Lie Still, page 15
“I told Caroline she should leave you alone.”
“You know about the rape?” The words shot out of my mouth before I could stop them.
“What are you talking about?” Misty’s confusion appeared sincere. “What rape?”
This was one of the most schizophrenic conversations of my life, and I’d played it all wrong. But now I had nothing to lose.
“Did your name used to be Alice?”
Misty’s fists clenched. Her face blanched white under her tan.
“I need to go,” she said.
She laid a $20 bill over the $14.59 check and stalked out, a cue we were done, maybe with everything.
17
The key turned a little too easily in the front lock, which should have been my first clue. But I was tired and distracted, my belly rebelling against the Butt-Kicker’s jalapeños and my unsettling lunch with Misty.
Two feet inside the door, I almost stepped on it. A mirror. Mike’s grandmother’s mirror. The same mirror that scared me to death the other night by reflecting the ghostly specter of my face.
I wondered when Mike had moved it from the bedroom to the front alcove of the house. Why he’d laid it flat on the entryway floor where I might trip on it. I stared down at my image in the antique glass. Slightly cloudy, as if one of me was imprisoned in another dimension.
Not a bad idea to hang it on this wall. It would open up the tiny space. Had Mike come home for lunch with a fit of decorating inspiration? Maybe he figured I was using the back door these days.
I gazed down at my reflection, wondering whether to try to move the massive mirror by myself. At least lean it against the wall. I lamented what a crappy housekeeper I’d become. The mirror was dirty. Smeared.
Kneeling, I realized the dirt spelled something. Three words. A love note from Mike? A wry comment on my seriously declining domestic skills?
The first word was see. At least that was definitely an s. The last word, her. I knelt to get a grip on the heavy frame and tilted the mirror up into the light so I could see better. The s vanished. The message was disintegrating.
Heavy gray dust. I was a worse housekeeper than I thought. The mirror smelled dank, like my great-grandfather’s sweater when I used to hug him.
Like cigarettes.
Or cigars.
My breath, coming faster, blew the first word away. It tickled my nose.
This wasn’t dust.
This wasn’t a message from Mike.
But it was a message from someone. Someone deranged.
I knew I should run, but my eyes were glued to the damn mirror.
Concentrate, Emily. Hold your breath. The second word, before it disappears. Or was it two words glued together?
The first letter? A? F? T? Seven letters? Eight letters?
The second word was though. I was pretty sure.
No, through.
First word, see. Second word, through. Third word, her.
See through her.
I jumped back and the mirror fell from my hands, violently hitting the floor. The glass that had shone with the faces of Mike’s ancestors for almost two centuries now lay at my feet in pieces, like hundreds of tiny knives.
I backed out of the door, my hands fumbling inside my purse for my phone. I needed to call Mike. A dark curtain in my brain began to draw closed.
I clutched the outside of the doorframe, one foot on the porch.
See through her.
Was the message a warning?
About Misty? About Caroline? Any one of the women in the club?
Who hates me this much?
My enemy, as always, was baffling. Inscrutable.
I slid down, the curtains on the stage swirling shut, the show over.
I woke up on my front porch with my head in the lap of a stranger.
“Are you all right, ma’am?”
A man with his hands near my throat. I wanted to scream, but I’d lost my voice. Maybe stolen by the spirits I felt whoosh out of that mirror when it shattered. “Your husband and an ambulance are on the way, ma’am. I took the liberty of checking the emergency numbers in your cell phone. That’s a helpful little thing Verizon’s got in the contacts list, letting you put it right at the top. I got my kids’ phones all set up. And mine. I’ve got the diabetes.”
I heard the faint wail of a siren in the distance. I pressed a hand to my chest, as if that would slow the irregular flutter of my heart. Could this man be telling the truth? I’d seen a UPS van parked on the street when I pulled in to the driveway. The man gingerly holding my head was wearing a brown uniform shirt. But it was always the man in the van.
