Silver Girl (25 page)

She met up with Connie again as they sat side by side at the nail dryers. Connie still seemed a little dazed, and Meredith wondered briefly if she was drunk. Had she been drinking at home before they left? Meredith didn’t think so, but then again, Meredith was oblivious. She should have made a vow to
pay attention
to the next person she became close to, but she hadn’t dreamed there would ever be such a person. She would pay closer attention to Connie, starting right now.

“Isn’t this
heavenly?
” Connie said. She wasn’t drunk, Meredith decided. She just had the nature of an addict, and the whole calming, peaceful, restorative atmosphere of the salon had permeated her skin and made her high.

“My nails look better,” Meredith said matter-of-factly. She wouldn’t tell Connie about her conversation with Gabriella, she decided. It was Meredith’s own fault for mentioning Utica. Freddy was so infamous now that the details of his life were known to everyone. The story about the housekeeper losing her life savings had gutted Meredith—that was how she felt every time, like she was being sliced open—although Meredith wondered about the mysterious relationship between housekeeper and man of the house. What kind of person would go to Delinn Enterprises on behalf of his housekeeper? Was it the same as Meredith going to see the school play of her manicurist’s son, a show of interest, a way of proving to himself that there was no class difference between him and his housekeeper—they could both invest with Freddy Delinn?

“I still have to get waxed,” Connie said.

“Oh,” Meredith said. She desperately wanted to leave.

“It should be quick,” Connie said.

Meredith decided the safest thing would be to wait for Connie in the car. She told Connie this, and Connie said, “What are you, a dog? Wait right here and read
Cosmo.
I’ll be out in a minute.”

“I’d feel safer in the car,” Meredith said.

“Okay, fine,” Connie said. “Do you want to make an appointment for hair?”

Yes,
Meredith thought.
But no.
This visit had gone fine—sort of—though her manicurist had called Freddy a monster psychopath to her face and Meredith had had to deny knowing him and she’d been force-fed that unsettling story about the housekeeper.

Could she do hair?

Vanity won out over fear: she made a hair appointment. The receptionist with the ringlet curls said, “You want cut and color?”

“I do,” Meredith said. She touched her wig. The receptionist watched her. The receptionist certainly realized Meredith was wearing a wig, but she punched Meredith’s information into the computer anyway and handed her a little card. Tuesday at four o’clock.

Connie disappeared into the waxing room. Meredith gave Gabriella a tiny manila envelope that held twenty dollars. This, she reassured herself, was her own money earned years before,
not
the money Freddy had pilfered from the housekeeper.

Meredith headed out of the salon. She was moving down the steps, watching her feet as she went. Paris at Midnight was a dynamite color. Her feet hadn’t looked this good in months.

She raised her head, searching for Connie’s car in the parking lot. She often caught herself looking for one of her own cars—the black Range Rover they drove to Southampton, or the Jaguar convertible that they drove in Palm Beach, a car that most closely resembled a woman’s shoe. She didn’t miss the cars at all; she wondered if Freddy did. She decided not. Freddy, ironically, hadn’t cared much for material things, only the money and the power it brought. He liked being able to buy a $70,000 Range Rover, but he didn’t love the Range Rover itself.

Meredith was so caught up in this thought—if she explained it to Connie or Dan, would they understand?—that she had to stop in the middle of the parking lot and remind herself: green Escalade. She spotted the car, but she was distracted by the sight of a woman chaining up a classic turquoise and white Schwinn at the bike rack while smoking a cigarette. Something familiar about the woman.

The woman turned, plucked the cigarette from her mouth, and blew smoke in Meredith’s direction.

Amy Rivers.

Meredith started to shake. She backed up a few steps, thinking it was possible that Amy hadn’t seen her, although there had been one split second of what Meredith feared was mutual recognition. Meredith spun back toward the salon and hurried up the stairs. In her haste, one of her flimsy flip-flops ripped off her foot. She had one bare foot, but she didn’t care. She went back into the sweet-smelling, air-conditioned cool of the salon and thought,
Get Connie.
Was there another way out of this place? There was a front door. Meredith could walk out the front door, and Connie could drive around and pick her up.

The receptionist noticed Meredith and said, “Oh, did you forget your shoes?”

