Her mother looked up, registering not surprise but almost its opposite. She enclosed Maddy’s hand in hers, giving it a strong squeeze. And suddenly Madison was five years old, crossing the road with her beautiful mother, hand in trusting hand.
She reached for a tissue and attempted to blow her nose. The sound meant she almost missed what her mother said. But she just caught the words: ‘Don’t listen to what she says.’
Maddy wanted to ask who ‘she’ was, but she knew she didn’t need to. She was thinking of a response that would signal her understanding but she could see it was too late. Whatever thought had been in her mother’s mind had disappeared. The woman facing her had wandered elsewhere.
Maddy blew her nose once more and decided to start again. She let go of her mother’s hand and said, ‘Mom, I wanted to talk about Abigail.’
Her mother’s face darkened at that, though it recovered with surprising speed. One of the doctors had spoken of that too. He had a name for it, if not avoidance then something similar. We find that, with this condition, the brain finds ways to shut out that which is too difficult to process.
Her mother reached for her book of Sudoku puzzles. Initially a doctor’s suggestion – Even when the brain loses its hold on words, it can retain its grip of numbers, but that muscle needs regular exercise – it had become a near-addiction.
Madison tried a different route. ‘You know Abigail’s job, Mom?’
‘She’s a good girl.’ She had her pencil in her hand, hovering over the grid of digits.
‘She is, she’s great. They like her, don’t they?’
‘Well, the children do.’
That was a good sign, one Maddy could not help but seize on as a point scored against Quincy. ‘The children?’ she asked, seeking confirmation.
‘The other children at the school.’
That ‘other’ landed with a thud. She was imagining Abigail as a child.
‘Abigail is a teacher, Mom. And she’s good at it.’
But her mother was too focused on adding up, using her fingers. As she pencilled in her findings, Maddy repeated herself and this time got an answer. ‘They offered her another job.’
That was news to Maddy. Could it be true? Had Abigail started working somewhere else, somewhere perhaps where she might have had a connection with the garrison?
She was getting ahead of herself. Her mother was hardly a reliable source and Maddy had spoken to Abigail about work and careers not that long ago. She surely would have told her if there had been any change.
‘What kind of job, Mom?’
Her mother suddenly brightened, her face a picture of light. She looked down at the puzzle book, hurriedly filling in several numbers at once. ‘There,’ she said proudly. But then she checked her work and a shadow fell. ‘Too good to be true,’ she said. Her catchphrase.
‘What kind of job, Mom?’
Her mother paused from rubbing out the ill-fated numbers and looked up blankly.
‘You said they offered Abigail a job? What kind of job?’
‘Same job.’
‘Oh.’
‘But better.’
‘At the same school?’
Her mother moved her head in what Madison wanted to see as a nod. But it wasn’t obvious. It might have been nothing, some mental flotsam that had wafted into her mother’s mind and then out again. Even if her mother had been making sense, it was simply letting her know about a promotion: it didn’t make much difference. ‘What about anywhere else? Did Abigail ever mention anything?’
‘Why would she?’ Whether this was Why would she look for a job somewhere else? or Why would she mention it? was not obvious. Truth was, it was quite possible that the words her mother had spoken bore no relation to the question she had asked at all. Why would she? could refer to anything and everything.
Maddy leaned forward to take her mother’s hand once more. She held it for a second, her mother gazing at her with that same eager blankness. ‘Mom, is there anything else Abigail might have mentioned, even something that didn’t seem important at the time? Try to remember, Mom. I know it’s hard. But I think you can remember more than—’
A voice rang out, simultaneous with a change in the light from the hallway. ‘Hello! It’s me!’
Quincy.
Instinct made Maddy withdraw, pulling back from her mother, letting go of the comfortable cave the two had made of their hands. At the same moment, Paola emerged from the kitchen, with a speed that suggested she had been hovering by the door.
