I know then that I’ve done as well as I possibly could. At least I am in the running. And the funniest thing is that before she closes the door behind me, I catch her glancing up and down the street distractedly, and I know she’s looking out for crazy Diane. Crazy Diane who leaves dead rats in her mailbox and calls her at night with vile, threatening words.
Chapter Nine
I leave it for thirty minutes. Any longer and she might contact the agency, maybe even gush about “Louise Martin”. I pray silently that she hasn’t done so as I make the call, my stomach clenched. She answers on the first ring and when I announce myself, her tone is a little puzzled, but warm, and my whole body relaxes as I breathe out.
Mrs. Carter, I hope you don’t mind, the agency gave me your number, they said it was all right…. It’s just that, I’ve been offered another position you see?… Yes, just now, but I wanted to check in case—well, I’ll be honest with you, I thought you were so nice, and I love the idea of helping you look after a little one, so I wondered if you’d made up your mind about me, one way or another…. Oh really? That’s awesome! I’m so happy, Mrs. Carter, you won’t regret it, I promise…. No, that’s all right, I’ll call the agency now and tell them…. That’s no problem at all, it’s better for me to let them know. Thank you so much, Mrs. Carter.
Then I send the email I’ve already drafted from my fake Housekeeping Solutions Group account.
Dear Mrs. Carter,
We’re delighted to let you know that Ms. Louise Martin has accepted your offer of employment as Live-in Housekeeper. Louise will start her position on Monday, blah-blah-blah, we will forward our invoice after the agreed trial period, blah-blah-blah.
She replies almost immediately, saying she really looks forward to Louise becoming part of the family, which I think is a very strange thing to say to a new employee, and under different circumstances, I think I would find it creepy.
It may be risky, all this, but not that risky. The key is to anticipate what the other party is going to do next and stay one step ahead. I’m not going to be there long, just long enough to reach my goal and then I’m out of there. I want redress. I want her to admit what she did to me and my family. To admit it was all a lie. And I want her to do that publicly. Some people might say that’s impossible, but those people are not consumed like I am. This is my life’s work now. And if I could make her feel miserable in the process, so miserable that she would want to die, well … that would be nice.
That night, I tell April I’m going to Pittsfield for a while. Just a week or two, I say. To stay with my cousin Mary who is convalescing. Pneumonia. Terrible illness, that.
“Oh! Will she be all right?” she asks, digging into her bowl of vanilla ice cream. I already finished mine and I’m wiping it with my finger and licking it.
“Oh yes. Eventually.”
She turns down the volume on the TV. “How long will you be gone?”
I’ve thought about this all day, obviously. How long will it take me to achieve my plan? Let’s see. Step 1: get inside the house, check. Step 2: seduce Harvey. Now, some people might laugh at the prospect of me—sad, fat, ugly me—seducing a man like Harvey, when he’s got someone like Hannah at home, but it’s not love I’m offering. It’s a hand job, and more. It’s all the things his wife won’t do, and for free. Show me a man who’ll turn that down.
Except it’s not for free, not really, but it’s Hannah who’ll have to pay. Because I’m going to make some good videos on my phone, ones where I role-play the shy, reluctant housekeeper. If I could get him to slap me, even better. Some men like that. But anything that shows “he made me do it” will do. And that’s where step 3 comes in.
Step 3 is where I turn the tables on Hannah. Step 3 is where she finds that everything she’s worked so hard for is about to go up in smoke. Because if I put those videos up on YouTube, Harvey Carter’s life as he knows it will be over. He will be shunned, humiliated. He’ll lose his law practice, or at least the bulk of his clients. I mean, who wants to be associated with that? The Carters will be social pariahs. I can’t imagine “little Mia sweet as pie” ever being accepted into an exclusive private school. I know these establishments. They’ll come up with all sorts of excuses as to why she’s not the right fit. And anyway, the Carters will be broke by then and Hannah won’t stick around if there’s no money. And she won’t want to be part of another scandal. All that work snagging Harvey for nothing, and those lifelong dreams of money and glamour? Irretrievably gone.
