Goodnight Nobody

by Jennifer Weiner

  "You're Kate Klein?" Laura Lynn Baird snapped.

  "Yes," I said.

  Laura Lynn had looked slim but imposing every time I'd seen her on television, gleefully trashing some Democratic congressman or feminist lawyer. In person, she was tiny, a flat-chested androgynous sprite the size of a starving fifth grader, clad in a pink Chanel suit with tufted cream trim at the hem of the skirt and on the jacket pockets. She had on cream-colored pumps, a double strand of pink pearls, and pearl and gold earrings. Her obligatory blond tresses, dyed the color of straw, had been blown out and sprayed until her entire head looked like it had been stuck under a broiler and crisped.

  "Come," she instructed, tightening her grip on my arm, drawing me into a cloud of hairspray and sour coffee breath, and leading me into a living room, a high-ceilinged space sparsely furnished with a few pieces of leather and metal furniture as hard-edged as she was. "Sit." She pointed, and I perched on a corner of a white suede love seat. There was a trio of panel-style television sets hanging on the wall like paintings. They were flanked by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with hardcovers. All the conservative heavy hitters were there: Ann Coulter and Peggy Noonan, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, the Michaels (Medved and Savage), and her fellow Lauras (Ingraham and Schlessinger).

  I stared at the titles, blinking at the yellow Post-its stuck to the spine of each title, each bearing two numbers and the words "How High" and "How Long."

  "The New York Times bestseller list," Laura said. "I like to keep track."

  I looked around for the baby paraphernalia--the bouncy seats, the Exersaucer, a couch cushion stained with spit-up--but couldn't find any. I did, however, see a framed eight-by-ten of her father, Byron "Bo" Baird, posed in front of an American flag. Bo Baird, with iron-gray hair and a complementary steely gaze, had owned twenty-eight newspapers nationwide at the height of his powers, each of them more right-leaning than the next. He'd dined with presidents and advised senators before dropping dead at the age of seventy-eight in a bed he turned out to be sharing with a woman who, regrettably, was not his wife. I'd been in high school when it had happened, but I remembered the late-night talk show hosts having a field day. The rumors--never confirmed, but extremely persistent--were that not only had Bo expired on top of another woman, he'd been wearing her high heels at the time.

  "I've got twenty minutes," Laura Lynn said, making a production of looking at the gold watch on one itty-bitty wrist. "And before we get started, I want to make one thing clear: Kitty Cavanaugh was not my ghostwriter. We worked together. Those goddamn fucking bloggers are already getting it wrong, big surprise, the Times had it wrong this morning, my lawyer's already drafting a cease-and-desist motion..." She paused for breath and snatched a can of Diet Coke from an LLB-monogrammed ice bucket on the chrome and glass coffee table. "You saw the obit?" she barked.

  "I...uh..." I fumbled through the slurry of broken crayons and juice-stiffened napkins at the bottom of my WGBH totebag and pulled out a notebook with a pink, glittery cover featuring Hello Kitty. It was Sophie's--the only thing I'd been able to find on short notice.

  "O-bit-u-a-ry," she said, pronouncing each syllable as if she were speaking to someone who'd just come back from her lobotomy. "In today's so-called paper of record." She snatched the offending pages off the coffee table and tossed them at me. "Connecticut Mother, Writer Slain," said the two-column headline on page B-6. "Katherine Cavanaugh, a Connecticut woman who worked in the editorial department of Content magazine writing 'The Good Mother' column beneath the byline of conservative social critic Laura Lynn Baird, was found dead in her kitchen on Friday afternoon. Mrs. Cavanaugh, thirty-six" was all I saw before Laura Lynn grabbed the newspaper out of my hand.

  "Don't read it," she rapped, her jaw clenched and tiny eyes glittering. "It's all lies, lies and bullshit, typical liberal smear garbage. My lawyer's already spoken to their ombudsman--oh, excuse me," she said, her husky, clipped voice heavy with sarcasm, "their ombuds-person. Gotta be gender neutral these days, right? Right?" She threw back her head, exposing a scrawny, corded neck, and made a noise that must have sounded like laughter when she was on TV.

  "How long had Kitty been, um, working with you?"

  "Five years, six years, something like that," she said.

