“Hell—Oh, hello, Mrs. O’Neill. Yes, Maggie’s here. I’ll put her on, just a moment,” he said as he walked back into the bedroom, having already been on his way.
He handed me the phone. “Hi, Mom—”
“Maggie? Thank God. Oh, I don’t know what I’m going to do, this is so unlike her and—”
“Calm down, Mom. This is so unlike who?”
“Whom, dear. It’s Melanie.”
Melanie again? “What’s wrong?”
“She’s left the hospital. Oh, I just don’t know what’s gotten into her! She couldn’t check herself out without a release from her OB/GYN, so she just up and disappeared on the nursing staff. I found her—she isn’t so beside herself that she’s no longer answering her cell phone—but she is dead set that she has too many pressing details to take care of to stay at the hospital another night. Little Isabella and Sophie are safe and sound in the nursery, thank goodness—she couldn’t sneak two low-birth-weight babies off the floor without raising an alarm. But that should tell you something as to her emotional state. And that’s not the whole of it . . .”
I’ll admit it—I drifted. My mother has a tendency to ramble when she is upset or uptight, and now was one of those moments. Of course, maybe in this one instance she had a right to. It did seem to be a
teensy
bit erratic on Mel’s part to leave without her doctor’s permission. Usually she’d be all for milking the pampering of an extended hospital stay. I guess the whole abandonment prospect was more than enough to drive any hormonal new mommy over the edge.
“Are you going over to her house?” I interrupted.
“I can’t! The girls from Bridge Club are due here at any moment, and I have a quiche in the oven, and—”
“Tell her we’ll go.”
Marcus’s voice cut into my mom’s monologue, and I gaped up at him in surprise.
You sure?
I mouthed. He nodded.
“Mom, Marcus and I will head over there and make sure Mel is okay.”
“You will? Oh, Maggie, that’s a huge load off my mind. Thank you, honey!” Wow, I actually got a thank you? A rare thing. “Margot has Jenna and Courtney at her place tonight, thank goodness. At least I don’t have to worry about them, too. Oh, there’s the doorbell. I have to go.” And with that she abruptly hung up. It was also a rare thing to escape my mom with so little fanfare. That made two things to be thankful for.
It wouldn’t do for me to descend upon Mel’s home wearing nothing more than a big, fluffy bathrobe, so Marcus brought me some clothes from the bag Steff had dropped off on the porch. Jeans were completely out since they wouldn’t fit over my cast, so I selected a pair of stretchy yoga pants and a light cami. Undergarments and a single flip-flop rounded out my casual look.
“Ready?”
I looked up at Marcus and nodded. “Ready.”
He would have carried me out to the truck, but I insisted on the crutches—no point in wearing my welcome out too soon. We barely spoke on the quick blitz over to Mel’s subdivision, but I couldn’t help noticing that he stopped and looked as we passed the gates to the subdivision that the Watkinses lived in, that we had only just left a few short hours ago. I knew we were both thinking about the same things. Wondering . . . were we right?
How Mel had gotten home, I didn’t know, but home she was. The front door stood open and there were lights on all over the house. Occasional movement beyond the curtains proved it.
“Well,” I said, gazing over at Marcus, “I guess I’d better go in.”
“Not without me,” he said, already halfway out his door. He opened mine for me and helped me down, reaching into the back for my crutches. “Come on, Hopalong.”
We opened the storm door and stepped inside. “Melanie?” I called out.
From the rear of the house I heard a thud and a bump. A moment later, Mel peeked her head out of a room down the hall from the kitchen. “Oh, it’s you. What are you doing here? Never mind, don’t tell me, let me guess. Mom sent you.”
She turned back into the room she’d peered out of without another word. Exchanging a concerned glance with Marcus, the two of us moved to follow.
The room was Greg’s home office, one I had been in only once right after the young married couple had signed on the dotted line for the house five years before. I’m sure the room didn’t normally look the way that it looked right now: the drawers lying open and the lamp pulled over to the edge of the desk... all the better to see the file contents, my dear.
“Soooo,” I drawled, leaning on my crutches just inside the door, “what are we doing?”
