Hush Hush (20 page)

A sad smile. “No.”

Tess went back outside. She’d have to tell Tyner eventually, sooner than eventually, but she didn’t have the heart for such a conversation today. She rounded the corner onto the tiny, secret lane of Hamilton where she had parked. There was a piece of paper on her windshield.
Fuck. Again?
She was almost relieved to find a ticket, even though she knew she had put enough money in the meter. The meter had shortchanged her. She could contest the ticket, ask for a trial, but that would mean trading a half day of her time to fight a thirty-two-dollar fine. Hard not to think the city had figured that out.

God, she hated the new meters. But a thirty-two-dollar fine was better than being called a crap mother by a stranger. Assuming the person was a stranger. In her darkest moments, Tess feared it was someone who knew her all too well.

Harmony’s phone issued a single bell-like tone, the sound she used for signal alerts and push functions. She glanced at the display while continuing to pack. A file had landed from the transcription company. So what? The project was dead, as dead as—But that was in bad taste. She couldn’t be angry at Stephen Dawes for being dead. And having watched Melisandre’s interview with him, Harmony
was pretty sure that Melisandre hadn’t killed him. The “interview” had been useless, way too short. It was also about as dispassionate as anything Harmony had ever seen. For exes, those two had zero chemistry. Harmony should have taken a firmer stand on Melisandre’s participation. It was one thing for her to conduct that interview with her lawyer. Strange and uncomfortable as that footage was, it wasn’t central to the film. Sure, it established that she had gone to see him before driving to the boathouse, but it also had established a pattern—Melisandre had left baby Isadora in the car at every stop that morning. At the school, outside Tyner’s office, in the boathouse parking lot. Who cared what Carolyn Sanders thought she saw? That was all hindsight, a self-involved young woman’s attempt to heighten her connection to something big, and thereby make herself more important. Melisandre had been disturbed enough to leave a sleeping child in the car everywhere she went that day. It hadn’t mattered at the school, where she was parked briefly, or at Tyner’s office, where she evidently used a garage. But there was a consistency in her strange behavior. And, in this case, the consistency established her insanity. A woman intent on homicide via neglect, then faking insanity—that woman probably would have had the child with her on those two previous visits. She wouldn’t have risked a concerned citizen busting her before she could execute her plan.

But it didn’t matter what Harmony thought. It never had, really. Since Melisandre had been charged with homicide, the cable vultures were circling. They both agreed there was no room for the kind of project they had planned over tea in a London hotel suite. Harmony had tendered her resignation yesterday, over the phone.

Melisandre had made a perfunctory attempt to dissuade her, even pretended that they might resume the film. “Once this is over,” she said, although it sounded like false bravado to Harmony’s ear. “Meanwhile, what do I do, with the files, everything that Tyner’s little friend gathered up?”

“Whatever you want, Melisandre. The material is yours. You paid for it. You paid for me, too, but I was just a loaner.”

If anything was over, it was Harmony’s comeback. Back to Inwood, back to waitressing until she could find a gig. Maybe she would start looking for a job in reality television.

And yet—the notification from the transcription app lured her back to her new laptop. She perched on the bed, clicked on the Dropbox icon, began watching the unedited footage again.
This could have been something special
.

Harmony had been surprised by Tess Monaghan’s naïveté. She didn’t expect Tyner Gray to be particularly tech savvy. An unfair stereotype of an older man, perhaps, but a true one in her experience. Even Melisandre had interesting gaps in her skill set, a consequence, Harmony had assumed, of having too many people doing things for her over the years. Melisandre could be flummoxed by a digital thermostat. She had actually called Tyner and asked him to explain how to work the one in her apartment.

But Tess wasn’t that much older than Harmony. Besides, Harmony had essentially told Tess that everything that had been recorded on various devices was also in the so-called cloud. Tess had to know that Dropbox would be accessible to Harmony on any computer, that it would be there when she got a new phone and accessed her account. Physical possession meant nothing in the digital age.

Only—when she tried to go back to the new footage, still in the cloud, it turned out the password to the Dropbox account had already been changed.
Wow, Melisandre, that’s a little cold
. But Harmony had told her to do this when they met over lunch today. At least Melisandre had sent her out in style, over a bottle of champagne at the Wit & Wisdom.

She went into Netflix and watched her second documentary, but not before reading the comments. “Condescending.” “Patronizing, racist, classist.” “Lorita’s quinceañero deserved to be captured
by someone who wasn’t sniggering at this dim-but-sweet Hispanic family as if she had discovered the Telemundo version of
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo
.”

“It’s in the editing” is, of course, the first line of defense for the wronged reality television star—but it was also true in this case. Harmony had been given a big budget to make her second doc. But the studio had essentially taken it away from her in editing, making this mishmash. She had no recourse. She could have taken her name off it, gone the Alan Smithee route, but her agent persuaded her that would be career suicide. She still ended up dead, career-wise.

