Lie Still, page 16
12 NOVEMBER: Gretchen is a lovely girl. And a doctor! She welcomed me here with an invitation to lunch at the local café. (I sipped at a terrible attempt at onion soup, probably from a packet, can you imagine? and a very weak iced tea.) She asked me to come over in several days to play cards with some of her friends. I believe I will go.
16 NOVEMBER: I had an enjoyable evening at Gretchen’s home with “the girls,” even winning the door prize (a sad little autumn wreath that I will toss directly or give to my girl). And a warm Brie appetizer with some kind of store jam spread on top! A very nice try. I told them about the accident with my husband and son and they were very sympathetic. I’m beginning to think moving here was a very fine idea. I believe I can help these women.
Caroline’s assessment of Gretchen grew more critical in tone as time wore on. Gretchen’s lack of care with her appearance (people might think she’s lesbian), her husband (stubby-chinned and Jewish-looking), her son (not worth the price of tuition at his fancy-pantsy university)—all were noted in the file. But affection wasn’t absent.
14 MAY: Gretchen saved a breech baby today and delivered Clairmont’s first triplets! I am so proud. There is a spot for her in heaven. I had my girl make her a lovely chicken pot-pie.
Again with my girl. Why was it that some Southerners still thought it perfectly OK to attach a possessive pronoun to someone who worked for you? And to rank domestic help? There was “hired girl” (to remind us that she was actually paid, not a slave), “my girl” (to imply some kind of benevolent relationship), “cleaning lady” (totally impersonal, somebody filling in), and “maid” (requires a uniform).
I flipped a few more pages. I’d never finish Gretchen Liesel’s file in the half an hour I had left. My eyes stopped short on a word.
Nazi. What a load of power in that shorthand.
Nazi, the abbreviation for Nationalsozialist. My father, a World War II history buff, made me learn to spell it. Taught me that the swastika was an ancient symbol for good before the Third Reich got hold of it.
I backtracked to the page before, the beginning of the entry.
2 JULY: I found out quite by accident that one of Gretchen’s ancestors was an officer in Hitler’s army. Her husband is an extremely Jewish professor, who specializes in Israeli studies or some such. He even wears the little hat occasionally. I’d just stopped over for a visit and Gretchen’s worthless maid stuck me in the library. Gretchen hadn’t yet arrived from the hospital and I found a stack of old picture albums simply by lifting the window seat to see how much storage it could hold. Her family did not carry the gene for good looks. I picked up the knit afghan on top to admire the stitching. And quite a shock! Underneath those, a Nazi uniform folded neatly in a plastic zip-up bag with a picture of the young man who wore it. There was some kind of World War II family tree drawn out by hand. I could not make head nor tails of it. Of course, when I see her, I will not say a word. The whole thing reminded me of that framed Hitler stamp collection that Dickie inherited from his father when he died. It was one time in our marriage that I put my foot down. I let Dickie hang the Confederate flag from that pole outside, but I wasn’t going to let him hang Hitler in my house.
So, Caroline’s husband had been a Hater. His name was Dickie. As for Gretchen, plenty of people saved artifacts of war, especially those tied to family. A SoHo artist I knew framed the photograph of a child that her father stole out of the wallet of a Korean soldier after he shot him to death. To me, swiping that picture was almost the equivalent of taking his life again. But to his daughter, the artist, it was somehow a reminder that we were all the same. She silk-screened the child onto one of her canvases and someone paid the $25,000 price tag without blinking.
Ironic. Hadn’t Misty called Caroline a little Hitler?
The phone shrilled on the counter. I jumped guiltily, and Caroline’s cat skittered around the corner. I let five rings go by before walking over to check the caller ID. Mrs. Drury’s red dial-up was no more. Mike had installed a top-of-the-line Sony with three lines, an answering machine, and a lot of other buttons I planned not to touch.
The small window read PRIVATE CALLER, which annoyed me even more than call waiting. “Private” callers were people angrily clinging to the crazy idea that there was still such a thing as privacy. In this case, the call was either from my elderly aunt in an assisted-living center in Minnesota who never talked less than forty-five minutes or from the anonymous person set on driving me out of my mind.
