Silver Girl (6 page)

Meredith didn’t protest. She was too nervous to protest because she was being escorted through locked doors and down long, stark hallways, to see Freddy. Meredith had promised herself she wouldn’t break down. She would fight off sentimentality and longing. She would simply ask Freddy the questions she needed the answers to, maybe not all eighty-four—there wouldn’t be time for that—but the top two or three: Where was the rest of the money? What could they do to clear Leo’s name? How could she prove to the world she was innocent? At this point, Freddy was the only person who could help her.

When she finally did see Freddy, she lost her legs. The guard had her firmly by the arm and kept her upright.

Freddy!
A voice inside her head was echoing down a long tunnel.

He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, just like the prisoners they’d seen on countless reruns of
Law & Order;
his hands were cuffed behind his back. His hair, which had been salt-and-pepper curls, was shaved down to the scalp, and nearly white. He was fifty-two; he looked seventy-five. But it was him just the same, the boy who had accosted her in the stacks of the Princeton bookstore. They had been enrolled in the same anthropology course, and Meredith had picked up the last used textbook, thinking she would save her parents some money. Freddy had begged her for it. He’d said,
I can’t afford a new textbook, so if you buy that one, I’ll have to go without, and if I go without, I’ll fail the course. You don’t want me to fail the course, do you?
And she’d said,
Who are you?
And he’d said,
I’m Freddy Delinn. Who are you?

She’d told him her name was Meredith Martin.

He said,
You’re very pretty, Meredith Martin, but that’s not why I’m asking you for the book. I’m asking you because I’m here on six different scholarships, my mother works at a bottling plant during the day and at Kmart as a cashier at night, and I need that used book.

Meredith had nodded, taken aback by his candor. Growing up on the Main Line, she had never heard anyone admit to poverty before. She liked his black hair and blue eyes and his pale, smooth skin. She would have mistaken him for just another beautiful, assholish upperclassman had it not been for his humility, which pierced her. Meredith had found him instantly intriguing. And he had called her pretty! Toby had broken up with Meredith only a few months earlier, and he had so decimated her self-esteem that she’d been certain no one would ever call her “pretty” again.

She handed Freddy the used book and took a new book, at more than double the price, for herself.

This entire memory was encapsulated in a single moment as she looked at Freddy. Meredith thought,
I never should have given him that book. I should have said, “Tough luck,” and walked away.

The warden released Freddy’s wrists from the cuffs so he could talk to Meredith on the phone.

Meredith found herself unable to speak. She didn’t pick up the phone and neither did he. He had always believed that Meredith was smarter than he was—true—that she was classier, better bred, more refined. He had always treated her like a rare, one-of-a-kind treasure; he had lived in awe of her. Deep in her heart, she worried—God, how she worried—that he had started all of this as a way to impress her.

She picked up the phone. “Fred.”

The guard standing behind Freddy helped him pick up the phone and put it to his ear.

“Fred, it’s Meredith.” Saying this made her feel idiotic, but she wasn’t sure he recognized her. She had pictured him crying, apologizing; she had, at the very least, pictured him expressing his undying love.

He regarded her coolly. She tried to get the guard’s attention to ask “Is he okay?” but the guard was staring off into middle space, perhaps willfully, and Meredith couldn’t snag him.

“Fred,” Meredith said. “I need you to listen to me. I’m in trouble and Leo’s in trouble. They’re trying to get me on a conspiracy charge.” She swallowed. “They think I
knew
about it!” Freddy seemed to be listening, but he didn’t respond. “And they think Leo was working with you on the seventeenth floor. Someone named Deacon Rapp told them this.” Meredith watched Freddy’s face for a flicker of recognition or interest. “Where is the rest of the money, Fred?” She had the list of eighty-four questions in her clutch purse—no one from security had even bothered to look at it—but if he could just tell her this one thing, then she could turn the information over to the Feds, and maybe that would get them off the hook. Even if there wasn’t very much left—a few billion or hundreds of millions—to give the Feds this information would help her and Leo. There would be no helping Freddy at this point. “Please tell me where the rest of the money is. An offshore account? Switzerland? The Middle East? It does nobody any good hidden, Freddy.”

