by April Henry
Picking up a paper plate, she took a place in line. Even though she was standing a few feet away, the coals from the giant barbecue felt hot enough to smelt steel.
The person in front of her turned around, and she realized it was Jim. “Enjoy your run?” he asked.
“I should have gone earlier.” She took a hamburger bun from an open plastic bag. “Say, do you know if anyone has seen Belinda since what happened this morning? I’m worried about her.”
“I went by her room,” Jim said. “I only talked to her a little bit. She’ll hold it together for a minute or two, then she starts weeping. That daughter of hers, Vanessa, is no help. She’s interested in some boy she just met here. What my mom used to call twitterpated.”
“It’s Wade’s kid, if you can believe it. Seems kind of incestuous.” Claire squirted ketchup and mustard on her bun, then added pickle slices. “Maybe I’ll go down and talk to Belinda this afternoon.”
The sweating teenager manning the grill plopped a hamburger that was charred black on the outside onto Claire’s open bun. She started walking toward the circle of people - including Dante - that still surrounded Jessica. Claire took a bite of her hamburger as she walked, then gagged when it dripped blood. Resolving to become a vegetarian (if she didn’t die from e. coli first), she tossed the entire plate of food in a garbage can already overflowing with half-eaten and hastily discarded burgers.
“So what plays have you been in recently?” Dante was asking Jessica when Claire joined them.
“Have you heard of Dirty Habits?” It was something of a silly question, because Dirty Habits had exploded in popularity after someone had taken a potshot at Nicole Kidman (and missed by a mile), disturbed by her portrayal of a lesbian nun involved with an older nun played by Glen Close. That and boycotts by every Catholic agency, as well as a stinging denunciation by Rudolph Guliani, had been enough to make tickets impossible to get. “I play Nikki’s other love interest.”
“The novitiate?”
Jessica blinked. “Um, yes. Of course, with those darned habits they make us wear, even my own mother wouldn’t recognize me.” She sighed. “I had to fight tooth and nail to be able to come back here for the reunion. Luckily, I thought to have it included in my contract.”
“Dante lives in Manhattan,” Claire said. She was trying not to envy Jessica her tanned legs and her ability to look glamorous even at a picnic. The actress wore pressed khaki shorts and a black sleeveless turtleneck. Claire tried to hide the ketchup stain on her shirt by tucking it even more deeply into her shorts. “He works at the Met.”
Jessica pushed her sunglasses up her nose, so all Claire could see was her own mirrored reflection as Jessica looked from Claire to Dante. “So have you seen Dirty Habits?”
“It’s a wonderful show.” Dante put out his hand. “You’re to be congratulated.”
They shook hands, setting the dozen silver bracelets on Jessica’s right arm to jingling. “Do you think I’m dressed appropriately?” Jessica appealed to both of them. “Me in my Kenneth Cole leather slides and my Ray-Bans and my Coach bag and my Donna Karan silk turtleneck. Maybe I’m not dressed right for Minor any more.”
Dante’s tone signaled that he was about to make a joke. “You’re worried you’re not dressed for the part?”
Jessica gave Dante a playful shove in the center of his chest. “Oh, you! There’s nothing worse than a punster.”
Claire hoped neither of them could see her eyes behind her sunglasses. While she was still fuming, Dante turned to her and asked her if she wanted to go get a sno-cone. As soon as they were out of earshot, he said, “So what proof do you have that she was ever on Until Tomorrow?”
“Who - Jessica? What do you mean?” Claire was having trouble switching gears. “My mom used to tape the show and I’d watch it when I got home from work. She was on almost every episode. Why are you asking me this?”
“Because the woman who played the novitiate was black.”
In the enervating heat, her brain seemed to be working in slow motion. “You mean the part Jessica said she had.”
He nodded.
“Are you sure?”
“I just saw it last week”
She started to ask again if he was sure, but one look at his face let her know he was. “Is that why you were over there listening to her stories?”
“Let’s just say it was an interesting blend of fact and fiction. According to Jessica, she’s kind of like Forrest Gump - she’s been on hand for anything important in the theatre world.”
