Her Perfect Life

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  Greer shifted into reverse, kept her foot on the brake. “Yeah, I asked him that. He told me he needed to gauge your reaction firsthand. Without me. Again, Lily, I’m so sorry. But I’m new to the Cassie thing, so I wasn’t sure what to do. If I chose wrong, all I can say is I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It’s not you.” Lily had to let her off the hook. She’d never heard Greer sound so apologetic, so insecure. And she’d have been involved, one way or the other, if Cassie had just shown up. “And yes, about contacting her? I have some ideas. I mean, it’s a gamble. But that letter said I should let her know, and…” She sighed, heavy with the weight of it. “I have to warn her. If she’s in danger? Whatever Cassie did, someone was not happy with it.”

  “Can I help at all?” Greer shifted back into park.

  “Her choice,” Lily said. Maybe it came out sounding harsher than she’d meant it. But Cassie, out of nowhere, had taken over her life, and Rowen’s, too.

  “But like you said, she doesn’t have to be Cassie. She can be a girlfriend. A new nanny. A book club member.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You gonna tell Rowen about her? Because—”

  “You think there was really a cat?” Lily interrupted. “And can you believe Banning had a client there? I wonder what the deal is. Maybe he made up the client story, when actually he and some guy upstairs are secret lovers.” Lily didn’t want to discuss Rowen with Greer and was pretty obviously trying to change the subject, but she was baffled by Greer’s instant reaction to the cat question. “Whoa. Do you hate cats or something? You look terrified.”

  “Oh, no.” Greer shook her head quickly, dismissing. “I was only thinking. I completely keep forgetting to tell you I saw Rowen today. At the aquarium. That’s why it was so coincidental that Banning mentioned it. But I didn’t want to say anything about Rowen in front of him. Silly, I guess.”

  “Thanks. Happy to keep her out of the spotlight.” Lily clicked open her car door, then frowned. “But wait. At the aquarium? I thought you were—what did you say you were doing this morning? My brain is a little fried.”

  “So. Weirdest thing,” Greer said. “I was meeting a source—it’ll probably be nothing, but we need to get something on the air this month, and the source, this guy I’d known off and on for a few years, suggested meeting at the aquarium, so I’m like, fine, it’s a pretty day. And no sooner were we there than the Graydon bus drives up, and out pops Rowen, carrying a stuffed penguin.”

  “Oh.” Lily nodded, imagining that. “Right when you were there.”

  “Told you it was weird,” Greer said. “So we chatted briefly, and that’s that. She was very polite, I must say. Her headmistress was with her, and—”

  “How fun,” Lily said. She had a headache now, full-on, and she had to get inside. “Your phone’s ringing. Thanks for the ride, Greer. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Lily had her house keys out before she reached the front door. She glanced at the mailbox, empty, and the white bench underneath it. Empty. She pursed her lips as she unlocked the door, remembering. There’d been a package there last night when she went to Willaby’s. But she hadn’t brought it in, and when she got home, she’d forgotten about it.

  “Huh,” she said out loud as the door clicked open. “I’m home,” she called out.

  Val and Rowen bounded out of the kitchen and down the hallway, Rowen’s white tennis shoes squeaking, Val’s claws skittering across the entryway’s hardwood floor. Rowe threw her arms around Lily’s waist, burying her head in Lily’s chest.

  “Mumma?” She looked up, still holding on. “I got to see real penguins. At the aquarium. And we got these shirts.” She stepped back, pointed to the logo on her short-sleeved tee.

  “You and penguins.” Lily shook her head. “You took Penny, honey. I thought we talked about that.” Val snuffled at Lily’s feet. Maybe smelling Banning’s cat, Lily thought.

  “How did you know?” Rowen pooched out her bottom lip. “I’m sorry, Mumma. I know you told me to use my own judgment, which means that I’m not supposed to do it, but I really wanted to, and—oh, did Greer tell you? I saw Greer!”

  “Good subject change, bug,” Lily said. She hung her tote bag over the stairway newel. “Yup, she told me. You can’t escape the eagle eye of your mom, kiddo. Remember that. But I’ll forgive you. Did you have fun, anyway? Let’s go see what Petra’s planning for dinner.”

