“She did live here,” said the bartender, breaking his silence. “She was down here for dinner more nights than she wasn’t.”
“Has Sidney heard yet?” John asked the bartender, and I noticed that two young women down the bar had stopped talking to each other and were now paying attention to our conversation.
“I don’t know, but I’m sure she has. It’s gone all over town.”
“Is the house finished?” I asked, wanting to keep myself in the conversation.
“No, not yet,” John said. “If you walk to the end of the cliff walk you can look at it. It was going to be huge. Little bit of an eyesore, I thought, but don’t quote me on that.”
“What do you think will happen to it?”
“No idea, really. For all I know, Miranda will finish it and move up here.”
“Oh, she’ll definitely move up here.” This was from one of the two women eavesdropping. They were both in their twenties, one in a sweatshirt from UNH, and one in a windbreaker and a Patriots cap. The woman who spoke, the one in the sweatshirt, already had a raspy voice, as if she’d been smoking for all her young life.
“You think so?” John asked.
“Yeah, I mean she practically lived up here anyways, and she was always talking about how much she loved it, and how awesome the house was going to be, and on and on. She’s from Maine, you know. Orono. I mean, maybe she won’t want to move into such a big house now that her husband’s dead, but I just wouldn’t be surprised if she came up here. She can live anywhere with her money.”
“Why was she up here all the time if the house wasn’t finished yet?” I asked.
John answered. “She was supervising. She said she practically designed the place. Her husband used to come up weekends. We all knew him really well.”
“What was he like?”
“What was he like? He was nice but a little distant, I guess. Everyone felt like they got to know Miranda really well, and Ted not so much. Maybe just because she was here so much.”
“Also, Miranda always bought drinks for the bar and Ted never did.” This was from the woman with the Patriots cap, and as soon as she said it, her face went pale as she remembered that Ted had been murdered. She covered her mouth and said, “Not that . . .” and trailed off.
“Were they rich?” I asked.
Everyone in our little knitting circle of gossip immediately reacted—the two women each saying “Oh yeah” in unison, John exhaling loudly, and the bartender nodding his head in one slow, exaggerated motion.
“Filthy,” John said. “You should walk down the cliff walk tomorrow and see the house. You won’t be able to miss it. It’s got something like ten bedrooms. I’m not exaggerating.”
The solo guitar player broke into “Moonlight Mile” by the Stones, and my new friends talked about how rich Ted and Miranda Severson were. The woman in the hooded sweatshirt used the word “gazillionaire,” while John said they were “very well off.” I went to use the restroom, and when I came back the two women were putting coasters on the necks of their Bud Light Limes to go out and smoke cigarettes, and John had bought me a new beer.
“Since we’re gossiping,” I said, sliding back onto my stool, “it seems strange that she spent so much time here at a hotel without her husband. You don’t think she was seeing anyone?”
John stroked one side of his handlebar mustache. “I don’t think so. She always seemed thrilled when Ted came up.” A slight chilliness had entered John’s voice, as though I’d possibly asked one too many questions.
“Just wondering,” I said. “It’s so sad.”
I stayed for a few more beers. John left after his second martini and I slid over and joined the two women, introducing myself. Their names were Laurie and Nicole, and both were waitresses, one at a fish place in Portsmouth, and one at the dining room of another seaside hotel two miles away. Sunday night was their going-out night. All they wanted to talk about was Ted and Miranda, the tenor of the conversation alternating between respectful and salacious. By eight, the Livery was nearly full, and another couple, friends of Laurie and Nicole, had joined us. Mark and Callie were in their thirties, also in the restaurant business, and a lot of what had been said about Ted Severson’s murder was repeated after they sat down. I stayed and mostly listened. I’d already decided that I wasn’t going to Cooley’s till the following night. Even though I had been drinking light beers, I’d had too many, most of them bought by my new friends, and I felt too drunk to trust myself in a conversation with Brad Daggett.
