Lie Still, page 12
It took a second for my eyes to adjust.
I didn’t see a lonely, crazy woman decaying on the floor or rolling around in a mad tryst with Mr. Bridgerton.
A gorgeous antique Oriental rug lay at my feet, free of blood.
I smelled roses. Air freshener, I thought, until I saw the vase of fresh flowers on the built-in desk that held a state-of-the-art iMac. My gaze swiveled to a well-stocked glass-fronted refrigerator, a TV/stereo console, and a Kindle resting on a cushy leather chair. I wouldn’t starve or die of dehydration or boredom if Maria shut the door behind me. My eyes fixed themselves on a built-in row of file cabinets lined against the left wall.
How long had Maria been gone? Five minutes? Ten?
I walked over to the computer screen. The pink room’s nasty cat stared back at me from the screensaver. Then he howled, I screamed, and he stalked casually off the screen. Not a screensaver. A video? I peered closer, into that hideous pink room. I checked my watch. The cat was licking his paws. On the wall above him, a Barbie clock was keeping real time.
Caroline was spying on her cat.
I took a shaky breath. My eyes wandered from the screen to the neat stack of flat manila folders of varying thicknesses resting beside it.
The one on top had my name on it.
My hand poised to open it just as my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I jumped like the cat had leapt out of the screen. Dammit.
I glanced down. A text from Misty.
Lunch tomorrow?
I texted back, K. And thought, Now go away, Misty.
I sat down at Caroline’s desk and balanced the folder on my lap, my heart running laps. I flipped it open. A two-year-old color snapshot of me at an art gallery opening was paper-clipped to the top left corner of the first page. Caught in profile, holding a glass of champagne. I wore a pale blue silk dress from a designer thrift shop in Chinatown and Lucy’s high silver heels. I was slightly drunk, trying to sell an A-list painting to a B-list celebrity.
It was attached to the first page of a report from a private detective agency in Dallas named Diskreet. Not a discreet name. Not even klever.
I refocused on the page.
Birth name: Emily Alena Waters.
Birthplace: Peekskill, New York.
My Social Security number, elementary school, middle school, and high school, college transcripts, SAT scores, hospitalizations, miscarriages, the crash that killed my parents.
The prisoner number assigned to the teenage drunk driver who killed them.
My job history, wedding date, husband’s name and occupation, closest living relatives—every bit blazingly accurate.
It mentioned nothing of the missing year between my sophomore and junior years in college. I thumbed impatiently to the second page.
I learned that my husband was faithful, that a New York adoption agency hesitated to give us a baby because of Mike’s occupation, and that our net worth totaled around $370,000. I shivered, because I knew what had to be coming.
I tore through the file but couldn’t find a duplicate of the rape report. I settled on a paper-clipped bundle of Xeroxed newspaper stories, a more complete set than my own. Each headline drove me a little deeper into panic.
College senior shot to death in car near popular club
Windsor flies flag at half-mast to honor murdered student
1,000 turn out for campus memorial
Police eliminate drugs as motive in frat-boy murder
Five co-eds interviewed in shooting death
My history in a few tidy words.
I was mesmerized by a row of five headshots, a youthful me and four other girls unlucky enough to crawl into Pierce Martin’s web. It could be the same girl photographed five times and cropped into a one-inch square. Pierce’s type. Smooth, shoulder-length brown hair, dark eyes, fresh, bright faces worthy of Neutrogena commercials. Virginal.
Thirteen years ago, we five became sisters of sorts. We’d waited together nervously in a makeshift holding cell outside the campus librarian’s office, the small sitting area where the police came to get us one by one for an interview.
“Fact-gathering,” the police told us.
I was the last one to arrive. The pretty Chi Omega, dressed in a blue cashmere cardigan and about five hundred bucks of Brighton jewelry, raised a hand to go first. I heard something indignant about “my daddy” before the door clicked closed.
The co-ed beside me on the couch compulsively rubbed the rosary trailing out of her purse. The prettiest of us stuck out her hand, introduced herself as “Lisa, pre-med,” and then calmly studied for a biology test at a small table.
