by Cate Holahan
The sergeant puffs his cheeks and exhales. Drugs and bad neighborhoods are deadly combinations. “I’ll look into it. Give me your number and I’ll get back to you in a few days.”
Relieved tears suddenly blur my vision. David will be so pleased and impressed when I tell him that I have a sergeant looking into Nick’s disappearance. He’ll apologize for calling me selfish and want to make up for his distant, cold attitude. I might not lose out on my chance to get pregnant this month after all.
“Thank you,” I manage. “It means a lot to my family.”
Sergeant Perez pats my arm like a friend. “Hey, don’t mention it.” He winks. “And if I were David, I wouldn’t be so nervous with you around. Your aim has really improved since class.”
I struggle to understand the joke. My aim? Did my last book have a detail about shooting that made it seem like I’d learned how to properly point a handgun?
The sergeant picks up on my confusion. “I saw you at the academy range the other day. Maybe a month ago.”
He must have seen someone who resembled me. I have long dark hair. Dark eyes. Olive skin. Pretty much any thin, medium-height Latina, Mediterranean, or Middle Eastern woman could pass for me from a distance.
“You hit the target straight in the heart.”
His chest swells as he smiles at me. It makes him proud to think that his one-week course turned a wordsmith that had never held a gun before into a marksman. He may even have agreed to help with Nick’s case because he believes I was a good student.
I thank him again, my face growing hot with my lie of omission. The truth is, I haven’t been to the range in a year.
Chapter 4
Her first name is Colleen. I mentally repeat it as I watch her exit a Chinatown dumpling shop and return to her unmarked police car. What you having for lunch, Officer Colleen? Not going to chase that speeder, Officer Colleen? Trying to make sure you get off early to see your boyfriend, Officer?
She is parked on the corner of Mulberry and Mosco, close to one of five massive basketball courts. To some of the five-hundred-dollar-sneaker-sporting players, the woman with a baby carriage pacing the narrow lawn between the blacktops must seem odd. But it’s Manhattan, so no one pays me any attention. This town encourages natives to leave eccentrics alone. Pay little mind to the woman shunning the relative quiet of the pedestrian path who, apparently, prefers that her baby nap to the sweet sounds of squeaking rubber soles, male grunting, and dropped f-bombs.
Officer Colleen hasn’t noticed me watching her despite the twenty minutes she’s spent in the car. She sits in her vehicle, alone, paper box on the dashboard, chopsticks in hand. A dumpling pops in her mouth. She taps the sticks against the container side as she chews, drumming out whatever happy beat is playing in her head. I ask the Universe to let the shumai stick in her airway.
It is not healthy watching her like this. Yet I have to. I need to understand what my husband sees in this woman. There’s the body, of course. So unlike mine. Petite and rectangular, whereas I am tall and pear-shaped. But Jake would need more than beauty to be swayed from my side. He’d need a brain. Would she be smart enough to do what I did to track her down? Could she guess that her husband’s e-mail and Facebook passwords were the same as the shared Amazon Prime login? Would she know to search both his e-mail and archived chats for conversations around the date of the case in which his lover had been a key witness and then zero in on the messages from the female cops? And after finding a seemingly innocent note from one of these officers revealing a personal e-mail address, would she then have the wherewithal to search for and read through all the deleted messages from that address? Would she note the increasing familiarity in her husband’s salutation—“Colleen,” then “Hi, Collie,” then “Col, I can’t get you out of my mind”—and trace the progression of their banter from flirty jokes to innuendo to outright sexting? Would she read the message sent this morning, the other woman lamenting her daily schedule and hinting at how happy she would be if a certain someone surprised her during her lunch break, and then go to that very locale?
I don’t think so. Though, obviously, I’m biased.
Officer Colleen is dumb enough to think that Jake will leave me. That’s clear in the way she gushes about how “precious” and “beautiful” Vicky is in their conversations, leaving out any mention of mommy. She’s implying with her selective effusiveness that she’d be a good stepmother. She’d love his daughter. He doesn’t need the wife-who-must-not-be-named.
