Lie Still, page 13
Copy Boy sighed heavily. New Yorkers aimed the F word like a Smith & Wesson into city streets and cafés, at perfect strangers, over the mildest of infractions, and the rubber bullets bounced right off. Here in Clairmont, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard the word in polite company, only on HBO.
He strolled over, hit the “reset” button several times, thrust his hand out for the first stack of papers without looking at me or them, slapped them into the correct slot, punched four more buttons, and we watched them happily collate.
In the kind of voice reserved for small children, Copy Boy explained how to repeat those steps for the next batch of papers. He stood a foot from me at all times, like he feared I might bite. Actually, I might. After a paper jam and brief battle with the credit card scanner, I was good to go.
The edges of the other files stuck out of my purse. Tempting. Was it more illegal to copy other people’s files? I glanced over at Copy Boy, all plugged up with his iPod, head down, and thumbs moving like the legs of a speeding roach across his phone. He would be a terrible witness in court.
I reached over to my purse, opened another file, slid the papers in place, and pressed “collate.”
“I didn’t do it.”
I laid the police reports that Mike tossed in my face the night before neatly onto the shining glass surface of his desk.
I had driven directly to his office from the copying store. I gave him no warning. Angie, the temp secretary that Mike said was living a second life as a dancer in a cage at Cowboys Stadium, cheerfully waved me into his office “as a surprise.” She scored the best flat-abs-to-big-boobs ratio I’d ever seen. Mike had conveniently left that part out.
Mike glared at me, then took a tense stroll over to shut the door. I glanced around the room, the first office he’d ever occupied that didn’t roll on wheels and come fully loaded with a trunk of armor.
The interior designer had opted for saccharine. Creamy walls. Wedding-cake crown molding tacked into every nook and cranny possible. Forgettable modern paintings with bright slashes of color. Two floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a bare, plant-free courtyard open to the blazing sun. I wandered over to look out. A dead vine drizzled over a gazebo. Four iron benches at the corners, probably heated to 150 degrees, waited to grill somebody’s rear end. Designed, I guessed, by a non-Texan.
“I can’t hear the screams of the prisoners,” I said. The architect of this three-year-old building had stuck the booking area and soundproof holding cells in the basement. Mike found this an oddly primitive concept. He’d joked about people disappearing off the Clairmont streets, never to be seen again.
He pressed an intercom button on his phone and spoke roughly. “Hold my calls, please.”
“Just like in the movies.” I was trying for a way in.
I dropped into a hard upright, green-striped upholstered chair in the corner and couldn’t help but think how good he looked in blue.
“Can I be Katharine Hepburn?”
“You think this is funny?”
Just like that, he turned me on, and not in a good way.
“No, Mike.” My words were taut with anger. “I do not think this is funny. I think it is shocking that you think that I could kill a man and then hide it from you for our whole marriage.”
Mike’s eyes bored into me, disbelieving.
“How can you possibly put this on me?”
The words were in there, ready to go. About how I tried to confess everything to Mike the night before our wedding and give him the chance to opt out. How he had deserved to know what he was getting into. How I stopped myself from telling him on a blanket in Central Park and after I met his mother and on the night we wrote our wedding vows.
“I don’t think you killed a man, Emily. Christ, you can’t even watch CSI reruns without changing the channel. What I think is that you will never, ever tell me the complete truth about yourself. I think we’re done with the surprises and then Whoops, look out, here comes another kick to the nuts.”
“I did it for you,” I insisted stubbornly. “I didn’t think it would look good for your career if you married someone who was once a suspect, however briefly, in a murder. I knew you’d feel obligated to share it with your superiors. This way, no one had to know.” Not the whole truth, but part of it.
Mike cracked his knuckles in annoyance, something I’d never seen him do. “First of all, my guess is my superiors know. They just didn’t find it significant enough to talk about. You weren’t an official suspect, right? Did the police even interview you? If so, there’s no record of it. It’s only significant to me because you chose to hide it. Am I getting through to you at all?”
