Silver Girl (26 page)

Moldering in jail where you belong. You and your son.

Amy was right: On some level, it
was
Meredith’s fault. She was, at the very least, responsible for Amy’s loss. She had begged Freddy to take Amy on as a client.
For me, please?
And Freddy had said,
For you, please? All right, yes.
But Meredith hadn’t known. They could surgically remove her brain and scour its nooks and crannies, and only then would they realize she hadn’t known a thing. Back at the very beginning, Meredith had offered to take a polygraph test, but Burt had told her that with certain kinds of people, polygraph tests didn’t work. Meredith didn’t understand.

“With pathological liars, for example,” Burt had said. “They are so convinced their lies are the truth that nine out of ten times they beat the machine.”

Was he calling Meredith a pathological liar? No, no, he insisted. But there had been no polygraph test to announce her innocence.

And there
were
certain things Meredith was guilty of: She was a coward; she had lived a life of submission. She had never asked Freddy where the money was coming from. Or rather, at a certain stage, she had asked him, and he hadn’t given her a straight answer or any answer at all, and she hadn’t demanded one. She hadn’t picked the lock to his home office under the cover of darkness and gone through his books with a fine-tooth comb the way she should have.

Eleanor Charnes, the mother of Alexander, Leo’s friend from Saint Bernard’s, had put a rumor out through the school that Freddy’s business was crooked, and Meredith had subtly seen to it that Eleanor wasn’t invited to the Frick benefit or to the Costume Institute Gala at the Met.

Phyllis Rossi had insisted her husband pull $25 million out of Delinn Enterprises because she’d chatted with Freddy at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, and she said she found his answers about his business “evasive.” Meredith had blackballed Phyllis for membership to the Everglades Club.

And then, of course, there was what she’d done to Connie.

Meredith was guilty of those things. But Leo—Leo wasn’t guilty. (Was he? Oh, God. Oh, God.
Hundreds of pieces of evidence.
From which “reliable sources” had Amy heard this? What did this mean?) When Amy had said Leo’s name, Meredith wanted to bare her teeth and snarl.
Don’t you tell lies about my son.
Amy Rivers was another scary pelican from the nightmares of Leo’s childhood.

Meredith’s vision started to splotch. She was going to pass out, but she didn’t care.

Connie came rushing out of the salon. When she opened the door, clean, fresh air blew into the car.

“Jesus!” Connie said. “What
happened?
”

Meredith told her, sparing no detail.

Connie said, “This is the woman you told me about? The one from Palm Beach?”

“Yes. I knew she was on the island. I saw her at the bookstore, but I didn’t think she recognized me.”

“Those things she said about Leo?” Connie asked. “They’re not true, are they?”

“They’re not true,” Meredith whispered. They couldn’t be true. They couldn’t be.

“I’d like to go back in there and rip her face off,” Connie said.

Meredith stared out the window. They were on Milestone Road, on their way home to Tom Nevers. There were trees and more trees. People riding bicycles. Normal people.

“The wig didn’t work,” Meredith said. “She knew me instantly.”

“Because you used to be friends,” Connie said. “Let me ask you this: Do you think she’s the one who took your picture? Vandalized the house? Slashed my tires?”

The thought had crossed Meredith’s mind. Amy was certainly angry enough to do those things, but the spray painting especially seemed juvenile and beneath her. The first word that Meredith would use to describe Amy Rivers was: “busy.” She was always rushing from one commitment to another. Her day was overscheduled. When she had lunch with Meredith, she always left ten minutes early and was already five minutes late for the next thing. Seeing Amy on a bicycle had thrown Meredith. In Palm Beach, she whipped her black Audi into the parking lot of the Everglades Club and screeched out. In Meredith’s mind, Amy Rivers was too busy to plan and execute that kind of vandalism. Surely she had bigger things to worry about?

But maybe not.

She would never have misspelled the word “thief.” Unless she was trying to throw the police off her trail.

Possible?

“I don’t know,” Meredith said.

Once Meredith retreated to her room, she dialed Dev at the law firm, while praying a Hail Mary. It was six o’clock on a Friday evening. What were the chances Dev would be at his desk? Meredith got the firm’s recording, which meant the miserable receptionist had left for the weekend. She was probably already in her seat aboard the Hampton Jitney. Meredith entered Dev’s extension. He answered.

“It’s Meredith.”

