Such a Perfect Family, page 3
“It’ll be okay, Tavish,” she’d told me when I’d sat at the edge of our bed with my head in my hands, terrified their words would get to her, thrusting a wedge between us. “My family just needs time.” A kiss on my bare shoulder, her body pressed up to my back as she knelt behind me. “But they love me, and once they see how happy you make me, they’ll be your biggest fans.”
We hadn’t quite gotten to that stage, but her parents and brother had thawed enough to throw us a huge party, and preparations were well under way for the “big, fat, totally extra Indian wedding” that would truly cement our relationship as husband and wife in their eyes. The description of the wedding was Diya’s, my wife excited about the celebration to come.
“Come on, baby,” I said to her today. “We’re getting married a second time, remember? No Elvis impersonator with purple hair and diamante eyebrows this time.” My voice hitched, my rib cage crushing my heart. “Then you’re going to take me on a tour of your favorite spots in New Zealand for our honeymoon. You promised.”
“We’ll drive to Milford Sound,” she’d said one dreamy night as we sat side by side at the end of their jetty while the stars sparkled overhead, the Milky Way so much brighter here than in the glittering metropolis in which I’d been born—and where I’d lived until I’d landed in New Zealand approximately a month and a week ago.
There was a poster in her teenage bedroom inside the main house that featured the lake and the sky, with the Milky Way caught in breathtaking detail by a camera lens. But even with my human vision, I’d seen an enormity of stars that night, the sky studded with diamonds.
“In the rain,” she’d added. “Milford Sound is best in the rain—waterfalls coming down all of the mountains that soar over the road as you drive in, the landscape so misty and mysterious that it’s straight out of a fantasy movie.” She’d leaned her head on my shoulder, warm and happy and so lovely that I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve her.
We both know you have blood on your hands.
I shoved away the memory of Detective Callum Baxter’s accusing words from eight months—and a lifetime—ago. Diya needed me sane and whole to fight for her; I couldn’t spiral into the black abyss that had been my life for far too long.
“We’re about to pull in,” the younger paramedic said.
I made sure not to get in the way as they unloaded Diya and rushed her into Emergency. The staff halted me when I tried to follow her through the doors inside, told me I had to wait because she was going straight into surgery. “We’ll alert you once she’s on a ward.”
Numb with fear, I was still standing in the public area when I saw the second ambulance turn in. I ran out in time to see Shumi being unloaded. Realizing that she’d probably be headed in the same direction as Diya, I waited by the second ambulance until the crew returned.
“Can you tell me anything about Shumi?” I asked, and when they looked blank, added, “The patient you just took in. My sister-in-law.”
“Oh right.” The woman of the pair, a brunette of maybe forty, grimaced. “I’m really sorry about your family. Do you know who else was there?”
“My father-in-law’s car was there, and I saw both him and my mother-in-law before I left the house earlier. The other car belongs to Bobby. That’s Shumi’s husband.” And Diya’s protective big brother. “They had to have come together—Shumi doesn’t drive.”
“Oh man.” The brunette glanced at her partner—a wide-shouldered Polynesian man—and got a nod. “Look, don’t tell anyone we told you, but she was stabbed, just like your wife.”
I shoved both hands through my hair. “None of this makes sense. They’re just a normal family.” Wealthy, yes, but not Beverly Hills levels of obscene money—or the stalkers and other nutcases that came with that. “Who goes in and stabs a normal family?”
The paramedics said nothing, but I had the feeling of words hanging in the air. “Did she jump into the lake?” I asked, trying to answer one question at least. “Shumi?”
A nod from the man. “Only reason she didn’t drown was that she got caught on a large branch that must’ve gone into the water in that last big storm and washed down by the house. She was unconscious by the time the fire crew found her, so without that branch…”
My stomach roiled. “Do you know if…if they found anyone else?”
Chapter 4
Private notes: Detective Callum Baxter (LAPD)
Date: Dec 2
Time: 23:15
Death notification made to Virna Musgrave’s son, Jason Musgrave. He was distraught and didn’t ask many questions. I’ll follow up with him tomorrow morning, when he’s had time to process the information.
Perez is back tomorrow so we can split up the tasks—all this money everywhere. Jason Musgrave’s mansion was the real deal, complete with fancy Italian tiles and all that—I don’t know, I get a bad feeling about it. Might be nothing, but we got to make sure we cross every t and dot every i, or the family’s piranha lawyers (it’s like the rich get them from the same vicious pond) will fucking eat us alive.
At least the higher-ups aren’t leaning on me yet. That’ll probably start tomorrow after Jason Musgrave gets over his shock and starts demanding answers.
Chapter 5
“No, man, I’m sorry—we didn’t see the fire guys bring out anyone else.” The male paramedic squeezed my shoulder. “But we left straight after the ambulance that brought in your wife. The cops will have any new information.”
His partner nodded. “This is the first place they’ll look for you, so I’d stay here.”
“I have no plans to leave. My wife’s in surgery.” I wasn’t a man who overshared, but the words wouldn’t stay inside, didn’t even feel real. How was it possible that I’d kissed my wife good-bye on the drive and left to get cake and come back to blood and fire?
