She’d never even made it out of town.
“He told me this was for the best,” Gigi cried. “He said he’d take care of me, and he’d take care of the girls. It’d be easier for them if they didn’t have to grieve for their mom, and they’d want for nothing.”
“Who?” Julia asked.
“The senator!”
“No. It can’t be,” Julia said.
“But, Mom,” Charlie said, “yesterday Dad said—” His voice caught. “Lorrie said he told her that he knew her mother.”
“Julia, I assure you, this has nothing to do with you,” Victor Underhill said.
“I think the authorities need to make that determination,” Tim Blum said. “I’m calling for backup. In the meantime, I’ll take these folks in for questioning.”
The voices were coming to me as if through a fog, so far away. I was breathing hard. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t catch my breath. From somewhere far away, a deep wail filled the room. Lennox had stepped up to me, and her arms were around me, holding me up, holding me still.
23
TRUER THAN THE TRUTH
IT TOOK THE POLICE A HALF DOZEN INTERVIEWS with Aunt Gigi to piece it together, what had happened that night.
There’d been a party at the Copeland Compound. The Copelands had had parties before, of course. But Gigi herself had never been invited. This time, she was. Practically all of Idlewild had been. Mom had already made plans to celebrate Gigi’s thirtieth birthday at Edgewater with Susannah and me, and she told Gigi she didn’t want to go to the party. But since Gigi was the birthday girl, it was her vote that mattered. So Mom agreed to hire a babysitter. She brought her new boyfriend, Nigel, to Idlewild for the first time. He’d be Mom’s date to the party.
Maybe Mom had wanted to make the senator jealous because he wouldn’t leave his wife for her; maybe she’d wanted to show him that she’d finally moved on and there were no hard feelings. Likely it was something in between, but we’d never know, because the only person who could tell us had been dead for over a decade.
Gigi hadn’t known anything about it at the time, because she hadn’t known that Mom and the senator had had any kind of relationship. She hadn’t even known they’d ever met before. All she knew was that there was a party at the Compound, on her birthday. A sign that the universe wanted her to have an extra-special celebration. She wore a new dress that she’d bought just for the occasion, and tucked her little poodle, Katie, into her bag, her date for the evening. There were passed hors d’oeuvres, and Katie got to taste duck confit and caviar and even a tiny sip of the specialty cocktail Gigi was drinking—champagne-infused Christmas punch. It was a Christmas-in-July party, and there were lights in the trees and ornaments everywhere. At the end of the party, guests were told they could choose an ornament to take home and put on their own trees on the real holiday.
The only part of the night that hadn’t been perfect was that they hadn’t had a chance to speak to the senator or his wife. Gigi didn’t want to leave without thanking them for a wonderful night—it wasn’t polite, she said. But the Copelands were nowhere in sight, and Mom insisted it was time to go.
They’d almost reached the front door when suddenly, like magic, the senator appeared in front of them. Mom didn’t have much to say, but Gigi gushed enough for them both about what a spectacular evening it had been, even though she hadn’t seen her cake at the dessert buffet. She’d worked so hard on it—three-tiered with buttercream icing and, no doubt, delicious. But the drinks were amazing, Gigi said. She just loved specialty drinks at a party. She told the senator she’d lost count of how many she’d had.
Nigel had also had a lot to drink, and he slurred his words when the senator asked him if he, too, had enjoyed the party. That was when Franklin Copeland offered to drive them home. He said he could get them home safely because he’d had only two drinks over the course of the night. A claim that Julia Copeland, when she was called in for questioning, would corroborate: The senator had a two-drink rule for himself when it came to social events. He always wanted to maintain control. It was a rule he abided by until the day he died.
Mom said the ride home wasn’t necessary—it wasn’t far at all, and she had also limited herself to two drinks, and besides, what would they do about her car? The senator said he held his liquor better than my mother did. Gigi had no idea how he knew that, but it didn’t matter to her. She brushed Mom off and said they’d love the ride and she’d come back in the morning for Mom’s Volvo herself. The senator led them to his white Mercedes, and Gigi got to sit in the front passenger seat. Mom and Nigel were together in the back. They cruised down Break Run. Gigi had rolled her window down and let Katie out of her purse, because even a poodle should get to experience the pure, unadulterated joy of being in a car driven by Senator Franklin Copeland, with the sea breeze ruffling her fur and the ocean roaring in her ears.
