Lie Still

13

“Miz Emily. You came. Gracias.”

It had taken four or five rings of the bell before Maria answered. She was an extremely pretty girl who didn’t look at all pretty right now. Hungover, maybe. She teetered a little in Caroline’s doorway. She was dressed in that frilly maid’s uniform, only it looked like she’d slept in it. Blotchy skin, runny mascara, brown hair slashed with unnatural maroonish streaks. An inch of black roots. The uniform transformed Maria’s curvy figure into a sexual cliché. The wrong kind of man would push her to her knees.

I didn’t look too hot myself: no shower or makeup, drained and exhausted from my fight with Mike, anxious about everything I needed to say to him. The cigar box was back in the front seat of the car, still a secret, now a secret in a Ziploc bag.

When Maria called that morning, crying, peppering me with an English-Spanish pilaf I couldn’t translate, it was tempting to say no. Even though my mission yesterday had been to track her down, I was too distraught today to deal with the problems of Caroline. Four days missing. I had my own messy life to get in order. Two of Maria’s words finally convinced me.

Cops. Help.

“Your husband. He left with his policeman two hours ago. After the search.”

“What search?”

“They had a paper. Official. They looked all over her bedroom, disturbing things. I am trying to fix. She will be unhappy. Blame me. She will fire me, I know it.”

Maria used her hand to shade her eyes from the sun, on its way to high noon, and peered down the empty street. Luxury cars and trucks were tidily ensconced in four-car garages, their owners chilling out in refrigerated homes. For me, fresh from Manhattan’s twenty-four-hour cacophony, the absolute stillness in late morning was eerie, as if everyone had fled a nuclear threat.

“What exactly do you want me to do?” The heat beat on my shoulders, and my throat felt parched.

“Your husband. He is in charge, no? He seemed nice. But the other one.” She pointed to her head. “Rojo.” Red. Cody Hill. “He said he would look into my family’s legal status if I didn’t cooperate. I need to know. Is he going to give my family trouble?”

“Are you here illegally, Maria?”

“The problem is not me.” She said this impatiently. “Can you talk to your husband about the rojo cop? Please.” The way she said rojo, it might as well have been asshole. Something we agreed on wholeheartedly. While I remained silent, considering this, she burst into tears and spun into a torrent of solid-gold Spanish.

“Maria,” I said gently. “English, please. I’ll try to help. Maybe I can talk to Mike.”

“Everything is a mess now,” she sobbed. “They took her drawers and closet apart. I can’t clean it up by myself. I’m afraid I will get in trouble if I bring in my sister to help.”

I was shoveling a grave for myself simply by standing on the doorstep of a possible crime scene. Mike had returned home at dawn to shower and re-dress for work while I pretended to be sleeping. We were pros at that double maneuver.

Violet’s sweet face flashed in my mind. A little girl who depended on her aunt for survival.

“I have about two hours,” I told Maria.

Maria swung the door wide with a shaky smile and led me to the kitchen. State-of-the-art stainless-steel appliances, miles of white granite counter space, stacks of generic white china behind the glass cabinets. A caterer’s dream.

Maria opened a door in the corner to reveal a servants’ staircase. The modern dumbwaiter was big enough to hold Maria and me cross-legged playing a comfortable game of patty-cake. As a kid, I’d always wanted to ride in one. Maria was already climbing the stairs in the narrow opening, quickly, two at a time.

“How many flights?” I was surprised to be slightly out of breath on the first landing. Maybe I should sign up for the No Baby Fat exercise class advertised in the window of the Clairmont Y.

“Four. Miz Warwick’s bedroom is on three.” One floor above the pink museum.

I tried to swallow my huffing and puffing once we reached the third floor. How could I be out of shape so fast? I ran a half marathon last year. Maria didn’t notice or didn’t care, hurrying around the curved hallway. This floor was identical to the one below it: closed doors, deep-red flocked paper, wall sconces dripping with painstakingly Windexed chandelier beads.

“Here.” She paused at a door in the middle. “We must be quick. Any minute she could return.”

She threw open the door to a room that took my breath away. No one settled back against these pillows on this bed to watch a rerun of Downton Abbey and eat potato chips. The creamy antique linens and embroidered pillows must have cost thousands. The walls curved in a semi-circle, inviting us into a painted garden. Clouds from a muted sky drifted on the ceiling. Everywhere, the muralist invoked the gardens of Versailles at twilight.