  I wrote it down. "How did you meet her?"

  "We were introduced," she said. "Joel Asch, he's the editor in chief of Content, had been her professor at Hanfield. He spoke highly of her, I interviewed her, she seemed intelligent, and capable enough, so that was that. There you go." She tapped her foot on the hardwood floor. "What else? What else?"

  I blurted out the first thing I could think of. "Where's your son? Is he napping?"

  "He's at the park with my mother. She takes care of him when I'm working," she said. She lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes at me, daring me to call her a hypocrite.

  "Oh."

  "And when I travel. I used to take him with me--he was more portable when he was little--but it just got to be too much. Last year I was on the road one night out of every three. That was why Kitty was so perfect," Laura Lynn said. "I supplied the politics, the ideology, the spin. She provided some of the details. You know. All that messy domestic stuff. Dirty diapers and drool." She whipped one manicured hand through the air. I imagined I could hear the air whistling in its wake.

  "So..." I wanted to ask who did the writing, but I knew I couldn't. So I said, "How did you divide the labor?" There, I thought. Much better.

  Laura Lynn shook her head in frustration. Not a single hair moved. "We'd talk on the phone, or we'd email. I'd give her ideas, we'd have conversations, and then she'd send me the final product. When you think about it, I was doing her a real service," Laura Lynn said.

  I couldn't help raising my eyebrows at that one, and I tried to camouflage my disgust as deep interest. "Oh?"

  "I believe in earned equality," she said. I recognized the catch-phrase from one of her TV appearances. "And unlike the so-called feminists"--she hooked her spindly fingers into air quotes and lifted her lip in a sneer--"I actually support women."

  "Oh?"

  "Absolutely," she said, nodding vigorously. "You see, a woman like Kitty, a mom with two kids..." She drummed her fingers on her knee, looking disconcerted, even upset, for the first time in our conversation. "She had two kids, right?"

  I nodded.

  "Two kids, in the suburbs, what other work could she possibly do? She couldn't go to an office, couldn't go back to school. I allowed her the luxury of staying home with her children, and a chance to have a voice in the world!" she concluded triumphantly.

  Hv voice in world, I scribbled, keeping my eyes assiduously on my page, knowing that if I risked looking at Laura Lynn, my face would give me away. "So she worked from home?"

  Laura Lynn nodded, sighed audibly, and glanced at her watch again. "That's right. After that first time we met in the city, it was just easier for us to do it on the phone or with email."

  "That was all right with your editor? With..." I looked at my notebook. "Joel Asch?"

  "Anything was going to be okay with him. He loooved her. He might have been fucking her, for all I know," she added, her voice suddenly vicious. So much for sisterhood, I managed to keep from saying.

  "Did she agree with your point of view? Your take on motherhood?"

  Laura Lynn scowled at me. "Well, of course she did. Why wouldn't she?"

  I wrote it down without answering. I wasn't touching that one. It was probably true. A woman who'd tell an almost stranger, "I would never leave my children," with her face and eyes glowing, like she was in the grip of some religious passion, or insane--probably would buy what Laura Lynn was selling.

  "Look," Laura Lynn continued, leaning forward and laying one hand on my knee for emphasis, "I would have been perfectly happy with a double byline. Honest to God. But the editors felt..."--she gave a tiny shrug--"that my name was the draw, and that sharing the credit would just muddy the waters. And Kitty was fine with it. Re
ally. Especially once we got the book deal."

  "Book deal?"

  She gave another impatient exhale and cracked open another can of soda. "We sold our manuscript three weeks ago," Laura Lynn said. "At auction. Six houses were bidding." She held her soda can like a microphone. "A collection of essays about the contested nature of motherhood in modern-day America. We got a seven-figure advance."

  "Did you have a title? I'd like to mention it at the memorial service."

  She blinked at me as I congratulated myself on my quick thinking. "The Good Mother. Of course."

  Of course.

  "And we were both going to have bylines!" Laura Lynn concluded, as if that fact alone put her halfway toward sainthood. "Make sure you mention that. Well, you know. It would say, 'By Laura Lynn Baird with Kitty Cavanaugh.' "

  I nodding, remembering a line I'd read in a hundred different detective stories: follow the money. A seven-figure advance meant that there was plenty of money to follow. "I don't want to get too personal, but would you mind telling me how you planned to split the advance, and the royalties?"

