The Devil She Knows

by Bill Loehfelm

  “I agree,” Gloria said. “So smart. And not afraid to show it.”

  Amber straightened up tall in her seat, peeking into her guests’ coffee cups. “Think you could warm us up, Maureen? While you’re up?”

  Maureen considered a comment about serving on her day off but swallowed it. She also let it slide that Amber’s response to Gloria’s compliments was to order another round of coffee from her smart and fearless waitress daughter. Maybe she didn’t like Maureen being the center of attention in her kitchen. Whatever attitude her mom copped had to be forgiven, Maureen decided, and forgotten. She wanted to show solidarity in front of the Sebastians, him especially. He needed to see that there’d be no using her and her mother against each other. She grabbed the coffeepot and made the rounds at the table.

  “So, Mom said it’s been a dog’s age since she’s heard from you guys.” She hovered with the coffeepot over Sebastian’s cup until he nodded. “Why the sudden interest?”

  “Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard,” Sebastian said, “but I started a new project for the parish some time ago, an outreach program between St. Stephen’s and the battered women’s shelter in Great Kills. Fund-raising, connecting women in need with resources, that kind of thing.” He reached into his wife’s lap and patted her folded hands. “If you’ve followed the campaign at all, you know that troubled women are close to my heart.”

  Maureen turned her back to the room when she set the coffeepot back on the counter, to hide her face. Don’t sell yourself short, she thought. Troubled boys are in there, too. “I’ve heard things to that effect.”

  “With the campaign heating up,” Gloria said, “Frank asked that I get more involved, help round up some volunteers. Really get the thing off the ground.”

  “The more solid the program is when I get there,” Sebastian said, “the more I can do for it from Albany.”

  “If you get there,” Maureen said.

  Gloria forced a breathy chuckle. “Oh, Maureen. Where’s your faith?” Her eyes flitted from Amber to Maureen and back again. She felt the tension in the room, Maureen could tell, and it was confusing her. Gloria patted her husband’s thigh. “Frank’s so far ahead they shouldn’t even bother with the vote. They should just send him upstate first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Now there’s an idea,” Maureen said.

  Sebastian turned to his wife. “People deserve their say, dear. You know how I feel about that.” He turned to Maureen, raising his chin to look at her down his nose. “Besides, that would leave me with a lot of business to tie up in one night. It’d be irresponsible of me to leave loose ends all over Staten Island.”

  “The two of you,” Gloria said, shaking her head. “Maureen, such fire. Listen to me, Frank Sebastian. If you’ve got a brain in your head, you’ll reach out to this young woman from Albany. Put her to work.”

  Sebastian settled his weight in his chair, the frame creaking under his bulk. “I’m sure I can find just the place to put her.”

  “See that, Maureen?” Amber said. “Soon as you finish school.”

  “I confess, Am,” Gloria said, “that it was Frank who first thought of calling you, after putting two and two together and remembering Maureen. But I did leap for the phone when he said your name. These women we’re reaching out to, they really need help; a lot of them are single moms. A lot of them have other problems, like you did. They can relate to you.” She looked down at the table. “I haven’t been the greatest friend and I’m not afraid to be humbled about that in front of you and your daughter. I hope you can forgive me.”

  Amber drummed her fingers on her forearms. She looked around the room, anxious, it seemed to Maureen, for a safe place to rest her eyes, and cleared her throat a couple of times as if to start speaking. Finally, she reached across the table and patted Gloria’s arm. “Of course I forgive you. What kind of Christian would I be if I didn’t?”

  When Gloria smiled, her apparent joy ignited the kitchen as if someone had lit a chandelier overhead. Maureen was stunned. She wondered for a moment if Gloria hadn’t taught Frank a thing or two about working a room instead of the other way around. Maureen watched as, under Gloria’s loving gaze, Amber’s shoulders melted like a snowdrift under the sun. Ten years dropped off her face. Maureen felt she was watching Sebastian work Tony Lacoste all over again. She needed to break the spell.

  “So what makes you such a great candidate, Mom, to liaison with a battered women’s shelter?”

