Sunburn: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  29

  Polly has taken to slipping out of bed before the sun rises and walking to the Royal Farms for coffee, a little downtime with the Wilmington News-Journal. She needs solitude, and that’s no longer available to her at home. After the explosion, she was too dazed to consider what it would be like to live with Adam. They were a couple, she was confident of his love for her, it made sense for him to stop paying for the motel when she got the larger place.

  But now she’s almost never alone, and she realizes how much she craves solitude, a luxury she didn’t know until this summer. Even when Adam is sleeping, his presence fills the garage apartment. That used to be comforting, like sleeping next to a lion. She felt safe. Now she notices that he snores a little, sometimes even passes gas. He is, after all, a man. Kinder to her than the other men she has known, but still a man, always a man.

  The new place is, by almost anyone’s standards, nicer than the one above the Ben Franklin. Modern appliances, one and a half baths. And most people would probably like the wooded backyard, the privacy it provides. But Polly misses the light that filled her second-floor apartment, the high ceilings and almost empty rooms. Even if most of the things in the new place belong to the landlord—the same landlord she had before, giving her a break; he feels terrible about the explosion, Cath’s death—they weigh her down. In the Royal Farms, there is nothing to clean, nothing to cook, not even a cup to rinse after she has finished her coffee. She leaves the newspaper behind for whoever sits down next. The News-Journal doesn’t really mean anything to her, she might as well be reading a paper in a foreign language. The towns, the counties, the elected officials—she doesn’t recognize a one. The only thing she knows about Delaware is Belleville and the only time Belleville was in the News-Journal was when Polly’s apartment blew up and Cath died.

  They mentioned her, of course. But no one cared. It was an accident, after all—that beautiful old stove, she thinks with a pang. There was even a little backfire of gossip that maybe it was Cath who started the fire but didn’t realize how much gas had built up from the leaking stove. It makes as much sense as anything, Polly supposes, but she keeps a polite silence when Max and Ernest try to bait that hook. Best not to speak ill of the dead.

  But maybe those rumors are sturdy enough to travel on their own, because here’s Cath’s brother-in-law, Trooper Jim, waiting in his official car when Polly leaves the Royal Farms just before sunrise.

  “May I speak to you?” he asks.

  “I need to get home.” Adam doesn’t like waking up alone. It’s really quite endearing.

  “It won’t take a minute.” He leans over, pushes open the passenger-side door. She climbs in, but she doesn’t close the door. She doesn’t like being in confined spaces with people she can’t trust, male or female. Her body is angled so she can move quickly if he tries to grab her.

  “You can close the door.”

  “I know.”

  He takes her measure, sees she won’t be bullied, lets it go.

  “So I’ve been talking to an arson expert. Guy who testifies in trials. He says there’s a scenario where it would make sense if someone made that explosion look like an accident in order to cover up a murder.”

  She says nothing. Ditmars told her a long time ago never to talk to anyone, about anything.

  “If there was a fire and the gas was on—yes, it could go like that, kaboom. And if Cath lit a cigarette, maybe, assuming the gas had been leaking for a while. But the scene is consistent with what would happen if a small fire started in another room. Say, from a candle.”

  Or a scarf, slipping and falling on the bare bulb of a bedside lamp.

  Never tell anyone anything, Ditmars whispers in her ear. She never thought she’d be happy to hear his voice in her head. His voice is forever trapped in her head, but it’s usually taunting, not helping.

  “But if the stove had been leaking for a while, you would have smelled it, right? You said you left to take a walk, then went to your boyfriend’s motel room.”

  “I often take walks at night.” Nothing specific, nothing that can be contradicted.

  “But, you know, cigarette fiend that Cath is, she’s pretty polite. She never would have smoked in someone else’s home.”

  “She lit up a cigarette in my kitchen the first time she came by, even though I asked her not to. And she used the burner.”

