Hush Hush

by Lippman, Laura

  Stephen had been so angry with her. She had insisted on setting up the camera to record their talk, as insurance, but he had given a curt “statement,” then told her to turn it off. She hadn’t expected that. Resistance, yes, but not anger. “We had an arrangement,” he said when she turned the camera off. “An agreement. I could have asked for child support, other financial concessions during the divorce. You agreed to leave—with half of my savings. We said we would put the past behind us, forever. Those things cannot be undone on a whim.”

  She argued that she had been desperate, unwell, but that made him only angrier. Which must be why he said such hurtful things.

  They had been in the kitchen of their old Bolton Hill house. It had been her idea—inspiration, she thought—to meet and tape her ex-husband there. She honestly thought that she and Stephen, back in their old house, could recover a fragment or two of their good times. She had loved him in a fashion. Not as profoundly as she should have, which may have been why he had devolved into the utter cliché, the husband who fucks the nanny. Really, how lazy could men be? Elyse wasn’t even that pretty or interesting. She was just there. Melisandre had certainly never seen her as competition. She never considered other women competition. They usually weren’t.

  It’s never going to happen, Melisandre. Never. Get over it. You look like a fool. You are a fool.

  The rage she felt at that moment—it was like nothing she had ever known. It wasn’t madness, which was the term Melisandre had always preferred for her illness. Unfashionable and imprecise as it was, madness seemed right to her. There had been something vicious inside her, something apart from her, all those years ago.

  Stephen had said: It’s never going to happen. Get over it. How dare he tell her what could happen? He still knew her well, and he used that knowledge to wound her. His words had the force of a physical blow.

  She checked her e-mail again. Harmony had finally answered her question about the protocols, explained the transcription app again, then advised Melisandre not to worry about doing her own transcription because Harmony would want to do it. She wrote that it helped her stay on top of the material. Melisandre ignored the latter. She began the laborious task of stopping and starting the tape, typing Stephen’s words. When her cell rang at one, she was tempted to ignore it, but then she saw DAWES in the display.

  “Melisandre? This is Felicia Dawes. Stephen’s wife.” It was a high voice, to Melisandre’s ear. Maybe even a little whiny. And overly enunciated, the way people talk when they’re trying to appear sober but aren’t.

  I am Stephen’s wife, she thought. You are just another nanny. Trainer. Whatever. I am Anne Boleyn. You’re Jane Seymour. She didn’t want Stephen, nor had she expected him to pine for her forever. But he could have done better than this.

  “Could you tell me what time you left Stephen? He hasn’t come home and he’s not answering his phone.”

  “I think it was no later than nine. I know I was home by nine-thirty or so, doing e-mail and transcription.”

  “Did he stay behind? Were you at a restaurant or his office?”

  “No, neither. We met at our old house.”

  “Oh.” A pause. “Oh.”

  “He was still there when I left. Do you need the address?”

  “No, thank you. I did live there for a time. Before our son was born.”

  “Stephen loved that house. I’m surprised you got him out of it.”

  The rude girl didn’t even bother to say good-bye.

  Poor thing, Melisandre thought. Poor thing. She had gotten in over her head. The nanny, the trainer. Stephen really was the laziest man alive. Why not the clerk at the dry cleaner’s? A barista? Cruel—but he had been cruel to her. Heedlessly cruel. Sticks and stones.

  Melisandre went to bed, although it was almost dawn before she found sleep. She had one of her old anger dreams, which she had had at frequent intervals during her marriage, although they had subsided over the past ten years. She yelled at people, she grabbed them and struck them, but she was harmless as a kitten. Her rage grew and grew. She pounded her fists on a table. The table was in a courtroom, but she was not working. Nor was she on trial. She knew these things in the way people know things in dreams. She was yelling at everyone and they laughed at her. She pounded and pounded and pounded and pounded—

  But, no, the pounding was outside her dream, in the real world. At her door. How could anyone be at her door? No one was supposed to be able to get to the penthouse without calling first or having a special key for the elevator. She would have to speak sternly to that girl, the one Tyner doted on. His stupid wife’s stupid niece, whom Melisandre had hired as a favor to Tyner.

