Goodnight Nobody

by Jennifer Weiner

  "The police still haven't caught anyone," I said. I sipped from my water glass, and as he ate, I filled my father in, working backward from my cheeseburger with Tara to Philip's desperate question. "He wanted to know if she was happy."

  My father's eyes were wide and soft underneath his glasses. "Was she?"

  I cracked open a fortune cookie, one-handed. "I don't know. She always seemed so put together when I saw her. Now I think she might have been just as lost as I am in Connecticut. She may have been having an affair. Or maybe her husband was. Lots of mystery."

  My father poked a single chopstick into the fried rice, and when he looked up, his eyes were worried. "Why are you so interested? Is it because you were the one to find her?"

  "Well, there's that." I swept the jagged cookie pieces into my palm. "I don't know. Maybe she reminds me of myself a little. She used to be a writer, she used to live in New York." I cracked open another cookie and told him what Tara Singh had told me. "She actually lived in my old neighborhood. I think she might have known Evan McKenna."

  "Your friend Evan?" he asked.

  I got up without answering and started closing the containers of food, thinking that somehow hearing his name out loud from someone who really did love me hurt even worse than thinking it. "It probably has nothing to do with it. Maybe they were just old friends. Or maybe she hired him to find out whether her husband was cheating." I sniffed the carton of milk he'd brandished so proudly, winced, and dumped it down the sink. "How's Mom?"

  "She'll be home soon," he reported. "She's teaching a master class this spring."

  Bitter words--good for her--rose in my throat. I pressed my lips together and took a breath. "That should be nice. I'm sure you miss her. I know my kids do."

  He looked at me carefully. I turned my back and stacked the food containers in the refrigerator. I was remembering the way I'd run to her in London, hoping, I guess, that she'd magically turn into the kind of mother I'd seen in movies or on TV--loving and solicitous, offering sympathy and strong English tea. Instead, she'd tossed a room service menu at me and hurried into a chauffeured car that would whisk her to lunch with executives at the European offices of her record label.

  He shook his head. "You know this won't be forever. She just wants to sing for as long as she can. Someday we'll get her back."

  "Someday," I repeated. I'd been hearing it my whole life. I'll be back by summer...I'll be home for Christmas...Of course I'll be at your graduation, honey, I wouldn't miss that for anything! Lies. Not that she'd meant to lie, but something always came up--another performance, a recording opportunity, travel difficulties. Something always made her break her word.

  My father reached for my hand. "She loves you very much."

  "I know she does," I said.

  He stared at me, puzzled. "Birdie, what's wrong?"

  "Besides running across dead bodies?" I gave a short, bitter laugh. "I don't know. Connecticut, I guess."

  "What about it?" he asked. He filled the teakettle and flicked on the gas. "Hot chocolate?" he asked, and I nodded yes.

  "It makes Stepford look like a hotbed of revolution." I told him about the birthday party I'd botched, about Marybeth Coe and her baby's diaper-free existence, about the formidable playground gang. I didn't tell him the rest of it: that Ben was hardly ever home and was usually either on the phone or online when he was; that I was having more sex with the shower attachment than I was with my spouse; that all the other mothers seemed content to while away the hours playing Candy Land or doing crafts with their kids, while I'd feel like screaming and running out of the house after fifteen minutes of either activity, which led me to the conclusion that there was either something wrong with all of them or, more likely, something wrong with me.

  "These women," I said. "They have the most beautiful gardens you've ever seen--planned, laid out, perfectly weeded and watered. They hang wreaths on their doors, and not just for Christmas, either. They've got spring wreaths, and Easter wreaths, and Thanksgiving wreaths, and probably last-day-of-school wreaths. Their houses look like they could be in one of those magazines: Traditional Home, Colonial Home, Whatever Home. They all had careers, but none of them ever talk about them, let alone say they miss them. They never want to talk about anything but their gardens, and what room they're redecorating, and their kids, and I..." I cleared my throat. "It's high school all over again." Only at least this time, I reasoned, nobody'd stuck a sanitary napkin to my chair. Yet.

