Good Little Wives

by Abby Drake

  “An anxiety attack?” Lauren and Caroline asked simultaneously.

  Then Caroline added, “Well, that’s impossible. What does Bob Halliday have to be anxious about?” Neither woman suggested that perhaps he’d found out about his wife and Vincent.

  The doctor smiled and looked back to Lauren. “If you’d like to see him now, he’s been asking for you.”

  Twenty-two

  Bridget wore a ruby red silk camisole and matching capri pants with geisha girls hand-painted in rich, vibrant colors. Her outfit was accented by black marabou feathered slip-ons and topped with a black burnout velvet shawl. She camouflaged everything under a long belted trench coat in case she ran into Randall or Aimée while coming or going, then gave Dana a peek when she climbed into the car.

  “If I have to have chemotherapy,” she said, “I might as well do it in style.” She didn’t add that her attire was most conducive to managing hot flashes that plagued her on the hour, every hour. She didn’t add that being a bit silly helped take her mind off Luc.

  It wasn’t until they were in the treatment room (infusion room, the nurse corrected, to which Bridget said, Quoi que, whatever), and Bridget was in the recliner with an IV needle stuck in her hand, that she said, “I was thinking I could use a pedicure.”

  Dana laughed. “A pedicure?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  “Now? Ah, excuse me, but you’re rather busy at the moment.”

  “Actually, I’m not. All I have to do is sit here for what will seem like days. Which is why I brought my cuticle oil and my creams and my clippers and my polish.”

  Dana smiled with one side of her mouth. “And…?”

  “And do you feel like giving a pedicure to a cancer patient?”

  Dana laughed again. “I guess it would be better than reading an old People.”

  “Great. Everything is in my bag. It will divert me from picturing my head without hair, or from the fact that I’m scared to death.”

  Dana closed her eyes. “Bridget…” she began, but sudden tears clogged her throat, so all she said was, “Yeah, well, I would be, too.” Then she moved to Bridget’s bag, dug out a clear vinyl pouch filled with pedicure things, and tried not to wonder about her mother, and whether she’d been scared, too.

  It was hard to believe that just eight days ago Caroline had been welcoming those who were her friends (and those who wanted to be) to her rite-of-spring luncheon. Now Lauren was right—ever since Vincent’s murder, a pall had dropped over the town.

  Before leaving the hospital Caroline decided to stop by the community relations office and check on last-minute reservations: She had to give the final head count on Wednesday, even though the gala now seemed rather trivial.

  Trivial?

  Totally, she was mortified to admit to herself.

  Taking the elevator to the third floor, she began to navigate the maze of corridors with the confidence of a person who’d never feared hospitals, never winced at illness, never fainted when she’d seen blood. Fainting shows weakness, she’d once said to Chloe, though now she wondered if Chloe ever listened to anything her mother told her, and if so, how on earth she’d lost Lee.

  Bypassing radiology, Caroline sidestepped a nurses’ station and took a short cut through oncology. She might not have noticed Bridget if the ruby red pajamas had not caught her eye. But there she was, in Infusion Room Six, with a tube snaking from her left hand.

  Caroline halted. “Bridget?” she asked. “What are you doing here?” As she stepped inside the doorway she saw Dana, frozen in what looked like a clumsy curtsy, crouched at Bridget’s feet. But Dana wasn’t curtsying, she was painting Bridget’s toenails. “Good Lord,” Caroline exclaimed, “what are both of you doing here?”

  A quick pause elapsed, then Bridget said, “Hell of a place for a pedicure, n’est-ce pas?”

  Like the rest of them, however, Caroline hadn’t been born yesterday. It took her only a few seconds to figure it out. “Cancer!” she suddenly cried without an effort at nonchalance.

  “Cervical,” Bridget replied.

  “So much for HIPAA,” Dana added, a remark that Caroline did not find amusing.

  “Well, good heavens, Bridget, why didn’t you tell anyone?” Then she looked at Dana. “Well,” she added, “I guess you did.”