Neither was good, but I picked up the phone.
“Hello?” A slight sound. In old movies, that meant the line was tapped. Now it probably meant my caller was clicking a pen. Audible breathing.
I slammed the phone down.
Leave. Me. Alone.
My house had barely recovered from yesterday’s assault. Evil had found a way back in again, traveling through the phone line like lazy electricity. The yellow morning light was suddenly dimmer, my coffee colder, the daisies on the wallpaper no longer cheerful. He was invisible but there, a presence in the kitchen, my kitchen, trickling his fingers down the back of my neck, so real that I reached out behind me to grab them in the air. I wondered if he was preparing another surprise for me. I wondered why I was so sure, for the first time, that my tormentor was a he.
The phone rang again. I was pissing him off. My eyes raced to the kitchen door, the deadbolt still secure from last night, although what I feared was already inside. I walked as calmly as I could to the front door. Twice more, the phone rang.
The front door was locked, of course.
The clock on the mantel read 9:32. Only thirty minutes until men began turning my house into a prison. I checked on the cop car and drew the shades in the living room.
I walked back to the kitchen.
I picked up the phone on the sixth ring.
“Don’t hang up.”
I swallowed a gasp. Not the voice of a man, but of a woman.
“Lucinda?” My voice was shaking, but the snake squeezing my gut had loosened its grip. Lucinda. The woman at Caroline’s little gathering with the tortured voice and the tortured last name. Not my tormentor.
“I’m sorry to bother you.”
“It’s no problem at all,” I lied.
“I just wanted to talk to you about … the other day. The secret that Misty read. I just wanted to know whether that was really your secret. About the baby. Whether it’s your husband’s.”
The snake wriggled under my ribs, to the center of my chest. I tried to picture Lucinda’s face, but it was a pale blur. All I could remember was her lisp. We had never been closer than five feet apart. We’d never spoken to each other directly before this phone call. I’m not sure our eyes even met, because she mostly kept hers cast on Caroline’s floor except when offering advice on dressing potatoes like dictators. Maybe this is how life sucked for her. Her voice defined her.
“Don’t hang up again,” she pleaded. “Please.” I could hear soft sobs.
I didn’t like situations like this, where the person on the other end is apparently hurting, yet is simultaneously throwing a knife at my heart. Which one of us would I sacrifice?
I took a breath. “What’s wrong, Lucinda?”
“That was my secret.” Thecret. Her lisp took the edge off the word. For a second.
“What?” It registered. Shock. And, yes, judgment. Her secret, not mine. She could have rescued me in that room.
“It was two months ago,” Lucinda said. “The last night at my sister’s. She lives in Maine. I go see her sometimes to get away from … things. He walked in the guest room. It was so hot and I couldn’t sleep, and I’d thrown off all the covers.”
He walked in.
“I thought it was my imagination. But he crawled in with me. I could feel the heat pouring off of him. And his skin. I could feel that. He wasn’t wearing anything.”
Please don’t tell me this.
“For a second, he just hugged me, kind of. Pulled me real close. Then he lifted my nightgown. It was such a shock. I didn’t want my sister to hear.”
“I’m so sorry.” She didn’t scream, I thought.
“He made fun of my lisp in high school.”
“Who, Lucinda?” But now I had a pretty good idea.
“Wilkie. My brother-in-law. Stupid name, isn’t it?”
My head began to pound.
“He never said a single word. He made a baby inside me without a word. It couldn’t have been more than three minutes. It wasn’t rough at all. Then he kissed me on my cheek and left.”
It wasn’t rough at all.
“I’m scared that Caroline will tell,” she said. “My husband has a very bad temper.”
I found my voice. “He raped you, Lucinda.”
“Oh, no,” she said. For the first time her words were clear, like she’d drunk from a cool stream. “I wanted it.”
Buck up, Emily.
Take a shower.
These women are crazy, but that doesn’t mean you are.