But he does. He does. Jake—he is Jake, despite the infantile diminutives scattered throughout her messages (Jakey, DJ, Boo)—wants his pie and whipped cream. If he planned on trading me in, he wouldn’t have hired a babysitter for all those Saturday date nights after seeing her for a quickie Friday afternoon. He wouldn’t have gushed about how much he loves me hours after she’d been sending him racy photos. He wouldn’t have bought me a new dress after giving her a silk scarf. And he wouldn’t now be standing her up for lunch.
She eats her last dumpling and closes the container. Her car door opens. She saunters over to a garbage bin on the corner and tosses in the paper box. No recycling for that policewoman there. No. Rules don’t apply to her. Screw the planet and everyone else on it.
A cry comes from the carriage. Victoria stirs in her seat, mouth opening and closing for food. That’s my exit cue. Though I might be invisible now, everyone will notice me when I feed my child. I don’t have the baby carrier to block prying eyes from my exposed nipple.
I push the stroller away from the courts toward a manicured lawn surrounded by two-foot-high fences. There will be benches alongside the grass. I can nurse there and then play with my baby. The day is beautiful, despite the scenery. Warm, with enough clouds to provide scattered shade.
Before I get out of eyeshot, I cast one more hateful glance toward the police car. She’s checking her phone, probably texting the man who refused to take the hint. My husband.
I’ll see you soon, Officer Colleen.
LIZA
I pull up to the house’s gravel driveway before sunset, take a deep breath, and turn inside. My old Mercedes rumbles over the white pebbles that have hid in my sandals since I learned to walk, coming to a stop at the side door and the concrete step that my mom chipped with an iron garden shovel. The house never changes. It sits at the end of a narrow lane, tucked behind a hedge of cherry laurel bushes and flowering weigela. Even the grayed exterior is as it has always been, despite last year’s long-overdue siding repair. Montauk’s salt air soon weathers any exposed wood, so no new shingle bears cedar’s true color for long.
I’ve resisted all attempts to modernize this two-story bungalow, ignoring realtors’ promises that they could rent the property for a fortune if only I renovated the kitchen or tacked on an extra bath. Overseeing contractors has always seemed too daunting. Moreover, I have no desire to sift through the house’s contents, weighing what I should discard of my past, dredging up memories of my father’s alcoholism and my mom’s constant struggle with it, a battle that ultimately ended in his storming out and her body surrendering to cancer before my twenty-fifth birthday. I’m content to leave the house alone, a sentinel of my memories—especially those I’d rather forget.
I take two steps at a time, avoiding the chip in the stair, and key into the side door. My muscles tense as it opens. It’s disconcerting, returning to the well-preserved scene of my youth, knowing that it lives on without me, hinting at my secrets to strange summer guests. My old bedroom, painted lavender when I was eleven, now hosts the children of affluent visitors. The kitchen’s ancient white fridge, stocked with local vegetables when I was a kid, is typically bare now save for half-carved blocks of stinky cheeses. Occasionally, a recorked bottle of white wine chills in the door.
I check for free booze as I inspect the house. A two-thirds-full bottle of rosé wastes away in the fridge’s lower shelf. I twist off the cap and swig it as I search for anything else out of place. The wooden table in the dini
ng room bears a new permanent watermark from the condensation on someone’s glass. No one besides me would notice. The dining table shows so many circular stains from years of coaster-shunning guests that they appear like old knots.
I pass through the living room to the sliding doors at the back of the house. The pool glitters beyond the glass, a blue topaz in a wooden setting. It has always felt like mine, even though my father built it for himself. He’d taken up swimming during a months-long period of sobriety and had decided that he deserved a lap pool. Mom hadn’t wanted it. The money, she’d argued, should go to my college fund. But no one could tell Don Cole how to spend his cash, and his real estate business was doing well at the time.
In retrospect, it’s one of the few arguments that I’m happy she lost. As I take in the scenery, I recall kissing Jack Maley on the deck at thirteen, sunbathing with Christine on summer weekends, an alfresco dinner during which David complimented my mother’s bone structure, aware that she’d become self-conscious since losing her hair.
