Disillusions

by Seth Margolis

  Russell Cunningham was pulling every political string he had to put pressure on the Feds. He’d offered a million-dollar reward for information leading to an arrest, and had hired a detective of his own. But nothing was working. Even the county boys had left Sohegan, figuring anyone with five million dollars in cash would be crazy to stick around town, let alone try to spend it locally.

  Unless, of course, the kidnapper was lying low until the case blew over. Unless the money was hidden somewhere nearby, just waiting to be claimed, untouched for the time being—except for the occasional surrender to temptation, a quick trip to the money tree. A hundred dollars here, a hundred there…Who could resist? Who would notice?

  Hell, even baby-sitters need to splurge now and then.

  Gwen picked up Jimmy from Andrew’s house and drove home. He watched television in the living room while she unwrapped the pitcher and washbasin and placed them on the small table in the front hall. Smug pleasure, that old acquisitive high, quickly gave way to a sinking feeling; the house looked suddenly shabby and cheerless. Not to mention messy.

  “Jimmy, come and put away your toys,” she called to him. When he didn’t respond she added, “Now!”

  He dragged himself into the hallway and sluggishly gathered together several toy cars and trucks, which he carried upstairs. A minute later, in the kitchen, Gwen heard a frightened scream.

  She took the stairs three at a time. Jimmy was standing just outside his room.

  “Look!”

  The floor was littered with every toy and book and article of clothing he owned.

  “Jimmy, did you—”

  “No, Mommy. And look.” He pointed to his panda, Mr. Meeko. “Oh, no.”

  She stepped into the room. Mr. Meeko’s head lay a foot or so from its body. It had been neatly severed, bits of white stuffing littering the carpeted floor.

  “Who did that, Mommy?”

  She shook her head and reached for him, but he wouldn’t enter the room. So she turned and picked him up and carried him downstairs. He was already damp and shivering.

  Chapter 20

  Dwight Hawkins arrived ten minutes after Gwen called, but he wasn’t too impressed by the injuries inflicted on Mr. Meeko. There was no sign of a break-in, though he did point out that anyone with a kitchen knife or credit card could open the locked back door. She showed him around the rest of the house, and while there was no evident damage, Gwen couldn’t help feeling that the place had been searched; rarely used drawers were open just a crack, a closet that was normally open an inch or so was shut tight. Nothing concrete, though.

  “It’s just that the panda is Jimmy’s favorite thing, the only toy we brought with us from the city. Someone chose that doll, someone knew.”

  “Jimmy knew.” Hawkins headed for the front door.

  “Jimmy?”

  “Sometimes kids do things they don’t want to admit to,” Hawkins said as he opened the door.

  “Jimmy would never harm that doll.”

  “You notice anything unusual about his behavior lately?”

  “Uh, no.” She saw by his expression that he’d caught her hesitation.

  “I’m sure you know your own son. Anyway, I’ll have a patrol car watch the street for the next few days. You’re a bit of a celebrity now. Local kids, they don’t get much excitement.”

  He started to leave.

  “Back in New York…”

  Hawkins turned back to her.

  “Back in New York my husband owed some money to…I don’t know who they were, but now that my name’s been in the paper I’m wondering if maybe they’re sending some kind of signal.”

  “This isn’t the kind of thing a loan shark would do, Mrs. Amiel.” He hesitated a moment. “You never mentioned to the FBI that your husband owed money.”

  “It didn’t seem relevant.”

  “How much money?”

  “I have no idea.”

  He studied her for a few moments. “No one drove two hundred miles from New York City to attack a stuffed animal. I wouldn’t worry about that.” He smiled awkwardly and left.

  She didn’t sleep well that night, and Jimmy woke up twice asking for water. She spent the early morning hours sewing Mr. Meeko together with a thick needle and heavy black thread. The result looked rather ghoulish, but Jimmy didn’t seem to mind the black scar around the panda’s neck. He did, however, insist on taking Mr. Meeko to camp with him.

  Neither Gwen nor Nick mentioned Valerie Goodwin’s visit Monday morning when he handed over Tess in the kitchen, although he did seem unusually sullen. The piano music commenced a few moments after he left her—scales played furiously fast and loud.

