Friends 2 Lovers, Volume Four: Hidden in Plain Sight by Jonathan Anthony Burkett is coming soon. Here is the first chapter, free.
Heads up: this book picks up right where Unexpected Consequences (Volume 3) ends, so this chapter gives away how that book ends.
Tuesday December 8, 2015
6:15 am
Claude and Kelly's House, Miramar
The house was still dark when Claude Jr. woke up hungry, and Kelly was already awake to hear him.
She hadn't really slept. She had lain beside Claude listening to him snore and to the ceiling fan turning slow circles, counting the hours down the way she had been counting them down all week. When the baby started fussing she was out of bed before he could get his full cry going.
"I know, I know," she whispered, lifting him out of the crib. "Mommy's here."
Four weeks old and already loud like his father. The second she settled into the rocking chair and gave him what he wanted, the whole world went quiet again. Her body still didn't feel like her own. Everything ached a little, and every two hours somebody small needed her. But this part, the rocking and the warm weight of him, she loved.
Daisy came padding down the hall in her pajamas, dragging her blanket behind her like a cape. Twenty-two months old, and she had already figured out how to climb out of her toddler bed without making a sound.
"Mama. Baby eat," she announced, pointing at her brother like she was reporting him to the authorities.
"Yes, baby's eating. What you doing up so early, my beautiful girl?"
Daisy didn't answer. She just sat down on the rug at Kelly's feet, which was how Daisy did everything, and Kelly smiled for the first time that morning.
When Claude Jr. was back in his crib, Kelly set Daisy on a stool at the kitchen island with a sippy cup and a banana and took out the comb, the coconut oil and the box of hair ties with the plastic bobbles.
"Hold still, and you can pick the colors."
Daisy thought about it with her whole face. "Blue."
"Blue like Daddy. Of course. Your daddy got you brainwashed already."
She worked the oil through and started the first braid, her fingers moving on their own the way her mother's used to. When she lifted the hair off the back of Daisy's neck to part it again, there it was, the way it was every morning: a small crescent of darker skin at the nape, no bigger than the tip of a thumb, curved like a new moon.
The first time Latoya saw it, in the hospital the day Daisy was born, she had gone quiet and then started crying all over again.
"That's Susan's," she had said. "Lord, that's Susan's thumbprint. His mother had that same mark, same place. I used to see it when she put her hair up. That's Susan letting us know she's here."
Ever since, everybody in the family called it Susan's thumbprint, and Kelly never braided Daisy's hair without running her thumb over it once, like a little prayer.
"There. Two blue, two white. You look like a princess."
"Princess," Daisy agreed, and went back to her banana.
Kelly looked at the calendar on the refrigerator, at the square for today, which was empty because she had never written anything in it. She didn't need to.
December 8.
One year ago today, in a hospital room with the blinds closed, Kelly had given birth to a little girl, and by that afternoon the little girl was gone.
She put Daisy in front of her cartoons with the volume low. Then she went into the laundry room, closed the door, and reached into the cabinet over the dryer, behind the detergent, where she had hidden it yesterday.
One cupcake, vanilla with pink frosting, because she didn't trust herself to bake one without crying into the batter. One small white candle. One book of matches.
She set the cupcake on the dryer and struck the match on the third try.
"Happy birthday, baby," Kelly whispered.
The little flame stood straight up in the still air. She bowed her head.
"Father God, I don't know her. I know the name they gave her, but I don't know what she sounds like or what she laughs at. I don't know if she's walking yet. I don't know nothing, Lord, and I know that's what I chose. I'm not asking You to change it. I'm asking You to keep her. Whoever's holding her this morning, let them be holding her right. And if she ever wonders about me, let her know I didn't give her away because I didn't want her." Her voice broke, and she waited for it to come back. "I gave her away because I wanted her to have something better than what I had in me right then. In Jesus' name."
She didn't say amen. She never could on this one. It always felt like closing a door.
Standing there with the dryer cold under her hands, it all came back the way it always did when she let it: in pieces, out of order, too much at once.
The secret clinic visit that spring, and Claude finding the papers and walking out. Carlos behind his office door, the role he promised and the price he demanded, and what he did when she said no. The men who came for him, and the car she was pushed into before she could scream. Tim Escobar's house in Gwinnett, Georgia, with its marble floors and locked doors. The guard who came into her room that night, and Larry walking in like a savior to pull him off her, telling her softly that he was the only one in that house who could keep her safe. What she had to do to keep him wanting to. The hotel room in Orlando, and her own father firing four shots into Larry's chest in front of the police.
She had come home alive. That was the part she held on to.
Then the positive test a couple of days after she got home, and Claude's face when she told him, and her own voice saying, I can't take another life. Months of carrying a baby she was afraid to love. The adoption papers. A nurse with kind eyes asking if she wanted to hold her daughter, and Kelly turning her face to the wall and saying no, because she knew herself. She saw her daughter one time, for the length of a breath, across that room, a little red face and a head of wet black curls, and then the door closed.
