Oh shit, she thought, what the hell is going on here? As the pieces of the puzzle began falling into place, her phone rang. It was Olivia.
Olivia arrived home from yoga eager to relieve the babysitter—if she could just find her stupid keys. Her plan was to spend the beautiful Sunday afternoon in the park with Simon. Getting in and out of the car was always a juggling act for new moms, but Olivia had more baggage than most—on every level imaginable. First, her hypochondria forced her to travel with her version of a go bag, which hung across her body, heavy with nearly the entirety of a medicine cabinet: Advil, Pepto-Bismol, a thermometer, Band-Aids, small umbrella, ankle braces, itch cream, and bug spray, to name but a few items. Today she also balanced her yoga bag full of smelly clothing while she tried not to spill her aprés-yoga skinny chai latte as she struggled to keep her yoga mat pinched under her armpit.
“Damn. Did I leave my keys in the car again?” she mumbled.
Olivia walked up to the porch of the house that was soon to be hers—once she’d successfully sued her estranged mother for trying to rob her of her inheritance. That her mother was clearly mentally ill did nothing to ease Olivia’s pain, or allow her any empathy. Every time she found some peace in her life, the evil witch would swoop in and sabotage her attempts at normalcy.
Olivia and her mother had never been close. When Olivia was seven years old, her mother left the family, moving from Greenwich to L.A. to become an actress. Some people manifest their family stress by being angry and bitter. But not Olivia. Her stress came out in quirks, like her echolalia. Though brilliantly book-smart, she came off to most as a total ditz. She was forgetful, silly, and disorganized. Her great secret was how absurdly intelligent she was.
When her father passed, it was only natural that he had left the house to her with no stipulations. She’d been the apple of his eye, and he’d endured a lifetime of guilt for what he saw as her insufficient upbringing. But, of course, despite not having communicated with her opportunistic, vengeful mother for nearly twenty years, Olivia wasn’t surprised that her father’s death would stir a sudden interest. The case, as far as her lawyers were concerned, was a no-brainer, but Olivia would put nothing past her mother.
Upon moving to California when Olivia was a child, and changing her name to Sunshine, the teenage model—wannabe was dissatisfied with her baby-boomer status—hippies and love children notwithstanding. Sunshine intended to be the next Twiggy. It seemed to be lost on her that Twiggy had character, personality, and charisma, which drew people to her. Sunshine believed she would be creating the “ray of sunshine” the modeling industry was waiting for.
Sunshine’s real obsession was with Burt Reynolds, and she was sure she was meant to be his costar. She followed him for nearly a decade, landing nothing more than background work in a few of his films and a random shampoo commercial as the before girl. Olivia had heard rumors that her mother tried to get into the porn industry but couldn’t even succeed there. How mortifying. Galvanized by the fame and celebrity all around her, Sunshine pursued her crazy dream relentlessly, constantly assuring Olivia by postcard that one day she’d be proud to see her mother on the silver screen. But she only succeeded in becoming increasingly pathetic in Olivia’s eyes. And Sunshine remained angry and unhappy, despite the oodles of money her “lowly accountant husband” made and by which her deluded fantasies were enabled. Olivia’s father, out of a sense of duty, continued to support Sunshine all those years, most likely in the hope that she would come to her senses and return home to her loving family.
Olivia and her brother, Finn, were raised by their faithful father, basically on his own, in this very house; and if she could beat her mother in court, the house would finally be hers. Unfortunately, this wasn’t going to be the first time she’d seen Sunshine from a witness box.
At seventeen, just a few months before her eighteenth birthday, when her trust fund would kick in, Olivia received a startling letter from her mother’s attorney. It seemed that mommy dearest was suing to be executor of her trust, claiming that Olivia’s father was not of sound mind when he drew up his intentions. In court she claimed that Olivia had told her over the phone that she’d smoked pot and was therefore a drug addict who would use that money for her “repulsive habit.” The overwhelming irony of this claim was not lost on those who’d gossiped that Sunshine was famous in L.A. for offering movie stars lines of cocaine to be snorted off her breasts and various other areas of her body. Olivia’s mother fought ferociously in the courtroom until a sympathetic, and aware, local magistrate dismissed the case outright and ruled that the trust would become Olivia’s on her eighteenth birthday just as her father wished. Soon after this, her echolalia kicked in.
