The Nobodies Album (31 page)

I tilt my head toward the floor so he can’t see my face. I close my eyes and concentrate on keeping my breathing regular.

“And then finally Bettina answered the phone. And we talked.”

I look back up at him, feeling a little steadier. “Do you remember any more about that?”

He’s quiet, thinking. “Not much. She was upset—I already knew that. And I apologized a million times and begged her to give me another chance. Also, I remember that it was right after I hung up that I fell down and hit my head. I think I might’ve been unconscious for a while. I don’t know.”

Behind us, in the entryway, the front door opens, and we hear Roland’s voice. “Hello, everyone! Look who I ran into at this wretched dinner party and brought round for a drink.”

Milo and I stand and turn to see Roland walking into the room with Joe. They’re both dressed up, wearing suits: Roland’s is dark and sleek, with a white shirt open at the throat, and Joe’s has a faintly retro cut, accented with a bright tie. I’m not prepared for the tone of the evening to shift so abruptly, and their sudden presence, cheery and glamorous, unsettles me.

“Hi,” I say, my voice a little too loud. “Chloe’s not with you?”

Joe takes off his jacket and throws it over the edge of a chair. “No, we couldn’t get a babysitter. She hates these kind of industry things anyway.”

Joe sits down on a chair next to the couch, and Roland heads toward the bar at the other end of the room. “What can I get everyone?” he asks.

In my mind I’m plotting a murder. I don’t have any idea if it’s the right one, the one that actually happened, but in the early stages of conception, it’s important to reserve judgment and let the story take you where it will.

Chloe hears from Joe that Milo and Bettina are getting married. She’s upset by the news, because she loves Milo or she hates Milo or she doesn’t want any other woman to have a claim on her daughter … something. She goes over to the house with the intention of disrupting things: confronting Milo, or maybe telling Bettina about Lia. But when she arrives, Milo’s not there, the engagement’s off, and Bettina already knows the truth. Bettina’s furious at Chloe, Kathy takes Bettina’s side, and … what? If Chloe’s goal is to cause friction between Milo and Bettina, then what motive does she have for murder, after she learns they’ve already broken up?

No, I don’t have it quite right. Not yet. But I’m not ready to toss it out entirely. I just have to find the details to make it work.

Roland carries glasses, sets down drinks. “So you two had a quiet night in?” he asks.

As I’m answering, Joe stands up suddenly. “Hey, Milo,” he says. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I watch them leave the room, feeling uneasy. I don’t think Joe has looked at me once since he came in.

“I wonder what that’s about,” I say.

Roland shakes his head. “No clue.”

“So the dinner party wasn’t much fun?” I ask.

He makes a face. “Nah, they never are.” He takes a sip of his drink. “I was bragging about you, though.”

I look at him, confused. “What do you mean?”

He smiles. “Told everyone I had a best-selling author staying in my spare room. They were all very impressed.”

I laugh awkwardly; I think I may actually blush. “As well they should be. I’m very impressive.”

He laughs. “Indeed you are. The head of marketing at my record label had heard of you, and that’s saying something.”

I’m considering several possible answers, none of which are as witty as I’d like, when the boys come back in. They both look serious. My smile fades.

“Look, I’ll just ask her, okay?” Milo says to Joe.

“What is it?” I ask.

Milo hands me a couple of sheets of paper. “Joe found this in his house. Chloe says she printed it out from a Web site called FreeMilo.com.”

It’s the fake interview. “I know about this,” I say. “It’s not real. I never said any of these things. I’ve already put a statement up on my Web site saying I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Joe and Milo exchange a look. “That’s what I figured,” Joe says. “But then Chloe said that the two of you had had a lot of time to talk, and that you’d confided in her …” He trails off.

“Confided what? That I did an interview for this Web site?”

“No.” He looks down. “She said she played ‘Traitor in the Backseat’ for you, and you were really affected by it. And you told her a bunch of the things that it says here: that Milo always had a dark side, that he changed a lot after his dad and Rosemary died. And also that you were really upset about Milo’s keeping Lia a secret from you. And that if he could lie about something like that, then maybe he was lying about not killing Bettina.”

