Ephemeris, Ch. 10-A post-For Better or Worse (6 x 23) Caskett multi-chap WIP
Title: Ephemeris, Ch. 10
WC: ~3000 this chapter, ~22,000 total so far.
Rating: T
Summary: "Brady keeps her in the loop. Daily updates, and he's always kind. He thinks this is just about closure, though. That she's looking for a murder-something to solve. He's kind about it but she knows how it must look in pieces like this. A series of coincidences stitched together by grief into something that isn't there."
She sleeps in the guest room now. She starts her nights out there, anyway. Mostly.
It's nothing to do with Martha and Alexis. Of course it's not. They don't say anything, though she knows they think it's strange. It is strange, and she knows they worry. That if they were any less kind they'd be exasperated with the sharp angles of her. With how she forgets and all the ways she acts like a guest.
But the truth is she's trying to settle. She's trying to be better now that they're home, and his room-their room is too much. She hasn't slept there since the accident. In the city-here-she hasn't really marked the difference between day and night in any particular way.
She wanders. She paces or tries to read sometimes. In the last couple weeks she's worked the case. It feels like forever, but it's hardly been any time at all and since she said the words out loud. Since they told Alexis. It's hardly been any time at all, and she's trying to settle into this. All the things she's never been to anyone. A grown daughter with a mother to lean on. A kind of mother to a grown woman who's never had one. A not-quite widow by day and this by night.
She's trying hard to be better now that they're home, but it's just more of the same. More of the in between her life has been since the accident. She sinks down wherever she is when exhaustion finally takes her. She closes her eyes for a while, but that's not fair to them either. She doesn't want them happening upon her in a heap in random corners of the loft. She doesn't want them to worry about her of all things.
So she'd tried. She'd thought she'd try now that they're home, because anything else would be too weird. But it's too much. She knew the minute she stood on the threshold, clinging to the bookcases and seriously contemplating it for the first time. Crawling into their bed alone. It's too much.
Their room here is absolutely neat. No books waiting by the bedside. No glasses or change or crumpled receipts on the dresser or the nightstand. Nothing in the hamper and fresh sheets on the bed. Nothing at all with his scent still on it, and she wishes she'd thought to bring his robe home.
It's the exact opposite of their room in the Hamptons, because they were supposed to be gone, and he's strange about that. For a man who's nine-tenths chaos, he's strange about it.
She remembers the first glimpse of it she'd gotten. Him springing out of bed, suddenly and completely awake and moving. Wholly unlike him. Wholly unlike anything she'd known of him in those first few weeks. He'd thrown her clothes at her, muttering testily, as if he hadn't been the one to peel them off. To cast them aside and tug her urgently to the bed too few hours before.
What the hell, Castle?
Tuesday. It's late.
He'd yanked the clothes away from her then. An afterthought and a hurried, apologetic kiss as he folded them himself.
Sorry. Housekeeper. I lost track of the days.
He'd tried for something reproachful. A look down his nose, like she was to blame for the fact that they'd spent most of their time horizontal those first few weeks. But he'd only come up with a grin, wide and joyful.
Sorry. She'll be here soon.
She'd launched herself stubbornly back on to the pillows, hiding a smile at the sight of him trying to hop into his boxers and straighten the things on the dresser at the same time. Wondering where, exactly, he might put her now neatly folded clothes.
You clean for the housekeeper?
The look he'd shot her was as close to baleful as a man only half in his underwear was likely to get.
Yes, Beckett. I clean for the housekeeper. Only sociopaths don't clean for the housekeeper.
It was that times a hundred right before the wedding. They were supposed to be gone. Straight from the wedding to the honeymoon, and he'd used it as an excuse to delay endlessly. He'd sneak off from the pile of books he had to sign and straighten the medicine cabinet instead. He'd arrange and rearrange vacuum sealed bags of winter sweaters and check behind every possible piece of furniture for stray socks and things, but he never quite managed to get to the thank you notes he was supposed to be tackling.
I want to be able to just fall into bed when we get back. Everything neat so we don't have to think about anything. We can just be home.
She wants that now for when they find him. She wants to fall into bed with him. She wants to just be home.
So she starts her nights out in the guest room. She still doesn't sleep much. Less now, because she's always waiting. Trying to work the case and expecting the phone to ring. She's always waiting for there to be a break.
"Not nothing" has become too little in the few days that have passed since she braved the roadside shrine. She burns with impatience. With the need to do, but it's not her case. It's not even Brady's case, though he's been helping where he can. Helping in ways he probably shouldn't.
He's kept their names out of it. Written the tip off to high-profile weekenders chasing a dog when he made the call to the neighboring police chief. It's not a stretch. The tiny village departments specialize in discreet, and no one's in a hurry to let the news of a body in the woods leak.