Freddy removed the receiver from his ear and looked at it like it was something he might eat. Then he set the receiver down on the counter in front of him.

She said, “Freddy, wait! They’re going to prosecute me. They’re going to prosecute Leo. Our son.” Maybe Freddy didn’t care about Meredith; she had to acknowledge the possibility that, along with lying about everything else, he had been lying about his devotion to her. But he would never knowingly allow Leo to go to prison.

He stared at her. The Plexiglas between them reminded Meredith of being at the zoo. Freddy was watching her like she was some curious specimen of wildlife.

She tried another tack. “I brought you quarters,” she said. “For the vending machines.” She held up the quarters, the only thing she had to bargain with.

He tilted his head but said nothing.

“He had no intention of talking to me,” Meredith said to Connie. “He wasn’t going to explain himself, he wasn’t going to give me any answers. He wasn’t going to give me anything. He didn’t care if I went to prison. He didn’t care if Leo went to prison.”

Connie said, “He’s a bastard, Meredith.”

Meredith nodded. She had heard people say this again and again. Her attorneys had said it. Even Freddy’s attorney, Richard Cassel, had said it to Meredith, out in the hallway before Meredith’s deposition:
You knew he was a bastard when you married him.
But it wasn’t that easy. Freddy had been many things during the thirty years of their marriage and a bastard wasn’t one of them. Freddy was smart and charming and driven to succeed like nobody Meredith had ever known. And he had made it clear that Meredith was part of his success. How many times had he said it? She was his winning lottery ticket. Without her, he was nothing. She, in turn, had done what any devoted wife would do: she had defended him. He had returns of 29 percent in good years. Meredith reminded people that he had been the star of the economics department at Princeton. He delivered returns of 8 percent in down years, and people were even happier. Meredith said, “Freddy’s got the magic. He understands the stock market like nobody else.”

But those who weren’t invited to invest with Delinn Enterprises had been jealous, then suspicious. He’s lying. He’s cheating. He’s breaking the law. He’s got to be; you just can’t deliver returns like that in this economy. Although it was difficult, Meredith learned to snub these people. She took them off the lists of the benefits she was chairing; she had them blackballed from clubs. These actions, now, seemed abominable, but at the time, she had only been defending her husband.

Was Freddy a bastard? Yes—God, yes! Meredith knew it now but didn’t understand it. She didn’t understand how she had lived with the man for thirty years without knowing him. He had always been generous to a fault; he made good things happen for people. He called the dean of admissions at Princeton to get his secretary’s son off the waiting list. He gave a pregnant woman his seat in first class, while he took her seat in coach—on a transatlantic flight! He sent Meredith’s mother orchids every year on her birthday without a reminder from Meredith. Was he a bastard? Yes, but he had hidden it well. And that was part of the allure of Freddy Delinn—he came across as mysterious and unknowable. What was it Freddy was hiding in the deep recesses of his mind, behind his kind and generous facade?

Now, of course, Meredith knew. Everyone knew.

Things at the jail had ended badly. Freddy didn’t say a single word. He stood up and offered his wrists to the guard like a well-trained monkey—and the guard, without so much as a glance at Meredith, shackled him back up.

“Wait!” Meredith said. She jumped up abruptly, knocking her chair over, and she slapped her palms against the Plexiglas. “Freddy, wait! Don’t leave. Don’t you dare leave!” She felt a force on her arms, the guards grabbed her, and she struggled to break free. She shouted, “They’re going to throw us in jail, Fred! Your family! You have to fix this! You have to tell them we’re innocent!” The guard had her bent over in a half nelson. She screamed. “Freddy! Goddamn it, Fred, tell them!”

The guard led Freddy away. It was no use; there was no getting him back. He was going to let them drown. Meredith’s body went limp in the guard’s grip; she clapped her mouth shut. She had never, ever raised her voice in public. She thought,
He’s drugged.
Or they’d given him a lobotomy or shock treatment. He’d been sitting right there, but he hadn’t been himself. He would never willfully let his wife and son go to the gallows.

Would he?

As Meredith was led back down the depressing hallways from whence she’d come, she had to admit: she didn’t know.

“So you still haven’t spoken to him?” Connie said. “You haven’t gotten any answers?”

