Dana picks it up. An unopened pack of antiseptic wipes. “Silly,” she says, “you are such a silly—” She rips them open. She’s had her hands all over the cat—who knows what he’s been into?
She stops. The odor wafts up from the plastic wrap and nearly gags her. Oh, my God! She reaches out behind her, finding the blue chair with her hands and backing slowly into it. The odor from Celia’s house fills up her brain—her neighbor’s fancy living room, her bloody body on the floor, that odor, that poignant, crappy-perfume odor, like these wipes stuck underneath the sofa, these stupid things she carries in her purse. She often buys the scented ones to mask the smell of rubbing alcohol. She remembers buying lemon wipes and, at some point, rose—probably lavender, too. She always carries them with her. Or did until . . . She tries to think back, tries to remember if she had them after the day Celia died, tries to remember if she stuck them there under the sofa in a drunken fog. She drops her head into her hands, covers her eyes with trembling fingers. All along, the odor lingered at the edge of her perception, played with her head, that faint, vague scent. All along, it was familiar. Eventually it would have surfaced—as she walked through Target behind a germ-conscious shopper, watched Wanda wipe the sticky face of one of her sons, or pushed through the turnstile of the train—anywhere at all she could and would eventually identify the scent. But here, under her own sofa in her own living room, the recognition makes her sink into the cushions of the blue chair, terrified because everything she’s found so far, everything she has unearthed or stumbled across, points to her being Celia’s killer. She closes the pack of wipes, traps the odors back inside, tosses them on the desk in the entryway. Everything is gray around her, all the color sucked out of the room. She only wants to sleep, only wants the world to fade, to recede, until she figures out what she should do.
It’s a quarter after nine, and Peter hasn’t come home. In the kitchen the dishes are stacked in a small pile near the sink and a ruined stew is caked to the inside of a large orange Martha Stewart pot. Dana scrolls to Peter’s number in her cell.
“Hello,” he says, and traffic rumbles in her ear.
“Where are you?”
“I told you.” Peter sounds annoyed. “I told you this morning I was meeting a client after work.”
“No.” She sighs. “No you didn’t.”
“And then when we talked later—when you called about the. . . when you called, I told you we were slammed at the office and I mentioned I’d be late again.”
“Not true.”
“Did you make the appointment yet with Dr. Sing?” he says, lowering his voice. “The appointment you were going to make a week ago!”
“Yes,” she says. “I made it for next Friday,” which is nearly true. After her discovery of the wipes, she did call the office, but she got distracted by something, by Spot climbing up the drapes or by something in the yard, by the disapproving sound of the voice on Dr. Sing’s machine. She will, though. She has to.
“I’m on my way home,” he says after a pause. “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
She hits a button, and her phone fades to black. Did he tell her he’d be late? She tries to summon up the tiny bits of talk they exchanged that morning, but she doesn’t remember Peter saying anything at all, except would she please move her car—it was blocking the garage. And certainly nothing was mentioned during her call about the note.
She considers going back to the St. Giles. She remembers how easily sleep came to her there when she was sleuthing—or it would have anyway, if she had let herself relax—even in all the tangle of dirty clothes and rumpled covers. She thinks about running into Ronald in the coffee shop next door or a diner up the street—he has to eat somewhere—and engaging him in idle conversation. “We’re fumigating our house,” she might tell him, or “Peter’s doing some renovating in our kitchen, so I decided to come here. Small world, eh?” She imagines getting chummy enough to ask again about the picture in Celia’s phone—if he saw it at some point, if he deleted it. And Dr. Sing is only two train stops up from the hotel.
She keeps her eyes shut, listening to Peter’s car purr in the driveway as he opens the garage door and pulls inside. In the end she doesn’t leave; she lies horizontally across the bed, hoping he’ll sleep in Jamie’s room or on the living-room couch. In the end she’s afraid that questioning Ronald will only add to her distress, her craziness, her uncertainty—that the photo in Celia’s cell was no more real than Bozo greeting her at the hotel or Michael Jackson’s voice after she turned off the radio.
