Lie Still, page 11
“Don’t you think that’s weird?” Letty persisted.
I covered my plate with two paper napkins, watching a red stain slowly spread. “I don’t know. I’ve been here three weeks. I don’t think you should openly accuse Misty of anything without more information.” I wondered if Caroline had been blackmailing Misty, too. The blurred photograph of that little girl on the bicycle crept into my brain. All that weird awkwardness.
Letty was still assaulting me with her garlic breath. My right temple pounded. “In fact,” I added, “I’m not interested in hearing your gossip about her. Ever.”
“Listen to you defend her.” Letty was in full sarcastic throttle. “I didn’t know you’d become such fast friends.”
Mike and Harry stopped their conversation to stare at us, like they had been watching a G-rated movie and suddenly somebody took off her top.
“Did you see those shoes she wore to Caroline’s the other night? Whore shoes. Misty’s a slut. Word is, so are you.” Letty’s words sliced the air at a decibel that carried to every corner of the restaurant. I tensed. Mike’s hand gripped my arm in warning. At last, some attention from my spouse.
“You think I don’t know about you?” The room was now completely still, as if a conductor had raised his baton. Waiters balanced trays, forks froze inches from open mouths. No one spoke a word, all eyes glued to the four of us. The maître d’ nervously maneuvered his way in our direction. I was sure he was dreading breaking up a brawl at the mayor’s table.
Harry scooted his chair back loudly, nearly knocking it into the horrified waitress behind him. His face was filled with the kind of disgust I reserved for … well, I didn’t reserve that kind of disgust for anything but the Texas roaches the size of silver dollars that I found clacking across the kitchen counter last night. But Harry did, and he was aiming it at his wife. Leticia withered. It was as if she’d lost weight in front of my eyes.
“My wife has been struggling with a new medication.” Harry tugged Letty roughly to her feet like she was an obnoxious child about to get a whipping in the restaurant bathroom. “My apologies.” He turned to the maître d’. “Please put this on my tab and add in a thirty percent tip. Mike, I’ll see you tomorrow. Emily, I’m sure we’ll meet again.” That thirty percent tip was Letty’s money, but Harry Dunn clearly threw it around like confetti.
Harry took my hand before I could refuse, bending to kiss it. I felt the tip of his tongue. It was a dead tie as to which of these two people was more repulsive.
“Good night,” Mike said, for both of us. I’m not sure whether he knew I was wiping the back of my hand along my pants leg.
On the way home in the car, Mike said nothing. I wanted to tell him about the boxes, both the one at Caroline’s that held secrets and the one that held the cigar. About Harry’s tongue. But now my own anger was blazing. He couldn’t blame me for the disastrous evening. He’d set up this little dinner party and informed me of the details in a text, making it very hard for me to say no. Sure, I could have been more tactful. But the woman called me a slut, and her husband licked me like a dog.
We reached the front porch, and I trailed behind him. Mike turned the key but the old, swollen door stuck like it usually did. He thrust a fierce kick in the middle of the frame and the door swung open, slamming against the wall, leaving a star-shaped hole in the living room plaster.
“You think I’m angry about tonight? About that shrew of a woman and her ambitious asshole husband? Here’s what I’m angry about, Emily.”
He spit out every syllable of my name like a bad taste in his mouth. He pulled me by the arm to our bedroom, to the pile of papers on his nightstand that I assumed were part of the Kilimanjaro of police files he reviewed as bedtime stories.
“See this?” He removed a sheaf of five or six pages from a folder, shaking them inches from my nose before letting them fall like autumn leaves. “What else is there, Emily?”
I shrugged off his hand and knelt clumsily to gather up the papers, to give myself time. My eyes blurred with tears, but I could see enough words and phrases to get the gist.
Homicide.
Gunshots.
My hands froze. On the page resting at my feet, a crime scene photo was replicated on a scratchy fax. I could make out a bloody black soup near Pierce Martin’s head.
“Why didn’t you tell me the man who raped you was shot to death three weeks later?” Mike was now on the floor with me, pulling me to him. His fury was hot and close. Too close.
