The Smart One (8 page)

A human hand.

I awoke in gauzy thickness, dreamlike. My surroundings were familiar but incomprehensible. Was this my house? How did I get here? The room was dark, appearing in shades of gray, but out the window the sky was that piercing blue you see only after a thunderstorm, and I thought I glimpsed something miraculous. Was it a rainbow? A real rainbow? I lifted my heavy head and stared straight out to be sure. It was! Then I blinked and saw a confusing vision. On the bright green lawn in the distance I saw what looked like Glenda the Good Witch, complete with pink gown and screwdriver-shaped fairy wand. I covered my eyes with my hands as I lay back down and thought,
this can’t be.

“Are you okay, dear?”

The voice startled me. I had thought I was alone. She sounded familiar but not like family. Who was she? And why couldn’t she just go away? I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I just wanted to look out the window again and see Glenda, who I thought might be able to help me escape from some bad place I sensed I was in.

The woman moved closer. “Bev, can you hear me?”

Without opening my eyes I sensed that she was a little person. And there was another one like her hovering over me.

Little people? Glenda? Rainbows? What was happening to me? Did I go to sleep and wake up in Oz?

I spread my fingers and peered out at the face of the woman speaking, trying to concentrate.
You know her
, I told myself.
Think.

“You passed out,” said the man next to her. “Kenny carried you in.”

Kenny. Kenny Waxman. I lifted my head again, trying to force past the fog. I noticed I was on the couch in my living room.

“Do you remember what happened?” the woman asked.

A distant siren got louder and I glanced toward the window. The rainbow was gone. So was Glenda.

“Is she out there?” I asked.

“Who?” said the little man. “Is
who
out there?”

“Glenda.”

“Glenda?” asked the little woman.

“With the pink gown and the wand.”

The little woman took my hand in hers. “That was Joey, your sister. Do you remember? You girls opened that…that industrial drum.”

A sick feeling seized my stomach with a cramp, followed by a wave of nausea. Yes, I remembered, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to go back into the dream where I had landed in Oz.

“Teddy, see if there’s some orange juice in the fridge. We don’t want to lose her again.”

“I’m okay, Mrs. Goodwin,” I said.

“Alicia,” she corrected. “We’ll get your blood sugar up and you’ll feel a whole lot better. When was the last time you ate?”

“I don’t know. I’m hungry though.”

“Crackers too, Teddy,” she shouted to the kitchen.

“Are you a nurse?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m a psychotherapist.”

Good, I thought. Then help me forget what I saw just before I passed out. Or convince me it was an imaginary vision. Just don’t tell me it was real.

“In the drum,” I mumbled.

“Shh.
We’ll talk about that in a minute. First see if you can sit up without getting dizzy.”

I sat up and put my feet on the floor. Teddy brought me the orange juice, which I sipped slowly. He offered me crackers, and I took a tiny bite.

After a while Alicia asked, “Now, are you feeling better? Do you want to talk about what you saw when you opened the drum?”

No, I didn’t. I wanted to pretend it never happened. But a glance out the window revealed the truth. Four police cars had pulled up in front of the Waxmans’ house, and an officer was wrapping yellow tape from tree to tree around the property.

“Bev?” she said gently.

I rubbed down the goose bumps on my arm and handed the empty juice glass to Mr. Goodwin. I cleared my throat and looked down at the floor.
Speak,
I said to myself.
Just say it.

Alicia Goodwin squeezed my hand and told me it was okay. I could rest if I wanted.

I shook my head and finally spit it out. “A body,” I said.

She took a breath. “Yes,” she said gently, “there was a body.”

“Do we know who?” I looked into her eyes, afraid I already knew the answer. I touched my chest where the letter Joey had found was still tucked inside my bra.
Please
, I prayed,
let me be wrong
.

“I’m sure the police will work very hard to figure that out,” she said.

As if on cue, the doorbell rang, and I hoped it wasn’t the police. I wasn’t ready to make a decision about whether to tell them about the letter. After all, what if I was wrong? What if I was just addled and confused? I didn’t want to implicate Sam Waxman in a murder if it was just a case of my imagination working overtime.

But if I didn’t tell the police about the letter, would I be guilty of something? Would it mean I was withholding evidence in a murder case? I took a deep breath to the count of four and told myself it would be okay. If I simply deferred handing over the letter, I wouldn’t be guilty of anything.