Maria compulsively smoothed out an invisible wrinkle on the duvet. No crime scene tape, no blood on the pillow. The window by the bed shut tight, filmy curtains draping either side.

“We must work first on the bureau,” she said, “and then the closet.” She nodded toward two double doors.

“OK,” I said, uncertainly. She pointed toward my foot. I was standing in a trail of silk underwear, tossed from a nearby bureau. I bent down, not really wanting to touch an old lady’s panties. Whoa. This was expensive, sexy honeymoon underwear. It also appeared to have never been worn. I didn’t think Mike would rake through a stranger’s underwear drawer and toss it in this perverted fashion. But Rojo probably would.

I began to fold. Maria disappeared into the closet. Too far away to carry on a conversation. It took about a half-hour to sort out the underwear and nightgowns scattered across the room.

“Maria?” I called her name toward the closet. She appeared instantly.

“Are you too tired to help me more?” she asked, a little petulantly.

I glanced at my watch. “I can work with you in there for a little while.” In closer quarters, where I could quiz her about Caroline and her damn club.

I wanted to snatch those words back once she reopened the doors, automatic lights flooding a cavernous white space. I should have started in here, to hell with the panties.

Two or three hundred shoes rested on floor-to-ceiling glass shelves, individually spotlighted, toes pointing every which way. And plenty of empty shelves where the piles dumped on the floor were supposed to go. Only the hanging clothes were undisturbed, hanging in neat, tight lines, organized by color, and Caroline liked color. Especially red.

“Every shoe must have two inches between each, with toes pointing straight out,” Maria recited. “Exactly. Like this.” She demonstrated on a pair of glossy black evening shoes. I half expected her to hand me a ruler. Maria slid a small ladder in place and proceeded to climb it. “The rojo… thought she hid something in her shoes. I’ll do top. You do bottom.”

“Did he find anything?”

“No.”

“Maria, where do you think Caroline is?” I kept my eyes on the pair of Josef Seibel leather clogs in my hands. They seemed very un-Caroline.

“I don’t know. I told the police this.” Defensive.

“Was she depressed? Her friends say she had become a little paranoid.”

“I’m not sure what this word-paranoid-means. What friends? They are all bitches.”

I appreciated her rude assessment. The woman who washed Caroline’s underwear, who picked her hair out of the shower drain, who spent more time with her than anyone on earth, would know.

“They are all calling here, all the time, leaving messages. Checking. Like they care. Last night, I found Miz Jenny and Miz Mary Ann creeping around the backyard in bug masks. I recognize Miz Jenny’s tetas falsas or I might have called the police. They said they were making sure that Miz Caroline hadn’t fallen behind a bush.”

I thought for a second. “Night vision goggles?”

“Si. Miz Jenny said she borrowed them from her husband’s hunting closet.”

Maria stepped carefully off the ladder. Her own shoes were white, clunky, and rubber-soled. Nurse’s shoes, before nurses started hipping it up with Crocs and New Balance.

Color flared on her cheeks. “Why did you show up at my home? I do not think you are the type for a babysitter.”

“Truthfully, because I need you. I’m out of my element here. Caroline invited me over to pass around that ridiculous box. Then someone dropped off a little blackmail package at my house. Was that Caroline’s idea?”

About six expressions played across the maid’s face. First, surprise. So she didn’t drop off the package. None of her facial tics after that were terribly sympathetic. In fact, the one she was wearing now could almost be described as… happy.

“It’s OK,” she assured me eagerly. “She blackmails all the ladies. Me. She provided fake papers for my sister and niece. This is what I am worried about with that cop. Violet was only one year old when she rode across the border in the trunk of a car. So sometimes Mrs. Caroline threatens to expose them. She helps but there is always a price.” Her voice trailed into bitterness. “If you are not going to hire me right now, I can’t say more. I will make you lunch. For el nino.” She pointed to my stomach and walked out. Conversation over.

It felt both safe and illicit to be alone. It reminded me of the naïve middle-schooler I once was, snooping in my parents’ closet, discovering a box of condoms and my mother’s vibrator. Excited and a little horrified. Guilty.

