by Lisa Unger
“And sad, so terribly sad. I heard voices, too. Male voices shouting.”
“More than one?”
“Yes. Don’t ask me what they were calling. I couldn’t make it out.”
“Of course not,” he said. Why would she have heard anything that could actually help?
“Did you know Marla Holt back then?” he asked. He already knew the answer. It was just his way of coming in soft.
She answered slowly, reluctant. “I baby-sat for Michael and Cara occasionally. Sometimes I cleaned for Marla. That’s what I did back then to pay the mortgage. That was a couple of years before she disappeared.”
“What do you remember about her?”
“I remember that she was very sweet, a loving mother. Not everyone takes to motherhood, you know. Not everyone likes it. She doted on those children, adored every minute she had with them. She’d call me so that she could get out and get some exercise. She was always very worried about her weight. But she was lovely. You were right. Too lovely for this place.”
She said it with more gravity than Jones thought he had. He’d meant that Marla Holt could have been in Hollywood or New York City. Eloise didn’t mean it that way.
“She did love her husband,” Eloise went on. “At least she did when I knew her. She was always chatting on about him. I think he was some kind of scientist, had won awards, was a professor somewhere out of town.”
“He was a geologist,” said Jones. “Taught at the college.”
“That’s right,” said Eloise. A little alarm chirped on her wrist-watch. She squinted down at it, and then she got up to walk over to the windowsill. She selected one of the bottles and tapped out two pills, filled a glass with water, and swallowed them down.
“Everything all right?” asked Jones.
“Just getting old,” said Eloise.
Jones didn’t buy that that was all it was, but it wasn’t any of his business. He watched her put the bottle back in its row and stare at it for a second.
“So is the Hollows PD reopening the case?” asked Eloise.
Jones shrugged. “I’m not sure what their plans are. Chuck Ferrigno asked me to go over my old files, talk to you and Ray Muldune, see if I remembered anything that asked for looking into again.”
“And do you?”
“I remembered that I thought the neighbor was holding something back. I thought it was odd that Marla Holt didn’t take her jewelry. It seemed like she’d devoted a lot of energy to collecting and organizing it. It would have been easy to take.”
She raised her eyebrows at him. “More odd that she didn’t take her children, don’t you think? Women don’t usually leave without their children.”
“Unless there’s a new boyfriend, not the stepfather kind.”
He tilted back in his chair a bit. On the job he’d seen plenty of women abandon their children. Babies left at the police station, mothers sneaking out of the maternity ward at the hospital, once a baby left in an open locker at the bus station. Probably Abigail would have left him if she weren’t so afraid of being alone, if she’d had anywhere at all to go. Not every woman was a natural mother; he was surprised more people didn’t realize that.
“Why are you here, Mr. Cooper?”
“I told you.”
“But that was only one reason.” He’d give her points for intuition.
“Honestly? I’m wondering what your racket is.”
She didn’t say anything, just held his eyes with that neutral gaze she had. What would it take to really piss her off? Jones wondered. Maggie was always accusing him of trying to get a rise out of people. It wasn’t true, generally speaking. He just couldn’t stand the fake stuff. Anger was real. Sometimes he liked to see a person get her feathers ruffled, just to see who she really was.
“Yesterday you came to me out of nowhere with dire predictions about my pending doom, among other things. You told me, too, that I was getting a reputation, that people were going to start coming to me for more things. Later that day the Hollows PD asks me to consult on a cold case to which it turns out you and Ray Muldune are connected. I guess I’m not a big fan of coincidence.”
She smiled at him, and it was genuinely warm. It lit up her face. He realized that she might have been pretty once, petite and dark-eyed, maybe even pixieish. She might have laughed and been happy in another life. But something had drained all the color from her, cored her out.
“I didn’t expect to like you, Mr. Cooper,” said Eloise.