  The foursome that had once been a fivesome, when Kitty was still married to Vincent, now seemed to have been cut to a twosome, a pair, which annoyed Caroline as much as the fact that she hadn’t been told.

  She supposed she should ask if Bridget was all right, so she did.

  “I will be,” she answered. “Dr. Wolfe is my doctor.”

  He was a Manhattan oncologist with privileges at New Falls. He was a generous donor, so Caroline said, “Well, you’re in good hands then. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll be at the gala, if you’re concerned about that.”

  Naturally it had crossed her mind, but she said, “Oh, Bridget, the only thing that matters is that you get well.”

  “I intend to. For one thing, I want to be around to help Dana solve the mystery of Vincent.”

  “Mystery? Between us girls, I find the matter already quite tedious.”

  Then Dana said, “Speaking of which, Caroline, did you give Vincent money before he died? A loan perhaps?”

  The IV pump beeped.

  Caroline laughed. “Give Vincent money? Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. But your daughter mentioned something to my son…”

  Straightening the shoulder chain that held her Dior bag neatly in place, Caroline said, “Oh, that.” Was that why she’d been slighted? “Well, yes,” she began with the story she’d concocted. “Vincent had asked Jack to invest in a new venture, but Jack turned him down. I didn’t think that was fair. With or without Kitty, Vincent had been a friend many years, hadn’t he? And now he had Yolanda, and I thought it was important to be supportive. It was also why I invited her to my luncheon, an act which none of you commented on, but I now gather several weren’t pleased.”

  “It was your party,” Dana said.

  “You could cry if you wanted to,” Bridget added, but Caroline sloughed off the remark.

  “I hope I’ve answered your question,” she said to Dana, narrowing her eyes in a slight glare. “Now I must get back downstairs. Bob Halliday is in Emergency. He had an anxiety attack. Good heavens, it seems as if everyone is falling apart.” She wished Bridget good luck, then scurried out to the hall, away from the women who had once been her friends.

  Dana didn’t get home until late afternoon. As soon as she entered the house, she remembered that Steven would be home for dinner, and she hadn’t planned a thing.

  Sam greeted her with a smug smile.

  “Please tell me you’ve whipped up a casserole and put it in the oven,” Dana said. When the boys were young she’d had help. But now Dana ate most meals alone and did not need a cook to nuke a Lean Cuisine.

  “Sorry,” Sam said. “We can order pizza. How were things at the hospital?” he asked. Dana had told him about Bridget. In the absence of her husband, Sam had become a confidant.

  “Fine.” Then she related what Caroline had said about the money she’d given Vincent. “I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s what she said. Now tell me, what have you been up to?”

  “Me?”

  “You.” She dropped her bag and headed for the tea kettle, deciding to wait for wine until Steven arrived.

  “Oh, nothing much.”

  He stood and watched as she filled the water, picked out a mug, dropped a tea bag in.

  “Mrs. DeLano called,” he said.

  “Kitty?”

  “She wants you to go with her tomorrow to visit her mother in Hyde Park.”

  “Well, I’m not going to do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I was away most of today and tomorrow is Wednesday and your father will be home tonight and I don’t know his schedule and besides, I’d really like
to spend time with you before you go back to school.”

  “So we can solve the murder.”

  “No,” she said with a mother’s smile, “so I can spend time with you.”

  “Maybe I have other plans.”

  “Like?”

  “Like it’s going to be a nice day and I’m planning to ask Chloe Meacham if she’d like to go for a walk.”

  “Chloe?” She did not ask what happened to his fantasy about Elise.

  “Strictly business, Mom. Maybe she’ll be more inclined to tell me stuff her mother won’t.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as…well, come into the family room and see what I’ve done.”

  She turned off the burner under the kettle because she knew with Sam this could be an ordeal. Secretly, however, she’d rather have him home than doing the things his twin brother was no doubt doing in Cozumel.