  My father set my hot chocolate in front of me. I wrapped my hands around the musical notes dancing up and down the chipped china. I'd bought this mug for him for some Father's Day more than twenty years ago.

  "So you're looking into Kitty Cavanaugh's death?"

  I took a sip of hot chocolate, then set my mug down. "I'm actually more interested in her life," I said. "I'm trying to figure out who she used to be before Upchurch."

  "Be careful," my father said sternly.

  "I'll be fine," I said, with more confidence than I felt.

  Twenty

  It was almost one in the morning when the train pulled into the Upchurch station. I was the only one to get off. I pulled my coat tight against me and shivered as I hurried off the platform. The parking lot was empty except for my minivan, glowing a ghostly silver under the sodium lights. My heels sounded as loud as gunshots as I racewalked across the pavement, wishing I'd remembered a scarf. There was something fluttering underneath my minivan's windshield wiper. A parking ticket? I wasn't even sure they gave them out in Upchurch.

  It wasn't a parking ticket. It was a note tucked into an envelope with my name on the front, a note written on a sheet of lined paper that looked like it had been ripped out of a notebook. The words printed in thick black letters read, "Stop asking questions or you will be next."

  I whirled around wildly, my heart hammering, as if whoever'd stuck the note on my car might have hung around to see my reaction. There was not a single other car, or person, to be seen, but I thought--or imagined--that I could hear footsteps approaching me, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

  I grabbed my keys, unlocked the car, got behind the wheel, slammed the door, and locked it. Then I stared in the rearview mirror, frozen in horror, imagining I saw a hunched figure rising out of the backseat, arms extended...Nope. Just the kids' car seats. "Okay," I whispered to myself. "Okay." My hands shook as I pulled out my cell phone. Who to call first? Ben? What could he do, at one o'clock in the morning? Wake up all three kids and come to fetch me?

  "Calm down, Kate," I whispered. I pulled Stan Bergeron's business card out of my tote bag and dialed his pager. After I'd punched in my number, I hung up and wrapped my hands around the wheel until they stopped shaking, jerking my head around to the left and the right and the left again, imagining I heard footsteps approaching or saw someone coming toward me, or heard something rustling in the backseat.

  The chief of police sounded sleepy. "This is Stan Bergeron, returning a page."

  "Stan, it's Kate Klein. I'm in the parking lot at the train station. Someone left a note on my car. 'Stop asking questions or you will be next.' "

  "Stop asking questions about what?"

  My heart sank. "About whether the Montessori preschool in Greenwich is any good," I snapped.

  There was a pause.

  "About Kitty Cavanaugh," I said, hearing my voice rise toward a shriek.

  Stan sighed as he realized he wasn't going to get to go back to sleep. "Meet me at the police station. Bring the note with you," he said.

  "I touched it," I told him.

  "Beg pardon?"

  "To read it. I touched it. So my fingerprints are on it."

  Stan stifled a yawn. "We'll deal with it. Come on down."

  Stan offered me coffee but couldn't figure out how to work the pot. I plugged it in, measured water and grounds, and slumped behind the desk where I'd sat the day I'd found Kitty.

  "You're not the only one," he said, not unkindly, pushing a notebook and pen across the
desk so that I could write down exactly what had happened.

  "Huh?"

  "Alexis Hagen-Holdt was in here this afternoon. She thought someone was following her when she was jogging and almost ran her off the road."

  "Oh, God."

  "Yeah. Her neighbor down the street has a sixteen-year-old son who just got his license. We're pretty sure that was the culprit." He plopped down in the chair across from me with a sigh. "Everyone's nervous."

  "Can you blame us?" I smoothed my shaking hands against my knees, and set about writing my field report, listing everyone I'd talked to, from the ladies on the playground to Laura Lynn Baird to Tara Singh and even my father in New York. It was after three in the morning by the time I drove home, with Stan trailing me in his cruiser. He escorted me to the front door. I carefully punched our code into the alarm system's keypad and eased the door open.

