It was hard not to be impressed by all that power and ostentatious wealth. The family lived on a private island. Jolie found herself wondering what her life would have been like if she’d been part of the family. But when her mother married her father, a working man and artist with little money and fewer prospects, the family turned their backs on her. These were difficult thoughts to entertain, because Jolie couldn’t help feeling she was being untrue to her father’s memory.
Jolie answered, and Kay said, “Forty-eight days and counting.”
The goal was for her daughter Zoe to reach the first day of classes at Brown University. “Just hope she doesn’t get knocked up before then.”
“You don’t honestly think that would happen.”
“No. Zoe’s a cool kid—waaaaay too smart for that. But I’ll feel a hell of a lot better when she’s in the dorm. I’ll finally be able to breathe.”
Kay wasn’t happy that her daughter was spending the summer at Indigo. She was sure Zoe’s cousin Riley was a bad influence. But Zoe had lobbied so hard, wanted it so badly, that Kay had given in. It was only for the summer. After that, Zoe would be safely in Rhode Island.
“So did you go see the house?” Kay asked.
“I did.” Jolie went to turn off the tap. She felt dirty and tired, and hoped the bathwater wouldn’t cool off too quickly.
“I was right, wasn’t I? Depressing.”
“A little,” Jolie said. “But maybe it wasn’t back then. I remember my first apartment—what a dump that was. But I was too young to know any better. I can see a young couple just starting out being happy there.”
“Young people in love,” Kay said. “They’ll live anywhere. You remember anything?”
“How could I? I wasn’t even two years old. I took some pics, though.”
“Well, good, you have a record of it, then. I’m glad it’s not listed with us—that place is going to be a hard sell, even if it is the ancestral home of the Petal Soft Soap Baby.”
Jolie smiled. Her big claim to fame.
Kay had made no bones about it; she wasn’t thrilled about the idea of Jolie going back to her parents’ house. She’d warned Jolie it would be disappointing. And it was. Jolie had hoped for some resonance, something that connected her to her parents during a happy time in their lives. But there was nothing.
They talked for a while longer, mostly about Zoe and her cousin Riley, Franklin Haddox’s daughter. Riley was spoiled, and Kay suspected she was sexually active. “I wish I hadn’t let Zoe stay with her.”
“She’s got common sense,” Jolie said. “She’ll be all right.”
“Easy for you to say.”
The water in the tub was cold. Jolie drained it and started filling it up again. In the meantime, she clicked through her photos of the house. A saltbox cottage, faded yellow. Sunny kitchen, linoleum floors, tiny nursery. The pocket yard, the canal out back. The canal looked a lot like the canal behind the house she lived in now.
Home of the Petal Soft Soap Baby.
Jolie clicked through the photos and tried to picture her parents living as newlyweds there.
As Kay said, they were young and in love. They didn’t have much money. They were about to have their first and only child. But the place was too old. The story was too old. Whatever had breathed life into the love story between her mother and father was gone.
She must have dozed off, because the bathwater was stone cold. Jolie hitched herself up a little; she’d slipped down so her chin was almost in the water. The candle had burned low.
She looked across the tub at her knees, rising up like islands. That was when it hit. A hurtling torrent of stark, raving fear. Her heart wanted to burst. Heat suffused her face. The fight-or-flight mechanism kicked in. She couldn’t stand to be in the tub another minute. She grabbed the sides and hoisted herself up. Her shin bumped and scraped the side as she scrambled out of the tub. Slipping, almost going down.
She grabbed the towel from the rack. Made it out the doorway. Shaking so hard she could barely work her legs. Her brain buzzed and stuttered. She couldn’t think.
The chasm opened. She felt the pull. Step in and disappear for good.
Go! One foot after the other.
She made it to the kitchen. Shivered in the sun streaming through the window.
Twenty minutes later, she went back in the bathroom. The sight of the full tub threw her heart into overdrive. She punched the drain fixture and retreated to the kitchen.
Something was very wrong with her. Mental-illness wrong. First the pond, scaring her for no reason. And now the tub. Jolie knew she would not fill that tub again. Forget the lighted candles, the bath salts. She hoped she wouldn’t react to taking showers, because then she’d really be in trouble.
After spending an hour Googling panic attacks and water phobias, she came to a conclusion. Panic attacks, it appeared, were tricks. Something unknown triggered the fight-or-flight reaction, and the body reacted, fooling a person into thinking he was in mortal danger. So the next time it happened, she would tell herself, calmly, that she wasn’t in danger.
Mind over matter.
Right now she had two choices. She could sit here frozen in fear. Or she could work the case.
The case seemed to be wrapping up in a satisfactory way. Maddy’s confession had sealed it.
But there were still things about the case that didn’t add up. Amy Perdue, for instance. Amy was Maddy’s employee—she worked at one of the apartment buildings Maddy owned. And Jolie was about eighty percent certain that Amy knew of Maddy’s cover-up of her husband’s suicide. That could be the reason for Amy’s fearful behavior in Bizzy’s parking lot, and the reason she’d driven to Maddy’s house at seven in the morning on the day Maddy’s husband died.
But Amy Perdue was also Luke Perdue’s sister.
Luke died in room nine. Chief Jim Akers died in room nine.
For the first time, she wondered if she’d got it right. The coincidences piled up, yes, but all of them led to the same place. They led to a case solved. They led to a solid confession.
But why did she feel as if she were missing something?
Jolie went over the facts of the case in her mind. They seemed solid. But…
She needed to make sure.
It was time to talk to Amy.
14
First thing you saw when you reached the outskirts of Gardenia was the pulp mill, which looked like a giant scorched shuttlecock. Beyond the pulp mill was a labyrinth of gray buildings and industrial pipes. Sometime in the late nineteenth century, the sign “Iolanthe Paper Company” had been affixed to a trestle above the main building. The sign, lit by two dim lamps from above, featured a beauty with long flowing hair and tiny wings—Iolanthe, Queen of the Fairies.
Iolanthe was Big Paper in the Land of Big Paper. Jolie’s family, the Haddoxes, sold out in the early seventies, laying the groundwork for two Haddox senators and a plum cabinet job, culminating in regular visits by the vice president.
Hard to be unmoved by such grandeur, but Jolie managed to keep a sense of perspective.
The Royal Court Apartments weren’t royal at all, but just a regular stucco rectangle two stories high. Cramped little balconies fronted sliding glass doors.
Jolie didn’t turn in the first time, but drove around the block and came back up the side street. On that first pass, she spotted a car parked alongside the outer wall of the apartments next to the office. A 1960s-era convertible. Cherry red, cherry condition. The writing on the trunk said Ford Starliner. A U-Haul truck was parked nose-out from the apartment closest to the office.