Silver Girl (34 page)

Meredith washed her dinner dishes. The house was dark now; she had to use the light over the sink or risk breaking a glass.

She saw that there was a single cupcake under plastic wrap resting on a saucer. It looked suspiciously like a vanilla-bean cupcake with strawberry icing from the bakery at the Sconset Market.
Connie is an angel,
Meredith thought. Or Connie felt worse about leaving Meredith alone than Meredith realized.

Meredith ate the cupcake standing up at the counter, wondering about the moment when she’d realized they were really… rich. It was probably a quiet moment—a nondescript afternoon walking home from lunch at Le Cirque with the likes of Astrid Cassel or Mary Rose Garth, when Meredith stopped in to Bergdorf’s and bought—who knows?—a $2,000 powder-pink Chanel cardigan and didn’t keep the receipt. Or it was something more momentous, such as her first trip to Paris with Freddy since their backpacking adventure. He had booked a suite at the Hôtel de Crillon. They had eaten at Taillevent, and in the Jules Verne restaurant at the top of the Eiffel Tower (Meredith could have skipped the Eiffel Tower, but not Freddy). The highlight of that trip wasn’t the hotel (though they laughed, remembering the hostel they had stayed at in the sleazy eighteenth
arrondissement
their first time through) or the dining (they remembered how they ate a baguette and Camembert while sitting on the floor of their room in said hostel), but a private tour that Freddy had arranged at the Musée d’Orsay. When he told Meredith they were going on a private tour, she thought that meant they would have their very own English-speaking guide. But what it meant was that at six thirty, half an hour after the museum closed, they stepped through a discreet door and were met by the museum’s curator, who was trailed by a waiter with a bottle of vintage Krug. The curator proceeded to give Meredith and Freddy a
private tour
of the museum, with special emphasis on Pissarro, who had been Meredith’s favorite painter ever since she attended a Pissarro exhibit with her father at the Philadelphia Museum of Art when she was fifteen years old.

Champagne, the whole museum hushed and waiting for them, the erudite curator with his elegantly accented English. Yes, on that day, Meredith understood that they had become rich.

Meredith checked the back door: locked. She checked the front door: locked. She checked the alarm: activated. The windows were shut and locked; the air-conditioning was on. Meredith toyed with the idea of turning on the TV. Other voices in the room might ease her anxiety. But Connie never turned on the TV and Meredith wouldn’t, either. She might inadvertently come across something in the news she didn’t want to see, or “Frederick Xavier Delinn: The Real Story” on E!

She went upstairs.

She couldn’t help feeling like a woman in a horror film, one who met her unsuspecting end in the doorway of a dark room. She wasn’t sure how to shed this feeling and relax. She was safe. Nothing had happened to the house or the car in weeks. It was now August; for all Meredith knew, Amy Rivers was gone. She, Meredith, was safe. The doors were locked, the alarm set.

She needed to sleep. And what that really meant was that she needed a sleeping pill. She knew Connie had something. Meredith had seen the prescription bottles.

She felt her way into Connie’s bathroom. She needed to turn on the light. But this was okay, this was Connie’s light. Whoever was watching from outside would see Connie’s light go on and believe that Connie was home. Meredith switched on the light. The prescription bottles were right there where Meredith remembered seeing them. She checked the labels: Ambien, Lunesta, Ativan, Prozac, Seraquil, Zoloft. Connie had cornered the sleep-aid/anti-anxiety market. Meredith shook each bottle; they were all full.

Meredith debated between the Ambien and the Lunesta. She chose Ambien; she took two pills. She took two Ativan as well, for a later time when she might really need them. She took the Ambien immediately, with tap water.

This was stealing. God, how she
hated
that word. She would make this right; she would tell Connie she’d taken two Ambien and then it would be borrowing. She told herself that she would also confess to Connie about the Ativan, although she knew she wouldn’t. Unless Connie counted her pills, she would never know, and plus it was only two Ativan, completely harmless.

So that was how stealing worked, right, Freddy? You “borrowed” a little something, no one would ever know; you were dealing out returns of 22, 23, 25 percent, everyone was happy. You could roll on like this indefinitely. You would be dead before anyone caught you.