  With warm, motherly thoughts, she followed Sam into the family room, then quickly saw why his smile had been smug.

  Twenty-three

  “Samuel David Fulton, what in God’s name have you done?” Dana peered around the room at the giant, easel-size sheets of paper that clung to the walls, the windows, and the drapes, that masked the montages of photographs of when the boys had been kids, that transformed the space she’d spent considerable time and a small fortune redecorating when the twins first went to college. The room now resembled a cross between a classroom and an interrogation site. On the sheets, notes and arrows and numbered lists had been neatly printed in different colored markers.

  “Samuel?” she repeated because he was too busy smiling to respond.

  “Isn’t it great? Look, I have a system. The black ink signifies a before and after timeline of when Vincent was killed. It shows us everything that’s happened. Then I used a different color ink for each potential killer and everything we know about them.”

  The first giant sheet covered images of the vacation in the Hamptons, 1993. It was scribed in red marker and was titled:

  CAROLINE MEACHAM

  “The luncheon began at twelve-thirty,” Sam said. “We assume she was at home at eleven-thirty, but has anyone checked this out?”

  He pointed to the word “ALIBI,” which was followed by three question marks.

  Then came “MOTIVE,” along with the words, “Gave money to Vincent?”

  The last line read:

  MEANS—Connected to a hit man?

  “Lauren Halliday,” Sam continued, skipping over a few sheets to one printed in blue. Beneath Lauren’s name he’d written:

  ALIBI—???

  MOTIVE—Vincent was her lover.

  MEANS—A close friend of Mrs. Meacham.

  Hit man?

  Dana glanced around. A poster for Bridget had been penned in green, Kitty in yellow, Yolanda, purple. Each commentary included added notes:

  BRIDGET HAYNES—Cancer (is this connected?)

  KIT TY DELANO—Inheritance (a surprise?)

  YOLANDA DELANO—

  Dana quickly noted that Yolanda necessitated big “???’s” from top to bottom.

  The display was well-structured though a bit overzealous.

  “Good grief,” Dana said. “Why is Bridget a suspect?”

  “She lied to the cops, Mom.”

  The fact that Bridget said she’d had a massage when she’d been scheduling chemo hardly seemed qualified to count as a lie. Dana skimmed the sheets for Rhonda and Georgette and a dozen or so others who’d been at the luncheon. “Well, at least you’ve been doing your homework.”

  “Pretty cool, huh? I’m missing a bunch of women, I know. I’m hoping Chloe will give me her mother’s guest list.”

  “Samuel,” Dana said, closing her eyes, choosing her words, opening her eyes again. “I applaud your efforts, really I do. But I don’t think you should have all this…” She waved her hand as if conducting the New Falls Symphony, which, on second thought, perhaps she was. “All this information out here in the open as if it’s an exhibition. These women are my friends, honey. I’d hate if they thought we’re spying on them or, good grief, accusing them.”

  “But I figured they don’t come over very often, and even if they do, you don’t entertain them in the family room, do you?”

  It was true: When friends got together they sat in the kitchen for tea, the formal living room for wine. In New Falls, no one but family used the family room. One exception had been when Dana and Kitty had sat in the sunroom and the tree had come crashing through and Kitty had saved Dana’s life.

  Like most things, there were always exceptions.

  “But other people come and go, Samuel. The cleaning people. Sometimes your father’s business associates…”

  “Well, can we leave the stuff up while I’m home?” Of the three boys, Sam was the least spoiled. Which was probably why he didn’t pout long. “It helps me think, Mom. And I’ll be back at school next week. Can we close off the room until then?”

  He’d gone to so much work, it would be a shame to take it down.

  She looked around again, studied the clues assembled in the room. Detective Johnson might do well to have a look at this. “So do you think I should go with Kitty to Hyde Park tomorrow?”

  Sam shrugged. “Sure, why not? While I’m interrogating Chloe, you can work on her.”

