Good Little Wives (15 page)

If Caroline's father saw her now, he would be
disgraced.

“Carolina”—he always called her Carolina in honor of South Carolina where her mother had been born, the diva of Charleston and purveyor of too many mint juleps—“Carolina, why did you let that young man shame us?” he would ask. But her father had died two years ago, having outlasted her mother by a dozen.

Still, he was dead and couldn't know, could he?

Her neck was stiff and tears teased her eyes as she climbed into the limo that had dutifully remained halted at the curb.

The driver shut the door behind her, then circled around and got behind the wheel.

He cracked the privacy window. “Home, Mrs. Meacham?” to which she uttered a small “Yes,” then he closed the window and she leaned her head back and let the tears drizzle down her flawlessly made-up cheeks.

The car glided into traffic, just another rich folks' limo, transporting another problem-free life of privilege. Surely no one on the outside would guess the last place Caroline wanted to go was back to New Falls, back to the whispers of everyone who now knew about Chloe, back to rearranging the seating for the goddamn hospital gala on the goddamn Windsor Castle-inspired goddamn velveteen-covered plywood.

Out of habit, Caroline reached into her purse, took out her cell phone, and checked her messages.

Rhonda Gagne wanted a gratis seat at the gala for her nephew who'd be in from Miami.

Jack said he'd be late getting home tonight in case she wondered. Sadly, she wouldn't have.

Chloe said, “Mom, you might not believe this, but Dana's son told me that the gun that killed Mr. DeLano wasn't Kitty's.”

Reference to Vincent, to Kitty, only made Caroline think about Elise.

Argh.

Could she see her just one more time? Could she explain why she'd ended their affair?

Then Caroline reminded herself that Vincent had been Elise's father. Elise would not want to believe he was capable of blackmail, or, God forbid, that he wasn't without flaws.

With a small sigh of resignation, Caroline started to return Chloe's call. Then she thought of her own father, how she'd
idolized him, how she'd thought he was perfect, how screwed up her life had been—maybe still was—because of it.

Then she thought,
Maybe if we want to be happy, all we must do is grow up. Grow up and live our own lives.

Without another thought, she snapped the cell phone shut, leaned forward, and slid open the window.

“I've changed my mind,” she told Gerald. “Take me to the Upper East Side.”

If she could see Elise, if she could touch her again, maybe Caroline might make it after all.

 

“Are you feeling better?” Dory's soft voice asked now as she stood in the bedroom, next to the window seat where Lauren sat. Liam was in her arms.

After Lauren had passed out at the hospital, she'd been rescued by Detective Johnson, of all people, who'd heard the thud as she'd hit the floor. She'd been rescued, revived, then checked out by a doctor and proclaimed able to go home.

“Yes,” Lauren replied now. “For the first time in years I feel as if I'm free.”

“Of my suffocating father.”

“Yes.”

“Thank God. I thought it would never happen.”

Lauren closed her eyes. “All the way home from the hospital he wouldn't speak to me. I said I was sorry. I asked him to forgive me. Still, he wouldn't speak.”

“No one ever defied him, Lauren. No one ever dared.”

“He will divorce me.”

“Did he say that?”

“No. I told you. He wouldn't speak.”

“Maybe he'll get over it.”

“Not if his buddies find out. Not if they find out at the club.”

“Men. They're more pigheaded than women.”

“Much more.” She didn't tell Dory she thought it was Dana who'd told the police. It no longer mattered. Lauren no longer needed to pretend that living with Bob Halliday was grand. If Dana was responsible for that, she should be thanked, not condemned. “I'm thinking of going to Nantucket. To get away from New Falls for a while.”

The baby gurgled. Dory smiled and touched his sweet face. At least she seemed to like being a mother, if not a wife. “You'll be gone for the hallowed hospital gala?”

Lauren looked away. “I hardly think I'll be missed.”

“Then I'll run away with you,” Dory said suddenly. “The baby and I will run away with you.”

“You can't! What about Jeffrey?”

“Jeffrey—and my father—can go to hell,” Dory said. “And you and I will go to Nantucket.”

“In that case,” none other than Jeffrey said from the doorway where he suddenly appeared, “you might want this along for protection from the sharks.” From his thumb and forefinger, he dangled a hefty-looking gun.

