The Perfect Couple

by Elin Hilderbrand

  Nick drops his pen. “Fell asleep?”

  “More like passed out,” Feather says.

  “You expect me to believe that?” Nick says.

  “It’s the truth,” Feather says.

  Nick stands up. “You were one of the last people to see Merritt Monaco alive. Unless you can come up with a taxi driver who will vouch for picking you up before two forty-five, I have you at the scene at the time of death. You were also the one who brought Ms. Monaco the water, which was the last thing she consumed before she died. Do you know what kind of trouble that puts you in, Ms. Dale?”

  “I stayed at the Winburys’ house,” Feather says, “because I was waiting for someone.”

  “Waiting for who?” Nick says. He tries to sort through the major players. Mr. Winbury having an affair with Merritt. Shooter Uxley in love with the bride. Who was Featherleigh Dale waiting for in the middle of the night?

  Feather’s full-on crying now.

  Nick can’t decide which way to go. Should he raise his voice and play the bully? No, he thinks. That only works on TV. In real life, what works is patience and kindness.

  Nick grabs the box of tissues they keep in the interview room for just this sort of occasion. He puts it on the table, plucks out a tissue, hands it to Feather, then eases down into his seat.

  “Who were you waiting for, Feather?” he asks, as gently as he can. “Who?”

  “Thomas,” Feather says.

  Thomas? Nick thinks. Who’s Thomas? Then he remembers: Thomas is Benji’s brother.

  “Thomas Winbury?” Nick says. “Are you involved with Thomas Winbury… romantically?” Married man, he thinks. Tag… way, way too old… They were there to commiserate, not confess.

  “Was,” Feather says. “But then he broke things off in May”—she stops to pluck another tissue out of the box and blow her nose—“when his wife got pregnant. He said he couldn’t see me anymore. He told me not to come to the wedding. He said if I came to the wedding, he’d kill me. Those were his exact words.”

  Nick’s thoughts are hopping now. Like father, like son. Thomas was involved with Feather but broke it off when he found out Abby was pregnant. Thomas tells Feather not to come to the wedding. Threatens her. Maybe he thinks she’ll tell Abby about the affair.

  “Do you think Thomas meant it?” Nick says. “People say ‘I’m going to kill you’ all the time. Too much for my taste. Or do you think… do you think he actually tried to kill you?”

  There was nothing in the shot glasses, nothing in the bottle.

  The water glass.

  “Let’s go back,” Nick says. “When you went into the kitchen to get water for Merritt, you said everyone was still back at the table, correct?”

  Feather pauses. “Yes.”

  “And there was no one in the kitchen?” he asks. “You’re sure you didn’t see Greer? I know you’re terrified of her but you can tell me the truth.”

  “No,” Feather says. “I did not see Greer.”

  “And you used the restroom after you poured the water?” Nick says. “How long were you in the bathroom?”

  “Couple minutes?” Feather says. “The usual amount of time. But I did try to primp a bit as well.”

  “So let’s say five minutes. Sound fair?”

  “Fair.”

  Plenty of time for Thomas to sneak in and drop a mickey in the water glass—or for Greer to do the same.

  But, Nick thinks, Merritt wasn’t poisoned, just sedated. Which leads Nick back to the father, Tag Winbury. Tag could have doctored the water before he took Merritt out on the kayak. Then, when she “fell overboard,” she would have been more likely to drown.

  What about the cut on her foot?

  Maybe she cut it on a shell on the ocean floor when she fell off the kayak? But there was blood in the sand. If Feather is telling the truth and Merritt was wearing sandals earlier in the night, then she must have cut her foot after she got back from the kayak ride. Could she have cut her foot on the beach before climbing into the kayak? But there was no blood in the kayak.

  Unless Tag had washed it off.

  But if he was going to do that, why not tie the kayak back up?

  Aaarrgh! Nick feels the answer is right there… he just can’t see it.

  He smiles at Feather again and says, “I’ll be back in two shakes.”

  Nick steps outside the interview room to call the Chief.

  “Talk to Thomas, the brother,” he says.

  KAREN

  A knock at the door wakes Karen up. Karen looks over to Bruce and finds him asleep and snoring aggressively.

