“Noted. Oh.” Brennan says from the hall. “You might try some Goop. For your boot. They sell it in auto parts stores. Stuff’s like magic. Both my brothers work on cars, so I learned a few things over the years.”
A moment later a chair grates across the floor in Jeananne’s office on the other side of the wall. The popinjay, Joe used to call Jeananne—small and chatty. Maggie Brennan has just hit the mother lode.
Dorrie makes three more phone calls. She stretches. There’s been a little burst of business—a couple of teardowns and renovations in Chelsea, and three kitchens, two in Jamaica Plain, and one in Martha’s Vineyard. On paper, at least, the company seems pretty solid. She yawns. She turns on her computer and scrolls through her e-mails. She’s been so backlogged, she hasn’t even glanced at any of her e-mails since Joe’s death.
A few messages pop up. Most of the company e-mails went directly to either Edward or Joe, and the few clients whose messages went unanswered have already phoned her at the office. Her eyes scan the names. Joe. She looks at the date: January 9. He sent this on the day he died. She takes a deep breath before she clicks it open. A name and a phone number jump on the screen along with a link. Only that.
Tears of disappointment blur her vision, even though she knows this is her business e-mail and that Joe would never send a personal message to her here. Even so. She wipes her eyes and looks back at the screen at a name she doesn’t recognize. Paulo Androtti. The number must be his. The link is probably to this guy’s website, and she promises herself she’ll look at it. Later. She closes out and grabs her purse, searching for a tissue to repair her blotched mascara just as Jeananne says, “I wonder. Do people ever really get over something like that? Like his wife and his—”
“And his—?”
Dorrie runs her index finger under her eyes and scrunches her chair over a few inches closer to the wall. Like tissue paper, these walls. Jeananne’s voice drifts through.
“Oh. Yes. His wife and his—and his sons, I was going to say.”
“Joe had a girlfriend.” Brennan’s voice is flat, but Dorrie knows she’s bluffing. Of course, she’s bluffing. Please, please, please, Jeananne. Just keep your stupid mouth sh—
“I think so,” Jeananne says. “I heard him talking a few times. Two or three. He was meeting somebody ‘. . . only an hour,’ he said this one time, ‘but I’ll do my best to make it . . . ’ ” She stops. Dorrie lets out a long breath and Jeananne pipes up again. “And then another time, he said he loved her, whoever it was.”
“Could have been his wife, no?”
“Yeah,” Jeananne says. “Sure. Maybe. Except he said it like he meant it, you know?”
Dorrie rubs at her mascara with her fingers as Jeananne’s chatter flutters through the wall. After a minute or two, Brennan leaves to talk to Len in the back, and Dorrie blows her nose, pulls up Joe’s e-mail for the second time. She sighs. She touches his name with the tips of her fingers and clicks on the link beneath Paulo Androtti’s name, but it doesn’t take her to his website as she’d thought; it takes her to a news story. She turns down the volume and leans in toward the computer screen, where a young newswoman is reporting a house fire in Jamaica Plain. “Tragic,” the anchorwoman says. She looks excited. Eager. A couple trapped inside, the woman pregnant, in her last trimester. Awful. Horrific. Investigating for arson or any foul play, she goes on to say, and then the newscast cuts to the weather.
Dorrie replays the clip. The couple’s last name was Robbins. Sheryl and Alex Robbins. Curious, she looks them up on Google, finds two short articles and their obituaries, a sad and poignant picture of the couple walking a small dog.
The name is vaguely familiar. Jeananne must have mentioned them—mentioned this. Or, no. It wasn’t Jeananne; it was Lola. Lola from the front desk. So horrible, she’d said. So senseless. Such a sweet couple.
Dorrie pulls up the Home Runs file on renovations and scrolls down to the R’s. Alex and Sheryl Robbins. And then their address is typed in, along with three contact numbers and an e-mail address for Alex.
She closes her door and copies the entire page, saves it on her desktop in her “Upcoming Auditions file—empty now except for this. She’s tried to keep up with her acting over the years, but lately, these past weeks, she’s let it go. Lately, she feels as if her whole life is a play. She prints a copy of the page and zips it into a small compartment in her purse.
