Nursery Crimes

by Ayelet Waldman

  Gee, I wonder which car belongs to Daniel Mooney? I thought.

  I got out of my suburban-matron heap, careful not to wrinkle the baby-blue maternity smock I had found crumpled at the back of my closet and had actually managed to iron in preparation for my incursion into Mooney territory. I looked innocuous and very, very sweet.

  Reaching into the backseat, I grabbed the handles of a shopping bag containing a spinach-and-feta-cheese lasagna that Peter had obligingly whipped up. I walked up to the front door, stretched my face into a sickly sweet smile, and knocked briskly. While I waited for an answer, I reached into the shopping bag and took out the foil pan of lasagna. Without warning and with a sudden jerk, the door opened. Startled, I gave a little jump. Not much, but just enough to tilt the lasagna pan and send a stream of tomato sauce out from under the foil wrapper and all over the front of my smock.

  “Oh!” I said with a gasp.

  Abigail Hathaway’s daughter stood in the doorway. “Oh, no!” she said, reaching out and steadying the pan. “You got it all over yourself!”

  I looked down at the splash of red festooning my chest and belly.

  “Lovely. Just lovely,” I said, ruefully.

  “I’m so sorry,” the girl said.

  “No, no! It’s not your fault! Don’t be sorry. It’s me. I’m just a complete klutz. I’m the one who’s sorry.” I motioned toward the sauce-covered pan. “This is for you and your . . . your dad.”

  “Thanks,” she said, although she clearly didn’t mean it.

  “It’s lasagna.”

  “Great.” Looking vaguely nauseated, she gingerly took the pan from my outstretched arms.

  “Would you like to come in and get cleaned up?”

  “That would be terrific. My name is Juliet Applebaum. I knew your mom.”

  Standing in the doorway, holding a pan of lasagna, Abigail Hathaway’s daughter started to cry. She cried not like the grown woman she looked like, but like the child she was. Huge, gasping sobs shook her narrow chest and tears poured down her face. Her nose streamed and, arms filled with lasagna, she turned her head to the side, trying ineffectually to wipe her nose on her shoulder. As she lifted her shoulder to meet her nose, the pan slipped from her hands, falling to the floor with a wet splat and spilling tomato sauce over her shoes.

  “Oh, no! Oh, no!” the girl wailed, dropping to her knees and trying to stem the tide of sauce making its way across the floor in the direction of a pink and white Oriental floor runner.

  I looked around me for a cloth, anything to catch the spill before it ruined what was surely an expensive carpet. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing to be found. I looked down at my shirt, and, with a helpless shrug, whipped it off over my shoulders and, joining Audrey Hathaway on the floor, used it to mop the spilled sauce. She sat back and stared at me, her surprise completely stopping her tears. I finished cleaning up the spill, tossed my filthy shirt on top of the lasagna pan, and hoisted myself to my feet, holding the by now quite disgusting offering in my arms.

  “Where’s the garbage pail?” I asked.

  “In the kitchen. Through there.” The girl pointed down the hall. I first checked my shoes to be sure they were clean of sauce, and then headed down the hall toward the perfectly appointed kitchen. I glanced at a gilt-framed mirror that I passed and was horrified to see myself in my black-and-white-spotted maternity bra, the one Ruby likes to call my cow bra. My stomach bulged over the top of my leggings, and my belly button made a little tent in the black fabric. Shuddering, I rushed into the kitchen. I crammed the pan, shirt and all, into the stainless steel trash bucket under the sink, found some paper towels on the counter, unrolled a few dozen sheets, and soaked them with warm water. Carefully squeezing out the towels, I made my way back to Audrey, who was still kneeling in the middle of the entryway. She hadn’t moved, but neither had she resumed her sobbing. I took each of her hands and gently cleaned them. Then, I wiped the sauce off her shoes and scrubbed up the last traces from the floor. I went back to the kitchen, threw out the mess of paper towels, and returned to the hall. Audrey hadn’t budged.

