Love You to Death (3 page)
Three months later at my birthday party, my hands had to be pried off Ted’s neck, so great was my adrenaline-and-anger-enhanced grip. My mother, who’d come all the way from Florida for my birthday as she did every year, had reached for her tube of pepper spray and managed to spray me in the eyes instead of Ted, which was how Ted had escaped past Olivia and Opal—not that they were doing anything but standing there gaping. Mary-Kate—who’d been kneeling between Ted’s legs, his black pants and gray Calvin Klein boxer briefs pulled down to his knees—had shot out of the room, pulling her skirt down over her hips and her tiny tank top back down over her huge bare breasts. She was out the front door before anyone could even blink.
Later, when Jolie and Rebecca had shooed all the guests away and brought out the birthday cake Rebecca had made from scratch (she’s a pastry chef), I didn’t even have the energy to blow out the two edible pink candles, which were in the shape of a two and an eight. When I finally went to bed, I found a lacy black bra that wasn’t mine under the pillow. It smelled like Chanel No 5.
Yes, happy birthday, Abby!
“Jesus, will someone tell me what it is?” Olivia asked, staring from me to Opal.
I handed her the section of newspaper. “Guess who’s marrying his cousin?” I said, tears coming from out of nowhere. I was a regular crybaby today.
Olivia scanned the announcement and handed it back to me. “He’s a jerk and she’s a jerk and they deserve each other.”
Opal nodded. “I’m sure she’ll come upon Ted getting a blow job from the nanny in a couple of years. No doubt.” She glanced down at Oscar, sleeping peacefully. “You didn’t hear that, little nephew.”
I glanced at the photo of Ted and Mary-Kate. The headline, Puck And Darling.
Opal’s premonition did make me feel a little better. “Thanks,” I said, crumpling the paper into a ball and throwing it toward the little wicker garbage can under Olivia’s dressing table. “Have a nice life!” I yelled at it like an idiot.
“Hey, I wasn’t done with the wedding section,” Opal griped.
There was a knock at the door. Veronica. “Picture time!” she trilled. “Foote girls family photograph.”
I stood up, but then realized she didn’t mean me. She meant herself and her daughters. She had a hand on each of their shoulders and was guiding them toward the door.
“And Abby, too, of course,” Olivia said quickly.
Veronica smiled a beat too late. “Of course! Abby, too!”
That was me,
Abby, too.
She took Oscar from Opal, and we all headed into the living room. Veronica positioned the four of us by the sliding glass door to the backyard, and my aunt Marian snapped the photo, then Veronica called for pictures of the Foote sisters, this time smiling at me on time. “Say cheeseburgers!” Veronica trilled, which was what my father always used to say when taking pictures.
“Shitburgers!” Opal said through a grin.
I smiled. Since puberty, Opal always shouted
shitburgers!
instead of
cheeseburgers,
despite being punished time and again. The first time it had come out of her mouth (which had been washed out with soap moments later), Opal was twelve; Olivia and I were both fourteen (we overlapped for a month). We were celebrating my father and Veronica’s thirteenth wedding anniversary, and Veronica called for pictures of the Foote girls. Opal, already wearing Isaac Mizrahi clothes (albeit from Target), knee-high leather boots and supersized black sunglasses, stood grinning on my right, holding her fingers in a V over my head. On my left, Olivia, a future PTA president in her taupe twinset and pearls, stared moodily at the floor. I was the tiny, brown-haired, brown-eyed monkey in the middle between the two beanpole blue-eyed blondes, the easy answer to
Which girl in the picture doesn’t belong?
The answer to why I was invited, year after year, to my father and stepmother’s anniversary dinner was much, much harder to figure out.
A second after the “say cheeseburgers” and the click, my dad noticed his eldest daughter had Opal’s fingers over her head. There was a mock-weary “Opal!” which led to a fit of giggles from The Immature One, as I called her then, which sent Veronica (or Demonica as my friends called her, quite undeservedly, as she wasn’t really
mean
) clickety-clacking on her high-heeled shoes into the living room. Though Veronica was more hostess-polite than nice, she definitely wasn’t wicked-stepmother material. Still, she’d always reminded me physically of a made-over Wicked Witch of the West. Which was funny because I was often told, especially every Thanksgiving, when
The Wizard of Oz
came on, that I looked just like Dorothy, minus the braids. And the skipping. And Toto.
Veronica had then snapped at Opal for ruining the shot (“we’re going to miss our dinner reservations!”) and at Olivia for not smiling. “Why can’t you both act more like Abby!” she’d complained to her daughters, sliding the sunglasses on top of Opal’s head and squeezing Olivia’s frown into an upturn that didn’t last.
“You mean boring?” Opal asked, snickering.
