“Yes.” Ronald draws himself up straighter. He stares at Peter’s face, his eyes small and dark, like raisins stuck in dough. “I’ve seen you before,” he says. His voice is low and tight, a bit menacing.
“Oh,” Peter says. “Probably in the hood.” Again he uses this strangely jolly voice that Dana doesn’t recognize.
“I don’t think so.” Ronald squints at Peter. “No. It was somewhere else,” he says as Peter walks over to the door where Wanda and her two boys are visible through the screen.
“Hey,” he says, a little of the jolliness gone from his voice. “Good to see you, Wendy.”
“Wanda,” she says. She slides past him and waves at Dana in the kitchen doorway.
Lon Nguyen is the next to arrive, with his wife, who speaks no English, and the two of them debate at length in Vietnamese before Lon takes one of the cinnamon buns and sticks it on a plate. He’s wearing flip-flops as usual. Dana hasn’t seen these before, and she wonders if he has a pair for whatever occasion may arise—if so, these would be the brunching flip-flops, a tad festive with a sky blue thong. She scrambles another batch of eggs and pours them into the frying pan as the front door opens again.
“Hello,” she calls. People bubble through the front door, and Peter stands back. He bows, makes a sweeping, welcoming gesture with his arm as the Steinhausers’ across-the-street neighbors swarm over the threshold. Clearly Dana has underestimated. There are at least twenty-five people milling through her house, oozing into the kitchen, where she stands dishing up plates of scrambled eggs and dying for a Bloody Mary. She hasn’t given a brunch in years, and after today, she promises herself, she never will again.
She glances up from the skillet to see Peter standing in the doorway, his hair sticking up on top. She thinks fleetingly of a rooster. “What?”
“Oh,” he says, “nothing, really. The office sent a clerk over with a discovery for a trial we’re working on.”
“Where is he? Or she?”
Peter backs up, takes a quick look at the living room. “She. And she’s on the couch,” he says, “talking to Wanda. Can you manage for a few minutes while I look it over—make sure it’s all there?”
“What trial?” Dana snaps, but the eggs are sputtering and crinkling at their edges, so she turns back to the stove. By the time she takes them out to the table, Peter has disappeared and Wanda is alone on the couch. Lon Nguyen makes his way through the crowds, and Dana remembers the signs he posted on telephone poles and stuck on the outsides of mailboxes several months before. LON NGUYEN, BLOCK CAPTAIN, they said, and there was a phone number, presumably his, that she’d not bothered to jot down before she tossed the thing into the recycling bin. He isn’t exactly a walking advertisement for Neighborhood Watch groups today—not at this makeshift wake for the bludgeoned, dead component of his block.
She picks up a fake sausage. “Sorta sausage,” Jamie calls it, and she chews on the rubbery morsel, swallows it down with a thimbleful of orange juice, all that’s left after the sudden gush of guests. She spots Ronald by the bookcase in the hall and makes her way over to where he thumbs through a book. He’s inches from the bedroom, and his eyes aren’t really on the book. They’re scanning again, as if he’s looking for something.
“Did you have enough to eat?” She stares down at where he’s squatting on the floor.
“Yes.” He nods. “Good sausage.”
“Did you try the eggs?”
“I’m vegan,” he says. “You have some interesting books.”
“I do.” Dana glances at the title in his hand. “But Bugs in Your Backyard isn’t really one of them. Would you like a Bloody Mary?”
“Yes,” he says, turning back to the book, “I’d love one.”
Dana finds some slightly aging tomato juice in the refrigerator and adds quite a bit of vodka, along with horseradish and various herbs and spices she finds in a cabinet. It’s getting noisy in the dining room. She swishes everything around inside the two glasses with her index finger, making her way slowly through the crowds in the three rooms between her and Ronald, who now seems focused on the bookshelf for something more illuminating.
“Thanks.” He sips at his drink. “Do you know all these people?”
“No. In fact . . .” Dana surveys the living room from where she leans against the wall. “I know Wanda and her boys and Lon Nguyen, and that’s about it.”
