His car wasn’t parked in the clearing between her and her grandmother’s houses, and she didn’t see it down at the edge of the lake where he often left it. The damp cold sliced through her wool coat as she parked in front of the house then trudged around to the back. His car wasn’t there, either, but when she stepped up on the back porch, Miranda could see the glow of a light in the rear bedroom. Pulling the lake house key out of her pocket, she fit it in the lock, took a deep breath, and threw open the door.
Shit
. Pumped for naked limbs and stammered apologies, what she got was an empty house and a strange sense of disappointment.
In the master suite the bedside lamp glowed and the coverlet had been pulled back, but the sheets appeared fresh and unrumpled. In the nightstand drawer, she found a half-empty box of condoms, something she and Tom hadn’t used since she’d started trying to get pregnant, and Tom’s Dopp Kit sat open on the bathroom counter. The damp sink with its glob of shaving cream told her he’d shaved.
Her husband had been here and it looked like he’d been expecting someone, but if they’d had sex, they hadn’t bothered with the bed. And if he’d been planning on a quickie before dinner at her parents, where was he now?
Miranda thought about the car she’d passed on the way up, but other than confirming it wasn’t Tom’s, she’d been too preoccupied and had too little time to examine it further. Nothing that had happened tonight made sense, and as she went through the house pulling open drawers and looking inside cupboards, she began to feel more and more like Goldilocks outing the three bears. Or Alice in Wonderland stumbling through some X-rated looking glass.
When there was nowhere else to look, she shoved the handcuffs, the blindfold, the oscillating penis, and the crotchless panties she’d found into the garbage. Then, brushing the tears off her cheeks, she drove back down the mountain with one thought in mind: throwing Tom Smith out on his satin-covered behind.
chapter
2
T
om’s butt wasn’t at home when she got there. Nor did it come home later.
At midnight she stopped priming for confrontation and climbed the stairs to their bedroom where, for the third time that night, she began to open drawers. Though she was now braced to find satin or lace, she found neither. She didn’t find anything in white cotton either, because Tom’s drawers were completely empty. In the walk-in closet she found more of the same. Or was that none of the same?
Numb now, she turned and walked back into the bedroom, stopping at the king-size bed she’d shared with Tom Smith for the last fifteen years.
There, propped on her pillow, sat a small square envelope. Miranda sank onto the edge of the bed, picked up the envelope, and pried it open with clumsy fingers.
In a firm hand, with well-formed curves and nicely dotted
i
’s, Tom had written,
Dear Miranda,
By now you’ve probably figured out that I’m not coming back. We had a good run, but there’s no need to look for me. I don’t plan to be found. I’m sorry about Ballantyne. Sorry about a lot of things. Have a nice life.
Tom
Miranda balled up the note and threw it at the dresser mirror as the pressure built behind her eyelids.
Her husband liked to dress up like Madonna and had affairs with other women. Her husband had left her without giving her the chance to throw him out first. This absolutely could not be happening to her.
The tears went into free fall and Miranda didn’t bother to wipe them away. Her husband wore black lace and red satin and he didn’t love her anymore.
The tears slid down her cheeks and took the last of her makeup with them; she tasted their hot saltiness as they plopped into the corners of her mouth.
She lost track of how long she cried, but when she finally looked into the mirror, a pitiful woman stared back. Miranda sat up straighter and squared her shoulders, but the woman still had tears streaming down her face. Searching for something to cling to, Miranda grabbed onto the pageant instruction her mother had been drilling into her since her fifth birthday, and which she now—more gently—passed on to others.
Okay, then. Sometimes you didn’t win the crown. Sometimes, though she didn’t have prior personal experience with this, you didn’t even make the final five. You could still put on the smile, and you could still walk the walk. If there was anything she knew how to do, it was that.
She’d get right on it just as soon as the woman in the mirror stopped crying.
As it turned out, the woman in the mirror possessed an inexhaustible supply of tears. She cried for hours at a time, eating up the entire weekend with body-wracking sobs that trickled down to wimpy little sniffles, then built back up again.