  Stan waved his flashlight into the foyer. The beam of light strobed off the piles of abandoned toys and kids' shoes, casting each kicked-off sneaker and discarded Barbie in flickering shadow. "Do you want me to come inside?" he whispered. I shook my head.

  "I'll be okay."

  I shut the door, locked it, reset the alarm, and crept up the creaky staircase, holding my breath as I eased past Sam and Jack's room, then Sophie's. Six more steps and I'd be home free. Five...four...three...two...

  "Mama?"

  Shit.

  "Sleep," I whispered to my daughter.

  "Story," she whispered back, pulling a book out of the stack on the table by her bed.

  I sat on her little canopied bed. Sophie was wearing a pink flannel nightgown. Her fine brown hair fell in tangles around her cheeks. She scooched over to make room, then leaned against me. " 'In the great green room,' " I began.

  " 'Was a telephone,' " said Sophie. She hooked Uglydoll, also dressed in a miniature pink nightgown, under her arm and flipped the pages.

  " 'Goodnight comb and goodnight brush, goodnight nobody, goodnight mush.' "

  "Mama, who is Nobody?" Sophie asked, pointing at the blank page.

  Me, I thought. I was thinking of the couples I'd seen on the street back in the city, skinny scarves looped around their necks, laughing into the darkness. I was thinking about Janie, with her highlights and her handbags and her fingers rattling over the keyboard, smart and competent, running her life, instead of the other way around. I thought about my mother in London tossing the room service menu at me and telling me she had to go without even asking what had brought me there and why my eyes were still red and puffy from all the crying I'd done on the flight. I thought of Ben standing in the doorway looking down at me as I crouched on my knees in front of the bathtub, not looking at me so much as looking through me.

  Instead, I said, "I don't know, sweetheart," and finished the story. " 'Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere.' " I kissed my daughter and then, at her insistence, her doll and eased over the creaking floorboards down the hall to my bedroom. If Ben woke up, I would tell him the truth. Either way I'd have to tell him. If someone was slipping threatening notes underneath the windshield of our car, if I was in danger, or the kids were, my husband needed to know. Three more steps. Two more. One...

  My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. Down the hall, one of the boys cried out in his sleep. I pulled it out, fumbled, almost dropped it, then brought it to my ear. "Hello?"

  I knew what I'd hear next: a low, growling, clotted voice, the voice of every monster under the bed, and it would say, "I left the note on your car, Kate. You thought your locks and your alarm kept you safe, but you're not safe. I'm in your house. I'm in your house right now..."

  "Kate?"

  Even after all this time, even after all the kids, his low, warm voice still made my stomach do a slow flip-flop. I could see him as he'd looked that New Year's Eve, with his eyes half open and his hands tangling in my hair.

  "Evan, where are you?" I whispered. I backed into the kids' bathroom, pulled the door shut, and sat down on the toilet in the dark. "The police need to talk to you."

  "Kate..."

  "Kitty Cavanaugh's dead and she had a note with your number by her phone and the police know that you were the last one to call her and now someone left a note on my car tonight, 'Stop asking questions or you will be next.' "

  "Kate, slow down."

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes in the darkness.

  "Where are you?"

  "Newark airport. I just got back from Miami."

  My stomach did another somersault. I pictured palm trees, white sand, Michelle in a thong bikini.

  "...been in touch with the police there," he was saying. "I'll be there--in Upchurch--tomorrow afternoon. Can I see you?"

  "I'm married," I blurted.

  "I know." Evan paused, and when he spoke again it was in the low, teasing tones I remembered from all of those takeout dinners and Scrabble games (and, more recently, from many of my sessions with the showerhead). "But I can still see you, can't I?"

  I leaned forward on the toilet seat, clutching the phone in one sweaty hand. But before I could answer, Evan said, "Are you all right, Katie? You don't sound like yourself."

  "I have to go. My kids are sleeping," I blurted, without thinking how ridiculous that sounded--it was the middle of the night; of course my kids were sleeping, and what did he mean about not sounding like myself? How did he even know who that was anymore? I hung up, turned off the phone, then crept back down the stairs to double-check that the alarm was working and that every door and every window had been locked.

