Look Closely

by Laura Caldwell

  “Leave it alone, Hailey.”

  “Leave it alone? What are you talking about?”

  The rain was coming harder in the taxi window now, but I didn’t move to close it.

  “Miss?” the cabbie said, “are you all right?”

  “All of it,” my dad said. “Just leave it alone. Please.” Was he crying or was it the sound of my own tears?

  “Please,” he said. “Please. Please.” And he hung up.

  “Oh, my God,” I whispered. I rolled up the window. I wiped my eyes. I lifted the phone and tried my dad’s number again, then went through the same five-minute process of getting a message, waiting for the receptionist and having him paged. As each second ticked by, I felt as if I wanted to jump out of the cab, I wanted to scream. Instead, I tapped my fingers on the armrest. Tap, tap, tap, tap. But he didn’t come to the phone this time.

  Finally, I reached Barbara. “You just missed him,” she said.

  “Where did he go?”

  “Out of town for a meeting. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “No,” I said abruptly. My mind was so cluttered that I couldn’t even dredge up any pleasantries. “When is he getting back?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure? What do you mean?” Like my secretary, Barbara was exceedingly efficient and fiercely loyal to my father. Not knowing his precise schedule was unheard of.

  “He’s not sure how long the meeting will take,” Barbara said. “Maybe a few days.”

  “A few days? Where is he?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Barbara, it’s me, for Christ’s sake. I need to talk to him.”

  “I’m sorry, Hailey, but he was explicit. No one is to be given information about where he is. And to be honest, I don’t even know all the details.”

  “Seriously, I need to talk to him immediately. This is important!”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  Time for a lie, I thought. Why not? There were so many out there already. “Barb, I need to talk to my father. I’ve just been to the doctor, and I’ve learned some bad news. Really bad. I can’t go into it specifically, but this is grave.”

  “Didn’t you just talk to him?”

  “Yes, but I got cut off before I could tell him.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m sorry. Are you going to be all right?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Jesus,” Barbara said under her breath. “If he wants to fire me, you’ll have to find me a job.”

  I wished I could laugh, but the impulse only had the opposite effect—I wanted to cry again. I said nothing, made not a sound.

  At last, Barbara said, “You know your dad doesn’t have a cell phone. Makes me crazy. And I don’t have hotel information, but I can tell you that he’s going to New Orleans. And I’ve got a phone number. You ready?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  As she recited the number, I knew I didn’t have to write it down. I already had that number memorized.

  “He’s not in,” McKnight’s secretary said. She smiled at me sweetly. “Can I have him call you when he returns?”

  I looked behind her to the light maple door of his office. It was closed, a crack of light at the bottom. When I had been there this morning, the door had been open, the office dark.

  “No, no message,” I said.

  She smiled again and returned her attention to the computer. But instead of leaving, I charged around her, moving fast for his door before she could stop me. I pushed the door open, and sure enough, there was McKnight, ensconced behind a contemporary glass desk, looking up blandly from a stack of papers. Strangely, there was little else on his desktop except for that stack. A neat freak, I thought, apropos of nothing except my growing hatred of the man. Behind him, a huge window showed a skyscraper to the left and the lake behind that, gray now and turbulent with rain.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. McKnight!” the secretary said, bursting into the room. “I told her you weren’t available. I said that—”

  “That’s quite all right, Mary,” McKnight said, his eyes never leaving mine.

  “Well, I’ll call security.” The secretary sounded nervous. “I’ll have them waiting outside.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” McKnight said. “Ms. Sutter has been punishing herself enough, I believe.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said loudly. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the secretary tiptoe quickly to the door and close it behind her.

  “Will you have a seat?” McKnight gestured to a white couch to the right of his desk.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew my father?” I crossed my arms and remained standing.

  “You never asked.”

  “Did he give you information to blackmail the Fieldings family?”

  McKnight drew his head back, a barely perceptible movement. He looked surprised. “Now that you mention it, yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that before? Why did you have me working for you if you were going to keep that information from me? Is this some kind of game to you?” I had a million other questions, a thousand other accusations, but I couldn’t get them to form a logical queue in my mind.

  “On the contrary.”

  “Tell me what is going on here!”

  McKnight opened his hands wide, as if to show he was hiding nothing.

  “Why did you hire me?” I lowered my voice.

  “You’re supposed to be the best, right? All those articles about the cyber-law wunderkind.” He sat back in his chair and folded his hands on his lap. “And I suppose I wanted to meet you. I wanted to see how you’d turned out.”

  The personal tone of his voice chilled me. “You have a house in Woodland Dunes,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “And you knew my parents when we lived there.”

  “Bravo, Hailey Belle,” he said.

  I coughed involuntarily. Hailey Belle was what my mom used to call me, a shortening of my full name, Hailey Isabelle. “You were involved with my mother,” I said. A trembling in my stomach, spreading throughout the rest of my body. I crossed my arms tighter, fearing I might start shaking all over.

  “Yes, I was,” McKnight said.

