Lie Still

24

Over the pounding, I could hear the sounds of a shrill argument outside on the stoop. I clicked off the phone call on the second ring, crept over to the kitchen door, and lifted the corner of Mrs. Drury’s blue-checked curtain. The Puppy Killer’s red, sweaty face was pressed up to the glass, trying to see through the fabric. We both jumped back, startled, and I dropped the curtain.

What exactly was the point of having police protection?

I opened the door.

“I’m not going to argue about it anymore, Tiff. That was your shot to take, not mine. I can’t believe we lost a match to two Jenny Craigers.”

Holly, dripping, her face the shade of watermelon, was addressing her friend furiously from the bottom of the stoop. Tiffany was inches from me, holding a plate of deteriorating lemon squares that appeared to have been abandoned in the backseat of a very hot car at some point. She shoved them at my belly and eased past me, with Holly not far behind.

Both were dressed in black sports bras and tiny white tennis skirts. Their hair was pulled up in painfully tight ponytails that popped jauntily out the back hole of their Nike baseball caps. The hairstyle had the added effect of stretching their wrinkles flat and slanting their eyes, exacerbating the sharpness of their features. They wore the exact same kind of Asics, glowing like little neon-green alien feet.

I stared at the plate of lemon mush in my hand. The plastic wrap appeared to have melted into them. One square, I noticed, was missing.

“Welcome to town and all that,” Holly said. “Tiff gave a piece to the cop out front. And then she offered to lick the powdered sugar off his lips.”

“It was a joke. Wow, this place is a dollhouse.” Tiffany yanked a chair out and plopped into it, her skirt flying up to reveal a hot pink underlining. Belmont yowled from under the table and careened to the windowsill. Apparently he recognized the neon-green feet of a possible cat killer.

“Thank you,” I said. What the hell was I supposed to say?

Holly pulled out another chair and kicked over a third one for me, as if this were her house.

“Sit. We can make this quick. Is your husband going to make Caroline’s files public in any way? If so, we need to take some pre-emptive action.”

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“Hmmm, not buying that. We know you got an up close and personal look at them.”

My mouth dropped slightly open.

“The maids, they talk,” Holly said. “Like, I know that Tiff here is probably in foreclosure. She bought a ten-thousand-dollar oak dining room table for her New Year’s Eve party and then returned it January 3, claiming it was scratched. Half of her six bedrooms have only mattresses on the floor. She’s like a homeless person with a Lexus.”

“Jesus, Holly, you’re so pissed off about that shot. I’m soooorrry. Shut up, already. This is about her.” Tiffany flipped her face to me. “We’re figuring you’ve got something to hide just like the rest of us. That we can join forces.”

Like hell.

I remained standing, thinking they might take a hint. “I didn’t know Caroline well at all, and she certainly didn’t know me. But I’m sorry she’s missing.”

“Uh-uh. No one’s all that sorry about that. And Caroline wouldn’t invite you over unless there was material to work with, honey.” Holly examined a small bruise on a very taut, very tan thigh. “There’d be no point.”

“I was about to take a nap.” I looked pointedly at the door.

“Kind of rude, girl.” Tiffany hadn’t budged. She was focused on the black wart on the ceiling. I wondered if she ate more than 300 calories a day. I could see the white bone of her knee through her tan. She pulled her left leg up into a half-lotus position and tugged restlessly at Belmont’s tail. He growled. Finally, someone he liked less than me.

“What do you think happened to Caroline?” It burst out. What I meant to say was, Get out.

“Hol and I have our little list of suspects. Whoever or whatever happened to Caroline, it’s not good, honey. She was a pain in the ass but you could always count on her to live by Caroline Warwick’s Golden Rules.”

“She stood us up,” Holly explained. “As prospective members, we got our invites a month ago to her annual candlelight séance. It was supposed to be last night. It’s like her best party of the year. Scares the pee-Jezus-crap out of people. Half of us showed up on her lawn to see if she’d conjure herself out of thin air.”