But then . . .
But then Katie jumped across the divide, into the backseat. Gigi twisted around to retrieve her. Katie was on Mom’s lap, wagging her tail. Nigel had nodded off, though they’d only been in the car about five minutes. And Mom was sitting there, oblivious to Katie, her eyes lasered in on the rearview mirror.
Maybe it was because it was dark, and the curve in the road near the Point was too hard to see. Maybe it was because Katie jumped back, and when Gigi reached around to get her, she knocked the senator’s elbow on the gearshift.
Maybe it was because he was returning Mom’s fixed gaze.
There was a smash, metal on metal, harder and louder than anything Gigi even knew was possible. They went through the guardrail and hit the water with the same force, the same sound. Water rushed in, and the car filled up fast. The water was as cold as ice, and Gigi tried to keep her head up, where there was air, but she was sinking down, freezing. The senator grabbed her hand and pushed her through a window. The headlights of the car flickered off, and the ocean was as dark as a cave. Gigi kicked and kicked but couldn’t tell if she was moving up or down. Finally her head broke the surface, and she could breathe again. And the senator helped her swim to shore.
He went back under and tried to get Mom and Nigel—and Katie, too. But it was too late. So he sent Gigi home with instructions to stay quiet. Not to tell Susannah or me what had happened to our mom. Not to tell anyone. He had a guy who could fix anything, he said. And his guy would repair the guardrail and arrange for it to look like Mom had moved away with Nigel. He’d get rid of Mom’s car and clean out her apartment. He’d explain it all to whoever needed to know these things. He’d take care of everything.
Susannah and I wouldn’t have to grieve the death of a parent. The senator told Gigi it’d be easier that way. And he said we’d always be taken care of. He wired the first payment into her account the next day.
Just before sunset on the day after Gigi’s thirtieth birthday, she walked Susannah and me over to the Point. She told us to pick puffer flowers and blow wishes into the water. Gigi ran her hand along the rail. She couldn’t find the part that was new. It looked the same as it always had.
“I think right then,” Gigi said, sitting on an old, scraped-up wooden chair, at an old, scraped-up wooden table, in a back room of the Idlewild Police Precinct, “that’s when I started to believe that the story was true. That this was actually Danielle’s plan, to run off with Nigel and leave the girls behind with me. You tell yourself a story for long enough, it becomes truer than the truth itself.”
Tim Blum wrote it all down and filed his report.
24
THE PARTY FOR CERTAIN
GIGI HAD BEEN TAKEN STRAIGHT FROM THE POLICE station to Idlewild General for psychiatric evaluation, where she was promptly admitted for treatment of a host of things—depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder. Mom had been dead for well over a decade, but suddenly it seemed that there was urgency to plan a funeral, and it was up to Susannah and me. There were so many choices: venue, flowers, and if anyone would speak. It made me think of Gigi
and the details of her birthday party that she wouldn’t have after all—I guess the only party you can be certain of is your own funeral.
Mom’s funeral would be small, we decided. Just us, plus Brian and Lennox and the moms, for moral support. More people would increase the odds that someone would tip off the press to the details, and we wanted to keep the press away. Though they were everywhere. If you turned on the news, it seemed as if Idlewild was the center of the universe. Members of the media, and regular people, too, had camped out in clusters at the bottom of the driveway to Edgewater, by the gates at the Compound, and at the Point. The roadside memorials had grown to gargantuan proportions. In the pictures I’d seen, I could barely make out the driveway to our house under the crush of flowers and candles and pictures and poems.
I was no stranger to stares and gossip, having been the girl in “that house” for so much of my life. But this was a whole different universe of notoriety. I was famous; my image was on television and all over the Internet—pictures lifted from my Facebook profile and candid shots from last year’s Hillyer yearbook. People I would never know were getting magazines and newspapers delivered. They were reading about me, and saying my name out loud, in between bites of scrambled eggs and loads of laundry.
