Hints of Heloise

by Laura Lippman

  “Right, nurture. It’s like, we used to think it was all about how you were raised, but now we think it’s about what’s in your genes.” A pause, a heartbreaking pause. “Why don’t we have any photographs of my dad?”

  “I’ve never been much of one for taking photos, except of you. Children change. Grown-ups, not so much. Your father lives in my memory.” And in my scars.

  “But he had red hair, like me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he was a businessman, who ran a com-, com-, com—” Bright as Scott is, as many times as they have gone over this story, he stumbles on this word.

  “Commodities exchange.” Oh yes, Val traded in commodities. “I never really understood it. Soybeans. And something to do with pork belly futures.” And the bellies and breasts and thighs and cunts of young women.

  “And he was nice.”

  “So nice.” Especially after he had beaten a girl. He was never nicer.

  “But he had a bad accident.”

  “Very bad.” His gun ran into a young man, and the woman he thought loved him made sure the police got hold of that weapon, and if he ever finds out, he will arrange to have her killed just for spite. Unless he finds out about you. Then he’ll instruct his old friends to kill you in front of her and leave her alive, knowing that will be the truest hell he can fashion.

  “I wish I had even one memory of him.”

  “I do too, baby. I do too.”

  Nature versus nurture. Hector Lewis had two families. Hector Lewis had two daughters. He beat one. She grew up to be a whore. With the other, he spared the rod, blew hot and cold, providing money and love in fitful amounts, and she grew up to be a cold-blooded killer. Just last week, Meghan moved her family to Florida. A fresh start, she said. It was too awkward, she said, living next door to Lillian after all that had happened. Not that Lillian was going to be living there long. Just as the cobbler’s children go barefoot, the Simmons heirs turned out to have hardly any insurance. Except for Lillian, on whom Dan had taken out a huge policy earlier this summer. That information, along with the selected correspondence that Meghan showed the police—the CD, the poetry, but never the Bible verses—and the autopsy findings of some odd, calcified spots in Dan’s brain, probably months old, took care of everything. Dan had lost his mind. His obsession with Meghan, the rape, his plans for Lillian, the disturbing pornography that he had neglected to clear out of his computer before he died—it didn’t exactly add up to anything, but it served the scenario Meghan had created. Unhinged Dan tried to rape Meghan and she killed him. It made as much sense as anything. It certainly made more sense than the truth. And if the police ever looked into the death of Brian Duffy for any reason, Dan would probably take the rap for that, too. Who was going to contradict Meghan? Not Heloise, certainly.

  Nature versus nurture. Heloise glances in the rearview mirror, sees her redheaded son looking out at the passing landscape, thinks of the redheaded man who fathered him, of the grandfather he never knew, of the aunt who has killed two men, of the mother who lies as naturally as breathing.

  “Mom!” Scott’s yell is horrified, embarrassed. “You’re crying.”

  “Sorry, honey. You’re just growing up so fast.”

  Announcement

  Continue reading for an excerpt of Laura Lippman’s new novel, Sunburn, that everyone is raving about.

  “Laura Lippman continues to push the envelope of modern crime-writing. Sunburn, her take on noir, may be her nerviest novel yet.”

  —Harlan Coben

  "A masterful mix from a total pro.”

  —People

  “Cool and twisty.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Sunburn is a dark, gleaming noir gem. Read it.”

  —Gillian Flynn

  “Sunburn delivers one of the year’s most intriguing mysteries.”

  —Associated Press

  “Spellbinding [. . .] this corkscrew of a book, with its psychological insights and sensual charisma, proves once again that Laura Lippman, as a writer, is sui generis.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  An Excerpt from Sunburn

  1

  JUNE 11, 1995

  BELLEVILLE, DELAWARE

  It’s the sunburned shoulders that get him. Pink, peeling. The burn is two days old, he gauges. Earned on Friday, painful to the touch yesterday, today an itchy soreness that’s hard not to keep fingering, probing, as she’s doing right now in an absentminded way. The skin has started sloughing off, soon those narrow shoulders won’t be so tender. Why would a redhead well into her thirties make such a rookie mistake?

