“A whore. For one year. I said to myself, three hundred sixty-five days. No more. A police friend of Mr. Dunn, he came to the club a lot. He saw me there. One day, soon after I got this job, Mr. Dunn, he came to the house. He tried to make me, you know, down there on him.” She pointed to her crotch. “Miz Warwick came home and found us in the kitchen. She made him stop. She scared him. She didn’t fire me. She paid off many lawyers for me to get my papers. You see?” She blew her nose messily into one of the papers from the desk. “I love her. I hate her. She will never let me go. What if she comes back and sees this?”
“Take a deep breath. We’ll just start in one corner and go at it a page at a time.”
I slid my purse off my shoulder, and shoved papers aside with my foot, creating a path. I snatched up four empty Diet Coke cans, a spilled bottle of NoDoz, and a lime-green bottle of a scary-looking energy drink called Ammo. Maria was fully loaded.
In less than an hour, we had cleared a quarter of the carpet space. The desperate, super-caffeinated Maria was surprisingly focused and fast. We placed the empty files in alphabetical order in a circle around the room, and then sorted tediously through the giant pile of papers, matching them to their files. It didn’t take long for me to realize that much of what lay at my feet wasn’t blackmail material at alclass="underline" innocuous newspaper clippings that went back as far as twenty-five years, Caroline’s notes about somebody’s illness, a birthday party, a society club dinner, a community play.
If somebody died, she dutifully included the local death notice and wrote closed on the outside of the file. Compulsive work. Sad work. A lonely old lady keeping track of a town’s minutiae when much of it could be found in online archives with a few keystrokes. How dangerous could this be? Would someone have been angry and crazy enough to yank her out of her bedroom window?
A green tab marked all of the files allocated to club members. A typed label recorded both the “anniversary date” of when the women joined the club, and their state of membership: active, moved, or deceased.
Someone romantically named Claire Elise Dubois stood out in a category of her own as “ejected.” Maybe a woman with special anger toward Caroline? I paused to read her story. Claire Elise, who liked to be addressed by both names, thank you, had been summarily thrown out three years ago “for consistent failure to properly RSVP.”
I wondered if, in Southern culture, this was worse than child abuse. I almost laughed out loud.
A high, musical voice stopped me.
It was frighteningly close, right outside the closet door, and it sounded very much like Letty Dunn.
16
“Yoo-hoo, Maria? Caroline?”
Maria worked faster than I did. She was over to the door in a split second, clicking it shut and throwing an inside lock.
“Who is that?” I hissed.
“Letty.” If rojo was asshole in Maria’s vocabulary, then Letty was clearly bitch. Maria’s fingers were quickly bringing the Mac to life. She clicked on an icon of an ugly cartoon baby labeled NANNY CAM.
“My cousin put this in for her. A camera on the front porch, in the hall. In her bedroom, living room, kitchen. To spy on me and that estupido cat to make sure we aren’t peeing on her rugs.” Her hands flew expertly across the keyboard. “He teach me. My cousin is very good with computers.”
I could see that.
Letty Dunn was in resplendent HD quality on the screen, bouncing up and down on Caroline’s bed like she was the star of a bad porn movie. I hoped Caroline’s bed could take it.
Her body was squeezed into a tight pink velour tracksuit. A matching pink baseball cap with NIKE etched in rhinestones perched uncomfortably on her massive yellow puff of hair. The diamonds on her hands blinked in the light, like a Morse code to outer space. She wore a gold bracelet weighted with oversized charms, the largest one emblazoned with the initials UDC. The jingling sound that accompanied every bounce was the industrial-sized key ring in her right hand. It looked like it belonged on a janitor’s belt.
Letty had a key.
“She will go away,” Maria said hopefully, under her breath.
Or maybe not.
Letty launched herself back on the massive bed, moving her arms and legs vigorously like she was making a snow angel. Perhaps it was some new cellulite-busting workout she’d seen on TV.
It was a mesmerizing show: her jiggling fat, the miracle of personal technology, and the general weirdness of Letty Dunn.
“Ma-REEEEEE-aaaaahhh,” Letty sang out. Her voice was an icy finger in my eardrum.
“Turn the volume off,” I whispered. Maria shook her head.
“Not to worry.” She pointed upward. “Soundproof. Miz Caroline likes to hear no noise while she listens to her classical music.”
“Caroline? You home yet? It’s LETT-eeeeeee.” Still, with the singing sound.
Then she abruptly changed tone.
“Maria, are you here? Lazy girl!”
My cell phone vibrated, a rattlesnake underneath a stack of papers across the room. I dropped to the ground, crawling toward it on my hands and knees. I read the text, trying to tamp down panic.
Misty. Lunch. Not now.
“Does she know how to get in?” I whispered.
“She can’t hear you,” Maria said. “And she is already in.”
“I can see that. Does she know how to get in here?”
“Oh. I don’t think so. I locked the door.”
Like that nasty cat, Letty disappeared from the screen to roam around. Maria fiddled with the buttons and split the screen into four sections. Since the nanny cam was a fairly low-tech affair that didn’t cover every room in the house, Letty wandered into view, then out of view. I felt like I was playing a kid’s video game, on a hunt for the evil pink sorceress. My fingers itched for a zap button.
Letty was taking her sweet time with her house tour. She ripped open drawers and cabinets at random, appearing to search for nothing in particular. She swept her finger over a living room lamp shade. She checked the moistness of the soil in a potted palm.
“That is supposed to be dry,” Maria mumbled angrily.
If I had any inkling of doubt about Letty’s character, which I didn’t, it vanished when she deliberately knocked an Oriental antique vase off its pedestal in the dining room. The crash tinkled through the speakers like a fake sound effect on an old radio show. A little smile played at the corner of Letty’s mouth.
“Yoo-hoo! Caroline? Maria? Are y’all here? Is everything all right?”
“She probably is the one who took Miz Caroline,” Maria said bitterly. “Or that Holly. One time she asked Miz Caroline to loan me to her so I could wash lice out of her dogs. That club will probably kill me, too. Think I know something.” Her eyes flashed with a little triumph. “Which I do. I know plenty.”
Before I could process any of this, Maria pointed to a fish-eye view of the front porch. “Look. A police.”
A man in uniform was stepping up to the door. I didn’t recognize him. He laid his pointer finger on the buzzer and didn’t take it off. With his other hand, he rapped a sharp, rapid drumbeat. Three more uniformed cops joined him on the porch. All carried evidence boxes and bags.
“We have to get out of here.” I searched the faces on the porch. No Mike. But he had to be the one who’d finagled a more expansive search warrant. He probably wasn’t far behind.
“Where’s your car?” Maria’s voice was eerily calm.
“A couple of blocks away. Diana Street.”
“Good. You can drop me at Brake-O. My cousin works there.”