Fool Me Once

Chapter 10

The Burkett servants lived in a complex of small homes on the back edge of the Farnwood estate, just left of the delivery entrance. The homes were all one level and reminded Maya of army barracks. The largest belonged to the Mendezes, Isabella’s family. Isabella’s mother, Rosa, still worked in the main house, though it was hard to say what she did now that all the children were grown.

Maya knocked on Isabella’s door. There was no sign of life, but these were hardworking people. Their hours were insane. Maya was far from a socialist, but she found it ironic how much the Burketts complained about staff and workers, really believing that this country was a meritocracy, when everything had been handed to them because, two generations earlier, a grandfather had found a way to exploit real estate laws. She knew most of the Burketts wouldn’t last a week working their servants’ hours.

Hector’s Dodge Ram pickup pulled in behind her. He parked a good distance from her and stepped out.

“Mrs. Burkett?” He looked scared.

“Where’s Isabella?”

“I think you better leave.”

Maya shook her head. “Not until I talk to Isabella.”

“She isn’t here.”

“Where is she?”

“She went away.”

“Away where?”

Hector shook his head.

“I just want to apologize,” Maya said. “It was all a misunderstanding.”

“I’ll tell her you said that.” He shuffled his weight from one foot to the other. “I think you better leave now.”

“Where is she, Hector?”

“I’m not going to tell you. You really scared her.”

“I need to talk to her. You can stay in the room. Make sure she’s safe or whatever.”

A voice from behind her said, “That’s not going to happen.”

Maya turned and saw Isabella’s mother standing there. She gave Maya a withering glare and said, “Leave.”

“No.”

Her eyes flicked toward her son. “Come inside, Hector.”

Giving wide berth, Hector made his way through the door. With one more glare, Isabella’s mother closed it behind both of them, leaving Maya outside.

She should have been prepared for this.

Back off, Maya told herself. Think it through.

Her cell phone sounded. She checked and saw that the call was from Shane.

“Hey,” she said.

“I looked up that license plate for you,” Shane said without preamble. “Your Buick Verano is leased by a company called WTC Limited.”

WTC. Didn’t ring a bell. “Any idea what that stands for?”

“None. The address is a post office box in Houston, Texas. It looks like some kind of holding company.”

“The kind of thing someone uses when they want to stay anonymous?”

“Yep. If we want to learn more, I’ll need to get a warrant. And to get that, I’d need a reason for looking into this.”

“Just forget it,” she said.

“If you say so.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“Don’t lie to me, Maya. I hate that.”

She didn’t reply.

“When you’re ready to come clean, call me.”

Shane hung up.

Eddie hadn’t changed the locks.

Maya hadn’t been back to Claire’s house — yep, still thinking of it as such — since pulling down Coach Phil’s pants. There were no cars in the driveway. Nobody answered her knock. So she took out the key and let herself in. As she entered the foyer, Eddie’s words floated back down to her.

“Death follows you, Maya...”

Maybe Eddie was right. If that was the case, was it fair to put Daniel and Alexa at risk?

Or, for that matter, Lily?

The boxes with Claire’s stuff still hadn’t been moved. Maya thought about the mysterious spare phone Eileen had seen. It seemed obvious that the phone was the kind of thing you bought when you didn’t want anyone to know who you were calling.

So what had happened to that phone?

If it had been on Claire when she died, the police would have gone through it. Of course, that could very well have happened. They might have recovered it during their investigation and concluded that it was meaningless. But Maya didn’t think so. Shane had contacts with the police. He’d looked into the investigation for her. There was nothing there about a spare phone or any unexplained calls.

Which meant the phone had probably not yet been discovered.

The boxes were unlabeled. Eddie seemed to have done it in a rush, dumping things in a flurry of grief so that clothes were mixed with toiletries, jewelry with papers, shoes with various trinkets. Claire loved cheesy souvenirs. Antiques and true collectibles were deemed too expensive, but Claire always got the snow globe when she visited a new city or tourist attraction. She had a shot glass from Tijuana. She bought a little piggy bank shaped like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She owned a Princess Di memorial plate, a wiggly Hawaiian hula girl who shook her stuff on a car dashboard, a pair of used Vegas casino dice.

