by Jane Haddam
“I miss it,” she said suddenly. “I know I’m breaking our rule, but I miss it.”
“I miss it, too,” Susan said.
“It’s funny how things work out. If you’d told me just three years ago that I’d be living at a place called Waldorf Pines and refusing to watch the evening news in case—well, in case. I wouldn’t have believed it. I really wouldn’t have believed it.”
“I know,” Susan said.
“And then there are the boys,” Caroline said.
She stood still where she was, contemplating her two sons. They were in New York now, she was pretty sure. She hadn’t talked to either one of them in three years, and when she had talked to them she’d still been living in the Bryn Mawr house. She’d loved the Bryn Mawr house. There had been a topiary maze in the back garden, and the kind of staff it took to keep it all up. There had been committees that knew how to run like committees, where everybody showed up on time.
“Never have children,” Caroline told Susan. “They’ll just turn on you.”
Susan looked at her hands again. She was fifty-nine years old, just two years younger than Caroline herself. Neither one of them was going to have any more children.
Caroline walked back to the wall of windows and looked out again. The yellow caution tape was blowing in the wind. The trees were all bright with color. The fairways were not quite green enough. It wouldn’t be a bad landscape if it hadn’t been so pretentious, so self-conscious, so uncomfortable. There was mock Tudor everywhere, and odd Gothic arches where they didn’t belong. The whole place look like an Olde Tea Shoppe set up by somebody with no taste, no knowledge of history, and far too much money.
She wondered where Michael Platte was this morning, and then she wondered why she bothered to wonder. They were all off in the same places, these people. They were shopping, endlessly. Or they were at expensive restaurants where the food tasted like sawdust. Or they were at “charity” events where no charity was ever done but everybody got their pictures in the paper the next morning. They probably got their pictures on the Internet instantaneously. Waldorf Pines had a Facebook page these days. It was as if they thought nothing was really real unless people they didn’t know could witness it.
“They don’t even do affairs right,” Caroline said.
Susan made another little squeak. “I never believed that,” she said. “Did you? Did you believe it?”
“That Martha Heydreich was having an affair with Michael Platte? Is having, I suppose. I don’t know. Everybody says so.”
“But people say things,” Susan said. “You know that.”
“I do know that,” Caroline said. “I’ll admit, it seems completely impossible. The woman is—well. ‘Sexy’ isn’t the word for it, anyway. Not that men won’t have sex with women who aren’t sexy. It’s always astounded me what men will have sex with. At least she doesn’t seem to be ruining her marriage over it, if it’s true.”
“Oh, no,” Susan agreed. “He’s very fond of her. It’s nice, isn’t it, to see a couple devoted to each other that way? That’s not usual. Especially around here.”
“That’s not usual anywhere,” Caroline said. “Oh, well. I still think it’s peculiar. And you’re right. Maybe it’s all just something people made up. But they do spend a lot of time together. You see them everywhere around here. And you can’t miss them. Not with that car of hers.”
“Maybe we should give them a few more minutes,” Susan said. “You know how it is early in the morning. People have a hard time getting started.”
“They don’t have a hard time getting started when they’re doing something they really want to do,” Caroline said—and then she just gave it up.
It was a nice day. She could think of things to do. She could work out the invitation design and settle on a list of possible favors by herself. Then she could call a meeting for something on a Saturday and they’d all be more than willing to troop in and okay her decisions. They were always willing to okay her decisions. They only wanted to be named as members of the committee and have their pictures taken when the time came.
She’d once thought that all that mattered to them was money, but this wasn’t true. All that mattered to them was to be seen by other people to have money. They had not learned—if they were lucky they would never learn—that money is never enough if that is all you have.
Caroline went out the side door and down the narrow hallway to the kitchen. The smell of coffee was strong and insistent. They did do very good coffee in this dining room, although you could opt for the designer variety if you wanted to. Designer coffee. Designer tea at three hundred dollars a cup. Back in the Bryn Mawr house, she’d had Red Rose every morning and loved it. She had Red Rose every morning now.
