by Abby Drake
Kitty lifted her glass again. “Ah,” she said, “a smoking gun. Right out of a Sue Grafton novel.”
It was the first spark of life Dana had witnessed since seeing Kitty that morning.
Then, lowering both her eyes and her voice, Kitty said, “I heard a noise. I thought the murderer was still in the house. I took out my gun and pulled the trigger by mistake. I shot the Oriental rug.”
“Excuse me?” Dana asked.
“The rug,” Kitty said, lifting her head again, this time her blue eyes wet with tears. “I shot the bloody rug that we bought when we went to Istanbul for our twentieth wedding anniversary.”
Dana frowned. “Isn’t the house empty?”
“Yes. Except for the rugs. A dealer from Newbury Street in Boston was coming to give us a price. Vincent promised to split the cash with me. Keep it away from the lawyers, you know. They already were charging the net worth of the house and the villa combined. Anyway, that’s why I went there. To meet Vincent and the rug dealer. We have nine carpets, in all. Scattered all over the house.” She waved her hand as if she were talking about dust mites and not valuable antique rugs.
“Did you tell the police?”
“Tell them what?”
“That you shot the rug?”
“Yes.”
“What did they say?”
“They told me I had the right to remain silent.”
The salads came, the waiter left.
“And did you?”
“I didn’t think I had a choice. What with the way it looked and all.”
The boys from Law & Order no doubt would have agreed.
Bridget had tried to be a good wife to Randall Haynes, a joyeux fille who would make his life a pleasant one. She did not care that some people thought she was a trophy: That was an American slang term; Americans could be so grossier, so visqueux.
Last year she had made certain her daughter was finally going to school in Provence—Ecole Ste. Anne—where Bridget would have gone if her parents could have afforded it. But Aimée was an only child, and Randall had finally agreed to send her, though he lamented that three times a year—Christmas break and spring and summer—would not be often enough to see his fourteen-year-old daughter.
Still, he’d allowed it because he knew his wife was from Provence. Luckily he did not know the rest.
But Bridget had tried to be a good wife. They’d had their ups and downs, like when he’d wanted more children and she’d said absolutely not, that she had not liked being pregnant, that she’d thrown up all the time. His good nature had vanished like a blip on a screen. He’d threatened to send her back to France without their daughter and without a dime. He said that in America the courts always sided with the parent with the money, especially if he could prove that prior to meeting him, she’d merely been a waitress and not a good one at that.
She hadn’t known if his caveats were true; she hadn’t known how to find out.
She hated Randall during that horrid time, hated him très terriblement. She thought of kidnapping Aimée and running away. But Bridget had nowhere to go, no longer anyone to go to.
She decided if she couldn’t have a good life, at least her daughter could. So she pretended to change her mind, to agree with Randall that another child would be worth a few months of illness. His humor, his love, returned. For several years she pretended to be trying to get pregnant, but instead she took the pill. Lucky for her, Randall was Catholic. As time went by he began to think that God had intervened (Bridget paid off a wayward priest to delicately plant the suggestion). When she turned forty, Randall woefully gave up, and now they only had sex on occasion, like Christmas and birthdays and when the Dow broke twelve thousand.
Through it all, Bridget had not once thought of shooting him.
She stood in the middle of her daughter’s enormous walk-in closet now, surveying the skirts and shirts and pants and cotton sweaters Aimée might want at school in the next couple of months. It had been a thin excuse for not accompanying Dana to Kitty’s arraignment. But the truth was, she couldn’t fit one more drama into her life.
“So sorry, darling,” Bridget had whined when Dana emerged from upstairs, dressed for the courtroom, keys to her Volvo in her hand. “But I’ll be leaving in days to get Aimée—I have so much to do!”
She could have lied and said she had a doctor’s appointment, but she’d had enough of those lately and didn’t want to jinx her diagnosis.
“Most women survive cervical cancer,” her doctor had told her.