I couldn’t breathe. When did Mike put these papers on the nightstand?
“Did you do it?” Four words, each one hitting my brain like an ice pick. “Why?” His voice was despairing. “Why can’t you talk to me?”
“Because I was a different person then.” My voice was cold and far away, not at all the way I wanted it to come out.
I tried again, and this time my voice broke with my pathetic confession. “Because you might not have married me.”
He dropped his hands from my shoulders.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he muttered.
“Wait. Mike, please.” I sucked in a shaky breath. “I didn’t kill him.”
But he was already gone.
One sheet at a time, I picked up the papers scattered across our bedroom floor. My tears were falling like fat drops of rain, smudging the ugly words.
Of course Mike had checked out Pierce Martin. What cop in his right mind wouldn’t check out a vicious crime against his wife, even if it happened thirteen years ago?
No, Pierce Martin never fulfilled his imaginary destiny as a nasty husband with two children, a dangerous roving eye, and serial rapist status.
My rapist was dead. I didn’t need to see the crime photo staring up at me from the floor. I knew with the certainty of someone who has stood over his casket to be completely sure.
Pierce’s mother had caught me when I’d crumpled over her son’s coffin. It had been harder to confront a dead Pierce than I’d thought. With the kind of irony only God can dish out, his mother grabbed my elbow as I wobbled, offering support, asking how I knew him, murmuring that he was a “wonderful boy.” This was before I became a suspect. Before I knew about the other girls.
I wanted to scream at his mother so loudly that I woke that evil son of a bitch in his coffin, so that all those mourners could know: You raised a monster!
Instead, I had pretended to be too overcome to talk.
When she turned away to find better consolation, I opened my fist, which clutched a chain with a tiny gold cross, a $30 diamond chip dropped into the center.
It was the cross hanging around my neck when he raped me.
The necklace that lived under the glass in a JCPenney store before he purchased it at the last minute, all part of his plan.
The one he gave me during the chocolate mousse course at my nineteenth birthday dinner two hours before he jammed himself inside me, then rolled off nonchalantly to pee in a bathroom a few feet away. Like I was nothing.
Standing over his dead body, I had lifted his suit flap and tucked the cross inside his crisp shirt pocket so he could take it with him to hell.
13
“Miz Emily. You came. Gracias.”
It had taken four or five rings of the bell before Maria answered. She was an extremely pretty girl who didn’t look at all pretty right now. Hungover, maybe. She teetered a little in Caroline’s doorway. She was dressed in that frilly maid’s uniform, only it looked like she’d slept in it. Blotchy skin, runny mascara, brown hair slashed with unnatural maroonish streaks. An inch of black roots. The uniform transformed Maria’s curvy figure into a sexual cliché. The wrong kind of man would push her to her knees.
I didn’t look too hot myself: no shower or makeup, drained and exhausted from my fight with Mike, anxious about everything I needed to say to him. The cigar box was back in the front seat of the car, still a secret, now a secret in a Ziploc bag.
When Maria called that morning, crying, peppering me with an English-Spanish pilaf I couldn’t translate, it was tempting to say no. Even though my mission yesterday had been to track her down, I was too distraught today to deal with the problems of Caroline. Four days missing. I had my own messy life to get in order. Two of Maria’s words finally convinced me.
Cops. Help.
“Your husband. He left with his policeman two hours ago. After the search.”
“What search?”
“They had a paper. Official. They looked all over her bedroom, disturbing things. I am trying to fix. She will be unhappy. Blame me. She will fire me, I know it.”
Maria used her hand to shade her eyes from the sun, on its way to high noon, and peered down the empty street. Luxury cars and trucks were tidily ensconced in four-car garages, their owners chilling out in refrigerated homes. For me, fresh from Manhattan’s twenty-four-hour cacophony, the absolute stillness in late morning was eerie, as if everyone had fled a nuclear threat.
“What exactly do you want me to do?” The heat beat on my shoulders, and my throat felt parched.