At exactly five, Dorrie grabs her coat and walks to the garage, still buttoning it when she hears Jeananne’s voice behind her. “Wait!”
She’s wearing the ugly coat Dorrie brought in to the office, and it hangs down off her arms. “I just saw that insurance woman again.” Jeananne’s voice echoes in the empty garage. “I’m working late tonight, so I ran up to Mug Me for some coffee, and when I got back, she was just standing in front of a parking space, staring at the cement.”
“Where?”
“There.” Jeananne shuffles her coffee around to point. “In front of Joe’s old space. She even squatted down to stick her finger in that—what?—gunk there, that little puddle of—”
“Huh.” Edward had mentioned at some point that Brennan used to be a cop. Old habits die hard, apparently. “Interesting,” Dorrie says, and even though she’s still slightly annoyed with her gossipy co-worker, she watches from her car until Jeananne is safely in the elevator.
Dorrie inches home along slushy roads and pulls up in the driveway, holds her naked hands in front of the heater vent before she hurries inside. Cold sticks to her clothes and she shivers in the hallway, sorts through hefty stacks of mail, separating bills from ads and catalogs. Newspapers still in their bags are piled up on the desk. She’ll stick them in with the recyclables. Later. I’ll think about it tomorrow! she says in her best Scarlett voice and she takes off her coat, shakes the snow onto the round bright rug in the small entryway. She turns on a desk lamp.
“Lily?”
The house is silent. The air is thick with odors from the kitchen. Burnt bread or toasted Eggo waffles.
“Up here,” Lily calls from her room. “On the phone.”
“Finish your homework first,” Dorrie yells, but her heart’s not really in it. She can’t concentrate; lately, her brain is in a fog.
“I am,” Lily assures her. “We are. Math.” Dorrie adds a bill from Boston Gas to a hefty pile of mail. She smiles, remembering Lily mentioning a new guy at school—a math and science geek, she’d said and rolled her eyes.
Dorrie stands at the foot of the stairs, leans forward toward her daughter’s room. “Did you find the cobbler?” Clearly not. If she had, the house wouldn’t smell like burnt toast. A second later, Lily sails down the stairs.
“Raspberry?” she mouths, her cell phone tight against her ear. Raspberry is her favorite. Raspberry anything—When Lily was three and deathly sick with strep throat, Dorrie, hovering over her daughter’s tiny bed with the heart-shaped headboard, asked her if there was anything at all she felt like eating. Lily’s voice was such a tiny fevered wheeze, she couldn’t hear. Only . . .
Dorrie had pushed closer. What, sweetie. Anything at all you think you could— Lily whispered “raspberry sorbet.”
“It’s almost dinnertime,” Dorrie says now. “Just take a bite.”
Lily gives her a hug. “Thanks, Mom,” she whispers. She points at Dorrie with the hand not holding her cell. Awesome, she mouths again, sliding back upstairs, plate in hand with not so much as a hiccup in her conversation.
Dorrie makes herself a cup of tea and glances down at her boot, the smear of grease. Goop, Brennan had suggested. She sticks her coat back on and heads out to the garage. If Goop has even the slightest connection to cars, Samuel will most likely have a jar of it out here somewhere. He’s methodical. He’ll have it on a shelf with other cleaners. She yawns again. Tired. She never seems to really sleep. She sees it in her dreams, that car sliding over into their lane, the tree, Joe’s eyes, staring toward the window, seeing nothing. Or did he? The look of surpris
e on his face. She wonders, sometimes, if he saw her mother in that last instant, her hand, white in the dark car, soft against the hard edges of death, leading him carefully from the wreckage.
The garage is a mess, but somehow Samuel’s shelves are in some kind of order. Jars. Cans. Combustibles. She sorts through. There it is. Goop! She grabs it, reads the directions. Toxic, of course. Samuel’s big on toxins. She opens it and takes a little whiff, decides to stick her boot outside on the front porch after she’s Gooped it.
She never comes out here. It’s Samuel’s space. She looks around, takes in the photographs of Lily—in her soccer uniform and graduating from sixth grade, Lily standing proudly in her skis—a shot of Samuel’s mother in her old Victorian two-family in Chelsea, and a few nice black-and-whites of Dorrie performing on stage. Samuel is an excellent photographer.
