He had unfinished business.
And he planned on taking care of it.
Tonight.
CHAPTER 31
In her office of her home in the West Hills, Faiza skimmed the posts on Jonas’s Facebook fan page, found nothing of interest and clicked off. She wondered where that freak was. Samuel’s son. Not her sister Zelda’s boy. A bad seed. Any way you looked at it. Out of prison and no doubt hell-bent on causing trouble, horrible trouble. No matter what that his stupid fans thought. They all seemed to think he was some kind of messiah.
Instead of Satan Incarnate.
And what about Roger, hmmm? Do you think he’s so pure?
She could almost hear Zelda’s voice telling her to break up with him. “He’s a loser, Faiza. Has he ever had a real job? Huh? And wasn’t he in prison? You could do so much better. Look at me. I went from Walter to Samuel. Because I wasn’t afraid to walk away. Leave him, Faiza. I don’t care how much you think you love Roger, he’s nothing more than a do-nothing. A leech! Useless!”
But that wasn’t true.
Picking her phone up off the desk, she hit the speed dial for Roger and rolled her desk chair back.
Voice mail.
Great. Where the hell is he?
Irritated, she rolled her neck, loosening her tight muscles, thinking she needed a massage. Oh, hell, she needed more than a hot stone massage, she needed a full spa treatment. Irritated, she walked into the kitchen and pushed the speed dial button again.
Once more she was rewarded with a click and Roger’s recorded voice.
“Pick up, pick up!” she said, phone to her ear as she stared through the window to the backyard where the landscape lights were buried, their bulbs glowing beneath two inches of snow. This should be a time of peace. Of serenity. Not the high-octane anxiety that had its grip on her.
Setting her jaw, she texted again: Call Me.
For the sixth damned time tonight.
She tossed the phone onto the counter and it skidded across the polished marble to bounce off the matching backsplash. She barely noticed as she went back to studying the backyard, where the swimming pool’s cover now bore a thick white mantle. Not good. The maintenance on this place was ever increasing and the taxes were always a worry. And what would happen next week, when she couldn’t dip into Kara’s trust? Where would she be? Where would Roger?
“Ingrate,” she muttered, thinking of him now as she retrieved her phone.
She dialed Roger once more.
For the kazillionth time her call went to voice mail, and she dialed again. “Don’t you ignore me,” she said, phone pressed to her ear as she walked into the den, opened a window, letting in the cold December air and clearing the room of the lingering ever-present odor of marijuana. God, she hated it. But as many times as she’d bought edibles for Roger, he still preferred to smoke. To her, it didn’t matter, but to him it just wasn’t the same.
Of course her call went straight to voice mail.
So angry she nearly threw her phone across the room, she stormed into the living room where the Christmas tree was decorated, ornaments glittering in the soft glow of the tiny lights she’d so carefully strung over the preflocked branches. The room was lit by candles, the scents of pine and mulled wine filling the perfect room with its snow-white carpet covering polished oak floors, a new pale-gray couch off-set the creamy side chairs and stone fireplace that rose to the height of the soaring ceiling high overhead. A grand piano was tucked into a near a corner where paned windows sparkled, reflecting the candlelight.
Picture-perfect, she told herself.
She loved it soooo much.
And soon it was going to slip through her fingers.
That’s why Roger had left.
Because once more she’d complained about losing it all. He’d been on his favorite old couch in his music room, looked up from his guitar, as he’d been still working on that horrible song, and said in a puff of marijuana smoke, “So deal with it.”
“I can’t,” she’d told him. “It’s beyond my control. Kara is turning twenty-eight next week and it doesn’t matter that Merritt Margrove is dead. Another attorney will be assigned and they’ll start looking through the records and they’ll figure out what I’ve been, we’ve been doing.”
“Which is?” he’d asked so blithely she’d wanted to strangle him with his own guitar strings.
“Which is that there’s no money! None left. You know that. Margrove knew it, too, but he was willing to keep his mouth shut because he’d dipped in as well. His bills were outlandish. I showed them to you. He’d padded them to the point of the absurd, all to make up for bad investments and his damned gambling issues.”