Lie Still

15

“This is it? This is everything?”

Mike ran a tired hand across his scalp, the wrinkles around his eyes, in his forehead, etched more deeply than I could ever remember. It was after 1 a.m. We sat at the kitchen table, an empty pizza box between us, while I tried to help him understand the events of the last thirteen years. The last week. The last twenty-four hours.

The rape. Pierce’s murder. The baby girl I left behind in Italy.

I had brought out the shoebox stuffed with the obscene letters I’d received for years after I returned from Europe. No signature, no return address. While the rain drummed a steady rhythm on the roof, I had told him about all of the hang-ups and the delivery of the cigar.

I didn’t answer. I let him assume that was everything. I couldn’t tell him about Caroline’s files. Not yet. What I’d done was illegal. He would never keep it from his boss, from that insufferable Harry Dunn, because Mike’s that kind of guy. He would get fired. I’d be responsible for a black blot on his pristine record.

“I saved a few things from college,” I said. “I think they’re in one of the boxes we stored in the sunroom.”

Mike closed the pizza box, tossing our paper plates on top.

“I want everything, Emily. Every scrap of information you kept. There is no detail too small. Whenever you remember something, in the middle of the night, while I’m at work, I want to know. Wake me up. Call me. You’re sure there’s nothing you know about Black Patch cigars? No significance? Pierce didn’t smoke them?”

I shook my head.

“This is a high-end cigar. I’ll send the box to a Dallas lab for testing tomorrow.” He fingered the top of the Ziploc bag. “The box is raw Spanish cedar. Most cigar companies don’t go to the trouble of packaging that way anymore even though it’s one of the best ways to preserve cigars.”

He walked over to the other end of the table and put the lid on the shoebox of letters. He’d pulled on latex gloves and read every one before the pizza arrived.

“I don’t have much hope for good prints off these. Explain again why you think your letter stalker is Pierce’s mother. What’s her name again?”

“Elizabeth Martin. She was a lunatic after Pierce was shot. She got my dorm room number from the campus police and just showed up, screaming horrible things at me in the middle of the night. She woke my whole floor. She called me a lying whore.” And other, worse things. I drank the last sip of soda water from my wineglass. “I was always ninety percent sure it was her. The writing is feminine. The rage is personal. The picture of the grieving mother from Guernica… it seemed pretty spot-on.”

“Most of us unartsy types wouldn’t make that connection. So maybe that’s a reach.”

“And there’s the point. She knew I would know.”

“What about the other girls who were suspects? They must have gotten letters, too.”

“I have no idea about that. I haven’t seen them since the day of the interviews. The police told us not to speak to one another. I didn’t know any of them personally. Different majors and dorms. Only one sorority girl. We were scattered across campus.” On purpose, I thought. So we wouldn’t be able to warn each other. “Pierce’s mother saw me at his funeral. We met over the coffin before I became a suspect. Maybe she fixated on me.”

“Maybe. But here’s the thing. The letters were delivered by mail for years. A variety of postmarks, all hundreds of miles from you.” His finger traced a circle on my arm, a habit of his. “Hand delivery, that’s a big step up.”

He reached across the table, and I slid my fingers on top of his.

“You believe me, right? You know that I’m OK about your daugh-the little girl? You could have told me from the beginning.” There wasn’t reproach in his voice, just reassurance.

“Yes.” I wondered at how something that had built inside of me like a terrible storm could end like this, without casualties.

Mike’s reaction to my news about my daughter said everything I would ever need to know about his love for me. He had pulled the car over immediately, switching off the ignition.

“I don’t know where she is,” I had said stonily. “I gave her away.”

It was several interminable seconds before he turned and grabbed my shoulders. His eyes had shone like slick blue glass. “I can’t believe you held this in. I wish you had told me. Although I can understand why you didn’t. That kind of violence… it’s intimate. Worse than a bullet.”

My heart physically hurt inside my chest at that moment. I had realized almost too late that Mike was one of the few guys who could understand, who wouldn’t take it personally, who knew up close and personal that victims of violence don’t follow a playbook. Some people let it go; the rest of us don’t.

“It wasn’t the rape or the murder that made me keep secrets from you,” I told him. “It’s just that it all led to the baby. I hated myself for giving her away. The guilt overwhelmed me. I had worked up the courage to go back and get her. Then my parents died and the grief took over everything. I could barely get out of bed. I called the nuns once, hysterical. She’d already been adopted. To talk about it made it more real. By the time I met you five years later, it was buried so deep, it seemed more normal not to talk about it.”

That was hours ago. I’d finally breathed all my secrets into the air and it felt like they’d flown away, at least for the night. Mike flipped off the kitchen lights and I followed him to bed. Too tired to make love, we wrapped ourselves around each other. For a little while longer, while the rain fell, no one was missing. Mike shut out everything else but me.

“Three words,” he murmured in my ear.

“Just one,” I replied. “Lucky.”

Day five missing.

Someone had looped a scraggly yellow ribbon around Caroline’s mailbox.

I stood once more at the door of her house, knocking for the sixth time. Maybe Maria had car trouble. Or changed her mind. It was still awfully early. A little after eight. On the phone, I had told her I wanted to return the files. I now had a full set of copies. I wanted to put everything back and then figure out how to drop a hint to Mike so he could execute another search warrant with everything in place and no one the wiser.

Almost a week now, but part of me still didn’t believe Caroline was anything but alive and crazy, probably in Mexico at this very moment, a Four Seasons spa employee wrapping her in seaweed like a human sushi.

