kate nods. It's bad enough, but Alexis moves on. A single grimace of disgust and she moves on. "So it was a coincidence? He just . . . happened to be there?"
"He happened to be there." Kate says thoughtfully. She taps the torn sheet. Her hand moves down. She traces the A in ACCIDENT. She pictures it. Cross keeping eyes on Castle. Wondering if the wedding would even come off. His version of fatherhood. "But the accident . . . that was planned. Cross was just working from their play book. Something that wouldn't raise any questions. A county police department and a small-town ME's office."
"And you in your wedding dress." It's soft. Pained. Alexis turns swiftly toward Kate. She's horrified. Just catching up with her own words. She reaches out to touch her arm. "Kate, I'm sorry . . ."
"No." She steels herself. Makes herself hard, even though it's awful. Another moment she never wants to relive. "No, you're right. They wanted this out of the city. They wanted us all as far out of the picture as possible, but the accident itself had to be big news. Me in my wedding dress . . ."
"But the wedding was supposed to be in Manhattan." Her pale skin lightens another shade. "You don't think they . . ."
Kate's stomach twists. All the air goes out of the room for a long, long heartbeat, and the walls lean in. She shakes her head against it, though. She doesn't have time for conspiracies around every corner.
"Page six." Saying it out loud helps. It makes sense, and she presses down hard on her own paranoia. She fights her way clear of it. "The fan sites. There were a dozen stories once we lost the venue. And they would have been watching. Looking for an opportunity. Mostly likely they heard . . ."
"They . . ." Alexis cuts in. Her hand comes to rest on the same sheet again. UNIDENTIFIED MALE.
"They," Kate repeats.
It's like the word is completely new on her tongue, but it's jangling in her head. Echoes of the last few minutes sounding out in the empty space but she doesn't know why. Not yet.
Nothing. There's too much nothing.
That's Cross's MO. She pulls the sheet with his name from the board.
She thinks about Paris. Roger Henson's body. Ted Rollins and the way Cross carried him from Coney Island to his own shower. Destroying evidence, but calling 911, too. She thinks about his smug smile.
Turn on the news.
A high-profile shootout and a chase ending in the river. Blaine's weapon on the library floor, but not his body.
Something and nothing in a carefully alternating pattern. He only leaves evidence when he wants someone to find it. When it shuts down questions or leaves her asking the wrong ones.
The X-ray was a fluke. He knew about Castle's knee, but not his hand. But it's more than that. It's Cross working under pressure. Cross without home field advantage. Without whatever back up he'd usually call, however "outside" he pretends to be.
The accident wasn't his nothing. It was theirs. And it wasn't the work of one man. They.
"Kate?" Alexis sounds worried.
Kate turns and finds herself far from the board clutching the torn sheet. She wonders how long it's been. How long she's been pacing. Making her wait.
"They," she says again. A laugh this time. She holds up the page. "Cross just happened to be there. He was improvising. But him . . ." She strides back to the board. UNIDENTIFIED MALE. She tugs at the sheet. The clip holds on to the corner and the heavy sheet tears away most of the U. A matched set with the one already in her hand. "Staging an accident . . . making sure the job got done and fixing it so no one would ask questions. That's not something you do alone."
"He had a partner." Alexis's eyes are wide.
"He had a partner." Kate feels a grin twisting at her lips. "And that's not nothing."
A/N: Again, thanks for reading and leaving feedback.