What You Don't Know, page 12
“What the—” He repeatedly pushed down on the stubborn handle, his ire seeming to grow with each repetition.
“It’s the—” Blair’s hands flew to the electronic keypad affixed to the handle and she punched in the access code, the little green light granting them access. “It’s a security measure, so no one can get into the house through the—”
Dio pushed her through the door, not caring to hear the rest of her explanation about the keypad. The door beeped softly as it slid shut. She fumbled with her keys as she tried to deactivate the alarm on her Range Rover and unlock it. Dio stood next to the passenger door, his eyes boring a hole into her.
“What’s the problem?” he asked as he peered at her over the roof of the car.
“Nothing, nothing. I’ve got it, I’ve—” The reassuring click of the doors unlocking calmed her for a few seconds as she slid behind the wheel, trying not to flinch as he folded his long frame into the passenger seat beside her. Now confined inside this tiny, hushed space, her breath seemed to thunder against the plush interior. The rank smell of his body intensified. The jangle of the keys, the rustle of his jeans and t-shirt across the supple leather seat crashed against her ears.
She dropped her purse on the floor behind her and started the car. Malcolm had parked the Mercedes in the same spot, leaving her free to back out of her own space. As she pulled out of the long driveway, Blair’s eyes jumped from house to house, straining past half-open curtains, searching for a front door magically opening, someone she could wave to, someone who would see this kid sitting next to her, wonder who he was, and think something just didn’t seem right. Hell, she’d even settle for one of Felice’s unwelcome drop-in’s.
Would anyone’s cameras be capturing this? Malcolm mentioning their own glitching cameras had irritated her. It wasn’t that she didn’t take it seriously. These things didn’t bother her the way they did him. All these years living in Highland Park, they’d never even had so much as a newspaper stolen.
It wasn’t a priority.
“Hey. Hey!” Dio yelled at Blair as he jerked the steering wheel toward him. She snapped to attention as she realized she’d almost hit the Wexlers’ mailbox. She pressed her hand against her chest and took a few shallow breaths.
“Sorry,” she said.
“You should keep your eyes on the road.” He looked out the window.
Blair shifted in her seat, gripping the steering wheel while Dio drummed his fingertips against his kneecap and mouthed song lyrics to himself, despite no radio playing.
This couldn’t be happening. Was she really driving her captor to the grocery store to feed the beasts at her house? Was she really acting like everything was fine? Was she really this casual? Like she was out for a Sunday drive. Like they weren’t under siege. Like she was on some lovely excursion.
Like she wasn’t sure she’d live to see tomorrow.
Phone Call
Saturday, April 1, 2:00 p.m., CT
Tree: Man … I been trying to reach you all day. Where the hell you at?
* * *
Look, all right, since you didn’t call me and tell me what you wanted because of Malcolm and Ol’ Girl being here, I had to change the plan. Had to change everything. And since you ain’t call me back, you can’t get mad about nothing.
* * *
(Silence) So, okay, I’m just letting you know, I’m gonna have to do things my way.
Separate Lives
Willie Dalton: Retirement is hard. You’re desperate to fill the time. It’s like a demon chasing you.
* * *
Bob Boswell: You see this all the time with pro athletes when they retire. On Friday, you know what your job is. Score touchdowns. Kick field goals. Run drills. Go to practice. Fly here. Fly there. And then on Monday, you literally have no idea what you’re supposed to do all day. It hits you like the hard, cold brick that it is. That clock just keeps marching on. Those calendar pages keep turning. The boredom. The silence. That’s what drags them down into the abyss. How are you going to fill that time? What are you going to do all day?
* * *
What are you going to do with the rest of your life?
* * *
Alex Martinez: Malcolm was one of those guys who had like twenty things lined up for when the end of his career came. Broadcasting, endorsements, speeches, business deals, appearances. The type of obligations that go along with being a former superstar football player and future Hall-of-Famer. He was always on the road, even in the off-season, always gone. He wasn’t waiting around for the moss to start growing.
* * *
Bridget Johnson: Except the husband being gone all the time, not great for a marriage. It was hard on my sister. Brutal. Definitely not the happily-ever-after she had in mind.
* * *
Lani Jacobs: At first, Blair went everywhere with him. Every game, every event, every everything. Those professional athletes, you know they want you with them all the time. Your time is their time. For a while, she was up for it, wanted to be with him. But you can’t keep that up forever. She’d spent all those years going all over the world with Captivate and I think she wanted a break and stay in one place. Put down roots. So, Malcolm bought her a house.
* * *
Bridget Johnson: He figured that would keep her occupied. Except my sister didn’t have any idea how to decorate a house or run a household. No clue.
* * *
Lani Jacobs: So, now she’s out here in Highland Park, by herself, no husband, no—all her friends were the football wives and they weren’t around. Their husbands are still playing. The Captivate girls were busy doing their own thing. And she was miserable. Absolutely miserable. She didn’t even know how to drive. Didn’t even have a license!