She hears the front door squeak open and then the hush of her husband walking in his stocking feet across the living room and into the kitchen. She hears the click of the stove as Peter relights the burner under the pot of stew, the sound of water streaming from the faucet into the caked vegetables. At some point she drifts off, awakening to the odor of cigarette smoke drifting through the half-closed window. She inches off the bed and wanders to the kitchen, where Peter’s stacked the dirty pots in the sink, a small and unexpected favor, and then she hears his voice. He’s in the backyard. He’s moved from under the bedroom window to stand on the brick patio on the other side of the porch door, and she moves closer, lulled by the hum of his words. She hears him say, “I can’t guarantee anything at this point.” Dana takes a step away, back toward the darkness of the kitchen. “I understand,” Peter says, and then he sighs, an exaggerated sigh. “I understand completely. You could. Exactly. Jeopardizing your— . . . Of course. It’s— . . . Just keep me on speed dial,” he says, “and I’ll— . . . No,” he says. “No. I won’t call. I’ll wait to hear from you. Just let me know if anything . . . if there’s anything— . . . Okay, hon,” he says, and Dana takes another step back, another step away. “Good-bye, then. It’s been—” The talking stops. Peter sighs again, but this time it’s a relieved-sounding little sigh. She hears the striking of a match, and a small flash of light pops briefly into the blackness over the patio. “Good riddance,” she thinks he says, but she wouldn’t swear to it.
She tiptoes back to the bedroom and falls across the bed, wanting to escape, wanting not to be here in this house with notes she’s possibly written to herself, with hand wipes reeking of lavender and guilt, with a husband who’s chosen the worst moment of her life to have an affair. She closes her eyes against the topsy-turvy world hers has become, and when she opens them again, the clock screams one-fifteen.
She tosses and turns for a few minutes, and then she gets up and walks out to the living room. Peter lies on the couch, his shoes and socks at odd angles to his body, as if he’s kicked them off. He’s hung his pants over the back of a dining-room chair, and judging from the empty lager bottles on the table, he’s had quite a bit to drink. There’s something else. An odor that eclipses the beer. She sniffs. Lately her sense of smell is amazing. She walks over to the couch where Peter snores explosively, spectacularly, and she bends over, inhaling flowery, sweet perfume. Lilac. She sniffs again. Yes. Definitely lilac. She knows what Peter would say. She knows he’d look at her, down his own ungifted nose at her, and say it was a client’s perfume, or that a co-worker hugged him out of gratitude, or that one of the paralegals in the building is young and untrained in the art of perfume application, so the odor wafts daily up the hall and sticks to all the lawyers. He would remind her to go see Dr. Sing, but his overheard phone call lets her know that “hon’s” perfume now clings to Peter’s clothes, reminders of what might have been their final tryst, residuals of a parting hug or a quick greeting in the lobby of a hotel—heavy and cloying. I hate you. I hate both of you, she whispers, leaning over him so closely that a small sprout of ear hair tickles her lips.
She glances at the table, at the green bottles lined up along its marble top like short, stout trees. She finishes off the last few swallows of beer in one of them and gets up to take them to the kitchen, knocking Peter’s pants off the back of the chair in her haste.
Her fingers feel thick and clumsy as she bends to pic
k them up, to hang them neatly over the chair. She sticks her hand inside the pockets, one by one. She thinks of packing some clothes in a suitcase and running away from the husband she hates at this moment with a passion and might, for all she knows, kill before the night is out. She can no longer trust her judgment.
Her hands tremble violently. The house is suddenly dreamlike, black and white and gray, as if she’s staring at an old photograph, as if she is no longer here. Peter’s pants shake between her fingers, and a receipt of some kind falls from one of his back pockets. It flutters to the fake Persian rug that runs the length of the dining room and lands faceup at the plushy edge, in the middle of a rose with a greenish vine looping out from the bottom petals. Dana gathers the squat bottles in her shaking hands and sticks them in the recycling bag beside the garbage in the kitchen. On her way back through the dining room, she picks up the paper from Peter’s pants and fiddles with it, folds it into fourths, glaring at him as she walks to the bedroom.
