She recognizes me instantly. Simon has obviously spoken of me, shown her my photograph, demonized me in every imaginable way. It doesn’t surprise me that she immediately tenses, then reaches for her handbag.
“Please don’t leave,” I tell her.
Her gaze hardens. “What do you want?”
“Just to talk.”
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“A few minutes, that’s all.”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she repeats stiffly.
“It’s not about you marrying Simon. I’m not a jealous ex-wife. It’s about Emma.”
She is glaring at me now.
“I won’t listen to this,” she says icily.
I don’t move.
Her eyes narrow menacingly.
“I’m leaving,” she says evenly. “If you follow me, I’ll call security.”
“Please hear me out.”
“No!” Charlotte says sharply.
She rises to her feet and stands peering down contemptuously.
“Never do this again,” she warns.
“He’s going after Emma. He did the same with my daughter. She warned me that he was—”
“Stop it!”
“I didn’t believe her, Charlotte. She had nowhere to turn. So she got in a boat and the boat capsized and—”
“I don’t want to hear this,” Charlotte interrupts vehemently.
It is all pouring out of me now. The great burden of my guilt.
“By not believing her, I killed her. That’s what I live with, Charlotte, and that’s why, with Emma, I have to—”
She whirls around to leave, and as she does, I reflexively do something desperate. I grab her hand.
She yanks it from my grasp.
“How dare you touch me,” she snaps, then rushes out of the pastry shop.
I can’t help myself.
I go after her.
It is a scene of deranged pursuit, Charlotte dashing for the safety of her shop, me trailing behind her, calling after her.
“Charlotte, please.”
When she makes it to the door of the shop, she wheels around.
“Not one more step,” she says. “Or I’ll call the police.”
She stares at me brutally.
“And we both know what will happen to you after that.”
I see myself in her eyes.
Claire out of control.
Claire with her paranoid delusions.
Dangerous Claire.
I want to break through this awful vision of me.
“Charlotte . . . one more word.”
Her body is rigid.
Her gaze is stony.
I make my last effort to reach her.
“Believe your daughter.”
2.
I’m gutted.
My body feels heavy. The air around me is thick and acrid. I am smoldering inside.
Then something rallies.
You cannot be undone by this, Claire, I tell myself, You cannot give up.
The phone rings just as I get to my car.
I shudder, convinced that it’s Simon, that Charlotte has already told him. But it’s a number I don’t recognize.
“Hello?”
“Claire Fontaine?”
“Yes.”
“This is Doctor Aliabadi. I’m calling from UCLA Hospital. Your father has been admitted here. I’m sorry to tell you, but he has had a heart attack.”
I get as much information as I can from Dr. Aliabadi, then drive to the hospital.
My father is awake, but he only nods when I come through the door. He’s very weak, half his energy drained from him. His white hair is disheveled, and his eyes open and close heavily, as if he is fighting sleep.
“I got this pain,” he tells me.
His voice is shaky. There is a hint of astonishment in it. Some part of him cannot believe that his life from now on will be overshadowed by the prospect of his death.
“They say I had a heart attack.”
He looks small, gaunt, as thin and frail as the aged musician in Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, and with the same look of physical exhaustion.
“I thought I was going to die.”
All his life he has been an angry man. Perhaps it was only Rose who could cool his wrath. Maybe that was why he’d wanted her so much, only to lose her when I made it to the boat.
My death had been his last hope for happiness. With what steaming ire he must over and over relive my unexpected survival.
A few minutes later he’s asleep. I could go home, but I decide to stay.
It’s hard to reconcile this dozing, weakened man with the athletic swimmer he once was, captain of his high school team.
I imagine him in his youth, churning through the glittering pool, a white wake behind him. Who was he then?
In books and movies, old foes forgive each other, put aside their grievances and make light of their ancient quarrels. Feuds are settled with a handshake, and everyone lives happily ever after.
There will be no such resolution with my father. He remains the man he has always been. Selfish. Self-absorbed. Concerned only that his raging appetites be satisfied at any cost. At heart, a killer.
Rather than indulging some fantasy of settlement, I shift my focus to the old man who saved me. I remember his voice calling out to me: Are you okay? There are far more men like him than like my father.
I know that this is true.
Because if it weren’t, the bodies of drowned daughters would roll in on every wave.
•
When I leave the hospital an hour later, I hear the ting of a message. Again I fear it is from Simon, infuriated by my confrontation with Charlotte.
It’s Mehdi.
I have a present for you. I don’t want to lose you, Claire.
How do you lose someone you never had?
But that isn’t the end of his message. You shouldn’t treat me this way. You really shouldn’t. It’s not right to spit on me like this.
Spit on him?
Obviously my failure to respond to Mehdi’s romantic delusion has turned to grievance in him. Somehow he thinks that because he feels a certain way, I should feel that way, too.
But I don’t.
In response, he is getting angry. I can hear it in his text. The low rumble of a volcano. Still below the surface, but rising.
