“Why do you need to know that?” Joey asked.
Miller took a deep breath, and I thought he was going
to chastise Joey for asking another question, but he gave a direct answer, “We’re trying to determine who would have had access to formaldehyde, which is used in certain types of manufacturing.”
“That’s what that smell was,” I said. “The body was preserved.”
Clare made a face like she was going to vomit. “Why would a murderer want to preserve a body?”
“To keep it from stinking,” Joey said. She squeezed her nose for emphasis.
“Oh God,” I said. “I just remembered something.” They all looked at me. I put my hands flat on the table while I considered whether there was any reason to keep my revelation to myself. The table felt cool beneath my fingertips and I considered pressing my forehead against it for comfort. Instead, I looked directly into Miller’s dark eyes.
“Sam
did
have access to formaldehyde,” I said. “He used it in his factory.”
“How do you know?”
I turned to Clare. “Remember Pickles?”
She thought for a second. “In the jar,” she said.
I nodded, and explained to the confused detectives. “When we were kids, Kenny Waxman had a preserved dead mouse. His mom was too neurotic to actually let him have a live animal, so he joked about it like it was his pet. But I remember that he told me he had preserved Pickles himself, using formaldehyde that his father had brought home from the factory for him.”
Dunn scribbled furiously, while questions ricocheted around my head. Was the formaldehyde connection alone enough to charge Sam Waxman with murder? Where was the shoebox with those samples of Lydia’s handwriting? And perhaps most important of all, was the woman in the drum pregnant?
“Detective,” I began, trying to think of a way to phrase the question that wouldn’t earn me a sharp rebuke.
“Yes?”
I stopped myself, realizing that even if he
was
willing to answer the question, I wasn’t sure it was something I was ready to hear.
“I have to use the bathroom.”
Miller said that was fine, and that we were done, anyway. He turned to my sisters. “Unless there’s anything else you ladies want to tell me?”
“Just one thing,” Joey said.
I looked at her, wondering what other information she might have.
“Yes?” Miller said.
She smiled. “What are you doing tonight?”
He held up the baggie containing Lydia’s letter. “Looks like I’m going to Florida to talk to ‘Dearest Samuel.’”
“What do you think she’s up to?” Clare asked, after we had dropped Joey at her bike and watched her speed off. My older sister had suggested a trip to the mall and a quick bite, but Joey had begged off without explanation. “And why is she so mysterious?”
“I don’t know.”
Clare looked pained. “I have such a bad feeling, Bev. When she gets secretive like this…”
I stared off in the direction her motorcycle went. “Should I follow her?” I asked.
Clare nodded enthusiastically, so I sped to the corner and stopped. I spotted Joey’s bike at the end of the block making a right, and proceeded slowly, maintaining a distance between us.
“She might be heading home,” Clare said when Joey left the neighborhood and turned north on Glen Cove Road.
I followed behind, going slowly enough so that two cars got between me and Joey. Soon enough, it became apparent that she was indeed going home. After she turned the corner onto her block, I pulled over and waited a few minutes before driving on. I parked down the block from the house she rented. Her motorcycle was in the driveway.
“She’s already inside,” Clare said, putting on sunglasses.
I laughed. “You’re a regular master of disguise, Clare.”
She remained somber. “I think we should wait here and see if she comes out again.”
“For how long?”
“Shh.”
“Why are you shushing me? No one can hear us.” I put the car in gear. “This is ridiculous. I’m leaving.”
“Wait!” she said. “Look!”
A dark sedan parked in front of Joey’s house and a man with a reddish beard and a briefcase got out. He wore a baseball cap, which looked incongruous with the white button-down shirt and tan khakis he wore.
“Who
is
that?” Clare asked.
“Probably the other tenant,” I said. Joey rented one-half of a two-family house.
“Pull up!” Clare commanded.
I inched forward so we could see which door the man entered. To my surprise, he pushed Joey’s buzzer. I stepped on the gas.
“Who do you think that was?” Clare asked after we passed.
