She focuses her attention on my bathroom instead, doing a slow loop around the room, admiring the sparkling tile and inhaling the new-paint smell, running her fingers over the white porcelain of my sink, the walls, the brushed nickel hardware. And then she’s standing back in front of me, looking impressed.
“You did all this yourself?”
“All except the plumbing and the shower.” I gesture to the shower pan Gabe told me how to build, tucked behind a thick plate of glass jutting up from the ledge. He was right; it is perfect. The height of the lip, the slight pitch of the floor, the way the water rolls right into the drain. “That was his idea.”
Mandy gives me an I’m-not-touching-that-one look, gestures to the first thing her gaze lands on. “I like the pebble backsplash. Nice touch.”
“Thanks.” I try to sound as if I mean it, but my voice is dull and detached, kind of like Gabe’s hey. It slices through my mind, reminding me that he still hasn’t called, still hasn’t texted, still hasn’t anything, and I wince.
Mandy shakes her head, and she looks at me so tenderly it makes my eyes sting. “Throw on some clothes and meet me downstairs.”
“Where are we going?”
She turns and disappears out the door, calling out from halfway down the hallway. “To get you good and drunk.”
* * *
Alone again in the bathroom, I notice the envelope.
Actually, scratch that. It’s not the envelope that I notice sticking out of the pile of mail, but the neat block handwriting that spells out my name and address across the front. The fat, round letters, the way they tip to the left. I’ve seen those letters before. I know whose hand wrote them.
Maria Duncan.
I check the date on the stamp. October 28, a little over a week ago. I rip open the envelope’s gummy seal and reach my hand inside, closing my fingers around cool metal. A key, silver and so nondescript that it could be for just about anything, and a hot-pink USB stick. I peer inside the package and find nothing more.
If I were still a journalist, I would call this my lucky break, that pivotal moment when a story cracks wide-open. I would race to my computer, pound out a story, file it with Victoria and watch my byline light up the internet sky. Instead, I pull on a bathrobe, carry everything downstairs, slip the stick into my laptop and wait for whatever Maria wanted to tell me.
A table of contents pops onto my screen, and I scroll through what must be twenty different files.
“What’s this?” Mandy says, and a glass of clear liquid on the rocks appears over my left shoulder. I take the drink and click on the first file.
“Amateur porn.” It was a guess, but it’s the right one. The video opens with a close-up of her naked torso, then jerks back for a wider shot. For about ten seconds, the image stops just under her neck, and then...full frontal of her face, glossy lips and plastic-doll eyes.
“Is that—”
“Maria Duncan,” I finish. “Otherwise known as Maisie Daniels.”
Mandy leans in closer to the screen. “Holy shit. Her boobs are—”
“Ginormous,” I interrupt again, Ben’s word rolling off my tongue. There’s really no other word that does them any sort of justice. “I know.”
“Your job is so much more interesting than mine.” Mandy pulls up a chair and settles in next to me. “I feel like we should have popcorn or something.”
I snort and take a long pull of my drink, and God bless her, it’s a stiff one. The vodka hits my empty stomach and bursts into a welcome cloud of warmth.
Maria’s costar says something from offscreen, and it takes me a second or two to realize I understood him. This is the unedited, uncut version of the clip. No Darth Vader voices, no blurred-out faces. So Maria wants to show me who’s been financing her lifestyle. I lean back in my chair, sip my vodka and soda, and watch.
The first two are men I recognize from the social pages of newspapers. Mandy comes up with their names, and they sound vaguely familiar in my ears. Playboys, and from what she knows of them, not very wealthy ones. Maria quickly moves on to bigger fish. Politicians, businessmen, athletes. It’s like watching Maria climb a social ladder of progressively influential and wealthy men. Naked men, and it strikes me that most do not live up to their illustrious reputations. I snort and polish off my drink.
