Hush Hush

by Lippman, Laura

  Upon closer examination, however, she saw that it wasn’t her check, just a piece of paper, in the same handwriting as the note on her car, two days earlier.

  All it said was “No bagel, Tess? So people are capable of change. Good to know.”

  2:45 P.M.

  It was a truism in Baltimore that one was forever running into people one knew. Good old Smalltimore. Kitty Monaghan, a native, was used to it.

  However, she was not used to seeing her niece walk by her bookshop, head down. Why wouldn’t Tess drop in if she were in the neighborhood? How busy could she be? But then, Tess was a mother now, much less carefree with her time. Not that she complained to her aunt, but Kitty had noticed over the holidays that Tess, never exactly a relaxed person, was more tightly wound than usual.

  Kitty went back to the calendar for the store’s upcoming events, more important than ever to her business. Even with an online store that did a booming business with Baltimore expats, Kitty needed to get people into her physical space if she was going to sell books, and that took more than just throwing a writer behind a card table. Kitty had a weekly music series, four different book clubs, and a storytelling hour for children every Saturday. She had created something called the RUI club—Reading Under the Influence—a kind of anti–book club in which women from book clubs came to get title suggestions and free wine, provided by Bin 604, who sent a store employee to conduct themed tastings. It was all working, but it required that she work pretty much every day.

  When Kitty had opened her bookstore twenty years ago, buoyed by a settlement over her wrongful termination from the city school system, she had thought she was opting for an easy life. Sit in a pretty space surrounded by books, make friends, ring up sales. Even in the beginning, it had been much harder than she had anticipated and there had been a moment—six months in reality, six very long months—when the world economy imploded and she thought she was going to have to surrender. The use of a war term was apt. She was besieged on every flank—by online stores, by the popularity of digital readers. Kitty felt that even the so-called binge watching of television had begun to eat into people’s reading lives. If you could sit down and watch four hours of Breaking Bad or Downton Abbey in a single night, when did you read? Even there, she took on a can’t-beat-them-join-them mentality. She did events for the novels of Julian Fellowes, leaning hard on the Downton connection. Perhaps inevitably, she started a small event called WireCon. It had been a local show, and there were more than two dozen books to date that could be linked to The Wire’s writers and stars. The “convention” had started three years ago with seventeen people sitting on folding chairs, pretending they were being called to order by Stringer Bell. Last month, the fourth annual WireCon had sold out the Senator Theatre, and Idris Elba, the actor who played Stringer Bell, had appeared. Along with, in Kitty’s estimation, every African-American woman in Baltimore, and maybe the surrounding counties. Anticipating this audience, she had cannily thrown Zane’s backlist into the mix, figuring the Maryland erotica writer, a trailblazer, was due for a rediscovery in the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey. Yes, Kitty was nimble, Kitty was entrepreneurial. To quote the Sondheim song, she had gotten through all of last year and she was still here.

  Next year? Yes. The year after that? Harder to say.

  Running a business had brought out a competitive part of her nature heretofore unknown to her. The youngest of seven and the only girl, Kitty had never had to compete for anything. She had been born lucky. Her beauty was part of the luck, but far from the whole story. Kitty had led a charmed life. Most of the time. She lived to please herself, which sounded selfish. Yet she believed it made her more generous—with her friends, her family, her husband. Her happiness secure, she could make others happy.

  She had always felt that birth order had much to do with her lack of interest in motherhood. Kitty had never wanted children. Correction: Kitty had always told people that she never wanted children, which wasn’t exactly the same thing. But if the birth order in her family had been switched, she would have been expected to be a second mother to her brothers. Instead, she was spoiled, although those who loved her insisted she wasn’t spoiled in the least. And everyone loved her. This was a fact about herself that Kitty understood only externally. She heard it over and over again, accepted it as true according to others, but never felt the reality of it. It was like being told about an interesting mole on the small of her back. “Everyone loves you!” “There’s a mole the shape of the Liberty Bell back there.” Oh, okay. Sure. That’s nice. But she couldn’t see it.