“He looked like an accountant or something. Maybe he’s doing Joey’s taxes.”
“Who does their taxes in July?”
“Maybe she filed for an extension.”
Clare shook her head. “If it was something innocent like that she would have told us. She would have said, ‘I have to get home because I have an appointment with my accountant.’”
I would have argued with Clare, but this mysterious visitor on top of Joey’s frequent disappearances made me think she really was up to something she didn’t want us to know about.
“At least he doesn’t look like a drug dealer,” I said. “Although…”
“Although what?” Clare asked.
“He could be
buying
drugs.”
Clare gasped. “You think? He looked so middle class.”
I shrugged. “I just don’t know.”
Clare took out her cell phone. “I’m calling her. If it’s something innocent, she’ll tell me.” She put her phone on speaker and called Joey, who answered quickly. Clare told her that she was planning on making a barbecue for Dylan’s birthday and wanted to be sure Joey was free.
“Of course I’m free,” Joey said.
“You can bring someone if you want.” Clare glanced at me. She looked so proud of herself.
“Who would I bring?”
Clare looked at me for help and I shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Whoever you want.”
“Maybe I’ll invite Sheldon,” Joey said, laughing. Something unintelligible followed.
“What was that?” Clare said. “It sounds like someone is there with you.”
“No one is here with me.”
“I thought I heard something.”
“It’s the radio,” Joey said. “I’m listening to Dr. Joy.”
“But it sounded like a man,” Clare insisted.
“It’s a call-in show. Listen, I’m kind of busy now. Can I call you back?”
When I pulled into the mall parking lot, Clare was still obsessing on Joey’s curious bearded man. But once we entered, the sensory assault of winding our way past Abercrombie & Fitch, the Gap, Waldenbooks, Foot Locker, Bath & Body Works, Express, Nine West, Old Navy, Dress Barn, Zales, B. Dal
ton, Ann Taylor, Williams-Sonoma, the Limited and Sharper Image on our way to the food court had lulled us both into a happy stupor. I was pretty convinced there was something piped into the air at the mall that made you believe with all your heart that the only thing standing between you and true bliss was a soft hot pretzel and a pair of dangly silver earrings purchased from a kiosk.
Clare, experiencing the same mall sickness as I, stopped in front of Victoria’s Secret with a glazed expression in her eyes. The object of her fixation was a devil-red ensemble that consisted of a sheer, crotch-length garment with spaghetti straps over a matching thong.
“
Uh,
Clare?”
Silence.
“Is that something you’re thinking of purchasing?”
She stared straight ahead.
“Clare? Honey? I’ve never seen you in red.”
“Red?”
“Yes, red. As in the color? You haven’t worn it since high school, when you paid Donna Lautato five dollars to do your colors and she said you were a summer.”
“C’mon,” she said, and walked so quickly inside I had to run to catch up with her.
Clare’s shopping radar led her straight to the rack where the red ensemble hung. She quickly found her size and headed for the dressing room. I loitered in the shopping area, examining lace bras and filmy nighties. I’m not much of a negligee gal—and if I was, I’d be more drawn to satin than lace—but something white and pretty caught my eye. It was terribly sheer, the fabric delicate as vapor, with an empire waist and white ribbon straps. I put my hand beneath it and the material was so diaphanous I could see the crescents of my fingernails.
“Can I help you find a size?” asked a salesgirl who was a few sandwiches shy of a size zero.
“No, I,
uh…
”
“It would look great on you,” she said, pulling one out and pressing it into my hand. Clare called me from the dressing room and I went to her, not even realizing I still clutched the sheer white nightie.
“What do you think?” Clare said, turning around to model the sizzling red ensemble for me.
What did I think? I thought that the way Clare looked in that thing was an indictment of modern society’s insistence that bone and sinew define sexiness. Clare wasn’t a hard-bodied, machine-enhanced ectomorph surgically altered to look more female, like our current crop of pop culture sex icons. She was a throwback—a sensual, curvy, gorgeous woman. A 1950s pinup.