Hannah will have to consider all this when I show her the videos. But I will offer her a way out. I will delete all of it if she admits that she lied about what my father did to her. A confession. I’ll film that too, of course. I’ll say it’s for my own security, in case they try to discredit me after I delete the videos of her husband’s misdemeanors.
Step 4? Distribute her confession far and wide, obviously. I’m thinking New York Post, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker… maybe I’ll make a deal with one of them for an exclusive. It may have been ten years ago, but it was a big case at the time. Wilson vs. Petersen. People will remember.
April is staring at me, her spoon against her bottom lip. “Earth to Claire Petersen?” she says, and for a moment I wonder if I spoke out loud.
“Two weeks,” I say. “Three at the most.”
Chapter Ten
That summer I had to come home to New York in the middle of camp for an orthodontist appointment that had taken months to secure. My mother picked me up that morning and drove me to my appointment, then I went home briefly to pick up some more clothes. I barely noticed the slim, shy girl in our house. We exchanged no more than a few words of greeting before my mother drove me back. Then maybe a week later, over one of our phone calls, my mother mentioned she needed to find a new nanny.
“Why? What about that girl, what’s her name?”
“She’s gone. She went home.”
“Already? I thought she was there for the whole summer? What happened?”
“I think she was just overwhelmed. She was so young, barely twenty. She’d lived her whole life on a farm, you know, so I guess it was too much for her.”
“I thought that was the point. Didn’t you say she wanted to visit museums or whatever?”
“Yes, well, I don’t think she did that. She was terribly unhappy, then she asked to go home, so we called her parents and sent her back.”
Then she told me other news, and I didn’t give a single thought to Hannah Wilson for months. Until I found out my parents were being sued in civil court for sexual assault.
* * *
There were two things that defined my father: he was a businessman, and he worshiped my mother. I think he could never believe his luck that she’d agreed to marry him. He was middle class before he met her, whereas she was the quintessential New York high-society woman. I used to think she was the most beautiful woman in the world, head-turningly so. She was also very smart, and in many ways, as wonderful and privileged as her life was, I think she wanted something else for me. Not a career so much as a calling. Didn’t quite work out that way.
But he was talented, or so we thought, and his investment firm grew steadily over the years. We were rich. By any standard. Which is why she picked us.
She went home, back to her pathetic life in Canada, and told her parents that my father had visited her room every night and did things to her. She also said she couldn’t tell my mother because he had threatened her.
I have no doubt that Hannah Wilson came to us with that plan already in place. She looked for a wealthy family, and she found one. She counted on the fact that my parents would not want the publicity and would quickly settle out of court for an undisclosed sum. Just a generic blackmail scam, although impressive in its simplicity.
Needless to say, my mother didn’t believe a word of it. The idea that my quiet, kind, bespectacled father was capable of whatever she claimed he did was never even considered, and after the initial shock of the betrayal, she re
turned to her defiant self. She had done so much to accommodate that girl, and this is how she repaid us? She was adamant that the Petersens would not settle. “We will clear our good name!” she thundered.
So my parents fought back. Hard. They accused her of going after money, which, considering she wanted ten million dollars in compensation, was the truth. Hannah returned to New York accompanied by her parents for depositions and filings. They looked so out of place, the three of them, in their Sunday best and with their baffled expressions, as if it hadn’t been their idea to be here, as if they hadn’t made all this happen. By then the press was having a field day. My father was a monster, Hannah was a naïve young girl who had been taken advantage of. My parents countered that she was a gold digger, that she’d even conned her own parents, who looked like good people, they said.
The problem was that she presented well in court. She was young, not beautiful but pretty enough, which was probably better. She looked scared all the time. Even at my young age, I could see that she had that quality that made people want to protect her.
