Goodnight Nobody

by Jennifer Weiner

  "Flowers in the Attic," I said softly. "Oh, my God."

  "What, Kate? What is it?" Janie asked.

  "Are you all right?" asked Ben.

  "Not a brother, but a sister," I babbled. "Do you remember Bo Baird?"

  "He was on the list Kitty gave...on Kitty's list," Janie said, wisely reluctant to invoke Evan's name in front of my husband.

  I jumped to my feet. "And Tara Singh told me there'd been rumors about Laura Lynn having some kind of breakdown after her father's death."

  Ben thrust three fingers in the air. "How many fingers do you see?"

  "Bo Baird!" I repeated, and ran past him to my laptop, which I'd left set up in the breakfast nook. "Ben, were there ever any rumors about him and an out-of-wedlock child? Or using drugs? Heroin?"

  "What?" Ben followed after me, still with the gallon of milk in his hands. "Kate, slow down! Who's Tara Singh?"

  I ignored him. "He died in a hotel room in Boston with another woman, right?"

  "Should I call an ambulance? Are you having double vision?"

  I looked up from the keyboard long enough to glare at him. "My head is fine and I'm asking you a question!"

  He put the milk down on the island in the middle of the kitchen and began speaking in a dry, lecturing-to-the-freshmen voice. "Bo Baird was infamous for his infidelities, but I never heard anything about an illegitimate child or heroin. Now tell me what you're talking about, or I'm calling the doctor."

  "She's Kitty's half sister," I muttered. It all made sense. Kitty wasn't just Laura Lynn's ghostwriter, she was her half sister and, coincidentally, a walking, talking condemnation of everything two generations of conservatives stood for, the illegitimate sister of a woman who thought single mothers signaled the end of Western civilization--as well as a fellow writer with a legitimate claim on her seven-figure book advance. I snatched my keys and purse from the breakfast bar. "Come on, Janie!" I called. Janie picked up her purse from the breakfast bar and ran after me as the kids stared.

  "I'll be back soon! Drink your milk, kids! And, um, brush your teeth, and don't give your father a hard time!" I ran for the garage door with Ben on my heels.

  "Where are you going?" He grabbed my shoulder and spun me around, and I couldn't come up with a single thing to tell him. Loose filling? Female trouble? Jury duty that I'd just remembered at six thirty on a Monday night?

  Janie placed one hand calmly on his cheek. "Something suddenly came up," she said.

  "We have to go," I said. I wrenched myself free and threw myself behind the wheel of the car. As I pulled out of the garage and zoomed down the driveway, Ben was standing in the doorway, watching me. His hands were in his pockets, and there was a look I couldn't read on his face.

  Laura Lynn Baird opened her door, saw my face, and started to close it. Janie jammed her stiletto-clad foot inside. "Let us in or we're calling the cops."

  "And telling them what?" Laura Lynn demanded in her clipped voice. "I should call the cops on you."

  "Never mind the cops. We'll call the press," I said. "We'll tell them that Bo Baird fathered a child out of wedlock."

  Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I saw the blood drain from Laura Lynn's face. "You're crazy," she said, baring her lips so that I could see her teeth before she shoved the door shut. I pushed back, remembering Kitty's body on the kitchen floor, her two little girls saying, She was the best mother in the world.

  "How'd it feel to have your own sister killed?" I asked. "I bet that would make a hell of a story for Content."

  Laura Lynn's scrawny body sagged against the doorjamb. "She wasn't...I didn't..."

  Janie pushed past me, then grabbed Laura Lynn's arm and goose-stepped the smaller, scrawny woman into the living room, where all three wide-screen TVs were on, one tuned to CNN, one playing MSNBC, the third frozen on a close-up of Laura Lynn's own face. "Ma!" Laura Lynn screeched in the direction of the stairs. "Give the baby his bath!"

  Ma shouted back something I couldn't hear. In the living room Laura Lynn, breathing hard, positioned herself on the couch. She was wearing another in her series of Chanel suits--this one was caramel, with gold-colored fringe--but her feet were bare. There was chipped pink polish on her toes. Her stiff, processed blond hair hung in sticky spikes around her shoulders, and her face, bare of makeup, was an unhealthy red that spoke of a recent chemical peel.

