Hints of Heloise

by Laura Lippman

  A car seems to come out of nowhere and she jumps, skittish. But it’s too early for anyone to be looking for her and, anyway, it isn’t against the law, leaving your family at the beach. She’s surprised more women don’t do it. She got the idea from a book she read two months ago. Well, she didn’t actually read it and she had been planning her own escape for a while. But everybody was talking about it, like it was a fantasy. If only you knew, she wanted to tell her neighbors along Kentucky Avenue. If only you knew what it means to walk away from something, what it takes.

  Money. She has some. She needs more.

  The guy last night—he liked her, she was sure. But she doesn’t want to make that mistake anymore. She has enough money to go two, three weeks. Summer is coming, there are probably some seasonal jobs still open. She wonders when Gregg will check the accounts, see how much money she moved out of their joint savings in that final week before their “vacation.” Half, which is what she was entitled to.

  The money will make him even madder than the fact that she left. At least Jani is a pretty easy kid, she wants to tell him. Imagine it otherwise. He can’t. Gregg can’t imagine anything. Life unspools as Gregg expects. Even the surprises—Jani, their marriage—don’t surprise him. She used to be that kind of person. But she’s not going to be, not anymore.

  Back at the motel, she sees the guy from the bar leaning against the doorjamb of room 3. Could be a coincidence. Everyone has a life, everyone has something going on. Don’t make the mistake of thinking everything is all about you, all the time.

  “Hi,” he says. He’s the kind of guy who can get away with just that one word. Hi. He’s good-looking in a bland way, and he probably thinks that’s enough. Probably has been enough with most women. She wiggles her fingers in a kind of greeting, but keeps her hand by her side, like he’s not worth the effort of bending an elbow.

  He says, “How long you staying over?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Every man in town, I’m guessing.”

  So predictable. And not even true. She has a version of herself that catches men’s eyes, but she’s turned that off for now, maybe forever. The only thing it ever got her was trouble.

  “I’m Adam Bosk,” he says. “Like the pear, only with a ‘k’ instead of a ‘c.’”

  “I’m the Pink Lady,” she says. “Like the apple.”

  “Think we can still be friends, me a pear, you an apple?”

  “I thought it was apples and oranges that can’t be compared.”

  She walks past him and into her room.

  She doesn’t come out again until the sun goes down, which means it’s almost 8:30 before she emerges. Maybe some people would go crazy, sitting in a motel room, nothing to eat but a pack of peanut butter and cheese crackers she found in her purse. Mom food. Gregg is going to have to learn tricks like that now. Jani’s an easy kid until she gets hungry, then all bets are off. She enjoys the silence, the novelty of no one needing her, no voices calling, nothing to be cleaned or cooked or washed. She doesn’t even put the television on, just lies back on the bed, steeping herself in silence.

  When she crosses the street, the sun huge and red as it sinks over the cornfields, she has a hunch he’ll be there, Mr. Pear. He is. She makes sure there’s a stool between them.

  “What are you having?” he asks.

  “How much money do you have?”

  He laughs. They always think she’s joking. Gregg did, that’s for sure. She wishes she could say, Pay attention. I haven’t even told you my name yet, but I’m telling you who I am, what I care about.

  As if privy to her thoughts, he asks, “What’s your name, Pink Lady? Not that you’ll be pink for long. There’s a nice shade of brown under that burn. I didn’t know redheads could tan like that.”

  What is her name? Which one should she use?

  “Polly Costello,” she says.

  3

  Jani wakes up crying for her mother. She’s only three years old. She can’t understand what’s happening. Gregg barely understands. She asks Gregg to read the note again, as if it might change since he read it last night and yesterday at lunch and yesterday morning and the night before that. The note does change. He adds a little to it with each reading. An additional, “I love you, Jani.” Then, the next time: “I love you more than anything, Jani.” Later, he thinks it might be a good idea to include: “Be good to Daddy. This is going to be even harder on him.”

  Pauline’s been gone only two days, and the note is already creased and worn. Jani holds it against her face, pressed between her cheek and her stuffed cat, when she goes to sleep. She goes to sleep crying, she wakes up crying. In between, she has nightmares that make her cry and mutter and moan, yet don’t wake her. They wake Gregg, though.

