Lie Still, page 25
I sat in the first open chair I came to, on the aisle on the far side of the pool, and quickly glanced inside the program. Letty had listed me as the fourth and last speaker. Emily Page, Wife of the Police Chief. I tried to tamp down my irritation. This was printed way before she ever picked up the phone to invite me.
My only consolation: The program listed Gretchen Liesel as Primary Eulogist. Maybe she’d run over her time limit. Maybe she’d inspire something in me. I had no idea what I was going to say. I didn’t recognize the names of the other two speakers. Letty planned to sing a solo to close things out. “I’ll Fly Away.” I had a feeling it would no longer be one of my favorite gospel hymns by the time the evening shut down.
“We are here to mourn our great friend Caroline Warwick.” Letty’s voice boomed across the yard. “Let us open with a moment of silence.” The crowd bowed their heads low.
“Hey, Letty,” someone called from the back. “We hear that Caroline found out you aren’t really descended from the General.”
“That is a lie,” Letty said calmly, head still bowed. “This is not an appropriate place to talk about things like how you blew my husband at my daughter’s middle-school prom.”
“Show some respect, y’all,” urged the tall woman sitting directly in front of me. “Take your bitch fight to Twitter, where it belongs.” She turned around and whispered to me, “This is why Yankees like you think Texans are lunatics.”
“I don’t think that at all,” I murmured. I just think Clairmont women are lunatics.
The crowd was babbling, moving in their chairs like restless hyenas. All those secrets, ready to explode. Caroline’s real legacy.
Gretchen hopped up out of her chair in the front row. She nudged Letty away from the microphone, quickly adjusting it, turning it down.
“Thank you, Letty.” She stared at her pointedly. Letty hesitated. Then she tottered away from the podium, back to her chair. “Everybody sit down. Shut up.”
And they did. By the time Gretchen finished her tribute, tears and $35 mascara ran down the faces around me. Women shared tissues from their purses. Gretchen’s story about a philanthropist and dear friend who never wanted credit were hard to square with the Caroline Warwick I knew. Not a peep about her being seriously psychotic. I had to wonder whether half of these women were crying out of relief that their secrets might die with her.
Gretchen rolled on for about half an hour. After that, Letty announced that the next two speakers on the program hadn’t shown. I wish I’d known that was an option.
“Next up is Emily Page, wife of our new police chief, who will share a few thoughts about Caroline and then she will update us on the tragic case.”
Shock, a little panic, followed by full-blown anger. No way could I offer up inside information on the murder. The murderer was possibly in the house.
I wanted to squeeze Letty’s neck with my hands until her chubby head popped off. Instead, I stepped haltingly up to the podium as Letty brushed by me in a wave of thick, flowery perfume, sat down, and peered up at me expectantly, as did forty other faces.
I glanced down at my program, pretending that I was refreshing myself on notes that didn’t exist. Then I gazed deliberately at each section of the crowd. Left, right, center, silently acknowledging them, a trick I learned in my high school speech class. Take a moment to possess yourself. Make them feel like you have a relationship with each one of them. I wondered whether my eyes had passed over Caroline’s killer.
I didn’t see Misty’s face out there. Or Holly’s or Tiffany’s, for that matter. I easily spotted Lucinda in the far back corner, hiding under a black floppy hat, which only made her stand out more.
“First,” I said, “I am unable to speak about the case. I think it would be … inappropriate on several levels.” Letty made a small, regurgitating sound. “I would, however, like to share a prayer I’ve always found a comfort to me. I am Catholic, and I know many of you are Baptist, but I think it is universal. Please bow your heads.”
Everyone immediately bowed their heads. The power of the podium in the Bible Belt.
It wasn’t hard to find this one lodged in my brain.
“Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee we do cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious Advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Amen.”
“Amen,” the crowd repeated.
I sat down. Letty seemed stunned. This appeal to the Lord wasn’t the big Hollywood finish she was expecting. But she was Letty, so she recovered quickly. She picked up a portable microphone resting at her feet on the ground, cued the pianist, and proceeded to blast out “I’ll Fly Away.”
Not as awful as I thought she’d be in a full-out performance. The pitch roamed a little beyond her reach, but she was at least on key and clearly had voice training.
She made the mistake in the first chorus of thinking the crowd was with her. She began to wander the aisles like a nightclub singer, sticking the microphone in people’s confused faces for them to sing along before yanking it away a second later and yelling for everyone to clap along.
Letty’s face glowed red-hot from her vocal effort and her anger at our lackluster participation as she bobbled around in her shiny sequins and skyscraper heels. She walked unsteadily back toward the podium, singing Tammy Wynette–style about God’s celestial shore. She almost made it.
A few steps from the podium, her left heel caught on the leg of an empty chair. She flapped her arms desperately in that moment before disaster, when you can see it coming but can’t stop it.
Gravity and about 250 pounds gave way, and Letty flopped backward into the pool like a human Shamu, taking four empty chairs with her. The splash soaked mourners sitting on the periphery of the water, who immediately let out shrieks, and at least one very loud “Fuck!”
