27 Blood in the Water (3 page)

She checked the pool house again. It was still deserted. Maybe Michael was late this morning. He usually wasn’t. She went back to the vanity and put her phone in the little stand that let her talk on speaker. The little stand was blue. So was the phone. So were the walls of the room. So was the brand-new BMW she’d gotten for her sixteenth birthday, the one that had featured so prominently when they’d filmed her episode of
My Super Sweet 16
. She had a dozen copies of the DVD of that episode sitting right on the shelf in the family room, in case anybody came over who wanted to see.

She punched in Heather’s number with one hand and started going through her jewelry box with the other. She had some really nice jewelry. She didn’t do fake stones, either. She’d explained that to her father. Her father had understood. And besides, why shouldn’t he buy her nice things? He was rich. He owned the three biggest car dealerships in this part of Pennsylvania.

Heather’s voice came over the speakers as a squawk. “LizaAnne? LizaAnne, is that you?”

“Of course it’s me,” LizaAnne said. “Who else would it be? You’ve got me on caller ID.”

“I know I do,” Heather said, “but you know what they’re like. I mean, maybe it was really your mother trying to see if I could get you in trouble if I didn’t know it was her. Or, you know. That kind of thing.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” LizaAnne said. “My mother doesn’t have time for that kind of thing. Have you been watching this morning?”

“I’ve been watching a little,” Heather said. “You know. I had to get dressed. I had to get my makeup on.”

“Did you see anything?”

“No,” Heather said. “It’s been really weird. There’s been nothing going on all morning. Oh, except Mr. Heydreich left to go to work. In his car. You know.”

“Are you sure she didn’t go with him?”

“Of course I’m not sure,” Heather said. “I couldn’t see into the car. He’s got those tinted windows. Do you like tinted windows? I’d think they’d make the car dark. And nobody would know it was you.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t want anybody to know it was you. If you were famous, you know,” Liza Anne said. “I think that’s retarded, though. I mean, why would you be famous in the first place if you didn’t want people to recognize who you were?”

“Maybe it’s when you get death threats and that kind of thing,” Heather said. “People who are famous are always getting death threats. Doesn’t that sound sucky? You go to all that trouble to get famous and then you have to skulk around because people are trying to kill you. Do you think people are trying to kill Taylor Swift? I bet they are.”

“Taylor Swift is retarded.”

“I know. I know Taylor Swift is retarded.”

“I want to go see Michael before the day gets started,” LizaAnne said. “But I can’t do it as long as I don’t know if he’s there. I mean, if I go over there and go wandering around in the pool house and there’s nobody there, I’m going to look retarded.”

“I don’t think he’s there,” Heather said. “I’m practically right on top of the pool house and I haven’t seen a thing all morning. And you know what she’s like. As soon as she knows he’s there, she comes right in, and in that car of hers, too. It’s not like you can miss it.”

LizaAnne looked at her jewelry. She had tiny sapphire studs for her ears. She had a ring of white gold with sapphires and diamonds in it. Heather had had a super sweet sixteen party, too, but the people from the show said they never did two in the same neighborhood, so they’d had to choose. Heather had gotten a car for her party, but it had only been a Ford. LizaAnne’s father said that nobody with any sense bought Fords, because the names stood for “Fix or Repair Daily.”

“Do you think I’m like her?” LizaAnne said. “The way everybody says?”

“Everybody doesn’t say that,” Heather said. “It’s just a couple of people.”

“It’s a couple of people here.”

“Well, it would have to be here, wouldn’t it?” Heather said. “I mean, they wouldn’t know who she was if they didn’t live here. It’s not like she’s famous, or any of that kind of thing. Nobody knows her but the people around here.”

“She hates me,” LizaAnne said.

“Of course she doesn’t hate you,” Heather said. “Well. You know.”

“She hates me,” LizaAnne said again. “She hates me because she knows Michael likes me better than he likes her. He really likes me. He’s just putting up with her because she gets him laid. She thinks she’s going to make some big thing out of it, but she isn’t. I mean, what would he want with her anyway, except, you know, her junk?”

“She’s really ugly,” Heather said. “And she’s old.”

