Goodnight Nobody (18 page)

I pushed through the doors and beat almost everyone out to the parking lot. Once I was there, I ignored the faces and concentrated on license plates. Eastham, Massachusetts, the obituaries had said. Eastham was where the unsent postcard I'd found was supposed to go. Connecticut plates are blue and white; Massachusetts plates are red, white, and blue. I saw three cars with Massachusetts plates: a little green lozenge of a Saab hatchback, a Cadillac SUV with a booster seat in back, and--I held my breath--a four-door Honda, probably five years old, which made it easily the oldest car in the lot. It was gray, with a ding in the driver's door and a bumper sticker reading "Give Peace a Chance."

I stood off at what I hoped was a polite distance between the Honda and the Saab and held my breath as--finally--one of the older couples I'd seen inside approached the gray car. The man was white-haired and frail, with pale skin and watery blue eyes behind oversized eyeglasses. The woman was short, small and slender, with curly gray hair cut close to her head, in a loose green sack of a dress, a necklace made of chunky glass beads, and Birkenstocks over black tights. She wore no makeup, not even the Upchurch woman's casual swipe of Sugar Maple lipstick. Definitely from out of town.

I picked my way across the gravel parking lot to their car. "Excuse me, are you Kitty's parents?" I looked at the woman, struggling to remember Kitty's maiden name. "Bonnie Verree?"

They looked at each other before the woman answered.

"Yes. I'm Bonnie Verree. Kitty was my daughter."

"I'm Kate Klein," I said, holding out my hand.

"We heard you speak," she said. She took my hand in hers, which was small and warm. She had the same blue eyes as Kitty, but that was where the resemblance stopped. I couldn't see any of her daughter's fine features in Bonnie's friendly, button-shaped face...and Kitty had been easily eight inches taller than her mother.

"You're the painter," I said.

She stared at me curiously.

"I was in Kitty's house...those beautiful seascapes."

"Oh," she said. Her husband clamped one blue-veined hand on her shoulder.

"We need to get going," he said. "There's terrible traffic on ninety-one."

I nodded, then blurted, "I wanted to tell you how sorry I was for your loss."

"Thank you, dear," she said.

"I was the one who found her," I began, then shut my mouth, realizing, with mounting horror, that it sounded almost as if I were bragging.
Hooray for me, I found your daughter's corpse!

"That must have been horrible for you," Bonnie said.

I gave a small nod, as if to suggest that I was the kind of sophisticated soul who stumbled across exsanguinated neighbors regularly. "I wish I'd known Kitty better," I said slowly, trying to think of a way to ask about that postcard.
Happier than I can even believe.
"I mean, we saw each other all the time, at the playground, and, of course, I read
Content,
so I've seen the articles she wrote..."

The words "articles she wrote" had a galvanic effect on the couple. Hugh's pale, lined face turned red. Bonnie pulled her hands away and looked at me helplessly. Her husband stalked to the driver's side of the car and shoved the key into the lock so hard I was surprised that I didn't see it pop out on the other side of the door.

"I'm sorry for your loss," I blurted again.

Bonnie shook her head as her husband reached over the gearshift and pushed her door open. "You don't understand," she said, in a voice so quiet I had to lean forward to hear it. "Hugh and I lost Katie a long time ago."

I was so stunned by what she'd said and by what she'd called Kitty, that I stood there as if I'd been frozen as Bonnie slammed the door and Hugh put the car in gear and came within six inches of driving his Honda over my toes. He stomped on the gas, squealed out of the parking lot, and pulled onto Main Street without pausing to look for oncoming traffic.

I staggered backward. My heel caught, and I'd almost hit the ground before someone grabbed my elbows.

"Are you all right?" a man's voice said.

My heel buckled underneath me and I fell down onto the gravel. "Ow!" When I pushed myself upright, my ankle throbbed, and my palms oozed pinpricks of blood.

"Sorry. Thank you," I said. The man who'd tried to catch me was in his fifties, short and wiry and entirely bald, with brown eyes, a narrow face, and a nut brown tan. He reminded me a little bit of an otter, something small and sleek and better suited for the water than the land.

"Jesus," I said, hoping that a few deep breaths would get my knees to stop shaking. "Meet the parents."

The man gave a perplexed shrug and extended his hand. "Joel Asch," he said.

The name was familiar, but it took me a second to remember what Laura Lynn Baird had told me.
Content
's editor in chief, who might have been sleeping with the deceased.

"You were Kitty's friend," I said.

He nodded. "I tried to be," he said, watching as I brushed bits of gravel off my hands.

"Did you two know each other a long time?" I asked.

He turned his head toward the town hall doors, where mourners clad in taupe and gray were filing out, murmuring quietly to each other. "Would you like to get a cup of coffee?" he asked. "I've got some time before I have to go back to the city."

