Lie Still

16

“Yoo-hoo, Maria? Caroline?”

Maria worked faster than I did. She was over to the door in a split second, clicking it shut and throwing an inside lock.

“Who is that?” I hissed.

“Letty.” If rojo was asshole in Maria’s vocabulary, then Letty was clearly bitch. Maria’s fingers were quickly bringing the Mac to life. She clicked on an icon of an ugly cartoon baby labeled NANNY CAM.

“My cousin put this in for her. A camera on the front porch, in the hall. In her bedroom, living room, kitchen. To spy on me and that estupido cat to make sure we aren’t peeing on her rugs.” Her hands flew expertly across the keyboard. “He teach me. My cousin is very good with computers.”

I could see that.

Letty Dunn was in resplendent HD quality on the screen, bouncing up and down on Caroline’s bed like she was the star of a bad porn movie. I hoped Caroline’s bed could take it.

Her body was squeezed into a tight pink velour tracksuit. A matching pink baseball cap with NIKE etched in rhinestones perched uncomfortably on her massive yellow puff of hair. The diamonds on her hands blinked in the light, like a Morse code to outer space. She wore a gold bracelet weighted with oversized charms, the largest one emblazoned with the initials UDC. The jingling sound that accompanied every bounce was the industrial-sized key ring in her right hand. It looked like it belonged on a janitor’s belt.

Letty had a key.

“She will go away,” Maria said hopefully, under her breath.

Or maybe not.

Letty launched herself back on the massive bed, moving her arms and legs vigorously like she was making a snow angel. Perhaps it was some new cellulite-busting workout she’d seen on TV.

It was a mesmerizing show: her jiggling fat, the miracle of personal technology, and the general weirdness of Letty Dunn.

“Ma-REEEEEE-aaaaahhh,” Letty sang out. Her voice was an icy finger in my eardrum.

“Turn the volume off,” I whispered. Maria shook her head.

“Not to worry.” She pointed upward. “Soundproof. Miz Caroline likes to hear no noise while she listens to her classical music.”

“Caroline? You home yet? It’s LETT-eeeeeee.” Still, with the singing sound.

Then she abruptly changed tone.

“Maria, are you here? Lazy girl!”

My cell phone vibrated, a rattlesnake underneath a stack of papers across the room. I dropped to the ground, crawling toward it on my hands and knees. I read the text, trying to tamp down panic.

Misty. Lunch. Not now.

“Does she know how to get in?” I whispered.

“She can’t hear you,” Maria said. “And she is already in.”

“I can see that. Does she know how to get in here?”

“Oh. I don’t think so. I locked the door.”

Like that nasty cat, Letty disappeared from the screen to roam around. Maria fiddled with the buttons and split the screen into four sections. Since the nanny cam was a fairly low-tech affair that didn’t cover every room in the house, Letty wandered into view, then out of view. I felt like I was playing a kid’s video game, on a hunt for the evil pink sorceress. My fingers itched for a zap button.

Letty was taking her sweet time with her house tour. She ripped open drawers and cabinets at random, appearing to search for nothing in particular. She swept her finger over a living room lamp shade. She checked the moistness of the soil in a potted palm.

“That is supposed to be dry,” Maria mumbled angrily.

If I had any inkling of doubt about Letty’s character, which I didn’t, it vanished when she deliberately knocked an Oriental antique vase off its pedestal in the dining room. The crash tinkled through the speakers like a fake sound effect on an old radio show. A little smile played at the corner of Letty’s mouth.

“Yoo-hoo! Caroline? Maria? Are y’all here? Is everything all right?”

“She probably is the one who took Miz Caroline,” Maria said bitterly. “Or that Holly. One time she asked Miz Caroline to loan me to her so I could wash lice out of her dogs. That club will probably kill me, too. Think I know something.” Her eyes flashed with a little triumph. “Which I do. I know plenty.”

Before I could process any of this, Maria pointed to a fish-eye view of the front porch. “Look. A police.”

A man in uniform was stepping up to the door. I didn’t recognize him. He laid his pointer finger on the buzzer and didn’t take it off. With his other hand, he rapped a sharp, rapid drumbeat. Three more uniformed cops joined him on the porch. All carried evidence boxes and bags.

“We have to get out of here.” I searched the faces on the porch. No Mike. But he had to be the one who’d finagled a more expansive search warrant. He probably wasn’t far behind.

“Where’s your car?” Maria’s voice was eerily calm.

“A couple of blocks away. Diana Street.”

“Good. You can drop me at Brake-O. My cousin works there.”