“Your husband. He is in charge, no? He seemed nice. But the other one.” She pointed to her head. “Rojo.” Red. Cody Hill. “He said he would look into my family’s legal status if I didn’t cooperate. I need to know. Is he going to give my family trouble?”
“Are you here illegally, Maria?”
“The problem is not me.” She said this impatiently. “Can you talk to your husband about the rojo cop? Please.” The way she said rojo, it might as well have been asshole. Something we agreed on wholeheartedly. While I remained silent, considering this, she burst into tears and spun into a torrent of solid-gold Spanish.
“Maria,” I said gently. “English, please. I’ll try to help. Maybe I can talk to Mike.”
“Everything is a mess now,” she sobbed. “They took her drawers and closet apart. I can’t clean it up by myself. I’m afraid I will get in trouble if I bring in my sister to help.”
I was shoveling a grave for myself simply by standing on the doorstep of a possible crime scene. Mike had returned home at dawn to shower and re-dress for work while I pretended to be sleeping. We were pros at that double maneuver.
Violet’s sweet face flashed in my mind. A little girl who depended on her aunt for survival.
“I have about two hours,” I told Maria.
Maria swung the door wide with a shaky smile and led me to the kitchen. State-of-the-art stainless-steel appliances, miles of white granite counter space, stacks of generic white china behind the glass cabinets. A caterer’s dream.
Maria opened a door in the corner to reveal a servants’ staircase. The modern dumbwaiter was big enough to hold Maria and me cross-legged playing a comfortable game of patty-cake. As a kid, I’d always wanted to ride in one. Maria was already climbing the stairs in the narrow opening, quickly, two at a time.
“How many flights?” I was surprised to be slightly out of breath on the first landing. Maybe I should sign up for the No Baby Fat exercise class advertised in the window of the Clairmont Y.
“Four. Miz Warwick’s bedroom is on three.” One floor above the pink museum.
I tried to swallow my huffing and puffing once we reached the third floor. How could I be out of shape so fast? I ran a half marathon last year. Maria didn’t notice or didn’t care, hurrying around the curved hallway. This floor was identical to the one below it: closed doors, deep-red flocked paper, wall sconces dripping with painstakingly Windexed chandelier beads.
“Here.” She paused at a door in the middle. “We must be quick. Any minute she could return.”
She threw open the door to a room that took my breath away. No one settled back against these pillows on this bed to watch a rerun of Downton Abbey and eat potato chips. The creamy antique linens and embroidered pillows must have cost thousands. The walls curved in a semi-circle, inviting us into a painted garden. Clouds from a muted sky drifted on the ceiling. Everywhere, the muralist invoked the gardens of Versailles at twilight.
Maria compulsively smoothed out an invisible wrinkle on the duvet. No crime scene tape, no blood on the pillow. The window by the bed shut tight, filmy curtains draping either side.
“We must work first on the bureau,” she said, “and then the closet.” She nodded toward two double doors.
“OK,” I said, uncertainly. She pointed toward my foot. I was standing in a trail of silk underwear, tossed from a nearby bureau. I bent down, not really wanting to touch an old lady’s panties. Whoa. This was expensive, sexy honeymoon underwear. It also appeared to have never been worn. I didn’t think Mike would rake through a stranger’s underwear drawer and toss it in this perverted fashion. But Rojo probably would.
I began to fold. Maria disappeared into the closet. Too far away to carry on a conversation. It took about a half-hour to sort out the underwear and nightgowns scattered across the room.
“Maria?” I called her name toward the closet. She appeared instantly.
“Are you too tired to help me more?” she asked, a little petulantly.
I glanced at my watch. “I can work with you in there for a little while.” In closer quarters, where I could quiz her about Caroline and her damn club.
I wanted to snatch those words back once she reopened the doors, automatic lights flooding a cavernous white space. I should have started in here, to hell with the panties.
Two or three hundred shoes rested on floor-to-ceiling glass shelves, individually spotlighted, toes pointing every which way. And plenty of empty shelves where the piles dumped on the floor were supposed to go. Only the hanging clothes were undisturbed, hanging in neat, tight lines, organized by color, and Caroline liked color. Especially red.