  Another knock. Then a voice: “Betty? Mac?”

  It’s Celeste. Karen swings her feet to the floor and carefully stands up. She still feels no pain, which is odd.

  She opens the door to see her sad, beautiful daughter standing before her, wearing the pale pink dress with the rope detail that she was supposed to travel in tomorrow. She’s holding her yellow paisley duffel bag.

  “Oh, my poor, poor Bug,” Karen says. She gathers Celeste up in her arms. “I am so sorry, sweetheart. So, so sorry about Merritt.”

  “It’s my fault,” Celeste says. “She died because of me.”

  Karen recognizes this response as an opening for a longer conversation. She glances back at Bruce. He’s still sawing logs, as they say; she knows she should wake him up—he will want to see Celeste—but she senses that Celeste needs a confidante, and there are some things that men just don’t understand.

  Karen grabs her cane, steps out into the hallway, and closes the bedroom door behind her. “Where shall we go?”

  Celeste leads her to the end of the hall where there is a glassed-in sunporch that is quiet and unoccupied. Karen negotiates the one step down holding on to Celeste’s arm. Celeste leads Karen over to a sofa with bright yellow-orange cushions the color of marigolds.

  Karen takes a moment to admire the room. The floor is herringboned brick covered with sea-grass area rugs. The perimeter of the room is lined with lush potted plants—philodendron, ferns, spider plants, a row of five identical topiary trees trimmed to look like globe lamps. From the ceiling hang blown-glass spheres swirling with a rainbow of color. Karen becomes mesmerized for a second by the spheres; they look as delicate as soap bubbles.

  Celeste follows her gaze and says, “Apparently these were an obsession of Greer’s the year she wrote A Murder in Murano. Murano is an island near Venice where they make glass. I had to look it up when Benji told me that.”

  “Oh,” Karen says. The room has enormous windows that look down over the round rose garden. “There is no end to the wonders of this house.”

  “Well,” Celeste says, but nothing follows and Karen can’t tell if she’s agreeing or disagreeing. She sits next to Karen on the cheerful sofa. “I decided last night that I wasn’t going to marry Benji.”

  “I know,” Karen says.

  “How?” Celeste whispers. “How did you know?”

  “I’m your mother,” Karen says. She could tell Celeste about the dream with the strange hotel and how, in that dream, Celeste was lost. She could tell Celeste that she woke up so certain marrying Benji was the wrong thing for Celeste to do that she got out of bed and went looking for her, but she had found Bruce and Tag instead and learned something she could have lived the rest of her days without knowing. She could even tell Celeste about her visit to the psychic, Kathryn Randall, who had predicted that Celeste’s love life would enter a state of chaos… But there’s nothing either one of us can do about it.

  Instead, Karen lets those three words suffice. She is Celeste’s mother.

  It’s suddenly clear that Karen’s remaining time on earth matters. There are so many moments of her life that will be overlooked or forgotten: locking her keys in her car outside of Jabberwocky in downtown Easton, having her credit card declined at Wegman’s, peeing behind a tree at Hackett’s Park when she was pregnant with Celeste, beating her best time in the two-hundred-meter butterfly in the biggest
meet of the year against Parkland when she was a senior, nearly choking on a cherry Life Saver during a game of kickball when she was ten years old, sneaking out to the eighth hole of the Northampton Country Club with Bruce during her prom. Those moments had seemed important to Karen at the time but then they vanished, evaporating to join the gray mist of her past.

  However, what Karen says to Celeste here and now will last. Celeste will remember her words for the rest of her life, she is sure of this, and so she has to take care.

  “When you met Benji,” Karen says, “we were very excited. Your father and I have been so happy together… we wanted you to find someone. We wanted you to have what we have.”

  Celeste lays her head in Karen’s lap, and Karen strokes her hair. “Not everyone is like you,” Celeste says. “Not everyone gets that lucky on the first try… or ever.”

  “Celeste,” Karen says. “There are things you don’t know…”

  “There are things you don’t know!” Celeste says. “I tried to make myself love Benji. He’s a good person. And I understood it was important to you and Mac that I married someone who could take care of me financially—”

  “Not just financially,” Karen says, although she realizes she and Bruce are probably guilty as charged. “Benji is strong. He comes from a good family—”

  “His family,” Celeste says, “isn’t what it seems.”