“She’s really thin.” LizaAnne looked down at her very rounded arms.

“She’s probably got an eating disorder,” Heather said. “She probably throws up in the bathroom all the time. It’s really disgusting.”

“It’s retarded.”

“It’s worse than retarded,” Heather said. “It’s really gay.”

“Maybe she’s got some kind of thing on him,” LizaAnne said. “Maybe she’s blackmailing him. Maybe he’s hiding out from the law or something and that’s why he came home.”

“Maybe she’s one of those sick people who can’t stand to be with anybody her own age,” Heather said. “Maybe she’ll have a psychotic breakdown and end up in an insane asylum. Then when people come to see her her hair will hang down in front of her face and she’ll scream.”

LizaAnne picked up more of her jewelry. She had dangling earrings with little emeralds in them. She had whole sets for each of the four piercings on each of her ears, each in a different color.

“I wish she wasn’t on that committee,” she said finally.

And then, because that was the thing they had both been trying very hard not to say, they both fell silent.

LizaAnne looked around her room. She liked her room. She thought anybody would like it. She looked past the vanity at the clothes hanging in the walk-in closet. She put all her jewelry back in her box.

“There’s an arrangement,” she said. “My father said so. Every girl who’s going to be eighteen and out of high school in the spring is going to be invited. The committee has to.”

“That makes sense,” Heather said. “It’s not her who’s paying for it. It’s our fathers who are paying for it.”

“He said even if she did try to pull something, we wouldn’t have to put up with it,” LizaAnne said. “We could sue the committee, and the membership board of the club, and that kind of thing.”

“She won’t try anything,” Heather said. “It’s not like people want her here. That’s the thing. It’s not like she’s Stanford-Pyrie or somebody that everybody sucks up to. Nobody can stand her.”

“Those breasts of hers are fake, don’t you think?” Liza Anne said.

“Of course they’re fake.”

“Nobody could have breasts that really look like that. And if they do have them, they don’t keep them.”

“They don’t keep them?” Heather sounded confused.

“They get them reduced. My mother said. She thinks she’s so perfect, hanging around the pool in a bikini the size of a postage stamp, and she’s what? Forty? I think there ought to be a law against people wearing little tiny bikinis when they’re forty,” LizaAnne said.

Suddenly, talking to Heather was just making her tired. She got up and got the phone out of its stand. It really was retarded, this whole stupid thing. And it was boring.

“I’m going to hang up,” she said. “I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

“Okay,” Heather said. “Ten minutes would be fine.”

LizaAnne made a face at the phone. With Heather, ten minutes would be fine, and so would be two, or sixty. It could be any time at all.

“I’ll be ten minutes,” LizaAnne said again. Then she shut off the phone, so she wouldn’t have to hear Heather’s stupid boring voice any more. Heather was a stupid boring person with a stupid boring voice.

In fact, everything about Waldorf Pines was stupid and boring, but at least it wasn’t retarded.

4

Eileen Platte had been up all night, all twenty-four hours of it, waiting. It was not the first time she had done this, and her greatest hope this morning was that it would not be the last. She’d been waiting for the last night for a long time now. There had been the day she had finally got up her courage to go through Michael’s drawers when he was at school. He’d been twelve that year, in sixth grade, and they had still been living in Wayne. She had been thinking about it for weeks, watching Michael when he came through the door off the school bus, watching him at dinner. He would lock himself in the bathroom for hours at a time, and she would sit there, just a few feet away, waiting.

In the end, she hadn’t found anything she hadn’t expected to find. She had gone through his drawers one by one. She had pushed his socks around just the way she did when she was putting them away when she’d done the laundry. Then she’d gone through the drawers of his desk. Finally, she’d done something she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do. She’d lain down on the floor and pushed herself under his bed. The marijuana was in a clear plastic bag taped to one of the wooden slats.

It was almost eight o’clock in the morning now, and there had been no sign of him since four yesterday afternoon. He’d been headed over to the Heydreichs’ house then, which is where he always went these days. The job guarding the pool didn’t give him enough to do. She couldn’t blame the club board. With Michael’s record, she wouldn’t have given him anything else to do, either. He was barely managing to handle this. Still, it was true. It wasn’t enough. It gave him too much time to think.

