“You really don’t mind about Bixby?” Melanie’s hair listed in the gentle jet stream from the air conditioning vent. It was the kind of expensive breeze one felt off the coast of Saint Barts. One that lifted your hair just so for pictures.
“Why would I mind?”
“Well, I know it must be painful for you, thinking that he might be happier with . . . someone else.”
“Someone like you, you mean,” I said.
“I wasn’t saying that.” Worry pinched the corners of her mouth white. Narrowed the upturned corners of her Disney princess eyes.
And I knew where that worry had come from.
My acknowledging the game was a direct break from our pattern of Melanie’s pretending not to notice how insulting she was being and my pretending that it didn’t hurt my feeling. No, that’s not a typo. I’m pretty sure I only have one and most of the time I’d name it irritation.
“Not out loud, no. But you were ever so delicately and deftly implying it.”
Now, she wasn’t worried, she was panicked. “If I said something to upset you, I—”
“You may as well cut the crap, Melanie. We’re the only two people in the car, and I’ve already caught your whole routine. Shall I save us both some time and acknowledge that you’re prettier, smarter, richer, and better than I am at probably everything?”
Her color had gone all hectic, cheeks staining a blotchy red that did nothing for her complexion. If this look had a season, it would be Nuclear Summer. “But that’s not true. There are lots of things you’re better at than me.”
“Name one,” I said.
“Well you . . . that one time when you . . . I’ve always noticed your . . .” She sounded like a busted record playing, the needle of her logic bumping from groove to groove.
“Ever heard of quitting while you’re ahead, Mels?”
“Breaking rules!” Triumph beamed from her face like sunshine. “You’re better than anyone I’ve ever met at breaking rules.”
This brought me up short. The sarcastic reply I had at the ready froze in my throat. “What?”
“Breaking rules. You’re always doing whatever you want whenever the hell you want to do it, no matter what anyone else says.”
“And you don’t?”
She scoffed. A harsher sound than had ever issued from that delicate white throat. “Are you kidding me? I’m great at doing what other people want to me to do. My mother. My father. College professors. Dean Koontz. Gary Dawes.”
“Like what kind of stuff are we talking about here? I need a solid example.” And by solid example, I mostly wanted to know if she’d choked on Dawes’s hog log.
“Like playing the piano. Like getting straight As. Like going to law school,” Melanie said.
These mild revelations left my tongue feeling like I’d just licked a battery. “You didn’t want to go to law school?”
“No. I didn’t.”
I blinked at her, this creature who couldn’t have been more alien to me at this moment if her head split open and tentacles started waving from the crevice. “Then why did you go?”
Melanie pulled up to the stoplight, the car gently rolling to a stop like a gliding swan. The reflection of red traffic lights turned her eyes an alarming shade of violet.
“I have two older brothers, you see. One of them is a doctor. The other is a research scientist just like Mother and Father. That left one box open for me. Lawyer.”
I blinked at her. Inside the safety of my mother’s construction, the fields were wide and the options endless. She’d fed me freedom along with my breakfast cereal.
You can be anything, Janey. Do anything.
I could not comprehend what life would be like any other way.
“But it’s not like they can force you.”
“Can’t they?”
“You’re a grown-ass woman, Melanie. What can they do to you?”
“Aside from disinheriting me? Kicking me out into the street without a dime to my name. No car. No money. Nowhere to go. When you’ve been given everything, everything can be taken away.”
This, I had never thought about. Only how much easier life would have been had I not had to scratch and fight for every goddamn thing I ever had.
“You could get a job,” I said.
“Doing what?”
“Anything. Hostessing. Waitressing.”
“Jane, I’ve never had a job. I’ve never so much as filled out an application.”
“But you’re wrong. You would have had to fill out an application to get into college, at least. And law school.”
“Not if your father is best friends with the admissions board. Or golfing buddies with Dean Koontz. You see?”
I was beginning to.