I’d been hiding out in Lennox’s house for days. Allyson Sackler and Meeghan Kandell had been named emergency temporary guardians to Susannah and me, and it was a relief to be taken care of. There was plenty of toilet paper at their house; in fact, each bathroom was stocked with extra rolls, and you never saw the supply diminish, because the minute you put in the replacement roll, a replacement to the replacement appeared under the sink. The food in the fridge was always fresh. The electric bill had been paid, and every last light fixture worked. Susannah had wanted to stay back at Edgewater, which was crazy to me. Why choose Edgewater over a house of order? But of course Edgewater was where her menagerie was. So at night Susannah bunked with me in the guest suite, and in the morning one of the moms would drive her through the thicket of onlookers so she could visit with all her creatures—including Brian.
The morning of Gigi’s birthday, the morning of Mom’s funeral, Allyson dropped Susannah at Edgewater early so she could feed the cats. She said she’d shower and get ready over there. Brian would bring her to the cemetery. I hadn’t thought ahead to funeral clothes when I’d shoved my jeans, a couple of T-shirts, underwear, and bras into my oversize Goyard bag to head over to Lennox’s house, and I didn’t have anything to wear to Mom’s service. But Lennox procured something from the back of Harper’s closet—a gray skirt and matching top. I was glad it wasn’t mine, so I wouldn’t have to put it back and see it in my closet between a sundress and my barn jacket.
I’d never have to see it again.
When I walked into the kitchen, Allyson was back. She folded up the newspaper she’d been reading at the counter and stuck it into a drawer, presumably to hide it from me. A pointless victory, because there was a desktop computer in the guest room, and I’d already seen a hundred articles about Franklin Copeland’s secret accident twelve years earlier, his affair with the woman in the backseat, and the child that relationship had produced: Susannah.
Of everything that had happened, that was the worst thing—that Susannah had to learn the truth of her parentage. I didn’t know how it had gotten out. I hadn’t told a soul, and through all of Gigi’s police interviews, she hadn’t mentioned it, which meant she hadn’t known or maybe even suspected it. The news outlet that broke that part of the story cited “an unnamed source close to the family.” Brian was on Susannah to get genetic testing done, to give proof that the rumor was true. It was just a cheek swab, he said. And then she’d be entitled to some of the Copeland inheritance. But Susannah said she didn’t care about the money; she never had cared about such things. I’d certainly never get a cheek swab to show anyone I was anything but a hundred percent Susannah’s sister, and I had fantasies of tracking the unnamed source down and throttling him.
“How about something to eat before we go?” Meeghan asked me. “Anything you want—a waffle, an omelet?”
I had a feeling if I’d said what I was really in the mood for was a hard-shelled lobster garnished with beluga caviar, she’d dive into the ocean herself and wouldn’t come up for air until she’d found them.
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“You’ve hardly been eating,” she said. “And I’m a mom, so I know your mom would want you to eat today. Some fruit? Cereal? Milk or no milk, it’s up to you.”
“Leave her alone, Meegs,” Lennox said. I offered Lennox a grateful smile, but when I sat down next to her, she nudged her toast slathered with fig jam over toward me. I took the smallest of conciliatory bites, and then I had to chew for about a full minute to get it down.
The phone rang, and Allyson picked it up and checked the caller ID. “Assholes,” she said. She clicked the button to answer, then hung it straight back up. “God, those reporters. I turned the ringer on not two minutes ago, because Craig was supposed to be calling right back.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
“What are you apologizing for?”
“They wouldn’t bother you if I wasn’t staying here.”
“So we’ll turn off the ringer again.” Meeghan shot Allyson a look. “It’s no big deal.”
“The calls aren’t all bad,” Lennox said. “Everyone from Hillyer has called to check in. I saved some of the messages on my cell. I can play them for you, if you’d like.”
I shook my head. Kids from Hillyer, people I’d never even been friends with, were quoted in the articles, too, commenting on everything from what classes I took to how I never invited my family to Visiting Day. Anything to be a part of the story.