She pulls on a pair of jeans and stuffs the paper into her pocket. She pulls a purple tank top over her head and packs without giving it a great deal of thought. She grabs random items. These days she doesn’t have to think about the ordinary things. They just occur. They are managed by some separate part of her brain that seems to always be operating—a default thinker—as she centers on the more important, pressing aspects of her life. She tucks a dress inside the bag along with a pair of slippers from Bloomingdale’s, jeans, and three tops she finds lying on a large, untidy pile on the bedroom floor. She plucks a nightgown off the bedside table and hurries to the bathroom, filling a makeup case with shampoos and mascaras and several jars of face creams.
When she’s finished, she slides into her shoes and zips the overnight bag. She scribbles a note for Peter, more lines from Prufrock, a nod to the lilac, clinging like tar to his clothes. “Is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress?” She turns to the door, closing it quietly behind her.
She slings her bag onto the seat and glances at St. Christopher, staring down at her from the visor. He winks. He nods toward her lap.
“What?” she says, and he nods again. Winks again. “There’s nothing there,” she says, and turns the key. She can feel him nodding as she backs out to the street. She can feel his eyes in the dark car, and she pushes in an old CD, pats her pocket with her left hand. It makes a crinkling sound, and she reaches inside for the scrap of paper that drifted out of Peter’s pants. “This?” she says, and even in the darkness of the front seat she can see St. Christopher nod.
When she gets to the end of the street, she pulls over, letting her tires crunch along the grassy border of the Brinkmeyers’ lawn. She opens the car door for light and smooths the paper out on her thigh. “It’s only a bill,” she starts to say, but she reads it anyway. “Days Inn, room 156,” it says. “August 23. One king. Nonsmoking. $189.99.”
Dana reads it again. She sits for a minute in the glow from the small, glass-plated ceiling light, and then she folds the receipt into fourths again and tucks it back inside her pocket, hooking the open door with her foot, letting it swing shut, letting the overhead glow sink back inside the ceiling. She sits, still as a statue in the balmy, breezy night until a light goes on in the Brinkmeyers’ bedroom, and she edges off their lawn to the sidewalk.
She leans her head in her hands and cries—for the husband that Peter was, for their child who is now a man, for the family they once were. She turns off the ignition and sobs in the dim light from a streetlamp. And when she can focus on the road, on driving to the city, on digging up her innocence if it is there for the digging, she brushes her hair back with her hands and runs her fingers under her eyes, collecting remnants of mascara.
“Well,” she says, glancing up at St. Christopher, even though she can’t quite see him in the once-again-dark front seat of the Toyota, “at least he wasn’t at the Marriott.” She pulls back onto the road and heads for the highway, reaching over to restart the music—vintage Journey, fiddling through to the song about the boulevards and streetlights, the smoky rooms, and she sings along, almost a whisper at first, but her voice rises in the darkness of the car. She speeds up, rambling down the highway to New York, and then she opens the car window, lets the wind ruin her hair, the cool air, the smallest breath of autumn, and she turns the music up higher, sings louder. The wind flies up from the water, and she feels it all around her, feels it blow through her skin, consuming her. She is the wind.
CHAPTER 21
Jack Moss checks his messages for the fifth time that morning, but there’s nothing. Nothing anyway that interests him, nothing from Ann. He thinks about his lunch with Kyle. The kid is tough—he’s had to be—and it was easy to see he holds his own. He reminds Jack of himself at that age. Still, Kyle is hiding something—something pretty big unless Jack’s way off. His story didn’t cut it, but it wasn’t that. There’s something more important that Kyle has no intention of telling him, and it scares the shit out of him when he thinks about what that might be.
It will take a lot of time, he thinks, a lot of thought and energy, but somehow he’ll win over his son, somehow he’ll make it up to him, all those years he felt abandoned, all those years alone with a reeling, alcoholic mother, him and Joey. Even if Kyle’s guilty, he is still Jack’s son and Jack will do what he can. He already has. He’s already compromised himself more than he ever dreamed he would. His work is sacred. But, in a totally different way, so is his son, and the guilt on both fronts is eating him alive.