  And why is she here, sitting on a barstool, forty-five miles inland, in a town where strangers seldom stop on a Sunday evening? Belleville is the kind of place where people are supposed to pass through and soon they won’t even do that. They’re building a big bypass so the beach traffic won’t have to slow for the speed trap on the old Main Street. He saw the construction vehicles, idle on Sunday, on his way in. Places like this bar-slash-restaurant, the High-Ho, are probably going to lose what little business they have.

  High-Ho. A misprint? Was it supposed to be Heigh-Ho? And if so, was it for the seven dwarfs, heading home from the mines at day’s end, or for the Lone Ranger, riding off into the sunset? Neither one makes much sense for this place.

  Nothing about this makes sense.

  Her shoulders are thin, pointy, hunched up so close to her ears that they make him think of wings. The front of her pink-and-yellow sundress is quite a contrast, full and round. She carries herself as if she doesn’t want to attract any male attention, at least not tonight. On the front, he can’t help noticing as he slides on a barstool, she’s not so pink. The little strip of skin showing above the relatively high-necked dress has only the faintest hint of color. Ditto, her cheeks. It is early June, with a breeze that makes it easy to forget how strong the sun is already. Clearly a modest type, she wears a one-piece, so there’s probably a deep U of red to go with those shoulders. Yesterday, fingerprints pressed there would have left white marks.

  He wonders if she’s meeting someone here, someone who will rub cream into the places she can’t reach. He would be surprised if she is. More surprised if she’s up for leaving with a stranger, not shocked by either scenario. Sure, she gives off a prim vibe, but those are the ones you have to watch out for.

  One thing’s for sure: she’s up to something. His instincts for this stuff can’t be denied.

  He doesn’t go in hard. He’s not that way. Doesn’t have to be, if that doesn’t sound too vain. It’s just a fact: he’s a Ken doll kind of guy, if Ken had a great year-round tan. Tall and muscular with even features, pale eyes, dark hair. Women always assume that Ken wants a Barbie, but he prefers his women thin and a little skittish. In his downtime, he likes to hunt deer. Bow and arrow. He goes to the woods of western Maryland, where he can spend an entire day sitting in a tree, waiting, and he loves it. Tom Petty was wrong about that. The waiting’s not the hardest part. Waiting can be beautiful, lush, full of possibility. When he was a kid, growing up in the Bay Area, his ahead-of-the-curve beat parents put him in this study at Stanford where he was asked to sit in a room with a marshmallow for fifteen minutes. He would get two if he didn’t eat the one while he waited. He had asked, How long do I have to sit here for three? They laughed.

  He didn’t learn until he was in his twenties that he was part of some study that was trying to determine if there’s a correlation between success and a kid’s ability to manage the desire for instant gratification. He still thinks it was unfair that the experiment wasn’t organized in a way that allowed a kid to get three marshmallows for sitting twice as long as anyone else.

  He has left two stools between them, not wanting to crowd her, but he makes sure she hears when he orders a glass of wine. That catches her attention, asking for wine instead of beer in a place like this. That was the idea, catching her attention. She doesn’t speak, but glances sideways when he asks
the blonde behind the bar what kind of wine they serve. He doesn’t break balls over the selection, which is red and white. Literally: “We have red and we have white.” He doesn’t bat an eyelash when they serve him the red cold. Not a sommelier-ordained-sixty-degree cold, but straight-from-the-fridge cold. He takes a sip, summons the barmaid back, and says, oh so politely, “You know what? I’m happy to pay for this, but it’s not to my taste. May I have a beer?” He glances at the taps. “Goose Island?”

  Another quick sideways flick of her eyes, then back to her own drink—amber, rocks. Wherever she’s going tonight, it’s not far from here. He looks into his own drink and says out loud, as if to himself: “What kind of an asshole orders red wine in a tavern in Belleville, Delaware?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, not looking at him. “What kind of an asshole are you?”

