Monday's Lie (24 page)

I was very good at looking for things. Yet, here I stood, empty-handed.

Perhaps, I thought, this wasn't a matter of spot-the-difference in this room, or any other room. Maybe the clue was tucked into something more subtle. Maybe today's game was a matter of spot-the-difference in this life, not necessarily this house.

I turned a circle in the middle of the den and remembered the floor strewn with boxes. I remembered having been concerned that we didn't have enough stuff to fill up the upgraded space. We were just kids, barely able to afford a real house. I remembered complaining that it echoed. We talked about throwing parties, not having babies. I remembered the alienness of not knowing how far down along the wall to reach for the light switch, and not knowing for the longest time which one controlled each fixture. I remembered the blissful little realizations that I felt at home as the weeks turned to months turned to years. We had been content here for a long stretch.

My mother and I had solidly reconnected in this house, finally. She'd come here to read her last books and tick off the lists of the films she'd missed. She'd been allowed to end it all when she chose to because she'd been here and not in a hospital. She had been grateful to me here, and I'd been so, so grateful for her gratitude.

Then life had slid down, slowly, and in so many ways, to something less satisfactory, and eventually into a lousy mess. But at least in some areas we'd pulled up, hadn't we?

That was the difference.

Up until recently, we'd been grinding away since my mother died, more contentious, less at ease in our niches. Then we'd been rewarded with the distraction of a windfall: my mother's legacy fund. We were doing better on paper, anyway. Anyone who had seen us on brash display in these last few weeks would have seen fit, smiling, smooching fools. He'd made such a show of us lately. And I, to try to avoid looking abnormal, would go ahead and dance when he would metaphorically sing so that our audience wouldn't feel uncomfortable—or would at least feel less uncomfortable. We were about to take the trip of a lifetime. . . .

I'm not worried about the trip.

My eyes stopped on the rich navy portfolio with its slick, gold-foiled logo: Best of All Worlds—Travel Agents and Timeshare Brokers. I sat in the swiveling chair and took the file into my lap. I'd already read through it days ago, which was the excuse I'd used to skip over it today, the very day I was actually looking for something important. I went through it again, page by page.

The tickle got a solid clawing at the back of the contract. When I'd first looked through the file, I hadn't read every bit of the endless fine print that Patrick had signed for. I had read the itinerary. I had admired the brochures for the ports of call and imagined the day-trips and excursions. I had tried to feel happy that I'd soon see the views in those artfully snapped photos, but with my own eyes—and with my dour husband, hopefully getting happier, beside me. But I had glazed over at the beginning of the fat ream of addenda and agreements and disclaimers that padded the back quarter of the stack.

Historically, my husband had declined every extended warranty he'd ever been offered. He shunned the salesmen's enhanced-protection provisos and any additional rust, fire, loss, leakage, insect, hail, and act-of-God plans for whatever might get ruined by such sundry. Those crafty deals, according to Patrick, were nothing but scams for suckers who couldn't say no. He'd said it a hundred times. He didn't second-guess his well-thought-out purchases, and he wouldn't part with an extra dime against the possibility of vague what-if scenarios.

But Patrick had bought travel insurance for this trip. The top-shelf policy, too, that covered luggage loss or theft, weather troubles, travel delays, medical emergencies, and provided a full refund or transfer of tickets for passengers unable to complete the itinerary due to serious illness or death.

I
t
seemed there wasn't much my mother hated more than denial. It was lying, laziness, and wasting time all rolled into one tidy sin. And it had only one remedy: stop it. If she ever wrangled the offense, I didn't know what it looked like on her face. I never felt farther from her than when I was, in her words,
leaving
poor, old reality standing on the side of the road with its thumb out
.