A long-legged yogi named Margaret sat in a lotus position in the middle of the carpet and meditated, much to the chagrin of the police officer in charge of making sure we didn’t speak to one another. I guess he decided that even he shouldn’t interrupt a conversation between Margaret and whatever higher power she was channeling.
That left me, chewing my thumb raw, wondering how I ended up here, sucked in by a sexual predator, thinking I should have called my parents for a lawyer even though the police said I didn’t need one.
That turned out to be true. They never even made it to the interview stage with me or Rosary Girl. Maybe some of her vigorous bead rubbing worked, although I didn’t believe so much in the power of prayer at that point. More likely, the police realized they had opened the gate on a rabid dog. Pierce’s parents were major endowment contributors. Alumni royalty.
I had watched the three other girls exit their interviews. They’d obviously been crying, except for Lisa, pre-med, who rolled her eyes at Rosary Girl and me on the way out the door.
“Fucking not guilty,” she mouthed.
The detective in charge directed his attention to the two of us. “I think we have enough for now.” His face had the look of someone who’d eaten a plateful of bad shrimp. What he didn’t appear was the slightest bit concerned about a girl gnawing her thumb bloody and another running rosary beads through her teeth. “We’d like to speak to the Martin parents about our findings before continuing our interviews. This is a delicate matter for you and the campus. We’ll stay in touch. Keep your mouths shut. That’s best for everyone.”
Three weeks later, I stepped off a plane in Rome with a new hair color and never heard a word from the police again.
Now my fingers lingered over a narrow column copied crookedly on a sea of white paper, dated a month after I’d run out of town.
A black pen had made a loop around the third item, which announced that police were declaring Pierce Martin’s murder case inactive “due to lack of witnesses and evidence.”
Who did I have to thank for this lifetime reprieve?
The Chi Omega’s rich daddy? Rosary Girl’s direct line to God?
The incompetent campus policewoman who dismissed my rape report? Pierce’s mother, to protect his reputation, her reputation, after learning more than she wanted to know about her precious son from the police?
I hadn’t been the only girl in that interview waiting room whose body and soul had been torn apart by Pierce Martin. The police knew. I’d lay my life down on that.
I’d buried everything as deep as I could thirteen years ago. I’d vanished for a year, cutting ties to everyone except my parents, who agreed to support a year abroad at a small university in Rome. They hoped the experience would help heal me. I never even registered at the university. My parents wired a monthly check to a Rome bank. An anonymous person forwarded each one to me after the first month without a single bit of hassle, even though I asked them to address the envelope to another girl’s name, two hundred miles away. The Italians understand that questions don’t always need to be asked.
I wrote my parents pure fantasy about my life: how I painted and studied during the week and backpacked to European landmarks on the weekends with a sisterly roommate who didn’t exist. I sent them little pencil sketches, all drawn from postcards I bought in a secondhand bookstore.
I returned home to my parents as myself, with my old name and my real hair color, hoping to leave my guilt and bewilderment behind. Instead, it chased me across the ocean, receding, crashing, teasing, always threatening to drag me under for the last time.
I glanced at my watch, a cheap piece with a flat yellow smiley face and a fake white leather band that I bought in Times Square for $7. It always ran about five minutes slow, which I figured was more than fair for the price.
Eleven minutes plus five had passed since Maria left me alone in the closet. I’d thumbed through the rest of the folders on the desk but didn’t recognize any names. I stuck my own file in my purse without any hesitation.
I walked over to the row of file cabinets and tugged on the first one. It opened an inch. Unlocked. A more aggressive pull and the drawer revealed a row of orderly files, each with a name printed on a color-coded tab—red, green, or blue. Some files appeared yellowed and aged, others brand-new. All were neatly stored like the diaries in the pink room. Alphabetical. Organized by the same compulsive fingers.
