by Jane Haddam
“I don’t understand what you see in her,” she’d told him, as he was pulling on his windbreaker and heading out back. He’d walk, of course. He couldn’t take the car. His license was suspended, and everybody at Waldorf Pines knew that.
“She’s such an unpleasant person,” she’d said, although she knew this was the worst possible tack to take. You couldn’t tell your nearly grown-up son that the woman he was spending his time with was an unpleasant person. That was not going to get him away from her and it wasn’t going to get him back to you.
“I’m sorry,” she’d said. “I don’t mean to criticize. But I don’t like her.”
“I don’t like her much, either.”
“Then I don’t see the point.”
“She’s good for me,” Michael had said. “You have no idea just how good she is for me.”
It was one of those conversations that left Eileen feeling a little strangled. She’d had a lot of them over the years, and not just with Michael. Her father had been like that, in the worst periods of his drinking. Her husband was still like that, and, as far as she could tell, he had neither drinking nor drugs to blame anything on. There were times she wished that she could just turn off the conversation and then turn off her mind as well, letting everything go.
This morning, she was so tired, the air felt like it had patterns. She thought she could reach out and touch it, and it would feel like a quilt. She had a headache. She had a feeling in her limbs as if all the blood had been drained out of them.
Michael had stayed out all night before. He stayed out all night often. Once or twice he’d disappeared for a day or two. For some reason, this time did not feel like all the others. She could not make herself do anything but sit here, in this vast kitchen, wondering how she had ever thought it was the answer to her prayers. She prayed a lot. She even got down on her knees and said the rosary, although she did it in her own bedroom, when Stephen was off at work, so that he wouldn’t see her and start railing about religion. Maybe that was why her life had turned out this way. Didn’t St. Paul say something about it in the Bible? It was wrong of believers to marry nonbelievers. It didn’t work out well. Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe believers were supposed to stay married to unbelievers, because that would change their minds. She had not changed Stephen’s mind. Stephen had not changed hers, but that hardly counted for anything. She hadn’t stayed true to God out of conviction. She’d only done it because she was afraid to do anything else.
She had coffee on the stove, but she didn’t want to drink it. She had muffins from the bakery in the refrigerator. She didn’t want to eat them. Michael ate almost nothing these days, and when he did eat what he ate was full of sugar.
“Listen,” she’d told him once—it was only a week ago now. She couldn’t believe it had been that recent. “Listen,” she’d said, thinking she was desperate. “There’s always one thing I can do. I can always go to the police.”
“Go to the police about what? The drugs? You’ve already gone to the police about the drugs. What good do you think it did?”
“I could go to the police about her,” Eileen said. She’d felt as if she were swimming through molasses. Sometimes she found it very hard to remember things. She remembered this from some kind of television program she’d watched, and she was desperately afraid that she’d got it all mixed up.
She’d gone on with it anyway. She’d had to go on with it. She couldn’t let her son disappear into the awful woman’s fantasies.
“I could go to the police,” she’d said again, piecing it together slowly. “I could make them charge her with rape. Because of the age difference.”
“You want to charge Martha Heydreich with rape?” Michael said. “Rape takes an unwilling partner. Hell, it takes a partner.”
“No, not unwilling,” Eileen had insisted. “It can be—it’s the age difference. I heard about it on television. If there’s enough of an age difference, the older person can be charged with rape. Something rape. There was a word for it.”
“Statutory,” Michael said. He’d sounded amused. “You’re talking about statutory rape.”
“Maybe,” Eileen had gone on. “If there’s enough of an age difference, the older person can be charged with statutory rape. Or some kind of rape. And they can be put in jail. And they can be put on the sex offender’s registry.”
“Only if the younger party is under eighteen,” Michael said. “And I’m not under eighteen.”
“She’s using you,” Eileen said. “You’ve got to see that. She’s using you. She’s got that silly husband of hers who’ll buy her anything she wants, and she’s got you to—she’s got you to—”
“To what?”
Eileen had turned her face away, to the wall. They were in the living room. It was a plain blank wall, without wallpaper. She had had nothing to take her mind off it.
“If you think she’s using me for sex,” Michael had said, “you’re out of your mind. I told you before about me and sex.”
Eileen had kept her face to the wall. That was a discussion she was not going to have again. Besides, she didn’t think he’d been telling the truth. It was the kind of thing he said when he was angry with her.
“I could go to the police,” she’d said, thinking only that if she said it often enough it would sink it, it would scare him somehow.
But nothing ever scared Michael. He had always thought of himself as invincible. He’d thought it when he was climbing trees and hanging down off them from his knees. He’d thought it when he was smoking marijuana and taking pills out of the medicine cabinet and going down into Philadelphia to buy things from people who looked like somebody’s worst nightmare on Law & Order.
“If you went to the police,” he’d said, “you’d look like a prime ass, and they wouldn’t be able to do anything anyway. It’s like I said. The younger party has to be under eighteen. But honestly, Mother, you don’t make any sense. One minute you’re insane because I’m gay, and the next minute you’re insane because you think I’m sleeping with a woman.”