  Rosa Piacevic walked into the kitchen carrying a withered philodendron in a glazed terra-cotta pot. She dumped the plant into a garbage pail, grunting angrily as she reamed out the last bits of dirt with her fingers.

  “We had a visitor this weekend.” She plunked the empty pot on the counter and began to scrub the inside with a damp paper towel. “Miss Goodwin.” She pounced on the first syllable: Goodwin.

  “She was Priscilla…Mrs. Lawrence’s best friend.”

  Rosa’s hand froze inside the pot. Her skin was pale and wrinkled, yet soft-looking, almost pure, like an underground creature that never saw the sun.

  “Is there something wrong?” Gwen asked.

  Rosa dropped the paper towel inside the pot and turned. She looked toward the door between the kitchen and the hallway, then walked closer to Gwen.

  “I think she makes the play for Mr. Lawrence.” Her voice was a low whisper, and she cupped one hand around the side of her mouth nearest Tess, as if to prevent the child from hearing.

  “Did you…see something?” Gwen asked.

  “Just the way she look at him.” Her eyes moved in Tess’s direction, then back. “And at the baby.”

  At the baby?

  “Did they…” How to put this delicately? “Did they…”

  “Share the bedroom?” Rosa peered at her, arching her hairless brows.

  “Well, that’s not exactly what I meant,” Gwen said quickly.

  “No, they did not. She use the big room next to the nursery. I see the sheets in a mess on the bed. Of course, I don’t have no idea what goes on when I am in my own apartment. But she got ideas, that one.”

  “And Mr. Lawrence, does he…have ideas?”

  “He like two things, Mr. Lawrence. Piano and daughter. Daughter and piano. He use machine to tape-record his own piano, he use it to tape-record Tessie’s voice. Both precious to him. Miss Goodwin?” She made a face, as if sensing a foul odor. “Who knows? I care only for the child, my zamer.” She leaned over and placed a finger on Tess’s forehead. “Baby-sitters, nannies…” She blew a puff of air through pursed lips. “They come, they go. I, Rosa Piacevic, they will have to drag away from this one.”

  “She’s Mr. Lawrence’s responsibility,” Gwen said. “Though she is hard to resist.”

  They both looked at Tess, who smiled obligingly. Rosa had never said much to her in the past, but now she seemed unable to stop.

  “The last girl, she said she wouldn’t never leave. Mr. Lawrence, he have different ideas.”

  “I thought she quit.”

  Rosa Piacevic frowned. “One day Mr. Lawrence ask my husband to carry her suitcases to the car, then drive her to the bus station. She was fired, leave that same day. Mrs. Lawrence, nobody asked her opinion, she was down in the city with her doctors.”

  “Doctors?”

  “Having checkup, in case the cancer come back.”

  Gwen nodded, lifting Tess out of the high chair. She began pacing the room, winding Tess down for her morning nap. The little inconsistencies—the lies—were starting to pile up: How had Priscilla and Nick met? Why had the last sitter left?

  “Mrs. Lawrence go crazy when she heared the girl is gone,” Rosa said. “I listen that evening, I hear Mr. Lawrence tell her she quit. But I know the truth. She was fired.”

  “What was she
like, my predecessor?”

  “Mary Alice?” Rosa Piacevic shrugged. “Quiet, plain, a little much fat on the hips and the behind.” Rosa turned back to the clay pot, but not before casting an accusatory glance. “She keep out of trouble.”

  Tess grew suddenly heavier in her arms; she was asleep, and not a moment too soon.

  “Nap time,” Gwen said as she headed for the front hallway.

  That afternoon she swam with Tess in the pool, then pushed her on the swing set on the oak-shaded east lawn of the house. The hot weather showed no sign of letting up; the air was perfectly still, not a branch or leaf moved, as if the earth itself had stopped spinning. As she pushed Tess, Gwen began to sweat, her long cotton cover-up clinging to her damp bathing suit.

