Past Perfect (37 page)

How often would she use the back door? I wondered. She had no swimming pool in back. And the gas grill she’d mentioned wasn’t even around. From the nearly bald ground that had once been lawn to the upended metal furniture, I couldn’t imagine her cavorting out back. The garage was attached to the house so when she pulled in her car, she probably went through a door that led directly inside. If she had guests, which I was finding it increasingly hard to imagine, they would come in the front door. She might not even look at her back door for days at a time. Weeks.

When Maddy started college she was always babbling about life imitating art. Maybe it had been vice versa. However, glancing down at my sandals, I saw they were not imitative of art, although calling Spy Guys art was, admittedly, chutzpah. I longed for the steel-heeled stiletto Dani had used to knock in the windowpanes. Was I as nuts as Maria? How could I possibly be considering breaking and entering?

Without opening the buttons, I pulled my shirt over my head, wrapped it around my fist and wrist, and with all the delicacy I could muster, tried to knock out the pane of glass nearest the doorknob. I got it on the fifth try. Then, making sure once again to cover my palm and fingers, I gingerly put my hand through the hole I’d made and unlocked the door. And opened it, but only a fraction of an inch. I didn’t want to be standing around in my bra if an alarm went off, so I shook out my shirt about ninety times to get rid of any fragments of glass, and put it back on.

I held my breath and pushed open the door with my hip: no alarm. That second, I realized she might have a silent alarm, which at that very moment could be lighting up the switchboard at the Tallahassee Police Department. Run! I commanded myself. Instead, I walked right into Maria Schneider’s house.

I should have stayed outside. True, the air-conditioning was blasting so hard it was a relief from the heat, but it was so freezing I immediately longed for gloves and socks. But that was nothing compared with the kitchen. It wasn’t the stench: I was breathing through my mouth so I wouldn’t smell it, but nothing, including the hum of the AC and the refrigerator, could obscure the bzzzz of the flies in there. I stuck my head in for just an instant, of course imagining hideous, decomposing bodies, but most of the flies, which seemed to be suffering from an epidemic of obesity, were busy at the breakfast nook table. A small contingent of fly foodies had broken off and were working at the dirty dishes in the sink and open dishwasher.

I gagged, and before I could work myself up into a major nausea festival, I rushed off the other way, looking for some kind of home office, or a desk. I found it, or something like it, in a room paneled in some light wood, oak maybe, with floor-to-ceiling shelves for books and show-off stuff: those Etruscan urns or chinoiserie people bring home from vacations, or their collections of Disneyana. The shelves were almost bare. Whoever had owned the house before Maria must have had a giant TV. Hers, in the space in the middle of the shelving unit, was of such ordinary size that it didn’t even hide the electrical outlet. Besides the couch on the opposite wall from the shelves, the only furniture was a desk and chair. I glanced at my watch: I would give this five minutes.

I didn’t even need that. The narrow drawer under the top of the desk was filled with narrow drawer things: pans, paper clips, a staple remover, and a couple of old floppy disks. The disks were labeled, but I had trouble reading Maria’s European-style handwriting, the kind that looks neat but is close to illegible. In any case, there was no computer in the room and I wasn’t about to steal the disks, though why I was suddenly having moral qualms after smashing her window and breaking into her house was beyond me. The drawer on the right had about ten unopened envelopes —including MasterCard, American Express, Southern Bell, and something from the Tallahassee traffic court. The drawer beneath was a file. All bills marked paid, alphabetized. It looked messy, though, with too many papers stuffed into a single drawer. And the wastebasket I found underneath the desk was overflowing with discarded catalogs.

Still, this wasn’t the room of a deranged person, not in the way the kitchen was. She wasn’t neat, but she hadn’t been an utter slob. But a person has to eat every day. I, for one, could go weeks and, on one occasion, a couple of months without opening a bill. Maybe what I saw as Maria’s craziness was not a long-term business. Maybe it had something to do with Lisa.

Then I realized that Maria did have to get dressed every day. So I went upstairs. She had one of those master suites: a giant bedroom with an unmade bed and discarded tissues on the floor, a blue-tiled bathroom only slightly smaller than the Mediterranean—surprisingly neat except for a sliver of dirty soap on the sink. Behind that was another enormous room —one really big closet. It was a mess. Not that she had a huge wardrobe. In fact, the room was so gigantic and her clothing so minimal that the place looked as if it had been looted. I made my way around strewn pants suits, slacks, scarves, matronly cotton bras and panties, dressy Tshirts, and shoes all over the floor. Everything was white, gray, black, or some combination.