“Every shoe must have two inches between each, with toes pointing straight out,” Maria recited. “Exactly. Like this.” She demonstrated on a pair of glossy black evening shoes. I half expected her to hand me a ruler. Maria slid a small ladder in place and proceeded to climb it. “The rojo … thought she hid something in her shoes. I’ll do top. You do bottom.”
“Did he find anything?”
“No.”
“Maria, where do you think Caroline is?” I kept my eyes on the pair of Josef Seibel leather clogs in my hands. They seemed very un-Caroline.
“I don’t know. I told the police this.” Defensive.
“Was she depressed? Her friends say she had become a little paranoid.”
“I’m not sure what this word—paranoid—means. What friends? They are all bitches.”
I appreciated her rude assessment. The woman who washed Caroline’s underwear, who picked her hair out of the shower drain, who spent more time with her than anyone on earth, would know.
“They are all calling here, all the time, leaving messages. Checking. Like they care. Last night, I found Miz Jenny and Miz Mary Ann creeping around the backyard in bug masks. I recognize Miz Jenny’s tetas falsas or I might have called the police. They said they were making sure that Miz Caroline hadn’t fallen behind a bush.”
I thought for a second. “Night vision goggles?”
“Si. Miz Jenny said she borrowed them from her husband’s hunting closet.”
Maria stepped carefully off the ladder. Her own shoes were white, clunky, and rubber-soled. Nurse’s shoes, before nurses started hipping it up with Crocs and New Balance.
Color flared on her cheeks. “Why did you show up at my home? I do not think you are the type for a babysitter.”
“Truthfully, because I need you. I’m out of my element here. Caroline invited me over to pass around that ridiculous box. Then someone dropped off a little blackmail package at my house. Was that Caroline’s idea?”
About six expressions played across the maid’s face. First, surprise. So she didn’t drop off the package. None of her facial tics after that were terribly sympathetic. In fact, the one she was wearing now could almost be described as … happy.
“It’s OK,” she assured me eagerly. “She blackmails all the ladies. Me. She provided fake papers for my sister and niece. This is what I am worried about with that cop. Violet was only one year old when she rode across the border in the trunk of a car. So sometimes Mrs. Caroline threatens to expose them. She helps but there is always a price.” Her voice trailed into bitterness. “If you are not going to hire me right now, I can’t say more. I will make you lunch. For el nino.” She pointed to my stomach and walked out. Conversation over.
It felt both safe and illicit to be alone. It reminded me of the naïve middle-schooler I once was, snooping in my parents’ closet, discovering a box of condoms and my mother’s vibrator. Excited and a little horrified. Guilty.
I shook it off. Maria had asked me here, to help. We were almost done. And I was hungry. My head felt a little light. I ran my hand along a row of historical romances stuffed neatly in a bookshelf at the end of the closet. Maybe where Caroline got her ideas. They weren’t real books, I realized. Even in her closet, Caroline was creating a façade. I leaned back against the shelf and closed my eyes. Suddenly, top to bottom, my world was moving. I fell backward, almost stabbing myself with a five-inch heel.
The bookcase was a camouflaged door.
I’d just read about this trend while thumbing magazines in my OB’s office in New York. High-def, high-concept secret rooms that whisked adults back to the fantasies of their childhoods while conveniently soundproofing them from their own kids. At the time, I thought it was ridiculous. But here I was, staring into a black crack, wondering what Caroline would hide. Hopefully just the comfortable Hanes granny panties she really wore.
“Don’t let anything shock you,” a friend said when I told her about our impending move to Texas. “Guns, babies, reputation. They’ll do anything to protect them.”
I let go of the absurdity of the moment, of the foghorn warning in my head, and stood up.
I laid my palm flat on Romancing Mister Bridgerton and How to Woo a Reluctant Lady.
I gave the shelf a push, wondering whether I was entering Caroline’s tomb.
A foot in, and I was still blind. I slid my right hand up and down the wall until it touched a switch that flooded light into a decent-sized room, about 12 × 15 feet.