She wondered what the boys were doing, out there somewhere, having jobs, loving women, maybe even getting married.
She wondered if they thought about the day she told them she would never see or speak to them again.
3
If there was one thing LizaAnne Marsh knew was absolutely pie-assed retarded—just first rate crapuscular gay—it had to be this thing about school starting at eight fifteen in the morning. Eight fifteen. Really. Even people who had to go to work to get money didn’t have to be there at eight fifteen. Not unless they had a really crappy job that was just mopping up after people or working at McDonald’s or doing something lame like being a cop. And that hardly counted. Real people didn’t have jobs like that. Real people had careers.
LizaAnne put her tray of eye shadows back on her vanity table and looked at her lashes in the mirror. LizaAnne liked to wear really thick eye shadow and then a line of black right under her lashes, but that was something else that was wrong with eight fifteen in the morning. You couldn’t get yourself up like that at eight fifteen in the morning without looking like somebody really stupid, like Martha Heydreich, and then people started making fun of you in the halls and in the gym and then … well, then. LizaAnne had never been on the wrong side of that “then,” and she didn’t intend to start now.
She got up from the vanity and went to the big bow windows that overlooked the golf course. This was only the second-best bedroom in the house, but LizaAnne knew a lot of houses where the first-best bedroom wouldn’t be as good. It was all so stupid, it really was. Even her father, who would give her anything she wanted, she only had to pout a little—God, how he hated to see her pout, and he knew she was kidding, it was really amazing—but even her father went on and on and on about being a good community citizen and not kicking people when they were down and all the rest of that nonsense. It was like one of those stupid mantras people said when they did yoga or whatever it was. LizaAnne didn’t know why anybody bothered.
Now she looked up and down the golf course, to the club building, to the pool house. There were two cars parked at the club building. That would belong to Mrs. Stanford-Pyrie and Mrs. Carstairs. It just went to show that LizaAnne’s mother was always right. A man would take anything if he couldn’t get laid. Those two must have met a couple of desperate losers to be Mrs. anybody at all. Mrs. Carstairs was a mouse. Mrs. Stanford-Pyrie looked like a horse. LizaAnne was more than half convinced that the two of them screwed each other when nobody else was looking.
Ewww.
LizaAnne had no problem with gay guys. She couldn’t really imagine what they did to have sex with each other anyway. Gay women were something else. She could imagine that. It was disgusting. It was worse than disgusting. It was retarded.
LizaAnne looked back at the pool house. The yellow tape was still up. Michael was probably inside somewhere, walking around the pool, making sure everything was safe. Sarah Lefton’s mother said that he hadn’t just dropped out of Penn State, he’d been kicked out, right on his ass, for running around naked on the tennis courts. LizaAnne didn’t know if she believed that. Running around naked on some tennis courts didn’t sound like such a bad thing, not even if they were outdoor tennis courts. Stewie Edland had been caught actually burn
ing down the teeter-totters at the municipal park last spring, setting them on fire with a pipe he was doing some drugs with, and all that had happened to him was rehab and five hundred hours of community service. People got too worked up about things. They really did. Nobody cared about kids fooling around, as long as that was all they were. Nobody cared about anything.
She checked the pool house again. It was still deserted. Maybe Michael was late this morning. He usually wasn’t. She went back to the vanity and put her phone in the little stand that let her talk on speaker. The little stand was blue. So was the phone. So were the walls of the room. So was the brand-new BMW she’d gotten for her sixteenth birthday, the one that had featured so prominently when they’d filmed her episode of My Super Sweet 16. She had a dozen copies of the DVD of that episode sitting right on the shelf in the family room, in case anybody came over who wanted to see.
