Sunburn: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  “You want a divorce? I thought you were concerned that he’d leave you if he knew about your past.”

  Shit, she forgot that she told Forshaw that she wanted to keep the settlement a secret for now because Gregg didn’t know she had been married before. Or how it ended.

  “It’s not going to work out. I left him back in June.” She lowers her eyes to her lap. “There are—well, I can’t talk about it.”

  “If you left him, you have to wait for two years.”

  Two years? She can’t believe it.

  “Isn’t there any way to make it go faster?”

  “He can file after one year from the separation, citing abandonment. He has cause. You don’t.”

  Oh, she has cause.

  “What would make him file?”

  “Christ, Pauline, I don’t know. I never met the guy.”

  “Can you move the money to—what do you call it? Like, a Swiss bank account or something overseas?”

  “Offshore. I guess that could be done, but I’d have to charge you for it.”

  “How much more of my money do you want?”

  “I’m a lawyer. I charge for my time.”

  “You already have 40 percent of my settlement. Isn’t that enough?”

  “I explained that. If you had let me take it to trial, we were looking at a chance for a much bigger payout. You were the one who wanted a sealed settlement, and that’s why the hospital was so eager to give you what you wanted. I could have made two, three million on my usual 30 percent. Instead, that’s what we got total. And you can have your money whenever you want.”

  “If Gregg knows about it, he’ll try to take it.”

  “He can try, but he won’t succeed. Look, I don’t do marital law, but any half-decent divorce attorney can shield that money from him.”

  “I’m done paying lawyers,” she says. “I just want to get out of my marriage as quick as possible, no complications. I was going to go to Reno, but—that’s not going to work out.”

  “Fine. Do it your way. There’s an argument to be made, Pauline, that you’re being penny-wise, but pound-foolish. Hire a divorce lawyer.”

  An argument to be made. He has to think that. He’s a lawyer. His livelihood depends on arguments having worth. She looks around his office. It’s filled with antiques, stupid things that clearly mean nothing to him, trophies purchased to celebrate cashing in on the misery of others. Babies with cerebral palsy because of botched deliveries, steel workers with destroyed lungs, lives and bodies ruined by drunken drivers.

  “Let me just ask you as a man—if your wife walked out on you, left you with your kid, what would make you want to divorce her?”

  “If I met a new woman, maybe. I don’t know. Your husband probably thinks the divorce is going to cost him, so he’s in no hurry to get started. Remember, he believes you’re dead broke. Maybe if you tell him you want to marry again, then he’ll think he’ll have you over the barrel and he’ll tip his hand, reveal what he wants.”

  She smiles. “That advice is worth more than almost anything you’ve done for me.”

  “No charge,” he says, waving a hand. Mr. Magnanimous. “We’ve both benefited nicely from our relationship. It was a lucky day for me when Irving Lowenstein referred you.”

  Another lie she has forgotten. Irving used to bitch about this guy all the time to Ditmars, which is part of the reason she chose him. Anyone on Irving’s bad side couldn’t be all bad. She had used Irving’s name, let Forshaw assume she was fond of nice old Mr. Lowenstein.

  “I probably should have sent him a gift, come to think of it,” Forshaw continues. “When I ran into him last fall, he wouldn’t even let me buy him a Diet Coke.”

  “You—ran into Irving? But you didn’t mention me, right?”

  “Didn’t have to. All I did was say medical malpractice and he figured out it was you. Besides, it was a referral. He knew he had recommended me to you, right?”

  Polly’s nostrils fill with a scorching smell, but it’s a memory, the pleasant smell of damp laundry as she presses Gregg’s shirts and watches television. “I’m Barry Forshaw and I’m for the law—and for YOU.” Irving. Irving Lowenstein. Why had she used his name when she called this stupid ambulance chaser? Because she wanted to sound connected, she wanted to be more than what she was, a dumb housewife, watching soap operas and listening to some guy’s Bawlmer accent bleating from her television set. Barry Forshaw is for the law—and for you. “How did you find me?” Barry Forshaw had asked her. All she had to say was television. But she thought that would mark her as naive, and to be naive was to be cheated, ruined, hurt. She said: “I heard from Irving Lowenstein that you were a fighter. We go way back, Irving and I.”

