I park my car in the circular driveway. I already know that behind the seven-bedroom, eight-bath manse itself there’s a boathouse and a dock with deep-water mooring. Also a full outdoor kitchen, and a movie projection system with theater-style seating for fourteen, used for entertaining on summer nights.
Judging from the catering truck parked in front of my car, and the bustle of white-clad workers unloading rolling carts filled with prepped foods, I gather this is one of those nights.
This suits my purposes. I didn’t specifically ask Melissa Masterson not to tell her parents I was coming, but I did lean heavily on an eighteen-year-old girl’s proclivity for drama and secrecy when I asked if we could talk.
I slip unnoticed around the side of the house and head toward the poolside “cabana.” It’s a miniature of the grand house, like a child-giant’s toy, able to sleep six. Catering staff mills about the lavishly landscaped backyard, placing floating candles atop the pool, lighting Tiki torches, setting up bar stations. The door to the pool house is unlocked and I slip inside.
Melissa’s waiting for me curled into the corner of a plaid sofa, bare, freckled legs tucked up under a sleek citron dress, one index finger twirling a lock of strawberry blond hair. She’s polished to a sheen, her elegant WASPy attire and composure a stark contrast to Natalie’s worried face and uniform of baggy sweats and disheveled hair.
“My going-away party,” she explains, gesturing toward the hubbub outside. “I’m leaving to start at Vassar.”
“Congratulations,” I offer in the lilting tones of Aimee Martinet. I’m keeping my story a simple and consistent one in Westport.
“Yeah, well, whatever, it’s mostly my parents’ friends. They just want to show off. I, on the other hand, can’t wait to get the fuck out of here.” She graces me with a radiant smile intended to undermine the coarseness of her words. “So. How can I help you?”
“You were Natalie Burrows’s best friend?”
“Yeah. Till, you know, everything with her mom. And then they moved, so.” Melissa shrugs.
“Can you tell me about that night? When her maman disappeared?”
Melissa’s eyes shift rapidly around the room searching for a safe place to land.
“Haven’t you talked to the police here in town? Because I gave them my statement a whole bunch of times.”
“Yes. And that’s why I wanted to ask you, mademoiselle, because I saw a discrepancy in the reports. When first interviewed, you said Natalie left here before ten. But later you said it was closer to midnight.”
I let the statement hang in the air between us.
Melissa gets up abruptly, long lithe limbs honed from what I would hazard has been a lifetime of sailing and tennis lessons, horseback riding and Pilates, suddenly restless and agitated.
“How can it matter? It’s like a hundred years ago. And that creeper from the nursery confessed, right? I mean I’m not even friends with Natalie anymore. And I’m leaving for college tomorrow.”
“Nothing should interfere with that, Melissa,” I reassure. “I’m not even here officially. It’ll stay between us, I promise. I’m just trying to get everything clear for my own sake.”
I offer her my silence once again. She wouldn’t have agreed to see me if she didn’t have something she wanted to get off her chest.
“Okay. Well, here’s the truth. She left here at nine-thirty or so.” She looks at me defiantly, daring me to chide her for lying. I don’t say a word.
“She was being weird. She’d been acting weird for a while. She wasn’t fun to be around. She wasn’t even nice. And that night, well, we had a stupid fight. But we were having fights all the time then, so when she asked me to say she left closer to twelve because she had left here and hooked up with Adam Nash and didn’t want her dad to know, I said sure. I mean, what was the big deal?”
“I understand. That’s the kind of harmless lie anyone would tell for a friend.”
Melissa nods assertively, pleased. “Right. Like I said, not a big deal. Especially with everything else that was going on.”
“Why did you stop being friends, Melissa? Was it more than just that the Burrowses moved away?”
Melissa’s eyes flick to the built-in cabinets surrounding the sixty-inch flat-screen TV. This girl should never play poker; she’s transparent as plastic wrap.
“Is there something you want to show me?” I ask.
Melissa hesitates, but only briefly. “Okay. Yeah. I might as well.”