  Her innate happiness drew people to her, just as it drew people to pick up all those self-help books promising happiness. When she was younger—not young, just younger, in her thirties—this quality had attracted men. Lots of men. Young men, usually, perhaps too young, but she’d had no interest in marriage, so that was good. She really didn’t see the point of marriage if one didn’t want children. Lately, science had been catching up with what Kitty had long suspected: Women had no innate talent for monogamy. They, too, became bored with partners at midlife. But Kitty had married at midlife. She loved Tyner, considered him a soul mate. Like oil and vinegar in the right proportions, they balanced each other. Tyner being the vinegar, of course, but only in the world at large. With Kitty, he was sweet and loving.

  She had always assumed he had fallen in love with her because she was not as self-congratulatory as some of his exes. Tyner had cut a great swath through Baltimore. (“Well, rolled,” he liked to say.) But he had been dubious of the women who were drawn to him. He called them Coming Home groupies. “I didn’t go to Vietnam. I got hit by a car outside Memorial Stadium. And I’m not Jon Voight. I’m better-looking.”

  He was, and aging with far more grace. Kitty glanced at the rack of magazines she felt obligated to carry—there was no real newsstand left in Fells Point—and shuddered at the surgically altered, cosmetically heightened, orthodontically enhanced faces that grinned back. She had read somewhere that one could see the effects of long-term bulimia in a woman’s face, that the chin and cheekbones formed a striking triangle. This month’s cover models—three actresses and three reality-TV stars—were five for six on the triangle scale.

  Kitty wasn’t immune to the desire to look good. She believed in maintenance. She liked facials. She touched up the gray in her auburn hair and availed herself of a professional colorist four times a year in order to restore the subtle balance of shades that had once been her birthright. She shaved her legs, moisturized, watched her weight. Kitty had always felt very good in her own skin.

  Then she had met Melisandre Dawes at dinner last week.

  The woman was a little younger than she was, but it wasn’t Melisandre’s youth that intimidated Kitty. For one thing, she didn’t look young for her age, not particularly. Melisandre looked every inch the forty-something she was, but in the best possible way. And then there was that hair, which could only be described as an aureole. Her tawny skin. Brown eyes with the light hair, once the Elizabethan ideal of beauty, and the eyes had flecks of gold that complemented the hair. Sure, the hair was highlighted, the skin cultivated, the body buffed, but why not? These ministrations were in service to a world-class beauty.

  “So wonderful to meet the woman who tamed our Tyner,” Melisandre had said, and it felt as if she were leaning down from a great height, although she was no taller than Tess and certainly less broad, and Tess never made Kitty feel this small. Maybe it was that familiar possessive, our Tyner. Kitty had not thought of Tyner as belonging to anyone but her. To whom did our refer? Kitty and Melisandre? Or the community of women in Tyner’s past?

  They had met at Cinghiale, in a private room, for Melisandre’s “security.” Kitty had thought such caution over the top at the time, although this morning’s events had proven her wrong, she guessed. She had said as much to Tyner, after Melisandre called this morning. They had been having a lovely lie-in, a perk of self-employment. Kitty may have had to work every day, but she
could arrange the schedule so someone else opened.

  “I guess I was wrong,” Kitty said. “About her security issues being overblown.”

  “You guess?” Tyner was almost never sarcastic with her. With others, yes, but not with her. He hurried through his morning routines, keen to go take care of the shaken Melisandre. Kitty worried this was a harbinger of things to come. Melisandre, for all her seeming confidence, had no problem leaning on others.

  Whereas Kitty was self-sufficient. She had never lived with a man before Tyner, never wanted to. Technically, she had been engaged, for all of a red-hot minute, but that was kid stuff. They hadn’t been serious.

  Well, she had never been serious. Who could be serious about getting married at seventeen?

  But he had been. Paul. She wondered what had happened to him. The modern thing would be to look him up on Facebook, but Kitty wasn’t on Facebook. The store had a Twitter account and a Facebook page, maintained by one of her employees, although Kitty wasn’t quite sure she approved. It seemed strange, reaching out to people through computers and phones to lure them into a bookstore. In the battle for people’s eyes, computers and phones were more competition.

