Hush Hush (14 page)

The Tasmanian Devil, Looney Tunes edition, was spinning in the narrow, sloped aisle that connected Eddie’s of Roland Park’s liquor department to the grocery store at large. Spinning and screaming and demanding something in garbled, guttural oaths that could not be understood. It was a fascinating display, something that Tess could have watched in awe—if the Tasmanian Devil were not Carla Scout Monaghan, who had just been told that she could not have a can of Pringles potato chips. Not now, not ever, per her father’s instructions. The only chips on Crow’s approved list were Kettle,
which were certified GMO-free. And those were for emergencies. He preferred for Carla Scout to eat homemade chips.

“Oh, is wittle you having a bad day?” A well-intentioned Roland Park matron lowered herself on creaky knees to Carla’s eyeline.

The child responded with a scream that should have shattered the nearby bottles of Scotch and gin and tequila.
Lovely, lovely tequila
, Tess thought. Could she have a shot now if she bought the bottle? Would that be so wrong? She couldn’t really blame Carla Scout for responding that way to baby talk. It set Tess’s teeth on edge, too.

The books said to ignore tantrums or remove the child promptly. They said other things, too, but Tess tended to forget what they were when she was in this situation. She was frozen, watching her toddler thrash it out in a high-traffic area, blocking anyone who wanted liquor, beer, wine, and snacks. And it was Friday at Eddie’s. Everyone wanted liquor, beer, wine, and snacks. Including Tess. TGIF? In her life, it was more like FMIF—fuck me, it’s Friday. Friday and Saturday were big work nights for Crow, requiring him to go in by 4:00, then stay until almost 3:00
A.M.
Which, of course, meant sleeping until noon on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Tess dreaded Friday nights. All she wanted to do was pick up some prepared dishes at Eddie’s—curried chicken salad for her, mac ’n’ cheese for Carla Scout, a bottle of sauvignon blanc—get home, and survive the next five hours.

Carla Scout had a slightly different agenda.

“What you should do—” the matron began.

“Is get my husband a vasectomy. We’re saving up!”
Why did I call Crow my husband, why am I putting on a front for some stranger?
Because enough of her life was hanging out in public. Much of Carla Scout’s rear end was hanging out in public, as her dress had bunched up, exposing the fact that she was wearing no underpants. On a rather cool day in March. How had that happened? Tess had a vague memory of picking up Carla Scout from the Friday babysitter who helped cover
the gap between Tess’s and Crow’s work schedules, a hurried visit to the potty, where Carla Scout had asked Tess “to give me some pri’acy.” Silly Tess had assumed she had come out with her Dora the Explorer underpants on beneath her long, smocked dress, not Carla Scout’s usual style at all, but it had been clean this morning. Matched with miniature suede boots bestowed on Carla Scout by her fashion-conscious grandmother, it had made for a plausible outfit eight hours ago. But, no, Dora the Explorer was apparently exploring the floor back at the babysitter’s house. Was having a bare-butt child in Eddie’s grounds for being reported to social services?

Tess crouched down and said, in what she hoped was a persuasively no-nonsense voice: “Carla Scout, I am going to count you down and if you can’t calm down, you’ll be going into Quiet Time. Right here, in the store. One … two … three.”

The girl’s wails rose and Tess felt as if everyone in North Baltimore was staring at her.

“Four … five … six.”

Carla Scout, although several aisles from Emeril’s signature spices, kicked it up a notch.

“Seven, eight, nine”—oh, Tess so did not want to say it—“ten.”

At that, Tess picked up her writhing daughter and deposited her in a corner. “Quiet Time. Right here, in the store.” It was this or leave, and she’d be damned if she was going to leave when she had everything she needed but the wine. And she was really damned if she was going to leave without the wine. She could feel herself flushing from embarrassment. She tried to tell herself she didn’t care. Tess had always maintained she didn’t worry about what people thought of her. Maybe she was lying to herself, or maybe motherhood was just the ultimate test. Every day she was judged a dozen times—and almost always found wanting. But she weathered the stares and smug glances, and Carla Scout finally calmed down, and they returned to their shopping with just the occasional dramatic
sniffle. Carla Scout’s, not Tess’s, although she was tempted, too.

