Hush Hush (5 page)

Tess’s restraint was hard-won, but she managed not to blurt out: “Hello? You killed one of his kids!” Yet Melisandre seemed to know what she was thinking. She had that way of looking deeply into someone’s eyes, but it didn’t promote the confiding feeling that Sandy’s gaze did. Melisandre’s look was probing, challenging. It put Tess in the mind of someone—or some
thing
—in a sci-fi movie, scanning her for weaknesses.

“I think Stephen knows I would never harm Alanna or Ruby. I left them in his care because I convinced myself it was in their best interests. And for ten years, I told myself that lie, every day. In Cape Town, my mother and I became close again, and when she died last year, I realized I had to try, if possible, to have a relationship with my daughters. That’s a profound change. The woman I used to be, the woman to whom Stephen was married, didn’t even like her mother that much. He doesn’t understand why I’ve come back and it unsettles him.”

“Do you think he finds it
unsettling
that you chose to buy an apartment in one of his buildings?”

“I told you—it’s the only one that meets all my criteria.”

Tess let an awkward silence build. She knew this wouldn’t bother Sandy at all. Sandy was great at silences, expert at using them. Nor did Melisandre seem discomfited by the absence of conversation. It was Tyner who blundered in, like a host at a dinner party that was dying a slow, awkward death.

“Do we need to talk about the notes? The ones you’ve been getting at the hotel?”

“Threatening notes?” This was Sandy. Tess tried to look as if she knew what was going on, but this was the first she had heard of something concrete. Tyner had told her this security overview was
primarily to assure Melisandre’s ex that the girls would be safe. Did the ex know about the notes?

“Not exactly,” Melisandre said. “More like taunting ones. The theme, if you could call it that, is that someone is onto me, knows all about me. I didn’t even bother to bring them.”

“Any idea who might be writing them?”

Melisandre shook her head. “Only that it’s someone who knows me, at least a little. Or is very good at research. A few odd facts jump out—my boarding school nickname, Missy, which only a few truly close friends use.”

Yes
, Tess thought. Tyner being one of them.

“That was never in the press,” Melisandre said. “But there are literally dozens of people who know it.”

“Could the notes be written by your ex or his wife?” Sandy asked.

“Stephen and I have a decent relationship, all things considered. The new wife—Well, not to be rude, but I’d be surprised if she’s clever enough. She was his physical trainer, I hear. I wasn’t around, but it’s my understanding that she landed her big fish quite expertly. But not, I think, via the power of the written word.”

An old commercial jingle ran through Tess’s head.
Meow, meow, meow, meow. Meow, meow, meow, meow
.

“Are you sure?” Tess asked.

“Sure of what?”

“Sure that you have a good relationship with your ex?”

Again, that intense, measuring stare. It was like being sized up by a velociraptor. A not very hungry one, because a hungry one would snap you in half, while Melisandre seemed to be deciding whether Tess was even a worthy snack.

“Do you know what I am, Tess?”

“A woman with enough money to make a documentary about herself?”

Tyner looked as if he wanted to bang his head on the table or
throttle Tess, but Melisandre was unruffled by her directness.

“I’m every woman’s worst nightmare. Because whenever a woman kills her child, every other mother—at least, every one who’s honest with herself—has a flash of sympathy. Not empathy. They don’t want to have done it, cannot imagine doing it. But they
know
.”

“I didn’t have a child when you”—Tess faltered, hated herself for showing that chink in her armor, and therefore had to double down on the active voice—“when you killed your child. But I can’t imagine that would ever be my reaction.”

“Wait and see, then,” Melisandre said. “Wait and see. Because it will happen again. It’s never going to stop happening. Filicide has been with us forever.”

“Do you even consider yourself guilty of filicide? You were found not guilty by reason of criminal insanity. You were beyond choices, rational thinking, right?”

Tess thought she had scored a point off Melisandre at last, but the woman’s smile appeared quite genuine. “Now, see? Wouldn’t that have been a lovely exchange to have on film? You’re a marvelous foil, Ms. Monaghan.”