It was on this very deck that I first fell for David. I can see him now, sitting upright on the lounge chair, hands folded in his lap, impeccably groomed with his Princeton haircut and golf shirt, earnestly telling my mom about his intent to defend people victimized by the system. He’d tried so hard. As if I’d needed any convincing to be with him. I’d decided to sleep with him the moment he’d approached me in the Columbia law library. He’d walked over to the checkout counter, seemingly another handsome prep-school product without a work-study tuition subsidy. But instead of shoving his book across to me as though his parents were personally paying for my English degree, he’d blushed and asked in his soft Texas twang about the novel in my hand. John Gardner’s Grendel. I still remember.
My nostalgia fails to create any warm fuzzy feelings. Instead, I become aware of a gnawing emptiness in my gut, a space demanding to be filled. I swallow the remaining wine and walk back around to the driveway. My navy duffel is in the trunk. The satchel is heavy, stuffed with my clothes for the upcoming conference and assorted marketing materials: pens, bookmarks, folders. I sling the bag over my shoulder and lumber back through the side door, across the house and up the steps into my old room. Taking over the master alone seems wrong. David’s presence grants me permission to use the grown-up spaces.
My old bedroom is stuffy, filled with hot air that has floated through the floorboards. Breathing is difficult. I squeeze around the bed and turn the painted white knob locking the window. The shutters open inward, revealing the twinkling water beyond. My body relaxes as I inhale the fresh air. I’ve always felt more at home outside this house.
A buzzing interrupts my moment of Zen. I unzip the front compartment of my bag and grab the source. Trevor’s name lights up the cell’s screen. It’s unlike him to reach out so soon after a meeting. Is he trying to renegotiate our agreement?
I can’t take another confrontation after the one with David. Best to let him leave a message. I’ll call back after I tell my husband about Sergeant Perez and am feeling better.
As I return the phone to the bag, my thumb hits the accept button. “Hello, Liza?” I fumble with the handset and attempt a breezy I-wasn’t-trying-to-forward-you-to-voice-mail greeting.
“How are you?” He sounds like he wants to know, not as though he’s making polite conversation before reneging on a handshake agreement, but the British accent impairs my judgment. Everything Trevor says in his deep-throated London singsong sounds either frank or sexy. Hollywood’s fault. The Queen’s English is the sole language of the upper crust, spies, and suave car thieves.
“I’m okay. What’s up?”
“Marketing would like to know when everyone is getting in and out of the conference.”
I’ve been holding my breath. I release it with a long sigh. The emptying of my lungs restores the buzz that I’d been working on moments earlier. “Courtney e-mailed me the flight itinerary a few weeks ago. I can forward the message.”
“That’d be great. Normally, I’d ask her, but she’s out today.”
“Give me a minute.” I rifle through my bag for my laptop, feeling suddenly resentful that the couple days I have not to think about the conference are in fact being taken up by the conference. I’m dreading this trip. Conferences are fun for the famous—authors sure to win an award or who have sold so many books that such things don’t matter. Those of us on the midlist must spend the whole time hustling, trying to gain the attention of more successful scribes and the few book enthusiasts who bother to attend.
My computer hides beneath a weekend’s worth of folded clothes. I pull it out and open my e-mail. The itinerary is in my in-box along with half a dozen messages from me to myself containing attachments of my latest manuscript.
I click on the flight info. “Looks like Sunday morning, arrival 11:10 AM.”
“I’m in then too. How will you come from the airport?”
“Guessing a cab. To be honest, I haven’t decided.” I’m tempted to add that I’ve been busy thinking about Beth’s character arc and writing, but I don’t.
“We can share a taxi to the hotel. You’re booked in the block at the Sheraton, right?”