But it amounts to their plan all over again. The man in the car and his partner. What's left of his partner, and a small town ME's office. It amounts to silence. Ironic.
Brady keeps her in the loop. Daily updates, and he's always kind. He thinks this is just about closure, though. That she's looking for a murder-something to solve. He's kind about it but she knows how it must look in pieces like this. A series of coincidences stitched together by grief into something that isn't there.
He doesn't know about the body in the car or Cross or the rest of the unbelievable story. He can't know.
She tells herself it's for the best, how quiet he's helped her keep things, because at least there's no new danger. For them or for Castle. On nights like this, with the TV on mute for some kind of company, she tells herself it's for the best until the sun comes up.
"Has inspiration struck, darling?"
Kate whirls around. Martha pads into the office, still tying the belt of her robe. She waves off the conversation. The back and forth of apology and denial. She drops into one of the leather chairs and scans the board.
What they call it the board for lack of a better word. It's more than a little silly. Twine strung from corner to corner along the back wall of his office. Clothespins and binder clips and some things stuck directly to the wall. Directly, defiantly stuck to the flat panel, because he's always been a brat about his fancy storyboard software, and she's not about to start using it now.
"No inspiration." Kate hangs her head. "Nothing new."
She'd been so hopeful. They'd all been so hopeful. There's a body. Parts of one, anyway, and a wrecked motorcycle. Cross must have gotten the bike from somewhere, and the body in the woods has to be someone, yet here they are. Stuck in a new round of not-quite-nothing.
Soil analysis confirms the remains have been in the ground anywhere from one to four months. The village PD recovered a scatter of foot bones and much of a badly fragmented leg. The size suggests male, and the wide scatter indicates a shallow grave and heavy scavenger activity. That's not surprising after the harsh winter, but Lanie thinks Cross was probably counting on it. An unusual amount of blood in the soil to help things along. More improvisation and Kate skips lightly over those particular details with Martha and Alexis.
It bolsters their theory, at least. Their rendition of how things went down in the aftermath. Cross would have had two bodies and a bike to ditch in short order. One in the car-their unidentified male-and one in the woods. But there's no DNA to speak of. No clothes or convenient medical devices, but there wouldn't be. Men like this-like Cross and the people who want him dead-don't have fingerprints or DNA on file. Men like this don't exist.
There's nothing to identify the bike, either. Nothing beyond make, model, and year. A Harley a lot like hers, though it's newer, and that pisses her off more than it should. There's another vehicle somewhere. The one meant to run Castle off the road in the first place. The one he would have used to take Castle away.
They assume Cross has abandoned or wrecked it by now. Ryan and Esposito are doing what they can with that. They're casting a wide net. Tracking every report on the radar, but there's not so much as a tire track to narrow things down. They have no idea what they're looking for, let alone where they might find it.
"Nothing new," Kate says again.
"You had a call earlier." Martha's tone is gentle. She leaves it hanging.
Martha trusts her. They're done with secrets, and Kate knows it's not that. But there's more to tell than she realizes sometimes. Martha is a good sounding board. She and Alexis both are. It's valuable. The roughly sketched things that tumble out of their mouths. Halting, half-formed things that tumble from her own. They make their way on to the board, a bold C in the margin. It's valuable, but there's really nothing to keep Martha up with tonight.
"Just Brady. Just checking in. Nothing new." Kate tries for a smile. Something she hopes is reassuring enough to send Martha back to bed, but no such luck.
"And yet, here you are." She settles back in the chair and gestures at the TV. Some middle-of-the-night rerun of some entertainment show. More than a little surreal with the silent plastic people half-covered by paper and post-it notes. "And not for the quality 's on your mind, Katherine?"
"The same." She turns her back on the board and rolls against the tension in her shoulders. "Trying to put the pieces together. Think of some other way Cross might have tripped up. Trying not to waste time wondering where we'd be if it were my case."
"Would you do things differently?" There's no accusation in it, just curiosity. "I mean, surely the NYPD has more resources."
"Not really." She's been at this too long. She should probably give up for the night. Make a show of heading up to the guest room and coax Martha along with her. She drops into the chair next to her instead. "I wish that mattered. Lanie's soil analysis came back a little faster, and we ordered a few more in-depth tests, but . . . having to keep it just to the four of us-doing it off the books-there's not a lot I could do differently, even if it were mine." She lets her eyes fall closed.
Martha reaches for her hand. Kate turns her palm up. There's tension in her grasp. Something Martha isn't saying.
"Martha. I don't have the energy for subtext tonight." She turns her head cracks an eye open.
"Fortunate, given that I'm hopeless at it, dear," Martha says drily. She's covering, though. She's hesitant. "We haven't heard from . . . our nemesis?"
Kate sits up. "Cross? Of course not. Martha, I would have told you . . ."
"Oh, darling, I know." She looks chastened. Tired and defeated. "I know. And I'm glad. Of course I'm glad."