“No answers,” Meredith said. “My attorneys told me that Freddy has stopped speaking altogether. They’re diagnosing it as a type of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“Give me a break,” Connie said. “Freddy?”

It seemed unlikely. Freddy was tough. He had come from nothing. His father had left the family when Fred was in diapers, then Fred lost his only brother, but he had shored himself up. He didn’t believe in things like
PTSD
. He was a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of guy. He was a nothing’s-gonna-happen-until-you-make-it-happen kind of guy. He had been so hard on the boys, Meredith remembered; they’d had to earn Fred’s respect. There were no excuses for bad grades or bad behavior or a missed fly ball. There were no excuses if they forgot a “please” or a “thank you,” or if they neglected to hold the door for their mother.
You kids have it so much easier than I had it. You don’t even know. You don’t know a thing.

Burt and Dev had confirmed with prison officials that Freddy Delinn had completely shut down. He was spending time in psych, but they couldn’t make him talk. He spoke to no one.

“Sometimes prisoners use this as a form of control over their captors,” Burt said. “He’s like that Indian in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
”

So he was being willfully mute, Meredith thought. Which should not be confused with
PTSD
. He was pulling a Chief Bromden. Had Freddy even read
Cuckoo’s Nest
?

“I don’t know what to do,” Meredith said to Connie. “Freddy is the only one who can save me, and he won’t do it.”

“Forget Freddy,” Connie said. “You’re going to have to save yourself.”

That night, Meredith didn’t sleep.
Goddamn you, Freddy,
she thought (zillionth and second). But she was sick with worry about him. By now, he would be getting adjusted to the horrors of his new, incredibly permanent home. What did it look like? What did it smell like? What did they feed him? Where did he go to the bathroom? Where did he shower?

And how were the boys? Meredith had seen some of the houses that Carver renovated—he favored glorious old Victorians in sad, sagging disrepair. He yanked out carpet and sanded down the long-hidden wood floors beneath. He drove around to architectural salvage places looking for glass doorknobs and stained glass windows. In Meredith’s imagination, the boys were living in such a house; it smelled like polyurethane; every surface was coated with sawdust. Carver hung doors while Leo lay across a high-backed sofa, talking to Julie Schwarz on the phone. Meredith knew the Feds had seized his computer and were trying to back up Deacon Rapp’s claims and link Leo to the bandits on the seventeenth floor. The Feds were still trying to track down Mrs. Misurelli in Italy so they could depose her. She, apparently, had been the gatekeeper upstairs. In this case, being “under investigation” for Leo was a lot of sit around and wait. Maybe in his spare time—and there would now be much of it—Leo helped Carver paint bedrooms or shingle the roof or repoint the brickwork of the eight fireplaces. Meredith was certain Anais was around; she had remained steadfast. She would cook her famous veggie enchiladas for Leo and Carver, and she would grow jealous about how much time Leo was spending on the phone with Julie Schwarz.

Meredith was okay picturing the boys like this, although Leo was a worrier and she knew he’d be having night sweats. For years when he was a child, Leo had wandered into Meredith and Freddy’s bedroom, afraid of the dark. He had a recurring dream about a scary pelican. Now the scary pelican was real: It was Deacon Rapp, it was the
FBI
, it was Freddy. Meredith couldn’t stop the unbidden flashes of Leo in prison, his head shaved, the other men coming after him day and night with their sick desires. Leo was only twenty-six.

Fear gripped her like hands around the neck, the way it could only happen in an unfamiliar room in the pitch black of night.
Take me if you must,
Meredith thought.
But do not take my son.

Connie had been right about one thing: Meredith was going to have to save them herself.

But how? How?

In the morning, Connie said, “I’m going to the Sconset Market for some muffins and the newspaper. And I’m going to the package store for a case of wine.”

Meredith nodded and tried not to seem like an eager, panting dog.
Don’t leave me here alone,
she thought.
Please.

“I know you want to come with me,” Connie said. “But Sconset is a tiny village, and everyone who summers there has summered there forever. Strangers are scrutinized. Someone will ask you who you are, guaranteed. The Sconset Market is microscopic. So you’re going to have to stay here. We don’t want anyone…”