Hush Hush (8 page)

Tess Monaghan believed no one should speak on a phone while driving a car, no matter what device was used. Hands-free, headsets, earpieces, Bluetooth—all of it took one out of driving. It was unsafe at any speed.

Still, she did it all the time.

She supposed that made her a hypocrite. And a really crappy mother, too, as she did it even when Carla Scout was with her. But Tyner had called her three times this morning and she had ignored the first two. When his number flashed in the dashboard caller ID a third time, she decided it must be urgent, possibly even personal.

“What’s up?”

“There was an incident with Melisandre this morning. It appears
that someone tried to drug her or poison her—we’re unsure. At any rate, her trainer drank something while in her apartment and he went into a seizure. He’s going to be okay, but it was clearly meant for Missy.”

That nickname again.

“Why ‘clearly’?”

“Remember, Melisandre told us the notes she’s been receiving are from someone who knows things about her past, things that not everyone knows. Well, she was a sugar fiend once. Used to pour tablespoons of sugar into her coffee, over her morning Rice Krispies. Remember, I was surprised that she didn’t want the sweets at breakfast?”

Tess remembered. She almost drove through a red light, thinking about how well Tyner knew Melisandre’s breakfast habits.

“So?”

“We think someone doctored her sugar. Her trainer used it, she didn’t. Could have been the tea, which was loose, but the sugar seems more likely, as it was in a bowl. The doctor thinks it could have been a large helping of one of the date rape drugs—they don’t normally see seizures from those, but it can happen.”

“What do the police think?”

Did paraplegics squirm? There was a squirm in Tyner’s long pause, Tess was sure of it.

“She didn’t call the police. The boy stabilized quickly, was breathing and alert within minutes. Melisandre chose to take him by private ambulance to her doctor. She goes to one of those boutique practices, one that’s available to its clients around the clock.”

Of course she does
.

“The doctor attended to the boy as quickly as any ER would have,” Tyner added. “Faster. Melisandre made the right choice.”

“So why are you calling me? Sandy and I are not responsible for the security in her current location.”

“She wants to move as soon as possible. She doesn’t want to spend another night in the Four Seasons.”

“Then tell her to call a moving company. Anyone but Mayflower, though. Then people in this town really won’t be able to forgive her.” Mayflower had been the company that had moved the Colts out of town in the dead of a snowy night. Thirty years and two Super Bowl victories later for the Ravens, Baltimoreans still carried a grudge against the moving company that had taken their beloved Colts away.

“I’m on top of those details, thank you very much. But I want you to go over to the Four Seasons, make some discreet inquiries. We need to figure out who had access to Melisandre’s suite.”

“Isn’t that Brian’s job?”

“It was. She fired Brian. Perhaps a little impetuous and unfair, but that’s Missy. She will not tolerate failure.”

Missy
.

“This could have happened in the plant where the sugar was packaged. It could have happened anywhere. Did the hotel provide the sugar? Did Melisandre shop for her own groceries? The opportunities for contamination are endless, from the store to the delivery, to whoever put it in a bowl to begin with. And who still puts sugar in a bowl, anyway? Why so fancy?”

“Melisandre was raised in a household where things were done in a certain way. Her father was from here, but her mother was British and Melisandre was born in London. Certain rituals were observed.”

Again, Tess was irked by this intimate knowledge. Sure, it was something any friend could know. And it wasn’t as though Tyner was a virgin when he married her aunt a few years ago. Her fabulous, gorgeous aunt, who was much too good for him. But Tess’s preferred narrative about her aunt and Tyner was that both were sexual adventurers who had discovered true love with each other. Okay, Tyner
and Melisandre had dated back in the day. Tyner had dated
everyone
, back in the day. But family facts, breakfast knowledge—you couldn’t say it was TMI, but it was more “I” than Tess needed.

“She’s terrified, Tess. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He disconnected without saying good-bye. Presumably to go tend to poor little Melisandre.
Missy
.

Tess turned to Sandy, riding shotgun. Oh, yes, that was the other thing she hated about taking phone calls in the car: Sandy had heard every word of the conversation, through the dash. She always forgot to tell callers when someone was listening, although she knew that was the proper etiquette.

“What do you think?” she asked him.

“Weird. She’s a puzzler.”

“Like all women?”

“No. On an individual basis. I understand a lot of women. You, for example.”

“The other day you said you never knew what I was going to say next.”

“I never know what you’re going to
say
, but your feelings are all but written on your big mick forehead. I just don’t get her agenda, which means I don’t get
our
agenda. When I was a murder police, I always knew the objective. Find out who did what. Get it cold. Pass it on to the state’s attorney, and if some defense attorney wanted to say, Well, Pinky killed Peaches because his mother didn’t love him, fine with me. Not part of my job.”