  "Well..." Laura Lynn set down her soda can and fiddled with her pearls. "We hadn't quite finalized it." She gave me a wide-eyed look. "But it was going to be fair. You can be assured of that. See, I believe in treating women fairly, and in paying them fairly."

  I nodded and wrote that down too, then kept nodding as Laura Lynn expounded on her views of motherhood (pro), feminism (con), and a woman's impact on the world (significant and favorable, provided she attended to her children first, thus effecting change on a micro level, but from little acorns spring great oaks, and there would be no need for gun control, campaign finance reform, or government regulation of the Internet, if only the mothers of the world would do their job).

  "Jane Segal said you found the body," Laura Lynn said. "Was it...was she..." She tilted her soda can back and forth, then raised her hands to her necklace. "Did she suffer?" she finally asked. Her pearls chattered between her fingers.

  "I don't know," I said.

  We sat in silence for about ten seconds before Laura Lynn chugged down the remnants of her soda and set down the can. "Gotta go," she said, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. "I'm taking the train to D.C."

  I knew my cue. "Did Kitty ever mention someone named Evan McKenna to you?" His name seemed to hang in the air like a mobile. If I looked up, I'd see it dangling over my head.

  "No," said Laura. "Why? Who's he?"

  "Nobody," I said. "He's nobody." As always, his name twisted through my heart. Nobody. How I wished that it were true.

  She got to her feet. "So, listen, I'm sorry for your loss. Was Kitty a good friend of yours?"

  I shook my head. "I didn't really know her that well. Just from the playground, or the supermarket, or soccer games."

  That admission seemed to relax Laura Lynn. "That's a shame. She was nice," she said. "Very reliable. Very thorough." She paused, perhaps realizing that what she'd said sounded more like a reference for a cleaning service than a eulogy for a departed colleague. "You know what Kitty was? She was a good mother. Just like the column said."

  I got home at five past eleven, which gave me fifteen minutes to debrief with Janie, fifteen minutes for research, and ten minutes to get myself to the Red Wheel Barrow for the eleven forty-five pickup.

  Typing "Laura Lynn Baird" and "Good Mother" and "book deal" into my favorite search engine caused it to spit out a dozen stories. Laura Lynn had, indeed, landed a deal "said to be well into the seven figures" for a collection of essays on motherhood previously published in Content, plus "additional original material." All the articles got all three of her names right, and a few of them even resurrected the scandal of her father's death, but I couldn't find any mention of Kitty Cavanaugh or any cowriter, ghostwriter, or other assistance, anywhere. I jotted down the name of the agent and the editor, Googled their phone numbers, and glanced at the clock: 11:28. My fingers hovered over the telephone. Screw it, I thought, and dialed.

  Dafna Herzog, Laura Lynn's literary agent, had a raucous laugh that she used midway through my spiel about how I was a neighbor of Kitty Cavanaugh's and that I'd recently spoken to Laura Lynn Baird. "Oh, God," she said, and chuckled ruefully. "My new favorite client."

  "I don't mean to pry."

  "Pry away," she said, and kept laughing. "I've gotten about twenty calls from reporters already this morning. The dead ghostwriter. What a story!"

  "So you knew about Kitty?"

  "Let's put it this way. I made an educated guess that Laura had assistance for those Content pieces. She's a hell of an advocate--you know?--and of course she's great on TV, but when it comes to putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard..." She chuckled again. "She can do sound bites, but not paragraphs or chapters, God forbid."

  "No talent?" I ventured.

  "No time," Dafna said. "So I figured there was someone, but I didn't know for sure until I saw it in the Times."

  "Laura never told you she'd be working with another writer."

  "I guess that was kind of an unspoken assumption on my part," Dafna said. "Which is to say, I didn't ask, she didn't tell."

  "And in terms of the financial situation..." I paused, but Dafna outwaited me. Finally I asked, "How much was her advance, exactly?"

  "Seven figures, with bonuses," Dafna said. "That's as specific as I'll get."

  Fair enough. "Laura Lynn told me that she and Kitty were going to split the money."