“No.” My voice is too loud; the word sounds like a small explosion. “I never said anything like that.” Joe’s staring straight ahead at an empty point in space. Milo’s looking at me, but I can’t tell what he’s thinking.

“Okay,” Roland says, holding up one hand in my direction and one in Joe’s. “Let’s not start throwing around accusations.”

I try to calm down. “Joe,” I say, more softly. “I don’t know why she’d lie, but it’s not true. She did play the song for me in the car—I was just telling Milo how much I liked it—but I never said that I thought Milo was guilty.”

Joe nods, still not looking at me. “Okay,” he says. “Well, maybe it was a misunderstanding.” His voice is skeptical.

“I’m sure that’s all it was,” I say, trying to sound warm. He loves Chloe; of course he’d take her word over mine. I still can’t quite read Milo’s expression, but he’s meeting my eyes intently, and he doesn’t look angry. His eyes narrow slightly, as if he’s trying to figure something out.

“When I was talking to Bettina,” he says slowly, “that last phone call. She was really upset, and she said that Chloe’s version of the story was kind of different from mine. Chloe told Bettina that she’d always wanted to tell her the truth but that I wouldn’t let her.”

I hesitate. “That’s pretty much the way she described the situation to me. That’s not true?”

He shakes his head. “I’m not saying I was dying to tell Bettina I’d cheated on her, but Chloe was kind of the one who convinced me. Once she and Joe were dating, she said that she wanted for all of us to be able to hang out together without Bettina thinking that she had to keep me and Chloe away from each other.”

I look at Joe. His eyes are moving back and forth between the two of us. He looks wary, even a little frightened. Roland’s sitting back in his chair, his expression intense but unreadable.

“Here’s the thing,” Milo says. “When we were talking, right after she told me Chloe had said that and I was telling her it wasn’t true, Bettina said, ‘Hold on, I’m going to go into the other room.’ And I heard someone say something to her in the background. I’m almost positive it was Chloe.”

“She was still there,” I say. “At twelve-thirty. Which is definitely later than what she told the police.”

“And if she overheard the conversation, she knew we were getting back together.”

“Wait,” Joe says, his voice sharp. “What are you talking about?”

“Chloe was at the house with Kathy and Bettina, right? What time did she come home?”

“No.” Joe shakes his head. “She wasn’t at your house
then
, she was there earlier, before you guys went to dinner. Remember, we both came by around six, because you and I were supposed to go over those pictures—you know, for that souvenir thing, for the tour? The program booklet or whatever. We both gave statements about how you guys seemed fine, and there was nothing unusual going on.”

“Yeah,” Milo says, “but Chloe was at the house later, too. She told the police that after we called from the restaurant, she wanted to come over to congratulate us. I’ve got a copy of her statement upstairs, if you want to see it. Remember, I called you around eleven, and you couldn’t come meet me because Lia was asleep and you were the only one home?”

“I know,” Joe says. “But that’s not where she was. She had a meeting with a potential client. Owner of a store who was interested in selling her jewelry. It was a last-minute thing—she checked her phone around nine and saw that this woman had left a voice mail …” He stops to think for a moment, and I see his face fall. “It was right after you called to say you were getting married.”

This is the moment where everything changes. Milo and I look at each other. I’m barely breathing. And there’s the first detail.

Chapter Seventeen

Ending a book is a nerve-racking proposition; at least, it is if you assume you’ll only have one shot at it. So many moments that could come last, but only one of them is right.

The next book I finish, two and a half years from this Saturday night in Roland’s living room, will not be a memoir, and it will not be an extension of anything I’ve written before. By then I will have packed
The Nobodies Album
away gently in a drawer, never to be seen by the world at large, and I’ll have made peace with my many endings, flawed though they may be.