A few things were still on hangers, including a flapperlike dress, sleeveless, black on top, and, starting at the hips, widening into a white pleated skirt. It still had the price tag: $89, reduced from $139. There were no sports clothes in her drawers and no sneakers or flip-flops on the near-empty shoe shelves. One pair each of black flats, black heels, white flats, and brown faux alligator heels.

Except something made me look at the brown pair. These alligators weren’t faux. I checked out the label. They were Manolos, so I assumed they cost about one or two thousand. I was a little taken aback, both by the intrusion of brown amid all that black, white, and gray— and by the price. I picked up a pair of Maria’s flats; I’d never heard of the label, but being my mother’s daughter, I had enough shoe knowledge to recognize they were fairly inexpensive and not at all stylish. And sure enough, size seven. I put the flat back down and picked up one of the alligator numbers. I, personally, could never spend that amount of money on shoes, but I had to admit, despite my husband’s protectiveness toward large reptiles, they really were beautiful and I wouldn’t mind having a pair.

Then I looked again. They were a size nine. Shoes that I bet would fit Lisa Golding. And if they were Lisa’s, what did that mean? That Lisa and Maria had met recently? That… I couldn’t think anymore. All that was in my head was I’m out of here!

And I would have been, except just then I heard a car bumping up that awful stone driveway. What in God’s name could I do?

Run. Hide. And pray I could figure something out.

WHILE HER CAR WAS STILL bumping up the driveway, I had broken into a run. I’d wound up in a thicket, if a thicket means shoulder-high bushes that smell like Juicy Fruit and have branches with what look like fuzzy little things on them, except the fuzzies are vicious thorns. I didn’t know if this was meant to be a natural barrier, upper-middle-class barbed wire, but every part of me not covered with clothes was crisscrossed with bloody scratches.

Maria’s car door opened and she called out, “Katie?” Then louder, and still louder. Closer too, as she came around the house into the back. “Katie, is that you? Did you get here early?” I couldn’t see where she was because I was scrunched down sideways. If I turned my head, the thicket might stir. “I checked the pocketbook in the car out front. It is you. Oh, Katie, are you hurt? I’m so worried. Can you call out to me? Try to make some noise. Don’t panic, I’ll find you.” Naturally I started to cry, but silently, and not the “[CRIES SILENTLY]” I’ve written into scripts, which always turns out looking phony and gets cut. The crying made everything worse because there was no way I could lift up my hand through the thorny branches to wipe my nose, which I then realized was a primal instinct, because the compulsion to do it was so powerful I had to consciously fight it. My earliest ancestors may have survived because of their nose-wiping gene.

I had another fear that made me stop crying. With so many scratches emitting tiny bubbles of blood, a dark cloud of insects would zoom into the bushes to feast on me. The extended family of the flies I’d seen in the kitchen. Maria would see a great buzzing cloud rushing straight to my part of the thicket, a living arrow pointing out my hiding place. Except right after I stopped crying, my lenses got so dry it felt as if my eyelids were on the verge of being glued shut.

“Katie? Is something wrong? Please, give me some sort of signal. That’s all. Then I’ll go inside and call the police. They’ll come and look for you, bring an ambulance.”

Sometimes she came close, but then her calls to me came from a farther distance—way on the other side of the house. I tried envisioning the lay of the land, which isn’t so easy when you’re stuck in a thicket. Being at the end of a cul-de-sac, I took a guess that her property was pie-shaped, albeit an ineptly cut piece of pie. I had made it to the back of the crust, somewhere near the left. When she was off to the right, there were minutes that I could no longer make out her words, only the sounds of vowels urging me to reveal my location. “Aaaaaaa-eeeeee!”

For the first half hour or so, there was still a little goody-goody inside my head, hands on her hips, scolding me, Maria’s so nice and has had a hard life. She’s just a bad housekeeper and look what you’ve done: made up a story about her being a nut job and/or a terrible person. Listen to her: She is so worried about you! You owe her an apology!

