Hush Hush

by Lippman, Laura

  “Yes,” Tyner said, his voice cold, “that does sound ‘flaky.’ Alanna hasn’t spoken to her mother for more than a decade. And she was sending her threatening notes.”

  “Ruby said. It could be Ruby, you know. Ruby could have sent the notes, then blamed her sister.”

  “Except Ruby’s whereabouts for Friday night are quite definite and she adores her sister.”

  Adores her so much she voluntarily went to the police and put her in for her father’s murder. What would Tess have done in the same situation? Not having a sibling, she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t even be sure what she would do if Carla Scout were in serious trouble. She wanted to believe that she would stand for principle. She feared she would Thelma and Louise it, only making sure that Carla Scout jumped out of the car before it headed into the Grand Canyon.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Yes,” Tyner said. “I’ll need you tomorrow, no matter what. And Missy may still come around.”

  “Keep me posted,” Tess said. She walked her plate back to the table and focused on having the best evening possible with Carla Scout. Sometimes that was all it took, mere focus, abandonment to the moment. She fitted herself to her daughter’s schedule, let the evening flow. Tonight it worked. The girl was asleep, the house clean by 9:30. Tess actually had time to read the newspaper. Which, come to think of it, was still on the front walk.

  She grabbed the plastic bag and unfurled the paper. Oh, hell, the carrier had screwed up again, as sometimes happened. It was the Beacon-Light, not the New York Times. (The Beacon-Light had refused to hire Tess more than a decade ago and Tess excelled at grudges.) Adding insult to injury, it wasn’t even today’s Beacon-Light but yesterday’s.

  She looked more closely. No, no, the carrier hadn’t screwed up. Because there, affixed to the story about Melisandre Harris Dawes, the one that had cost Tess her job, was a Post-it covered with a now recognizable handwriting. The first part was an address, vaguely familiar to Tess, although she couldn’t pin it down immediately.

  Then, in block letters:

  HYPOCRITE. YOU WORK FOR A CHILD KILLER. HAVE YOU NO SHAME.

  The article hadn’t named her, though. Her stalker was pretty stalkerish if he knew this. What the—And then the address clicked. It was in Medfield. Tess hadn’t recognized it because the address wasn’t what she thought of when she drove to the little white house on Fridays. She just thought of it as the little white house, home to Carla Scout’s Friday babysitter.

  Home to Carla Scout’s Friday babysitter. The place where she was due to go in less than twelve hours.

  As the little duck on Wonder Pets! liked to say: This was sewious.

  Friday

  2:00 A.M.

  “When did we stop talking to each other?” Crow asked.

  They were in bed and Tess was reminded of the saddest poem she knew. She should have been cheered that her seeping, sieve-like Mom-brain could conjure up a single line of poetry, but she would have preferred not to think about Philip Larkin’s “Talking in Bed,” with its searingly intimate knowledge of what it’s like to be estranged from your spouse. Not that she and Crow were in any trouble. They were just parents. Overworked, underpaid, and now in a full-fledged crisis.

  “There was never a right time to say, Oh, I’m getting these weird notes.”

  “Weird isn’t the word I’d use.”

  “But at first, that’s all they were. A compliment—I thought—on feeding meters. A creepy observation on my breakfast habits. And then when I got the one on being a crappy mother …” Her voice trailed off. She could not bear to tell Crow that she worried he would agree.

  “You told Sandy.”

  “Not about the last one. He was with me when I got the first one. And the second one came up by accident. Really, Crow, I wasn’t trying to shut you out. But there’s never time to sit and talk. Our life is like an air traffic control tower with one very busy plane coming and going all day.”

  She thought of the early days of their courtship, when talking in bed was easiest. Everyone knew the famous adage about newlyweds, about how if you put a penny in a jar every time you had sex the first year, you wouldn’t hit that figure again for the rest of your lives. But that was also true of those aimless, intense conversations that happened after sex, when you had hours and hours to lie around and just talk. Crow had found her fascinating then. He had pursued her ardently, made it clear that he found everything about her intriguing. But he had also run away twice, always because he doubted her affection for him. No, that wasn’t quite right. The first time, Crow had doubted her love for him. The second time, he had felt that he couldn’t protect her and it turned out that Crow, for all his evolved qualities, still wanted to be a protector.

