The Spires

by Moretti, Kate

  She felt calmer now. This was all a huge mistake—she just had to talk her way out of it. Surely anyone with a medical degree could see that, right?

  “I’m Dr. Beck.” She opened the blinds in the room and took a seat on the little (rounded) desk chair. Not a nurse, then. “We’re going to talk for a bit. Just to get an idea of where you stand, what sort of outpatient help you might need, if any.”

  “Outpatient? So I get to leave?” Penelope felt both relieved and deflated at the prospect. Relieved because it was validation that she hadn’t completely lost her mind. Deflated because where was she going to go? It was Thursday. Linc and Tara would be at school, hopefully. Brett, for all his faults, was generally a levelheaded and responsible father. He would have minimized her absence, certainly not told them she’d been admitted—admitted, for God’s sake—until they knew what the outcome would be. Brett might be home waiting for her, and she wasn’t ready to see him yet. And Willa? God knows.

  “Yep. Fortunately, you don’t meet the criteria for an involuntary hold. Just had a bit of a stressful night?” Dr. Beck smiled—more kindness. So much kindness. She had a clipboard on her lap and a laptop underneath it but made no move to open either one. She folded her hands and just waited.

  Penelope closed her eyes and inhaled, and in a rush, all the events of the past few weeks came spewing out, without conscious thought. Brett’s job. Willa. Brett’s hospital stay. Willa’s “help.” The birth control pills and condoms. The affair. The disastrous dinner party. Then she rushed on and told Dr. Beck about the things only she knew to be true: the necklace, the photos that had been in her closet, the knife, Grey, Violet, maybe Brett’s illness? It was all under a cloud of suspicion now.

  “Well, first of all, we’ve done some research here. You should know that Grey and Violet Hudson exist—that is easily verifiable information. You are not having some elaborate delusion,” Dr. Beck said sympathetically. What did Dr. Beck look up? How much did she believe about everything else? Penelope couldn’t tell. “What do you think about Brett and Willa telling you that these things are not true?”

  “I think that Willa is lying and Brett believes her. I mean, it’s provable now. I could have showed him yesterday. But I didn’t. I chose the pictures. I wanted some kind of impact. I wanted him to finally see what had been going on in the house. He’s always so oblivious. And now he thinks I’ve genuinely had some kind of psychotic break. Because I was angry about the affair, or because we’ve been disconnected. Our marriage is complicated right now.”

  “All marriages are always complicated.” Dr. Beck gave her a small smile and then wrote something on her notepad, tore off the top sheet. “I do want you to come back for cognitive therapy—I think that’s just plain good for anyone. I see no indication that you’re suffering under any delusions or hallucinations. I don’t know what the story is with your friend, but it is likely not a result of your mental stability. For the time being, I think a mild antidepressant would aid some of the immediate anxiety.” She paused. “I do know they could have booked you for assault, and you were a bit wild last night when they brought you in.”

  “I was angry. Furious, actually.”

  “Understandably so. But I’m simply trying to explain why we thought a night of rest would ease some of the emotional turmoil.”

  “Okay, so I’m just free to go?” Penelope glanced to the door, beyond the metal-mesh glass, and saw the officer who had transported her last night waiting in the hallway, hands resting on his belt. For how long?

  “You are free to go.”

  Penelope’s first thought was, Oh, thank God. Her second, Free to go where?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  February 26, 2020

  The police officer dropped her in front of her house. The shades were drawn, and the house looked asleep, despite it being eleven in the morning. Brett, even when laid off, was up at dawn, stretching and meditating and drinking energy shakes, making Penelope nervous with all his jittery energy. He buzzed around the kitchen with his yogurt and his chia seeds, getting underfoot as Penelope marshaled the whole process of getting the children to school. Penelope was always proud of her lack of resentment for that—and that she never martyred herself. She didn’t want anyone’s poor you. She actually truly liked the mornings.

  It was Wednesday. What had Brett told the kids about her? She checked her text messages, and there was nothing. Not even from Brett. At the mental hospital—God, that was such a foreign concept and completely disconnected with where she’d been the night before—they had taken everything. Her purse, keys, cell phone, clothes, even her shoes. They had given her hospital-issued socks, complete with rubber nonslip soles. This morning she had gotten it all back in a plastic bag before being discharged.

