Sunburn: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  “Really?” She’s not getting rattled. She doesn’t seem to respect the fact that Cath’s in charge here.

  “Really. Leave town and—” This is the harder part. “Leave town and maybe pay me a little money.”

  “Pay you? For what?”

  “Not to tell people what I know. About you and your ex. And how you pretended it was all for your kid, but you didn’t hesitate to cash in when you could.”

  “Now I really don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you drunk? You seem a little drunk, Cath. You should leave your car on Main Street, walk home.”

  “You have money. There was an insurance policy.”

  “Right.” Polly rolls her eyes, looks around the room where they’re sitting. “I’m clearly loaded.”

  Cath is a little buzzed and caught off guard by how differently the conversation is playing out, now that she’s having it. She had imagined Polly weeping, begging her to keep quiet, offering up money. Gossip, her brother-in-law said. A lot of this stuff isn’t written down anywhere. There’s a newspaper article naming Polly as one of the women whose sentence shouldn’t have been commuted, but the stuff about the money—it was never proven that Polly planned to steal it, Jim says. And would anyone with money live here? Not just in this apartment, but in Belleville. If Cath had a lot of money, she’d blow this town so fast. How much money does Polly have? Cath’s decided she’ll settle for $10,000, enough for a down payment on one of the new town houses they’re building on the little swampy section south of town that they’ve started calling a lake. Belle’s Landing. The cattails are pretty in the sunset. She imagines herself on the deck, having a drink with a nice man, watching the sun go down over the marsh.

  “I mean it,” Cath says. “I’ll give you”—she pauses, then realizes that in pausing she has erred badly—“two days. Then I’m going to tell everyone at the bar about you.”

  “Everyone? Isn’t Adam the only person who matters to you?”

  “This isn’t about Adam.”

  “That’s good. Because you’ll never have him. You could tell him I’m a man, like in that movie everybody was talking about last year. It still won’t make him want you. Nothing could.”

  That hurts. Cath twitches, remembers what it was like, lunging at that girl when she was seventeen, the crack of the railing, then another crack, more of a snap. The girl ended up a quadriplegic, but it was the railing’s fault, not Cath’s. Attractive nuisance was the legal term. The guy who owned the old driving range was the one who had to pay the family, not Cath’s mother and father. Besides, the girl had baited her, prodded Cath into losing her temper.

  “Two days,” she says, rising to her feet. She wishes her hip didn’t sway and bump the table, sloshing the vodka from her untouched glass. Her tipsiness undercuts her power.

  She drives home at fifteen miles per hour, trying to figure out when the two days begin. She guesses she has to give Polly forty-eight hours, which takes them to midnight Thursday, so it will be Friday before she gets around to telling anyone.

  She realizes she really wants to tell everybody. Wants it more than the money, maybe. She wants to embarrass Polly, to vanquish her. She hates Polly in a way she has almost forgotten she could hate. Who is she to come to town, steal a desirable man, act so holier than thou?

  Cath decides she’s going to take whatever money Polly scratches together and still tell everyone. Hasta la vista, baby.

  19

  Polly locks the door behind Cath. Adam is planning to visit later, but too bad for him. Let him steal up the stairs, try the door, be surprised when he discovers it is locked. Will he knock? Call out her name in the street below? She has told him over and over again that they must not draw attention to themselves. Even in this block, a ghost town after five, someone might hear.

  If he does knock, will she let him in? She’s not sure. She needs to think.

  It’s clear that Cath doesn’t know much. She can fish all she wants, but the only thing she has, solid, is that Polly served time for killing her husband and some people think she lied about the abuse. Interesting that the old money gossip follows her. At least, she’s pretty sure it’s the old gossip, about the old money. When those reporters looked into the commutations, they wrote, semiaccurately, that Ditmars took out life insurance a few months before she killed him. But that policy was in Joy’s name and Joy became a ward of the state after Polly was sentenced.