  “Garden variety.” Or so his exes—one wife for a span of five years, maybe seven, eight girlfriends, which strikes him as a respectable number for a thirty-eight-year-old man—always told him. “You from around here?”

  “Define from.” She’s not playing, she’s retreating.

  “Do you live here?”

  “I do now.”

  “That sunburn—I just assumed you were someone who got a day or two of beach, was headed back to Baltimore or D.C.”

  “No. I’m living here.”

  He sees a flicker of surprise on the barmaid’s face.

  “As of when?”

  “Now.”

  A joke, he thinks. A person doesn’t just stop for a drink in a strange town and decide to live there. Not this town. It’s not like she’s rolled into Tuscany or Oaxaca, two places he knows well and can imagine a person saying, Yes, here, this is where I’m going to plant myself. She’s in Belleville, Delaware, with its saggy, sad Main Street, a town of not even two thousand people surrounded by cornfields and chicken farms. Does she have connections here? The barmaid sure doesn’t treat her like a local, even a potential one. To the barmaid, blond and busty with a carefully nurtured tan, the redhead is furniture. The barmaid is interested in him, however, trying to figure out whether he’s passing through tonight or hanging around.

  Which has not yet been determined.

  “Let me know if you want someone to give you the skinny on this place,” the barmaid says to him with a wink. “It would take all of five minutes.”

  Barmaids and waitresses who flirt this overtly make him a little nervous. Bringing a man food or beer is intimate enough.

  He lets both women alone, drinks his beer, watches the inevitable Orioles games on the inevitable TV with the inevitable shimmy in its reception. The team is good again, or, at least, better. As the redhead’s third drink reaches its last quarter inch, he settles up, leaves without saying good-bye to anyone, goes to his truck in the gravel parking lot, and sits in the dark. Not hiding because there’s no better way to be found than to try to hide.

  Ten minutes later, the redhead comes out. She crosses the highway, heads to the old-fashioned motel on the other side, the kind they call a motor court. This one is named Valley View, although there’s no valley and no view. The High-Ho, the Valley View, Main Street—it’s like this whole town was put together from some other town’s leftovers.

  He waits fifteen minutes, then enters the little office at the end, and inquires if there’s a room, despite the big red VACANCY sign filling the window.

  “How many nights?” the clerk, a pencil-necked guy in his thirties, asks.

  “Open-ended. I can give you a credit card, if you like.”

  “Funny. You’re the second person today to ask for an open-ended stay.”

  He doesn’t have to ask who the first one was. He makes a note to himself that the chatty clerk will be chatty about him, too.

  “You need my credit card?”

  “Cash is fine, too. If you commit to a week, we can give you the room for two hundred fifty. We don’t get many people Monday through Friday. But, you know, there’s no kitchenette, no refrigerator. You gotta eat your meals out or bring stuff in that won’t spoil.” He adds, “If the maid sees stuff sitting out, she’ll tell me. I don’t want ants or roaches.”

  “Can I keep a cooler in the room?”

  “As long as it doesn’t leak.”

  He hands the credit card over.

  “I can give you a better rate if you pay cash,” the guy says, clearing his throat. “Two hundred twenty dollars.”

  Guy’s got some sort of scam going, must be skimming the cash payments, but what does he care? He can last a long time in a place that’s $220 a week, even if there’s no refrigerator or stove.

  He wonders how long she can last.

  2

  She steps out of room 5 into a bright, hot morning, unseasonably hot, just as the weekend at the beach had been, but at least there the breeze from the ocean took the edge off. People said how lucky it was, getting such a hot day in early June, when the water is too cold for anyone but the kids. School not even out yet, lines at the most popular restaurants were manageable. Lucky, people kept saying, as if to convince themselves. Lucky. So lucky.

  Is there anything sadder than losers telling themselves that they’re fortunate? She used to be that way, but not anymore. She calls things the way they are, starting with herself.

  When Gregg had started talking about a week at the beach, she had assumed a rental house in Rehoboth or Dewey. Maybe not on the beach proper, but at least on the east side of the highway.