She turns toward the door and something catches her eye in all the mess and chaos of her husband’s automotive lair, a baggie on the second shelf beside a box of nails. She reaches for it but then she stops, stares at a piece of black cloth on the back of the workbench, sticking out from behind a stack of books on engines and a jar with pens and cutting tools. She walks across the room and gives a little tug, and there it is. A black glove—the one she lost the night Joe died. The lined leather Bloomingdale’s purchase she thought she’d never see again lies boldly on the bench. What the hell? Or maybe it’s the mate, she tells herself, the one she lost earlier. But if so, why would Samuel hide it?
She sticks it behind the books where Samuel had it hidden. She backs away as if the glove is some wild creature she has inadvertently awakened, and slips through the garage door into the kitchen. Suddenly she’s back inside her nightmare, but this time she’s awake.
XI
MAGGIE
Maggie steps out of her heels and pulls a pair of boots from under her desk. Sometimes she feels as if she’s in a strange sort of play, here in this office of beige, her desk a small, unsturdy fortress on a plastic-feeling floor. Not that she’s particularly knowledgeable about such things, but she once had a boyfriend who was an actor. Daryl. He’d taken her to a few off-Broadway shows that Maggie didn’t understand and suspected Daryl didn’t, either. “It was a little esoteric,” he might say afterward, as they hunched over their coffees in some earnest little café he’d discovered, or “He takes some getting used to,” of a screenwriter with an unpronounceable last name.
She reaches down to tie her boots and heads out to Southie to check on Joseph Lindsay’s old Audi, which has been down at the O’Brien brother’s place since the night of the accident. She won’t bother Hank with this. It’s not as if they’re partners at this point.
She drives the long way to South Boston, avoiding Chinatown. It makes her skittish. Edgy. Makes her remember that night with the kid in the slouchy jeans. She makes a wide loop and keeps her eyes on the road. She hasn’t done anything even remotely like police work in months. Hasn’t had to, not since she left the force. Maggie plays it safe these days, sticks to the forms and sticky notes, some investigations. She stays on her beige stage, alone, except for the occasional phone call to a client—Your husband, Mrs. Randolph, was he seventy-eight or seventy-nine? I can’t quite read the writing on page three—and sporadic conversations with the agents, the greetings and leave-takings, the swapping of vital information. Aside from these brief contacts, she usually has very little interaction at work, which Maggie thinks might be a good thing. At least for now.
She glances at the street. Shops are less expensive here than downtown; it’s a mix of old and new. Southie’s up-and-coming, but the people are more casually dressed, the sidewalks far less crowded. She pulls into the lot at O’Brien’s and takes out her notepad. A car backfire echoes against the hollow insides of the building and Maggie shudders. It’s almost imperceptible. She’s gotten good at not reacting visibly. She’s better now, she tells herself, but when she’s honest with herself, she knows she’s only managed to suppress her feelings, that her nerves are raw and that open wounds run along her bones and veins and skin. She knows that fear goes somewhere, shock and guilt and fear. It doesn’t simply go away.
She waits for her heart to slow down, takes a couple of deep breaths, and then she walks over to the garage, shakes hands with Ian, one of the O’Brien brothers, tells him why she’s there, and Ian points her to the Audi, out back in an old shed. “All this snow and ice.” He shrugs, makes a sideways motion with the flats of his hands. “Hell. If the car was outside, there’d be nothin’ left of it to see, let alone sell. Parts’d be ruined.”
“Mind if I take a look?”
“Have at it.” Ian nods his head, walks back to the heated garage to work on something worth saving, something that the Audi, Maggie sees the second she opens the shed door, is definitely not. She’s surprised at how hard the car hit. Newbury’s not a main thoroughfare, so even if Lindsay was skidding on ice, the brakes should have slowed it down enough to avoid the kind of damage she’s looking at here. She snags an old crate with the toe of her boot and pulls it closer to the car, glances around her at the building that was probably a warehouse before O’Brien Towing bought it with the land decades ago. She sits against the wall and squints at the car. Wind drifts in through spaces between boards and Maggie wonders if it was always this drafty or if all the winters have together warped the wood, made the gaps. She remembers coming here with Hank to check on cars involved in robberies, jackings, hit-and-runs. She leans back. The floor smells like straw.