  Janie faced her as I stepped behind the couch and started asking questions. "What happened, Laura? Did Kitty tell you who she was? Did she say she wanted her own byline or more of the book advance money? Or maybe," I mused, as she turned on the couch, staring at me, "she was just going to write her own book. Tell her own story. A hell of a story. Right-wing newspaper magnate as the father she never knew, half sister who's a media princess, mother whose death might not have been an accident. How long until she turned into the one all the TV shows wanted to talk to?"

  Laura Lynn tugged at her stiff-as-straw hair and glared at us without saying a word.

  "She was your half sister," I repeated. Laura Lynn's lip curled.

  "She was competition," said Janie.

  "And so I killed her? That's what you two think?" She snorted. "You need to get out more." She got to her feet, blond hair obscuring radiation-red cheeks. "Why don't you start right now?"

  "Fine," said Janie, easily grabbing the cordless telephone next to Laura Lynn's monogrammed ice bucket. "I think we'll just make a few calls first. The newspapers, maybe a few of those television talk shows. Or maybe," she said, extending the phone toward Laura, "I should let you go first. Why don't you give a holler to Ma upstairs. Give her a little heads-up so she can get ready for another go-round with the late-night talk shows." She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "I wonder if Judith Medeiros let your father wear her clothes too?"

  Laura Lynn's eyes filled with tears. She brushed them away fiercely. "That's enough," she said. She snatched a remote control off the coffee table, waved it at the TV sets, flicked them all into blackness, and popped the top off a can of Diet Coke.

  "I knew she was looking for something the first day we met," she said, wiping her mouth with the fringed sleeve of her jacket. "It was supposed to be a job interview, and all she wanted to hear about was my life. Did I have brothers and sisters, where did we go on vacations, did I ever live in New York? I didn't want to answer, but she was Joel's darling. I didn't have a choice."

  Janie leaned against the bookcase and opened Laura Lynn's copy of some conservative woman's book of dating tips for God-fearing girls. "How did you figure out what Kitty really wanted to know?" she asked, flipping through the pages.

  Laura Lynn kicked the bottom of the couch with her bare heel, like a little kid who'd been sent to time-out. "She told me that her mother and my father..." She groped for her soda, raised the can to her lips, and gulped. "I didn't believe her at first," she said. "She told me to go home and ask him. I said forget it, my father wasn't well, and I wasn't going to do anything to put his health in jeopardy. She said if I wouldn't, she'd drive up there and do it herself. I told her she'd never get through the front door."

  "So then what?" asked Janie.

  For the first time since we'd barged through her door, Laura Lynn seemed to falter. "I...my father...I didn't want to put him through that, through some stranger showing up with those kinds of accusations. So I lied to him," she said. "I told him my doctor needed a blood sample for my family history. He and I went into town together, saw his doctor, and I went back to New York with a blood sample. And lo and behold..." She crossed the room and slid one of the televisions away from the wall, revealing a safe. She twirled the tumblers and opened the door. There was an envelope inside, and a paperback book bound in plain red paper. Laura Lynn pulled both items out--I caught the words "uncorrected proofs" on the cover of the book, and the dual byline she'd spoken of: "by Laura Lynn Baird and Katherine Cavanaugh." She opened the envelope and extracted a single sheet of paper, yellow, a carbon copy of a form from Lenox Hill Hospital that had been written in tripli
cate.

  "See here?" She pointed to a line in the center of the page and read the words in a voice rich with triumph. "Results negative."

  I felt my heart contract as I scanned the form and found Bo's name, and Kitty's. "Oh."

  "Yeah. Oh," she said, snatching the page out of my hand. "You can show yourselves out."

  Her tone was just as furious as it had been when we'd shown up, but her face looked fragile and exhausted, like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother's suit; a little girl in need of nothing more than a good shampoo and a nap. When she plunked back on the couch, I saw that the soles of her feet were dirty. I looked at the date on the page.

  "This was six years ago," I said.

  She nodded.

  "So if you knew that Kitty wasn't related, why let her keep working for you?"