“Jeffffrey!
” Dory shrieked.

“Get away! Get away!
” Lauren cried, snatching up all the pillows on the window seat and barricading them around her as if the downy innards could stave off the explosion from a thirty-eight.

“For godssake,” Jeffrey said, lowering the gun, “Take it easy, will you?”

“What are you doing here?” Dory asked, her voice still pitched in a shout. “What are you doing with that gun? There's a baby here, in case you forgot.”

As if on cue, little Liam began to cry.

“I haven't forgotten. I‘ve hardly even
seen
him, Dory. Christ. Can't I at least see him?” He tried to step into the room, but Dory raised her hand like a school crossing guard in traffic.

“Don't you dare,” she said.

He stopped. “Why are you going to Nantucket?”

“Why are you carrying a gun?”

Lauren shrank back against the window, watching the chess match unfold in front of her: queen; rook; little Liam, pawn.

“I found it in Caroline Meacham's water garden.”

Lauren eased the pillows back. “What?”

“Gardeners find all kinds of things. Golf balls, winter gloves, snakes sometimes. Never dreamed I'd find a gun. It was caught up in a lily pad, like someone tossed it there.”

“Dear God,” Lauren said. “Did you show Caroline?”

“No one was home except for the maid. I didn't think I should tell her.”

“What about the police?” Lauren asked. “You have to take it to them.”

“Yeah, I planned to, as soon as I was finished with your lawn.” He did theirs after the Meachams. Despite being “family,” even Jeffrey knew that in New Falls, Jack and Caroline came first.

“Take it
now
, Jeffrey,” Lauren demanded. “It could be a murder weapon.”

He jerked up straight, looked at the gun with new respect. “Do you think it got Mr. DeLano?”

For a man with a college education, even one in landscape engineering, Jeffrey sometimes seemed a little vague. “It's possible,” Lauren said.

The three of them stared at the gun as if it knew the answer.

“Do you think,” Dory asked, momentarily forgetting she wasn't speaking to her husband, “that someone threw it into Caroline's water garden on her way into the luncheon?”

“Someone,” Lauren agreed. “Or Caroline herself.”

 

Caroline crossed the atrium of the apartment building as she'd done countless times, aware that Elise had never wanted a doorman—a “watchdog,” she called it—who announced everyone's visitors and made covert notes of their personal lives.

A doorman, however, might know if Caroline would be welcomed, or if Elise had another lover by now.

Her gait slowed at the thought.

Caroline, after all, had been the one who'd broken things off—had been
forced
to break things off, thanks to that slime Paul Tobin and the two hundred thousand dollars she'd given him that he'd supposedly given to Vincent. (“He'll be pleased to know you're a lesbo,” Tobin had told her. “The cash will keep him from spreading the word.” An extra hundred thousand for Tobin was to “reassure her” that he wouldn't tell Vincent her lover was Elise.)

So she'd broken up with Elise to protect her—from scandal, from Tobin, from Vincent—and from having Elise learn the kind of man Vincent had become.

She stepped into the elevator, pushed the “up” arrow, and
told herself to not think about it now, because Vincent was dead and could no longer hurt them.

The ride to the penthouse was swift and unnerving. Caroline tiptoed toward the door marked “B” and nervously rang the bell.

She waited.

No one came.

She knocked.

Elise was usually home at this time, having worked three or four hours in the morning, then returned for a nap that would allow for an evening shoot—or, better, for a nightlife, a trolling of the sex clubs if she so desired.

Caroline stood there, pondering the words “Elise” and “desire” in the same sentence, when the door suddenly jerked open.

They stood there a moment, eye to eye, breath to breath.

“Caroline.”

“Elise.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I've come for a visit.”

“A visit.”

“Perhaps I should have called.”

“Yes, you should have called.”

A thin ridge of moisture formed on Caroline's forehead, under her arms, between her thighs. “I had business downtown. I took a chance.” So it was true. Elise had another lover, someone younger, no doubt, someone more sultry. Perhaps someone she'd met in the clubs.

“But you and I have no further business together,” Elise said. “You're the one who wanted it that way.”

“I've changed my mind.”