“I’ve seen the guy in the Dockers,” Ronald says. “He lives across the street from us. From me. And Nguyen, of course. He’s the one who started our Neighborhood Watch.”
Dana nods. “Which really needs to be more . . . um, watchful.”
“Yes.”
“By the way,” Dana says. She leans over so she’s nearly whispering in Ronald’s ear. “Do you have Celia’s phone with you?”
“No,” he says, back at the book. “Why? What is it with you and Celia’s fucking phone?” Dana sees he’s suddenly stopped reading. His eyes are frozen on the page. His jaw twitches. His ears are red, and a little rash begins to zigzag upward from his throat. Still he doesn’t look at her.
“Nothing.” Dana takes several steps backward. “Really,” she mumbles. She trips on the edge of the rug. “God. I was just— Actually . . .” She clears her throat and speaks in what she hopes is a commanding tone, despite Ronald’s sudden and alarming mood shift. “I was wondering if she still had the photos of the two of us. There were several,” she lies, “of us hamming it up for the camera. We were friends, you know. It would be nice to flip through and reminisce.”
Ronald shrugs. On the other side of the living room, Peter is escorting someone out onto the porch—the clerk, she supposes. Is he screwing her, too? Dana moves forward for a better look, brushing past a snag of neighbors as the door opens. She inches through the crowd as Peter steps outside with his visitor, and Dana studies the back of the departing head as best she can through all the people between her and the doorway—tallish brunette.
Lon Nguyen touches her sleeve with the tips of his fingers. “We are leave now,” he announces. His wife stands waving and smiling at the front door. Wanda, too, is waving. She’s mouthing Thank you and making an I’ll call you gesture with her thumb and pinkie as her boys spill loudly into the yard.
“Thank you all for coming,” Dana says. She taps a crystal glass with the edge of a teaspoon, and a twinkly sound fills the suddenly quiet house. A couple of minutes later Ronald walks briskly toward his car, neighbors crowd the street in their brightly colored summer clothes, and Dana closes the door, heads for the sinkful of soapy water.
“I’m taking a nap!” Peter yells from the living room. “What a freak show that was,” he calls out after a few minutes. How about that Donald character!”
“Ronald?”
“Right. Celia’s husband. Did you see the way he was looking at me? Like I ran over his dog!” Peter’s voice lags on the last few words, and when she peers around the counter, she sees he’s already asleep, his shoes lined up toe to toe beside the couch. Dana gives the glasses a cursory rinse and sticks them in the dishwasher. Clearly Peter noticed Ronald’s weird behavior, too, even taking the cell-phone picture out of the equation, which Ronald certainly has. If she intends to see the thing again, she’s obviously on her own, and by the time she starts the dishwasher, she’s decided to take a trip into Manhattan to find the phone herself.
CHAPTER 10
It’s nearly two when Dana tosses her apron into the washer along with several place mats and a dish towel. She wanders into the living room, where Peter’s snores ripple loudly through the house, eclipsing the music from the CD player near the foyer. Did anyone even hear it, she wonders—the eclectic mix of seventies and eighties music she’d so carefully chosen, the dribs and drabs of ancient blues and modern jazz? Peter hadn’t picked out anything. In fact, except for his announcement in the kitchen doorway and his presence during the first few minutes, she has no idea where he even was during most of the brunch. For all Dana knows, he was in the backy
ard, squatted near the picnic table with his phone.
She yawns. Someone’s left the front door slightly open, and she tugs on the doorknob. She grabs her latest novel from the desk just inside the door in the entryway, and when she opens the book, a piece of paper falls out—a shopping list, she thinks at first, or an old deposit slip, something she’s used as a bookmark. But there’s writing on it, tiny writing she can barely make out. “Fair eats, but your little brunch doesn’t begin to pay the piper. Better watch your back.”
Fear rips through her, surrounds her—a strangling, suffocating fear. She clutches the tiny piece of paper and closes her book, setting it on the coffee table as if a sound, a movement made too quickly, anything at all might set off an explosive, fatal retribution. She eases herself off the chair and over to Peter, snoring on the couch. She reaches out and touches him, a light, silent touch. The snoring stops for several seconds before it resumes.