My last image of Diya before the fire was of her in pajama shorts and a navy blue hoodie she’d stolen from me; it swallowed her up, but she loved the thing. Her feet had been in flip-flops, her hair still piled on top of her head as she waved me off. She hadn’t had her shower yet, had been planning to do so while I ran the errand.
“I think I’ll wash my hair, do the full curls routine,” she’d said to me before I left. “You can take me out for a date tonight.”
“As long as you wear the green dress.” Already in the car, I’d stuck my head out the window. “You know what that dress does to me. Last time around, I married you!”
Her laughter had been wild and sweet, the kiss she blew me the kind of goofy romantic thing newlyweds did. No shadows in her eyes, none of that weight that seemed to crush her at times, no fear inside me that my wife would vanish if I turned away.
Blood—God, there’d been so much blood on her.
Something crackled on the brunette paramedic’s shoulder, the speaker coming to life to indicate an urgent call for assistance.
I stepped out of their way.
It wasn’t until I was back inside the public area of the Emergency Department that I realized why else they’d told me to stay here. I had no idea if the fire was out or if it continued to rage, but the firefighters would eventually gain control.
And the situation would shift.
Forensic officers on the scene. Vans destined for the morgue. Bodies…or body parts being carried out.
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
“Sir.” A nurse walked up to me, her eyes a concerned hazel against freckled white skin, and her scrubs a deep blue. “Are you bleeding?”
“What? No.”
When she indicated my tee, I looked down to see smears of red.
Diya’s blood.
This nurse must not have been on the floor earlier.
“I came in with my wife—she was stabbed. Taken straight into surgery. They wouldn’t let me stay with her. Diya Prasad.” All her legal documentation was still in her maiden name even though she’d decided to take mine after marriage.
“Diya Advani,” she’d said, sounding it out. “I like it.”
I wasn’t sure if she’d even had the chance to begin the change-of-surname paperwork, or what that entailed. She’d mentioned something about updating her driver’s license for starters, but neither of us had been in a rush about it. We were married, were one; the rest of it was window dressing.
“Hold on a minute.” The nurse left.
She returned to find me in exactly the same spot. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have a plan in mind, my usually agile brain on the fritz.
“Your wife is no longer on this floor,” the nurse said. “Here are directions to a waiting area close to the ICU, where she’ll be brought after surgery.”
She put a piece of paper into my hand, as if aware that, right now, I didn’t have the capacity to retain too much new information. “I’ve told the ICU staff where you’ll be if they need to get hold of you. Before you go to the waiting area, though, I’d suggest changing.” She indicated my long-sleeved T-shirt. “I found a clean scrub top for you.”
I took the offered item, suddenly viscerally conscious of being covered in Diya’s blood. My skin crawled. “Wait,” I said before she could move away. “Will my sister-in-law also be brought to the ICU? Shumi Prasad. She was stabbed, too.”
The nurse’s eyes widened. “Are you next of kin?”
Another crackle in my brain, another struggle to find the right words. “Her husband…was in the fire. Her family’s based in another part of the country and I don’t know how to get in touch with them. My wife would know, but…” I fisted my hands. “I’m the only one here right now.”
“You might have to wait for the police in that case.” A sympathetic smile.
A woman walked into the ER just then, crying and doubled over in pain, and the nurse had no more time for me. She was gone before I could think up an argument that might get her to divulge Shumi’s status or location. Shoving the piece of paper she’d given me into my pocket, I made my way to the closest guest toilets.
Someone had stuck a small sticker to the wall just outside, of curving green against a black background.
One look and I was thrown back to my first local bushwalk with Diya. She’d pointed out the tight curving curl of a fern frond, said, “The koru design I showed you at the airport? It comes from these fronds. It’s a symbol of endurance and growth.”
A slow smile, her hand sliding into mine. “It’s peaceful here, right?”
I’d known why she was asking; she understood that her new husband was a man drowning in darkness who needed the embrace of such nonjudgmental silence. She didn’t know the why of my nightmares—how could I tell her what I’d done? What I’d been?—but she’d soothed me many a night.
It’s okay, Tavi. It’s okay.
It was only on that forest walk that she’d asked me the most important question: “Who’s Joss?”
The name I called out in the night over and over, the guilt that whispered to me like that heartbeat in the creepy Poe story we’d had to study in high school. Only this one was all vicious laughter and the scent of expensive tobacco.
Jocelyn “Joss” Wai had never smoked anything so cheap as a store-bought cigarette.
Diya had protected me from the storms since the very first night we spent together, Jocelyn’s vengeful ghost deciding to visit me on the day when I was the happiest I’d ever been.
Back then, far from this land that she called her own, far from the family that cherished and protected her, she’d been the stronger of the two of us. In those nighttime hours after a terror that woke me on a reverberating scream, my fears of her drifting away had seemed foolish, a fanciful whimsy.
Diya had been the most solid thing in the room.
It was only after we came to New Zealand that I’d realized my wife’s flame sometimes flickered so low that it came close to extinction. Not even a hint of a smile for days, a black cloud hanging over her head that seemed ready to suffocate her. She’d felt distant, even when she was in my arms, as if she’d gone somewhere I couldn’t follow.
