Lie Still, page 7
I pictured Caroline trotting up to the door in her pearls and running away in a senior citizen version of Ding Dong Ditch. It wasn’t a genteel lady move.
The scarier possibility, of course, was that my faithful, hateful mail stalker had gathered momentum. Something had taken her rage to a more intimate level.
The phone—a red, old-fashioned dial-up still attached to the wall—shrilled two feet from my head, and I let out a short scream.
Calm down. You aren’t a nineteen-year-old girl anymore.
I picked up the receiver, ready to give the caller everything she had coming to her. To let her know that I wasn’t a person who could be blackmailed, although another part of me tried to speak up, saying I was exactly that kind of person.
“Emily?”
Not a female voice. Mike.
“Yes.” I battled a wave of nausea.
“You aren’t answering your cell phone.”
“It’s … on the bed. I think.”
“Hold on a second,” he said. The phone chilled my burning cheek. I could hear a small commotion on the other end. Several voices.
Could I tell Mike about the rape now? After all these years?
He’d be angry, hurt, that through all of our shouting matches, hours of marriage counseling, the ups and downs of our marathon sex life, I had never trusted him enough. Keeping the rape from him was one more dent in our marital armor. It would erase all the progress we’d made in the last six months. I’d thought about this thousands of times, relentless waves lapping at the shore.
I closed my eyes, hating myself. For the rape. For the things that followed.
But Mike’s curt words quickly erased any thoughts of telling him anything. “I’m over at Caroline Warwick’s house. She’s missing. Em, you were one of the last people to see her.”
My fingers involuntarily crumpled the police report until it was a wad in my fist, the size of a small grenade.
8
Was I imagining the soft sound of crying in the background? Maria?
“Oh, Mike.” I cleared my throat. “When?”
“Caroline complained of a migraine all afternoon, then went to bed around seven-thirty last night. Maria claims she stayed on her shift longer than usual before going home, to make sure Caroline was OK. This morning, when she didn’t show up for breakfast, Maria found her bedroom empty, the bed rumpled, but the covers still in place, like she hadn’t ever pulled them down.”
“Maybe she made the bed and went on a late morning walk?” Why was this being treated as such a crisis when it had been less than twenty-four hours? And why was he calling me? Mike never included me in his investigations. Never.
I aimed the ball of paper at the kitchen wastebasket ten feet away, playing a game with myself. If it went in, I didn’t have to tell Mike anything at all. If I missed, I would come clean.
“Maria says Caroline tells people that she hasn’t made her own bed since she was six,” Mike said. “She’s fired three housekeepers who didn’t change the sheets by eight on the dot every morning.”
“Maybe she took a late night drive? Got in an accident?”
People like Caroline always came back. I arched my wrist and fired. The paper ball bounced off the wastebasket’s rim and under the kitchen table. Stupid game.
“We’re checking the hospitals. But all of her cars are in the garage. Three Cadillacs.” Mike lowered his voice. “I don’t feel good about this.” At once, I understood. Mike’s well-trained gut was talking.
“You think something has happened to her?”
“There’s a little blood on the back of a pillow. An open window. A footprint in the flower bed. Ladder marks in the dirt. A gutter with a dent in it. It could be a week-old nosebleed, a desire for fresh night air, a diligent gardener picking weeds, and a little hail damage. It’s not like I have a crack CSI unit.”
“There’s something else, I can tell.” Mike’s sarcasm had whipped up a new batch of paranoia in my head. Was Caroline’s bedtime reading a copy of my rape report? Was someone sweeping my past into an evidence bag? Mike couldn’t find out this way.
“There are three empty prescription bottles on her nightstand. Prozac, Percocet, and Vicodin. Exactly the drug cocktail that killed her friend Helen. Prescribed by Dr. Gretchen Liesel. The painkillers are for migraines, so that’s consistent at least. But the Mayse suicide is extremely fresh in my mind.”