In spite of himself, he smiled back. He didn’t expect to like her, either. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. He did find her interesting, though, a curiosity. The pieces of her didn’t fit together. He didn’t say any of those things.
She came to sit across from him again. “There’s no racket. I just say what I see. People can take it or leave it. I get that it’s not easy to accept things you can’t understand. It took me a full decade to accept what was happening to me.”
She gestured around her run-down kitchen, with the old appliances and peeling wallpaper. “As you can see, I’m not exactly living high on the hog.”
“Money’s not everything.”
Eloise sighed then, rubbed her head with a slim thumb and forefinger.
“I think it’s time for you to go. You want me to prove to you that I am what I say I am. Or you want to prove to yourself that I’m a fraud so that you don’t have to fret about my predictions. But neither one of those things is going to happen today. I’ll tell Ray you’ll be calling on him. He probably has more to contribute to the conversation than I do.”
She rose and walked down the hallway toward the door. After a second, Jones followed. He looked at the photos on the wall, two girls growing up in picture frames-babies in the bath, dance recitals, on horseback, prom. One blond, one dark. One favoring Eloise, one not. There were shots of a much younger Eloise. Jones found himself staring. The woman in the photographs-smiling, vibrant, bright-eyed-bore so little resemblance to the woman before him that out of context he would never have recognized her. There was a candid shot from her wedding; she wore a slim lace gown. Her smile was wide; her eyes were wet. She gripped her happy husband’s arm with one hand, a bouquet of roses in the other. Whatever had happened between that frame and the present moment had sucked the life from her. It wasn’t just age. The woman patiently waiting for him at the door was a specter, a ghost by comparison. Jones found himself pushing back an eddy of sadness.
He joined her at the door. She wouldn’t look at him, just stared outside.
“If you remember anything about Marla Holt…” he said. He let the sentence trail as he stepped onto the porch and took in the ill-kempt yard. He thought about offering to rake her leaves. They were going to kill the grass. And she was obviously not in any condition to be doing lawn work.
“I have a feeling we’ll be staying in touch, Mr. Cooper.”
“Call me Jones,” he said.
“Good-bye, Jones.”
He was about to turn back and say something about the leaves, but she had already quietly closed the door.
chapter thirteen
The baby was sleeping, and it was exactly one hour and thirty minutes before she had to leave to pick up Cammy from aftercare. Paula Carr made herself a cup of tea in the microwave, waiting in front of it so that she could turn it off before the buzzer sounded. Then she brought her cup with her to the couch, stepping over the toy truck she’d been meaning to move all day, and sat, releasing a deep breath.
This was the only time she had to think, to breathe and figure out what she was going to do. The rest of the day raced by in a blur of caregiving-breakfast, nursing, dropping off, grocery shopping, nursing, peekaboo, cleaning, nursing, starting dinner, picking up Cameron, snack, bath time, stories, on and on. It was absolutely manic from 6:00 A.M. until 7:30 P.M. She was firm on that bedtime for the little ones. Otherwise she wasn’t even a person. Without that time she wondered when she’d ever be just Paula-not Claire and Cameron’s mom, Kevin’s
wife, Cole’s stepmother.
Kevin didn’t even know that she left Cameron in school for aftercare sometimes. She paid for it out of the account he didn’t know she had, either. As she looked out the window to her backyard, she felt a twinge of guilt about it, followed by a swell of anxiety. What if he finds out? The leaves were falling from the trees, and the sky was a flat gray.
For some reason, when they’d married, she hadn’t closed her savings account right away. At the time there was only a little money in there, just under a thousand dollars. She kept meaning to take care of it, but then she just forgot. Did she forget? Or did some small part of her think it was a good idea to have a place, however small, that he didn’t know about?
It was perhaps eighteen months into their marriage when she started contributing money to it, money her mother gave her for Christmas and birthdays, money she was able to skim off the household budget. Then, a few months ago, her aunt Janie had died. Janie knew. More than anyone else, Janie knew that something was not right with Paula.