Felicia collapsed at the kitchen table with a glass of green iced tea and her laptop, overwhelmed by how much she needed to do, how little energy she had to do any of it. The house was quiet. At last. Mornings were horrible. Joey was usually up by five, six if Felicia was lucky, and just as he began to calm down, there was the chaos of Stephen and the girls leaving, which seemed to set Joey off. He was still getting up in the middle of the night, too, despite no longer needing to nurse at 2:00 and 4:00
A.M.
Nine months old, sixteen pounds, and he still wasn’t sleeping through the night. Felicia had tried following
the precepts of
The Happiest Baby on the Block
, she really had. Irony of ironies, this former personal trainer was a washout at sleep training. Felicia, who had literally made grown men cry for their own good, could not let her son cry it out for even five seconds.

“Well, if he’s like everyone else in this family, he’ll be out of tears before he’s in kindergarten,” Alanna had said at breakfast this morning, which for her was a cup of black coffee that she never finished. It killed Felicia that an athlete of Alanna’s caliber ate so poorly, but she suspected her stepdaughter’s black coffee was an attempt to provoke her, so she ignored it.

Alanna added: “If he makes it to kindergarten. Not all Dawes children do.”

That was harder to ignore.

Welcome to the Unhappiest Family on the Block. Also the only family on the block, so they were the happiest, the unhappiest, the richest, the poorest. It was the Big House in the Big Woods, a lonely fortress that felt as if it were in the middle of nowhere, although the Beltway hummed with traffic not ten minutes away. It was everything Felicia had ever wanted—a house that she had helped design—and she was miserable.

Felicia had started agitating for a new house the moment she became pregnant. No woman wanted to live in a previous wife’s house under any circumstances, and to live in
that
house with a baby—no thank you. But she never expected that Stephen Dawes, champion of urban living, would choose to move his family to a custom-built house on a private lane, surrounded on three sides by a wooded state park. Trust Stephen to find a parcel of land in the middle of state parkland, yet only twenty-five minutes from downtown. Felicia had imagined something with actual neighbors, shops within walking distance. She argued that she would be in the car all the time, living in a location this remote. Stephen pointed out that she never walked anywhere in Bolton Hill.

Fair enough. But if they had to move—and they did, for space;
the Bolton Hill house was huge but had only three bedrooms—why not another city neighborhood, or at least a more traditional suburb? Stephen glided past those questions when Felicia tried to ask them. The land had been purchased, the plan was under way. He said he would buy Felicia a new car, a hybrid that got better gas mileage. And give Alanna a car, too, so she could be responsible for getting herself and her sister to school. The girls might even change schools. They were in a decent school district here, and it would save a lot of money if the girls chose to attend public school.

The last piece of Stephen’s argument scared Felicia a little. She had never known him to lobby for anything on the grounds of cost. Not that he was foolish with money. And he had always been careful not to spoil the girls. He bought Alanna a used Subaru Outback for her first car, for example. Of course, Alanna managed to get into an accident the first month—not her fault, yet not quite
not
her fault, Felicia suspected—and Stephen was so horrified at the body damage done by this small collision that he replaced the totaled Subaru with a cherry-red Mercedes. Used, but still.

The girls refused to change schools anyway, not that Felicia could blame them. Ruby had been about to start her freshman year when they moved last summer, while Alanna was a junior. It seemed hypocritical of Alanna, who had been complaining about Roland Park Country School for years, to embrace it the moment she was given a chance to transfer, but Alanna was nothing if not perverse. Ruby sided with Alanna. Ruby always did what Alanna wanted.

And even with Alanna driving herself and Ruby to school, mornings were still hell. Stephen always said, “I’ll make sure the girls get off in time, don’t worry, just hang out with Joey.” But there were a thousand questions. Okay, a dozen.
Alanna’s tracksuit?
In the laundry room, on the drying rack.
Ruby says she’s going to someone else’s house after school—did she tell Felicia? Can Felicia pick her up? Because Alanna has practice after school and the other girl’s mother works
.

Stephen was evolved enough that he usually remembered to say:
The other girl’s mother has a
job
, or
works outside the home
. Usually. But he spoke the words as if they were foreign-language phrases he didn’t quite understand. What had he said when Joey was born?
Why not take some time off?
Felicia wondered now if it was because he wanted to save the money that child care would have cost, or if he feared what it would mean to his own day-to-day life if Felicia were working.