Last names. I needed to remember last names. Beswetherick. Nope, there was no Beswetherick. I thumbed through the first row of files and found Cartwright, Jennifer. Jenny, one of the blond Southern stereotypes who cavorted with me in Caroline’s plush Garden of Evil? Beach House or Red Mercedes, I couldn’t remember which. I pulled her file and set it on top of the cabinet.
Dunn, Harold and Dunn, Leticia. I yanked them out. This was almost too easy.
I thumbed my way along the D’s and E’s. There had to be hundreds of files here. Caroline’s voracious information-gathering apparently extended far beyond the club. I glanced at the door. How much time did I have? Camel. I remembered that Mary Ann’s last name was “Camel,” something she mentioned during that drunken Bunko game. The other woman in the Garden of Evil, she of the Mephisto habit. I went back to the C’s. No Mary Anns. I tried the K’s. Kimmel. Bingo. I hadn’t factored in the Texas accent.
Five files away was Gretchen Liesel’s. Thick. My stack was getting tall.
I opened another cabinet. Rich, Misty. Thin. Maybe empty. Onto the pile anyway.
I racked my mind but couldn’t think of the last names of either Tiffany the Puppy Killer or Holly Who Had to Carve a Potato. Twenty-three minutes now without Maria. I yanked open another file cabinet and my fingers searched for Valdez, Maria. Nothing at all in the V’s. Had Maria taken it?
My brain was shrilling, Light a match and get out. What I was doing was illegal, not to mention immoral, and the two weren’t always the same thing and one was bad enough.
But I had to get some idea of what I was dealing with, of what Mike was dealing with, right? And this seemed as good a place as any to start. I tucked the stack of files I’d pilfered into my bag, alongside mine. Thank God Lucy had talked me into this monster of a fake-patent-leather purse.
When Maria showed up with a tray, the shelf was clicked in place and I was pretending to finish up a row of walking shoes. Everything felt unreal, including the beautiful plate of food she set on the dressing table where Caroline probably sat to fiddle with her earrings. An egg salad sandwich on black rye bread cut into perfect, crustless triangles, a pile of plump, chilled purple grapes, a homemade oatmeal cookie with chocolate chunks, and a glass of what appeared to be fresh-squeezed orange juice. Impossible to resist.
I stood up and stuffed a triangle of sandwich into my mouth.
“You find the room, right? I give you enough time?”
I stared at Maria blankly, still chewing, thinking I’d misheard her. She shrugged. “I left the catch loose. I don’t want to get in trouble for showing you. I put your file on top.” She hesitated. “I don’t read it.”
Right. A rush of heat flooded into my face. Is Maria with me or against me? I purposely kept my eyes off my purse, lying at my feet. Should I scream at her? Or say thank you?
I slipped my purse casually over my arm. I decided to play nice.
“Maria, you don’t have to stay here. To work for her. Whatever is going on … you don’t need to be part of it.”
“I have to find my file. She showed it to me once when she was angry. I know it is somewhere.” Her face wore a mask of tight desperation.
“How much time did she spend doing this? Snooping on everyone?”
“Every afternoon. Two to four. I brought her peach tea and dry wheatberry toast every day at four exactly.” She snatched my plate. “I will wrap this up for you. You need to go. You should never be here. It was a mistake.”
Her eyes were glued to my purse. She seemed to be considering whether to rip it off my shoulder.
“I read your file,” she said calmly. “Whatever you have put in your bag, you will need to bring it back. Talk to your husband about Rojo.”
It was no longer a request.
14
After pulling in to my driveway, I rolled down the windows, opened the sunroof, adjusted my seat into a more comfortable position, and picked out Harry Dunn’s file.
The top sheet detailed an efficient list of Harry’s trysts for the last year, courtesy of the Diskreet Agency, for whom my respect was growing. Fourteen different lovers, times and dates, most of them anonymous women met in roadside motels, only one person I knew.
Mary Ann had dallied with Harry for three weeks last October, once in the back of his Escalade. A telephoto lens had been able to showcase the crack of his ass. I wondered if Caroline had shared the details with Letty. Maybe she had blackmailed him into behaving and Letty was none the wiser. Caroline, the diabolical Dear Abby.
