Hardly Knew Her

by Laura Lippman

  Heloise comes to the front door and knocks, then waits to be admitted. Very unlike Meghan’s female friends, who push open the door with a cheery “hello,” sure of their welcome. Since Brian’s death, Meghan has paid special attention to how people enter her home. Was the door unlocked that day? Did she leave the garage door up when she left, shaking with adrenaline? Heloise, of course, is the one person who could not have sneaked back to kill Brian. Or wait—why not? Meghan went back to band practice. Who knows what happened in those intervening hours?

  But the fact is, she cannot imagine Heloise doing that for her, which makes her kind of sad. A real big sister would have done it, and Heloise is the older by six months. But then—a real big sister would have owned up to it, too.

  “Look,” she says, thrusting the note at her sister. “It was in the mail today. I thought—”

  Heloise takes her wrist, gently but authoritatively. “Let’s go out, to that wine bar on the highway. Talk there. You can leave the kids, can’t you? Melinda can look after them, right?”

  “Yes, but—isn’t it safer to talk here?”

  “It’s safer not to talk anywhere. But if we have to talk, let’s do it in public, where we’ll have to make an effort to be circumspect. Drive with me and we’ll agree on some code words.”

  Meghan is torn. She doesn’t want to be careful. She wants to let the pent-up words and emotion spill out. There’s no risk from the kids. Kids never register their parents’ secrets, not unless those secrets affect them directly. At the same time, she likes the idea of a drink, on a Saturday night, in a popular place. The food is good, the wine list varied. There might be men there. And a drink with her sister in public—the normalcy of it has an appealing novelty. Perhaps Heloise even has some tips for how to meet men.

  “Just give me five minutes to change.”

  THE WINE BAR IS, IN FACT, called the Wine Barn, and it’s in a converted barn. Infelicitous, he thinks. Is he using the word correctly? It was on his word-a-day calendar last week and he liked the sound of it, but he’s not sure the usage is precise. “Regrettable” may be better. “Cheesy.” But it gets away with the hideous name because the interior décor is simple and chic, by the area’s standards, and because it is an unrelievedly adult place in a suburb where everything else is kid-centric. The Wine Barn allows children in the dining room, but they have to play by its rules, eat from its menu. No chicken fingers or other kiddie menu concessions. He never gets to eat here because his wife thinks that’s a kind of bigotry.

  Saturday is date night for the older folks here, cruising night for those in their twenties, the teachers and firefighters and other essential types who live in the townhouses and apartments at the outer ring of the burg. He used to have quite an eye for those teachers. But now, all he sees is Meghan. I’m your knight, he wants to sing out. Your knight in shining armor. I saved your life. You owe me everything. But it will be so much sweeter for her to realize this on her own, then do what he needs her to do, just as he has done what she required. Unbidden. Selfless. That’s true love.

  The sister is handsome, too, but a little self-contained and self-sufficient for him. Once, he saw her on the side of the road with a flat tire, and he offered to change it for her. It seemed the least he could do, given that he was the one who had deflated it back in the parking lot, during their sons’ soccer game. “I’ve already called Triple A,” she said with a polite but dismissive wave of her hand. “I’ll wait until they show up.”

  Most women wanted the company, and that’s all it ever was, company. It seemed a harmless habit, creating situations from which women would need rescue, then extricating them. A quick poke of a tire gauge. A vaguely ominous note left on someone’s windshield. Anonymous phone calls, although caller ID had ruined that pastime. “I’ll take care of it,” he said time and time again to the women in his social set, requiring nothing more than a smile, acknowledgment that he was needed, that he could help, something he never got at home, where he felt superfluous.

