Peony Street (12 page)

“Heavy tease and spray?” she asked the woman.

“Better lay it on pretty thick; it’s got to last through Tuesday,” the woman said. “I’ve got the Interdenominational Women’s Society meeting on Tuesday night at the
Owl Branch Missionary Baptist Church. We’re doing a cookbook to sell as a fundraiser for Pine County Hospice. I’m going to have a fight on my hands getting my broccoli casserole in there instead of Sister Mary Margrethe’s.”

As the woman filled Claire in on the fierce political battles being waged over the charitable cookbook project, Claire loosened the rollers and pulled them away from the woman’s thick, unnaturally black hair, which sprang right back into crisp, roller-shaped curls. Claire pictured Myrna Loy in The Thin Man and Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. No, not quite right. She wished the woman had a big white streak in front or something that would make it more interesting. She pictured the Bride of Frankenstein and smiled to herself. She’d done that one before, on herself for a Halloween party.

“Did you ever see Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame?” she asked the woman.

“That’s one of my favorite movies,” the woman said. “Do you like old movies?”

“Love ‘em,” Claire said, and set out with fresh enthusiasm to recreate the hairstyle Mame Dennis was wearing when Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside fell in love with her while shopping for the orphans’ roller skates at Macy’s.

As Claire was finishing up with what she thought was Denise’s last client of the day, her Aunt Alice and the busybody came in. They were surprised and delighted to see Claire, who enthusiastically faked the same reaction. As she took Auntie Mame’s money she glanced at the appointment book and saw two more customers were scheduled after these two. The first was Scott and the other name was smeared and illegible.

“This is wonderful,” the busybody said. “You can tell us what all the movie stars are really like.”

“You’re so thin,” Aunt Alice said. “The last time I saw you your hair was blonde and curly and you were carrying an extra twenty pounds. You’re not anorexic, are you? I hope you’re not hooked on any of those drugs because that would kill your mother. She has enough to worry about with that crazy father of yours. How did you get your teeth so white? They don’t look real. ”

Claire wondered how she would get through the next hour.

After Alice and the busybody left, Claire finally dealt with the gross puddle Denise had left on the floor behind the front counter. Her eyes watered and she fought her gag reflex with rubber gloves on her hands and a whole roll of paper towels. She threw everything that had gotten wet in the trash and bleached the floor.

She called her mother to tell her where she was and what she was doing.

“That’s awfully nice of you,” Delia said. “I’ll have to make them a meatloaf tonight and run it over there in the morning.”

She still had some time to kill before Scott’s appointment. She worried that if she sat still she might think too much and this was definitely not a safe place to fall apart. She swept the floor, wiped the counters, washed out the sinks, washed and dried a load of dirty towels and then folded them. She organized the supply shelves and made a list of things Denise was out of. It was quiet, she was surrounded by familiar objects and smells, and hardly anyone knew where she was. It felt completely natural to be there.

‘Could I do this every day?’ she asked herself.

She envisioned the energy it would require and the competition she would have if she started her own business in L.A. If Sloan followed through on her threat to blackball Claire in the industry there was no point in even trying. There were so many younger and hotter-looking kids coming up, and all of them were probably more talented and skilled than Claire. Her ace up the sleeve had been her connection to Sloan. Without that she might as well buy The Bee Hive, pull on some support hose, and get her teasing arm back in shape.

‘I’d be right back where I started,’ she thought.

It seemed to Claire as if the opportunity for her potential life, the one that would eventually include settling down in one place with a really nice husband and at least one cute kid, had passed by without her realizing it. She was almost forty. It was too late to start over in her chosen career and about a minute before too late to have a child. How was it that three years ago when she’d signed her last contract with Sloan, it had seemed like she had so much time left to start the next chapter, the really meaningful chapter? Now it looked as if her best years had been squandered.

Reluctantly she let herself think about the man she’d left in
Scotland. Drama professor Carlyle McKinney wasn’t handsome, but with a crooked smile and laughing brown eyes, his face had character. He was barely as tall as Claire, and she blushed to think how readily she gave up high heels for him.

Although a master of accents, Carlyle’s trained speaking voice was pure Masterpiece Theater. Claire had been thrilled every time a little Scots burr sneaked in during his unguarded moments. Speaking of which, the unguarded moments had been brilliant as well, an intoxicating mixture of passion, tenderness, and laughter.