Meredith acted like a thief, putting the bottles back exactly as she had found them, lifting them again to see if there was a noticeable difference in their weight.

As she tiptoed back down the hallway, she heard a
thump, thump, thump
and a squeak. She stopped in her tracks. Squeak. A prolonged squeak. A squeaky wheel.

Blood hammered in Meredith’s ears. She was hot with panic and afraid she would vomit up her dinner—as well as the pills she’d just taken. She sucked in a breath. She was either imagining things, or Connie was home, or the police were wandering around, doing a check. (Had the police continued to do their surveillance? Meredith should have asked Connie to call them.)

She heard another thump, a definite thump this time, and Meredith thought,
Okay, now what do I do?
Her instinct, as when she saw Amy Rivers at the bookstore, was to freeze. She closed her eyes and remained as silent and still as an animal in the woods and hoped that the predator moved on.

Another thump, more squeaking. The noise was coming from outside. There were people outside, people at this house, way out in deserted Tom Nevers. Part of Meredith wanted to look out the window and find out what was going on. It might be the police, and if it wasn’t the police, it would be something she would have to describe to the police. But Meredith was afraid of being seen.

The hallway, she decided, was safe. It had no windows, and the rug was velvety soft. Meredith laid her head down. She wanted a pillow, but she was too afraid to venture into her room or back into Connie’s room to fetch one. They were coming to get her. And didn’t she deserve it? Three days before Delinn Enterprises was exposed as a Ponzi scheme, Meredith had transferred $15 million from the company slush fund to her and Freddy’s personal brokerage account. Meredith had made it clear in her deposition: Freddy had asked her to transfer the money, and she had transferred it. She had thought nothing of it—until that afternoon, freshly home from the bank, when she saw Freddy throwing back the 1926 Macallan. At that moment she realized the $15 million wasn’t meant for a house in Aspen (Carver had been pressuring Freddy because he loved to snowboard) or for a Roy Lichtenstein (Samantha had a line on one for sale), as Meredith had believed it might be. The $15 million was a levee against the flood. But by the time Meredith realized this, the money had been moved. Meredith had done it at Freddy’s behest; he had made her an unwitting conspirator. And now, investors were clamoring for her head. And now, quite possibly, she was going to prison.

But Meredith’s first crime was that she had threatened to leave Freddy; she had threatened to take his children away. She had attacked his manhood; she had made it clear the life he was providing wasn’t good enough. She didn’t want to work; she wanted to stay home. She didn’t want to drop her kids at day care; she wanted a nanny. She didn’t want to ride the subway; she wanted cabs. That wasn’t what she’d been saying, but that was what Freddy heard—and he set out to find a way to give those things to her.

There was another noise, louder than the others, that came from out front. A
BAM
,
that was how Meredith would describe it; it sounded as though someone had dropped a large package on the front porch. But maybe that was Connie? Meredith waited. It was quiet for one minute, then two.

Meredith felt the sleeping pills sprinkle their fairy dust over her graying head. Her eyes drifted closed. The rug was velvety soft.

Meredith awoke to the first pink light of day. Her body ached from sleeping in a pile on the floor, but she noted the daylight with relief. She had made it to the morning.

She felt okay to move around the house. The terror of the night before had faded, although there was still some residual fear, worry, concern, anxiety, something picking at Meredith’s corners. She had survived, but she wasn’t safe. Something had happened in the night, she was sure of it, though it might have been her imagination. It had
not
been her imagination. But it if
were
her imagination, how grateful she would be!

She descended the stairs. At least she hadn’t interrupted Connie and Dan’s romantic evening.

The downstairs was clean and unchanged, the great room suffused with light. With trepidation, Meredith peered out at the back deck. It looked okay, right? But there was a trail of something dark, something Meredith didn’t like the looks of. Meredith felt groggy and cottonmouthed. She needed water first, then coffee. Connie always made the coffee and, sure enough, when Meredith checked, the coffee machine was all set up and ready to go.

There was a trail of something dark on the deck. Oil, she thought. Though she knew better.

She didn’t like the way she was feeling. She should call the police. And say what? That she’d heard noises? That there was a suspicious trail on the deck?