The new person who had taken up residence in my head was calm and insistent and bugging the hell out of me. I pushed her away and twisted the cranky knob in the bathtub to the right until the water shooting from the showerhead was almost too hot to stand. I stepped into it.
Maybe Lucinda wasn’t raped, but you were.
I dug my nails into my scalp painfully while I washed my hair. Why was everybody in this godforsaken town reminding me of what I should have been able to let go of years ago? My past and present were like two silvery necklaces in a drawer whose chains were now inexplicably, impossibly knotted together.
I wondered whether Lucinda would keep her baby. Why I always assumed that people with a handicap of some kind were somehow more pure. About the hundreds of moments between Lucinda and Wilkie that led to that night, about whether she’d been lying in that guest bed for years, waiting for him to show up. About the sometimes shaky line between rape and seduction that no one ever wants to talk about. About whether a psychiatrist would say Lucinda could even understand what rape was.
And Caroline. It was like a gong resonating. Caroline had gathered up the most confused, spiteful, vulnerable, damaged human beings she could find for her little club. To fix them? Or prey on them? Had Caroline really known about Lucinda’s baby? Or did she just sling her random arrows, knowing she needed only one dead-on hit to wield power over every person in the room? Had Caroline stirred the cauldron in this town to the boiling point and been forced to run because of it? Had she already secretly put that monstrosity of a house on the market? I should tell Mike to check.
Ten minutes later, hair dripping, mind still whirring, I dug through various unpacked boxes in the bedroom. I reluctantly tugged an olive-green maternity shirt over my head that reminded me of a miniature Lands’ End tent. Just as quickly, I ripped it off. The clock said that I had three minutes before Mike’s security goons arrived. I wrestled deeper into the box for my favorite sweatshirt, one of Mike’s, big and cozy enough to take care of the low-60s nip that some bow-tied TV weatherman said was “an unexpected cold front down from the Yankees.”
No luck. Maybe it was in a box of winter clothes in the sunroom at the back of the house. The sunroom, designated as my future painting studio, was crammed with boxes I hadn’t gotten to yet. I grabbed my robe off the bed and padded down the narrow hallway, stopping abruptly at the sunroom. The door was wide open.
I felt a familiar trickle of dread.
My easel wasn’t where I stacked it three weeks ago, folded and leaning in the corner near the blue plastic tub that held all of my art supplies.
It was now erected in the center of the room, facing toward the door, boxes pushed aside to make way. A sheaf of art paper was clipped in place, the top one blank. A tube of paint was set out along the easel’s edge, the cap off.
I hadn’t painted in two years and I never left the cap off a tube of paint. After yesterday, I wasn’t stupid enough to think that Mike had set this up as a gesture of encouragement.
And why would the crime scene tech or cops mess with stuff that was packed? Well, said the third person in my head, they probably wouldn’t.
My eyes searched.
A cigar, half-smoked, lay on the floor by the leg of the easel.
Dust danced in the light that streamed through the wall of dirty windows. Or was it smoke? I don’t know how I traveled those few feet, but my hand reached up and ripped off the first page, and the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth, faster and faster and faster, a blur of frenetic motion.
Because I knew there was another message.
I was inside the mind of my tormentor, like he was inside mine.
It was neatly taped to the last sheet of paper. A snapshot of Mike and me.
Exiting the restaurant after dinner with Harry and Letty.
Mike’s expression, angry.
My expression, undetermined.
That’s because a perfect red thumbprint, every ridge discernible, obliterated my face.
19
The crime scene tech blamed the cops, the cops blamed the crime scene tech, and a furious Mike blamed himself, but everyone agreed that I shouldn’t worry, the easel had been set up at the same time by the same intruder who drew the message in the mirror. The stalker hadn’t re-entered the house. The police had simply missed the sign of an upright easel as being significant yesterday. They were positive the thumbprint was red paint from the open tube, not blood, which didn’t comfort me in the least.
One of the female cops, Justine something, her face scrubbed shiny, her blue uniform so tight and starched that I wondered whether it was rubbing her skin raw, told me the thumbprint was a good sign. He could be identified. Her voice mentally patted me on the head.