  Groaning, I lowered myself next to her and stretched my arms out to her. Silently, she inched over to me and awkwardly leaned into my arms, resting her head on my chest. She started to cry again, but without the violence of the first episode. This time her tears fell quickly and silently, dampening my bra. I rocked her gently, smoothing her hair with my hand.

  We sat like that for a few minutes. Finally, Audrey Hathaway sat up.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. It sounded like she’d been saying that a lot.

  “Don’t be sorry, honey. You have nothing to be sorry about.”

  “I miss my mom.”

  “I know, sweetie. I know.”

  “You’re a friend of hers? I’ve never met you before.”

  “Well, no. Not a friend. I met your mother right before . . . right before she died. My daughter applied to her school.”

  She looked at me, still obviously not understanding what I was doing there.

  What was I doing there? What had I been thinking? “I didn’t really know your mom at all. She didn’t even accept my little girl to Heart’s Song. After I heard what happened I just thought you and your dad might not be that interested in cooking,” I finished lamely. I looked around at the devastation I had wrought on her house and on myself.

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. Audrey looked startled.

  “Look at me!” I said with a gasp through my guffaws.

  She seemed to see me for the first time and suddenly burst out laughing, too.

  Wiping tears from our eyes, we got up from the floor.

  “Can you just see me driving down Santa Monica Boulevard in this?” I asked her.

  “You’d probably get arrested!”

  “For solicitation! Of cows!” That set us off again.

  Once we finally managed to catch our breaths, Audrey stuck her hand out.

  “I’m Audrey.”

  “I know. My name is Juliet.” I shook her hand.

  We stood looking at each other for a moment and then I remembered something.

  “Oh, my God, your father. I can’t let him see me like this.”

  “Stepfather. And don’t worry. He’s not here.”

  “You’re here alone?” I was astonished. What kind of a man leaves a child alone just days after her mother is killed?

  “Yeah. He had to go out. He’ll be back soon. Maybe I can find you something to wear.”

  “That would be great, although I hate to bother you.”

  We both looked down at my stomach at the same time.

  “I guess it would kind of have to be, like, a big shirt or something,” she said.

  “Like, a really big shirt.”

  “Wait just a sec, okay?” She ran up the stairs. A moment later she was back, holding a man’s Oxford-cloth, button-down shirt, frayed at the collar and cuffs. I looked at it doubtfully.

  “Is this your stepfather’s? Do you think he’ll mind?”

  “It’s mine. It used to be my dad’s. My real dad. Not Daniel.” She spat her stepfather’s name out of her mouth as if it tasted bad.

  “Do you mind if I borrow it?” I asked. “It looks kind of special.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I promise I’ll wash it and bring it back tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  We looked at each other, awkwardly, for another minute. It didn’t feel right for me to be there, but I didn’t want to leave the girl all alone. Someone had to take care of her, and it was clear that her stepfather wasn’t interested in the job.

  Audrey reached up and brushed a lock of purple hair out of her eyes. I smiled and said, “I like your hair.”

  She blushed. “My mom hates . . . hated it.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “It’s not permanent or anything. It washes out after a while.”

  “Did you do it yourself?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I did the purple part m
yself. I got the haircut on Melrose.” She fingered the shorn side of her head. By now a fine fuzz covered the half that had looked shaved when I saw her at the memorial service.

  “Can I feel it? I love the way a buzz cut feels.”

  She leaned her head over to me and I rubbed my palm across the soft fuzz. “Mmm,” I said. “Soft.”

  She smiled. “Hey, want something to drink? Like tea or something?”

  “Sure.”

  While Audrey bustled around the kitchen putting on the kettle and putting tea bags into pretty ceramic mugs, I perched on a stool at the counter.

  “Is there anything you need, honey?” I asked. “Are you doing okay?”

  It was a stupid question. She was pretty clearly not doing okay.

  “No. I mean, yes. I’m doing fine, I guess. I don’t need anything.”

