Goodnight Nobody

by Jennifer Weiner

  I fluffed the last of the pillows, then squatted down to pick blocks up off the floor. "Do you think Ted killed Kitty Cavanaugh?"

  He shook his head without any hesitation. "We aren't friends, but I've spent a lot of time with him. I could see him getting ugly. I could see him losing his temper, getting abusive." He looked down; he appeared frail and exhausted. I could see blue veins pulsing in his wrists. "He wasn't too happy with me today. Or with you. He's a yeller, maybe a shover. But I can't see him stabbing someone to death."

  I tossed the blocks into the toy chest. "So if he didn't do it, who did?"

  Ben ran his fingers wearily through his hair again. "Can't you just let it go?"

  "Can't," I said, getting up from the couch and smoothing the pillow where I'd sat. "Won't," I added.

  "Why not?"

  "Because women in this town--women just like me--are disappearing and dying." I gathered crusty paint brushes and construction paper from the coffee table. "Lexi Hagen-Holdt's missing now. Her husband just called."

  He looked at me with narrowed eyes. "So what, you're going to investigate that too?"

  I felt my temper flare but kept my voice light. "Why? Would what be a problem for you?"

  He just shook his head.

  "Look, I'm..." I set down the arts and crafts equipment, groping for words. "I'm good at this, Ben. And I've never been really, really good at anything."

  He rubbed his eyes. "What are you talking about? You're a good mother."

  Only insofar as our children still have all of their limbs, I thought. "Not by Upchurch standards. I'm barely adequate. And that's the thing. I was a good-not-great singer, but not in the same league as my mother. I was a good writer, but not as good as Janie." I put the paint brushes in their glass bottle. "I'm good at this. Or I think I could be."

  He stared at me. "You want to keep doing this?" he demanded. "You think this could be"--the incredulity in his voice was almost too much for me to stand--"what, a career?"

  "Well, I don't know! Maybe! I mean, the kids are going to be in school all day, at some point. I'm going to have to find something to do. I'm not just going to take yoga classes and, and volunteer at the art museum!"

  "Why not?" Ben asked. "That doesn't sound so bad to me." He gave me an appraising look--my backside in particular. "Maybe you could join a gym."

  "I'm not going to dignify that with a response," I said.

  I stood in front of Ben and held out my hand for the pictures of Ted Fitch's playthings. He gave another sigh, handed them over, muttered, "I give up," and plodded past me. I heard him walk past our bedroom and the door of the guest room open, then close.

  I was in bed half asleep when my cell phone buzzed. I answered without looking at the screen to see who was calling. "Hello?"

  "Kate?" asked Evan. "Is everything all right?"

  My breath caught in my throat. Nothing, I thought. Nothing is all right. "Everything's fine," I said.

  "I've got something for you," he said.

  I sat up straight in the bed. "What?"

  "It's about Delphine Dolan."

  "What?" I asked again.

  "I think it would be better if I told you in person," said Evan. "Can you meet me for a drink?"

  I told him to give me a couple of days. "Don't call me," I said. "I'll call you."

  Thirty-Three

  "They lost your Pap smear?" Ben asked over breakfast three days later. "How?"

  "I don't know. It happens sometimes, I guess. But Dr. Morrison said he could squeeze me in as long as I got there by nine."

  My husband shook his head. "You really need to find a doctor in Connecticut."

  "But I love Dr. Morrison!" I attempted an expression of dewy maternal remembrance and tried to squash the guilt rising through my body, because the truth was that a doctor's appointment was once again not on my agenda for the day. "I could find a doctor here, but it wouldn't be the same. Dr. Morrison brought our babies into the world."

  Ben stared at me. "Are you feeling all right?"

  "I'll feel fine once I get this taken care of."

  I dropped the kids off at nursery school. Carol Gwinnell had told me she'd be happy to take the boys home with her after school, and Gracie was going to take Sophie for a manicure as a special treat, then drop her off at Carol's.