  Could someone be gossiping about the other stuff? There’s only one possible source to these rumors, and he’s bound by law not to tell anyone. Which doesn’t mean he hasn’t. Lie down with dogs, as they say. He didn’t have the best reputation. But then—that’s exactly why she chose him. Polly can’t afford men with good reputations.

  She can leave, of course. Even absent Cath’s threats, there are good reasons to leave. Adam is acting oddly. She never planned to stay past Labor Day. She has things to do. Why not leave? Leaving solves everything. And she won’t have to pay Cath a dime. That’s how stupid Cath is. She doesn’t realize that, with blackmail, it’s one or the other. You can’t tell someone to leave and expect to be paid off. Why would Polly, once gone, care what anyone in Belleville thinks of her?

  Adam. It grieves her to leave him behind, vulnerable to Cath’s lies, if not to Cath herself. He will think the worst of Polly. That she’s a killer, a liar, a rip-off artist. And maybe she deserves his low opinion, but only if he knows the whole story, not whatever jumbled mess that Cath relates. If she leaves now, Cath wins.

  Cath can’t win.

  Footsteps on the stairs. She watches the knob turn. Even the knob, squeaking in alarm, seems surprised when the door fails to open. Now it rattles, turning back and forth, as Adam whispers her name.

  “Polly? Polly? It’s me.”

  Of course it’s you. Who else would be at my door this late? She says nothing, just stares at the knob, mesmerized.

  “Polly?” Louder now.

  She stands still, barely breathing. He knows she’s here. Where else would she be? How much do you want me? she thinks. It’s not vanity on her part. It’s vital information.

  She hears him retreating down the stairs. Okay, that’s it, she has to leave town, he’s not going to stand by her. She is already mentally packing. She’ll rent a U-Haul, load up her things. She could be in Reno next week.

  Then his footsteps roar back, it’s like a big wave rolling in after a series of small ones have lulled you into thinking the surf is calm. To her shock and delight, the door flies open with what sounds like one swift kick, the frame splintering.

  He rushes in and she is terrified, but only for a moment. This man will never hurt her. She jumps up, her arms circling his neck, confident of being caught.

  * * *

  “What was that?” he asks later.

  “What?”

  “That stupid game with the door. Did you not tell me to come by tonight?”

  “We have trouble,” she says. “And very little time to decide what to do. Cath’s figured out that we’re together. She’s willing to do anything—anything—to force me to leave town. A woman scorned and all that. You won’t believe the lies she’s willing to spread.”

  He doesn’t ask about the lies. Interesting.

  “I’ll go with you,” he says without hesitation. More interesting, still. How much does he know? And how? Yet he’s loyal to her, still wants her.

  “Let’s sleep on it,” she says. “I don’t trust decisions made in the middle of the night.” She is telling the truth. Although she killed Ditmars in the middle of the night, she planned it by day. For weeks and weeks she planned. She was planning his murder even before she realized it. The universe all but told her to do it.

  It began with a nurse’s aide, who came to help twice a week. Respite care, they called it. At first, Polly would use those hours to grocery shop. Then she found the film series at the museum, free on Thursday afternoons, and she escaped the long Baltimore summer in that cool, hushed place. Afterward, she’d
go to the sculpture garden, studying the families in the museum restaurant, wondering what it would take to be like them. She couldn’t believe that they were the same species on the same planet, that’s how far away their lives seemed to her.

  The summer of 1985, the film series was all black-and-white films from the 1940s. Double Indemnity. Mildred Pierce. The Postman Always Rings Twice. Polly didn’t understand at first how they were linked, why the series was called Raising Cain, but then someone explained they were all based on books by a Maryland man who had lived in Baltimore and Annapolis, grown up on the Eastern Shore.

  When fall came and the film series ended, she began going to the library and looked for the books that had inspired the movies. Be bold, Walter Huff told Phyllis Nirdlinger—no wonder they had changed the name for the movie. Not even Barbara Stanwyck could play someone named Nirdlinger and make her sexy. Polly began to study the encyclopedias, the ones that didn’t circulate. There was a diagram of the human body layered on three color transparencies that showed exactly where everything was. The heart is not really on the left side of the body, although we place our hands there to say the pledge. It’s much closer to the center. And it tips slightly, almost as if it were drunk.