  How many times was she going to have to learn this lesson? She had been threatened. She hadn’t turned to him for help. It made him crazy.

  “We’re talking now,” Tess said. “Let’s figure out what to do about child care tomorrow. I still don’t think this is a real threat, just someone who wants to fuck with my head for some reason. But, okay, he or she has won. What should we do?”

  “Can you take the day off?” Crow asked.

  “I wish. Tyner says he needs me.”

  “Okay, so it’s the nuclear option. Your mom.”

  “Yep. Carla Scout will come home with her hair curled and shoes that match her purse.”

  *

  Will Carla Scout be safe even here? Tess wondered as she drove to her mother’s house later that morning. Did Tess’s stalker know where her parents lived? She kept a careful eye on the rearview mirror and drove the most random route she could devise. She was reasonably sure she hadn’t been followed, but then—she had been followed at least three times. That first morning on Elm Street, the day outside Jimmy’s, the afternoon at Eddie’s. Perhaps one of those encounters had been random, but no more than one. And the note leaver knew about Melisandre, too. Then someone had managed to drive down her street, a tiny lane that saw almost no traffic, and switch out her newspaper, although that could have been done at any time yesterday. Still, that was the creepiest part, imagining this person walking up her walk, taking her New York Times, leaving the older copy of the Beacon-Light.

  “Okay, I’ve dropped Carla Scout off over on the west side of town,” she told Tyner on her cell, sitting in her mother’s driveway. Carla Scout had been so delighted to have a day with her grandmother that she barely registered Tess’s departure. “I figured I’d call in to find out where I’m going, just in case it’s closer to where I am.”

  Tyner paused for so long she thought the call had been dropped.

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “You don’t know where I’m going. I thought you said you had something urgent for me to do today.”

  “I do. The good news is—Melisandre has, as I told you she would, cooled off. She wants you working on her case again.”

  “You know, Tyner, whenever anyone says ‘the good news is,’ that means there’s bad news.”

  “I wouldn’t say it’s bad. Only—challenging.”

  Okay, then it was really bad.

  “Melisandre wants you to find Alanna. She knows it looks awful, her disappearing like this. We have a great attorney for her, once she comes in. Gloria Bustamante has agreed to represent her.”

  “That old lush?”

  “She’s better drunk than most attorneys in this town are after a week in Bible camp. Besides, she’s stopped drinking. Secretly. Last time I had lunch with her, I caught her sneaking water into her water glass. She had the staff trained at the Center Club to make it look as if she were drinking vodka all day.”

  “That’s just bizarre.”

  “I know. Besides, she was always a Scotch drinker. I should have been onto her from the start.”

  “No, I mean it’s bizarre for Melisandre to think I can find Alanna. I don’t know anything about her.”

  “You found the boyfriend.”

  “So
did the cops.”

  “Tess, it’s work. It pays by the hour. I can’t make you do it, but can you really afford to turn it down?”

  “Probably not. I’m going to have to buy Kevlar vests for everyone in the family.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Did Melisandre have any suggestions where to start?”

  “Only one. The former nanny.”

  “The woman who had an affair with her father? That seems unlikely.”

  “Melisandre believes she was in touch with Alanna, around the time filming started.”

  “Why?”

  “Mother’s intuition. Plus, someone had to wind Alanna up, right? Why did she show up at Hinerman’s office out of the blue, asking about his testimony?”

  “Do you have her details?”

  Tyner did. Elyse Mackie managed a fancy food store at Belvedere Square, on the city’s north side. But she wasn’t in when Tess called. She was, a colleague offered when pressed—Tess might have intimated that she worked for a lawyer who did probate work and there was money at stake—at a bridal shop, making an event of selecting her dress. “It’s a new thing, I think,” the co-worker said. “They make it a hen party of sorts, champagne and hors d’oeuvres. It’s up in Timonium.”