It’s fine! I have enough!
Words I’d overheard when she’d moved into my Venice Beach condo after her original hotel booking ran out five days from that night on the rooftop where I’d fallen in love with my girl in the green dress. I’d thought her family was worried about her financial status after she’d impulsively decided to stay on in the city, and had told her she didn’t have to stress about finances.
“I have plenty of money,” I’d said, standing on the balcony of that piece of beachfront real estate I’d owned since I was twenty-two. “Please let me spend it on you.”
She’d given me an odd little smile then, this breathtaking woman from the other side of the world who’d captured me so completely that I wasn’t even mad about it—not when she loved me as hard as I loved her.
“I never thought I’d meet someone like you, Tavish. A man straight out of my fairy-tale dreams.” Her fingers on my jaw, the caress so light it was the merest whisper. “I feel so free with you, as if I’m truly seeing life for the first time. No filters, no restraints. I’m myself and I remember all of me.”
The pills, so innocuous in their brown plastic bottles…those I’d discovered later. I’d grown up in LA, the land of glitter and excess; my first thought had been that my wife had a party-pill habit. Then I’d seen the labels with complex drug names and started to understand that this had nothing to do with ecstasy or heroin, uppers or downers.
I was holding prescription medicine in my hands.
It didn’t matter; my wife owned my heart when she shone bright—or when she fell into the dark.
I shoved through the door into the toilets.
It was hospital clean and hospital cold, hard-wearing tile and icy white sinks. Unable to even look at my crumpled and bloody T-shirt after I pulled it off, I shoved it into the trash can meant for the paper towels used to dry hands.
It vanished in a soft rustle.
With the toilets still empty of anyone but me, I washed my hands and forearms to get rid of any traces of blood and soot, then threw some water on my face, using the paper towels to finish my cleanup. I noticed absently that I’d lost some of the hair on my arms—scorched by the heat from the fire. But no burns as far as I could see…until I turned and looked at my back.
A scattering of mismatched red spots across my shoulders and upper back, small indicators of my proximity to the flames, but nothing serious. Not like the lips sliced into my wife’s body.
Hands shaking, I pulled on the dark blue scrub top; the color was several shades lighter than the midnight blue Bentley I’d hired to drive us to our wedding in Vegas.
“Black looks good on you, Mr. Advani.” Diya’s gaze had been sultry as she ran her fingers over the tuxedo that Susanne had had made for me when I turned twenty-one, an expensive gift that had stood the test of time; the tailor had left room in the seams so I’d been able to have it altered when I put on more muscle, settled into my adult body.
Diya, for her part, had chosen a dress of darkest amethyst fitted to the waist, the bottom half an airy flow to the ankles. Sleeveless, with a plunging V-neck, it had made her appear a siren right off the silver screen.
The necklace I’d given her—a jagged icicle of a diamond pendant—had sat perfectly in that vee, but she hadn’t needed the adornment. Diya’s shine had dazzled brighter than any gemstone as she spun under the kaleidoscope of lights and music and color that was Las Vegas, her beauty so sharply defined that it had scared me for a minute.
A woman that lovely, that fragile, might just one day shatter.
As Jocelyn had shattered. As Virna had shattered.
Susanne…her end had been a thing far more torturous and slow.
“I’m Diya Advani!” Diya’s happy scream had obliterated the cold chill of my worry, my world as awash in multihued lights as the skies of Vegas. “Mrs. Tavish Advani!”
Grabbing her by the hips, I’d lifted her up and spun us both around.
Diya’s hair a tumbled fan around her shoulders, her strappy black heels hanging off her fingers, and her body light but so, so alive.
My fingers clenched on the cold porcelain of the sink. “Please, baby.” The plea whispered out of me.
The door to the toilets swung open.
Gut clenching at the sudden burst of noise, I pushed off the sink. It took all my courage to follow the directions to the waiting area. The main atrium of the hospital proved huge and wide; it was full of natural light due to a high peaked ceiling full of glass panels, while the pillars to my left bore intricate Māori carvings.
A number of people sat talking quietly at tables I could see at one end.
I didn’t notice much else, my focus on getting closer to Diya. Going up one floor using the stairs, I went through the doors as the instructions said I should—and realized I’d arrived.
Tucked to the left of the doors, the waiting area was delineated by several large armchairs currently empty of occupants. A sign at one end advised of the hospital’s chaplaincy services, while the largest wall held a striking piece of Māori art. The usual hospital signs and a fire extinguisher sat at the far end of the wall, while a water fountain occupied the little corner directly next to the doors.
Despite the fact that the waiting area wasn’t a walled room on its own, it sat mired in silence…because according to the sign opposite the doors, the hallway led to the Intensive Care Unit as well as the Coronary Care Unit on the left, the Medical Unit on the right.
Not a place where people lingered or wandered past without painful reason.
While a nurse about to enter the ICU did check and confirm that Diya remained in surgery, she refused to share any information on Shumi, and since my mind was going in circles, my panic stretching my skin until I thought it would burst, I decided to keep myself busy by seeing if I could find my sister-in-law’s family.