After about the fifth or sixth clip, Mandy ducks into the kitchen to refresh our drinks. I keep my eyes on my computer screen, but I’m only half watching. I’m more focused on the key, and what’s behind the door that it opens. Money, most likely, but where? And why does she want me to have access to it?
“Why are we still watching these?” Mandy says when she returns. “If we’re going to watch porn, let’s at least pay for the good stuff.”
I pluck my drink from her fingers. “I’m still waiting for Maria’s message.”
“Which is?”
“I have no idea.”
And I really don’t. Why would Maria send these to me? What is she trying to tell me? I pick up the envelope and check inside again. Nothing. No note, no card telling me what the key’s for. I go back to the table of contents, scroll through the files again. All video files. I click on the next one, working my way down the list, watching and waiting for her message, but by now the vodka is clogging my brain, and I’m having trouble stringing thoughts together. What is Maria trying to say? What does she want? What’s her message?
Message! The image of my voice mail icon, its little number ticking up, up, up, flashes across my mind, and I sit back with a gasp.
“What?” Mandy says.
I dig my phone from my bag on the floor and scroll through the voice mails until I find the ones I’m looking for. The ones with a string of numbers my cell phone doesn’t pair up with a contact name.
“Oh, now you’re going to listen to your voice mails?” Mandy rolls her eyes. “Figures.”
I start with the oldest and work my way forward. “Hi, Abigail, this is Nathalie calling from Bloomingdale’s. Friends and Family starts this—”
I delete it without listening to the rest, scroll to the next string of numbers.
“Oh, my,” Mandy says, pointing to the screen. “Do you think she does yoga? She’s very bendy.”
“Shh,” I tell her, putting the phone back to my ear.
As soon as I hear her voice, high and breathy, every atom in my body goes completely still.
“Abigail, hi. It’s Maria... Duncan, in case you were wondering. Surprise!” A high-pitched giggle. “Anyway, by now you should have received the package I sent you. At least, I hope you’ve gotten it. The memory stick is pretty self-explanatory, but the other item...well, I’d really rather not talk about that in a voice mail, so, please, call me. 443-555-4303. I need to talk to you in person.”
“Holy mother of God,” Mandy says, her voice breathy and low.
With shaking fingers, I move on to the next.
“Me again. Maria. I haven’t heard back from you, and I’m starting to get a little worried. Scratch that, I’m a lot worried. Are you still mad at me? Is that what this is about? Because now is not the time to be holding grudges. Now is the time to be calling me back.” A long pause, then, “I think I might be in trouble.”
“Seriously, Abby,” Mandy says. “You need to see this.”
I swivel my chair to give Mandy my back, then click on the next one, working my way through the rest—seven in all. In each message, her tone becomes increasingly frantic, and she sounds more and more...loony. Certifiably insane. A slightly hysterical tinge to her voice, the words wild and at breakneck speed. How did I never hear it before?
Finally, I reach the last of them, this one from five days ago.
“I will not stand for this. I will not be ignored. Are you not appreciative of everything I did for you? I put your name on the front page o
f every news website there was. I made you viral. And this is how you thank me? Not everything is about you. This is about married men using me, using my body in every possible way, for their sick, disgusting, perverted pleasures, so stop judging me and call me motherfucking back!” She puffs a trio of sharp breaths that seem to calm her voice by a thousand degrees. “No. You know what? Never mind. I’m over it, and I’m over you. I want my key back.”
I’m going back to listen to them all over again when Mandy latches on to my arm and physically turns me around on my chair. “Abby, look at the screen.”
That’s when I hear another voice, a male voice drifting up from my laptop speakers, and I don’t have to look at my screen to know. I hear his moans and grunts and dirty talk, and I want to cover my ears so I don’t.
I recognize his voice. I recognize his face. I recognize everything about him.
The man on my screen is Uncle Chris.