What finally shut her up—the voice in my head, not Maria—was the realization that any person truly concerned about the welfare of another would have called the cops. No one of goodwill would be yelling out to bargain, Tell me where you are and then I’ll call the police.

Other than it was big, I had no sense of the size of her property or what was on it. The immediate area around the house was bare, and all I had was a vague recollection of a clump or clumps of trees in the distance. I thought I recalled the land sloping downward when I’d passed the window in her bathroom. There might just be one small grouping of trees between her and my thicket. Or the trees could be a mini-forest—maybe several mini-forests—and she could spend the time until nightfall tramping in the woods, watching out for snakes. A mistake, snake thinking. I had never recoiled at the zoo when Adam would pick one up to show me something interesting, but suddenly all I could imagine was the hideous, chokey exhalations snakes make in movies, and maybe in real life. Then giant fangs would sink into my flesh. Singing “Born in the U.S.A.” inside my head did not help.

Okay, time to think. What would Maria do if she found me? Say, Ooh, you’re so scratched up. Let me get the Neosporin? Attempt to reason with me by saying, Ben Mattingly is a bad man and deserves to be extorted so please don’t interfere with what I’ve been doing or plan to do? I didn’t think so. She would kill me.

Crying was too weak a word. I began weeping again, still silently, thinking how devastating my death would be to Adam. Nicky too, of course, but kids have resilience that comes in part from not being able to comprehend the true dimensions of loss. Adam was self-possessed, strong, practical —all those solid qualities that allowed his forebears to travel to the middle of nowhere, endure frightening weather and soul-wrenching loneliness, and survive. But for all his being a man from the West, there was an Eastern aspect to his view of life; he seemed to see the two of us as one soul. He had never said it directly, but over the years he told me a hundred times, with and without words, that he never felt whole until I came into his life.

I couldn’t bear to think about my parents’ grief. Maddy, finally the only child, would discover what I would feel if something happened to her, that we comprised some other kind of spirit. Who would Oliver hire to write season six? A jerk. Maybe it wouldn’t be a jerk. The Times TV critic would say, Spy Guys, old and, from the start, tired, has suddenly sprung to life …

Maybe my mother would call me to chat and Adam would say, She decided to stay overnight in Tallahassee. Then she would call my sister and, in the course of their conversation, mention Tallahassee and —I knew I’d told Maddy about going to Cincinnati and visiting Dick Schroeder. But I couldn’t remember whether I said anything about a real estate agent in Tallahassee. Had I known about Maria then? Had I told her Maria’s name? As Oliver was gracious enough to point out with some frequency, “Your sense of continuity sucks the big one.” But maybe I had. She’d call Adam and pour out everything about Maria—wait, they’d conference call with my parents on the line.

From somewhere between me and the house, though a blessed distance away from me, I heard her sneeze three times: “Choo, choo, choo,” without any Ahs.

Adam would call me at the Holiday Inn and on my cell phone, which would ring and of course not be answered. He’d think, Something’s wrong. He’d be quick-witted enough to look at my calendar on the computer and search “Tallahassee” and find Maria’s name and Orange Blossom Realtors. Within thirty seconds, he and my father— because Adam would be too polite to push him off—would be on the phone with the Tallahassee Police. Soon, any minute, I’d hear sirens. Maybe not sirens, because that would tip her off.

A perfect Spy Guys dénouement. My specialty, unreality TV. They all lived happily ever after. That old saying “Where there’s life there’s hope” trying to fight off “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” Of course there was also that stupid thing with feathers, but that probably only worked if you were a New England WASP.

Maria would kill me because she had killed before. Not the two men. I recalled her kitchen and decided that even before she’d gone bonkers, she’d had neither the organizational skills to arrange Bernard Ritter’s murder nor the laboratory resources to pull off Dick Schroeder’s—if indeed his death had been a homicide.

But could she have killed Lisa? Maria’s surprise, even sadness, on hearing about Manfred-Dick’s death could have been a pretense. She might have gotten his new name years earlier from Lisa. If she’d heard he’d died of a rare disease, her second (if not her first) thought would be: CIA. And to Maria, the Agency meant Ben. And with Ben came Lisa. So it was possible Maria was prepared for trouble when Lisa came by. Or maybe knowing Lisa so well, something she did might have aroused Maria’s suspicion. Or something she said. Lisa had always been a lousy liar.