“Too late. The glow is gone. That's what happens when things are only about lust.”

She started to protest, but a woman's voice suddenly came from down the hall.

“Elise? Do you have a guest?”

The voice sounded familiar.

Oh God, it was Yolanda.

“Mrs. Meacham?” the young woman asked after she came around the corner and practically stopped
dead
, a most apt description.

“I was in the neighborhood,” Caroline said, her brain starting to stutter, her words clipped in staccato. “I'm bringing good news for Elise. The police have confirmed that her mother's gun did not kill her father.”

With that, she smiled a perfunctory smile, gave a quick bow (
A bow? Oh God, had she really done that?
), swooped her cape over her shoulder, and traipsed back to the elevator as if her mission were complete.

Steven was gone again, this time for a one-day
meeting in Albuquerque where the parent company for a chain of resort spas was buying an “all-natural” aloe-and-shea-butter-based cosmetics business. “It seems like a perfect marriage,” he said over an early dinner before he took off for the airport.

Dana said, “Oh, like ours.”

They hadn't spoken about the issue of a new lawyer for Kitty. If Michael had told him that she indeed had planned to go against Steven's wishes, no one had told her.

Still, there had been a decided chill in the dining room, and she was glad he was leaving.

“I'll take the red-eye and be back Saturday morning,” he said. “In time for the gala.”

Right,
she thought.
The freaking gala is this weekend.

He kissed her cheek and he was gone and she retreated to the family room.

Sam was out; he'd mumbled something ambiguous about following up on a lead, though Dana wondered if he'd gone to see Chloe—the only one in New Falls over twenty-one who did not have a chart on Dana's family room walls, except Elise, but she wouldn't kill her father, would she?

Dana scanned the potential murderesses, the cast of their real-life whodunit. The evidence again suggested that Kitty hadn't done it, so who was left?

Lauren?

Caroline?…Bridget?

The fact was, any of them might have.

Lauren had an affair.

Caroline knew a hit man.

Bridget had too many secrets, including if the father of her daughter was husband number
un
or
deux
.

They'd all been friends many years. Had their trust—like hers and Steven's—really been on tenuous ground? But wasn't communication between women usually more honest than between women and men?

She surveyed Sam's data, his notes, his charts. One loose designer thread after another.

She pondered this way and that, then pondered some more. Then Dana realized there was only one way left to get at the truth:

The wives of New Falls needed to do lunch.

They met at Caffeine's instead of the club, where
the staff would be queued up to eavesdrop.

They ordered wine. When it was poured and everyone sipped, Caroline began. “Before we start, I have some news.”

“Caroline,” Dana said, “with all due respect, please shut up. This time, I'm in charge.”

Caroline pursed her puffed lips. “That's fine, Dana. Then while you're in charge, do me a favor and ask if anyone has any idea why a gun was in my water garden.”

“A gun?” Dana asked.

“A gun?” Bridget asked.

Lauren, however, remained mute.

“I was in the city yesterday. I arrived home to an entire
squadron of police tramping through my landscaping, stringing yellow plastic tape from my weeping cherries to my Japanese maples. They drained the pond that Lauren's son-in-law spent fifty-three thousand dollars digging up.” She leaned forward in her chair, placed her elbows on the table, and tented her fingers. “So, if anyone has any ideas, I'm listening.”

“Good grief,” Dana said.

“Good grief,” Bridget said.

“Was it the gun that killed Vincent?” Lauren asked.

Caroline shrugged. “Who knows. They aren't telling me anything. They're treating me like a suspect.”

“We're all suspects,” Dana said. “Even more now that Kitty has been cleared thanks to the ballistics.”

“Don't look at me,” Bridget said. “I was arranging for my chemotherapy. I doubt anyone can top that.”

“I didn't kill him,” Lauren said. “By now you all know about my affair. When Vincent took up with Yolanda, I was angry and hurt. I would have loved some revenge, but I'm afraid of my own shadow, and all of you know that, too.” She was, of course, making oblique reference to the neck wattle she'd yet to have tightened.

“But you're running away,” Dana said. When Dana had called about doing lunch, Lauren said she was packing for a trip to Nantucket.

“I'm running from Bob, not from Vincent.” Her voice fell to a low octave that implored no further details.

