"This is not about spending. This is about ... this is about ... I don't know what this is about," Wendy said in frustration. "This is about how that woman made me feel."
"Yeah: jealous and paranoid. What I said."
"Right," said Wendy. "You know everything, don't you? If you're so smart, then tell me why she showed up here today. Tell me that!"
Her husband dumped the bag by the door and she heard the rattle of glass; he hadn't separated out the recyclables. He scowled as she re-opened the bag and fished out the beer bottles, then began to tie it shut again.
He said, "I can't believe that you're letting some wacko come between us this way!"
She looked up at him from her task. "Who are you, Jim? I don't even know you. We've been married for twelve years, and all I know about your past is that you're an only child, your father left you when you were three, and your mother died of an aneurysm when you were a senior in high school."
"Isn't that enough?" he asked.
"No. It's not. I know you had a hard childhood and that you don't remember much of it—but come on! You can tease Ty all you want about aliens abducting your family, but sometimes I think that you're the only alien around here. I have nothing to go on, Jim—nothing!"
He said stiffly, "It was enough for you to have a son by me. And to raise him with me. And to have your family accept me as one of their own. It was enough for me to open my door and my wallet to each and all of your relatives." Obviously wounded, he said, "What more do you want from me?"
Words. They were just words. Wendy didn't hear any of them. "Is Zina the big secret you were trying to tell me about?" she said, making a valiant effort to steady the quaver in her voice. "Look me in the eye, Jim. Answer me yes or no. And God help you if you lie to me."
Her husband looked her straight in the eye and said, "No. The answer to your question is no."
Chapter 16
That night they lay without touching—depressingly easy to do in their new vast bed.
Wendy was too wired from the encounter with the strange and distraught Zina and from her later, dragged-out argument with her husband to sleep. She tossed and she turned, angry and suspicious and uncertain after the day's bizarre event.
The sound of Jim's relaxed and easy snoring became both an irritant and a source of reassurance to her: he should have been more concerned that she was so upset; but on the other hand, no man with an extra wife on his hands could possibly have fallen asleep so fast or so soundly.
When Jim opened his eyes at six a.m., Wendy was staring at him, still trying to fathom his character.
"I really don't know you, do I?" she murmured, as if he had simply glanced away and then back at her, rather than slept a solid six hours.
Jim closed his eyes again and let out a sigh that sounded more sleepy than exasperated. He reached out and laid his arm across her waist and gave her a gentle squeeze.
"I'm sorry that that crackpot ruined your party," he said softly. "I know how much it meant to you. But we've got to learn to take these things in stride, Wen. It's part of being a lottery celebrity. Eventually people will stop coming out of the woodwork, and we'll be able to return to something like a normal life."
She rolled on her side to face him. His face was still puffy with sleep, his reddish hair pillow-shaped into a cock's comb. A let's-be-friends smile hovered at the corners of his mouth.
"Waddya say?" he whispered, though their guests couldn't possibly hear. "Kiss and start over?"
Instead of a yea or a nay, Wendy ran her hand over his hair, smoothing it into a more or less normal shape, and said, "What was your mother like?"
His brow twitched down in confusion; he wasn't expecting the question. "I've told you about her," he said, sounding vaguely wounded. "She was a high school English teacher. She typed doctoral dissertations on weekends to earn extra money to raise me. She wanted me to work on Wall Street. She liked Fleetwood Mac and the Kinks and chocolate croissants. She was tall and slender and blond. She had a musical voice. She was beautiful and smart—and she died too damn young."
He looked forlornly cheated by the fact, but Wendy ignored it and said, "I mean, tell me about her, what she was like. Did she have a sense of humor? Was she outgoing, generous, easily fooled? What kind of movies did she see? Did she keep a garden? Did she drink? You've never even said if she enjoyed a beer once in a while."
"What the hell difference does any of that make?" he asked, more puzzled than angry by the barrage of questions.