As it neared closing time, and as the group got louder, I asked again about the possibility that Miranda was screwing around up here in Maine.
“I don’t think so,” said Laurie, who had designated herself the closest-to-Miranda in the group. “If she was, then I don’t know when she was doing it, because she was only ever here at night, and she always went straight up to her room at the end of the night. No, I don’t think she was doing anything up here. I mean, slim pickings around these parts.”
“Yeah, there is,” Nicole said.
“No offense, Mark. You’re taken, but seriously, I doubt it.”
“She’s fucking gorgeous, though. It makes you wonder,” Mark said, and his girlfriend, Callie, nodded heartily in agreement, as did Nicole and Laurie.
“Was she?” I asked.
“Oh, my God, yes. She was like model gorgeous. Totally hot.”
“She must have gotten hit on?”
“If she’d gone other places, sure. Like Cooley’s. But not here, not really. This is not exactly a pickup bar.”
“Sidney would’ve picked her up,” Callie said.
Again, they all reacted, nodding their heads. “Yeah, Sidney’s obsessed,” Laurie said. “Lily, Sidney’s the bartender here most nights. She was totally in love with Miranda but, you know, that only went one way.”
I learned nothing else, and when the bar closed at ten, I went back to my room, got into the boxer shorts and T-shirt that I slept in, and slid into bed after loosening the sheets. I couldn’t sleep if my feet were tucked completely in. I turned the bedside lamp off, and the room became intensely dark, a blackness that I wasn’t used to. Where I lived in Winslow was quiet, but my street had streetlamps, and my bedroom was never completely dark. I tried to think of Ted, but the blackness of the room made me remember where he was now, and as I wound down into sleep, it was Miranda that kept entering my consciousness, her eyes an inch away from mine, her touch on my wrist becoming a grip, her sharp nails growing like talons and digging into me.
CHAPTER 19
MIRANDA
That night in Orono—after eating bad take-out Chinese food and watching my mother struggle to ask me questions about my dead husband instead of telling me about her pathetic life—I lay in the undecorated guest room on a twin bed that was the only piece of furniture in the room. The walls were a horrible lemon chiffon white, and even in the dim light from the streetlamps outside, I felt oppressed by their tackiness.
I was wide awake, still worrying about Brad and his ability to keep his shit together, and still wondering why Ted had gone to Winslow on the day that Brad had killed him. I’d been saying the name—Winslow, Winslow—all day to myself. I was still sure that I knew someone who lived there. Clearly it was someone Ted knew as well, and I wracked my brain, going through all of our friends, to try and figure it out. So far, nothing.
I chewed at the skin around the nail of my thumb until I tasted blood, then made myself stop. I thought of getting up, going downstairs to look for the cigarettes my mother was pretending she didn’t have, but knew that if she heard me, she’d come out of her bedroom and yak some more. Instead, I tried to masturbate, the only sure way I knew of getting myself to sleep. I pictured blank-faced men, as I always did, but their faces kept getting replaced by Ted’s or Brad’s and I eventually gave up, resigned myself to a sleepless night. I stared at the ceiling, and at the occasional fan of light that wheeled over it when a car passed outside on the road.
I must h
ave fallen asleep because I woke with my mother standing over me in a pink robe, her hair still damp from the shower.
“Jesus, Mom,” I said.
“Sorry, Faithy. I just wanted to look at my peaceful sleeping daughter.”
“That’s exactly the point. I was peaceful and sleeping.”
“Go back to sleep, then. I’ll be downstairs in the kitchen. I’ll keep your breakfast warm.”
After she left, I lay awake in bed, checking my phone. It had been turned off since the previous evening and I had about a thousand voice mails and text messages from friends, sending their sympathy, and asking if I needed anything. I went online to see if there was anything new about Ted’s murder, and it didn’t appear that there was—the reports still focused on a random home invasion, the neighborhood banding together in solidarity and fear. No news was good news, I told myself, and decided I would return to Boston that day, or maybe to Kennewick. Another day and night with my mother was out of the question.