“Hey, Meredith—”

Meredith launched into what Amy Rivers had said. It wasn’t true, was it? There weren’t hundreds of pieces of evidence against Leo?

Dev was quiet. Meredith felt like she was free-falling.

“I’m not Leo’s attorney,” Dev said. “Honestly, I’m not sure what kind of evidence is amassed against him. There’s something, Meredith. I mean, we knew that, right? Otherwise he wouldn’t be under investigation. But right now, from the sounds of it, nothing they have is strong enough to stand up in court—otherwise, they would have charged him. And he hasn’t been charged. Julie is hunting down this Misurelli woman, the secretary. She said she’d fly to Padua herself if she had to. Julie has a phenomenal legal mind. And she has the eye of the tiger. Leo is in good hands, Meredith. There’s nothing you can do except tell yourself that Leo hasn’t been charged and he’s in good hands.” Meredith heard Dev swallow. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Meredith said. Dev promised he would talk to her after the weekend, but if she needed him in the meantime, she had his cell number.

Meredith said good-bye and hung up, then turned off her phone. Deep breath: Not charged with anything. In good hands. Phenomenal legal mind. Amy Rivers was lying.
Your family is going to be flushed away. Like turds.

My God,
Meredith thought.

Later, Connie grilled the salmon, and the smoke floated in the open balcony doors and made Meredith’s stomach rumble. She should just go down; she was being childish. Without Meredith downstairs, Connie might drink too much. She might obsess about the reason Dan hadn’t called, or she might fall deeper into self-pity about Wolf and Ashlyn.

Meredith should go down. But she couldn’t.

A little while later, Meredith heard a rustling outside her room. A piece of paper shot under the door.

It said, “Your dinner, Madame.”

Meredith opened the door and despite her prevailing sentiment that all she should be eating was stale bread smeared with rat guts, she took the beautiful plate—rosy salmon glazed with some kind of mustard dill sauce, grilled asparagus, and a pearly ear of Bartlett’s Farm corn already buttered and salted—and sat on her bed and devoured everything.

Meredith flipped the note over and wrote, “It was delicious. Thank you.” She wanted to add,
I love you,
but she and Connie hadn’t completely cleared the air between them yet. Soon, maybe. Meredith left the note out in the hallway, then shut her door and lay on her bed. It was still light outside, and her book was right there, but she couldn’t read. She hadn’t shut herself away to block out Connie. She had shut herself away because she needed to think.

Hundreds of pieces of evidence. Eye of the tiger. In good hands. Hasn’t been charged. Fly to Padua. Spend the rest of his life in prison.

Sick love story.
That was another phrase that bothered Meredith.

If Meredith were very honest with herself, she would admit that, in some way, the beginning of her love affair with Freddy had been entangled with the end of her love affair with Toby. Meredith had spent her first semester at Princeton seeking out the “amazing opportunities” Toby had promised she would have when he broke up with her. She had wanted Toby to be right. She had wanted Princeton to be so scintillating that she forgot she ever knew a boy named Toby O’Brien. And the person she fixed her attentions on was Freddy. Then her father died, and Toby missed the funeral, and Meredith had allowed herself to be used by Dustin Leavitt. And when Meredith returned to school feeling as lonely as she ever had in her life, there was Freddy. Her answer. He was a pool, and she dove in.

Freddy became the president of Dial his senior year while Meredith moved into a suite with Gwen Marbury and born-again-Christian twins Hope and Faith Gleeburgen, who had been matched with Meredith and Gwen because there had been no other choices for either pair. The Gleeburgens seemed perfectly nice. Although what did Meredith know; she was never in the suite. She spent every night with Freddy.

Meredith didn’t have friends other than Gwen Marbury, though Gwen, too, fell away. Gwen had dated Richard Cassel for a while in an attempt to remain close with Meredith and Freddy; she had entertained notions, perhaps, of
becoming
Meredith and Freddy, but Gwen and Richard weren’t a good match and they broke up. Richard later told Freddy, “You can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can’t take the trailer park out of the girl,” which was a hideous thing to say—but that was Richard Cassel for you: an unapologetic snob.

