“Everything is a mess now,” she sobbed. “They took her drawers and closet apart. I can’t clean it up by myself. I’m afraid I will get in trouble if I bring in my sister to help.”
I was shoveling a grave for myself simply by standing on the doorstep of a possible crime scene. Mike had returned home at dawn to shower and re-dress for work while I pretended to be sleeping. We were pros at that double maneuver.
Violet’s sweet face flashed in my mind. A little girl who depended on her aunt for survival.
“I have about two hours,” I told Maria.
Maria swung the door wide with a shaky smile and led me to the kitchen. State-of-the-art stainless-steel appliances, miles of white granite counter space, stacks of generic white china behind the glass cabinets. A caterer’s dream.
Maria opened a door in the corner to reveal a servants’ staircase. The modern dumbwaiter was big enough to hold Maria and me cross-legged playing a comfortable game of patty-cake. As a kid, I’d always wanted to ride in one. Maria was already climbing the stairs in the narrow opening, quickly, two at a time.
“How many flights?” I was surprised to be slightly out of breath on the first landing. Maybe I should sign up for the No Baby Fat exercise class advertised in the window of the Clairmont Y.
“Four. Miz Warwick’s bedroom is on three.” One floor above the pink museum.
I tried to swallow my huffing and puffing once we reached the third floor. How could I be out of shape so fast? I ran a half marathon last year. Maria didn’t notice or didn’t care, hurrying around the curved hallway. This floor was identical to the one below it: closed doors, deep-red flocked paper, wall sconces dripping with painstakingly Windexed chandelier beads.
“Here.” She paused at a door in the middle. “We must be quick. Any minute she could return.”
She threw open the door to a room that took my breath away. No one settled back against these pillows on this bed to watch a rerun of Downton Abbey and eat potato chips. The creamy antique linens and embroidered pillows must have cost thousands. The walls curved in a semi-circle, inviting us into a painted garden. Clouds from a muted sky drifted on the ceiling. Everywhere, the muralist invoked the gardens of Versailles at twilight.
Maria compulsively smoothed out an invisible wrinkle on the duvet. No crime scene tape, no blood on the pillow. The window by the bed shut tight, filmy curtains draping either side.
“We must work first on the bureau,” she said, “and then the closet.” She nodded toward two double doors.
“OK,” I said, uncertainly. She pointed toward my foot. I was standing in a trail of silk underwear, tossed from a nearby bureau. I bent down, not really wanting to touch an old lady’s panties. Whoa. This was expensive, sexy honeymoon underwear. It also appeared to have never been worn. I didn’t think Mike would rake through a stranger’s underwear drawer and toss it in this perverted fashion. But Rojo probably would.
I began to fold. Maria disappeared into the closet. Too far away to carry on a conversation. It took about a half-hour to sort out the underwear and nightgowns scattered across the room.
“Maria?” I called her name toward the closet. She appeared instantly.
“Are you too tired to help me more?” she asked, a little petulantly.
I glanced at my watch. “I can work with you in there for a little while.” In closer quarters, where I could quiz her about Caroline and her damn club.
I wanted to snatch those words back once she reopened the doors, automatic lights flooding a cavernous white space. I should have started in here, to hell with the panties.
Two or three hundred shoes rested on floor-to-ceiling glass shelves, individually spotlighted, toes pointing every which way. And plenty of empty shelves where the piles dumped on the floor were supposed to go. Only the hanging clothes were undisturbed, hanging in neat, tight lines, organized by color, and Caroline liked color. Especially red.
“Every shoe must have two inches between each, with toes pointing straight out,” Maria recited. “Exactly. Like this.” She demonstrated on a pair of glossy black evening shoes. I half expected her to hand me a ruler. Maria slid a small ladder in place and proceeded to climb it. “The rojo… thought she hid something in her shoes. I’ll do top. You do bottom.”
“Did he find anything?”
“No.”
“Maria, where do you think Caroline is?” I kept my eyes on the pair of Josef Seibel leather clogs in my hands. They seemed very un-Caroline.
“I don’t know. I told the police this.” Defensive.
“Was she depressed? Her friends say she had become a little paranoid.”
“I’m not sure what this word-paranoid-means. What friends? They are all bitches.”
I appreciated her rude assessment. The woman who washed Caroline’s underwear, who picked her hair out of the shower drain, who spent more time with her than anyone on earth, would know.
“They are all calling here, all the time, leaving messages. Checking. Like they care. Last night, I found Miz Jenny and Miz Mary Ann creeping around the backyard in bug masks. I recognize Miz Jenny’s tetas falsas or I might have called the police. They said they were making sure that Miz Caroline hadn’t fallen behind a bush.”
I thought for a second. “Night vision goggles?”
“Si. Miz Jenny said she borrowed them from her husband’s hunting closet.”
Maria stepped carefully off the ladder. Her own shoes were white, clunky, and rubber-soled. Nurse’s shoes, before nurses started hipping it up with Crocs and New Balance.
Color flared on her cheeks. “Why did you show up at my home? I do not think you are the type for a babysitter.”
“Truthfully, because I need you. I’m out of my element here. Caroline invited me over to pass around that ridiculous box. Then someone dropped off a little blackmail package at my house. Was that Caroline’s idea?”
About six expressions played across the maid’s face. First, surprise. So she didn’t drop off the package. None of her facial tics after that were terribly sympathetic. In fact, the one she was wearing now could almost be described as… happy.
“It’s OK,” she assured me eagerly. “She blackmails all the ladies. Me. She provided fake papers for my sister and niece. This is what I am worried about with that cop. Violet was only one year old when she rode across the border in the trunk of a car. So sometimes Mrs. Caroline threatens to expose them. She helps but there is always a price.” Her voice trailed into bitterness. “If you are not going to hire me right now, I can’t say more. I will make you lunch. For el nino.” She pointed to my stomach and walked out. Conversation over.
It felt both safe and illicit to be alone. It reminded me of the naïve middle-schooler I once was, snooping in my parents’ closet, discovering a box of condoms and my mother’s vibrator. Excited and a little horrified. Guilty.
I shook it off. Maria had asked me here, to help. We were almost done. And I was hungry. My head felt a little light. I ran my hand along a row of historical romances stuffed neatly in a bookshelf at the end of the closet. Maybe where Caroline got her ideas. They weren’t real books, I realized. Even in her closet, Caroline was creating a façade. I leaned back against the shelf and closed my eyes. Suddenly, top to bottom, my world was moving. I fell backward, almost stabbing myself with a five-inch heel.
The bookcase was a camouflaged door.
I’d just read about this trend while thumbing magazines in my OB’s office in New York. High-def, high-concept secret rooms that whisked adults back to the fantasies of their childhoods while conveniently soundproofing them from their own kids. At the time, I thought it was ridiculous. But here I was, staring into a black crack, wondering what Caroline would hide. Hopefully just the comfortable Hanes granny panties she really wore.