At breakfast we talked about my plans, my mother only asking questions for which she already knew the answer. It had always been that way. What outfit are you going to wear for your first day of school? Where were you thinking of applying to college? Why do you think your father would go and do something like that? That morning she asked me where I was planning on living now that Ted was gone. “Not in Boston, of course,” she answered before I could. “I know that already.”
“Boston, probably,” I said in response.
“Faithy, don’t say that. After what happened. Your neighborhood is obviously not safe. I never really thought it was and I was right. I saw that movie with Matt Damon about Southie—”
“Mom, I live in the South End, not South Boston. They are entirely different neighborhoods.”
“Clearly they are not. Or if they are, they are both violent and dangerous. You could move up here, show everyone in Orono what you made with your life. With your money you could buy the biggest house here.”
“Mom, I don’t want to talk about it—not right now, okay?”
To her credit, she nodded solemnly and began to wash dishes at the sink while making little sighs for my benefit. I forgave her for her bad manners and her selfishness. I always did. People say that personalities are formed and set by the time we hit the age of five, but Sandra Roy’s personality, at least for the second half of her life, was entirely formed by the day my father, head of the history department at the University of Maine, lost his tenured position for coming on to a freshman girl. Until that moment, my mother thought she was living a life of luxury. I guess she was in a way—she’d been raised in a tenement in Derry, and she’d made it all the way to the University of Maine, where she met Alex Hobart, a grad student from a middle-class town in Vermont. She dropped out of college her junior year to marry him, and a few months later she gave birth to my brother, Andrew, then a year later gave birth to me. When we were both young, my father secured a tenure-track position in the history department at the university. He excelled, becoming the youngest department head in the school’s history; his yearly-increasing salary was practically a fortune in Orono, and my mother, happy with just the two children, turned our custom-built Colonial into her special project. When I was nine, the family traveled to Europe, and my mother came back with a new way of speaking, sounding like an American actress in the 1950s, all clipped words and vaguely English vowel sounds.
Then it all fell apart the year I started high school. A freshman girl taking my father’s seminar on ancient Egypt taped him soliciting her for sex in exchange for grades. The situation went public, and my father was immediately fired. My mother threw him out of the house and filed for divorce. I remember that year as one long rage-fueled monologue from my mother, who seemed to blame my father more for losing his well-paying job than for his attempt at sexual blackmail. These monologues were directed at me. Andrew had discovered pot, then Phish, and spent all his free time in his bedroom, his head encased in large headphones. There were no savings; all of my parents’ money had gone into house furnishings and vacations, and two years after the divorce, my mother sold the Colonial, and we moved into a three-bedroom attic apartment normally rented to students. Andrew, a senior at high school then, stayed in the apartment for less than a month, before moving into a friend’s house. My mother protested, but I knew she didn’t really mind. She’d turned against all men, and that included my shiftless brother. “Just us girls, now,” she’d say, insisting that the apartment was temporary. But we stayed there all through my junior and senior years of high school. My brother graduated, then spent a year following a Phish tour around the country, ending up in San Diego, where he still lived. Last I’d heard, he was working at a brewpub and shacked up with a woman he’d met who already had four children. He’d called and left a message on my phone after Ted had died but I hadn’t called him back, and probably wouldn’t.
After the divorce, my father moved to Portland, where he got an adjunct position at a community college. My mother got work as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, and between her salary, and my father’s meager child support checks, we made ends meet. The constant refrain of our two-women house was that my mother’s life was ruined, but that mine could be better. And by better, my mother meant more money.
