‘Buy another.’ I glare all around. ‘You think Imogen’s behind these, too?’
They study the notes, Carolyn with the greatest degree of interest. She looks at me, her eyes bright. ‘Where did you get these?’
‘I found them buried in Ruby’s closet.’
‘Ruby didn’t tell you about them herself?’ Bronnie asks.
‘So we don’t have the same relationship as you and Bel do,’ I say. ‘I guess I’m not the mother you are.’
‘I didn’t mean that. I just meant that it must have been difficult to come across these. What did she say when you talked to her about it?’
‘She didn’t say anything because she’s locked up in a mental hospital.’ I look at each of them in turn, scrutinizing their reactions. ‘She tried to kill herself today, thinking that’s what all of you—and your daughters—wanted.’
Bronnie is visibly shocked, and shaken. Carolyn is reservedly surprised, while Elise is unmoved, throwing back the remnants of her G&T. ‘Is she okay?’ Bronnie manages.
‘Of course she’s not okay,’ I say. How dim can a person be?
‘I meant—is she okay physically? How did she . . .?’
‘She tried to hang herself. Fortunately, it didn’t work.’
Now Elise’s eyes are bright, though it’s with amusement rather than curiosity. Somehow, despite everything, I’d never imagined she could be this cruel. ‘Wait, let me guess. She used the prop noose? And—shocker—it failed?’
I feel like I might lunge across the table at her. ‘She didn’t know it would fail. She truly wanted to die, because of you and your daughters. I want to know who’s been pushing her toward this with the music box and the noose and these notes.’
‘Wait, the music box? That was for Jess,’ Carolyn says.
‘The light blue leotard,’ I say. ‘That’s Ruby’s color. Jess never wears it. When I went to pick Ruby up at school today, there was blood splattered on her. Because of the cut on her face. It’s all been meant for Ruby. Everything’s been designed to harm her, or to make it look like she harmed someone else. It’s all about Ruby.’
‘Spoken like a true narcissist’s mother,’ Elise says. ‘Have you ever considered the very real possibility that Ruby did all those things herself? She pushed Imogen. She hung the noose to get sympathy. Then she pretended to commit suicide with that same noose, as if she’d been driven to it. She left these notes for you to find. What’s the common denominator? Wherever Ruby goes, there she is.’
‘The notes were hidden! She didn’t want me to find them.’ I look to Bronnie and Carolyn. Are they really going to stay silent in the face of Elise’s hideous, immoral accusations? My daughter’s in the hospital! She wanted to die. When she wakes up, she probably still will. I don’t know what I can do about that, so I’m here doing this, trying to find out the truth. Trying to get some measure of justice.
‘Let’s face it,’ Elise says. ‘Ruby is obsessed with attention. She’ll do anything to get it. Rather like some other people we know.’ She stares at me, her meaning clear. She thinks the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
‘Let’s all take a breath,’ Carolyn says. ‘Kendall, you are coming in hot. But I understand it. I mean, I can’t understand it because Jess has never had those types of tendencies, though I can imagine how upsetting it must be. And Elise, I do get what you’re saying. Ruby has been somewhat erratic in her time at OFA.’
‘We just can’t rule anything out, that’s all.’ Bronnie seems to mean it to be soothing but I feel electrified with betrayal.
‘Can’t rule it out? You honestly think Ruby could have done all this herself?’ I nearly shout at her. People at other tables are staring. For once, I could not give a shit.
‘I just think that it could have been a cry for help,’ Bronnie says. ‘She has trouble talking about her feelings, so she acts them out. You’ve told me that yourself.’
All this time, I trusted her the most. I confided in her. Now she’s using my own words against me? My vision actually blurs with rage.
‘What the fuck do you know anyway?’ I say. ‘Your head is so far up Adam Racki’s ass that you wouldn’t recognize the truth if it bit you on the nose. Whoever heard of a wardrobe mistress doing data entry? You’ll do anything to be near him.’
‘Data entry?’ Elise perks up, as if that’s the juicy part of what I’ve just said. I will never understand that woman. Not that I want to.
I’ve tried hard not to imagine what Greg could have possibly seen in her. Best case scenario, he was choosing my antithesis. I’ve also tried not to imagine where it happened—whether they first met in a hotel bar like this one, or if Elise has been in my bed.