Once I had read the travel-insurance addendum all the way through, I tucked it back into the obscenely luxurious folder and left for work. I ran the radio up loud and babbled a running commentary on the relative merits of my fellow commuters, wishing terrible things on every driver who distinguished himself in any way from the pack of whirring metal boxes around me—from whatever brand of moron would buy such a fucking ugly snot-green Martian box, to the ridiculous hipster singing his heart out, blessedly behind safety glass, to the undoubtedly nice old lady who should have had her license cryogenically frozen to be reunited with her once they'd figured out how to do courage transplants on the terminally flinchy.

By the time I got to my office I thoroughly hated myself.

I had my ID this time, but I went through the lobby anyway, unsure of what I wanted out of a confrontation with Victor.

“There she is! Hey, lady, where you been hiiiiidin'?”

“What's my name?” I clapped my hand over the photo badge dangling around my neck.

“Huh?”

“What's my name? I mean, you miss me so terribly all the time. Surely you know my name by now?”

Victor rolled his ogle-y eyes and smirked. “What did that guy say? That
Romeo and Juliet
guy? He said, ‘What's in a name?' That's my philosophy, too—what's in a name? It's all the same. See? Poetry.”

“Hmmm. Shakespeare. Okay, I didn't see that coming.”

He pursed his lips and nodded. “Mmmm. Hmmm. Well, you're lookin' fiiiine, Miz—” He leaned in well closer than he needed to read my tag, which I'd let go. “Miz Aldrich.”

“Oh, I doubt that I'm looking anywhere close to fine.” I swiped my card and the turnstile allowed me through.

“Aw, no. It's all good. Miiiiiiighty fine, just like I said, 'cept I'm thinkin' you could do with just a little bit of a smiiiile on your face.”

I leaned into his space and thumped my palm on the counter. Victor's eyebrows did a twitchy little dance to the top of their reach. “You know what I think? I think you practice all the long
i
-sound words you can think of. I think you practice them in the mirror, actually. And I think you probably do this a lot because there's nobody around at home to tell you to cut it out. But it's creepy and I think you know it's creepy. And for you, it's funny to be a creeper because you're bored. And I can see where you'd get bored sitting down in this cave all day. But you know what, Victor?” I leaned in a little farther. “You don't bother me anymore. So let's make a deal, you and me. I'll come through this lobby every weekday morning, and every weekday evening, and twice on the lunch hour, and you can long-
i
and eyyyyyyyeball me all you want and I won't file a complaint with”—I leaned in well closer than I needed to read the embroidered logo on his uniform shirt—“Gateway Security. In exchange, you leave everyone else alone.”

His eyebrows found an extra millimeter of distance from his eyes.

“I don't want to hear of one more woman all skeeved out by her walk through the lobby. You got that? You keep your eyes and
iiiiiiiii
s to yourself. Of course, I'll be missing out on my daily exercise up and down those stairs, but I don't need to worry that I'll gain any weight. I don't mind being your little thrill if you don't mind being my appetite suppressant.”

I left him gawping and turned for the elevators.

“Stop watching my ass, Victor,” I called without turning around. A bump and a rattle of keys, then an officious rustle of paper, came in answer from the security desk behind me.

•  •  •

I don't know that I felt better exactly, but I'd at least cut the blue wire for a while.

Then, all of a sudden, back-to-back meetings had never been so interesting. I made concentration an Olympic event for the rest of the morning, and in a burst of not letting my mind wander during the second roundtable discussion, I discovered a pretty tidy solution to the problem of a nagging data conflict that had been plaguing our development team for half a year. I earned gold-star nods from everyone at the table.

But I kept talking. I ate up every pause so that no one could gather up their things without looking rude. I had an epiphany for a third meeting just as the chair races were under way, mere inches from setting everyone free. The squeaking wheels and groaning vinyl muffled their sighs as they all scooched back into position at the table, and we planned the agenda for my latest (and last) bright idea.

The clock eased forward to noon. Lunch was calling them. It was screaming at me.

On the way back to my office, I insinuated myself into a conversation about an upcoming 5K charity race even though I wasn't a runner anymore. Then I stopped by Marco's office to see if he had pictures of his new baby. He had loads, thank the gods.