Yes, all of a sudden, Meredith realized she
had
forgotten her shoes, a fact that was only going to slow her down. Gabriella walked out of the spa room holding Meredith’s suede flats, the same shoes she had gone to visit Freddy in—they were now, officially, bad-luck shoes—and at the same time, Meredith heard the chiming noise that meant someone was entering the salon. She was so nervous she feared she would pee all over the salon floor.

A voice said, “Meredith?”

And Meredith thought,
DO
NOT
TURN
AROUND
.

But forty-nine years of Pavlov-like conditioning prevailed, and Meredith responded automatically and found herself face to face with Amy Rivers.

Amy was wearing a light-blue polo shirt and white shorts and her Tretorns. Her hair was in a ponytail; she was tan. The strange thing was how
familiar
she was to Meredith. It didn’t seem right that someone so familiar—Meredith had eaten lunch with this woman countless times; she had hit thousands of tennis balls beside her—should be so threatening. She had been Meredith’s
friend.
But that was how the world worked. It wasn’t the bogeyman in the closet you had to fear; the people you liked and cared about could hurt you much worse.

“Nice wig,” Amy said. She reached out to touch it—possibly, to tear it off—but Meredith backed away.

Meredith said nothing. Gabriella was still holding Meredith’s shoes. Very slowly, like she had a gun trained on her, Meredith reached out for her shoes. Amy’s eyes flickered to Meredith’s feet, then over to Gabriella.

“You gave this woman a pedicure?”

“Yes,” Gabriella said, a touch of Russian moxie in her voice.

“Do you know who she is?”

Gabriella shrugged, now seeming less certain. “Marion?” she said.

“Ha!” Amy said, announcing Gabriella’s gullibility. Turning back to Meredith, she said, “Did you get the message I left you?”

Meredith nodded.

“Your husband stole all my money,” Amy said. “Over
nine
million
dollars. And I’m one of the lucky ones because I still have a job and Jeremy has a job, but we had to sell the house in Palm Beach, and we had to pull Madison out of Hotchkiss.”

“I’m sorry,” Meredith whispered.

“But like I said, I’m one of the lucky ones. I honestly don’t know how you can move about like a regular human being—summering on
Nantucket,
getting
pedicures—
when you have ruined so many lives. People are
broke
because of you, Meredith, and not only broke but
broken.
Our neighbor in Palm Beach, Kirby Delarest, blew his brains out. He had three little girls.”

Meredith closed her eyes. She knew Kirby Delarest. He was an investor with Freddy; he and Freddy had been friendly acquaintances, if not actually friends, because Freddy didn’t have any friends. But Kirby Delarest had swung by the house on occasion. Meredith had once happened on Freddy and Kirby barbecuing steaks by the pool midday, drinking a rare and expensive bottle of wine that Kirby had bought at auction, and smoking Cohibas. Meredith had found this odd because Freddy never drank and certainly not midday during the week, but Freddy had been effusive on that day, saying that he and Kirby were celebrating.
Celebrating what?
Meredith had asked. Because of the cigars, she thought maybe Kirby’s wife, Janine, was expecting another baby. Meredith had said,
Is there something I should know?
Freddy had taken Meredith in his arms and waltzed her around the flagstone patio, and he said,
Just dance with me, woman. Love me. You are my winning lottery ticket. You are my lucky charm.
Meredith had been curious, bordering on suspicious, but she decided to just enjoy it. She didn’t ask anything else. She supposed Freddy and Kirby were toasting the occasion of yet more money, a good deal, a correct gamble, some more unbelievable returns. Kirby had been a tall, lean man with white-blond hair, and he had an accent she couldn’t place. It sounded European—Dutch, maybe—but when she asked him, he claimed he hailed from Menasha, Wisconsin, which did explain his amiable nature and his Scandinavian good looks, as well as Freddy’s affinity for him. Fred loved midwesterners. He said he found them to be the most honest people on earth.

Meredith hadn’t heard the news that Kirby Delarest shot himself, because there was no one to tell her. Samantha had decorated for Kirby and Janine Delarest; Freddy and Meredith had made the introduction. Meredith wondered if Samantha knew.

Gabriella and the receptionist stood watching. Meredith then realized the salon was silent, except for Billie Holiday crooning.

“I’m sorry,” Meredith said. “I had no idea.”