“So what’s going on here?”

“Got me.” Sandy’s shrug implied something else.

“You have an opinion, though.”

“No. I specialize in not having opinions. But—”

“But what?”

“Don’t lose sight of the fact that no one had more chances to doctor her guy’s drink than she did. Doesn’t mean she did it. But the obvious answer …”

Is the obvious answer
. Tess knew that was an article of faith in Sandy’s old job.

“Okay, then why?”

“Not my favorite question, as you know.”

“Possibly mine. As you know.”

“Well, they’re making a movie about her, right? Maybe she just needed something to happen.”

“Tyner said she’s terrified. That’s hard to fake.”

Another shrug. It wasn’t a who-knows shrug. If anything, it seemed to indicate a world of knowledge that Sandy didn’t want to share.

“Guy had a seizure. If she’s responsible, then she’s worried that she’s gone too far.”

Tess chewed on that. Chewed on it almost literally, absentmindedly grabbing a pen from the pocket between the seats, putting it in her mouth, and gnawing on the top.

“I see you doing that and I think two things,” Sandy said. “One is that, one day, I’m going to have to give you the Heimlich.”

“And the second thing?”

“I never want to borrow a pen from you.”

“I feel like there’s a third thing you want to tell me.”

Sandy grabbed the handle above his seat. He claimed Tess’s driving made him nervous. “Unfinished business here. She didn’t hire you because you’re the best of the best of the best. Sorry—but you said it first, security isn’t our
bailiwick
.” He was clearly proud of himself for remembering that word. “So what do you want to do?”

She wanted to finish the work as contracted and be free from Melisandre Harris Dawes. But visions of sugarplums—food, clothing, braces, college tuition—danced in her head. A visit to the Four Seasons meant more billable hours.

“Is it okay if I drop you at the hotel and let you approach management alone? This is going to be delicate and you still have your cop gravitas. You’ll probably get further than I ever would.”

“Sure. What are you going to do?”

“I thought I’d go to the boathouse. I need to think, and I think best on the water.”

“Fine with me. But I thought you said you couldn’t go back on the water until April, that it was too cold to row yet.”

“All the serious rowers get back on the water by March. I’m just not serious anymore.”

Tess retrieved her shell from the rack at the boathouse. Rowing technology had come a ways since her time as a mediocre college rower, and she now had a shell that was extremely light, yet hadn’t killed her bank account. Workout clothes were different, too, concocted of magic fibers that wicked moisture away and kept warmth in or, depending on the weather, wicked moisture away and let the warmth out. The magic of Under Armour. Like a lot of native Baltimoreans, Tess was amazed when anything from her hometown became a national phenomenon. Yet there was Under Armour’s headquarters on her rowing route, a thriving hive of activity where Procter & Gamble had turned out Ivory, Tide, Dawn, and Cascade. Locust Point, a working-class neighborhood once, was making a move on hip and trendy. It was even the site of a couple of swank condo developments, including 13 Stories, Melisandre’s new home.

But for everything that had changed about Tess’s rowing routine, one thing remained constant. Tess went to the water to think. Or, more precisely,
not
to think, which was when solutions came to her. Today, her body was a little stiff from winter; she never worked out as much as she intended to over the cold-weather months, not since Carla Scout’s arrival. Ah, well, she wasn’t even forty. She could return to her peak shape with a little effort, not that her peak was that formidable. More like a Maryland mountain, certainly nothing you’d find out west. Not that Tess had ever been out west. She had barely left her home state. She had never traveled abroad. She could probably count on her fingers the number of times she had been on an airplane.

How had this happened? No one
planned
to be a boring stick-in-the-mud. But in her twenties, working as a reporter, Tess had had almost no money and very little vacation time. And then she had had all the time in the world—and zero money, because she had been laid off. Circumstances had thrown her into her PI gig, and she was good at it, even if the local newspaper, the
Beacon-Light
, had hung that stupid moniker, the Accidental Detective, on her. Crow had said that article was practically a blueprint for stalking.

Then she became an accidental mom. Soon, Tess supposed, she would be an accidental spouse, assuming she and Crow ever found time to get the license, go to the courthouse. But there was never time.