He whipped around and faced the vertical painting behind his desk, a swath of gloppy red, with a saffron dot of color drifting off the canvas in the left corner. I could have painted it in sixty seconds with my eyes closed. I wasn’t sure what the artist intended as the message. But I felt like the yellow dot.
“If it weren’t for the baby …”
He said it under his breath, with his back to me. But I heard.
“What?” My voice rose, surely carrying through the thin, cheap walls that were a given in showy, taxpayer-funded buildings like this one, unless you were locked up in the basement.
“What’s the if? You wouldn’t stay with me? Say it, Mike. Say you want to leave me.”
“You’re ridiculous, you know that? I’ve had almost twenty-four hours to think about this. And you want to know my grand conclusion? If it weren’t for the baby, I’d be stupid enough to sleep on the couch in the reception room for another night. Maybe two nights. But it appears there is nothing you can do … nothing, do you hear me? … that will ever make me walk out on you. I figured that out three therapists ago. And right now, with all this weirdness …” He gestured to the air. “I’m not leaving you alone at night.”
The tears fell in a dismal trail down my face. Still, he refused to look at me. I couldn’t blame him.
“I’m so sorry, Mike.” My voice wobbled. “I’m so sorry.” I didn’t stop repeating it, couldn’t, until he walked over and pulled me tightly to him. We stood that way for a long time.
“You look more like Ingrid Bergman than Hepburn,” he said, finally, nuzzling my neck. “Let’s go home.”
“I love you, Mike.” I whispered it, half wishing he’d push harder right now, for real, interrogating me like one of his suspects—but then, Mike never did turn that side of himself on me.
He smiled gently, still expecting the best of me, and rubbed my stomach.
“Let me guess your next surprise. It’s twins?”
“No,” I said, slowly. “It’s a boy. Just one boy.”
“What’s that?” He gestured to the Ziploc bag that I’d rested on the desk.
“I’ll tell you at home.” I scooped it up.
In the car, I pressed my head back against the seat and screwed my eyes shut, physically whipped. Surely I wasn’t doing the baby any good. I needed all of this to stop.
Mike stared straight ahead at the road as he flicked the wipers on to take care of a fine mist settling on the windshield. And then he asked, as casually as he’d ask if I wanted to order a pizza for supper. I knew the question was coming eventually, and it might as well be now, in the twilight of this strange day.
“Do you know who shot Pierce Martin?”
“No,” I said, automatically. “But if it counts, I wished him dead every day.”
There was one thing left. The thing that had been sleeping and waking inside me every day since I was nineteen.
The mist crept over the car, shutting out the world.
“I have a daughter from the rape,” I said, and Mike nearly ran off the road.
I was nineteen years old and three months pregnant when I first met Lia.
She was sitting with her small pile of possessions, cross-legged on the cobblestones of an Italian courtyard, counting out fifty-nine stones. When I bent down to hand her a euro, she grabbed my hand and begged me to pray the rosary with her.
Lia was blind. Most days, she hung out a few footsteps away from Mary’s Refuge in Ravello, which rests on a promontory above the Mediterranean Sea. Lia taught me that pretty beads are unnecessary. The counting is the important part.
I found the flyer for Mary’s Refuge on a bulletin board in the vestibule of my college’s Catholic chapel, a tiny stone building on the edge of campus with one small stained-glass window. It was the day after I learned that I was pregnant from the rape.
A student Catholic organization was trying to drum up money for Sister Abby Francis and her small endeavor by the sea for unwed mothers. I tore the piece of paper off the wall. I would go there. For a while, I would become someone else.
When my baby was born on a chilly September day in a 900-year-old villa in a city hanging off a cliff, an ocean away from its conception, I didn’t want to even see the face, to think of it as human.
She is perfect, one of the sisters assured me gently. She counted and blessed all of my daughter’s fingers and toes like a living rosary. I glimpsed a tiny pink face.
We will find her a good home.
The little girl who haunts my dreams stands at the top of a hill, waiting. She gets a little older each year. In a month, she turns thirteen.