  Ben and I rode the train to New York, together, sitting side by side on dingy orange-and-gold-striped plastic seats. Ben folded his newspapers into precise thirds. Once he'd finished the front page, he handed it, without comment, to me. "Upchurch Mother Missing," read the Gazette headline, beside a picture of Lexi with newborn baby Brierly in her arms. The front-page story didn't tell me anything I hadn't heard from Denny. Lexi was still missing, the cops were still looking, and a toll-free number had been set up for anyone with information to call in, no questions asked. I stared out the window, thinking about Kitty and Lexi, Joel Asch and Ted Fitch, Philip Cavanaugh and Kitty's parents, who'd lost their daughter before she'd died.

  "Coffee?" Ben asked.

  "Please," I said, and watched as he handed me his cup, then unfolded his long body from the seat and moved, sure-footed in his blue suit and red-and-blue striped tie, down the aisle to throw out the paper. He'd added the artificial sweetener that I liked and had wrapped the cardboard cup with paper napkins. But when he sat back down again, his thigh brushed against mine, and he immediately pulled it back and said, "Excuse me." I wanted to reach out for his hand, to say, Let's forget this. You skip work, I'll blow off my fake Pap smear, we'll go to a museum and then to the Oyster Bar for lunch. We'll get a room at the Plaza and make love until we have to catch the six-eleven home.

  The words stuck in my throat and stayed there as the train pulled into the station. I stared at his profile, his shock of dark hair and thick eyebrows, the same well-formed mouth and chin all three of our children had inherited. If he really thought I was waiting for the kids to go to elementary school so I could enjoy mornings at the gym, lunches where I'd spear a few lettuce leaves and air-kiss my friends, afternoons whiled away at Saks or Nordstrom's, buying formal gowns for black-tie parties where I'd do more air kissing and lettuce spearing and suffering in high heels, he didn't know me. Which made hooky and hotel sex more than a little unlikely.

  "Good luck with everything," Ben said, gesturing euphemistically toward my nether regions.

  "Wait," I said, but he'd already disappeared into the crowd thronging Grand Central Station: men in overcoats and women whose sneakers squeaked and left drippy gray prints on the wet marble floor. I sighed, then walked down the stairs to the subway to my first stop: breakfast with Janie.

  Janie had ordered an assortment of breakfast sandwiches and bagels. She'd spread them across her desk, along with Saran-wrapped slices of blueberry-yogurt loaf and bottled water, when I arrived at the offices where I'd formerly worked.

  "Help yourself," she said. She was wearing imposing horn-rimmed glasses that said Prada along each earpiece and had clear plastic lenses. Janie had perfect vision but would occasionally accessorize with eyeglasses when they suited her purpose. I nibbled at egg and cheese on a bagel and looked around. The New York Night newsroom hadn't changed much in the five years I'd been away. The mouse gray carpeting had been replaced with something in a subtle hunter green pattern, and the battered metal filing cabinets had been moved from one wall to another, but other than that, it was the same old place.

  I watched as Sandra the book editor sipped from her promotional Man Show water bottle and scowled at some sucker's novel, as our former boss Polly, who hadn't aged a day, purchased pretzels and orange soda from the vending machine.

  "Hey!" Janie snapped her fingers in front of my face. "Are you there?"

  "Sure. Sorry." I collected myself as she pulled a folder out of the top drawer of her desk. "What have you got for me?" I asked as Mark, the managing editor, yelled what looked like the word motherfucker into his headset and kicked the trash can across his office floor.

  "Well, I've had a busy
two days." She straightened her glasses and opened her folder. "David Linde," she began, sliding a picture of a sixtysomething-year-old guy with wary blue eyes and a gray ponytail. "A luthier living in Eugene, Oregon. Said he had no idea who Kitty Verree-slash-Cavanaugh was. Didn't recognize her picture."

  "You emailed it to him?"

  "I showed it to him."

  "In Oregon?"

  "Sy lent me his jet. Have you ever been there?" she asked. "It's supercute!" It was one of the things I loved about Janie--the way she could talk about the entire Pacific Northwest like it was an evening bag she was considering buying.

  "He never heard of her," I said as my heart started sinking and my sex-for-money-with-older-men story began to unravel.

  "That's what he said. And I ran through his whole history," Janie said, flipping to a new page of notes. "They were never even in the same place at the same time, as far as I can tell. He's been living in Oregon for, like, twenty years, and the last time he was in New York City was before she was born."