I covered my plate with two paper napkins, watching a red stain slowly spread. “I don’t know. I’ve been here three weeks. I don’t think you should openly accuse Misty of anything without more information.” I wondered if Caroline had been blackmailing Misty, too. The blurred photograph of that little girl on the bicycle crept into my brain. All that weird awkwardness.
Letty was still assaulting me with her garlic breath. My right temple pounded. “In fact,” I added, “I’m not interested in hearing your gossip about her. Ever.”
“Listen to you defend her.” Letty was in full sarcastic throttle. “I didn’t know you’d become such fast friends.”
Mike and Harry stopped their conversation to stare at us, like they had been watching a G-rated movie and suddenly somebody took off her top.
“Did you see those shoes she wore to Caroline’s the other night? Whore shoes. Misty’s a slut. Word is, so are you.” Letty’s words sliced the air at a decibel that carried to every corner of the restaurant. I tensed. Mike’s hand gripped my arm in warning. At last, some attention from my spouse.
“You think I don’t know about you?” The room was now completely still, as if a conductor had raised his baton. Waiters balanced trays, forks froze inches from open mouths. No one spoke a word, all eyes glued to the four of us. The maître d’ nervously maneuvered his way in our direction. I was sure he was dreading breaking up a brawl at the mayor’s table.
Harry scooted his chair back loudly, nearly knocking it into the horrified waitress behind him. His face was filled with the kind of disgust I reserved for … well, I didn’t reserve that kind of disgust for anything but the Texas roaches the size of silver dollars that I found clacking across the kitchen counter last night. But Harry did, and he was aiming it at his wife. Leticia withered. It was as if she’d lost weight in front of my eyes.
“My wife has been struggling with a new medication.” Harry tugged Letty roughly to her feet like she was an obnoxious child about to get a whipping in the restaurant bathroom. “My apologies.” He turned to the maître d’. “Please put this on my tab and add in a thirty percent tip. Mike, I’ll see you tomorrow. Emily, I’m sure we’ll meet again.” That thirty percent tip was Letty’s money, but Harry Dunn clearly threw it around like confetti.
Harry took my hand before I could refuse, bending to kiss it. I felt the tip of his tongue. It was a dead tie as to which of these two people was more repulsive.
“Good night,” Mike said, for both of us. I’m not sure whether he knew I was wiping the back of my hand along my pants leg.
On the way home in the car, Mike said nothing. I wanted to tell him about the boxes, both the one at Caroline’s that held secrets and the one that held the cigar. About Harry’s tongue. But now my own anger was blazing. He couldn’t blame me for the disastrous evening. He’d set up this little dinner party and informed me of the details in a text, making it very hard for me to say no. Sure, I could have been more tactful. But the woman called me a slut, and her husband licked me like a dog.
We reached the front porch, and I trailed behind him. Mike turned the key but the old, swollen door stuck like it usually did. He thrust a fierce kick in the middle of the frame and the door swung open, slamming against the wall, leaving a star-shaped hole in the living room plaster.
“You think I’m angry about tonight? About that shrew of a woman and her ambitious asshole husband? Here’s what I’m angry about, Emily.”
He spit out every syllable of my name like a bad taste in his mouth. He pulled me by the arm to our bedroom, to the pile of papers on his nightstand that I assumed were part of the Kilimanjaro of police files he reviewed as bedtime stories.
“See this?” He removed a sheaf of five or six pages from a folder, shaking them inches from my nose before letting them fall like autumn leaves. “What else is there, Emily?”
I shrugged off his hand and knelt clumsily to gather up the papers, to give myself time. My eyes blurred with tears, but I could see enough words and phrases to get the gist.
Homicide.
Gunshots.
My hands froze. On the page resting at my feet, a crime scene photo was replicated on a scratchy fax. I could make out a bloody black soup near Pierce Martin’s head.
“Why didn’t you tell me the man who raped you was shot to death three weeks later?” Mike was now on the floor with me, pulling me to him. His fury was hot and close. Too close.