  “Oh, God.” I remembered Walter Fieldings’s comment about my father’s personal vendetta against McKnight. “That’s why my dad hated you.”

  “Does he hate me? Too bad.”

  “Of course he does! Doesn’t everyone? Do you know anyone who cares for you, who even likes you?” I was yelling again.

  “Your mother did.”

  The logical side of my brain clicked into gear. My mother in her blue suit, saying, “Caroline is here. She’ll watch after you.” The sound of two long car horns. “You were there that night. You came to pick her up on the night she died.”

  “Good work, Hailey Belle.”

  “Don’t call me that!” I unfurled my arms and strained toward him.

  He laughed. He actually laughed at me, and my anger zinged into something sharper. I saw more flashes from that night. My mother clutching her head, answering the door. The hand on her shoulder. That ring with the black diamond inset. The man catching her as her knees buckled, his dark-haired head leaning over her.

  And then something else shifted into focus. Maddy. That same ring on her nightstand. “Have you been dating my friend, Maddy?” I said incredulously.

  “Yes, she’s quite lovely.”

  “My God! Don’t tell me that’s a coincidence.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it, although I would call it a convenience.”

  “Are you sick?” I yelled. “Are you fucking sick?”

  “Some might say. But no, I’m quite well.”

  “Did you use my mother, too? Did you seduce her so you could blackmail my father and then blackmail the Fieldings?”

  He looked surprised again, his eyebrows arched. “My. You are smart, aren’t you? I haven’t been giving you enough credit.” He swung around in his chair and gazed out the w
indow. Rain was pelting it now, fog starting to obscure the view of the lake. “It may have started out that way. I saw your mother walking the beach night after night. She was a very attractive woman.” He glanced at me as if waiting for a reaction.

  “And?” I said sarcastically, angrily.

  “And your father was rarely around. I knew your father represented Fieldings, and so yes, I thought if his wife had an affair, he might want to keep it quiet. But you should understand one thing.” He turned back and leaned forward on his desk. “I grew to love your mother very, very much. Her death destroyed me.”

  I scoffed.

  He looked at me with eyes that could cut. “I loved your mother.” He enunciated each word. “And the night she died I told her, very briefly, what I’d done. I told her that I’d set out to use her as a pawn, but I’d fallen in love with her.”

  “And Maddy? Why? Why did you do it?” I thought of Maddy’s excited face, her happy eyes when she talked about “Grant.” “Were you trying to keep tabs on me?”

  “It was a nice way to find out firsthand what you were thinking about, Hailey. What you were doing. Besides, you’ve got to admit that your friend, Maddy, is quite the attractive girl.”

  “You disgust me.”

  He paused. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “You left the ring at Maddy’s place on purpose, didn’t you?”

  “Why not? I didn’t wear it anymore. I haven’t worn it since your mother died. And you were taking so very long to figure things out.”

  “You were having me followed!” And then another piece shifted into place. “You sent me that letter.”

  “I thought it was time,” McKnight said. “You’re a big girl now.”

  My breath was coursing in and out, too fast, too shallow. I felt light-headed and then red with anger. “You sick asshole. Did you kill her? You just said you were there that night, and I wouldn’t put it past you to brag about it. Did you hurt her?”

  “You don’t know yet? Maybe you aren’t that savvy.”

  “Tell me.”

  “This is yours to figure out, Hailey Belle.”

  “If you call me that one more time, I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” he said incredulously.

  “I’ll call the police.”

  He laughed again. “And tell them what?”

  He was right. It was an empty threat. I could say that I wanted the investigation of my mother’s death opened again, that I suspected McKnight had had something to do with it, but what if he didn’t? What if the real person at fault was my dad or Caroline or Dan?

  I clenched and unclenched my hands. I felt like screaming so loud they would hear it across the lake in Woodland Dunes. Instead, I grabbed my briefcase from the floor, threw open his office door and ran for the elevator.

  24

  On the way to the airport, I called the airlines and booked a flight to New Orleans. My hands had a light tremor to them, as if an earthquake was rumbling a hundred miles away. I wanted to call Maddy, but she would still be in that deposition, and I didn’t know how to break the news to her just yet. I could barely get it to sound real in my own head.

  I called Ty. He answered right away at Long Beach Inn, and in that second after he said hello I could see him clearly. The coppery hair hanging over his forehead, his strong shoulders beneath an olive T-shirt, the hint of a smile.

  “Did you get my messages?” he said.

  The urgency of his voice scared away his image in my mind. “No, I’m in Chicago.”

  “Chicago? When did you get in? I would have come to see you.”

  “I would have liked that.” I stared out the window at the bungalows lining the highway. Somewhere, inside one of those homes, someone was having an average day, a boring day. “I got in last night. For some business. But I’ve got to talk to you.” I pulled my eyes away from the houses and stared at the back of the driver’s bald head. “I’ve got to talk to someone.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Ty said. “I need to talk to you, too. That’s why I’ve been calling you all day. Something’s happened over here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My father resigned yesterday.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. I thought his news would be somehow worse. “Was it unexpected?”