  "Maybe Kitty made house calls," I said, but I was flailing, and I knew it.

  "Not to worry. It gets better," Janie said, sliding David Linde's picture back into the folder. "This," she said, pulling out another photograph, "is Harold Saccio. Ophthalmologist in Maine."

  Harold Saccio had tufts of curly gingery hair poking out from behind his ears, heavy glasses, and a blobby pink nose. If he was a shade or two darker, he'd be a dead ringer for my kids' Mr. Potato Head.

  "Hung up on me when I mentioned Kitty's name."

  My fingers tightened on the edge of the picture. "Interesting."

  "Didn't answer my subsequent eighteen phone calls."

  "Wow."

  "Then he pulled his lab coat over his head when I greeted him in the parking lot of his office building and threatened to have me arrested for trespassing."

  "You went to Maine too?"

  "Maine is also very cute," said Janie, adjusting her glasses. "So he tried to blow me off. At which point I very charmingly indicated the news van that was parked across the street and said he could either speak to me in private, off the record, or I'd give them the go-sign and they could film him doing the walk of shame back to his Mercedes."

  My jaw dropped open. "News van?"

  "Friend of a friend," Janie said modestly. "Guy who owed me a favor."

  "You know guys in Maine?"

  "I get around," she said modestly, and flipped her shining hair over her shoulders. "So, back to Harry Eyeball. We drive to a diner in Portland, and he starts mumbling." She made a face. "The guy talked like an auctioneer, and he had an accent, and he was all sweaty and kept taking off his clothes."

  "Huh?"

  "Jacket, suit jacket, tie..." She winced. "I was terrified he'd keep going. I said, 'What do you know about Kitty Cavanaugh?' and he starts going on about what happened was a long time ago, it was a youthful indiscretion, blah de blah blah, doesn't wish to discuss it, it was a bad time in his life, and he's sorry, and he's happily married now."

  My palms and the small of my back started sweating. "So he knew Kitty."

  "In New York."

  "When?"

  She shook her head. "I couldn't pin him down. Couldn't even get him to say Kitty's name. He just kept saying that what happened only happened once, in New York City, and that it was all in the past. I don't know whether the past was when Kitty asked Evan to look him up, or, you know, two weeks ago. And then, when I started really pushing for details--like when he met her, who hooked it up, how much it cost..." She sighed. "He got on the phone with his lawyer and said if I had anything else to ask him, I'd need a subpoena. And he stuck me with the check!"

  "Bastard," I said. "And after you came all that way to see him."

  Janie nodded, sliding Harold's picture back into the envelope. "Bo Baird's dead, of course, which takes him off the suspect list."

  "Him, but not Laura Lynn," I said, thinking out loud. "What if she found out that her father knew her ghostwriter, in a biblical sense?"

  "Knew her and paid her," Janie said. "I think it's at least worth mentioning to our pal Stannie."

  "What about Emmett James?"

  Janie made another face. "That didn't go very well," she said, and pulled the fourth photograph out of the envelope. If the other two men had been in the full flower of middle age, Emmett James was waiting at Death's bus stop. He was tiny, in pleated black pants and a loose-fitting white button-down shirt, with wisps of white hair floating around a head pink and innocent as an egg. Tiny, blue-veined hands were folded in his lap.

  "Emmett James," Janie said. "Professor emeritus of English literature with a concentration in modern British and American poets. Ninety-two years old, lives in New Haven, and he's in a wheelchair. So, not to generalize about the differently abled, but I don't think he's our killer...and I can't imagine him paying for sex. At least not in this century."

  I studied the photograph. "Did you ask him about her?"

  "I did," Janie said. "Or should I say, I tried. The guy's really, really old." She sipped from her cup of coffee. "He started quoting this poem for me. We were in his office, which was, like, floor-to-ceiling books, and this high little window, absolutely no light. It was all very Gollum and the ring."

  "What poem?"

  "It's by Sharon Olds," she said, handing me the final page from her folder, a single-spaced printout of a poem titled "Why My Mother Made Me."