She pulled up the e-mail Melisandre had sent Friday night, which had included the clip with Stephen. Melisandre also couldn’t figure out how to upload a video on her own, so she had sent them as attachments. Two minutes. Two dull, unnecessary minutes. Why had she even wanted to film Stephen? Melisandre had been back and forth on the issue of the affair. She wanted it in, she wanted it out. She wanted it in but didn’t want to involve Alanna. Harmony understood it was a spiky topic, but they could have gotten more out of Stephen than this say-nothing two-minute
statement
.

Two minutes—she glanced at the clock. She had lost too much time to her little mournful memory walk. She would have to rush to make the 5:30 train.

Tess was still amazed by how motherhood had changed her hearing. She could hear Carla Scout sigh in her sleep yet was capable of sleeping through a car accident in front of her house. Literally. A car had driven into a tree directly across the street and she had not heard a thing.

The ringing telephone fell somewhere in between, rousing her by the third or fourth ring. She had fallen asleep in a chair, reading.
Tess glanced at the clock—11: 15
P.M.
Not necessarily a scary, world-ending phone call, but an urgent one.

“You didn’t answer your cell,” Tyner said.

“Hello to you, too.” The iPhone was on the table next to her, its face blank. “It’s out of juice. I forgot to charge it. What’s up?”

“There’s no easy way to say this, so—you’re fired.”

“What the—?”

“I’m sorry, but Melisandre is adamant. She believes you went behind her back and—well, no one can convince her otherwise. Knowing you, I doubt you did it, but it doesn’t matter. She wants you off her case and I can’t overrule her.”

“Tyner, I still don’t know what I allegedly did.”

“Leaked to the
Beacon-Light
. Melisandre has a Google alert, and the story went live about a half hour ago.”

“I didn’t tell them about Alanna.”

“No, and Alanna’s not mentioned in the story, which is the only reason
I’m
not fired. But everything else is there—the anonymous notes, including the content, the incident with the trainer. Maybe she’ll cool down, Tess, but—I doubt it.”

“I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything.” Tess remembered Sandy mentioning his friendship with a reporter at the
Blight
. No, he would never take such action without consulting her.

“I believe you, Tess. But Melisandre doesn’t, and that’s all that matters for now.”

She heard a woman’s voice in the background.

“Wait, are you there right now? Is that Melisandre or Kitty? Put Melisandre on the phone and let me talk to her.”

“I don’t think that’s the best idea right now. She’s terribly upset.”

That makes two of us
, Tess thought, hanging up. She should be glad to be off the job. Melisandre was self-destructive, determined to ignore the growing evidence against her own daughter. And she was quick to fire people—look at Brian, the bodyguard, who had been fired after the incident with the trainer.

Look at Brian—yes, look at him.
He
knew about the notes. He knew about Silas. He could be the source. What had been his full name? Hell, Silas could be the source. Or Harmony.

They had all signed that nondisclosure pact, Tess remembered. The one Melisandre had wanted her to sign, and Tess had refused. And Tess was the one who kept finding links to Alanna. That had to be her real crime. Not talking to the press, but getting too close to the truth.

Ruby was not supposed to be on her computer after ten. But that had been her father’s rule. Felicia didn’t care. Felicia didn’t care about her at all. Felicia wanted to be her guardian just because of the money. Alanna said it didn’t matter who their guardian was. She was out of here in a year. Well, it mattered to Ruby. She had three more years until she was eighteen.

She read the story again. How could her mother not have recognized the source of those notes? True, taken out of context, read one at a time, they might not jar one’s memories. But Ruby recognized them instantly. The familiar sentences washed over her as a series of colors—green, blue, yellow. The light slanting through the window, a soft rug underfoot. She always thought she had no memories of those times, yet here one was, at last. For so long, she had yearned to remember something, anything, from the before time.

Now she had, and it was the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

What should she do? What was right? What was best for everyone? Who deserved her loyalty? She wished she could unknow things. People joked about bleaching their brains all the time now. If only that were possible. She had been warned, eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves. But it wasn’t what she knew about herself that was the problem.

Ruby wished she were a baby again. She would be the sweetest baby in the world, a child so sweet and lovable that her parents wouldn’t dare to have another one because the new baby could never be as wonderful as she was. They would still live in the yellow-brick house, just the four of them. No Isadora, no Felicia. No Joey, either, but so it goes. She would trade her little brother to have her family back, intact. But all she kept doing was splintering it. She had lost a sister, a father. Now she was going to lose someone else, but who would it be? There was no end to it, no end.

Tess sat at Golden West, looking at the
Beacon-Light
, rereading the story she had read online the night before. On this, her seventh or eighth read, it was, to her eyes, relatively innocuous. Yes, it included the incident with Silas, which wasn’t good for Melisandre’s defense. Not calling 911, seeking private treatment for him. That did look weird. What if the same thing had happened with Stephen? Say he slipped and went through the doors and Melisandre had this bizarre PTSD reaction, then panicked because she realized no one would believe her, so she slipped away. Given the nature of his injury, he would have died very quickly.

