Harry took my hand before I could refuse, bending to kiss it. I felt the tip of his tongue. It was a dead tie as to which of these two people was more repulsive.
“Good night,” Mike said, for both of us. I’m not sure whether he knew I was wiping the back of my hand along my pants leg.
On the way home in the car, Mike said nothing. I wanted to tell him about the boxes, both the one at Caroline’s that held secrets and the one that held the cigar. About Harry’s tongue. But now my own anger was blazing. He couldn’t blame me for the disastrous evening. He’d set up this little dinner party and informed me of the details in a text, making it very hard for me to say no. Sure, I could have been more tactful. But the woman called me a slut, and her husband licked me like a dog.
We reached the front porch, and I trailed behind him. Mike turned the key but the old, swollen door stuck like it usually did. He thrust a fierce kick in the middle of the frame and the door swung open, slamming against the wall, leaving a star-shaped hole in the living room plaster.
“You think I’m angry about tonight? About that shrew of a woman and her ambitious asshole husband? Here’s what I’m angry about, Emily.”
He spit out every syllable of my name like a bad taste in his mouth. He pulled me by the arm to our bedroom, to the pile of papers on his nightstand that I assumed were part of the Kilimanjaro of police files he reviewed as bedtime stories.
“See this?” He removed a sheaf of five or six pages from a folder, shaking them inches from my nose before letting them fall like autumn leaves. “What else is there, Emily?”
I shrugged off his hand and knelt clumsily to gather up the papers, to give myself time. My eyes blurred with tears, but I could see enough words and phrases to get the gist.
Homicide.
Gunshots.
My hands froze. On the page resting at my feet, a crime scene photo was replicated on a scratchy fax. I could make out a bloody black soup near Pierce Martin’s head.
“Why didn’t you tell me the man who raped you was shot to death three weeks later?” Mike was now on the floor with me, pulling me to him. His fury was hot and close. Too close.
I couldn’t breathe. When did Mike put these papers on the nightstand?
“Did you do it?” Four words, each one hitting my brain like an ice pick. “Why?” His voice was despairing. “Why can’t you talk to me?”
“Because I was a different person then.” My voice was cold and far away, not at all the way I wanted it to come out.
I tried again, and this time my voice broke with my pathetic confession. “Because you might not have married me.”
He dropped his hands from my shoulders.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he muttered.
“Wait. Mike, please.” I sucked in a shaky breath. “I didn’t kill him.”
But he was already gone.
One sheet at a time, I picked up the papers scattered across our bedroom floor. My tears were falling like fat drops of rain, smudging the ugly words.
Of course Mike had checked out Pierce Martin. What cop in his right mind wouldn’t check out a vicious crime against his wife, even if it happened thirteen years ago?
No, Pierce Martin never fulfilled his imaginary destiny as a nasty husband with two children, a dangerous roving eye, and serial rapist status.
My rapist was dead. I didn’t need to see the crime photo staring up at me from the floor. I knew with the certainty of someone who has stood over his casket to be completely sure.
Pierce’s mother had caught me when I’d crumpled over her son’s coffin. It had been harder to confront a dead Pierce than I’d thought. With the kind of irony only God can dish out, his mother grabbed my elbow as I wobbled, offering support, asking how I knew him, murmuring that he was a “wonderful boy.” This was before I became a suspect. Before I knew about the other girls.
I wanted to scream at his mother so loudly that I woke that evil son of a bitch in his coffin, so that all those mourners could know: You raised a monster!
Instead, I had pretended to be too overcome to talk.
When she turned away to find better consolation, I opened my fist, which clutched a chain with a tiny gold cross, a $30 diamond chip dropped into the center.
It was the cross hanging around my neck when he raped me.
The necklace that lived under the glass in a JCPenney store before he purchased it at the last minute, all part of his plan.
The one he gave me during the chocolate mousse course at my nineteenth birthday dinner two hours before he jammed himself inside me, then rolled off nonchalantly to pee in a bathroom a few feet away. Like I was nothing.
Standing over his dead body, I had lifted his suit flap and tucked the cross inside his crisp shirt pocket so he could take it with him to hell.
13
“Miz Emily. You came. Gracias.”
It had taken four or five rings of the bell before Maria answered. She was an extremely pretty girl who didn’t look at all pretty right now. Hungover, maybe. She teetered a little in Caroline’s doorway. She was dressed in that frilly maid’s uniform, only it looked like she’d slept in it. Blotchy skin, runny mascara, brown hair slashed with unnatural maroonish streaks. An inch of black roots. The uniform transformed Maria’s curvy figure into a sexual cliché. The wrong kind of man would push her to her knees.
I didn’t look too hot myself: no shower or makeup, drained and exhausted from my fight with Mike, anxious about everything I needed to say to him. The cigar box was back in the front seat of the car, still a secret, now a secret in a Ziploc bag.
When Maria called that morning, crying, peppering me with an English-Spanish pilaf I couldn’t translate, it was tempting to say no. Even though my mission yesterday had been to track her down, I was too distraught today to deal with the problems of Caroline. Four days missing. I had my own messy life to get in order. Two of Maria’s words finally convinced me.
Cops. Help.
“Your husband. He left with his policeman two hours ago. After the search.”
“What search?”
“They had a paper. Official. They looked all over her bedroom, disturbing things. I am trying to fix. She will be unhappy. Blame me. She will fire me, I know it.”
Maria used her hand to shade her eyes from the sun, on its way to high noon, and peered down the empty street. Luxury cars and trucks were tidily ensconced in four-car garages, their owners chilling out in refrigerated homes. For me, fresh from Manhattan’s twenty-four-hour cacophony, the absolute stillness in late morning was eerie, as if everyone had fled a nuclear threat.
“What exactly do you want me to do?” The heat beat on my shoulders, and my throat felt parched.
“Your husband. He is in charge, no? He seemed nice. But the other one.” She pointed to her head. “Rojo.” Red. Cody Hill. “He said he would look into my family’s legal status if I didn’t cooperate. I need to know. Is he going to give my family trouble?”
“Are you here illegally, Maria?”
“The problem is not me.” She said this impatiently. “Can you talk to your husband about the rojo cop? Please.” The way she said rojo, it might as well have been asshole. Something we agreed on wholeheartedly. While I remained silent, considering this, she burst into tears and spun into a torrent of solid-gold Spanish.
“Maria,” I said gently. “English, please. I’ll try to help. Maybe I can talk to Mike.”