  Or, in other words, about as far as someone could be from where Tess was right now and still be in the Baltimore metro area. That was okay. She got paid by the hour and the mile. And she hadn’t been joking about the Kevlar vests. For all she knew, she’d be hiring her own security detail soon. Hey, Brian needed a job.

  *

  The bridal boutique was in a strip mall, but a high-end one. Tess, who seldom ventured into Baltimore’s far suburbs, thought of her city as down-and-out, a little dowdy. Yet there were places such as this, a bridal shop offering couture in a town where most of the citizens couldn’t pronounce the word. Seemed pretty pricey for a young woman who managed a store that imported olive oil, even if some of the balsamic vinegar there did go for as much as a hundred dollars a bottle. Elyse Mackie must be one of those women who threw around the phrase my day. Tess vowed never to use those words. Should she and Crow actually get their act together and pick a date. The party was well under way, with two champagne bottles upended in the buckets and a third being passed among the five women. The dress-shopping-as-brunch concept seemed risky to

  Tess. Didn’t they worry about getting champagne or grease stains on the gowns? The bride to be was easy to spot, as she stood on a raised platform, modeling a mermaid-like concoction. The dress was so narrow around the ankles that Tess had to think it would take hours for her to walk down the aisle. She’d make better time in a sack race.

  “We’re open by appointment only,” the boutique’s owner said to Tess with one of those bright, fake smiles that conveys nothing a smile is supposed to convey. She was taking the measure of Tess’s net worth, as evidenced by her clothing. How had Elyse Mackie ever passed muster here?

  She was a pretty woman, although not in Melisandre’s league. Not even in Felicia Dawes’s league, come to think of it. She had the kind of prettiness that comes from long mornings at the mirror until hair and makeup are just so. Felicia Dawes, ravaged by grief, lack of sleep, and the plain old rigors of motherhood, was a natural beauty. And Melisandre was a force of nature, Tess had to admit. If Melisandre had walked in here in an Old Navy peacoat, jeans, and Frye boots, she would have been treated as if she wore couture. Some women make clothes look better simply by putting them on.

  Not Elyse Mackie, though. She was out of her depth, trying on dresses and a lifestyle clearly beyond her means. Maybe Elyse Mackie was marrying well. But Tess had a hunch she either had saved diligently or was prepared to go into debt for her special day.

  “Miss Mackie? I hate to bother you under these circumstances, but it’s urgent. I’m a private investigator trying to find someone, and there’s a possibility—remote, to be sure—that you may be able to help me.”

  Elyse looked confused, which was understandable. Strange enough to have a private detective call on you. Stranger still to have one invade your—what was the event called? Not a shower. Not really a hen party. Shoptail party? Bridalunch?

  “I can’t imagine—”

  “It will only take a moment, but if we could speak privately, I’ll get out of here, let you go back to enjoying your party.”

  “This is a setup, right?” one of the women asked. “It’s like a practical joke. Dawn, did you hire a stripper? Because they sure screwed up if this is who they sent.”

  Elyse looked cross. “I told you guys that’s not what I want. Not at the hen party, and certainly not here. Please.”

  “No, I’m the real deal. And this is about”—Tess thought for a second about what to say that would convey seriousness to Elyse without providing too much information to the others—“someone you used to care for, a long time ago. More than ten years ago. She’s gone missing, I need to find her, for her own good.”

  “Alanna?” The emotion in Elyse’s eyes was vivid, if unknowable. Tess nodded.

  They went back to the dressing room. Tess would have preferred not to speak through a curtain, but Elyse could barely breathe, much less sit, in the dress she was wearing. The owner of the shop hovered jealously, refusing to leave until the dress had been removed and passed through the curtain. She shot Tess a look as if she were the bad witch at the christening, defiling this special day. What was that witch called? Elyse then put her own clothes back on and came into the tiny sitting room in the dressing area.

  “What’s happened to Alanna? Does it have something to do with Stephen’s death?”

  “We don’t know,” Tess said, which wasn’t a lie. They didn’t know. They would know when they found her.

