Some days, I was bored—most days. I refused to turn on the telly before four in the afternoon, just on general principle. That was a slippery slope to the fat farm and the loony bin or some awful hybrid of the two. If you know anything about British television you know it’s not all mind-expanding drama anyway, not by a long shot, certainly not during the day. You are much more likely to find hour-long footage of a pond being drained, or of a bird building a nest only to have its eggs stolen by predators. The British are very big on nature shows that are nothing if not bloody and true to life. Sometimes they save this type of show for the dinner hour, God knows why.
So it was with this hint of excitement and joie de vivre that I headed into my meeting with Macy Rideout. She and Barry, her newish husband, lived in that honking great manor house I told you about outside the village. Built centuries before on top of a hill, and shored up with rock for impregnability, these days it was reached by a long, winding asphalt drive, at the top of which was a wrought-iron gate and intercom. Together Macy and Barry lived an artfully curated life, routinely pruning away unnecessary people, cutting them off the same way you’d deadhead a rosebush or remove Brussels sprouts from the stalk.
I, apparently, was one of those unnecessary people, which had made it difficult to know how best to approach Macy. I was only slightly acquainted with her to begin with—those superficial book club and Court Cookout encounters. I’d rung her first, of course (I wasn’t going to get past the gated entrance without that) and I think she was so surprised she forgot to maintain her distance. So much so I wondered if the distance hadn’t been Barry’s idea more than hers.
I needn’t have worried. My discovery of the body, of which she was by now fully aware, had sprinkled me with celebrity stardust. She gushed a bit when I rang her, as if I were a long-lost friend. Apparently we were going to pretend she hadn’t dropped me months before from her flawless new life.
“Here’s the thing, Macy,” I had said when I got her on the phone that morning. I’d left a message (I was probably interrupting her manicure) but she’d called me right back. “I’ve remembered something odd about Anna.”
“Everything about Anna was odd,” she said acidly. “Except the parts that were just plain rotten. And mean.” I’d guessed right about the manicure; I could hear little puffing sounds as she blew the paint dry. “And self-serving. You know that book we read? The Devil Wears Prada? Like that.”
“I meant, odd about her body.” I waited for Macy to ask why in God’s name I would call her about that, but no. This seemed to make perfect sense to her. “When I saw her that day. She was dressed in exercise gear—”
“That unspeakable orange horror? I tried to tell her—”
“Blue, actually. Macy, stay with me here. Under the running shorts she was wearing this lacy number. I could see it wasn’t the normal sort of thing you’d wear jogging. I mean, would you? Did she?”
“God, don’t ask me. I mean, I never watched her getting dressed. Except at the gym but I wasn’t watching her, if you know what I mean. We didn’t have that sort of—”
“So, Macy, she normally wore the same type of underwear any woman would wear to run in. A support bra and industrial-strength panties. Not some flimsy thing designed for a man to peel off with his teeth during a midnight tryst. Macy, think about it. Who runs in lace knickers?”
There was a pause as she thought it through. I gave her a moment to engage the gears.
“No one,” she said at last. “Not me. Probably no one.”
“So this was unusual.”
We both agreed it was (“She wouldn’t bother for Alfie, that’s for certain”) and that this deserved further exploration. So at the pre-arranged time, I appeared at the gate and was duly admitted into the plush embrace of Rideout Manor. They had had the name of the house changed officially, causing no end of fuss. God only knew how Barry rammed it past the parish council, the historical society, and all the gray buns in charge of flying the tradition banner. Barry might be nouveau riche, but riche talks.
The door was opened by a young, curly-haired blonde most women would have barred from the house rather than risk the inevitable complications. In a thick Eastern European accent, she invited me to wait in the parlor for her mistress, asking politely if I “vood lak anysing to drank.” I asked for some water, just to see if it would turn out to be Perrier. I was so wrong. It was Veen, from Finland. I looked it up later. It cost about fifteen pounds per 750 milliliters. Thanks, Macy. Apparently, I was worth bribing. More likely, it was just what they kept on hand at Chateau Rider.
