Ted was third on the roster, after Deputy Mayor Michael Suarez and the state's comptroller. The deputy mayor was, in my opinion, too handsome to waste himself on the people's business and should have gone into acting instead; the comptroller was a sixtysomething career politician who'd spent forty years of her life in Albany and, as a result, looked and sounded half dead. Janie and I shepherded the kids into the concrete basin, where a friendly ward leader gave them each a balloon. Janie tied one around each kid's wrist, I pulled out my notebook and a pen, and Ted Fitch launched into his standard stump speech.
"I am Ted Fitch and I will be the next senator from the great state of New York!" he boomed to a sprinkling of applause. I studied his long, angular face, his aquiline nose and thin lips, as Ted zipped through his talking points: the diversity of our great nation, the oppressiveness of the current regime, how a new day was dawning in America, and how he needed the support of true believers--true Americans, all over the nation--to make the dream a reality. "Thank you all for all of your support, and God bless America!" he concluded. There was more applause, a little more enthusiastic, as he collected handshakes and cheek pecks from the other dignitaries, high-fived the ten-year-old they'd procured to sing the National Anthem, and made his way offstage.
"Stay here," I told Janie. I shoved my notebook in the pocket of my black wool pea coat and threaded my way through the crowd to the line of Town Cars idling along the curb behind the stage. The drivers were leaning against the doors, smoking and talking. The first three I asked shook their heads, but I hit pay dirt with the fourth. By the time Ted Fitch had glad-handed his way down the stairs and his staffers were walking him back to his car, I was standing there waiting for him.
"Well, what a pleasant surprise!" he said, hugging my shoulders and giving me a hard, bloodless buss on the cheek. Up close, Ted didn't look as good as he did in his campaign posters, or as rested as he'd been at our party. Bags had bloomed underneath his eyes and there was white stuff crusted in the corners of his lips.
"Can I borrow you for a minute?" I asked.
"Of course!" he replied, in the bluff, hearty voice of a man getting ready to spend the next year shaking hands, kissing babies, and acting inordinately interested in everyone he met. "What can I do for you?"
I stepped close to him and said quietly, so his pair of fresh-faced staffers wouldn't hear, "Can we talk somewhere in private?"
Ted Fitch nodded, puzzlement spreading over his face. "Is the car all right?"
I didn't have time to regret saying yes until I'd slid awkwardly along the length of the big back seat and the door had closed with a heavy clunk behind me. I'd wanted privacy, but the tinted windows and black leather interior were making me feel like I'd locked myself into a crypt, with Ted Fitch beside me.
"Water?" Ted asked. I shook my head as he opened a bottle of his own and downed a fistful of pills. "Echinacea, zinc, vitamin C, ginkgo biloba," he explained. "Gotta stay strong out here!"
I nodded. He gulped, blinked, swallowed more water and more pills. "So, Kate! Is everything all right? Is this about Ben?"
I shook my head and smoothed my hands along my pants, suddenly wishing we were outside in the fresh, cold air. "I wanted to ask you about Kitty Cavanaugh."
I was watching him carefully, to see if he'd blink, or twitch, or touch his ear, or shout out, "Yes! I killed her!" His face gave nothing away. "The writer. Such a tragedy," he said. "Wasn't she a neighbor of yours?"
"She was. And a friend of yours," I prompted.
He shut his eyes in a gesture somewhere between a long blink and a short wince. "We knew some of the same people," he said carefully.
I shifted my body on the seat, feeling a drop of sweat work its way between my breasts and soak into my waistband. The heater was blowing stale, warm air in my face, and its roar made me feel like I was shouting. "I know how busy you are--"
"That husband of yours!" Ted Fitch said, with a ready-for-my-close-up guffaw. "He keeps me hopping!"
"Kitty was murdered," I said, speaking fast, feeling my entire body start sweating, knowing I needed to get the words out before I lost my nerve completely. "The police haven't arrested anyone. I know that you and Kitty were together at Aquavit having lunch before she was murdered. I just want to know..." Okay, Kate. Stay calm. "I want to know what your relationship was."
