Lie Still (17 page)

I walked over to the row of file cabinets and tugged on the first one. It opened an inch. Unlocked. A more aggressive pull and the drawer revealed a row of orderly files, each with a name printed on a color-coded tab—red, green, or blue. Some files appeared yellowed and aged, others brand-new. All were neatly stored like the diaries in the pink room. Alphabetical. Organized by the same compulsive fingers.

Last names. I needed to remember last names.
Beswetherick
. Nope, there was no Beswetherick. I thumbed through the first row of files and found
Cartwright, Jennifer
. Jenny, one of the blond Southern stereotypes who cavorted with me in Caroline’s plush Garden of Evil? Beach House or Red Mercedes, I couldn’t remember which. I pulled her file and set it on top of the cabinet.

Dunn, Harold
and
Dunn, Leticia
. I yanked them out. This was almost too easy.

I thumbed my way along the
D
’s and
E
’s. There had to be hundreds of files here. Caroline’s voracious information-gathering apparently extended far beyond the club. I glanced at the door. How much time did I have?
Camel
. I remembered that Mary Ann’s last name was “Camel,” something she mentioned during that drunken Bunko game. The other woman in the Garden of Evil, she of the Mephisto habit. I went back to the
C
’s. No Mary Anns. I tried the
K
’s.
Kimmel
. Bingo. I hadn’t factored in the Texas accent.

Five files away was Gretchen Liesel’s. Thick. My stack was getting tall.

I opened another cabinet.
Rich, Misty
. Thin. Maybe empty. Onto the pile anyway.

I racked my mind but couldn’t think of the last names of either Tiffany the Puppy Killer or Holly Who Had to Carve a Potato. Twenty-three minutes now without Maria. I yanked open another file cabinet and my fingers searched for
Valdez, Maria
. Nothing at all in the
V
’s. Had Maria taken it?

My brain was shrilling,
Light a match and get out
. What I was doing was illegal, not to mention immoral, and the two weren’t always the same thing and one was bad enough.

But I had to get some idea of what I was dealing with, of what Mike was dealing with, right? And this seemed as good a place as any to start. I tucked the stack of files I’d pilfered into my bag,
alongside mine. Thank God Lucy had talked me into this monster of a fake-patent-leather purse.

When Maria showed up with a tray, the shelf was clicked in place and I was pretending to finish up a row of walking shoes. Everything felt unreal, including the beautiful plate of food she set on the dressing table where Caroline probably sat to fiddle with her earrings. An egg salad sandwich on black rye bread cut into perfect, crustless triangles, a pile of plump, chilled purple grapes, a homemade oatmeal cookie with chocolate chunks, and a glass of what appeared to be fresh-squeezed orange juice. Impossible to resist.

I stood up and stuffed a triangle of sandwich into my mouth.

“You find the room, right? I give you enough time?”

I stared at Maria blankly, still chewing, thinking I’d misheard her. She shrugged. “I left the catch loose. I don’t want to get in trouble for showing you. I put your file on top.” She hesitated. “I don’t read it.”

Right
. A rush of heat flooded into my face.
Is Maria with me or against me?
I purposely kept my eyes off my purse, lying at my feet. Should I scream at her? Or say thank you?

I slipped my purse casually over my arm. I decided to play nice.

“Maria, you don’t have to stay here. To work for her. Whatever is going on … you don’t need to be part of it.”

“I have to find my file. She showed it to me once when she was angry. I know it is somewhere.” Her face wore a mask of tight desperation.

“How much time did she spend doing this? Snooping on everyone?”

“Every afternoon. Two to four. I brought her peach tea and dry wheatberry toast every day at four
exactly
.” She snatched my plate. “I will wrap this up for you. You need to go. You should never be here. It was a mistake.”

Her eyes were glued to my purse. She seemed to be considering whether to rip it off my shoulder.

“I read your file,” she said calmly. “Whatever you have put in your bag, you will need to bring it back. Talk to your husband about
Rojo
.”

It was no longer a request.

A
fter pulling in to my driveway, I rolled down the windows, opened the sunroof, adjusted my seat into a more comfortable position, and picked out Harry Dunn’s file.

The top sheet detailed an efficient list of Harry’s trysts for the last year, courtesy of the Diskreet Agency, for whom my respect was growing. Fourteen different lovers, times and dates, most of them anonymous women met in roadside motels, only one person I knew.

Mary Ann had dallied with Harry for three weeks last October, once in the back of his Escalade. A telephoto lens had been able to showcase the crack of his ass. I wondered if Caroline had shared the details with Letty. Maybe she had blackmailed him into behaving and Letty was none the wiser. Caroline, the diabolical Dear Abby.

I glanced into Mary Ann’s and Jenny’s files. The first women, other than Letty, whom I met at the Bunko party that night. Official
members of Caroline’s toxic little club. And right in my lap, their private applications for membership.

Caroline required that hopefuls answer invasive, truth-or-dare questions. They ranged from the softball,
When did you tell your first lie?
to
What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made?
to
Who is the person you like least in Clairmont?
A little beyond your average college sorority crap. These were very, very bored women.

The undertones rang clear to me. Hold back and you won’t get in. A bold line at the bottom promised that all applications were “strictly confidential.”

As for Jenny and Mary Ann, they wrote the answers to Caroline’s questions as if they’d sucked down a couple of pitchers of margaritas together and let their baggage and poor spelling fly.

Between them, they’d lain down for five abortions, seven plastic surgeries, and two arrests for public intoxication (literally, the cop had ordered them flat on the ground). They always voted a straight Republican ticket—except for Obama, because they both had always wanted to “do a black man.” The person they liked least in Clairmont was, not surprisingly, Letty Dunn, crossed out with the pen in a blink of sobriety (but not well enough to keep me from figuring it out) and replaced with “the pharmacist at Walmart because he won’t refill our Ambien without calling Dr. Gretch.”

