TMonaghan 12 - Hush Hush

by Laura Lippman

  Joey slept on, considerate for once. She had time to do all the things she never had time to do anymore—shave her legs, wash and dry her hair, slather herself with lotion. Felicia’s looks had never depended on makeup, but she needed a little help these days, especially with her sleep so disrupted. She studied her face in the mirror, wondering how Melisandre Dawes had aged, then wondering why Melisandre still used the surname Dawes after all these years.

  Her phone again. The cell. Stephen. She almost didn’t take it. The quiet was delicious. She was as close to being alone as she ever was these days.

  “Listen,” he said. “About tonight.”

  No, she thought. No, no, no. “Yes?”

  “Something has come up.”

  “At work? On a Friday?”

  “Melisandre wants to meet with me. She says it’s for the documentary. And you know what? I might as well get it out of the way. Tell her face-to-face that I won’t do it and the girls have changed their minds. That the girls aren’t going to see her at all, with or without a camera. Then she’ll be out of our lives forever.”

  “But tonight is date night.”

  “What? Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot. Well, we can still go out. I’ll just be home a little later. I mean, maybe not some big fancy meal, but we can have some time to ourselves.”

  “We’ll see,” she said with a tight-lipped fury that didn’t seem to register with him at all.

  “I’ll be home by nine, I’m sure. See you then, okay?”

  No, she decided, after hanging up the phone, it’s not okay. I’ll treat myself to a night out. Alanna’s already agreed to babysit. I’m going to go out on my own, see a movie, stop somewhere for a drink. Let Stephen arrive home and wonder where I am. That would show him.

  She went to her closet, selected a knit halter dress. Although it left her shoulders bare, it would be warm enough paired with a jacket. Felicia’s shoulders had always been among her best features. She might not be in peak condition, but she still looked pretty good. Lots of men would look at her tonight, offer to buy her drinks, maybe even flirt with her. Nothing wrong with flirting, especially if one’s husband was going to spend date night with his ex-wife.

  3:15 P.M.

  Sandy looked skeptically at the machine on his desk. He was no Luddite. The department had not relied much on computers at the time of his retirement—Google was barely used, as Sandy recalled—but he had always used databases, especially when he came back to work cold cases.

  But this thing, this tablet. How had he allowed himself to be sold this? He didn’t even understand why it was called a tablet. The young woman had been so enthusiastic, though, and the demo at the Apple Store had been seductive. All you have to do is take it home and plug it in, she kept saying, after setting up basic programs for him—his e-mail, the text message function, an iTunes account, and his first-ever Facebook account, which was the whole point of this exercise.

  Had she looked at him strangely when he expressed interest in that particular application? It was probably in his head. But she had seemed almost a little pitying when he offered the lie “I need it to keep in touch with my grandkids.” She said: “Kids don’t use it as much as older people, actually. I hope you won’t be disappointed if they’re not in touch with you as often as you hoped.”

  How much would she have pitied him if she knew the real story?

  Sandy opened the Facebook app. His profile had no photo attached, and he currently had zero friends. Strangely, there were already requests, but he ignored those. Facebook urged him to share his “status.” He ignored that, too. He was a faceless man, using his proper name—Roberto—trolling these strange waters. The things that people shared here! And so many had clearly ignored the privacy settings.

  But that was to his advantage. It took a while, but he found what he was looking for. Some people would call what Sandy did playing hunches. Or, perhaps, making an educated guess. He had given up on trying to explain that what he did was a kind of science, informed by a lifetime of experience. True, he hadn’t really known what Facebook was a few days ago. But once he understood, he was sure he would have better luck with it than Tess would, and here was a solid lead, justifying his confidence. He would have to do more research before he shared the information, make sure he was right. He felt a little cocky, having bested her in a milieu where she should have been able to outthink him.

