The Decorator Who Knew Too Much

by Diane Vallere

  I looked up at Emma. She’d been quiet for a few seconds, but started talking again. “He invited me to stay for lunch and I said yes. We had quesadillas and salsa and I got a little on my dress. He said he’d wash it for me, just like I did for him—and instead of laughing it off, I reached around to my back and undid my zipper and let my dress fall to the living-room floor.”

  Oh, my.

  Emma finished her third glass of wine and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I don’t regret it. Sometimes Jimmy isn’t a very nice person. Sometimes he drinks a lot and doesn’t treat me well. And Albert was a nice, attractive man who treated me like a princess. And he didn’t have a wedding ring, so I assumed the only one risking anything was me. I know it was wrong, but I’m still glad I did it. Does that make me horrible?”

  “What you did doesn’t make you a horrible person, it makes you a real person.”

  “Madison, when I came to Dallas to see Hudson last year, that wasn’t a regular visit. Jimmy and I needed a break. A separation. But we don’t have enough money for me to move out. Jimmy makes the money while I take care of Heather, so I had nowhere to go. After what happened with Hudson, when his past came up, I asked if he wanted to come stay with us. He did, and it helped a little, but I knew sooner or later he was going back. He kept saying there was something in Dallas he wasn’t willing to leave behind. Now I know he meant you.”

  “Was Hudson always like he is now?”

  “If you’re asking about his love life, I can’t tell you too much. Hudson was always a private guy. When he had a girlfriend, it was just her. He didn’t juggle or date around.”

  I looked down at my glass. “Anybody serious?”

  “Sure,” she said. “By the time you’re our age, we’ve all had somebody serious in our past. But that was a long time ago. A lot of people shut him out when he was suspected of murder. Or maybe he shut them out first—I don’t know. But as far as I know, you’re the only one he’s opened up to since then.”

  Whether it was the wine or the candid girl talk or a combination of the two, I didn’t know, but this time it was me who struggled to hold back tears. When Hudson’s reputation had been cleared, the circumstances had shifted our relationship from landlord/handyman to something more personal, and when it was over, he’d let me know he wanted more. I hadn’t been ready. Hudson had packed up his truck and left town, leaving me to wonder if I’d let something good slip through my fingertips because I wasn’t able to get past my own emotional prison.

  He’d told me he visited his sister, but had never mentioned anything more. Had he known about their marital problems? Had he accepted the role of intermediary in order to help Emma, or had he been playing protective big brother, making sure Jimmy didn’t put her or Heather at risk? And when Emma had brought Heather to Dallas earlier in the year, had that really been just a family vacation, or had Hudson been trying in his own way to offer her the same getaway she’d offered him?

  I reached my hand out and squeezed Emma’s. “Sometimes life doesn’t turn out the way you think it will,” I said. “None of us know anything. We’re all just trying to do what we can to be happy and not hurt anybody else.”

  “Madison, there’s something I haven’t told you,” she said quietly. She stared into the bottom of her empty wineglass.

  What else could there possibly be?

  “The day you arrived, the accident where you and Hudson were driven off the road. The car—the SUV—was Albert.” She looked down at her hands and spun her gold wedding ring around her finger a couple of times. “That’s the day I found out he used to be married to my neighbor, Jo.”

  I’d started wondering about that. The girls were friends. The mothers were friends. But Jo had moved into the house next door to Jimmy and Emma after the divorce, and she appeared to have no regrets about the dissolution of her union with the doctor.

  “I was next door with her,” Emma continued. “The girls wanted to bake cookies together, so we made an afternoon of it. Jimmy was getting the food for the cookout.”

  Rocky shifted his weight against my foot and let out a puff of air. “What happened next?” I prompted.

  “Hudson called me when your plane landed. Even though it would have taken time for you to get from the airport to here, I started watching the window. Excited about your visit, I guess.”

  “We were excited too. The ride from the airport felt like the longest ride in the world.”

  She smiled, but it was bittersweet. “That truck pulled into the driveway. I knew Jimmy arranged for you to have a Jeep from his fleet, so I was curious. When I saw Albert, I panicked.”

  “Did Jo see him?”

  “Yes, she saw him out the window and called him a dumbass. Said if he was so stupid that he didn’t remember which house she lived in, she wasn’t going to correct him. She took the girls to the next room so he wouldn’t see them through the window. He pounded on my front door for a while and then got into his truck and drove off.”

  “But he wasn’t there to see her, was he? He was there to see you.”

  “I thought he was there for me. I dumped the milk when Jo wasn’t looking and told her I had to go to my house to get more. But when I got there, I called Albert and told him it was over.”

  “I know it’s hard to accept, but you did the right thing. Whatever relationship you had with him was built on an illusion. It wasn’t real life. As hard as it is to see now, this is all for the best.”

  “No, you don’t understand. Albert said he understood why I had to break things off, but that he needed to get into my house because he left something behind the last time he was there. So I left the key under the mat and told him to let himself in. I went back to Jo’s house to make sure she didn’t figure anything out.”