  Then again, her single most successful signing of the year to date was for a blogger turned memoirist with a huge Twitter following, so maybe there was something to it.

  She glanced at the clock in the upper right hand corner of her computer screen. Almost three. Tyner hadn’t checked in since he left this morning. He didn’t, usually. It didn’t bother her. Usually. She thought again about Melisandre, the dinner. People jumped to do things for her. Men and women. They couldn’t have known, Kitty thought. If they had known what she had done, they wouldn’t find her charismatic. No one was charming and beautiful enough to transcend that story. Yet Tyner knew and he didn’t care. Ah, but Tyner had known her before all this happened. We dated, he’d told Kitty. No big deal. Kitty had laughed. “One of the cast of thousands, eh?”

  But Melisandre had let it slip, during dinner, that she had broken up with Tyner only because he made it clear he had no interest in marriage or fatherhood.

  Or was it a slip?

  Another advantage of being the boss was that Kitty didn’t have to close most days, although she had always worked the last shift on Saturdays so she could go over the week’s receipts. She went upstairs to change and take down her hair. In her younger days, Kitty had favored a vintage look verging on costume, but now she wore simple, timeless clothing. Still vintage, but the more expensive kind, found in consignment shops instead of church rummage sales. She overdressed, perhaps, for the role of a bookstore owner, but she liked her tailored black dresses, which she paired with old jewelry—Bakelite bracelets, Chanel pins. Dressing for work, she often thought of dowdy Mildred Pierce, her attempt to create a fancy uniform for herself at her restaurant, only to look a little odd and wrong. Kitty never looked odd or wrong. There were some who said she was more beautiful than ever. Tess’s Crow, for example, who had once worked in Kitty’s store, and had nursed a little crush on her before falling for Tess. Did her employees still get crushes on her? She hadn’t stopped to think about that for a long time. She paused, facing the mirror, hands holding the ends of a distinctive choker, a chalky white number that contrasted beautifully with the black dress’s neckline, but also looked like a ghastly fake smile.

  She put on an apron—no role playing here, it was just good sense to protect a dry-clean-only dress from grease and splatter—and made sure that dinner was one that Tyner would like. Pork tenderloin, roasted vegetables. They usually ate at eight, then spent the evenings in companionable silence, reading for work. They also had a secret habit—not a guilty one, but a secret one, key distinction—of watching Mary Tyler Moore reruns on Netflix. Tyner laughed so hard during these shows. Although Tyner was more of a barker than a laugher, coughing up a single harsh syllable of approval when he found something funny. Kitty had worked out recently that The Mary Tyler Moore Show had gone off the air not long before Tyner’s accident. Did he laugh because it was funny or because it reminded him of a time when he’d laughed more freely?

  At 7:45, Tyner called.

  “I lost so much time today, dealing with Melisandre, the hotel, the expedited move. She forgets that she’s not my only client. And I’m in a good rhythm, here in the office. If I leave now, I’ll just disrupt the flow of what I’m doing. Would you mind terribly if I work for a few more hours?”

  “Of course not,” she said quickly. She would not nag. She would not remonstrate. Plus, he sounded genuinely put-upon, harried. He did not enjoy the demands Melisandre put on him. He couldn’t say no to her. Why couldn’t he say no to her? Kitty ate her share of the supper she had prepared and put the rest away on the lower shelves of the refrigerator, so Tyner could reach and reheat them. She changed out of the dress that no one had seen her in and put on a nightgown and a kimono she had owned forever. She curled up in her usual spot on the sofa, but she enjoyed television only when she could watch with someone else. There was nothing to do but read a book. Which, in the life of a bookseller, meant reading galleys for the next season. She settled in with a sigh, plucked one from the pile, and started in. She fell asleep on page 79—at least, that was where she found the book, spine spread, lying on the floor when she awakened. It was 11:30.

  And she was still alone.

  11:30 P.M.

