They wound up the day at Cate and Windy’s favorite restaurant, the Rainforest Café at the MGM Grand, sitting surrounded by the fake trees and fake animals, Bill not even once murmuring that it wasn’t very healthy. They played Count the Brides as one wedding party after another passed them, and Cate discovered that her name rhymed with “great” and made up a song commemorating it. It was a wonderful day, the three of them getting along beautifully as a family, even when they heard an advertisement on the radio for rooms that rented by the hour in case you wanted to have a quickie at lunchtime and Cate asked what a quickie was, Bill looking over at Windy like saying, “I told you Vegas wasn’t a good place to raise a child”; even when Cate went on a little too long for everyone’s comfort about how great Mom’s friend Ash was and how much Bill would like him and maybe he could be Bill’s friend too.
Windy spent the day doing everything she could to be the perfect mom, the perfect fiancée, working to prove to an internal judge that her life was everything she wanted. Doing anything to subdue the stomach-clenching feeling of guilt she had gone to bed with and woken up with and spent the day with. Even a chocolate milk shake couldn’t quell it.
It was exhausting and after tucking Cate in at eight thirty she felt like she was ready for bed herself. But she still had a few more hours of quality time with Bill left this weekend, and the Perfect Fiancée was going to see that he enjoyed them. She poured them both drinks and went to join him on the sofa. She almost turned back around when she saw that he was flipping through the bridal magazine she’d bought on Friday.
He held it up with a big, happy smile. “I didn’t know you bought anything like this, babe. Does that mean you changed your mind and decided you want a large wedding?”
“No. Oh no. Actually, I bought that for—” She stopped and changed course, “—for ideas.” He looked so happy at the thought that she’d bought it for them, she could not bear to crush that by telling him the truth.
He took the glass of scotch she gave him and patted the couch next to him. “Sit down and show me what you were looking at in here so I can keep up.”
She sat cupping her drink in both hands, leaning forward. “A lot of different things. Just to, um, get in the mood.”
Bill was still beaming about the magazine. “I wasn’t going to tell you this but your mother called me this week. She was worried that something happened between us because you don’t call her back to talk about wedding plans. She said she thought she was more excited about us getting married than you are. I’m glad to see—” tapping the magazine, “—that’s not the case.”
“No. I’ve just been too busy to deal with it.”
He put the magazine aside and turned on the couch to face her. “Why don’t you tell me about this big case you’re working on?”
That caught her off guard. “I’d love to. Well, not really love to, it’s pretty horrible. But I can’t. It’s not like in Virginia. The confidentiality rules here are pretty strict. No discussions of active cases.”
Bill nodded, his smile fading. “Guess I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t.”
“Damned how?”
“If I don’t ask about your work, and if I do. I was just trying to learn what you are so caught up in. So I would understand why you can forget about me so easily when I can’t ever seem to get you off my mind.”
Windy thought her heart might break. “Bill, that is so nice. I’m sorry. I wish I could explain it to you. You just have to trust me that it’s important.”
He leaned back into the cushions of the couch, balancing the scotch on one thigh. “Is this what it is going to be like all the time, Windy? I don’t want to put you on the spot, or make you defensive. I’m asking because I genuinely want to know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you always going to be caught up mind, body, and soul in a world we can’t talk about? Rushing off to check your cell phone every three minutes even on Sundays?” He lowered his eyes to look at her. “Don’t deny it. I could tell you were doing it.”
She had thought all day that she was being so careful. Damn damn damn. What else had he seen through?
Bill reached out with his finger and stroked her cheek. “Recently I’ve started having a fantasy. Do you want to hear it?”
No, Windy thought, in no mood for sharing fantasies. Said, “Of course.”
“In my fantasy, you come home every day at five and we sit down to dinner, you and me and Cate and the brothers and sisters we give her. And we talk, and spend time together. And then when the kids are in bed you and I talk, and spend time together. Like normal people.”
Windy stared at her lap.
He leaned toward her. “I just want you to enjoy what you have. Enjoy being with your daughter. Enjoy being with me. Enjoy making babies with me soon. Do you understand? Instead of me always having the impression that I am distraction from what you want to be doing. I don’t want to feel like asking you to take a day off is some kind of pressure. I want it to be a pleasure. Something you want to do.”
It was the word “pressure” that brought it all home to Windy, made her understand, boom, like snapping her fingers. She looked up and was staring into Bill’s handsome face, his eyes holding hers, but she wasn’t seeing him. She was seeing a ceiling fan in a hotel room in Hawaii. Cate asleep in the adjoining room, the ceiling fan spinning slowly around over the big bed she and Evan were sharing. It was a fancy hotel, but there was a cobweb on the fan, she’d noticed it the first night but hadn’t mentioned it. That kind of attention to detail, part of her training, drove Evan crazy. She had been practicing what she wanted to say to Evan all day, working out different tones, different sentences. Different ways of saying that maybe she needed more from him. Evan was out of bed, standing at the glass door, watching the wind. She was lying on her side, watching him. Finally she blurted it out to his reflection, too chicken to ask him to turn around. But he did when she was done, looking confused, hurt, saying, “Why are you doing this? Putting all this pressure on me?”