“Well, I know I didn't kill him,” Dana said. “I had no need.”

“You have no secrets?” Caroline asked with a sad laugh. “Come, come, Dana, we all have secrets.”

Bridget pulled out the neckline of her scoop T and used it to fan off a hot flash.

“If I have secrets,” Dana said, “they do not involve Vincent. Or anyone in New Falls, for that matter.”

“Then what might they be?” Caroline asked.

“Oh, stop it,” Bridget interrupted. “Whatever they are, they can't be as incriminating as knowing a hit man. Caroline, why don't you tell us about that?”

Caroline fingered her glass as if it were Steuben. “Okay, if we're going to be honest, you asked for it. A while back, I considered having Jack killed.”

The whole restaurant went quiet, or was it only their table?

“What's the matter?” Caroline asked. “Are you going to tell me that not once in your married life none of you wished your husband was dead?”

Dana opened her mouth to say, “No!” but realized the others had fallen silent. She said a quick amends to Steven for letting them think she agreed.

“What did you do?” Bridget asked. “Look one up in the Yellow Pages?”

She fingered her glass again, ignored the remark. “Do any of you remember Mike Dawson, the pro?”

He'd been the good-looking golf pro who'd given them a few hopeless lessons then one day disappeared, the way golf pros often do.

“He'd been hitting on me, and I let him. But I told him the only way he'd have a chance was if Jack was out of the picture. I'd been kidding, well, mostly, but Mike gave me a name and phone number. I kept it because I figured someday…”

The steward uncorked a second bottle of wine. Caroline's voice drifted away on its bouquet.

“I don't believe you,” Lauren said.

Caroline laughed. “Well, it's true. It's also why Mike disappeared. After consideration, and
re
consideration, I changed my mind. The thought of starting over alone, or worse, with someone else, simply seemed too tiring. But after that, Mike's presence made me nervous. I decided his association with the underworld was inappropriate for New Falls. So I told Jack he'd propositioned me. The next day, Mike and his Big Berthas were gone.”

They mused, they sipped, they ordered salads niçoise. Then Dana said, “I thought you knew someone in jail.”

Caroline blanched. “In jail? Me?”

“You knew it was cold when Kitty was there.”

She smiled a smile that seemed to be private. Then she said, “Sorry. The only one I've ever known in the pokey was my dear mother. Every so often she'd wind up in the drunk tank and I'd bail her out. My father wouldn't do it because he wanted her to stay there and learn a lesson. He figured that way she might get sober. He figured wrong.”

“Oh, Caroline,” Lauren said.

“Oy vey,” Bridget said.

“So you're saying you didn't kill Vincent,” Dana said.

“Scout's honor,” Caroline replied. “Though I might as well tell you I had a good motive.”

Lauren's lips puckered. “Why? What did my Vincent ever do to you?”

No one commented that he hadn't been
her
Vincent.

“Well, for one thing, he was blackmailing me,” Caroline
replied. “I'd already paid him two hundred thousand dollars and I knew he'd be back for more.”

 

Bridget gripped the enamel sink in the ladies' room where she had fled after feigning nausea from the chemo, and who could argue? Apparently Dana could, because she blew through the door right behind Bridget and asked what was really going on.

“I'm sick,” Bridget said. “I don't think I'm supposed to have wine.”

“Wine runs through your French veins,” Dana said. “Besides, I might believe you except I saw your jaw drop when Caroline mentioned blackmail.”

Just then the door opened again, and in came Lauren followed by Caroline.

“Are you all right, Bridget?” Lauren asked while Caroline took a seat on the stiff brocade sofa parked in front of a gilt-framed mirror.

“I'm terrific,” Bridget said. “
Trés
terrific.”

“You don't have to be sarcastic,” Lauren said.

“I have cancer,” she replied. “I have a right to get sick. Or sarcastic.”

None of them challenged that.

Then Bridget said she was sorry. “It's not the cancer,” she confessed. “The
son of a beetch
Vincent was blackmailing me, too.”

Lauren's hands flew to her ears. “Stop it! Stop saying bad things about him!”

Dana's eyes flicked from Caroline to Bridget, back to Caroline again. “Why would he blackmail either of you?”