I couldn’t breathe. When did Mike put these papers on the nightstand?
“Did you do it?” Four words, each one hitting my brain like an ice pick. “Why?” His voice was despairing. “Why can’t you talk to me?”
“Because I was a different person then.” My voice was cold and far away, not at all the way I wanted it to come out.
I tried again, and this time my voice broke with my pathetic confession. “Because you might not have married me.”
He dropped his hands from my shoulders.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he muttered.
“Wait. Mike, please.” I sucked in a shaky breath. “I didn’t kill him.”
But he was already gone.
One sheet at a time, I picked up the papers scattered across our bedroom floor. My tears were falling like fat drops of rain, smudging the ugly words.
Of course Mike had checked out Pierce Martin. What cop in his right mind wouldn’t check out a vicious crime against his wife, even if it happened thirteen years ago?
No, Pierce Martin never fulfilled his imaginary destiny as a nasty husband with two children, a dangerous roving eye, and serial rapist status.
My rapist was dead. I didn’t need to see the crime photo staring up at me from the floor. I knew with the certainty of someone who has stood over his casket to be completely sure.
Pierce’s mother had caught me when I’d crumpled over her son’s coffin. It had been harder to confront a dead Pierce than I’d thought. With the kind of irony only God can dish out, his mother grabbed my elbow as I wobbled, offering support, asking how I knew him, murmuring that he was a “wonderful boy.” This was before I became a suspect. Before I knew about the other girls.
I wanted to scream at his mother so loudly that I woke that evil son of a bitch in his coffin, so that all those mourners could know: You raised a monster!
Instead, I had pretended to be too overcome to talk.
When she turned away to find better consolation, I opened my fist, which clutched a chain with a tiny gold cross, a $30 diamond chip dropped into the center.
It was the cross hanging around my neck when he raped me.
The necklace that lived under the glass in a JCPenney store before he purchased it at the last minute, all part of his plan.
The one he gave me during the chocolate mousse course at my nineteenth birthday dinner two hours before he jammed himself inside me, then rolled off nonchalantly to pee in a bathroom a few feet away. Like I was nothing.
Standing over his dead body, I had lifted his suit flap and tucked the cross inside his crisp shirt pocket so he could take it with him to hell.
13
“Miz Emily. You came. Gracias.”
It had taken four or five rings of the bell before Maria answered. She was an extremely pretty girl who didn’t look at all pretty right now. Hungover, maybe. She teetered a little in Caroline’s doorway. She was dressed in that frilly maid’s uniform, only it looked like she’d slept in it. Blotchy skin, runny mascara, brown hair slashed with unnatural maroonish streaks. An inch of black roots. The uniform transformed Maria’s curvy figure into a sexual cliché. The wrong kind of man would push her to her knees.
I didn’t look too hot myself: no shower or makeup, drained and exhausted from my fight with Mike, anxious about everything I needed to say to him. The cigar box was back in the front seat of the car, still a secret, now a secret in a Ziploc bag.
When Maria called that morning, crying, peppering me with an English-Spanish pilaf I couldn’t translate, it was tempting to say no. Even though my mission yesterday had been to track her down, I was too distraught today to deal with the problems of Caroline. Four days missing. I had my own messy life to get in order. Two of Maria’s words finally convinced me.
Cops. Help.
“Your husband. He left with his policeman two hours ago. After the search.”
“What search?”
“They had a paper. Official. They looked all over her bedroom, disturbing things. I am trying to fix. She will be unhappy. Blame me. She will fire me, I know it.”
Maria used her hand to shade her eyes from the sun, on its way to high noon, and peered down the empty street. Luxury cars and trucks were tidily ensconced in four-car garages, their owners chilling out in refrigerated homes. For me, fresh from Manhattan’s twenty-four-hour cacophony, the absolute stillness in late morning was eerie, as if everyone had fled a nuclear threat.
“What exactly do you want me to do?” The heat beat on my shoulders, and my throat felt parched.