No one else, of course, knew. Not Dana or Caroline or Lauren. Not Aimée. Not Randall.
When Bridget had her hysterectomy, they’d thought she’d gone into the city to have some work done on her thighs (liposuction wasn’t just for fat people anymore) and her tummy (tucking was so easy). It was amazing how the latest patient rights’ legislation helped you burrow like a little mole in a medical backyard, helped you keep your private things truly private, God bless America.
Radiation treatments were even easier to pull off: She’d claimed to be a volunteer for a French program at the United Nations. Every day for seven weeks, she took the train into the city. No one questioned, not even Randall, why she was exhausted. Nor did anyone question why she was having godawful hot flashes because no one knew her body had been hurled into menopause ahead of its natural time.
Still, the doctors wanted Bridget to have chemotherapy. But she wanted to put it off until she’d told Luc.
Luc, after all, had been her first husband, though her second didn’t know it; he’d fathered her son, whom Randall didn’t know about, either. Luc was the man Bridget had loved forever, the man who lived across the sea, not far from where Aimée now went to school, quelle coincidence. Bridget needed for Luc to know she still loved him, in case she was not like “most women” and did not survive.
Plucking a pretty pink sweater from a cubbyhole, Bridget smiled. She folded it, dropped it into the suitcase. She’d leave for Provence this coming weekend to spend a few days in the country before bringing her daughter home. While she was there, she’d tell Luc about the cancer. Maybe then he’d tell her that he still loved her, too.
With slow, deliberate motions, she packed the suitcase. If she finished early enough, she might go back to Dana’s and ask how Kitty had made out.
It was after five o’clock when Dana finally arrived home. She went into the living room, poured a glass of wine, and sat down on the love seat, propping her feet on the low coffee table, the way she’d often admonished her sons for doing.
She’d hated leaving Kitty. The apartment Kitty was renting (two bedrooms, two baths, no ambience) was partially filled with the landlord’s unimaginative furniture, poorly framed floral prints, and thin window blinds that at least blocked the view of Interstate 287. She said she’d be fine but Dana wasn’t convinced.
Nor was she convinced Kitty hadn’t shot Vincent.
It had been nearly a year since Kitty had been one of “them,” nearly a year since Vincent had left her and snatched her credentials the way the Queen of England had once revoked Princess Di’s “HRH” just because her husband couldn’t get his priorities straight. It was abominable, Dana thought, the way men could be the screwups, yet emerge the victors.
Her cell phone and the house phone rang simultaneously. Dana closed her eyes and considered answering neither. But she’d spent too many years as a mother to be comfortable with that (“Michael”—or Ben or Sam—“fell on the playground and split his forehead open”) and too long as a New Falls wife to expect such a luxury (“Honey, my driver can’t get to LaGuardia. Do you feel like taking a ride?”).
So she opened her eyes, checked caller ID (Caroline, not the school, and Bridget, not her husband), and answered them both anyway.
“We all need to do lunch tomorrow,” Caroline said, and Dana agreed and passed the query over to Bridget.
Lunch, of course, was not about food, which none of them ate much of anyway. It was, instead, their just
ification to talk, their venue for resolving the persistent issues that had a way of creeping into their lives.
The issue, right now, being Kitty, though Dana was surprised Caroline was feigning interest.
“She called me,” Caroline said.
“She called her,” Dana relayed to Bridget, who was on the cell.
“She wants the name of an attorney.”
“She asked Caroline for the name of an attorney.”
“She doesn’t understand that I can’t get involved.”
Dana wasn’t sure how to translate that to Bridget, so she merely tucked the receiver between her neck and her chin and took a drink from her glass.
“What time?” Bridget was asking. “And where?”
“Where?” Dana asked Caroline. “What time?” She’d have to reschedule her pedicure, but this was more important. Steven wouldn’t be home for another few days, and it wasn’t as if anyone else saw her toes.