  Well, they had been close to the beach. But it was Fenwick, on the bayside, and it was a two-story cinder block with four small apartments that were basically studios. One big rectangular room for them and Jani, a galley kitchen, a bathroom with only a shower, no tub. And ants. Wavy black lines of ants everywhere.

  “It’s what was available, last minute,” Gregg said. She amended in her head. It’s what was available, last minute, if you’re cheap. There had to be a better place to stay along the Delaware shore, even last minute.

  Jani couldn’t sleep unless the room was in complete blackout. So they kept her up late, to nine or ten, because the alternative was to go to bed together at eight, and lie there in the dark without touching. The first night, about 2 A.M., Gregg made a move. Maybe a year or two ago, it would have been sexy, trying to go at it silently in the dark. But it had been a long time since she found anything about Gregg sexy.

  “No, no, no, she’ll wake up.”

  “We could give her a little Benadryl.”

  That had given her pause, made her wonder if she should change her plans, but no, she had to go ahead. The next day, she did ask him if he would really do that, give Jani a Benadryl. He insisted he was joking. She decided to believe him. If she didn’t believe him, she would have to stay. And there was no way she could stay.

  That was Saturday. She put a gauzy white shirt over her bathing suit, but even that irritated her shoulders. She huddled under the umbrella, shivering as if cold. A bad sunburn can do that, give you chills. Gregg played in the surf with Jani. He was good with her. She wasn’t just telling herself that. He was good, good enough, as good as she needed him to be.

  They went to the boardwalk, the smaller one up at Rehoboth, which was better for little kids like Jani than the one in Ocean City. Gregg tried to win Jani the biggest stuffed panda he could, but he never got above the second-tier prize. Do the math, she wanted to tell him. For the $20 he was spending, shooting water guns at little targets, tossing rings, he could buy Jani something much better.

  On Sunday, she watched them build a sand castle. About 11 A.M., she said she had had too much sun, she was going back to the house. House, huh. Place. The highway was busy, it seemed to take forever to get across. She changed into her sundress, packed a bag, the duffel, which had wheels, and wrote a note to go with the one she had brought with her. She worried what would happen if she didn’t leave a note. The notes were more for Jani than Gregg, anyway.

  She bounced the duffel down the steps and onto the sho
ulder of the highway, followed it almost a quarter mile to the state line, where she planned to take the local bus to the Greyhound station in Ocean City. She would then head to Baltimore, although she couldn’t stay long. She was too easy to find there, she would fall back into certain routines.

  An older man in a Cadillac offered her a ride to D.C., and she figured why not. Then he got pervy, his sad old fingers sneaking toward her knees like some arthritic spider, and she said, “Put me out here.” It was Belleville. ONE OF THE TEN BEST SMALL TOWNS IN AMERICA, according to a shiny, newish sign.

  Now, seeing Belleville in the bright morning light, she wonders what the other nine are.

  She doesn’t have much of a head start. Gregg would have seen the note at noon or so, when they came back for lunch. He was probably more upset that she hadn’t made them any sandwiches or set the table. He didn’t love her and she didn’t love him. He had one foot out the door. He’d leave her, get an apartment. He’d never pay child support, not without endless nagging. She might even have to get a job. So why not go ahead and get a job, but let him have Jani, see what it’s like to be a full-time parent? He wasn’t going to trap her.

  When you’ve been in jail even a short time, you don’t like feeling confined.

  What next? She’s thought a lot of things out, but she hasn’t thought everything out. She has to earn some money, enough to head west by fall. She had assumed she’d do that in D.C., but maybe it’s easier to do it here.

  Certainly, she’ll be harder to find.

  She walks into the town proper, down the main street. Which is called Main Street. There is a deli, a grocery store called Langley’s, a Purple Heart thrift store, a florist. But a lot of the shops are empty, long vacant by the looks of them.

  She doubles back to the motel, the bar she had chosen last night when she made her ride pull over. The High-Ho. Certainly it should be Heigh-Ho?

  The guy in the bar last night was awfully good-looking, kind of her type, not that she was interested. Still, she was surprised, even a little insulted, that he gave up so easy.