I shook it off. Maria had asked me here, to help. We were almost done. And I was hungry. My head felt a little light. I ran my hand along a row of historical romances stuffed neatly in a bookshelf at the end of the closet. Maybe where Caroline got her ideas. They weren’t real books, I realized. Even in her closet, Caroline was creating a façade. I leaned back against the shelf and closed my eyes. Suddenly, top to bottom, my world was moving. I fell backward, almost stabbing myself with a five-inch heel.

The bookcase was a camouflaged door.

I’d just read about this trend while thumbing magazines in my OB’s office in New York. High-def, high-concept secret rooms that whisked adults back to the fantasies of their childhoods while conveniently soundproofing them from their own kids. At the time, I thought it was ridiculous. But here I was, staring into a black crack, wondering what Caroline would hide. Hopefully just the comfortable Hanes granny panties she really wore.

“Don’t let anything shock you,” a friend said when I told her about our impending move to Texas. “Guns, babies, reputation. They’ll do anything to protect them.”

I let go of the absurdity of the moment, of the foghorn warning in my head, and stood up.

I laid my palm flat on Romancing Mister Bridgerton and How to Woo a Reluctant Lady.

I gave the shelf a push, wondering whether I was entering Caroline’s tomb.

A foot in, and I was still blind. I slid my right hand up and down the wall until it touched a switch that flooded light into a decent-sized room, about 12 × 15 feet.

It took a second for my eyes to adjust.

I didn’t see a lonely, crazy woman decaying on the floor or rolling around in a mad tryst with Mr. Bridgerton.

A gorgeous antique Oriental rug lay at my feet, free of blood.

I smelled roses. Air freshener, I thought, until I saw the vase of fresh flowers on the built-in desk that held a state-of-the-art iMac. My gaze swiveled to a well-stocked glass-fronted refrigerator, a TV/stereo console, and a Kindle resting on a cushy leather chair. I wouldn’t starve or die of dehydration or boredom if Maria shut the door behind me. My eyes fixed themselves on a built-in row of file cabinets lined against the left wall.

How long had Maria been gone? Five minutes? Ten?

I walked over to the computer screen. The pink room’s nasty cat stared back at me from the screensaver. Then he howled, I screamed, and he stalked casually off the screen. Not a screensaver. A video? I peered closer, into that hideous pink room. I checked my watch. The cat was licking his paws. On the wall above him, a Barbie clock was keeping real time.

Caroline was spying on her cat.

I took a shaky breath. My eyes wandered from the screen to the neat stack of flat manila folders of varying thicknesses resting beside it.

The one on top had my name on it.

My hand poised to open it just as my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I jumped like the cat had leapt out of the screen. Dammit.

I glanced down. A text from Misty.

Lunch tomorrow?

I texted back, K. And thought, Now go away, Misty.

I sat down at Caroline’s desk and balanced the folder on my lap, my heart running laps. I flipped it open. A two-year-old color snapshot of me at an art gallery opening was paper-clipped to the top left corner of the first page. Caught in profile, holding a glass of champagne. I wore a pale blue silk dress from a designer thrift shop in Chinatown and Lucy’s high silver heels. I was slightly drunk, trying to sell an A-list painting to a B-list celebrity.

It was attached to the first page of a report from a private detective agency in Dallas named Diskreet. Not a discreet name. Not even klever.

I refocused on the page.

Birth name: Emily Alena Waters.

Birthplace: Peekskill, New York.

My Social Security number, elementary school, middle school, and high school, college transcripts, SAT scores, hospitalizations, miscarriages, the crash that killed my parents.

The prisoner number assigned to the teenage drunk driver who killed them.

My job history, wedding date, husband’s name and occupation, closest living relatives-every bit blazingly accurate.

It mentioned nothing of the missing year between my sophomore and junior years in college. I thumbed impatiently to the second page.

I learned that my husband was faithful, that a New York adoption agency hesitated to give us a baby because of Mike’s occupation, and that our net worth totaled around $370,000. I shivered, because I knew what had to be coming.

I tore through the file but couldn’t find a duplicate of the rape report. I settled on a paper-clipped bundle of Xeroxed newspaper stories, a more complete set than my own. Each headline drove me a little deeper into panic.