And what I was beginning to see was making me all kinds of cranky.
“I’m qualified to do one thing and one thing only. Be a lawyer. This is what my parents paid for. This is what I know how to do. I’ve never so much as run a cash register. I’ve never filled out an application. I’ve never even done my own laundry.”
I stared at her, reminding myself to blink. How could someone get to our age and be so fantastically unprepared for life’s most basic tasks? All the skills I had taken for granted. All the things my mother had insisted that I learn to do for myself.
I knew how to clean a gun before most people had learned how to ride a bike. I’d learned how to ride a bike before most children knew how to read. I knew how to read before some children had been potty trained.
The more you know how to do for yourself, the less you need anyone else, Janey. The less you need anyone else, the safer you’ll be.
“Doing your own laundry is totally overrated. As is breaking the rules, for that matter. It’s a royal pain in the ass, having to talk yourself out of trouble all the damn time.”
“But you know how, is my point. I wouldn’t even know how to start.”
“Easy,” I said. “Next time someone tells you to do something, do the exact opposite.”
“I couldn’t—”
“You could.”
Then Melanie’s car started ringing. Not her phone, but the car, the sound of her ringtone filling the cabin through the speakers. The glowing backlit display on the dashboard flashed “Mother.”
Melanie’s sigh was long and deep. “I have to take this.” She punched a button on the steering wheel, and the call connected. “Hello, Mother,” she said evenly.
“Melanie, darling. What are you doing downtown?” Even irritated, Melanie’s mother had a voice that conjured sprawling New England lawns. Cool glasses of lemonade served on wooden verandas, the blades of outdoor fans circling lazily overhead. Old money.
“I’m on my way to the country club.”
“Oh? And what were you doing in the Highlands area before that?”
“I was picking up a friend.”
“And who might you be collecting in that area of town?” Her mouth handled the word like it was a dirty diaper—pinched by the extreme edges, held as far away from her person as possible.
“Buffy Von Lumpling,” I said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Beidermeyer.” I affected a southern accent far more stereotypical than the one Melanie and her mother favored, knowing by instinct how it would horrify them both.
A distinct chill came over the line.
“My apologies, Miss Von Lumpling. I wasn’t aware my daughter wasn’t alone in the vehicle.” Her diction was at once stiff, cold, and perfectly polite.
“Well, I’m mighty grateful to your daughter for being willing to give me a ride to the country club. My Festiva broke down earlier today, and I’d hate to miss my interview.” I’d offered her a choice in this sentence. Two very problematic words, and she could only pick one of them to chew on. I had a pretty good idea which one she’d choose.
“Interview?”
“Yeah. I’m trying to land me a job as napkin girl in the dining room. I’ve been practicing folding napkin swans all damn day.”
The teenie
st, tiniest shadow flickered at the corner of Melanie’s mouth. The mere forethought of a smile.
“I wasn’t aware my daughter had friends with those kinds of qualifications.”
“Oh, I don’t know that I’d call us friends.” I winked at Melanie. “More like acquaintances.”
Relief smoothed some of the ire out of the Beidermeyer matriarch’s voice. “That makes more sense, I suppose.”
“It’s my brother she’s closest to. What with their having made out in the closet at the last Beta Theta Pi mixer.”
Melanie’s eyes went as wide as duck eggs as her mother made a gurgling sound through the car’s speakers. I imagined top-shelf vodka fumes puffing out of Mrs. Beidermeyer’s nose as she choked on her evening cocktail.
“Speaking of acquaintances, you think you could put in a good word for me, Mrs. B? I’d bet those folks at the country club would be willing to overlook my record if I had someone like you vouching for me.”
“Record?”
“Oh, it’s nothing major. A few misdemeanors here, an aggravated assault there. We’ve all gotten up to the dickens now and then, am I right, Mrs. B?”
The Mrs. Beidermeyer in my mind steadied herself on a Hepplewhite secretaire. “Melanie, please disengage me from the speaker phone this minute. I need to speak with you privately.”
