TMonaghan 12 - Hush Hush

by Laura Lippman

  Now this was something else Tess liked about her new partner. Sandy found a way to make his opinions known while still letting Tess be the boss. He was very satisfactory that way. His predecessor, Mrs. Blossom, had been too deferential. Then again, Mrs. Blossom had always been up for emergency babysitting, whereas Sandy was not. Alas, Mrs. Blossom had moved to Arizona after the winter with almost seventy-five inches of snow. That winter had broken Mrs. Blossom.

  Sandy was also more meticulous than Tess. After just a little more than a year together, she had come to see that Sandy always gave 100 percent to anything he did, whereas she could be satisfied with 90 percent. Hey, it was still an A-minus. Today, for example, she wanted to avoid using their favorite hacker for full financial sweeps on the employees they were interviewing.

  “Always good to know who’s in debt or has financial problems,” Sandy said.

  “It’s 2014,” Tess grumbled. “Everyone has financial problems. And Dorie is expensive when we have a rush job. You know that.”

  “Yeah, but Melisandre Dawes is paying three times your normal rate right now,” Sandy reminded her. This was a cheering thought. They were on the clock, being paid by a woman who actually said things like “Money is no object.” Tess was pretty sure that money was always an object, even when you had a lot of it. Especially if you had a lot of it. She imagined the minutes as coins falling into a bank. It helped a little, but it didn’t make her stop feeling like an enormous bully as she quizzed housecleaners and room service waiters and parking valets and bellmen. A few struggled with English, and Sandy stepped in, speaking a slow, careful Spanish that was the aural equivalent of a car whose engine hadn’t been started for years.

  By lunchtime, the only thing that Sandy and Tess had been able to establish was that far too many people had had access to Melisandre’s suite and it was for the best that she had moved to her penthouse, even if they hadn’t persuaded her to take all their suggestions on security.

  “I have to say, I’m not that impressed with her bodyguard,” Tess said. “He deserved to be fired. She’s really been pretty vulnerable all this time.”

  “He’s just that. A bodyguard for hire. Not a security expert, just another retired cop. Stands next to her twelve hours a day with a gun. She got what she paid for.”

  “That’s what I mean. Money isn’t a problem for her. So why didn’t she want twenty-four/seven protection? I really think he was more of a prop, for this documentary. A nice visual, you know—the misunderstood woman needs a bodyguard by her side because some deluded person might want to cause her harm. Who, though? The kinds of nuts who get upset enough to contemplate violence don’t care about women killing their children. They only come out when women want to terminate pregnancies.”

  Sandy coughed. It could have been a cough, nothing more. But Tess heard a world of argument in that cough.

  “What?”

  “There are reasonable people who believe that abortion is wrong. As wrong as murder.”

  “But the second they cross the line and try to harm someone, they are no longer reasonable, right?”

  “I’m not speaking for myself. I don’t believe in God, not really. But my wife did and she believed abortion was wrong. Even if she had known—”

  “Known what?” But this was a part of Sandy’s life where he always shut down. His wife had died from cancer several years ago, Tess knew that much. There was a son, too, grown now, and Sandy never spoke of him. She had inferred something was wrong, although she had assumed it was drugs or drink. Could it be something that might have led another couple to choose abortion?

  “It’s not important,” Sandy said. “And in all other things, Mary and you probably would have agreed. Especially on everything that was wrong with me.”

  That was Sandy’s way of changing the subject, Tess understood. She could never decide what a truly good friend would do when people didn’t volunteer personal information. Should she push for the confidence or let it go? She let it go.

  “You want to go over the threatening notes that Melisandre has received? See if there’s anything in them that can be linked to what happened in the suite? Or just anything at all that could help us?”

  An hour later, they had the notes spread across the Parsons table in Tess’s office, along with the remains of their lunch from Iggies—a salad for Sandy and a sausage-fennel pizza for Tess, who had decided not to think about losing weight until the weather was reliable and she could work out every day.

  The notes, five in all, had been written on a computer, printed on plain white paper, sent in basic envelopes. They had not been preserved in any sensible way, another sign of Brian’s incompetence. Melisandre had shoved them into a manila folder, not even bothering to log where and when she had received them. Some had come by mail, one had been dropped off at the Four Seasons front desk.