“Are you all right, honey?” she’d ask at the end of their weekly conversations. “Is everything okay?”
“Of course, Janie. Don’t be silly,” Paula would answer. Because she really wanted things to be okay. And more than that, she really wanted everyone else to think things were okay. And not just okay, perfect. Perfect marriage. Perfect children. Perfect Paula. She couldn’t bear it otherwise. She couldn’t stand the thought of people feeling sorry for her, thinking she’d failed. Because, on some level, weren’t people a little happier when things were not okay with other people? Didn’t it make them feel a little superior, a little better about themselves?
Surprisingly, Kevin had allowed her to take Claire and Cammy to Janie’s funeral. She’d figured he would insist on going, or demand that she go alone and come back right away. But he’d seemed to be eager for her to go, to take the kids, stay the weekend if she wanted. It wasn’t until later that she’d understood why. He’d waved, smiling in the driveway, and she’d watched him get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. The baby started to cry.
“Why is she always crying?” Cammy wanted to know. He glanced over at his little sister with interest.
“She’s just a baby,” Paula said. “She doesn’t have any words yet. She’ll fall asleep soon.”
“Why isn’t Dad coming?” He had that tone. It was pre-meltdown. Wobbly, petulant. Cammy always wanted his dad, even though Kevin was absent, vacant most of the time with the kids, especially the baby. She wondered why that was, that the parent who gave the least was wanted the most.
“He’s busy this weekend,” she said, forcing an easy brightness into her voice. “But Pop-Pop will be there to play with you.”
“Why is Dad always busy?” Now he was staring out the window. When he frowned like that, right before he was about to cry, he looked just like his father.
She drove the two hours to her hometown, stayed with her parents for the first time in years. Kevin didn’t like Paula’s parents, so their family visits were always quick and perfunctory. They’d meet halfway between their homes, have lunch somewhere. Kevin didn’t like her to spend too much time with them, even got angry when he thought she was talking to her mother on the phone too much.
And once she was with them for a while, in their home without Kevin, she understood why. When she was with her parents, she remembered what it was like to be loved and respected. She remembered what it was like not to have every move you made monitored, judged, and criticized. She remembered tenderness, intimacy. She remembered what it was like to be Paula. She expanded, stretched out her limbs from the box she’d been living in. She could breathe.
She’d wept at Janie’s funeral, couldn’t hide her sadness even though Cameron had his head on her lap and Claire slept on her shoulder. They didn’t seem to mind her sorrow, even appeared to understand that it was natural and right to mourn someone’s passing. They didn’t wail and fuss. Cameron rubbed her leg, and Claire cooed; they were flanked by her mother and father. For the first time in years, crying for her aunt who’d suffered so, and crying for what she’d allowed her own life to become, she felt honest. She felt safe.
After the kids were in bed and her father was firmly ensconced in front of the television, Paula’s mother told her about the money.
“Janie wanted you and the children to have what she could give. It’s significant. A little over a hundred thousand dollars. But she didn’t want it to go to Kevin. She was worried about you, Paula. And so am I.”
She started to tell her mother that everything was fine, that she was worried for nothing, that Kevin was just a difficult man to understand but that he was good to them and all was well. Except the words wouldn’t come. No more lies. But she didn’t tell her mother the truth, not the whole truth. She didn’t want her mother to be afraid. Paula just said she was very unhappy and didn’t know what to do, but that the money would help her decide. She told her mother about the account that was in her maiden name. She promised he wouldn’t find it.
“No one needs to be unhappy anymore, Paula.” Her mother said it in a whisper, looking down at the table between them. She looked so sad, older and more tired than Paula ever thought of her.
“What do you mean, Mom?”
“I just mean that you have a right to be happy. And if someone is making you unhappy, you have a right to leave. This idea that we hold on to miserable marriages that erode our lives? It’s old-school. Life is too short.”