Money. Time. The first was theoretically infinite. Tess had always embraced the wisdom of Mr. Bernstein in
Citizen Kane
: It’s not hard to make a lot of money, if all you want to do is make a lot of money. But the pursuit of money blinded one to the finite nature of time. There was no truer democracy than time. Everyone got twenty-four hours in a day. But, like that game show with the briefcases full of cash, the one that Tess never got the hang of despite having watched it compulsively while being on bed rest during her pregnancy, no one knew how many of those days they were going to bank. So how did you value your hours? Tess wanted Melisandre’s money—and felt dirty for wanting it. Because Sandy was right. Melisandre hadn’t hired Tess because she was Baltimore’s Gavin de Becker, the best of the best of the best. Melisandre wanted Tess because she provided a connection to Tyner. Why? What was the unfinished business between them? Why couldn’t Melisandre just stalk Tyner on Facebook and leave Tess out of it?

The day was cold, typical of this wretched winter, and Tess’s stiffening fingers forced her to turn back early. Walking her shell into the boathouse, she remembered how shocked everyone here had been when Melisandre’s madness had brushed up against this close-knit
world. Stephen Dawes had rowed with a private club, competed in all the local races, some regional ones. He never came back to the boathouse after that day, and who could blame him? Melisandre wasn’t really part of the community, except as Stephen’s wife. Tess didn’t even recall seeing her around, back in the day—and Melisandre wasn’t a person who would escape notice easily.

Feeling nostalgic for the person she was ten years ago, even though that person had been lonely, broke, and miserable, Tess went to Jimmy’s, her post-workout haunt when she had lived in Fells Point above her aunt’s bookstore. She loved Jimmy’s, but she had stopped going there after that newspaper profile—that Accidental Detective nonsense—had mentioned how she always ordered the same thing for breakfast, a toasted plain bagel. Tess’s monomania was a private quirk, thank you very much. Besides, it was now almost two o’clock, so she had a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich and read the
New York Times
that she grabbed off the front steps every morning and almost never opened. She probably couldn’t pass a grade school current events quiz these days.

She hit the restroom, and her check was waiting on the table for her when she returned.
Okay, okay, I get the hint, you want me out of here
, she thought.
It’s not like people are waiting for tables at this time of day
.

Upon closer examination, however, she saw that it wasn’t her check, just a piece of paper, in the same handwriting as the note on her car, two days earlier.

All it said was “No bagel, Tess? So people are capable of change. Good to know.”

It was a truism in Baltimore that one was forever running into people one knew. Good old Smalltimore. Kitty Monaghan, a native, was used to it.

However, she was not used to seeing her niece walk by her bookshop, head down. Why wouldn’t Tess drop in if she were in the neighborhood? How busy could she be? But then, Tess was a mother now, much less carefree with her time. Not that she complained to her aunt, but Kitty had noticed over the holidays that Tess, never exactly a relaxed person, was more tightly wound than usual.

Kitty went back to the calendar for the store’s upcoming events, more important than ever to her business. Even with an online store that did a booming business with Baltimore expats, Kitty needed to get people into her physical space if she was going to sell books, and that took more than just throwing a writer behind a card table. Kitty had a weekly music series, four different book clubs, and a storytelling hour for children every Saturday. She had created something called the RUI club—Reading Under the Influence—a kind of anti–book club in which women from book clubs came to get title suggestions and free wine, provided by Bin 604, who sent a store employee to conduct themed tastings. It was all working, but it required that
she
work pretty much every day.

When Kitty had opened her bookstore twenty years ago, buoyed by a settlement over her wrongful termination from the city school system, she had thought she was opting for an easy life. Sit in a pretty space surrounded by books, make friends, ring up sales. Even in the beginning, it had been much harder than she had anticipated and there had been a moment—six months in reality, six very long months—when the world economy imploded and she thought she was going to have to surrender. The use of a war term was apt. She was besieged on every flank—by online stores, by the popularity of digital readers. Kitty felt that even the so-called binge watching of television had begun to eat into people’s reading lives. If you could sit down and watch four hours of
Breaking Bad
or
Downton Abbey
in a single night, when did you read? Even there, she took on a can’t-beat-them-join-them mentality. She did events for the novels of Julian Fellowes, leaning hard on the
Downton
connection. Perhaps inevitably, she started a small event called WireCon. It had been a local show, and there were more than two dozen books to date that could be linked to
The Wire
’s writers and stars. The “convention” had started three years ago with seventeen people sitting on folding chairs, pretending they were being called to order by Stringer Bell. Last month, the fourth annual WireCon had sold out the Senator Theatre, and Idris Elba, the actor who played Stringer Bell, had appeared. Along with, in Kitty’s estimation, every African-American woman in Baltimore, and maybe the surrounding counties. Anticipating this audience, she had cannily thrown Zane’s backlist into the mix, figuring the Maryland erotica writer, a trailblazer, was due for a rediscovery in the wake of
Fifty Shades of Grey
. Yes, Kitty was nimble, Kitty was entrepreneurial. To quote the Sondheim song, she had gotten through all of last year and she was still here.

