“But you don’t know if this really happened.”
“Unless my mother dreamed it up to protect me. I know you always believed your grandmother was weak because she never stood up for herself, pathetic because your grandfather controlled her completely. Well, after your father left, I was a wreck. I was told that he’d simply said he was sick of me and sick of the baby. I locked myself in my bedroom and wouldn’t leave it, wouldn’t eat. Until one day she came into my room, sat down beside me, took my hand, and told me this is what happened.”
“My father never talked to you about any of this?”
Lydia shakes her head. “I told you, I never saw or heard from him again. There were divorce papers with his signature at the bottom, that was it.”
“So many lies. All lies, from you, from my father, from my grandparents.” Suddenly Sunday freezes. She whispers, “Grandfather has never said my name. Never.”
Lydia looks startled, then nods. “No, he hasn’t. He hated Phillip so much that from that day on he refused to see you, to admit you carried his precious blood, my blood, as well as Phillip’s. He certainly didn’t want to call you by that name your father gave you. It was he who insisted on sending you to boarding school in Europe-”
Lydia’s face contorts as she places her palm over her own mouth, as if to hold the words in. She leaps to her feet, knocks the chair over, grabs her purse, and runs from the club dining room.
Jacques Trudeau rushes after her, then stops. He turns and looks at Sunday, starts toward her, and stops again.
The camera rests on Sunday’s face. Tears sheen her eyes, slowly begin to slide down her cheeks. She doesn’t move, then her lips form the word Father.
“Clear!”
There was silence on the set, and then, something that rarely happened, there was applause.
It took Mary Lisa a good minute to bring herself back. She blinked, but the tears continued to fall.
She heard Bernie yell, “You just won the Emmy for next year, sweetheart!”
Betsy walked up to her, marveled at the tears on her face, and grabbed her hand. “You were incredible, Mary Lisa, and you know what? You made me better. You drew me right into it. Well done, well done. Hey, sweetie, maybe we’ll both get Emmys next year. Hey, are you all right, Mary Lisa?”
“Huh? Oh, I’m fine, Betsy. I’ve got stuff on my mind, I guess. I’ve got to get changed now.”
Betsy, besides being a good actor, was also a shrewd woman. She lightly touched her fingertips to Mary Lisa’s arm. “It’s amazing you can function at all, with all you’ve been through, Mary Lisa. You keep your chin up. I want you to know that all of us are on the alert. Come along now, let’s walk to the dressing room together. Hey, Lou Lou, are you free to touch up Mary Lisa’s makeup?”
FORTY-FIVE
Chico held a kick pad in front of him as he yelled at Mary Lisa that she wasn’t kicking hard enough. When she yelled and went at him, Chico turned, feinted, and leaped backward, all the while yelling at her-“Keep your knee straight!”-“Stay balanced!”-“More energy!”
After five straight minutes, she was panting so hard, she collapsed where she stood. He tossed the kick pad onto a mat, leaned down and patted her shoulder. “Not bad for your third lesson. Next time wear a band around your forehead, it’ll keep the sweat from dribbling into your eyes. I know that stings.”
No kidding, Chico de Sade. She kept her head down, still trying to simply draw breath into her lungs.
“Mary Lisa, you’ve got some talent, you’re tough. Come on, now, get yourself together. Here’s a Coke, loaded with sugar. Catch your breath, and then we’re going to do it again at”-he consulted the big clock on the wall-“a quarter after, okay?”
Three minutes from now? You’re giving me three lousy minutes to come back to life? She raised her head as she drank down the Coke. “I want to kill you. Promise you’ll let me take you down, and I’ll do it.”
“You can try, Mary Lisa, you can try.” He patted her sweaty shoulder again and walked away, whistling. She watched him pull out his cell, punch in numbers, then talk. Here she was dying and he was calling his girlfriend?
Three minutes later, with the help of a full can of Coke racing through her system and lots of deep breathing, she knew she was going to live. She splashed cold water on her face, slipped one of Chico’s sweatbands over her forehead, and got to her feet again. She focused all her strength, all her energy, all her fury and fear, on him. Her first kick was so hard he stumbled backward. He gave her a huge grin, waved his fingers at her. “Is that a onetime deal or do you think you can do that again?”
When she was hovering at the edge of collapse again, unable to give Chico even a hate-filled look, he called a halt and told her not to forget the aspirin and hot tub.
Mary Lisa wanted to get going so she didn’t take time to shower in Chico’s minimalist unisex locker room. As she walked barefoot across the mats, she noticed the bright red polish on three toenails of her right foot was badly chipped. She grinned at Chico, pointed to her toes. “One of the hazards of the sport, Chico?”
“As long as none of those cute little toes are broken, they’ll just serve as a reminder you’re in training,” Chico said.
She gave him a fist to his perfectly polished bicep on her way out. “I’m going to clean the floor with you next time, Chico.”
“Yeah, I’ll count on it. Don’t forget the exercises, Mary Lisa.”
Mary Lisa rolled her eyes. She had forty-eight hours to convince her muscles they wouldn’t implode. And she was actually paying for this?
She was surprised to notice this time, though, that she was actually walking out of the dojo without all her muscles screaming at her. Only her foot was sore. When she climbed into her Mustang, she pulled out her cell, noticed a message from Jack. She hit the Call Number button.
Jack answered his cell on the third ring. “Yeah?”
“Hey. It’s Mary Lisa. I gather since you called you’re in need of some of my insights into that mess you’ve got in Goddard Bay?”
“Right. But first, Mary Lisa, how are you? You’re taking care, right? Still the most popular girl in the Colony?”
“I’ll tell you, I don’t feel very popular right now. I haven’t felt this unpopular since I called Robbie James impotent in the eighth grade.”
He laughed. She smiled listening to that wonderful laugh. He’d sounded tired, but now that was all forgotten, at least for a minute.
“How did you know he was impotent?”
“I heard my father mention the word to my mother, about a friend of theirs. I asked her what it meant and I thought she’d faint. She told me to forget it-”
“So of course you used it the first chance you got.”
“Robbie was being a real jerk, talking about how a friend of mine didn’t have any boobs when he knew both of us could hear him, along with a dozen other kids, so I called him an impotent jerk, told him I’d read it in the girls’ bathroom.”
“What did Robbie do?”
“His face turned as red as the trim on our neighbor’s house and his friends started hooting, poking him, you know the teenage boy drill.”
“You think maybe he’s the one down there trying to do you in?”
“Nah. Last I heard, Robbie was living in Moscow, Idaho, teaching history at the local high school.” She laughed. “That’s enough about me, big boy. Tell me what you’ve found out about Milo Hildebrand’s murder.”
Jack was in his office. He took a sip of his cold, dead coffee, put his feet up, and tilted his head back. “The M.E. has confirmed Milo died of poisoning with coumarin-you remember I told you it’s a kind of rodent poison. It’s only loosely regulated, fairly easy to get. We found traces of it in what was left of the mashed potatoes on Milo’s dinner tray. So it looks like someone did slip into the kitchen at the Goddard Bay Inn, or got to the tray after it left there. We’ve shown photos of everyone close to the case-the Hildebrand family and Mick Maynard, Jason’s brother-to everyone at the inn and to our own staff. No one recalls seeing any of them around the time Milo’s dinner was prepared in the kitchen.” He sighed. “It turns out Marci Hildebrand worked in the inn five years ago, long before she married Jason Maynard, but so have lots of people in Goddard Bay over the years.”