  “Well, yeah. My father could never quit that job. He loved it. That’s why I bought the inn from them. But look, that’s not the point. I don’t know how to tell you this.”

  I closed my eyes. It was going to be worse. “What?”

  “He started drinking last night. He used to have a problem, but he’d quit years ago. Anyway, Mom called me because he was getting out of hand and scaring her. When I got to the house, he was totally loaded. It was pretty out of control. My mom had left the house, and I tried to get him to eat something, but he was talking crap. At least I thought.”

  “What was he saying?”

  “I didn’t really pay attention at first. He was saying something about how he deserved it, but I had no idea what he meant. Finally, I realized he was talking about when he got promoted to chief of police. I kept saying, ‘Yeah, Dad, of course you deserved it,’ but he wouldn’t listen to me. And then this was where it got weird. He grabbed my hand and said, ‘Tell Sutter that I could have done it on my own.’”

  “Sutter?” The cab was weaving in and out of traffic, the motion making me nauseous.

  “Your dad,” Ty said. “He kept repeating himself, but finally he told me that your dad had gotten him the promotion to chief of police.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know your dad was corporate counsel for the town of Woodland Dunes? Well, apparently, he got my dad his promotion by having his predecessor fired.”

  “That’s crap,” I said, but my voice was weak, unconvincing.

  “Maybe. But that’s not the worst part. I don’t know how to say this.”

  I rubbed a hand over my face. “Just say it.” I hated the flat tone of my voice.

  Ty sighed. “He might have been talking shit. He was stinking drunk.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he knew the true story of what happened to your mom. He said your dad got him the promotion to keep him quiet, and he wanted the job bad enough to go along with it.”

  The cab had pulled into the airport now, and the driver stopped at the curb, waiting for me to get out.

  “And?” I said, my voice anything but flat now. “Oh, my God, Ty, what? What happened?”

  “I’m sorry, but he shut up then. I couldn’t get him to tell me anything else. He just kept saying that he could have gotten the job on his own, he should have done it by himself.”

  The cabdriver had gotten out of the car and opened my door now. “Ma’am,” he said.

  “Ty, thank you for calling me, for telling me this, but I have to go.”

  “What are you doing? I could drive over there.”

  “I wish so badly that I could see you right now, but I’m at the airport. I’m going to New Orleans.”

  “New Orleans? Why? For business?”

  “For my family,” I said. “For my mom.”

  I had half an hour to wait until my flight boarded, so I sat on a padded bench, my cell phone at my ear. Ignoring the crowds and the announcements about gate changes, I called that New Orleans number—the one I’d found in my father’s house, the same one he had given his secretary before he left town. Once again, it rang and rang. Yet what was I expecting? I had the address that the investigator gave me, and I would go there as soon as I landed.

  I called Amy next and told her I would be out of the office for at least another day. I didn’t know what I would find in New Orleans, but even if I could get a flight back to Manhattan that night, I couldn’t imagine going to work in the morning. The thought of ever working on the McKnight case again was repugnant. I kept seeing Sean McKnight’s face. I kept hearing his words—This is yours to figure out, Hailey Belle.

  “Oh, n
o,” Amy said. “You’ve got to be back tomorrow.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to. The partnership committee wants to interview you.”

  “What? When did this happen?” But really, what did it matter?

  “They started today. Everyone else was here, so they said they would take yours tomorrow. I already told them you’d be back.”

  “Tell them I can’t.” Two women walked by me, pulling black bags on wheels. They were both laughing. I felt a stab of envy for them, for an uncomplicated and benign moment.

  “Hailey, I really think you need to get here tomorrow.” Amy had a knowing tone to her voice, which meant she had heard something through the secretary gossip pool.

  “Why?” I said, although again I found it hard to muster up any alarm or even interest.

  “Werner’s secretary said you’re on shaky ground, and if you don’t get in here and dazzle them, you’re definitely not going to make it this year.”

  Dazzle them. It sounded as if they were expecting showy parlor tricks. “I guess this isn’t the year for me to be partner,” I said.

  I shut off my cell phone.

  Another cab ride, this one from the New Orleans airport to the address on Magazine Street. I felt exhaustion sweep over me with a few light brushstrokes, something I could put away for a while, but something that would claim me eventually. My cell phone remained turned off inside my bag. I was sure that if I switched it on, I would find a message from Amy and at least a few from attorneys at the firm. But there was no one I wanted to talk to right now. Except my father.

  Twenty-five minutes later, the driver turned onto Magazine Street, an eclectic mix of run-down homes, upscale restaurants and kitschy antique stores. I noticed a cab in front of us, one that had been there for most of our trip. A tingling sensation went through my body. The back of the passenger’s head in the cab. Why hadn’t I looked closer before? The thin gray hair, the ramrod posture, the perfect navy suit collar. The passenger turned his head to watch something on the street, and I knew for sure. There was no mistaking the profile of my father’s high, proud forehead, his strong chin.

  “Can you slow down?” I said to the cabdriver.