Lie Still (27 page)

“She and her husband came from California,” I ventured.

He nodded. “I remembered you saying that. No pops there yet, either. Frankly, I wasn’t that interested in Misty until a few hours ago. One of my more ambitious young cops followed Caroline’s financial trail straight to that glass house Misty is living in. It’s owned by a trust in the name of Caroline Warwick. Caroline’s real estate lawyer flips houses for her. Caroline currently
owns five homes in a fifty-mile radius. Two of those houses are on the market, two are being updated, and Misty Rich lives in the other one.”

All of this information was making my head throb. Other parts of me already throbbed. The soles of my feet, my neck, the back of my legs all the way up to my butt. And now the suspect was flesh and blood. He had a name.
Wyatt
.

“Why don’t you just roll up to Misty’s house and ask her to show you a driver’s license? I could ask her, for that matter.”

“No.” Mike’s voice was tight with irritation. “I’m not ready yet.”

“OK, OK. I don’t know if you could trace this, but she was in a car crash when she was twelve. Or that’s what she says. She has scars.” As soon as I said the word, it felt like a betrayal. Mike had moved to the sink and stopped in the middle of rinsing out his beer bottle.

“What kind of scars?”

I spoke reluctantly, wondering why I felt like I’d made some sort of silent pact with her. “A six-inch narrow line on her left forearm. Vertical. Not suicidal. I saw a couple of marks inside her thighs when we sat out by the pool that day. I didn’t get a good look. She seemed embarrassed by them. Some of the gossip … is that she is or was a drug addict. I think that’s jealous crap,” I said firmly.

“How do you know it wasn’t suicidal? People serious about suicide slice vertically along the vein between the wrist and the elbow. It takes about a second on Google to find explicit instructions. The slash-across-the-wrists method is movie folklore.”

I guess it was a positive thing that I didn’t know this.

“What else?” Mike pressed. “Even if it’s little, it could be helpful.”

“She said something about taking classes at USC. But I didn’t get the impression she got a degree from there. Today, for the first time, she mentioned her family. An aunt. No name.”

Mike, familiar with the signs of my nightly meltdown—the higher tone of my voice, fingers stripping through my hair like an angry comb—spoke gently. “Don’t worry about it for now.”

“Are you going back to work?”

“Not tonight. My deputies shoved me out the door. Told me to sleep for six hours or I wasn’t going to be of any use to anybody. What’s this?”

He’d been thumbing through the mail lying on the counter, his usual wind-down for the night. My red notebook was suspended between his thumb and pointer finger.

Something stopped me from telling him. Old habits. The shame I still wore, like a tattoo from a drunken spring break in hell.

“Just notes from a college Shakespeare class. I found it today when we unpacked. I’m thinking of reading a little more Shakespeare now that I’m more equipped to understand it. And since I have time on my hands.”

“Maybe you could write me a sonnet sometime,” he said with a smile. He set the notebook back down. I let out my breath. “Good night. And good morning, too. I’ll be out of here before you’re up.”

He kissed me on the forehead, not the neck, or the lips, or my cheek. This meant two things. He wasn’t mad anymore and no sex tonight. Both good.

As usual, Mike didn’t doubt my words. The guilt in my gut was familiar, but growing less bearable every day.

T
he newspaper article slipped out of the notebook so silently I only saw it on the linoleum because I bent down to reposition my slipper and found my nineteen-year-old face looking up at me. I had just finished straightening the kitchen and was about to turn off the lights and follow Mike to bed.

That stupid front-page story from the college newspaper. Before
starting supper, I had swept it up from the kitchen table and tucked it inside the notebook.

Five little brunettes. The only time my picture made the paper except for our wedding announcement in
The Times
.

The byline leapt out at me.

Bradley Hellenberger.

The name that ran flush left over the top of the best campus newspaper stories. A titillating and anonymously sourced piece on a student’s affair with a lit professor in line for dean. A first-person exposé after four weeks inside an insidious campus cult.

The murder of a rich college frat boy.

Everybody knew this reporter was going places.

So where did he go?

Did the ripple effects of Pierce’s violence take Bradley Hellenberger down, too?

I never seriously thought about him as anything but a peripheral character, run over by this story along with his editor. But as soon as my eyes hooked on his name, the incident flowed back in slow, chronological pieces.

I shook the notebook over the table, and his business card fell out, the edges soft like a worn blanket. I was surprised it was still there.

I knew for a fact that Bradley Hellenberger was angry. I knew he was ruthless. I knew he felt cheated. I knew he suspected that one of the five of us killed Pierce because he waited for me after my Middle East history final, the class where I learned that sometimes there is way, way too much to forgive.

Bradley fell in line with me as I walked down the steps of the liberal arts building, his business card proffered as his first and last gesture of civility. I was slightly awed for just a second, because he was a campus celebrity of sorts. He wasn’t at all how I imagined he’d look, the big man behind the byline. Short for a guy, not even 5′8″, skinny, nondescript eyes, pinkish skin, a bad haircut, and wire-rimmed glasses. His written words blew like a
force of nature but, in person, he appeared to be more of a light breeze.

“I know you’re one of Pierce Martin’s ex-girlfriends. I need to know what happened with the police. They interviewed you and the other girls, right?” He’d stopped me on the last step by holding my arm in a weak pinch, but it hurt. I decided Bradley was less like a breeze and more like a bug.

“Let go of me.” I shrugged him off. I’d been ducking calls from Bradley Hellenberger for days. “I’m not going to tell you anything. You ran our pictures, you unbelievable asshole.” I couldn’t stop staring at his nose. He had the tiniest nostrils I’d ever seen, like a baby’s. I wondered how he could breathe through them when he got a cold.