“You think Caroline killed herself? She was definitely not suicidal when I saw her.” Anything but.
“It’s not my top scenario. And there’s another odd thing. Maria says Caroline always kept her Bible on her dresser. Wouldn’t let her touch it, even to dust. Onionskin pages. A relic. There’s an inscription. To our blessed daughter, on her tenth birthday. Someone ripped a page out of it and underlined a passage. One of my guys found it on the floor by the window. Hold on, let me get it. It’s already been bagged.”
Mike came back on the line.
“Matthew 23:33.”
“It’s not top of my mind at the moment,” I said.
“You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?”
Tearing a page out of someone’s Bible was like burning the flag in front of a soldier. Maybe worse.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked. He wants me to tell him the truth, I thought. Tell him that the five women who sat in a room with Caroline Warwick yesterday, including his pregnant wife, would make a nice little lineup of suspects.
“Stay home. I’m sending an officer over for your statement.”
“Mike, I …”
He’d already hung up.
Cody Hill was a young, redheaded policeman who topped out at about 6’5″ and held a glass of ice water in sprawling hands that belonged to a former Clairmont High School All-State quarterback. It was a fact he mentioned about himself immediately after dropping onto my couch.
I forced my fingers to stop twirling a strand of hair into a tight rope. The crumpled campus police report now resided in the pocket of my jeans, a ball of lead. When did paper become so heavy?
“I don’t really know how I can help,” I told him. “I don’t know Caroline Warwick well. She invited me to a party at her house several days ago and then yesterday for a glass of iced tea with a few other women.”
“How did she seem?”
“Yesterday? Fine, I guess. Again, I don’t know her well enough to say. Her headache came on suddenly.”
“She didn’t say anything that indicated she was worried?”
“No, the conversation was … just small talk. Benign.” If you considered a puppy murder and sex toys under the mattress to be benign. Maybe Cody would. I wasn’t sure why I was lying, setting more traps for myself. But yesterday Caroline wasn’t the victim in that room. I wasn’t about to start my sentence in this town by ratting out the people who were.
The officer, tapping out his notes on an iPad, paused over the word benign, and I stopped myself from spelling it for him.
“What time did you leave Ms. Warwick’s home yesterday, ma’am?” He stuttered a little over the ma’am, and I began to sympathize that he had drawn the short straw to interview the wife of the new boss.
“Let’s see. I looked at the clock when I got home. It was three-fifteen. So I probably left her house around three.”
“Did you have any contact with the housekeeper? Maria Valdez?”
“Yes, Maria let us in. She let me out. I was the last one to go.”
He paused for a beat, as if that was significant. “Did she show any animosity toward Mrs. Warwick?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Do you know if she’s an illegal?”
“Illegal isn’t a noun.” My voice was clipped, not liking where this was going. “If you’re asking if she’s in the country legally, I don’t have any idea.”
“Yes, ma’am. We’ll be checking on that.”
Patronizing. No more trace of a stutter. Maybe he’d faked it. You’d think at this point in my life I could read people faster. Like last month, when that New York plumber charged me twice what he should have, swaying any doubts about the price with a story about being a single father who struggled to braid his daughter’s hair that morning.
People are adept at getting what they want these days, mingling the lies and the truth, fooling you, wriggling into your soft parts. Maybe people always had been like this.
I was beginning to think that underneath Cody Hill’s fresh-scrubbed face, a redneck bully thrived.
“That’s an interesting little club she’s got set up,” he drawled. “I’ve heard some weird rumors about it from my girlfriend. Like they all have special tattoos in a private place. A lot of pissed-off women in this town, both the ones who get in and the ones who get blackballed. My girlfriend, she’s still hoping for an invite.”
“I’m not her ticket,” I said. Tattoos that said liar or whore or killer? Nothing seemed too far-fetched at the moment.
Cody frowned, not liking my answer. “Did things seem normal between Ms. Warwick and her guests?”