“There you are,” said Jill. I could have kissed her. Marco had been trying to get rid of me for five minutes and I was running out of small-talk ammo.

“Hi! What's up?” I sounded like a lunatic.

“Security has been calling. They're looking for you. There's some guy downstairs, waiting to see you? Brian Men—Menefee, Mena—something.”

Oh.

•  •  •

“I'm not sure I can adequately express how much I do
not
want to talk to you right now,” I said from the turnstile.

From behind the safety of his desk, Victor offered Brian a sympathetic look.

“Can we talk?” Brian asked.

“What about?”

“I don't like the way we left things.”

“What, they didn't give you an A on your report?”

“This isn't a professional visit,” said Brian. “Can we get out of here? Have you had lunch? Let me at least buy you lunch.”

I had to kill the next hour somehow anyway.

•  •  •

I ordered soup.

“That's all you're having?” Brian asked.

“I'm probably not even having that. I'm not very hungry.”

Water was sipped. Napkins were flourished into place. Windows were stared through. It was nerve-racking enough to completely blank my brain, which made it my new favorite thing ever.

Brian broke my reverie. “Okay, look, I had a lot of respect for your mother. And I respect you, too.”

“You don't know me well enough to respect me.”

“Right. But I generally start out thinking well of people and chainsaw down the pedestal from there as things go along.”

“It shouldn't take you long to bury me, then.”

“Don't say that,” he said.

“Okay.”

“But it was more than just standard respect. You have to understand. I admired Annette. And I liked her. It's a funny thing, even in the years between working with her, if her name ever came up in passing, she just came right back to me—vivid, you know. Even now. She gets stuck in your head, like a song.”

I sighed. “Yes. She was something, my mother.”

“She really was. And if she were alive, she'd be ten kinds of pissed off that I've upset you like this.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

I laughed in spite of myself. “Knew her that well, did you? Are we getting to the part where you make a confession I don't want to hear? Were you almost my stepfather or something?”

“No. Good God. Nothing like that. I know because she told me.” Brian slid a jump drive across the table. “Like I said, whenever she comes up in conversation, I remember her so clearly. So all of this, it made me think back to part of the last interview she and I had, right before we were done. I went through the audio and snipped it out for you. Hopefully it'll clear up any lingering questions about my attachment to this case, about why I'm here. Maybe it could even serve as an apology of sorts.”

I looked at the gray plastic bar on the table, but didn't reach for it. “How much trouble are we going to get in for that?”

Brian chuckled, a little perforated exhale. “You've got us all wrong. You know it's not like that. It's a bureaucracy made up of a million little, low-tech cogs. And a few big, toothy important and fancy ones. Nothing rests on a snippet of old conversation on a jump drive I bought yesterday at Office Depot. It has to be that way or the whole machine falls apart. You have to see that. It can only work as a hive of bit players. They have to let people be able to live a life while they do the job. They'd get no takers otherwise. There aren't many who are cut out for nonstop cloak-and-dagger. I mean, your mom was Annette Vess, for God's sake, and there weren't any exploding pens in the drawers or villains lurking behind every door.”

“Only on the night you were there.”

“Touché.”

“So let me rephrase. How much would this annoy Paul Rowland?” I tipped my head at the jump drive.

Brian shrugged. “He wouldn't like it, but not because it's sensitive or anything. There's something about Annette that was hanging over Rowland's head. Everyone kind of knows it and he's extracranky about anything that has to do with her. Your mother had him by the short hairs somehow. But the interviews were pretty standard.

“Admittedly, his insistence on leaving the taps until the end was a little less typical. But after all of it was filed away in the end, there was nothing of special interest, except that last seventy-two minutes of music. So if he knew that you had heard this, it wouldn't really be a big thing. He'd just . . . Well, you'll see.”

My soup arrived. I surprised myself and finished it all.