Wendy hesitated, then said, "Knowing her lets me know you."
"Damn!" He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed and remained with his back to Wendy for a long, strained moment. Finally he said gruffly, "Why don't you just hire a PI? You can have him tail me through my secret life at Home Depot and West Marine."
He was sitting just beyond her reach. Wendy could have made an effort, yanking him playfully by his boxer shorts back into bed. But the mood was all wrong, and besides, she wasn't sure he'd let her.
"Earlier—when you were so sound asleep—I did think about hiring someone," she admitted. "But it would be just my luck to pick some sleazebag who'd turn around and sell the story to the Enquirer." She added, "I had to think about Ty."
"But not about us?" he said without turning around. "You didn't think about what kind of effect that would have on you and me?"
"We can't be any more at odds than we are now," she countered, sounding bleak. "At least an investigation would put the thing to rest."
"The thing. What thing?"
"Zina. The thing with Zina." She looked down and caught a glimpse of her body, so much more filled out than the slender, blond Zina's. Zina, who might very well look like Jim's adored mother.
"I've told you," Jim said wearily. "The woman who crashed your party is obviously a wacko. But what's the use? You're not listening. You hear what you want to hear."
"Why won't you tell me your secret?" Wendy implored, because that too had been on her mind all night. "Why won't you trust me with it?"
"Back to that again," he said with a sigh. He glanced at Wendy over his shoulder and then looked away. "Trust has nothing to do with it. Something happened, I'm not proud of it, I've moved past it. I'm not looking back. There is no point."
"Could this Zina possibly be involved—"
"Oh, Christ!" he said, standing up abruptly. "Give it a rest! That woman had nothing to do with my secret," he said with venomous emphasis. "Absolutely nothing."
He reached for the cutoffs lying on the striped slipper chair next to his side of the bed and hauled them over his freckled legs. "I'm going out for coffee," he said as he zipped up.
"When will you be back? Pete wanted to meet with us—"
"Screw Pete."
"Okay-y-y," she said through gritted teeth. "He's not quite my type, but whatever you say, dear."
Her husband apparently had no desire for banter, either hostile or friendly. He walked out of the spacious bedroom without a glance back either at her or at the sparkling waters of Narragansett Bay.
****
Zack Tompkins stepped uneasily from the frozen tundra that surrounded his sister and onto the brimstone path that led to Wendy.
He was in a spectacular fix of his own making. Zina wanted nothing to do with him. She had spoken exactly one word to him after he'd commandeered her Civic and had driven her home: "Good-bye." He'd been forced nearly to bite through his tongue in the effort not to pump her about what had happened when she'd showed up at Jim Hodene's beach house, because he figured that his sister deserved the chance to mourn in silence.
In any case, it wasn't hard for him to fill in the blanks. There would have been a huge hullabaloo—Wendy's family was the kind that went in for hullabaloos—and Wendy would have been both enraged and devastated (he wasn't sure which emotion would take precedence) and, after the shocking revelation, undoubtedly would have moved out. If not last night, then surely that morning. As for her son ... Zack preferred not to dwell on
what the boy must have felt; it was painful in the extreme.
So now what, genius? After liberating his truck from the towing lot, Zack headed straight for the construction site. He was still without a plan as he turned onto Sheldon Street, aware that the usual sudden joyous thump of his heart today was merely a dull, aching beat. Assuming that Wendy deigned to open her door to him—and that was a ballsy assumption, indeed—he felt that he had no choice but to throw himself at her mercy and beg her for forgiveness.
And then go back to blackmailing Jim.
It was definitely still doable, and Zack wanted to do it, paradoxically now more than ever. After all, Jim Hodene was a man of means with instant status. He wouldn't want the world to know that he'd abandoned a fragile, pregnant woman, then stolen an identity and committed bigamy—jailable offenses, all.
