Face Time

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  “May we take a quick look upstairs?” I ask. Then I casually ask the clincher as if it’s no big deal. “And the basement?”

  Poppy perches on the couch and pulls out a cell phone. “I have a couple of calls to make,” she says. She’s already focused on dialing. “Look around, and then—Hello, this is Priscilla Morency, can you hold a moment?” She interrupts herself, looking at me apologetically, and waves us along. Go ahead, she mouths the words. She holds up her hand, fingers spread, pantomiming. Five minutes.

  “Want to split up?” I turn to Franklin, keeping my voice low. “You take the kitchen, I’ll go upstairs, then we can meet in a few minutes.” I point down the hall. “Figure out where the basement door is, okay? Then we’ll go down there together.” I glance at Poppy, who now has the phone tucked between her cheek and shoulder, and is consulting her notebook. “She’ll forget about the five-minute thing,” I predict. “But we should hurry.”

  Franklin nods, checking his watch, and turns down the hall. I trot up the stairway, trailing my fingers on the wall over a patchwork of faded, then bright paint. Square outlines on the wall remember where pictures used to be. Family portraits? Souvenirs from Ray’s political campaigns? Little Gaylen’s first finger painting? I think of that newspaper snapshot of Gaylen and her father. Except Gaylen would be older now, of course.

  I’m upstairs. A narrow hall. The afternoon sun struggles to make it through the four-paned window at the hall’s end, but a partly closed shade shapes the light into fluttering shadows on the closed doors, two on each side of me. There was a murder in this house. Did someone scream? Panic? There was a struggle, certainly. Violence. Passion. A body, battered and bleeding, crumpled and lifeless at the bottom of the basement stairs. The murderer, and the victim, might have walked this hallway.

  The intensity of the vision surprises me a little. I pause, hand on the banister, keeping my connection to the real world and the live people downstairs. There’s no cleaning solution potent enough to eradicate bad karma.

  I banish the ghosts and choose a door.

  Bathroom. Hand still on the doorknob, I take a quick scan and decide to come back if I can. I close the door and choose another, opening it quickly now, aware of my time limits. The master bedroom, this one must be. There’s a double closet, its doors faced with sliding mirrors. Hesitant at first, I slide open one closet door, setting off a soft clatter as a row of wire hangers rustles with my gesture. I look quickly. Nothing. I reach up to the closet’s upper shelf, patting my hand along the top in case the cleaners missed something. I check the floor. Nothing.

  Now that I’ve given myself permission, I head for the armoire. One door open, two. A few limply empty plastic cleaning bags on hangers, an empty shoe box on the floor. Even on tiptoe, I can’t see what’s on the top shelf, so I pat across it with my hand again. Nothing. Damn.

  On fast-forward now, I quickly open every bureau drawer, hearing the scrape of the metal rollers as each slides open. Still nothing. I close the final drawer, reminding myself there are still two rooms to explore and not much time to do it.

  The drawer won’t close. I try again, but there’s something jamming it. Have I broken the bureau? That’ll be fun to explain. I open the drawer again and close it more slowly, almost hearing the clock ticking. It still won’t close.

  I reach underneath, searching blindly for some mechanism that’ll release the wooden drawer from its bracket. Finding what feels like the switch, I click it open, and the empty drawer slides completely out. Holding the drawer in one hand, I stretch my other arm into the opening, reaching for whatever obstruction might have been in the way. My fingers feel a crinkle. Like a piece of paper.

  “Charlie?” I hear Poppy’s voice from the bottom of the stairs. I hope from the bottom. It’s going to be very unpleasant to try to defend why I’m standing in a convicted murderer’s bedroom with a drawer in one hand and my other arm deep in her dresser. And I’ve still got to see the basement.

  I grab the paper and carefully ease it out. Don’t want to tear it. Fumbling with haste, I tilt and wiggle the drawer to get it back into place. “Do it,” I mutter at the drawer.

  “Be down in a moment,” I call out, still continuing to jiggle the drawer handle, trying to sound casual. Poppy’s still all the way downstairs, it sounds like, and I don’t want her joining me up here just yet.

  With a metallic click, the drawer finally rolls all the way closed. I look at the document in my hand, and then I hear my name again. The voice is getting closer. I grab my tote bag and dig out my cell phone. This had better work.

