“Jane, have you heard from Sheila?” Susan asked.
“No. She didn’t respond to my e-mail or the fax I sent. We’ve given reasonable notice. In my opinion, the board is free to replace her after whatever deliberations it deems appropriate.”
“What about Maggie?” Jenna asked. “Is she going to join the call or is she with you, Jane?”
This awkward moment caused a thin smile to appear on Judith’s lips. Did it produce a bit of sweat on the very cool Jane Larson as well? Judith imagined a bead of sweat forming at the top of her chest and slipping between Jane’s pretty white breasts like a raindrop sliding down a windowpane.
“She’s not here with me,” Jane said. “And I’m not sure whether she will call in or not. I did e-mail her along with the rest of the board members.”
More awkward silence followed. Gossip is a wonderful thing. Jane and Maggie had never even come out as a couple, yet everyone knew they were or thought they were, which was almost as good. The imagination is so much more fertile than the sad reality of day-to-day living. And now this breach! Should the board members offer sympathy for something that neither of them had ever had the courage to even declare? It was a nice social dilemma, worthy of Ann Landers.
Judith nearly blurted out the truth. In fact, Maggie was resigning from WPW today; that was the condition Judith had imposed when Maggie had called earlier and asked if she could speak at Monday’s demonstration outside Jarvey’s Bar. It was really just too satisfying to see this all playing out. Maggie had won Jane because she was so much more beautiful than Judith. But let us see what power can do—a power as strong as any man’s.
Maybe Judith would call Jane later on. See if she had a date tonight. See if she needed the best massage in New York City.
“I still have the feeling someone is on the call who hasn’t announced herself yet,” Susan said. “I thought I heard at least six people joining.”
“What difference does it make?” Ellen asked. “We’re not doing anything illegal or inappropriate. If Sheila and Judith are listening and unwilling to admit it, so what? Let them listen. In fact, let’s assume they’re listening.”
“Yeah,” Charmaine said. “Let’s talk about what a loony bird Judith is, and maybe she’ll feel the need to pop off in response.”
“I meant we should do everything properly, as if everyone is watching and listening,” Ellen replied.
“We all know what you meant,” Charmaine muttered.
Condescending pig to condescending bitch, Judith thought. It was quite a show.
“Let’s proceed with the meeting,” Susan said then. “First order of business, should Sheila be removed as the chairwoman of this board?”
The pre-ordained horseshit followed: pattering pabulum about why Sheila should be replaced—failure to call meetings, failure to respond to board members—all good and proper, as Jane demanded. Within 15 minutes, one resolution was passed to get Sheila out and another to make Susan the temporary head. More interesting to Judith was the third resolution, which authorized Susan to use all of WPW’s resources to notify its members and supporters to appear at Jarvey’s Bar tomorrow evening, at the time already scheduled by the Eumenides, for a counter-demonstration. Wonderful.
The WPW board needed to show the people of New York that women wanted to act peacefully and without the threat of violence to obtain justice, which is to say that they were willing to grovel in the dirt and beg the men to do something. Please master, and later you can fuck us front, back and sideways if it turns you on. That was what Judith’s own mother had done. Judith and her brother had gone on a camping trip with Uncle, the three of them sharing one large tent: Uncle and Judith and the brother who was famous for sleeping through the most violent thunderstorms. And so Uncle had had three undisturbed nights with his precious girl, his lovely little girl whom he adored above all others. Just let me touch you, let me just touch you there, let me just crawl on top of you like a carousing dog! And Judith’s mother had deferred to the men—to their priest, to her husband, to her father—all of whom had said, “What’s done is done, why expose our dirty linen to the world; just keep him away from now on.”
Jesus, Mother!! And the baby? Of course, the baby.
Still, Judith kept her emotions under control until they began to discuss the details of their plans. Ari announced in her smug way that she would obtain a permit that would not only allow WPW to congregate directly across from the bar but would also force the Eumenides further down the block. A loudspeaker permit insured that their message would be heard over the Eumenides’ chanting.