* * *
Elena York: Blair wasn’t a particularly ambitious person. She kind of stumbled into the whole singing career thing, but it wasn’t something she’d dreamed about her whole life or anything. She really became a success with Captivate by accident, not because she wanted it necessarily, but because it fell in her lap.
* * *
Isabelle Ryan: Blair was task-oriented. Give her a job to do and she would give it her all. So, while she wasn’t a go-getter or all that proactive, she was an incredibly hard worker, which is why she did so well with the singing group. Learn these dance steps, put on this costume, sing this song and boom, she’s going to hit it out of the park. But once she didn’t have anyone to tell her what to do or where to go, she floundered.
* * *
Elena York: For most people, this would be a real opportunity to cultivate all of the interests you never had time to pursue, but quite simply, Blair didn’t have that kind of drive, didn’t have those passions.
* * *
Lani Jacobs: She’d go grocery shopping practically every day because she thought that’s what she was supposed to do, even though she had no idea how to cook anything. She’d wander around the mall all day but never buy anything. She’d jog to the city early in the morning and then walk home—a four-and-a-half-hour walk—because it killed time.
* * *
Bridget Johnson: The worst part about that time, though? The women. Malcolm was such a player when my sister met him. I mean, he had the worst reputation. Don’t get me wrong—I love Malcolm, but he was a dog. There’d always been tabloid stories about him, but after they got married, they escalated. Like through the roof. He was having an affair with this one, spotted coming out of a club with that one. Paternity suits. Women coming up to my sister on the street or at a restaurant, ringing the doorbell, holding babies they claimed belonged to Malcolm. Sending my sister pictures and letters—panties, used condoms, you name it. Going on talk shows, selling stories, accusing him of all kinds of stuff. It was relentless.
* * *
Ricky Gilbert, Malcolm’s Brother: Yeah, my brother … he could be messy back in the day. But once he and Blair got together? That all stopped. Cold. It was all noise. No truth to any of it whatsoever.
* * *
Lani Jacobs: Well, he was gone all that time, so that didn’t help matters. All she could do was imagine the worst. The most dangerous thing in the world is a woman with an overly active imagination and all the time in the world.
* * *
Bridget Johnson: I told her to divorce him. To me, it just wasn’t worth all the drama.
* * *
Skye Stafford: Because so much about this case was so strange, one of the angles police pursued was the possibility the family had been targeted by a long-lost illegitimate child of Malcolm’s out for revenge, or orchestrated by a past spurned lover.
* * *
Elena York: There was one woman in particular, Laurie Sanders, who was especially vocal in the media about what she claimed was a long-term affair with Malcolm. She’d bombard the couple with e-mails, phone calls—send her panties in the mail to Blair, stuff like that. Eventually, they had to take out a restraining order against her.
* * *
Bridget Johnson: All of this took a devastating toll on my sister. And so … she lashed out.
* * *
Isabelle Ryan: Why do women have affairs? A variety of reasons, but in Blair’s case, it was a mix of boredom, neglect, and rage. A potent combination.
* * *
Lani Jacobs: Sure, I think that’s why she did it. To send him a message.
* * *
Bridget Johnson: She saw a flyer at the grocery store one day about cooking classes. That’s how it started. A cooking class.
1:45 p.m.
Blair snuck a quick glance at her passenger—her jailer—wondering if she should try to get him talking, work him in some way to get him on her side, play him against the ringleader.
She didn’t have a clue how to do that, though. She couldn’t even wrack her brain for some book or movie she’d seen for a reference. She avoided those types of movies like a fungus. She didn’t like scary movies of any kind. No car chases, no running through the dark woods to elude a knife-wielding maniac. No mind-bending psychological thriller with a twist at the end. No blood. Nothing that would invoke tossing and turning at night. Nothing that would wake her from a fevered sleep, sending her scurrying around the house in search of locked doors and intact window panes. Nothing she’d have to watch through splayed fingers, crouched in the corner, the thumping of her heart only slightly less audible than the foreboding music or piercing screams on the screen.
Instead, she reveled in bubbly romantic comedies. Frothy confections with gentle, hokey laughs and sunny, storybook endings. She’d probably seen every Hallmark movie ever made at least ten times. As a kid, she’d save her little pennies for the movies every Saturday and watch whatever comedy was on the bill, the sillier the better. Anything to make her laugh, anything to make her feel good. Anything to escape that apartment.
Those kinds of movies agitated Farrah. “Schmaltz,” she called them. “God, Mom, are you watching that drippy dippy crap again? Where’s the schmaltz police?” she would say, rolling her eyes and groaning. “How can you stand it?”
Blair would always laugh at Farrah saying something like “schmaltz.” The privilege of growing up in Highland Park. You didn’t hear words like that in the Bronx. Not the crumbling corner of the Bronx she’d grown up on, anyway. And yet, Blair would laugh, embarrassed, charmed by her daughter, proclaiming how cute she thought her fluffy little movies were, despite their cheesiness. The corny cheesiness was exactly what she loved. Then they would dissolve into giggles and Blair would pull her daughter down on the couch to force her to watch, though Farrah’s squirming and cynicism would soon send her bolting from the room in search of something comforting on her iPhone. A true crime podcast. One of Sondra Ellis’s grim and gritty documentaries. Old episodes of Girls. Insecure. Nirvana’s Nevermind, a discovery her freshman year of high school that ignited what Farrah laughingly referred to as her angsty-black-teen-trapped-in-white-suburbia years.