  Before he signed off, he did an odd thing, knowing it was odd, yet incapable of stopping. He searched for women with the name Mary Bailey. His late wife’s maiden name had been Bailey. She’d made a joke about it on their first date, but it had gone over his head. As a boy in Cuba, Sandy had never seen It’s a Wonderful Life. As a teenager in the United States—essentially a refugee, orphaned within months of arriving—he’d had no desire to see a film with such an incomprehensible title. Eventually, Mary had gotten him to watch it one Christmas Eve, and he had tried not to let her see how much he hated it. Really, people thought this was a warm, celebratory movie? It was the saddest thing he had ever seen. Nice guy spends his whole life never getting what he wants. Sandy had lived it. He didn’t need to see that in a movie.

  And yet George Bailey, holding Zuzu aloft in his arms, ended up being one up on Sandy. They both had their Mary Baileys—lovely women, much too good for them—but Sandy’s son was not the kind of child to be held placidly. Bobby would have torn Zuzu’s petals to bits, knocked down the tree in a rage, chucked his toys at his parents’ heads.

  The boy had been institutionalized since age six. The best thing about Mary’s death was that Sandy could stop pretending to care about him. Once Bobby’s problems emerged—and once his rage nearly cost Mary her life—Sandy could not regard Bobby as his son. It was more as if they were in some horrible fairy tale and had given birth to an animal, one prone to attack and hurt those who loved him best.

  So when Tess talked about how hard it was to be a mom, or how she could not imagine someone not having a relationship with her children, Sandy didn’t share. What could he say? She was a nice young woman, but she didn’t know from hard. One of the advantages to not being a big talker was that no one noticed when you shut down.

  There were a lot of Mary Baileys on Facebook, but none was as lovely as his own, in Sandy’s opinion. He started to power down the tablet, then saw that the lady at the Apple store had added gin rummy and hearts to the games folder, probably because he had admitted he liked to play both of those on his laptop. And you could name your opponents. That was pretty nifty. He set up the gin game so his opponent was named Mary. She beat him soundly, just like the real Mary. Sandy was never sure what he thought about the afterlife, but for a half hour or so, he allowed himself to believe that his beloved wife was playing gin with him. Game after game, he took wild chances, played stupidly against the odds—and lost happily.

  4:30 P.M.

  The Tasmanian Devil, Looney Tunes edition, was spinning in the narrow, sloped aisle that connected Eddie’s of Roland Park’s liquor department to the grocery store at large. Spinning and screaming and demanding something in garbled, guttural oaths that could not be understood. It was a fascinating display, something that Tess could have watched in awe—if the Tasmanian Devil were not Carla Scout Monaghan, who had just been told that she could not have a can of Pringles potato chips. Not now, not ever, per her father’s instructions. The only chips on Crow’s approved list were Kettle, which were certified GMO-free. And those were for emergencies. He preferred for Carla Scout to eat homemade chips.

  “Oh, is wittle you having a bad day?” A well-intentioned Roland Park matron lowered herself on creaky knees to Carla’s eyeline.

  The child responded with a scream that should have shattered the nearby bottles of Scotch and gin and tequila. Lovely, lovely tequila, Tess thought. Could she have a shot now if she bought the bottle? Would that be so wrong? She couldn’t really blame Carla Scout for responding that way to baby talk. It set Tess’s teeth on edge, too.

  The books said to igno
re tantrums or remove the child promptly. They said other things, too, but Tess tended to forget what they were when she was in this situation. She was frozen, watching her toddler thrash it out in a high-traffic area, blocking anyone who wanted liquor, beer, wine, and snacks. And it was Friday at Eddie’s. Everyone wanted liquor, beer, wine, and snacks. Including Tess. TGIF? In her life, it was more like FMIF—fuck me, it’s Friday. Friday and Saturday were big work nights for Crow, requiring him to go in by 4:00, then stay until almost 3:00 A.M. Which, of course, meant sleeping until noon on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Tess dreaded Friday nights. All she wanted to do was pick up some prepared dishes at Eddie’s—curried chicken salad for her, mac ’n’ cheese for Carla Scout, a bottle of sauvignon blanc—get home, and survive the next five hours.

  Carla Scout had a slightly different agenda.

  “What you should do—” the matron began.

