Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Even more legendary was her sultry voice.
Audrey used to sing Raja to sleep even when he was eleven or twelve, while I listened with my ear pressed to the wall between our bedrooms. And she used that same voice to campaign for the care of abused and abandoned children.
“No child should have to live without love,” she’d said in one interview. “Every child should know they’re treasured, their dreams important.”
I guess all that goodness got cloying after a while and she’d decided that not loving me would be her outlet. It had been an active thing, my mother’s lack of love for her second-born, not simple emotional neglect.
“I should’ve never given in to Anand’s begging and had you,” she’d told me while doing her makeup one day when I must’ve been seven at most, her tone offhand. “Raja was all I ever wanted or needed. We had five years as the perfect little family before you came along.”
The wipers swiped back and forth as the traffic started to move again, and I allowed them to swipe away the memories of my strange mirage of a childhood. Smiling appearances before the media, my mother’s arms around both her children.
Those photo ops had been some of the only times she’d touched me.
But Audrey Advani no longer mattered. Not when the love of my life lay in the hospital after using what might’ve been her last moments of consciousness on this earth to give me a message I couldn’t decipher.
Ani…they said…about Ani…not…
Chapter 24
Private notes: Detective Callum Baxter (LAPD)
Date: Dec 28
Time: 01:02
Everyone’s on vacation and too busy to reply to my requests, but I have managed to confirm that Susanne Winthorpe is dead.
Christ.
That makes three women. Three dead lovers.
What the hell are we investigating here?
Chapter 25
Half of me was convinced Ackerson had put me on a no-fly list, but I got through customs and security in New Zealand without a hitch, then onto the flight. But it wasn’t until after the plane was in the air that I relaxed.
A bare three hours later and we were on the runway in Nadi, Fiji’s largest airport.
The humid heat of the tropical country hit me like a damp wall when I stepped off the plane. The air was as thick as molasses and somehow slower, the scent of the earth different in a way I couldn’t explain. As if all that lush tropical vegetation had permanently altered its chemical composition.
No one rushed ahead of me, most of the male passengers in shorts, and shirts featuring hibiscus blooms or palm trees. Many of the women wore strappy sundresses and had pulled out sun hats in readiness for hitting the outside world.
Tourists.
Hardly any locals on this midweek flight, to my eyes, though I did spot a couple of little old Indian ladies in light saris, and a small group of native Fijians in black shorts and white tees bearing the name of a local rugby sevens club. The latter was a game with which I had little familiarity, but that Rajesh Prasad had followed with near-religious fervor.
My jeans weren’t going to cut it in this heat, but they’d have to do.
An airport staff member in uniform, a red hibiscus bloom over her ear, pointed the passengers toward the immigration line. Unlike when I landed at LAX, no one was impatient, and a number of people chatted to each other as if they were in no rush to be anywhere.
I shifted from foot to foot.
And heard Diya’s laughter in my mind as she teased me about my need for constant forward motion. “Island time will drive you crazy,” she’d said one night, after we’d been talking about her childhood home. “But resistance is futile—things will happen when they happen, so just relax and enjoy life.”
As it was, the line moved along quickly enough even with no one in a hurry. When the officer, with his dark skin and tight curls, first saw me, he said, “Bula. Coming home?”
Funny, how I’d never thought I’d be asked that question on island soil at the far end of the Pacific. Hadn’t ever thought about visiting Fiji at all; my grandparents had immigrated from India, my only knowledge of this land due to seeing its name splashed across my mother’s favorite bottled water.
“First-timer,” I said. “My wife’s from here.”
“You’ll be back,” he predicted before returning my passport and waving over the next person.
I had no luggage to pick up, nothing to declare, and was soon exiting into the arrivals area, where people waited for their relatives. A little girl in a pretty pink dress was jumping up and down as she peered at the stream of arriving passengers, her hair pinned to the sides of her head with barrettes. Dressed up to fetch someone important to her.
Her father stood next to her, smiling indulgently.