  But Meghan—he never dared that trick with Meghan. Perhaps that’s because she was too needy. If he helped her once, it would be criminal to stop. Criminal! Heh. Seriously, he had a hunch that Meghan would see through him, that she would figure out that her secret admirer, her benevolent benefactor, was also her malefactor, another new word he had learned in the past month. Malefactor. Male factor. He wants to be the male factor in Meghan’s life and there’s really no reason he can’t be. He simply needs her to kill his wife. The problem is how to introduce this in conversation. He has seen Meghan several times since Brian’s death, even allowed himself a quick hug at the funeral—those fragile birdlike bones, so frail in his arms; they could definitely have sex standing up, something he hasn’t done for years. But there never seems to be a right time to explain that he finished off Brian and now needs her to return the favor. He wants her to figure it out, to volunteer. Hence the note, which must have arrived by now. He watches carefully through the narrow windows on the addition to the barn, a kind of sunroom. What if she shows the note to her sister? Does her sister know? That would be inconvenient. And traitorous. Brian’s death is their secret, his and Meghan’s.

  A threesome with the sisters would be hot, though. No use denying that. He and Meghan would gang up on the other one, and she wouldn’t have that cool, contained smile when they were through with her.

  FIVE

  The notes continue through the summer. There are Bible verses, snippets of poetry, one CD with a single song burned into it (“If Loving You Is Wrong”). Meghan wants to scream, I get the hint. Only she doesn’t, and Heloise cautioned her to do nothing as long as possible. “If the person really knew something, he would press you, make demands.” Meghan wonders if it’s Heloise, playing a game with her, keeping her on her toes. But, more often than not, she believes that these notes are from her…helper. But what does he want? Blackmail seems likely. Brian’s death left her pretty well fixed. The insurance company was a little hard-ass at first, demanding a tox screening when it was revealed that Brian had lost his job, fishing for something that would allow them to build a case for suicide. A formality, the family lawyer said, and the screen had come back with only moderate amounts of alcohol, consistent with a beer or two at lunch. Meghan was retroactively pissed when she heard that—I’m out schlepping the kids, per usual, and you can’t clean the basement without breaking for a beer, and probably some couch time. Her hands and jaw clenched, the emotions of that day rushing back. She was never so angry in her life and she hopes never to be that angry again. But then, with Brian dead, how could she be? Brian was the source of all her problems. Look at how smoothly the house runs without him, how well the kids are doing overall. (She prefers to gloss over Melinda’s sudden goth phase and Mark’s decision to drop out of band. They have to grieve a little. It’s healthy.) The fact is, the house always functioned independently of Brian, given his travel for work. His infrequent appearances were what had kept them from establishing rhythms and norms. Really, Brian was like a houseguest, not a father.

  The doorbell, a knock, then a “Hello???????,” although it’s a male voice today, not one of the girlfriends. Who, come to think of it, don’t come around as often.

  “It’s Dan Simmons, Meghan. Some more paperwork came in today and I thought I’d bring it over. It’s about those various annuities you wanted.”

  The annuities. Dan has been a little pushy about shepherding her investments, and although Meghan thinks the financial arm of his insurance business is not particularly impressive, it’s been easier to let him handle everything. She says as much now as they settle in at the dining room table: “I’m so grateful to you, Dan, for handling all this.”

  He pats her hand. “My pleasure.” He leaves his hand there a second too long. Then five seconds, then ten.

  “Dan…” He’s not the first husband to flirt with her, although it happened more in the early days, before she was tired and angry all the time. Only then it was at parties, where th
ere had been some alcohol. This is much more wanton. It’s a little exciting, although she’s not attracted to Dan. But she likes the idea of him being attracted to her.

  “Better be careful,” she teases lightly. “Lillian could be standing in your kitchen, looking right at us.”

  “There’s no direct sight line into the dining room. I know because I know where to look to find you. And Lillian’s in Rehoboth with the kids all month. I rented a house and even arranged a spa visit for her, for our twentieth anniversary.”

  “You’ve always been so thoughtful that way.” She tries to move her hand away, but Dan won’t let her.

  “I thought about plastic surgery. She never mentions it, but it couldn’t hurt. And women do die that way, don’t they? Even if she didn’t die, she would be weak afterward, taking lots of pain meds. Anything could happen.”

  “Dan—”

  “Accidents happen every day. No one knows that better than an insurance agent. Car accidents, slipping in the bathtub, falling down stairs. Stairs are so dangerous. If people only knew. But you know, don’t you, Meghan? How dangerous stairs can be?”