She’d left the Boston Police Department on her own. There’d been no sanctions from on high, no slap on the hand. No one really knew the truth of it except Hank, and even that was because Maggie finally told him. It was just after her fourth-year anniversary, not that anyone besides her mother and her sister actually kept track. Summertime. July. Middle of a heat wave, lots of people on the street. A shop owner in Chinatown hit a silent alarm in the middle of a robbery, and Hank and Maggie got the call.
They’d maneuvered through the cramped, tight neighborhood and turned on Hunter Street, with its vibrant sounds and colors, the glut of signs and people, the lack of space. They’d turned off the engine and coasted to the front of the store. There was a kid with a hoodie, slouchy pants, the usual, but when Hank and Maggie got inside, the place was a mess. It looked like someone had gone crazy in there—bags all over, food spilled everywhere, and the owner hunkered down on the floor against the wall, looking scared to death.
“Put your hands behind your head and turn around real slow,” Maggie told the kid. “Real slow.” But the boy reached inside his pocket, grabbed something, and whirled toward them, pointing it at Maggie.
“Fuck!” Hank was right behind her in the doorway, and Maggie aimed her gun at the kid, but she couldn’t pull the trigger. She froze.
It turned out all right. In truth, it was the best possible outcome. The weapon the boy pulled on them was just a pipe he’d picked up from the street, a construction site, his own house, maybe, but it wasn’t a gun like they’d both thought.
“Good call as it happens,” the chief told her and Hank the next night when they came in. “But sheer luck it went down the way it did. You don’t ever wanna take that kind of chance. He could easily have killed you. Either that or messed you up for life. The both of yous.” And Maggie knew it wasn’t a good call, even if Hank didn’t, even if he thought she’d seen the kid only had a pipe. It was something else that rendered her unable to react, froze her like a statue in the doorway to that shop on Hunter Street, that put her somewhere else for those few crucial seconds, put her in a jeep in Iraq, as snipers fired out of a window in a building somewhere down the road. For that small space of time she was every bit as helpless as she was the day several rounds of bullets killed three friends behind her in the Humvee she was driving into Baghdad.
She’d given her notice four days later. She’d stayed on for a couple of weeks, rode with Hank the same as always, but things were different after that night. Maggie was
different. She couldn’t trust herself to not screw up when it really mattered. She wasn’t sure she’d act in the best interest of the ones around her, protect the lives she was supposed to save. “I need my eight hours of beauty sleep,” she’d told her partner. “This night shift’s killing me.” And it was only months later, when she’d been at the insurance company for a while, that she told Hank the real reason she had left the force.
For a second, Maggie wonders if that’s why she’s here—if it has nothing to do with Joseph Lindsay’s life insurance policy or an extra Starbucks cup rolling around the front seat of his car. Did seeing Hank the other day spark something, make her miss the old days, when she felt connected, alive? Was this her chance to put things right, to prove that she’s got what it takes, not only to the chief and the department, but to herself?
She starts to get up. She takes a last look at the Audi and shakes her head. What a waste. And then she sees something, a piece of plastic. She squats down and then she lies on her back and pulls herself under the wrecked front end of the car.
It looks like a tie wrap.
What the fuck?
She looks closer, touches the thing. She knows about cars. She takes a few shots with her iPhone before she stands up, and then she takes more photos of the outside and the inside of the car, where she finds a lid jammed down beside the seat. She grew up in that kind of family, the kind that pieced together junkers and kept them on the road—jalopies they’d’ve scrapped if they weren’t so broke all the time, eking out a living, making engines run way past their prime. She stoops down again, fiddles with the tie wrap pulled against the scuffed brake line. She grins. All those afternoons spent helping out her brothers paid off every now and then. It made sense to come here after all. Now, with this goddamn tie wrap fastening a damaged line. Someone tied the brake line to a rough piece of the suspension and over time, the scraping of the line would cause the brake to fail. On a night like that Friday night Joe Lindsay died, the swerving of the steering wheel, his sudden desperate jamming on the brakes just might do it.
The Other Widow Page 8