“Twelve-thirty. At Calabrese.”
“That’s in Tarrytown,” Dana said.
“Yes. It’s near where Kitty lives. She’ll join us there.”
Dana passed the information on to Bridget, who asked, “Shall I call Lauren?”
Dana turned from her cell back to her landline. “What about Lauren?”
“No,” Caroline said. “I already called her. She said she can’t make it.”
Can’t. Won’t was more like it, Dana suspected. Lauren, after all, was afraid of her own silly shadow.
“Shall we meet at the restaurant?” Dana asked.
“Yes,” Caroline replied. “I have an early appointment at the museum.” She was on more boards of directors than seemed physically possible.
“We’ll meet her there,” Dana told Bridget.
“I’ll pick you up,” Bridget said to Dana, which would happily allow for pre-and post-lunch discussion.
They said good-bye all around, then Dana hung up both phones, stared at her wineglass, and wondered how it happened that life did these kinds of things, that as soon as you felt restless and bored, along came a distraction to keep you from losing your mind.
She thought she was going to go crazy.
Lauren sat on the window seat in the master suite, looking out at the rolling green lawn and the towering oak trees and the flower beds that had been tended by Jeffrey, the gardener, who once worked for Martha Stewart but now worked for her and for Caroline, too, doing twice the work for four times the price. He had, after all, married Lauren’s stepdaughter Dory, and the women took care of their own.
Lauren sat on the window seat, toying with her triple strand of pearls, her eyes stinging with tears, her throat closing with fright.
She was alone in the “big house on the hill,” as Bob called it because of the way it was perched, overlooking (overseeing) the town as Bob liked to do. Bob and Mr. Chang had gone into the city, after Mr. Chang said he’d very much enjoyed his visit to their home.
She’d smiled and bowed and said, “It was a pleasure to have you,” all the while holding her secret close to her chest, so close that Mr. Chang could not suspect anything might be askew, so close that Bob wouldn’t know, either.
Finally they’d left. She’d sat there and watched as Jeffrey packed up his rakes and his hoes and departed, too. And now she stared at the stillness of the earth and the quiet of the sky as the sun slid toward the horizon, its soft salmon color stretching its arms.
She sat there in the silence and wondered how soon it would be before everything erupted. How soon it would be before someone, somehow, would learn that, before Yolanda, Vincent DeLano had been sleeping with her.
Five
Lauren Halliday had been born Lauren Bryson of the Boston–Palm Beach–Nantucket Brysons. The silver spoon in her mouth had literally been a ladle, intricately carved by Paul Revere himself and owned by her industrialist and abolitionist great-great-great grandfather, who’d been gifted it for his “statesmanlike spirit” in helping desegregate Boston.
From the Beacon Street brownstone where she’d been raised, to the waterfront mansion where the family wintered, and the sprawling, gray-shingled “cottage” where they summered, Lauren had it all.
She was quiet and sweet, always eager to help. She went to the right schools, had the right friends, wore the right clothes, smiled the right smile. She never had acne, had perfect blond hair that to this day she wore demurely long, tied back with a pretty ribbon. As a young girl she’d been a natural at dancing and on horseback, and she loved her volunteer job giving out books at the hospital because it made her father so proud. At twelve, however, she was whacked in the head by the boom of a sail mast (did her cousin Gracie really not see her?) and soon after, she developed ulcers, which the doctors said she’d outgrow. When she didn’t, they put her on Xanax, which she still enjoyed on occasion.
Bob had been a friend of her father’s, a member of the Harvard Club, an investment manager for First New York National, where he’d gone from New Boston Bank & Trust, where her father had been senior vice president.
Lauren married Bob eighteen years ago when she was thirty-one and he, forty-nine. It was a second marriage for both. (Her first to the son of a lobsterman who was more enamored of her cash than of her—as her father, too late, had predicted; Bob’s first to a woman who’d borne him seven children, then had the misfortune to be hit by a bus. “A city bus, of all things,” Lauren’s mother had wailed. “Public transportation.”)