  Dana dropped down on the couch that faced Yolanda’s purple name. “We should focus on Yolanda, shouldn’t we?”

  “We should focus on every one of them, Mom. I know they’re your friends, but it’s pretty obvious one of them is a killer.”

  Caroline told Jennie she’d be in her bedroom and please do not disturb. No phone calls, no visitors, no matter if the entire hospital gala went up in smoke.

  She was depressed.

  After stripping off her Austin Reed pleated trousers, she pitched them onto the floor. The people in community relations had already known about Chloe and Lee. How had they found out so quickly? And what made her think she flew above the radar screen just because she was who she was?

  This wasn’t, of course, just about Chloe, and whether she, like her mother, seemed to be destined to live a loveless, unhappy life.

  No, it wasn’t just about Chloe. It was also about Caroline’s friends: Lauren, Bridget, Dana. All the women who had come to her luncheon, who would be at the gala (the number of reservations had escalated since Vincent’s murder; even the nobodies now wanted to chew on the New Falls social pie, no matter what it would cost them).

  It was about all the women whose lives were gentler than hers, who had a friend who would give them a pedicure if they had cancer. Women who had husbands, lovers, some with both. Hell, even Lauren, sweet, timid Lauren, had danced under sheets that weren’t hers, all in the name of passion, of love. All the while pretending to be Bob’s perfect wife.

  Caroline, of course, was a pro at pretending. She’d learned when she’d been young, whenever Mother had been stricken by a “sick headache” (translation: when Mother had ingested too many martinis), and Father had relied on Caroline to accompany him to the symphony or the gallery opening or the charity event, or when he needed her to host dinner guests Mother had invited then forgotten she had. Caroline had become a pro at pretending to be everything but herself.

  God, she’d become such a cliché.

  Moving to the windows, she pulled the drapes, shutting out the leftover light of day. She went to the bed—the wide, king-size bed that was just like the one Jack slept in, had been sleeping in, down the hall in the guest suite for the last dozen years. She peeled back the fluffy comforter, crawled beneath it. She wished she had a small dog to cuddle against, to feel its breath rise and fall, to feel its warm belly curved against hers.

  But Caroline did not have a dog and did not need one now, any more than she needed a husband in her bed.

  The simple truth was, Caroline needed a woman.

  There, she told herself. I admit it. I need a woman, damn it. But not just any woman.

  “Elise,” she whisper
ed into the room.

  More than Caroline wanted the gala to be a huge success; more than she wanted her picture in Town & Country or the Times or any of those; more than she wanted life—at least, her life—Caroline Meacham wanted Kitty’s daughter.

  It was the real reason, of course, she could no longer be friends with Kitty, the real reason she’d alienated Bridget and Dana. Things had become so complicated; what else could she have done?

  If only she could go back to the beginning…

  “My mother doesn’t understand me,” Elise had said one summer afternoon before Vincent left Kitty. She strode around Caroline’s pool, a gin and tonic in one hand. Her other hand was planted on the shorts that rode too low on her slender hips, that rose too high up on her supermodel legs. Each time she tossed back her thick red hair, her firm, full breasts peeped from her too-tight spandex top as if searching for someone who might be interested.

  At first Caroline averted her eyes, too startled that the young woman had aroused—yes, aroused—such primal thoughts.

  How old was Elise anyway? Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? Certainly it was sick for a woman over fifty to love, to lust, after a twenty-eight-year-old. (Not that anyone had questioned Vincent when he’d taken up with Yolanda, double standards being what they were.)

  While Elise had talked and strode, Caroline focused on the age difference, not on the goddamn elephant in the goddamn backyard, the fact that the twenty-eight-year-old was a woman, for godssake, not a man.

  Hello?

  But when Elise claimed to have something in her eye and she straddled the chair where Caroline sat, bending close enough for Caroline to breathe her breath onto her breasts, to feel her ready sex radiate from between those silky thighs, Caroline decided it didn’t matter if this was man or woman, beast or beauty.