I need to stay focused. This isn’t about Greg and his disloyalty right now. It’s about Bronnie’s. ‘You were there when the slate fell. How could you save Ruby and still doubt her?’
Bronnie won’t look at me, and I’m not sure if it’s because of shame or anger. I did just expose her little whatever-it-is with Adam Racki.
‘You seem like you could use a drink, Kendall,’ Carolyn says. ‘I’ll grab you a chair.’
While Carolyn’s gone, Elise and Bronnie ignore me totally. As I lurk between them, my avenging angel persona is wearing off like a spell, and I’m not sure who to replace it with. The Kendall who was always hoping they’d like me, though it’s looking like none of them ever did? The Kendall who was reborn after cancer? The Kendall who wanted everyone to think she had a marriage so solid that it could go global? The Kendall who’s failed at mothering her poor, damaged girl?
I have so much to be guilty for, but I’ve held it at bay by storming around town, investigating, getting nowhere. Now it’s washing over me, full force.
Carolyn returns with the chair. I perch, thinking that I haven’t even told Greg the latest. He doesn’t know that Ruby’s in the hospital.
It’s not an oversight. I’ve been holding off for fear that he would get right on a plane, and I just can’t face him. Not after what he’s likely done with Elise; not when he’s likely to blame me for Ruby’s situation, and he might very well be right. I can still hear those words from her suicide note. There was no accusation in them, and that’s what hurts the most.
‘So what we need to do now is review the evidence,’ Carolyn says, ‘as calmly and rationally as possible.’
Bronnie nods, while both Elise and I look at her like she’s lost her marbles. At a moment like this, sounding logical might be the craziest thing of all.
‘None of us want some psycho on the loose,’ Carolyn explains. ‘None of us want to be targeted, or to have our daughters targeted. So we need to put our heads together and puzzle this out.’
Carolyn might be right. At any rate, this gives me a chance to observe them all. I don’t know if I’m keeping my friends close right now or my enemies closer. But Ruby’s bedded down for the night, and I don’t have anywhere to be. I have too much adrenaline to go home and sleep. Not that I’d want to sleep; I can’t bear to dream.
Carolyn gives a recitation of all the events since the music box, concluding, ‘Kendall is correct in that everything either points to Ruby or was aimed at her, except for when Elise and I were sideswiped by a car.’
‘Which could have been random,’ Elise says.
‘Just because it doesn’t fit the pattern doesn’t make it random,’ Carolyn counters. ‘My best theory is this: It’s Imogen, with an accomplice. We can all see that Imogen is unhinged in a way that’s very different from how Ruby is unhinged. No offense, Kendall.’
There are no words.
Carolyn smacks the table. ‘I’ve got it! Imogen’s dodgy boyfriend is her accomplice.’
‘And the motive?’ Elise asks.
‘Ruby was with Imogen’s boyfriend, so Imogen was mad at Ruby, because girls are often stupid that way, thinking the other girl is to blame instead of the bloke, and because he wanted to get out of hot water, he agreed to help Imogen harass Ruby.’
‘Ruby wouldn�
�t touch some wannabe drug dealer,’ I say. She’s had limited interest and experience with boys; it’s not where her head is right now. Even if she did change her mind, there’s no way she’d be with the man Bronnie had described. ‘This is pure fantasy.’
Carolyn is undeterred, and Elise seems like she could be persuaded to the theory. Their opinions of Ruby are that low. But it seems to me that Carolyn is grasping at straws, like she’s trying to cast suspicion elsewhere and keep it off her and Jess, when the Mordue women have the strongest motivations of anyone. Who knows, they could have been sending Ruby those notes, hoping she’d off herself, and when it wasn’t working fast enough, they rigged the slate to fall.
Though Bronnie’s the one whose husband is a roofer. Maybe there really wasn’t anyone on the roof. Bronnie rigged the slate to fall and then came to her senses at the last minute.
Am I actually suspecting Bronnie of trying to murder Ruby?
I feel dizzy. I don’t know if I’ve eaten anything since breakfast, and my tenuous grasp on reality is loosening by the second.
‘We’re all on your side, Kendall,’ Bronnie says gently. ‘We all want to find out who did this.’