  Amber held up her hand. She wouldn’t look at her daughter, as if she knew exactly what Maureen was up to. “It’s not what you think. Don’t get upset.”

  “I’m not upset. I’m curious.”

  Amber turned, her face expressionless. “I was a psychology major in college. I did some volunteering.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Maureen!”

  “Ma, you went to school for accounting.”

  “Frank, Gloria, I’m sorry,” Amber said, turning to her guests. “She’s overworked, she’s having problems with her apartment. She’s short on sleep.”

  “She’s standing right here,” Maureen said, “and asking a simple question.”

  Sebastian took his wife’s hand and stood. Maureen could see him straining to hold back a smile. No one else seemed to notice his effort. “Gloria, give Amber the envelope and let’s get out of the Coughlin ladies’ hair for the day.”

  Gloria pulled a manila envelope from a giant designer handbag. She slid it across the table. “It’s a meeting schedule; we’ll be getting together at St. Stephen’s twice a month. And there’s a phone list with the names and numbers of the other women in the group. I’ll be having a little something over at the house for the whole group soon.”

  “You’ll let me know?” Amber asked.

  “You’re first on the list,” Gloria said. “I’d like for us to be close again. I never should have let that go.”

  Sebastian backed away from the table to let his wife come around in front of him. He waited, grinning at Maureen the entire time, as Gloria and Amber exchanged hugs and whispered farewells. When the two women broke their embrace, Sebastian took one of Amber’s hands in one of his. He set his other hand on her shoulder.

  “Just great to see you, Amber,” he said. “Thanks for letting us intrude on your morning. And thanks for coming on board with Gloria’s project. We’re both very grateful, and I know those women you’re going to help will be, too.” He tipped an invisible hat to Maureen. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything coming from a boring out-of-touch old man like me, but I feel your pain. I know you’re tired. I know it’s hard to see your future. But never forget, ever, that it’s people like you, women like you especially, that drive me. I promise you, I won’t let you slip my mind this time.” Sebastian settled his hand on the small of his wife’s back. “Get some rest and don’t be a stranger, if you need anything.” He guided Gloria toward the stairs.

  Maureen waited at the top of the stairs as Amber, after giving her daughter a long, dirty look, followed the Sebastians down to the front door. After Gloria stepped out, Sebastian turned. “Amber, I took the liberty of putting a ‘Sebastian for Senate’ lawn sign out front. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” Amber said. “Saves me the trouble of doing it myself.”

  The three of them exchanged one more quiet farewell; then Amber locked the door. She turned, hands on her hips. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “You got an associate’s in accounting,” Maureen said. “Believe me, I know. You’ve told me a thousand times about your degree, about your heroic slog through night school. I can repeat it back to you if you like. What are you lying for? Especially to those two.”

  “Accounting came after your father left.” Amber straightened his picture on the wall. “Before him, for your information, I was a psych major at Wagner. That’s what I was when we met. I never finished but that doesn’t mean I didn’t study and didn’t learn, like you and those books you pretend to read. So watch
who you’re calling a liar.”

  “So there’s nothing to these ‘other problems’ you had that battered women could relate to.”

  Amber crossed her arms and leaned back against the door. “Listen, Gloria’s putting on a show to help Frank get elected and she needs some help, not that he needs hers. She never could resist the urge to show off. Years ago it was jewelry and her daddy’s car; now it’s her new boobs and her big-shot husband. I promise you every woman she’s recruiting for this outreach program is either divorced or widowed and probably broke.

  “We used to know each other and she thinks I’m lonely and bored and easy to hit up for time, and she’s right and so what? She’s full of it and I know it and she knows I know it and we go through the motions anyway. It’s what adults do, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s how we have friends. You oughtta try it some time, get some of your own. Quit barreling into my life whenever you need something.”

  “You never answered me,” Maureen said, sitting on the top step. “What does Gloria know about you and Dad that I don’t?”

  “Pffff, Gloria. She doesn’t know half of what she thinks she does, that’s what she knows. I never did like that woman very much. And we were never close, no matter what she says.” Amber came halfway up the steps, sat a couple down from her daughter. “Anything I didn’t tell you it’s because it didn’t matter.”

