The Secret Lives of Married Women (23 page)

The proceedings after that are a blur in my memory. Kamin asked for a sidebar conference in the judge’s chambers. There he requested a recess on grounds of surprise. And the next morning, he filed a motion to dismiss the case against Abel.

Technically speaking, it might have been the most unequivocal success of my legal career. But I left the courthouse all but unnoticed. The reporters and cameramen were like a feral pack of dogs, hot-eyed and hell-bent on just one person: Nan.

She was happy to talk to them, as it turned out. And happy to provide them with a photograph of her own, of a shirtless John Bonney at the end of a domme’s flogger. It was on the cover of the
New York Post
the next morning, beneath the headline
WHIPPING BOY BONNEY’S FOILED FRAME-UP
.

“You know,” I told Nan now, “most defense lawyers have a savior complex. But as good as the outcome was for Abel—and no client of mine has ever had a better one—I didn’t save him. You did. Can’t you go back to him at this point? Surely he would take you back now.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not possible. It would never be the same as it was before. Too much has happened.”

“Does that make you...sad?”

“Yes.”

The waitress came over with the check and I handed her a credit card without looking at it.

“And the Lighthouse job?” I asked, when she’d moved away again. “How is that?”

“It’s fine,” she said. “Which is the most anything else could ever be.”

“Please forgive this question,” I said, “but I have to ask: why Abel? I mean, there’s a great deal to admire about the man, but I don’t understand the depth of feeling you’ve invested in him. What is that about?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

The waitress came back with the credit card slip and I picked up the pen she’d provided. I had asked Nan almost everything. The only questions left in my mind were logistical ones.

“How did you get that photograph of Bonney?” I asked, even though—having been to the Nutcracker—I could hazard a guess, and Nan confirmed it.

“They have hidden security cameras in each room. For a lot of reasons. So the house would have some recourse if a client hurt one of the women. So there would be a record of what took place in a session if a client ever accused one of the dommes of seriously hurting him. Mistress DeVille kept a meticulous archive of these tapes going back two years.”

“And you had access to this archive?”

“I’d worked there a long time,” Nan said. “She trusted me.”

“So you made stills from the videos,” I guessed.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled. “It’s much easier to sell individual photographs to the media than it is to leak a tape. I sent them to Bonney’s office by messenger the morning of the trial. I let him know I had the originals and that if he didn’t persuade Kamin to drop the case within twenty-four hours, I would sell them to the press.”

“And then, once the trial was over, you sold them anyway.”

“Yes,” she said, without a hint of apology in her tone. “The pictures supported the story I told on the stand. Without them, the public might think I was lying about everything.”

A new question came to me now.

“If you had those photographs of Bonney,” I said slowly. “If you had them all along—then why wait? If you’d threatened him earlier, he might have pulled some strings to avert the trial before it began.”

“I didn’t see Bonney’s picture in the paper until the charges against Abel made the news,” Nan said. “By then, Abel’s reputation had been ruined. To me, it wasn’t enough to keep him out of prison. I had to clear his name.” She looked steadily across the table at me. “Maybe now he can even have the waterfront at Red Hook.”

“You did clear his name,” I said, “but at the expense of your own.”

“Abel’s the only person I really care about,” she told me. “He knew about my past already. Who else would I worry about?”

“Well, just as you said in court. The nuns. The only family you’ve ever known.”

“But again, they’re a reclusive order. They don’t read newspapers, they don’t watch television. They don’t talk to outsiders. How in the world would a tabloid story reach them?”

“Not the story. The photographs. You wouldn’t answer this question in court, but since you’re assured of confidentiality now: what’s to stop John Bonney at this point from sending the photographs of you to the convent? If only for revenge?”

She stared at me for a long moment, as if unwilling to believe I could be so slow-witted. When she spoke again, her voice was gentle and almost pitying.

“There are no photographs of me. There never were.”

“Bonney has no photos of you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then how could he blackmail you?”

“Bonney never blackmailed me. He never even recognized me. He’s a submissive himself, you understand. So when he came to the Nutcracker, I was never the one he wanted to see.”

I sat back against the black vinyl, suddenly feeling the need for another drink, and a stronger one than beer.

“So,” I said slowly. “The only one guilty of blackmail is you. And by dint of that, you’ve managed to take down an innocent man.”

“Bonney is hardly an innocent man. He tried to destroy Abel. He masterminded the entrapment.”

“But Abel walked into that trap of his own accord. He was hardly innocent either.”

“Do you have any innocent clients, counselor?”

I didn’t answer this.

“I’m not interested in innocence,” she said after a moment. “We’re all fallen creatures. Clearly, neither man is an angel. But Abel’s the devil I know.” She smiled ever so slightly. “Or at least, the one I serve.”

“From afar,” I said. It wasn’t a nice thing to say. Something about this woman—perhaps her indifference to anyone but Abel—remained an affront to me.

But she didn’t seem put off by the remark. “From afar,” she agreed. “That part has been difficult, I admit. But that’s my fault, and my cross to bear.” She tilted her head and added, “I learned that from the nuns.”