Macy did keep me waiting for nearly fifteen minutes, but then I’d arrived early for our talk. And for Macy, somehow you always made allowances. That level of perfection took time to achieve.
She finally descended on a cloud of perfume known only to the twelve Olympian gods. And only they knew what it cost.
Macy had struck gold on her third marriage (much like my stepmother, gold being relative; to someone like Tralee, my father looked like a billionaire). Other comparisons could be made with my stepmother, except that Macy was a genuine knockout, not the dime store version, as well as being about a hundred years younger.
Physically she was all chest and tiny waist, a tanned blonde Barbie brought to life. She had been a flight attendant before she retired to attend to Mr. Rideout’s every need. She liked to wear white to offset the tan and to match her wide peroxided smile. Her hair nestled at her collarbone and never grew an inch longer—the whole time I’d known her the hair had never changed. For all I knew she’d been born that way. It was not a wig, either; it was weekly attention from Maurice de Fortuna (nee Stanley Bobienski). She was on the waitlist to get into Rossano Ferretti, where it was said Duchess Kate got her hair done.
Since Macy could hardly disguise her good looks, she compensated for the mayhem she caused by being nice. Not pretend-nice or icky nice—one of those people driven by guilt to donate excessively of their time and money to charitable causes, a type of which the village had no shortage—but genuinely kind, which no one, especially me, could understand. Where had the compassion and awareness come from, if not from being one of the world’s outcasts? I would swear she had no mean bone in her body, this woman for whom men flung themselves across rooms for the honor of opening a door or holding out a chair for her.
It also made her dropping me from her life all the more puzzling. It had been nicely done, you understand, so nicely it took me months to notice the ruthless efficiency of it. In the US, we grow our own version of women like Macy. We call them Southern Belles.
Now she seemed genuinely happy to see me. That was part of her charm, professionally honed in the friendly skies of British Air. It is said of former flight attendant Carole Middleton that she is more beautiful in person than her photographs convey. I believe this. I also believe if you could photograph the inside of her head you’d find an array of computer chips. That may also have been true of Macy but if so, she kept her brains better hidden, distracting the viewer—the male viewer, in particular—with a shot of cleavage that stopped them in their tracks. Why she wasted this firepower on me I can’t imagine, but perhaps she had an engagement later that day. She wore a white scoop-neck sweater with crocheted lace around the low neck, and skintight white pants that suggested she wasn’t wearing underwear.
That thought, of course, pulled me back to the image of Anna as she lay half in and half out of the water.
Something stark must have shown on my face, for Macy said, “You poor thing. It must have been terrifying. Please sit down. Tell me all.”
So I did tell all, or nearly. I left out the part where Milo looked suspiciously at me. It’s a funny thing, but once people get it into their heads that you’re a suspect, just because you were neighbors with the woman, for God’s sake, it colors the entire conversation. So I gave Macy the short version, concluding: “But I’m confused. I thought you two were
jogging buddies. And there she was, alone on the path that morning.”
“We were. We were for a long time. But it’s been ages now.”
I waited for her to expand on that. Most people do rush in to fill the silence, as Milo clearly knew, and someone as eager to please as Macy was no exception.
“Once we moved away, it became more difficult to meet up.”
“I understand. You grew apart?” I kept my tone light and friendly. It was not an inquisition, but from the pretty pout on Macy’s features, the wrinkling of her powdered button nose, she was enduring a mental struggle of epic proportions. She knew and I knew: the two women could so easily have met up about a third of the way along their regular route, keeping up part of their running routine together. And yet, they had not. The runs had stopped as if overnight.
At a guess, Macy’s husband was at the center of it. Somehow, some way. Anything dodgy in the neighborhood, he usually was.