“You think she lied about it all?”
“Oh, she probably does some acting. But I’ll bet she waits a lot more tables.”
“Maybe she started making it up on the plane,” Claire said, remembering her old friend’s impulsivity, always coupled with a burning desire to be loved. “She probably started worrying about how she was going to answer everyone’s questions about how she was doing.”
“Just like you were before we came.”
“Yeah, but it’s worse for her.” Claire felt a spurt of pity. “She was really important in school. And she was such a good actress. Nobody was surprised when she was on that soap opera - but they would have been shocked if she came back from New York City and said she was waiting tables or doing something menial. I guess she just couldn’t live with that idea.”
While they were fixing their sno-cones, Rebecca appeared beside Claire. She pumped the last drops of something labeled “blue raspberry” onto her crushed ice. It was the same color as Windex.
“Are you having a good time, Rebecca?” Claire asked.
“It’s been interesting, that’s for sure.” She leaned forward and dropped her voice. “Tyler thinks I was maybe the last person to see Cindy alive.” Her eyes were wide with excitement. “I went into the bathroom and there she was.”
“What time was this?” Claire asked.
“A little after eleven thirty.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“I didn’t talk about anything. I just listened to Cindy. She was bragging about her job as a cheerleader consultant, about her trip to Kauai, about her new SUV and how fast it can go.”
“Doesn’t sound like much fun,” Claire said sympathetically. She was already losing any fear of speaking ill of the dead.
So, it seemed, was Rebecca. “The worst thing was the way she bragged about everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was all by pretending to complain about it. Her job required so much travel to so many exotic places. And their nanny had gotten sick and hadn’t been able to go Kauai with them, so Cindy had to watch after her daughter herself. The kid’s eleven, and Cindy made out like she was having to run after a toddler!”
This sounded like the Cindy Claire remembered. “So what are you doing with yourself these days, Rebecca?” And then was immediately sorry she asked.
“I’m a bronze-tier PermaFood distributor. It’s a line of premium dehydrated food. Everything from vegetables to main courses to deserts. All of it guaranteed to last at least twenty-five years. Remind me and I can get you a brochure from my room later.”
Claire shook her head. “That’s okay.”
“I tried to get Cindy interested in it last night in the bathroom, too. She didn’t even answer, just kept using all those little jars and bottles lined up in front of her. And then she sprayed her hair with a whole cloud of hairspray. I just about gagged. Served her right that she had to use one of those puffer things afterwards.”
“Puffer?”
“You know, a whatchamacallit.” Rebecca brought the back of her thumb to her lips, fingers curled, and made a puffing sound with her lips. “One of those asthma inhalers.”
And just a few hours before Rebecca had seen her using an inhaler, Claire had also heard her using one. Were you supposed to use them that close together? “Did you tell Tyler about her putting on new makeup?”
Rebecca shrugged. “Yeah. He was mostly interested in what time I saw her
.”
Had Tyler, by the nature of his sex, missed an important clue? Why would a woman go to the bother of putting on a fresh coat of makeup near the end of an event? Was it just because she didn’t want her public to see anything less than a perfect mask? That made more sense if Cindy had been only been checking for smears and smudges. But to completely repaint the canvas seemed to imply something more. Had Cindy been preparing herself for a special encounter? Had she gone out in the parking lot to meet someone?
RUCNNE1
Chapter Twenty-four
He rapped softly on her door, twice. The hotel corridor was empty, but still he felt a shiver of fear as he waited for her to answer. Everyone was out in the sun, having fun, relaxing now that “the killer” had been caught. A strange sort of gaiety possessed them. Death had passed by so close that they had smelled his dank breath, and that made the warm summer air all the sweeter.
When Belinda opened the door, her face was swollen and damp, blotched with red. “Oh, hi.” Her plump hands pulled the top edges of her white terrycloth bathrobe closer together.