* * *

Her undoing, as she’d long known, was in seeking affirmation of what should have remained ephemeral. Abel was right to dismiss her. Faith that couldn’t endure without reassurance was no faith at all. Whenever she felt he should have let her stay, she remembered his warning of long ago.
There are some mistakes,
he had said,
that you can’t make.

He’d called her after the trial to thank her for saving him. That was the way he put it: saving him. Their conversation wasn’t long—there was too much that neither of them would ever be able to say—but his voice was hoarse with gratitude. The memory of this made her exile endurable, though it still wasn’t easy, and would never be easy.

Sometimes she thought the hardest cross, the hardest loss, to bear was not the privilege of assisting Abel, nor the steady and cherished routine, nor even the chance to pass her days in his presence, but the certainty of her understanding with him and the serenity it yielded. The way it tampered with the air and the sunlight even when she wasn’t near him. Her sense of purpose and peace, her feeling of having a place in the world. And the way it carried her to and from the office, informing every sight she took in along her path.

Like the sparkle of broken glass pressed into the pavement. The trees along the sidewalk, flowering somehow from rain-starved roots. Lone gulls too far inland, adrift overhead. The open grates at the edges of the tire-scarred streets, where smoke was always rising from underground.

“What is this?” Stas asked, upon coming home to find the makings of a party on the side porch. It was an unseasonably warm night in February. Since screening in the porch and buying a heat lamp the autumn before, we liked to have dinner outside when it wasn’t too cold. On the picnic table was a bottle of champagne, a tin of caviar and a little bakery cake.

Clara, who had been stacking blocks in the corner, came running to Stas. Four-month-old Leo slept in the plastic swing that hung from the rafters.

“I knew you were in meetings all day and I didn’t want to tell you this by voicemail,” I told him. “But Lily had her baby this morning!”

“Ah! Well, this is very fine news,” he said, picking up Clara and hugging her. “But I thought she was not due for another two weeks.”

“She wasn’t. The baby came early.”

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

“A boy. He’s almost eight pounds and his name is Hilton William.”

“Hilton?” Stas said, taking a seat at the table and reaching for the champagne. “Like the hotel?”

“Yes, exactly. I asked the same thing. Apparently Lily’s sure he was conceived in a Hilton hotel room. She said it was a very special night.”

“I see. Very well, then. Though I am glad this special night did not happen in a Super 8.”

This made me laugh. But then I’d been laughing with joy all day. The birth was still a miracle to me. Lily and Darren had been trying to have a baby for so long. I’d even come to believe they’d made their peace with the way things were. But these past nine months, she and Darren were unmistakably so much happier that I wondered how I’d ever thought they were happy before. And while I knew this was because of Lily’s pregnancy, I couldn’t help thinking it was also about whatever had happened in that hotel room.

“In other news,” I said now, nodding at the moving van parked outside the house next door, “I think we’ve finally got neighbors.”

“Do they look nice?”

“I haven’t actually seen them. I’ve only seen the moving guys. But I guess we’ll know soon enough.”

Months had gone by before a new company took over the construction of that house, and it was several more months before it was finished. I wondered whether the buyers knew that a man had been killed inside it and buried beneath it.

After struggling for more than a minute with the bottle of champagne, unable to peel away the seal around the cork, Stas reached for his boot knife and cut it away.

I’d seen my husband draw his knife a dozen times before. And yet just for an instant, within this festive setting, it was a jarring sight: the glint of a blade slipped from a boot. Or maybe I was just unsettled by the mention of the house next door.

“Did I ever tell you,” I asked abruptly, “that for a while there, I thought you’d killed Jack?”

Stas raised an eyebrow. “No, you never did,” he said. “Is this true?”

“Yes.”

“When was this?”

“When the detective told us he was likely dead.” I smiled at him now, and made my tone light, as if I were joking. “I suspected you right away.”

“I see,” he said after a long moment. He twisted the top of the champagne bottle and there was the violent sound of a popping cork. “And how did you feel about being married to a murderer?”

I wasn’t sure whether he was nettled or amused.

“Well,” I said. What could I say? I would never tell him how frightened I’d felt, how disoriented and distressed and alone. I would never tell anyone, let alone Stas, how my anguish gave way to arousal, or how dismayed I was to learn he was innocent. “I didn’t know how to feel, really.”

“Were you afraid of me?”

“Not really. Maybe a little.”

“Too bad that didn’t last,” my husband said, and his tone was as light as mine had been a moment ago.

The sun dropped behind the pines in the vacant lot across the street and a wind rustled the trees. Sitting there, listening to the locusts seething beyond the screen, I had a sudden dizzying sense of how scant a shelter we had here, how precarious it all was: the few planks underfoot that kept us above the dirt, the lanterns that we lit against the gathering dusk.

Then Stas folded his knife and replaced it in his boot. He poured two flutes of champagne, nudged one of them toward me and lifted the other.

“To family,” he said. And we drank.

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