I wondered whether the pharmacist they complained about was the one Tiffany mentioned was her husband. And whether that would aid or hinder her efforts to get in. I was beginning to understand the entanglements of small-town society. Take a step and your high heel was stuck in somebody’s net.

Jenny and Mary Ann shelled out their secrets for bonus points, leaving little need for Caroline to fill out the space she’d left for her own personal critique. What else was there to say? Caroline admitted both of them as members on the same day six years ago, maybe because Jenny’s husband ran a local branch of
Bank of the West and Mary Ann’s owned half of Grandes Cielos, a popular upscale restaurant and shopping development at the east edge of Clairmont. I think that because those were the only facts highlighted, presumably by Caroline, in fluorescent yellow. I absently bit into the half an egg salad sandwich that Maria had wrapped up for me.

The only things that Caroline did personally note about the two women, scribbled and dated after a monthly meeting several years later, were that
Mary Ann’s in heat all over town
and
Jenny’s breasts looked as hard as rocks tonight
. I couldn’t see either of these women, who thrived on self-imposed drama, as interested enough in anything but themselves to be involved in Caroline’s disappearance. What was their motive? These two weren’t hiding a thing.

I’d avoided Letty’s file, intimidated by its thickness. A headache ebbed and flowed and the baby kicked, suggesting that I needed to get out of this cramped space. I tackled the cookie. Delicious.

Maybe one more file. Misty’s appeared to be a fast read. Thin. Probably a single page.

A tiny moth of paper fluttered out, onto the floor of the passenger seat. I bent down to pick it up. I felt like a rope was being pulled tight against my stomach.

Caroline’s pretty handwriting was upside down. I righted it.

A stranger is someone you know
.

I turned the piece of paper over. A single word, scribbled in pencil.

A question really.

Alice???

A
n hour later, I swung open the door of Copy Boy.

I didn’t want anyone in Clairmont to see what I was doing, so
my iPhone led me here, to a low-end, family-owned Kinkos competitor in a town fifteen miles away. Seven former customers had posted online that the service sucked.

For ten minutes, the high school kid behind the counter lazily watched me struggle to figure out an off-brand Japanese copier the size of a small Toyota. The machine was loaded with enough buttons to fire a cruise missile. Actually, there were probably fewer buttons involved in firing a cruise missile.

“I just want to make a fucking copy! Where the fuck’s the button that says ‘
make a fucking copy
’?” I didn’t normally cuss at high school boys—I’m a good Catholic girl who normally doesn’t cuss out loud at all—but the hormones were coursing and I was furiously tugging on a Yankees sweatshirt even though it was 102 outside. Retail air-conditioning in Texas summer is like a brisk fall day in Manhattan.

Copy Boy sighed heavily. New Yorkers aimed the F word like a Smith & Wesson into city streets and cafés, at perfect strangers, over the mildest of infractions, and the rubber bullets bounced right off. Here in Clairmont, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard the word in polite company, only on HBO.

He strolled over, hit the “reset” button several times, thrust his hand out for the first stack of papers without looking at me or them, slapped them into the correct slot, punched four more buttons, and we watched them happily collate.

In the kind of voice reserved for small children, Copy Boy explained how to repeat those steps for the next batch of papers. He stood a foot from me at all times, like he feared I might bite. Actually, I might. After a paper jam and brief battle with the credit card scanner, I was good to go.

The edges of the other files stuck out of my purse. Tempting. Was it
more
illegal to copy other people’s files? I glanced over at Copy Boy, all plugged up with his iPod, head down, and thumbs moving like the legs of a speeding roach across his phone. He would be a terrible witness in court.

I
reached over to my purse, opened another file, slid the papers in place, and pressed “collate.”

“I didn’t do it.”

I laid the police reports that Mike tossed in my face the night before neatly onto the shining glass surface of his desk.

I had driven directly to his office from the copying store. I gave him no warning. Angie, the temp secretary that Mike said was living a second life as a dancer in a cage at Cowboys Stadium, cheerfully waved me into his office “as a surprise.” She scored the best flat-abs-to-big-boobs ratio I’d ever seen. Mike had conveniently left that part out.

Mike glared at me, then took a tense stroll over to shut the door. I glanced around the room, the first office he’d ever occupied that didn’t roll on wheels and come fully loaded with a trunk of armor.

The interior designer had opted for saccharine. Creamy walls. Wedding-cake crown molding tacked into every nook and cranny possible. Forgettable modern paintings with bright slashes of color. Two floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a bare, plant-free courtyard open to the blazing sun. I wandered over to look out. A dead vine drizzled over a gazebo. Four iron benches at the corners, probably heated to 150 degrees, waited to grill somebody’s rear end. Designed, I guessed, by a non-Texan.

“I can’t hear the screams of the prisoners,” I said. The architect of this three-year-old building had stuck the booking area and soundproof holding cells in the basement. Mike found this an oddly primitive concept. He’d joked about people disappearing off the Clairmont streets, never to be seen again.

He pressed an intercom button on his phone and spoke roughly. “Hold my calls, please.”

“Just like in the movies.” I was trying for a way in.

I dropped into a hard upright, green-striped upholstered
chair in the corner and couldn’t help but think how good he looked in blue.

“Can I be Katharine Hepburn?”

“You think this is funny?”

Just like that, he turned me on, and not in a good way.

“No, Mike.” My words were taut with anger. “I do not think this is funny. I think it is shocking that you think that I could kill a man and then hide it from you for our whole marriage.”