Tiffany pushed herself from the chair. “Think about those files, Emily. Women need to stick together. It’s why the club is so successful.”

Before I could answer, Tiffany was out the door, yelling something sugary at the cop car. Holly followed more slowly, before languidly turning back. The muscles in her bare arms and legs were sleek and buttery smooth. Every molded piece of her was high and tight. Chop off her forty-year-old Botoxed head, and she was sixteen. I felt fat and clumsy and about seventy, with or without my head.

I met her eyes, bracing myself for a final threat. But her eyes were a surprise. Little blue pools of fear. Hurting. Then they blinked, a magician whipping away his cape, and the real Holly was gone. Whatever had been reflected there was about way more than the sex toys under her mattress.

Holly was like me. Acting. All of these women were actors. Stars of a TV drama that had gone on a few too many years. Speaking in the same sarcastic cadence, weighted by their mistakes, a parody of themselves. How I felt more days than I wanted to admit.

What Holly said next was perfectly scripted.

“You scratch our backs, Emily, we scratch yours. Ask our husbands. Our nails are long, and they hurt.”

Eight very unsettling minutes with those two women and the possibility of plastic wrap cancer did not stop me from prying loose a drippy lemon square and taking a bite as soon as the door shut. It was like the sun bursting in my mouth, if the sun was tart and yummy and a few degrees cooler. I licked my fingers and decided the best thing was to stick to my plan. My past. Something I could try to follow in a logical line. However illogical Mike thought that was.

He picked up on the third ring.

“Brad Hellenberger.” A pause. “Anybody there?” Busy. Already irritated.

“Um, yes. This is Emily. Emily Page. You knew me as Emily Waters. At Windsor. But you probably don’t remember. We never actually met. Although I thought we did. Lucy Blaize gave me your number.”

What a ramble.

He fed silence back to me. This call was a mistake of monumental proportions. The unpregnant me always thought ahead in practical steps, but that me was long gone, taking a break somewhere on a sunny shore, decked out in a bikini and downing a rum drink.

“I remember,” he said.

Two words, so heavily weighted on the line that I knew without a doubt that I held significance for this Bradley Hellenberger.

“What do you remember?” I asked quickly.

“I remember a story that shouldn’t have seen the light of day.”

“But you wrote it.” Bitterness clipped my voice.

“I wrote it, without names. As per the rules of the Windsor journalism program and any credible newspaper, I was required to give the list of those names to my editor. I did.”

“And the pictures? What about the pictures?”

“The student editor-in-chief hacked them. The department investigation after the story ran uncovered that’s how he got a lot of his tips. In your case, he took the list of names I gave him and downloaded ID outtakes from a trashed campus directory file. Today, those photographs wouldn’t even exist, erased in a digital second as soon as they were deemed imperfect. I didn’t know he had those pictures or was planning to run them until I saw the paper the next morning.”

I wasn’t sure whether to believe him. He was certainly at the ready with a defense after all these years. I heard the rustle of papers and another line ringing.

“I’m not sure exactly why you’re calling, Ms. Page, but this seems like it’s going to be a longer conversation than I can do right now. In five minutes, three enormous egos will be descending on me to pick next month’s cover piece. Are you in the city?”

“No. I live… near Dallas. We moved from New York a month ago.”

“Well, here’s a coincidence. I’ve got a meeting in Atlanta tomorrow and I have a layover at DFW… wait a minute. Let me call up the ticket. I should have about forty-five minutes around noon tomorrow. Can you swing by the terminal?”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. It seemed beyond coincidental. And why would a professional editor book any domestic flight with a layover?

“Yes,” I said. “I can swing that. I’d like you to consider giving me the names of the other four girls. I only have first names. I want to contact them.”

“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.”

“You might be after you talk to me. Could you check your old notes in advance of our meeting? I ask that fully realizing that you’re regretting that you even picked up the phone when you saw a strange number on your caller ID.”

“I pick up all strange numbers. My best stories arrive that way. And I don’t need to check my notes.”