  Once you know where the heart is, then you need to know where the rib cage is. Because even the best knife could break on a bone. Night after night, Polly slipped her arms around Ditmars, tickling his chest softly. Counting his ribs, willing her fingers to memorize the topography of his body. She needed the best knife she could find, so she squirreled away money, bought a beauty of a Japanese butcher knife, one she never used for carving.

  She would get one chance. Only one. She went to sleep night after night next to her husband, praying for the literal strength to kill him.

  “Sleep?” Adam asks.

  “Eventually,” she says, putting her hand in his. They lie on their backs, side by side, like brother and sister. When she tells him everything, he will understand.

  Right? Right?

  * * *

  Polly is up with the sun. Adam finds her at the kitchen table, not a stitch on, drinking hot coffee. No matter how warm the day, she always wants to start it with a cup of hot coffee.

  “So we go, right?” he says. “There’s nothing to bind us here.”

  “Casper will have a heart attack if you leave. He’ll do anything for you.”

  “Summer’s almost over. Doesn’t matter how good the food is. No one’s going to come to Belleville just for the food.”

  “They might. If the place were nice enough. A little paint, cosmetic changes. It could be something really special.”

  “I don’t see that happening.”

  “Maybe not right away. But it’s more your place now than his. He’d probably do whatever it takes to keep you. I don’t see why we should have to go.”

  “But if you don’t want Cath to tell people about you—”

  “Maybe she should go.”

  “She’s pretty rooted, best I can tell.”

  “They say the big trees topple over fastest. Because they don’t bend.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The only power she has over me is what she knows. I’m going to tell you what she’s got on me, Adam. What she thinks she’s got on me.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “No, I do. I need you to decide if you want to be with me once everything is out in the open.”

  He takes the mug of coffee out of her hand, says: “Baby, I do know.”

  “What, exactly?”

  “I know who you used to be. What you did.”

  “How?”

  A pause. “She already told me.”

  “And?”

  Years go by. Dinosaurs roam the earth, find extinction, mankind begins, Jesus dies on the cross. Columbus sails to America, the world wars are fought. All those things happen while she waits for him to reply.

  “I don’t care.”

  He loves her. He actually loves her.

  “Then I’ll tell her tonight that she can say whatever she thinks she knows. I’m not leaving. And today, I’ll tell Casper. I don’t want him to hear it from her.”

  “You said she wanted money from you.”

  “Can’t get blood from a stone.”

  He falls to his knees in front of her, almost as if he were about to propose, which delights and terrifies her in equal measure. But all Adam wants to do is bury his head in her midsection like a child. They remain this way for a very long time, Polly cradling Adam’s head, grateful the world has finally sent her the man she needs, the man she deserves.

  20

  Adam clocks Cath making a beeline for him the first chance she gets at work. It’s Thursday, the last day of August, they’re busy at lunch and dinner. Mr. C can get by with Cath alone on the lunch shift, but he’ll need both his waitresses for dinner.

  “Your girlfriend’s not who you think she is,” she says.

  He says, “What girlfriend?” and keeps on working. He’s layering mozzarella between local tomatoes, then drizzling pesto vinaigrette. It doesn’t really require a lot of focus, but he keeps his eyes on those tomatoes as if he’s making rosettes for a wedding cake.

  Cath, perhaps mindful of the fact that it’s hard to collect blackmail once you’ve let the secrets out into the air, doesn’t say anything more, just cocks her hip, then saunters away, swinging her ass hard. He’s dying to learn how much she knows. The facts in the video are the ones in the public domain and her state trooper brother-in-law might have been able to grab some records, especially if Cath filched Polly’s social security number. But the money that Irving knows about—nobody knows about that, according to Irving. He only found out by accident. Millions, he said, and won on a lie.