On-screen, I watched Letty throw open the door to the cops like she owned the place.

Maria turned up the volume.

“… I wanted to peek in on her maid. Daddy always said, you can’t trust anyone who makes less than $15,000 a year or more than $200,000. You’re probably all in the clear on that front.”

The cops didn’t seem to know what to do with her. Letty was attempting to squeeze by them, using her double basketball of a bottom as a weapon. In the meantime, my mind had landed on an excellent idea. Don’t budge. Hunker down in Caroline’s secret lair with the loaded little fridge until the cops finished their search. They didn’t know this room existed.

But, no. Maria had flipped off the computer and was now shoving the door open. “Let’s go,” Maria said, suddenly urgent. “While she is here bothering.”

Only a second of indecision on my part. I wanted to get the hell out of there.

As Maria led me down the hall, I worried that her escape plan might involve the dumbwaiter, especially when we stopped in front of it, at the back staircase.

“These stairs go to the basement. We can go out that way. I could stay if I wanted to. I have a right to be here.” She said this defiantly.

Maria picked up a flashlight from a shelf in the stairwell that held five different odors of Oust. “The light is broken,” she told me. “You might trip. I will go first.”

Three and a half flights down. As we hit the bottom landing, my eyes registered forms in the darkness: large paintings leaning against the wall; chairs stacked on top of one another; cardboard boxes; a still, human shape ten feet to my left.

I stifled a scream, realizing I was staring at a life-sized Western version of Saint Nick. Cowboy hat. Boots. A sign that said, Y’ALL BE GOOD. He likely ventured out once a year to stand on the front porch. By now, I could make out sliding glass patio doors on the far wall. The vertical blinds were shut, letting in only a trickle of light.

I almost lost it when the glass door stuck and Maria muttered under her breath and I heard the trample of feet above my head. But Maria gave the door a good, competent whack and we stepped out of the crazy Spanish novella of the past hour into dazzling Texas sun, onto a small patio, in a cranny of Caroline’s expansive backyard.

“I am afraid for my family. That they will be stolen away.” Those were Maria’s last solemn words to me as she hopped out of my car at Brake-O. I wasn’t sure whether she meant by a boogey-man who crept in windows or one who came with an immigration badge.

I saw no reason to mention that I’d left the bookshelf door cracked open for the cops.

Our fingerprints, everywhere.

Let it all blow up.

Tiffany. Letty. Mary Ann.

Jenny. Lucinda. Holly.

All those y’s. All those boob jobs. All those strangling little secrets.

Southern sisters, linking arms, spinning and dancing a jig in my head until I couldn’t tell them apart anymore. One face, one body, one voice, one killer. A glittering, faceted diamond. The club.

Right now, in Caroline’s private little cave, everything that those women and a hundred others might kill to protect was being stuffed into evidence bags. Because of me. My mouth, meanwhile, was half-stuffed with a bite of Chef Joe Bob’s burger of the day. I had decided to order it the second I saw it lettered in hot pink chalk across the blackboard: FOUR-CHEESE-BARBECUE-JALAPEÑO-BUTT-KICKER. In New York City, Joe Bob could sell these for $20 apiece, if he laid them out on designer pottery with an organic sprig of something green and exchanged smoked Gouda for the pepper jack. Here at Joe Bob’s Diner on Clairmont’s Main Street, the cook in the black cowboy hat threw it on a chipped, white-on-its-way-to-gray diner plate, along with a sloppy helping of half-ripe tomatoes, dill pickle chips, and a glop of a questionable mayonnaise-based item that I assumed was slaw.

Misty picked at a Caesar salad with dark wilt and mundane croutons, clearly not a menu item where Chef Joe Bob put his creative powers to use. I wondered why she picked the town’s burger joint for our lunch date if she was the health freak she appeared to be. I’d never seen her eat anything but a lettuce-based entrée. She couldn’t weigh more than 105 pounds.

“Did you see the WFAA news truck setting up across the street?” I asked her. “A woman on the sidewalk told me they’re doing a piece on Caroline.” I gathered a handful of paprika fries, stuck them on a napkin, and slid them over to her. “Here, have some.” My not-so-subtle way of trying to get Misty to say something, anything about Caroline.

Misty shrugged, as if neither the fries nor the truck interested her. She displayed a stunning lack of curiosity about Caroline’s disappearance.

And what about the secrets in that box? This baby is not my husband’s. Look under my bed. There is blood in my house.