“Really?” I asked sarcastically. “I think it’s a sign that he doesn’t give a flip anymore. That he has an endgame. That he’s not in the system. So do you really think that’s a good thing, Justine?”
Even the guys operating on my living room with drills and hammers stopped their noise long enough to watch Mike drag his hormonal wife into the kitchen.
Three men from the alarm company had arrived minutes after Mike screeched up to our curb with his siren wailing. They climbed out of their van and took note of the cop cars, apparently unruffled by an emergency in progress. From a distance, the trio appeared identical: soldier-cropped hair, pale skin, army boots, and dark green jumpsuits that showed off Y physiques. They had strolled into my house like a bunch of Timothy McVeighs, a marketing image likely dreamed up by a right-wing Texas entrepreneur. The company played on both patriotism and fear, claiming it used only experienced war veterans as employees.
Right now, for me, that was working fine.
God bless Texas, and come right in.
I sat at the kitchen table across from Mike, who was as uptight as I’d ever seen him. I was hungry but I felt like throwing up. My head already hurt like hell but I had a desire to bang it against those yellow daisies as hard as I could.
One of the blond clones had just finished attaching several high-tech warts, some kind of motion sensors, to the 98-year-old ceiling. The head clone briefly had explained all the perks of this new security system to me while I sat on the couch and nodded numbly, but the only thing I really remembered was, “A house fly won’t be able to get by it when we’re done,” which made me imagine laser beams shooting from the ceiling like a giant bug zapper.
Mike’s finger explored the nicked lip of his coffee cup. The cup was a memento from a night at Wicked on Broadway. The chip was courtesy of our movers. He stood up, moved to the sink, dumped the dregs, and tossed the cup in the trash under the sink. I’d decided two days ago when I unpacked the mug that it was worth keeping because we’d had amazing, (almost) fully clothed sex against a tree in the park on the way home that night.
“I’m done in this room.” The clone nodded curtly to me as he carried the ladder out the back door.
Mike pulled a skillet from under the sink, tossed in a good chunk of butter from the refrigerator, and set the burner on low.
“What are you making?” It didn’t take more than the sight of melting butter to distract me. “Don’t you need to get back to work? To Caroline?”
“Grilled cheese.”
“I want two,” I said. “No, three. On whole wheat. No, white.”
“Plastic cheese or real?”
“The good stuff.”
“I repeat, plastic or real?”
“Well, maybe a little of each.”
I pushed myself away from the table to retrieve a few accoutrements: sweet pickle chips, a bag of Ruffles, and carrot sticks, today’s small concession to health.
“What’s happening to us, Mike?” I shut the refrigerator door with my foot. “There is an alarm company booby-trapping our bedroom right now. Who is doing this to me? Why now?” My voice was shaking, teetering in hysterical range.
“I think it’s tied up with Caroline’s case,” Mike answered bluntly. “I just don’t know how yet. Still, I’m pretty sure it’s not a person from your past, but someone in the present who’s using it against you. Or more likely, against me.” He avoided my eyes as he flipped a sandwich onto my plate. “Emily, have you ever thought that you want it to be someone connected to … your rapist? That the baby is a catalyst for all this emotion? That you are trying to finally confront it?”
“That’s ridiculous.” Inside, I wasn’t sure at all.
“Let’s go over this again. How many people knew about the rape?”
“Who really knows? My parents. Pierce. His roommate was there.” Mike lifted his eyebrows at this new piece of information but didn’t say anything. “None of those are possibilities. Three are dead. The roommate was a wimpy guy who had his own problems with Pierce. I don’t think he’d want to hurt me.”
“Who else?”
“Well, my roommate. But she was so good to me … afterward. She has no reason to scare me. I haven’t talked to her in years. She’s a marketing executive in Minnesota, I think. Then there’s the cop who took the report that night, obviously. The police never actually interrogated me and I was known only as ‘one of the ex-girlfriends’ in a couple of front-page stories in the Newark and New York newspapers. Rape was never mentioned as a possible motive for his murder. Only jealousy.”