  She pulled on a robe and instinctively fluffed her hair, which she could tame no matter how wild or bedheaded.

  The man at the door introduced himself as a policeman, Lieutenant Martin Tull, showed her a badge. Stephen, Stephen, something about Stephen. What was he trying to tell her? She really shouldn’t have taken an Ambien after drinking wine. Maybe this was a dream, too?

  “I told his wife that I left him at the Bolton Hill house at nine,” she said. Was it 9:00, 9:30, 9:45?

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tull said. “A police cruiser went by there a few hours ago at Mrs. Dawes’s request.”

  “I didn’t request it. Oh—of course.”

  “Ma’am I’m sorry to tell you, but Mr. Dawes is dead. He went through the glass doors at the back of the house and bled to death.”

  Bled to death. Death. She saw Isadora’s lifeless body, pulled from the car by a crabber who had broken the window in his desperation to save her. She saw her trainer, Silas, convulsing. She saw herself. Why did death stalk her? What did it want from her?

  I should sit down, she thought. Then: I am going to sit down. Where do I sit down? How do I sit down? It’s like Isadora all over again except I’m here for this, I know what’s going on.

  “He fell through the doors? I always worried about that glass,” she said after groping her way to one of the dining room chairs. “It’s because of the way the flooring was done—it’s the same inside and out, which is a lovely effect—we could open the doors in such a way that it was like one big room. But dangerous. I worried about the girls so.”

  “We’d like to talk to you about your evening with him. Downtown, if you don’t mind.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “But you want me to come downtown?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I need to dress, call my lawyer and ask him to meet us.”

  “You’re not under arrest, ma’am. It’s no big deal, really. Just want to talk.”

  “I’m a lawyer,” she said. “I wouldn’t dream of speaking to you without one present.”

  She knew that insisting on a lawyer would escalate things, but she didn’t care. Only a fool would speak to police without a lawyer present.

  She made him wait for forty-five minutes while she showered and dressed, changing her outfit three times. She realized this could be the only power she would have for a while, making this detective wait. She began to put on her usual uniform of leggings and cashmere, then decided to wear a dress instead. A blue knit dress, paired with boots that added three inches to her height. She kept her jewelry to a minimum, wearing only diamond studs and her watch, which had belonged to her mother. Poor Mum. She had done the best she could. Almost every mother did, in Melisandre’s view. She had done the best she could, no matter what people thought.

  While in the bathroom, she managed to send Harmony a text:

  Take all materials related to film to Tess Monaghan and tell her they are now privileged. I’ll arrange for her to pick up what I have here.

  Of course, Tyner really needed to be the one to hold the videos and transcripts, Harmony’s shooting schedule, whatever ephemera the film had generated. But Tyner was going to be with Melisandre all day. Tyner was going to be with her for hours and hours. She fluffed her hair, put on eyeliner, and
smiled at her reflection.

  She looked very good, all things considered.

  Part II

  Saturday

  10:30 A.M.

  Tess had no choice—today was going to be her own impromptu take-your-daughter-to-work-day. It would have been unfair to Crow, who had arrived home at 4:00 A.M., to shake him awake five hours later and ask him to watch Carla Scout while Tess ran around town at Tyner’s bidding. For one brief, ungenerous moment, she had tried to rationalize that it was in Carla Scout’s best interest to be left in her father’s care. It was going to be a boring Saturday morning for her, strapped in her car seat. But Tess recognized she was being selfish even as she tried to be selfless.

  “I want Dada,” Carla Scout announced from the backseat, for the fifth or sixth time, not the least bit placated by the treats Tess had plied her with—a cruller (from a Crow-approved bakery) and chocolate milk (organic, but Starbucks, iffy in Crow’s world).