  For the next fifteen minutes or so I sat sipping tea at Abigail Hathaway’s kitchen counter, next to her grieving daughter. Neither of us spoke much, except to comment on the flavor of the tea (peach ginseng) or the weather (chilly, for Los Angeles). There was, however, an odd companionable feeling between us, not like friends and nothing like mother-daughter, but some kind of link nonetheless. Audrey seemed comforted by my presence. Maybe it had nothing to do with me. Maybe the girl was so lonely and so sad that any living, breathing presence would have been enough for her. Whatever it was, by the time I got up to leave, I felt like I had formed a bond with the awkward, sad child.

  After my cup had long been empty, I kissed Audrey good-bye, gave her my phone number, and left. As I drove away I turned back to see her standing in the doorway, staring after me. I waved and she lifted her hand for an instant before disappearing into the house.

  I drove down the Pacific Coast Highway, onto the Santa Monica Freeway, and into an impenetrable wall of traffic. As my twenty-minute ride stretched to an hour and then some, I had plenty of time to reflect on my actions of the past few days. Investigating Abigail’s death had seemed like something I could do. More importantly, maybe, was that it was something to do. Meeting Audrey Hathaway had changed all that. Suddenly I was confronted with what I should have understood from the very beginning. This was not a chapter out of a Nancy Drew story. It was a real, live tragedy. Abigail’s death was not an excuse for activity for a bored housewife, but the worst thing that would ever happen to a teenage girl. How dare I even attempt to “investigate”? How arrogant of me to think I was competent to solve this crime! Who did I think I was, running all over town, questioning nannies, brawling with studio executives, crashing funerals? I was deeply embarrassed by my gall in showing up at that poor girl’s house with a Trojan horse in the shape of a spinach-and-feta lasagna.

  By the time I made my way home, I had firmly resolved to give up my investigative efforts. I decided to leave it to the people who really knew what they were doing: the police. I walked in the door, scooped up my own little girl, and squeezed her as hard as I could. As Ruby wriggled and howled in protest, I breathed in the puppy-dog smell of her hair and wordlessly promised her that I would never leave her like Abigail Hathaway had left her own little girl. My baby would never ache so for a mother’s touch that she needed to cry in the arms of a stranger.

  I kissed Peter on the cheek and was just about to tell him about my decision to give up investigating the murder when he handed me a scrap of paper on which he’d written the following message:

  “Lilly called. Says ‘PAY DIRT!’ Call her ASAP.”

  “When did she call?” I asked.

  “Just a couple of minutes ago,” he replied.

  I had to at least find out what she’d discovered. I called her. The answering machine picked up the phone.

  “Lilly? Are you there? It’s Juliet. Pick up. I know you’re screening, because Peter says you just called. Pick up pick up pick up pick up pick up.”

  By now Ruby had joined in and was shrieking “Pick up” and dancing around the room.

  “All right, already. For goodness sake!” Lilly’s exasperated voice interrupted our song-and-dance number.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi, yourself. Boy, do you owe me. That was the worst lunch of my life. The woman brought a camera and kept asking the waiters to take our picture. By the time dessert showed up she’d taken enough for an entire album.”

  “I’m so sorry I put you through that,” I said with a laugh.

  “Doesn’t matter. Anyway, do I have some gossip for you!”

  “Great!” I said. Then I remembered my decision. “Except I’d sort of decided not to look into this anymore.”

  “What?!” She sounded genuinely angry. “Do you mean to tell me I withstood two hours of fawning by Herma Wang for nothing? I don’t think so, girlfriend.”

  “I’m so sorry. It’s just that I met Abigail Hathaway’s daughter, who is in a really bad way, by the way, and I started feeling guilty about playing this Agatha Christie game. I should leave it to the cops, don’t you think?”

  “Listen, what I think is that you are doing this girl a favor. You could find out who killed her mother! You have a civic duty to do whatever you can to help solve this murder. And, moreover, you started this ball rolling, and you should follow it up. At least listen to what I have to say. You can always just call the police and pass the information on to them!”