College senior shot to death in car near popular club

Windsor flies flag at half-mast to honor murdered student

1,000 turn out for campus memorial

Police eliminate drugs as motive in frat-boy murder

Five co-eds interviewed in shooting death

My history in a few tidy words.

I was mesmerized by a row of five headshots, a youthful me and four other girls unlucky enough to crawl into Pierce Martin’s web. It could be the same girl photographed five times and cropped into a one-inch square. Pierce’s type. Smooth, shoulder-length brown hair, dark eyes, fresh, bright faces worthy of Neutrogena commercials. Virginal.

Thirteen years ago, we five became sisters of sorts. We’d waited together nervously in a makeshift holding cell outside the campus librarian’s office, the small sitting area where the police came to get us one by one for an interview.

“Fact-gathering,” the police told us.

I was the last one to arrive. The pretty Chi Omega, dressed in a blue cashmere cardigan and about five hundred bucks of Brighton jewelry, raised a hand to go first. I heard something indignant about “my daddy” before the door clicked closed.

The co-ed beside me on the couch compulsively rubbed the rosary trailing out of her purse. The prettiest of us stuck out her hand, introduced herself as “Lisa, pre-med,” and then calmly studied for a biology test at a small table.

A long-legged yogi named Margaret sat in a lotus position in the middle of the carpet and meditated, much to the chagrin of the police officer in charge of making sure we didn’t speak to one another. I guess he decided that even he shouldn’t interrupt a conversation between Margaret and whatever higher power she was channeling.

That left me, chewing my thumb raw, wondering how I ended up here, sucked in by a sexual predator, thinking I should have called my parents for a lawyer even though the police said I didn’t need one.

That turned out to be true. They never even made it to the interview stage with me or Rosary Girl. Maybe some of her vigorous bead rubbing worked, although I didn’t believe so much in the power of prayer at that point. More likely, the police realized they had opened the gate on a rabid dog. Pierce’s parents were major endowment contributors. Alumni royalty.

I had watched the three other girls exit their interviews. They’d obviously been crying, except for Lisa, pre-med, who rolled her eyes at Rosary Girl and me on the way out the door.

“Fucking not guilty,” she mouthed.

The detective in charge directed his attention to the two of us. “I think we have enough for now.” His face had the look of someone who’d eaten a plateful of bad shrimp. What he didn’t appear was the slightest bit concerned about a girl gnawing her thumb bloody and another running rosary beads through her teeth. “We’d like to speak to the Martin parents about our findings before continuing our interviews. This is a delicate matter for you and the campus. We’ll stay in touch. Keep your mouths shut. That’s best for everyone.”

Three weeks later, I stepped off a plane in Rome with a new hair color and never heard a word from the police again.

Now my fingers lingered over a narrow column copied crookedly on a sea of white paper, dated a month after I’d run out of town.

A black pen had made a loop around the third item, which announced that police were declaring Pierce Martin’s murder case inactive “due to lack of witnesses and evidence.”

Who did I have to thank for this lifetime reprieve?

The Chi Omega’s rich daddy? Rosary Girl’s direct line to God?

The incompetent campus policewoman who dismissed my rape report? Pierce’s mother, to protect his reputation, her reputation, after learning more than she wanted to know about her precious son from the police?

I hadn’t been the only girl in that interview waiting room whose body and soul had been torn apart by Pierce Martin. The police knew. I’d lay my life down on that.

I’d buried everything as deep as I could thirteen years ago. I’d vanished for a year, cutting ties to everyone except my parents, who agreed to support a year abroad at a small university in Rome. They hoped the experience would help heal me. I never even registered at the university. My parents wired a monthly check to a Rome bank. An anonymous person forwarded each one to me after the first month without a single bit of hassle, even though I asked them to address the envelope to another girl’s name, two hundred miles away. The Italians understand that questions don’t always need to be asked.

I wrote my parents pure fantasy about my life: how I painted and studied during the week and backpacked to European landmarks on the weekends with a sisterly roommate who didn’t exist. I sent them little pencil sketches, all drawn from postcards I bought in a secondhand bookstore.

I returned home to my parents as myself, with my old name and my real hair color, hoping to leave my guilt and bewilderment behind. Instead, it chased me across the ocean, receding, crashing, teasing, always threatening to drag me under for the last time.

