The three of us remained still, eyes trained on the ring. All silently asking ourselves the same question.
“Is it . . . ?” Caroline breathed. “The woman who was with him?” The detectives had told us about Luna Hernandez, the woman who’d left him alone that last night.
“The detectives said she hadn’t known Joe for very long, just a few months.” Renee turned toward Caroline. “And he wanted to marry her?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” said Caroline, and then she held up a hand. “Wait—” She darted out of the room, into the kitchen, and returned with the polaroid. Caroline placed the photo of Joe and Luna on the coffee table, and we crowded around to look. For a moment no one spoke. The muffled clang of the elevator reached us from the distant interior of the building.
“Look at them,” said Renee. “How old do you think she is?” My sister appeared to vibrate ever so slightly, like a rocket in the seconds before liftoff. “So the woman who leaves him, leaves him to die, he was going to propose to her?” Renee’s hands were shaking. She sat down on the couch. Her garbage bag hit the floor with a splinter of glass. “Does Joe have a will?” Renee said. “We need to get in touch with that lawyer. This is important.” She was looking directly at the ring, as if she were speaking to it and the ring was talking back. “Did this woman know? I mean, did she know how serious Joe was?”
“Renee, do you think . . . she did something?” Caroline asked. She peered first at Renee, then at me with the look of a confused passenger who has just been told she’s boarded the wrong train.
“The police talked to her. They let her go,” I said. “Don’t even think about that. He fell. He slipped. There was water on the floor, that’s what the police said. It was a horrible, horrible accident.”
“I don’t know, Fiona,” Caroline whispered.
I saw Renee’s paranoia taking hold of Caroline, the wheels spinning as they often did, with Renee alerting us of danger. Don’t put plastic in the microwave. Exercise twenty minutes every single day. No trans fat. We should have listened to her about Joe and the drugs, I knew that, but that didn’t mean we had to listen to her now. The idea that Joe had loved Luna made me feel just a tiny bit better, and this seemed reason enough to believe. Here before us was the most magical of fairy tales: a secret ring, an innocent girl, a true love.
“Renee, you always assume the worst,” I said. “They were in love. She made a mistake, that’s all. She was in shock when they told her—you heard what the police said.”
“Fiona, did Joe ever tell you he was dating someone?” Renee asked.
Joe had called me early on Sunday morning, just a week before he died. Somehow he’d found the blog and deduced that I was the Last Romantic. I think I know her pretty well, he’d said. And then, Why, Fiona? Why are you doing this? It cheapens you. This was what seemed the most intolerable: his judgment, his dismissal of the entire project. Find someone you love, he’d said at the end, and his voice was earnest and sincere in a way I hadn’t heard before. Perhaps it was this moment of vulnerability that provoked my anger. Joe had cheated on his fiancée, lied to his sisters, kept secrets from me, from everyone, distanced himself year after year while we were living in the same city, and then just left, left us all behind as though we meant nothing. As though his sisters occupied the same position as his fraternity brothers and work colleagues. Who was Joe to advise me about love? I hadn’t wanted to hear his voice or his judgment, so I hung up on him.
And that was the last time I spoke to my brother, Joe. The very last.
“The last time I spoke to Joe—” I began. Maybe he’d intended to tell me about Luna. Find someone to love. But maybe it was something else entirely.
“What is it, Fiona?” Renee asked. “What did he say? Did he mention Luna?”
I shook my head. “No, he didn’t mention anyone.” I looked around the room, at the newly open spaces of dusty floor, the taped-up boxes and bulging bags of trash. “But I never asked him. We only talked about me.”
“Well, I don’t buy it,” Renee said, her voice fierce. Her suspicion filled the room. “There’s something going on here. There’s motive.”
“Okay, Miss Marple, let me go get my magnifying glass,” I said, and I began to cry.
“I want to meet her. I want to look her in the eye and ask her why she left him,” said Renee.
Caroline clapped her hands fast. “Yes, we should look her in the eye. We should give her the ring!” She said the last with the conviction of a missionary. “That’s what we should do. That’s what Joe would have wanted us to do.” She nodded once with finality.
“I agree with Caroline,” I said, wiping my tears. Of course, fulfill the last wish. Bestow the ring upon its rightful owner. There was a simplicity to it, a clarity of purpose. “Yes, that’s exactly what we should do.”
For a moment Renee was silent. She recognized that she was losing ground. Her anger, so vivid on her face just moments before, had gone slack.
“We should not give her the ring,” Renee said.
“It’s hers,” I replied. “Renee, don’t you see?”
Caroline nodded emphatically. We sat together in our dead brother’s apartment, and we waited for our big sister to decide.
“Okay,” Renee said at last. In her hands the diamond ring flared and sparkled in the room’s reflected sunlight. “Give it to her. But I want to be there. I want to see her face.”
For five more hours, we cleaned Joe’s apartment. Once the windows were washed, the garbage bags deposited in the dumpster, three runs made to the Goodwill, Renee told us that she was going for a drive. “I just need some air,” she said. “I won’t go looking for Luna. Don’t worry.”
It wasn’t until after Renee had left that I wondered about her words. Why reassure us like that? I tried my sister’s phone, but she didn’t answer.
“Caroline,” I said. “Where’s the ring box?”
Caroline was eating a piece of pepperoni-and-pineapple pizza; we had ordered from a place one block away. “The usual for Mr. Joe?” the man on the phone had asked. “Yes,” I had answered. “The usual, please.”
Now Caroline stopped chewing and swallowed. “Let me look.” She began searching around the coffee table, under the couch. “I don’t see it,” she said.
“Do you think . . . ?” I began.
“Renee doesn’t like carelessness,” answered Caroline. “Sometimes she forgives people. Other times she doesn’t. It’s hard to know when she will or won’t.”
Caroline and I looked at each other. “We should go down to that restaurant,” I said.
Chapter 12
Renee drove across the causeway from Miami Beach, with its all-week weekend of skin and flash and thumping noise, to downtown Miami, which was slower, more restrained, particularly now, 4:00 p.m. on a Tuesday before the office buildings emptied.
Inside Revel Bar + Restaurant, the tables were empty. It was possible to see Joe here, Renee thought as she paused just inside the front door. This seemed like Joe’s kind of place. Slick, expensive, but homey, too, comfortable. The bartender was a tall man with hard, pale arms and sharp, straight-edged planes to his face. He looked vaguely dangerous, like a Russian gangster or a struggling actor who auditioned for those kinds of roles.