Mel didn’t stop, and she didn’t look up. “We,” she said in a tone that was short and businesslike, “are trying to find pertinent information in Greg’s files.”
“Are we, now?” I clumped forward, Marcus following, until I could see into the drawer she was rifling through. “What sort of things are we looking for?”
“Bank statements. Insurance information. Investment portfolios. Savings account books. Credit card statements.” Flip, flip, flip went her nimble little fingers. “It was too late for me to hit our bank account today, but that’s okay. It was too late for him to hit it, too. But you can bet, first thing Monday morning, I’ll be waiting at the doors.”
I leaned a hip on the edge of the desk. “Mel, don’t you think this could have waited until you were released from the hospital?”
“Hmm. No. You see, I realized today, as I stared down into the perfect beauty of my two new baby girls and tried to come to terms with the fact that their father found it acceptable to leave them in their first hours of life, how little I know him. He has his job, he works long hours, he has to entertain clients, and I am not invited along. He pays the bills. He takes care of everything, Maggie. He always has. He always insisted. And I let him. Stupidly, maybe. And I realized today how easy it would be for him to have . . .”
“Have a double life?” I supplied when her voice trailed off.
“Yeah. Yeah, a double life.” She sighed and leaned back in the desk chair, pushing uncharacteristically limp blond hair out of her eyes with trembling fingers. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
I thought of the sense I’d had that something was not quite right in Mel and Greg’s perfect life . . . and then I thought of Frannie Watkins and her husband and their new baby, and secrets that refused to stay hidden. “No, I think it’s quite sensible. But Mel, you just had a baby. Two babies. By C-section.”
“And you just broke your ankle. And yet we’re both here, aren’t we,” she said, going back to the task at hand.
Marcus’s eyebrows shot up. Good man that he was, he smothered the smirk that threatened.
“Here, why don’t you lie down on the sofa at least, and let me do that for you,” I told her. “Maybe you’d like a cup of tea. Marcus?”
“Pop would be great,” Mel said, sighing, as she shifted over to the sofa. “With ice.”
Marcus didn’t seem to be fazed to be taking orders. “Back in a sec,” he told me.
When he’d gone, I slipped into the desk chair. “You’re sure you’re all right?” I asked her. I didn’t like her color, or should I say lack of it? A true blond, Melanie was always pale, but not colorless.
She groaned as she leaned back against the pillows and crossed her arms over her stomach, closing her eyes. “I’ll be okay.”
She would be after I took her back to the hospital. Muttering inwardly about my stupid, selfish brother-in-law and his spectacularly jackass behavior, I decided the faster I searched through his files for her, the better. “You’re sure what you’re looking for will be here?”
“Oh, it’ll be there, all right. Greg was nothing if not meticulous about paperwork. He even kept duplicate client files here at home in the event that he needed to access something quickly.”
I paused midflick through the folders. “Really ... ?” I suddenly wondered if that would include a file for the preempted divorce proceedings called off between Harry Jr. and Frannie Watkins . . .
Most of the personal and home files were in this drawer, but that didn’t stop me from opening the next while Mel wasn’t paying attention. A quick check of the folder labels showed contents A through D. I closed the drawer and carefully slid down to the floor in order to get to the lowest one. Surreptitiously peeking around the corner of the desk to make sure that Mel had not noticed, I eased the drawer open. S through Z. Bingo.
I felt a twinge of conscience as I swiftly found the W’s, and my twinge grew even worse as my fingers did the walking through to Watkins, Harold Jr. vs. Watkins, Frances C.... It was none of my business, no way, no how... but would it hurt anything, really? It’s not as though I was reading through someone’s personal information in order to use it against them in some way. Although, when I allowed myself to think that far, that was exactly what I was doing, wasn’t it ... assuming that all the speculation and conjecture and guesswork that Marcus and I had run through had merit. But it wasn’t for personal gain, I amended in my mind. Just... balance in the universe.
Crossing my fingers for karmic luck, I spread the folder out on the wool carpet. The curtains were still drawn tight, leaving the room cast in shadow, and the small desk lamp wasn’t doing enough to cut through the gloom, so I was forced to lean in close for a better view as I quickly began flipping through the papers. Irreconcilable differences, financial statements, blah, blah. All went unperused. That wasn’t what I was looking for.