My father moved the camera from his face and sing-songed, “There’s a twenty-five-dollar Tar-
gzay
gift card for any Foot-ay girl who smiles when I say ‘bacon-double-cheeseburgers.’”
On her first day of seventh grade, Opal had told her teachers that her last name was pronounced Foot-ay, as in French, and not Foot, as in feet (it
is
pronounced
foot
). My father thought that was cute. Because my name was Abby, and not even Abigail, I hadn’t been able to go around telling people my name was Abby Foot-ay.
“Ha! Abb-ay Foot-ay! That does sound pretty stupid!” Opal had agreed.
“
You
sound pretty stupid,” Olivia had shot back.
The Foot-ay sisters did not get along so well back then.
Anyway, the bribe worked. Opal had smiled from earring to dangling earring. Olivia, who’d been saving up for an iPod, forced cheer. My smile was school-pictures stiff, but my father and stepmother liked that kind of smile for family albums.
“Perfect!” my dad had said. “Just perfect. Okay, say bacon-double-cheeseburgers!”
“Shitburgers!” Opal had yelled simultaneously with the
click!
and then had been dragged off to the bathroom to eat some Zest.
The two photographs are side by side in my The Teen Years album—the left side representing the real moment, the truth of my family, which was why it was my favorite photograph, and the right side representing the manufactured, the
cheeseburgers,
when we all wanted to say
shitburgers.
“Where’s that new boyfriend of yours?” my aunt Marian asked as she lowered the camera. “I’m dying to meet him. I hope he’s a nice young man, unlike that last one you dated. Or the last one. Or the last one.”
Shitburgers.
I
learned many boyfriends ago that an easy way to feel better (slightly better, anyway) after a breakup, even if the breakup was a godsend because the boyfriend was clearly a superjerk in hiding, was to
look
good. And so, on Monday morning I didn’t drag myself to work with bed head and the blues. I blow-dried my hair pin-straight, put on mascara and the pinky-red lipstick Opal had once given me. I slipped into my favorite outfit—a black wrap dress that managed to be both office appropriate and hot-date appropriate—my favorite shoes (glen-plaid tweed), and I looked much better than I felt.
Of course, a torrential downpour began halfway into my twenty-minute walk to work. My umbrella, which was usually in my tote bag at all times, was instead in the backseat of Superjerk’s car. I was dripping wet. My fabric shoes were soaked. My hair clung to the sides of my head. The moment I walked through the double glass doors of
Maine Life
magazine, Marcella French, our obnoxious receptionist, pointed and laughed. Marcella was enjoying the perks of a flirtation with Gray Finch, editor in chief of
Maine Life
and everyone’s boss on the small staff, so she felt free to ridicule whomever she wanted. Just wait till summer intern season started. Forty-year-old Marcella would be toast.
Henry’s face was the first thing I saw when I set foot inside my tiny cubicle. No, not his face-face. A photograph of his face. Ugh! Why had I put up that stupid picture of the two of us on our second date!
I’d had the photo in my desk drawer for weeks, but last week, after a particularly sweet date, I’d pinned it up on the bulletin board to replace the empty four-by-six space that Ted’s photo had left six months ago. I glared at it, at Henry’s stupid smile, at his dumb dimple. The picture had been taken on our second date as we boarded a dinner cruise around Casco Bay. A photographer was snapping everyone’s photograph in front of a buoy, and if you liked the shot, you could pay to have it in a paper frame. Henry and I were all awkward smiles and unsure of what to do with our hands. So we both settled for school-picture smiles and hands clasped in front of our stomachs. Since it was our second date, we felt compelled to say yes to the photograph, which was $14.99.
At least
Henry
had paid for the picture. I glared some more at his face, then grabbed the mini darts set that my coworker Shelley had given me for Secret Santa last month. I aimed in the vicinity of Henry’s heart. Or lack thereof.
“Bull’s-eye!” I said.
Shelley’s head appeared over the gray fabric “wall” that separated our cubicles. Her wildly curly brown hair bounced on the top of the divider. “Uh-oh. What happened?”
My second dart landed on Henry’s nose. “I am going to kill him, that’s what happened. That jerk ditched me in—”
“Abby Foote?”
I swiveled around at the unfamiliar voice to find a familiar face. The face of all faces. A face ten years older than the last time I’d seen it, but yes, it was him! Benjamin Orr! The love of my teenage life. Well, secret life. I—and countless other girls—had been secretly in love and lust with Ben Orr for two years in high school. He probably couldn’t match my name with my face, despite having been in two classes of mine. Ben Orr had been captain of everything, from the football team to Mathletes. I’d been the Amazing Invisible Girl.
He stood just outside my cubicle with another man, fiftyish. His dad? Perhaps they had a Best Of request. Best-Looking Guy in Maine? Best Body?