  She wondered if Brett had gotten the kids off to school. Maybe Willa had? She felt a lurch of something sick in her gut. She had visions of them all resuming their morning routine—Tara eating cereal, something sugary and multicolored, while Linc housed down a banana and a hard-boiled egg. Tara with her coffee and Linc throwing back a large glass of milk in one guzzle, Adam’s apple bobbing. She imagined Willa, pouring the cereal, washing the milk glass, humming at the sink. She imagined Brett, finding her in the kitchen in her sleep shirt. She imagined his hand sliding across her backside, his voice filled with grief and concern: Have you heard from Pen?

  No. Just no.

  She texted Tara: can you please go to Sasha’s after school today?

  A reply: Sure. Are you okay? You didn’t come home. Where were you? Linc called and said it went to voicemail. Dad tried to downplay everything, but we’ve been worried! Dad said you guys had a fight.

  Putting it mildly. Which was fine—she didn’t want her kids to know any details about any of this until she could figure it all out. Figure what out?

  She shot another text to Linc, asking the same questions, with much the same responses. She asked him to go to Zeke’s, and he agreed. He also replied, I love you. Because he was Linc.

  She turned and walked away from her house, down the street, made a right onto Middletree Lane to the little yellow bungalow with the brick-red shutters and wide wooden front porch.

  He’d been sitting in a rocking chair—just sitting, which never failed to amaze her; Penelope had never, in her mind, sat and done nothing for one moment in her life—and he stood when he saw her, a cup of coffee in one hand.

  Penelope closed her eyes. Please, please, please believe me, she thought fervently.

  She stuck a hand in the air in a wave. Jaime waved back.

  It took her less time to tell Jaime everything—the affair, Willa’s lies, the knife, the photographs, the dinner party, Grey, Violet—than it had Dr. Beck. When she was done spewing what had felt like word vomit, he sat back against the rocking chair and exhaled loudly. A gust of sweet coffee and peppermint.

  “Do you believe me?” Penelope asked, her voice smaller than she wanted, her throat bone dry. She wanted self-assurance. I am telling the truth and therefore must be believed. Jaime paused for too long.

  “Yeah, I do.” Jaime said it softly, but resolute. “I knew something about Brett. I didn’t know details, but I suspected.” He stopped talking for a moment, picked at the paint on the white chair. Penelope had been with Kiera when she’d bought the rockers. An Amish roadside stand in the middle of Pennsylvania that sold nothing but rocking chairs, handmade on site, a bearded man on a stool with a hand lathe and chisel carving her real wood, none of that particleboard crap furniture. Kiera was from California—everything glass and metal, shining in the bright seventy-six-degree sunshine. Pennsylvania had felt like another world, a quaint adventure. They shoved two white rocking chairs in the trunk of her Ford Explorer, ate streusel and fasnachts, and laughed all the way home at their sweet little hallo and jovial mach’s gut! as they pulled away. For years later, they’d get together for after-dinner drinks, and when they parted, one or the other would say mach’s gut!

  Penelope had nev
er sat in them before. As far as she could remember, she’d never seen Kiera sit in them either.

  “You never said anything.” It was a stupid thing to say, and Penelope knew it. If Jaime had said he thought Brett was cheating, Penelope would think it was driven by ulterior motive. She used to feel so confident of Jaime’s attraction to her that she’d used it as fuel. Brushing her hair shiny before heading to the Stop N Shop, just in case she ran into him. Wearing the tighter jeans with the rip under the left cheek because he’d commented on it once, his voice a low, tortured rumble in her ear. The flirtation alone had been enough for her.

  But not for Brett.

  Penelope waited for the anger that never surged. All her rage had ebbed away. When she thought of Brett’s affair, she thought of course. Like he’d fulfilled a predetermination.