“That’d be great.” My high pitch rings false. There was a time when I’d take Trevor’s offer as nothing more than a favor for a friend and colleague. But since my so-so streak of novels post–Drowned Secrets and my downright disappointing last book, I wonder whether he wants to break some bad news in person. I grip the bed’s worn coverlet and muster the courage to ask a direct question. “Trev, if there is something you want to tell me, I’d rather know beforehand—”
“No. Nothing. Liza, you really worry too much.”
“Expect the worst and you won’t be surprised.”
Trevor chuckles. “Suspense writers.” I can picture him shaking his head. “Speaking of suspense, how is the work coming?”
My hold loosens on the bedspread. “Okay, I think.”
“Did you give any more thought to what I’d said about the—”
“Shrink?”
“Well, at least adding some psychological tension to the romantic scenes.”
I mimic his accent. “You worry too much, love. I promise to have some proper naughty bits in the shagging scenes. Everything will be tickety-boo.” As soon as the words escape, I realize that my mockery could be considered rude rather than “cheeky.” The wine is blurring the difference.
Trevor laughs. “I don’t say ‘tickety-boo.’ Otherwise, not bad.”
I exhale in relief. Pissing off your editor is never a good idea. “But not great?”
“You require practice. It’s good that we have this conference ahead of us. A few drinks in . . .” He makes a clicking noise with his tongue. “I might break out the cockney.”
“Oh. I’d love that.”
“I bet.”
Are we flirting, or is the wine making me imagine things?
“All right,” Trevor says. “I’ll let you get back to it. Looking forward to the conference.”
Suddenly, so am I.
*
The house has nothing to eat. After writing for an hour, my stomach announces this fact with all the subtlety of a whoopee cushion. I head out to the car at twilight, intent on hitting up the market down the main road before it gets too dark to drive without my distance glasses. While stopped at a red light, I shoot Christine a text that I’m headed to Blue Horse Grocery. As the store only exists in Montauk, the short message serves as an announcement that I’m in town and an invitation. Chris doesn’t need me to ask her to dinner.
She hasn’t returned my text by the time I turn into the store parking lot. I assume she has plans and consider purchasing a prepared dinner salad. It’d be great to drop a couple pounds before my dog-and-pony show. As I exit my car, my phone beeps. Four words sit on my screen: “Great minds think alike.”
She’s standing with her back to me as I enter, perusing the wine selection. I’d recognize my best friend’s red hair and
finely freckled arms anywhere. The girl doesn’t tan as much as she becomes pop art. A happiness that I didn’t realize I was missing swells inside me. Same ol’ Chris. To me, she’ll always be the sixth-grade ginger I befriended twenty-four years ago, albeit with some cross-hatching around the eyes and new elevens between her brows. The former she earned from a sunglasses-less childhood. The latter was inflicted by a recent divorce.
She turns to me as the door jangles shut. My name rings out like an accusation. “Liza Cole! What’s on the menu?”
I grab a wire basket from a stack against the door and slip into the first aisle. A slab of weathered wood is bolted to the wall, punched full of holes like an old-time switchboard. Wine bottles protrude from each space. “What would you like? David’s not with me. Work has ruined another romantic weekend.”
Chris examines a label and then, murmuring approval, withdraws the bottle with a flourish. “Who needs those?” She smirks, betraying her sarcasm.
I hug her, peering into the basket dangling from her forearm as we embrace. A bottle of Pinot Noir, a bottle of sparkling white wine, and a Riesling already sit in her cart. She drinks more now that George is gone.
“I’m alone as well.” She wrinkles her nose. “The bastard gets Emma for nearly the whole summer. They’re taking her camping this week.”
The trip sounds like a fun father-daughter bonding excursion. A good dad thing to do. But Chris doesn’t want to hear me praise the man who ran off with her twenty-six-year-old au pair. “Camping? Doesn’t he know preteen girls need cell service?”
Chris fails to turn her smile into a believable grimace. “She’s going to hate it, right?”
“Well, the campfire stories will be scary.” I imitate a strong German accent. “Vonce upon a time, dere was a succubus—”
“And she’s telling this story! Ahhh.” Chris laughs. Laughter is the only vaccine for crying. You shed a few tears instead of a thousand.