15
“This is it? This is everything?”
Mike ran a tired hand across his scalp, the wrinkles around his eyes, in his forehead, etched more deeply than I could ever remember. It was after 1 a.m. We sat at the kitchen table, an empty pizza box between us, while I tried to help him understand the events of the last thirteen years. The last week. The last twenty-four hours.
The rape. Pierce’s murder. The baby girl I left behind in Italy.
I had brought out the shoebox stuffed with the obscene letters I’d received for years after I returned from Europe. No signature, no return address. While the rain drummed a steady rhythm on the roof, I had told him about all of the hang-ups and the delivery of the cigar.
I didn’t answer. I let him assume that was everything. I couldn’t tell him about Caroline’s files. Not yet. What I’d done was illegal. He would never keep it from his boss, from that insufferable Harry Dunn, because Mike’s that kind of guy. He would get fired. I’d be responsible for a black blot on his pristine record.
“I saved a few things from college,” I said. “I think they’re in one of the boxes we stored in the sunroom.”
Mike closed the pizza box, tossing our paper plates on top.
“I want everything, Emily. Every scrap of information you kept. There is no detail too small. Whenever you remember something, in the middle of the night, while I’m at work, I want to know. Wake me up. Call me. You’re sure there’s nothing you know about Black Patch cigars? No significance? Pierce didn’t smoke them?”
I shook my head.
“This is a high-end cigar. I’ll send the box to a Dallas lab for testing tomorrow.” He fingered the top of the Ziploc bag. “The box is raw Spanish cedar. Most cigar companies don’t go to the trouble of packaging that way anymore even though it’s one of the best ways to preserve cigars.”
He walked over to the other end of the table and put the lid on the shoebox of letters. He’d pulled on latex gloves and read every one before the pizza arrived.
“I don’t have much hope for good prints off these. Explain again why you think your letter stalker is Pierce’s mother. What’s her name again?”
“Elizabeth Martin. She was a lunatic after Pierce was shot. She got my dorm room number from the campus police and just showed up, screaming horrible things at me in the middle of the night. She woke my whole floor. She called me a lying whore.” And other, worse things. I drank the last sip of soda water from my wineglass. “I was always ninety percent sure it was her. The writing is feminine. The rage is personal. The picture of the grieving mother from Guernica … it seemed pretty spot-on.”
“Most of us unartsy types wouldn’t make that connection. So maybe that’s a reach.”
“And there’s the point. She knew I would know.”
“What about the other girls who were suspects? They must have gotten letters, too.”
“I have no idea about that. I haven’t seen them since the day of the interviews. The police told us not to speak to one another. I didn’t know any of them personally. Different majors and dorms. Only one sorority girl. We were scattered across campus.” On purpose, I thought. So we wouldn’t be able to warn each other. “Pierce’s mother saw me at his funeral. We met over the coffin before I became a suspect. Maybe she fixated on me.”
“Maybe. But here’s the thing. The letters were delivered by mail for years. A variety of postmarks, all hundreds of miles from you.” His finger traced a circle on my arm, a habit of his. “Hand delivery, that’s a big step up.”
He reached across the table, and I slid my fingers on top of his.
“You believe me, right? You know that I’m OK about your daugh—the little girl? You could have told me from the beginning.” There wasn’t reproach in his voice, just reassurance.
“Yes.” I wondered at how something that had built inside of me like a terrible storm could end like this, without casualties.
Mike’s reaction to my news about my daughter said everything I would ever need to know about his love for me. He had pulled the car over immediately, switching off the ignition.
“I don’t know where she is,” I had said stonily. “I gave her away.”
It was several interminable seconds before he turned and grabbed my shoulders. His eyes had shone like slick blue glass. “I can’t believe you held this in. I wish you had told me. Although I can understand why you didn’t. That kind of violence … it’s intimate. Worse than a bullet.”