Pressure: she asked him to spend the last day of their vacation just with her and Cate, the three of them, instead of going off to do something. She got to spend so little time with him between work and being a mom, and it would mean so much to her if they could have just that one day together. It had come out pretty well, she thought.
But not well enough. “You’ve never said anything about needing more time with me before,” Evan had pointed out and she had wanted to say because I was afraid you would react this way, afraid it would make you scared, make you pull away. But she had backed down. Had said, You are right, everything is fine. Had lain awake, watching the fan spin the cobweb around as he asked could they talk about this later and went for a walk outside, to be by himself for a while.
Had smiled and waved him off when he went windsurfing the next day despite the clouds. Had lain on the beach wondering if she would ever be able to do anything to compete with the thrill of that, even though he’d done it a million times before. Had watched and waited for him to come back, through one day, then the next and the next. At least, she had told herself as she spent those sleepless nights in the black leatherette armchair of the coast guard’s office biting her nails, she was not looking at that cobweb anymore.
She had hated identifying the body. Hated having to admit it was real. But she’d done it. Because she had to see proof.
Now here was the dialogue reversed, Bill wanting more time with her, wanting just to be with her. And she was the one pulling away, acting like a child. Bill was offering her everything she wanted, stability, maturity. Attention. He would never be happier away from her. He would never make her feel boring. These were the things that mattered in a relationship, the ones that would see you through long years together, give you a rudder, a future you could count on. She wanted to put as much distance as she could between herself and the feeling she had after Evan died. A voice inside her said she was running away from her feelings for Evan, but
that wasn’t it. Being a grown-up was about compromise. Evan had never learned that, but she knew it.
She shifted the strap on the white Maidenform bra she’d worn for Bill and said, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I need to let something go. At least cut down my hours at work. Do a better job balancing.”
Bill gave her a huge grin and pulled her to her and said, “Good girl.” Kissing the crown of her head, his hand moving down to her breast, feeling the cup of his favorite bra. “Very good girl.”
She was not ready for that again, not yet. She put her hand over his. “I think—I think I’m going to go get some water.” Gently sliding out from under his arms and standing up. “Do you want some?”
“No thanks.” Bill got up too, heading for the stairs to the bedroom. He stood with his hand on the banister and a wicked smile on his face, looking in his monogrammed button down and “casual look” khakis like a catalogue model for Brooks Brothers, and said, “Don’t take too long, babe. I’ll be waiting for you.”
Windy carried her water from the kitchen to Cate’s room and sat on the spare bed, listening to her daughter sleep, watching the rainbow comforter move up and down with her breathing. She was getting so big so fast, changing every day, learning new ways to talk back. Becoming her own person.
Maybe Bill was right. Maybe she was losing out on too many important things. Maybe she needed a different job. Because that was what lurked under his words, she knew. He was too respectful to suggest it, but she knew that nothing in the world would make him happier than if she told him she would quit.
Cate opened her eyes and looked at her. “What are you doing over there, Mommy? Did you have a nightmare?”
Windy put the glass of water on the apple green night table between the beds. “Sort of.”
“Maybe you need a hug.”
“Maybe I do,” Windy said, and slid onto Cate’s bed, clinging to her like she was drowning. As they separated, she spotted a box in the corner of the room and said, “What’s going on over there?”
“Those are my things for the pawn shop.”
“What?”
“The things I don’t want anymore. You said they go to the pawn shop.”
Windy reached out and started lifting things from the pile. Cate’s toothbrush, the cough medicine she took when she had the flu, a T-shirt, a brooch her grandmother had given her one Christmas. And then something that made Windy’s throat go tight. A white terry cloth dog in blue chenille overalls. “Honey, Big Fred is in here.”
“I don’t want him anymore.”
“But you love him. Your dad gave him to you.” She still remembered Evan coming to the hospital after Cate was born, looking like a worn-out wreck. Then explaining he had spent two hours at the toy store, quizzing mothers and kids, to find the very best stuffed animal for his daughter. When he’d shown her the floppy dog, Windy had been skeptical, but as soon as she was able to, Cate had grasped it by one white paw and not let go for three years.
She wouldn’t even look at it now. “He makes me sad.”
Windy took the stuffed toy and slid up the bed toward her daughter, who was hunched with her arms crossed over her chest, her face set.
“You can’t make me keep him,” Cate said.
“Okay. But let’s talk about this first. Why does he make you sad?”
“Because he reminds me of Daddy.”
“It’s okay to be sad sometimes, especially if it’s because you miss someone you love. You have to be sad to be able to be happy.”
“Looking at Big Fred makes me cry.”
“That’s okay too.” Windy brushed the hair off Cate’s forehead with her fingertips and tucked it behind her ear.
“You never cry.”