She strides to one of the cabinets and pulls the door open. She pushes aside a stack of board games: Monopoly, Clue, Candy Land, Boggle, Chutes and Ladders, Operation. “My little brother’s,” she explains derisively.
Finally she extracts a sealed manila envelope from behind the pile of games.
“Here. These are why we stopped being friends. I took them because I saw she needed help, and they were a big part of how we convinced her dad to, you know, put her into treatment. But to be honest? They scared the shit out of me.”
Melissa gives her shoulders a shake, as if she’s brushing off a memory as sticky as a spider’s web. “I should have gotten rid of them long ago. So take them. Do whatever you want with them.”
She proffers the envelope. I take it.
Suddenly morphing into a poised swan of a girl, Melissa arches her neck and extends a thin, elegant hand for me to shake. I get the sense that perhaps she’s channeling her mother.
“And now,” she says, “I need to get ready for my guests.”
I’ve been dismissed.
Their Manhattan apartment is full of dust and ghosts.
Has it only been a matter of weeks since they left it for their family adventure in Paris? It seems impossible.
It never really did feel like home here, Natalie reflects. Mom never lived here. Jake was a fleeting presence. Dad tried his best, but it was never home.
Natalie’s caught herself a few times since her epiphany in the hospital. Gnawing her thumb, for example, at the funeral home. But for the most part she’s embraced her faith in a fresh start.
She contemplates her full-length reflection in the mirror inset into her closet door. The pageboy haircut she got this morning suits her sharp features and frames her eyes beautifully. She’s wearing a simple black shift and black chunky booties. She’s pleased with how she looks; it’s as if a little French gleam and polish rubbed off on her this summer. Warmth spreads through her with the realization she is being kind to herself. Surely this is another sign of her redemption. Isn’t that what Dr. Bloom used to say? Compassion starts with self-compassion.
Natalie pulls her box of treasures from its deep hiding place in the closet. Jake’s asked her to think about writing something to read aloud at Dad’s funeral. She wants—no, needs—the comfort of the talismans inside, the reminders of happier times. She lifts the lid.
Immediately she knows something is wrong.
The box is half-empty. All her sketchbooks are gone; that much is apparent immediately. Quickly, she rummages through the rest of the contents. Her Menehune doll is here. Mallory’s rosy pink lipstick. Ticket stubs and that funny sketch she did of Jake on a paper napkin. Her heart-shaped lapis lazuli. The program for Cabaret Night is still there, but the half-joint is missing.
Natalie sits back on her haunches, heart pounding. Who’d been inside her room? Who’d messed with her things? Jake? Daddy?
She can faintly hear Jake, talking on the phone in another room, using that “grown-up” voice that he’s pressed into service when dealing with the awful formalities. That’s what he calls all the responsibilities that seem to have fallen on his shoulders, the formalities. The word leaves Natalie with images of businessmen in tuxedos and bow ties, bowing and scraping as Jake navigates their politely treacherous paths.
Creeping from her bedroom, Natalie heads down the hallway. Jake’s voice is coming from the kitchen. Okay. She’ll take a look in Brian’s office first.
Daddy’s office smells like him. A mix of his favo
rite aftershave, pepper, a faint lemony overtone from the wood polish, a hint of coffee. The scent makes tears spring to her eyes, but she wipes them away impatiently.
She searches with furtive urgency. It seems wrong to sort through Daddy’s private papers. He’s dead, Natalie understands this, but still this feels sneaky, a violation.
The same violation he perpetrated on her if he rummaged through her room and took her things, she thinks angrily.
If Jake comes in, she will tell him she is looking for mementos to put aside before they pack up Daddy’s belongings to donate to charity. He’ll like that. It’s totally plausible. Completely reasonable.
She finds the sketchbooks stuffed into a plain brown paper bag on the top shelf of the closet, underneath a stack of old issues of Architectural Digest. She sinks into Brian’s desk chair and flips the pages of the top book of the stack.
