Chapter 15 Cal
FIFTEEN
CAL
Callum Havick stabbed at the potatoes on a paper plate, careful not to poke through the grease-soaked bottom. Funeral potatoes, they were called. Other cultures revered death as life’s only guarantee. Americans made cheesy potato casserole with a morbid name. Damn if they weren’t good, though.
Cal’s roommate from law school and one of his oldest friends, Paul, leaned against the kitchen counter. With a crumpled paper towel, he dabbed the sweat beading his brow and spoke over a box fan buffeting in the corner.
“I see you found your appetite.”
“The start of it, at least,” Cal said between bites.
Grey hair sprouted from Paul’s mostly bald head, and a couple more crow’s feet cracked at his eyes. His infectious laughter was the same, though. Time didn’t wear on that.
Cal hadn’t seen him since last summer when they, along with Richard and a few others, had celebrated their thirty-year Harvard Law reunion with a trip to Monterey.
As the sun set on Big Sur, the men and their spouses had reminisced on their youth, and Cal had fallen in love with his wife all over again. Butterflies had bloomed in his belly, and he’d gone tongue-tied and clammy. He’d decided then to renew their vows the following summer.
This summer, he realized and swallowed down the last bite of casserole.
Paul’s wife, Susan—a plump woman with florid cheeks and Midwestern sensibilities—shuffled into the kitchen with a vase of wilted lilies.
“You can’t exist on potatoes,” she said and set the vase on the counter before clearing away the empty casserole dish.
Says the Kansan. Potatoes were all Cal could stomach. Everything else either sat like a brick in his belly or sent him dashing to the bathroom.
“I’m going to dry the flowers and make the most darling little trinkets with them. Keychains, paper weights, whatever you’d like.”
Paul fanned himself with the newspaper.
“What the hell is Cal gonna do with all that?”
“It’s a memento. It’d be a shame to throw them out.”
There were a dozen more arrangements rotting in Cal’s living room. They’d arrived in droves from colleagues, friends, people whose names didn’t have a face in his memories.
“I’d love that,” Cal said with a smile. It was the least he could do.
When Paul and Susan had heard the awful news, they’d taken the red eye from Chicago and set up camp at the house. The rest of Cal’s Harvard crew had done the same and descended on Portland to make casseroles, arrangements, distractions.
“You two visit,” Susan said and shooed Paul and Cal toward the deck off the kitchen. “Paul, we need to leave in about twenty minutes.”
Paul saluted his wife and followed Cal outside where the evening air was thick and warm, but a hell of a lot cooler than inside. Yesterday, the air conditioner had thumped and bumped and finally given up the ghost, so the house baked in another heat wave. When it rains, it pours.
“You know you’re more than welcome in Chicago,” Paul said and pushed leaves off the deck with the tip of his shoe. “Suze and I wouldn’t mind. Shit, she’d be delighted. It’d give her someone else to fuss over.”
Humbled by the gesture, Cal glanced at the kitchen window. Through the glass, Susan scrubbed the casserole dish in the sink.
“I appreciate it, but I can’t. I need to stay.”
His fingertips swept over his cellphone stowed in a belt clip. For the first few days, it rang off the hook and Cal had answered with his heart lodged in his throat. Amelia was never on the other end, though, only mournful condolences. He collected them graciously gutted and wrecked.
“Look, you’re just gonna keep beating yourself up,” Paul said with forceful affection, the kind that barges in with good intentions. “I think getting away would do you some good. You’ve just gotta—”
“I’ve gotta what? Cope? Wait for another pile of ashes to show up at my door?”
Everyone had opinions about Cal’s grief. Cal had opinions too. These days, they zipped from his lips far faster than he could stop them. Paul shook his head and tried again.
“That’s not what I meant. I love you like a brother, and I hate seeing you this way, but no one has seen Amelia since the party. I don’t know that you’re going to find her in the…” Paul cleared a catch in his throat. “Well, in the way you think you are.”
Paul couldn’t say it. No one could. Dead. Amelia Havick was dead. That’s what everyone wanted to say, and Cal was suffering, not stupid, so he heard the whispers and read the room.
“My daughter isn’t dead,” he’d told anyone who’d listen. With rubbery smiles, they indulged it like a lunatic delusion and threw him a bone to say that they tried. It was only human to be so knee-deep in denial.
“You think she’s dead,” Cal said with a sinkhole in his chest. Shoulders hunched, he collapsed into it. One day, it’d swallow him whole.
Paul fixed his eyes to the far end of the yard where sunlight and shadows met on the overgrown lawn.