“Has Charlie called?” I asked.
“No, I’m sorry. He hasn’t.”
“I’m sure the entire Copeland family is thinking about you right now,” Meeghan said. “Especially Charlie. But he has his own grief to deal with, too. Yesterday must’ve been a particularly hard day for him.”
Yesterday had been Senator Copeland’s funeral. Not the public spectacle Julia had been planning. Instead, a dozen family members sailed out a couple of miles on the Atlantic and scattered his ashes. I’d seen pictures on the Internet of that, too, captured by cameramen with telephoto lenses. But no other details were released.
“I don’t want you to think for a second that you should be staying anywhere but here,” Allyson told me. She’d come up behind me and squeezed my shoulders. “But we should get going. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
I SAT IN THE BACKSEAT OF THE MOMS’ CAR, BESIDE Lennox. There weren’t any news vans outside the gates to Dream Hollow, but once we made the turn onto Lamb Avenue, there they were, lining both sides of the street.
“Don’t run over anyone’s toes,” Meeghan said as Allyson maneuvered slowly through the throng.
“I wouldn’t mind if you did,” I said.
“Oh, Lorrie,” Allyson said, and I could tell by her voice that she was smiling. “I’d do almost anything to please you right now.”
She drove through the cemetery gates. I spotted Tim Blum’s cruiser and Brian’s red pickup beside it. He and Susannah got out of the truck and walked toward us. Susannah was in a slate-blue peasant dress. Her hair, which she’d cut herself after the fire, was brushed out and damp at the ends. Brian was in his good jeans, a button-down that looked like he’d rescued it from the bottom of a pile of laundry, and a skinny tie. He was holding Susannah’s hand, and I remembered the feeling of Charlie’s hand in mine. How strange that I’d lost my mother because of his father; even so, I wanted him with me when we finally buried her.
From a few yards away, I could hear the click, click, click of a couple dozen camera shutters, capturing us in staccato movements. We’d been found out, despite our best efforts to keep things private. Tim Blum stood in front of us, as if his one body could shield the six of us from the photographers.
We walked up the driveway together and entered the main building, which was filled with fresh-cut flowers. Like the flowers lining Break Run Road. It seemed a strange tradition, flowers to honor those who’d died. All I could think about was how they’d be dead soon, too.
A man in a dark blue suit approached us. He introduced himself as the funeral director, Ed Seeley. I nodded; I’d spoken to him on the phone. He led us down a corridor to a room filled with plush couches in pastel colors. There were boxes of tissues on every surface. “I know this is hard,” Ed Seeley said. His mouth was set straight, but there was the warmth of a smile behind his eyes. “I’m going to do what I can to help you through this.”
“The girls appreciate that,” Meeghan said.
“Yes, thank you,” Susannah said.
“No thanks required. I’m just doing my job, and as you requested, we’ll have a small graveside service. Your mother will be buried on the far side of the cemetery.”
There’d been no body to recover, as Tim Blum had said. Just the remnants of jewelry she’d been wearing and what were probably fillings from her teeth, or maybe Nigel’s. Nigel’s own father had died, it turned out, but his extended family had been notified. Across the ocean, perhaps he was being memorialized in some way. The moms had suggested that Susannah and I put the few things that remained in a casket so there’d be some part of Mom to visit.
“It’s quite private,” Ed Seeley went on. “You can’t see it from the road, and there are oak trees right there, so it gets nice shade.”
“That sounds peaceful,” Allyson said. She squeezed my hand. “I think your mom would’ve liked that.”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded.
“And which one of you is speaking?” Ed Seeley asked.
“I am,” I said.
That had been another suggestion from the moms. They’d pulled me aside a couple days ago and told me in confidence that they’d written a similar request into their living wills about wanting Harper and Lennox to speak at their funerals one day. Their daughters didn’t know about it; the moms didn’t want to upset them with thoughts of their eventual death. But when you go through something sad, everyone is more inclined to tell you their own sad stories—even those that haven’t happened yet.
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