  Karen gazes out the window at the serene expanse of the Nantucket harbor. Maybe Celeste already knows that Tag Winbury’s mistress has a baby on the way. It makes either perfect sense or no sense at all that a family as wealthy and esteemed as the Winburys have a second narrative running deep underneath the first, like a dark, murky stream. But who is Karen to judge? Only a few hours ago, she feared she had caused Merritt’s death.

  “So few families are,” Karen says. “So few people are. We all have flaws we try to hide, darling. Secrets we try to keep. All of us, Celeste.”

  “I made it to the night before the wedding,” Celeste says. “Before that, I thought if I acted on my true feelings, something bad would happen. Then I told myself that was silly. My actions don’t influence the fate of others. But Merritt died. She died, nearly as soon as I made the decision. She was the only real, true friend I’ve had in my life other than you and Mac, and now she’s gone forever. Forever, Mama. And it’s my fault. I did this to her.”

  “No, Celeste—”

  “Yes, I did,” Celeste says. “One way or the other, I did.”

  Karen watches the tears stream down her daughter’s face. Karen is curious—and more than a little alarmed—that Celeste keeps insisting Merritt’s death is her fault. Did Celeste do something to her? Did she not do something? It can’t be a good idea for Celeste to be carrying on about how it’s her fault when the house is crawling with police.

  “What do you mean by that, darling?” Karen asks. “Do they know what happened?”

  “I think she took pills,” Celeste says. “I think she did it to herself. She was in a bad relationship, a bad situation… and I was emphatic about her breaking it off for good, but she said she couldn’t. I found her crying in the rose garden last night.”

  “You did?”

  “She wanted to know why love was so hard for her, why she couldn’t get it right. And I hugged her and kissed her and told her it was going to be fine, she just needed to move on. But you know what I should have done? I should have told her that I couldn’t get it right either. That love is hard for everybody.” Celeste takes a breath. “I should have told her I didn’t love Benji. But I couldn’t even say the words in my own mind, much less out loud to another person. She was my best friend and I didn’t tell her.”

  “Oh, honey,” Karen says.

  “Early this morning I went outside to look at the water one last time because I knew I was leaving this view behind for good. And I saw something floating.”

  “Celeste,” Karen whispers.

  “It was Merritt,” Celeste says.

  Karen closes her eyes. They are both quiet. Outside, birds are singing and Karen can hear the gentle lapping of the waves on the Winburys’ beach.

  Celeste says, “I’m not going to marry Benji. I’m going to take a trip, by myself maybe. Spend some time alone. Try to process what happened.”

  “I think that’s wise, darling,” Karen says. “Let’s go tell your father.”

  Bruce is still asleep in bed, though his noisy breathing has quieted. His hair is standing on end, his mouth hangs open, and even from so far away, Karen can smell his night-after whiskey breath. His left hand, the one with the wedding band, is resting on his chest, over his heart. Their love is real, Karen thinks. It’s strong but flexible; it’s unfussy and unvarnished. It has thrived in the modest house on Derhammer Street, in the front seat of their Toyota Corolla, in the routine of their everyday—breakfast, lunch, dinner, bedtime, repeat, repeat, repeat. It has endured long workweeks, head colds, snowfalls and heat waves, meager pay raises and unexpected bills; it endured the deaths of Karen’s parents, Bruce’s brother, Bruce’s parents, and the smaller losses of Celeste’s toads, lizards, and snakes (each of which required a burial). It endured through construction on Route 33, a schoolteacher strike when Celeste was in fourth grade, the Philadelphia Eagles losing season after season after season despite Bruce’s impassioned ranting at the TV (and finally winning it all this past year when, quite frankly, both Bruce and Karen had stopped caring about football); it endured the sad day the Easley family moved away and took their dogs Black Bean and Red Bean, who at the time were Celeste’s best friends, with them. It survived the Pampered Chef parties thrown by women who all secretly thought they were better than Karen, it survived Bruce’s bizarre friendship with Robin Swain, and it will survive this tragic weekend.