The producers on Sloan’s last movie had hired Carlyle to be Sloan’s dialect coach, and as a consequence he and Claire spent many long days shivering under the same umbrella. He made her laugh, which for Claire, now immune to the physical beauty of the gorgeous actors she met every day, was a potent aphrodisiac. Of course, as soon as Sloan caught wind of what was going on she found a way to ruin it, and Claire had given her final notice.

‘I miss him,’ she thought, and then immediately scolded herself for her weakness.

“La, la, la,” she said, but these feelings, once dug up and brushed off, would not be buried again so easily.

‘You’ve got to quit being such a romantic,’ Claire told herself. ‘There is no perfect man.’

“Hello,” Scott called as he came in. “Hey, Claire. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

She filled him in on Denise and he said he didn’t mind if she cut his hair.

“I hope it’s not a conflict of interest or anything,” she said. “I don’t want you to get in trouble with Sarah.”

“If you knew how little I care about what that woman thinks of me,” he said. “Plus you can’t be chief of police in this town and not trip over a conflict of interest at every turn. Your dad forgot to tell me that before he retired.”

“Do you think they’ll clear me for take-off soon?”

“Maybe by the end of the week,” Scott said.

Scott reclined in the chair at the shampoo bowl and Claire washed his hair.

“It’s getting a little thin on top,” he said with some embarrassment.

“That just means you have an elevated testosterone level,” Claire said. “Just proves you’re a manly man.”

“I want that printed on a tee shirt,” Scott said, “which I will then wear every single day for the rest of my life.”

“High levels of testosterone cause something called DHT to gum up the hair follicles,” Claire said. “The hairs get thinner and thinner, and eventually quit growing altogether. High levels of testosterone can also cause prostate cancer, so you’ll need to watch out for that.”

“This conversation just took a weird turn,” Scott said.

“Hair stylists are like shrinks; nothing’s too personal. Plus, now that we’ve spent a night together in jail we should be able to talk about anything,” Claire said. “There are some supplements I can recommend that are supposed to block the enzyme that converts testosterone into DHT. It takes a few months but I’ve seen good results with the people who’ve tried it.”

“It’s not like that heart medicine people put on their scalps.”

“No, but some people swear by that, too.”

“I don’t want any of those hair plug thingies.”

“They’re much less obvious these days,” Claire said. “The trick is to cut your hair really short and plant several crops over a long period of time; that way the change isn’t so dramatic. It’s very expensive, though; at least a hundred grand to do it right.”

“I could just shave it all off, like Sam does, but I’m not sure I have the right shape head.”

“You don’t need to do anything drastic,” Claire said. “There’s one actor I know who had part of his scalp removed, the bald part, I mean, and then they sewed the edges back together. He has to part his hair on the side to cover up the scar.”

“That seems like a big risk to take just for vanity’s sake.”

“When your entire career is based on how you look those risks seem more reasonable.”

“I guess I’m lucky, then,” Scott said. “I can do this job bald and fat.”

“Just tell people your bald spot is a solar panel for a sex machine.”

“Another great tee shirt.”

After they were finished with the shampoo and scalp massage Scott moved over to the hydraulic chair. Claire trimmed his hair, shaved his neck, and against his protestations, worked on his eyebrows.

“It’s called manscaping,” she said. “Chicks don’t dig the unibrow.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“No,” she conceded. “But look how good you look now.”

She turned him toward the mirror, but instead of looking at himself, he was looking at Claire’s reflected image. His newly groomed brows were separately furrowed.

“What?” she asked his reflection.

He turned the chair and faced her.

“There’s something in my inside jacket pocket that I want to show you, but you can’t tell anyone I did.”

“Okay ...” Claire said.

She went to where his jacket hung by the door and reached inside the interior pocket.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she said when she removed the plastic baggie which held a smart phone.

“I think it’s Tuppy’s,” Scott said. “Someone turned it in earlier today. Evidently when he got hit his phone flew several yards and landed in the bed of a pickup truck parked on the street. The owner moved it before Sarah’s team performed their search; she doesn’t know I have it.”