The fact that Wendy now knew about them did not change the blackmail equation. Wendy and her family might have valid reasons not to run to the media with the scandalous tale, but Zack had none—except possibly that blackmail was also a jailable offense.
It was a detail that in Zack's present mood didn't scare him at all. The only thing that scared him just then was Wendy.
He parked his truck behind her Taurus on the street, then took a deep breath and knocked his two knocks.
As the front door swung open, a fierce if hypocritical wish zipped through his brain: I hope she kicked his ass.
"Mawnin'," he drawled, bracing for the firestorm to come. "You're here early for a Saturday."
She looked exhausted, which in Zack's eye only made her more unfathomable. "Yes ..." she said in a vague, unsettled voice. "We were up at six."
We?
"Six on a Saturday—wow," he said, groping for a response.
She shrugged and said, "We were supposed to slip out to breakfast and then meet Pete to talk about adding a little balcony off our bedroom, but Pete just called. He won't be able to make it."
We?
Baffled by her calm and shocked by the thought that she could sleep with a bigamist, Zack stammered something about the party going well, then.
Wendy winced. "It turned out differently than I'd expected."
No shit, he thought. She wasn't the only one feeling surprised. Cautiously, because he was beginning to divine that he might somehow get off scot-free, Zack tried to probe the extent of what Wendy knew. He said, "Lots of guests?"
She gave him a sharp look but said quietly, "All the usual suspects: my entire family was there. Plus, unfortunately, an extra red herring. At least, I think she was a red herring."
Zack had no trouble looking confused. Red herring?
She saw it and said, "Got time for a cup of coffee?"
Where was Jim? Zack looked around, and she took it to mean that he was too busy for coffee, so she said with faint resentment, "I'll pour you a mug and you can sip while you work, how's that?"
"Yeah, no ... yes; I'd appreciate it. I have some time." She looked happy about that, and it buoyed him.
"I hadn't expected you today," she admitted.
"I'm making up some time that I took yesterday," he explained as he followed her into the half-demolished kitchen.
She nodded and then got to the point. "Ever since we won the lottery, people have been swarming over us for money," she said bluntly. "Loans, grants, offers, schemes—we've had every possible request to share the pot. Friends I never knew I had ... friends of friends I never knew I had ... and women! Good grief, Jim has been beseiged."
"No kidding?"
Wendy indulged in a rueful laugh as she took down a big blue stoneware mug that Zack liked to use. She said, "If Jim had dated half the women who claim to have known him before I met him, he'd be dead by now; no one could have kept up that pace. Actually, we've had some grins over the calls. One woman claimed to have had his twins. Of course, Jim was bedridden for half a year as a result of a motorcycle accident during the time in question—but I guess she thought it was worth a shot. You know how golddiggers are."
Why did she expect him to know? If she was trying to rattle him, she was doing a darn good job, Zack decided. He didn't dare respond to her remark, hardly dared even to look at her.
But no, she seemed oblivious to the irony of her words as she filled the mug and handed it over, black, the way he liked it. Zack nodded his thanks and wondered where the hell she was leading him, because they were wandering off the brimstone path now, and headed straight for the woods.
She filled a mug of her own, a green version of Zack's, and stood with it like some co-worker at the office coffee machine. If he wouldn't sit, then apparently she wouldn't, either. Zack no longer thought that she was trying to bait him; simply, she had a burning need to talk.
"Yesterday, my dopey brother Dave personally escorted a gate-crasher onto the grounds, leaving my mother's birthday party a shambles," she said with a sigh. "It would have been funny if it hadn't been so ... if she hadn't been so ...." She shook her head and said, "It wasn't very funny."
Wendy looked down at the planked floor, scratched and scraped bare in places by the crew's boots.
"I don't understand," Zack said truthfully.
She looked up. "This woman, this gate-crasher, said she was married—is married—to Jim. For the last twelve years."
"And ... you believed it?" It didn't sound to Zack as if she did.
"The woman—she said her name was Zina—has to be an incredible actress," was the evasive response.