  * * *

  “I promise you, there wasn’t anything to see down there,” Franklin reassures me as we pull out of the Sweeneys’ cul-de-sac. “You were taking so long upstairs, I just went down to the basement myself, figuring you’d arrive sooner or later. Too bad it was too much later,” he adds. “You should have checked your watch.”

  I know he’s teasing, but it drives me crazy that Poppy threw us out before—well, she hadn’t exactly thrown us out, but even though she’d politely tucked my business card into her files, she had made it clear our time inside was up. Luckily Franklin was resourceful enough to investigate the basement himself. So far, he hasn’t stopped talking about what he saw downstairs long enough for me to show him what I found upstairs. Just as well, since I’d rather wait until we can get somewhere private. And I do want to hear about that basement, even if he thinks it wasn’t revealing.

  “It was all…” Franklin wrinkles his nose, remembering. “Bleachy. The concrete floors, all spotless.” He glances at me. “You know, spot-less. No stains, if that’s what you’re imagining.”

  I had been, actually. He knows me too well. “What’s at the top of the stairs? Are the steps steep? Were there railings? Are the floors all concrete?”

  I’m wondering about Oscar Ortega and his investigators accepting the story that a woman of Dorinda’s size, a “little snip of a thing” as Poppy had called her, got control of her hulk of a husband and managed to push him down the stairs. Not to mention how she bashed him with an iron. “According to the news articles,” I continue my thoughts out loud, “they’d gone home after having an argument in that bar. The Reefs? Dorie hit him with the iron while he was passed out on the couch, then dragged him to the basement steps and pushed him down.”

  I pause, imagining the scene, and Dorinda, and how heavy her dead husband would be, and why the daughter didn’t wake up, and how much blood and evidence there would be on the path from the couch to the basement steps. “You’d think Oz’s crime-scene people could easily tell,” I begin, “whether someone actually—”

  “She confessed,” Franklin reminds me, interrupting. “Oz and the Swampscott police probably didn’t even bring in a trace evidence team. Wouldn’t have needed to. Case closed, you know?” Franklin clicks on the car’s turn signal. “Dunkin’s okay?”

  “We’ve got to talk to her. Got to,” I say, probably for the millionth time, as we head into the parking lot of the coffee shop. There’s a line at the drive-through, so Franklin pulls up to the front door. “Wait,” I say, turning toward him. I make a quick check around the parking lot, although with Poppy long gone, who’s going to be watching us? I zip open my purse.

  Franklin looks at me inquiringly. “Did you forget to go to the bank machine again?” he asks. “I’ll spring for the lattes.”

  “Nope,” I reply. I pull out my cell phone, and click into My Photos. “I just want to show you something. Look what I found in the Sweeneys’ bureau,” I say, holding up the phone so Franklin can see it too. “It’s a picture of Dorie from high school. See? It had slipped behind a drawer, you know? Underneath. I took a snap of it with my phone. She’s wearing a Swampscott High hoodie sweatshirt, so it must have been taken years ago. You can tell how young she is. And she’s giving the peace sign. Very eighties teeny bopper.”

  “You took it? From a drawer?” Franklin is focusing on the process, not the picture. I’d hoped he’d i
gnore that part. “You opened their drawers?”

  “Yeah, yeah, so I opened the drawers,” I say, trying to dismiss him. “I couldn’t help it. But I didn’t take it. I put the picture back, so if anyone knew it was there, which they don’t because everything was cleaned out, it’ll be there when they check. Which they won’t. And now,” I say, pushing the cell phone closer to him, “we have a new picture of Dorie.”

  Franklin squints at the admittedly fuzzy photo. “Which,” he says, “we won’t be able to use, not only because it’s basically out of focus, but also because how will you—and I do mean you—explain where you got it?”

  “I know we can’t use it on the air. But once I found it, I couldn’t just leave it, you know? And I couldn’t swipe it, although I admit the thought crossed my mind. Anyway, we have it. For whatever it’s worth. And to prove I didn’t totally fail as Nancy Drew.” I click off the phone and tuck it into my tote bag. “Now let’s go get those lattes, Franko. I need a little caffeine courage before I face my mother.”

