Lie Still

8

Was I imagining the soft sound of crying in the background? Maria?

“Oh, Mike.” I cleared my throat. “When?”

“Caroline complained of a migraine all afternoon, then went to bed around seven-thirty last night. Maria claims she stayed on her shift longer than usual before going home, to make sure Caroline was OK. This morning, when she didn’t show up for breakfast, Maria found her bedroom empty, the bed rumpled, but the covers still in place, like she hadn’t ever pulled them down.”

“Maybe she made the bed and went on a late morning walk?” Why was this being treated as such a crisis when it had been less than twenty-four hours? And why was he calling me? Mike never included me in his investigations. Never.

I aimed the ball of paper at the kitchen wastebasket ten feet away, playing a game with myself. If it went in, I didn’t have to tell Mike anything at all. If I missed, I would come clean.

“Maria says Caroline tells people that she hasn’t made her own bed since she was six,” Mike said. “She’s fired three housekeepers who didn’t change the sheets by eight on the dot every morning.”

“Maybe she took a late night drive? Got in an accident?”

People like Caroline always came back. I arched my wrist and fired. The paper ball bounced off the wastebasket’s rim and under the kitchen table. Stupid game.

“We’re checking the hospitals. But all of her cars are in the garage. Three Cadillacs.” Mike lowered his voice. “I don’t feel good about this.” At once, I understood. Mike’s well-trained gut was talking.

“You think something has happened to her?”

“There’s a little blood on the back of a pillow. An open window. A footprint in the flower bed. Ladder marks in the dirt. A gutter with a dent in it. It could be a week-old nosebleed, a desire for fresh night air, a diligent gardener picking weeds, and a little hail damage. It’s not like I have a crack CSI unit.”

“There’s something else, I can tell.” Mike’s sarcasm had whipped up a new batch of paranoia in my head. Was Caroline’s bedtime reading a copy of my rape report? Was someone sweeping my past into an evidence bag? Mike couldn’t find out this way.

“There are three empty prescription bottles on her nightstand. Prozac, Percocet, and Vicodin. Exactly the drug cocktail that killed her friend Helen. Prescribed by Dr. Gretchen Liesel. The painkillers are for migraines, so that’s consistent at least. But the Mayse suicide is extremely fresh in my mind.”

“You think Caroline killed herself? She was definitely not suicidal when I saw her.” Anything but.

“It’s not my top scenario. And there’s another odd thing. Maria says Caroline always kept her Bible on her dresser. Wouldn’t let her touch it, even to dust. Onionskin pages. A relic. There’s an inscription. To our blessed daughter, on her tenth birthday. Someone ripped a page out of it and underlined a passage. One of my guys found it on the floor by the window. Hold on, let me get it. It’s already been bagged.”

Mike came back on the line.

“Matthew 23:33.”

“It’s not top of my mind at the moment,” I said.

“You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?”

Tearing a page out of someone’s Bible was like burning the flag in front of a soldier. Maybe worse.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked. He wants me to tell him the truth, I thought. Tell him that the five women who sat in a room with Caroline Warwick yesterday, including his pregnant wife, would make a nice little lineup of suspects.

“Stay home. I’m sending an officer over for your statement.”

“Mike, I…”

He’d already hung up.

Cody Hill was a young, redheaded policeman who topped out at about 6’5″ and held a glass of ice water in sprawling hands that belonged to a former Clairmont High School All-State quarterback. It was a fact he mentioned about himself immediately after dropping onto my couch.

I forced my fingers to stop twirling a strand of hair into a tight rope. The crumpled campus police report now resided in the pocket of my jeans, a ball of lead. When did paper become so heavy?

“I don’t really know how I can help,” I told him. “I don’t know Caroline Warwick well. She invited me to a party at her house several days ago and then yesterday for a glass of iced tea with a few other women.”

“How did she seem?”

“Yesterday? Fine, I guess. Again, I don’t know her well enough to say. Her headache came on suddenly.”

“She didn’t say anything that indicated she was worried?”

“No, the conversation was… just small talk. Benign.” If you considered a puppy murder and sex toys under the mattress to be benign. Maybe Cody would. I wasn’t sure why I was lying, setting more traps for myself. But yesterday Caroline wasn’t the victim in that room. I wasn’t about to start my sentence in this town by ratting out the people who were.

The officer, tapping out his notes on an iPad, paused over the word benign, and I stopped myself from spelling it for him.

“What time did you leave Ms. Warwick’s home yesterday, ma’am?” He stuttered a little over the ma’am, and I began to sympathize that he had drawn the short straw to interview the wife of the new boss.

“Let’s see. I looked at the clock when I got home. It was three-fifteen. So I probably left her house around three.”

“Did you have any contact with the housekeeper? Maria Valdez?”

“Yes, Maria let us in. She let me out. I was the last one to go.”