“Yes, I’m Abby,” I said, unable to take my eyes off Ben. He was tall—six feet. Broad shouldered. Dark, dark hair to match his dark, dark eyes, which were so intense, so intelligent, but sparkling. He had such fair skin. He’d been drop-dead cute at fifteen and sixteen. He’d graduated to drop-dead gorgeous.
Both men reached into the breast pockets of their suits and pulled out gold shields, their gazes going from the dart in Henry’s nose to me and back again.
They were the police? I jumped up. “Did something happen to my mother? Opal or Olivia? Veronica? Oh God, Oscar—did something happen to Oscar?”
“You didn’t mention the brother-in-law,” the older one said. “Why is that? Do you want to kill him, too?”
Huh? I glanced at Shelley; so did both cops. Her eyes widened at me and she ducked back down.
“Excuse my partner,” Ben said, cutting the other man a look. “He hasn’t had his fourth cup of coffee yet. We’re not here about your family. We’re here about Ted Puck.”
Ted Puck? What about Ted Puck?
Ben eyed me. “I’m Detective Benjamin Orr of the Portland Police Department. This is my partner, Detective Frank Fargo. We’re investigating the murder of Ted Puck.”
What?
I staggered back, my butt hitting the knob of the drawer on my desk. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Murdered?
What?
What? No. There had to be a mistake. They must be talking about a different Ted Puck. I straightened. “The Ted Puck I know is fine. I just saw him yesterday. I mean, his face. His engagement announcement was in yesterday’s paper.”
“That’s the one,” Detective Fargo said, jotting something down in a tiny spiral notebook.
I stared from Ben to Fargo, unable to speak, unable to shut my mouth, which had dropped open. Ted Puck was dead?
Dead?
“In fact, Miss Foote,” Fargo said. “I believe Ted brought his fiancée, Mary-Kate Darling, to your birthday party six months ago when you and Ted were a couple. You caught them in a sexual act, according to witnesses.”
There was a sudden silence in the offices of
Maine Life
magazine. Unusual. Which meant everyone had stopped in midsentence to listen.
Ben glanced around. “Is there somewhere we could go to talk more privately?” he asked. “A conference room?”
“You can use conference room A,” Gray Finch, my boss, said, appearing behind the detectives. “Second door on the left. I’ll have my admin bring coffee.” He paused. “Officers, our Abby isn’t in any kind of trouble, is she?”
Fargo smiled. “I sure could use that coffee.”
Finch’s eyes widened and he glanced at me, then hurried off.
“Lead the way, will you, Miss Foote?” Fargo asked.
I would have led if I could’ve moved. I stared down at Fargo’s shoes. Scuffed black Rockports like the ones Henry wore.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Ben said, and I looked up at him.
“I’m just—” I shook my head. “I’m just so shocked.”
“I’m sure you are,” Fargo said. “Why don’t I lead the way. Second door on the left, the man said. We cops are trained to listen carefully,” he added, tapping his ear.
Now
my
eyes widened. I trailed behind him; Ben trailed behind me. I felt my coworkers’ gazes on me until I opened the door to our small conference room. Fargo sat at the head of the long table. Ben sat adjacent. I sat across from Ben. I could smell someone’s cologne.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” Ben said, flipping open a small spiral notebook. He clicked his pen, and I jumped.
“You sure do startle easy,” Fargo said.
Easily,
I wanted to correct. I didn’t.
Ben smiled at me. “We’d like to ask you a few questions. Is that all right?”
I nodded.
“Your hair’s dripping,” Ben said, reaching into his breast pocket for a pocket of packet tissues. He held it out to me.
“Uh, thanks,” I said, squeezing the ends of my hair with the tissue, which disintegrated into shreds immediately. My hair was coated in tissue guts. Ted Puck was dead. Benjamin Orr was sitting across from me. Talking.
“You and Ted dated some months ago?” Ben asked.
I nodded.
There was a knock at the door. Fargo said, “Yeah,” and Marcella opened the door and peered in, her round blue eyes ever rounder. She held a tray with two mugs of coffee, a pint of milk and sugar packets. She set down the tray, then slowly backtracked from the room, clearly hoping to eavesdrop.
“You can close the door on the way out,” Fargo snapped, and she bolted.
Ben took his coffee black. “So, Abby, you were telling us about your relationship with Ted. When did you start dating and when did you break up?
“Um, we broke up in July. On my birthday. The seventh. We started seeing each other in April.”
“Why did you break up?” Detective Fargo asked. “We think we know,” he added with a snicker, “but we’d like to hear it from you.”
“Um,” I said. And that was all that would come out of my mouth.
Fargo raised an eyebrow. “According to witnesses, Ted brought Mary-Kate to your twenty-eighth birthday party, introduced her to you and your family and friends as his cousin from out of town, and then you, along with your mother and half sisters, came upon the two of them participating in a sexual act in your bedroom, which—” he f lipped a page in his notebook “—was supposed to be off-limits to guests.”
