Lie Still (19 page)

Maria’s thick brown hair stuck up like a hip-hop artist’s; her eyes were dilated, black and wild, rimmed by dark crescents of smeared mascara.
Is she high?

She channeled us on a straight path up the formal staircase without saying a word. The house was still asleep. Lights off. My presence felt more wrong than ever. Still, I followed her back into the closet.

The bookshelf had already been pushed away, a rectangle of bright light behind it.

I stopped short at the doorway, the threshold of disaster.

Papers littered the floor, the desk, the reading chair. The file cabinets gaped open, a few lonely folders still hanging, spared. One small square of Oriental carpet stood out in the debris, as if that is where Maria stood while twirling and flinging files and papers like a human tornado.

“I know,” Maria said. “It is bad.”

I found my voice, and it moaned.

“Maria, what have you done?”

“I had to find it. My file. I spent all night going through them. I thought maybe mine was mixed up in someone else’s.” She fidgeted with a strand of hair and spoke so fast I could hardly understand. Her eyes were like two black moons. “Maybe it is not
so
bad. I put all the old files over there.” She gestured toward the desk. As far as I could tell, every file had been trashed and tossed aside, completely compromised. “And the newer ones here.” She made a circular motion that encompassed the floor space.

“No, Maria. It’s bad.” I knelt on the floor, distractedly picking up an empty file folder. Whoever the hell Meredith Lindstrom was, her life story was now scattered somewhere on this floor. My head pounded. Caroline’s files, organized in alphabetical order, tidily stored in a cabinet, had been overwhelming enough to consider. I couldn’t imagine how, in a day or even ten days, anybody could make sense of the maelstrom beneath my feet. And what Maria and I were doing in this room at all … well, now, amid the destruction, it struck me in the gut as not just wrong, but dead, dead wrong.

“Maybe she doesn’t even have a file on you, Maria. Maybe she only said she did.” My mind was charging ahead, recalculating my plan.

Throw the files from your purse on the floor with the rest. Get out
. That’s what my little voice said.

“I told you, I
saw
it. She showed it to me. My file is bad.”

With a burst of clarity, I realized Maria wasn’t talking about illegal relatives being shipped back to Mexico.

“What is it, Maria? What does she have on you?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“Say.”

“OK. OK.” She took a breath. “When I first came here, I could not find good work. I danced in a club. It was the only way I
could make enough money. To send home. My mother and sister … don’t know how I supported them.”

“You were a …?”

“Puta.”
She spat out the word.

I was going to finish that sentence with
stripper
, but OK.

“A whore. For one year. I said to myself, three hundred sixty-five days. No more. A police friend of Mr. Dunn, he came to the club a lot. He saw me there. One day, soon after I got this job, Mr. Dunn, he came to the house. He tried to make me, you know, down there on him.” She pointed to her crotch. “Miz Warwick came home and found us in the kitchen. She made him stop. She scared him. She didn’t fire me. She paid off many lawyers for me to get my papers. You see?” She blew her nose messily into one of the papers from the desk. “I love her. I hate her. She will never let me go. What if she comes back and sees this?”

“Take a deep breath. We’ll just start in one corner and go at it a page at a time.”

I slid my purse off my shoulder, and shoved papers aside with my foot, creating a path. I snatched up four empty Diet Coke cans, a spilled bottle of NoDoz, and a lime-green bottle of a scary-looking energy drink called Ammo. Maria was fully loaded.

In less than an hour, we had cleared a quarter of the carpet space. The desperate, super-caffeinated Maria was surprisingly focused and fast. We placed the empty files in alphabetical order in a circle around the room, and then sorted tediously through the giant pile of papers, matching them to their files. It didn’t take long for me to realize that much of what lay at my feet wasn’t blackmail material at all: innocuous newspaper clippings that went back as far as twenty-five years, Caroline’s notes about somebody’s illness, a birthday party, a society club dinner, a community play.