I look at the time.
I have only a few minutes to make it to my first client. I do my best, but I will be late. I call ahead to let her know.
The drive is about half an hour. On the way I try to return to the pleasure I’d felt when I talked with Ray, but less agreeable aspects of my life keep intruding.
First the smallest of them: Mehdi.
Then the big one: Simon.
My desperation spikes. It’s like a fire inside me, sucking up the oxygen.
It is a huge relief when I reach my client’s house and can step back into the open air.
“It’s the first time you’ve ever been late, Claire,” my client says when she opens the door. “Is everything okay?”
I catch myself in the mirror that hangs in the foyer. There is an explosive tension in my eyes. I have to pull back, calm myself. All right, Claire, focus on your work.
I look at Jennifer and smile my teacher’s smile.
“Ready to get started?”
“Sure.”
We walk onto her patio and take our seats at a wicker table.
Jennifer is a graduate student at UCLA in French history. She is in need of tutoring for her French language exam. At UCLA she will be given a page of text to translate into English, using only a French dictionary.
She has brought an excerpt from the historian Jules Michelet’s history of the French Revolution. He writes a very formal French, less literary than, say, Marcel Proust, but challenging nonetheless. The page deals with the fountains of Versailles, along with the elaborate waterworks that made them possible and that were so noisy they kept the villa
gers of Marly from sleeping.
After we have read and translated together for a few minutes, Jennifer looks at me wonderingly. “Is Michelet saying that the noise of the waterworks at Marly was one of the causes of the French Revolution?”
“Yes, that’s what he says.”
“That’s ridiculous, don’t you think?”
“No. I can see his point.”
She is clearly surprised by my answer. I try to explain.
“It’s something that won’t let you rest, that noise. Something that drives everything else from your head.”
Jennifer is perplexed.
“A noise you can’t get rid of,” I tell her fiercely, almost angrily. “Like you can’t get rid of guilt. Or rage. Or fear.”
This outburst takes Jennifer aback.
“I see,” she says.
I retreat to Michelet’s text, but as the lesson goes on, I am continually dragged back into this struggle with Simon. His incessant noise!
•
My nerves are still jangling when I leave Jennifer. I need to quiet them, so I walk over to the small park across the street. A man is sitting on a bench. He is dressed in a dark blue suit. There is a large package beside him, beautifully wrapped and tied with an enormous ribbon.
Simon used to bring me flowers wrapped this way, boxed as a gift, with a lovely bow, but I can no longer imagine him as a suitor, nor myself as ever being the one he loved. Instead I conjure up another scene. The gift vanishes. The man is now Simon, but he is no longer alone. A second man sits beside him. They are discussing what can be done about me. They need a strategy to control me. They talk for a while, then they laugh. It’s obvious that they have come up with the solution. A foolproof method to silence me. It will work perfectly, the conspiracy they’ve hatched. My fate now ticks forward intractably, like a well-timed watch. Best of all, whatever scheme they’ve dreamed up will be invisible. No matter what is done to me, it will appear that I did it to myself. All my wounds self-inflicted. No indication of a master plan. Ah, it is incredibly clever, their little plot. They rise and shake hands. How proud they are to have found a way to rid Simon of his problem.
My cell phone tings.
It’s Nicolas, a trust-fund baby whose family fortune allows him to dabble in screenwriting. He is forty-four, and last summer he lived in Brussels, where he picked up a smattering of French. He has learned that France sometimes subsidizes films and wants to move there so he can market his work to the government. He thinks they are more likely to fund films about France and thus has decided to write about “the artists of Montmartre.” The few pages of a script he has read to me suggest that he is more interested in drugs and sex than in artistic struggle.
I look at his message.
Gotta cancel, Claire.
A last-minute cancellation for which he offers neither apology nor excuse nor compensation.
I now have a two-hour interval between clients.
There is a coffee shop nearby. I go there, order an espresso, and take a seat by the window. A few tables away, a man is reading a travel magazine. A white sailing boat is on the cover. I know nothing about boats, but it looks very much like the one Simon rented in Catalina. I quickly turn away, because I don’t want to be reminded of that night.
It’s too late.
My memory unwinds like a film, absorbing in every detail. The boat rocking in the wind. The splatter of rain on the deck. The way Melody huddles beside the rail, peering out at the distant lights of the island.
I walk toward her. She turns to me, and I detect something disturbing in her eyes. I haven’t noticed this before. I can’t decipher it.
Melody, are you okay?
No, Mom, I’m not okay.
I close my eyes to shut out this memory.
Not long after she died, I happened upon a website called Tell Me Your Secret. The idea was to write postcards anonymously. You could pick the card you wanted. Some had flowers. Some had sunsets, landscapes, waterfalls. On these innocent-looking cards, you were to reveal a secret you could admit only to yourself. Some were innocuous: I lie about my age. Others more serious: I don’t love my husband anymore. A few went dark: I like hurting animals. One was heartbreakingly raw: When my sister lost her baby, I was glad.
