Lie Still (26 page)

“Maybe we can talk tomorrow,” she suggested.

“Maybe,” I replied stiffly.

As I slid open the deadbolt, I wasn’t thinking about her snooping in the sunroom or her jumpiness and I certainly wasn’t thinking about how she deserved a grateful thank-you at the door for bringing order to my house and, surely, to some extent, my marriage.

I was thinking about her eyes.

Maybe it was nothing.

A whim.

A fashion conceit.

But the first time I met her, Misty’s eyes were a deep brown like a golden retriever collie mutt I once loved.

In the light of the sunroom, they were blue.

M
isty Rich’s master bathroom was probably a chrome and granite affair with perfectly folded, impersonal white towels, nothing like the motley collection she unpacked for me, worn thin and soft, accrued over many years, combined in marriage and now ready to clash with Pepto Bismol–colored tile.

Were her bathroom drawers stuffed with every hue of contact lens, five different shades of brown and blue and green, including that Caribbean aqua so mesmerizing and so utterly wrong on the face of a human being?

Who was she?

Did she feel like I did? That she hosted infinite people inside her body, who slipped in and out seamlessly, with no one ever noticing, transforming her into what she thought people wanted?

Twilight was casting its gray pall in the sunroom, but I could still make out the words scrawled on the box that Misty had been kneeling over.

OLD DISHES/STORAGE
.

Misty could have been telling the truth.

I began to dig through the boxes, tossing them aside, dumping them on the floor, a small well of panic rising.
Where was it?
There. The box underneath a round container that held my wisp of a wedding veil.

EMILY/PERSONAL
.

The mover’s tape securely in place.

I scraped my nail under the edge of the tape and ripped it open.

Since I was a kid, I’d stuck any piece of paper that meant anything to me in one place.

An old lover’s poem, my parents’ obituaries, a handcrafted birthday card from a friend, a
New York Times
review of the best books in the last decade, a napkin with the scribbled names of my foodie friend Delia’s favorite San Francisco restaurants. All of it, stacked neatly into folders and envelopes for future reference, most of it unlikely to ever be touched again.

I pawed my way to the bottom until I uncovered the corner of something red. An ordinary, college-ruled notebook—notes from a Shakespeare class that confounded my nineteen-year-old mind with imagery and metaphors and obscure, clever references to the politics of another time. Why doesn’t anyone admit that Shakespeare is so damn hard to understand?

It wasn’t until much later, as an adult, that I had my epiphany. Shakespeare’s words were not meant to be read and highlighted at a tiny desk in the hushed stacks of a university library. Shakespeare was meant to be roared out loud, and breathed in like a brisk wind.

I barely pulled out a B in the course, but I tried, at least until after the rape.

After that, before each class, I had swallowed two Vicodin prescribed for a toothache six months earlier, enjoyed a nice buzz, and doodled in the margin of this notebook.

I looked up from the box, frustrated by the waning light. Beyond the smeared glass of the sunroom, twisting, bare tree branches drew a sharp black outline against orange sky. A wicked Elizabethan set design for someone out there, watching.

I regretted not bringing the flashlight from the hall closet. This room had never been wired for a fixture. Mrs. Drury apparently didn’t enter it after dark. I wondered whether the cop was still out front.

Shivering, I flipped toward the back of the notebook, to my carefully rendered cartoon of a man with horns.

He lay on his back, a knife in his gut.

Rude ram, to batter such an ivory wall!

Angry words scratched across the page.

Words about Lucrece.

About me.

I was the crazy girl who did this.

Five names floated in the empty spaces, circled in heart balloons.

Brook E
.

Margaret S
.

Renata T
.

Lisa C
.

Emily W
.

That’s how the policeman called our names, like a teacher reciting first-grade attendance.

I wrote those words, drew that awful thing, on the same day that I met Rosary Girl and Lisa, pre-med. I’d been only a few minutes late to my Shakespeare class after the police dismissed us. I raced there from the library, eager to turn in my final semester paper, a mad, rambling piece of crap.

The professor had assigned us to write a fifteen-page analysis of any Shakespeare poem. It would count as forty percent of our final grade. Most of the class settled on
Venus and Adonis
or
“The Phoenix and the Turtle,” because those papers were for sale on campus for about seventy-five bucks. Twice that if you wanted an A.

I’d picked
The Rape of Lucrece
, the first words of Shakespeare that truly engaged me, a balm to my anger.

I had no trouble getting the gist.

A cockatrice, I learned in a Google search ten years later, is a serpent hatched from a cock’s egg, with the power to kill with a glance.

I didn’t keep the red notebook for the drawing, an embarrassing, vengeful thing.

I kept the paper for the names.

T
he headlights flashed through the kitchen windows like a lighthouse strobe as Mike turned his cruiser into the driveway. I heard the crunch of his shoes on the pebble driveway, the clank of the mailbox opening and shutting on the front porch.

Familiar, safe sounds.

“Emily? What happened? Were we visited by a fairy?” The front door slammed behind him, and I counted the electronic
pings as he punched the numeric code, my mother’s birthday plus a random 5 and a 3, into the keypad.

I had turned up the cozy factor in the living room. A few logs stacked by the garage now glowed in the stone fireplace, even though Mrs. Drury’s outdoor thermometer with the sunflower face pointed at 68 degrees. A couple of cheap candles flickered on the coffee table.

“Emily, where are you? Am I in the right house?”

“In the kitchen,” I called back. “Very funny.”

I whacked the bottom of a tomato soup can with a wooden spoon, releasing the congealed glob into the pan, then dumped in a mixture of water and milk from a Pyrex measuring cup. With the other hand, I stuck a pan of open-faced tuna and tomato melts into the oven, upgraded with five-grain bread and Havarti.