I glanced at my watch, a cheap piece with a flat yellow smiley face and a fake white leather band that I bought in Times Square for $7. It always ran about five minutes slow, which I figured was more than fair for the price.

Eleven minutes plus five had passed since Maria left me alone in the closet. I’d thumbed through the rest of the folders on the desk but didn’t recognize any names. I stuck my own file in my purse without any hesitation.

I walked over to the row of file cabinets and tugged on the first one. It opened an inch. Unlocked. A more aggressive pull and the drawer revealed a row of orderly files, each with a name printed on a color-coded tab-red, green, or blue. Some files appeared yellowed and aged, others brand-new. All were neatly stored like the diaries in the pink room. Alphabetical. Organized by the same compulsive fingers.

Last names. I needed to remember last names. Beswetherick. Nope, there was no Beswetherick. I thumbed through the first row of files and found Cartwright, Jennifer. Jenny, one of the blond Southern stereotypes who cavorted with me in Caroline’s plush Garden of Evil? Beach House or Red Mercedes, I couldn’t remember which. I pulled her file and set it on top of the cabinet.

Dunn, Harold and Dunn, Leticia. I yanked them out. This was almost too easy.

I thumbed my way along the D’s and E’s. There had to be hundreds of files here. Caroline’s voracious information-gathering apparently extended far beyond the club. I glanced at the door. How much time did I have? Camel. I remembered that Mary Ann’s last name was “Camel,” something she mentioned during that drunken Bunko game. The other woman in the Garden of Evil, she of the Mephisto habit. I went back to the C’s. No Mary Anns. I tried the K’s. Kimmel. Bingo. I hadn’t factored in the Texas accent.

Five files away was Gretchen Liesel’s. Thick. My stack was getting tall.

I opened another cabinet. Rich, Misty. Thin. Maybe empty. Onto the pile anyway.

I racked my mind but couldn’t think of the last names of either Tiffany the Puppy Killer or Holly Who Had to Carve a Potato. Twenty-three minutes now without Maria. I yanked open another file cabinet and my fingers searched for Valdez, Maria. Nothing at all in the V’s. Had Maria taken it?

My brain was shrilling, Light a match and get out. What I was doing was illegal, not to mention immoral, and the two weren’t always the same thing and one was bad enough.

But I had to get some idea of what I was dealing with, of what Mike was dealing with, right? And this seemed as good a place as any to start. I tucked the stack of files I’d pilfered into my bag, alongside mine. Thank God Lucy had talked me into this monster of a fake-patent-leather purse.

When Maria showed up with a tray, the shelf was clicked in place and I was pretending to finish up a row of walking shoes. Everything felt unreal, including the beautiful plate of food she set on the dressing table where Caroline probably sat to fiddle with her earrings. An egg salad sandwich on black rye bread cut into perfect, crustless triangles, a pile of plump, chilled purple grapes, a homemade oatmeal cookie with chocolate chunks, and a glass of what appeared to be fresh-squeezed orange juice. Impossible to resist.

I stood up and stuffed a triangle of sandwich into my mouth.

“You find the room, right? I give you enough time?”

I stared at Maria blankly, still chewing, thinking I’d misheard her. She shrugged. “I left the catch loose. I don’t want to get in trouble for showing you. I put your file on top.” She hesitated. “I don’t read it.”

Right. A rush of heat flooded into my face. Is Maria with me or against me? I purposely kept my eyes off my purse, lying at my feet. Should I scream at her? Or say thank you?

I slipped my purse casually over my arm. I decided to play nice.

“Maria, you don’t have to stay here. To work for her. Whatever is going on… you don’t need to be part of it.”

“I have to find my file. She showed it to me once when she was angry. I know it is somewhere.” Her face wore a mask of tight desperation.

“How much time did she spend doing this? Snooping on everyone?”

“Every afternoon. Two to four. I brought her peach tea and dry wheatberry toast every day at four exactly.” She snatched my plate. “I will wrap this up for you. You need to go. You should never be here. It was a mistake.”

Her eyes were glued to my purse. She seemed to be considering whether to rip it off my shoulder.

“I read your file,” she said calmly. “Whatever you have put in your bag, you will need to bring it back. Talk to your husband about Rojo.”

It was no longer a request.