Still, it was hard to imagine how she could have kept her job after Joey was born. A personal trainer at Felicia’s level worked long and odd hours. Her day often began as early as 5:00
A.M.
and could run as late as 9:00 or 10:00
P.M.
The kinds of people Felicia trained didn’t go to the gym between nine and five, or even between eight and six, although one or two might try to squeeze a session in during lunch. Her clients worked out in the predawn hours or straggled into the gym at night, having done whatever they needed to do to make the kind of money that made it possible to hire Felicia. In just seven years, she had gone from being a fresh-out-of-college corporate gym trainer to owning her own company, the kind of trainer who ended up on various Best of Baltimore lists. It didn’t hurt that she was sleek and blond and blue-eyed, the epitome of what people think a female trainer should be. Although when Stephen hired her, three years ago, he claimed he had not seen her photograph, simply instructed his assistant to find the city’s best trainer.

Stephen was usually her last appointment of the night, paying for his sessions in advance on the theory that doing so would force him to come no matter how his workday had treated him. “I’m a washout,” he said. “I used to row, but—” He didn’t finish the sentence. Presumably, he assumed that Felicia knew how it had ended, why he avoided the boathouse. But in 2002, Felicia had been in college, and she didn’t remember the story at all. It had sounded vaguely familiar when someone filled her in, and she had pretended she’d known all along; who wants to be the kind of twenty-something who doesn’t
pay attention to such a horrific story? Her ignorance spoke of self-involvement, an insularity beyond Alanna’s. Felicia rationalized that it had been a Baltimore thing, and she was a Western Maryland girl. Her hometown of Cumberland was a world away, more likely to hear the news out of Pittsburgh. At any rate, the only things that Felicia knew about Stephen Dawes when he started working out with her were that he had a lot of money and he was in crappy shape. “I’m a single parent,” he would say. “I need to be around for my kids.” Then, with a truly charming, bashful grin: “I also might start dating again.”

His body snapped back fast, former rower that he was. He supplemented his sessions with Felicia by running in the mornings, going to the occasional yoga class. The pale, saggy client who first came to see her was transformed within months into a trim man with healthy color. He was losing his hair, but in that charmingly wolfish way, in which a widow’s peak remained while the hair on either side receded. The woman that Felicia trained before Stephen began asking her lots of questions about him, lingering to stretch. Felicia did not encourage her dawdling.

To be a personal trainer required one to be impersonal about people’s bodies. One had to be like a doctor; not that there weren’t bad doctors. (Felicia had been felt up by her ENT guy when she was just twenty-three.) Personal relationships were rare, at least among the elite trainers. They weren’t good for business. She had a friend who had ended up in bed with a male client. “I went from getting eighty dollars an hour to boss him around and stretch him a little to getting zero dollars an hour to do everything he wanted,” she quipped.

But as Stephen gradually unburdened himself to Felicia, she had found herself falling in love with him. And it was hard not to be proud of him as her creation, to look at the new and improved Stephen as
hers
. She had to hold her jealousy in check when he discussed his
attempts to reenter the dating pool. Why should some other woman enjoy what Felicia had made? He talked about the ups and downs of dating under the judgmental gaze of his daughters. They disliked everyone automatically. He had tried to involve them in his social life, had asked if they wanted to go over his Match.com selections. They said they couldn’t think of anything they wanted to do less.

This went on for three months or so. Stephen dating, telling Felicia about his dates, usually in a comic fashion. Felicia, who had moved out of her boyfriend’s house a month or so before Stephen began training with her, returned to her ex after he made an earnest pitch. It didn’t work the second time, either. She ended up back on her own, living in a crappy little studio, the best she could do in Baltimore’s tight rental market.

On February 15 two years ago, she met Stephen for a training session in the gym of a new high-rise he had built in Locust Point. She didn’t usually travel to him, but he said he wanted to use the gym there a couple of times, get a feel for it before the big sales push.

“Did you have a good Valentine’s Day?” he asked as he warmed up on the treadmill.

She shrugged. Felicia didn’t tell her clients anywhere near as much as they told her.