Next year? Yes. The year after that? Harder to say.

Running a business had brought out a competitive part of her nature heretofore unknown to her. The youngest of seven and the only girl, Kitty had never had to compete for anything. She had been born lucky. Her beauty was part of the luck, but far from the whole story. Kitty had led a charmed life. Most of the time. She lived to please herself, which sounded selfish. Yet she believed it made her more generous—with her friends, her family, her husband. Her happiness secure, she could make others happy.

She had always felt that birth order had much to do with her lack of interest in motherhood. Kitty had never wanted children. Correction: Kitty had always
told
people that she never wanted children, which wasn’t exactly the same thing. But if the birth order in her family had been switched, she would have been expected to be a second mother to her brothers. Instead, she was spoiled, although those who loved her insisted she wasn’t spoiled in the least. And everyone loved her. This was a fact about herself that Kitty understood
only externally. She heard it over and over again, accepted it as true according to others, but never felt the reality of it. It was like being told about an interesting mole on the small of her back. “Everyone loves you!” “There’s a mole the shape of the Liberty Bell back there.” Oh, okay. Sure. That’s nice. But she couldn’t
see
it.

Her innate happiness drew people to her, just as it drew people to pick up all those self-help books promising happiness. When she was younger—not young, just younger, in her thirties—this quality had attracted men. Lots of men. Young men, usually, perhaps too young, but she’d had no interest in marriage, so that was good. She really didn’t see the point of marriage if one didn’t want children. Lately, science had been catching up with what Kitty had long suspected: Women had no innate talent for monogamy. They, too, became bored with partners at midlife. But Kitty had married at midlife. She loved Tyner, considered him a soul mate. Like oil and vinegar in the right proportions, they balanced each other. Tyner being the vinegar, of course, but only in the world at large. With Kitty, he was sweet and loving.

She had always assumed he had fallen in love with her because she was not as self-congratulatory as some of his exes. Tyner had cut a great swath through Baltimore. (“Well, rolled,” he liked to say.) But he had been dubious of the women who were drawn to him. He called them
Coming Home
groupies. “I didn’t go to Vietnam. I got hit by a car outside Memorial Stadium. And I’m not Jon Voight. I’m better-looking.”

He was, and aging with far more grace. Kitty glanced at the rack of magazines she felt obligated to carry—there was no real newsstand left in Fells Point—and shuddered at the surgically altered, cosmetically heightened, orthodontically enhanced faces that grinned back. She had read somewhere that one could see the effects of long-term bulimia in a woman’s face, that the chin and cheekbones formed a striking triangle. This month’s cover models—three actresses and
three reality-TV stars—were five for six on the triangle scale.

Kitty wasn’t immune to the desire to look good. She believed in maintenance. She liked facials. She touched up the gray in her auburn hair and availed herself of a professional colorist four times a year in order to restore the subtle balance of shades that had once been her birthright. She shaved her legs, moisturized, watched her weight. Kitty had always felt very good in her own skin.

Then she had met Melisandre Dawes at dinner last week.

The woman was a little younger than she was, but it wasn’t Melisandre’s youth that intimidated Kitty. For one thing, she didn’t look young for her age, not particularly. Melisandre looked every inch the forty-something she was, but in the best possible way. And then there was that hair, which could only be described as an aureole. Her tawny skin. Brown eyes with the light hair, once the Elizabethan ideal of beauty, and the eyes had flecks of gold that complemented the hair. Sure, the hair was highlighted, the skin cultivated, the body buffed, but why not? These ministrations were in service to a world-class beauty.

“So wonderful to meet the woman who tamed our Tyner,” Melisandre had said, and it felt as if she were leaning down from a great height, although she was no taller than Tess and certainly less broad, and Tess never made Kitty feel this small. Maybe it was that familiar possessive,
our
Tyner. Kitty had not thought of Tyner as belonging to anyone but her. To whom did
our
refer? Kitty and Melisandre? Or the community of women in Tyner’s past?

They had met at Cinghiale, in a private room, for Melisandre’s “security.” Kitty had thought such caution over the top at the time, although this morning’s events had proven her wrong, she guessed. She had said as much to Tyner, after Melisandre called this morning. They had been having a lovely lie-in, a perk of self-employment. Kitty may have had to work every day, but she could arrange the schedule so someone else opened.

“I guess I was wrong,” Kitty said. “About her security issues being overblown.”