  “Sorry, kiddo, you’re stuck with me.”

  “I want a Dada day, I want a Dada day,” she chanted, thrumming her feet.

  “That makes two of us,” Tess said.

  “Huh?” It never occurred to Carla Scout that anyone yearned to have a day without her.

  Their first stop was Melisandre’s apartment, where she said she had left her iPhone, iPad, digital camera, and laptop, all of which were to be collected. Once that was done, Tess had to drive to the Four Seasons on the other side of the harbor and meet Harmony Burns, who would add her gadgets and papers to the pile.

  But the apartment first. Tess had to admit, Melisandre was a pretty cool customer, remembering to leave these items behind. Tess entered the apartment with the keys given to her during their security checks, trying to keep Carla Scout from running amok. But it was hard, locating things when Melisandre hadn’t provided precise locations. While Tess was searching, Carla Scout ended up seizing a doll she found in one of the bedrooms. An American Girl doll, Tess realized. She had been trying to keep Carla Scout from knowing of their financially ruinous existence.

  “Mine,” she said.

  “No, it’s not, Carla Scout.”

  “MINE.” Carla Scout believed that “No” was the result of not having been heard, so she simply amped up the volume at the first denial. And on the second, then the third.

  “Not yours,” Tess said firmly, removed it from her daughter’s grasp, and walked it into the bathroom, thinking to stow it in a cabinet there. Oh, thank goodness, there was Melisandre’s phone on the sink, and the tablet was on the back of the toilet. She threw those into her battered leather knapsack with the laptop and camera, which she preferred to a purse, as it kept both hands free when she was walking. She instructed Carla Scout to follow her to the car, only to discover, upon fastening her into her car seat, that she was clutching a book, In the Night Kitchen. Fuck. She should take it back, but she couldn’t bear the idea of unbuckling, then rebuckling, Carla Scout.

  Wait—why did Melisandre have a copy of In the Night Kitchen? That was appropriate for little kids. Why did she have an American Girl doll, come to think of it?

  *

  Harmony was waiting for Tess on the circular drive at the Four Seasons, all her materials loaded onto a bellman’s cart.

  “How long will I have to go without my iPad?” she asked. “And my phone? How am I supposed to cope without my phone?”

  “Tyner said go over to the AT&T store on Fleet, say you lost yours, and buy a new phone and tablet. He’ll reimburse you. I assume everything is backed up somewhere?”

  “I use—”

  Tess held up a hand. “Don’t tell me. I’m not sure how it works in this brave new world. And when it comes to your laptop, well—la, la, la, I can’t hear you, you don’t even have one, okay? We have a grace period, maybe a long one, in which no one is going to ask for this stuff. The detectives assigned to this case are old school. They believe in interrogation above all. And they’re good at it. Tyner is more worried about the state’s attorney’s office requesting these items down the line, but—better safe than sorry.”

  “He’s right to be concerned,” Harmony said. “Federal prosecutors sought all footage from a reality show last year after they indicted two of the people on it. I’m talking about stuff that had never aired. The network fought the request, but I’m not sure how it ended up.”

  Harmony looked thin and frail in her black clothes and her cherry-red Doc Martens. She could pass for a teenager. Maybe that’s why Tess felt an almost maternal desire to cheer her up.

  “But this is good for your project, in the long run? I mean, something has happened. You have a story to tell now.”

  “No, it’s horrible. Other media is going to swamp us. And I don’t understand why Melisandre was meeting with Stephen. That was terribly premature.”

  “I assumed that was because of the kids. She was desperate to see them.”

  “Yes, but why—” Harmony stopped herself.

  “Why what?”

  “Never mind. Melisandre usually knows what she’s doing, even if she doesn’t always tell me. I’ll leave it at that.”