It had been such a crappy day. Tyner had asked Tess to meet him, then raked her over the coals for having made so little progress in developing leads about Melisandre’s harasser. He didn’t particularly appreciate Sandy’s theory about the sugar bowl. “That’s overwhelmingly cynical,” Tyner said. “This is clearly someone from her past. Someone close to her.”

“Like you, Tyner?” Tess had said, and then Tyner had just freaked the hell out. Told her she was indolent and insolent, that he had referred her as a favor because he knew she could use the work and would it hurt for her to be grateful for once. Tyner was always cranky and prone to tongue-lashings, but this was unlike anything Tess had known. She had been grateful that Sandy didn’t witness it, given how close to tears Tyner pushed her.

She had left Tyner’s office just in time to get caught in the rain without an umbrella, forgotten it was Friday and gone home without picking up Carla Scout, then driven over to Medfield, where the Friday babysitter lived. And now this. The thing was, she would happily buy her daughter Pringles. But she had agreed to try to do things Crow’s way. No soda, ever. No store-bought cookies, crackers, cakes. Carla Scout could have junk food—junk food made with straight-up white sugar, white flour, butter, et cetera—but it had to be pedigreed or homemade. Oven-baked potato chips, sliced with a mandoline that was probably going to take a hunk of someone’s finger someday, deep-fried sweet potatoes, even tortilla chips. Crow had started baking bread, too, old-fashioned Irish brown bread, which was delightful. And he baked like a madman on his days off. Whoopie pies, perhaps the most aptly named food ever, because Tess really did want to say whoopie when she bit into one. Homemade Twinkies. Something called compost cookies and chocolate sandwich cookies with buttercream icing that were the closest thing to a Hydrox that Tess could imagine. All in all, a good deal.

But Carla Scout still yearned for the occasional can of Pringles or a package of Gummi Bears, and it grieved Tess to deny her. She thought a little crap, in moderation, wasn’t that bad. Crow said if she wanted to take over the cooking, she was welcome to it.

Okay, no Pringles.

Carla Scout was calming down, slowly but surely. It felt as if the tantrum had gone on for hours, but it was less than five minutes by Tess’s watch. Tyner’s tantrum had probably lasted longer. They procured a bottle of wine—“Mommy juice!” Carla Scout announced to everyone in earshot—and checked out without further incident. Roland Avenue was a madhouse, as usual, so Tess had to leave her cart and go get the car, two blocks away, carrying Carla Scout, who complained about the wind and rain. It was nice, Tess thought, to live somewhere a person could leave a cart of groceries on the sidewalk for five or ten minutes. When they got home, the dogs needed a quick walk, so she put away the perishables, left the other groceries to sit. Tess being Tess, she had forgotten to bring the recyclable bags for shopping, but that was okay: a woman with three dogs could always use some more plastic ones. Carla Scout took Miata’s leash, as the Doberman was actually the gentlest and most patient of the three dogs, while Tess wrangled the two greyhounds, large and small. It was still light at 6:30, a nice change, and the walk restored some equilibrium between mother and daughter. Carla Scout, as was her wont, was fascinated by her own bad behavior in the grocery store, quizzing Tess about it. “I lie on the floor. I kicked. Why I do that, Mommy? Why I do that?”

“I’d love to know,” Tess said. But she could feel her jangled nerves settling. The key to these grueling weekends was to adapt herself to Carla Scout’s rhythms, to let her take the lead the same way she let the greyhounds pretend to be in charge. They would go home and have a “picnic” tonight—dinner on a blanket on the floor of Tess’s bedroom, the dogs shut out, while they watched a movie on Tess’s computer. Carla Scout loved these picnics, as did Tess, because they involved paper plates and plastic cutlery. Nothing to wash but
Mama’s wineglass—and that was always the last thing to go into the dishwasher each night.

The rest of the evening was as sweet and easy as Tess could dare to hope. It was only at 10:00
P.M.
, when Tess was lying in Carla Scout’s bed, the girl curled into the nook of her arm, that she remembered the groceries that had never been put away. She extricated herself carefully—Carla Scout had a habit of throwing an arm and leg across Tess, like some sci-fi parasite securing its food source—and went into the kitchen, feeling loose and warm and happy.