Mike’s black industrial backpack—he still wouldn’t concede to a briefcase—dropped from his shoulder to the linoleum floor. It held things with a dark history that I didn’t want to know about. I always imagined that if I stuck my hand in there, something inside would yank me into an abyss.

Mike walked up behind me and slid his arms around my waist.

“The place looks great.” He pressed warm lips against my neck and reached for my glass of red wine on the counter. His touch after a long day without it still left me a little breathless. In New York, pre-baby, we’d be on the floor by now.

“Hey, stop that.” I slapped his hand. “Get your own. I’m rationing. I measured six perfect ounces. As for the house, it wasn’t all me. Misty helped.”

“What?”

“Misty Rich dropped by. She spent most of the day here.” The easy mood cracked like the delicate glass it was, and he abruptly released me.

“Why do you look that way? Not that long ago, you were encouraging me to get out and make friends.”

“A lot has changed since then. Let’s talk about her after supper. The fire’s lit, the soup is simmering, the mood is light.”

“Now my mood sucks a little. You shut me out last night and you’re doing it again.”

“Thanks for the brew.” Mike popped the top of a Xingu he’d grabbed out of the refrigerator, a pricey black beer that he loved, my affectionate offering to lubricate the night.

“I was frustrated,” he said. “A computer crash prevented me from seeing what Billie rounded up from the national databases. A brand-new $3 million system, and it blows up. I spent two hours trying to get someone to fix it. The tech company that installed it didn’t send someone out until this morning. Their guy got the thing up and running in fifteen minutes. He’s now number three on my speed-dial. I promised I wouldn’t hesitate to rouse him out of dead sleep.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me that?”

“Baby, I’m stressed. Wondering if I should just quit this job, pay the contract penalty, and get us the hell out of here.” He took a swig of beer. “And it’s hitting me. That you might want to find her. What that entails.”

Her
. No lead-up, but I didn’t need one. She hovered over us like a confused bird blown off-course. We’d avoided the subject since that night, never once broaching the obvious question of whether I could leave the daughter I’d abandoned to a life of fantasy.

“I don’t have any plans … to disrupt her.” I spoke haltingly, not sharing how often my fingers had poised for a Google search. Or that I’d sketched her face in my imagination, on napkins, on scrap pieces of paper, a million times.

“Sorry, move, I’m burning the tuna melts.” I pulled out the pan and dropped it on the stove, shutting the oven door with my
knee. “Get the paper plates and napkins, will you? The bowls are on the stove. Help yourself.”

After a few efficient seconds, we clinked his beer and my wineglass in lieu of saying grace and settled in to another of my 1950s suppers. Belmont, secretly renamed Golden Turd in my head, joined the party and rubbed against Mike’s legs. My husband, everyone’s hero. Last night in bed, Belmont actually spooned him, flipping over when Mike did.

“So if the computer’s up and running now, what did you find?” I asked.

“We ran about thirty names from the files found at Caroline’s. It turned up what you’d expect. DUIs. A little tax evasion. Shoplifting. Harry Dunn’s corporate shenanigans in Houston, which I already knew about. Completely denies it, by the way.” He slugged the last of his beer. “It’s Caroline Warwick who turns out to be very interesting. She’s not the widow she claims to be. Her husband and son are alive. So is a sister.”

My mouth dropped open in the middle of a bite and I rescued the piece of tuna dripping down my chin. I don’t know what I was expecting, but not this. “She specifically told me her family was dead.”

“She apparently told everyone that for years.”

“I don’t understand. Why would she go to such elaborate lengths to reinvent herself? Where are her husband and son now?”

“She grew up in Kentucky, which is where her husband still lives, in their house.” That meshed, I thought, with the portrait of the horse and her musical Southern accent.

“Her husband’s name is Richard Deacon. They separated twenty years ago and divorced a few years later. Richard stayed in Hazard. Caroline reverted back to her maiden name.”

Richard. Dickie. The Hater. I knew of Hazard. It was in one of the most poverty-stricken areas in the country. I couldn’t for a second picture Caroline there.

“Her son still lives in Hazard, too? What’s his name?”

“Wyatt. We haven’t found him yet. Wyatt was briefly shipped off to a juvenile detention center. It coincides with the time Caroline arrived in Clairmont. The Hazard police are not being too forthcoming with us about why, so I may take a little trip there. The son eventually landed in an expensive boarding school for rich kids. The folks at the school are equally zipped up on the subject. They would only tell us that he graduated as expected, at eighteen. There’s not much of a trail after that.”

“Is he at the top of your suspect list?” I was adding quickly in my head. Caroline’s son would be in his thirties now.

“He’s up there, simply because he is suddenly alive and linked to a previous criminal history. The obvious question is, why would he do anything now, after all the years in between?”

“Maybe he didn’t know where she was.”

“I don’t think so. Caroline didn’t make herself that hard to track backward or forward. Any PI could have done it. We’re having a little trouble with Misty Rich, though. There are 42,000 people in the United States with ‘Rich’ as a last name. The computer spit out ten Misty Riches, all of them over forty and easy to locate. None of them is your Misty. My guess is that ‘Misty’ is a nickname. Billie, who seems to know these things, thinks chances are that her legal name could be ‘Michelle’ or ‘Melissa.’ Billie is also tracking a list of Todd Riches. There are plenty of those, although none who are legally married to anyone named ‘Misty.’ Or ‘Michelle’ or ‘Melissa.’ ” He had emphasized the
your Misty
part a little too much.