  Meghan has finally extricated her hand, only to have Dan grab her wrist. She decides to stop fighting him, and when he lets go, she flips her hand so the fingers are facing up. She gives his palm a light, tickling touch.

  “Money?” she asks.

  “You,” he says. “And we have to figure out how to take care of Lillian. I can’t afford a divorce. But then—you couldn’t, either, could you, Meghan?”

  “You were watching that day?”

  “Actually, I didn’t see what happened. The sight lines again. But I saw you come and go so quickly. Then I came over here to ask Brian if he had a level. I was trying to install one of those closets, from the Container Store. At first I thought only of myself. I didn’t know I was finishing what you had started. Then I thought, I’ll leave the pillow behind, just in case. If it showed up in the police report—and the insurance company would receive all the reports, of course—I would know that Brian fell. If there was no mention of a pillow…well, I would have my answer.”

  “It was an accident,” she says.

  “Officially, yes.” He caresses her palm. “Smart girl.”

  “No, I mean that I didn’t plan it. I came home to have it out with him. He dropped this bomb on me as I was heading out, which was his way of avoiding arguments, and, for once, I wasn’t going to be denied the fight. When I saw him coming up the steps with that box of stuff—I didn’t think. It was an impulse. He tripped on the Crocs.”

  “Let me do the thinking for both of us. The important thing is, this is our secret, right? No one else knows?”

  Instinct, as swift and certain as the impulse to shove Brian down the stairs, tells her to lie. “I haven’t told anyone. You?”

  “No.”

  “And you haven’t been reckless enough to write these things down somewhere, to keep a record that someone else might read?”

  “No,” he says with a laugh, tapping his head. “It’s all up here.”

  She looks around the room, then past it, into the kitchen, at the big windows. She realizes now how often Dan has looked at her through those windows, how her kitchen, a replica of his but in a different color scheme, came to seem better somehow. While Meghan was dreaming of life without a husband, Dan was persuading himself that all he needed was a change of partner, that the thinner, slightly younger woman he saw could make everything right in his life. Okay, then.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” she says, pleased to see how he shakes, just a little. She’s in control. For now.

  HELOISE IS HEADING HOME from the grocery store when she has to pull over for the cop car, then an ambulance, then another cop car, rushing down Old Orchard. Another car accident, she thinks, but then sees the convoy turn onto her sister’s small street, which has no more than a dozen houses, and it gives her pause. What are the odds? Mathematically, one in twelve. She thinks about the recent glimpses of her nephews and nieces, how sad they all are since their father died. She thinks about Meghan’s mother, who took a halfhearted swipe at her wrists in a desperate attempt to win back Hector Lewis when the birth of Meghan wasn’t enough to bring him home.

  A police officer stops her when she tries to enter the house, and it takes enormous self-restraint to remember that he is not a street cop, grabbing the young prostitute she once was. She never feels at ease around cops.

  “Ma’am, this is a crime scene—”

  “But it’s my sister’s house.”

  “Is that Heloise?” It’s Meghan’s voice, croaking from inside the house. “Please, let me see my sister. I want my sister.”

  Meghan’s eye is freshly bruised, her lip split. She is wearing a robe and a pair of socks, and presumably nothing else. A female police officer sits with her at the kitchen counter, pushing a cup of tea toward Meghan, who keeps pushing it away.

  “Our neighbor,” Meghan tells Heloise. “Dan Simmons. He came over here with some of the paperwork for the trusts I’m putting together for the kids and he raped me. I—all I was trying to do was protect myself. I thought he was going to kill me.”

  Paramedics trudge down the stairs, shaking their heads, and now the attendants from the medical examiner’s office march up, followed by detectives with rubber-gloved hands. Heloise wants to follow, but she knows they will think her morbid, unnatural. Still, she wants to know, wants to survey the scene.