At the bottom of the last bag, she found a can of Pringles. How had her daughter smuggled them into the cart without her noticing? Then again, part of Eddie’s cachet was that employees still unloaded the contents of one’s cart onto the belt, with another person bagging at the end. Tess dug out the receipt to make sure she had paid for it. Carla Scout had serious klepto instincts, although she usually took what she called tiny things—keys, coins, earrings. No, there wasn’t a can of Pringles on the receipt. But when could Carla Scout have grabbed it?

There was a note, however, written on the back of the receipt, in now-familiar block printing:

Melisandre poured herself another glass of wine, checked her e-mail, noticed a quiver to her hands. Why hadn’t Harmony answered her? What else could she have to do on a Friday night in Baltimore? The young woman worked all the time. She had no life outside the project. Melisandre almost felt guilty about that. Almost.

Harmony was right: It had been a risk, forcing Stephen to meet with her. But she couldn’t wait. That was her lifelong problem. When she wanted something, she couldn’t wait. This was not a consequence of being spoiled or indulged as a child. Melisandre had been raised by fond but detached parents who delegated as much child care as possible, then sent her to boarding school at age fourteen. Her father, so much older than her mother, had died when she was seventeen, and she had felt grief, but also sadness for not having a father she could miss more sincerely. Yet losing her mother last year had sent her reeling. They had grown closer during Melisandre’s time in Cape Town. It was her mother, facing stage 4 breast cancer, who had urged Melisandre to find a way to reenter Alanna’s and Ruby’s lives by any means necessary. But her mother didn’t know the whole story. Only two people did, Melisandre and Stephen.

Stephen had been so angry with her. She had insisted on setting up the camera to record their talk, as insurance, but he had given a curt “statement,” then told her to turn it off. She hadn’t expected that. Resistance, yes, but not anger. “We had an arrangement,” he said when she turned the camera off. “An agreement. I could have asked for child support, other financial concessions during the divorce. You agreed to leave—with half of my savings. We said we would put the past behind us, forever. Those things cannot be undone on a whim.”

She argued that she had been desperate, unwell, but that made him only angrier. Which must be why he said such hurtful things.

They had been in the kitchen of their old Bolton Hill house. It had been her idea—inspiration, she thought—to meet and tape her ex-husband there. She honestly thought that she and Stephen, back in their old house, could recover a fragment or two of their good times. She had loved him in a fashion. Not as profoundly as she should have, which may have been why he had devolved into the utter cliché, the husband who fucks the nanny. Really, how lazy could men be? Elyse wasn’t even that pretty or interesting. She was just
there
. Melisandre
had certainly never seen her as competition. She never considered other women competition. They usually weren’t.

It’s never going to happen, Melisandre. Never. Get over it. You look like a fool. You are a fool
.

The rage she felt at that moment—it was like nothing she had ever known. It wasn’t madness, which was the term Melisandre had always preferred for her illness. Unfashionable and imprecise as it was,
madness
seemed right to her. There had been something vicious inside her, something apart from her, all those years ago.

Stephen had said:
It’s never going to happen. Get over it
. How dare he tell her what could happen? He still knew her well, and he used that knowledge to wound her. His words had the force of a physical blow.

She checked her e-mail again. Harmony had finally answered her question about the protocols, explained the transcription app again, then advised Melisandre not to worry about doing her own transcription because Harmony would want to do it. She wrote that it helped her stay on top of the material. Melisandre ignored the latter. She began the laborious task of stopping and starting the tape, typing Stephen’s words. When her cell rang at one, she was tempted to ignore it, but then she saw DAWES in the display.

“Melisandre? This is Felicia Dawes. Stephen’s wife.” It was a high voice, to Melisandre’s ear. Maybe even a little whiny. And overly enunciated, the way people talk when they’re trying to appear sober but aren’t.

I am Stephen’s wife
, she thought.
You are just another nanny. Trainer. Whatever. I am Anne Boleyn. You’re Jane Seymour
. She didn’t want Stephen, nor had she expected him to pine for her forever. But he could have done better than
this
.

“Could you tell me what time you left Stephen? He hasn’t come home and he’s not answering his phone.”

“I think it was no later than nine. I know I was home by nine-thirty or so, doing e-mail and transcription.”

