Page 119 of Sunburned

Red spattered the white wall, so bright in the afternoon sunlight. An image I knew instantly would be burned into my mind forever.

Cody’s firearm clattered silently to the tile as he dropped to his knees beside it, blood oozing onto the floor.

The high-pitched ringing in my ears blended with the muffled sound of the front door opening. Laurent rose from where he’d fallen, his eyes glued to Cody.

I was still holding the gun as Jennifer entered my line of sight, sprinting for Cody, who writhed on the floor, clutching his arm, blood hemorrhaging from the bullet hole I’d put there. “You shot him!” she cried.

“He tried to kill himself and Audrey stopped him,” Laurent explained, his voice hoarse.

I lowered the gun, my hand trembling. “A towel,” I managed. “We need to stop the bleeding.”

The sirens were close now, their wails melding with Cody’s guttural howls. I placed the gun on the counter and tossed Jennifer a kitchen towel as Laurent scrambled to grab Cody’s weapon from where it rested on the floor.

“I thought it wasn’t loaded,” Jennifer said shakily as she pressed the kitchen towel to Cody’s wound.

Laurent set Cody’s firearm next to the one I’d used to stop him from killing himself, then wrapped his arms around me. “There was one in the chamber. I could see the extractor was protruding,” I said, leaning into him.

I’d known I was taking a chance, aiming for Cody’s forearm. But in the split second I had to make the decision about whether to fire, I figured the worst that could happen was that I’d kill him, which wasn’t any worse than what he was going to do to himself if I didn’t take the shot.

I heard tires in the driveway, and one by one, the sirens abruptly cut. Footsteps, followed by someone pounding on the door, shouting, “Police!”

Chapter 46

The days following Cody’s arrest for Tyson’s murder were an emotional roller coaster. The recording from the kitchen security camera was enough for the police to charge him not only with Tyson’s murder but with Ian’s as well, and once he was detained, he quickly confessed, not wanting to go through the spectacle of a lengthy trial after already having admitted on video to what he’d done.

He also copped to having pushed me off the boat, having rationalized it would be a lot easier to pin Tyson’s murder on me if I wasn’t around to refute the story. But he changed his mind at the last minute and dived in after me, sorry for what he’d done.

To my relief, he didn’t mention my part in the cover-up of Ian’s death. Whether out of remorse for having tried to kill me or gratitude for my saving his life, I wasn’t sure.

He was relocated to a holding facility in St. Martin, and Jennifer moved to a house there to be closer to him, though from what Samira told me, Cody refused to speak to her. I was surprised Jennifer still wanted anything to do with him after she learned what he’d done to the father of her child, but perhaps she really did love him. And Cody hadn’t known that Tyson stole Ian’s work.

My name was cleared immediately, though I was asked to stay on the island awhile longer to provide testimony. I didn’t tell Samira that I’d been the one to leave the arrest report on Tyson’s pillow. It had been the reason Cody killed him in the end, and she was already beating herself up for giving it to him, so I let her believe Tyson had been the one to leave it there, that he had inadvertently been the engineer of his own demise.

But I knew it was my fault Tyson was murdered.

I’d been so angry with him after I returned from La Petite Plage that I’d wanted to warn him I knew the truth of his duplicity. That I could hurt him more than he could hurt me. And I was right; in the end, I did, didn’t I?

I didn’t know that he wouldn’t come home that night, that Samira would find the arrest report and, seeing Cody’s name on it, hand it off to him. I didn’t know Cody had killed Ian because he believed Ian had turned him in, or that Cody would kill Tyson as well when he learned the truth.

Poor long-suffering Cody. It was my fault he learned the truth, and though I can safely say I wouldn’t have told him if I’d known how it would all turn out, I did also believe he deserved to know. I didn’t want Tyson to die, didn’t want Cody to go to prison. But I comforted myself with the knowledge that the truth is buoyant; like an Air Jordan buried for years in the Everglades, eventually it rises to the surface.

After a few days of my guilt eating away at me, I confessed my part in Tyson’s demise to Laurent. But he had a different point of view, reminding me that it was Tyson’s own paranoia that had made him susceptible to Jennifer’s blackmail plot, setting off the chain of events that ended his life.

Tyson had chosen to turn his brother in all those years ago, had chosen to cover up Ian’s death and steal his technology. And while those choices may have made Tyson a billionaire, over the years the lies had destroyed him from the inside out, transforming him from the driven young man I’d known to the cynical specter he’d become.

It’s hard to comprehend the sprawl of the decisions we make, ourchoices colliding with those of others to create an impossibly tangled web that can come undone with the pull of a single thread.

But Tyson made his own decisions; he was both the creator and the destroyer of his own life.

—

Samira was too overwhelmed to plan a funeral straightaway, electing instead to do a celebration of life in a few months, when she’d had time to process Tyson’s death. She and Gisèle planned to return to Paris once the loose ends had been tied up, but in the meantime, they’d moved back into Le Rêve, which was where I found them when I walked over to say goodbye the day before I was to be allowed to return home.

A heaviness clung to Samira as she lounged on a divan on the covered veranda, smoking cigarette after cigarette. “I know I should stop,” she said, blowing a line of smoke out at the blue sky.

“Your husband just died,” I said. “Give yourself time.”

“I hope you’ll come to the celebration of life,” she said. “It will be in northern California I think, though I don’t know where yet. You should bring your boys.”

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