  And now, because Baltimore is so goddamn small, Irving has learned she hired Forshaw. Gregg may not know she has money hidden away, but Irving does.

  She manages to smile, shake Forshaw’s hand, walk out to Adam’s truck, but she’s shaking too hard to drive.

  She hadn’t been completely stupid on that first visit, she thinks. It had been a test, dropping Irving’s name. She needed someone just a little crooked, someone who would agree to pursue a settlement and keep it a secret. Someone who would then bank her money until she was free of Gregg. Anyone who had done business with Irving had to be a little bent. So she had said “Irving Lowenstein” and, abracadabra, Barry had nodded, said he knew Irving, although mostly as an adversary. She remembers thinking that was good, that they were adversaries. He wasn’t part of their schemes, then.

  The schemes—she straightens up behind the wheel of Adam’s truck, takes a deep breath. She’s not shaking anymore. There may be a way to solve the Irving problem. Irving’s not stupid. If Barry thanked him for referring Polly to him, he’ll have figured out she has money. And he’ll come after it. “I have 100 percent of the risk, but only 40 percent of the money,” Ditmars used to lament. “Irving takes 10 percent for doing nothing. But don’t ever try to gyp him out of his 10 percent.”

  Last fall, Forshaw says. He ran into Irving last fall. The mystery is why Irving hasn’t made a move on her yet.

  Only maybe he has.

  She bangs open the glove compartment, decides she has time to run one more errand before heading east.

  27

  “I think I saw Pauline,” Savannah Hansen tells Gregg when he comes to pick up Jani. Late. He’s thirty minutes late, and there might be beer on his breath.

  “You’re always saying that.”

  “Not always. Sometimes. Maybe three times during the summer.” She frowns at a grubby chocolate handprint on the skirt of her yellow plaid sundress, which is brand new. The pattern reminded her of that cute outfit that the lead girl in that new movie wore. Savannah is in very good shape for her age, for any age really. She doesn’t exercise, but she watches what she eats, always has, ever since Gregg’s father walked out on them when Gregg was not even a year old. She still had some of the pregnancy fat when Curtis left her. Which was her fault. Savannah has always been very honest with herself. She let herself go, got sloppy and whiny, and Curtis wasn’t having it. Some women in her situation would have been bitter, but Savannah found strength in seeing what she had done wrong. Being bossy was okay; men secretly liked bossy in her experience. But not naggy and self-pitying. And you can be bossy only as long as, at the end of the day, your man knows he’s the king of the castle, the cock of the walk. She raised Gregg to expect nothing less. Go figure that mousy Pauline would be his undoing.

  Jani is asleep and Gregg hoists her to his shoulder with a kind of absentminded tenderness. She’s a beautiful girl, but then—Jani favors her father. No conceit there, Gregg is a pretty boy, the one thing that Savannah and Curtis did right, with those dark curls and pale blue eyes. Once Curtis left, Savannah never lacked for male companionship but when the men figured out that Gregg was always going to be number one, they didn’t want to play second fiddle.

  She didn’t care. She didn’t need ’em. Curtis was good about money,
if not much else. She got to raise her boy the way she wanted, which was to be all-man. The way Savannah saw it, if you treated a man right, he could afford to be benevolent, generous. It’s only when you pick at a man’s power that he turns mean.

  She was so disappointed when he brought Pauline home. And not fooled for a minute. She knew the girl—woman, in her thirties already, although she was trying to play it younger—was knocked up the moment she saw her. It was the only possible explanation for the swift marriage down at the courthouse, never mind all that talk about the honeymoon. Eight months later, Jani proved Savannah right.

  She would have rather been wrong. Not that she doesn’t love Jani, dote on Jani. But she wasn’t ready to be a grandmother yet. She was too young, barely fifty when Jani was born. Once, the cashier at the Bel-Loc Diner even asked if she and Pauline were sisters. Oh, Pauline was insulted, but it was right after Jani was born, so she was looking a little puffy and exhausted.

  “Girl,” Savannah had told her, meaning to do nothing but good. “Don’t do what I did. Don’t let yourself go. Your man is job number one.”