  I read:

  Maybe I am what she always wanted

  my father as a woman,

  maybe I am what she wanted to be

  When she first saw him, tall and smart,

  standing there in the college yard with the

  hard male light of 1937...

  I stopped reading. "Nineteen thirty-seven?"

  "I'm telling you, he was out of it," Janie said. "I felt bad for bothering him."

  I nodded, skimming the rest of the poem, looking for clues, or some reference to prostitution. I got nothing.

  I lie here now as I once lay

  in the crook of her arm, her creature

  and I feel her looking down into me the way

  the maker of a sword gazes at his face

  in the steel of the blade.

  "What's it supposed to mean?"

  "Probably nothing," Janie said. "I mean, the guy was like a jukebox. Press a button, a poem would come out."

  "Did he have one for you?" I asked.

  She ducked her head modestly and quoted, "She walks in beauty, like the night."

  "Very nice." I swept the pictures and the poetry into the folder. "I can never thank you enough for doing all of this for me."

  "Well, it's for me too. My story."

  "If there is one," I grumbled. "It's probably going to turn out that the mailman did it." I got to my feet, shoving the folder into my WGBH tote bag, which I'd carried to prove that I was absolutely, positively not trying to impress Evan McKenna.

  Janie stood up and put her hand on my shoulder. "Hey."

  I looked up. "What?"

  She looked deep into my eyes and solemnly intoned, "Do you ever have that not-so-fresh feeling?"

  "Huh?"

  She sighed, nudged me back down into a chair, and sat down. "I'm worried about you. Only I don't know how to talk about it. As you know, I'm not very maternal, so I've been watching television."

  "You've been watching television commercials," I said.

  Her eyes flashed. "And a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, which I want credit for. Those are two hours of my life I'm never getting back." She grabbed my hands, looked into my eyes again, and said, "Seriously, Kate, I'm worried about you."

  "I'm fine," I said.

  "How are things with Ben?" she asked.

  "They're fine."

  "And the kids? No, wait, let me guess," she said, scowling at me with a look of absolute aggravation. "They're fine too."

  I looked at my best friend, twisted a lock of hair around my finger, and came clean. "Ben told me I needed
a hobby," I said. "He said I'm a housewife, not a detective."

  "Oof."

  "Do you think I need a hobby?"

  Janie pulled off her glasses and folded them carefully in the cylindrical leather case that said Prada. "I think," she finally said. "I think that I want you to be careful. I think if anything ever happened to you, or your kids--"

  "Janie!"

  "Well, have they found Lexi Higgy-Whoosit yet?" she demanded.

  "Hagen-Holdt," I said, and shook my head. "Nothing's going to happen to us," I said, but even as I spoke the words, I wasn't sure I believed them. There was a line of the poem stuck in my head. A tall woman, stained, sour, sharp...Was that Kitty? Was it me?

  "I love you," Janie said, leaning across her desk to give me a hug. "I just want you to be safe. Safe and happy."

  "Love you too," I said. But even as I was hugging her, even as I was thanking her for everything she'd done, I was glancing to be sure that the photographs and the mysterious poem were secure in my bag, and I knew that I wouldn't be able to stop now, not even if I wanted to.

  Thirty-Four

  I got to the bar of the Time Hotel fifteen minutes before noon, when I'd arranged to meet Evan, and saw that we would have the place to ourselves. There were a dozen low, round tables, circles of polished stone surrounded by overstuffed, squishy rectangles. All of them were empty. The lights were low; the room felt warm after the wind outside. Two televisions hanging over the bar were tuned to celebrity poker. I checked my coat, put my hat and mittens in my bag next to Janie's file, went to the ladies' room, and studied myself in the mirror. The lights were unforgiving. My skin was sallow, my hair was a wreck, and the only thing I had in my purse to remedy the situation was a single tube of lipstick that could very well have dated back to the time when I'd still held out hope that Evan and I could someday be a couple. I sighed, wet a paper towel and rubbed it above my lip and underneath my eyes. Then I broke out the lipstick, carefully shaded my lips, then smeared some on my fingertip and adding a judicious swipe across the top of each cheekbone. I looked down at the lipstick, a pearly pink color, and wondered whether it could serve as eyeshadow too.