By that time Milo’s case will be over, though it will take almost a year before the charges are dropped. It’s not a simple thing to clear an accused murderer and arrest a different suspect. The next year, and the two years that follow as Chloe awaits trial, will provide an interesting lesson in narrative structure, as the two contradictory stories about what might have happened the night Bettina died become fleshed out in greater detail.

Joe and Chloe’s house will be searched on Sunday morning. While Milo and I tire ourselves out by chasing Lia around Roland’s courtyard, detectives will seize several items, including Chloe’s laptop. A search of the computer’s history will eventually lead them to a password-locked blog containing excerpts of a novel-in-progress—subject matter unimaginative, prose merely competent—about a woman in love with a successful rock singer, who happens to be her boyfriend’s best friend. Police will also learn that three days after the murder, the computer was used to set up a new e-mail account ([email protected]), through which a person claiming to be me corresponded with the webmaster of FreeMilo.com. The clothes that Joe and Kathy remember Chloe wearing that night will never be found, but her car, in spite of obvious attempts at careful cleaning, will turn up traces of Bettina’s blood.

On Sunday afternoon Milo and I will make a trip to the Wave Organ, where police will later find Milo’s blood on a stone, and from there we’ll move outward, retracing the route to Milo’s house, until we come upon a convenience store with a battered vending machine standing outside. Through the dusty, pitted glass, we’ll see the prizes available for a quarter: little plastic bubbles filled with shimmering pink jewels. We’ll also see that across the street from the convenience store, there’s an ATM—an ATM with a security camera, containing a tape that will reveal a shadowy Milo kneeling heavily in front of the machine and digging through his pockets for change at 2:09 a.m., which places his arrival home outside the window the coroner has determined for the time of Bettina’s death.

•  •  •

During those three years I’ll travel back and forth between Boston and San Francisco often. On one of those visits, Milo and I will take an afternoon to drive down to San Jose and visit the Winchester Mystery House, which was supposed to have been our destination the day after we went to Yosemite, all those years ago. It’s an exceptionally strange place, a work of evolving art—never finished, never intended to be—and it’s there that I’ll get the idea for my next novel. I suppose it’s not unclear why this particular tale should appeal to me; sometimes I’m more transparent than I’d like.

The history of the house is this: A woman, heiress to a fortune made from the manufacture of rifles, becomes terribly distraught after she loses her husband and her daughter. She becomes convinced that she’s the victim of a curse, that she’s being haunted by ghosts. That she’s being held responsible for the damage caused by the invention she’s profited from. She believes that if the house she’s building is ever completed, she’ll die.

She hires workers around the clock, every hour of every day for thirty-eight years. A reclusive widow living a solitary life, building room after room, sleeping in a different bed every night in an attempt to confuse the demons. The orders she gives the workers are often nonsensical; it doesn’t matter what they build, as long as they keep building. By the time she dies, the house contains nine hundred doorways. A stairway that goes nowhere. A window in the middle of a floor.

I won’t say how the novel ends, but it begins like this:

People in the town had been speculating for years about what Mrs. Winchester might keep inside her safe: jewels, piles of money, dishes dipped in gold. The day she died, the day that the workers put down their tools, never to complete whatever tasks they were in the middle of, her neighbors were disappointed to learn there was nothing of value inside. Some items of clothing. Clippings from newspapers. And a velvet box holding a lock of a baby’s hair.

These three years are difficult ones for Milo and Joe, who are grieving for interconnected but sometimes conflicting losses. Milo, always wondering if he’ll ever remember the one moment that still eludes him—the trip upstairs in the dark to whisper good night to the woman he thought was asleep, to kiss her forehead and leave a plastic bauble by her bed—isn’t sure he’ll ever forgive Joe for loving Bettina’s murderer. And Joe, perhaps understandably, sometimes wishes it were Milo behind bars instead.

There are times when it seems impossible that any semblance of friendship will remain between them, so it’s perhaps lucky in an unhappy way that they have Lia to bind them together. Lia, heartbroken and afraid; Lia, who will have nightmares for more than a year and who will spend Christmas Eve in a prison visiting room. Lia, the ligament that stretches between them, keeping them from snapping apart completely.