“If she were alive, she would’ve come home by now.”
The point stood, but Cal stubbornly refused to believe it.
“I’d know if she was gone. It’d be like a light turning out in me.”
“I know what it’s like to lose someone without making amends. What happened between you and Amelia wasn’t your fault.”
Wasn’t it, though? The trees beyond the fence swayed in the gentle breeze, not unlike the last time he saw his daughter. His carelessness had driven a wedge between them by then, and Amelia stood in his office no longer a little girl, but her trust in him fading like a dying star.
Most nights, Cal dreamed of her. The years of her life played like an old movie until the film ran out at dawn and he laid alone in the morning light.
“I shut her out,” Cal said, the words thick with shame. “She needed me, and I left her out in the cold. And for what? My own pride. I was so hard on her. Maybe if I hadn’t been.”
Cal grounded the thought before it got away. He couldn’t rewrite the past, so he turned to Paul and voiced what mattered.
“This isn’t about the things I didn’t get to say or what I would’ve done differently. Amelia isn’t dead. I can’t prove it, but I need you to believe me. She ran from something that night.”
“From what, though?”
“Burt warned me that Rich was in over his head with Philippe Velasco. I’ve got this sick feeling that Rich knew more about Philippe’s death than he let on.”
Paul folded his arms and sucked on his teeth. “Fuckin’ Rich.”
He didn’t know the half of it and took up the cause because Cal had made it clear that Richard Dauer wasn’t the man they used to know.
And he was missing—not identified amongst the dead and his beloved Ferrari unaccounted for.
The implication was clear. Richard survived but made no attempt to reach out, not to Cal or anyone else.
“Something bigger is going on,” Cal said, “and I think Amelia is caught up in whatever it is.”
An uncanny calm blanketed the yard as the world went quiet. The birds stopped chirping, and the leaves no longer rustled. Tension tangled in Cal’s stomach.
“Listen to me, Cal. If you’re not gonna come to Chicago, at least consider leaving town for a while. It’s not good, you staying here alone.”
“I’ll think about it.” Cal mindlessly patted the phone at his hip, his only lifeline to Amelia. “I appreciate all that you and Susan have done for me. You have no idea what it’s meant.”
Paul squeezed Cal in a tight embrace and huffed in a way that Cal knew he stifled tears.
“You can’t imagine how sorry we are.”
Cal’s chest ached, and he clung to his friend who’d stayed longer than anyone else. At the kitchen table, Susan plucked petals from the lily arrangement and placed them in a plastic bag. The clean casserole dish sat beside the barren arrangement.
“What am I supposed to do?” Cal asked tearfully.
“You carry on because you’re Callum Havick, the most decent man I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, let alone calling one of my oldest friends. And damn it, we’re getting old, aren’t we? What the hell happened?”
A hearty chuckle rumbled from Paul, and Cal wiped away the tears as he laughed too. Susan smiled at them and tapped her watch.
“The offer always stands,” Paul said as they headed inside. “You give your HVAC guy some hell. If he ain’t here by tomorrow…”
“I know. I will.”
Cal bid his farewells to Susan and Paul, shed the last shared tears, and watched as their rental pulled from the driveway. Paul honked three times and waved out the window.
After they left, Cal sat on the porch until twilight delivered him into darkness. He went inside then and took up his spot at the end of the kitchen table with a clear view of the front door.
When Amelia turned sixteen, everyone told him to expect long nights waiting for her to tiptoe inside after curfew.
He never had to. Amelia was always a good girl.
Even as a child, she’d been soft-hearted and eager to please; his little daydreamer with daisy-chains in her hair and poems in her heart.
He’d worried that she needed thicker skin to weather a world that could be cruel.
In the end, the cruelty had come from him.
He deserved the punishment he received, the nights he listened as she cried herself to sleep and her icy retreat in the days that followed.
The words still played on repeat, that moment of anger he couldn’t take back.
Cal’s phone trilled. The chair wobbled as he flew to his feet and answered the call.
“This is Cal,” he nearly shouted. The outburst left him lightheaded and faintly breathless.
A man on the line was polished and polite, a silver-voiced stranger who introduced himself as Special Agent Kingsley Bright with the FBI’s Portland office.
Pleasant enough, Agent Bright offered his condolences without the stuffy pretense of a fed but pivoted to business with little intervening chit-chat.
“I work in our organized crime unit,” Agent Bright explained. “I picked up an investigation from my colleague, Martin Kranski. You know him?”
“I’ve met him a few times.”