  And one had been slipped under her door.

  “I thought you said Brian was ex-police.”

  “He is. After my time, left the department about a year ago. He was a vice detective. Left two years short of his twenty, which is weird, but it happens. They’ve got some pretty big jerks over there these days.”

  Sandy’s tone made it clear that “vice detective” was many rungs below murder police, his preferred term for what he had done.

  “So why would he just gather up these notes as they appeared and not treat them like evidence?”

  “Probably following orders. Based on what happened this week, Melisandre Dawes wants to avoid the police whenever possible. She put that kid’s life at risk by not calling 911.”

  “She told Tyner she panicked, that it was almost like post-traumatic stress disorder. She froze.”

  “Yeah, she froze, he broke the sugar bowl when he passed out, she had a private physician take care of him, the maid happened to clean up the mess while they were at the doctor’s office, so there’s nothing to examine.”

  Normally, Tess liked working with someone even more cynical than she was. But this seemed a bridge too far.

  “You do think she did it. But why? She didn’t get any footage out of it. And according to Tyner, her ex now wants to renege on letting her see the kids in anything but public settings. No visits to her new apartment. So there was no benefit. Quite the opposite.”

  Sandy looked through the notes again. The ones that had arrived by mail were postmarked Baltimore. Well, there’s someone who still needs the postal service, Tess thought. Stalkers. E-mail was too easy to trace. When it came to threats, you wanted good old-fashioned stamps, maybe some magazines to cut up. Or maybe just a notepad to leave missives on someone’s car as the opportunity arrived, Tess thought, remembering her own notes. Melisandre’s correspondent had typed these not-quite-threats on a computer, then printed them out. A first-rate computer expert might be able to find these keystrokes on a computer, but you’d have to know which computer to search.

  “They’re not exactly threatening,” he said. “If she were writing them, I think they’d be more dramatic.”

  “Melisandre says the writer uses tiny details that only she knows. Her nickname, references to personal habits. Including her sugar habit.”

  “I still think she would do something more overt. These are a little creepy, although I can’t put my finger on why. But I bet she knows and she’s not telling us everything.”

  “Why wouldn’t she tell us?”

  “Because everybody lies.”

  Tess knew that was a murder police’s axiom and Sandy was old-school murder police, a term that was dying out in Baltimore. And she didn’t disagree. She had the sense of being an unwitting player in someone else’s drama, just another Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, being sent off to England while things were happening at a far higher level.

  The first one said:

  Dear Missy—Just wait and see what fun we’ll have. (That’s what Bear said. Remember?)

  “Missy? Is that the boarding school nickname?”

  “Yes,” Tess said. “But Tyne
r doesn’t know from Bear and Melisandre says she doesn’t, either.”

  “Here’s number 2. Sent a week later.”

  We bake cake! And nothing’s the matter! Nothing’s the matter! Still have that sweet tooth, Missy?

  Then there was

  But he will not know about that. He will never find out. Isn’t that what you promised, Missy?

  “Wait, which is the next one? Do we have the chronology right?” Tess asked.

  “This came next.”

  We will have to shut you up where you can’t do any more harm. And yet you can, Missy. Wherever you are, you can still do harm.

  The final note was the cruelest, to Tess’s way of thinking. And also annoyingly familiar, yet just out of reach.

  This kid is driving me CRAZY! Literally true in your case, right, Missy?

  “I hate to nitpick, but her child didn’t literally drive her crazy unless it had a driver’s license,” Tess said. “So—not an English major. And don’t tell me about the OED. The OED is wrong to change its stance on this.”

  Sandy was uninterested in the Oxford English Dictionary and its position on literally. He also had probably abandoned the fight for hopefully. “Five notes. Harassment, but not illegal.”

  “Yeah, I’ve gotten only two and the second did bug me, even though there was nothing overt in it.”

  “Wait, another one? Like the one the other day? What did it say?”

  That’s right. She hadn’t told anyone about the second note. Crow didn’t even know about the first. It had gotten lost in all the details of day-to-day family life.