  “We?”

  “I work for her mother.”

  “She killed Stephen, didn’t she? She really did it this time.”

  “This time?”

  “I mean—what happened before. She was out of her mind. I was there. I saw her. Saw the beginning. I was let go, before things got really bad, but when I looked back—I saw it, I really did.”

  Why was Elyse Mackie arguing the legitimacy of Melisandre’s madness with Tess? It had the feel of an argument she had made before, with herself or someone else. Elyse was someone who had a vested interest in Melisandre being insane. Because otherwise, she was implicated, however indirectly, in Isadora’s death.

  “Have you seen Alanna recently? I know it’s a long shot, but she’s been gone for a day now and she had to go somewhere, seek out someone whom she trusted.”

  “I did see her. She came to my work, out of the blue. We went for coffee. I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was—or how much she looked like her mother.”

  “Was there a reason she came to see you?”

  Elyse sighed, averted her gaze. “You work for her mother, right? So you probably know. Fine. I had an affair with Stephen. Alanna saw us. Together.”

  Tess nodded as casually as possible, as if the information were new to her.

  “After, the thing, with Isadora, after what happened, Stephen hired me back. I was happy to go. I was in love with him. He led me to believe that we would be a couple. Officially, eventually. When it was—what was the word he used?—appropriate. The girls had been through so much, and there was still the trial to get through. We were a lot more careful, the second time around, but we, um, started up again. Then, out of the blue, right before the trial, he terminated my employment and ended our relationship. Just like that. The thing was, I had signed a nondisclosure contract when I returned. I could be sued. For more money than I’d ever have.”

  So there was something Stephen and Melisandre had in common—their love of nondisclosure contracts.

  “Didn’t you think it odd that your lover made you sign something like that?”

  “He said everyone in his employ had to sign the same contract or it wouldn’t be legally binding on the others, or something like that. I was twenty-five. I was in love. And
maybe he was, too, but looking back, I think he just didn’t want to be troubled to find a new nanny. Anyway, I got mad. When I got fired the second time. So I called the state’s attorney and asked if the clause was binding in a criminal trial. They said it wasn’t. But the problem was, all I could testify to was the affair itself, the fact that Alanna had seen us. Only Alanna could testify as to whether her mother knew. I was told to be prepared to appear in case they needed to corroborate Alanna’s testimony, but then—mistrial. It never happened. Melisandre sought a trial by judge the second time around and—Well, that was fair. She was insane when she killed Isadora. I never doubted that. Stephen and I—we talked about it once, only once. Obviously, we wanted to believe that it wasn’t revenge, for what Alanna saw. What woman would do that?”

  Elyse Mackie seemed to shrink as she spoke. Tess looked at their surroundings, noted again the overreach on Elyse’s part. The chairs on which they sat looked like antiques, probably running to four figures each. It was as if, after all these years, Elyse was trying to have the wedding she’d thought she was going to have if she married Stephen Dawes. She was trying to be Melisandre, big and golden.

  “Is that what Alanna wanted to know when she came to see you? If she had, indirectly, caused her sister’s death?”

  “Actually, what she wanted to know was if there was a deal.”

  “A deal?”

  “She believed that her parents had an arrangement. They both benefited if Alanna didn’t take the stand. It would hurt Stephen’s reputation if the affair got out, but it would also hurt Melisandre’s defense. She had decided that her parents worked it out together—what it would take to get a mistrial before Alanna was called to the stand.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “The truth. That I wasn’t exactly close to her father around the time of the trial, that he had fired me and stopped taking my calls. I said she should ask him these things directly. The filming had started for the documentary, and I had decided on my own not to tell that part of the story, even if asked. But they didn’t ask me, which I found interesting. After all, Melisandre knows, right? And she was acquitted, so she can’t be tried again. Interesting, like I said. Like she was holding it back for some reason. Or, maybe, as Alanna suspected, there was a deal. Anyway, I called Stephen and gave him a heads-up. About Alanna, about how the filmmaker didn’t ask about us.”