“Did he stay behind? Were you at a restaurant or his office?”

“No, neither. We met at our old house.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Oh.”

“He was still there when I left. Do you need the address?”

“No, thank you. I did live there for a time. Before our son was born.”

“Stephen loved that house. I’m surprised you got him out of it.”

The rude girl didn’t even bother to say good-bye.

Poor thing
, Melisandre thought.
Poor thing
. She had gotten in over her head. The nanny, the trainer. Stephen really was the laziest man alive. Why not the clerk at the dry cleaner’s? A barista? Cruel—but he had been cruel to her. Heedlessly cruel. Sticks and stones.

Melisandre went to bed, although it was almost dawn before she found sleep. She had one of her old anger dreams, which she had had at frequent intervals during her marriage, although they had subsided over the past ten years. She yelled at people, she grabbed them and struck them, but she was harmless as a kitten. Her rage grew and grew. She pounded her fists on a table. The table was in a courtroom, but she was not working. Nor was she on trial. She knew these things in the way people know things in dreams. She was yelling at everyone and they laughed at her. She pounded and pounded and pounded and pounded—

But, no, the pounding was outside her dream, in the real world. At her door. How could anyone be at her door? No one was supposed to be able to get to the penthouse without calling first or having a special key for the elevator. She would have to speak sternly to that girl, the one Tyner doted on. His stupid wife’s stupid niece, whom Melisandre had hired as a favor to Tyner.

She pulled on a robe and instinctively fluffed her hair, which she could tame no matter how wild or bedheaded.

The man at the door introduced himself as a policeman, Lieutenant Martin Tull, showed her a badge. Stephen, Stephen, something about
Stephen. What was he trying to tell her? She really shouldn’t have taken an Ambien after drinking wine. Maybe this was a dream, too?

“I told his wife that I left him at the Bolton Hill house at nine,” she said. Was it 9:00, 9:30, 9:45?

“Yes, ma’am,” Tull said. “A police cruiser went by there a few hours ago at Mrs. Dawes’s request.”

“I didn’t request it. Oh—of course.”

“Ma’am I’m sorry to tell you, but Mr. Dawes is dead. He went through the glass doors at the back of the house and bled to death.”

Bled to death. Death. She saw Isadora’s lifeless body, pulled from the car by a crabber who had broken the window in his desperation to save her. She saw her trainer, Silas, convulsing. She saw herself. Why did death stalk her? What did it want from her?

I should sit down
, she thought. Then:
I am going to sit down. Where do I sit down? How do I sit down? It’s like Isadora all over again except I’m here for this, I know what’s going on
.

“He fell through the doors? I always worried about that glass,” she said after groping her way to one of the dining room chairs. “It’s because of the way the flooring was done—it’s the same inside and out, which is a lovely effect—we could open the doors in such a way that it was like one big room. But dangerous. I worried about the girls so.”

“We’d like to talk to you about your evening with him. Downtown, if you don’t mind.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“No, ma’am.”

“But you want me to come downtown?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I need to dress, call my lawyer and ask him to meet us.”

“You’re not under arrest, ma’am. It’s no big deal, really. Just want to talk.”

“I’m a lawyer,” she said. “I wouldn’t dream of speaking to you without one present.”

She knew that insisting on a lawyer would escalate things, but she didn’t care. Only a fool would speak to police without a lawyer present.

She made him wait for forty-five minutes while she showered and dressed, changing her outfit three times. She realized this could be the only power she would have for a while, making this detective wait. She began to put on her usual uniform of leggings and cashmere, then decided to wear a dress instead. A blue knit dress, paired with boots that added three inches to her height. She kept her jewelry to a minimum, wearing only diamond studs and her watch, which had belonged to her mother. Poor Mum. She had done the best she could. Almost every mother did, in Melisandre’s view.
She
had done the best she could, no matter what people thought.

While in the bathroom, she managed to send Harmony a text:

Of course, Tyner really needed to be the one to hold the videos and transcripts, Harmony’s shooting schedule, whatever ephemera the film had generated. But Tyner was going to be with Melisandre all day. Tyner was going to be with her for hours and hours. She fluffed her hair, put on eyeliner, and smiled at her reflection.

She looked very good, all things considered.