Toward the back of the file amid various legal documents and written statements, I came across a manila envelope. Quickly I scanned for a return address for some hint as to the contents. “Bartlett Investigations,” I silently read in the upper left corner. That and the words “Private and Confidential” stamped on the envelope made me think I had found what I was looking for.
“What are we doing?”
Marcus’s voice came from right behind me, so suddenly that I nearly leapt from my skin. I clapped my hand over my heart and gave him an accusing stare. “Criminey, you could have killed me.”
He grinned and tweaked a curl that had escaped from my clips. “Sorry about that. I didn’t think I needed to announce myself.”
“Did you find something, Maggie?” Mel asked, straightening from her vantage point over on the leather sofa.
“Erm, not yet,” I told her, pushing the folder over a bit in case she could see around the edge of the desk.
Marcus handed Mel her cold pop, but she waved a hand at it and went back to her reclining posture against the pillows, resting her head against her hand. He set a glass on the edge of the desk for me—pop again, lots of ice. “No tea that I could find.”
“That’s okay. It probably would have been instant, anyway,” I joked.
“Here, let me help you,” he said, taking my hands and pulling me up to a standing position so I could sit on the chair. Then he squatted down and started scooping the folder together.
“Oh, don’t do that—” I started, but it was too late. He had already set it on the desk beneath the lamp. His eyebrows raised when his gaze caught on the contents of the folder. He lifted his to mine. All I could do was shrug, my cheeks hot with embarrassment.
Still I couldn’t help but feel a
little
bit vindicated when he started flipping through the pages. Eager to help, I reached for the manila folder and drew it out on top.
Cautiously, his eyes on Melanie, he reached for a pad of paper and a pen.
Is
that what
I
think it
is?
he wrote.
I took up the pen.
PI
report, I scrawled back.
He glanced over at Mel. No response, so he carefully turned the envelope over.
It was sealed. A large label had been carefully affixed over the top of the retaped envelope, ensuring it stayed that way: “HIGHLY SENSITIVE CONTENTS. REPORT HAS NOT BEEN RELEASED TO CLIENTS. KEEP ON FILE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. NO EXCEPTIONS.”
My gaze flew to his. I grabbed the pen. Has not been
released to clients??
I underscored the s.
Record
definitely still sealed.
Marcus frowned, his mind working a mile a minute. As was mine.
On paper I slashed out:
So if neither Harold Sr. nor Harry Jr. had been advised of Frannie’s affair by the firm...
Didn’t that also mean that neither Watkins had definitive foreknowledge of the affair? Or was I jumping to conclusions ? I was getting myself confused. Perhaps Harry Jr. had had his suspicions, perhaps not ... but at least with this unbroken seal, it was pretty much assured that he did not have the outright pictorial proof that this envelope in all likelihood contained. And without that, there went all of our conjecture about the relationship between Harry Jr. and Nunzio like so much toilet water swirling down the drain.
My head was spinning, fact and supposition and intuition no longer separable in my mind. At least I could take solace in the knowledge that Marcus didn’t seem to be faring any better.
Grandma Cora always used to say, when you dropped a stitch in your knitting, the only thing to do was to unravel it ... It was old-timey wisdom, sure, but it still applied. Go back to the beginning. Go back to basics. Get down to brass tacks. Cut your losses and start all over again fresh.
In other words, just the facts, ma’am. Because that was the problem with speculation. Sometimes the facts got lost in the dirty laundry.
Fact: Someone at the Watkins home that night phoned Nunzio. The police mentioned this, so I could only assume they had data to back it up.
Fact: The police were told that Nunzio was an intruder. Hm.
Fact: The police were also told that they, the Watkins, did not know Nunzio. Which of course had to be refuted by the phone record data, not to mention the fact that Frannie knew Nunzio very well. Even I was witness to that little tidbit.
Fact: Harold Sr. was unlikely to have been at his son’s home that night, which to my mind made him an unlikely factor in Nunzio’s death. Which also made his confession bogus.
Fact: I was talking myself in circles. Was I missing something ? I had to be.