Skeleton Key (5 page)

“I'm going to call the town police,” she said. “We should have done this hours ago. There may have been an accident”

“You told me not to worry,” Zara Anne said stubbornly.

The phone rang and rang in Faye's ear. Then it was picked up and Faye recognized the voice of Rita Venotti, who seemed to have been on the night shift at the police department before forever.

“Oh, Rita,” Faye said. And then she explained, in detail, so that Rita wouldn't say what Zara Anne had, that it had happened before, that there was nothing to worry about.

“I could send somebody out,” Rita said. “I could send Danny Hazelton. Would that be all right?”

“That would be fine,” Faye said.

“We don't have any accidents over the radio,” Rita said. “I don't think you have to worry about that. We monitor the state police all the time.”

“Maybe it was professional thieves, then,” Faye said. “Although it hardly seems possible.”

“I know, I know,” Rita said. “It hardly does seem possible. It used to be you never had to worry about any of that out here.”

Faye put the phone down. Zara Anne was wielding the remote, punching channels as if her life depended on them. Sometimes, late at night, she settled on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and watched the PTL club as if it were a documentary. Now she had found a rerun of an ancient
Hawaii Five-O
episode. Jack Lord was looking just as tense and phony as he ever had.

“Zara Anne,” Faye said carefully. “I've been meaning
to talk to you about some things. I've been meaning to talk to you about us.”

“You've been meaning to throw me out,” Zara Anne said. “I could see it coming.”

“I don't think it's a question of throwing you out,” Faye said. “I think it's more of the order of, well—”

“Sometimes I really do believe in God,” Zara Anne said. “I believe in a God of the devil. If you get what I mean.”

“No. No, I don't.”

“I bet nobody ever threw that girl out. The rich one. I bet she gets to stay anywhere she wants for as long as she wants. I bet all she has to do to get a lover is say she wants one, and there it is.”

“It?”

Zara Anne swivelled her head around. Her face was mottled with red. The skin of her face was slack and loose and creased, like polyester that has been left to wrinkle at the bottom of a laundry basket. Faye didn't think she could have been this unattractive when she first came here. In fact, Faye was sure she couldn't have been. If Zara Anne had been this unattractive, Faye would never have brought her home.

“If you think you're going to get rid of me just by saying so,” Zara Anne said, “you're going to have to think again. I'm not a piece of cardboard. I'm not here just so that you can push me around.”

“I don't want to push you around,” Faye said, automatically, but the thought came to her that this possibly wasn't true. It would be a great deal of help if she
could
push Zara Anne around, at least to the extent of getting her to move a little. Sweep the floor. Remember to pick up her clothes instead of leaving them where they fell as she took them off, even if they fell in the middle of the upstairs hall, because she took them off on the way to the shower.

Zara Anne had drifted off again, her mind on the television set or the air or wherever. “You can't push me around,” she said again, but her heart wasn't in it.

Faye looked at the set and saw Ann Nyberg on News
Channel Eight, tapping papers together on the anchor desk. The graphic behind her said
CHILD ABUSE
, but there was no way beyond that to tell what the story was about.

Faye left Zara Anne to it and went through the living room to the little back hall. She went down the back hall to the kitchen, where the dinner dishes were still piled in the sink and three dirty coffee mugs were standing out on the counter. She began to put things away automatically, at the same time she was filling the kettle and putting it on to boil.

It was time she rethought her life, all of her life, from beginning to end. Lesbian or not, New Age or not, she was behaving just like a man with the way she chose her lovers. Maybe she was behaving worse than a man, because no man would have chosen Zara Anne out of the dozens of women wandering around the Hartford Civic Center that afternoon. No man would put up with Zara Anne's wild clothes, or her Depression-era Okie thinness, or her stupidity.

The kettle whistled and Faye took it off the stove. She started to put a Red Zinger tea bag into her favorite mug and then opted out. Red Rose would be better. She could use all the caffeine she could get.