After Freddy graduated, he received a job offer from Prudential Securities in Manhattan. Meredith couldn’t stand the thought of being without Freddy; she couldn’t stand the thought of Freddy in Manhattan with all the professional women in their snug power suits, meeting for drinks at the South Street Seaport after work. He would turn his blue gaze on someone else; this new girl would light up, fall at his feet, do his bidding. It made Meredith physically ill to think about. She started vomiting after nearly every meal in the spring of her sophomore year. Freddy thought she was bulimic—but no, she insisted, she was just sick with worry about losing him. They went to Mental Health Services together and saw a counselor, like a married couple. The counselor thought some separation would be good for both of them, but for Meredith in particular.

“It seems like you’re in danger of losing yourself,” the counselor said. “Freddy has basically subsumed you.”

“That’s bullshit,” Freddy said. “We don’t need separation.” If he had been thinking the same thing when he walked in there, hearing the words come out of the therapist’s mouth propelled him in the opposite direction.

“Then why are you leaving?” Meredith asked.

Well, Freddy pointed out, he had loans to pay back, lots of loans, which was something that Meredith, coming from her privileged background, would know nothing about. The Prudential job paid good money; he couldn’t just walk away from it.

“Fine,” Meredith said. “Then I’ll drop out of school and come to Manhattan with you.”

“Now, do you see how self-destructive that is?” the therapist asked.

The solution arrived in the form of a well-paying internship, offered to Freddy by the head of the economics department, who was writing a new textbook and needed a research assistant. Freddy, in his years at Princeton, had been known as an econ whiz. He understood the way money worked, what drove the markets, what slowed them down. He had been watching the stock market, he said, since he was twelve years old. At Dial, he was voted “Most Likely to Become a Wall Street Legend.”

Now, Meredith blinked. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, watching the sun sink into the ocean.
Most Likely to Become a Wall Street Legend.
Well, that prediction had come true, hadn’t it?

The summer between Meredith’s sophomore and junior year, Meredith convinced Freddy to go backpacking through Europe. They rode the Eurail; they slept in cheap hotels and pensiones. Meredith had planned their itinerary of cities—Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Venice, Florence, Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, Amsterdam, London—as well as the itinerary within each city. She wanted to see the churches and the art museums and every place that had literary significance—Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Meredith explained to Freddy the importance of Giotto’s frescoes and the difference between the Gothic and the Romanesque. Freddy took notes in a tiny reporter’s pad. At first, Meredith thought he was making fun of her, but as they squeezed into a twin bed at night, he insisted his interest was sincere. She was the one who had read the Yeats and taken the art-history courses; she was the one who could speak French. He was just an uncultured kid from a house with pasteboard walls in upstate New York, trying to keep up with her.

Before they left, Freddy had told Meredith that he had no money for such a trip. He had put all of his graduation money—which consisted of a check for a hundred dollars from his mother, a thousand-dollar cash award from the economics department, and a thousand-dollar leadership award from the alumni of Dial—toward his student loans. Meredith had assured him that she had enough money for both of them. And, true to his word, Freddy ran out of money right away. He spent the bulk of what he’d brought at a nightclub in Barcelona. Neither Freddy nor Meredith had wanted to go to a nightclub, but they’d met some chic Catalan university students on the Rambles who had talked them into it. Once they were in the club and were charged an exorbitant sixteen dollars for two beers, Meredith suggested they leave, but Freddy decided he wanted to stay. The university students secured a table near the dance floor and ordered several bottles of Cava. Meredith and Freddy danced awkwardly to the house music, and then sat back down at the table, talking to the university students in English. Freddy reverted to his tutoring days, correcting everyone’s tenses. Meredith grew drunk and combative—she wanted to leave—but Freddy kept putting her off. One of the students was a dark-haired girl who looked like Trina. This girl asked Freddy to dance. Freddy glanced at Meredith and quickly said no, but Meredith felt compelled to say, “Don’t be stupid, Fred. Go dance with her.” So Freddy and the girl danced, and Meredith excused herself for the ladies’ room—where everyone was snorting cocaine or shooting it into their ankles—and threw up. She rested her face against the grimy tiles of the floor by the evil-smelling toilet and decided that this was the lowest point of her life, short of her hour in Dustin Leavitt’s apartment. She hadn’t thought such a base feeling was possible when she was with Freddy, but there it was, and furthermore, she was pretty sure she was going to lose Freddy to the Spanish girl. He would marry her and enjoy a life in the Catalan countryside helping the girl’s father with his olive farm. Meredith was only roused from the floor by someone aggressively kicking the door to her stall and bellowing something in German. When Meredith got back to the table, Freddy was standing. They were leaving, he said. Meredith had never been so relieved.