  Opening the door of the coffee shop, I walk into a fragrant den of cinnamon and vanilla and sugary just-baked doughnuts. A little caffeine courage? I need an extra large. Because after my hospital visit, I remember, there’s my tête-à-tête-à-tête with Josh and Penny.

  I smile at the pink-jacketed teen behind the counter. “High-test,” I say. She looks at me, blank and confused. I try again. “No fat no-foam no-sugar triple latte, two Splendas, double cup.”

  This, she comprehends. Good thing I’m in the communications business.

  * * *

  How am I supposed to get an eight-year-old girl to fall in love with me? Penny’s wearing what I recognize as Josh’s old Beach Boys T-shirt with a pink leotard underneath, black leggings and pink ballet shoes. Her frosty pink nail polish is chipping from her bitten fingernails, and her pin-straight brown hair is held back with a sparkly black headband. She deigned to acknowledge my presence when I arrived at the restaurant, but since then, I’ve obviously been about as enthralling to her as the salt shaker. So much for the communications business.

  What’s making this more complicated, I still have to explain to her dad—the heart-flutteringly handsome man across from me—that yet another news story is coming between us.

  Right now, though, it’s Penny who’s coming between us. She’s sitting next to Josh in our maroon suede booth, her spindly preteen body tucked into him as closely as possible. I’m on the other side of the red-checked tablecloth.

  Two, plus one. I’m so clearly the addition, the newcomer, the intruder. This is going to be a difficult dinner.

  And Penny isn’t making it any easier. As I pretend to examine my seared tuna, Josh’s daughter begins to make bread pellets from the mini-baguette on the plate in front of her. So far her conversation with me has consisted of: “Fine.” “Yuck, who could eat raw fish?” And “Mom always lets me have pasta with butter.” And that comment was mostly to Josh.

  Using her thumb and one finger the same way my sister and I used to play marbles, she flips a bread pellet sideways across the table, and it lands in Josh’s water glass.

  I burst out laughing, then cover my mouth with my napkin to hide my reaction. I know I’m not supposed to laugh—it will encourage her. But on the other hand, it’s harmless, and pretty funny. If you’re eight. Which, of course, she is.

  “Think you’re a comedian, huh?” Josh tries to rumple her hair, but she flattens herself into the corner of the booth, laughing, and pulls her knees up to her chest, tucking those little shoes under Josh’s thigh. She obviously adores him. “Gotcha, Daddy,” she says. “Two points.”

  I might as well not even be in the room.

  “On the floor,” Josh says, affectionately pushing her feet off the suede. I’m watching the bread pellet fall apart in Josh’s glass. Disintegrating. Just like our relationship, if I can’t find the secret words to break through Penny’s no-trespassing barrier.

  “So Mom says to tell you both hello,” I begin, attempting to make us a table for three. “I was just at the hospital, and the doctors say she’s recovering nicely.” Then I stop. Talk about the elephant in the room. My first venture into conversation, and I’ve brought up the M word.

  Penny pulls a lock of hair across her mouth and looks at me from under her lashes, her smile vanishing. “My mother is a doctor,” she says. “She’s on a cruise.” She briefly turns back to pellet-making, then looks at me again, challenging. “To Montserrat. It’s French.”

  Okay, I’m going for it. She’s eight. I’m a grown-up. Lots of kids even like me. I can do this. “Yes, I know,” I say, putting down my chopsticks. “I actually covered the story in Montserrat, after the volca—”

  Two waiters in sleek black T-shirts arrive, their steaming platters cutting off what might have been my best chance to finish an actual sentence. Penny’s plate is white, her scallops are white, her pasta is white, and she looks skeptically at the green flakes sprinkled on the sides of the dish.

  “I hate—” she begins.

  Josh twists the end of his napkin into a point and with one swift gesture swipes the parsley out of existence. “There, fussy bird,” he says, touching her nose with one finger. “All white again.” He shrugs, looking at me apologetically. “Not worth the struggle, you know? White food. Victoria says it’s a phase.”

  I hate—when he says her name. I know it’s silly, they’ve been divorced for two years now. But if Victoria told him it’s a phase that means they must talk. And of course they have to talk—they share Penny. And Penny will always be both of theirs, no matter that Victoria married Elliott what’s-his-name. No matter if Josh and I—

  I sneak a foot under the table, slide a toe under one leg of Josh’s jeans. “How’s your—salmon?” I ask.