I actually knew Barry slightly better than I knew Macy. For several years, Barrymore Rideout, Esq., had lived alone in the house catty-corner from ours. It came as a surprise to many in Weycombe Court when he no longer lived alone, that the rumors of his gayness were evidently not true, and that he and Macy, every woman’s basic nightmare, were an item. It was about the time she moved in, I noticed, that remarks began to be made about Barry’s commonness. Comments of the “of course, his father was a butcher” variety, showing how quickly they forgot how many famous Brits had working-class fathers (Wolf Hall, anyone? Cardinal Wolsey? Cromwell? Not to mention Shakespeare). I guess Barry’s prole background and rise to success in spite of it all were okay with them so long as he didn’t breed.
I think it was his choice of bride that cemented his fate in terms of his place in Weycombe society. Macy’s looks were so much of the Vegas showgirl variety. Even at the gym, it was full makeup, push-up latex, and that precisely coiled hair. Needless to say, she did not perspire. She’d probably had surgery to remove her sweat glands and seal her pores.
And there the rest of us would be, in at best some BB cream and yesterday’s smudged mascara, hair in a ponytail, and wearing, in my case, a Wellesley T-shirt and yoga pants.
Problems in Weycombe Court began to simmer from the moment the wedding invitations to Macy and Barry’s nuptials landed in the postbox. Macy had made it to the top of the financial ladder, an achievement undreamt of by her grandparents, who ran an off-license in Newham or somewhere with a similar crime rate. She and Barry living together was fine with everyone, that’s what commoners do, but making it official crossed some sort of line, exposing the fault lines running beneath the village.
Barry was head of a firm of solicitors which he was said to rule like a warlord. Stocky and swarthy, he oozed testosterone and carried himself with the swagger of a footballer. He looked the type of man who needed to shave twice a day, and now that we knew the Neanderthals bred successfully with Homo sapiens, it was clear his family had participated in these mergers. He did the “seduce with the eyes” thing with every woman he met, just to keep in practice. But there was no doubt in my mind or anyone else’s that Macy was the catch of his life.
His accent was a bit common, even to my ears. His bigger crime may have been that he socialized at all levels—he was as friendly with the milkman as he was to whatever lordship crossed his path. But apparently this democratic attitude masked a thuggish, no-holds-barred way of dealing in the courts, much of it behind the scenes. So his marital happiness upset the social order, and Weycombe’s job was to keep him firmly in his place, no matter how rich he was. If he had been killed instead of Anna, my money would have been on the members of the Weycombe Court Book Club as suspects, following the plot device of Murder on the Orient Express and working out the assassination plot over wine and toads in the hole.
Come to think of it, it wasn’t impossible that Anna had been targeted in similar fashion. But every group needs a leader, especially for a murderous enterprise, and Anna would have been that leader.
14
Macy and I went a few rounds until finally I said, “Macy, was Barry another reason you and Anna stopped running together?”
“What exactly do you mean?” She wasn’t making it easy. I didn’t think she was stalling: it was more that she seemed genuinely perplexed.
“I mean, whose idea was it that you drop your daily runs?”
She thought some more, staring into space, her face a picture of pretty concentration. In an old Victorian print, the image would be titled Beauty Bewildered or some such.
“I guess it was hers.”
“She wanted to be free to meet up with someone.” It was not a question.
“You think so, too?”
“Yes,” I said. “Knowing her, I do.”
Macy examined the silver sheen of her manicure, in case something in the conversation was causing it to tarnish. With a visible struggle, she said, “You don’t think it was Barry she was running to meet? In Riverside Park, maybe?” She wanted to know, and yet she didn’t want her suspicions confirmed. They should issue a permit for this kind of denial with the marriage license.
“Maybe,” I said. I was a bit surprised to have my own hunch confirmed by such a noodlehead. But truly, I thought if Anna was meeting up with Barry, it was more likely some financial skullduggery was afoot, not romance. Barry would have to be crazy to jeopardize his relationship with Macy. He’d never again get that lucky. “If it helps put your mind at ease, Macy, I think it could have been anyone she was meeting. Any number of people.”