After that came Claude Jr., and the second wedding in white and blue with nobody shooting at anybody for once, and the plaza with their names on the sign, and the foundation. A life she had prayed and fought for.
She had started seeing a therapist after it all, a calm, sharp woman named Dr. Imani Ward. Then six months ago, pregnant and tired of crying in an office, she had told Dr. Ward she was doing better and stopped going. She had told herself it was the truth.
Standing over a cupcake in a laundry room at a quarter to seven in the morning, she wasn't so sure anymore.
The door opened behind her.
Claude stood there in a white T-shirt and basketball shorts, eyes heavy with sleep. He looked at her. Then he looked at the candle burning on top of the dryer.
"I woke up and you wasn't there," he said finally. "Daisy's in there watching her little pig show. I didn't know where you went."
"I'm right here."
"Yeah." He stepped in and pulled the door almost closed. The laundry room was too small for both of them. It always had been. "That's for... today, right? For her."
Kelly nodded. She didn't trust her voice.
Claude looked at the little flame like it was something that could bite him. She could see him reaching for words and not finding them, the way he did every time this subject came anywhere near them. For a whole year he had called her "that baby" when he had to call her anything, and mostly he didn't call her anything at all.
"You could've told me," he said. "I would've... I don't know. Got you a bigger cake or something."
In spite of everything, Kelly laughed. It came out wet. "A bigger cake, Claude?"
"I don't know what you supposed to do!" He threw his hands up and let them drop. "I'm serious, angel eyes. Nobody gave me the book on a day like this."
"There's no book."
"Then tell me what you need. For real."
Kelly looked at this man she had known since they were children, who had fought for her and failed her and come back to her, and she felt the whole year sitting between them in that tiny room.
"I need you to not make it about him," she said quietly. "Just for today. She's not his. She's not anybody's but hers. She's a little girl turning one."
Claude's jaw tightened, and she watched him fight it down. Then he nodded.
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
He put his arms around her from behind, and they stood together over the cupcake. After a minute he cleared his throat.
"Happy birthday, little girl," Claude said, so low she almost didn't hear him.
Kelly leaned back into him. Then she blew out the candle.
* * *
Tuesday December 8, 2015
10:40 am
C & K Barber and Beauty Plaza
By ten o'clock the plaza was loud. The barbershop had three chairs going and a bench full of men arguing about the Dolphins, and the salon next door smelled like flat irons and shea butter. At the far end was the glass door with the gold letters Kelly still smiled at every morning: THE CLAUDE AND KELLY FOUNDATION.
Claude stuck his head in at a quarter to eleven in his navy suit, checking his watch.
"How I look?"
"Like a man who's about to buy a hotel," Kelly said from behind her desk.
"I'm about to look at a hotel. Big difference. Twenty-two rooms on Biscayne. Old Art Deco joint, needs everything. Pop says the owner's tired and his kids don't want it." But he was grinning. He had been talking about a hotel with his name on it since they were teenagers on her mother's porch in Detroit. "You good? With the little man?"
Claude Jr. was asleep in his carrier on the corner of her desk. Daisy was at Latoya's until two, because Latoya was working the late shift this week and swore she could handle a toddler in the morning and a hotel at night and still have energy left to tell everybody what to do.
"We're good. Go. Call me after."
He blew her a kiss and went, crossing the lot to the Escalade the way he walked when he felt the world was finally going his way. Kelly said a quiet prayer that it would keep going his way for at least one more day.
This week was the toy drive. She had three hundred names, two hundred and twelve toys and twelve days until the Christmas party at the community center. She had almost gotten through the morning without thinking about the cupcake when Renata, the volunteer coordinator, came in with the mail.
"Bills, a thank-you card from that church in Opa-locka, more bills. And something for you. Personal, I think. No return address."
Kelly went through the stack the way she always did. The thank-you card had crayon drawings on it, and she stood it next to her computer. Then she came to the last envelope.
Plain white. A typed label: MRS. KELLY RICHARDS, C/O THE CLAUDE AND KELLY FOUNDATION, and the plaza address. No return address. A Miami postmark from yesterday.
Later she would think it was the label that turned her stomach over before she even opened it. Nobody typed labels anymore. Nobody was that careful unless they had a reason.
Inside was a photograph. A real one, glossy, four by six.
A little girl sat in a high chair in front of a window. She was wearing a pink paper party hat tilted sideways on a head full of soft black curls. In front of her was a small cake with pink frosting and a candle shaped like the number one. She had one chubby hand buried wrist-deep in the frosting, and she was laughing at whoever held the camera, laughing with her whole face, her eyes squeezed into happy half-moons.
