Page 17

Banhoff Prison had been Jonas’s home for all of his adult life.
Her cell buzzed and she tore her gaze from the TV to check the phone’s tiny screen. Aunt Faiza’s name appeared. Again. “Great.” She wasn’t in the mood to talk to the woman who had raised her, a woman as different from Mama as night to day. It was hard to believe they had been sisters.
“Stubborn as a mule,” Mama had confided once while lighting a cigarette on the wide back porch of their city home, “and determined. Let me tell you, Kara, don’t try to talk her out of anything. It’s a waste of breath.” She’d taken a deep drag from her Virginia Slim, then exhaled and waved the smoke away. “I tried to tell her about Roger, but would she listen? Hell no.” Mama’s eyebrows had pulled together then as she’d smoked. Mama had never liked “Uncle” Roger, Faiza’s boyfriend. Kara hadn’t understood it then. At the time Roger had been tall and slim like Daddy, but he’d had thick brown hair and pale blue eyes that flashed in his perpetual tan, while Daddy had black hair that curled a little and light brown eyes that had seemed to look past everyone’s façade and see right to the heart of them. But then Kara had lived with Faiza and Roger all of her preteen and high school years. And she’d seen Roger for what he really was—a man who could never hold a job, a man with huge appetites and, Kara suspected, even bigger secrets.
The phone rang in her hand again and Kara snapped back to the present and, gritting her teeth, said, “Faiza.”
“There you are! I’ve been calling all afternoon!”
“Yeah, sorry.” Then asked, “I just caught the news. Is Jonas really out of prison?”
“Why do you think I’ve been trying to reach you?” Faiza asked frantically. “Why didn’t you pick up?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Doing what?” Faiza asked suspiciously. “What could be so important that you couldn’t answer the phone or text me back?”
What did it matter? Jonas was out of prison! But Kara answered. “Working.” Not really true, but . . .
Faiza let out a soft, “Humph.” A brassier blonde than Mama had been, Faiza wore her hair curly and sprayed so that it fanned out around her face, where she’d always applied what Kara’s mother had referred to as extreme makeup. “She never got over the ultra-glam of the eighties,” Mama had confided. “If Faiza had her way, she’d have curly hair to her shoulders, out-there bangs and jean jackets with huge shoulder pads.” She hadn’t toned it down much over the years. “Working,” she repeated with more than a little edge of doubt.
She knew Faiza didn’t think her working as a substitute teacher was a serious job for a woman in her late twenties, and had said so often enough. Too bad. Kara had learned after college that she wasn’t cut out for an elementary classroom; too bad she’d learned that sorry fact while student teaching and already had earned her degree, another fact Faiza hadn’t understood.
“Why didn’t you change your major?” she’d asked a hundred times over.
“Why didn’t I?” Kara had always thrown back at her, not ever explaining that once she’d been on a path, she wanted to just get done with it, through college as quickly as possible. The degree had been a requirement for her to inherit her portion of her parents’ estate, and she’d earned it in three years rather than four because college life hadn’t been for her. She’d holed up in her dorm room, then apartment, and studied, unable to ever get into the swing of campus life, and even put in the extra hours and another year for her master’s. Another requirement to gain her inheritance according to her parents’ wills.
Now wasn’t the time to dwell on it. Not with her brother out of stir. “So Jonas is . . . where?”
“Unknown. So far. But he’ll turn up, let me tell you. Like a damned bad penny.”
“But—”
“Listen, you probably would have been the first to know if you’d taken the time to pick up the damned phone.” Faiza sounded put out. “You must’ve seen that I called, heard my message. Or read my damned texts!”
“I’ve also had a few appointments.” At least that wasn’t a lie. Before Dr. Zhou, Kara had visited her accountant and learned just how badly her once-healthy trust fund had dwindled. Significantly.
Yeah, it had just been a stellar day.
Kara’s stomach twisted, she peeled herself from the couch and with Rhapsody at her heels made her way to the kitchen, where she poured herself another big glass of wine. No restaurant pour for her, not while dealing with Faiza.
Faiza said, “I tried to let you know, to warn you that Jonas was getting out.”
“I knew he was going to be released. You’d have to live in Outer Mongolia not to know that,” Kara snapped.
Faiza ignored her sarcasm. “I meant today.”
“I thought it was scheduled for next week.”
“So did I . . . but that was wrong. But it got changed somehow. Who knows? Now he’s a free man, your half brother.” She said it distastefully, as if the words were bitter. “And believe it or not, he had the nerve—the nerve, mind you—to call me. Your mother’s sister. That murdering son of a . . .” She stopped herself, and Kara heard her take in an audible deep breath. “He was, I mean, heisyour brother.”
“Who claims he’s innocent.”
There was a snort on the other end of the line. “That’s what they all say.”
Kara kept sipping as her aunt added softly, “He wanted your number.”
“What?” Kara choked on her wine, spilling the red liquid on her pajamas and the kitchen floor. “You didn’t give it to him,” she sputtered. She wasn’t ready to face Jonas, not without a wall of thick prison glass between them.