In high school I was pretty average, but I did turn myself into a world-class shoplifter. Most of my thefts occurred outside of Orono, in either Bangor or Portland during one of my visits to my father. I mostly stole from department stores, the places that employed store detectives who prowled around trying to look like customers. Those detectives were trained to look for shoplifters by observing their body language, looking for someone who was acting nervous or suspiciously. I was never caught because I never acted like a thief. I perfected the casual nonchalance of a girl with her parent’s credit card doing a little aimless shopping. I brought a big purse with me wherever I went, and I looked for small expensive items. Scarves. Perfume. I became very skilled.
The only time I was spotted stealing was by a classmate at the pharmacy in Orono. I rarely shoplifted there—it was too close to home, and a store that I went to a lot. I was a junior in high school then. I purchased several items from one of the hawk-eyed old lady cashiers, but walked out with three packs of replacement razors for my Gillette Venus in my purse.
After exiting through the automatic doors I heard a guy’s voice say, “I think you forgot to pay for something.”
I turned. It was a kid I knew from school. James something. I didn’t realize he worked at the pharmacy. “Excuse me?” I said, trying to sound like I had more important things to do than talk to a drugstore employee.
“In your purse. I saw you put the razors in there.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I said, making my face look shocked. “I totally forgot about those.” I began to step toward the store. “I’ll just—”
The boy laughed, and grabbed my arm and steered me away across the sweltering parking lot. It was August, that annual two-week period when northern Maine turns hot and muggy and mosquito-infested. The asphalt had softened and filled the air with the smell of hot tar. “I’m not busting you,” he said. “I just saw you. I don’t give a fuck if you steal. I do it all the time.”
“Oh.” I laughed. “I know you, don’t I?”
We introduced ourselves. His name was James Audet, and he was a junior as well, although he’d started at Orono High halfway through the previous year. He was handsome, with light blue eyes, high cheekbones, and thick blond hair. He was also short, and tightly muscled to make up for it, which caused him to walk like a gymnast, bouncing on the tips of his feet. I was a bit of a loner in high school, biding my time until college, and determined to make sure my grades were good enough to secure financial aid somewhere out of state. James and I became fast friends. He confessed to me that he believed the only thing that mattered in life was money, and that he planned on making a lot of it.
“Then marry a rich woman,” I said. We were at the Friendly�
��s two towns over where we liked to hang out.
“I’m too short. Rich women want tall husbands.”
“Is that true?”
“Proven fact. You, however, could definitely marry a rich man. Look at those tits.”
“Ugh. I look like a freak.”
“Trust me. You’re the slightly awkward girl in high school who comes back for the reunion and looks like a model. I’ve seen it a hundred times.”
“Seen it where?”
“Movies, of course.”
After graduation we both got jobs in what passed for a downtown in Orono, James at a pizza place, and me at that same pharmacy I used to sometimes steal from. I had gotten into Mather, a private college in Connecticut. It was a school that primarily catered to rich kids from New York and Boston, but I’d graduated third in my class, and my parents’ financial situation ensured that more than half of my tuition would be paid for with aid. James was going to the University of Maine, where his father coached the wrestling team. We were both virgins, and by July of that summer, decided to have sex with each other so that we wouldn’t enter college with no experience. We did it in the back of James’s Caprice Classic. Afterward, he asked me how it felt. “Incestuous,” I said, and we both laughed so hard that James fell off the backseat and bruised his hip. We kept at it, though, telling ourselves that we’d seen every good movie that was out that summer, and the hookups passed the time. On our last night together before my father was going to pick me up and drive me to Connecticut, James said, “It was nice knowing you.”
“Um, we’ll see each other at Thanksgiving.”
“No, I know. I just assume you’ll have some rich boyfriend by then and won’t even talk to me.”
“I’ll talk to you,” I said.
But he was right, and we barely saw each other again after we each started college. I only ever thought of him when I came back to Maine. I wondered if he knew how rich I was.
“You ever hear anything about the Audets?” I asked my mother after we’d cleared the breakfast things, and moved to the living room with the high bay windows that looked out over the Methodist Church adjacent to the graveyard.
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