“She’s not a nice woman,” Eileen had said. “And it’s not like—it’s not like you don’t have other opportunities. There’s that Marsh girl. She’s always mooning around after you. She’s always asking me about you. She’d go out with you if you asked her.”
“LizaAnne Marsh is a first-rate bitch and a tenth-rate everything else. I wouldn’t go out with her if she were made of gold and gave platinum when she came. You’ve got to be desperate if you’re trying to sic me on LizaAnne Marsh.”
“I’m not trying to sic you on anybody,” she’d said. She’d still had her back to him, but she’d known the conversation was over. He’d already started to sound bored. She kept looking at the paint as she listened to his footsteps walking away, walking across the carpet, walking across the tile of the foyer, opening the front door.
He’d stopped there and waited for a bit. Then he’d said, “I really am gay, you know. And it isn’t Martha Heydreich who’s using me.”
Now she sat in the kitchen and tried to make sense of it. If Michael and Martha Heydreich had been out all night together, Arthur would know about it. He would at least know that his wife had been out. Would he know that his wife had been spending time with Michael? Eileen had no idea how these things worked. Stephen could have been having affairs with every other woman at the club, and she wouldn’t have been able to tell.
The kitchen was a cavern. It echoed. Copper pots hung from the ceiling. A stove big enough to cook for a restaurant took up most of one wall. How had she imagined that she would be able to work in here, cook in here, feel at home in here?
It had been so long since she had felt at home anywhere—ah, but that was a cliché. Michael would hate the sound of it.
She took a very deep breath. She sucked up all the air in the room. She could always do the most obvious thing. She could always walk herself right over there and ring the doorbell. She wondered what the house was like. She’d never b
een in it. Maybe there were pink carpets on the floors. Maybe there were pink wallpapers on the walls. Arthur Heydreich was somebody she saw around once in a while. He was so normal. He did something professional in Philadelphia.
She would not go over to that house. She would not ring the doorbell. She had no idea what she would say if she did. Michael was nineteen. He could do what he wanted to do. He could do everything except buy alcohol. Did that make even the least amount of sense?
She thought about calling her sister-in-law, but she didn’t. Stephen’s sisters thought it was all her fault. No other Platte had ever turned out like Michael. She must have done something to him. She thought about calling her own sister, and didn’t. Her sister was one of those people for whom bad luck is a myth, a rumor—the kind of thing that happened to other people, and was probably an excuse for their own fault. She thought about calling one of those advice programs she sometimes listened to on the radio, and then she felt like an idiot.
Michael was out there, somewhere. He was either dead or dying, lying in a ditch, on the side of the road, in an alley somewhere where he’d gone to buy drugs and ended up getting robbed and murdered instead. He was with a prostitute, who would make him ill. He was with Martha Heydreich, who was making him crazy. He had told her the truth when he told her he was gay. He had lied when he told her he was gay. She had lost him, utterly and completely, before he was ten years old.
And she didn’t know why.
5
Horace Wingard knew for a certainty that everybody who lived at Waldorf Pines knew that his name was a fake, just as they knew his accent was a fake. Fake was not an issue at Waldorf Pines. He knew it wouldn’t be as soon as he saw the place. That was why he had felt it was so important to get the job here when he first thought about it. It was all well and good to say that you should be yourself. What if yourself was not what you really were? Not everybody had the good luck to be born into exactly the right circumstances. Some people didn’t have the luck to be born into even approximately the right circumstances. Horace himself had bombed out completely in the luck department, being born, but he thought he’d won the sweepstakes on substance. Horace was exactly the person he wanted himself to be. He only needed to tweak the ornamentation a little bit to make it all perfect.
Or nearly perfect. There was nothing Horace Wingard could do about time, and that meant he was living in the twenty-first century instead of the nineteenth. He would have done much better in the Philadelphia of the 1890s, when people knew how they were supposed to live.
Horace looked across his desk and frowned a little at the computer. The computer always looked out of place. Then he got the big ledger book out of the desk’s center drawer and opened it at the computer’s side. He liked the ledger book better than anything else he had to work with managing Waldorf Pines.
“Miss Vaile?” he said.
Miss Vaile put her head through the door at the far end of the room. Horace had hired her the way men usually hired secretaries, for her looks—but not for the kind of looks most men would have gone in for. Horace did not care one way or the other about a large chest or a face like Marilyn Monroe’s. He had no idea if he was gay or straight and didn’t want to find out. The whole idea of sex had always seemed to him to be more than a little insulting. No, he wanted Miss Vaile because she was the picture of the sort of woman who would have been secretary at a golf club in a novel by Henry James, except that in a novel by Henry James she would have come to her job through a distress in her circumstances.
Miss Vaile was actually from Paoli, and had gone to a very good secretarial school.
She came into the room with her steno pad in her hand. The steno pad was useless—Miss Vaile did her work on a computer, too, and she was good at it—but Horace liked the effect it made, and he insisted on it. She came across the carpet to his desk, glancing just a moment at the fire burning in the fireplace. Horace had heard her complain that he acted as if he thought the club’s furnace was going to destruct at any moment.