  “Hello there.” Nick approached them from the house, wearing only a bathing suit. Tess waved both hands at her father as Gwen contemplated the fact that the swing set and the pool were on opposite sides of the house.

  “I see you two have already been swimming.” He leaned against one of the swing’s supporting poles. Posing, she thought. With the sun directly on him, he looked lean and supple and flawlessly tanned, as if the swing had been placed in that very spot for no other reason than to make him look irresistible leaning against it. As if the sun, too, had been positioned to flatter him.

  “It’s so warm…” She could think of nothing more profound to say.

  “I don’t mind the heat, I think I enjoy it, in some ways.” He absently stroked his chest and abdomen. “It was Priscilla who insisted on keeping the air-conditioning cranked up. The house felt like a meat locker sometimes.” He must have sensed her disapproval. “Not that I could blame her,” he said quickly. “She always said the heat made her queasy.”

  Gwen nodded and gave Tess an extra-hard push.

  “Do I make you nervous in some way?” he asked after a short silence. “You always seem so tentative when we’re alone together, and yet when we first met, that day at the diner, there was nothing at all hesitant about you.”

  “It’s…it’s a strange situation, that’s all. Your wife was…” She looked at Tess, then back at him. “It’s only been a week, and you…” She shook her head.

  “And I what…I don’t appear sufficiently grief stricken?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to. The truth is, I feel dreadful about what happened. I wake up at night playing that awful scene at the ravine in my head, thinking I’ve been dreaming. Then I look over at the pillow next to me, and it hits me, as if for the first time. She’s gone.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting—”

  “But a part of me feels liberated, I can’t deny that. I can’t disguise it. Priscilla…she lived in a bubble, her own air-conditioned bubble. I never managed to penetrate it, but I never gave up trying. Now I feel as if a burden has been lifted—I don’t have to try anymore.”

  Tess swung back and forth in enviable oblivion.

  “You knew Priscilla for a while,” he said. “What was your impression?”

  “I barely knew her.”

  “Oh, but you knew her as well as most people. Better, perhaps.”

  “That’s ridiculous, what about”—she tickled Tess’s chin between pushes—“Valerie Goodwin?”

  “I don’t think Valerie ever got through to Priscilla. She’s a very superficial woman. Priscilla was the perfect friend for her: their relationship never went below the surface.”

  “I thought you liked her. Valerie, I mean.”

  He seemed to think this over. Gwen stole a glance at him. His eyes were closed against the relentless sun. A vertical trail of fine dark hair bisected his abdomen.

  “Valerie…Valerie had big dreams at one time. She was going to be this great actress, this fabulous movie star. The closest she got was a few modeling assignments, and now she’s too old even for that. Washed up at thirty-five. She’s a bitter woman. Not without her charms, but so full of regrets…I never could stand her, really.”

  “I’m surprised.”

  “She was my wife’s best friend, our child’s godmother. Did you expect me to treat her like an enemy?”

  “No, I just thought—”

  “Priscilla used to send her money every month to cover her expenses. I think that’s the real reason she came up this weekend, to find out if she’s still on the payroll.”

  Gwen grabbed Tess’s ankles and held her for a moment before letting go.

  “Well, the gravy boat is over, I’m afraid.”

  “Gravy train,” she said.

  His eyes flashed at her. “Thank you,” he said icily. “Priscilla left Valerie five thousand dollars in her will, but unfortunately I am not able to continue her generosity. Five thousand dollars will last Valerie Goodwin about a week and a half, if she cuts back. I wonder what she’ll do?” He sounded thoroughly unconcerned.

  “Her affection for Tess seemed genuine,” she said.

  “Perhaps. She can’t have children of her own. Something about her eggs.”

  “Oh, I…” He looked at her. “I’m sorry,” she said, remembering how much Valerie had enjoyed feeding Tess, swimming with her.

  “Anyway,” Nick said, “I hope I don’t make you nervous. I suppose I could burst into uncontrollable sobs every few hours; perhaps that would reassure you. But I cannot pretend to feel something I don’t. Priscilla did not deserve to die. And Tess deserves a mother.”

  “And you?”