  She watched Jaime search for the right words—comfort or opportunism, which way would he go? What did he feel for Willa, especially now that he knew the truth? Penelope saw the broad flex of his shoulders as he rubbed the bristle on the back of his head, something he always did while thinking. She kept her eyes down, stared at his feet, at the soft-gray leather moccasins that Penelope had bought him for Christmas last year. She’d spent more money on Jaime than on Brett, she remembered. She watched the flex of tendon in his ankle travel up his leg, the muscle twitching under the soft, worn denim of her favorite jeans.

  She would not touch his thigh, no matter how much she wanted to. Brett’s affair was not a free pass.

  She broke the silence. “I need your help.”

  “Anything, always, you know that.” The smile he gave her was brief, sideways, a little sad.

  “Do you believe me about Willa?” Penelope asked.

  “Of course I believe you. You’d have to be crazy to lie about a husband. A child, for God’s sake.” Jaime caught his words then and, without thinking, reached out and took her hand. His hands were warm despite the cold morning. “You’re not crazy. I’m sorry. I just meant . . . maybe there’s another reasonable explanation.”

  “Like Willa is crazy?” Penelope challenged him. Pick me, she wanted to say. I am the normal one. Like sanity was a contest she deserved to win. She studied her hand in his and flashed on that night in the street, his hands across Willa’s bottom, pulling her against him. Which one of them was the prize?

  “No. Like there’s a mistake somewhere. Could there be two Willa Blaines?”

  Penelope gave him a hard, disappointed look. Men always looked for excuses.

  He squeezed her hand and pulled her to standing. She followed him into the house. She didn’t let go of his hand.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  February 26, 2020

  “Willa Blaine, Bree Haren, Flynn Lockhart,” Penelope said. Jaime typed them all into a Word document on his computer. “Jack Avila.”

  “We’ll skip Willa—you’ve already looked into her.” Jaime ran a simple Google search on Bree Haren, Deer Run Pennsylvania, and Bree Haren, University of Pennsylvania Wharton, which turned up a white pages listing. Penelope peered over his shoulder.

  “She never married, which isn’t surprising.” Penelope smiled at first, thinking of the Bree she knew well—airy fairy and floating—and then wondered how much of it had been real. The night of the fire had exposed them all, their ugly interiors, ulterior motives, the darkness they brought out of each other.

  Jaime raised his eyebrows in question.

  “She had zero interest in men or women, sex, or romantic relationships in general.” Penelope gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Marriage would have been a stretch for Bree, I think. I think now she’d be called asexual, maybe aromantic. But it wasn’t a widely known thing back then.”

  “But she had you. The Spires.” Jaime’s voice hitched over the words.

  “Oh, well, friendships are a different matter. But even that . . .” We did it for the baby. “And also, look at all of us. We’ve not fared so great, you know?” Penelope studied the long list of known addresses—all over the country. Utah, Missouri, Maine, Florida, and then inexplicably back in Pennsylvania, in Doylestown, about a half hour from Deer Run. Then, nothing past 2015. She reached over Jaime and clicked back to the search results. She typed in Bree Haren Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and her eyes were instantly drawn to the word obituary. She gasped out loud.

  “Bree’s dead.” She took the laptop from Jaime and, heart racing, scanned the listing. No cause of death named, just a brief list of relatives—no husband or children—a mother and father living abroad, and a brother that she’d never spoken about. She remembered the eulogy they’d given her. To her nonexistent tits, Willa had said. Bree’s eulogy had been the most impersonal. Well, of course, none of them truly knew her. Penelope felt a shiver down her spine.

  Penelope returned to the search results and did a quick scroll, hitting upon an article in a local Doylestown newspaper. Bree Haren, 36, was killed in a hit-and-run accident when witnesses say a blue truck slammed into her Toyota Camry on Thursday, August 6, 2015. The truck fled the scene, and authorities are asking anyone with any knowledge of the accident to please come forward.

  There was no follow-up article.

  “I can’t believe she’s dead,” Penelope repeated, feeling dazed. On one hand, she hadn’t had contact with Bree since the night of the fire. On the other, she was still someone Penelope had cared for deeply during her life. She thought at one point that Bree cared for her.