Twenty-Three

Ten minutes later Joel Asch and I were seated at a table at Brookfield Bagels, a gray-shingled cottage with yellow-and-white-striped awnings and half a dozen round wooden tables for two, where six bucks could get you a watery cup of coffee and a warm, squishy circle of dough the exact texture of impacted Wonder Bread. Joel Asch took one bite, winced, and set it aside.

"I know," I said, lowering my voice, "they're awful, aren't they?"

"They're...not good," he said. He looked as if he was debating whether to force down his mouthful of faux bagel or spit it into his napkin. He finally decided to keep chewing.

"So tell me," I said. "How did a stay-at-home mom from Upchurch end up writing for one of the most important magazines in America?" With my fulsome compliment still hanging in the warm, yeast-scented air, I reached into my bag for my notebook.

Joel Asch smiled at me indulgently. "You wouldn't be angling for her job, now, would you?"

I shook my head. "I keep pretty busy here," I said.

"Well," he said. "I was Kitty's professor in college, and we'd kept in touch over the years. Kitty was actually the one who brought Laura Lynn to my attention. I caught her a few times on CNN. Her ideas intrigued me. The battle between stay-at-home mothers and mothers who work. The contested ground of maternity in America."

I nodded and wrote
contested ground.
"As a mother myself, I have to tell you, that's a fascinating subject." As a mother myself, it was doubtful I'd ever find time to read about it, given that I was too busy living it, but flattery couldn't hurt.

"So I called Laura Lynn, and she was eager to be associated with
Content.
"

"Of course," I said, in a tone that implied that you'd have to be a pederast or a space alien not to want to be associated with
Content.

"But she was busy. The demands on her time were such that it became clear that she would need..." He twirled his plain gold wedding band around one thin brown finger. "A certain level of assistance. And I'd seen plenty of Kitty's work in college."

Seen her work,
I wrote. The plot was thickening. At least, I hoped it was. "What subject did you teach at Hanfield?" I asked.

"I was a guest lecturer there for a semester. I taught a course in politics and the press." He carefully rolled up his empty cream cheese packet. "Kitty impressed me. Her mind impressed me. The clarity of her writing. The singularity of her focus."

"Mmm-hmm," I said, wondering whether
singularity of focus
wasn't professorspeak for
nice rack.
Kitty must have been a tasty morsel as a coed--that bittersweet chocolate hair tied back in a headband, that fresh face and perfect body in jeans and a Hanfield sweatshirt.

"She was very bright," he said. "And a hard worker, and she turned in her papers on time. I helped her find her first job, writing the in-house newsletter for St. Francis Hospital in New York. When it became clear that Laura Lynn needed help, I called Kitty and asked if she'd be interested. Then I set up a lunch for the two of them to meet, and that was that."

That was that,
I wrote. My heart was pounding. He'd met her in college, admired her mind, kept in touch with her over the years, found her not one but two jobs in the ultracompetitive New York City market. If that didn't spell
affair
I wasn't sure what did...which meant that horrid Laura Lynn had hit the nail on the head. "I have to say, I'm amazed she found the time to write. Kids can be pretty overwhelming."

He gave an indulgent chuckle. "That's what my wife tells me."

I laughed along with him, thinking that his wife and I probably had a lot in common--high-powered husbands who were hardly ever home, men who liked the concept of a wife and children more than they seemed to enjoy the reality of kids who'd cry at the slightest insult or stubbed toe, clamor for junk food or crappy plastic toys and on bad days whine ceaselessly at bedtime, bathtime, mealtime, and many times in between.

"How did they work together?" I asked.

"They did a lot by email, and on the phone. Laura Lynn would call her from airports or greenrooms or wherever she found herself. They'd talk about a theme, hammer out an outline, then Kitty would write a draft, Laura Lynn would approve it, and Kitty would email it to me."

"She didn't come into the office?"

He shook his head, looking pained, and a little suspicious. "Well, the other writers..." He reached into his pocket for a travel pack of aspirin, shook two loose, considered, and added a third. I filled in the blank myself: the other writers at
Content
probably had no idea that Laura Lynn Baird wasn't writing "The Good Mother" herself, so having Kitty show up in the office would have come as an unpleasant surprise.

"What about her politics?"

He gulped his pills and gave me a blank stare. I tried again.

"Laura Lynn had very strong opinions about working mothers." This earned me blank stare, the sequel. "She felt that mothers shouldn't work outside the house."

"That's not a very nuanced reading of her work," he demurred. I plowed ahead, thinking that there'd be time for nuance later, after I'd figured out who'd killed Kitty and was now leaving notes suggesting that I was next in line.

"I guess that what I'm wondering is whether Kitty felt the same way about working mothers."