  “Ma.”

  “But if you’re gonna pitch a fit about it.” With both hands, Amber brushed her hair back from her temples. Maureen noticed that the ten years that had dropped off Amber’s eyes under Gloria’s smile had returned. They’d brought another five years back with them. Amber studied her fingernails as she spoke. “When you were six, your father and I went through a phase.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “You asked,” Amber said. “There was a girl up the block old enough to baby-sit. Your father and I hired her a few times—you were old enough for a sitter—and we went out. We tried having dates again, like before we were married.” She forced a pained grin and turned it on Maureen. “These dates, they were mostly to bars around the neighborhood.”

  “I think I remember this.”

  “You might. So anyway, for example, one night we came home fighting. I wouldn’t get out of the car. Your father pulled me by the arm too hard and I fell into the garbage cans out front. It made a real racket, left me with a sore shoulder. Here and there, for a while, a few things like that happened, silly things. Usually we ended up laughing about them. We both drank too much back then.” She rubbed her hands on her thighs. “Rusty nails. God, I could drink those all night. Does anybody order those anymore?”

  Maureen raised her hands. “Don’t change the subject. Correct me if I’m wrong, but somewhere in there you just told me Dad used to get drunk and knock you around.”

  Amber stood, sliding her back up the wall. “You’re wrong. Don’t be like those damn know-it-alls at church like Gloria. Talking behind their hands, thinking they’re so superior. For your information, yeah, sometimes those bumps and bruises came from falling into the garbage cans, but more often they were from—from other things.” She took a deep breath, searching for the right words. “I’ll just say those dates didn’t always end in fights. If nothing else, for a while there I was having twice as much fun as those fake stuck-ups.”

  “Jesus, Mom, that’s gross.”

  Amber didn’t seem to hear. “Maybe I shouldn’t have let those women think what they wanted. Maybe I should’ve stood up to them, Gloria especially.” Maureen watched her mother’s vision drift along the staircase wall to the photo of her vanished husband. “I should have, I admit it. I should’ve defended my husband, your father. Anyway, it’s too late for any of that, but let me tell you one thing. Your father wasn’t a wife beater. Don’t let anyone tell you he was. Maybe he was capable of it, maybe he wasn’t. But there’s no way I would’ve stood for it.”

  “You really could’ve done that?” Maureen asked. “You really think you could’ve kicked him out? Or packed up and left, like he did?”

  “Packed up and left?” Amber asked. “Never. I would’ve cut his throat in his sleep, buried him in the yard. Raised you in Mexico. Never mind rusty nails, we’d be drinking margaritas and having this conversation in Spanish. On a beach.” She covered her eyes with her hands. “Christ, I need a nap.”

  Without another word, Amber went up the stairs and headed down the hall toward her bedroom. After Amber had closed the bedroom door, Maureen wished she’d reached a hand out as her mother had passed by, had touched Amber’s shoulder or the back of her hand. She heard Amber lock the bedroom door. Maureen went down the stairs, grabbed her coat from the rack beside the front door, and went outside.

  14

  The cold hit her like a slap, watering her eyes and setting her cheeks stinging. God, it was cold. The first day of December. The weather would only get worse before it got better. She dug her smokes from her pocket, lit one with shaking hands, couldn’t tell her cigarette smoke from her frozen breath. It was cruel and hateful, what Sebastian was doing, his reaching into Amber’s life and using her loneliness against her. Maybe it was because her mom was involved, Maureen thought, but this move felt even more heartless than the way Sebastian had used Tanya. Maureen’s conscience pricked at her. She knew her own neglect had helped make Amber so vulnerable. Something told her Sebastian knew it, too. He needed to be taken care of, and soon.

  She flipped open her phone. No missed calls. No Waters. She tried his cell again. No answer. She found his card in her coat and called his number at the precinct.

  On the third ring: “One-twenty, NYPD.” A man, but not Waters. Younger. Chewing gum.

  “I need to speak to Detective Nat Waters.”

  “This an emergency?”

  “Maybe,” Maureen said. “I don’t know.”

  A pause. “You don’t know. Can I have your name?”