  Part Two

  The Ghost Writer

  Twenty-One

  It was a six-hour flight from London to New York, and I'd gone a little nuts in the duty-free shop, buying two paperback novels with candy pink covers, comically bewildered British heroines, and the promise of a happy ending by page 375; four glossy magazines; three Cadbury milk chocolate bars; and one half-bottle of red wine I was fully prepared to slip into the bathroom to chug. I had a silk eye mask and a pair of Scottish wax earplugs. Finally, in case of dire emergency or an unexpected crying jag, I had two of the prescription painkillers I'd saved from the summer before when I'd had my wisdom teeth pulled.

  On the plane, I'd slipped off my shoes, pulled the blanket up to my chin, unwrapped the first candy bar, and flipped open one of the magazines when a tall, stooped man with a pleasant, narrow face sat down beside me.

  "Hi."

  He was about my age, and his voice, and orthodontically perfected teeth, were unmistakably American. I gave him a faint half-smile, nodded, and turned toward the window with the magazine spread open in my lap. "Your Most Intimate Health Questions Answered," read the headline. Evidently the editors of British Cosmo believed that many of my most intimate health questions involved itches in places you couldn't scratch in public.

  The guy was undeterred by my cold shoulder and the words "yeast infection" in large pink letters on the top of the page. He stowed his laptop underneath the seat in front of him, wriggled out of his leather jacket, and inquired, "Is that any good?"

  "I'm learning a lot." I ostentatiously flicked another page and wondered whether I'd actually have to scratch myself to get him to leave me alone.

  He clicked his seatbelt closed. "Are you from New York?"

  I made a noncommittal noise. Why, God? Why me? I eased one of the painkillers out of my pocket.

  "You look so familiar," the guy continued. I turned and looked at him: brown eyes, close set, underneath thick black eyebrows. Beaky nose in a thin face, and a nice-enough smile, narrow shoulders and knobby wrists. Nobody was ever going to mistake him for a pop star.

  "Just one of those faces, I guess." I slid the pill into my mouth and washed it down with a slug of bottled water.

  "You know, one thing I never get used to over here: no ice in the water."

  I half nodded and turned toward the window. Ten days with my mother had given me a bunch of new diva tricks--the dismissive yawn, the vacant stare, the sudde
n switch to another language.

  "You have to ask for ice if you want it in your water," he continued. "You go out to eat, they pour you a glass half full of warm water. Who wants to drink that?"

  "Look," I said, deciding that if I didn't take proactive steps, I'd be listening to this dolt talk about his beverage preferences until the drugs kicked in.

  He mistook my movement for friendliness, smiled, and stuck out his hand. "Ben Borowitz."

  "I have a gun," I replied, and opened my purse to show him.

  He pulled back, thrusting both hands in the air as if I were a cop who'd told him to stick 'em up. Of course, the instant the words were out of my mouth, I felt guilty. I touched his wrist gently. He jumped in his seat.

  "Hey."

  He ignored me, grabbing the in-flight magazine and flipped to a feature about Memphis barbecue.

  "I don't really have a gun," I said, opening my purse wider. "It's just a compact. My mother bought it for me on Portobello Road." Reina and I had spent an afternoon shopping, with my mother striding grandly along the rainy street in ankle-length skirts and a necklace of gumball-sized pearls, waiting to be recognized; me in jeans and a bulky raincoat trailing after her, praying that if she was, she wouldn't introduce me.

  He risked a glance sideways, and I pulled out the compact to show him. "See?"

  "I can see that you don't want to be disturbed," he said, with his gaze fixed rigidly on his magazine.

  "Yes, but I shouldn't have scared you. I'm sorry. I've just..." Oh, God. I felt my eyelids prickle and my throat start to close. "I've been going through kind of a hard time."

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. An actual cloth one that smelled clean and felt starchy when I pressed it beneath my eyes.

  "I'm sorry I bothered you," he said. "It's just that you really do look familiar."

  I shrugged and sniffled, readying myself for a game of Jewish geography or New York City where'd you go/who do you know. "I grew up on the Upper West Side and I went to Pimm for high school."