  "That," said Dafna, "would have been between Laura Lynn Baird and your friend. The deal I negotiated was only for Laura."

  Deal only for Laura, I wrote. "You know, I think your client lied to me," I said.

  Dafna practically exploded in laughter. "Well, mazel tov! You just lost your virginity!" she chuckled. "Listen, Laura Lynn was--is--a writer. At least, she'd like to be one. Writers lie. They embroider. They dissemble. Not to put too fine a point on it, they make things up. And what was Laura Lynn going to tell you? I'm a greedy monster who was going to keep it all? Poor thing," she spluttered, "now she's really on the hook. She'll probably have to set up a college fund for the ghostwriter's kids. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

  Eleven thirty-two. I decided to go for it. "Do you think Laura Lynn Baird could have killed Kitty?"

  I braced myself for another hailstorm of laughter. It didn't come. "For the money, you mean?" Dafna asked. "If she thought that Kitty was going to sue her, or expose her somehow? I guess I'd say that people have killed each other for a lot less money than what we were talking about." She paused. "Boy, wouldn't that be some story?"

  "Some story," I repeated. "So what happens to the book now?"

  "Hard to say. Now that it turns out Laura didn't technically write those pieces by herself, your dead lady's going to get author credit for sure. It'll build interest. Given the--uh--recent events. Anyhow," she concluded, "call back if there's anything else you need." Click.

  It was eleven thirty-four. Information gave me the switchboard for Content, and the receptionist put me through to Joel Asch's office. "What is this regarding?" she asked dubiously, after I'd introduced myself as Kate Klein from Upchurch, Connecticut.

  "Kitty Cavanaugh. She was a friend of mine." I paused, considering, and decided, What the hell. "I was the one who found the...who found her. Her body."

  "And, so...what is this regarding?"

  Good question. "Well, I know she wrote for Content, and that Joel was the one who hired her..." I paused.

  "Yes," said the woman on the other end of the line. Her voice sharpened. "But what is this regarding? What do you want?"

  "Just to talk to him," I said limply. "To talk to him about Kitty."

  "I'll give him the message."

  "Thanks," I said, reciting my name and my telephone number. Eleven thirty-seven. I set the phone down and sprinted to the minivan. If I was late again, I was going to get another lecture and another ten-dollar-per-child fine from the school's director, Mrs. Dietl, who had the curli
ng gray hair and warm blue eyes of a cookie-box grandma and the heart and soul of an ATM machine.

  Suspect, I thought, zipping out of the driveway and narrowly missing the mailbox, picturing Laura Lynn's corded neck and skinny fingers strangling a can of Diet Coke. I had an honest-to-God suspect.

  I pulled out of Liberty Lane, onto Main Street, zipping over a pile of pulpy gray and crimson that had formerly been a squirrel. "Frankie and Johnnie were lovers. Oh, Lordy, how they did love," I sang. "They swore to be true to each other. Just as true as the stars above. He was her man, but he done her wrong." I didn't realize how loudly I'd been singing, or how wide my mouth must have been open, until I whizzed past a police car parked at the corner of Folly Farm Way and noticed the pink-faced officer staring at me. Oops. I shut my mouth and picked up my cell phone, which had started beeping insistently. One missed call. I hadn't heard it ring, but that was no surprise. Upchurch cell phone reception was notoriously crappy, because the town fathers and mothers had refused to permit a tower anywhere near their quaint little country paradise. I punched in the numbers for voice mail and felt my hands tighten on the wheel in a death grip as I heard my name. "Kate," said a voice I hadn't heard in seven years. There was a burst of static, loud noises in the background. "...it's Evan McKenna. We need to talk."

  Eight

  Janie and I didn't get hired by People magazine, but thanks to Janie's persistence, my good grades, and, I suspect, the eventual behind-the-scenes machinations of Sy Segal, we landed jobs as copy editors/ wannabe reporters at New York Night, a weekly magazine just shy of being a tabloid whose bread and butter--or gin and tonic--were the drug- and alcohol-fueled antics of young celebrities. Not that we ever got to meet any of these young celebrities, although if Sy had been less insistent on the matter of her employment, Janie could have partied with them all night instead of working all day.