“What is it you want me to do with it?”

“I’m hoping you have a charger that will work with it so we can power it up and check his messages.”

“But I don’t know his password.”

“You said you might be able to figure it out.”

“You could get in so much trouble,” Claire said. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because you’re Ian’s daughter; because you’re an old friend; because I never for one minute thought you could murder anyone, but Sarah thinks you did, and she’s determined to prove it.”

“Ambitious?”

“She’ll stoop to anything she thinks will raise her profile.”

“You think if his messages clear me she might erase them and say there weren’t any.”

“I know Sarah better than just about anyone and I can tell you that is exactly what she’ll do.”

“Jiminy Christmas,” Claire said.

Claire rummaged in her bag until she found her phone charger. Being very careful to keep the plastic between her fingers and the phone’s surface, she plugged it in and set it on the counter to charge. They looked at each other.

“Got any cards?” Scott asked.

Claire dealt the cards but halfway through the first hand Scott put his down on the counter.

“What’s the deal between you and Sam Campbell?”

Claire could feel herself blush and cursed her thin, pale Irish skin.

“I’ve got to learn to cover it up better,” she said. “I don’t want Hannah to find out.”

“Find out what, exactly?”

“You can’t tell anyone; not Maggie, not Patrick, not Ed, nobody.”

“I solemnly swear,” Scott said.

“It happened when we were in high school, the summer Brad Eldridge drowned,” she said. “One night Sam and I ended up out at the lake alone. We’d been drinking beer and one thing led to another.”

“Really?” Scott said, smiling broadly. “You and Sam?”

“This is so embarrassing,” Claire said. “I’d had a crush on Sam for ages and Linda was away at cheerleading camp. He was my first.”

“But what happened? Why didn’t you two get together? I saw the way he looked at you yesterday.”

“Brad drowned the next day,” Claire said. “Everyone was freaked out about that. The next time I was alone with Sam he said he was sorry, that he felt like he took advantage of me. He said we should forget it ever happened. He broke my heart, if you want to know the truth. I wanted to die but I couldn’t tell anyone about it.”

“I’m so sorry,” Scott said. “He never told any of us.”

“Afterward, I decided I was already ruined, so to speak, so I might as well have fun. Pip was the lifeguard at the pool that summer. What a loser, when you think about it now. He had graduated two years before but was still hanging out with high school students and lifeguarding was his actual profession. Back then we were all crazy about him. I decided to seduce him, and it wasn’t difficult.”

“I don’t know anyone who would have turned you down.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the future. I didn’t think there might be consequences.”

“What consequences?”

“We got caught.”

“Your dad?” Scott said.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “He said if Pip didn’t marry me he’d arrest him. And you know my dad; he meant every word he said.”

“Pip’s lucky Ian didn’t shoot him instead.”

She could remember the shame and embarrassment she’d felt on that night as if it had happened yesterday; her father’s disgust and disappointment; her mother’s grief and subsequent emotional withdrawal from her. That was the reason she’d quit high school, got her GED and went to beauty school. That’s why as soon as she had her cosmetology license she left Rose Hill and ran off to
California with Pip; she couldn’t stand the way her parents looked at her, how little they thought of her. She was diminished in their eyes, and to her teenage brain it seemed that no redemption would ever be possible.

Her eyes filled with tears; she stood up, not sure where she was going but determined to run somewhere. Scott stood up as well, and took her in his arms.

“You’ve carried that burden long enough, Claire,” he said as he hugged her. “You were so young. You made a perfectly human mistake and you paid for it. You’ve got to forgive yourself, now. You’ve got to let it go. You sweet, sweet girl.”

Claire clung to Scott and wept. It felt like a safe place to fall apart.

The timer she had set went off, and she broke their embrace to turn it off. She wiped the mascara from underneath her eyes, blew her nose in a tissue, and tried to laugh.

“Being a cop’s a lot like being a shrink, too, isn’t it, Scott?”

“We’re friends from way back and we’ll be friends ‘til way yonder,” Scott said. “It will always be our secret.”

“I might as well tell you the rest of it,” Claire said. “Since you’re the only one I’m going to tell.”

Scott sat back down and Claire wiped her eyes again.