•  •  •

But three years is a long time, and by the time the verdict is read at Chloe’s trial, some good will have come from the bad. Pareidolia will record a new album, one I think is their best yet, though I may not be an impartial judge. Lia, who already has an impressive collection of loving grandmothers—in addition to Joe’s mother, Chloe has both a mom and a stepmother whom we all do our best to get along with—will nevertheless come to call me Nana. And at the party celebrating Milo’s exoneration, Roland and I will find ourselves alone for a moment in the kitchen. It’s there that I’ll look at him and wonder what, exactly, we’ve become to each other. It won’t be anything like the way it was with Mitch; there’s none of the twinning intimacy of lovers who do their growing up together. We’re two people who met already knowing who we were, and that makes it completely new. There in the kitchen, I’ll lean forward to kiss him, and wait to see what happens next.

•  •  •

Back to this night in November of 2010, not yet a week after Bettina’s death, this moment I’ve decided to linger on: After Joe stops talking and a terrible look of understanding crosses his face, Milo will call Sam Zalakis, who will come over, even though it’s late. The five of us—me, Milo, Sam, Roland, and Joe—will be up for most of the night, beginning the job of piecing together our version of the way things might have gone.

It’s not a harmonious process. It’s particularly difficult for Joe, who spends the first half of the night slumped in his chair, looking dazed and ill. After he’s had some time to regain his balance, he joins the conversation with a frantic passion: he argues, he reverses himself, and he rages at the rest of us for believing something he doesn’t yet want to believe. But he stays. And we do our best to take care of him.

Sometime around two a.m. Roland will make tea, and it will finally occur to me to go upstairs and retrieve the sugar bowl that Joe gave me, which we now conclude Chloe took from Roland’s china cabinet after the murder, when she suspected I might come to town. We’ll all watch as Milo takes the note from my hands and looks at it as if it’s something precious. Runs his fingers over the words, as if he’s reading Braille. When he speaks, his voice will be thick and hoarse. “Where did you get this?” he’ll ask. “That’s Bettina’s handwriting.”

Whatever I thought might be important about the note isn’t, or, at least, not that we know of. We’ll never learn when Bettina wrote those words, or what she was referring to, or who she thought was lying. But it’s this clue that’s not a clue, this piece of paper that turns out to have nothing to do with the murder itself, that determines how we’re going to tell Bettina’s story. It’s the starting point for the conversation in which Milo and Roland put Bettina together out of the pieces they have.

Roland will remember a little girl, funny but lonely, who used to leave notes for him to find. Sometimes jokes, sometimes poems. Sometimes things she didn’t want to say out loud. He’ll remember houses she built out of sticks and grass for fairies to live in, and he’ll remember the sad way she waved at him as her mother pulled her away from the courthouse after the judge ordered the paternity test. He’ll remember the two of them playing charades and twenty questions and games of Bettina’s own invention, and he’ll remember that whenever the rules called for players to draw slips of paper, the sugar bowl was pressed into service.

Milo will remember a New Year’s Eve party where he met a pretty girl and midnight seemed to hold more promise than it ever had before. He’ll remember that “family” was an idea neither of them trusted, but that eventually they gave each other a home. He’ll hold on to the hard-won memory that the last words they said to each other were kind ones.

Together they’ll remember that Bettina never lied, and that she didn’t like it when other people did. They’ll remember that “Someone is lying” is a phrase Kathy used when she didn’t want to hear what Bettina had to say.

It’s because of the note in the sugar bowl that I’ll finally start to feel like I know Bettina. It’s how I’ll learn that I would have liked her a great deal.

•  •  •

Back again to this moment in the living room, sitting with Roland and Joe. For now, we don’t know how any of this will end. But Joe says something, and Milo and I turn to look at each other. For the first time, it seems possible that the story might take a different turn.