  “Just wanted to know if I had enjoyed my breakfast,” Tess said. It felt wrong to talk about the notes with Sandy when she hadn’t had a chance to tell Crow. But she and Crow were so exhausted that when they had time together, she didn’t want to speak of upsetting or distracting things. “I figure real life is starting to imitate Facebook now. ‘Friends’ you’ve never met comment on every aspect of your personal life. Everyone’s always looking for a Like button.”

  Sandy looked baffled. He had no use for social media. Antisocial media, maybe.

  “I did check to see if the daughters had Facebook accounts,” Tess said.

  “Why?”

  “Melisandre has one and it’s wide open. You should see the things some people write. I thought the girls might be lurking there, or be part of her network. I felt kind of sleazy, doing it. I mean, I wasn’t going to send a friendship request to either of them, although I have an account I use for that sometimes. It’s come in handy for some of the insurance stuff I’ve worked on. People who are suing over slip-and-falls will post photos of themselves finishing marathons.”

  “Why would they let a stranger see that?”

  “You’d be amazed how many people will ‘friend’ an average-looking woman named Marge Gunderson, who lists her address as North Dakota. Sometimes they even say, ‘Hey, did you know you were a character in a movie called Fargo?’ I always feign amazement. Anyway, I looked to see if the daughters had public accounts, but I didn’t find anything. Either they’re not there, or their privacy settings are really high.”

  “Good for them.”

  “But frustrating for a mother intent on reconnecting. Because you just know that Melisandre has probably tried to reach out to them that way. How could she sign away her rights to them, Sandy? How does someone walk away from her kids? If anything, she should have been keen to show the world—show them—that she was capable of being a good mother.”

  Sandy kept his eyes on the papers in front of them. “Guilt? I mean, she was going to kill them, too, right? That’s a hard one to patch up. And sometimes, when things get bad—when you haven’t done the right thing by someone—it’s hard to make your way back.”

  Tess suspected he was speaking from experience.

  “Everyone has bad days—I still can’t imagine walking away. Carla Scout drives me crazy sometimes. Figuratively.”

  “I’d like to tell you it gets better,” Sandy said. “But my kid—well, he’s kind of like a forever three-year-old, so I don’t know what happens next. But I hear it gets better.”

  Tess went back to studying the notes, aware that Sandy had finally offered up a clue about himself, while she had been lying. No, she couldn’t imagine abandoning her daughter, but she sometimes thought about the life she used to have, almost as if it were an alternate reality. Some evenings, marching through the routines like a zombie, she asked herself: What would I have been doing five years ago on a night like this? Eating dinner out, without being interrupted seventy thousand times. Reading a book. Going for a run. Something for her, and her alone. She had been so self-centered. Why not? She’d had only herself to tend to.

  But once you were a parent, how did you walk away? Especially given what Melisandre had done. And it wasn’t like Melisandre had sought a do-over. She didn’t remarry or try to have more children, although it might have been possible at her age. Not easy, but not impossible for a woman of means, although perhaps risky given her history of postpartum depression.

  Maybe Melisandre was making her play for a do-over right now.

  So who tainted the sugar? Who sent the notes? Nothing seemed to connect.

  “Want to break early and go for a drink?” Tess asked Sandy hopefully.

  “We got three more interviews back at the hotel,” he said. “Some people just coming off their shifts.”

  He was more conscientious than she was, too. She should probably consider that a point in his favor. And they would be in Harbor East when they finished today. They could go to the cool sushi place there or drop by Cinghiale or— No, she couldn’t go anywhere. She had to be home by six so Crow could go to work. Drinks and dinners out were enjoyed by Alterna-Tess.

  1:30 P.M.

  The thing about being grounded was that it just made it more logical to cut school, especially on a day practice was canceled. If Alanna didn’t have cross country to look forward to, she certainly wasn’t going to hang around for chemistry and English. As long as she was there to drive Ruby home—the reason her car had not been taken away—no one would know. Besides, there was someone she needed to see downtown.

  But first, she wanted to see the old house.