“Sam and I kept in touch. Even after I married Pip and went to
California and he went into the service. We wrote to each other. He told me the things he couldn’t tell Linda, about how scared he was to go to Kuwait, and that his fellow soldiers felt more like his family than his real family did. He knew marrying Linda was a mistake and had only got engaged to her because both their mothers pressured them to marry.

In turn, I told him about what I really got up to in
L.A., the kind of people I was working for, and how scared I was to admit it had been a huge mistake to marry Pip and move clear across the country. Sam and I made this pact that we would eventually go back to Rose Hill and be together. It was only a fantasy, I knew, to get us through a difficult time, but there was a tiny part of me that thought it might actually happen.

“When Sam got hurt they sent him to a hospital in
Germany for several weeks before he came back to the states. I borrowed money from my boss and flew to DC to see him at Walter Reed. He was so medicated he couldn’t communicate. The doctor thought I was Linda, who had never once come to see him, so he took me in his office and sat me down. He said Sam would probably never walk again, and that men who had been through what he had often had severe emotional difficulties the rest of their lives. He asked me if I was willing to go through that with him and I said I was. I meant it. I was. I decided I was going to leave Pip, move back to Rose Hill and help Sam recover.

“The day I had to leave I visited Sam one more time. He was not so out of it that morning but was in a lot of pain. He was so glad to see me. He just held onto me and cried. I told him what I planned to do and he told me not to do it, that he didn’t want me to give up my life to take care of him. At that point everything looked so bleak to him; he believed he would never walk again, and that there was no point in living if he couldn’t. He said he loved me but that his life was over. He was so depressed I thought he might kill himself if he had the opportunity. I stayed until his pain got so bad they had to medicate him again. It was awful. I told the doctor what I was afraid he would do and he said they knew that, that they were closely watching him.

“Pip thought I was coming home for a visit, so I had to drive over here before I went back to California. I went to see Sam’s mom and she acted like he was already dead. I saw Linda, and she was mostly worried about what people would think of her if she was married to a cripple, plus she was upset thinking they would always be poor. It made me sick. I visited my parents for a couple days, and then flew back to California, determined to break up with Pip and move back to Rose Hill.

“On the plane back to
California I made a plan. I set myself a deadline of six months, which was how long the doctor thought Sam would be at Walter Reed. I had to earn enough to pay back the money I’d borrowed to fly to DC, plus enough money to move back to Rose Hill. Denise’s mom still owned The Bee Hive, and I knew she would give me a job.

“When I got to California Pip had a surprise for me. He’d forged my name on a mortgage to purchase a condo in
Malibu. I found out later he was sleeping with my boss, who put him up to it. Her slimy boyfriend owned a mortgage company that churned out those crazy loans that are illegal now. If it would have just hurt me I would have defaulted on the loan, but it turned out he’d forged my parents’ names as cosigners, so I couldn’t just walk away.

“On top of that Pip had been fired in the middle of a renovation job and we were being sued. I had to work two jobs just to make the mortgage payment. Pip lost his lawsuit and I had to borrow more money from my boss to pay the lawyer and the settlement. Six months turned into a year, and I was still in so far over my head that I couldn’t leave
L.A.

“I kept tabs on Sam through Maggie and Hannah, so I knew when he came home what bad shape he was in. They told me how good you, Ed, and Patrick were to him, and how you wouldn’t let him give up. I knew you helped him get rehabilitated and then convinced him to go to MIT. His mother wouldn’t let me talk to him when I called, and I didn’t dare write to him at her address. It was one of the darkest periods in my life. I knew where I wanted to be but I couldn’t get there.

“Eighteen months after Sam came home I finally caught Pip cheating on me with my boss. I kicked him out and quit my job. I thought I might be able to sell the condo at a loss, and I was willing to face the consequences of not repaying my terrible boss. As soon as I made the decision I wanted to tell Sam I was coming home. I called the Thorn on a night I knew he would be there with you guys, and Hannah answered the phone. She told me she had made Sam laugh for the first time since he came back and that she was in love with him. I heard the happiness in her voice, and I knew that if she could make Sam laugh then she was doing what I had wanted to do for him.