‘Maddy! This is a surprise,’ her sister said brightly, her cheeks flushed with fresh winter air. She was carrying two – no, three – shopping bags, overflowing with groceries. In that instant, and not before, Maddy realized that she had announced her own visit by bringing precisely nothing. ‘How long have you been here?’
‘Actually, I was about to leave.’
‘Oh, don’t go so quickly. I’m sure Mom’s enjoying having a chat.’
Paola stepped in to remove the plate, where the rink of gravy had now congealed. ‘You tired now, yes?’ she said gently. ‘Tiring answer all those questions.’
Maddy could feel the temperature drop and stiffened herself for the inevitable.
‘Questions?’ asked Quincy, the brightness in her voice becoming strained. ‘What questions?’
‘We were just having a chat,’ Maddy replied, the words sounding feeble in her mouth. ‘Weren’t we, Mom?’
The older woman herself now spoke, her expression suggesting that she wanted to help Maddy out. ‘Abigail’s happy where she is,’ she said, her face filled with that same, innocent smile.
Quincy said nothing, but the urgency with which she moved to dump the bags in the kitchen signalled that she was far from done with this topic. Maddy watched the way she handed the third bag to Paola, no words necessary, hinting at a complicity between the two women which rather explained the latter’s minor act of intelligence gathering.
‘Maddy, why don’t you help me get some of these things out of the car?’
She did as she was told, even though she knew what was coming.
Once outside, by the empty trunk of her oversized SUV, Quincy launched right in. ‘This is not a “story”, Maddy, do you hear me? This is real life.’ The telltale redness was spreading up Quincy’s neck. ‘That’s your mother in there, who’s just lost a child. You have to …’ She stopped, as if she could not find words potent enough to convey her anger. ‘Why not talk to us for once, Maddy. Not interview us, but talk to us. Just once.’ She let out a noise – part growl, part grinding of teeth – an animal expression of sibling fury.
Maddy wondered about saying nothing, a technique from childhood which, when she had the self-discipline to deploy it, usually delivered great results, maddening an already-mad Quincy still further. But that required a self-restraint she didn’t have. Not today, not any more.
‘You know, Quincy, just because you’re the older sister does not give you the right to tell me how to behave. It didn’t then and it doesn’t now, OK?’
‘But I wouldn’t have to tell you if you only—’
‘And it’s about fucking time you stopped doing it, Quincy. I mean it. In fact, it’s way past time. We’re adults now, Quincy. Adults. And I don’t need you acting like—’
‘Adults? You! You’ve got to be kidding. You don’t know the first thing about adult responsibility.’ She gestured towards the house, whose front door was still open. ‘Who do you think makes—’
‘I don’t care, Quincy.’
‘Oh, I know you don’t care. That’s completely obvious, Madison. One hundred per cent obvious. You don’t care about anyone but … in fact, I’m not sure who you care about. It’s certainly not us. But do you even care about yourself? I mean, look at the state of you. You’re a—’
‘Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Quincy? Just shut the fuck up. You don’t know the first thing about me. And not just me. Abby and I talked about this hundreds of times. About how you
act like you’re the mother—’
‘But—’
‘And don’t think that’s just ’cause of what’s going on now. You’ve always been doing it, long before Mom got … sick. Abby agreed. You’ve been a bossy bitch since we were kids and you know what, Abby couldn’t stand it and nor can I.’
At that, Maddy felt the hot, sharp sting of a slap across her cheek from her older sister, her arm, muscled and toned through a thousand sessions with a personal trainer, able to deliver quite a blow.
Inside, Maddy dabbed at the burning flesh of her face, but she did not cry. On the contrary, she almost welcomed the blow. It had ended the argument between them just now. But, even in this first instant, she suspected it had done something more. She had felt the bolt of lightning that ends a close, humid day.
Their mother was asleep as they sat chatting in the kitchen, Paola a safe distance away washing sheets. Maddy nursed a cup of hot jasmine tea, prepared for her by her oldest sister.