It might have been just a medium-sized disaster if, while Letty’s head bobbed above the water, one of the passing votives hadn’t caught her hair on fire.
I found myself at the side of the pool, leaping. For the half second I was suspended in mid-air, I wondered how my life had come to this. Then I hit the water—no small splash, either.
“Your hair is on fire!” I was yelling, reaching for Letty’s head, dunking it under.
Her head popped up.
“Are you trying to drown me?” she screeched.
The fire was out. The left side of her hair was singed all the way to the scalp, with a splotch of skin turning newborn baby pink. She’d been lucky. The rest of her head had been too wet to light up. But Letty had at least six months of hair recovery in front of her.
I felt a diabolical urge to dunk her again, saying, No, no, your hair is still on fire, Letty, and then again and again, letting her bob up and down, until it stopped being funny.
It turned out that the two Mexican women who handed out the programs, Juanita and Lupe, had suffered in Letty’s domestic service for the last ten years.
With Letty’s grudging permission, Juanita dug into the back of her mistress’s walk-in closet to find the smallest-sized clothing she owned, which turned out to be a lavender velour tracksuit in a size 16. It was wonderfully loose and cozy, and made me completely rethink my snotty attitude about velour.
Meanwhile, Lupe wrung out my clothes and hung them over several of the chairs outside. She then delivered a cup of hot cinnamon tea, which I sipped while Gretchen pumped up a blood pressure cuff on my arm, which she’d retrieved from her bag in the car.
After Gretchen briefly examined Letty’s scalp and recommended a temporary fix of over-the-counter cortisone cream, Letty disappeared into the back wing of the house. The last of the guests were trickling out the front door.
“I’m glad you are delivering my baby,” I said to Gretchen, moving over on the couch to make more room for her. “You seem calm in an emergency.”
“You’re the one who jumped in to save the day.”
“Instincts. Wife of a cop. Former junior lifeguard.”
“Your blood pressure is good.” Gretchen stripped off the Velcro, sounding curt. “Do you understand what the words avoid stress mean?”
It seemed rhetorical, so I didn’t answer. And while I had Gretchen’s attention, I meant to take full advantage. “Did you know that the cops are going through files that Caroline kept on all of you?”
“I thought we were done with this conversation. But yes, rumors are all over town that cops are picking our lives apart. I never saw the file room, but I had a general idea. I thought of it as a fairly harmless hobby.”
“Did you know she snooped around your house and found the Nazi uniform?”
“You don’t give up, do you? Yes, she eventually told me. That uniform left our house years ago. We donated it to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. How did you find this out anyway? Is your husband letting you read the files?”
“No,” I said, sharply. “Definitely not.”
“So?”
“So, I don’t think Caroline’s motives were all that pure. I told you in your office that someone left a package on my doorstep. It was the police report from the night I was raped in college.”
Gretchen’s face remained impassive.
“Her husband and son are still alive.” Now I was just throwing darts at the wall.
No reaction.
“You knew,” I said.
“I know that Caroline didn’t deserve to die the way she did.”
“Do you have any idea who hated her this much?”
“No.” She snapped her black medical bag shut and spoke gently. “Caroline wouldn’t taunt you about a rape. You’re the victim. Whatever her methods, she was all about helping the victim.”
“Hi, y’all.” Letty’s voice rang out cheerfully behind us, like this awful evening was just another day in the life.
She plopped beside me on the couch, the leather cushion offering up a helpless sigh. The yellow smiley faces on her flannel pajamas beamed at me. She wore a matching blue facial mask that cracked a little, like a series of mini-earthquakes, every time her mouth moved. She’d stuck a SpongeBob Band-Aid on the left side of her forehead and tucked her hair into a clear pink plastic shower cap.
“Did I hear y’all talking about that little package I left on Emily’s doorstep a while back? By the way, I’m going to want that outfit back tomorrow before noon. I think I’m close to fitting back into it.”
She patted the shower cap on her head distractedly.
“What are y’all staring at? I’m giving myself one of those Queen Helene Cholesterol Hot Oil Treatments from Walgreens. It’s an old pageant-girl trick. My hair’s under a lot of stress.”
29
Letty had delivered the rape report to my doorstep. Letty. The revelation opened a yawning space in my brain. My ears hummed and the baby somersaulted while Letty’s mouth moved and her blue face cracked in front of me like dry land in a drought. I wondered if it was going to explode and send bits of plaster into my eyes.
Letty delivered the package, just that one, at least that’s what she said when I asked her, in a very faraway voice, about cigars and phone hang-ups. And what kind of person would voluntarily admit the one crazy thing and not the others?
She shrugged it off in the way only Letty could.
“I don’t know what phone hang-ups you’re talking about,” she said. “It’s rude to suggest it. And I don’t smoke. Pageant girls don’t. It makes your lips look like a horse’s butt-hole. I was just doing my job for Harry as head of the background search committee for the new chief of police. It was a lot of work. Ten applicants.
Harry asked me to check out wives, kids, relatives, friends. Turns out, I had a real knack for it.”