28
The vodka is slowing me down. It’s making my limbs heavy and useless, sticking my ass to the leather seat of my swivel chair with superglue. Even my jaw is malfunctioning, hanging from my head like a broken branch. Close your mouth, my mother would say. You’ll catch flies.
I stare at the flickering images on my computer screen and try to make sense of what I’m seeing, but my normally sharp brain cells laze around in my skull. And every time I manage to corral them into a coherent thought, it’s this one: Maria and Chris. Maria and Chris! My married, father-of-two godfather-slash-honorary-uncle, the one who changed my diapers and bounced me on his knee, who taught me card tricks and introduced me to bluegrass music, who took me skydiving when I turned eighteen and bought me my first beer when I turned twenty-one, is a lying, cheating pervert.
And now I’ve seen him naked.
“What is going on here?” Mandy says. “Why did Maria send you all these videos? Does she know Chris is your uncle?”
“I don’t know.”
After everything I’ve learned these past few days, I suppose I shouldn’t be so confused, shouldn’t feel so shocked. I shouldn’t have to sit here in the glow of my computer screen, hearing their voices, seeing both their faces, watching their bodies twist and contort in order to believe. I shouldn’t, and probably it’s the vodka, but it takes watching the video three entire times, from beginning all the way to the end, before I do.
I freeze the video screen, switch over to Skype, click on the number for Floyd. He and I have never Skyped before, but his number comes up on my screen, and I don’t want to use my cell. I want to keep it free in case I need to play Maria’s voice mails for him.
The line connects, and a handsome-ish face fills my screen. “Floyd?”
“No offense, hon,” he says, and it’s Floyd, all right, “but I had higher hopes for you. You look like you just got home from a three-day bender.”
“And you look so much better than I expected.”
I was right about Floyd’s computer-geek look, wrong about pretty much everything else. His blond hair is neat and stylish, his jawline long and lean as a marathon runner’s. And judging from his clothes, a designer polo and horn-rimmed glasses just this side of ironic, he doesn’t live in anybody’s basement.
“Why does everyone assume that just because a guy’s a computer genius, he’s a fat slob, living in a filthy frat house with a bunch of other fat slobs, drinking beer and playing video games all day long?”
“Mostly because every time I talk to you, you’re drinking beer and playing video games. And I thought it was your mother’s basement.”
He presses a hand to his chest and winces dramatically. “Ouch.”
“I’m not alone. This is my friend Mandy.” I pull Mandy’s head closer to mine, and she waves into the camera. “She knows about Maria, too.”
Floyd gets a load of Mandy, and his brows slide up his forehead. “Well, hello there, Mandy.”
“She’s married,” I say, moving us right along to the point of this call. “In the interest of time, I should tell you I haven’t listened to any of your voice mails. Start at the beginning.”
His lips spread into an I’m-the-man grin. “Hon, all you need to know is Wesley Wainright IV.”
“The former senator?”
“The former senator’s son, and the sick-ass who was porking Maria. And when I say porking, I mean porking. The dude’s a total pig.”
It makes sense. The Wainrights hold the kind of prestige that wouldn’t do well with a scandalous sex tape floating around the internet, and they have enough money—the kind of wealth that goes back to the Gilded Age and includes textile and railroad empires if I’m not mistaken—that nobody would miss a briefcase or two full of cash. And lately, rumors have been swirling that the former senator is preparing for a bid for the White House. I imagine he’d pay just about anything to keep his son’s pornographic trysts off YouTube.
I turn to Mandy. “Did we see Wesley on the videos?”
“No, but there are at least three or four more to go.”
And that’s when Floyd’s message hits me. “Wait. How do you know it’s Wesley? I thought you said the transactions were all cash.”
“They were. Maria’s a smart cookie and she hid the cash well, which means unless one of her donors comes forward...” He lets the words trail off, but I don’t need to hear it. He’s telling me the cash is untraceable. “But I don’t like dead ends, so I followed her. I saw them.”