“And the first time Judith uses her megaphone, the police will confiscate it,” Ari added. “Just as they did at the exhibit.”
“Excellent!” Susan said, a comment that was echoed by everyone on the fucking phone—enough to make you sick!
And what did you have to do to get such cooperation, Ari? Judith almost blurted out. A blow job for Smalley and all his pals? For that bit of barter you wouldn’t even have to wrinkle your precious clothes.
“I think that about wraps up what we needed to do in this meeting,” Susan said.
“What about speakers at the demonstration?” Ellen asked.
“Good point. I was going to ask Maggie to say a few words. There are some politicians we could always ask, as well.”
“I think Maggie would be the best,” Charmaine said. “How about it, Jane? Do you think you could ask her for us?”
Another awkward silence! Did anyone else hear the snide quality of Charmaine’s comment? Rub her face in it, ladies!
“Of course I will,” Jane replied in a breezy, very professional voice. “And I’m sure she will have no problem doing it for WPW.”
That was the tipping point for Judith.
“Guess again!” she said. “Maggie isn’t going to speak for you sorry bitches. If you check your e-mail, you’ll see she’s already resigned. She’ll be standing with the Eumenides tomorrow evening and speaking for us. And, Ari dear, I would love to see Smalley try to shut Maggie down when she starts to speak. He just might start another riot!”
Chapter Forty-Six
The conference call ended immediately after Judith’s interruption, and Jane quickly checked her e-mail. Her heart was racing when she saw two messages from Maggie in her inbox. The first announced her immediate resignation from WPW and the WPW Board, which had been sent to all of the board members. The second was to Jane only, and she could barely concentrate on the words, skipping to the end and then back again several times before she could take in its meaning.
Dearest Sweet Jane,
Please don’t think it was your fault that this thing between us didn’t work out. It was doomed from the start, as any relationship is necessarily doomed when there are secrets to hide. Forgive me. I loved you so much; I thought I could pull it off. But I am the woman who suffered the ordeal that I wrote about in the Diana book.
I have written a new chapter and am attaching it for you. It’s posted on my website and will be out first thing tomorrow in The Portal. Every day I think I am getting closer to telling the truth.
I wish I had found a way to tell you about all this in person, but you would have seen that I had lied to you. I was so afraid I would lose you! When a person lies to you once, how do you ever trust her again? False in one thing, false in all things. Isn’t that what the lawyers say?
The past has tormented me for so long! But now I think I have found peace. Diana will do what she will. I am at peace with that also.
I’ll have just a short announcement to make tomorrow night, which should bring things to their conclusion. It’s the only way I can think of, since I discovered long ago that I’m too much of a coward to end my own life.
Please, if you still have any feelings left for me, don’t come to the demonstration tomorrow. If I saw you, I might lose the small amount of courage still in me to say what has to be said.
Remember that this much was always true. I loved you very much, a
s much as I ever loved anyone, as much as I am able to love anyone. M
What did she mean that it didn’t work out? Why was she acting as if everything were over between them, when all they’d had was a silly fight, a lovers’ spat? And what did she mean by her reference to a conclusion—surely she didn’t intend to take her life? The note in fact reaffirmed that she would not. Jane read it again to be sure. So what did she mean to say? What could she possibly do that would have such finality?
Then a thought crept into her mind. Perhaps Maggie was Diana. Was that the central lie? It certainly made sense, given the content of her book and all those strange similarities between the fictional and the real worlds. Then Jane remembered back to the first night in the country and the sound of a car, and her vague idea that Maggie might have left her that night to deliver her package to Smalley. Was that what was going on here? Was Maggie going to confess and spend the rest of her life in prison?
Jane tried to work through the details to see if this theory could fit but found it impossible to concentrate. Logistically, Maggie couldn’t have killed Glaser. But then again, who even knew if Diana was his killer?