  “Do you know what it was that he left behind?”

  “No,” she said. “I thought he meant a sock or a pair of underwear.” She blushed. “Something that might come back to haunt me. But now, after what happened that day, I’ve been over it in my mind a hundred times since then and the only thing I can think is that he was using me for something illegal.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Did you say anything to him?” I asked.

  “I didn’t know how to confront him without Jo finding out, and I don’t know what I would have said to him if I did. I thought about texting him, but my hands were covered in flour and cookie batter.”

  “Your hands?”

  “The cookie making process got a little messy by the third batch.” She held her hands out in front of her and inspected her fingernails as if expecting to find cookie dough residue still there.

  “How long was he inside?”

  “Maybe ten minutes? He came out between the third and fourth batches of cookies. He had two full duffel bags with him that he threw onto the passenger seat of his truck and then he left.”

  “He must have left in a hurry so he wouldn’t get caught.”

  She nodded. “A couple of minutes after he left you came to my front door. You know the rest.”

  A slight breeze rearranged the leaves of the palm trees in front of us. Emma tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle a yawn. I didn’t know what time it was, but no matter how I looked at it, it had been a particularly long day. There was too much to process. The best thing for all of us was to try to get some sleep.

  I carried the empty bottle of wine and the dirty glasses into the room, disposed of the former and rinsed out the latter. Emma crawled into her queen-sized bed next to Heather and Rocky jumped on the other bed, looking at me expectantly. I untucked the sheet and then crawled underneath and let Rocky curl up next to me. The last thing I thought before falling asleep was if Emma was right about Albert using her, and if so, for what.

  It was a fitful night of sleep filled with fragmented images of prescription bottles, dirty SUVs, and swirling red and blue lights. Three different times
I relived the experience of the Jeep flipping over and Hudson being trapped inside. Three different times I’d woken up before having a chance to go for help. The silver lining was the fact that the recent nightmares triggered from my PTSD had been nowhere in sight.

  The next morning, without waking Emma or Heather, I dressed in my bathing suit and grabbed a towel, swim cap, and goggles and then led Rocky out of the room to the pool.

  Several years ago I’d discovered the therapeutic aspects of morning swims. Through all of the twists and turns my life had taken over the past few years, swimming had remained a constant, far more effective at restoring calm to my life than any medication might. I believed the cure was in the illness. When I was ready to confront what I’d been through, I’d start to accept it and move on. It was yet another form of self-sufficiency.

  The motel pool was shorter than the regulation lap pools I swam in at home, so instead of concentrating on laps swum, I let my mind wander. I’d been in Palm Springs for all of four days, and already I longed for my life back in Dallas. The simplicity of taking a decorating job with Mad for Mod, of getting up early and scouting flea markets, thrift stores, and estate sales. The morbid yet effective practice of combing through the obituaries to learn of recently deceased women of a certain age who might leave behind mid-century marvels. Sketching out room concepts, combing through Atomic Ranch magazine, reading posts on RetroRenovation.com, and brainstorming new ways to find clients who appreciated the niche services I offered. Now that summer was behind us, my showroom would be rearranged from the Tiki and Polynesian scene that fit so well with the motel I was staying at to something more cozy. Maybe a Rat Pack era bar or a sunken living room pit with thick white faux fur throw rugs and turquoise furniture. Even though Dallas in September was still pretty hot, the residents, by mutual agreement, chose to crank the AC and pretend it was fall. That was possibly my favorite part of the Dallas culture: the fact residents could pretend the city was whatever they wanted it to be.

  Every couple of laps I stopped and checked on the status of Rocky. His leash was looped over the arm of a lounge chair, and he sat underneath it and watched me with his chin flat against the pool deck. The sun was already starting to heat things up. The tension in my body was just about gone after forty-five minutes in the water.

  I stopped at the edge of the pool and propped my arms on the deck. “Hey, Rocky, you hanging in there?” I asked him. He lifted his head and looked at me, and then stood up and walked toward the pool. I expected his leash to stop him on his way to the water, but it didn’t. It trailed behind him, untethered to anything. Slowly he advanced toward me until he was at the edge. The next thing I knew, he jumped into the water!

  The pool was only about three feet deep in the area where I was, so I hopped along the bottom and scooped him up. He wriggled around a bit, and then dog-paddled to the side of the pool. In an awkward display of pet ownership, I picked him up and set him on the deck. He shook his body rapidly, spraying water across the deck. I hoisted myself out of the water and grabbed the end of his leash before it caught on something. I’d taken great care to secure it to the arm of the chaise before I started swimming. How had he gotten loose? I walked him to the chaise and inspected the chair, expecting to find a broken or loose component. The chair was in perfect working order.

  I picked up my towel. As the folds of the terrycloth fell open, a small piece of paper fell out and Rocky sniffed it. I picked the paper up and held it open with my thumb and index finger of one hand while I pressed the towel against me with my other. The handwriting inside was the kind of neat cursive scroll no longer taught in elementary schools.