  Alanna still had a set of keys. Why wouldn’t she? Why shouldn’t she? They hadn’t sold it, merely moved. Most of their furniture was still there, although her father had let Alanna and Ruby take a few favorite things to the new place. She parked on the street, then circled around to the back, unlocking the garden gate.

  “Hello, you,” she said.

  It was a distinctive-looking house from the front, a freestanding yellow-brick Victorian with turrets and a lone gargoyle, a standout even in a neighborhood full of idiosyncratic houses. That was the problem. The house became the stand-in for the family when the family was not made available. Newspapers and television stations used two images over and over—the house and her mother being led away from her bail hearing, her wild hair flying.

  Even then, after, they never considered moving. The house was their father’s dream, old on the outside but reconfigured within, his vision of what a family home should be. The living room and dining room were formal, retaining the grand proportions of a nineteenth-century town house. Her father was ahead of the curve there, renouncing child-centric lifestyles while others were building houses with tiny living rooms and so-called great rooms abutting kitchens. Stephen Dawes didn’t believe that children should be seen and not heard, but he did think that adults had ceded too much territory to their offspring.

  Not that their kitchen, which she entered through the deck-to-ceiling glass doors, was small. It was large and open, the heart of their family’s life. A builder’s daughter, Alanna realized that the appliances and fixtures there were now slightly out-of-date, but she still loved the island, whose base was covered in a mosaic of blue tiles. It should have clashed with the coral-verging-on-orange Aga, yet it worked. The family had spent a lot of time here, but it was not
a great room, and it was not meant for play. Instead, the entire fourth floor had been given over to the children’s playroom.

  Alanna climbed three flights of stairs to this space. While the rest of the house was her father’s design, this had been her mother’s creation, inspired by a book she had read as a child, a book she had planned to share with Alanna and Ruby when they were older. But by the time they were older, their mother was gone, so Alanna never did find out in what children’s book the kids played in something called the Office. She knew only that her mother had attempted to re-create it from memory. There was a big rag rug over a floor that her father had soundproofed, a trapeze bar hanging from the ceiling, a piano, although no one in the family had ever learned to play. A box full of dress-up clothes, two easels. One wall was slate, so it could serve as an enormous chalkboard. The television had never been hooked up to cable, but it had a DVD player, so Alanna and Ruby could watch films here. An entire wall of bookshelves, only half full now. After the divorce, her mother had demanded some of their books and toys, putting them in storage. “See?” Ruby had said last week, when she nagged Alanna into agreeing to see their mother. “She always planned to come back.”

  Yes, she planned a lot, their mother. She planned more than anyone knew.

  A circle of three beanbag chairs faced the bookshelves—bright blue, bright yellow, bright green. And although the blue one was Alanna’s, she felt like Goldilocks as she tried out each one, not that any of them gave way. Each was just right. One for Alanna, one for Ruby.

  And one for Isadora.

  They had chosen these chairs while their mother was still pregnant. One for all, all for one, their mother said. You will be my three musketeers. We will be the four musketeers, always looking out for each other. No one told Isadora about this arrangement, apparently. She was a difficult baby. Crying all the time, not any fun. Boring. Alanna might have even pronounced her banal, if she had known that word at age five. Before Isadora was born, Alanna and Ruby had quarreled a lot. Or so she was told. She didn’t remember that part. What she remembered was that the real musketeers were her, Ruby, and their nanny, Elyse. They did everything together, while her mother was stuck with boring Isadora. Her mother wandered through the house at night, her face pale and Isadora wailing on her shoulder. She would pass her and Ruby’s open bedroom doors, not even thinking to check on them as she once had. The Night Mother, Alanna called her. Soon it was as if the Night Mother was with them night and day. She didn’t notice anyone but Isadora. It was embarrassing, the way her mother was always unbuttoning her shirt to feed the baby. It was gross. Had Alanna felt that way at age five? Yes, yes, at age five she had begun to find everything about people’s bodies to be silly at best, vile at worst. When they said she would have to share her room with Ruby so that the baby could have a room of her own, she had been furious. How would she change her clothes with Ruby in there? Even at five, Alanna required a lot of privacy.