She left the tea to steep on the counter and went out the back door to stand on the little porch there. Through the small back windows, she could see the lights she had left shining in the garage, and the hulk of her Escort. She could see the empty space where the Jeep had been, too. Obviously, Zara Anne wasn't the only thing in her life that was out of control.

If there was one thing Faye Dallmer couldn't stand, it was being out of control. She had been that way once, when she was very young. She didn't intend to be that way for any length of time again. Not even by accident.

It was fifteen minutes after eleven, and Sally Martindale was having a hard time keeping her stomach under control. It had been bad enough when she was still out on Interstate 84, with wide empty roads and good road lights and nothing to be afraid of except the existential kinds of things that had plagued her, endlessly, ever since Frank had moved back to New York. Losing Frank and getting fired all at once—it was exactly the kind of double whammy Sally had always been suspicious of when it happened to other people. Surely there must have been something they'd done. Surely it couldn't be plain old innocent bad luck. Now that it had happened to her, she hadn't the first idea of what to do. Tonight she had simply driven out to Ledyard, where the Mashentucket Pequots had their gambling casino, and used her last two hundred dollars to give the slots a shot She had kept back fifteen dollars for a full tank of gas, which was a good thing. The slots had been absolutely dead for her all night, the way the rest of her luck had been dead for her for almost two years. It was amazing how luck always seemed to travel in packs. It was even more amazing just how long a string of bad luck could go on, without even taking a break for air.

Right now, she was driving under the dark cover of the trees on Swamp Tree Road, heading for the main lodge of the Swamp Tree Country Club. She thought she ought to know this road by heart by now, since she drove it every morning of her life. Doing the books for the Swamp Tree was the only job she had been able to get after she had been fired from Deloitte, Touche in New York. At the time she had been offered it, she had been glad to get in, in spite of the fact that it was part-time and didn't come with benefits. It was only that she realized what an impossible position she was in: still a member of the club, still cheerfully intending to bring her daughter out at the Swamp Tree's
Midnight Cotillion, and so short of cash that she was afraid to go to the doctor when she got a little sick. She hadn't been to a dentist for over eighteen months.

Sally looked across at her daughter, Mallory, sitting in the other bucket seat, her hands folded in her lap, her mouth set. Mallory had always been heavy, but since Frank left she had literally ballooned. The dress she was wearing now had to be at least a size twenty-four. It wasn't only the size, either. Mallory had changed in every way it was possible to change. Frank was willing to pay for her college tuition, but Mallory wasn't willing to take it—in spite of the fact that she'd fantasized forever about going to Smith, and had even gotten accepted. These days Mallory was in a nursing program at the University of Connecticut branch campus in Waterbury. She drove into class every morning just before Sally went to work, except on weekends. On weekends Mallory went to the club and sat at the big circular tables in the main dining room with all the other girls, acting as if nothing had happened. It was all wrong, Sally thought, all wrong, everything that had happened to them. Things like this were supposed to happen to other people, who deserved them.

The road dipped and swayed. Up ahead, Sally suddenly saw the lights she had been looking for, winking like fairy auras in the blackness. She relaxed a little, but only as much as she thought she could afford.

“Well,” she said, “we're practically there. I thought I'd gotten lost for a moment.”

“You took the right road,” Mallory said. “I saw you do it.”

“I know I did. It didn't look familiar. Maybe I'm not used to being out here so late.”

“I can't believe you've done this before,” Mallory said. “I can't believe it. What are you going to do if they catch you at it? What am I going to do if they put you in jail?”

“We've got to eat,” Sally said. “We can't go on keeping the thermostat at sixty-eight all through the winter. We can't live on the cranberries I grow in the backyard.”

“We could sell the house and move someplace smaller.”

“It would take forever to sell the house.”