  “Can I speak to the detective?”

  “He’s not here. That’s why I’m taking a message.” Another pause. “Your name?”

  How long could she wait for Waters to turn up? Would this guy give her Waters’s home number? What kind of rumors would that start?

  “You there, miss?”

  “Maureen. Maureen Coughlin.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” The cop covered the phone, muting the swearing male voices in the background, including his. They know my name at the station, Maureen thought. That can’t be a good thing. The cop came back on the line. “Ms. Coughlin? He left instructions that if you’re in trouble you should come by the station and wait for him.”

  “What? Why?”

  More muffled voices. “He didn’t say. Do you have a car? If not, we’ll be happy to send you an escort to the station.”

  “No, that won’t be necessary. I’m not in trouble. He asked me to call him this morning, so that’s what I’m doing. He’s got the number.”

  “We’ll get a message to him.”

  “Thanks.” She hung up and slipped the phone into her coat pocket.

  No, the cops coming to pick her up wouldn’t work out. There’d be no explaining that to her mom. Besides, scared as she was, Maureen wasn’t going to be babysat. She wasn’t going to hang around the station like some dirty-faced runaway so a bunch of cops could gawk at her and whisper behind her back all day. It’d be like hanging around the boys’ locker room. No, thanks.

  Maureen looked up and down the block, lingering by the front door of her mother’s house, checking for some sign of Sebastian. He wouldn’t stick around himself; she didn’t expect that. The candidate had a busy schedule. He was trying to get elected. Commitments, events, meetings required his attention. But he very well might have left an extra pair of eyes behind. He had the resources. She didn’t see anyone suspicious, the block looked pretty much deserted, but Sebastian wouldn’t put two guys in dark suits across the street in a dark car. He’d be more subtle. Maureen wondered who else on the block Gloria knew. Everyone?

  Whe
ther she was a sucker, a pawn, or a co-conspirator, Gloria wasn’t to be trusted. She could be hunched over some other woman’s kitchen table at that very moment, begging forgiveness for past neglect and mining for information about lonely old Amber Coughlin and her crazy daughter. Crazy Daughter needed to discourage this renewed friendship between Amber and Gloria. Doing that without revealing the real reasons for it would require some finesse. Finesse was not Crazy Daughter’s strong suit.

  Maureen walked to the curb for one more look up and down the block, sucking hard on the last drag of her cigarette before dumping the butt in the gutter and crushing it out. She headed back to the house. I’ve got to get out of here, is what I’ve got to do, Maureen thought, to protect my mother. He’ll lose interest and so will Gloria if I get outta here, if Sebastian believes he can’t reach me through her.

  At the front door, she reached into her pocket for her keys. Not there. She’d left them in last night’s jeans. She rang the doorbell. What was she gonna tell her mom? Nothing, that’s what. I’ll explain it all, Maureen thought, when it’s over. I’ll apologize for what happened with Gloria, be a better friend to her myself. She squeezed her eyes shut tight. I never should have come here in the first place, she thought. Take care of things yourself, like a grown woman should.

  She rang the bell again, stomping her numbing feet on the stoop. C’mon, Mom.

  The front door swung open. “You give up those nasty cigarettes,” Amber said, “and things like this will stop happening to you.”

  “Ma, you don’t know the half of it.”

  Maureen jogged up the stairs and headed for the kitchen. Frank Sebastian had a political campaign, a business, a home. He was a big shot, pretty friggin’ famous, at least on Staten Island. Why was she sitting around letting him come after her? How hard could it be to drop in on him? And there it was, where it had always been, next to the fridge, third drawer down: the phone book. Which, looking at the cover, Maureen realized was three years old and useless. She dropped the phone book on the counter and went back to her room, where she grabbed her bag. She hadn’t even unpacked. She looked around. God, last night her old room had seemed so small and lonely. She’d felt so pathetic being there. Now she wanted to lock the door and hide under the covers forever. Maureen saw the ladybug glowing against the floorboard. She pulled her foot back to kick it to pieces, but she stopped. Instead, she snatched it from the wall and stuck it in her coat pocket, the plastic shell warm in her fist.