“There’s no need to do that,” I insisted. “I’ll just stick my fingers in my ears while y’all talk.”
“Melanie.”
“I can hum too, if that’d help. Here goes nothing.” I warbled out the first few bars of “I Wish I Was in Dixie” as shrilly and emphatically as I could.
“Melanie Leigh Beidermeyer—”
“Oh, all right, all right. We’ll take you off speaker. Is that what this button here does?” I pushed the “End Call” button, and the car’s interior went silent.
Melanie blinked at me, her face pale with shock.
“You just hung up on my mother.” The wonder and alarm in her voice would have been just as appropriate to an announcement that the sun had imploded or something similar.
“Well, shoot,” I said, not entirely out of the dialect. “Is that what I did?”
“You just hung up on my mother.”
The car began ringing once again. Melanie answered it with the punch of a button. “I’m so sorry, Mother. Buffy must have pushed the wrong button.”
“A thousand pardons, Mrs. B. I ain’t used to all this fancy gadgetry your daughter has up in here.”
“Perhaps it might be best if you acquired transportation more akin to your level of comfort next time, then.” The acid in her tone could have eaten through a whole pallet of steel rebar.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to imply your daughter shouldn’t ought to have offered me a ride, Mrs. B.”
“You’re more astute than I would have guessed, Miss Von Lumpling.”
“Why thank you, Mrs. B. And for what it’s worth, I think your twat’s probably warmer than the icicle you have lodged up your keister.”
Melanie and Mrs. Beidermeyer favored me with identical gasps.
“Melanie, you will drop her off and come home at once.”
“How about nope.” I disconnected the call.
“I can’t believe you did that. I could never hang up on my mother like that.”
“Sure you could. Watch this.” So I hit the “Redial” button and waited to hear Mrs. Beidermeyer’s terse greeting on the other end of the phone before hanging up on her a third time, just for good measure “See? Easy.”
“She’s going to be livid.”
“She’s already livid. And guess what? You’re okay. See how the sidewalk isn’t littered with birds that fell out of the sky? See how the laws of gravity didn’t come unraveled and the earth didn’t cease to spin on its axis?”
“You don’t understand how Mother can be. When she gets into one of her rages . . .” Melanie trailed off, her eyes wide with worry.
“How the hell did she know where you were, anyway?” I asked.
“The car’s GPS sends my parents a text whenever I stray from the boundaries of my prescribed area.”
What she said was shocking enough, but it was the way she said it. Like this was a completely natural thing for any parent to do. Track your every move via GPS and call to check should you stray out of the prescribed area. Melanie Beidermeyer was a beautiful bird that had long since stopped pecking at the bars of her gilded cage.
But. But.
“There may be hope for you yet,” I said.
She brightened incrementally. “You really think so?”
“I do. I highly doubt your parents would approve of matching you with Bixby, and yet you asked me to set you up. You probably knew you’d get tagged for coming downtown to get me, and you did it anyway. We may find a rebel in you yet.”
She sat up straighter in her seat, apparently encouraged by having these small signs pointed out to her.
We pulled up through the semicircular drive in front of the country club, a sprawling building with glowing windows, immaculately clipped hedges, and the wood-shingled exterior of an unassumingly expensive Hamptons vacation home. White columns and crisp trim lent it the air of old southern money. The kind of place where the sound of golf cleats crunching on the imported gravel and the shadows of wide-brimmed garden hats would be ubiquitous in summer.
Almost immediately, two men clad in khakis and golf shirts came jogging out to the car and opened each of our doors.
Melanie handed a neatly folded stack of bills to one of them and gracefully levered herself out of the car. I followed suit with considerably more skirt adjusting and throat clearing.
Two more men opened the double doors for us as we approached, their timing impeccably attuned to our very gait, it seemed.