‘All I know is,’ Quincy was saying, ‘Abby was proud. Certainly too proud to ask Mark and me for help. And too proud to ask Mom.’
‘Or me.’
‘Or you. That’s right. So she took on extra work.’
‘What kind of work?’ Maddy asked, desperate to adopt a tone that was talk rather than interview.
‘Extra teaching.’
‘Where, at the school?’ Maddy took another sip of tea, to maintain the grammar of a chat.
‘She was hired by some parents at the school, to tutor kids who needed extra back-up.’
‘What kind of parents?’
Quincy flashed her a warning look, as if she was approaching but had not yet crossed the red line that separated journalism from family. ‘Do you want to tell me what this is about, Madison?’
Maddy hesitated. ‘I’m not sure yet. It may be nothing. But there may be a … pattern.’
‘A pattern?’
‘Other women. Killed the same way.’
‘Jesus.’
‘So what kind of parents?’
‘Around there? Fairly affluent, I guess. Comfortable without being tony.’
‘Any Chinese expats?’
‘Chinese? Seriously?’
‘Maybe. Everything’s a maybe at this stage, Quince.’
‘Do the police know about this?’
Maddy looked down, staring into the ripples her spoon was making in the tea.
‘Maddy?’
‘I don’t know. Put it this way, I don’t think they care as much about Abby as we do. So, that school. Any Chinese expats?’
Quincy barely paused. ‘No. I’d be amazed if there were any. Not there.’
Maddy did her best not to show any disappointment. Not to feel any was harder. But she let the conversation with her sister run on, only clamming up when the subject of Abby’s funeral surfaced. She said there would be issues with the coroner’s office, that the autopsy process for a homicide could take weeks, that it was not in their interest to rush things. But she knew she was not telling the whole truth, even to herself.
After she had gone into her mother’s bedroom to say goodnight – planting a kiss on her forehead, tasting the cold fragrance of her night cream – she found herself, once again, outside and by Quincy’s car, preparing to say goodbye.
‘I’m sorry about what I said before,’ Quincy began. ‘About how you looked.’
Maddy gave a wan smile, the humour of it not eluding her. Two sisters can say the most vicious things about the very core of each other’s character, that’s natural. But to criticise the other’s appearance, now that’s crossing the line.
Quincy saw the joke, allowing a smile of her own to escape. She shook her head, repeated her apology for pointing out how exhausted Maddy seemed then said, as if to herself, ‘What is it with both my sisters? Gorgeous girls, if only they got more sleep.’
Maddy laughed along but then stopped herself. ‘What was that?’
‘You and Abby. The beauties of the family. You always were.’
‘No. About sleep.’
‘Oh, it was nothing. I didn’t mean anything by—’
‘You said both of us got no sleep. Did Abby have …’ She hesitated, as always, over the word insomnia. She hated having a label, a disease with a name. Besides, she resented the idea of so stubbornly large and complex a part of her life being reduced to a single word. If it was simple enough to say in eight letters, why could it not be solved just as simply? To her mind, it belittled a foe that was too mighty, too greedy to be captured in so short a space.
‘No,’ said Quincy, kind enough to pick up the cue without needing the actual word. ‘No, it was nothing like that. I just think Abby was worrying some – about the extra work she had taken on.’
‘What kind of worrying?’
‘That it was interfering with her regular work, at the school. “Too many late nights,” something like that.’
‘She said that?’
‘Yes!’ Quincy replied, the edge returning once more. ‘But don’t start quoting me. Remember what I said, Maddy.’
‘Sure,’ she replied. ‘You’re right. I remember.’
They gave each other a brief embrace, awkward, the arms and hands not quite in the right places. They promised to speak soon, about Mom, about logistics. Maddy did her best to say goodbye the way a loving sister would leave a house of mourning. But the only thought in her mind as she reversed the car and pulled away was the one that had just been planted.
Too many late nights.