Maya remained stone-faced as she sorted through the goofy tchotchkes that had at one point in their existence made Claire smile. She was in mission mode now. On one level, doing this, sorting through these nothings that her sister had cherished, was intensely painful, and the guilt started seeping in:

Your husband is right. I let death in. I should have been here. I should have protected you...

But on another level — a higher, more important level — this guilt and pain helped. They made her mission more discernible. When you can see the stakes, when you realize the true purpose of your mission, it motivates you. It makes you focus. It makes you push away the distractions. You gain clarity of purpose. You gain strength.

But there was no phone in any of the boxes.

After the last box, she collapsed back onto the floor. Think it through, she told herself. Get into Claire’s head. Her sister had owned a phone she wanted no one to know about. Where would she hide it...?

A memory came to Maya. Claire had been a junior in high school, Maya a sophomore. Claire, in perhaps her one fit of rebellion, had started smoking cigarettes. Dad had a super sensitive nose. He could smell them on her.

Dad was pretty liberal about most things. Being a college professor, he had seen it all and expected experimentation. But cigarettes struck a nerve. His own mother had died a horrible death from lung cancer. Nana had moved into the small spare room toward the end. Maya remembered the sounds mostly, the haunting, horrible wet sucking-gurgling coming from Nana’s room, spending her last few days slowly and agonizingly being choked to death. Maya could barely enter that room after Nana’s death. Death lingered. Its smell had seemingly burrowed into the walls. Worse than that, Maya sometimes was sure that she could still hear the sucking-gurgling sound. She had read somewhere that that sound never fully disappears. It just gets fainter and fainter.

Like the sounds of helicopter rotors. Like the sound of gunfire. Like the screams of death.

Maybe, Maya thought now, in that terrible room... maybe that was where death first started to follow her.

Maya stayed on the floor and closed her eyes. She tried to slow down her breathing and keep the sounds at a distance.

The memory nudged her again: Dad hated cigarettes.

Right, okay. Claire started smoking, and Dad would freak out. He started searching Claire’s bedroom at night, finding the cigarettes, and throwing small tantrums. The smoking stage didn’t last long. But while it did, Claire finally thought of a hiding place their father would never look.

Maya’s eyes lit up.

She quickly stood and hurried toward the living room. The old trunk — ironically, Nana’s old trunk — was there. Claire had used it as a coffee table. There were family photos on top. Maya started taking them off and putting them on the floor. Most of the photos were of Daniel and Alexa, but there was one of Eddie and Claire from the wedding. Maya stopped and stared at them. Both looked so damned young and hopeful and happy and mostly unsuspecting. These two had no idea what life had in store for them, but then again, no one does, do they?

The inside of the trunk was used to store tablecloths and linens. Maya removed them and started feeling her way along the bottom.

“My father brought the trunk over from Kiev,” Nana had told them during a visit when they were little, years before the cancer choked her to death, when Nana was spry and healthy, when she would take them swimming or teach them tennis. “See this?”

The two little girls bent close.

“He built it himself. It’s a secret compartment.”

“Why was it a secret, Nana?” Claire had asked.

“So he could hide his mother’s jewelry and cash. Every stranger is a potential thief. Remember that. You two girls. When you’re older. You will always have each other. But never leave your valuables where others can find them.”

Maya’s finger found the small seam. She dug down, heard the click, and slid back the secret panel. Then, just as she had done as a child, she bent close and looked inside.

The phone was there.

Maya pulled it out with a smile of satisfaction on her face. If she were a more religious person, she would have sworn that her sister and her nana were looking down upon her. But she wasn’t religious. The dead always stayed dead. That was the problem.

She tried to flip the phone on, but the battery was completely empty. No surprise. It’d probably been sitting untouched since Claire’s murder. Maya turned the phone over and checked the charging socket. It looked somewhat familiar. She’d be able to find a cord and charge it later.

“What are you doing here?”

The voice startled her. Instinctively she rolled away from it and came up prepared to defend herself.

“For chrissake, Eddie.”

Eddie’s face was red. “I said—”

“I heard you. Give me a second to catch my breath.”