  What kind of woman walks out on her family? Gregg knows. The kind of woman he picked up in a bar four years ago precisely because she had that kind of wildcat energy. Pauline was supposed to be a good time, nothing more. She scratched, she bit, she was up for anything, anywhere, anytime.

  Then, in the middle of their summer fling, she peed on a stick and a plus sign formed in the circle, but it might as well have been a cross and he was up on it. Because it turned out she was a good girl all along. Good enough that she wouldn’t think of having an abortion. Did not see that one coming. Plus, she was thirty-one and she figured this might be her last chance to have a kid. Maybe it was a sign? A destiny thing?

  They got married fast. It wasn’t so bad at first. So much was happening. She said she didn’t want a wedding because she had no people, it would just make her sad, her side of the church empty, so they got married at the courthouse and used the money that would have gone to a wedding to honeymoon in Jamaica, one of those resorts where everything was included. It was cheap because it was the last week of October, the tail end of hurricane season.

  They had to find a house big enough for what was going to be the three of them and they lucked out on a bargain up near Herring Run Park, a snug little brick place, very respectable, all the old woodwork and leaded windows still intact. Jani arrived. A first for both of them, but Pauline was calm while he was a mess. Now that he thinks about it, maybe that was the first sign that she wasn’t right. Should any woman be that calm, taking care of her first baby? At the time, he thought it meant she was a natural mom, but maybe this was proof that she was the opposite. She is detached, removed, a caretaker, not a parent.

  The sex slowed after Jani was born and it was still good enough that it made him angry that they didn’t have more of it. She said that if he wanted more attention from her, he needed to help around the house. He wasn’t raised to be that way. Gregg had grown up without a father, and his mother had worked overtime, in and out of the house, to make sure he knew what was his due as a man. Pauline didn’t even have a job. Why was she so tired?

  By the time Jani turned two, Pauline was still tired and the newness had worn off everything—marriage, house, baby, her. There was nothing left to distract them from the fact that they just didn’t like each other that much. Yet the sex was still good. Looking back, he thinks she treated the sex like that was her job, a job she enjoyed. Listening to his friends at work, he felt smug at first because it wasn’t that way with them. But now he knew, that was another sign that she was unnatural. Once a woman became a mother, she wasn’t supposed to be like that. Pauline was a dirty, dirty girl. She wasn’t cut out to be a mother, a wife. How had he missed it?

  Then, Pauline had—it was hard to admit, even to himself—Pauline had started hitting him. During. It had started with him spanking her a little, not hard, just for fun, a way to spice things up. She had howled all out of proportion to the pain, tried to scratch him with her nails.

  But when she calmed down, she asked if he wanted to see what it felt like. He didn’t, but he didn’t want to look as if he wasn’t as bold as she was. She slapped his cheek. It hurt, but he didn’t want to say how much because he couldn’t let her be tougher than he was. Of cours
e, he had reined himself in, didn’t use his full strength because that would be wrong, whereas she wasn’t holding anything back. It stung. It was painful. It was exciting.

  Then, somehow, about two months ago, the acrid fights of their day-to-day life spilled over into the sex and even sex wasn’t fun anymore. He had a coworker, Mandy, who went to lunch with him, listened and sympathized. He started staying out late, claiming he was working overtime. They were doing a lot of refi’s at work, so it was credible. Then he went home to Pauline, overflowing with this mysterious anger.

  He started dropping by the bar where he met Pauline and, yes, sometimes, he took another girl out to the parking lot. The sex was never quite as good as what he had with Pauline, in their early days, but it was better than what he had now, which was pretty much nothing.

  He had proposed this beach vacation as one last family get-together, to see if they could find their way back. He spun the one-room studio rental as a part of the plan—real togetherness, one big happy. But, in the back of his mind, he was already thinking about moving out. His mom would take him in, he could always count on his mom.

  Now she’s moved out, leaving him with the kid. There had been a separate note just to him, one that he had hidden from Jani. This note was cool and businesslike. A typed note at that, which means she had written it before they ever got here. Probably pecked it out at the library, where they had word processors.