  “Yes, the first time she came by. So how many times was it that she dropped in to see you? Remember, I’m the one she asked to check you out, so don’t try to sell me on the friend thing.”

  Her fault. She has said too much. That doesn’t mean she has to keep talking. Ditmars taught her that, too. You can shut up anytime. The sooner, the better. If she didn’t scream or cry, the things he did to her, they didn’t last as long.

  “Anyway, it could be arson,” Trooper Jim continues. “The investigation isn’t necessarily closed. Just so you know. A murder case never goes away. Who knows what kind of technology they’ll have in five, ten years? Cath’s death has completely fucked up my in-laws. Finding who’s to blame may be the only thing that will help them.”

  “Closure,” she says.

  Polly thinks about an investigation that had haunted Ditmars, if only briefly. An accident on Christmas Day, in what would be the last full year of their life together. A family that had yearned for an old-fashioned Christmas had been foolish enough to use candles on the tree. But it was a gas leak that made the fire fatal, a fireball shooting up into the sky over Woodlawn. Walking through the wreckage where an entire family had died, Ditmars had a vision. He wanted, briefly, to be a better person. He swore he was going to change, made a resolution to stop drinking.

  Three days into the new year, he beat her with a belt, then wrapped it around her neck during sex. Six weeks after that, there was a fire strangely similar to the Christmas Day one, only in the city.

  “So you know about my first husband?”

  “Some.”

  “Do you know everything?”

  “He’s dead. Why are we talking about him?”

  Polly studies the sun as it rises—there’s a stripe of orange red, a low simmer on the horizon, then a perfect round lozenge suddenly popping up. She has never known sunrises and sunsets like they have in Belleville. The flat, open landscape gives the light so much room to spread.

  “My husband was a dirty cop. He was an arson investigator. He knew how to make things look like accidents. He never—his words—shat where he ate. He worked for the county. But there were fires in the city, deadly ones, from time to time. And I’m pretty sure he set them.”

  “He’s dead,” Trooper Jim repeats. Polly wonders for a moment, Is he? How can she be sure? It turns out it is possible to have seen a man’s body, a knife sticking through his heart, and still wonder if one will ever be free of him. She can’t believe she won. And, yes, she considers killing Ditmars a victory. She lost almost every battle in the years they were together, but she won the war. She won that war and she’ll win this one.

  “He had a partner. Irving Lowenstein. He arranged for policies, they split the proceeds. He probably suspects I know things—insurance fraud, even murder. He has reasons to want me dead.”

  “Are you trying to say someone was trying to kill you and killed Cath by accident?”

  “I’m saying it’s a possibility.”

  “I’ll need more than your say-so. Dates, names.”

  “I can get them.”

  30

  June pours tomato soup into bowls, puts out goldfish crackers that she bought at the Food Lion on her way to her parents’ house.

  “Please eat,” she urges her mother. When Dorothy “Dodo” Whitmire retired from her job at the state school board, her plan was to start golfing with her husband, pursue her interest in birding, which had been limited to what she could see from their deck. Now she is hunched and ashen as if she has lived years in the dark, immobile. June’s father, Dan, never much of a talker, is almost completely mute these days
, and he has lost so much weight that his face looks like melted rubber.

  Since Cath’s death June has tried to visit her parents at least one or two evenings a week. They are only in their late fifties, but the loss of their oldest daughter has aged them, cruelty on top of cruelty. It doesn’t help that they had both taken early retirement, which has ended up giving them unlimited time to grieve.

  Everyone, even June, always assumed she was their favorite. She was certainly the “good” one, the one who gave them little cause to worry over the years. But she is beginning to suspect that they would be able to make peace more easily with her untimely death for that very reason. Cath was a work in progress, so many of life’s most basic milestones left undone. Stuck in a nowhere job she was about to lose. Incapable of getting her act together to enroll in the local community college, no matter how much she talked about it. Cath and her castles in the air. The day before she had died, she had called June with questions about high-end finishes in kitchens, which ones were worth the money, which could be skipped. She said she was thinking about buying a town house in a new development near the marsh, and there were upgrade options. June asked her how she could possibly afford it, and Cath said—coyly, June thinks now—that she was a better saver than anyone gave her credit for, that tip money had been coming in like a bumper crop this summer.