She managed her affliction with a prescription medication called clonidine. Echolalia didn’t keep her from much in life, but Olivia analyzed scientific data for an environmental organization funded by the government. It was an intense job, and she was asked to speak all over the world on the organization’s findings. Given the stress of her work, it was only a matter of time before symptoms emerged.
On the day she knew she’d have to quit, she was in China, a country with one of the few scientific communities that truly appreciated the importance of her work; this, of course, made her visit all the more exciting but also incredibly stressful. When she got up to give her talk to a room jammed full of Chinese geologists and their interpreters, someone in the back, presumably speaking to a colleague, loudly and rather remarkably uttered, “CHAAANG!”—and that was it. The jet lag, her performance anxiety, the moment caused a compulsion that she simply could not suppress. She abruptly excused herself, sprinted to the ladies’ room, and repeated “CHAAANG” loudly in the small, dingy stall several times, utterly horrified despite the fact that no one was there to hear her. Compulsion passed, she straightened her suit and returned to the meeting; she was so mortified that she desperately hoped everyone thought she’d had a severe bout of diarrhea. Thank god she’d removed her lapel mic.
Now, on a leave of absence, she had returned to Connecticut just in time for the passing of her father and the hellish new court battle with her maniac of a mother.
Olivia looked up from her front seat after finding her keys still in the ignition, surprised by the presence of a slightly hulking man she had never seen before, holding something she was getting used to seeing: a large manila envelope. Assuming he was an agent from her mother’s attorney or yet another process server, she said, “What does that horrible mother of mine want this time?”
“I don’t know your mother, Miss Barnes, but I suggest you read this very carefully,” the creepy looking man said, in a gruff voice with a hint of an accent. Eastern European? Russian? He wasn’t quite Boris and Natashaesque but reminded her of some of the bad guys at the port in season two of The Wire. He had more hair in his mustache than the slicked-back mess on his head, and he wore a light brown, blazer-style leather jacket, slightly darker than his tan slacks.
“Aren’t you supposed to say ‘You’ve been served’? Are you new at this?” Olivia replied.
The creepy man then stepped up very close to Olivia, scaring her just a little, which seemed to be his intention. “If I were you, I would take seriously this papers.” He mispronounced the word seeeeriously in a way that let Olivia know he was not a process server but something much more sinister.
Olivia felt a chill run down her spine. “Okay,” she whispered as if she could barely get the word out and watched the man walk down her driveway to a dark Lincoln Town Car. In any other neighborhood, a waiting limousine would be an unusual sight, but in Greenwich it was beneath notice.
“Oh, my god! Coco was right.” Olivia dropped everything she was holding and ripped open the envelope. Inside were an eviction notice and an official letter from the surrogate court stating that while the house was in probate it was the property of the decedent’s next of kin, which, according to this document, was her mother, Sunshine. Olivia ran inside to call Coco.
&nb
sp; At the same moment, CJ arrived home from yoga with no idea that his three cohorts were now in three separate states of confusion; nor did he know that his world was also about to fall apart. Nanny was in the family room waiting for him to come home.
“Scubu…. you home, son? I inda television room,” she said in her thick Jamaican accent.
“Yes, Nanny, it’s me,” CJ replied as he walked into the room. “I picked up your medicine. It’s on the kitchen counter, and you have a doctor’s appointment Thursday at eight in the morning. I’ll take you and go into work late that day, don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried, child, you a good son. Oh, Scubu, there’s dat envelope come for you today,” she said nervously.
CJ opened the envelope like it was no big deal, but in his heart he suspected it might be. In an instant he noticed it had no return address, just his name. But what really caught his eye was the fact that it was not addressed to CJ but used his full name, Charlton Jeffre Skoda. Nobody called him that. He nervously opened the envelope and went white as a sheet at what he saw inside.