  Some unnerving inconsistencies start to surface as the policewoman talks to Meghan in her deceptively conversational way. Why is Dan Simmons naked? How did he manage to take his clothes off while keeping Meghan under his control? Did she really keep a loaded gun, unlocked, in her nightstand drawer? With kids in the house? Was she crazy? Heloise wishes her sister would stop talking. But Meghan points to the marks on her face, admits how frightening it has been, living without her husband, admits her ignorance and negligence with the gun but says she believes it is the only thing that prevented Dan from killing her. He choked her when they had sex, see? There are marks on her neck. She was blacking out, she thought she was dying, there was nothing to do but reach into that nightstand table, grab the gun, and blow his brains out. Look—there is brain matter in her hair, a fine spray of blood on her face. She knows she has to go to the hospital and talk to police at greater length—Heloise puts in here that she wants her sister to have a lawyer, a good one. She won’t use her own man, but she’ll ask him for a recommendation.

  “Can’t my sister drive me to the hospital for the rape kit? Do I really need to go in the ambulance or a police car?”

  Meghan walks stiffly to Heloise’s car, carrying a duffel bag with clothes to change into after the exam.

  “So,” Heloise says, letting that one word stand for the two dozen questions she wants to ask.

  “I told him I like it rough. It took him a while to warm up—I had to beg him to hit me, bully him, even scratch him a little—but he caught on. And then I told him I wanted to do the autoerotic thing.”

  “With Brian’s gun?”

  “Oh, no. I had him wait downstairs, told him I wanted to get ready for him. That gave me time to get it out of the lockbox and load it, then put it in the nightstand.”

  The hospital is only a mile away now. They will never speak of this again, Heloise knows.

  “Are you sure?” she asks. “That he was the one?”

  “Yes. And he wanted me to kill his wife, Lillian. Isn’t that awful?”

  “Awful,” Heloise agrees.

  “I saved her life, if you think about it,” Meghan says. “What a terrible, terrible man.”

  “Yes.”

  SIX

  Meghan sits in the little dressing room adjacent to the green room at the Today show, waiting for the makeup and hair people. She had hoped for something a little loftier—Oprah, to be exact—but she supposes Today is the best thing to do if you can’t get Oprah. She did get Oprah, though; Oprah just didn’t get her. She was asked to be one o
f several women, up to a half dozen, featured under the theme “She Fought Back.” Meghan doesn’t want to be one in a crowd, her story reduced to a mere trend. Besides, there were some indications that Oprah might ask a lot of questions about the gun—why was it so near to hand, in a house with children—and the publicist who has been advising Meghan found the course of the pre-interview worrisome and recommended pulling-out. Today is more interested in Meghan’s decision to speak publicly about being a rape victim, her assertion that women have nothing to fear by coming forward. “There’s not just one way to be a rape victim” is the line the publicist impresses upon her to use in interviews, something he apparently cribbed from an Internet site.

  “And what are you talking about today?” the makeup girl asks, beginning to apply foundation.

  “I was raped and I killed my attacker,” Meghan says.

  “Oh.” The makeup girl’s eyes slide upward, meeting the gaze of the hairdresser, who’s standing behind Meghan, twirling a round brush through her hair. Meghan sees it all in the mirror—the concern, the pity.

  “It’s okay,” she assures them. “That’s why I’m here. Because women should talk about these things. It was horrible, what happened to me, what I had to do to survive. But I have no regrets, and certainly no shame.”

  Again, her lines are rehearsed, but that doesn’t mean they’re not true. Even when Meghan allows herself to think about what really happened—something she does less and less—she can’t imagine taking a different course of action. No regret, no shame. She was on top of Dan, their second go-round, riding him and encouraging him to choke her, when he saw her reach for the drawer. “What are you getting?” he gasped. “Something to make it better. Close your eyes.” He did as he was told and she managed to grab the gun, hold it behind her back. “Flip me, you on top.” “I’m too big for a little girl like you, I’ll break you.” “I’ll be fine.” Gracelessly, they switched positions, and she let him have a few more seconds of pleasure—“Eyes shut, eyes shut,” she crooned—until he finally asked, “Where’s the surprise?”