Unlike less privileged Gracie, who’d been raised with Lauren’s leftover clothes and accessories once Lauren had tired of them or they’d gone out of style, this was the first time Lauren had been given a hand-me-down. Fortunately, by the time she and Bob married, two of his kids had their degrees and were living on their own, two were still in college, and only three were still “school age”—nine, twelve, and fifteen—still in need of some sort of mothering, which Lauren would have done if only she knew how.
But like her father, Bob was rich, so instead of patience and hugging, Lauren offered nannies (they were too old for that), then summer camps, then child psychologists. When the kids finally grew up she was hugely relieved, though she never said so.
The thing with Vincent had been a fluke.
Bob had turned sixty-five, and along with the milestone came impotence. With impotence came frustration, then confusion, then anger.
He was angry, she supposed, at the clock and the calendar and the fact that, though he played racquetball and golf and ran three miles a day, Mother Nature had pointed her finger and said, “Done.”
So his penis was wilted like overcooked pasta and he refused the Viagra and the rest of the stuff, citing that this must be a “virus” or some other phenomenon, that surely his noodle would come back to life and spring forth once again from his pants.
He had, after all, fathered seven children. Clearly he had no problems in the bedroom.
She tried blowjobs and oils and getting on top. She tried whipped cream and pornography and negligees with the nipples cut out.
None of it worked.
After a year, Lauren was horny. Well, the truth was, after two weeks, Lauren was horny, but it took her a year to admit it. And that long to wonder if Bob’s “virus” would define the rest of her life.
Then, on a simple, run-of-the-mill Tuesday, there was Vincent.
She’d been in the city buying china because Dory’s wedding was in a few weeks, and Lauren wanted to be certain the girl had the best. She’d taken the train because Bob was using their driver, and she hated the traffic and the hassle of parking.
There had been an accident of some sort on the tracks north of the city. The train to New Falls was delayed. She went into The Campbell Apartment—a chic bar in Grand Central Station—for wine and the wait. Within five minutes Vincent DeLano sat down beside her.
“If it isn’t Lauren Halliday,” he said with a grin.
They talked.
They drank.
The train was stalled another hour.
They discussed having dinner, but drank more instead. Then Vincent told her she was the prettiest of all of Kitty’s friends. That she was the sweetest, the absolute sexiest. That whenever he saw her, his penis got hard. Very hard.
Did Bob know how lucky he was?
If he hadn’t mentioned Bob, Lauren might have escaped. Instead her hand traveled to Vincent’s crotch, right there in The Campbell Apartment in Grand Central. He was right: His package bulged.
Luckily the Helmsley was within walking distance.
By the time they were finished, Lauren was weak-kneed and raw. And God, she felt good. If she felt any guilt, it was over the fact that she didn’t feel guilty. For once in her life she had been a bad girl, and God, yes, it had felt good.
A few months and dozens of lusty afternoons later, she found out that Vincent was also seeing Yolanda. The thought of him touching the woman whose hands touched her hair had been too repulsive for words.
Now that he was gone, she should feel relieved, the way she’d felt when Bob’s kids finally left. But as she sat in her boudoir, staring out at the sunset, Lauren could think only one perilous thought: Had Vincent told anyone about their affair, and if so, would they tell the police?
Six
Tarrytown, New York, was where Washington Irving had penned The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, so it wasn’t unheard of for odd things to happen there. It was also downriver from Ossining, the home of notorious Sing Sing prison that now boasted twice as many annual visitors as inmates. Kitty wouldn’t go there if she were convicted because she wasn’t a man.
Instead she’d no doubt end up in the quaint little hamlet of Bedford Hills, which housed the only maximum-security facility for women in the state, or at least that’s what Dana figured would happen, though no one at the table seemed to want to address it.