“Dat man come to the door, I seen ’im before, he no good. I tell him so,” she said. “I worry you in big trouble.”
“Nanny, you spoke to the man? Did he tell you what was in this envelope?” CJ was now incredibly worried.
“No, but ’im notta nice man. I ask whatta goin on and ’im tell me to make sure you see this as soon as you get ’ome. What’s the matter, Scubu?”
“I can’t tell you, Nanny,” he said apologetically. “I’d like to, but I can’t.”
“You tell me everyting, pleeze, boy,” she scoffed.
“I’m sorry, I just can’t,” he said again.
“Dat mayor tryin’ to have some fun wit you?” she asked.
“The mayor? Why did you say the mayor?” Now he was alarmed. What did she know? She always knew everything, but there was no way she could know what they’d seen last night. He hadn’t told a soul.
“That man, him work for the mayor, I see them together in town,” she said.
“The man who brought this envelope? He works for the mayor? Are you sure?” CJ said, seriously panicking now.
“Aye,” Nanny said. CJ kissed her and ran out of the house. Where he was going, he didn’t quite know.
Olivia arrived at Coco’s house visibly shaken. She was uncomfortable with how unraveled she was allowing herself to be in front of near strangers. She wondered if it was okay to let her freak flag fly with someone who, while in the same predicament, seemed to be handling it so much better.
Coco sat at her kitchen table looking across at Olivia, who twirled and untwirled a piece of string around her finger.
“I can’t lose the house, so let’s do whatever the letter says and just go on with our lives,” Olivia said between nervous blinks.
“This letter is all but an admission of guilt. We can’t let him get away with murder! We have to do something! Think about that woman. What if it was you…. or me?” Coco insisted.
“I have a baby to take care of. Why can’t you do it without me?” Olivia thought that having a baby would give her an out.
“This isn’t a negotiation. We’re talking about a criminal—a violent one. He isn’t offering an opportunity for separate deals. If one of us caves, he goes down all the same. He’s blackmailing all of us, collectively. We’re in this together.”
Coco now knew that it was not a practical joke, nor was it a Halloween prank. They had witnessed a murder. The mayor’s letter pretty much confirmed it.
“Holy shit!” Coco surprised herself with her outburst. “Jesus Christ, we saw a friggin’ dead body last night. She’d just been killed!”
“Oh, I’ve seen lots of dead bodies,” Olivia said matter-of-factly and somewhat absently.
“You have? Where?”
“Well, I saw cadavers all the time in grad school. I was going to be a forensic scientist before I switched to geophysics, but I saw my first dead body long before that even. It was at a carnival on the Cape,” Olivia told her.
“Really? Well, that was my first, and I’m hoping that I don’t become somebody else’s first,” Coco said, not really joking.
“Yeah, really. When I was a kid we used to spend summers in Hyannis, and they always had these carnivals in Barnstable County. This one summer when the carnival was shut down for the night, my friends and I hopped the fence by the Tilt-A-Whirl. As we headed toward it, we saw a strange lump on the ground. It looked like a big blue blowup toy, but there was a horrendous smell coming from it. We got closer and saw a woman, clearly dead. We screamed and ran. One of the boys we were with stopped a passing police car and told him what we saw.” Olivia stopped and waited for a reaction.
“Oh no. Was she murdered?” Coco wasn’t all that interested, but she thought Olivia might be making a point. She responded in a way that she felt would satisfy her new friend.
“No, she probably overdosed; in retrospect, she had all the telltale signs,” Olivia said proudly, as if pleased that her forensic schooling had finally proved useful.
As Coco rolled her eyes, her phone rang.
“I’m in my car. Where do you live? I have to come over,” CJ whispered frantically on the other end of the phone.
“Let me guess. An envelope showed up at your house.”
“Shhhhh, stop talking. The phones might be bugged. I’m coming over, where do you live?” he demanded.
“Well, if the phone is bugged, I’m not giving out my address,” Coco joked.