I maneuvered around him to the sidewalk, students rushing by on either side of us. I had nowhere to be for hours, until 5 p.m., when I’d promised Rosemary I would meet her in the dining hall for the last supper of the semester. I fell in with the pace of the crowd, hoping he’d get lost. Ever since the rape, Rosemary watched over me like a mother, never leaving me alone too long, but on that day, she had finals stacked up.

“Did all of you conspire to kill him?” He yanked me to a stop and said it with such fierceness that a guy walking by with his arm slung over his girlfriend’s shoulders stopped short, forcing the crowd to detour around them. It seemed like Bradley
wanted
other people to hear.

“You OK?” The towering, buffed-up stranger was talking to me but shooting Bradley the “I can beat you into cherry pudding” look he’d probably been shot his whole life.

I answered for him. “Yes. I think so. Yes. He’s leaving. Aren’t you leaving?” I didn’t want to make a scene. I didn’t want anyone to recognize me, or him.

Bradley let go of my arm, seething. A dark flush crawled up his face like an angry surf.

“Yeah, I’m leaving.”

“Good thinking, bud.” My anonymous protector reattached himself to his girl and walked on, but slowly, his face turned toward us, making sure.

“Is this the kind of finesse you use to get all your stories?” I asked heatedly.

“They’re firing me, bitch. I can’t let that happen right before I graduate. I need to know what you girls said to the police. If they’re arresting anyone.”

“So this is personal.”

“Yes,” he said. “This is personal. Don’t forget it.”

He seemed so small in person that I had forgotten him. A spider I flicked away.

Three weeks later, I was on a plane to Italy.

M
ike was already snoring on top of the covers, chest bare, boxers on, black plastic reading glasses slid halfway down his nose, a file placed open and upside down on his chest. Tanner Kohl’s. Someone else I didn’t know.

The small TV on the bedroom dresser exploded with a low-volume cheer as an Illinois coach lost it, charging a ref, screaming, permissible unless he took that behavior out into the street.

I snapped it off, along with Mike’s reading light. I slipped off his glasses and set them on his bedside table, picked up the file and rested it on top of the short stack on his dresser.

His files, my files, Caroline’s files. Way too many files.

I shook out my new quilt lying at the end of the bed, watching the lucky birds fly and gently float back down.

As soon as the fabric brushed his skin, Mike shifted on his side, still sleeping, to settle into a more comfortable nest. I prayed that I was doing this mundane routine for him when he was
eighty, when every bit of passion was dried up, settled into memory fuzz like a good book.

Sleep did not come so easily for me. My mind circled like a Ferris wheel in a never-ending loop.

Questions with no answers.

Round and round, round and round.

One person in particular was still stuck on the ride. I couldn’t see her face as she whizzed past. She was just a name on a slip of paper.

Alice
.

T
he next morning I approached my laptop, tucked into a tiny alcove in the breakfast area. The built-in desk was designed for old-fashioned writing with a pen or pencil. There was just enough room for my laptop, not an inch to spare.

A few wooden slots attached to the wall above it were perfect for mail and bills, and we’d dutifully started filling them up. Mrs. Drury’s relatives had bequeathed us the small scratched wooden stool that slid out of sight underneath. I noticed my rear end didn’t fit on it as easily as it did five days ago when I’d paid the electric bill.

I ran my fingers across the laptop keys like it was a piano that needed tuning. Four months ago, this Mac laptop loomed large in my world, an addiction. Technological crack. I’d never been a big texter, but I checked my Facebook and email so obsessively in New York that Mike whined that it interfered with our sex life.

As soon as I passed the riskiest stage of the pregnancy, the need to reaffirm my existence every day disappeared. I no longer wanted to update my status on Facebook to share a picture of an especially nice pastrami sandwich from Zabar’s with 522 friends. I was connected to another human being in the most intimate way possible and it filled me up.

Since we’d arrived in Clairmont, I checked email once a day and had fallen completely off the Facebook wagon. Now I was thinking Facebook could be a very useful tool.

But first, Bradley Hellenberger. I typed his full name and
journalist
into a Google search, immediately rewarded with dozens of hits. He hadn’t fallen into a ditch. He was a managing editor for a prominent online newsmagazine in New York. This was going to be easier than I thought.

I clicked the third link, which promised a bio. When the picture flashed up, I thought I’d made a mistake. The guy who appeared beside the short profile was dark-complected with brown hair. Intelligence and ego radiated out of his eyes. This man was definitely
not
a light breeze. And definitely not poor, skinny Bradley with the small nose holes.

My eyes traveled over the bio. By the second paragraph, I began to get the sense that something was very wrong. This Bradley was that Bradley. Or at least, their history was the same.

Bradley graduated magna cum laude from Windsor with a double major in journalism and history the same year that I was raped. He began his career as an investigative reporter on the Windsor newspaper, with stories that received national attention in papers around the country.

He worked as a writer and editor at
The Wall Street Journal
and
The Philadelphia Inquirer
before going to work for magazines. So
The Wall Street Journal
hadn’t blown him off after the controversy. He was a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He made his home in New York City with his wife and three children.

It didn’t mention a cosmetic surgery overhaul.

The Bradley I met thirteen years ago on the steps of the liberal arts building wasn’t the real Bradley. I’d met an imposter.

Why?

My hands were suddenly ice-cold.

It entered my mind that maybe Lucy could help. Maybe she even knew Bradley Hellenberger. My best friend happened to be a reporter in New York journalism circles, with a generous freelance contract writing for
Vanity Fair
.

Lucy had the voice of a poet and the eye of a cynic. She told me she’d never write fiction, because life was way more bizarre and fascinating than anything she could dream up. I specifically remember the day the Joseph Fritzl case broke. The Austrian monster who had locked his daughter in the basement and proceeded to rape her for twenty-four years and father her seven children, never letting her see the sun.