Lie Still (16 page)

“Are you too tired to help me more?” she asked, a little petulantly.

I glanced at my watch. “I can work with you in there for a little while.” In closer quarters, where I could quiz her about Caroline and her damn club.

I wanted to snatch those words back once she reopened the doors, automatic lights flooding a cavernous white space. I should have started in here, to hell with the panties.

Two or three hundred shoes rested on floor-to-ceiling glass shelves, individually spotlighted, toes pointing every which way.
And plenty of empty shelves where the piles dumped on the floor were supposed to go. Only the hanging clothes were undisturbed, hanging in neat, tight lines, organized by color, and Caroline liked color. Especially red.

“Every shoe must have two inches between each, with toes pointing straight out,” Maria recited. “Exactly. Like this.” She demonstrated on a pair of glossy black evening shoes. I half expected her to hand me a ruler. Maria slid a small ladder in place and proceeded to climb it. “The
rojo
 … thought she hid something in her shoes. I’ll do top. You do bottom.”

“Did he find anything?”

“No.”

“Maria, where do you think Caroline is?” I kept my eyes on the pair of Josef Seibel leather clogs in my hands. They seemed very un-Caroline.

“I don’t know. I told the police this.” Defensive.

“Was she depressed? Her friends say she had become a little paranoid.”

“I’m not sure what this word—
paranoid
—means. What friends? They are all bitches.”

I appreciated her rude assessment. The woman who washed Caroline’s underwear, who picked her hair out of the shower drain, who spent more time with her than anyone on earth, would know.

“They are all calling here, all the time, leaving messages. Checking. Like they care. Last night, I found Miz Jenny and Miz Mary Ann creeping around the backyard in bug masks. I recognize Miz Jenny’s
tetas falsas
or I might have called the police. They said they were making sure that Miz Caroline hadn’t fallen behind a bush.”

I thought for a second. “Night vision goggles?”

“
Si
. Miz Jenny said she borrowed them from her husband’s hunting closet.”

Maria stepped carefully off the ladder. Her own shoes were white, clunky, and rubber-soled. Nurse’s shoes, before nurses started hipping it up with Crocs and New Balance.

Color flared on her cheeks. “Why did you show up at my home? I do not think you are the type for a babysitter.”

“Truthfully, because I need you. I’m out of my element here. Caroline invited me over to pass around that ridiculous box. Then someone dropped off a little blackmail package at my house. Was that Caroline’s idea?”

About six expressions played across the maid’s face. First, surprise. So she
didn’t
drop off the package. None of her facial tics after that were terribly sympathetic. In fact, the one she was wearing now could almost be described as … happy.

“It’s OK,” she assured me eagerly. “She blackmails all the ladies. Me. She provided fake papers for my sister and niece. This is what I am worried about with that cop. Violet was only one year old when she rode across the border in the trunk of a car. So sometimes Mrs. Caroline threatens to expose them. She helps but there is always a price.” Her voice trailed into bitterness. “If you are not going to hire me right now, I can’t say more. I will make you lunch. For
el nino
.” She pointed to my stomach and walked out. Conversation over.

It felt both safe and illicit to be alone. It reminded me of the naïve middle-schooler I once was, snooping in my parents’ closet, discovering a box of condoms and my mother’s vibrator. Excited and a little horrified. Guilty.

I shook it off. Maria had asked me here, to help. We were almost done. And I
was
hungry. My head felt a little light. I ran my hand along a row of historical romances stuffed neatly in a bookshelf at the end of the closet. Maybe where Caroline got her ideas. They weren’t real books, I realized. Even in her closet, Caroline was creating a façade. I leaned back against the shelf and closed my eyes. Suddenly, top to bottom, my world was
moving. I fell backward, almost stabbing myself with a five-inch heel.

The bookcase was a camouflaged door.

I’d just read about this trend while thumbing magazines in my OB’s office in New York. High-def, high-concept secret rooms that whisked adults back to the fantasies of their childhoods while conveniently soundproofing them from their own kids. At the time, I thought it was ridiculous. But here I was, staring into a black crack, wondering what Caroline would hide. Hopefully just the comfortable Hanes granny panties she really wore.