Her fingers find the rough edges of the handful of drawings that were ripped from the center of this sketchbook three years ago. All this time, and she still feels in her physical body the violation and betrayal represented by those torn and exposed pages.
She flips through the next book in the stack and then the one below that.
The sense of exposure is overwhelming. These are her private sketchbooks. Daddy had no right! What did he think when he saw them? Oh god, what must have he thought? Why didn’t he talk to her about them? She could have explained. She could have explained everything.
Natalie gathers up the stack of books and shoves them back into their brown paper bag.
These are hers. No one else needs to see them. In fact, Natalie’s decided.
She’s going to destroy them all, the very first chance she gets.
Back in my Manhattan hotel room, I toss the manila envelope Melissa Masterson gave me down on the bed. I haven’t yet looked inside.
I strip off the guise of Aimee Martinet and pad into the shower, washing off the perfumed, chilled-air affluence of Westport as much as the grimy heat of Manhattan.
Clean hair toweled dry, wrapped in a luxurious hotel-supplied robe, I open the twist-off bottle of chardonnay in the mini bar and chug half of it before settling onto the crisply made bed. I slide a fingernail under the manila envelope’s seal.
Pull out a sheaf of drawings.
The one right on top is a portrait of Natalie, her face scrunched with concentration as she flays a delicate slice of flesh from her torso. She is nude.
The second one is even more disturbing: Natalie crouched on her haunches and grinning wickedly while cutting off her own baby toe. Blood spurts in exaggerated plumes.
Natalie’s flamboyant signature graces the bottom right-hand corner of both drawings.
Riffling queasily through the other pages in the stack I understand why Melissa was happy to be rid of them. Why she held on to them too.
I put the drawings aside and boot up one of the computers I purchased yesterday. Log in to the hotel WiFi.
I run a check on Elena, now traveling under the dead-double identity of Irina Sherkov (born and died 1989 in Kiev). Irina’s safely en route to Sydney, Australia; although with her chopped, dyed hair and baggy clothes she looks nothing like the elegant international model she once was, more like an underfed charwoman.
An apartment has been purchased for her in Sydney, a three-bedroom luxury unit on fashionable Gloucester Street. Bank accounts have been opened and filled with a hefty portion of Boris’s illegal gains. She’ll have the quiet life there that she craves.
As for her pig of a husband, I drained most of his accounts. Some of his wealth went to Elena, some to me. I left enough behind to give the authorities a solid trail of money, guns, and blood. But before I turned him over, I had a little fun.
A hot blonde paid a hundred euros to saunter past him, a quickly stuck syringe, and he was mine. Jumah rolled up in his dinky white van and we were off the street before anyone blinked. Boris was delivered the next morning, stark naked, cellophane-wrapped to a streetlight in the middle of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. His head was bald, shaved of the mane of which he was so proud. A flash drive with details of his operations and proof he paid kidnappers to abduct his wife was taped over one bare nipple.
I was safely in a plane over the Atlantic by the time he was discovered.
Maybe it was childish of me, but I didn’t have much of a childhood. I take my pleasures where I can find them.
With Elena happily resolved, I am free to focus on the Burrowses.
I may have more and more questions, but I also have ideas about how to get some answers.
The ceremony in the church had been unbearable. First the minister spoke. Then Jake. Natalie got through her own remarks and cried only once. Jake put his arm around her when she came back to the pew, and she nestled into his side.
But then all those teary faces, all those endless testimonials.
Not that there was anything wrong with people saying nice things about Brian, of course not. It was the having to stay composed, face frozen, while all these virtual strangers droned interminably on about Daddy.
Jake had organized the service. Natalie had been happy to let him. Now she wishes she had looked at the list of speakers. Insisted on a few changes.
She’s grateful a smaller crowd has followed them to the cemetery, reducing the number of former friends and acquaintances collected for another greedy glimpse of scandal.
Natalie loathes them all. She knows they use the misfortunes of her family as a kind of protective talisman. So awful, what happened to the Burrowses. But so close to home, that kind of horror, it couldn’t possibly strike us too. She’s sure that’s what they all silently hope as they cross their fingers and say their stupid prayers.