The future was too bleak to contemplate, and the past, at least in hindsight, didn’t look all that attractive, either. Unsure what else to do, Miranda picked up the phone, forced the quiver from her voice, and used a fictional flu to cancel everything. Then she pulled the covers up over her head and hid from the world while the emptiness washed over her.
Her grandmother Richards was the first to breach Miranda’s beachhead of fictional germs and very real misery.
A week after Tom’s decampment, Gran appeared in Miranda’s bedroom holding an artfully arranged tray that bore a heavenly-smelling bowl of soup and a plate of saltines. A glass of water with its requisite slice of lemon sat next to a folded linen napkin. A single rose stood in one of Miranda’s cut-glass bud vases.
At seventy-five, Cynthia Ballantyne Richards was no longer as tall as she had once been, but her loss of height did not detract from her regal bearing. Her short white hair was as artfully arranged as the tray, and she wore one of her bridge-at-the-club uniforms—a red wool pantsuit with an Hermès scarf tucked into the neckline.
Her grandmother had always been the most astounding mixture of genteel sophistication and backwoods outspokenness, what Miranda secretly thought of as Granny Clampett after boarding school and a European tour.
Without asking, she sat down on the side of the bed and settled the tray across Miranda’s lap.
Miranda had never been so glad—or so horrified—to see anyone in her life. Tom’s taste in underwear and his empty closet loomed between them. She had never successfully lied to her grandmother, and they both knew it.
“Do you know what day this is?” her grandmother asked.
“No.” The aroma of her grandmother’s chicken vegetable soup wafted up from the tray, and Miranda breathed it in.
“Do you care?”
“No, not really.”
Her grandmother reached over, unfolded the napkin, and tucked it into Miranda’s pajama top. Then she picked up the spoon and placed it in Miranda’s hand.
“This, too, shall pass.”
Miranda tore her gaze from the soup, which was making her mouth water, to stare up into her grandmother’s eyes. A fine line of wrinkles radiated outward from their corners, and somehow, without Miranda’s noticing, her grandmother’s skin had become paper-thin.
“Yes, well . . .”
“Where’s Tom?”
Miranda froze, the spoon midway to the beckoning soup. But it was all too raw, too humiliating to share with her family. “He’s, um, out.”
Out of the house. Out of my life.
“Out of town.”
Something flickered in her grandmother’s eyes and for a long moment they stared at each other, weighing the silence, waiting for the other to speak. Miranda had the oddest sense that her grandmother knew . . . something.
Please, God,
she thought,
please don’t let it be the cross-dressing part.
She braced herself for the third degree, though that was more her mother’s style than Gran’s, and breathed a huge sigh of relief when her grandmother let the subject pass.
“The Lord does not give us burdens without equipping us to carry them.”
She definitely knew something. Something that she didn’t want to say and which Miranda definitely didn’t want to hear. Stalling, Miranda dipped her spoon into the soup and brought it to her lips.
“Mmmm, Gran, nobody makes chicken vegetable like you do.”
One of her grandmother’s silver eyebrows rose. “I am not vain about my cooking.”
“No, no, of course not.” Miranda took another spoonful and almost sighed at the warmth and perfection of it. “Though you easily could be.”
Like she had as a child, Miranda dipped a saltine in the soup and ate most of it in one bite.
“Lord, you’re half starved.”
“Mmmph.” Miranda swallowed. “I haven’t had much of an appetite.” Nor could she remember when she had last eaten.
“Yes, I can imagine.” Her grandmother speared her with a look but didn’t ask what she’d been eating or when Tom would be back, for which Miranda was deeply grateful.
“You know, sometimes disaster and opportunity are just opposite sides of a single coin. It’s only when we’re tested that we find the motivation to become more than we have been.”
Miranda reached the bottom of the bowl and the end of the saltines. If anyone but her grandmother had been sitting there, she would have lifted the bowl to her lips to drain the last drop.
“You’re sounding awfully prophetic, Gran.” She raised her own eyebrow in direct imitation. “But you make a mean bowl of chicken vegetable.”