Chapter 23
Despite everything they had said to each other at their mother’s house, it was Quincy’s earlier barb that kept returning to Madison. You don’t know everything. She could not deny its truth in the area where it should have been least applicable and which mattered most: her knowledge of her younger sister. There was so much she didn’t know.
The expensive clothes in the closet, the nights glued to the bar at the Great Hall had no place in the portrait of Abigail that Madison had carried around all these years. Perhaps, she now wondered, she had barely updated it since Abigail was a child, tumbling and rolling around with their dog, Chilli. Perhaps she had never really known the adult Abigail at all.
As she contemplated the computer screen – emptied now after a Skype call with Jessica, in which the housemate had detailed a dramatic increase in Abigail’s spending power to match the striking change in wardrobe, but could not explain either – the pain of it entered her. She would now have to research her own sister. The chance to talk, to find out and explore, that chance had been available to her every day for years and years. Unlike most families she knew, they all lived in the same city. Abigail had been within easy reach. But now it was too late.
After a futile glide through Google, she went back for the fifth or perhaps sixth time to the Facebook page. The messages from friends now fought for space with countless statements from strangers.
This tragedy shows how much we have forgotten what it means to be an American!!!
Words cannot say, how much pain is in my heart. You’re in a better place now, even though we are apart.
She kept scrolling, but there was page after page of them. Weeding out the rubberneckers, gathering on this page the way they might at the scene of a car crash, focusing only on those who knew Abigail, whether as a teacher or a friend, this was unarguable evidence that Abigail was deeply and widely loved.
She was skimming over them now, taking in their shape and flavour rather than reading each word, when she stopped suddenly. She took her finger off the downward arrow and went back.
I loved to watch you dance. You weren’t just hot like the others. You had real beauty. RIP.
She read it three times, lingering in a different place each time. ‘Hot’ caught her, as did ‘the others’. She had a rising sense that she understood what she was looking at, and as that grew a creeping nausea grew with it. She clicked immediately on the username, Greg Stanhouse, to see a generic silhouette where the profile photog
raph should have been.
Surely Barbara Miller and the homicide department had seen this? She should call, if not Miller then at least Jeff. This had to be of paramount relevance. She was furious with herself for not spotting it earlier.
The nausea had reached her throat. She pushed back in her chair, tilting her neck in the same direction, as if on the receiving end of an unseen but almighty upper cut. The desire for sleep was so powerful and, in this moment of shock, the prospect of it seemed plausible. She closed her eyes.
Her head filled with a swirl of colours, dulled but insistent. What she saw behind her eyes resembled a thermal imaging map, the shape of it shifting. There was a sound to it, throbbing and arrhythmic, like shellfire in a war zone. Her body was crying out for it to stop, desperate for the quiet, or at least constant, steady noise that might bring rest.
But the explosions would not let up and nor would the voice inside, rattling through the facts and what they might mean, a running commentary that was telling her that the author of that one-line Facebook message might well be the man who murdered Abigail and maybe even ‘the others’.
She should call the police, this was too serious to handle alone. But she could foresee with great clarity the consequences. In less than a second, her mind displayed for her in telescoped form the scenes that would follow: the struggle to reach Miller, the messages left and ignored; the eventual, reluctant call to Jeff, in which he would try to soothe her, urging her to get some rest, as if it were that easy, and to leave the police work to the police; the frustration and delay; the low-level detective assigned the task of checking out one among hundreds of leads, doubtless treating Maddy’s discovery as if it were no better than any of the random tips such a case brought in from the public …
No. There was no time for any of that. She would do this herself. Avoiding delay was the official reason, the one she told herself as she forced herself to sit back up, then stood, walking in stiff, upright steps, like the undead in a silent horror movie, over to the bathroom, splashing her face with water then recoiling as she sniffed the old, unwashed towel. She told herself that doing this alone was about saving time, but even she was not entirely fooled by that story.
The 3rd Woman Page 17