“Don’t let anything shock you,” a friend said when I told her about our impending move to Texas. “Guns, babies, reputation. They’ll do anything to protect them.”

I let go of the absurdity of the moment, of the foghorn warning in my head, and stood up.

I laid my palm flat on
Romancing Mister Bridgerton
and
How to Woo a Reluctant Lady
.

I gave the shelf a push, wondering whether I was entering Caroline’s tomb.

A
foot in, and I was still blind. I slid my right hand up and down the wall until it touched a switch that flooded light into a decent-sized room, about 12 × 15 feet.

It took a second for my eyes to adjust.

I didn’t see a lonely, crazy woman decaying on the floor or rolling around in a mad tryst with Mr. Bridgerton.

A gorgeous antique Oriental rug lay at my feet, free of blood.

I smelled roses. Air freshener, I thought, until I saw the vase of fresh flowers on the built-in desk that held a state-of-the-art iMac. My gaze swiveled to a well-stocked glass-fronted refrigerator, a TV/stereo console, and a Kindle resting on a cushy leather
chair. I wouldn’t starve or die of dehydration or boredom if Maria shut the door behind me. My eyes fixed themselves on a built-in row of file cabinets lined against the left wall.

How long had Maria been gone? Five minutes? Ten?

I walked over to the computer screen. The pink room’s nasty cat stared back at me from the screensaver. Then he howled, I screamed, and he stalked casually off the screen. Not a screensaver. A video? I peered closer, into that hideous pink room. I checked my watch. The cat was licking his paws. On the wall above him, a Barbie clock was keeping real time.

Caroline was spying on her cat.

I took a shaky breath. My eyes wandered from the screen to the neat stack of flat manila folders of varying thicknesses resting beside it.

The one on top had my name on it.

My hand poised to open it just as my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I jumped like the cat had leapt out of the screen.
Dammit
.

I glanced down. A text from Misty.

Lunch tomorrow?

I texted back,
K
. And thought,
Now go away, Misty
.

I sat down at Caroline’s desk and balanced the folder on my lap, my heart running laps. I flipped it open. A two-year-old color snapshot of me at an art gallery opening was paper-clipped to the top left corner of the first page. Caught in profile, holding a glass of champagne. I wore a pale blue silk dress from a designer thrift shop in Chinatown and Lucy’s high silver heels. I was slightly drunk, trying to sell an A-list painting to a B-list celebrity.

It was attached to the first page of a report from a private detective agency in Dallas named Diskreet. Not a discreet name. Not even klever.

I refocused on the page.

Birth name: Emily Alena Waters
.

Birthplace: Peekskill, New York
.

My Social Security number, elementary school, middle school, and high school, college transcripts, SAT scores, hospitalizations, miscarriages, the crash that killed my parents.

The prisoner number assigned to the teenage drunk driver who killed them.

My job history, wedding date, husband’s name and occupation, closest living relatives—every bit blazingly accurate.

It mentioned nothing of the missing year between my sophomore and junior years in college. I thumbed impatiently to the second page.

I learned that my husband was faithful, that a New York adoption agency hesitated to give us a baby because of Mike’s occupation, and that our net worth totaled around $370,000. I shivered, because I knew what had to be coming.

I tore through the file but couldn’t find a duplicate of the rape report. I settled on a paper-clipped bundle of Xeroxed newspaper stories, a more complete set than my own. Each headline drove me a little deeper into panic.

My history in a few tidy words.

I was mesmerized by a row of five headshots, a youthful me and four other girls unlucky enough to crawl into Pierce Martin’s
web. It could be the same girl photographed five times and cropped into a one-inch square. Pierce’s type. Smooth, shoulder-length brown hair, dark eyes, fresh, bright faces worthy of Neutrogena commercials. Virginal.

Thirteen years ago, we five became sisters of sorts. We’d waited together nervously in a makeshift holding cell outside the campus librarian’s office, the small sitting area where the police came to get us one by one for an interview.