  Yet her boss confirmed to Jim that he was going to let Cath go, or at least cut her hours way back, although he also insisted he had not yet told her that. He had been maddeningly unapologetic about his disloyalty to her, indifferent to the protocols of death, in which people agree to act as if the deceased were a better person than she was. “I can’t afford two waitresses off-season,” he said. “I pitch in, or my wife does.”

  Could Cath’s death have been a suicide attempt? June wonders, leaning against the stove, waiting to see if her parents will eat anything. She cannot imagine her wayward, intense sister taking her own life. But she can envision Cath staging a scene, for effect, getting down on her hands and knees and sticking her head in the oven, then getting bored at her own dramatics. She had done things like that when they were children. Once, on April Fool’s Day, she had spread ketchup on herself and sprawled at the bottom of the stairs for June, only seven at the time, to find her. She hadn’t been fooled for long, but the image still lives in her head. When she has nightmares about Cath—and she has two, three a week—that’s what she sees, a ten-year-old covered in blood.

  She feels guilty that she can still go about daily life in a way her parents cannot. She loved her sister, of course. But Cath was exhausting, absorbing so much attention and time. June, settled and happy, felt more and more like Cath’s second mother. Cath had begun to borrow money here and there—small amounts, but June kept this secret from Jim. She has a lot of practice, keeping Cath’s secrets.

  The family never spoke about the “accident”—a word that lives in quotations in June’s head because she knows the law. If you attack someone, leap at the person with teeth bared and hands ready to strike, you have intent, even if you’re not trying to put them in a wheelchair for life. Yet if the family had dared to discuss this taboo topic, June would never have told them the connection she made long ago: Cath jumped on that girl a week after June won three awards at her middle-school graduation ceremony. June has long believed that Cath yearned to leap at her, punch her and hit her, for being the effortlessly good girl. But it wasn’t effortless. It was the only role left to her as hellion Cath burned her path through adolescence. When June was a teenager, it felt as if every conversation with her parents started with an almost absentminded congratulations on June’s latest achievement, then quickly moved to the problem of Cath, what should they do about Cath? Oh, June believes this woman killed Cath. But the quiet, analytical part of June’s mind, honed by hours of listening to court testimony, can’t help wondering if Cath provoked her.

  “Eat,” she urges her parents, who move their soup spoons through their bowls but fail to raise them to their mouths. The goldfish crackers she sprinkled along the surface have bloated and sunk. This was how June and Cath had eaten tomato soup when they were little, putting so many goldfish in their bowls that you could barely see what they called the red sea. The trick was to eat them quickly, while they still had a little crunch and snap. She had thought it might comfort her parents, this unacknowledged callback to a simpler time. Because by the time Cath was eleven or twelve, it was clear she was not going to have an easy life. She wasn’t self-destructive, but she was destructive. Things broke around Cath. Things and people. Accidents, her parents always said. Cath had accidents.

  But not everything was an accident. There had been a set of china, their paternal grandmother’s, in the attic. When June and Jim got engaged and set up a wedding registry, June told her mother that she was happy to take the family china. Her mother, looking embarrassed, confessed that Cath had broken most of it when she was a teenager, just gone up to the attic and flung plates and cups and serving dishes against the wall.

  “You have to eat, Mom,” June says again. Her mother takes a tiny sip of soup, a larger sip from the Michelob Light at her place. She always seems to have a beer going when June comes by. But it’s just the one, as far as June can tell, nursed slowly through the afternoon and evening. She’s checked the recycling bins. Her mom is averaging one a day, no more than two.

  Desperate to do anything, say anything that will rouse her parents from this dull, zombielike state, June offers, knowing it’s premature, “Jim has a lead. Into the, um, explosion. Someone—might be held accountable.”