“No
idea?
” Amy said. She took a step toward Meredith, and Meredith could smell the cigarette smoke on her. Meredith hadn’t known Amy was a smoker; possibly it was a stress-induced habit, caused by Freddy.

“No,” Meredith said. “No idea. About any of it.”

“You expect me to believe that?” Amy said. “Everyone knows you and Freddy were connected at the hip. Everyone knows you two were living out some kind of sick love story.”

Sick love story?
Meredith had no response for that.

“And your son?” Amy said.

Meredith snapped her head up. “Don’t,” she said. What she wanted to say was,
Don’t you dare say one word about Leo.

“They have hundreds of pieces of evidence against him,” Amy said. “Someone in my company knows that cute little lawyer of his, and supposedly even she says it’s a lost cause. Your son is going to spend the rest of his life in prison.”

“No,” Meredith said. She closed her eyes and shook her head. No, there weren’t hundreds of pieces of evidence against Leo. Julie Schwarz was a superstar; she would never have spoken out against her case, her client.
Leo!
If there were hundreds of pieces of evidence against Leo, Dev would have told Meredith.

“Yes,” Amy said. “Yes, absolutely. My sources are reliable. Your family is going to be flushed away, Meredith. Like turds.”

Meredith opened her mouth to speak—and say what?
You’re wrong. Leave me alone.
Or again,
I’m sorry—
but the receptionist took the occasion of Meredith’s loss for words to step in. “Are you ready to be shampooed, Mrs. Rivers? We have to keep things moving or we’ll get backed up.”

Amy laughed. “Do you know who this woman is?”

The receptionist seemed baffled. Gabriella said in a weaker voice, “Marion?”

“It’s Meredith Delinn,” Amy said.

That night, Meredith went up to her room without any dinner. Connie protested. She had salmon steaks marinating and ready to grill, and corn on the cob from Bartlett’s Farm. “You have to eat something. I’m going to make you a winner dinner.”

The winner dinner was the problem. The dazzling house overlooking the ocean was the problem. The beautiful life Connie had allowed Meredith to share was the problem. Amy Rivers was correct: How could she continue to live a life of privilege when so many people had lost everything? Kirby Delarest—the kindhearted midwesterner whose three little blond girls always wore matching Bonpoint outfits to dinner at the Everglades Club—had shot himself. Meredith occasionally took solace in the fact that Freddy hadn’t murdered or raped anyone. But now Kirby Delarest’s blood was on his hands. Seen through Amy’s eyes, Fred’s crimes seemed more reprehensible—as though Meredith had opened a basement door and found thirteen thousand dead bodies stacked one on top of the other.

She couldn’t eat a winner dinner.

“I can’t eat,” she said.

Connie said, “Come on, you’ve just had a bad day.”

A bad day.
A bad day was when Meredith got an A-on her French quiz and her mother made chicken à la king with tinned mushrooms for dinner. A bad day was when it was raining and Meredith had both boys in the apartment pulling each other’s hair and ripping pages out of their picture books and refusing to go down for a nap. What had happened with Amy Rivers in the salon hadn’t been a
bad day.
It had been a moment Meredith would never forget. Amy had forced Meredith’s face to the mirror and shown her the truth: She was ugly. She could try to hide, but once people discovered who she really was, they would all agree. Meredith was a despicable human being, responsible for the downfall of thousands. Responsible for the trajectory of the nation’s economy into the Dumpster. Gabriella, on hearing the name
Meredith Delinn,
had blanched and said, “But you told me you not
know
Freddy Delinn! Now you say he your husband?”

“She lies,” Amy said. “Lies, lies, lies.”

The receptionist had backed away from Meredith slowly, as though there were a tarantula sitting on her shoulder.

Meredith whispered, “Cancel my hair appointment, please.”

The receptionist nodded; her face showed obvious relief. She banged on the computer keyboard with hard, eager strokes, deleting Mary Ann Martin.

As Meredith moved to the door, Amy said, “You can enjoy your Nantucket summer vacation, Meredith, but you’ll pay. The other investors are clamoring for your head. You and your son are going to end up just like Freddy, moldering in jail where you belong.”

Meredith had sat in the scorching hot interior of Connie’s car like a dog—a dog that would have expired if he’d been left in the car for the length of this appointment—but Meredith had made no move to put down the window or turn on the AC. She didn’t care if her brain boiled. She didn’t care if she died.