“Peter?” She calls his name softly. She glances around the room in case whoever wrote the note is still inside, sunk into a corner. “Peter!” she says, louder. This time the snoring stops. His eyes pop open.
“What?”
“Someone was here!”
“Many were here.”
“No—” Her voice breaks. “No,” she says again. “Someone else was here, someone angry with me.”
“We basically tossed them out,” Peter says, sitting up with an exaggerated groan. “They’ll get over it.” His eyes are droopy; his perfect hair is one big cowlick.
“No,” she says. She shakes his arm and holds the scrap of paper up in front of his face. “Read it!”
“Read it? I can’t even see it! Where are my—”
“Here,” she says, and she hands him her reading glasses.
“‘Fat ears—’”
“No,” she says. “God.” She sticks on her glasses. “‘Fair eats, but your little brunch doesn’t begin to pay the piper. Better watch your back.’”
Peter yawns. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means—” Dana stops. She doesn’t know, actually, but clearly she was right: Someone’s watching her, threatening her, hating her. She chews on her cuticle. “It means, Peter, that someone’s stalking me, planning to kill me for all I know. It means I’m scared shitless!”
“I meant, did you offend someone? Hit a garbage can? Play your car radio too loud?”
“Well, yes. I mean, obviously I have. Offended someone. In fact, maybe whoever I offended is crouched somewhere inside the house.”
“Why would they be?” He yawns again.
“Why would someone kill Celia?”
After a minute or two, Peter gets up and shuffles from room to room.
“You have to really look,” Dana says, kicking at the drapes. She checks all the coats in the hall closet and behind the shower curtains in both bathrooms. She can hear Peter thumping around their bedroom, and when she hears him trip over an amp cord, she knows he’s checking Jamie’s room.
“Nothing,” Peter says, back on the couch. “Do you mind if I finish my nap?”
“No,” she says. “Well, yes. Actually, I do. We have to figure out who left that note,” she says, but the only answer is a rumble of far-off thunder and an indecipherable murmur from her husband. She rereads the message, checking the paper for other writing, a label, a number—anything that might provide a window into the world of whoever wrote it and left it for her. There are some fragments of numbers—a receipt, too ripped for her to tell where it came from. She thinks about Ronald at the Root Seller, the odd way he acted, trapping her there in the aisle. She thinks about the neighbors milling here and there, with faces she has never seen. She thinks about how guilt tugs at her, wakens her from fitful, insufficient sleep, and then she thinks about the hooded figure staring at her through her kitchen window from the backyard, the scraping sound she thought was the althea plant beneath the bedroom window—how she scrutinized the yard to no avail, but still she knew—still she felt the eyes just somewhere underneath the surface of things, watching. Waiting. Hating.
She wonders: If she could pull back the too-large hood on the figure in the yard, whose face would be there, hidden in its breeze-blown folds? A wayward teenage gangster looking for an open window or an unlocked car? Celia’s killer? Worse, would she have seen Celia’s ghostly, anguished face lurking there or, worse still, her own?
Dana tiptoes out to her car while Peter snores on the sofa. Not only does the note terrify her, there’s the meeting with the detective on Celia’s case the next morning. Questioning the neighbors, he’d told her on the phone. It’s standard. She wonders, though. Lately nothing in her life is standard; nothing is the way it seems. She hasn’t mentioned it to Peter, even though she knows he could come with her; he could act as her lawyer. But would he? Could she find out things about her husband if she meets this cop—this Jack Moss—alone? Things she couldn’t learn with Peter there beside her? Storm clouds hover overhead, turning the sunny day into a gray and early evening. She grips the steering wheel and drives toward town, pulling sloppily in to a parking space outside an all-night diner. She sits for a moment in the hot dampness of the front seat. A sign blinks and buzzes overhead, bathing both her dashboard and St. Christopher in slightly blue fluorescence. JESSIE’S DIN, it says, the last two letters bashed out by some misguided soul or a wayward baseball from the vacant lot next door.