With her hands shaking so much that she could barely hold the phone, Jane called Maggie, but the call went to voicemail immediately. She hung up and dialed again and the same thing happened.
She cried out in frustration. She wanted to pour out her heart; to tell Maggie that she loved her and only wanted to be with her; that the inability to talk to her was driving her crazy; that her whole body was shaking, even as she tried to be calm; that tears were streaming down her cheeks.
She left a brief message, hoping that some of the urgency she felt was present in her voice. “Maggie, I need to talk to you. You’re wrong about us. Nothing you have said or could say will ever change the way I feel about you. Please, call me! It’s not fair to treat me this way.”
She left two more messages before she decided to go to bed. And that night her sleep was troubled by dreams in which she was driving to Maggie’s house, but kept getting lost in a maze of country roads. At first they seemed familiar until they took twists and turns past houses and fields she no longer recognized. At one point, she approached a person for directions but couldn’t remember the address and could only repeat “Maggie’s house, Maggie’s house” over and over to an uncomprehending face that first belonged to a stranger; then to Martha, showing disapproval for not having written down the address; and finally to Smalley, staring at her with those unfathomable gray eyes. When she reached the house in her dream, the front door was open and she went inside. She felt as if she were in a movie that she had seen before, and that she would open a door or turn down a hallway and find Maggie hanging dead. But she kept walking through the house anyway, calling out Maggie’s name, opening closets, and finding doors she had never seen before that led deeper into darkness. Finally, she crawled through a hallway so narrow that she couldn’t even turn around and came out into a room with whitewashed walls. Maggie sat in a flowing black dress and held a gun to her head, smiling, making kissing motions with her lips even as her finger tensed on the trigger.
At that point Jane woke up with a start, sweating profusely, and could not fall asleep again for over an hour.
The next morning, Jane went down to her office and forced herself to do some work. Around nine-thirty, Smalley called her.
“I need to talk to Maggie,” he said.
“She isn’t talking to me either, Detective.”
“We’ve checked her apartment, the farm, even Sheila Majors’ place. We can’t find her anywhere. This is urgent, Jane.”
“I don’t know where she is! If I knew, I would be with her, trying to get her to listen to me!”
“Then you have to go through Martha’s files.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Just listen to me. I found Glaser’s notes. He was checking adoption records. That was what he wanted to tell me and why he was killed. There is a connection between Carina and Diana. A blood connection. Mother daughter, sisters, something.”
“Maggie is Diana,” Jane said. “I lied to you about being with Maggie the night before Diana delivered her package to your house. I heard a car in the driveway that night. I was in a fog. She may even have drugged me.”
“Maggie is not Diana,” Smalley said. “I’m sure she’s not, but if you don’t help me, she will die. Is that what you want?”
“Of course not. But I can’t go through Martha’s files. It’s a horrible breach of trust. The Disciplinary Rules forbid it. The law forbids it. You’ve been around long enough to know that.”
There was a long pause. She thought he might have hung up. His voice was trembling when he started speaking again.
“If I loved someone as much as you love Maggie, I wouldn’t care what goddamned laws or rules I broke to help her. I would not care.”
* * * *
Jane had a conference at 11:00 a.m. at the courthouse on Centre Street and she was grateful for the presence of another attorney, the judge’s clerk and then the judge to keep her focused on something other than Maggie—where she might be, whether she would call back at all. It was inconceivable that Jane would never talk to her again.
Afterward, she walked north from the court, up Lafayette Street, through Chinatown, and the fringes of Little Italy and the East Village to Union Square, where she got on the uptown subway, exhausted.
Back at the office, she found it increasingly difficult to concentrate as the hours passed toward that evening’s demonstration. Twice more, she called Maggie’s cell phone, but each time it went directly to Maggie’s voicemail. “Maggie, please call me back. Maggie, I can’t believe that you’re acting like this to me!”