  “It was so pretty, and the penguins were so funny—they’re called rockhoppers. They have orange feet!”

  “Uh-huh,” Lily said. Where was that package?

  “And, Mumma, does Auntie Greer have a boyfriend?”

  Lily stopped just at the archway to the kitchen. “A what?”

  Rowen shrugged, her thin shoulders almost hitting her ears. “She was really nice to him, and they talked to Headmistress Glover. I saw them on a bench. When I was on the bus.”

  “Who?”

  Petra came out of the kitchen, wrapped in a too-big apron. “Hamburgers,” she said. “Sound good?”

  “And french fries!”

  “Who, honey?” Lily asked. Greer had said she was meeting a source, so it all fit together. But odd that Rowen would label him a boyfriend. “Who did you see on the bench?”

  “Aunt Greer and the man,” Rowen said. She took Lily’s hand. “Come on, hamburgers.”

  Lily laughed, shook her head. “Great. Petra? Did you see that box that was on the porch yesterday? Just a regular brown box?”

  “Yes,” Petra said. “I put it in your office upstairs. Haven’t you seen—”

  “Oh, right.” Lily nodded. That made sense. “I haven’t been up there since whenever.” She stopped, drew in a deep breath. Looked at the coffee table in the living room. “Can you go check it for me, Rowesy? Make sure it’s in my office? You can leave it there if it is. I just want to know.”

  “If you don’t be mad at me about Penny.”

  “This is not a negotiation, Rowen.” Lily pointed up the stairs.

  Rowen dashed away, Val clambering after her.

  Lily walked toward the third vase of pink-and-white lilies. “Petra? I know the package is fine. I just wanted to—you called me about these.”

  Petra nodded. “More lilies. I was worrying. Do you want me to get rid of them?”

  Lily shook her head slowly, wondering. “It’s fine. I’ll see you in a minute. You have hamburgers to consider.”

  As Petra left for the kitchen, Lily walked toward the elaborate arrangement, the amber-tipped stamens, the curving white petals lined with fragile stripes of burgundy. The fragrance, as she got closer, was almost intoxicating. A two-pronged green plastic stick poked up from between two voluptuous flowers. In between the prongs, a tiny envelope.

  Lily knew, without opening it, what it would say. And when she did, she was right.

  She knew, without one further thought, what she was meant to do.

  CHAPTER 47

  GREER

  I backed out of Lily’s driveway, almost relieved. I’d never seen Lily look so wary, so overloaded. It was a lot, as I’d tried to reassure her, to grasp the actual evidence that her sister was a drug dealer and potential murderer. And I couldn’t imagine what she’d do if she found out that the other half of her secret life had been ten feet away from her, in the very same house.

  But she’d never know, and at least that part of the story would soon be wrapped up. Sam Prescott had been tender and careful with Rowen at the aquarium. And he’d done a good job of sounding politely interested in her without seeming suspiciously interested. Happily, Rowen hadn’t asked his name, and I hadn’t offered it.

  “I see you brought your penguin,” he’d said to her. I’d told Rowen he was an old friend, in town for a couple of days, and that I was working with him on a story. If she tried to recount that relationship to Lily, it would sound perfectly plausible. I’d worked at several other TV stations, and keeping connections was part of the job.

  “Her name is Penny,” Rowen had e
xplained, holding her stuffed toy between both hands as if politely introducing them, too.

  Prescott had laughed. “She looks like she’s had some tough battles with the other penguins and maybe lost a few. Or maybe the winters are tough in the Arctic?”

  “Antarctic,” Rowen corrected him. “She belonged to my Aunt Cassie,” she went on. “So she’s older than me.”

  That had been a moment, I remembered, as I braked at a stop sign. I kept my eyes on the road as the evening rush hour traffic passed, but in my imagination, I was reliving this morning.

  “That’s so nice,” I’d said. “Where did your aunt give you Penny? Did she come to your house?”

  Rowen plopped the well-worn plush toy onto her lap and wrapped both arms around it. “No. She gave Penny to my mom, and my mom gave her to me. She keeps me company if Mumma has to work in the night.”