  She looked down at her lap. "I felt sorry for her, I guess. She was so perfect, so smart, but when she got going about her mother, she just..." She fluttered her thin hands in front of her. "Cracked. Here. Keep this." She handed me the book. I saw the words The Good Mother written on the front cover in heavy black ink above Kitty's name. "I told you the truth. She was a good writer. Probably she was a good mother too."

  "Too bad," said Janie as we pulled out of Laura Lynn's driveway and into the icy black night. I squeezed my eyes shut, shivering, and groaned out loud.

  "What am I going to tell Ben?"

  "Let me handle that," Janie said.

  I shook my head, cringing at the excuse that she'd concoct, but it turned out that I didn't need to worry. By the time we pulled into the garage, the house was dark, the doors were locked, all three children were sleeping, and the master bedroom was empty. Ben had apparently chosen the guest bedroom again over the pleasure of my company, and by the time I woke up the next morning, he was gone.

  By ten o'clock I'd pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt I'd plucked from the basket of unwashed laundry, dropped my kids off at Sukie Sutherland's for a playdate, and mixed a pitcher of extra-strength, very spicy Bloody Marys. Janie and I spent the morning sitting at the kitchen table, drinking.

  "It's too bad," said Janie, shaking more Tabasco sauce into our glasses. "It would have been so cool if Philip was her husband...her brother...her husband...her brother."

  I took a long sip, then pushed my glass away. Sukie said she'd take the kids until two, but it wouldn't do for me to show up tipsy and fall even further in the Upchurch mothers' esteem. If such a thing were even possible.

  "Or if Laura Lynn was her sister," Janie said. "That would have worked for me too."

  "Not Philip Cavanaugh," I said. "Not Bo Baird. Not Joel Asch. Not Ted Fitch. What do I do now? Just walk around New York City trying to figure out who else Judy Medeiros slept with?"

  "You know I love you," said Janie. "But if that's your plan, you're on your own." She lifted her glass in a toast. "That woman had some social life."

  I cut a lime into wedges and squeezed juice in my glass. "What about Judy? Have the cops told you anything?"

  "It was a cold case--well, actually it was barely a case at all. Single white female and would-be artist dying with a needle in her arm didn't exactly raise eyebrows in Greenwich Village in the seventies. The coroner's report did say that she didn't have track marks..."

  "You saw the coroner's report?"

  Janie flashed me a satisfied smile.

  "Can you get them to reopen the case?"

  Ice cubes rattled against each other as she stirred her drink. "I'm trying."

  "Maybe Evan's got more names," I said. The thought of starting from scratch, finding more men, tracking them down, asking them questions, had exhausted me before I'd begun.

  "Let's start at the very beginning," Janie said. "Why do people murder? Love or money. Crimes of passion or crimes of...of being broke."

  "Very eloquent," I sighed, feeling so drained from the disappointment and the liquor and the previous day's Pilates that even breathing was an effort. I crossed my arms on the table and rested my head against them.

  "You know what? Go take a bath," said Janie. "I'll fetch the little ones."

  "Are you sure?" I asked as I scrabbled for my keys and tossed them across the table.

  "As long as she doesn't start talking about her nipples, I'm good. Go," said Janie, and shooed me toward the stairs.

  Five minutes later, Janie backed the minivan cautiously down the driveway. Five minutes after that, I called Content, and this time, the snotty receptionist put me right through.

  "I spent Thanksgiving in Cape Cod," I told Joel Asch. "I talked to Bonnie Verree. She told me what Kitty was looking for."

  The line hummed almost imperceptibly while Joel Asch said nothing. I imagined him sitting behind a desk like the one I'd occupied at New York Night, some battle-scarred, scuffed-metal thing, and closing his eyes.

  "I was a fool," he said roughly. "She was so interested in me..." He went silent again. My mind continued to add details to his desk; a sleek silver laptop, a fancy little stereo, a few framed pictures of his wife and kids. "I was flattered," he finally said. "And...oh, hell, I'll admit it. I wanted her. And I went after her. Until she told me why she was so interested. Then I felt like a fool." He laughed bitterly. "Which was only fair. I'd certainly been acting like one."

  "But you tried to help her."