  He smiled and looked at her. “Me? I have been released from one prison only to find myself stuck in another.” He smoothed back his hair with the palms of his hands, his expression darkening. “Now I think I need to cool off.”

  He pressed himself off the swing support and jogged effortlessly across the lawn. She watched him, tempted to follow. For the first time since last evening she’d forgotten about Mr. Meeko, about someone breaking into her house and mutilating the one thing Jimmy cared about.

  Disillusioned men are the most dangerous, Miss Amiel. They’ve already lost their dream.

  Gwen turned back to Tess and resumed pushing as Nick Lawrence disappeared around the corner of the house.

  Chapter 21

  The month passed in an easy, steady rhythm: weekdays with Tess, evenings and weekends with Jimmy. The events at the Devil’s Ravine remained vivid in Gwen’s mind—when wouldn’t they be? But it was beginning to seem possible to move beyond that awful day, to arrive at a place where she could view Priscilla Lawrence’s murder as a tragedy that had befallen a woman whom she had barely known. Just that, nothing more.

  She had better locks installed at home, and occasionally she’d spot a police car driving slowly to the end of Glen Drive, then back again. Maybe it had been just a prank, the assault on Mr. Meeko. A vicious joke on Sohegan’s scarlet woman—for she often thought everyone in town assumed she and Nick were lovers, had been lovers, in fact, even before the murder. Desecrating the house of an adulterer was good sport. Fitting punishment.

  And yet, awakening at night from fitful sleep, she couldn’t help thinking that slicing off the animal’s head so neatly had taken real effort and concentration—hardly the work of a bunch of thrill-seeking teenagers. She tiptoed into Jimmy’s room every night now, sometimes two or three times, just to watch him.

  The murder investigation continued, of course, though she had to believe it was running out of steam. Russell Cunningham spent at least a few minutes a day at the mansion, usually before leaving for the factory, not so much playing with Tess as observing her, as if she were some kind of rare butterfly who might fly off if inadequately tended. Occasionally she’d hear him using his cell phone, often in the nursery, barking orders at a private investigator, screaming at some secretary at Tack & Hardware to get the goddamn FBI on the phone. But these calls were growing less and less frequent.

  Nick spent his days at the piano, working through the Pathetique Sonata at least a dozen times a day. Sometimes she woke up at night hearing it, each note as sharp and precise as a migra
ine. She’d turn on the radio to clear it from her mind. Country and western, jazz, Christian call-in shows, she didn’t care.

  The Piacevics kept the house running as efficiently as ever; the refrigerator and pantry were always well stocked, the house impeccably clean, the grounds immaculate.

  And Tess? She never called for her mama anymore.

  July turned out to be considerably less warm than June. On the Monday following the Fourth, Gwen dropped Jimmy off at his day camp and arrived at the mansion at eight o’clock, as usual. The kitchen was empty, however, piano music already floating in from the living room. She stood in the hallway, waiting for a break in the playing. After a few minutes Nick stopped abruptly and turned; though she hadn’t moved, had barely breathed, she felt certain that he’d sensed her presence in some instinctive, almost feline, way.

  “Good morning,” he said. He always seemed slightly dazed when he stopped playing, as if he’d just opened his eyes from a long sleep, or received troubling news. He flicked a switch on a large radio and cassette player that he kept on the piano—boom boxes, they were called in New York.

  “I’m taping myself. It helps to chart my progress.”

  She nodded, wondering what he imagined he was progressing toward. (He is preparing for perfection, Valerie had said.)

  “Where’s Tess?” she asked.

  “I brought her next door. I thought Maxine might like to see her. She’s barely left the house since Priscilla died.”

  The mention of Priscilla felt as inappropriate, somehow, as the sight of the long piano in the middle of the living room. Neither her death nor her life were much referred to at Penaquoit any longer. He must have sensed her unease.

  “Hard to believe it’s been a month,” he said. “Some days it feels as if she’s been gone for years. Other days I can’t shake the feeling that she died just yesterday.”

  “Do you want me to pick up Tess?”

  “What? Oh, right, yes, about ten o’clock.”