“I just came by to see how you were doing,” he said, slipping inside and closing the door behind him. A quick glance around the room showed him they were alone. His breathing loosened now that he was hidden from prying eyes. “I’ve been worried about you.” Leaning forward, he gave her a quick, one-armed hug. When her arms went around his back, he felt a brief spurt of surprise. She clung to him for a moment, and over her shoulder he made a face that she could not see.
Then Belinda let go. Without speaking she turned away and sat on the bottom edge of one of the two unmade double beds. He sat across from her in a chair fashioned from plastic to look as if it had been hand-hewn from a log. The TV murmured in the background. He thought to himself that even in her grief Belinda could not bear to switch off the set. Clothes were scattered everywhere around the room - heaped on the other bed, strewn across a bureau, half-hanging from the hangers in the closet. The door to the bathroom was open, and more clothes lay puddled on the floor.
“Sorry about the mess.” Belinda waved one hand vaguely. Her nose and upper lip were chapped. “My daughter Vanessa came with me. You know sixteen-year-old girls. It takes them forever to decide what to wear.”
“This whole thing must be very upsetting for her.”
Belinda gave him a bitter smile, her lips quirking down at the corners. “Not really. She didn’t see what I saw. The whole thing isn’t real to her. She can’t imagine what it’s like to be with someone you’ve known your whole life, only she’s dead. I mean, Cindy’s body was there, but it was empty.” Tears spilled from her eyes and ran down her cheeks, but she made no attempt to stop them. “I think Vanessa thinks the whole thing is exciting. Like a TV cop show or one of those Scream movies or something. And yesterday she met some guy in the video game room, and she’s all stirred up about him. Sixteen and she thinks if you spend two hours talking to someone it must be true love. Maybe it’s genetic, since her father seems to have the same idea about his new assistant.” At the thought of how life had betrayed her, her weeping intensified. She ran the back of her hand underneath her nose and then wiped it on the lap of her bathrobe. He hid his disgust.
“Maybe now is a bad time,” he ventured, leaning forward. “Honestly, I don’t know what to do. I only know I want to help you in whatever way I can. Is there anyone you would like me to call to be with you? Or do you want me to go away and leave you alone?”
“No,” Her answer crowded his query. “No, I don’t want to be alone. There’s only been a couple of people who have stopped by, and they don’t stay for long. Maybe people don’t know what to say. So don’t go. ‘Cause when I’m by myself, then I just keep thinking about it and thinking about it. If only I had gone out to my car a few minutes before. Maybe that would have been enough. Tyler told me they think that the dishwasher guy must have done it right before I came out there. If I had gone out twenty minutes earlier, maybe Cindy would have been still alive. Twenty minutes earlier and maybe I could have frightened that guy off. That’s all. Twenty minutes. And now Cindy’s dead.”
“You can’t think about that,” he said, more harshly than he had intended. “You’ll just go crazy.” He himself had been awake most of the night, playing out different scenarios. Imagining himself reasoning with Cindy instead of panicking. Imagining that he had never agreed to go out in the parking lot at all. Imagining that twenty years ago, he hadn’t made the mistake of allowing himself to be seduced by her. “And look at what you did this morning. You were there for Cindy’s husband. If you hadn’t stopped him, he might have killed that guy. Then where would he be? His wife would still be dead and he would be doing ten to forty. He didn’t need that.”
“I couldn’t let Kev - Kevin keep hitting him. Even though it makes me sick to think about that Mexican guy putting his hands around Cindy’s neck, I couldn’t just let him get killed in front of me. At least the judge let Kevin out on bail so Alexa didn’t have to be alone. She’s only eleven, you know.”
He steepled his fingers. “Maybe you should think about going home. It must be very stressful, being in the same place where - it all happened.”
“What am I going to do if I go home? At least here, there are a few people who understand. Like you.” She gave him a wet-eyed, trusting look.
He leaned forward and gave her knee a pat, careful to avoid the place where she had wiped her hand. “That’s why I came by to see you. I couldn’t stop thinking about you, about what you’ve lost. You and Cindy were so close. Best friends for more than twenty years.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Yes.” She was starting to sob again in earnest, high-pitched little yips.