‘How about this instead? Imogen wanted Ruby’s place in the group,’ Carolyn suggests, ‘and Dodgy decided he’d help her get it.’
‘Couldn’t they just all be friends?’ Bronnie says. ‘Wouldn’t it have been easier?’
Carolyn shakes her head like Bronnie is hopelessly naïve. ‘There’s not room for everyone. The Academy will never be some hippie commune, no matter how many love-ins Adam organizes.’
‘But Imogen had already taken Ruby’s place in the group before the noose. Why keep going?’ I say.
‘To make sure that Ruby wouldn’t worm her way back in.’ It’s crazy to think Carolyn’s a law professor. She seems so comfortable convicting people without sound evidence. Or perhaps she just has no qualms about redirecting suspicion from her and Jess.
Or just from Jess. It could be that Carolyn thinks her daughter had a hand in all of this, and she’s already launching a preemptive cover-up just in case. Defense attorneys never ask if their clients are guilty; they don’t want to know. The same could be said for mothers.
‘Assuming Imogen is behind everything,’ I say, ‘why would she pick Ruby?’
‘Imogen targeted Ruby because Ruby had targeted Jess previously—i.e. Ruby had it coming, in Imogen’s mind,’ Carolyn says.
‘Are you forgetting that the music box had already been put in Jess’s locker the day Imogen arrived?’ Bronnie says. ‘Imogen wasn’t at the school last year, so how would she have known all of this and had time to make a music box with a Jess-shaped ballerina singing Jess’s audition song?’
‘Let’s say the music box was someone else, maybe Ruby,’ Carolyn says, ‘but then Ruby saw the error of her ways, and everything after was Imogen and Dodgy, including running the car off the road.’
‘In my heart,’ Bronnie says, ‘I just don’t think it’s Imogen. She’s a seventeen-year-old girl who was desperate to make friends. So she told some lies along the way to garner attention or sympathy—’
‘She said her father was dying!’ Carolyn bursts out. It’s clear that she’s not about to allow any defense of Imogen to go unchecked.
To her credit, Bronnie won’t be silenced. ‘She told some lies, but she wasn’t backstage when the noose was hung. She was sitting in the audience with Kendall. Then when the slate fell, she wasn’t on the roof; she was the one calling out in order to save Ruby.’
‘She must have loosened the slate earlier,’ Carolyn says. ‘She engineered it to fall, and she planned to call out so she could look heroic, and she could pretend that someone else had been up on the roof to cast suspicion elsewhere, but she didn’t think anyone would actually be close enough to save Ruby.’
‘Wait, you really believe that Imogen is a cold-blooded murderer?’ Elise asks.
Carolyn nods firmly. ‘I do. Well, she’s a cold-blooded attempted murderer, and it’s up to us to take her down. We have to protect Ruby.’
Now she’s crossed over into absurdity. She’s got to be covering for someone. Either she’s looking after herself and Jess, or she’s looking after Elise and Sadie. After all, Jess was telling Sadie backstage that she needed to come clean, and Elise hates me enough to try to seduce my husband. Those two mother-daughter pairs are the most suspicious—not that Bronnie’s in the clear, but Elise and Carolyn have seemed a whole lot chummier lately.
‘Let’s put our cards on the table here,’ I say. ‘None of you really want to protect Ruby. You don’t care what happens to her, or to me.’
‘You can’t think that,’ Bronnie protests.
‘Why wouldn’t I think that?’
‘Oh, poor Kendall,’ Elise says, dripping with sarcasm. ‘She and her darling daughter can take turns playing the victim.’
‘You’ve never bothered to get to know either of us,’ I say. ‘So you might try shutting the fuck up.’
Elise does the opposite, of course. ‘You came here tonight, guns blazing, using Ruby’s hospitalization as a way to get the upper hand, demanding answers from the rest of us. But you haven’t given us any real answers, have you?’ I don’t say anything. ‘I’m talking about Vee, of course. That bullshit you fed us about how she really did just fall, and Ruby got blamed, and it was so hard on her, she became a pariah, blah blah fucking blah.’ Her eyes are flashing. What did I ever do to her? Why does she hate me so much? ‘Your own husband thinks Ruby’s a psycho who pushes girls down flights of stairs. And how do you think she got that way?’
‘Fuck you,’ I say.