Ted Fitch blew out an explosive, mint-scented breath. "You think I'm involved in her death somehow?" He glared at me, all traces of be-nice-to-the-soccer-mom wiped off his features, replaced by what was almost a caricature of annoyance. "What gives you the right? Are you a detective now?"
I shook my head. "Just a housewife," I said softly.
Ted Fitch gave a disgusted growl and reached for his door handle. "I don't have time for this nonsense."
I wiped my hands on my legs again. "Sandra Willis," I said.
He let go of the handle and slumped back in the seat as blood turned the tips of his ears bright red and his cheeks and nose angry maroon. "Jesus," he said softly. "Jesus Christ. You and Ben must have some pillow talk."
"This didn't come from Ben," I said. It was true enough. "I used to be a reporter." Which was also true.
He sighed. "So the papers have this now. The--uh--the incident with Miss...uh..."
"Sandra Willis," I said again. "I don't think the papers have anything. That isn't my concern. I just want to know about Kitty."
He unscrewed the top of his water bottle, then screwed it on again. "I don't think we should discuss it," he said.
"Yeah, well, Sandra Willis didn't think she wanted to have sex with you, but you didn't let that stop you, right?" As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew that they'd been a mistake.
His face contorted again. "Get out of this car right now." This time he reached across me, his forearm as unyielding as a two-by-four against my breasts, and grabbed my door handle. He shoved the door open a few inches before I managed to slam it shut.
"You were together before she died. What were you talking about? Why was she crying? Were you having an affair? Was she..." Pregnant, I was going to ask. In spite of my best intentions, Janie's story had taken hold in my brain. Ted Fitch, purple-faced and breathing hard, sat back on his side of the car.
"You want to know?" he asked in a strangled voice. "You want to know what she wanted?" He shoved his hand into his hip pocket.
Oh, God. This time I was the one who grabbed for the door handle. "Maybe we can continue this some other time--"
He grabbed my hand and yanked me back down in my seat. "You want it?" he asked. His face was twisted as he threw a balled-up piece of paper at me. "Here. Here you go. Now get out."
It wasn't until I finally got the door open and half stepped, half staggered out onto the sidewalk that I realized what he'd thrown in my lap. Money. I unfolded the crumpled twenty with shaking hands as the door slammed and the Town Car drove away.
"Hey!"
Janie hustled over with the kids and their balloons. "Is this friendship finally paying off?" she inquired. Then she got a good look at my face. "What happened?" she asked. "Are you okay?" I shook my head, and she lowered her voice, putting one hand on my shoulder and studying my face. "What now?" she asked.
"Now," I said, and took a deep, shuddering breath, giving all three kids a group hug, "let's get some lunch and go shopping."
We spent the day at our favorite New York hangouts, pretending everything was fine--that I'd never moved to Connecticut, that nobody had gotten murdered, that I hadn't been shoved out of a car after a politician had tossed twenty bucks in my lap. We had hot fudge sundaes at Serendipity 3, where Janie and I had decided to live together, and we let the kids spend Ted Fitch's twenty at Dylan's Candy Bar. After a trip to the Museum of Natural History to look at the whale and a stop at Rockefeller Center to watch the ice skaters, the kids were wiped out from the combination of sugar and activity. Janie dropped us off at the train station. "I'll look into the list," she promised, pulling a sticky Sam and a sleepin
g Jack off of her shoulders and handing them over to me. "Call me when you get back to Pleasantville."
The four o'clock train back to Upchurch was almost empty. I set the boys down to sleep on a nest made of our coats, and I tucked Sophie at a window seat with my scarf and hat for a pillow. She still had a lollipop clutched in one sticky hand. I detached it as gently as I could and kissed her candy-sweet cheek. "Bug off," she said, swatting at me with her eyes half-closed.
I settled myself in my own seat and pulled out my notebook, to try to make sense of the day. You want to know what she wanted? he'd asked, and tossed money at me. Kitty wanted money, I wrote, then added a question mark. I thought of Dorie Stevenson's soft Southern twang. A pair of pearl earrings that she wore every day...I scribbled frantically, equal parts enthralled and exhausted. Maybe Kitty had been having sex with men for money. Maybe that was what they could give her that the college boys couldn't. And if Philip really had been a disaster at work, as Ben had told me, maybe she needed money, still.