What did that mean exactly? Was I still a story to him? Was he really refusing to look at his notes out of ethical concerns? Or were our names branded in his memory?

“This is nice of you,” I said cautiously. “To meet me.”

“I figure I owe you something, I trust anybody Lucy Blaize would send my way, and I’m curious why you’re finally calling me back after thirteen years. It’s a little late to give me a quote.” I heard voices in the background. “Gotta go. The egos are descending. I’ll text you my flight info in a few hours and we can arrange a place to meet.”

A few hours. Could this be because he hadn’t even bought a ticket yet?

As I hung up the phone, I thought that time is not at all the big pink eraser people say it is.

Thirteen years was nothing.

For Brad. For me.

Thirteen years was a blink.

The voice was female, nasally and one hundred percent Brooklyn.

“I’m trying to reach Ms. Emily Page.”

I gripped the receiver, head still planted on the pillow, clinging to fragments of an illusive dream starring Caroline Warwick in a Victoria’s Secret underwear commercial.

“Yes. That’s me.” My voice was froggy with sleep.

“I’m Latisha Johnson, representing the New York State Parole Board. You asked for phone notification of the Luke Cummings decision, correct?”

Oh my God, was that today? Was it already morning? What time was it? I glanced at the clock. Could it really be 10 a.m.?

That made it 11 a.m. New York time. I was going to be late to meet Brad if I didn’t hurry. But I was frozen in place, immediately nauseous. Good news or bad news? In my experience, it always seemed like a 50-50 shot.

“Ma’am, are you still there?”

“Yes, I’m here. Yes, that’s correct. I want to know.”

“The board has unanimously decided that Luke Cummings will be paroled one week from today. I’m sorry.”

“No, no, that’s great news.” And it was. The relief surging through my veins was the kind I rarely experienced, a no-holds-barred euphoria that usually followed a five-mile run or a generous dose of Percocet or a baby born perfect.

“Good girl. I been at this job a long time and holding on to all that hate is a mistake. God bless and have a beautiful day.”

I’m sure Latisha wasn’t supposed to drop the G word, but G bless her back.

A few seconds after we hung up, the phone rang again. Latisha must have forgotten something.

But no.

It was him.

Silent, as usual.

By now, his silence was as recognizable as Latisha’s nasally voice.

I walked into Terminal B dripping wet, pissed off, and wanting to shoot dead the architects of the whirling dervish of roads that made up Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

Get over. Exit. Whoops, no, don’t get over. What are you doing? Turn!

That’s what the signs said. Well, that’s what it felt like the signs said.

Add to that the aggressive redneck personalities of the Texas drivers scurrying around me for the last forty-five minutes. I learned fast that if you’re in a black pickup truck, you get a free pass to signal after you slide into another lane. I vaguely remembered a Jerry Seinfeld riff on “polite” Texas drivers. They weren’t going to stop you from getting over, but they weren’t going to help you, either. You were on your own, baby.

It’s not that they were any worse than New York drivers. I just expected more.

Mike didn’t know where I was, a good thing. He had been back on the job since 3 a.m., when a motorcycle wreck jerked him out of bed. The bike flipped on a highway exit ramp into Clairmont. It was the first fatality for the young deputy who responded, and he was a mess, throwing up at the scene.

To add just a little more suck to Mike’s life, the computer system continued to freeze, Time and USA Today were requesting interviews about Caroline’s case, and Harry Dunn was bugging Mike to drop a DUI for a friend. There wasn’t enough personnel for Mike to keep assigning a cop to the house, so, starting today, he’d parked an empty cruiser in the driveway. He wasn’t happy with this as a permanent solution and mentioned that “something else was in the works.”

My pocket vibrated, making me jump. Had Bradley already landed?

I tugged out my phone.

No.

Lucy.

“Hey, what’s up?” I could hear in her tone that Lucy knew very well what was up.

“Why did you lie to me?” Hurt.

“I’m sorry, Luce. It’s a… long story.”

“Brad called to confirm that I knew you. He said you wanted information on the murder of a guy you dated at Windsor. That you ended up getting screwed by a story he wrote. He wanted to know if you were the type to indulge in revenge fantasies.”