  “Really? Then why did you let your man go?” Oh, she had a mouth on her when Gregg wasn’t around. She was full of sass, that Pauline.

  “I didn’t let him go. But when he left, I admitted it was my fault.”

  Savannah has to give Pauline credit: she starved that baby weight off her. Fact is, she went too far. She wasn’t meant to be skinny, Pauline. In a bathing suit, she had those telltale silvery tracks, the sign of a big weight loss at some point.

  Ah well, Savannah Hansen’s One-Baby Day-Care Center is closed for today. She’s going to make herself a kahlúa with a splash of skim milk, then have some Lean Cuisine manicotti while she watches Entertainment Tonight.

  The woman she saw today, parked across the street in a truck—Savannah was pretty sure it was Pauline. But, as Gregg says, it’s not the first time lately that she thought she saw her and why would Pauline be driving a big truck like that. Maybe when you fear something, you see it hiding around every corner. And Savannah has always had an uneasy feeling around Pauline. That look she gave her, when the man at the Bel-Loc said they could be sisters. She is not a woman who will tolerate rivals, Savannah thinks, adding some ice cubes to her drink. Which is a problem because Pauline is always going to have rivals. It’s not her looks, it’s her lack of confidence, pure and simple. She already has a rival in Jani.

  Oh, and now come to find out that she had a past. Gregg told Savannah that he found out this summer that Pauline was that woman who killed her husband and lied about it. Something like that. Savannah went all over cold, hearing that. Imagine, her sweet son lying in bed next to that woman. Thank God they’re getting divorced. They better be getting divorced.

  Savannah puts her feet up on her hassock. Her just-so house is beginning to look a little worse for wear. It’s no place for a sticky toddler. Much as it pains her, Savannah has to put Gregg on notice that this is a temporary arrangement. She loves her grandchild, but she didn’t sign up for another round of this every day shit. She has served her time.

  28

  A song plays in Adam’s head as he looks at the gas gauge on his truck. Where did you go, my Handsome Polly-O? Half full. That’s consistent with a trip to Dover. Only the odometer isn’t. The truck has turned over to thirteen thousand miles, which means she traveled more than two hundred miles yesterday. Did she really think he wouldn’t check the mileage?

  Yes, you sick fuck. Because she thinks you believe every word she says. Which means she either trusts you or she’s playing you for a fool.

  In which case: Yes, you dumb fuck.

  Either scenario, he’s hosed. If she loves and trusts him, he can never reveal to her the real reason they met. And if she’s playing him, he’ll end up another chump, abandoned at best.

  This much is clear: Polly returned from wherever she was in a mood that is new, at least to him. It’s as if she’s changed her hair color, but by no more than a shade. Always self-contained, she now carries the air of someone with a secret, a pleasant one. She smiles without seeming to be aware of it, hums in careless moments. They get up, go to work, come home, make love.

  Everything is the same as it was.

  Or is it?

  It takes him a few days to pick up on the changes. She doesn’t read the real estate ads anymore. Strange, he used to hate seeing the paper lying on the table, the house ads circled in bright blue marker. But now that she’s stopped, he feels unnerved. Why has she stopped planning for the future, their future? She no longer talks about B and Bs, or what the High-Ho could be in the hands of an ambitious young couple. She doesn’t push him to add new dishes to the menu. She doesn’t brainstorm about specials or theme nights.

  In bed, she is more passionate than ever.

  Where did you go, my Handsome Polly-O? What do you know, my Handsome Polly-O?

  Polly-O. His mother had sung that old folk song to him in her off-key yet pleasant warble of a voice. She had an autoharp. Of course she did. And, once again, the world has caught up to his mother, with people going crazy for this album by a pretty young bluegrass artist. When Adam was young, he hated his parents’ music, but then—teenagers are supposed to hate their parents’ music. Does it still work that way? If he had a kid, how could the kid dare to say no to the Clash and the Pogues and Elvis Costello? A kid would have to tie himself in knots, making a case against the musicians Adam loved in his teens and twenties, still loves.