Gretchen and I watched, speechless, as Letty blathered on, oblivious to the effect on her audience. I wondered if she’d been born with a slice of her soul missing and if she stored bloody knives with her Little Debbie cakes.
“I checked out all your college records.” She studiously examined a chipped hot-pink nail. “You went to a bunch. I figured you for some kind of a cheater who had to move around. But your transcripts didn’t bear that out. Sweetie, you don’t need to look so shocked about all this. A little money opens lots of doors, always has, always will, even at those Ivy League, stick-up-their-butt schools. I lucked into some student temp at Windsor University’s police department, who was more than happy to help me. Called me back three days later. I guess it took some digging in the basement files to find your name. We agreed that I’d send her a hundred-dollar Urban Outfitters gift card and she’d mail me a copy.”
My secrets in exchange for a pair of skinny jeans.
Dry crumbs from Letty’s face fell like blue dust onto the couch. “Those scholarship kids are always quick to take a dime. Did you just make up the rape? That’s sure what it sounded like.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“Why would you do this, Letty?” Gretchen asked in a strained voice.
“Why the hell do you think? So Harry would have leverage with the new chief if he ever needed it. I was going to hold on to it in case it was ever useful. Small-town politics is a bitch. But then I got pissed when Emily arrived, all snotty and New Yorky, strutting around like a pregnant Demi, at least from the waist down. Not to be downright mean or anything, Emily, but your boobs wouldn’t pass pageant muster. Anyway, it was like we weren’t good enough for you. I thought it would be worth it to take you down a peg. She said I shouldn’t do it, but Caroline wasn’t always right about everything. Look what happened to her. Planted like a crocus bulb in her own backyard.”
“Caroline knew about the report?” I stammered.
“Yep. I showed her the day it arrived because she liked to keep track of things herself. She said it wasn’t important. That we should feel sorry for you. I believe her exact words were, Men are filthy pigs.” Letty sat back on her own little haunches.
“I have to go,” I said.
Juanita appeared with a plastic garbage bag stuffed with my wet clothes. She held out my Manolo Blahniks, which didn’t appear all that worse for taking a dip in Letty’s saltwater pool.
“Keep them,” I said.
“Are you OK?” Gretchen walked beside me to the door, any tension between us erased by Letty’s bizarre confession. She draped her arm around my shoulders, but I could barely feel it.
“I have to go,” I repeated.
Jesse’s headlights chased me all the way home.
When I arrived at the house, Mike was preoccupied in a way I was all too familiar with when it came to his big, ugly cases. Distracted, when I told him that Letty admitted delivering the rape report to our door.
“That’s good,” he said absently, as if it was something to be crossed off a list. He barely glanced up at my disheveled appearance.
A copy of Caroline’s autopsy report was spread out to all four corners of the kitchen table. I had to turn away from the pictures. Gray, red, surreal. Mike made no effort to hide them. He pressed his palms on either side of his head like a vise. “No forensic evidence. No hairs. No blood. No semen. She was drugged with Vicodin, half a bottle of Tylenol PM, and high-proof whiskey. Then he cut her. For four to five days, he toyed with her. There were plenty of wounds before he struck her heart. He stripped her naked and washed her in something that left traces of citric acid and non-fat dry milk. Then he stored her somewhere for a week.”
He was talking more to himself than to me, so I just walked away. He was still at it, making another batch of coffee, when my head hit the pillow. I wondered whether we were finally falling apart. Intellectually, I knew that solving this case was the best way he could love me. But right now, all I wanted were his arms around my baby.
I slept hard and woke up about seven the next morning to an unexpectedly cool, lazy breeze drifting through the screen. The wind rustled the leaves of the forty-year-old live oak outside the window, encouraging me to sink deeper under the birds. I knew that Jesse was on the job out front, so I let nature lull me in and out of a fitful consciousness until mid-morning.
I restlessly piddled around after that. People wonder why women stalked by boyfriends or husbands or strange creeps don’t run. It’s because there is nowhere to run. There’s not enough money to run. Electronic trails everywhere. The only escape is death. His or yours.
Come and get us, jerk, said the little voice in my head, bravely. We’re ready.
This time, I listened.
I slipped my gun out from under a pile of silk panties in my underwear drawer, where I had carelessly hidden it from Mike. I set it on the dresser while I unpacked a small box of jewelry and hooked earrings into place on a little plastic tree. I placed it on the kitchen counter while I washed Mike’s cereal bowl and juice glass. I rested it on top of the dryer while I threw Letty’s tracksuit into the washer. I eventually landed on the stool in front of the computer. I stuck the gun into one of the cubbyholes of Mrs. Drury’s desk and called up my email.
Brook Everheart Marcum added you as a friend on Facebook …
Did it matter anymore? Mike would say no, that I should just leave it alone.
I clicked the link. Brook had 796 friends. Brook Everheart Marcum, bless her heart, was a friend to all.
Brook networked in Miami and Chicago. She was a stay-at-home mom, married, with two children. Her profile picture displayed her on a yacht with a broad grin and healthy cleavage. Arms outstretched, Titanic-style.
I scrolled down her wall.
Brook last recorded her status four hours and twenty minutes ago.