Joel Asch unfolded his paper bag and smoothed it on the table. "You knew her, didn't you? Weren't you close?"

I tried for another chuckle. "Well, you know how it is. Mostly we wound up talking about what kind of peanut butter our kids liked."

Ha ha ha,
laughed Joel.

"How about in college? Hanfield had lots of conservatives, right?" I knew it did, from my time online, and from my own college years, when it had been notorious as a breeding ground for budding Phyllis Schlaflys and Pat Buchanans. "Did Kitty participate in any of that?"

"I can't say that I remember specifically."

"So why would she want to go to work ghostwriting--"

"Assisting," Joel Asch said with a grimace.

"Fine. Assisting a woman who was writing things she didn't necessarily believe?"

Joel Asch took a furious bite of his bagel. I watched as his teeth sank into the mush. "Entree," he muttered.

"Excuse me?"

"It gave her entree," he said, biting off each word. "Writing for
Content
gave her a certain cachet, a certain eclat, a certain--"

"Please let your next word be in English," I said.

He frowned at me. Then his face relaxed. He tilted his chin back and gazed at the ceiling. "Fine," he said. "English. Fine." His expression grew wistful. "She was funny, too, you know. Kitty was. Do you know what she called this place?"

"What, Brookfield Bagels?"

"No," he said. "Upchurch. She called it Land of the Lost."

I felt my heart contract in sympathy as I realized that behind the perfect-mother mask Kitty had been disconcerted by her hometown, just like I was. And funny. Who knew? "So why did she move here?"

I expected another shrug or blank look or some variation on my own story:
she's here because it's where her husband wanted to be.
But Joel Asch surprised me.

"I think she ended up here for the same reason she was willing to work for
Content
and shape prose she might not have necessarily agreed with," he said.

"Cachet," I quoted, "eclat."

His thin lips lifted in a faint smile. "Status. That and the ability to move in the right circles," he said. "I'm not sure there's a French word for it. Access, maybe. She could have access to people in high places, attend the right charity benefits, the right fund-raisers. If she picked up the phone and said, 'I write for
Content,
I'm doing research for Laura Lynn Baird,' she could get senators on the line. Even presidents."

"And she didn't care that she didn't have a byline?"

He suffered through another bite of bagel and shook his head. I was starting to feel desperate, and he was starting to look antsy. "Look," I said. "I'm not trying to pry, or snoop, but I'm scared. We all are. The police haven't arrested anyone. All of the mothers are jumping at shadows. Anything you could tell me...anything at all..."

"I'm sorry," Joel said. Then he looked at his watch. "I wish I had some answers for you, but I should really get going." He pushed himself away from the table. I followed him out the door.

"Do you think one of Laura Lynn's readers could have had something to do with it?" I asked, as we made our way to the parking lot. Joel walked fast, and I struggled to keep up. My ankle was killing me, and my feet must have swollen while I was sitting. It felt like I was walking on knives. "I know she got hate mail."

"Laura Lynn got hate mail," he corrected. "I would forward it to her. She wanted to see it, no matter how crude, or threatening, or laden with misspellings."

I hurried after him as fast as I could, thinking that as far as Joel Asch was concerned,
threatening
and
laden with misspellings
were probably equally frightening. "Did Kitty see the hate mail?" I asked. "Did she know about it?"

He rubbed at his pate, then jammed his hands in his pockets and pulled out his keys. "I really wouldn't know," he said. Which, I realized, wasn't exactly an answer. I reached for his shoulder, and he spun around, exhaling impatiently. The sun stretched out our shadows in the Brookfield Bagels parking lot. It was high noon, which was appropriate--and upsetting. I was going to be late to get my kids again.

"Look," I said. "Forgive me if I'm confused. Maybe being home with kids has fogged my brain a little, but this doesn't make sense. You helped Kitty Cavanaugh get two jobs, one of which was a pretty big deal, and now she's been murdered. This beautiful, brilliant, hardworking, funny woman. Dead. Don't you want to find out who did it?"

"Of course I do," he said quietly.

"Were you sleeping with her? Is that why you gave her the job?"

His shoulders stiffened as he glared at me. I heard the thrum of traffic on Main Street, the faint babbling of the brook that ran behind the bagel shop. The cool breeze stirred my hair. I braced myself, thinking he'd laugh or storm off or get in his car and drive.

"No," he said. "I wasn't sleeping with her. For heaven's sake, she was young enough to be my daughter." He took a deep breath, tossing his keys from his left hand to his right. "I appreciate that you're interested in the details of her death. I wish I could be more help." He paused, then went on awkwardly. "I'm sorry you lost a friend."

He extended his hand and, after a minute, I shook it and told him, "I'm sorry too."