“I didn’t do CPR because your husband told me not to after I checked your breathing. The baby and all. By the way, I watched you go down from my truck across the street, and you landed pretty good. On your butt. Then you kind of keeled over real gentle. Just like an angel laid you down. So you’re married to our police chief?”
It didn’t seem like a question he expected a response to. Even in the bizarreness of the moment, with this stranger’s sunburned, porous face peering down at me, I was reminded how Texans are the most natural people with the simile that I’d ever met.
Like an angel laid me down.
“I’m going to close my eyes,” I announced.
“No, ma’am, I’m sorry, I can’t let you do that. Your husband made it real clear that if you woke up to keep you wide awake.”
Vehicles screeched up to the curb, sirens on mute. Blue and red lights flashed in the living room window like a patriotic Christmas display.
Footsteps, crunching up the walk. Mike’s voice saying, “I’ll take her.” Familiar tree-trunk arms lifted me up.
“You OK, baby?” His breath was warm in my ear.
“Which one of us are you referring to?” I put my arms around his neck. I breathed in his minty aftershave.
“Both.” He carried me down the walk to the ambulance while a cop I’d last seen this morning on a computer screen kept pace beside us. Two black-and-whites were parked at the curb.
“Ron,” Mike said. “Get the name of the delivery guy and his driver’s license, will you? He gets a free ride on tickets for a while. Find out what his favorite beer is while you’re at it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Really, I think I’m OK.” Mike plopped me in the open end of the ambulance and a frowning EMT attached a blood pressure cuff. “It was just a shock.”
“What was a shock?” he asked distractedly.
Of course. He had no idea about the mirror. “Inside.” I pointed to the house. “Someone broke in. They left a message on your grandmother’s mirror. I think it was written in ashes.”
“My grandmother’s mirror is in the bedroom.” He said it soothingly, but he looked concerned. Probably about whether I’d banged my head too hard on the concrete porch.
“And now it’s in the front hall,” I insisted. “Somebody moved it. I nearly stepped on it when I walked in the door. Someone tapped out a message, maybe with the stub of a cigar. See through her.” It sounded crazy. I needed to make him understand. “But it’s gone. The message. I blew it away. The mirror broke. I’m so sorry.”
As if the message had never been there at all.
It was like watching a Transformer convert for battle. Mike barked something and two cops appeared at his side within seconds. That’s the way it was with Mike. He led and cops followed him. Anywhere.
It was, he said in one of his more revealing moments, an awesome burden, and he meant awesome as in huge. Heavy. He’d never lost a man, and I dreaded the day he did. Mike was not one for telling big stories about himself, and every day on the job in New York was a story.
I knew, only because his mother told me on our wedding day, that Mike had saved two lives before he was twelve. A cat that a teenage boy was about to hang from a tree and, a year later, a little girl who almost stepped into a child molester’s van to pet a golden retriever puppy. Mike caught her arm and yanked her back. He memorized the license plate for the cops. The guy had been listed on the Sex Offenders Registry and was hauled straight back to prison.
The boy with the cat had just looped a noose around the animal’s neck when Mike showed up. Pretty quickly, the cat was watching the action from a safe perch in the same tree that was almost his gallows. Mike was bloodied and rolling on the ground when the cat’s owner, an old neighbor lady, showed up with a can of Lysol and shot the bully in the eyes. Mike escaped with a cracked rib, a commendation from the SPCA, and free homemade cookies after school until the old lady died his junior year. His mother loved to tell the details, and I loved to hear them, over and over.
I often wondered why his mother told me about his early heroic nature on the day we got married. Whether she knew I needed saving. What has always been perfectly clear between us is that she steadfastly believes that her only son is an instrument of God. It is one thing we agree on.
A half-hour later, I sat on the sidewalk in a lawn chair Mike brought out from the garage. Two cops were loading the mirror frame, now swathed in plastic, into the trunk of their patrol car.