I glanced into Mary Ann’s and Jenny’s files. The first women, other than Letty, whom I met at the Bunko party that night. Official members of Caroline’s toxic little club. And right in my lap, their private applications for membership.
Caroline required that hopefuls answer invasive, truth-or-dare questions. They ranged from the softball, When did you tell your first lie? to What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made? to Who is the person you like least in Clairmont? A little beyond your average college sorority crap. These were very, very bored women.
The undertones rang clear to me. Hold back and you won’t get in. A bold line at the bottom promised that all applications were “strictly confidential.”
As for Jenny and Mary Ann, they wrote the answers to Caroline’s questions as if they’d sucked down a couple of pitchers of margaritas together and let their baggage and poor spelling fly.
Between them, they’d lain down for five abortions, seven plastic surgeries, and two arrests for public intoxication (literally, the cop had ordered them flat on the ground). They always voted a straight Republican ticket—except for Obama, because they both had always wanted to “do a black man.” The person they liked least in Clairmont was, not surprisingly, Letty Dunn, crossed out with the pen in a blink of sobriety (but not well enough to keep me from figuring it out) and replaced with “the pharmacist at Walmart because he won’t refill our Ambien without calling Dr. Gretch.”
I wondered whether the pharmacist they complained about was the one Tiffany mentioned was her husband. And whether that would aid or hinder her efforts to get in. I was beginning to understand the entanglements of small-town society. Take a step and your high heel was stuck in somebody’s net.
Jenny and Mary Ann shelled out their secrets for bonus points, leaving little need for Caroline to fill out the space she’d left for her own personal critique. What else was there to say? Caroline admitted both of them as members on the same day six years ago, maybe because Jenny’s husband ran a local branch of Bank of the West and Mary Ann’s owned half of Grandes Cielos, a popular upscale restaurant and shopping development at the east edge of Clairmont. I think that because those were the only facts highlighted, presumably by Caroline, in fluorescent yellow. I absently bit into the half an egg salad sandwich that Maria had wrapped up for me.
The only things that Caroline did personally note about the two women, scribbled and dated after a monthly meeting several years later, were that Mary Ann’s in heat all over town and Jenny’s breasts looked as hard as rocks tonight. I couldn’t see either of these women, who thrived on self-imposed drama, as interested enough in anything but themselves to be involved in Caroline’s disappearance. What was their motive? These two weren’t hiding a thing.
I’d avoided Letty’s file, intimidated by its thickness. A headache ebbed and flowed and the baby kicked, suggesting that I needed to get out of this cramped space. I tackled the cookie. Delicious.
Maybe one more file. Misty’s appeared to be a fast read. Thin. Probably a single page.
A tiny moth of paper fluttered out, onto the floor of the passenger seat. I bent down to pick it up. I felt like a rope was being pulled tight against my stomach.
Caroline’s pretty handwriting was upside down. I righted it.
A stranger is someone you know.
I turned the piece of paper over. A single word, scribbled in pencil.
A question really.
Alice???
An hour later, I swung open the door of Copy Boy.
I didn’t want anyone in Clairmont to see what I was doing, so my iPhone led me here, to a low-end, family-owned Kinkos competitor in a town fifteen miles away. Seven former customers had posted online that the service sucked.
For ten minutes, the high school kid behind the counter lazily watched me struggle to figure out an off-brand Japanese copier the size of a small Toyota. The machine was loaded with enough buttons to fire a cruise missile. Actually, there were probably fewer buttons involved in firing a cruise missile.
“I just want to make a fucking copy! Where the fuck’s the button that says ‘make a fucking copy’?” I didn’t normally cuss at high school boys—I’m a good Catholic girl who normally doesn’t cuss out loud at all—but the hormones were coursing and I was furiously tugging on a Yankees sweatshirt even though it was 102 outside. Retail air-conditioning in Texas summer is like a brisk fall day in Manhattan.