He sighs. He and Ann weren’t able to start a family of their own, although they tried for years. There were countless trips to countless specialists, thermometers dictating when they could make love, until love was no longer really in the equation—the full moon this, the new moon that, this position, that position, boxers not briefs. Oysters, not burgers. Dark chicken and so much salmon he still gags when he smells it. Cutting back on after-work beers. He did it all. They did it all, but nothing worked. In the end they gave it up. They put in for adoption, but the list was as long as the Lincoln Tunnel, the conditions rigorous. He was too old, she was too needy, their house too cluttered. . . .
After Ann’s second miscarriage, after nearly five months of serious depression, the throwing-away of the thermometer, and with Jack’s fiftieth birthday looming, Ann drove down to the pound and adopted a puppy—nearly as complicated a process, she said later, as adopting a child—printed “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DADDY” in large capital letters on a card she tied with a pink bow around its neck, and presented Molly to him at the breakfast table. He loved the dog. They both did. They both do. They’ll have to work out her custody at some point, and the irony is not lost on Jack that he will beg for weekends with the dog when he let his boys go without a fight.
“Anything new?” Rob says from his desk.
“On what?”
“The Steinhauser case? Hey,” he says. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Jack says. “Sure. I’m okay.” He gets up, grabs his keys. “I’m going out for a minute. Got something to check on Ashby Lane.”
“Want me to come?”
“I’m good on this trip,” he says. “You’ve got your hands full with the missing kid.”
When he’s nearly to the Steinhausers’, it starts to rain, a flooding, blinding rain, and he inches along the road, looking for street signs through the curtains of water. He doesn’t remember exactly where the street is in all the twists and turns, nearly hidden now inside the fog, barely visible in this pounding rain. It’s an older subdivision with abundant, massive trees that occasionally obscure mailboxes and house numbers and the few sporadic road signs.
He finds the street and makes a slow turn, nearly hitting a black Lexus swerving up the wrong side of the road. “Watch it, you asshole,” he snarls at the closed window, at the pouring rain. He glares toward the driver of the other car, and even with all the water he recognizes Peter. “Figures,” he says, and he thinks about turning around, pulling him over, giving him a tic
ket, but he’ll concentrate on the murder. There’s something really shady about Peter—he stinks—but Jack isn’t sure it has anything to do with the case.
It’s the wife who looks guilty.
He pulls up to the Steinhausers’ and stops the car, peering through the rain at the front porch, at a small white blob by the door. When the rain slows down a little, the white blob hops off—a rabbit, he thinks—and he remembers what Kyle said about the Steinhausers’ dog, that it was in the pictures of the house they showed on TV, but it wasn’t. Jack was there when they shot the crime-scene footage that was later on the news, and the dog was missing, much to Ronald’s distress. It didn’t show up again until the next evening, when Ronald went back to look for him and discovered him sitting at the front door, disheveled and dirty—skittish, Ronald said, which was unlike him. Seeing the rabbit on the porch has jogged Jack’s memory, bringing back this small detail that Kyle dropped into their tangled knot of conversation. So Kyle lied about where he’d seen his teacher’s dog. If he didn’t see it on TV, then where?
The lies are stacking up in other areas, too. The cell-phone picture wasn’t in the phone. He’d checked Celia’s cell at the station himself after interviewing Dana; he’d called Ronald and had him bring it down. All the other pictures were there—the ones of Celia hamming it up for the camera and several shots of her boys, a few confusing blobs that the husband said were plants and parts of plants, and, Jack suspected, several of Ronald’s thumb.
But no sign of the couple described to him in such detail.
Was the photo in the cell phone deleted? He watches the rain streak down the windshield and thinks it would be pointless for Dana to make up such an elaborate story. Why not just say she went to the Steinhausers’ to help her friend with a recipe or lend her eye shadow or one of a million other things women help each other with? Why bother making up something that could so easily be checked, so easily disproved? So long-winded and difficult to keep straight? If she’d wanted her husband to look guilty, why not just say that the afternoon she died, Celia called her over—which the neighbor corroborated—to tell her they were having an affair and Peter’d dumped her? Why go to all the trouble about a photo in a fucking phone? Far more probable that Ronald’s lying. The guy is obviously covering up something, so it makes sense he’s deleted a photo in his late wife’s phone. Maybe the techies can pull it up—he’ll have Ronald bring it in again. Or was Dana simply wrong, confused?
The Pocket Wife Page 14