  She toggled over to Jaime’s Word document and transcribed the article in broad strokes—died at 36 in a car accident, hit and run. Not married.

  She repeated the Google search with Flynn Lockhart. Flynn had married and lived in Colorado from 2015 to 2018. In 2018, Flynn was arrested for masterminding a Ponzi scheme and stealing over $1.2 million. The Flynn she knew would never have done such a thing. It was unfathomable.

  Oh my God. All of them.

  Quickly she repeated the search with Jack Avila and felt a sweep of relief to not see yet another obituary or appalling news story. She did find an alumni article from UPenn. UPenn Alum joins the Peace Corps. Guyana. Then Botswana. Penelope ran a follow-up search on Jack Avila, Botswana. And hit nothing. She did a domestic search, and there was no information on a Jack Avila, roughly forty-two years old. No known US address.

  She opened Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, but no Jack Avila in any of them.

  “No one can be invisible in the digital age,” Jaime observed wryly.

  “If they live in Botswana they can. At least I’d guess.” Penelope thought for a moment and then pulled up the Wharton Alumni page. She logged into her account and found a lone profile, a grainy image of the Jack she remembered, hair windswept and dark, eyes bright, against a backdrop of green jungle and muddy road, kneeling down to pose with a very large turtle. A big white smile. She could scarcely breathe.

  The only thing listed was an email address: javila@gmail.com.

  Penelope felt a stir in her gut at the memories, the feel of his arm across her shoulders, the pine smell of his shirt. Had she ever loved anyone as much as she loved him? At one point in time, she would have sworn that no one had known her like Jack had. Was that true? Had it just been an infatuation? She thought of their walks home from the bookshop: Jack’s childhood, the story of his mother, their night together. Had it all been one sided? She hadn’t let herself look back, to examine what she always believed to be the most influential relationship in her life. Now, she found herself wondering if it had been a love based not on rock, but on sand.

  After the fire, she purposefully walled up her heart. But before? Maybe what she’d said about Bree applied to herself as well. Maybe none of them had known how to truly love someone. No. Not Flynn. Flynn loved openly, with his whole heart.

  She quickly composed an email: Jack, it’s Penelope. If you get this please give me a call. Something very strange is going on. I need your help. (973)-442-1876. Hope you’re well. And hit send.

  Jaime read over her shoulder. “So, Willa is technicall
y missing, Flynn is in prison, Bree was killed in a hit-and-run, Jack is MIA. That’s a lot of sudden deaths and tragedy for one group of friends. Almost statistically impossible.”

  Penelope had been thinking the same thing. “Do you think someone is killing us? Or trying to? If so, who?”

  “Damned if I know, Pen.”

  Penelope chewed on her thumbnail, thinking. What would she do now? Where would she go? Jack might never email her back, or he might take days. “Can I stay here?” She couldn’t go home, not yet.

  “Of course. Always.” He patted the cushion behind her head. “I’ll sleep out here; you can have my room.” She was grateful that he tackled logistics so smoothly.

  What was going on at her house? Had Willa left? Was she there, waiting for them all to come home, to cook dinner again? Was she trying to take her place? She had a home, with a child. What would be the point? What was the connection between Willa and Bree’s death and Flynn’s bankruptcy? What had happened to Jack?

  “Do you care if I bring Tara here after school? I don’t know what is going on, but I don’t want her in that house. With Willa.” Or Brett, she thought but did not say. She didn’t think Brett posed any kind of danger to her children, other than bad decision-making. If he was having an affair, letting Willa stay after everything they’d discovered, he wasn’t making sound choices. “I sent Linc to Zeke’s house.”

  “She’s usually here anyway.” Jaime smiled, rubbed a warm hand between her shoulder blades.

  Penelope unlocked her phone and checked her messages. Nothing. Not from Jack, but not from Tara or Linc either. She didn’t expect anything from Brett, although she did wonder what he was doing now. Had he chased after Genevieve last night? Or instead, were he and Willa staging a faux family dinner (her mind conjured up images of an elaborate roast, buttered vegetables, au gratin potatoes, prepared by Willa in a red-checkered apron)? Did they wonder where she was?