  “Mumma,” Prescott had said. I could watch him tasting the word. It must have made it more poignantly real, I thought, knowing who “Mumma” was, and what she had done to him. And his daughter.

  “What does your … Mumma … do?” Prescott asked. I supposed he was pretending he had no idea who Lily was, which was understandable. But knowing what I knew from Lido, I’d needed to find one more thing. At least one more thing.

  “Rowe? When did she give Penny to your mom?” I asked. I was embarrassed with myself for interrogating a seven-year-old, but this might be valuable information. “And where does your aunt live?” I tried to balance the likelihood that Rowen would report this conversation to Lily, and how a little girl might present it. At Lido, Banning had told me Cassie had been in witness protection for the past twenty-plus years. And had not connected with Lily at all. If she’d given Penny to Lily recently, that meant Lily knew way more than Banning thought. And way more than she’d told him.

  “I don’t know.” Rowen shook her head. “Just far away somewhere.”

  “About your Penny. Have you always had her?” Prescott crafted a more careful question.

  “How long is ‘always’?” Rowen asked.

  So that wasn’t going anywhere. For the next ten minutes, we’d chatted, or more precisely, they’d chatted, about fish, and birthday cake, and school, and Rowen’s poetry. Prescott had recited the beginning of “Jabberwocky” with much enthusiasm, and Rowen had giggled as he did.

  “Those are silly words,” she’d said. “Mumma reads that to me.”

  Father and daughter, I’d thought, watching them. After seven years, instantly on the same wavelength. I could feel the emotion from Prescott, the longing and the restraint. I wondered if this one brief meeting would make it worse for him. Why was Lily determined to keep them apart? My animosity toward her solidified. For her selfishness and her denying Rowen such a critical part of her development.

  “So unfair,” I said out loud.

  A car came up behind me, beeped. I waved an embarrassed sorry at the driver behind and pulled out of the intersection. After we’d walked Rowen to the glass entrance of the aquarium, Rowen had hugged me goodbye and solemnly shaken hands with the man she did not know—and maybe never would know—was her father. Prescott, those green eyes softened with sorrow, had gone back toward the nearby Long Wharf hotel. Where I, dumb me, thought he’d been staying. I’d driven to Banning’s house as instructed.

  I’d felt honored, really, to bring those two together. It was heartbreaking, the idea that maybe they’d never see each other again. It’s possible, I thought, trying to give Lily the benefit of the doubt, that Lily had been waiting for the right time to tell Rowen about her father. It’d be silly to keep it from her, and I was actually surprised that Rowen hadn’t already asked. But maybe she had. How would I know? Lily never talked to me about anything but work. I smiled, realizing how much the world had changed. Never talked to me until now.

  Still, why should Lily have more right to tell her daughter about her parentage than the child’s father? Seemed like that should be equal. And even after an acrimonious split, it wasn’t like Sam Prescott was a serial killer. He was just already married. Lily was just as much at fault—if there was a fault—as he was.

  “Come on in,” Banning had said when I arrived at the house on the corner after leaving the aquarium. As promised, he’d shown me the stack of files, explained where they came from, and let me read the printed-out newspaper clippings in one of them. The ones that reported the death of Jeremy Duggan. I hadn’t seen any of those in my fast search of Cassie Atwood Pennsylvania police investigation because Cassie’s name hadn’t been mentioned in those articles.

  As I drove back to my apartment, I almost forgot to look at the highway. My mind was full of those clippings. As a journalist, I notice bylines. And the articles from the local paper about Duggan were all written by the same person. A reporter called Tosca Manukian.

  I pulled off at an exit and into the parking lot of a fast-food place. I could almost smell the french fries. I hadn’t eaten the entire day. Fries or research? I sighed. If I had low blood sugar, I wouldn’t be able to think. I took my phone with me as I yanked open the door of the restaurant, the fragrance of oil and salt reassuring me I’d made the right decision.

  I ordered, got a hamburger, too, and a chocolate shake, and leaned against the window, tapping my phone. As Smith, Banning had always told us the straight scoop. No reason to think he’d change now that we knew who he really was.