I had expected a broad oak entrance desk of the kind you’d expect to find at a courthouse or somewhere else where entry is carefully monitored and strictly enforced. Instead, there was only a small but immaculately neat concierge desk to the left of the entrance, outfitted with a spray of fresh flowers and a tall glass dispenser of water studded with cucumber slices and mint leaves. The slim monitor next to it was manned by a just as slim man.
His face opened like a flower at dawn when he spotted Melanie.
“Melanie! How lovely to see you. And have you brought us a friend?”
I couldn’t make out a single trace of buried irony or disapproval, and believe me, I looked.
“Yes, Hillard. This is my good friend—”
“Buffy Von Lumpling,” I finished for her, offering my hand.
He shook it, ending with a warm and welcoming squeeze. “What a spectacular name. I’ll bet your parents just have the most fabulous sense of humor.”
“They’re dead.” I tried on a sepulchral tone, waiting for the thin mask of kindness to shatter.
It didn’t.
Hillard moved from delight to perfectly calibrated dismay in a nanosecond. Oh, this dude was good, all right. But I’d figure out his game soon enough.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“I barely knew them. Vehicular accident was what went on the police reports, but personally, I thought it was a mob hit.”
Melanie side-hoofed my ankle, apparently not a fan of the mob-hit angle.
“Hillard, Buffy is visiting from out of town for a few days, and I thought it might be nice to show her some local hospitality. Would you mind setting up a temporary membership for her?” Dark lashes feathered against her high cheekbones. This artful combination of lilting accent and demure southern femininity had felled men for as long as men could be felled. She was Zelda Fitzgerald. Scarlett O’Hara.
“How lovely. Of course I will. We’d be delighted to have you. How long will you be staying?”
“Just until the rash clears up,” I said. “My dermatologist thought the mountain air would do me good.”
Another horrified sideways glance from Melanie.
“Well, we’ll be
happy to take care of you for as long as you’re here.” He dipped into a desk drawer and extracted a key card, which he slid into some kind of scanner and slipped across the desk. “Here you are. Melanie, will you be showing her around, or should I arrange a tour?”
“I’ll show her around.”
I took the card from the desk. “Isn’t there any paperwork I need to sign?”
Hillard’s laugh was warm and gentle. “Not at all. Any friend of Melanie’s is a friend of ours. We’re delighted to have you.”
I felt the protective layers of Fuck you, fuckball I’d girded my metaphorical loins with beginning to melt like candle wax under the radiant heat of all this unexpected kindness.
Melanie threaded her arm through mine and steered me toward a set of double doors. “Come on, Buffy. Let’s go take a look at the spa facilities. I can’t wait to introduce you to Vivian, my masseuse.”
As soon as the swinging door closed behind us, Melanie tugged me behind a bank of oak-paneled lockers and turned to face me, hands on narrow hips.
“A mob hit? A rash? Really, Jane?”
“It’s Buffy to you, and yes. It’s my intrepid orphan’s spirit that enables me to persist in the face of such a dermatological tragedy.”
She folded her arms tightly across perky, couture-clad bosoms. “Well, little orphan Annie Shingles, what now?”
“Now, you get gone and I get to business.”
“But I thought—”
“Look, Melanie. It’s nothing personal. I mean, it’s kind of personal because I don’t like your face and being exposed to your presence for extended periods makes me want to stab puppies, but in this case, my desire not to have you around is purely practical.”
The one time in our years of association that I hadn’t bothered to soften the truth, and Melanie had the nerve to grin at me. Standing tears magnified her eyes. Frankly I was a little surprised she had them. Tear ducts, that is. I had always kind of assumed that if I poked a finger up Melanie’s nose, I’d get about a quarter inch before I struck a core made of solid gold and fairy dust. Essence of unicorn, maybe.
“Oh, Jane. I know what you’re about now.” Then she did something so hideous, so unexpected, that I nearly fell backward into an artful wicker towel hamper.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1) Page 19