So much for clarity and focus, Maya thought. She had been so lost in the brilliance of her discovery that Eddie had been able to enter and sneak up on her without her noticing.

Another mistake.

“I asked you what you—”

“I was going through her boxes,” Maya said.

Eddie took a step that had a little too much sway in it. “I told you to stay away.”

“So you did.”

Eddie wore the same red flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal his ropey forearm muscles. He was wiry and tight like a welterweight boxer. Claire had liked that about him, his build. His eyes had the red of drink.

He stuck out his hand, palm up.

“I want your key. Now.”

“I don’t think so, Eddie.”

“I can change the locks.”

“You can barely change your clothes.”

He looked down at the picture frames and linens strewn on the floor. “What are you doing in that trunk?”

Maya didn’t reply.

“I saw you take something. Give it back.”

“No.”

He eyed her now, his hands forming fists. “I can just take it—”

“No, you can’t. Was she having an affair, Eddie?”

That stopped him. His mouth dropped open. Then he said, “Go to hell.”

“Did you know about it?”

The welling in Eddie’s eyes started up again, and for a moment Maya’s eyes found that wedding picture, found Eddie’s happy, hopeful face. So maybe it wasn’t just the drink that was causing the red. Eddie saw it too, the same photograph, and something in him gave. He collapsed onto the couch. His face fell into his hands.

“Eddie?”

His voice was barely audible. “Who was it?”

“I don’t know. Eileen said Claire was getting secret calls. I just found a phone she hid in this trunk.”

He kept his face in his hands. “I don’t believe it,” he said in a voice that had nothing behind it.

“What happened, Eddie?”

“Nothing.” He looked up. “I mean, we weren’t at our best. But that’s marriage. There are cycles. You know all about that, right?”

“We aren’t talking about me.”

Eddie shook his head and lowered it again. “Maybe, maybe not.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Claire worked,” he said, too slowly, “for your husband.”

Maya didn’t like the cadence in his voice. “So?”

“So her excuse, when I asked, was that she was working late.”

He met her eyes now. She met his. Maya was not one for talking in circles.

“If you’re trying to imply that Claire and Joe...”

It was too preposterous to even finish.

“You’re the one saying she had an affair,” Eddie said, shrugging his way back to his feet. “I’m just telling you where she was.”

“So you had some inkling that maybe there was someone else?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yeah, you did. How come you never told the cops about that inkling?”

Now it was his turn not to reply.

“Oh, right,” Maya said. “You’re the husband. They were already looking at you hard. Imagine if they knew that you suspected her of having an affair.”

“Maya?”

She waited. He took a step toward her. She took a step backward.

“Give me that goddamn phone,” he said. “And get out of my house.”

“I’m taking the phone.”

Eddie stood in her path. “You really want to test me?”

Maya thought about the gun in her purse. The truth is, you never forget it. If you carry a weapon, it is always in your thoughts, always weighing you down or pulling at your sleeve. It is always, for better or worse, an option.

Eddie took a step toward her.

There was no way Maya was giving up the phone. Her hand started toward her purse when she heard two more familiar voices.

“Aunt Maya!”

“Yay!”

Daniel and Alexa crashed through the door as only the young can. They gave their aunt a big hug. She hugged them back, making sure neither pressed up against her purse. She kissed them both a little hard, quickly made her excuses, and slipped out the door before Eddie could do anything stupid.

Five minutes later, Eddie called on her mobile.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I loved Claire. God, how I... You know all this. And we had troubles, sure, but she loved me too.”

Maya was driving the car. “I know, Eddie.”

“Do me a favor, Maya.”

“What?”

“Whatever you find on that phone, no matter how bad, I need you to tell me. I need to know the truth.”

In the rear window Maya spotted the red Buick again.

“Promise me, Maya.”

“I promise.”

She hung up and took another look in the rearview mirror, but the red Buick was gone. Twenty minutes later, when she got to the Growin’ Up Day Care Center, Miss Kitty had her fill out the rest of the paperwork and arrange payment. Lily didn’t want to leave, which Maya took as a good sign.