“You know how much I love Maggie and Hannah. When we were in grade school and Liam died, my parents were so devastated they couldn’t be there for me. Aunt Bonnie is such a pill and Aunt Alice is so ditzy; there was no adult I could turn to. Those two little girls took care of me and got me through it. I could never hurt them; I won’t let them be hurt.”

Scott looked at her with great compassion and concern.

“For what it’s worth, I think Hannah and Sam have been as happy as anybody could be, considering the circumstances,” Scott said. “Sam went through some dark times, but Hannah stuck by him and he’s doing great now. I think you did the right thing.”

“Doing the right thing sometimes hurts so badly, doesn’t it?” Claire said.

“It’s the worst,” Scott said. “Sometimes I think having a conscience is a curse.”

“It felt good to get all that out. Thanks for listening.”

“Any time,” Scott said. “We do-gooders have to stick together.”

“Let’s try Tuppy’s phone.”

Claire got some latex hair color application gloves out of the supply closet and put them on. Scott hung over her shoulder and watched while she tried several passwords.

“His password is always his latest crush plus the year. What was that stage manager’s name? Nigel? No. Trevor? No. It was Irish.”

“Sean, Patrick, Brian, Ian, Curtis, Timothy…” Scott said.

“It wasn’t one of our family names. It’s right on the tip of my tongue. Tuppy made a crude nickname out of it.”

“I’m not comfortable suggesting anything,” Scott said.

“That’s okay,” Claire said. “I’ve remembered. It’s Declan2011.”

“I don’t need to know the nickname. I can imagine.”

It worked.

There were voicemails waiting but his full voice mailbox required another password she couldn’t figure out. She was able to pull up Tuppy’s last text messages. It looked like he erased his text history as soon as he got to DC. There were four outgoing and two incoming texts cached after that. Three of the outgoing were to Claire, the two incoming were from Sloan, and the first outgoing one was to someone named Morty. They read:

To Morty at 1:00 p.m. GMT: “I will be in NYC early enough on Monday to have lunch before the meeting. Looking forward to working with you, Chance.”

To Claire at 4:45 p.m. GMT: “Wr u? M on yr pln. Nd to tlk.”

Incoming from Sloan at 8:05 p.m. EST: “Yr as gd as ded.”

To Claire at 8:07 p.m. EST: “In dc. Wl mt u n rh. Btw I qt! Mr ltr.”

Incoming from Sloan at 2:11 a.m. EST: “No whr u r cmn 4 u.”

To Claire at 2:12 a.m. EST: “Yr swt dad has bk. Kp safe. Btw njoy yr 3dm. Yr wlcm.”

“Do you understand all that?” Scott asked her.

“He got a ticket for the same flight as me but I didn’t know it. He said we need to talk. He went ahead and took the flight to DC, and then wanted to meet me in Rose Hill.

“He said he quit his job and I should enjoy my freedom. I don’t know why he said ‘you’re welcome’ and I don’t know what book he’s talking about. Maybe Morty is a potential employer in NYC. He didn’t abbreviate anything in that text and he used Chance instead of Tuppy so it must be important. Sloan’s texted him twice, once to say he is as good as dead, and the last to say she knows where he is and she’s coming for him.”

Claire felt a chill as she said the last message out loud. She met Scott’s gaze and grimaced. Scott wrote down all the phone numbers and carefully transcribed all the texts on a sheet of paper, along with Claire’s interpretations and all the times translated into Eastern Standard Time.

“His last text was at two-twelve p.m. Eastern Standard Time.”

Claire looked at his phone log and saw that his last call was made to her.

“I need my phone,” Claire said. “He may have left me a voicemail telling me what was going on.”

“It sounds like your employer meant to do him harm.”

“Sloan’s got an oversized sense of entitlement and loves to create drama. She’d say worse to a bartender who brought her drink five seconds later than she expected it.”

Scott studied Tuppy’s texts again.

“I’m surprised how few texts he has from her. I would think she’d harass him pretty much nonstop as soon as she knew he’d gone.”

“Sloan’s a screamer, not a texter. Part of Tuppy’s job was to do the texting if she needed any done. She probably made Teeny do it.”

“Teeny?”

“He’s Sloan’s stylist; part of the team.”

“But why didn’t she text or call him again after the one where she says she knows where he is and is coming for him?”