There was a fat, pregnant pause. Who would go first?

Eenie.

Meenie.

Miney.

Bridget wound up being Mo.

“Merde
,” she said, just as someone flushed, exited a stall, washed her hands too quickly, and departed the ladies' room. Bridget shrugged as if secrets no longer mattered. “Vincent found out I'd been married before. He learned I had a son who drowned in the marshes. He knew I never told Randall.”

It grew quiet again.

“You had a son?” Lauren whispered. “But you didn't tell Randall?”

Bridget lowered her voice. “It would have upset him because I'd never been truthful. When I first met him, Randall thought I was a virgin. He is so Catholic, even back then. Randall is a good man, but sometimes he is naïve.”

“How much did you pay Vincent?” Caroline asked.

“Same as you. Two hundred thousand.”

Caroline stood up and said, “I need more wine.”

 

They reassembled their postures, their napkins, their platitudinal smiles.

Then Bridget said, “So Vincent blackmailed us both, Caroline. I have revealed my deepest, most painful secret. What did Vincent learn about you? Was it motive enough for you to kill him? Because believe it or not, I did not.”

In their absence, the salads had arrived. Caroline picked up her fork now, tined bits of olives as if they were delicate diamonds, plinked them one by one onto her bread and butter plate. “Perhaps none of you know this, but I am a lesbian.”

If someone had dropped a proverbial pin, it would have echoed from New Falls to New Delhi to New Guinea then back to New York.

“Excuse me?” Dana asked as another piece of black fruit dotted the white china plate.

Caroline sighed. “So shoot me, I'm gay. Don't worry, though. I never eyed any of you in the locker room. In fact, I've only really had one female lover.”

No one spoke; no one could.

Then Bridget said, “Well, I guess that tops my cancer. So Vincent found out you liked women and you paid him to be quiet.”

“He found out because he had a private investigator doing his dirty work. Not an investigator, really. More like a greedy attorney.”

“Paul Tobin?” Dana said, as some pieces fell together.

“When Kitty was arrested that lowlife called me,” Caroline continued. “He said he needed a big case, and that he wanted hers.”

“Or he would take over blackmailing you where Vincent had left off?” Bridget said.

“Worse. He'd tell the world the rest. That not only am I a lesbian, but that my lover was Vincent's daughter.”

Vincent's daughter?

Vincent's
daughter?

“Elise?
” asked Dana, Bridget, Lauren, all at the same time.

Caroline nodded. “I sold my mother's sapphires to keep them quiet.”

“And now a gun shows up mysteriously in your water garden,” Dana said.

“A gun that, chances are, is connected to Vincent's death,” Bridget added.

Lauren jumped up, flung her napkin on the salad niçoise.

“I'm tired of you! I'm tired of all of you! You are turning my Vincent into some sort of…of…”

“Rogue?” Caroline asked, then said, “Sorry, my dear. But I believe your Vincent did that to himself.”

Tears jumped from Lauren's eyes, landing on the napkin that had landed on the salad.

Dana stood up and took Lauren's arm. “Please, honey, sit down. No one's trying to trash Vincent. We're just telling the truth.”

“But I can't believe it…”

“Can't,” Caroline said. “Won't.”

“Caroline, please shut up,” Dana said for the second time during the lunch. She turned back to Lauren. “We don't always know people the way that we think. It happens to all of us, Lauren.”

“You don't understand,” Lauren wept. “I gave him two hundred thousand dollars, too. But I thought he loved me…” Then she looked at Dana. “Did he blackmail you, too?”

Before Dana could answer, Bridget said, “Ha. Dana has no secrets,” and, well, except for her father, that was pretty much true.

“So,” Dana said, wondering what Sam was going to say about all this, “the bottom line is, Vincent blackmailed all three of you, but you say you didn't kill him.”

“Not me.”

“Not I.”

“Not
moi
.”

“And there's a gun now that's no doubt connected.”

“No doubt.”

“No doubt.”

“No doubt.”

“Okay,” Dana said, folding her hands in her lap. “Then I have a question, and please don't get angry. If none of us did it, what about our husbands? Is it possible one of them found out about the blackmail…that one of them is Vincent's killer…and that he threw the gun in the water garden on a whim?”