Windy’s fingers froze over Cate’s ear. She looked at the box Cate had filled with things for the pawn shop and wondered how many bad memories she’d put in there, shoving them out of sight, just like her mom. What was she teaching her daughter? “I do cry, honey,” she protested. She could not remember the last time she had really cried, but she was sure this wasn’t a lie. “You just don’t see it.”
“I want to.”
Now Windy laughed. “Okay. Next time I cry, I’ll be sure to show you.” She paused as if she were thinking. “What if you’re not here?”
“You could take a picture,” Cate said, dead serious.
“I sure could.”
Cate sat up a little straighter. “Bill doesn’t like to talk about Daddy, does he?”
Windy shook her head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I guess because he didn’t know him. It’s hard to talk about people you don’t know.”
“I talked about him with Ash. Did Ash know him?”
Windy paused. “No. What did Ash say?”
“I asked if he always wanted to be a policeman and he said no he wanted to be an artist when he was growing up and I told him I wanted to be an artist when I grew up too.”
“I thought you wanted to be a monster truck driver.”
“And an artist. Like Picasso.”
Her daughter knew about Picasso? How had this happened without her knowing it? Bill’s voice was in her head with the news flash that it was because she was always working, and she couldn’t even object.
Cate was still in her story. She said, “So Ash asked if you or Daddy liked to do art and I told him that you were really bad at it, and how Brandon and I had to repaint the part of the cabinet you did—”
“That was because no one told me the lines had to be straight,” Windy objected defensively.
“—and that I didn’t know about Daddy. Did he do art?”
“Not really.” Thinking of their time in Paris, the hours they spent at the Louvre, mainly posing like the decapitated and dismembered Greek statues and laughing so hard that they were escorted out by red-coated guards twice. “But he loved to look at it.”
“Oh.” There was a long pause, then Cate said, “How about since Bill doesn’t like it, if you talk about Daddy with me?”
“That would be great.”
“And then maybe we could cry.”
“Maybe we could.”
“Tell me one thing about him right now.”
“He loved you very much.”
“That’s a boring thing,” Cate said, giving a big yawn.
Windy wondered when she stopped thinking love was boring, and if she could get back to that place. She kissed Cate’s forehead and said, “I think it’s time for bed for both of us.”
“All three of us,” Cate said, reaching for Big Fred. She tucked him in next to her, pulled the covers under her nose, the way Evan used to, murmured, “If you have any more nightmares, just . . .” and was asleep.
Windy went to bed, careful not to wake Bill, telling herself she was very lucky. She had a wonderful daughter, a man who loved her. Why did life have to be more complicated than that?
Lying in bed and running her fingers over the red lines the bra left across her rib cage, telling herself that just meant it was the wrong size, she must be putting on weight. Wondering if she should try the “Beat That Bulge Before Your Big Day Diet” outlined on pages 32 and 33 of Sophisticated Bride.
CHAPTER 63
“Surprise” was one of those words like “accident” that made Windy’s spine go tight. It was pretty hard to surprise her, she usually saw evidence of whatever was coming on a shirt cuff or the bottom of a shoe, the way a pen stuck out of a travel wallet, something like that, and she thought maybe part of the appeal of her job, at least now, was to be sure she wouldn’t be surprised.
But in the car as she dropped him at the airport that morning, Bill had said that he was coming back on Friday afternoon, and he had a surprise for her.
“I don’t like surprises,” she reminded him and he said, “You’ll like this one. Trust me.”
The word seemed to be hanging around the air of the car like cheap air freshener as she drove to her office. In books and movies the idea of a surprise l
ike that, where they were in their relationship, could only mean one thing. She thought back to how happy he had been to see Sophisticated Bride on her desk, and hoped she was wrong.
She loved Bill. She knew she did. Around four in the morning, she had realized that her fantasy about Ash on Saturday had more to do with the pressures of the investigation, trying to escape from them, than any real feelings on her part. It was natural to project all your insecurities onto someone that way, particularly someone she felt as comfortable with as she did with Ash. By six A.M. she really believed it. Sitting at a red light now a few blocks from her office, at nine-fifteen A.M., she reiterated it to herself. She had just been looking at it backward, taking everything too literally. Ash wasn’t a romantic interest, he was a symbol of her work, of the tug of war she felt between that and her life with Bill.
Looking at it backward.
Brakes squealed and horns screamed as Windy stepped on the gas and zoomed through the intersection against the light. She’d got it. She had figured out why Eve had marked those pages in the bridal magazine. And what she had been bringing with her to the crime scenes.
Ash could smell her, the clean scent of her skin, before she burst into his office in her camel pantsuit, looking like the best thing in the world, her eyes shining the way they did when she got excited, and said, “Flowers.”
He hung up the call he was dialing and let himself stare at her for a moment as he tried to figure out what she meant. “Flowers?”
Windy put three crime scene photos on his desk, three pictures of tables, each spattered with blood, each with a clean space of the same octagonal dimensions.
“Eve brought them all flowers when she came to kill them. In a vase with an octagonal base. That is why we keep finding the octagonal voids in the blood spatter near the killings.”
“Like a memorial? The way people bring flowers to a funeral?”
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