“I don’t understand what you see in her,” she’d told him, as he was pulling on his windbreaker and heading out back. He’d walk, of course. He couldn’t take the car. His license was suspended, and everybody at Waldorf Pines knew that.

“She’s such an unpleasant person,” she’d said, although she knew this was the worst possible tack to take. You couldn’t tell your nearly grown-up son that the woman he was spending his time with was an unpleasant person. That was not going to get him away from her and it wasn’t going to get him back to you.

“I’m sorry,” she’d said. “I don’t mean to criticize. But I don’t like her.”

“I don’t like her much, either.”

“Then I don’t see the point.”

“She’s good for me,” Michael had said. “You have no idea just how good she is for me.”

It was one of those conversations that left Eileen feeling a little strangled. She’d had a lot of them over the years, and not just with Michael. Her father had been like that, in the worst periods of his drinking. Her husband was still like that, and, as far as she could tell, he had neither drinking nor drugs to blame anything on. There were times she wished that she could just turn off the conversation and then turn off her mind as well, letting everything go.

This morning, she was so tired, the air felt like it had patterns. She thought she could reach out and touch it, and it would feel like a quilt. She had a headache. She had a feeling in her limbs as if all the blood had been drained out of them.

Michael had stayed out all night before. He stayed out all night often. Once or twice he’d disappeared for a day or two. For some reason, this time did not feel like all the others. She could not make herself do anything but sit here, in this vast kitchen, wondering how she had ever thought it was the answer to her prayers. She prayed a lot. She even got down on her knees and said the rosary, although she did it in her own bedroom, when Stephen was off at work, so that he wouldn’t see her and start railing about religion. Maybe that was why her life had turned out this way. Didn’t St. Paul say something about it in the Bible? It was wrong of believers to marry nonbelievers. It didn’t work out well. Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe believers were supposed to stay married to unbelievers, because that would change their minds. She had not changed Stephen’s mind. Stephen had not changed hers, but that hardly counted for anything. She hadn’t stayed true to God out of conviction. She’d only done it because she was afraid to do anything else.

She had coffee on the stove, but she didn’t want to drink it. She had muffins from the bakery in the refrigerator. She didn’t want to eat them. Michael ate almost nothing these days, and when he did eat what he ate was full of sugar.

“Listen,” she’d told him once—it was only a week ago now. She couldn’t believe it had been that recent. “Listen,” she’d said, thinking she was desperate. “There’s always one thing I can do. I can always go to the police.”

“Go to the police about what? The drugs? You’ve already gone to the police about the drugs. What good do you think it did?”

“I could go to the police about her,” Eileen said. She’d felt as if she were swimming through molasses. Sometimes she found it very hard to remember things. She remembered this from some kind of television program she’d watched, and she was desperately afraid that she’d got it all mixed up.

She’d gone on with it anyway. She’d had to go on with it. She couldn’t let her son disappear into the awful woman’s fantasies.

“I could go to the police,” she’d said again, piecing it together slowly. “I could make them charge her with rape. Because of the age difference.”

“You want to charge Martha Heydreich with rape?” Michael said. “Rape takes an unwilling partner. Hell, it takes a partner.”

“No, not unwilling,” Eileen had insisted. “It can be—it’s the age difference. I heard about it on television. If there’s enough of an age difference, the older person can be charged with rape. Something rape. There was a word for it.”

“Statutory,” Michael said. He’d sounded amused. “You’re talking about statutory rape.”

“Maybe,” Eileen had gone on. “If there’s enough of an age difference, the older person can be charged with statutory rape. Or some kind of rape. And they can be put in jail. And they can be put on the sex offender’s registry.”

“Only if the younger party is under eighteen,” Michael said. “And I’m not under eighteen.”

“She’s using you,” Eileen said. “You’ve got to see that. She’s using you. She’s got that silly husband of hers who’ll buy her anything she wants, and she’s got you to—she’s got you to—”

“To what?”

Eileen had turned her face away, to the wall. They were in the living room. It was a plain blank wall, without wallpaper. She had had nothing to take her mind off it.