He paused for a beat, as if that was significant. “Did she show any animosity toward Mrs. Warwick?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Do you know if she’s an illegal?”

“Illegal isn’t a noun.” My voice was clipped, not liking where this was going. “If you’re asking if she’s in the country legally, I don’t have any idea.”

“Yes, ma’am. We’ll be checking on that.”

Patronizing. No more trace of a stutter. Maybe he’d faked it. You’d think at this point in my life I could read people faster. Like last month, when that New York plumber charged me twice what he should have, swaying any doubts about the price with a story about being a single father who struggled to braid his daughter’s hair that morning.

People are adept at getting what they want these days, mingling the lies and the truth, fooling you, wriggling into your soft parts. Maybe people always had been like this.

I was beginning to think that underneath Cody Hill’s fresh-scrubbed face, a redneck bully thrived.

“That’s an interesting little club she’s got set up,” he drawled. “I’ve heard some weird rumors about it from my girlfriend. Like they all have special tattoos in a private place. A lot of pissed-off women in this town, both the ones who get in and the ones who get blackballed. My girlfriend, she’s still hoping for an invite.”

“I’m not her ticket,” I said. Tattoos that said liar or whore or killer? Nothing seemed too far-fetched at the moment.

Cody frowned, not liking my answer. “Did things seem normal between Ms. Warwick and her guests?”

“I don’t know them. I don’t know what normal would be.”

“Did anything at all stick out at you yesterday?”

“You’re just asking the same question different ways. Maria could surely tell you more about these women than I can. Did you ask her? She speaks English.” You jerk.

He flipped the iPad cover over his notes, and stood. “Mostly, I was just after a timeline.” The words flowed in a syrupy drawl. “I ’preciate it, ma’am.”

He towered over me as we walked to the front door. He stopped short, four inches from my stomach, invading my baby space, nauseating me with the smell of bitter sweat and an overdose of Old Spice deodorant.

“One more thing, ma’am. Your husband’s already thinking about calling in the FBI. It ain’t even the usual forty-eight yet. It’s tough being the new guy, trying to please the mayor. We all get that. But we can handle this. So maybe you could assure him, since you’re a friend of Miss Warwick’s, that wouldn’t be such a good idea. Give her a little time to come home on her own. Prevent her some embarrassment.”

He glanced down, and I became distinctly aware of the paper bulge in my front pocket, and then the one in his pants. I realized that his eyes weren’t trained on my belly but on the sliver of bare skin showing above my jeans.

His gaze rolled up to my breasts, a C cup for the first time in their lives. My nipples tingled like he was physically touching them, and I felt the familiar flush of shame. The experts say the body is cued to respond, even under attack, even when we don’t want it to.

“Watch where you look.” My voice pulsed with anger.

“You seem a little on edge, Mrs. Page.”

He stepped over the threshold to the porch, and I slammed the door.

I waited for Mike in his favorite armchair, facing the door, my feet propped up on a moving box. I pulled my grandmother’s afghan tight around my pajamas. When I was five, I liked to waggle my fingers like little puppet people through the crochet holes.

There is blood in my house.

Staring at the door, I thought about how I could never survive Mike leaving me. About how ironic it was that I married a man immersed in violence when I can barely make it through a full episode of his favorite cop show on cable.

Mike takes my idiosyncrasies in this area in stride. He knows what’s off the table. Horror movies with the word Saw or a Roman numeral in the title. Torture scenes that involve fingers, clippers, knives, cigar cutters, or water. Children in peril.

The truth is, I was like this before Pierce raped me. Ever since Beth died in Little Women, I’ll check out the end of any book that foreshadows the death of a character I love. As long as I know what’s coming, it’s OK. But don’t surprise me.

Yet I have no problem at all murdering Pierce Martin. I see him in my head right now, arms crossed, lazy grin. I’m pulling the trigger. One, two, three, four, five. Always five. This isn’t the first time I’ve killed him. It helps that I know he’s going to die.

His body lurches like a floppy fish with each blast until he crumples, finally harmless. I’ve never felt any guilt about making this bloody mess. I haven’t successfully reconciled that with my belief in a loving, forgiving God who asks me to reflect His image.

In my night dreams, when I’m not on guard, Pierce is alive. He lurks while I’m soaring through a happy, nonsensical plot, vanishing the second I turn my head.

While I sleep, my rapist is still my stalker, even though I’ve killed him over and over in the daytime. Even though I know he can’t hurt me anymore.

When Mike walked in the door, my Cartier watch said it was 3 a.m.

“I have to tell you about the box,” I said.

Except that when I woke up, I wasn’t wearing a Cartier watch. I didn’t own one. A pillow from our bed was tucked under my head. I hadn’t put it there.

When I woke up it was morning, and Mike was already gone again.