“I can understand how upset you are. Especially when you think that you must have been out there right after it happened. Too bad you didn’t see anything.”
She shook her head. “That’s what Tyler kept saying. He kept bugging me, saying I must have seen something. But I told him I didn’t see anything.”
“Nothing?” he asked, keeping his face carefully composed. “Maybe you saw something little. Something so small it didn’t mean anything. Maybe there was, I don’t know, a note by her body that blew away before the cops got there. Or you heard something, heard the guy’s voice, heard him talking to Cindy. Or maybe you saw this guy’s car, you know, saw his car when he drove away.”
“A car.” Belinda sat up straighter on the bed. “I had forgotten about it until you said that, but I do remember a car going by right before I saw Cindy. I remember looking up, thinking it was going too fast, but then I saw the, you know, the body - and I stopped thinking about anything but that.” She looked at the phone. “I’ll have to call Tyler. He was talking about hypnotizing me.”
He remembered how, in a panic, he had started to drive away, before he realized that his absence would betray him, before he realized that the only possible solution was to go back and act as if nothing had happened. Now he put his hand out and touched Belinda’s wrist. “Hypnotize you?”
“Yeah. He said a hypnotist can take you back in time and freeze everything in your mind. You know, like pressing the pause button on the VCR when you want to see the movie credits. He said they could make it be so that I could see the details around me for every step of that walk, turn my head to the left and see everything that in real life was just a blur. And like a video, he said you could zoom in and out. He said that you can read the license plates of cars, or see tiny scars on people’s faces.” She pulled her hand back and looked at him, some bit of intelligence flickering briefly in her eyes. “Why are you asking me all this?”
“Cindy and I were, were close.” He folded his hands and dropped his gaze.
Her next words froze his blood. “I know how close you were,” Belinda said softly. “She told me about it. Maybe Cindy is looking down and smiling right now. You helped me remember about seeing that car. Maybe there was a reason you were supposed to come and talk to me today.”
�
�I think you’re right. There is a reason.” He opened his arms to her and leaned forward. She paused, eyeing him uncertainly. He could tell Belinda thought he was going to hug her. Instead, he yanked on her bathrobe tie, pulling it from around her waist. “What?” she began, reflexively clutching the edges of her robe together. In one quick motion, he wrapped the tie around her neck.
He was on her so fast, his knees pinning her shoulders to the bed, there wasn’t even time for her to scream. He did what he had to do, but he turned his face away. He didn’t want to watch Belinda’s bulging eyes accuse him as her mouth twisted, silently screaming his name.
He spent the next five minutes wiping everything down with a wet washcloth he found in the sink. And while he worked, he had an idea. It entailed a bit of risk, but if it worked out the way he thought it would, then no one would suspect him. It was, he decided as he polished the doorknob, a perfectly wonderful idea. He giggled a little at the thought of it, until he caught himself And then, in silence, he leaned down and gathered up Belinda into his arms.
Chapter Twenty-five
Claire woke up from her second nap of the day feeling about as tired as she had when she lay down. With the curtains drawn, the room was dim and undefined, just like her thoughts. She had dreamed about Logan, that much she was sure of. The old Logan, skinny and funny and smart. Where was he? Why had he disappeared? Was he all right, or had Cindy’s death pushed him back into the place where the voices whispered in his ear?
The bedside table held a directory of hotel services, a TV Guide, postcards of glamorous-looking people playing slot machines (although from what Claire had seen, the instant the photos were finished the models had been replaced by elderly matrons in polyester), and the Minor phonebook. Claire had forgotten that an entire phone book - both yellow and white pages - could be less than an inch thick.
There were three entries under West - but none of them were Logan or started with an L. There was an E. West, though, who lived on Ash Creek Road. Claire couldn’t remember Logan’s mom’s name, but she did remember the name of her old street. When she was little, the older kids had called it “Ass Creek” and when Claire had repeated it, Jean had threatened to wash her mouth out with soap.