So I stepped in. I told my mother that when I’d met Hannah that day, I’d said something like, I’m sure I’ll see you again before you go back, and she’d said, I don’t think so, I don’t intend to stick around here for long. I asked why that was, and she winked at me and whispered, I got what I wanted. I’m going to go home, and very soon I’ll be very rich.
I said I didn’t even understand what she meant but I hadn’t asked because, why would I? She meant nothing to me; I just wanted to return to my summer camp.
It says a lot about the stress my parents were under that they believed me. They immediately called their lawyer, and public opinion began to shift against her. It also helped that they were generous donors, culturally as well as politically. The press remarked that my mother had even volunteered at a soup kitchen one Christmas.
My father gave a press conference with all of us by his side, outside the court where he had filed a counterclaim. He spoke words I didn’t understand like “malicious prosecution,” “frivolous claims” and “abuse of process,” but I nodded in agreement the whole way through. We had done nothing but be kind and generous to her, and this had been a premeditated con, an attempt to blackmail us against a potential scandal not of our own doing, skillfully carried out by a young woman of dubious character. The “dubious character” was a reference to the fact that she’d been caught shoplifting two tubes of lipstick with a school friend long ago, and some clever journalist had dug up the story and made it sound like she was part of some criminal gang.
And then my father paused for longer than made sense, and when I turned around to look at him, he looked suspended in time and I’ll never forget the look of terror on his face when he turned to my mother. He groaned and clutched at his chest, and before we could do anything, he’d fallen hard on the concrete steps. After that, all I remember are the screams and my mother cradling his head on her lap. By the time the ambulance arrived, he had died.
And that was the end of Wilson vs. Petersen. The press carried unflattering photos of Hannah above headlines that screamed murderer and con artist. She had killed an upstanding citizen, a man who had given so much to his family, to his church, and to the poor of this city. For a while, people rightly brayed for her head—on talk shows, in line at the checkout. There should be consequences, they said, for what she’d done. But they’d left by then, the three of them, back to their shitty little lives on their farm.
The end? No. Evil has many tentacles and it was not finished with us yet.
It turned out that the money that had funded our lavish lifestyle wasn’t strictly ours. It belonged to my father’s clients. It was amazing that he hadn’t been found out at that stage, considering he essentially borrowed from Peter to pay Paul, without telling either Paul or Peter. I’ve thought a lot about the years when my life was a kaleidoscope of birthday parties, ponies and tennis lessons, and I can’t recall a single occasion where my father was stressed, or him admonishing my mother for spending too much. It was the opposite, really. He was always buying us gifts. But now his clients wanted their money back, but there was no money. And that would have been the bigger scandal. Never go after rich people’s money, I found out the hard way. They’ll forgive you anything, except stealing from them. But my mother sold everything and settled with everyone, and under the circumstances and out of respect for my mother, no one made a big fuss.
Not long after we buried my father, my mother moved us to a cramped two-bedroom apartment in Charleston, West Virginia, where she would just lock herself in her room. I would walk in to find her lying in bed with the blinds drawn and an eye-mask over her face, like some faded film star. When she emerged there was a smell about her, acrid and unwashed. Her hair became limp and greasy, and over time matted on the back of her head. She wouldn’t eat, she wouldn’t speak, except to say, “I have to lie down, I have a migraine.” Just like she said the day before and the day before that. We had no housekeeper then. No staff, no friends to speak of, no one to help us. I would order us a pizza and pay for it with her credit card. I would think about my dad, about how much I missed him. My little brother would cry himself to sleep.
When my mother died, alone in that room, the doctors said it was an accidental overdose, but I knew it wasn’t. I think she literally felt she had nothing to live for. It goes without saying that I have often thought of doing the same, until Hannah Wilson came back into my life, and life got exciting again.