As I considered sitting down on the stoop and giving Maria another fifteen minutes, the door opened a crack.

Her face was red and puffy, and she’d abandoned the uniform for jeans, sneakers, and a tight black gold-lettered Santana T-shirt that showed off her plump breasts.

She pulled me inside, gripping my arm tightly, setting off a trickle of fear.

“What’s wrong? Did something happen? Is Caroline back?”

She shook her head.

“The FBI is getting involved,” I assured her. As was First Baptist. Flyers of an unsmiling Caroline littered the trees, store windows, and bulletin boards. I felt Caroline’s disapproval, sure she would consider it demeaning to be displayed in something other than a gilt frame.

Maria’s thick brown hair stuck up like a hip-hop artist’s; her eyes were dilated, black and wild, rimmed by dark crescents of smeared mascara. Is she high?

She channeled us on a straight path up the formal staircase without saying a word. The house was still asleep. Lights off. My presence felt more wrong than ever. Still, I followed her back into the closet.

The bookshelf had already been pushed away, a rectangle of bright light behind it.

I stopped short at the doorway, the threshold of disaster.

Papers littered the floor, the desk, the reading chair. The file cabinets gaped open, a few lonely folders still hanging, spared. One small square of Oriental carpet stood out in the debris, as if that is where Maria stood while twirling and flinging files and papers like a human tornado.

“I know,” Maria said. “It is bad.”

I found my voice, and it moaned.

“Maria, what have you done?”

“I had to find it. My file. I spent all night going through them. I thought maybe mine was mixed up in someone else’s.” She fidgeted with a strand of hair and spoke so fast I could hardly understand. Her eyes were like two black moons. “Maybe it is not so bad. I put all the old files over there.” She gestured toward the desk. As far as I could tell, every file had been trashed and tossed aside, completely compromised. “And the newer ones here.” She made a circular motion that encompassed the floor space.

“No, Maria. It’s bad.” I knelt on the floor, distractedly picking up an empty file folder. Whoever the hell Meredith Lindstrom was, her life story was now scattered somewhere on this floor. My head pounded. Caroline’s files, organized in alphabetical order, tidily stored in a cabinet, had been overwhelming enough to consider. I couldn’t imagine how, in a day or even ten days, anybody could make sense of the maelstrom beneath my feet. And what Maria and I were doing in this room at all… well, now, amid the destruction, it struck me in the gut as not just wrong, but dead, dead wrong.

“Maybe she doesn’t even have a file on you, Maria. Maybe she only said she did.” My mind was charging ahead, recalculating my plan.

Throw the files from your purse on the floor with the rest. Get out. That’s what my little voice said.

“I told you, I saw it. She showed it to me. My file is bad.”

With a burst of clarity, I realized Maria wasn’t talking about illegal relatives being shipped back to Mexico.

“What is it, Maria? What does she have on you?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“Say.”

“OK. OK.” She took a breath. “When I first came here, I could not find good work. I danced in a club. It was the only way I could make enough money. To send home. My mother and sister… don’t know how I supported them.”

“You were a…?”

“Puta.” She spat out the word.

I was going to finish that sentence with stripper, but OK.

“A whore. For one year. I said to myself, three hundred sixty-five days. No more. A police friend of Mr. Dunn, he came to the club a lot. He saw me there. One day, soon after I got this job, Mr. Dunn, he came to the house. He tried to make me, you know, down there on him.” She pointed to her crotch. “Miz Warwick came home and found us in the kitchen. She made him stop. She scared him. She didn’t fire me. She paid off many lawyers for me to get my papers. You see?” She blew her nose messily into one of the papers from the desk. “I love her. I hate her. She will never let me go. What if she comes back and sees this?”

“Take a deep breath. We’ll just start in one corner and go at it a page at a time.”

I slid my purse off my shoulder, and shoved papers aside with my foot, creating a path. I snatched up four empty Diet Coke cans, a spilled bottle of NoDoz, and a lime-green bottle of a scary-looking energy drink called Ammo. Maria was fully loaded.

In less than an hour, we had cleared a quarter of the carpet space. The desperate, super-caffeinated Maria was surprisingly focused and fast. We placed the empty files in alphabetical order in a circle around the room, and then sorted tediously through the giant pile of papers, matching them to their files. It didn’t take long for me to realize that much of what lay at my feet wasn’t blackmail material at all: innocuous newspaper clippings that went back as far as twenty-five years, Caroline’s notes about somebody’s illness, a birthday party, a society club dinner, a community play.

If somebody died, she dutifully included the local death notice and wrote closed on the outside of the file. Compulsive work. Sad work. A lonely old lady keeping track of a town’s minutiae when much of it could be found in online archives with a few keystrokes. How dangerous could this be? Would someone have been angry and crazy enough to yank her out of her bedroom window?

A green tab marked all of the files allocated to club members. A typed label recorded both the “anniversary date” of when the women joined the club, and their state of membership: active, moved, or deceased.

Someone romantically named Claire Elise Dubois stood out in a category of her own as “ejected.” Maybe a woman with special anger toward Caroline? I paused to read her story. Claire Elise, who liked to be addressed by both names, thank you, had been summarily thrown out three years ago “for consistent failure to properly RSVP.”

I wondered if, in Southern culture, this was worse than child abuse. I almost laughed out loud.

A high, musical voice stopped me.

It was frighteningly close, right outside the closet door, and it sounded very much like Letty Dunn.