  Josh flickers a look at Penny, who’s focused on twisting her spaghetti, and then winks at me. “The cottage in Truro has a private outside shower,” he says, leaning across the table. His voice is PG matter-of-fact, but his look conveys an unmistakably X-rated double meaning. “Did I tell you that? Warm summer nights, in the moonlight, you can wash the sand out of your hair. Or wherever.”

  And there’s the rub. Here’s where I’m supposed to look dreamy and seductive, perhaps mention my new and frighteningly small bathing suit, perhaps allude to coconut-scented suntan lotion. And it would all be from the heart. I’m longing to try out that shower, and see just how X-rated one summer vacation can be. Just one hitch in the potential passion. Dorinda Keeler Sweeney is stuck in prison. And I can get her out. Does that trump spending time on Cape Cod with the man of my dreams, shower or not? Wouldn’t any other decision be selfish?

  “Um,” I reply. “That sounds perfect.” I move a bit of gingered sea bass around my plate, stalling. It’s usually my favorite, but now I’m too tense to enjoy it. I bring a bite of fish to my mouth, then put it back down. “But you know,” I begin. Dorinda’s potential innocence pesters me like an insistent child, never far from my side. “You know I told you about Dorinda Sweeney?”

  * * *

  Penny is out of it. She’s strapped by the seat belt into the back seat of Josh’s Volvo, mesmerized by some PlayStation gizmo, the real world muted into muffled background by her iPod earbuds. Oblivious to the intense conversation in the front seat. We’re all parked outside of my apartment, the car windows open, letting in the summer as the last of the daylight fades. Tourists with cameras around their necks stroll along the twisting narrow sidewalks, pointing and gesturing, locating the architectural quirks and oddities of the oldest part of Boston. A blue-uniformed police officer in BPD shorts bicycles slowly past, giving me a quick appraising glance, and salutes as I return a reassuring wave—I’m fine. I hope that’s true. I’ve got to go inside soon. Josh and Penny are going home.

  “It’s fine, sweets,” Josh reassures me. He runs a finger down my cheek, tracing my jaw, then tilting my chin. “Got to get you another Emmy, right? And get Dorinda Sweeney out of prison. Penny and I will be fine in Tr
uro. And you can be our special treat. Come see us whenever you can. It would be…” He pauses, cocking his head back at Penny. “Well, if someone had unjustly taken me away from her, I’d be unstoppable. Whatever. Do your stuff, Brenda Starr. Truro can wait.”

  I glance into the back seat, see the child Josh loves so much. They have such a connection, a bond, a certainty. Right now, she looks sweet, clicking intently on her computer game. And loving. And eight. And what little girl wouldn’t worry about the other woman, essentially a stranger, threatening to take her dad away? How can two be three?

  Reaching over, I take Josh’s hand. “I need you to understand, I’m not choosing my job over you two. It’s just—Dorinda. That videotape is a perfect alibi. She should not be spending one more day behind bars.”

  Without another backward glance, Josh pulls me toward him, his eyes locked into mine. “We’ll be here for you,” he says, giving me a delicate kiss on the forehead. “Me, and even little Penny. I’m proud of you.”

  The complicating combination of a stickshift and an eight-year-old means I can’t melt into his arms. Or slide my hand under his shirt. Or slide his hand under mine. But I trust him. Victoria is completely out of the picture, thousands of miles away, cruising happily with her husband. Penny will come around. And Josh would tell me, I reassure myself, if he was upset. Maybe, maybe it could work.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Before.” I’m peering into the oversize makeup mirror, illuminated by the unforgiving perimeter of frosted bulbs surrounding it. Maysie, ponytailed as always and hands on hips, is looking at me in the mirror, too. Since she’s the only woman working for Channel 3’s all-sports radio station, she’s claimed this fourth-floor ladies’ room as her private salon, the place where we convene for high-level gossip and general life discussions. Today, it’s face time.

  “And after.” I use two fingers on each side of my face to yank up what Mom insists are my worrisomely sagging jowls. “Is it that much better? I mean, don’t I look like a lizard with blond hair and red lipstick?” My voice sounds a little lispy, since pulling on my skin spreads my mouth out of its normal range. I let my face drop back from fantasy-35 into reality-46.