  To say that her parents brightened would be inaccurate, but their eyes focus on her, hopeful and curious. They want their daughter’s death to have meaning. There is no meaning in an accident. But if Jim is right, Cath’s death was still a kind of an accident, the consequence of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She won’t explain that to them just yet.

  “That woman?” her mother asks.

  “She’s—connected.” There will be time enough, assuming Jim is right, to tell them the full story. “But if his information is correct, it would have been someone else who actually did it.”

  Since that woman—June, like her mother, prefers not to use her name—confided in Jim, he has been almost distressingly excited, talking about how much it will mean for his career if he can link Cath’s death to similar arson cases in Baltimore. It’s unseemly, that’s the word, how Jim is more focused on his future than on justice for Cath. June blames that woman. She does something to men. She took Cath’s boyfriend from her. She bewitched Mr. C into giving her preferential treatment over Cath, which makes no sense. Good Lord, Mr. C has known June and Cath since they were kids and he had the soft serve ice cream place on Main Street. And now that woman has Jim convinced that she can help him solve the mystery of Cath’s death. It’s not sexual, not exactly. She’s a pot simmering, full of promises—

  Pot. June realizes she has left the electric burner on under the soup and she goes over, turns it off. She pours the uneaten portion into Tupperware, puts it in the fridge, notices all the Tupperware from her last couple of visits. The crisper drawer is full of rotting vegetables and the milk has gone bad. Dutiful daughter that she is, she begins throwing out what can’t be saved, rinsing the Tupperware, preparing the dishwasher to run. She boils water for a Nescafé for her drive home, then rummages in the cupboard for sugar. All she can find is the old china sugar bowl from the set that Cath destroyed, filled with sugar cubes. Can sugar go bad? She figures as long as there are no ants crawling in the bowl, it’s okay.

  As she’s bolting her coffee over the kitchen sink, she sees what appears to be a flash of orange and black in the backyard sycamore. An oriole is a rare sight in these parts, especially this time of year, and it’s probably just a red-winged blackbird, its coloring distorted by the dusk.

  Still, there’s no harm in saying, “Mom, I think I just saw a Baltimore oriole.”

  Her mother doesn’t even both
er to come to the window.

  “Well, it’s gone now,” June says with staunch cheer. “But I swear I saw one.” She will give her mother binoculars for Christmas, she decides, or introduce her to a new hobby. Or they could find something to collect together, maybe those cute little Beanie Babies.

  June leaves her parents in the den, watching Murder, She Wrote. She worries a little about them watching crime shows, but it was always their favorite program. Maybe it’s a good sign that they still want to visit Cabot Cove and follow J. B. Fletcher on her various trips. Murder in J. B. Fletcher’s world is almost gentle, bloodless. And there’s no follow-up, no future visits from J. B. Fletcher in which the bereaved are staring into space, indifferent to food, conversation, or even a possible Baltimore oriole sighting.

  31

  Adam is pulling roasted bones from the oven when it first occurs to him to wonder if Polly could be cheating on him. How has he gotten here, from chopping carrots and celery, to questioning her fidelity? He takes a second, traces his chain of thought back to its source: he is making stock and that’s one letter off from taking stock. Taking stock is taking inventory. At least, he assumes that’s where that usage started. But most people now use it as a term for checking in on their own lives. Where am I? What do I have? What do I lack?

  Adam is in a job with no future or money, in love with a woman he can’t trust. At a critical moment, he lied to protect her. But maybe she didn’t need his protection. The fire was ruled an accident, as was Cath’s death. Polly has done nothing in recent weeks to suggest she’s not worthy of his trust.

  Although there was the day she borrowed his truck and put two hundred miles on it when it should have been more like a hundred. She later said that she went to Dover to get a Delaware driver’s license. Turns out whoever told her that she could use her birth certificate was wrong, because she needed proof of residence, too.