“It’s a stupid day,” he said. “So overloaded with expectations. Did you know that florists do a brisk business on the
fifteenth
? All these guys in the doghouse. But the good news is, the price of roses drops. Tells you everything you need to know about the Valentine’s Day economy.”

“I don’t even like roses. I like peonies.”

“You told me that once.”

She had? She didn’t remember that.

“You know what I want to do tonight? I mean, I know you’re supposed to call the shots, but remember when you had me run up and down the stairs, how much I complained. What if we race? To the top?”

“To the top?” The building was thirteen stories. Stephen had told her once that Baltimore, unlike New York, called the thirteenth floor the thirteenth floor, and he loved his hometown for that. He had named this tower 13 Stories; its address was 1313 Locust Point.
When you’ve been as unlucky as I have
, Stephen told her once,
nothing really scares you anymore. Nothing silly, at any rate
.

“Scared?”

“Of course not.”

Even for someone as fit as Felicia had been—and she had been in her prime that night—a race up twelve flights of stairs was taxing. Plus, she felt the pressure to win. It would be embarrassing to be bested by a client.

But she also wanted to win because Stephen was Stephen and this was the only advantage she had over him, being more fit. It was awful enough to have feelings for him. She couldn’t lose the race, too.

He fell back by the third flight or so and, by the time Felicia reached the tenth flight, she couldn’t even hear his footfalls over her own rasping breath, the blood pounding in her ears. It never occurred to her that he had slipped out of the stairwell on the third floor and taken the elevator.

When she burst through the door onto the roof, cold and startlingly bright, Stephen was waiting there. With a bouquet of peonies. In the solarium of the penthouse apartment behind him, a table was set with a white cloth, and a bottle of champagne could be seen in an ice bucket.

“February fourteenth is for suckers,” he said. “Let everyone else have it. We can have February fifteenth. That is, if you’ll consider going out with me.”

They had married on that date a year later, and Joey had been born four months after that. Since then, Felicia’s only client had been Felicia. She had managed, in the tiny pockets of time available to her, to rebuild her body to what it had once been. But she had sold
her business. When, if, she went back to work, she would have to start all over, building a client list, regaining her reputation. Now Stephen worked out with the male trainer who had taken over Felicia’s business. And she had gone from living in a studio apartment to a haunted house in Bolton Hill to this large and—
just say it
—scary, spooky house in the woods, where she spent entire days in which she spoke to no one but grocery clerks and the disembodied voice that took her order at the drive-through Starbucks on Nursery Lane, a big highlight of her day. When Joey was fussy, she put him in his car seat, got a chai tea at the drive-through, and drove around the industrial landscape near the airport, listening to what Stephen called girl music. “You have the musical taste of a teenager,” he told her.

Not that the two teenagers in the house would have anything to do with her. Alanna and Ruby were cagey enough not to be outright rude to her. Stephen would have jumped on bad behavior. They were even loving to Joey, especially Ruby. But they acted as if Felicia didn’t exist. No, as if she were—a
fart
, and they were ignoring her out of kindness, the way a trainer attempts to do in all but the most extreme cases of flatulence.

Stephen, in fact, had let go with the most amazing fart, in terms of sound, when Felicia was stretching him out one night. It couldn’t be ignored. After a split second, he had laughed at himself, and she had joined in. She sometimes thought that was the moment she started falling in love with him. When he farted in her face.

Maybe that wasn’t the best basis on which to begin a relationship.

But, no, be fair: The relationship had begun with a bouquet of peonies, underneath a cold February sky hard with stars. Later, she would hear the story—although not from Stephen—about how he had proposed to his first wife, the ring dangling from the tree, the friends and family hidden inside the boathouse. Stephen’s mother, Glenda, had told Felicia that story, saying dryly: “Stephen always did like to make a production of things.” What was her point? That Felicia
wasn’t so special? Or that a beautiful beginning was no protection against a bad ending? Felicia thought the real issue was that Stephen’s mother, a widow since he was small, didn’t want to share her son with anyone. Glenda Dawes had nothing good to say about Melisandre, and she had given Stephen an earful when she found out he was going to let the girls decide if they should be filmed with her.