“Fact-gathering,” the police told us.

I was the last one to arrive. The pretty Chi Omega, dressed in a blue cashmere cardigan and about five hundred bucks of Brighton jewelry, raised a hand to go first. I heard something indignant about “my daddy” before the door clicked closed.

The co-ed beside me on the couch compulsively rubbed the rosary trailing out of her purse. The prettiest of us stuck out her hand, introduced herself as “Lisa, pre-med,” and then calmly studied for a biology test at a small table.

A long-legged yogi named Margaret sat in a lotus position in the middle of the carpet and meditated, much to the chagrin of the police officer in charge of making sure we didn’t speak to one another. I guess he decided that even he shouldn’t interrupt a conversation between Margaret and whatever higher power she was channeling.

That left me, chewing my thumb raw, wondering how I ended up here, sucked in by a sexual predator, thinking I should have called my parents for a lawyer even though the police said I didn’t need one.

That turned out to be true. They never even made it to the interview stage with me or Rosary Girl. Maybe some of her vigorous bead rubbing worked, although I didn’t believe so much in the power of prayer at that point. More likely, the police realized they had opened the gate on a rabid dog. Pierce’s parents were major endowment contributors. Alumni royalty.

I had watched the three other girls exit their interviews.
They’d obviously been crying, except for Lisa, pre-med, who rolled her eyes at Rosary Girl and me on the way out the door.

“Fucking not guilty,” she mouthed.

The detective in charge directed his attention to the two of us. “I think we have enough for now.” His face had the look of someone who’d eaten a plateful of bad shrimp. What he didn’t appear was the slightest bit concerned about a girl gnawing her thumb bloody and another running rosary beads through her teeth. “We’d like to speak to the Martin parents about our findings before continuing our interviews. This is a delicate matter for you and the campus. We’ll stay in touch. Keep your mouths shut. That’s best for everyone.”

Three weeks later, I stepped off a plane in Rome with a new hair color and never heard a word from the police again.

Now my fingers lingered over a narrow column copied crookedly on a sea of white paper, dated a month after I’d run out of town.

A black pen had made a loop around the third item, which announced that police were declaring Pierce Martin’s murder case inactive “due to lack of witnesses and evidence.”

Who did I have to thank for this lifetime reprieve?

The Chi Omega’s rich daddy? Rosary Girl’s direct line to God?

The incompetent campus policewoman who dismissed my rape report? Pierce’s mother, to protect his reputation, her reputation, after learning more than she wanted to know about her precious son from the police?

I hadn’t been the only girl in that interview waiting room whose body and soul had been torn apart by Pierce Martin. The police
knew
. I’d lay my life down on that.

I’d buried everything as deep as I could thirteen years ago. I’d vanished for a year, cutting ties to everyone except my parents, who agreed to support a year abroad at a small university in Rome. They hoped the experience would help heal me. I never
even registered at the university. My parents wired a monthly check to a Rome bank. An anonymous person forwarded each one to me after the first month without a single bit of hassle, even though I asked them to address the envelope to another girl’s name, two hundred miles away. The Italians understand that questions don’t always need to be asked.

I wrote my parents pure fantasy about my life: how I painted and studied during the week and backpacked to European landmarks on the weekends with a sisterly roommate who didn’t exist. I sent them little pencil sketches, all drawn from postcards I bought in a secondhand bookstore.

I returned home to my parents as myself, with my old name and my real hair color, hoping to leave my guilt and bewilderment behind. Instead, it chased me across the ocean, receding, crashing, teasing, always threatening to drag me under for the last time.

I
glanced at my watch, a cheap piece with a flat yellow smiley face and a fake white leather band that I bought in Times Square for $7. It always ran about five minutes slow, which I figured was more than fair for the price.

Eleven minutes plus five had passed since Maria left me alone in the closet. I’d thumbed through the rest of the folders on the desk but didn’t recognize any names. I stuck my own file in my purse without any hesitation.