Over the years she’s come to Jessie’s when she couldn’t sleep, when her insides buzzed and jiggled as if she’d stuck her finger into a wall socket. She’s come here for years, times like this when she’s run out of friends to call in the middle of the night—and really, who could be expected to listen to her endless babbling at 3:00 A.M.?—when nudging Peter awake only makes him pull the covers tight around him and turn toward the wall. She comes to Jessie’s when she’s feeling manic and wired. It’s so much better than a bar, she tells herself—told Peter when he cared enough to ask where she was going—better than drinking herself into a stupor, even though she’s done exactly that more times than she can count. It scares her, though, the drinking, the thought of becoming an alcoholic like her father, dead at forty-one, the strange way he died. Baffling, really. He traveled all the time. He often rode that 9:15 from Philly.
It’s been almost three years since she’s come here, sitting in this same back booth with the cracked red plastic, the table with its ugly speckled pattern, the nicks along the edge, the thankfully bad lighting. She reaches for a napkin, slips a pen out of her bag, vaguely aware of the waitress approaching. She smiles. Glenda is a beacon in a dark night, an island in a soupy sea of humanity—the drunks, the homeless, the misbegotten, the heartbroken and lonely. The crazy. Glenda the Good.
“Hey!” she says. “Dana! Haven’t seen you in ages!”
“I know. I’ve been—” Sane, she thinks. I’ve been a little too sane for Jessie’s.
“What can I get you?” Glenda pockets a tip from the next table and glances back at Dana. “Decaf?”
“Yeah,” Dana says. “Wow. You have a memory like an ele—”
“Got to in this business.”
“My neighbor,” Dana says. “She was murdered.”
“Oh! God! The one on Ashby Street? It’s been all over the news.”
“Lane,” Dana says, “but yeah.”
“Be right back.” Glenda sighs, heading toward the cash register, where several customers are lined up in the faulty, greenish lighting of the entrance as Dana clicks her pen open and closed and open again.
“Notes,” she writes across the napkin top. She draws a line down the center, dividing it in half. “What I know,” she writes at the top of the first half. “What I don’t,” she scrawls at the top of the second, and she underlines both headings. She has always been organized. When Jamie left for college, it was Dana who helped him pack, setting aside her feelings about his opting for Boston instead of NYU. She was the one who pored through manuals, who researched every school in the Northeast, print
ing page after page of statistics, leaving them neatly clipped and stacked by state on Jamie’s desk. She focused on the minutiae of the thing and closed her eyes to the reality. By the time they drove up with him to college, a sad little caravan, she and Peter chugging along behind their son’s Nissan, she was exhausted. At the orientation dinner, a torturous affair, she drank too much and laughed too loud, embarrassing her son with her rambling. When they left, she leaned heavily on Peter’s arm, nearly comatose by the time the taxi dropped them off at their hotel near Copley Square, the first good sleep she’d had in weeks.
Under the first heading, she writes “I was there, I was angry, I was drunk.” She chews on the end of her pen and adds, “I don’t remember chunks of the afternoon, Ronald has Celia’s phone, Peter and Celia together, Peter and the Tart together,” and, as an afterthought, “Peter is such a prick!”
Under the second heading, she writes, “If or when I’ll be implicated in C’s murder.” She stops, glancing up at Glenda moving toward her. “I am on a train to Crazy,” she adds to the first list, and then, in capital letters, “I AM THE LAST KNOWN PERSON TO SEE CELIA ALIVE!”
“Here you go.” Glenda sets two cups of coffee between them. “That one’s decaf.”
“Don’t you have to . . . ? Aren’t you . . . ?”
“Taking a break. Everybody needs a break,” she says.
“Even Glenda the Good.”
“I like that. ‘Glenda the Good.’ The Wizard of Oz, right?”
“It’s actually Glinda,” Dana says, but Glenda doesn’t answer.
“I’m so glad you’re here.” Dana leans forward on her elbows. “I was afraid you might be off.”
“I’m never off,” Glenda says. She takes a sip of coffee. “Why?”
“My neighbor,” Dana says. She looks around the restaurant. “I think I might have killed her.”
Glenda rips a packet open and lets sugar sift into her cup. “Never liked that fake sugar,” she says. “The devil you know is better than the one you—”
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