Tears ballooned inside Blair at the thought of her daughter. In an instant, she appeared like a mirage in front of her. She’d never tell anyone this, but she was so glad Farrah looked like her. The dewy dark bronze cheeks, often flushed with excitement, blooming with health, happiness, and love. So unlike the façade of her own adolescence—the perpetually growling stomach and worn clothes patched together with stolen masking tape and safety pins. The girl’s glittering, wide-set eyes, one light brown, one hazel. The rubber band limbs and spuds for breasts. The long, lush blue-black ringlets, typically tumbling out of a fraying ponytail holder. The high swell of her bottom, the dimple of her chin and playful curve of her thin lips stretched into a megawatt smile, marred only by the crooked front tooth stubbornly hugging its straight mate. The one ear studded with a row of hoops, the other adorned with a single silver stick earring.
And her laughter. Farrah’s laughter. Light and infectious. Blair so desperately wanted to hear those sparkling notes again.
Which meant she had to try.
Blair cleared her throat to catch Dio’s attention. He didn’t budge.
“So, how old are you?” she asked.
He gave her a lazy glance. “Twenty-three. Be twenty-four next month.”
Blair grabbed the pendant of her necklace and rubbed it. “Any special plans for your birthday?”
Dio laughed, a heyna-like cackle that made her flinch. “Do I have special plans for my birthday?” he asked, imitating her. “What?”
“Look, I just meant—”
“What, you mean, like a party or something?”
“I guess—yeah. A party.”
“There ain’t gonna be no candles on a cake. Nobody singing me ‘Happy Birthday.’ Nobody bringing me no presents—nothing.” He sniffed and looked back out the window. “It’s just another day.”
They sank back into silence. The turn for the grocery store was at the next light. There was another store a few miles away and she wondered if she should go there instead. He wouldn’t know the difference. Of course, if she went to her regular store, maybe someone would recognize her, think it was strange she was back the next day—and with someone she’d never been in with before. Her grocery schedule was like clockwork. Malcolm had never been to the store with her. He wouldn’t know the first thing about grocery shopping. Farrah would come with her sometimes when she was home. Mostly, it was just her. Always her. Someone had to see something. Notice something was wrong.
The choice was clear. They would go to this grocery store and she would have to hope she was able to signal to someone or someone would be alert to the oddity of this young man grocery shopping with her and not on her regular day.
Decision made, Blair pulled into the lot, bustling with people, cars, and carts, and parked near the front. This was the very reason she hated going on Saturdays. Then again, the odds of running into someone she knew shot to the top of the charts. A neighbor. An acquaintance.
Someone.
She slung her purse over her shoulder, holding it close, scanning for eyes, lips, strands of hair, someone familiar. Dio walked in step with her, hands shoved into his pockets, he, too looking around.
The doors slid open and Blair grabbed a cart. She glanced over her shoulder at Dio. His mouth had dropped into an ‘O,’ his head rotating around at the sights, lights, and sounds.
“Damn.” He let out a low whistle. “This like Disneyland or something. This where you buy your food?”
“Yeah.” Blair shrugged, her head swiveling slowly, scanning, still coming up empty. “It’s nothing special. Just a regular old grocery store.”
“This ain’t like no grocery store I’ve ever seen.”
She didn’t answer, still distracted by the hunt for a familiar face.
“We got a corner store and a gas station a little further up,” he continued, either not realizing she hasn’t responded, or not caring. “That’s where we buy our groceries. Every few months, Mama gets on the bus—two buses actually—to go to the big grocery store, which ain’t even nowhere near as nice as this. Ain’t no five minute drive, neither. Two hours there and back. She got to save up a little extra, ’cause it’s expensive as hell and all of us got to go with her to help carry the bags and—” He shook his head again. “This? This is something else.”
Blair chewed on her bottom lip as she steered the cart toward the bakery section. “That’s how it was with me, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m from the Bronx.”
“Get the hell out of here—you—you from New York? Miss Mansion? Miss Highland Park? The Bronx? Boogie down Bronx?”
“South Bronx.” She felt her feet slide onto solid ground, wondering why she hadn’t thought to make this connection before. Probably because she liked to forget. “Mott Haven.”
“What’s that, Mott Haven?”
“The PJ’s. Projects. You know.”
“The projects? You? You grew up in the projects? The hood?”
“Until I was eighteen.”
“Man, I would have never, ever guessed that about you, miss. Not in about a million and a half years. I thought you was gonna tell me you grew up in some mansion or something.”
“Oh no. Not me. No, my husband grew up in a mansion in Malibu. Right on the ocean.”