  Google took forever to open. I watched the thing on the screen spin like some jackpot was waiting to appear and the universe was trying to keep me in suspense. Finally the search screen appeared. Tosca, I typed.

  “Burger and fries? Ma’am?” a reedy voice called out. I looked up. “Shake?”

  The orange-shirted counter girl slid an orange plastic tray onto the tiled surface in front of her. I stashed the phone in my pocket.

  CHAPTER 48

  LILY

  Lily took the silver letter opener from the pencil-filled ceramic coffee mug on her desk. She’d thought the opener was useless, old-fashioned, one of those thank-you-for-your-speech commemorative mementos that seemed to accumulate around her house. She felt bad throwing them away—plaques and coffee mugs, vases and paperweights—because the people meant well, but it was just so much clutter. Now this particular clutter was exactly what she needed. She poised the sharp point over the paper tape that sealed the brown cardboard box, ready to slice it open. Then paused.

  As she’d noted the day before, there weren’t any of the expected store logos or markings on it, and the label was typed. It was not so long ago—well, it was, actually, more than ten years ago, when she was a rookie in a Denver newsroom—that they were all ordered never to open a package or letter if they didn’t know who’d sent it.

  Which was a tough call for a reporter, whose entire journalistic life might be hinged on an anonymous tip. As Lily knew all too well these days. This box was light, but something was in it. She shook it carefully. Listened. Nothing.

  She puffed out a breath. This was not going to be a bomb or anthrax or the severed head of a horse. Stabbing the point through the top of the tape, she drew the letter opener slowly down, the ripping the only noise in her private upstairs study. Petra had turned on her music in the kitchen; Lily felt the faint bass vibrate through the floor. Petra and Rowen sometimes danced as they cooked and set the table, and Rowen seemed to be developing very particular tastes about music. Mercifully, she was past her “Baby Shark” days.

  Lily stuck a hand through the opening of the box. Ripped open one side, then the other. Several layers of thin white tissue paper lay underneath, pristine and evenly creased. She lifted the first layer. Saw a hint of something black underneath.

  Lifted the second layer. And tears came to her eyes.

  She closed the door to her study, her knees suddenly unreliable, and walked back to the box. The tissue paper lay open as if revealing her past. And possibly her future. A fuzzy black-and-white stuffed penguin was nestled inside, tags still attached. On one webbed foot, the pr
inted tag gave the penguin’s name.

  Lily lifted the new Penny from her box, and it was all she could do not to hug it to her chest. She felt like a child again, a child in the darkness, with her big sister, her revered older sister, the beautiful one, the smart one, whispering confusing secrets to her in the night.

  Lily remembered their unsettlingly quiet house afterward. Their mother, even quieter, and Gramma Lily arriving. The police had first promised answers, and after none came, the police went away. Mom had died, and then Gramma, too. And Lily, on her own at nineteen, had struggled and managed and worked and tried to forget.

  And in that journey, what lingered most, what haunted her most, was “I’ve done a bad thing.”

  Now Lily finally knew what the bad thing was. Her sister was a drug dealer and maybe a murderer.

  The penguin lay there, staring at her. This was unquestionably a gift from her sister. Besides Cassie, no one alive—no one but Lily herself—knew where and how the original Penny had been bestowed.

  “What are you trying to say, Penny?” Lily whispered. Because what she could not comprehend—if Cassie was truly a killer and a drug informant, and had stayed successfully hidden for all these years, why would she want to reveal herself?

  Unless. Lily sat at her desk, moved the keyboard away from in front of her, and set the penguin in its place. She stared at it.

  I’ll try to know where you are, Cassie had told her. So she must know Lily was a reporter. A reporter who prided herself on finding the truth. Was that what Cassie was asking for?

  “Mumma!” Rowen’s voice came up the stairs, muffled by Lily’s closed door.

  She opened it and called down, “What, honey?”

  “Petra says ten minutes.”

  “Tell Petra thank you, I’ll be right there.”

  Ten minutes. Dinnertime was sacred when she was home. She had ten minutes.