  “Is get my husband a vasectomy. We’re saving up!” Why did I call Crow my husband, why am I putting on a front for some stranger? Because enough of her life was hanging out in public. Much of Carla Scout’s rear end was hanging out in public, as her dress had bunched up, exposing the fact that she was wearing no underpants. On a rather cool day in March. How had that happened? Tess had a vague memory of picking up Carla Scout from the Friday babysitter who helped cover the gap between Tess’s and Crow’s work schedules, a hurried visit to the potty, where Carla Scout had asked Tess “to give me some pri’acy.” Silly Tess had assumed she had come out with her Dora the Explorer underpants on beneath her long, smocked dress, not Carla Scout’s usual style at all, but it had been clean this morning. Matched with miniature suede boots bestowed on Carla Scout by her fashion-conscious grandmother, it had made for a plausible outfit eight hours ago. But, no, Dora the Explorer was apparently exploring the floor back at the babysitter’s house. Was having a bare-butt child in Eddie’s grounds for being reported to social services?

  Tess crouched down and said, in what she hoped was a persuasively no-nonsense voice: “Carla Scout, I am going to count you down and if you can’t calm down, you’ll be going into Quiet Time. Right here, in the store. One . . . two . . . three.”

  The girl’s wails rose and Tess felt as if everyone in North Baltimore was staring at her.

  “Four . . . five . . . six.”

  Carla Scout, although several aisles from Emeril’s signature spices, kicked it up a notch.

  “Seven, eight, nine”—oh, Tess so did not want to say it—“ten.”

  At that, Tess picked up her writhing daughter and deposited her in a corner. “Quiet Time. Right here, in the store.” It was this or leave, and she’d be damned if she was going to leave when she had everything she needed but the wine. And she was really damned if she was going to leave without the wine. She could feel herself flushing from embarrassment. She tried to tell herself she didn’t care. Tess had always maintained she didn’t worry about what people thought of her. Maybe she was lying to herself, or maybe motherhood was just the ultimate test. Every day she was judged a dozen times—and almost always found wanting. But she weathered the stares and smug glances, and Carla Scout finally calmed down, and they returned to their shopping with just the occasional dramatic sniffle. Carla Scout’s, not Tess’s, although she was tempted, too.

  It had been such a crappy day. Tyner had asked Tess to meet him, then raked her over the coals for having made so little progress in developing leads about Melisandre’s harasser. He didn’t particularly appreciate Sandy’s theory about the sugar bowl. “That’s overwhelmingly cynical,” Tyner said. “This is clearly someone from her past. Someone close to her.”

  “Like you, Tyner?” Tess had said, and then Tyner had just freaked the hell out. Told her she was indolent and insolent, that he had referred her as a favor because he knew she could use the work and would it hurt for her to be grateful for once. Tyner was always cranky and prone to tongue-lashings, but this was unlike anything Tess had known. She had been grateful that Sandy didn’t witness it, given how close to tears Tyner pushed her.

  She had left Tyner’s office just in time to get caught in the rain without an umbrella, forgotten it was Friday and gone home without picking up Carla Scout, then driven over to Medfield, where the Friday babysitter lived. And now this. The thing was, she would happily buy her daughter Pringles. But she had agreed to try to do things Crow’s way. No soda, ever. No store-bought cookies, crackers, cakes. Carla Scout could have junk food—junk food made with straight-up white sugar, white flour, butter, et cetera—but it had to be pedigreed or homemade. Oven-baked potato chips, sliced with a mandoline that was probably going to take a hunk of someone’s finger someday, deep-fried sweet potatoes, even tortilla chips. Crow had started baking bread, too, old-fashioned Irish brown bread, which was delightful. And he baked like a madman on his days off. Whoopie pies, perhaps the most aptly named food ever, because Tess really did want to say whoopie when she bit into one. Homemade Twinkies. Something called compost cookies and chocolate sandwich cookies with buttercream icing that were the closest thing to a Hydrox that Tess could imagine. All in all, a good deal.

  But Carla Scout still yearned for the occasional can of Pringles or a package of Gummi Bears, and it grieved Tess to deny her. She thought a little crap, in moderation, wasn’t that bad. Crow said if she wanted to take over the cooking, she was welcome to it.