“I don’t know them. I don’t know what normal would be.”
“Did anything at all stick out at you yesterday?”
“You’re just asking the same question different ways. Maria could surely tell you more about these women than I can. Did you ask her? She speaks English.” You jerk.
He flipped the iPad cover over his notes, and stood. “Mostly, I was just after a timeline.” The words flowed in a syrupy drawl. “I ’preciate it, ma’am.”
He towered over me as we walked to the front door. He stopped short, four inches from my stomach, invading my baby space, nauseating me with the smell of bitter sweat and an overdose of Old Spice deodorant.
“One more thing, ma’am. Your husband’s already thinking about calling in the FBI. It ain’t even the usual forty-eight yet. It’s tough being the new guy, trying to please the mayor. We all get that. But we can handle this. So maybe you could assure him, since you’re a friend of Miss Warwick’s, that wouldn’t be such a good idea. Give her a little time to come home on her own. Prevent her some embarrassment.”
He glanced down, and I became distinctly aware of the paper bulge in my front pocket, and then the one in his pants. I realized that his eyes weren’t trained on my belly but on the sliver of bare skin showing above my jeans.
His gaze rolled up to my breasts, a C cup for the first time in their lives. My nipples tingled like he was physically touching them, and I felt the familiar flush of shame. The experts say the body is cued to respond, even under attack, even when we don’t want it to.
“Watch where you look.” My voice pulsed with anger.
“You seem a little on edge, Mrs. Page.”
He stepped over the threshold to the porch, and I slammed the door.
I waited for Mike in his favorite armchair, facing the door, my feet propped up on a moving box. I pulled my grandmother’s afghan tight around my pajamas. When I was five, I liked to waggle my fingers like little puppet people through the crochet holes.
There is blood in my house.
Staring at the door, I thought about how I could never survive Mike leaving me. About how ironic it was that I married a man immersed in violence when I can barely make it through a full episode of his favorite cop show on cable.
Mike takes my idiosyncrasies in this area in stride. He knows what’s off the table. Horror movies with the word Saw or a Roman numeral in the title. Torture scenes that involve fingers, clippers, knives, cigar cutters, or water. Children in peril.
The truth is, I was like this before Pierce raped me. Ever since Beth died in Little Women, I’ll check out the end of any book that foreshadows the death of a character I love. As long as I know what’s coming, it’s OK. But don’t surprise me.
Yet I have no problem at all murdering Pierce Martin. I see him in my head right now, arms crossed, lazy grin. I’m pulling the trigger. One, two, three, four, five. Always five. This isn’t the first time I’ve killed him. It helps that I know he’s going to die.
His body lurches like a floppy fish with each blast until he crumples, finally harmless. I’ve never felt any guilt about making this bloody mess. I haven’t successfully reconciled that with my belief in a loving, forgiving God who asks me to reflect His image.
In my night dreams, when I’m not on guard, Pierce is alive. He lurks while I’m soaring through a happy, nonsensical plot, vanishing the second I turn my head.
While I sleep, my rapist is still my stalker, even though I’ve killed him over and over in the daytime. Even though I know he can’t hurt me anymore.
When Mike walked in the door, my Cartier watch said it was 3 a.m.
“I have to tell you about the box,” I said.
Except that when I woke up, I wasn’t wearing a Cartier watch. I didn’t own one. A pillow from our bed was tucked under my head. I hadn’t put it there.
When I woke up it was morning, and Mike was already gone again.
9
The sign near the receptionist’s desk had promised WOMEN CARING FOR WOMEN, as if that was worth bragging about, and so far, so good.
Dr. Gretchen Liesel’s waiting room was like a giant womb, bathed in warm red tones and indirect light, without a harsh fluorescent bulb in sight. Somehow, I hadn’t expected Texas to be like this.
