“Greg?” She’d finally interrupted whatever he’d been saying. “Forgive me here for the outrageous notion-but if you cannot manage to come home, how about if you pick up your phone and call Tenley yourself? Remind her you exist?”
A hang-up moment if Catherine had ever heard one, and it took every bit of her willpower not to do it.
“Tell Tenley I love her,” Greg had said. And then he was gone.
“Never? Never?”
Jane tried to remember the last time she’d seen her sister like this. Over many years, Melissa had perfected annoyed-petulant and demonstrated it whenever she didn’t get her way.
“You’re saying this has never happened before?” Melissa stood next to a striped wing chair in Robyn and Lewis Wilhoite’s living room, one hand on her navy silk hip and the other gesturing, underlining every time she said “never.” Jane could picture the identical stance in a courtroom, Melissa as prosecutor, grilling some poor defendant on the witness stand.
Melissa’s target now was suburban housewife Robyn Wilhoite, perched on the center cushion of her almost-gaudy chintz couch, alone, hands in her lap, fingers intertwined.
“Never happened that I don’t know where they are?” Robyn pouted, fussed with the black cardigan draped around her shoulders. “Well, not really. I mean, lately Lewis is trying to be, well, he calls it spontaneous. He thinks Gracie should be more… flexible. Live for today, all that. They go on adventures.”
Jane, standing by a multiwindowed mahogany breakfront, waited for her cue, not certain of her role. Melissa had asked her to come, her pleading voice on the phone making Jane’s presence seem urgent, but after a brief two-cheek air kiss, Melissa’d essentially ignored her. Still, the best way to understand a story was to listen. Any good reporter knew that.
“Flexible?” Melissa was saying. “They go on ‘adventures’? My question was: Has it ever happened before? A fairly binary question. Yes or no?”
Robyn flattened herself against the couch, pressing into the flowered cushions as if she were trying to get farther away from her new-what was she about to become? Jane tried to parse the relationships. Robyn was little Gracie’s mother, and Melissa would soon be Gracie’s stepmother. So Robyn and Melissa were… there was no word for that, Jane realized.
“Gracie left her cell phone at home.” Robyn’s voice was a mix of whine and whisper. “Lewis isn’t answering his, and I’ve left message after message. But he thinks the phone is silly. He says it’s a ‘technological noose.’ Strangling real life.”
Lewis sounded like quite the piece of work.
Jane tried to catch Melissa’s eye, but her sister focused on Robyn.
“I see. I suppose. Still.” Melissa slapped the back of one hand into the palm of the other, like a politician making a point. “Daniel arrives from Geneva tomorrow now, if all goes as planned, and we’re all supposed to fly back to Chicago. What if they’re not back in time for that? It’s the wedding!”
“Why is she here?” Robyn pointed to Jane.
Jane saw Melissa shake her head, quickly, as if to clear it, change the tone. She stopped her rapid-fire interrogation and lowered herself onto the wing chair, tucked her silk skirt under her, then reached out a conciliatory hand. Not quite touching Robyn but coming close.
“I’m so sorry, Robyn,” Melissa said. “I tend to accelerate right into lawyer mode. It’s the wedding. I’m a little on edge. Jane’s here simply in case we need to call someone. We’re family, right? She’s family. But the easiest solution is most often the correct one. That’s why I’m asking-before we make any major decisions-if it’s possible your husband just forgot to call to update you? That his cell battery is dead? That he and Gracie are, I don’t know, getting pizza?”
A tiny jagged streak of black mascara blotched one of Robyn’s cheeks, and she yanked her pale hair behind her ears, twisted it up on the back, let it fall. “Pizza?”
“Robyn?” Jane took a few steps closer. “You’re saying Lewis and Gracie have never been off your radar? He picks her up at school for lunch?”
“Well, not totally. Of course I don’t always know where they are,” Robyn said. “Why would I?”
Well, Jane thought, I would know where my daughter was. So any suspicious mind-and Jane was proud of hers, a necessary quality in a reporter-would wonder if the reportedly manipulative and clingy Robyn was truly upset over Gracie’s whereabouts, or simply trying to screw with the woman about to keep her daughter from her for three months a year. A suspicious mind would also speculate whether obviously skeptical Melissa was upset over Gracie, or over Robyn’s center-ring disruption of her own prenuptial plans.
Jane had a glimmer of the wrenching dominoes of divorce. Melissa had confided to her that Daniel missed his daughter. The little girl wrote him loopy-lettered postcards about kittens and school and being the flower girl.
Daniel’s impending marriage to Melissa, who Gracie thought was “awesome,” Melissa had confided, was a chance for father and daughter to reconnect. But reconnecting with her father-while living with stepmother Melissa-meant being yanked from her mother, leaving the stepfather she seemed to love, moving to another city every summer, and being made to live a semi-schizophrenic life. Not uncommon, but maybe not the best for a nine-year-old. Maybe not the best for anyone. But the couple, bolstered by Melissa’s know-how of the legal system, had pled their case to a probate court, a judge had ruled, and so it was.
Jane watched the mother and bride-to-be as they continued their familial tug-of-war. How did anyone know what was overreacting and what was a real emergency?
“Lewis didn’t want Gracie to go, you know? That’s what’s beginning to worry me.” Robyn took out a cell phone, tapped some numbers with manicured thumbs. “He was bulls-I mean, so upset about it. ‘She’s my daughter, too,’ he kept saying. And I know he was upsetting Gracie. Talking about how she’d miss school and her friends and her cat. I didn’t know how to handle it, but I truly thought he’d get over it. I mean, if it has to be, it has to be. We made our beds, I guess.”
“Was he ever… inappropriate with her?”
Had to give Melissa credit for asking that, flat out. Jane had been wondering the same thing, puzzling over how to phrase it. Lawyer Melissa had probably phrased it many times, in and out of court.
“What? No, oh, absolutely no.” Robyn was shaking her head, even while Melissa was talking, waving the question away. “Are you serious? No. He was never, never… he’s been wonderful, until the judge-anyway. He’s just sad, I guess. You know accountants, they’re all about logic and planning and making things turn out the way you want. But Lewis recently decided to break out of the mold. Show his emotions. Try new things. Experiment. ‘Live to the fullest,’ he started saying. ‘Life is short.’ Anyway. I’m texting him, again.”
Jane watched these players inhabit their roles, trying to analyze whether what she was seeing and hearing was blanketing some complicated emotional subtext. But theoretical motives and familial chess games aside, where was Gracie? If Lewis Wilhoite was a manipulative emotion-hiding planner, those were not reassuring attributes. Was Robyn protesting too much? Hiding from reality?
A nine-year-old and her stepfather were not where they were supposed to be. The stepfather didn’t answer his phone. Not a good thing. If they were out getting ice cream, fine, they’d all have a good laugh, someone would get yelled at, and it would all be happily ever after.