If somebody died, she dutifully included the local death notice and wrote
closed
on the outside of the file. Compulsive work.
Sad work. A lonely old lady keeping track of a town’s minutiae when much of it could be found in online archives with a few keystrokes. How dangerous could this be? Would someone have been angry and crazy enough to yank her out of her bedroom window?

A green tab marked all of the files allocated to club members. A typed label recorded both the “anniversary date” of when the women joined the club, and their state of membership: active, moved, or deceased.

Someone romantically named Claire Elise Dubois stood out in a category of her own as “ejected.” Maybe a woman with special anger toward Caroline? I paused to read her story. Claire Elise, who liked to be addressed by both names, thank you, had been summarily thrown out three years ago “for consistent failure to properly RSVP.”

I wondered if, in Southern culture, this was worse than child abuse. I almost laughed out loud.

A high, musical voice stopped me.

It was frighteningly close, right outside the closet door, and it sounded very much like Letty Dunn.

“Y
oo-hoo, Maria? Caroline?”

Maria worked faster than I did. She was over to the door in a split second, clicking it shut and throwing an inside lock.

“Who is that?” I hissed.

“Letty.”
If
rojo
was
asshole
in Maria’s vocabulary, then
Letty
was clearly
bitch
. Maria’s fingers were quickly bringing the Mac to life. She clicked on an icon of an ugly cartoon baby labeled
NANNY CAM
.

“My cousin put this in for her. A camera on the front porch, in the hall. In her bedroom, living room, kitchen. To spy on me and that
estupido
cat to make sure we aren’t peeing on her rugs.” Her hands flew expertly across the keyboard. “He teach me. My cousin is very good with computers.”

I could see that.

Letty Dunn was in resplendent HD quality on the screen, bouncing up and down on Caroline’s bed like she was the star of a bad porn movie. I hoped Caroline’s bed could take it.

Her body was squeezed into a tight pink velour tracksuit. A matching pink baseball cap with
NIKE
etched in rhinestones perched uncomfortably on her massive yellow puff of hair. The diamonds on her hands blinked in the light, like a Morse code to outer space. She wore a gold bracelet weighted with oversized charms, the largest one emblazoned with the initials
UDC
. The jingling sound that accompanied every bounce was the industrial-sized key ring in her right hand. It looked like it belonged on a janitor’s belt.

Letty had a key.

“She will go away,” Maria said hopefully, under her breath.

Or maybe not.

Letty launched herself back on the massive bed, moving her arms and legs vigorously like she was making a snow angel. Perhaps it was some new cellulite-busting workout she’d seen on TV.

It was a mesmerizing show: her jiggling fat, the miracle of personal technology, and the general weirdness of Letty Dunn.

“Ma-REEEEEE-aaaaahhh,”
Letty sang out. Her voice was an icy finger in my eardrum.

“Turn the volume off,” I whispered. Maria shook her head.

“Not to worry.” She pointed upward. “Soundproof. Miz Caroline likes to hear no noise while she listens to her classical music.”

“Caroline? You home yet? It’s
LETT-eeeeeee
.” Still, with the singing sound.

Then she abruptly changed tone.

“Maria, are you here? Lazy girl!”

My cell phone vibrated, a rattlesnake underneath a stack of papers across the room. I dropped to the ground, crawling toward it on my hands and knees. I read the text, trying to tamp down panic.

Misty. Lunch.
Not now
.

“Does she know how to get in?” I whispered.

“She can’t hear you,” Maria said. “And she is already in.”

“I can see
that
. Does she know how to get
in here
?”

“Oh. I don’t think so. I locked the door.”

Like that nasty cat, Letty disappeared from the screen to roam around. Maria fiddled with the buttons and split the screen into four sections. Since the nanny cam was a fairly low-tech affair that didn’t cover every room in the house, Letty wandered into view, then out of view. I felt like I was playing a kid’s video game, on a hunt for the evil pink sorceress. My fingers itched for a zap button.