Have you looked around?
the police would ask.

And Meredith would say,
No, I’m too afraid.

She picked up her cell phone and turned it on. It chimed three times with messages. But when Meredith checked, she saw these were the messages left by Dev the previous evening. So there was nothing new. She got a glass of ice water, which she drank to the bottom. The coffee was brewing; the sunlight was filling up this room exactly the way Wolf Flute had intended.

Meredith moved toward the front door. But no, the front door was too scary. Meredith was thinking of the worst, and the worst she was thinking about was a bomb. Something had been dumped or thrown on the front porch, of that she was fairly sure. Special delivery for Meredith Delinn.

Call the police! Nantucket had little or no crime (or at least this had been the case before she arrived); the police would welcome something to do on this Thursday morning.

Have you looked around?

The front door was too scary. If she opened the front door, the bomb would detonate. There would be a fiery explosion or a lethal spray of nails or a leak of radioactive waste.

Meredith peered out the window of the sitting room, from which she could see part of the front porch obliquely. And yes, Meredith saw a spill of something dark.
Oh, God!
She was really shaking now, she was moving to the front door, she would open it just a crack, she would peek through her fingers, not enough to see, just enough to confirm her awful suspicions.

The door was triple locked, and she had to disengage the alarm before she could open it. That required the code, which was Ashlyn’s birthday: 040283, a date Meredith had known for, well, nearly thirty years, but had trouble remembering in her present state. She turned the alarm off; the house was unsealed. She stood behind the door and pulled it open with a sucking sound, and she peeked—her eyes were mostly closed—but she saw what she needed to see. Flippers, whiskers, a ghastly, gaping red smile.

Harold lay on the front porch with his throat cut.

Meredith slammed the door shut and locked it. She was hyperventilating. Not a bomb, but in many ways worse. From her cell phone, she called the police and gave the address, then she said, “I have found a dead sea mammal on my front porch.”

“On your front porch?” The dispatcher said.

“A seal,” Meredith said.

“A dead seal?” The dispatcher said. “Really? On your porch?”

“Can you send someone, please?” Meredith said. And then she said, “This is Meredith Delinn.” She wasn’t sure if the dispatcher would know her name, but of course she did, everyone in American knew her name.

The dispatcher said, “Yes, Mrs. Delinn. We’ll send a car out now.”

Meredith slid to the floor and understood that her mistake wasn’t in threatening to leave Freddy. Her mistake was in not leaving.

Connie drove to the town pier alone, thinking that she had another fifteen minutes of peace before her summer detonated. When she’d told Dan what she’d done—or, more accurately,
not
done—he’d said,
Don’t worry about it. With what we’ve been through, it can’t be a big deal, can it?
But he might only have been saying that to make Connie feel better.

Town pier, eleven o’clock in the morning on a stunning summer day. The pier was crawling with families carrying coolers and fishing poles and clam rakes, clambering aboard motor boats to putter out to Coatue and Great Point. Connie was astonished how relaxed and happy these people seemed. Connie was sick with anxiety. Sick! She had followed her gut, and now she had to hope for the best.

Eleven o’clock, he’d said. But she didn’t see him anywhere. Typical. It was Veronica’s gene passed down:
Late for my own funeral.

Connie walked the dock, checking out this boat and that boat, looking but not seeing, her heart thundering, her stomach sour like she’d eaten a dozen lemons for breakfast. Then she saw him, the square shoulders, the bowlegged lope. Unmistakable. The sun was a bright halo around his head.

Toby!

He was wearing a green polo shirt, a pair of khaki shorts, deck shoes without socks (did Toby even
own
socks?), aviator sunglasses. He was tan. (Toby and Connie were alike in many ways, but Connie freckled while Toby was now, and always had been, a bronze god.) He still had a full head of sandy hair, and his weight seemed stable. In the past, Connie had seen him both gaunt and underfed, and bloated and heavy. He whooped and gave her a big hug, lifting her right off the dock, and Connie was reminded that, when sober, he was just like a Saint Bernard puppy, all boundless love and enthusiasm. He had been sober now for nearly two years—or so he claimed.