‘Very clever.’ Elise grins, like she’s the one with the upper hand now.
‘It is important that we cut the crap, Kendall,’ Carolyn says. ‘We need to be honest with each other if we’re going to keep the girls safe.’
‘All your girls are safe. It’s Ruby who’s not. It feels like one way or another, my girl is going to die.’ There, it’s out. My greatest fear. I stare at the table, trying not to cry. They won’t get my tears.
Bronnie reaches out and touches my arm. ‘I’m so sorry for all that’s happened. But I have to agree with the others. You need to tell us the truth. How else can we help?’
Ruby wanted her story out there. She said it herself, in the suicide note. And earlier in the day, too, at the nurse’s office. She wants to be free. I’m only honoring her wishes.
No more delaying. It’s time to start the performance.
‘You’re right, I haven’t been completely honest, and I told Ruby to keep secrets, too. I didn’t want you all to prejudge us, and I was sure that the worst was behind us. But obviously . . .’ I trail off strategically, hoping to engender compassion. But even with Bronnie, it seems that I have to earn it.
‘First, there are some things you need to understand about Vee,’ I say. ‘I’d thought there was no way that was her given name, but later, after I met her parents, I found out that it was. They were theatrical people themselves, and they’d wanted a V name, for some reason, and then they said, “Well, how about Vee?” They were hard people to take seriously, like their daughter was.’
I see in Elise’s eyes: Get on with it.
‘Vee and Ruby didn’t like each other initially, but then they became friends. It wasn’t the smoothest friendship because as freshmen at an elite private performing arts school, they were in competition. Vee and Ruby were the two best, and sometimes Vee won and sometimes Ruby won. There was a certain amount of rivalry is what I mean.’
I see it in Carolyn’s eyes now: Get on with it.
Then it’s all too much—the pain and the shame and the uncertainty of what’s going to happen next, the sheer terror of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—and I burst into tears. Bronnie is instantly nurturing, and Carolyn and Elise soften a little, but they’re not going to turn to mush. They’re still waiting to hear the story before they decide what they think of me, and of Ruby.
�
��I’m sorry I lied,’ I blubber, ‘but I wanted Ruby to have a fresh start at OFA. That’s why we were willing to move so far away from home.’
‘That, and no school closer to home wanted to take her,’ Elise has to interject.
‘Yes, she did get turned down from other schools, but that wasn’t fair. It was on the basis of rumors, not fact. Only I couldn’t go in front of all the admission boards and explain it, so she got rejected, and it devastated her. Think how your girls would feel.’
‘So what precisely happened?’ Carolyn asks.
‘Vee was over at our house like she often was, and she fell down the stairs.’
‘Really, Kendall? That’s your story and you’re sticking to it?’ Elise says, disgusted.
‘That’s what we told the police,’ I say, genuinely tearful at the memory. It was terrible for Ruby and me. ‘We said that we’d both been in the kitchen downstairs and heard Vee tumbling. We had this rug at the top and we moved it so that it looked like Vee had slipped.’ Bronnie is staring at me in horror; the other two are impassive. ‘I know how it sounds, but you have to think how it would have looked. Vee and Ruby had been having some issues in their friendship, and no one would have believed the truth.’
‘Which was?’ Elise says.
‘That Vee and Ruby were arguing at the top of the stairs, and Vee was the aggressor. She was angry and she grabbed Ruby. Ruby broke the grip like anyone would have done and somehow, Vee fell. It really was self-defense—Ruby was scared, she thought Vee might push her down the stairs—but we were afraid the police wouldn’t believe that. We thought it was best to say it had been a total accident, that we were nowhere near Vee.’
‘You thought the best way to go was to lie to the police?’ Carolyn and that smug mug of hers. Like she wouldn’t do the same. Like she wouldn’t do worse.
‘We did,’ I say, as humbly as I can. ‘In hindsight, I still don’t know if it was the right call. Maybe it would have been better if the police had investigated and exonerated her, because everyone at school was so eager to let their imaginations run wild. It was a drama school, after all. So they concocted all these stories about what kind of person Ruby was, and they ran around calling her a murderer. What if the police had listened and railroaded Ruby? What if she’d wound up in prison for a crime she didn’t commit? Think about what you would have done if it were one of your daughters.’
The Understudy Page 21