  "I tried to be good to her," Joel said. "And I couldn't do much. A name here and there...an introduction to Laura Lynn Baird..."

  And a pair of pearl earrings, I thought. My heart twisted as I imagined my own father, who would have done anything for me; who'd wanted to come to Connecticut the minute he thought I might have been in danger. I'd looked at Kitty on the playground and thought that she had everything, never guessing that I had the thing she wanted most.

  "We're closing the issue tonight," Joel said, jolting me back to reality. "If there's anything else I can do for you."

  "Thank you," I told him. I hung up the phone and plodded upstairs to take a bath.

  Twenty minutes later, I lay in the oversized soaking tub for two that I'd only used once since we'd moved in, staring at the snow splattering onto the skylight, feeling like a complete and utter failure. Thanksgiving was over; Christmas was coming. The Red Wheel Barrow nursery school would close its doors for most of December, which meant all kids, all the time, and effectively spelled the end of my free time and my investigation. Kitty's murder was still unsolved. Kitty's paternity, and her mother's death, were still mysteries, Lexi Hagen-Holdt was still missing, and I had no idea who'd put the threatening note on my car. All of the work and worry, and all I had to show for it was one idiotic memorial speech, one imperiled marriage, and one situation involving an extremely persistent, frequently irresistible other man that I had no idea how to resolve.

  So Delphine had been a hooker, I thought, as I idly loofahed my legs, and Kevin Dolan had turned out to be a suburban Pygmalion. So Kitty had been searching for her father, and answers about her mother's death, among the rich and powerful men of New York City. So my husband's client had been one of the potential daddies, and Bo Baird and Philip Cavanaugh Senior had been too.

  "Love," I said. "Money." I held my breath and slid under the water, letting my hair billow around my shoulders. It all added up to a great big steaming heap of nothing. Except for Janie. At least she'd leave Upchurch with a great story. Lucky Janie. At least she got to leave.

  My cell phone trilled from where I'd left it on the towel rack. I stretched my arm out of the tub and snagged it. "Hi, Janie."

  "Enjoying yourself?"

  I shut my eyes. "More or less."

  "Good. We're stringing cranberries and popcorn for holiday garlands." She dropped her voice. "It's boring as fuck, but luckily your kids are easily amused."

  "Fine. Have fun!" I tried to sound enthusiastic, and failed. "I'll see you later."

  I lay back in the water and thought about the women of Upchurch, the high-test supermommies who would never really be my friends. I pictured Kitty on the playground,
squatting in front of my children, her dark brown hair and classic features illuminated by the sun. Then I imagined Kitty walking into that country club, long legs scissoring underneath her dress, taking in the scene with her pansy-blue eyes, looking at Philip and Flora and Philip Junior, smoothing her skirt and smiling, sitting down in the chair that had been pulled out for her, taking her place, her rightful place, right between Philip and--

  "Oh, my God." I sat bolt upright, sending water cascading down in sheets onto the tile floor, and I stumbled out of the tub, groping for the telephone.

  Philip Cavanaugh Senior didn't sound happy to hear from me. I didn't care.

  "I just have one more question," I said, standing naked in the bathroom, while water streamed down my shoulders and puddled at my feet.

  He laughed thickly. "Sure, why not?"

  "When Kitty showed up at the country club--"

  "Walked in there like she owned the place," he said crossly. Ice cubes rattled in the background. Clearly Janie and I weren't the only ones consoling ourselves with drink. "Like she had a right. I wonder if her real father was Jewish?"

  I let that slide. "You said Philip was there with a girlfriend. What was her name?"

  The pause felt like it stretched out forever. "Chesty little thing," Philip Senior finally said. "Suzie something?"

  We used to date, I heard Sukie saying, a secret smile lifting her lips, cheeks flushing under her makeup, the blush of a girl who can't believe that the guy of her dreams is smiling back at her--a blush I'd certainly worn myself, the night Evan had showed up at the Lo Kee Inn on New Year's Eve and kissed me on the street. A million years ago.

  I hung up without saying goodbye, started to run out of the bathroom, slipped on the wet tiles and landed flat on my ass. I ignored the pain and punched in Janie's number with shaking hands. Her phone rang once...twice...three times.