“They already know where you live! My god, woman, where are you?” CJ shouted into the phone.
“Eighty-five Walsh Lane,” she said.
“Okay, I’m a few blocks away, don’t leave,” CJ said.
“Where am I going?” Coco replied flatly, and then, clicking off her phone, she turned to Olivia. “Well, CJ sure has his panties in a bunch. I’m guessing he got an envelope too. He should be here in a few minutes.”
“Do you think the other girl…. Bailey, got one too? She must have,” Olivia said.
“I’d bet money on it. Do you know where she lives or her number?” Coco asked.
“CJ probably knows where she lives; they went to high school together,” Olivia said. “And I think he got her number last night.”
“Right, right,” Coco continued. “Well, I think when he gets here we should call her and the four of us should figure this out together, don’t you?”
“Okay, good plan.”
Just then Coco heard Sam on the staircase and panicked. She hadn’t told him about the night before or why they had received this envelope; when Olivia had called, she’d tucked her letter away and walked into the other room. As far as he knew, it was just another document, and he assumed one of his old partners was messing with him or there’d been some gross clerical error. She wanted desperately to keep him in the dark, to protect him from what she now knew. Okay, think fast, she told herself. Who is Olivia, and why is she here?
In a hushed whisper Coco said, “Olivia, I didn’t tell Sam any of this. Please, just don’t say why you’re here.”
“Sure, what are we going to….” And before Olivia could finish her sentence, Sam entered the kitchen.
“Hi, I’m Olivia. Coco and I are in yoga together.” She tried to remain calm, but calm wasn’t in her toolbox. “You must be Sam. Coco has told me so much about you…. Did I mention we’re in yoga together? At the yoga center. In town.” She was bombing. “Hi, I’m Olivia,” she said, holding out her hand. It was like last night all over again.
“Don’t let me interrupt, I’m just getting a soda. Nice to meet you, Olivia.” Sam shook Olivia’s hand. He looked haggard and worried, and shot Coco a look as if to say, Don’t we have more pressing matters at hand?
The doorbell rang. Coco could see CJ hopping around at her front door like a kid desperately needing to go to the bathroom.
“I’ll get it,” Sam said.
Coco jumped up. “No, no, no. Don’t worry, it’s cool. It’s
for me. Another one of our yoga buddies is here. We’re just, uh, figuring out a weekend for a yoga retreat that, uh, Olivia is helping me put together. You know I’ve been talking about doing that for a while.”
“Oh yeah, right,” Sam said half suspiciously. Coco was definitely acting weird, but Sam had learned, as most significant others do, to just let her be. The last time he’d been suspicious of Coco’s weird behavior it was because she was planning a surprise party for him; so, with their first-date anniversary coming up, Sam thought it best to just play dumb.
“I’ll be up in my office. I’m waiting to hear back from Kor-nacki,” Sam said.
“Okay. Love you,” Coco said over her shoulder as she ran to the door.
She opened the door to a very tense CJ, who burst right in.
“Darling, you were right, oh, my god!” he half whispered, half yelled as he paced in her entryway. “This is bigger than I thought it was, and I am totally freaking out!”
He was flustered but also had never been to Coco’s house, so he wasn’t sure which way to go. He settled for pacing in anxious circles around the foyer.
“Oh, my god, what do we do? And where the hell is your living room? I have to sit down.” CJ was frantic.
Coco led him to the living room, which was in the back of the house by the kitchen, where she picked up Olivia along the way.
“Come in here, you two. Sam won’t be able to hear anything,” Coco assured them.
“Oh, my god, you didn’t tell him? Did they threaten his life? Yours? We have to call the police!” CJ insisted.
“Hang on, hang on! Nobody is calling anybody until we sort all of this out,” Coco said.
She was surprisingly calm on the outside. Inside, she too was a mess, but with two maniacs on her hands she had to become the voice of reason.
“Okay, first off, CJ, what happened? What did you get in your envelope?” Coco needed to know.
The Yoga Club Page 5