Inside, I was thinking: He didn’t tell Lucy about the rape or this would be a completely different conversation. Maybe he doesn’t know.

“I’m at the airport now,” I said. “We’re meeting in about ten minutes.”

“He told me. Emily, I really didn’t call to ask you why you didn’t tell me the truth. It just came out. I called to warn you that Bradley sounded a little too interested. And with a journalist like Bradley or me, that generally isn’t a good thing.”

My iPhone recommended Tip o’the Hat as the best place for meeting a stranger on a plane in Terminal B. The “Irish-Texas pub” was squeezed beside Bobo China’s Express Waffle Buffet. I couldn’t decide which was a weirder marriage, but the leprechaun doffing his cowboy hat on the neon bar sign might be tipping things in his favor.

No matter, both places were doing a rockin’ business at high noon on an August day at DFW airport, while a long line for security snaked less than a hundred yards away. According to the TV screens, Bradley’s flight from LaGuardia had landed six minutes ago.

My eyes roamed the dim bar, while Lucy’s warning roamed my head. How crazy was I to meet a guy who had, in his own words, “screwed” me? Maybe he wasn’t the Bradley who accosted me on the steps all those years ago, but he could have sent the twerp who did. There was no reason to believe he wasn’t involved.

Half of the men in this place could be Bradley, except not one of them was looking for me. Oddly, I felt safer here than in my house. Safety in numbers, right? And in anonymity. I could hear twenty conversations going on around me and not make out a word anyone was saying.

Two stools along the bar opened up. I slid into one and sat my purse on the other, just in time to prevent a woman with pancake makeup and a gold and white Jessica Simpson carry-on from wiggling her bottom there.

“I’m holding it for my husband.” I smiled sweetly and placed a hand on my stomach. “He’s in the bathroom. Do you mind?”

“You can stop milking the baby crap. I’ve had five of them.” But she didn’t put up a fight, and drifted off.

The bartender slapped down a shamrock-shaped coaster. “I’m not sure I can serve a… pregnant lady. Texas law or something.” He barely looked legal himself.

“Tonic and lime. And see that woman over there glaring at me? Put whatever she’s having on my tab.”

I fingered the curved edges of the coaster, which was printed with some kind of bar trivia game. You were supposed to read the quote on it aloud to your drinking buddies and ask them to identify whether it was Western or Irish.

I stopped spinning the coaster long enough to read it. THE PROBLEM WITH SOME PEOPLE IS THAT WHEN THEY AREN’T DRUNK THEY’RE SOBER. Hmm. Maybe John Wayne. I flipped it over.

William Butler Yeats. I thought he wrote strictly about dappled grass.

The bartender plunked down another coaster and set a plastic cup of half-fizzy water on it. A grayish lime wedge floated on top.

“Thirty-six fifty,” he said.

“That’s one expensive glass of water.”

The voice was brusque, behind me. I willed myself not to flinch as a hand casually brushed my shoulder. I could smell him, of course. Exotic spices. Musk. A scent first extracted from the gland of a Himalayan deer.

When I turned, Brad was pretty much what I expected: tall, dark, handsome, with perfectly proportioned nostrils and a Louis Vuitton briefcase that he was probably vain enough to have picked out himself.

“That includes three martinis for the woman over there,” the bartender said, defensive. “She ordered in advance when she found out you were paying, lady. Are you? Paying?”

I removed my purse from the stool, and the man immediately swapped himself in. He stuck out his hand. “Emily, right? I’m Brad.” His grip was cool and firm. He held my hand a little too long.

Then he answered the question on my face.

“You’re one of two women in here. You’re pregnant in an airport bar and drinking overpriced water that you could find for half the cost in a less overpriced plastic bottle next door. Not that hard to deduce. Congratulations, by the way. I didn’t know.”

He threw down two twenties.

“Did you bring your own car?”

I nodded.

“Then let’s take a walk.”

Already, out of control.