Chapter Eleven
I move in with the Carters the following week. Hannah takes me to my quarters, as she calls it. It’s at the back of the first floor and down half a dozen steps. It’s small and cramped and makes my room at April’s seem like the Taj Mahal. I vaguely wonder whether housekeepers have a union.
My uniforms hang in the closet. I had been concerned I might have to dress up in some black pseudo-French frilly type, but I am pleased to find a double-breasted light blue dress with two rows of white buttons all the way down the front, and white trim on the collar and sleeves. She must have ordered some new ones specially, because there is no way Diane and I are the same size. I also find a number of pinafore aprons, all of them white. Next door to my room is the bathroom and a small gym, equipped with a treadmill, a spin bike and weights.
“That’s where I live,” she quips. “Harvey had it put in especially for me. Do you think I should be offended?” She chuckles, then pats her hips and adds, “Still trying to lose that post-baby fat. Some days I think it will never happen.” I’m at least twenty pounds heavier than she is, but never mind.
“You look great, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” I say. Except me, obviously.
She smiles. “Thank you.”
The last two rooms are the laundry and what she calls the utility room. In there is a cleaning trolley with cloths and spray and feather dusters, which I’m supposed to push around the place as I do my work.
“Everything all right?” she asks as we go back upstairs.
“Everything is terrific,” I reply. And she laughs. We both do.
Then she takes me on a tour of the house. I make all the right noises (ooh, aah) even though part of me is a little shocked at how ostentatious everything is. The living room alone—I mean, the main living room, because there are a number of living rooms—is larger than April’s little apartment downtown. Then there’s the view. The tall windows from floor to ceiling that open onto the private terrace facing directly over Central Park. The white wood-paneled walls, covered with artwork. Even the ceiling is spectacular. It’s a painted sky, all blue and white and pale gold, and it’s breathtaking. Like a dream. Apart from the bedrooms, there is very little wall space in this place that isn’t covered with valuable artwork.
“This is my favorite room in the house,” she says when we reach the kitchen. I doubt that very much, but it’s a good line. “I love this view, overlooking the trees.” She stands back from the tall windows. “If you stand abou
t here, you might even think you’re in the country.”
“You might have to put your hands over your ears, too,” I say, and she laughs, a big genuine laugh.
Next is the nursery. It’s a perfect room for a baby, with its light-pink-and-light-gray color scheme. She tells me that the artist who did the ceiling in the main living room came and painted the mural. It’s a little girl walking among wildflowers, carrying a parasol made of butterflies. Mia makes gurgling noises in her crib and Hannah picks her up. She’s wearing a white cotton onesie and wriggles her feet. Hannah brings her belly to her nose and smells her, which strikes me as hilarious and makes me laugh out loud.
“I know, isn’t she the most beautiful girl ever?” she coos, as if I’d been laughing out of pure joy at the sight of her. “She used to cry all night. Thank God we’re past that now. Speaking of which…” She shows me a white object that looks like a cheap plastic radio. Like something you’d have in the shower. “Baby monitor. We have two of them, but yours is different because I couldn’t find a video monitor that worked all the way down to your room.”
“I have one in my room?” I blurt, panic rising. An image of me running up the stairs to Mia in the middle of night flashes in mind. Then doing it again. And again. And then daylight.
She smiles apologetically. “It’s only if I’m out. When I’m here, you can turn it off, or turn it down low. Anyway, this is yours. Audio only.”
I’m still fuming over it when she says, “Here, you want to try to feed her?” And to my horror, she hands me Mia. “Sit down. I’ll go and fetch her bottle.”
She walks out, leaving me and Mia together in the armchair. I’ve never held a baby before. She doesn’t cry, which is good. I lift her up, jiggle her little body, get used to her weight, figure out how to sit her down and how to cradle her, sort of, just enough so I don’t look like the complete fraud that I am. Then Hannah returns with the bottle and hands it to me. I mumble something about it being the right temperature, then stick one end in Mia’s mouth.
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