“I think Marc is going to have a coronary and collapse when he sees you in that,” I said.
“You don’t think my thighs look cottage cheesy?”
She seemed so serious I tried not to laugh, but couldn’t help letting a snicker escape. “Clare, there isn’t a straight man in the world you wouldn’t stop dead in that.”
“Really? You think it says ‘Hot’?”
“I think it says ‘Fuck me, big boy.’”
She sucked in her stomach and viewed herself from the side. “Is it too much?”
“I seriously doubt your husband will complain.”
Clare’s expression remained fixed, as if nothing I said got through to her.
“Don’t you feel sexy in it?” I asked.
She shrugged and looked down. “I never feel sexy anymore,” she mumbled.
“Why not?”
It seemed like an innocent enough question, but Clare re
acted as if someone had just bombed her home. She burst into tears, covered her face in her hands, and slid down against the wall of the dressing room until she was curled in a ball on the floor crying.
I hesitated for a moment, trying to understand what I said that could have set her off. I crouched down. “Clare?” I said softly. “What’s going on?”
She ran the back of her hand under her nose, a trail of mucus following behind. I found a tissue in my purse and handed it to her.
She looked up at me, her eyes red and wounded. “Marc cheated on me.”
“Marc?” I said. “Are you sure?” It just didn’t seem possible.
She nodded.
“How do you know? Did he tell you?”
She shook her head.
“Did you…walk in on something?” I shuddered. The thought of Clare experiencing what I did with Jonathan was excruciating to contemplate.
“No, but…” She cried silently into the tissue.
“But what?”
Clare blew her nose and wiped it clean. She took a deep breath. “A couple of months ago, Marc was in Houston on business and Sophie woke up with this terrible croupy cough. I was thinking about taking her to the hospital, but it was the middle of the night and I couldn’t tell if it was just my anxiety running away from me, so I called his hotel room.”
“And?”
“And…and a woman answered,” she said.
Goose flesh rose on my arms. “What did she say?”
Clare folded over the tissue and wiped her nose again. “She said hello.”
“What did
you
say?”
“I said hello back.”
“And then what?”
Clare opened her own purse and found a pack of tissues. She pulled one out. “And then she hung up.”
I paused to take this in. “And that’s it?”
She nodded.
“Did you ask Marc about it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I wanted to be able to tell myself that I got a wrong number, or that Marc had been switched to another room and forgot to tell me. But I can’t push it away. It keeps coming back. And all I can think is that I’ve failed in some terrible way.”
Yes, I remembered that feeling. When I walked in on Jonathan and Savannah I felt that on some fundamental level it was my fault—that if I’d been a better wife, better lover, better artist, he wouldn’t have cheated on me.
“Oh, Clare,” I said. “This is not your fault.”
“I used to be so pretty, Bev. Remember? And now I’m so fat and so old, like a mommy cow with expensive highlights.”
I sighed. Part of me wanted to tell Clare that there was so much more to her than her appearance, but I knew it wasn’t what she needed to hear just then. I stood up and grabbed her hands, bringing her to her feet. “Come here,” I said, and dragged her to the door of the dressing room. I opened it a crack and scanned the sales floor. “You see that salesgirl over there?” I pointed to the tiny young woman who had helped me. “You’re about twenty times prettier than she is.”
“I am not.”
“Okay, then thirty times prettier. And you see that woman in the spike heels?”
“Pucci’s. She’s stunning.”
“Not compared to you.”
“Liar.”
I turned Clare toward the mirror and stood behind her, addressing her reflection. “I don’t know what happened in that hotel room with Marc, but I know that you’re a beautiful woman and that he adores you. But if you don’t believe me, go ahead and buy this fuck-me-now nightie and look at your husband’s face when he sees you in it. I think it’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
Just two days later I was at Clare’s house, sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and thumbing through one of her home decorating magazines while waiting for Dylan and Sophie to get home from day camp. Clare was at her Modern American Lit class and a contractor I hadn’t seen was upstairs making more noise than I thought was possible without arena-sized speakers. He was, Clare had explained to me, remodeling the master bathroom. I couldn’t imagine what was wrong with it to begin with, but it seemed that doing construction in one form or another was Clare’s hobby. The house was in a continual state of metamorphosis.