A tech was just finishing up dusting the front doorknob and random surfaces inside that the intruder might have touched. The lock had shown signs of being greased and picked but not enough that all of Mike’s new colleagues had swallowed my story whole.
“Probably pointless,” Mike said. We watched the lid of the trunk slam shut on the mirror. “We aren’t likely to get prints. Whoever this was probably wore gloves.” He turned to me. “Come on, let’s go in. I’m home for the night.”
At the door, the fingerprint tech slid by us shyly, offering up a sweet smile, probably thrilled about a job that involved more than a stolen car radio. She barely looked old enough to babysit, but she was professionally attired in bootie-covered tennis shoes, latex gloves, and the Texas requisite Wrangler jeans.
Mike gripped my hand as we stepped over the threshold. It was like a bitter wind had blown through our home. The space felt tighter, compressed. The air smelled metallic.
“I’ve hired someone to clean up the powder.” Trying to reassure me, as if I was actually concerned about a little more dust. “I’ve already called a place in Dallas to install a new security system for us. They do some crime scene cleanup on the side. They won’t leave until there are alarms on every window and every door. They’ll be here at ten in the morning. I can justify keeping a unit at the curb for twenty-four hours. We’ll figure this out as we go along.”
I was suddenly feeling lonely and scared, very pregnant, a lot sorry for myself and ticked off. I didn’t have alarms on every window in New York City, but I needed them here. I missed my parents desperately, with a physical ache, like I hadn’t in years.
Mike and I ventured into the kitchen, a room relatively unscathed by the day. At least I could pretend the fingerprint dust in here was flour or, in the case of the graphite on the white Formica countertop, spilled pepper.
“I changed my mind,” he said. “Let’s go out. Get a burger or something.”
The thought cheered me up a little. A two-hamburger day.
“Oh, geez, I forgot. Wait a minute.” Mike was already out the back before I could stop him. I heard his car door slam. He returned in seconds with a large cardboard box, the flaps loosely closed. He set it on the floor and opened up the top.
“I was at Caroline’s today,” Mike said. “Didn’t think this little guy should be there alone.”
I heard a low and perturbed growl. Mike reached inside and lifted out my furry orange nemesis.
18
After Mike left for work the next morning, I threw on my old pink chenille bathrobe with the torn peekaboo hole in the rear, folded my new lucky bird quilt into a precise rectangle at the end of the bed, reassured myself by confirming that the cop car was at the curb outside. Then I headed to the kitchen to fix myself a cup of decaf and a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats with fresh blueberries. Before the pregnancy, I didn’t know what a frosted mini-wheat was.
I washed the bowl and spoon and left them to drain on a faded blue dish towel, hand-stitched with a puppy face and the words IRON ON TUESDAY. The towel was a remnant of the previous owner, Mrs. Elsa Drury, who had lived in the house for forty-six years before dying peacefully in a chair by the window.
I stood in the approximate spot where Mrs. Drury met her Lord and lifted the curtain in the living room again. My bodyguard, still there.
After retrieving my purse from under the cabinet near the computer, I pulled out the copies of two of the files I had yet to read: Letty Dunn’s and Gretchen Liesel’s. According to the reminder note Mike propped by the coffeepot, it would be two hours before the alarm company showed up.
Two sips of coffee and three sentences into the life of Leticia Abigail Lee Dunn, I sensed a presence moving behind me. I jerked around, the chair leg banging against an angry yellow ball. He yelped. I yelped.
“Don’t sneak up on me, or a few of your lives will be cut short during your time here,” I warned. The cat sailed into my lap like a bag of Gold Medal Flour with legs. “Is this an apology?” I scratched tentatively behind his ear. He dug a claw painfully into my thigh.
He leapt off and wandered over to the bowl of dry food that Mike had picked up at Walmart on a midnight run. He ate grumpily. The message was clear: The food’s not great in this joint.
He jumped onto the windowsill, licking one of his lionesque paws. Caroline probably called him something cuddly, like Butterball. He was no Butterball.