  “I guess you’re right. Anyway, I’m dying to find out what Wang told you. I can’t believe she really said anything. Didn’t she take some kind of oath of confidentiality? Does that woman have no ethics?”

  “Apparently not. Although it’s not like she told me intimate details or even really admitted to treating Abigail Hathaway.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “She said she did have a patient named Abigail, no last name, wink, wink. Wang had been treating her primarily, but she saw the whole family at various points. You were right: Daniel-no-last-name-either and Abigail were having problems—serious ones, according to Wang. She wouldn’t tell me what, but she did say that divorce was possible, even likely.”

  “I knew it. I just knew it.”

  “That’s not all. Apparently she also saw the daughter a few times. There were some serious problems there, too.”

  “I called that, too. I stopped by Abigail’s house today and found Audrey, the daughter, all by herself. Her mother just died, and her stepfather can’t be bothered to keep her company.”

  “Nasty.”

  “Yup. Did Wang give you any ideas about what was going on with Audrey and her stepfather? Any abuse or anything like that?”

  “She didn’t say. All she would say was that the problems they were all having seemed more serious than normal marital difficulties or adolescent angst.”

  “Lilly, you’ve outdone yourself. This is all really interesting. I’m not sure that it’s a motive for murder, but it sure does paint our grieving widower in a different light. I knew the guy was rotten the first time I saw him. And my first impressions are always right.”

  “You know what I like best about you, Sherlock?”

  “What, Watson?”

  “Your self-effacing nature.”

  “I am modest, aren’t I?”

  I thanked Lilly for her time and, promising to see her soon, hung up the phone.

  “What’s this I hear?” Peter said. “Giving up the private-eye biz?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said with a sigh. “I guess so. I started feeling really guilty once I met Audrey, Abigail’s daughter. The poor thing cried in my arms today.”

  “Jeez. I heard what you told Lilly about the stepfather. He sounds like a real creep.”

  “Totally,” I agreed.

  Peter, Ruby, and I got up a game of Chutes and Ladders, which I played absentmindedly, all the while trying to decide whether to act on the information Lilly had given me. Every time I landed on the boy stealing cookies or the girl coloring on the wall and had to slide my piece down a chute into a losing position, I felt like someone was trying to tell me something. Finally I decided
that the only responsible thing to do was let the police know what I had discovered and leave it at that. Let Detective Carswell do his job.

  After losing to Ruby as usual (Peter placed a distant third), I called the detective. I managed, miraculously, to find him at his desk.

  “Detective Carswell? This is Juliet Applebaum. We spoke about the Hathaway affair, if you recall.”

  “Yes, Mrs. . . . er, Ms. Applebaum. I do recall our conversation.”

  “I have some more information for you.”

  “Relevant information?”

  Was it just to me, or was this guy this sarcastic to everyone he dealt with?

  “Yes, relevant information. At least I think it’s relevant,” I answered, trying to keep my own voice as neutral as possible. The detective obviously thought I was a hysterical ninny, and I didn’t want to give him any more fuel to add to his snide little fire.

  “Why don’t you let me be the judge of the information’s relevance,” the detective said.

  I gritted my teeth with irritation. Why is it that a certain kind of man thinks that just because you happen to be a mother you also are necessarily an idiot? In my prior incarnation as a criminal defense attorney, I had grown used to being taken seriously. Very seriously. Prosecutors might not like what I had to say, and they might not be willing to give my clients the deals I wanted, but they never condescended to me. Now, suddenly, just because I had doffed my barrister’s wig and donned a housewife’s kerchief, people like Detective Carswell thought they could pat me on the head and send me on my way.

  “Well, Detective Carswell, how do you judge the relevance of the fact that Abigail Hathaway and her husband were going through serious marital difficulties and, in fact, were considering divorce?”

  That got his attention.

  “How do you know this? Who told you about this? How reliable is your source?” His sentences tumbled out in a rush.

  Well, well, well. Now I was suddenly someone with sources.