  It’s best you start forgetting what you know.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I looked around the pool for signs I wasn’t alone. A young black teenager in bright blue swim trunks sauntered in, swinging a whistle around his right hand while he flipped through screens on his cell phone with his left. He made it from the motel lobby to the lifeguard station without looking up. He glanced at the laminated schedule taped to the guard chair and then let it slip through his fingers and continued on.

  Other than him, it was me and Rocky.

  Until this moment, I’d thought of myself as the person who knew a whole bunch of different bits of information about Albert Hall. Facts that hadn’t yet been released, connections between the victim and various people around town, secret affairs and grudges, all things I’d come to learn simply because others had confided in me. With the identity of the victim not yet released to the public, anything I could have reported to the police would have been hearsay, and after the way they’d treated me when I first reported the body, I wasn’t willing to go out on that limb again.

  But this note changed everything. It meant someone knew what I knew. Someone was watching me. Someone could get to me when I least expected it—here, at the motel, where I had come to get away. Where I thought I’d be safe. How many people even knew I was here?

  The thought stopped me mid-towel-off. I looked up at the balcony where Emma and I had sat last night swapping stories and drinking wine. She had as many reasons to want to scare me into silence as anybody else, and she could have easily fed the note between the folds of my towel in the room before I even left.

  Then there was Jo Conway. She knew I was staying here. She was the one who had originally given me a ride to the motel—not just the ride, but she’d been the one to suggest it.

  The towel had come from Emma and Jimmy’s house, and I couldn’t rule out Jimmy as having slipped the note into the towel when we were there. He’d been the one to send me to the quarry all alone. He’d even told Hudson to check on me. Had he known Benji would be there? Had he set up the whole thing to scare me?

  It was no secret I enjoyed morning swims. Emma had packed the towels from the house. Jimmy could have hidden the note in a towel at the house yesterday or the day before. I would have found it eventually. But untethering Rocky—that had to be done in person, and Jimmy was in the hospital. He might have planted the note, but something else was at play this morning.

  And then there was Benji. My encounter with him at the quarry had left me unsettled. He’d attacked Jimmy and Hudson in Salton, but I didn’t know why. I’d written him off as a local thug who had wanted to scare me, but what if there was more to his presence?

  I stepped into a vintage yellow terrycloth all-in-one shorts suit with a hood and zipped it up over my bathing suit. My wet hair hung down the back, dripping directly into the hood. I slipped on white flip flops with daisies attached to the straps, slung my towel around my shoulders, and gathered Rocky’s leash. We walked toward the lifeguard. He stood by the end of the pool, skimming leaves from the water with what appeared to be a strainer on a very long pole.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Madison and this is my dog, Rocky.”

  “Hey,” he said. He glanced at me and Rocky, and then back at the pool.

  “You didn’t happen to see anybody walking around the pool while I was swimming my laps, did you?”

  “Why?”

  He pulled the strainer out of the water and held it by his side like Zeus holding a staff.

  “I came down early and I had my dog’s leash secured to the arm of a chair. When I was done, he wasn’t tethered anymore and I think someone let him loose. I was wondering if maybe you saw who did it.”

  “Which chaise?”

  I turned and pointed to the orange and white striped chair at the end of the pool. “The one on the end.”

  “Yeah, those chairs are old. The leash probably wasn’t secure when you started swimming.”

  “It was.”

  He shrugged. “You probably thought it was, but it wasn’t.”

  I glared at him for a few seconds. It was clear he didn’t believe me, and arguing the point wasn’t going to get me anywhere. “Did you see anybody?”

  “My shift doesn’t start for another t
en minutes,” he said. “My dad dropped me off early so he could get to work, but it’s not my job to look after your dog or your swimming. Not until seven thirty.”

  I didn’t like his attitude. He probably didn’t like mine either. “Is it possible for someone to get to the pool if they aren’t staying at the motel?” I asked.

  “Listen, ma’am, if you have some kind of complaint, you need to take it up with the manager. The pool is open to residents twenty-four seven, but the motel only has a lifeguard on duty from seven thirty to ten. Anything outside of that is your own responsibility. Maybe if you’re so worried about your dog, you should have left him in the room.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  He appeared stunned by the question. “Why?”

  “I’m going to take your suggestion of talking to the motel management, and I think it’s a good idea to know which of his employees I talked to this morning.”

  “Tommy.”

  “Okay, Tommy, thank you.”

  I left him on the pool deck and Rocky and I walked back to our room. Emma was still in bed.

  “Mmmmmmm,” she said. She stretched her arms over her head and then rubbed her eyes with balled-up fists. Heather was curled up next to her snoring slightly. “Where’d you go?”

  “Morning swim.”

  “You’re a better person than I am,” she said. “I never get to sleep in anymore.”

  “Tell you what. Stay in bed as long as you want. I’m going to shower and get dressed, and then I’ll go get us some breakfast.”

  “You’re a saint,” she said. “I’ll be sure to tell my brother.” A few seconds later, she was sleeping as soundly as her daughter.