But the article also mentioned the notes, and that seemed like a plus to Tess. The notes established that someone had been harassing
Melisandre
. That would be another foothold in Tyner’s defense. Someone was stalking her. And it was fair to think the sugar was meant for her. Was it not reasonable to assume that person had gone to her old house and found Stephen there? Okay, it was a coincidence
that almost groaned under its own weight, but defense attorneys were allowed coincidences, given that life was full of them.

Besides, Tess felt a reluctant sisterhood with anyone on the receiving end of cryptic, vaguely sinister notes.

Tyner knew there was no way Tess was the “source close to Melisandre Harris Dawes,” as the article had it. But the lady was on a tear. And Tyner had to placate Melisandre—
Missy
—for now. And while Tess should have been relieved to be relieved of the job, instead she was incensed. She had already raged to Tyner, then Crow. Now it was her best friend’s turn to hear her lament.

“No spawn?” Whitney asked when she arrived.

“Daddy took over at ten,” Tess said. Then, in that kind of confessional gush that one’s best friends can inspire: “He’s better with her than I am. He never loses his patience.”

“You’re too hard on yourself,” Whitney said. Surprising. Whitney Talbot, who had probably been voted least likely to spawn by her graduating class at Roland Park Country School, was not celebrated for her empathy. But in the past few years she had been softening. No, not softening, but smoothing out a little. Supervising her family’s foundation had introduced a vein of kindness into this superhuman creature, who found failure incomprehensible. Certainly, being rich and intelligent was no guarantee of success, but Whitney honestly did not understand how anyone who tried could end up failing. It had been bizarrely comforting, when Tess Monaghan was waist-deep in failure, that Whitney refused to believe Tess couldn’t turn things around. Comforting and frustrating. The concept of “too hard” on oneself was not something Whitney would have expressed even two or three years ago. She was the friend who told you to stop whining, slap on a helmet, and get into the game. And yes, she said “helmet,” not big-girl panties.

Still, Tess felt tentative talking about her struggles with motherhood to her happily childless friend. “No one tells you that it’s, well, kind of boring. Being a mom.”

“Did you expect to be in thrall all the time?”

“I didn’t know what to expect. Maybe I should have read
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
.” Tess, ordered on bed rest, had read novels while pregnant. She had tried to read a couple of baby manuals but decided she would rather read classic horror novels or watch horror films in which aliens burst out of orifices that bore an uncanny resemblance to Georgia O’Keeffe paintings. At least Shirley Jackson was honest about her desire to scare the piss out of people. The baby books claimed to be about joy and anticipation but specialized in fear and anxiety.

“My parents are going to his funeral,” Whitney said. “Dawes, I mean.” Now that was the old Whitney, changing the subject when she became bored.

“When is it?” Tess asked.

“Not until Sunday.”

“WASPs,” Tess said.

“I know.”

Their food came, and Whitney picked at her Elvis, pancakes served with peanut butter and bananas. Food did not really interest her. Tess, who had chosen an abstemious egg-white omelet, eyed Whitney’s plate with undisguised yearning, then summoned the waitress and asked for a side of
sopapillas
.

“Back to Melisandre.
We
know you’re not the source,” Whitney said. “It’s got to be the bodyguard, don’t you think? She fired him. She’s quick to do that, isn’t she? She likes to fire people. Why not make an anonymous call to the newspaper if you’re that guy?”

“Or Harmony. Yet Harmony is the one who’s given us the best leg up in defending Melisandre, by providing that videotape that shows her having a perfectly civilized exchange with Stephen. Well, not
us
, not anymore. But as long as Melisandre refuses to use the information about Alanna—no, I can’t see Harmony doing it. The classy thumb sucker of a film she envisioned is now just one big Nancy Grace three-ring circus. That’s why she quit. Doesn’t matter if the
charges against Melisandre are dropped and Alanna is charged. It won’t save the film. Besides, the source didn’t mention Alanna, or her boyfriend. The source had the contents of the notes and the incident with Silas. Who else knows about that?”

“The person who wrote the notes, and the person who put the date rape drug in the sugar bowl. That person knows. Will the reporter at least confirm that you didn’t tip him off? He could do that, ethically. Tell Melisandre you’re not the source, but not reveal who the source is.”

“Sandy called him for me,” Tess said. “He said he couldn’t help me even if he wanted to, because he doesn’t know his source. He received a letter at the paper, then played that game where you call someone and say, ‘So, will I be wrong if …’ Melisandre, for all her sophistication, got took. She thought she bluffed him, but she was wrong. She ended up confirming everything in the letter. On the record, yet. Oh, well, there wasn’t that much for me to do, anyway. I’m not allowed to talk to Alanna or Ruby.”

“Allowed? If you’re fired, I guess you can do whatever you like, right? Meanwhile, if the source was anonymous, that makes it more likely it’s someone who signed a nondisclosure statement, no?”

Tess smiled. “I knew there was a reason I have you in my life, Talbot.”

“Yeah, now remind me why I have you in mine.”

“To eat your leftovers,” Tess said, spearing a triangle of Whitney’s barely touched pancakes.