Paula was surprised by this; she’d have expected her mother to suggest couples therapy, to try to make it work for the good of the children, something like that.
“You’re happy with Dad, aren’t you, Mom?” she asked. She had always thought of her parents as being well suited, having a good marriage. It was important to her suddenly that this, too, wasn’t some illusion she’d maintained for herself. “You’re happy, right?”
Her mother patted Paula’s hand. “Happy enough, dear.”
Happy enough.
Over the monitor, Paula heard Claire coo. Paula held her breath, waiting for the cry that would herald the early end of nap time. But then she heard the baby sigh, her breathing return to its deep sleep rhythm. Paula felt her shoulders relax. It was a funny, impossible little trap of nature, motherhood. It muddled your brain with floods of hormones and sleep deprivation, kept you constantly busy tending to a million needs, had you forever thinking about the care of others. You could disappear into motherhood, forget completely that once upon a time you were an athlete, a graduate student, that you had ambitions to go into politics, change the world. That once upon a time you wanted to write. And even though motherhood wiped all that away like a cosmic eraser over the chalkboard of your life, it gave you something else-this crazy, blissful, adoring love that splits you open and redefines you from the inside out. Most of the time, in your mommy-addled brain, it seems like a fair enough trade-off. And maybe under normal circumstances it is, if you’re happily married, safe in your home. The kids aren’t small forever. There’s time to work later, when they’re both in school. And really, what could be more important and fulfilling than raising kids well?
But that wasn’t the problem, of course. Paula wasn’t worried about changing the world anymore. Her M.B.A. seemed more like a waste of time and money, something she did to satisfy her own hunger for accomplishment. Kevin had pushed her into it when they were dating. And since he was her boss, too, it had seemed like good advice. He’d implied that it would help when he was campaigning for her to become a partner in the consulting firm he’d formed with a bunch of his buddies from college. At the time business was booming. But now some of the partners were in personal bankruptcy. Major clients had sent their work to India. The company was struggling. And Paula hadn’t even pretended to work for them since Claire was born, even though ostensibly there was a job for her in human resources and recruiting when she wanted it. Every once in a while, she did some paperwork for Kevin or made calls on overdue invoi
ces when the baby was sleeping. But all the employees had been laid off. Only the partners remained. She couldn’t care less about the company or about her stalled professional life. Those were luxury problems. What she cared about was that there was something wrong with Kevin. Something very, very wrong.
When did it happen? She often found herself wondering. She wanted a moment to point to, a reason. But if she was honest, the signs were there long before they married. They were so subtle, so easily explained away in the blush of early love. At least that’s what she told herself. How he always needed to plan everything-first their dates and vacations. It was romantic, wasn’t it? Until she realized that she didn’t have much to say about anything, even what movie they went to see. Then he started to buy her clothes-gorgeous, expensive clothes. Which was lovely, until she realized he didn’t want her to wear her old clothes anymore. Until he suggested that she stop eating bread to fit into a size six instead of size eight. You’re beautiful. I love you. I just want to help you be perfect. Even when her friends expressed shock and dismay at this type of attitude, she blew it off. It would be nice to be a size six for her wedding day. And who needs bread, anyway?
And then her friends weren’t good enough. If she encouraged him to see her friends with her as a couple, he’d have too much to drink and say the most awful things to them. You’d be pretty if you weren’t so overweight, Katie. Ever think about joining a gym?… You should be proud of your accomplishments, Judy. It’s just too bad someone else raised your kids. If she tried to see them alone, there would be an awful fight when she got home. Slowly her friendships started to drift. Then, suddenly, her family was white trash; they needed to minimize contact. Your cousin’s in jail, for God’s sake. Do you want your kids to grow up like that?
It wasn’t until they’d been married awhile, after she’d had the two children he’d demanded they have (two was the perfect number) and she was a slave to the house and the kids she loved more than her own life, that things started to get really bad. It wasn’t until she was well and truly trapped that things started to get scary.