Back at the house, Maya got Lily settled and opened what she referred to as the Drawer of Many Cords. Like most people she knew, Maya never threw out a power cord. The drawer was stuffed past capacity, like a snake-in-a-can, with dozens, maybe hundreds — heck, there was probably a cord that could work a Betamax — for her to go through.

She found an adaptor that fit into the bottom of Claire’s phone, plugged it in, and waited for it to have enough juice to work. It took about ten minutes. The phone was rudimentary — just the facts, ma’am — but it did indeed have a call history. She pressed the icon and started to scroll through the calls.

They were all to the same number.

Maya scrolled down and counted sixteen calls. The number was unfamiliar. The area code was 201. That meant northern New Jersey.

Who the hell was Claire calling?

She checked the dates. The calls started three months before her death. The last call came in four days before the murder. So what did that mean? The calling pattern was fairly uneven. There were a lot in the beginning, a lot toward the end, a scattering in the middle.

Was Claire setting up rendezvous?

For a moment Maya flashed back to Jean-Pierre. Her imagination started toying with her then. Suppose Jean-Pierre had gotten in touch with Claire after all these years. You hear about that all the time, especially in the Internet Age. No lover ever completely vanishes when you have Facebook.

But no, it wasn’t Jean-Pierre. Claire would have told her.

Really? Was she so sure about that? Claire had been up to something, no question about it, and she hadn’t seen fit to tell Maya what it was about. Maya had always thought that she and Claire shared everything, that they had no secrets from each other, but then again, let’s be fair here. Maya was on the other side of the world when all this happened, fighting for her country in a forsaken desert instead of being here, home, protecting her sister.

You were keeping secrets, Claire.

So now what?

Do the easiest thing first. Google the phone number. See if she got lucky and something came up. Maya typed the numbers into the search engine and hit the return button.

Bingo. Sort of...

The number came up right away, which surprised her. Most times, when you google a number, you get some offer to buy information or background checks on its owner from a third party. The phone number Claire had been calling was a business of sorts, but like everything else surrounding the swirling insanity of the past few weeks, it led to more questions than answers. The place was indeed in northern New Jersey, near, if the Google map was to be believed, the George Washington Bridge. It was called Leather and Lace — A Gentlemen’s Club.

Gentlemen’s Club. Euphemism for a strip club.

Maya clicked on the link, just to be sure, and was greeted with a screen full of scantily clad women. Yep. Strip club. Her sister had secured a secret phone and hidden it in their grandmother’s old trunk so she could call a strip club.

Did that make sense?

Nope.

Maya tried to throw this new information into the mix. When she added it all up — Claire, Joe, the nanny cam, the phone, the strip club, the rest — Maya considered all the possibilities and came up with bubkes. Nothing made sense. She started grasping at straws. Maybe Claire was having an affair and, what, her boyfriend worked there. Maybe Jean-Pierre was the club manager. The website did offer its “upscale clientele” something called a “French Lapper,” though Maya had no idea and did not want to know what that could possibly be. Maybe Claire was leading a secret life and worked there. You read about that sometimes or see it in a bad cable movie. Housewife by day, stripper by night.

Stop.

She picked up the phone and called Eddie.

“You found something?” he said.

“Look, Eddie, if I have to dance around” — she realized the irony the moment the word spilled from her lips — “or worry about filling you in, I’m not going to learn anything, okay?”

“Yeah, sorry, what’s up?”

“Do you ever go to strip clubs?”

Silence. Then: “Ever?”

“Yeah.”

“Last year, some guys at work had a bachelor party at one.”

“And since then?”

“That’s it.”

“Where was the club?”

“Wait, what does this—”

“Just answer, Eddie.”

“Outside of Philadelphia. Cherry Hill area.”

“No others?”

“That’s it.”

“Does a club called Leather and Lace mean anything to you?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Eddie?”

“No. It means nothing to me.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“You’re not going to tell me what this is about?”

“Not yet. Bye.”

Maya sat there and stared at the website. Why would Claire be calling Leather and Lace?

No reason to keep coming up with unfounded theories. She wanted to drive right now and go the club, but she had no sitter for Lily. Growin’ Up closed at 8:00 P.M.

Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow, she would get to the bottom of Leather and Lace, so to speak.