Kelly's heart stopped. She felt it stop.
She didn't know that face. She had seen it once, for one breath, red and screaming. She didn't know it, and she knew it anyway, the way you know your own voice on a recording even when it sounds wrong.
Her hand shook so badly the photo slipped and turned over on the desk.
Blue ink on the back, block capitals, neat and careful.
HAPPY 1ST BIRTHDAY TO OUR DAUGHTER.
The word OUR was underlined twice.
The office was too small and too bright. Somebody in the barbershop laughed out loud, and none of it was real. Only the four words were real.
He knows where she is. He's been close enough to take her picture. He knows where I am. He knows what today is.
Beside her, Claude Jr. stirred in his carrier and made a small sound, and that sound brought her back.
Kelly took one long breath in through her nose and let it out through her mouth, the way Dr. Ward had taught her. Then another.
The old Kelly would have known exactly what to do with this. She would have put it in the bottom of her purse and then the back of a drawer and told nobody, so that nobody she loved had to carry it with her. And Claude would have found it eventually, because Claude always found everything, and he would have done something none of them could take back.
Not this time, she thought. He wants me scared and quiet. He wants me hiding it. That's what he's counting on.
She didn't touch the photo again with her fingers. She slid a clean sheet of printer paper under it, folded it over, eased it back into the envelope and put the envelope in a manila folder. Then she called a number she had hoped she wouldn't need again before the trial.
"Arnold."
"Detective Arnold, it's Kelly Richards."
In the pause she heard him come all the way awake. "What happened? The kids?"
"Everybody's fine." She was surprised how steady she sounded. "I got something in the mail. From him. I need you and Ms. Castillo to see it today."
"Don't touch it no more than you already did."
"It's in a folder."
"Good. State Attorney's office. I'll call Castillo and meet you in the lobby." Another pause. "Kelly. Does Claude know?"
Kelly looked at the baby sleeping on her desk.
"Not yet," she said. "I'm calling him after."
* * *
Tuesday December 8, 2015
12:15 pm
Office of the State Attorney, Miami
Assistant State Attorney Renée Castillo was a small woman with short gray hair, reading glasses pushed up on her head and a voice that never got louder than it needed to be. In a year Kelly had never once seen her rushed. She read the four words through a clear evidence sleeve, turned the photo over to look at the little girl, and turned it back.
"Monday postmark," Detective Arnold said from the window. He still moved a little stiffly since the bullets he took at the wedding, and he had only been back on full duty since the fall, but his eyes were the same as always, tired and sharp at once. "Mailed so it would get here today. He planned it."
"He'll say he didn't send it," Kelly said.
"Of course he will," Castillo said. "And there won't be a print on it, and the label will have come out of a library printer. None of that matters as much as you think. A judge knows who has a reason to send a sexual-assault victim a photograph of the child she placed for adoption, on that child's birthday, five months before trial. His hearing is already on the calendar for nine tomorrow. The defense wanted his conditions loosened." She almost smiled. "His timing is unfortunate. I'm going to ask the judge to revoke his bail."
"Will she?"
"Probably not, on this alone. But she'll remember it. And so will he, because he'll know you didn't hide it." Castillo looked at Kelly over the table. "Most people in your position hide it."
"I used to," Kelly said.
Detective Arnold had known her since she was sixteen, since the worst week of all their lives in Detroit. Something moved in his face that she couldn't read.
"Is it her?" Kelly asked him. "Is it really her?"
He didn't pretend not to understand. "I can't know that without making calls I'm not supposed to make. A closed adoption is closed for a reason." He looked down at the photograph. "But if I was him and I wanted to hurt you, I wouldn't send you a picture of some other child."
Kelly nodded. She had known it already. She just needed somebody else to say it.
Castillo glanced at the baby asleep in his car seat, and her face softened for the first time. "Go home, Mrs. Richards. Hold your babies. I'll see you at nine. And call your husband before somebody else does."
* * *
Tuesday December 8, 2015
12:50 pm
Biscayne Boulevard, Miami
The meeting had gone better than good.
Claude sat behind the wheel in the little lot behind the hotel, tie loosened, still turning it over. The roof leaked, the elevator was older than Anthony, and the lobby floor was original terrazzo, green and gold, and when the sun came through the front windows it lit up like the inside of a church. Claude had fallen in love with it in about four minutes.
"Don't let the man see it on your face," Anthony had laughed on the sidewalk. "You looked at that lobby like you was looking at Kelly on your wedding day."
His phone lit up on the dashboard. Angel Eyes.
"Baby, you should've seen this place. The floor in the lobby, I'm telling you—"
"Claude."
Just his name. It took the grin right off his face.
So she told him. The envelope and the typed label and the little girl in the pink party hat, the four words and the word OUR underlined twice. That she had driven straight downtown with the baby. What Castillo said about tomorrow.