“You
guess
?” Tyner was almost never sarcastic with her. With others, yes, but not with her. He hurried through his morning routines, keen to go take care of the shaken Melisandre. Kitty worried this was a harbinger of things to come. Melisandre, for all her seeming confidence, had no problem leaning on others.

Whereas Kitty was self-sufficient. She had never lived with a man before Tyner, never wanted to. Technically, she had been engaged, for all of a red-hot minute, but that was kid stuff. They hadn’t been serious.

Well,
she
had never been serious. Who could be serious about getting married at seventeen?

But he had been. Paul. She wondered what had happened to him. The modern thing would be to look him up on Facebook, but Kitty wasn’t on Facebook. The store had a Twitter account and a Facebook page, maintained by one of her employees, although Kitty wasn’t quite sure she approved. It seemed strange, reaching out to people through computers and phones to lure them into a bookstore. In the battle for people’s eyes, computers and phones were more competition.

Then again, her single most successful signing of the year to date was for a blogger turned memoirist with a huge Twitter following, so maybe there was something to it.

She glanced at the clock in the upper right hand corner of her computer screen. Almost three. Tyner hadn’t checked in since he left this morning. He didn’t, usually. It didn’t bother her. Usually. She thought again about Melisandre, the dinner. People
jumped
to do things for her. Men and women. They couldn’t have known, Kitty thought. If they had known what she had done, they wouldn’t find her charismatic. No one was charming and beautiful enough to transcend that story. Yet Tyner knew and he didn’t care. Ah, but Tyner had known her before all this happened.
We dated
, he’d told Kitty.
No big deal
. Kitty had laughed. “One of the cast of thousands, eh?”

But Melisandre had let it slip, during dinner, that she had broken up with Tyner only because he made it clear he had no interest in marriage or fatherhood.

Or was it a slip?

Another advantage of being the boss was that Kitty didn’t have to close most days, although she had always worked the last shift on Saturdays so she could go over the week’s receipts. She went upstairs to change and take down her hair. In her younger days, Kitty had favored a vintage look verging on costume, but now she wore simple, timeless clothing. Still vintage, but the more expensive kind, found in consignment shops instead of church rummage sales. She overdressed, perhaps, for the role of a bookstore owner, but she liked her tailored black dresses, which she paired with old jewelry—Bakelite bracelets, Chanel pins. Dressing for work, she often thought of dowdy Mildred Pierce, her attempt to create a fancy uniform for herself at her restaurant, only to look a little odd and wrong. Kitty never looked odd or wrong. There were some who said she was more beautiful than ever. Tess’s Crow, for example, who had once worked in Kitty’s store, and had nursed a little crush on her before falling for Tess. Did her employees still get crushes on her? She hadn’t stopped to think about that for a long time. She paused, facing the mirror, hands holding the ends of a distinctive choker, a chalky white number that contrasted beautifully with the black dress’s neckline, but also looked like a ghastly fake smile.

She put on an apron—no role playing here, it was just good sense to protect a dry-clean-only dress from grease and splatter—and made sure that dinner was one that Tyner would like. Pork tenderloin, roasted vegetables. They usually ate at eight, then spent the evenings in companionable silence, reading for work. They also had a secret habit—not a guilty one, but a secret one, key distinction—of watching
Mary Tyler Moore
reruns on Netflix. Tyner laughed so hard during these shows. Although Tyner was more of a barker than a laugher,
coughing up a single harsh syllable of approval when he found something funny. Kitty had worked out recently that
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
had gone off the air not long before Tyner’s accident. Did he laugh because it was funny or because it reminded him of a time when he’d laughed more freely?

At 7:45, Tyner called.

“I lost so much time today, dealing with Melisandre, the hotel, the expedited move. She forgets that she’s not my only client. And I’m in a good rhythm, here in the office. If I leave now, I’ll just disrupt the flow of what I’m doing. Would you mind terribly if I work for a few more hours?”

“Of course not,” she said quickly. She would not nag. She would not remonstrate. Plus, he sounded genuinely put-upon, harried. He did not enjoy the demands Melisandre put on him. He couldn’t say no to her.
Why couldn’t he say no to her?
Kitty ate her share of the supper she had prepared and put the rest away on the lower shelves of the refrigerator, so Tyner could reach and reheat them. She changed out of the dress that no one had seen her in and put on a nightgown and a kimono she had owned forever. She curled up in her usual spot on the sofa, but she enjoyed television only when she could watch with someone else. There was nothing to do but read a book. Which, in the life of a bookseller, meant reading galleys for the next season. She settled in with a sigh, plucked one from the pile, and started in. She fell asleep on page 79—at least, that was where she found the book, spine spread, lying on the floor when she awakened. It was 11:30.

And she was still alone.