My heart physically hurt inside my chest at that moment. I had realized almost too late that Mike was one of the few guys who could understand, who wouldn’t take it personally, who knew up close and personal that victims of violence don’t follow a playbook. Some people let it go; the rest of us don’t.
“It wasn’t the rape or the murder that made me keep secrets from you,” I told him. “It’s just that it all led to the baby. I hated myself for giving her away. The guilt overwhelmed me. I had worked up the courage to go back and get her. Then my parents died and the grief took over everything. I could barely get out of bed. I called the nuns once, hysterical. She’d already been adopted. To talk about it made it more real. By the time I met you five years later, it was buried so deep, it seemed more normal not to talk about it.”
That was hours ago. I’d finally breathed all my secrets into the air and it felt like they’d flown away, at least for the night. Mike flipped off the kitchen lights and I followed him to bed. Too tired to make love, we wrapped ourselves around each other. For a little while longer, while the rain fell, no one was missing. Mike shut out everything else but me.
“Three words,” he murmured in my ear.
“Just one,” I replied. “Lucky.”
Day five missing.
Someone had looped a scraggly yellow ribbon around Caroline’s mailbox.
I stood once more at the door of her house, knocking for the sixth time. Maybe Maria had car trouble. Or changed her mind. It was still awfully early. A little after eight. On the phone, I had told her I wanted to return the files. I now had a full set of copies. I wanted to put everything back and then figure out how to drop a hint to Mike so he could execute another search warrant with everything in place and no one the wiser.
Almost a week now, but part of me still didn’t believe Caroline was anything but alive and crazy, probably in Mexico at this very moment, a Four Seasons spa employee wrapping her in seaweed like a human sushi.
As I considered sitting down on the stoop and giving Maria another fifteen minutes, the door opened a crack.
Her face was red and puffy, and she’d abandoned the uniform for jeans, sneakers, and a tight black gold-lettered Santana T-shirt that showed off her plump breasts.
She pulled me inside, gripping my arm tightly, setting off a trickle of fear.
“What’s wrong? Did something happen? Is Caroline back?”
She shook her head.
“The FBI is getting involved,” I assured her. As was First Baptist. Flyers of an unsmiling Caroline littered the trees, store windows, and bulletin boards. I felt Caroline’s disapproval, sure she would consider it demeaning to be displayed in something other than a gilt frame.
Maria’s thick brown hair stuck up like a hip-hop artist’s; her eyes were dilated, black and wild, rimmed by dark crescents of smeared mascara. Is she high?
She channeled us on a straight path up the formal staircase without saying a word. The house was still asleep. Lights off. My presence felt more wrong than ever. Still, I followed her back into the closet.
The bookshelf had already been pushed away, a rectangle of bright light behind it.
I stopped short at the doorway, the threshold of disaster.
Papers littered the floor, the desk, the reading chair. The file cabinets gaped open, a few lonely folders still hanging, spared. One small square of Oriental carpet stood out in the debris, as if that is where Maria stood while twirling and flinging files and papers like a human tornado.
“I know,” Maria said. “It is bad.”
I found my voice, and it moaned.
“Maria, what have you done?”
“I had to find it. My file. I spent all night going through them. I thought maybe mine was mixed up in someone else’s.” She fidgeted with a strand of hair and spoke so fast I could hardly understand. Her eyes were like two black moons. “Maybe it is not so bad. I put all the old files over there.” She gestured toward the desk. As far as I could tell, every file had been trashed and tossed aside, completely compromised. “And the newer ones here.” She made a circular motion that encompassed the floor space.
“No, Maria. It’s bad.” I knelt on the floor, distractedly picking up an empty file folder. Whoever the hell Meredith Lindstrom was, her life story was now scattered somewhere on this floor. My head pounded. Caroline’s files, organized in alphabetical order, tidily stored in a cabinet, had been overwhelming enough to consider. I couldn’t imagine how, in a day or even ten days, anybody could make sense of the maelstrom beneath my feet. And what Maria and I were doing in this room at all … well, now, amid the destruction, it struck me in the gut as not just wrong, but dead, dead wrong.