Then she stopped talking and waited.
Claude didn't say anything.
He stared through the windshield at a dumpster and a stack of old pallets with a stray cat asleep on top in the sun. He could hear his own breathing. He could hear, very far back in his head, the sound his phone made when he threw it against the wall in Detroit after the videos came. The screen cracking. Himself screaming.
The silence went on long enough for Kelly to say, very softly, "Claude? You still there?"
"He sent it to the foundation," he said. His voice didn't sound like his own. "To our building. With our names on the door. On her birthday."
"Yes."
"And you went to the police first. Before me."
"Yes," Kelly said. She didn't apologize. "I went to the police first. And then I called my husband."
Claude closed his eyes. Some part of him, the part that had sat in therapy rooms and church pews and graveyards, understood exactly why she did it, and was even proud of her. The rest of him wanted to find Larry right now and put him through a wall.
He hit the steering wheel once, hard, with the bottom of his fist. The horn let out a short, ugly blast, and the cat jumped off the pallets and ran.
"Claude!"
"I'm alright." His hand was throbbing. "I'm sorry."
He breathed in and out, hard, three times. Then he said the thing that had come to him in the middle of the silence, cold and clear.
"Tomorrow's the bail hearing. Tomorrow I'm going to be standing in the same hallway as him, and he knows it." He laughed, with nothing funny in it. "He didn't just send that picture to you, Kelly. It's for me too. He wants me to lose it."
Kelly was quiet for a moment.
"Then don't," she said.
* * *
Wednesday December 9, 2015
5:00 am
Uncle Devin's Gym
The gym was dark except for the lights over the ring, and it smelled the way it always did at that hour: leather, bleach, old sweat, and the coffee in Uncle Dev's office that nobody ever cleaned.
Clinton Johnson sat on the ring apron with his hands out, palms down, and let the man wrap them.
He had always liked this part, even back when he was sixteen and angry at everything, sleeping at the Jameses' house because his own mother didn't want him in hers. Before the cameras and the pay-per-view money and the long winning streak, there was this: the gym empty, the tape going around and around. It was the only time all day his head got still.
"Too tight?"
"Nah. Good."
The trainer worked without hurry. He was a quiet man, built solid but not flashy, his head shaved clean and his face plain in a way people forgot as soon as they looked away. He wore gray sweats, the same gray sweats every morning, it seemed like. When he leaned forward to tear the tape with his teeth, his collar slipped and Clinton saw the edge of the scar again, pink and puckered, just under his collarbone. Clinton had seen the others once in the locker room, four of them close together on the man's chest.
Coach never talked about it. Surgery, was all he ever said about the spring of last year, when he went away for months and came back thinner and quieter than ever. Mr. James said a man's business was his own business, and that was the end of it.
"How's your mother?"
"Good. Real good." Even four years after that New Year's Eve, when his mother held him in her kitchen and cried and said she was sorry for everything, it still felt strange to say it and mean it. "She keeps sending me pictures. My little sister had her birthday party Sunday. Cake all over her face, man. Look like she went swimming in it."
The trainer's hands didn't stop. "That's how you're supposed to do it at one. Make a fist."
Clinton made a fist. The wrap was perfect. It was always perfect.
The trainer slid on a pair of focus mitts, and something almost like a smile touched the corner of his mouth.
"Big week, champ," he said.
Clinton laughed and hopped down off the apron, rolling his neck. "Every week's a big week with you, Coach Larry."
"That's right. Every one of them." Larry raised the mitts. "Jab."
Clinton jabbed. The pop of it echoed off the empty walls.
"Double. Now the right. Hands up, don't admire it."
They went three rounds in the dark with the street outside still black. Larry called the punches in a low, even voice, and every time Clinton's glove cracked into the mitt, Larry's face stayed exactly the same, calm and patient and forgettable.
When the timer buzzed, Larry tossed him a towel. "Roadwork. Four miles. Devin's meeting you out front at six. I got to leave out early."
"Again? Where you got to be?"
"Business. I have somewhere to be at nine."
Coach never explained, and Clinton didn't ask. He went out front to wait for Devin, bouncing on his toes in the cold, and Larry walked alone to a plain gray Camry under a broken streetlight at the far end of the lot.
He sat in the car for a minute with the engine off. Then he took out his phone and scrolled to a picture of a little girl in a pink party hat, laughing, one hand buried in a cake.
He looked at it for a long time.
On the back seat, in a dry-cleaner's bag, hung a charcoal suit tailored to fit a body that had healed around four bullets, and a white shirt, a silk tie and a pair of black shoes polished like mirrors.
Larry put the phone away, started the car, and drove toward downtown to get dressed for court.
To be continued in Hidden in Plain Sight, coming soon.
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