  According to Irving. Who didn’t bother to tell Adam about Polly’s past until he decided he wanted to make Adam feel like a jerk. It’s funny—knowing what he knows now isn’t enough to make him stop loving her. But if he had known all along, it might have been enough to stop him from falling in the first place.

  Barn door open, horse gone.

  Adam has never had these out-of-control feelings about a woman before, not even the woman he loved enough, for a time, to marry. Lainey. She never even crosses his mind. Polly never leaves it. He keeps thinking this has to end, that it’s like a flu or fever that will run its course. He had moments where he believed he could walk away from her, collect his last check from Irving, and enjoy the fall on another continent.

  And then he kicked her door in. She tried to act tough, but he wasn’t fooled. She was terrified when he came through that door. Memories of her ex, he’s guessing. But she also seemed excited. It’s a complicated thing, the human brain. No one wants to be abused. But what if, after the fights, some chemical is released? What if the fight is a kind of drug that leads to a high? What do you do then?

  They should leave together. And then what? Irving could destroy his reputation pretty fast if Adam takes up with Polly. No one’s going to want to hire the PI who fell in love with his target.

  Polly told him last night that she doesn’t want to settle more than one hundred miles from Baltimore, maybe two hundred, although she refused to say why. He thinks about the trip back to the city, the day he followed her. The answer is on Rogers Avenue, or nearby. Could the money be there? Has she entrusted the cash to a third party she believes won’t rip her off? She has no family left in Maryland—according to Irving—and she isn’t a woman who makes friends easily. The film mentioned a disabled daughter, so maybe that’s the stepdaughter she ripped off? If she ripped her off.

  Philadelphia, Richmond, Pittsburgh, New York—her two-hundred-mile radius leaves them with a nice array of options. He can’t see himself in New York; money doesn’t go far there. He doesn’t want to live in the South. (He knows Maryland is technically the South, but the D.C.-Baltimore area has been an okay base. Richmond is South-South.) Pittsburgh, though—it’s a city, but it’s easy to get to nature from ther
e. Maybe not the ocean, but he could still hunt in western Maryland. And you can be in Canada in less than four hours.

  Canada? Where did that come from? He pauses, knife in hand, tries to nail down his own chain of thought. Escape, running away. They’re going to run away from here. Once you start to run, you never stop. Maybe she’s right. They should hold their ground. Face down Cath, make her ashamed to think she could use Polly’s past against her. Make her the bad guy.

  But they would still have to contend with Irving. Adam has to persuade Irving there is no money, that it was all a bullshit story. To do that, he would have to talk to her about what he’s been told, get her side of things.

  He would have to tell her that it was no accident, him finding her here.

  Would she forgive him? Would she ever trust him again if she knew he’d been hired to befriend her, follow her, find this money that may or may not exist?

  They need to go. He’ll persuade her tomorrow that’s the only safe way.

  21

  If there is one thing Polly knows how to do, it’s waiting. It’s her talent, her art. Waitress indeed. She’s a pro.

  Her life began with waiting. But isn’t that what all teenage girls do? You put on a yellow bathing suit and you wait for your life to begin. There was Burton Ditmars, tanned and muscled and so grown up. She was fourteen. She cannot blame herself for thinking he was offering her a life.

  The next phase was waiting for Ditmars to come home. Then she began waiting even more eagerly for him to go out. The night Joy was born, she waited for the doctor to come, screaming at nurses that it was time, it was time, it was time. She waited through doctors’ appointments. Waited for Ditmars to hit her because then she would be in that briefly benevolent “after” phase, all sweetness and gifts and backrubs. Strangely, when she discovered that nonprofit that organized time-outs for women such as herself, she initially found herself watching the clock during her “liberty,” longing for it to end. She didn’t know what to do with four hours to herself. Shop? She had no money of her own. And it made her jumpy, trying to relax in her own house with another person in it. Plus, Joy knew she was there. Polly had to leave in order to enjoy her “respite,” and that was no respite at all.