She stopped by the desk and waited, patiently. That was also something Horace had taught her to do. He was not unaware that the job at the club was a very good one, and that he made it better in a thousand different ways that added up over time. Horace was one of those people who expected to get what he paid for.
“The cotillion,” he said now. “I was supposed to have the paperwork on my desk this morning. How many tables in the dining room, how many girls to be introduced, everything. We have to have the paperwork or we don’t know what to do next.”
“I quite agree with you.”
“And?”
Miss Vaile did not shrug. Horace did not like people who shrugged. Instead, she looked up out of the great tall windows that gave a view over the eighteenth hole and pinched her nose ever so slightly. When Miss Vaile pinched her nose, you knew that something truly impossible was happening.
“We don’t have the paperwork,” she said. “At least, it hasn’t come to my attention, and that’s where it should have come. There’s no sign of it anywhere.”
“And this is—who? Who was supposed to bring it in? Caroline Stanford-Pyrie?”
“No,” Miss Vaile said. “Mrs. Stanford-Pyrie is the head of the committee, but it’s Mrs. Heydreich who has charge of the paperwork. I did talk to Mrs. Stanford-Pyrie, of course, but she told me to talk to Mrs. Heydreich.”
“And?”
There was the pinch of the nose again. “I haven’t been able to reach her.”
“What do you mean, you haven’t been able to reach her?”
“I’ve called several times,” Miss Vaile said, “but there’s been no answer. She was supposed to be at a meeting in the dining room this morning, but she did not show up. I’ve talked to both Mrs. Stanford-Pyrie and Mrs. Carstairs. There’s been no sign of her. I called her house. The maid said she was out.”
“Extraordinary.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so,” Miss Vaile said, “there have been other things to attend to this morning. There’s been that business with the security cameras. I thought it was going to be a fairly simple sort of thing, but the more I look into it, the more complicated it gets. I know you told me to handle it myself, but I’m not sure I can.”
“You’re not sure you can handle a broken security camera by yourself,” Horace said. “What can there possibly be to handle? You call the repair company and they come right out and fix it.”
“I did call the repair company.”
“And they haven’t come out?”
“They have come out,” Miss Vaile said. “They came out immediately. We would expect them to. We pay them a significant bonus to make sure that they always come out immediately.”
“Then I don’t understand what the problem is. They’ve come out, they should fix it. Or is it very badly damaged? Do we need a new one? That shouldn’t be a problem.”
It was Miss Vaile’s turn to look somewhere else. She looked into the fire. “It’s not damaged,” she said finally. “In fact, at the moment, it’s working perfectly normally.”
Horace frowned slightly. “That can’t be right,” he said. “There was dead time this morning. I saw it.”
“Yes, I know.” Miss Vaile sighed. “The gentleman from the security company saw it, too. I saw it. But the fact is that there is nothing wrong with it. With the equipment, I mean. The equipment is functioning normally. It’s just that, last night, between ten forty-five and twelve thirty, it stopped functioning normally, and nobody knows why.”
Horace stared at her, amazed. “And that’s it?” he said. “That’s all anybody’s going to say about it? It stopped functioning normally and nobody knows why? There has to be a reason for these things. They don’t just sort of happen out of nowhere, for no reason.”
“I do understand that,” Miss Vaile said. “And the man from the security company also understands it. That’s why he’s still here. But it’s all we’ve got at the moment, except for the fact that it wasn’t the only ca
mera that malfunctioned last night. They all did.”
Horace Wingard put his hands down flat on his desk. He thoroughly hated computers and everything that went with them, but that was not the same thing as saying that he didn’t understand them.
“Are you saying the entire security system went down? For nearly two hours in the middle of the night?”
“I don’t know,” Miss Vaile said. “I don’t think so. He didn’t mention anything about the alarms. I think he would have if they had malfunctioned. What he said was that it looked as if somebody had turned the system off and then turned it back on again.”
“Turned it off and then turned it on again,” Horace Wingard said.
“It could have been done,” Miss Vaile pointed out. “It was only necessary to flip the switch in this office. It might have been an accident.”
“If you mean I might have had an accident, Miss Vaile, I can assure you I didn’t. And what’s left after that? Possibly one of the residents just waltzed in here when I wasn’t looking—”
“It really isn’t out of the question,” Miss Vaile said. “Especially at that time of night. There are always a lot of people in the club house, playing bridge, that kind of thing. And if you’re here at all, you’re out and around, not sitting at your desk. And I, of course, am not here at all. And I do think the man would have mentioned if something had gone wrong with the alarms.”
“I don’t think he would have,” Horace said. “He’d be scared to death we’d move to another company on the spot. We can’t have things like this. The whole point of Waldorf Pines is that we provide security twenty-four/seven. There aren’t going to be any home invasions here. There aren’t going to be any incidents, either, where your ex-wife shows up ready to blow your head off. We can’t afford to have a system in place that goes down and leaves us vulnerable for two hours in the middle of the night. Can you get that man up here to talk to me right away?”