  But the next generation would do it, if only out of sheer perversity. God, the shit on the radio now, those awful “boy” bands built on a formula as old as the Monkees—a cute one, a brainy one, a quirky one, an ugly one.

  He is cleaning up after a slow Wednesday, although business had picked up a bit when early diners reported around town that he was serving “chicken casserole.” The dish was, more accurately, a chicken lasagna, made with heavy cream and about four pounds of cheese. It tickles him, he has to admit, when he gets a burst of locals late in the shift because word has traveled about how good tonight’s special is. But it reminds him, too, what life in a small town is like. There are three or four families who “matter,” at least in Belleville. There’s one in particular whose name is on everything, the Langleys. They were here tonight, swanned in like the king and queen of homecoming, their loyal court in attendance. But their approval matters, and he slaved over their plates as if the New York Times restaurant critic were out there.

  No, the small-town life is not the life for him, which sounds like another song his mother might have sung. How he misses his parents, those sad, sweet hippies who ate macrobiotic, smoked dope, and died before they were sixty—a heart attack for him, a stroke for her—because some people do everything right and still don’t catch a break.

  And maybe that’s Polly, he thinks, looking at her, closing down the register at the bar. Maybe she just had shitty luck all these years. He watches her count the cash. She’s so loving with the money. It’s as if every bill is a child on its way to school, each one needing a last loving touch—a cap adjusted on this one, a smear of toothpaste wiped from the corner of that one’s lips. She is especially solicitous of her tips, tucking them into her billfold snugly.

  Why aren’t you tucking your own child into bed at night, Handsome Polly-O? Where did you go, my Handsome Polly-O?

  And maybe because his thoughts keep going to music tonight, or maybe because she’s swaying a little, as if lost in a private dance, he goes over to the jukebox and drops a quarter in. He doesn’t want to agonize over a pick, so he punches in a random combo, AA:11. He knows the song from its first notes. “I’d Like to Get to Know You.” 1968. A deeply uncool song. But he was eleven in 1968. He would have killed to slow-dance with a girl to this song, to any song.

  He turns and opens his arms to her and she doesn’t have to be asked. Oh, how I love you, Quiet Polly-O, with all your secrets and silences. They move through the restaurant as if it were a ballroom. Jorge come
s out of the kitchen to watch, then disappears as if he’s caught them fucking. Their dance is that private, that intimate. I’d Like to Get to Know You. He would, he would. He wants to know her and he wants her to know him. He was hired to get to know her. Those were his literal marching orders. Get to know her, Irving had said. Insinuate your way into her life. Look for inconsistencies. Is she living large in any way? I need to figure out if she’s tapped into the money, or if it’s out there somewhere, waiting for her. We have to get to her before she wastes that poor child’s money. She’s done this before. She and her husband used me to run a very sophisticated insurance scheme.

  He realizes now that Irving planned to blackmail Polly. He thought she would pay to keep her safe new life, that she would be terrified of her husband knowing about her past. When she bolted, he lost his leverage. But it’s also evident now that Adam was working for a bad guy. Had worked. He ended the relationship the Tuesday after Labor Day, told Irving that he clearly wasn’t going to be able to deliver the information Irving wanted—the proof that she even had money, much less where she was keeping it. Adam hadn’t started out to work for a bad guy. He thought he was on the right side. He had been told that a woman had stolen money from her stepdaughter. When Adam had confronted Irving with his lies, he seemed to shrug, said he always thought the girl was a stepdaughter because Polly had been so unloving with her, so distant. And, after all, she had in fact murdered her husband. Was it so wrong to think she was capable of screwing over her own daughter?

  She did kill a man. That’s not up for debate.

  What if this woman in his arms killed Cath, set that fire? Did she know that the volunteer fire department would be easy to fool, or did she simply take the risk? But why would she kill Cath when Cath had no power over her? How had she lured her there? By the time Cath died, Adam and Mr. C knew about Polly’s past. What more could there be?

  I’d Like to Get to Know You. Sing it, Spanky. Sing it. Polly’s eyes are closed, her head on his shoulder. They dip and swoon through the restaurant. And when the song ends and the jukebox is silent, they stand there a long time, swaying to the songs in their heads.