The noise abruptly stopped and a few seconds later I heard the contractor’s work boots trampling down the stairs.
“Clare?” he called.
I got up and walked toward the staircase, where I saw him descend. He was tall and lanky with a mop of dense, dark curls and looked like a young Marlon Brando, especially around the nose and lips. Dressed in tan baggy pants covered in dust and a faded green T-shirt that said Goode Earth Habitats, he reminded me of my ex. But the similarity stopped at the clothing. This guy had the bright eyes of
someone with a profound capacity for happiness. I wasn’t sure if I was attracted to him, but I wanted to be. I needed something to distract me while I waited to hear from that school in Las Vegas. And I needed someone to distract me from Kenny Waxman.
“She went out,” I said to the contractor. “I’m her sister, Bev.” Flirt, I told myself. For heaven’s sake,
flirt.
He wiped his hands on his shirt and we shook. His grip was firm, his palm warm and dry.
“Leo Carlotti,” he said.
“Did you need something, Leo?”
“I had a question about the shower door she ordered. Do you know if it’s here?”
I told him to look in the garage. He thanked me and went off in that direction, while I stood there chastising myself for not being able to think of some way to keep the conversation going.
I took a deep breath and followed him to the garage, where I found him standing in the middle of the immaculate floor, looking around.
“No shower door?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“That a problem?”
“I’m not sure which one she decided on, and without the measurements I’m at an impasse.”
Impasse.
Fancy word for a contractor. I wanted to know more about this guy.
“I could try calling her husband at his office,” I suggested, knowing full well Marc wouldn’t have any idea what shower door Clare had ordered. But I congratulated myself for thinking of a way to get at least a few minutes with him.
He shrugged. “Can’t hurt, I guess.”
Leo followed me into the kitchen and I called Marc’s office.
Fortunately, he was in a meeting and I was able to leave a message for him to call back.
“Do you…want to have a cup of coffee while we wait?” I tried to sound nonchalant and not at all desperate.
“That would be great.” He smiled a pretty smile.
Gay?
I thought for a second. No, not gay. Unless maybe. Shit. Clare and Joey probably had a special way to find that out within seconds, but I was at a loss.
I filled Clare’s designer kettle with water from her designer faucet, and placed it on the designer stove. Then I put several scoops of designer coffee into an elegant French coffee press. I held up the bag of fancy coffee to show Leo. “I don’t think there’s one single thing in this entire house that’s generic.”
He laughed. “I get mine from the discount club.”
Okay, so not gay then.
“What is Goode Earth Habitats?” I asked. “Is that the name of your company?”
He looked down at his shirt. “No, it’s a charitable organization founded by a woman named Elinora Goode. We build homes for the homeless.”
“We?”
I asked.
He shrugged. “I got pretty involved after Hurricane Katrina.”
“Oh my. That’s so…noble.”
Noble?
What century did I live in?
He looked down, embarrassed. “Yeah, well. I’m good with my hands and don’t have a lot of cash anymore, so I figured it was what I could do.”
Anymore
. That made it sound like Leo had an interesting history, as if there was a fallen empire in his past. And now he was just a good-hearted hippie type—the kind of person a lot of my artist friends wanted to be but were too self-absorbed to actually become. And maybe this was me being overly ro
mantic, but the idea that he was unconcerned with having a lot of cash was endearing. An unambitious guy was a refreshing change. At least that’s what I was telling myself. With Kenny and Joey so cozy, I was determined to be interested in this guy.
“So how does that work?” I asked, taking a designer mug from the designer cabinet. “Do you have to travel?”
“This job,” he said, sweeping his hands toward the upstairs bathroom, “is mostly seasonal. So during the winter months, if I have enough cash saved, I go down South and help out.”