  I will let you know of my plans as soon as possible. I know you want a divorce, so let’s make it quick and painless. For now, it’s best if Jani remains with you, in the house and routine she knows. I will call after I’m settled.

  And now it’s Tuesday, their last day of “vacation.” He has trudged through the past forty-eight hours as if the end of this getaway was some sort of finish line. He cannot believe how hard it is to care for a child 24/7, although he told himself that’s because they’re not at their house, with all their stuff. Now, packing up to return home, he sees that life is just going to keep going, that he will have even more problems once he gets home. What will he do for child care? He loves Jani, but, Christ, he cannot be a single dad.

  There’s a $125 penalty if you stay one minute past 11 A.M. on the last day of your rental, even on a Tuesday. Jani wanted one more morning at the beach, but Gregg can’t get them packed up and have the place clean enough to get his deposit back if they do that. Jani whines every second of the morning and shows a real talent for creating a mess wherever he has just cleaned—stepping in dust piles, leaving sticky prints on appliances, tables, walls. They get away with only minutes to spare, 10:57 on the dashboard clock.

  When he turns to check his sights as he backs the car out of the driveway, he sees Jani in her car seat, clutching that damn note to her cheek. Those dark curls, olive skin, light eyes—she looks nothing like her mother. If he hadn’t been at the hospital when Jani was born, if he hadn’t been there for the pregnancy, he’d wonder if a woman could somehow fake having a kid. Jani has looked exactly like him since Day One. “That’s evolution at work,” Pauline told him. “If babies didn’t look like their fathers, they’d reject them. She’ll look more like both of us as time goes on.” Well, it’s three years later and the little girl in the car seat still looks like a female version of him. Put their childhood photos next to each other and you’d think they were fraternal twins. There’s not a trace of her mother in her face.

  Pauline’s not going to dump this kid on him. He’ll find her, make her do right. He’s the one who’s supposed to be moving out, moving on.

  “Whore,” he mutters.

  “What, Daddy?”

  “Nothing.”

  Two miles up the highway, he takes the left turn onto State Highway 26 too fast and the boogie board he roped to the roof goes sliding off. Horns honk around him, as if he planned this fiasco. He’d leave the board on the roadside if he could, but that would make him no better than her. He pulls over and puts everything to rights, then fights for his way back into the westbound traffic, surprisingly thick for a Tuesday in June. Oh God, there’s a funeral, apparently for the most popular guy in Bethany Beach, the line of cars twenty, thirty deep. He adds this mishap to the growing list of everything that’s her fault. She has ruined his life. Or tried to. He’ll find her, make her fulfill her obligations, make her pay.

  He remembers the first slap, after he gave her permission, so hard it almost brought tears to his eyes. It was as if she had been waiting to hit him for a very long time.

  About the Author

  Since LAURA LIPPMAN’s debut, she has won multiple awards and critical acclaim for provocative, timely crime novels set in her beloved hometown of Baltimore. Laura has been nominated for more than fifty awards for crime fiction and won almost twenty, including the Edgar. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Now a perennial New York Times bestselling author, she lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her family.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Laura Lippman

  Sunburn

  Wilde Lake

  Hush Hush

  After I’m Gone

  And When She Was Good

  The Most Dangerous Thing

  I’d Know You Anywhere

  Life Sentences

  Hardly Knew Her

  Another Thing to Fall

  What the Dead Know

  No Good Deeds

  To the Power of Three

  By a Spider’s Thread

  Every Secret Thing

  The Last Place

  In a Strange City

  The Sugar House

  In Big Trouble

  Butchers Hill

  Charm City

  Baltimore Blues

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  One True Love first published in Death Do Us Part; copyright © 2006 by Laura Lippman.

  Scratch a Woman copyright © 2008 by Laura Lippman.

  Excerpt from Sunburn copyright © 2018 by Laura Lippman.

  HINTS OF HELOISE. Copyright © 2018 by Laura Lippman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.

  Digital Edition AUGUST 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-286861-9

  Cover photograph © ketsu/Shutterstock

  William Morrow Impulse is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

  William Morrow and HarperCollins are registered trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers in the United States of America and other countries.

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