“Your husband. He is in charge, no? He seemed nice. But the other one.” She pointed to her head. “Rojo.” Red. Cody Hill. “He said he would look into my family’s legal status if I didn’t cooperate. I need to know. Is he going to give my family trouble?”
“Are you here illegally, Maria?”
“The problem is not me.” She said this impatiently. “Can you talk to your husband about the rojo cop? Please.” The way she said rojo, it might as well have been asshole. Something we agreed on wholeheartedly. While I remained silent, considering this, she burst into tears and spun into a torrent of solid-gold Spanish.
“Maria,” I said gently. “English, please. I’ll try to help. Maybe I can talk to Mike.”
“Everything is a mess now,” she sobbed. “They took her drawers and closet apart. I can’t clean it up by myself. I’m afraid I will get in trouble if I bring in my sister to help.”
I was shoveling a grave for myself simply by standing on the doorstep of a possible crime scene. Mike had returned home at dawn to shower and re-dress for work while I pretended to be sleeping. We were pros at that double maneuver.
Violet’s sweet face flashed in my mind. A little girl who depended on her aunt for survival.
“I have about two hours,” I told Maria.
Maria swung the door wide with a shaky smile and led me to the kitchen. State-of-the-art stainless-steel appliances, miles of white granite counter space, stacks of generic white china behind the glass cabinets. A caterer’s dream.
Maria opened a door in the corner to reveal a servants’ staircase. The modern dumbwaiter was big enough to hold Maria and me cross-legged playing a comfortable game of patty-cake. As a kid, I’d always wanted to ride in one. Maria was already climbing the stairs in the narrow opening, quickly, two at a time.
“How many flights?” I was surprised to be slightly out of breath on the first landing. Maybe I should sign up for the No Baby Fat exercise class advertised in the window of the Clairmont Y.
“Four. Miz Warwick’s bedroom is on three.” One floor above the pink museum.
I tried to swallow my huffing and puffing once we reached the third floor. How could I be out of shape so fast? I ran a half marathon last year. Maria didn’t notice or didn’t care, hurrying around the curved hallway. This floor was identical to the one below it: closed doors, deep-red flocked paper, wall sconces dripping with painstakingly Windexed chandelier beads.
“Here.” She paused at a door in the middle. “We must be quick. Any minute she could return.”
She threw open the door to a room that took my breath away. No one settled back against these pillows on this bed to watch a rerun of Downton Abbey and eat potato chips. The creamy antique linens and embroidered pillows must have cost thousands. The walls curved in a semi-circle, inviting us into a painted garden. Clouds from a muted sky drifted on the ceiling. Everywhere, the muralist invoked the gardens of Versailles at twilight.
Maria compulsively smoothed out an invisible wrinkle on the duvet. No crime scene tape, no blood on the pillow. The window by the bed shut tight, filmy curtains draping either side.
“We must work first on the bureau,” she said, “and then the closet.” She nodded toward two double doors.
“OK,” I said, uncertainly. She pointed toward my foot. I was standing in a trail of silk underwear, tossed from a nearby bureau. I bent down, not really wanting to touch an old lady’s panties. Whoa. This was expensive, sexy honeymoon underwear. It also appeared to have never been worn. I didn’t think Mike would rake through a stranger’s underwear drawer and toss it in this perverted fashion. But Rojo probably would.
I began to fold. Maria disappeared into the closet. Too far away to carry on a conversation. It took about a half-hour to sort out the underwear and nightgowns scattered across the room.
“Maria?” I called her name toward the closet. She appeared instantly.
“Are you too tired to help me more?” she asked, a little petulantly.
I glanced at my watch. “I can work with you in there for a little while.” In closer quarters, where I could quiz her about Caroline and her damn club.
I wanted to snatch those words back once she reopened the doors, automatic lights flooding a cavernous white space. I should have started in here, to hell with the panties.
Two or three hundred shoes rested on floor-to-ceiling glass shelves, individually spotlighted, toes pointing every which way. And plenty of empty shelves where the piles dumped on the floor were supposed to go. Only the hanging clothes were undisturbed, hanging in neat, tight lines, organized by color, and Caroline liked color. Especially red.