“I hope you’re right. There could be a thousand reasons … Maybe she just didn’t want my company.”
And maybe I was looking at this the wrong way up. Had Macy dropped Anna? Somehow I didn’t think so. By Macy’s standards, Anna was royalty. Besides, Macy needed some friends, even in her new exalted state, and Anna had played that role for a very long time. She had nearly stepped in as matron of honor at the wedding when it looked like Macy’s sister was going to go into labor right about then. What Anna and Macy ever found in common I wasn’t certain, but a fondness for clothes and makeup and apple cider slimming regimens and discussing those things at length probably passed for a close sisterhood in those parts, in those circles. I wouldn’t know.
“It’s just that,” I said, following up the thought, “she had once been so close she had nearly been part of your wedding party.”
Macy nodded. “Krista’s timing was always bad. The baby ended up being so late they had to induce. Whatever was I was going to do with a matron-of-honor dress, size elephant, for heaven’s sake?”
Krista at the altar had been a sight to see. No one in the pews could take their eyes off of her, in case she doubled over in pain behind the baptismal font. She looked like Exhibit A in some medieval pageant on the wages of sin.
“There would barely have been time to cut it down to Anna’s size,” Macy continued. “Even though she was no gazelle, mind.”
“This is true.”
“And her coloring was all wrong, with that dark hair. She’d have been the only brunette on the altar, apart from Barry.”
“Mmm. Yes.”
“You have to think of the photos. For pos—pos—posterior?”
“Posterity.”
“Right. You are so smart. I wish I’d gone further in school.”
It was a snarky comment on its face but with Macy, you never felt that snark was in her repertoire. Along with “posterity,” it just wasn’t in the database.
I smiled. “I still have the student loan debt to prove it. Anyway, I did not get the sense from Anna that there had been a rift. You know, living next door to her as I did, I picked up on a lot. Still … ”
I let Macy’s mind drift over the possibilities of what I might have picked up on. Which was not much about the Rideouts, truth be told. But from the stricken look in Macy’s eyes, I might have been Anna’s close
st confidant, engaging in soul-baring conversations over hot cups of cocoa before the fire, just us two girls in our footie pajamas. After the slightest hesitation, Macy seemed to opt for admitting to the truth of what I might already know.
People are funny that way. It was something I learned in my time as a reporter: they always assume you know more than you do. And they are so anxious to get their side of the story out, they end up revealing more than would ever have come out on its own.
She looked at me, assessing me for—what? My ability to be discreet?
“Would you like something to eat?” she asked. “C’mon, let’s have a bite. Like old times. It’s almost time for lunch. Bonita does a mean tuna salad.”
“Bonita?”
“Her grandmother was Spanish.”
So we continued our conversation over a staggeringly good salade niçoise. We sat at a round table in a warm pool of sunlight before a picture window overlooking the back garden.
“She, well. Hmm,” began Macy, taking a sip of Veen and replacing the bottle with care. “It’s wrong to speak ill of the dead. But Anna was not what she seemed.”
I wanted to say she seemed to be an evil, double-dealing, bloody-minded slut, but instead I shoveled in a forkful of tuna and waited.
“She set her sights on Barry. Well. You can see for yourself what an attractive man he is. But I wasn’t having any of that.”
Again I was left wondering, this time at Macy’s view of her husband. I supposed he was attractive to women with Neanderthal DNA, which on the surface fair Macy did not seem to possess. Still, we’re talking more than three hundred thousand years ago. A lot could happen.
“It’s the reason we moved out of Weycombe Court so suddenly, you know,” she offered. “We had planned to stay longer, take our time finding and renovating the perfect place, wait and see what the market did. We weren’t in any rush.”
“I thought Anna was the broker on the sale of your house. And the purchase of this one.”
Weycombe Page 10