Melodramatic. Laughable, if it weren’t that Caroline was so twisted. Was one of those secrets Misty’s? Or was the whole thing a giant hoax and the entire club in on it?

“Do you know what UDC stands for?” I asked randomly.

“UDC?” She rattled off a list. “University of the District of Columbia. United Doberman Club. United Daughters of the Confederacy. Unicorn Dunces Club. Take your pick.”

“I pick number three. United Daughters of the Confederacy. Although two and three could be the same thing. And four is an interesting concept.”

“Why do you want to know what UDC stands for?”

“I saw it on Letty Dunn’s charm bracelet. She certainly believes in her elevated place in the world.”

“Really, you think that? I think the opposite. I think she has no idea who she is. But then, I think most of us don’t.” Misty stared at my chin, motioning for me to catch the dripping burger juice. “You have a voracious appetite for red meat.”

“I know. It comes with the hormones. Mike says the next step for me is to dine with wolves at a fresh kill.”

Today, Misty had adopted the look of a rich suburban housewife. An all-white Nike jogging suit flashed against a new, deeper tan. The symbolic “diamond” dollar sign nestled in the hollow of her neck. I looked surreptitiously for scars. There was the faint outline of several on both inside forearms. If you weren’t looking for them, you wouldn’t notice. I wondered if she had used makeup on her body or had instead made a date at the spray tan shop operated by Letty’s cousin.

“I heard that Letty used to be a completely different person,” Misty said. “Before Harry. Did you know she was a model? A Miss Texas contender?”

“She mentioned it.” I tried to rub a spot off my iced tea glass. It didn’t budge. The thick glass was so scarred from dishwasher use it was impossible to tell if it was clean. “That doesn’t mean she was ever a decent human being.”

Misty moved first, leaning over to brush her hand gently over the top of my head. Intimate. “You’ve got something in your hair.” A tiny, frilly pink flower drifted into my iced tea glass.

“I think it’s from a crepe myrtle,” I said stiffly. “I took a walk.”

I took a walk, all right. Less than an hour ago, I’d walked right out of Caroline Warwick’s basement door, camouflaged by a bounty of crepe myrtles, while cops flooded the house behind me. I’d walked briskly with Maria through the backyard, to the gate, made it without incident to my car, dropped her off at Brake-O, drove home to change clothes and then on to Joe Bob’s Diner for lunch. All of this, without going into early labor.

“Harry Dunn slept with at least three women the week before they were married. Including Letty’s sixteen-year-old sister and one of the bridesmaids. And it didn’t stop. Caroline knew.”

“So what? Half the town must know that Harry is a dog. He hit on me. I’d bet he’s hit on you.” For God’s sake, he tried to get a free blow job from Maria by the pots and pans.

“It was different with Caroline,” Misty insisted. “Harry hated her. She hated him.”

“Are you trying to say that Harry has something to do with Caroline’s disappearance?”

“I’m just saying it’s an area to explore. You might mention it to your husband.”

“Was your secret in that box?” I was barely able to tamp down my next question. Was it about that little girl?

Misty pushed her crystal-studded Anne Klein sunglasses more firmly in place on top of her head. “Caroline hires professionals to spy on people. She keeps a file cabinet of dossiers.” Misty knew? Had she been in Caroline’s closet? I tried to keep my face expressionless. I dug into the white glop. Marshmallow, not mayonnaise. Interesting. Not terrible. I took another bite to relieve some of the jalapeño.

Misty pushed aside her half-finished salad. The fries were limp and cold. “Letty tipped off the cops to an argument I had with Caroline the day before she disappeared.”

“I heard. That’s why you should be the last person to defend her. Letty’s a borderline sociopath.” An image of her knocking that vase to the floor sprung to mind.

“She wasn’t lying. Don’t you want to know what we were arguing about?”

“I guess.” My head was starting to hurt.

“You.”

I wasn’t hungry anymore. The burger was settling in a lump near the baby, who was probably setting up to kick it like a soccer ball. I was tensing, waiting for it, for whatever Misty was about to say. “That makes no sense,” I said.

“I told Caroline she should leave you alone.”

“You know about the rape?” The words shot out of my mouth before I could stop them.

“What are you talking about?” Misty’s confusion appeared sincere. “What rape?”

This was one of the most schizophrenic conversations of my life, and I’d played it all wrong. But now I had nothing to lose.

“Did your name used to be Alice?”

Misty’s fists clenched. Her face blanched white under her tan.

“I need to go,” she said.

She laid a $20 bill over the $14.59 check and stalked out, a cue we were done, maybe with everything.