After filling out a little paperwork, my body nestled itself into one of six overstuffed chairs as a classical music station played faintly, the way I imagined the baby could hear music in his insulated cocoon. I dug into the Sunday Arts section of The New York Times, a treat, because I’d started reading it on Mike’s iPad since we moved, and it just wasn’t the same. I had taken exactly one bite from a chocolate chip granola bar from the loaded snack basket when a sweet-faced nurse named Anna called my name.
I obediently followed her into an exam room, outfitted with the same soft lighting, a couch, and custom oak cabinets that hid the cold, glistening tools that made every muscle in my body clench. Or maybe they used those awful disposable plastic ones here. Surely women caring for women knew that, for some reason, cheap, hard, disposable plastic hurt more than steel. Anna left the room, and I shed my clothes and pulled on the cuddly, high-thread-count, blue cotton gown folded on the exam table.
I lay back on it and thought about my sole reason for being here.
Paranoia.
Paranoia about an ache in my belly this morning that was either a sign that I was losing my baby or that I shouldn’t eat red Doritos every day.
Paranoia about Caroline’s ridiculous fortune-cookie secrets. About yesterday’s vile package on my doorstep and whether the missing Caroline could possibly be responsible. I wanted to believe that Dr. Liesel had the answers to all of these concerns, all of it covered by doctor-patient confidentiality.
When I called several hours ago, the receptionist heard my first sentence about pain in my lower abdomen and immediately plugged me in as a new patient at 4 p.m.
Two raps on the door. Dr. Liesel stepped inside, dressed in pale green scrubs.
“Hello, Emily.” She gave my shoulder a gentle pat before heading to the sink to wash her hands. The pat. It changed the entire dynamic of the doctor/patient relationship. Perfecting the patient pat should be a medical school graduation requirement.
“So what’s going on?” She dried her hands on a paper towel and rolled her stool over, unhooking the blood pressure cuff from the wall.
“It hurts all across here. Probably something I ate?” Hopeful.
“Don’t talk.” She pumped up the cuff.
The blood pressure machine hissed like an angry snake, the only sound in the room. I thought about Mike, who had no idea that I was here, or that something might be wrong. My worry was all I could carry this time. He was more afraid of losing me than of losing another child he didn’t know.
But I knew this child. He had wrapped his little fingers tightly around my soul. So had all the ones before him.
I breathed deeply and tried to focus on the cool and gentle fingers pressing on my wrist, feeling my pulse.
“150 over 90.” Dr. Liesel ripped off the Velcro cuff. “Not ideal. Your pulse is a little fast. When did you last see Dr. Herrera?”
Why was this always a surprise to a doctor? That pulses race faster and blood pounds in the presence of someone who could rock your world with a few words of irrefutable science?
“Several days ago. Everything checked out fine.”
“Lie back and let’s untie your gown.” She flipped a switch on a screen above my head, pulled out an ultrasound wand, and squirted warm jelly on my stomach.
Searching, searching, searching for that elusive heartbeat. I squeezed my eyes shut, and wondered where women caring for women heated up the goo.
I tried not to imagine a tiny, curled-up form perfectly still on the screen above my head. Too still. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until I heard horses galloping through a stream and almost choked on air. My baby, beating away.
“From what I can see so far, your baby looks and sounds perfect.” She gently wiped the jelly off with a soft washcloth.
“Lie back for a second.” Careful hands massaged my stomach. From my angle, it appeared to be protruding about two more inches than yesterday. She pressed a stethoscope to my belly before pulling it out of her ears and adjusting the exam table into a sitting position. “It’s noisy in there. Maybe eat some plain yogurt. Do you know the sex?”
“Yes.” Overflowing with gratefulness, indebted, as everyone is to a doctor who delivers good news, as if they’re somehow responsible for it. “A boy.”
“Relax, OK? You’ve made it well past the first trimester this time. I see here in your paperwork faxed over from Dr. Herrera that you’ve had a number of miscarriages. The percentages are with you at this point.” She paused, frowning at my paperwork. “Is this right? A glass of wine a day?”