"But . . ." Kate slumps into the chair again. She squeezes Martha's fingers and lets them slip free. "It means we're cold. He's not worried. It's not necessary for him to bother with me."
"Isn't that . . . doesn't it seem odd?" Martha's eyes fix on the board. On one of the too many questions they still don't have an answer for Why now? "I mean, at the time, it was everything-knowing that body in the car wasn't Richard's. For you and me and Alexis . . . "
". . . but it's not like I could have opened an investigation with it." Kate nods. It bothers her, too. It's not the first time she's turned the disconnect over in her mind. "Not with an x-ray. Not when the AG's office would have denied all knowledge. Assuming they didn't just arrest everyone involved."
"Still. It was enough to bring him out of the woodwork."
Martha's mouth twists. She's more and more vocal about her distaste for Cross. It's funny by day. She's funny. Razor sharp about him. But the scars show by night. She blames herself. Kate knows the signs too well.
"I should've been more careful. AG's office is how I found out Anderson Cross was wanted by the CIA in the first place." Kate shrugs. It's the simplest explanation, but it itches. It's unconvincing, and the itch is something more than just dead-of-night paranoia. "Assuming that wasn't a cover story . . . Either way, I should have known better than to lean on McCord like that. He has to have eyes and ears inside a dozen federal agencies."
"But he hasn't heard the buzz from our charming Village Police Department?" Martha looks dubious, and rightly so.
"He's heard." She hates saying it out loud, but it's true. He has to know. About the body. About the bike. He must, and she knows what the silence must mean. She grits her teeth. "He just . . . doesn't care. We don't worry him."
"And why is that?" Martha raises her hands-a sweeping gesture at the board. "Another accident-a body-and all of it along the same stretch of road? It's a hell of a story, dear."
"Hell of a story no one would believe." Kate scrubs at her eyes. Any other night she'd close them right here. She'd reach for a different kind of nothing for a while. "He's still running the game. Even if I could tell Brady or Gates or . . . someone, they'd never believe it."
"No, dear. I don't suppose anyone like that would believe it."
There's something odd in her tone. Something absent that makes Kate look up. Martha's attention is fixed on the TV. Kate follows her gaze to the flat panel. It's the tail end of whatever mindless show's been on. The lead-in to something new. Another piece on him. The cover of Wild Storm gives way to his book-jacket picture. She hates it. Marketing always goes for the empty ones that hardly look like him at all, but it hits her solid in the ribs. It always does.
Martha gropes on the coffee table for the remote. She hits the volume button a few times.
. . . tragic and untimely death has resulted in unprecedented interest in the author and his work. Publisher Black Pawn projects record-breaking sales for Richard Castle's final two novels.
Kate takes the remote from her. She blindly fumbles for the mute button. Her heart pounds. "Martha . . ."
"Katherine, you said it yourself. He's running the game." Martha sits forward in her chair. "Why are we letting him?"
"Because it sounds crazy. I sound crazy." She stares down at the carpet as if that can keep the world from shifting under her. "And he might . . . Cross might . . ."
"He might what?"
Martha asks quietly and Kate doesn't have an answer. She doesn't know what she's afraid of any more. She doesn't know what there is to fear that doesn't already have her walking the floors night after night.
"So long as Richard stays dead . . ." Kate murmurs, her mouth almost too dry to form the words. "That's the only card he has to play. He has no friends, no backup. The only way he he can keep Castle alive is if the world thinks he's already dead."Her voice sounds odd in her own ears. Level and dismissive, but the rest of her is alight. Crawling and tingling and new breath filling her lungs like she's standing on the edge of something. "But what if he's right? What if it is the only way?"
"What if he is, darling?" Martha shakes her head. She's afraid. She's afraid, too, and somehow it steadies Kate to know. Martha is no fool. Alexis isn't. They all know this is life and death. "Richard would never choose this. He would never settle for a life that kept him away from us forever."
Kate is silent. Stiller than she's ever been as if the next word-the next breath or flick of fingers-will have her falling. Will have them all falling, but it might be time for that. It might be well past time.
"Kate." Martha reaches for her hands. "I refuse to believe that the one person in all the world who can keep Richard safe is the same man who used him as bait. I don't think you believe that, and Richard certainly wouldn't. He would never choose this. He'd choose his family, and it's his family he'd trust to keep him safe."
"He would. He's kind of an idiot." Kate laughs a little tearfully.
"Yes, darling, but he's our idiot."
"How?" She looks to Martha, wide eyed. She's shaken. On edge and exhilarated. At a loss and out of her own body. She's been living with silence for so long.
"We find the right audience, kiddo." Martha holds her hands fast. Anchors her. "We do that and the story tells itself."
A/N: Thanks for reading and leaving feedback. Sorry this got a little long.