“And where do you stay?”
“Someone usually puts me up.”
“So you just sleep on someone’s couch half the year? God, you’re like Mother Teresa.”
“Listen, I’ll tell you the truth,” he said, pulling out a chair and straddling it backward. “I love nearly every second of it. Imagine working really hard, I mean
physically
hard, which just releases all these endorphins, you know?” He looked off into the distance as if he were trying to picture it. “And if you screw up, which happens, no one gets pissed. I mean, not really pissed, because no one’s there to make money. Everyone is just trying to get this very real thing done. And the people. The people are great.” He tucked his curls behind his ears.
The kettle whistled and I poured the boiling water over the coffee in the French press. This guy was pretty intense, and possibly a little odd. But I was sucked in. I wanted to know more.
“And then, you know,” he continued, “you get to see people move in. Old people. Young people. People with kids. And everybody cries. I mean everybody.”
“Including you?”
“Especially me. Ha!” He drummed the table for emphasis.
“This is amazing stuff, Leo. Someone should be filming it, putting it on the news. I think people would be interested.”
“Actually,” he cleared his throat. “Actually, I’m writing about it. Kind of a memoir.”
“You want to get it published?”
“Someday.”
Aha. There it was. Call me a cynic, but I knew there had to be something not altogether altruistic about this guy. Not that I thought his heart was in the wrong place, just that I knew everyone harbored at least some sort of vanity. And I had found Leo’s. Frankly, it made me more interested. Who wanted to date a saint?
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
He said he wouldn’t mind something to go with the coffee, and I found some organic chocolate chip cookies in a package made from recycled paper. Clare would have been horrified, but I put the bag right on the table rather than arrange the cookies onto a serving plate. I pushed down the plunger on the coffee press and poured him a cup.
I watched as he drank his coffee and ate the entire bag of cookies without looking up. Then he asked for another cup.
I laughed. “You seem pretty hungry.”
“Didn’t have lunch,” he said, still chewing.
I sat across from him, thinking I was doing a good job getting him to talk, but a lousy job flirting. I hadn’t done anything to let him know I was interested. I wasn’t even that successful in establishing eye contact. How did women steer the conversation in that direction without saying something stupid and embarrassing? Was I supposed to tell him he was
dreamy
?
“So what do you do?” he asked.
“I’m teacher. Or about to be one. I’m waiting to hear about a job.”
“Cool. You married?”
“Divorced. You?”
“Never stayed in one place long enough to get married. One day, though. I could see being a husband and having kids.”
“Yeah, kids are great.” God, I sounded like an idiot. “I mean, that’s why I’m a teacher now. I love working with children.”
And that’s why I want to be Miss America.
Sheesh.
“We should go out sometime,” Leo said.
I heard a double honk from outside and bolted out of the chair, banging into the table and almost knocking over his coffee cup. “Oh! Clare’s kids! But
uh
…yeah, we
should
go out sometime.”
I rushed to the front door leaving Leo in the kitchen.
Seven-year-old Sophie got off the bus first, her face flushed red from the heat. Dylan, three years older, followed behind looking tired. I kissed the children hello and made them stop in the powder room to wash their hands before ushering them into the kitchen for snacks. Leo was standing by the sink, downing the last drops of coffee from his cup.
“Hello, Peace,” he said to Sophie, messing her hair. He patted Dylan on the head. “Hello, Happiness.”
I laughed, understanding that his nicknames were intentionally ironic. Sophie was a chatterbox in constant motion, and anything but peaceful. Dylan was a quiet kid and, today at least, a bit melancholy.
“Hi, Leo!” Sophie sang enthusiastically.
“Hi,” Dylan mumbled.
“I need to make a Home Depot run,” Leo said to me. “You think Clare will be here by the time I get back?”
“She should.”
“And you?”
I smiled. “Maybe.”
“Just in case, here’s my card.” He pressed it into my hand and leaned in for a whisper. “My home phone number is written on the back.” He winked at me and patted my head like he did to the kids, and then he was gone.