I felt my pulse quicken as I imagined it: Kitty adding up the cost of private school tuition and a six-figure mortgage, the cars, the clothes, the vacations for sun or skiing, the dozens of things you'd need to survive nicely in Upchurch, and realizing the only way she could have it all was by supplementing her ghostwriting with the occasional discreet afternoon assignation that would end with a few hundred dollars on the nightstand. I wondered whether Dorie knew, or had suspected, what her old roommate had been up to. I wondered how Tara Singh would feel to find out that her mortal enemy's ghostwriter had had feet of clay, and various body parts for rent.
Back in Upchurch, the garage was empty, and the house was dark. I gave the kids chicken nuggets for dinner, bathed them, read them the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and put them to bed. I was sitting down on the couch with my notebook and my nuggets when the phone rang.
"Hello?"
"Kate?" It took me a minute to attach the deep voice to Denny Holdt's face. "Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering whether you'd seen Lexi lately."
I thought. "At the party. Before that, at ice-skating lessons." She'd had Brierly bundled up against her chest in her brightly colored Guatemalan wrap while Hadley practiced skating backwards. Lexi and the baby both had on red-and-gold wool caps with earflaps pulled down over their blond hair. She'd turned down a sip of my vending machine hot chocolate, pulled a bright green Granny Smith apple from her pocket, and eaten that instead.
"Yeah," Denny said gruffly. "She didn't come home last night."
Oh my God, I thought, remembering what Stan had told me in the police station, how Lexi had thought she was being followed. "Are the kids all right? The baby?"
"No, no, the kids were with a sitter. Brierly's right here with me. And Hadley...Hadley, stop that!" There was a shout, then the sound of something crashing. When Denny came back on the line, he sounded a little breathless. "Sorry, he keeps swinging off the balcony."
"Was there a note, or a message?"
"Nope. Nope, nothing. I got home at eight o'clock and the kids were in bed, asleep. The sitter said she didn't know where Lexi was going, and she hadn't said when she'd be back. Nothing was touched, nothing was taken. There's no suitcases missing, or clothes or anything. Her purse is gone, and her car, but her jewelry's all here, and--Hadley, what did I tell you about that?"
Another thump, a screech, and noisy tears. It was longer before Denny got back on the line.
"Sorry."
"I think you should call the police," I said.
"I did," he replied. "They say they can't do anything until she's been missing for forty-eight hours, even with...with everything else that's been going on."
"Do you have any idea where she could have gone?"
"Her mother hasn't heard from her. Her sister hasn't heard from her. She's not answering her cell phone, so I'm calling all of her friends. Hadley, you stop that right now!"
More thumping, more screaming. I pictured Lexi at my party, her shoulders tensed and calves twitching as she watched Philip touching Janie's hair. "Forgive me for asking this."
"No. No, please, whatever it is..." His voice dropped. "If it'll help them find her..."
I talked quickly, before I could lose my nerve. "Were you and Lexi having any problems?"
There was an uncomfortable, bristly pause. "We were fine," he said stiffly.
"Fine. Fine. Listen, is there anything I can do to help? Anyone I can call?"
"No," he said. "No, you were last on my list."
Figures, I thought as Denny Holdt hung up without saying goodbye. I turned the phone over in my hand for a minute, then dialed the Cavanaughs' number. Philip answered on the fourth ring.
"It's Kate Klein. I just got off the phone with Denny Holdt."
"Denny told me," said Philip. "It's horrible." He sounded like he meant it too. His tone was what you'd expect from a sincerely worried neighbor, as opposed to someone who'd chopped Lexi up into little pieces and stored her remains in freezer bags. Then again, did I really have any idea what a mass murderer would sound like?
"How are you?" I asked.
"Oh, keeping busy," Philip said. "I'm taking a leave of absence from work, and I'll be meeting the girls down in Florida tomorrow."
I nodded, remembering. "They're there with your parents?"
"My mother," he said. "My father's going to stay up here to hold down the fort."
