Crimson Footprints lll: The Finale Read Free Page A

instruments. Nonetheless, the Porsche sat in their garage, a bold bribe paid out in full. It was the Tanaka way, not the Hammonds’. Deena couldn’t imagine what they’d give him for his high school graduation, his college one, or when he married one day.
    Noah burst by, bubbling, humming and pausing only to thrust in time with his own rendition of the Batman theme song, before powering onward with his luggage. It seemed not to matter that he wore a green and massively obnoxious Incredible Hulk fist on one hand and the cape of Superman on his back.
    Three children and she recognized not a one as being of her own design, not even when the eldest was technically her brother’s child.
    Others would travel with them to Oranjestad. Mrs. Jimenez, their maid; Antonina, their au pair; and Mario Saunders, the resident chef, who busied himself daily with threats about finding work elsewhere, never mind his incomparable salary.
    Finally, they were on their way. First, to pick up Deena’s grandmother, then onward to Miami International where they would board an early evening flight, first class, to the island. No one in the car had much enthusiasm for the trip, as all of them, except Grandma Emma, had just summered there. Meanwhile, she was too busy with anticlimactic sleeping to bother with excitement.
    On the flight the children busied themselves with iPads and groans of boredom, long past the enraptured face-to-window presses typical of majestic destinations. But Grandma Emma was a different story. Seated next to Tony with a blanket in her lap, she gazed out on open blue waters, eyes steady, gaze clear. Deena wondered what she thought, remembered, considered. She wondered what it must have felt like to face definitive lasts. Last vacations, last gazes of open water, last plane ride perhaps? Deena wondered if, when her time came, she would be as graceful and accommodating of death.
    Aruba eventually came into view. A dot of honed in green, nestled into shimmering blue waters, it burst into calypso colors and sharp-edged countryside as they grew near.
    Oh, did it stand alive, ushering Deena back to sweltering nights, sweat, and soca skin-to-skin on the dance floor. There’d been no children then. Only Tak and Deena and all the touches they could stand. She could drown with that, Deena realized. She could drown, content, so long as his fingers touched her body and her arms wrapped him in the end.
    Once landed and with luggage in hand, they were driven from the airport to their chateau on Malmok Beach. They weaved away from the city along L.G. Smith, straddling the sea as delicate raindrops fell. A tiny island was all Aruba was, no bigger than D.C., though pulsing with flavor.
    In a few minutes time, they arrived at their summer home.
    Two floors of pretentious estate stretched to the ocean’s edge in unhurried grandeur. It was the sort of pompous residence celebrities bought to assert their wealth. Two dozen bedrooms, ten bathrooms, in addition to indoor and outdoor pools. There was more, of course, much more. And all of it was Deena’s.
    It never got old for her: wealth, deference, power. She’d shattered the glass ceiling with her own two fists. Wealthiest architect under 50. No preludes, no preamble. While she was far from the iconic figure that Tak’s father was, hers was a name worth knowing and knowing well.
    Deena stood in the entrance hall of her vacation home, one of three they owned. Her chef pushed past her muttering, while the au pair struggled with an armful of bags, each donned with surfer waves.
    “Really, Mia,” Tak snapped as Antonina dropped a fistful of bags. “Think you could trouble yourself with more than a skateboard for once? She’s not your valet, you know.”
    Mia’s gray eyes flitted up to her father, painted with what her mouth wouldn’t say, before snatching two suitcases from the floor and barging up the stairs.
    Tak sighed.
    “Is it time for this already?”
    “She’s thirteen, so yeah,”