  Ruby had learned as a child that attempting to muffle or conceal a sound only drew attention to it. If you whispered, people leaned in to catch what you were saying. If you tried to tiptoe, or close a door without being heard, people wondered why you didn’t want to be heard. So when Ruby went to her listening post late at night, she simply got up and walked downstairs. If someone ever challenged her, she would say: “I’m going to get a glass of water.”

  But no one ever challenged her, possibly because no one else, not even Alanna, had discovered that one could hear everything being discussed in their father’s bedroom while standing in the hall closet.

  Ruby wasn’t sure why this acoustical anomaly existed. Everywhere else, the house seemed to smother or distort sound. She assumed it was some shortcut in construction, a missing layer in the wall that the closet and bedroom shared. Atypical of her father, a perfectionist known for overseeing every detail, but then the house was atypical for him. Brand-new, built from scratch, not rehabbed. Suburban. Beyond suburban. Rural in feel, surrounded by trees, yet almost close enough to hear the humming cloverleafs of the Beltway and various interstate exchanges. Now, late winter, was the most light-filled time in the house. And when the trees were bare, one could see the house’s glowing windows from a great distance, and that was cozy—from a distance, looking in. As spring turned to summer, the house would grow darker and darker.

  The house was also unusual in that it had a master bedroom suite on the first floor, with the other bedrooms on the second and third floors. It made Felicia crazy, going up and down the stairs so much. She had taken to wearing a pedometer to show Ruby’s dad how much she walked. Silly, but then Felicia thought it mattered, how many steps a person took in a day. Ruby specialized in getting out of gym class whenever possible, no small thing at a physically rah-rah place like Roland Park Country, especially when one’s sister was a track star. Her latest condition, supported by a forged doctor’s note, was an enlarged spleen. That should be good for a week or two.

  She slipped her coat from a hanger, careful not to make a sound, then made a nest, leaned her back against the rear wall.

  “I don’t see why this concerns us,” Felicia was saying.

  Her father’s voice was indistinct; he must be in the bathroom. Luckily, Felicia had trouble hearing him, too, and he had to come out and repeat himself.

  “It concerns us, Felicia, because we gave the girls permission to see Melisandre if that’s what they want.”

  “You gave permission. I wasn’t consulted.”

  “Jesus, Felicia. Can we not have that conversation again?”

>   “It was really hurtful. When they said they didn’t want me to adopt them.”

  “Understood. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “I waited until I was pregnant to ask because I wanted to emphasize that we would be one family.”

  This old thing. It wasn’t the first time that Ruby had heard Felicia complain about their refusal to be adopted. She had felt bad at the time, but she was glad now. Alanna had been right to say they shouldn’t go along with it. Alanna used to have Ruby’s best interests at heart, but now it wasn’t so clear that she did, not after what Ruby had heard in this same spot a few days ago, Alanna agreeing with her father that it might be better if they avoided seeing their mother as long as possible. Ruby hadn’t heard enough of the conversation to know why Alanna was suddenly on their father’s side, and you couldn’t go to someone and say: “Last night when I was eavesdropping, I didn’t quite catch everything, could you fill me in?”

  “Is that why Melisandre came back?” Felicia asked. “Because she knows I asked the girls to let me adopt them?”

  “She came back to make this stupid film, best I can tell. But she has been getting threatening notes, apparently, which I just found out about. And now this.”

  “I know Silas, a little. He was just getting started when I sold my business. What a crazy thing. Do they know what happened?”

  “It’s just a clusterfuck as I understand it. He knocked the sugar bowl to the ground when he fell and it smashed, and some maid with a Dustbuster cleaned it up while they were out getting him medical attention. Tyner Gray is trying to spin it as a good thing—he says the Four Seasons will probably be more cooperative with his private investigator if there’s not a police investigation, that the promise of discretion is a powerful carrot. I don’t know. I don’t really care. Look, I’m worried for Missy, even if the seizure, whatever caused it, probably wasn’t the intended outcome. Her doctor thinks someone used a drug, maybe GHB.”