“If we moved someplace small enough, you could take the extra money from the house and use that to help us live on. We could quit the club. We could give up on my being a debutante. Lots of people live on less money than you're making now. I've met them.”

“I don't want to live on less money than I'm making now,” Sally said.

Mallory turned her head away, so that she was looking out the window on her side, into the dark. “It's like a disease you have,” she said. “It's like you think there's some kind of cosmic meaning to all this stuff. It doesn't have anything to do with life.”

“You don't know the first thing about life,” Sally said, feeling suddenly furious—but she had to tone it down. The lights were right ahead of her now. She could see the two low stone pillars that marked the entrance to the club. She could see the gravel drive winding up the hill right to the lodge itself.

“Here we are,” she said, making the car turn slowly. She didn't want to end up in a ditch with all this ice on the road. “When we get there you can go into the dining room and see who's around that you know.”

“I don't want to see who's around that I know. I don't like the people I know. Not at this place.”

“Even your father understands the need for contacts, Mallory. These are the best contacts you're ever going to have, unless you come to your senses and let your father put you into college next fall.”

“Contacts for what?”

“Contacts,” Sally said stubbornly. “You really have no idea how the world works. No idea. I wish I could get you to see what you're trying to get me to give up on and throw away.”

“I wish you could see what I see.”

“You're romanticizing poverty. That's all you're doing.
It's very common in adolescents who've never had to fend for themselves.”

“You're romanticizing money.”

They had reached the wide gravel parking lot. This was a weekend night in the country. The lot was more than half-f. Sally put the car into a space at the back, being careful not to hit either of the two Volvos that surrounded her. Her own car was a Volvo, too, because it had been bought before Frank left them. If she'd had to buy a car of her own these days, she wouldn't have been able to afford anything expensive, because she wouldn't have been able to get the credit.

She pulled the key out of the ignition and dropped it into her purse. “I don't know what you're going to do if you don't go into the main dining room,” she said. “You'd look much too conspicuous if you came with me. And you can't hide out in the ladies' room for an hour.”

“Maybe I can just go into the library and read.”

“On Friday night?”

“Some people do read on Friday night, Mother. Some people work, too. Some people even just stay home and don't see anybody.”

“This is the club on Friday night. You'll look ridiculous. Sometimes I think you want to look ridiculous.”

“Maybe I just want to look like myself. Or maybe I just don't want to look like a debutante.”

“Stay in the car for all I care,” Sally said, popping her door open and letting the wind rush in. “Stay out here and freeze. If I don't do what I came here to do, we're not going to eat next week.”

She climbed out onto the gravel and slammed the car door shut behind her. It was freezing out here, not only late October but early frost. She had left her coat in the backseat of the car. She didn't want to get it. Mallory was fumbling around in there, getting ready to come out. Sally didn't want to talk to her again.

Sally wrapped her arms around her chest and started across the lot, wobbling so violently on her high heels that
she thought she was going to break an ankle. When she got to the lodge's front door, she turned back and saw Mallory lumbering toward her, not wearing any kind of coat, either. Maybe with all that fat on her she doesn't get cold, Sally thought—and then she was ashamed of herself, because that seemed spiteful.

She turned away and let herself into the lodge. There was no one at all in the front lobby although Sally could see a few couples in the dining room beyond, and one or two of the girls in Mallory's group. The girls were not the ones Sally most wanted Mallory to know—but then they wouldn't be, since girls like that almost always had other things to do on weekend nights besides hang around at the club. That was true even if they were heavy and unattractive, like Mallory was. Money covered a multitude of sins. It was one of those things Mallory just didn't understand.

Sally bypassed the main rooms and went down to the back where the administrative offices were. Her own office was the second-biggest one on the corridor, after the club manager's,
SALLY MARTINDALE, FINANCIAL OFFICER
the sign on her door read. Sally made a face at it. Of all the things she found it hard to take, this was what she found the hardest: that there was a sign on her door that announced, unequivocally, just how far she had come down in the world.