Stepping gingerly, Zack said, "What was Jim's reaction?"
"Blank. Unconcerned. Pissy, once he saw how upset I was."
She was being so forthcoming, so crushingly candid. Zack could only nod in sympathy.
"I haven't been able to let it go," Wendy confessed. "There was just something about her. You know how some women seem born to—well, pine? She seemed like one of those—someone who prefers living in a dream world to the everyday one. Who knows what kind of dreams she's made up? Maybe she's poor. Maybe she read about a handsome young man who came into wealth and she thought, 'Look at that! He fits into my dream perfectly. I just have to let him know.' So she did, in her fashion."
Wendy sipped her coffee, then looked at Zack with a wan smile. "Too weak for you? I could make another pot."
Zack's throat felt too dry to swallow. He forced himself to smile, then forced himself to sip. And all the while, he was thinking, That son of a bitch. That son of a bitch. He denied everything.
"Did anyone sit her down and talk to her?" Zack wanted to know.
"Not one on one. There was too much chaos for that. Really, I don't remember any of it clearly—except the look in her eyes when she saw Jim come out of the house. I couldn't forget that," Wendy said, obviously upset.
"So Jim had never seen her before in his life," Zack said in a flat voice.
"No. But the odd thing is, when I first saw her in the garden, I had the sense that I knew her. It was only much later, in the middle of the night to be exact, that I realized she was the spitting image of Jim's mother."
Zack did a double take. "You knew his mother?"
"Well ... no; but why would you be surprised if I did?"
"I had the sense that his people weren't from around here," Zack managed to say.
"Jim's mother died when he was in high school," Wendy explained, "and all of his photos of her got lost in his moves between foster homes. But he's described her to me, and she sounds like Zina. On the other hand, Jim didn't mention noticing any resemblance, so maybe I'm the one with an overactive imagination."
"You don't know anything about this Zina, then?"
"Just that her name is Hayward and that she lives near Worcester up north. My brother got that much out of her before she—"
The phone rang and Wendy cringed. "That has to be my mother, tracking me down for the post-mortem. I'll let the machine pick up," she muttered, and she added, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to go on and on, Zack; yesterday was just so ... unnerving, that's all. Don't let me keep you...."
It definitely wasn't Gracie Ferro.
Chapter 17
A deep, bellowy voice said, "Jim? You there?" and then waited to find out. When no one picked up the phone, the voice tried again. "Jimmy? Yoo-hoo. It's me. You there?"
And then a click.
Zack's reaction was, What a dufus, but Wendy reacted with real alarm.
"Oh, God ... it's that caller," she said in a shaking voice. "He won't go away." She put her mug down so hard that coffee slopped over the rim.
She hurried to the answering machine to replay the message. "Listen. It's that same guy. I know it is." She seemed to be talking more to herself than to Zack.
She hit a button and played the message again. Again, Zack heard a dufus.
She said, "Hear it? The sounds in the background? Voices."
"But not voices conversing," Zack said, listening with interest.
"No. They're having sex. It's a porn tape," she said angrily.
She was absolutely right—either that, or the guy was phoning from a whorehouse. Still, Zack wasn't sure whether he should or should not know the sound of porn, so he settled for quipping, "Are you sure it's a tape? It could be DVD."
Wendy was not, of course, amused, and Zack felt instant remorse.
"You have caller ID," he noted. "He's blocking his number, of course."
"Naturally," she answered with a sharp little sigh.
Concerned by the level of her distress more than by the caller, Zack said, "You've had calls from him before?"
"Yes, but this is the first time I've heard his creepy voice," she said with a shiver of disgust.
Zack didn't think the voice sounded creepy so much as untutored. The guy was a lowlife, and it surprised Zack not a whit that Jimmy Hayward had pals who were lowlifes. It would take a while for newly wealthy James Hodene to shake the leeches from the cuffs of his Ralph Lauren khakis.
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