She punched in Heather’s number with one hand and started going through her jewelry box with the other. She had some really nice jewelry. She didn’t do fake stones, either. She’d explained that to her father. Her father had understood. And besides, why shouldn’t he buy her nice things? He was rich. He owned the three biggest car dealerships in this part of Pennsylvania.
Heather’s voice came over the speakers as a squawk. “LizaAnne? LizaAnne, is that you?”
“Of course it’s me,” LizaAnne said. “Who else would it be? You’ve got me on caller ID.”
“I know I do,” Heather said, “but you know what they’re like. I mean, maybe it was really your mother trying to see if I could get you in trouble if I didn’t know it was her. Or, you know. That kind of thing.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” LizaAnne said. “My mother doesn’t have time for that kind of thing. Have you been watching this morning?”
“I’ve been watching a little,” Heather said. “You know. I had to get dressed. I had to get my makeup on.”
“Did you see anything?”
“No,” Heather said. “It’s been really weird. There’s been nothing going on all morning. Oh, except Mr. Heydreich left to go to work. In his car. You know.”
“Are you sure she didn’t go with him?”
“Of course I’m not sure,” Heather said. “I couldn’t see into the car. He’s got those tinted windows. Do you like tinted windows? I’d think they’d make the car dark. And nobody would know it was you.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t want anybody to know it was you. If you were famous, you know,” Liza Anne said. “I think that’s retarded, though. I mean, why would you be famous in the first place if you didn’t want people to recognize who you were?”
“Maybe it’s when you get death threats and that kind of thing,” Heather said. “People who are famous are always getting death threats. Doesn’t that sound sucky? You go to all that trouble to get famous and then you have to skulk around because people are trying to kill you. Do you think people are trying to kill Taylor Swift? I bet they are.”
“Taylor Swift is retarded.”
“I know. I know Taylor Swift is retarded.”
“I want to go see Michael before the day gets started,” LizaAnne said. “But I can’t do it as long as I don’t know if he’s there. I mean, if I go over there and go wandering around in the pool house and there’s nobody there, I’m going to look retarded.”
“I don’t think he’s there,” Heather said. “I’m practically right on top of the pool house and I haven’t seen a thing all morning. And you know what she’s like. As soon as she knows he’s there, she comes right in, and in that car of hers, too. It’s not like you can miss it.”
LizaAnne looked at her jewelry. She had tiny sapphire studs for her ears. She had a ring of white gold with sapphires and diamonds in it. Heather had had a super sweet sixteen party, too, but the people from the show said they never did two in the same neighborhood, so they’d had to choose. Heather had gotten a car for her party, but it had only been a Ford. LizaAnne’s father said that nobody with any sense bought Fords, because the names stood for “Fix or Repair Daily.”
“Do you think I’m like her?” LizaAnne said. “The way everybody says?”
“Everybody doesn’t say that,” Heather said. “It’s just a couple of people.”
“It’s a couple of people here.”
“Well, it would have to be here, wouldn’t it?” Heather said. “I mean, they wouldn’t know who she was if they didn’t live here. It’s not like she’s famous, or any of that kind of thing. Nobody knows her but the people around here.”
“She hates me,” LizaAnne said.
“Of course she doesn’t hate you,” Heather said. “Well. You know.”
“She hates me,” LizaAnne said again. “She hates me because she knows Michael likes me better than he likes her. He really likes me. He’s just putting up with her because she gets him laid. She thinks she’s going to make some big thing out of it, but she isn’t. I mean, what would he want with her anyway, except, you know, her junk?”
“She’s really ugly,” Heather said. “And she’s old.”
“She’s really thin.” LizaAnne looked down at her very rounded arms.
“She’s probably got an eating disorder,” Heather said. “She probably throws up in the bathroom all the time. It’s really disgusting.”
“It’s retarded.”
“It’s worse than retarded,” Heather said. “It’s really gay.”