“Every shoe must have two inches between each, with toes pointing straight out,” Maria recited. “Exactly. Like this.” She demonstrated on a pair of glossy black evening shoes. I half expected her to hand me a ruler. Maria slid a small ladder in place and proceeded to climb it. “The rojo … thought she hid something in her shoes. I’ll do top. You do bottom.”
“Did he find anything?”
“No.”
“Maria, where do you think Caroline is?” I kept my eyes on the pair of Josef Seibel leather clogs in my hands. They seemed very un-Caroline.
“I don’t know. I told the police this.” Defensive.
“Was she depressed? Her friends say she had become a little paranoid.”
“I’m not sure what this word—paranoid—means. What friends? They are all bitches.”
I appreciated her rude assessment. The woman who washed Caroline’s underwear, who picked her hair out of the shower drain, who spent more time with her than anyone on earth, would know.
“They are all calling here, all the time, leaving messages. Checking. Like they care. Last night, I found Miz Jenny and Miz Mary Ann creeping around the backyard in bug masks. I recognize Miz Jenny’s tetas falsas or I might have called the police. They said they were making sure that Miz Caroline hadn’t fallen behind a bush.”
I thought for a second. “Night vision goggles?”
“Si. Miz Jenny said she borrowed them from her husband’s hunting closet.”
Maria stepped carefully off the ladder. Her own shoes were white, clunky, and rubber-soled. Nurse’s shoes, before nurses started hipping it up with Crocs and New Balance.
Color flared on her cheeks. “Why did you show up at my home? I do not think you are the type for a babysitter.”
“Truthfully, because I need you. I’m out of my element here. Caroline invited me over to pass around that ridiculous box. Then someone dropped off a little blackmail package at my house. Was that Caroline’s idea?”
About six expressions played across the maid’s face. First, surprise. So she didn’t drop off the package. None of her facial tics after that were terribly sympathetic. In fact, the one she was wearing now could almost be described as … happy.
“It’s OK,” she assured me eagerly. “She blackmails all the ladies. Me. She provided fake papers for my sister and niece. This is what I am worried about with that cop. Violet was only one year old when she rode across the border in the trunk of a car. So sometimes Mrs. Caroline threatens to expose them. She helps but there is always a price.” Her voice trailed into bitterness. “If you are not going to hire me right now, I can’t say more. I will make you lunch. For el nino.” She pointed to my stomach and walked out. Conversation over.
It felt both safe and illicit to be alone. It reminded me of the naïve middle-schooler I once was, snooping in my parents’ closet, discovering a box of condoms and my mother’s vibrator. Excited and a little horrified. Guilty.
I shook it off. Maria had asked me here, to help. We were almost done. And I was hungry. My head felt a little light. I ran my hand along a row of historical romances stuffed neatly in a bookshelf at the end of the closet. Maybe where Caroline got her ideas. They weren’t real books, I realized. Even in her closet, Caroline was creating a façade. I leaned back against the shelf and closed my eyes. Suddenly, top to bottom, my world was moving. I fell backward, almost stabbing myself with a five-inch heel.
The bookcase was a camouflaged door.
I’d just read about this trend while thumbing magazines in my OB’s office in New York. High-def, high-concept secret rooms that whisked adults back to the fantasies of their childhoods while conveniently soundproofing them from their own kids. At the time, I thought it was ridiculous. But here I was, staring into a black crack, wondering what Caroline would hide. Hopefully just the comfortable Hanes granny panties she really wore.
“Don’t let anything shock you,” a friend said when I told her about our impending move to Texas. “Guns, babies, reputation. They’ll do anything to protect them.”
I let go of the absurdity of the moment, of the foghorn warning in my head, and stood up.
I laid my palm flat on Romancing Mister Bridgerton and How to Woo a Reluctant Lady.
I gave the shelf a push, wondering whether I was entering Caroline’s tomb.
A foot in, and I was still blind. I slid my right hand up and down the wall until it touched a switch that flooded light into a decent-sized room, about 12 × 15 feet.