  Tess lingered for a minute in the driveway. There was something likable about Harmony Burns. She had seen her only once before, at Tyner’s office, and then the young woman had been not so much a person as a person associated with the film that Tess wanted no part of. But Tess, forever inquisitive, had Googled Harmony after their encounter and read her slender backstory—the accolades that had greeted her first documentary, the criticisms that had buried the second and tarnished her reputation. She had been accused of exploiting her young subject, affirming racist stereotypes, not stepping in when the girl’s cousin huffed spray paint on-camera.

  “I used to be a reporter. Too.” The tacked-on word was a bit of conscious flattery. “The story goes where the story goes, no?”

  “It’s not what I signed on for. I don’t do crowd scenes, headline drama, CNN crazy-lady-of-the-week. I wanted to make a film about a woman who was trying to rebuild her relationship with her daughters.”

  “I thought it was a broad look at the criminal insanity plea.”

  “Yes, it’s that, too. But I also wanted to document the return to something that others would call normalcy. Insanity by any name—there’s still such a taint. Young actresses can go to rehab seven times. And be forgiven, seven times. But no one’s allowed a comeback from crazy.”

  What do I believe about Melisandre Harris Dawes? Crazy? Crazy then, but not now? Never crazy? Tess decided she preferred not to think about Melisandre at all. The story was just too awful—the mother sitting mere yards away, shielded from the sun by a shade tree, while her daughter essentially baked to death in a luxury SUV. Of course it was crazy, but what did crazy mean?

  Tess got back into her car and headed to police headquarters to see if Tyner needed anything else from her. There wasn’t much news on the radio on a Saturday morning. The death of Stephen Dawes was still unknown to the city at large. She wondered how long that would hold true. Even if an enterprising reporter had been listening to the police radio overnight, the report would have been for an ambulance dispatched to a Bolton Hill address, then a call for homicide detectives. A reporter would have to look up the address to learn that it was the home of someone well known, then go to the scene to understand the circumstances of the death. After all, it would initially be investigated as an accident.

  And it might have been an accident. It was possible that Stephen Dawes had walked or fallen through the large plate-glass doors along the rear of his Bolton Hill home. There was evidence that he had been drinking, although it was unclear how much, just that an empty wine bottle had been found at the scene. It also appeared that he had died very quickly, blood gushing from his femoral artery. Even if someone had been there, he couldn’t have been saved.

  But if someone had been there, why hadn’t that person called 911?

  *

  Tyner had no more work for Tess after she dropped everything off. N
o praise, either, but that was comfortingly in character. Carla Scout, bored with the book she had stolen from Melisandre’s apartment, was breaking bad after a long morning in the car. But Tess had a solution for that—Saturday story hour at her aunt Kitty’s bookstore. Carla Scout was a regular there. Kitty didn’t tell the stories. For all her personal warmth and magnetism, Kitty didn’t really have a lot of rapport with kids unless, like Carla Scout, they were related to her. She hired a smiley, happy lady to tell the stories on the children side of Women and Children First, then busied herself in the Dead White Men annex.

  And that suited Tess, who needed to talk to someone, anyone, today. There had been no opportunity to tell Crow about the third note last night, especially given that he didn’t know about the first and second notes. Besides, she was afraid that Crow, kind as he was, might share the sentiment of the note writer. She was a crappy mother. She lost her temper. She yelled. She couldn’t plant herself in the moment the way Crow could. She tried to blame it on being six years older, but did the reason matter? Crow was an innately great parent. Tess? Not so much. The accidental detective had become the accidental mother, and the learning curve was even steeper in this line of work. Tess remembered a PI friend, one who hadn’t started out so friendly, telling Tess that she held her gun like a blow dryer. That was even funnier if one had seen Tess with a blow dryer. But she had learned to hold a gun, even to use one with lethal force when it came down to it. Her hand reached for her knee, for the slightly raised scar that reminded her that she was alive, and lucky to be so, that a gun had saved her life. She touched this talisman of flesh much less frequently since Carla Scout was born. Tess no longer needed to be reminded of her own mortality. Carla Scout did that job very nicely.