  Okay, no Pringles.

  Carla Scout was calming down, slowly but surely. It felt as if the tantrum had gone on for hours, but it was less than five minutes by Tess’s watch. Tyner’s tantrum had probably lasted longer. They procured a bottle of wine—“Mommy juice!” Carla Scout announced to everyone in earshot—and checked out without further incident. Roland Avenue was a madhouse, as usual, so Tess had to leave her cart and go get the car, two blocks away, carrying Carla Scout, who complained about the wind and rain. It was nice, Tess thought, to live somewhere a person could leave a cart of groceries on the sidewalk for five or ten minutes. When they got home, the dogs needed a quick walk, so she put away the perishables, left the other groceries to sit. Tess being Tess, she had forgotten to bring the recyclable bags for shopping, but that was okay: a woman with three dogs could always use some more plastic ones. Carla Scout took Miata’s leash, as the Doberman was actually the gentlest and most patient of the three dogs, while Tess wrangled the two greyhounds, large and small. It was still light at 6:30, a nice change, and the walk restored some equilibrium between mother and daughter. Carla Scout, as was her wont, was fascinated by her own bad behavior in the grocery store, quizzing Tess about it. “I lie on the floor. I kicked. Why I do that, Mommy? Why I do that?”

  “I’d love to know,” Tess said. But she could feel her jangled nerves settling. The key to these grueling weekends was to adapt herself to Carla Scout’s rhythms, to let her take the lead the same way she let the greyhounds pretend to be in charge. They would go home and have a “picnic” tonight—dinner on a blanket on the floor of Tess’s bedroom, the dogs shut out, while they watched a movie on Tess’s computer. Carla Scout loved these picnics, as did Tess, because they involved paper plates and plastic cutlery. Nothing to wash but Mama’s wineglass—and that was always the last thing to go into the dishwasher each night.

  The rest of the evening was as sweet and easy as Tess could dare to hope. It was only at 10:00 P.M., when Tess was lying in Carla Scout’s bed, the girl curled into the nook of her arm, that she remembered the groceries that had never been put away. She extricated herself carefully—Carla Scout had a habit of throwing an arm and leg across Tess, like some sci-fi parasite securing its food source—and went into the kitchen, feeling loose and warm and happy.

  At the bottom of the last bag, she found a can of Pringles. How had her daughter smuggled them into the cart without her noticing? Then again, part of Eddie’s cachet was that employees still unloaded the contents of one’s cart onto the belt, with another person bagging at the end. Tess dug out the receipt to make sure she had paid for it. Carla Scout had
serious klepto instincts, although she usually took what she called tiny things—keys, coins, earrings. No, there wasn’t a can of Pringles on the receipt. But when could Carla Scout have grabbed it?

  There was a note, however, written on the back of the receipt, in now-familiar block printing:

  YOU MAY HAVE GOTTEN A LICENSE TO BE A PI, BUT YOU’D NEVER GET ONE TO BE A MOTHER. YOU’RE A CRAPPY MOTHER.

  Midnight

  Melisandre poured herself another glass of wine, checked her e-mail, noticed a quiver to her hands. Why hadn’t Harmony answered her? What else could she have to do on a Friday night in Baltimore? The young woman worked all the time. She had no life outside the project. Melisandre almost felt guilty about that. Almost.

  Harmony was right: It had been a risk, forcing Stephen to meet with her. But she couldn’t wait. That was her lifelong problem. When she wanted something, she couldn’t wait. This was not a consequence of being spoiled or indulged as a child. Melisandre had been raised by fond but detached parents who delegated as much child care as possible, then sent her to boarding school at age fourteen. Her father, so much older than her mother, had died when she was seventeen, and she had felt grief, but also sadness for not having a father she could miss more sincerely. Yet losing her mother last year had sent her reeling. They had grown closer during Melisandre’s time in Cape Town. It was her mother, facing stage 4 breast cancer, who had urged Melisandre to find a way to reenter Alanna’s and Ruby’s lives by any means necessary. But her mother didn’t know the whole story. Only two people did, Melisandre and Stephen.