Hush Hush (15 page)

Tess had no choice—today was going to be her own impromptu take-your-daughter-to-work-day. It would have been unfair to Crow, who had arrived home at 4:00
A.M.
, to shake him awake five hours later and ask him to watch Carla Scout while Tess ran around town at Tyner’s bidding. For one brief, ungenerous moment, she had tried to rationalize that it was in Carla Scout’s best interest to be left in her father’s care. It was going to be a boring Saturday morning for her, strapped in her car seat. But Tess recognized she was being selfish even as she tried to be selfless.

“I want Dada,” Carla Scout announced from the backseat, for the fifth or sixth time, not the least bit placated by the treats Tess had plied her with—a cruller (from a Crow-approved bakery) and chocolate milk (organic, but Starbucks, iffy in Crow’s world).

“Sorry, kiddo, you’re stuck with me.”

“I want a Dada day, I want a Dada day,” she chanted, thrumming her feet.

“That makes two of us,” Tess said.

“Huh?” It never occurred to Carla Scout that anyone yearned to have a day without her.

Their first stop was Melisandre’s apartment, where she said she had left her iPhone, iPad, digital camera, and laptop, all of which were to be collected. Once that was done, Tess had to drive to the Four Seasons on the other side of the harbor and meet Harmony Burns, who would add her gadgets and papers to the pile.

But the apartment first. Tess had to admit, Melisandre was a pretty cool customer, remembering to leave these items behind. Tess entered the apartment with the keys given to her during their security checks, trying to keep Carla Scout from running amok. But it was hard, locating things when Melisandre hadn’t provided precise locations. While Tess was searching, Carla Scout ended up seizing a doll she found in one of the bedrooms. An American Girl doll, Tess realized. She had been trying to keep Carla Scout from knowing of their financially ruinous existence.

“Mine,” she said.

“No, it’s not, Carla Scout.”

“MINE.” Carla Scout believed that “No” was the result of not having been heard, so she simply amped up the volume at the first denial. And on the second, then the third.

“Not yours,” Tess said firmly, removed it from her daughter’s grasp, and walked it into the bathroom, thinking to stow it in a cabinet there. Oh, thank goodness, there was Melisandre’s phone on the sink, and the tablet was on the back of the toilet. She threw those into her battered leather knapsack with the laptop and camera, which she preferred to a purse, as it kept both hands free when she was walking. She instructed Carla Scout to follow her to the car, only to discover, upon fastening her into her car seat, that she was clutching a book,
In the Night Kitchen
. Fuck. She should take it back, but she couldn’t bear the idea of unbuckling, then rebuckling, Carla Scout.

Wait—why did Melisandre have a copy of
In the Night Kitchen
? That was appropriate for little kids. Why did she have an American Girl doll, come to think of it?

Harmony was waiting for Tess on the circular drive at the Four Seasons, all her materials loaded onto a bellman’s cart.

“How long will I have to go without my iPad?” she asked. “And my phone? How am I supposed to cope without my phone?”

“Tyner said go over to the AT&T store on Fleet, say you lost yours, and buy a new phone and tablet. He’ll reimburse you. I assume everything is backed up somewhere?”

“I use—”

Tess held up a hand. “Don’t tell me. I’m not sure how it works in this brave new world. And when it comes to your laptop, well—la, la, la, I can’t hear you, you don’t even have one, okay? We have a grace period, maybe a long one, in which no one is going to ask for this stuff. The detectives assigned to this case are old school. They believe in interrogation above all. And they’re good at it. Tyner is more worried about the state’s attorney’s office requesting these items down the line, but—better safe than sorry.”

“He’s right to be concerned,” Harmony said. “Federal prosecutors sought all footage from a reality show last year after they indicted two of the people on it. I’m talking about stuff that had never aired. The network fought the request, but I’m not sure how it ended up.”

Harmony looked thin and frail in her black clothes and her cherry-red Doc Martens. She could pass for a teenager. Maybe that’s why Tess felt an almost maternal desire to cheer her up.

“But this is good for your project, in the long run? I mean, something has happened. You have a story to tell now.”