My entire faced burned. “Um, who told you that?”
Fargo ignored my question. “You must have been very angry at Ted,” he said, tapping his pen against his notebook.
That was an understatement. At the party I’d taken my mother and sisters to my bedroom to show them the gift Ted had given me when he and his “cousin” had arrived. Just a half hour earlier Ted and I had gone into my bedroom.
Close your eyes and hold out your hand,
he’d said. And when I opened my eyes, there was a small wrapped jewelry box on my palm. The size of a ring box. I’d almost fainted. If he’d asked me to marry him right then and there, after only three months of dating, I would have said yes. But inside the box were earrings, not a ring. Diamond earrings, though, which had said so much to me about what I meant to him, how he felt about me. Big present. Big love.
Of course, later, the earrings were determined to be cubic zirconia, worth around $9.99 at Wal-Mart.
Ted then suggested a quickie, but I was afraid of getting caught, so I’d promised him a longie later. A half hour later, when I opened the door to my bedroom, my mother and Olivia and Opal standing behind me, so excited for me, there was Ted, sitting up against the headboard of my bed, his jeans unzipped and his “cousin” facedown in his naked lap.
I heard my mother’s and Olivia’s united gasp, Opal’s “you pig!” and all that came out of my mouth was “But she’s your cousin!” My mother reached for the pepper spray, and I lunged for Ted’s neck.
Ted, six foot two, 180 pounds of muscle, escaped unharmed. He called from his cell phone a half hour later. “She’s not my cousin, okay? Look, I shouldn’t have brought her. I shouldn’t have even gone to your party. But I didn’t want to disappoint you, so I figured I’d hang for an hour and then make an excuse to leave. I was planning on telling you tomorrow that I’d met someone else, but…for what it’s worth, I’m really sorry about what happened. So I didn’t hurt you while I was prying you off me, did I?”
No, Ted, you didn’t hurt me at all. Really. Not a bit.
And what was with guys and
for what it’s worth?
It was worth
nothing.
Fargo was staring at me. Ben was still writing in his notebook. I’d told them the whole sorry story.
“So a few minutes ago, in your cubicle, you mentioned that you saw Ted yesterday,” Fargo said, his shellacked gray hair glinting. “Where and when?”
“No, I meant I saw his face—in the newspaper,” I explained. “The wedding section.”
Fargo’s gray eyebrows slanted. “So now your story is that you
didn’t
see Ted yesterday in person. You didn’t go over to his apartment to, say, congratulate him on his engagement?”
I shook my head.
Ben took a sip of his coffee. “How’d you feel when you saw the announcement in the paper?” he asked.
I shifted my gaze to him, grateful to avoid Fargo’s moving eyebrows.
I don’t know! Why are you interrogating me?
I shrugged.
Fargo leaned close. “The court reporter can’t hear a shrug. You really should start practicing speaking up now for when you’re on trial.”
I felt every ounce of energy drain from my body. Whoa. Wait a minute. “Are you saying you think I tried to hurt Ted?”
“Tried to hurt?” Fargo repeated. “Honey, the guy is
dead.
”
“Abby,” Ben said. “May I call you Abby?”
I nodded.
Ben offered a smile. “We’re just investigating all leads.”
I stared from Bad Cop to Good Cop. My lower lip trembled, and I decided to ignore the bad one. “Um, Detective Orr, you probably don’t remember me,” I began, “but we went to high school together. Go, Rangers!” I added like an idiot.
Ben tilted his head slightly and stared at me. He shook his head. “I can’t place the face. But it was a big school, and my family moved out of state before my senior year.”
Yeah, a big school with 164 graduating seniors. That I hadn’t registered on his radar wasn’t a surprise.
“Well, what I mean is, you
know
me,” I said to Ben. “You don’t
know me
know me, obviously, since you don’t remember me, but we grew up in the same town, walked the same halls—”
“Miss Foote,” Fargo interrupted. “Do you want to know who I went to high school with? One of the most infamous serial killers in Massachusetts history.”
Oh.
Ben f lipped a page in his notebook. “Abby, can you tell us where you were yesterday evening, between the hours of seven and nine?” “Home,” I said. Under the blankets. “I went to a family party at my sister’s house until around three, then I went home.”
“What did you do at home?” Fargo asked.
“Nothing, really,” I said. Which was true.
Fargo raised an eyebrow. “Nothing—from three until you arrived at work this morning? That’s most unusual.”
“I had a tough day,” I said. “I watched TV and then went to bed.”
They wanted to know what I watched, so I had to tell them I spent two hours glued to a Lifetime movie about a woman who finds out at her husband’s funeral that he had two other wives. Then it was reality TV. A little CNN. And then I pulled a pillow over my head and tossed and turned for a few hours until I fell asleep.