I told him to travel safely, to give his daughters my best wishes and those of my children. Then I hung up the phone and wrote Philip to Florida in my notebook, thinking that I wouldn't have been the least bit shocked if it turned out he wasn't traveling alone.
Upstairs, Sophie had kicked off the covers and lay spread-eagled on her sheet in her pink-and-white-striped pajamas, miniatures of Aunt Janie's, with an identically attired Uglydoll in the crook of her arm. Sam slept on his left side, Jack on his right, nestled together in the bottom bunk bed, the way I imagined they had when they were still inside of me. I tiptoed over their trucks and blocks and bent to kiss their cheeks. Then I crept back downstairs, picked up the phone, and called Carol Gwinnell, the least intimidating of the fast-dwindling pool of Upchurch supermoms, to ask if she'd heard the news about Lexi.
Thirty-Two
"I heard," Ben began, forty-five minutes later, "that you saw my client today."
I looked up from my computer, where I'd been scrolling through more of Laura Lynn/Kitty's columns, and raised my eyebrows. "Beg your pardon?" I asked politely.
He exhaled impatiently. "At the rally, Kate."
"Oh," I said, tapping away without meeting his eyes. "Oh, yes. We had a conversation."
"Well, I had a conversation with him too," Ben said, slapping a slim manila folder down on the desk beside me. "Most of it was spent trying to convince him not to fire B Squared Consulting."
"You still want to work for him?" I asked. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised."
"You're unbelievable, do you know that?" he growled.
"Yes, but being unbelievable isn't a crime. Does your guy have an alibi?" I asked.
Ben pointed at the folder. "At the time of Kitty Cavanaugh's murder he was having lunch."
"And there were witnesses to this lunch?"
Ben paused. "His mistress."
"Bully for Ted," I said. I closed the computer and looked at the pages. There was a picture of an apartment building, a photocopy of a driver's license belonging to one Barbara Downing, hair blond, eyes blue, height five five, age thirty-six. I wondered if, in private moments, he called her Barbie. I flipped through the pages, looking for other pictures, but found only a few grainy long-lens photos of the candidate exiting his Town Car and entering the apartment building. "What, no nudity?"
Ben winced.
"And just because he's got a mistress, and just because she'll swear to whatever he tells her to swear to, doesn't mean he didn't do it."
Ben's nostrils flared. "You think he found the time to drive to Upchurch, murder a woman, clean himself up
, and be back in the city for his three o'clock briefing before his dinner in Westchester?"
"Some days," I said sweetly. "I take the kids to the Red Wheel Barrow in the morning, do three loads of laundry, pick up your dry cleaning, get the oil changed, swing by the grocery store, pick the kids up again, and feed them lunch in the car so we can get to Craft Circle at one-thirty. It's all about time management. If you told me I had to throw a murder in there somewhere, I'm sure I'd figure out how." I gave him a big, cheesy grin and turned back to my computer.
"You still think he did it?" Ben demanded.
"I'm not convinced he didn't. And either way, there was something fishy going on between the two of them. Unless throwing money is, like, his kink." I could tell from Ben's confused expression that whatever Ted Fitch had told him about my ambush at the rally, it hadn't included his tossing twenty dollars into my lap.
"Kate..." Ben shook his head wearily and returned the pages to the folder.
"Nor," I continued, "is the news that he has a mistress exactly a balm to my soul." A lofty moral pronouncement from a woman who'd once found Play-Doh in her pubic hair, but it was true. I walked into the living room and started dismantling the pillow fort the kids had built the day before and replacing the cushions on the couch. "Remind me again why you're working for him?"
"Because he's the best candidate out there," Ben said. I stared at him. He shrugged. "Because everyone's dirty." He raked his fingers through his hair. "If it's not women, it's alcohol. If it's not women or alcohol, it's a kid in jail, or rehab, or a messy divorce and an angry ex-wife trying to sell her story to the tabloids." He rubbed his temples. "Bill Clinton changed the nature of the beast," he said. "Post-Nixon, you'd have to be a choirboy to try to get elected, because the press was going to put you under a microscope. Anything you'd ever done or even thought about doing was going to be front-page news. Now"--he shrugged--"now it doesn't matter what you've done, as long as you've got thick skin and a nice smile."
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