I turned my attention back to Letty. I wondered if someone at the police station was reading this file simultaneously, if that person would be discreet, if the slip of a fortune in Misty Rich’s folder had fallen out and was lost somewhere in the deep green grass of Caroline’s yard. If that even mattered.
I skipped down to Caroline’s comment section. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but Caroline had known Letty for a long time, in the Before Harry years. When Caroline showed up in Clairmont, Letty was a freshman in high school. I guessed that the town was still just a spot in the road then, mostly working ranchland.
Caroline’s remarks about Letty were relatively kind. She took only a few stabs. Letty’s senior homecoming queen mum was so large it would have been more appropriate on a coffin. And several years later: Letty’s wedding dress was a $10,000 piece of Chinese crap that my girl could have sewn.
Letty and Harry had settled in Houston after their marriage, but four years ago moved home to Clairmont after what Caroline intriguingly referred to as “Harry’s setback.” A newspaper article neatly paper-clipped to the page cited numerous possible SEC violations by the Driscoll Investment Co., which mostly specialized in handling the multimillions of Texas and Oklahoma oil- and gas men.
The last paragraph of the story, faintly underlined in pencil, read: The SEC investigation follows last month’s firing of a high-level executive involved in questionable overseas investments, including Asian pornography and German sexual gadgetry. From what I could gather, three months after this little “setback,” Harry accepted a job from Letty’s daddy, overseeing Lee family real estate.
My eyes roamed to the part of the application filled out in Letty’s loopy hand. She married Harry two weeks after graduating from Southern Methodist University with a 3.82 GPA in biology and a declaration of pre-med. Wow. She was smart. She just didn’t put it out there. Maybe this was a Texas thing. After all, George W. Bush matriculated at Harvard.
Shortly after she graduated, Letty’s father rented Bass Performance Hall in downtown Fort Worth for her wedding. The painted clouds and sky in the dome hovered over seven hundred guests, including a former president (first name, George). In the reception that followed at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden, the flower girls set two thousand monarch butterflies free. Twelve bridesmaids (but only two groomsmen) traveled down the aisle in Oscar de la Renta black. The pearl-studded train on Letty’s gown measured fifty feet. Style magazine featured the near-architecturally impossible, ten-tiered white macadamia nut rum cake in its June bridal issue. The two honeymooned in a luxuriously appointed hut staked over aqua waters in Tahiti.
Letty had so much to say about the wedding that she jumped to a separate page of personally engraved stationery, inserted when she ran out of space.
Her dissertation was in answer to a single question: What was the most memorable moment in your life?
A wife and mother, and the best moment of her life was like a day at Disney World—not real, ephemeral, and in her case a harbinger of bad things to come. Harry Dunn, a black crow in a tuxedo.
Maybe I was just jealous. Mike and I tied the knot at the justice of the peace with only his parents; my best friend, Lucy; and Mike’s best buddy, Leroy, as witnesses. I wore a creamy, ankle-length antique lace number from the twenties, scored from an estate sale rack at Poppet on 9th Street. Every second, I wished for my parents to show up, courtesy of the same random, illogical forces that stole them from me.
Letty was a piece of work, but I felt less hateful toward her.
I thumbed through to the last page of the file. A document from the Robert E. Lee Society declared that the Lees of Clairmont were not part of their official ancestral rolls and that “our research points to them being related to the Lees of Coal Hill, Arkansas.” Now, that was blackmail material.
I moved on to Dr. Liesel, fully aware that I needed a shower and that Caroline’s files were like a drug I couldn’t stop mainlining.
I expected this file to resemble everybody else’s, but it was very different, almost like a diary. Notebook pages filled edge-to-edge with Caroline’s A-plus-worthy cursive writing, the kind nobody takes pride in except people who came out of elementary school before 1960. Mike’s eighteen-year-old niece had told me last summer that the hardest part of the SAT for her was the instruction to copy out three sentences in cursive.
Caroline’s writing flowed like the great Mississippi.