Here in the verdant, softly rolling hills of the cemetery are a small assortment of people from Dad’s office, including Hank Scovell, Mr. and Mrs. Masterson (although Melissa’s already left for Vassar, Sunny told her proudly, offering up Melissa’s condolences in proxy), a few of Jake’s friends from school.
Grandma Sue is here of course, with an aide to manage her wheelchair, but Natalie is not at all convinced that Grandma has a clue what’s going on.
Maybe that’s better. Maybe she’s lucky.
The coffin is lowered into the earth and Natalie looks away. She doesn’t want to think about earth and worms and maggots and rot, Daddy’s body turning to fetid carrion. When she dies, she’ll be cremated, she decides. Burnt to ash and cinder. Maybe she’ll purchase one of those urns she saw advertised that takes cremated remains and converts them into trees. She’d like to be a tree.
Out of the corner of her eye she catches a glimpse of a figure, somehow familiar, but also oddly out of place, tucked behind the large oak tree down the path. It’s a woman, her face obscured by enormous sunglasses, her hair wrapped in a patterned scarf in shades of gray. She wears well-cut black trousers and a steel-gray silk blouse.
Natalie glances at Jake. He’s beside her, staring fixedly at the sight of Brian’s coffin nestling into the dirt.
Who is she?
Natalie goes very still as realization hits her.
It’s the mysterious Hannah Potter. A woman who does not exist.
Come to pay her respects to the living and the dead.
Natalie looks different. Her long hair has been chopped into a short angular bob. It suits her. With a simply cut black wrap dress taut on her thin frame and high-heeled strappy shoes, she looks downright chic. She looks older too. Not surprising, really. Tragedy takes its toll.
But there’s something else about her that I can’t quite put my finger on. A lightness that seems at odds with the somber burial service unfolding in front of us.
Jake Burrows looks terrible. Haggard. Deep dark circles rim his eyes. He greets mourners’ condolences with a weary stoicism. Hank Scovell wraps an arm around Jake’s hunched shoulders and whispers briefly in his ear before departing.
A couple approaches the siblings; the wife looks like a tanner, ropier version of Melissa Mas
terson. Wifey bends to kiss Natalie. She flinches, visibly.
Finally the mourners drift away, leaving just Brian’s kids by the open graveside. Jake crouches down on his haunches, and Natalie places a hand on the top of his head. He shakes her off, then shoots her an apologetic smile.
Natalie looks over at me. I step out from behind the tree. Natalie leaves Jake to his thoughts and heads toward me.
“Hello,” I offer when she’s close enough to hear me.
“Why are you here?” she snaps. “And just who the hell are you really, ‘Hannah Potter’?” She’s very pale.
In reply, I extract the envelope Melissa gave me and hand it over to Natalie. She opens it and pages through the contents.
On top are the drawings of Natalie injuring herself.
Beneath them is another series of images with a different star: Will Crane.
Will Crane stabbed. Will Crane hung. Will Crane impaled on a spike, Will Crane burning at the stake, Will Crane buried alive, one clawlike hand grasping at nothingness from under the pile of mounded earth pouring into his gaping mouth.
Alongside the grotesque drawings of Crane are notations. Natalie had apparently stalked Crane; notes lining the margins of each artwork include detailed accountings of street addresses and drive times, people met and meals eaten.
Natalie looks at me with stony eyes. “So? You have some of my old drawings. So what?”
“I have questions—”
She interrupts. “You offered to help me. I thought you gave a shit about me. But everything you’ve ever said to me is a lie and I would like to know why. Who are you? Why are you all up in our business?”
I glance over at Jake, kneeling by his father’s grave, oblivious to our conversation.
“Tell me about the drawings, Natalie. Were you following Will Crane?”
“So what if I was?”
“What did you hope to accomplish?”
“He took my mother from me! I had a right!”
The Burial Society Page 20