“Porking?” Mandy and I say in unison.
Floyd laughs at either our use of his word or the way we lean into the camera with identical, wide-eyed expressions. “No, not porking. Making the exchange. But I knew it was him because of the finger.”
“What are you talking about?” I shake my head, still not understanding. Mandy looks just as clueless as I am. “What finger?”
Floyd rolls his eyes. “Jesus, girl, it’s been all over the news. Where the hell have you been?”
“Virginia,” I say, knowing it’s not the answer he was looking for, not wanting to detract from the bigger question at hand. “What finger?”
He is silent for a moment or two, and I hear rapid-fire clicking of his keyboard and mouse, and suddenly I’m looking at a split screen—half Floyd, half his internet browser. He types a website address into his browser.
While the video is loading, Floyd tells us that sometime in the past week, while I was busy doing whatever I was doing in Virginia, a handful of new clips made their way onto the internet, all of them starring Maria and Wesley Wainright IV.
“How do you know it’s him?” I say. The man’s face is blurred beyond recognition.
“I already told you, hon. Because of the finger.”
I search out the man’s hands, but both of them are tucked behind Maria’s naked thigh.
But unfortunately for me and Mandy and everyone else with working eyeballs, everything else about him is in clear, sharp focus. Wesley’s sexual tastes are perverted and violent and dip way into repulsive territory, and though I’m not the squeamish type, there are more than a few parts Mandy and I cover our eyes for. Floyd is right; the dude’s a total pig.
And then Floyd holds up a long finger. “Wait for it. Wait for it...”
At just the right moment, he taps his mouse and the picture goes still. He instructs us to look at the lower left corner of the screen, where the man’s hand clamps onto Maria’s breast in a way that can’t be even remotely pleasurable. Less like a fondle, more like a five-fingered vise. Only, one of them, his right ring finger, is shorter than all the others, cut off at the second knuckle.
Floyd leans back in his chair. “Boating accident, the summer after his freshman year in college. He’s lucky he didn’t bleed out. His blood alcohol level was .21, and that’s not even taking into account the pot and cocaine.”
“Okay, so he’s a pervert wit
h a drug and alcohol problem. So?”
“So one of his fraternity brothers drowned that day, but somehow, despite the alcohol and drugs, despite them all being underage, the police never pressed charges. Why do you think that is?”
“Because he’s a Wainright.”
“Ding, ding, ding.” He reaches for his mouse and hits Play, and the clip starts up again. “But not even a Wainright can get Wesley out of this one.”
At first I assume he means the awful images blowing up the internet and my computer screen and how Maria is using them to finance her ostentatious new lifestyle, but something about his expression grows spider legs that creep up my spine.
“Get Wesley out of what?”
“They arrested him this morning for murder.”
“Of?” I say, even though I already know. Even though I’m already reaching for the desk, bracing myself for his answer.
“Maria Duncan. Who else?”
* * *
Autumn returns that weekend for its final hurrah of the year. Crisp air, blue skies and sunshine light up the trees with leaves of red and orange. I stay inside every second of it, glued to my computer screen, watching for news of Maria.
Wesley confesses on a bright Saturday morning to a flurry of cameras and Google hits, all of which catalog a long line of evidence pulled from his basement. His basement. Poor Maria. Her tragedy began and ended in a dark, damp basement.
His lawyers schedule a press conference that nobody pays any attention to because eight hundred miles away, an explosion at a fireworks facility blows a crater into a residential neighborhood north of Milwaukee. An entire city block and all the people in it gone, blown to bits. A death toll in the hundreds and climbing amid allegations of bribery and misconduct and idiocy in the form of a lunatic with a cigarette.
And Chris’s name is never mentioned. Not any of the other names from the videos Maria sent me, either, which means Maria was too busy getting the life squeezed out of her by Wesley Wainright IV to alert the media to any of the other men financing her lifestyle.
The Ones We Trust Page 22