“No, it’s horrible. Other media is going to swamp us. And I don’t
understand why Melisandre was meeting with Stephen. That was terribly premature.”

“I assumed that was because of the kids. She was desperate to see them.”

“Yes, but why—” Harmony stopped herself.

“Why what?”

“Never mind. Melisandre usually knows what she’s doing, even if she doesn’t always tell me. I’ll leave it at that.”

Tess lingered for a minute in the driveway. There was something likable about Harmony Burns. She had seen her only once before, at Tyner’s office, and then the young woman had been not so much a person as a person associated with the film that Tess wanted no part of. But Tess, forever inquisitive, had Googled Harmony after their encounter and read her slender backstory—the accolades that had greeted her first documentary, the criticisms that had buried the second and tarnished her reputation. She had been accused of exploiting her young subject, affirming racist stereotypes, not stepping in when the girl’s cousin huffed spray paint on-camera.

“I used to be a reporter. Too.” The tacked-on word was a bit of conscious flattery. “The story goes where the story goes, no?”

“It’s not what I signed on for. I don’t do crowd scenes, headline drama, CNN crazy-lady-of-the-week. I wanted to make a film about a woman who was trying to rebuild her relationship with her daughters.”

“I thought it was a broad look at the criminal insanity plea.”

“Yes, it’s that, too. But I also wanted to document the return to something that others would call normalcy. Insanity by any name—there’s still such a taint. Young actresses can go to rehab seven times. And be forgiven, seven times. But no one’s allowed a comeback from crazy.”

What do I believe about Melisandre Harris Dawes? Crazy? Crazy then, but not now? Never crazy?
Tess decided she preferred not to think
about Melisandre at all. The story was just too awful—the mother sitting mere yards away, shielded from the sun by a shade tree, while her daughter essentially baked to death in a luxury SUV. Of course it was crazy, but what did crazy
mean
?

Tess got back into her car and headed to police headquarters to see if Tyner needed anything else from her. There wasn’t much news on the radio on a Saturday morning. The death of Stephen Dawes was still unknown to the city at large. She wondered how long that would hold true. Even if an enterprising reporter had been listening to the police radio overnight, the report would have been for an ambulance dispatched to a Bolton Hill address, then a call for homicide detectives. A reporter would have to look up the address to learn that it was the home of someone well known, then go to the scene to understand the circumstances of the death. After all, it would initially be investigated as an accident.

And it might have been an accident. It was possible that Stephen Dawes had walked or fallen through the large plate-glass doors along the rear of his Bolton Hill home. There was evidence that he had been drinking, although it was unclear how much, just that an empty wine bottle had been found at the scene. It also appeared that he had died very quickly, blood gushing from his femoral artery. Even if someone had been there, he couldn’t have been saved.

But if someone had been there, why hadn’t that person called 911?

Tyner had no more work for Tess after she dropped everything off. No praise, either, but that was comfortingly in character. Carla Scout, bored with the book she had stolen from Melisandre’s apartment, was breaking bad after a long morning in the car. But Tess had a solution for that—Saturday story hour at her aunt Kitty’s bookstore. Carla Scout was a regular there. Kitty didn’t tell the stories. For all her personal warmth and magnetism, Kitty didn’t really have a lot of
rapport with kids unless, like Carla Scout, they were related to her. She hired a smiley, happy lady to tell the stories on the children side of Women and Children First, then busied herself in the Dead White Men annex.

And that suited Tess, who needed to talk to someone, anyone, today. There had been no opportunity to tell Crow about the third note last night, especially given that he didn’t know about the first and second notes. Besides, she was afraid that Crow, kind as he was, might share the sentiment of the note writer. She was a crappy mother. She lost her temper. She yelled. She couldn’t plant herself in the moment the way Crow could. She tried to blame it on being six years older, but did the reason matter? Crow was an innately great parent. Tess? Not so much. The accidental detective had become the accidental mother, and the learning curve was even steeper in this line of work. Tess remembered a PI friend, one who hadn’t started out so friendly, telling Tess that she held her gun like a blow dryer. That was even funnier if one had seen Tess with a blow dryer. But she had learned to hold a gun, even to use one with lethal force when it came down to it. Her hand reached for her knee, for the slightly raised scar that reminded her that she was alive, and lucky to be so, that a gun had saved her life. She touched this talisman of flesh much less frequently since Carla Scout was born. Tess no longer needed to be reminded of her own mortality. Carla Scout did that job very nicely.