“Maybe she’s got some kind of thing on him,” LizaAnne said. “Maybe she’s blackmailing him. Maybe he’s hiding out from the law or something and that’s why he came home.”
“Maybe she’s one of those sick people who can’t stand to be with anybody her own age,” Heather said. “Maybe she’ll have a psychotic breakdown and end up in an insane asylum. Then when people come to see her her hair will hang down in front of her face and she’ll scream.”
LizaAnne picked up more of her jewelry. She had dangling earrings with little emeralds in them. She had whole sets for each of the four piercings on each of her ears, each in a different color.
“I wish she wasn’t on that committee,” she said finally.
And then, because that was the thing they had both been trying very hard not to say, they both fell silent.
LizaAnne looked around her room. She liked her room. She thought anybody would like it. She looked past the vanity at the clothes hanging in the walk-in closet. She put all her jewelry back in her box.
“There’s an arrangement,” she said. “My father said so. Every girl who’s going to be eighteen and out of high school in the spring is going to be invited. The committee has to.”
“That makes sense,” Heather said. “It’s not her who’s paying for it. It’s our fathers who are paying for it.”
“He said even if she did try to pull something, we wouldn’t have to put up with it,” LizaAnne said. “We could sue the committee, and the membership board of the club, and that kind of thing.”
“She won’t try anything,” Heather said. “It’s not like people want her here. That’s the thing. It’s not like she’s Stanford-Pyrie or somebody that everybody sucks up to. Nobody can stand her.”
“Those breasts of hers are fake, don’t you think?” Liza Anne said.
“Of course they’re fake.”
“Nobody could have breasts that really look like that. And if they do have them, they don’t keep them.”
“They don’t keep them?” Heather sounded confused.
“They get them reduced. My mother said. She thinks she’s so perfect, hanging around the pool in a bikini the size of a postage stamp, and she’s what? Forty? I think there ought to be a law against people wearing little tiny bikinis when they’re forty,” LizaAnne said.
Suddenly, talking to Heather was just making her tired. She got up and got the phone out of its stand. It really was retarded, this whole stupid thing. And it was boring.
“I’m going to hang up,” she said. “I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”
“Oka
y,” Heather said. “Ten minutes would be fine.”
LizaAnne made a face at the phone. With Heather, ten minutes would be fine, and so would be two, or sixty. It could be any time at all.
“I’ll be ten minutes,” LizaAnne said again. Then she shut off the phone, so she wouldn’t have to hear Heather’s stupid boring voice any more. Heather was a stupid boring person with a stupid boring voice.
In fact, everything about Waldorf Pines was stupid and boring, but at least it wasn’t retarded.
4
Eileen Platte had been up all night, all twenty-four hours of it, waiting. It was not the first time she had done this, and her greatest hope this morning was that it would not be the last. She’d been waiting for the last night for a long time now. There had been the day she had finally got up her courage to go through Michael’s drawers when he was at school. He’d been twelve that year, in sixth grade, and they had still been living in Wayne. She had been thinking about it for weeks, watching Michael when he came through the door off the school bus, watching him at dinner. He would lock himself in the bathroom for hours at a time, and she would sit there, just a few feet away, waiting.
In the end, she hadn’t found anything she hadn’t expected to find. She had gone through his drawers one by one. She had pushed his socks around just the way she did when she was putting them away when she’d done the laundry. Then she’d gone through the drawers of his desk. Finally, she’d done something she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do. She’d lain down on the floor and pushed herself under his bed. The marijuana was in a clear plastic bag taped to one of the wooden slats.
It was almost eight o’clock in the morning now, and there had been no sign of him since four yesterday afternoon. He’d been headed over to the Heydreichs’ house then, which is where he always went these days. The job guarding the pool didn’t give him enough to do. She couldn’t blame the club board. With Michael’s record, she wouldn’t have given him anything else to do, either. He was barely managing to handle this. Still, it was true. It wasn’t enough. It gave him too much time to think.