Her eyelids were heavy and her stomach felt pleasantly full for the first time in a week. The hurt and horror of Tom’s betrayal was still there, and she had no more idea how to handle things today than she had a week ago, but her Gran was here. She wasn’t completely alone.
Her eyelids fluttered open as her grandmother stood and lifted the tray off Miranda’s lap, leaving the rose on her nightstand.
“I think there are things you’ll tell me when you’re ready, Miranda. In the meantime, all I ask is that you remember who you are and where your responsibilities lie.”
“Wow, Gran.” Miranda yawned and stretched, comforted by her grandmother’s presence and the warmth of the soup now filling her belly. “I’m going to have to nominate you for Town Oracle.” She yawned again. “Maybe Ballantyne should sponsor a Mystical Wise Woman Pageant.”
Her grandmother bent over and kissed the top of her head, and for a brief moment Miranda was a little girl again, and all was right with her world.
“Get some sleep, Miranda. It’ll help you mend. I’ll lock up on my way out.”
For the first time since Tom’s departure, Miranda slept for more than a few minutes at a time. She slept for eleven hours, deeply and completely and without a single dream about Tom—or what his absence would do to her life.
She woke at 7
A
.
M
. and flicked on the television set. She lay there for a while half listening to the news, letting her mind wander, until the tragic story of a small-town manufacturer grabbed her attention.
It was widgets, not bras, and the town was called Henryville, not Truro. But the company had been clipping right along for several generations, until the family member running it absconded with a large chunk of the employee pension fund.
Miranda’s eyes flew open, and she sat straight up in bed as she realized it wasn’t just her and their marriage that Tom had pummeled so mercilessly. She didn’t know what sorts of red flags he’d waved at Fidelity National, but he’d left Ballantyne, her family’s single most important asset, leaderless. If anything happened to the company it wasn’t just her family who would suffer; its three hundred employees would be out of work.
Miranda threw the covers off, sat up, and swung her legs over the side of the bed.
Without jobs, and no other sizable employer around to provide new ones, they and their families would be wiped out.
And so would Truro.
Oh, God
.
Her legs were weak from lack of use, but Miranda made it to the dresser, where she pulled out underclothes and stared in dismay at her reflection in the mirror.
The thick dark hair that normally hung down her back stuck straight out in an impressive Medusa imitation, and her face was so pale that the freckles across the bridge of her nose stood out like chocolate chips on an underdone cookie. Her green eyes looked as dull as the algae that sometimes filled the pond out back, and she had a bad feeling that she’d lost weight—not a plus when you were almost six feet tall and already skinny as a rail.
Miranda tried a smile. Her lips quivered and made her look like a dog that had just spotted the rolled-up newspaper in its master’s hand—but at least she wasn’t crying anymore. At this point, a day without tears was way up there next to winning the swimsuit competition and making the top ten. Funny how low your expectations could drop.
In the master bath she flicked on the small TV and confirmed that it was Monday morning, which meant she’d spent two more days feeling sorry for herself than it had taken God to create the universe.
Careful not to confront herself in the mirror again, Miranda stripped off her pajamas and stepped under a pulsing stream of hot water. Cradled in the steamy warmth, Miranda drew air into her lungs and turned her face up to the stream of water, wishing she could stay in this warm wonderful place forever.
For a few bracing moments she stood naked and alone in her steamy cocoon. Then she forced herself to open the glass door, reach for a towel, and step back into the real world.
It was time to get down to the plant and hunt for clues to where Tom had gone, and find out how bad things really were at Ballantyne.
chapter
3
M
iranda drove through the front gate of Ballantyne Bras’ corporate headquarters, wincing as she always did as she passed under the archway that read
BALLANTYNE BRAS
. . .
SUPPORTING TRURO FOR OVER A HUNDRED YEARS
.
She ignored the security guard’s surprise—he couldn’t be any more startled to see her than she was to be here at eight-thirty on a Monday morning—and parked her BMW in Tom’s spot.