“Three notes so far, but this was the first overtly cruel one?” Kitty asked with her instant, easy empathy. She had always been more like a big sister than an aunt.

“Sandy nailed it from the first. He said that if someone had the power to approve of my behavior, they also had the power to disapprove. The second one creeped me out, but my eating habits are,
thanks to the
Beacon-Light
, public record. As Crow said, that article was a blueprint for stalkers. That, and the coverage of the Epstein affair, when I went into premature labor after throwing an antique bedpan at someone’s head.”

“Ah, yes. My gift to you. More fortuitous than I would have dreamed.”

“You’ve always had a way of anticipating my needs better than I can.”

Kitty nodded, but she was distracted today. Abstracted, to use that rare word that sounded like Baltimore malapropism but was actually proper English.

“You okay, Kitty?” Tess asked and realized she seldom had cause to ask this question. Kitty was always okay, better than okay. Happy, stable, a rock. It had never occurred to Tess until this moment that no one, not even Kitty, could be happy all the time.

“Stephen Dawes’s death—I don’t even know the man, but it’s clearly going to be at the center of our lives for a while. Melisandre called Tyner at seven or so. We weren’t even awake. Even before this horrible accident, the last few days have been exhausting.
She’s
exhausting. I hate the habit of calling women high-maintenance—as if they were cars or appliances. As if women, in general, require care in a way that men do not. But Melisandre Dawes is high-maintenance. Besides—she makes me feel short.”

Tess recognized that her aunt was trying to divert the conversation with that little joke at the end.

“You
are
short.”

“But I never feel that way, ever. In my mind, I’m taller than you. So—what are you going to do about the notes?”

“Well, I guess I’ll do my own security assessment on myself. We have a good alarm system, although I never have installed outdoor cameras. I also think it would be hard for someone to follow me now that I’m on guard. What I find unnerving are the places I can’t
control. Day care, the part-time babysitters. I don’t want to tell them about the notes, though. It’s bad enough …”

Her voice drifted off. She was unwilling to say the rest, but Kitty knew. Kitty understood.

“You’re a good mom, Tess. Don’t let some crazy person convince you otherwise.”

“I’m not as patient as I could be. The other day, Carla Scout took my phone out of my purse and pretended to make a call. She said, ‘Hello, hello, hello. What’s happening. Not AGAIN!’ And then she told her mysterious caller—‘I don’t like it.’” She dropped her voice almost to a whisper, although Carla Scout hadn’t been whispering. “‘I don’t like it when Mommy yells.’”

“Well, that just shows how extraordinary a circumstance it is, Mommy yelling.”

“Maybe,” Tess said, keen to believe this. “Maybe.”

“You know, Tess, your own parents were a little overwhelmed when you were small. The house in Ten Hills—when they bought it, they knew they would need two incomes to keep it.”

“I thought they bought a big house because they were going to have lots of kids.”

“They were, but they hadn’t thought it through. Judith had to go back to work as quickly as possible after you were born. And your dad—I love my brother, he’s such a good man, Tess, but he didn’t lift a finger to help with you. That’s how it was. It’s part of the reason I never wanted kids. I remember reading Nora Ephron, writing about the women’s consciousness movement in the seventies, how it basically involved men agreeing to clear the dishes after dinner.”

“Is the point that I have it so good?”

“No, the point is that your mother yelled, too. Probably more than you even remember. And yet, you love her and you don’t dwell on those things.”

“She hated messes so much,” Tess mused. “You know how she is
about her own clothes. Everything perfect and matchy-matched. She wanted me to be the same, but I was a slob. Made her crazy.”

“Have you ever thought about what your mother might have achieved if she had started at NSA even a decade later than she did? Or considered how her wardrobe was one of the few things she controlled back then?”

Tess, to her chagrin, had not. She had never contemplated her mother’s side of anything.