Letty was taking her sweet time with her house tour. She ripped open drawers and cabinets at random, appearing to search for nothing in particular. She swept her finger over a living room lamp shade. She checked the moistness of the soil in a potted palm.

“That is
supposed
to be dry,” Maria mumbled angrily.

If I had any inkling of doubt about Letty’s character, which I didn’t, it vanished when she deliberately knocked an Oriental antique vase off its pedestal in the dining room. The crash tinkled through the speakers like a fake sound effect on an old radio show. A little smile played at the corner of Letty’s mouth.

“Yoo-hoo! Caroline? Maria? Are y’all here? Is everything all right?”

“She probably is the one who took Miz Caroline,” Maria said bitterly. “Or that Holly. One time she asked Miz Caroline to loan me to her so I could wash lice out of her dogs. That club will probably kill me, too. Think I know something.” Her eyes flashed with a little triumph. “Which I do. I know plenty.”

Before I could process any of this, Maria pointed to a fish-eye view of the front porch. “Look. A police.”

A man in uniform was stepping up to the door. I didn’t recognize him. He laid his pointer finger on the buzzer and didn’t take it off. With his other hand, he rapped a sharp, rapid drumbeat.
Three more uniformed cops joined him on the porch. All carried evidence boxes and bags.

“We have to get out of here.” I searched the faces on the porch. No Mike. But he had to be the one who’d finagled a more expansive search warrant. He probably wasn’t far behind.

“Where’s your car?” Maria’s voice was eerily calm.

“A couple of blocks away. Diana Street.”

“Good. You can drop me at Brake-O. My cousin works there.”

On-screen, I watched Letty throw open the door to the cops like she owned the place.

Maria turned up the volume.

“… I wanted to peek in on her maid. Daddy always said, you can’t trust anyone who makes less than $15,000 a year or more than $200,000. You’re probably all in the clear on that front.”

The cops didn’t seem to know what to do with her. Letty was attempting to squeeze by them, using her double basketball of a bottom as a weapon. In the meantime, my mind had landed on an excellent idea. Don’t budge. Hunker down in Caroline’s secret lair with the loaded little fridge until the cops finished their search. They didn’t know this room existed.

But, no. Maria had flipped off the computer and was now shoving the door open. “Let’s go,” Maria said, suddenly urgent. “While she is here bothering.”

Only a second of indecision on my part. I wanted to get the hell out of there.

As Maria led me down the hall, I worried that her escape plan might involve the dumbwaiter, especially when we stopped in front of it, at the back staircase.

“These stairs go to the basement. We can go out that way.
I
could stay if I wanted to. I have a right to be here.” She said this defiantly.

Maria picked up a flashlight from a shelf in the stairwell that
held five different odors of Oust. “The light is broken,” she told me. “You might trip. I will go first.”

Three and a half flights down. As we hit the bottom landing, my eyes registered forms in the darkness: large paintings leaning against the wall; chairs stacked on top of one another; cardboard boxes; a still, human shape ten feet to my left.

I stifled a scream, realizing I was staring at a life-sized Western version of Saint Nick. Cowboy hat. Boots. A sign that said,
Y
’
ALL BE GOOD
. He likely ventured out once a year to stand on the front porch. By now, I could make out sliding glass patio doors on the far wall. The vertical blinds were shut, letting in only a trickle of light.

I almost lost it when the glass door stuck and Maria muttered under her breath and I heard the trample of feet above my head. But Maria gave the door a good, competent whack and we stepped out of the crazy Spanish novella of the past hour into dazzling Texas sun, onto a small patio, in a cranny of Caroline’s expansive backyard.

“I am afraid for my family. That they will be stolen away.” Those were Maria’s last solemn words to me as she hopped out of my car at Brake-O. I wasn’t sure whether she meant by a boogey-man who crept in windows or one who came with an immigration badge.