I remember staring at one of those blank postcards, my desire to expose my own unbearable secret so overpowering I could barely resist doing it, even anonymously.
But I did resist it.
I always have.
No one will ever know.
PART IV
Sloan
ON THE PHONE, Simon’s voice was taut. “She took the next step,” he told me.
“What do you mean?”
“She confronted Charlotte.”
“When?”
“Yesterday morning.”
“Where? It couldn’t have been at her house or I would have seen it on—”
“No, no. It was where she works. I should have given you that address, too.”
Yes, he should have, I thought, but it was too late now.
“Charlotte didn’t want to tell me. She knew it would upset me, but over dinner last night she broke down and just—”
“What happened?” I interrupted.
“Charlotte was just sitting in a pastry shop, waiting to go to work. Claire ran over to her and sat down at her table. Right across from her. When Charlotte tried to leave, Claire grabbed her hand. She physically accosted her! Charlotte pulled free and ran out into the street. Claire followed her. She practically chased her into the place where she works.”
“I see.”
What was done was done. Now what mattered was to make sure it didn’t happen again.
“Are there any other places Charlotte goes that Claire might know about?”
“Just my house, of course. She comes there sometimes.”
He seemed genuinely shaken by what Claire had done, and because he’d failed to mention Charlotte’s workplace.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
His tone was very strained. He was at the end of his rope.
I thought fast and came up with a way to calm him down and buy time to devise a plan.
“Okay, it’s time to play a harder game,” I told him. “Let me do some digging.”
“Digging for what?”
“Information on Claire,” I answered. “Something I can use to come down on her.”
This darker direction clearly appealed to Simon.
“Like a hammer,” he said firmly. “No more Mr. Nice Guy. Because there’s no predicting what she’ll do next. Or to whom.”
“I understand.”
“Please keep in touch,” Simon said. “I’m very concerned about where this is headed.”
I promised him I would, then hung up and went to work.
When a case gets to such a flash point, sin eaters sometimes go nuclear. They’re afraid they’re going to fail their clients, and so they bring out the heavy artillery. I’d done the same from time to time, but I wasn’t ready—not yet—to go that route with Claire.
It seemed better to defuse her.
One of my teachers in the police academy had once told the class that the human brain is designed to recognize a threat. Even when people are completely delusional, their primitive, reptile brains can detect any creature more dangerous than themselves.
His point was simple. The bottom line in people is fear. It can even trump madness.
When I applied this truth to Claire, the conclusion was obvious. She had to be threatened by something so deep it could penetrate her craziness, like an ice pick to her brain.
I started searching her file for anything that might force her into controlling herself. What could possibly do that? She wasn’t intimidated by authority. She’d even attacked two fully armed police officers.
I went back through her records. If she’d been so much as given a ticket for speeding or written up for littering, I’d have found out about it. But aside from the psychotic break she’d
had at Simon’s house, her record was clean.
I thought I’d hit another dead end. But I didn’t give up. There was another record, a case that might shine a harsh, exposing light on some dark corner in Claire Fontaine. I knew I wouldn’t locate it under her name, however.
Fontaine, I typed into the LAPD databank search engine, Melody.
She came up under the usual headings: Birth Certificate, Learner’s Permit, US Passport. Then things darkened: Catalina Police Department, Catalina Island Medical Center, Catalina Island Mortuary.
I called the cops on Catalina, told them I’d once been with the LAPD and was now working on what I called a case involving the death of Melody Slater. A Captain Patrino remembered the drowning. Yes, there’d been an investigation, but no charges had been filed. During the course of our conversation, he mentioned that Claire had been the last person to talk with Melody before she drowned.
I wondered if Claire had said something to her daughter that had compelled her to crawl into a dinghy and row away in a stormy sea.
I realized that this little tidbit of information wasn’t much to go on, so I decided to check another source as well. It was a long shot, of course. There are lots of long shots in this business. The good news is that some of them pay off.
Candace Marks was sitting at her desk when I went into her office. “Sloan,” she said brightly. “Good to see you.”
She nodded toward the chair in front of her desk.
“Have a seat.”
I sat down casually, as if there was nothing in particular on my mind.
“How are things in the catch-a-cop business?” I asked.
She laughed.
“Slow since the Rio Rancho bust.”
Candace had been at the spearhead of a major LAPD scandal, an investigation into a drug-payoff scheme that had netted five retired cops and three that were still on duty. It had also garnered quite a few headlines for Candace herself.
She gave me one of her woman-to-woman winks. “Well, they don’t call me ‘Candy Cane’ anymore. I’m the resident hard-ass now.”
“Good for you.”
She sat back in her chair, a gesture that made it clear that she was all business. “What can I do for you?”
“Claire Fontaine. Remember her?”
Candace shook her head.
“Simon Miller’s wife.”
“Oh, sure. The crazy one.”
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