  We would go to the post office to mail packages or check our box, and the line was always extra-long on Saturdays, but you know what? I didn’t care. I could wait an hour. I could wait all day… because I was with Karen.

  While Celeste gently jostles Bruce’s shoulder to wake him up, Karen slips into the bathroom and locks the door behind her. She opens the third drawer, finds the bottle of pills, picks out the three pearlescent ovoids, and flushes them down the toilet.

  Karen’s pain is gone. She feels stronger than she has in weeks, months even. It makes no sense, and yet it does.

  Karen can’t go anywhere just yet. She needs to see what will happen next.

  GREER

  She catches the Chief on his way out of Tag’s study.

  “There’s something I think you should know,” she says.

  The Chief barely seems to hear her. He’s looking at his phone. “If you’ll excuse me,” he says. He reads his screen, then says, “Your son Thomas is… where? I’ll need to talk to him next.”

  Greer can’t believe he’s brushing her off. She deliberated about her best course of action: Tell him about the pills or not? Yes, she decided, for a couple of reasons. She will tell him about the pills and they will finally be able to put all this to rest.

  “I haven’t seen Thomas,” Greer says. “But Chief Kapenash, sir, there’s something I must tell you.”

  The Chief finally seems to notice her. They are standing in the hallway; God only knows who’s listening. Tag is in his study. He might have his ear pressed up against the door. Greer wonders if she should have discussed her decision with him first. He has always been good at seeing a problem from every possible angle and ensuring that a strategy won’t backfire. Many times, when Greer needed help with the plot in one of her mysteries, she would consult Tag and he would nearly always come up with a creative answer. Those were some of Greer’s favorite moments in her entire marriage—lying in bed with Tag, her head resting in the crook of his arm as she explained her characters and their motivations while Tag asked provocative questions. He praised her imagination; she gushed over his insightful solutions. Character development required a humanist like Greer, but plotting often benefited from the mind of a mathemati
cian. Greer had felt, in those instances, like part of a team.

  Oh, how she hates him! For an instant, she wishes she’d married someone mediocre, uninspiring. Wealthy and uninspiring—her third cousin Reggie, for example; posh accent and not an original bone in his body.

  “Shall we go into the living room?” Greer asks the Chief. She turns on her heel, not waiting for an answer.

  The Chief follows her into the living room and Greer closes the door behind him. She doesn’t bother with sitting. If she sits, she thinks, she might lose her nerve.

  “I forgot to tell the detective something,” she says.

  The Chief’s expression hardens into all business. He’s not a bad-looking man, Greer thinks. He has a gruffness that she finds sort of appealing, nearly sexy. And he’s age appropriate. This is what Tag has done; now Greer has to appraise candidates for future romantic interludes. Would the Chief be interested in her?

  Never, she decides.

  The Greek, maybe, Nick, if he were in the mood for an older woman. Greer flushes, then she notices the Chief looking at her expectantly.

  “I didn’t forget, exactly,” Greer says. She wants to clarify this. “It’s something I only just remembered.”

  The Chief nods almost imperceptibly.

  “I went to bed whenever, midnight or so, but I couldn’t sleep. I was wound up.”

  “Wound up,” the Chief says.

  “Excited about the wedding. I wanted everything to go well,” Greer says. “So, as I told the detective, I got up and went to the kitchen to pour a glass of champagne.”

  “Yes,” the Chief says.

  “Well, what I forgot to tell the detective—meaning what I didn’t remember at all until just a little while ago—is that I brought my sleeping pills to the kitchen. My intention was to take a pill with water before I drank my champagne.”

  “What kind of pills were they?” the Chief asks.

  “I’d have to call my physician in New York to be sure,” Greer says. “They’re quite potent, put me to sleep instantly and knock me out for eight hours straight. Which was why, in the end, I decided not to take a pill. I needed to be up early this morning. So I hoped the champagne would do the trick by itself, and that was, in fact, what happened. But when I looked for the pills a few moments ago in my medicine cabinet, where I keep them, they weren’t there. And that’s when I recalled bringing them to the kitchen. I checked the counter next to the refrigerator plus every shelf, every drawer, every possible hiding place. I asked my housekeeper, Elida. She hasn’t seen them.”