Smiling, I stuck the card into the pocket of my jeans and turned my attention to the children, asking them about their day at camp as I searched the cabinets for the specific snacks they had requested—cereal for Sophie and an apple for Dylan.
“Courtney and Anastasia and Emma are my best friends at camp,” Sophie said. “And the Cheerios are next to the granola, Aunt Bev.”
“Got it,” I said, and poured some into a bowl.
“At swim today I played with Beatrice and Tonya because we were in a group together and guess what? I was the only one who could swim underwater. And the swim counselor, Allison, said I could maybe move up a level next week.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And the juice boxes aren’t in the refrigerator. They’re in the cabinet under the fruit bowl. My counselor’s name is Meg and she has a boyfriend.”
“Sophie, honey, you’re a force of nature.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means you’ve been at this camp one week and you already have a bunch of best friends and know everyone’s name. And I bet everyone knows yours too.”
She smiled, satisfied, and I turned my attention to Dylan. I wanted to see if I could pull him out of his sullenness.
“Hey, you’ve got a birthday coming up, Dyl. Are you inviting any of your camp friends?”
“I don’t know.”
Clearly, it was up to me to keep the conversation going. “What was the best part of your day today?”
He shrugged. “Baseball, I guess.”
“Oh yeah? Tell me about it.”
“We were down two-one, and I hit a home run with two men on and we won.”
Men.
That killed me. “You must have been the hero of the day.”
He smirked. “For
my
team, yeah.”
I laughed, and pressed him to tell me more about camp.
“We did archery today,” he said. “My first time and I almost got a bull’s eye.”
He was picking up, but there was an earnestness about this kid that made it impossible for him to hide how he was feeling, and I still felt like there was something tugging at him under the surface. I decided to try to lift his mood by making him laugh. I found an apple in the refrigerator and put it on my head.
“Archery, huh? Think you could shoot this?”
“Hold still,” he said, not missing a beat. He pulled back an imaginary bow, closed one eye and released an arrow straight at me.
I put my hand to my face and doubled over, catching the apple before it hit the floor. “
Ow,
my eye!” I wailed in mock horror. “You shot my eye out.”
Sophie squealed in delight.
Dylan smiled. “Sorry, Aunt Bev. Let me try again.”
“Are you kidding? I only have two eyes.” I made him stand against the wall and put the apple on his head. “My turn,” I said.
Dylan stood straight up. I pretended to struggle with the tension of the bow as I pulled it back. I aimed right for the apple and released. Dylan grabbed the apple and bent in half.
“You got me in the gut!” he said. “I’m dying.” He collapsed
to the floor and expired with all the melodrama he could muster.
“Oh! Ack! Argh!”
He was genuinely hilarious, and the more Sophie and I laughed, the more he moaned and groaned and twitched in the throes of his last gasp. He signaled for me to come close enough to hear him whisper his dying words, which he croaked out. “Your…aim…blows.” And then he closed his eyes and dropped his head to the side, the universal sign for croaking.
“What did you expect?” I said. “I’m blind in one eye, remember?”
Later, I tried to interest the children in an art project. Sophie was game, but Dylan only wanted to retreat into the playroom in the basement where his video games were set up.
“You sure you don’t want to paint?” I asked. “PlayStation will still be there when we finish.”
But I couldn’t sell it, and he left us girls to our creative pursuit. When Clare got home with a few bags of groceries, I helped her unpack and told her that Dylan seemed a bit out of sorts. She said he’d been like that for a few days and she wasn’t having any luck figuring out what was troubling him. She called into the basement to tell him to come up, and had to do so several times before he reluctantly trudged up the stairs.
“What?” he said when he faced her. Now his mood seemed dark, angry.
“I just wanted to see how your day was, sweetie.” She reached into one of the grocery bags.
“It was fine.”
“I got that spaghetti sauce you like,” she said, showing him. “I’ll make it for dinner.”
“Did you get Mallomars?”
“Mallomars?”