She didn’t know whether she would go to the demonstration later or not. On the one hand, she wanted to respect Maggie’s wishes; on the other, she desperately needed to talk to her.
By the middle of the afternoon, she could no longer pretend to do legal work and started to clean up the office. The file cabinets were limited and these were meant to contain only the pending cases. Once a matter was concluded, it had been Martha’s’ practice to strip the folders of unnecessary papers and bring them downstairs for storage. Every year or so she would review the files in the basement. Some of them could be emptied completely of documents, and with those, Martha retained the file folder, but placed a form inside which showed the date when the papers were removed. Many of the others contained divorce judgments and settlement agreements, which she held onto indefinitely.
The work of sorting and putting things in order soothed Jane, and made her think about the first time she had met Maggie, back when she had come to see Martha while Jane was still in law school. Maggie had lied to Jane about that representation—a silly lie that was easily revealed since Martha never did copyright or contract work and would never have represented her in connection with Getting There. Jane could have gone downstairs to Martha’s storage space and discovered the real reason for the representation, but she had refrained. It would have been a fundamental violation of ethics, as she had told Smalley, but more importantly she would have breached Maggie’s privacy in a very basic way. Jane had felt certain that eventually Maggie would voluntarily tell her about it, and that is exactly what had happened when Maggie first told her about Carina. But perhaps there was more to the representation. Some terrible secret burdened Maggie that she was unable to reveal.
There was no question in her mind that morally and legally she had been right not to look through Martha’s old files. But Jane couldn’t stop hearing Smalley’s angry trembling voice in her mind. “If I loved someone as much as you love Maggie, I wouldn’t care what goddamned laws or rules I broke to help her!” And she did love Maggie, more than Smalley could ever imagine.
The vast majority of files were designated merely with the names of her clients. Only those cases that Martha felt were especially sensitive were given a pseudonym for filing purposes. Maggie had joked about the nam
e “Farm Girl” that Martha had given her. Jane had originally assumed that the pseudonym had been used simply because Maggie was a well-known writer, and Martha wanted to protect the file for that reason. But perhaps there had been another reason why Martha had considered the file to be sensitive. What if there was something more to Maggie’s involvement with Carina?
Jane went directly to the cabinet that held the files beginning with “F” and looked for one marked Farm Girl. To her surprise there was only a single piece of yellow legal paper inside. The first two entries were written in Martha’s careful printing with a felt-tipped blue pen.
Today, met with Farm Girl. Friend committed suicide. Farm Girl says concerned about publicity and affect on sales. Told her I would do what I could to keep matter out of the press.
Spoke to friends at police headquarters. Gave them helpful info. Much appreciated. Matter closed.
Further down the page, another entry had been made, apparently some time after the first two. It was done in different ink and clearly had been written quickly.
PROBLEM. SFD asked me last week to find out what happened to baby girl put up for adoption years ago. Located adoptive parents’ names. Found child’s name given by adoptive parents. Realized too late the connection to Farm Girl. Told SFD I couldn’t represent her anymore in connection with locating the baby girl. Didn’t tell her why except to mention conflict. Suspect she knows.
Tell Farm Girl? NO!
Jane felt a great cold fear descend on her as she read. Here was the proof that Martha had represented Carina’s natural mother in tracking down her adopted daughter only to find out the connection to Maggie, making it impossible to continue. It had probably started as a small favor for someone, a favor that Martha was undoubtedly able to do easily by using her extensive contacts in the Family Court and the Surrogate’s Court. And as Jane put the pieces together—Glaser’s murder when he began to check the adoption records, Smalley’s mention of the connection between Diana and Carina, and Diana’s overbearing treatment of Maggie—it seemed increasingly possible that Carina’s natural mother was also Diana, and that SFD was an abbreviation for her pseudonym.
Praise Her, Praise Diana Page 34