But what if my sisters had already told the police about it? Then I’d
have
to hand it over. And what if the detective was cagey like the guys on TV, and didn’t tell me he knew, waiting to see if I would come clean on my own?

Come clean?
Why was I thinking like a criminal from a bad movie—as if the coppers might burst in and say, “The jig is up.” I put my head in my hands. I didn’t even know what a jig was, let alone know how to determine when it was, in fact,
up
.

I heard Teddy chatting at the front door and got a clammy chill. I looked down at Alicia’s hand, patting my knee, and pictured blood circulating through veins and arteries, nerve endings alive with electrical impulses. Then I envisioned that dead white hand, inert as a shadow on the moon. Could it have been Lydia’s? Had it pumped chocolate syrup onto a plate of cookies? Written a confusing note to a lawyer…or a desperate letter to a lover about the baby growing inside her?

Picturing Lydia dead and crammed into whatever liquid preservative was in that barrel sapped my already limited reserves, and that familiar weakness crept back.

Teddy Goodwin and a police detective entered the room.

“You just went pale as a ghost,” Teddy said, looking at me.

Alicia turned to face me. “Head between your knees,” she said.

“Do you feel well enough to answer some questions, Miss?” the detective said, bending toward my face.

“Name’s Bev,” I said from between my knees. “Can we do this later?”

“Of course,” he said, and told Teddy Goodwin he’d leave his card.

Later, after I was feeling better and the kind Goodwins had left, I took a hot shower and changed into clean clothes. I heard my sisters let themselves in.

“Upstairs!” I called.

Clare and Joey tromped up the steps, helped themselves to clean towels, and took turns showering in the other bathroom while I blow-dried my hair. The volume of the dryer served to drown out everything but my thoughts, and I wondered how I would tell my sisters about the connection I made from Sam Waxman to the letter, from the letter to Lydia, and from Lydia to the dead body without sounding like I had suffered permanent brain damage from my little fainting spell.

I came into my bedroom to find them rooting around in my drawers for clothes to borrow. The room felt a little crowded; I had replaced my childhood twin bed with the queen-sized one from my apartment, and it took up most of the floor space. Unlike Clare’s old room, which had been converted to a nursery when Dylan was born, and Joey’s old room, which became a big storage closet after her furniture was donated to a needy cousin, my room remained largely unchanged from the day I left for college and stripped it bare of posters. The
walls were pale purple and the windows had lilac and gray curtains that had matched my old bedspread. The furniture was this aesthetic horror in shiny white contempo enamel that my mother thought was Trump-chic in the eighties.

I looked out the window at the Waxmans’ house. There were still police cars parked out front but now they were joined by three news vans. A woman reporter with a microphone stood talking into a camera with the house as backdrop.

“The media have arrived,” I said.

Joey rushed to the window next to me. She was topless. I pulled the curtain over to cover her.

“They’re probably going to want to talk to us,” she said, scrunching her curls.

“I hereby designate you our official spokesperson,” I said, and looked at Clare for confirmation.

She shrugged. “Fine with me. I look like a cow on camera.”

Joey went back to rummaging through my dresser drawers. “Do you have a solid tank top?” she said. “Something dark?”

I opened another drawer to see what I had for her. “What did they do with the body?” I asked.

“Took it away in an ambulance,” Joey said as she pulled an old concert T-shirt from my drawer. She made a face and put it back. “Said they would do an autopsy.”

“They tell you anything else?”

She shook her head.

Clare took a sleeveless black shell from my drawer and held it in front of herself. “It was a woman.” She put her hands inside the shirt to see how much give it had, and placed it back in the drawer. Wise move. My own modest breasts barely fit in that shirt. Clare’s porn star D cups didn’t stand a chance.

“They told you that?” I said.

“I heard them talking. The detective was speaking to the ambulance driver and said, ‘She’s damn well-preserved.’”

“I kind of figured,” Joey said. “A man wouldn’t have fit in that drum unless he was chopped up or something. Let me see that black shirt.” Clare handed it to her and Joey pulled it on. “I wanted to go back into the house to use the bathroom, but they wouldn’t let me. Said it was now a ‘crime scene.’”

Clare added that no one would be allowed in until they removed the yellow tape, and I wondered aloud where Kenny was going to stay. “He was planning to sleep in the house tonight,” I said.

Clare closed the drawer she’d been looking in and opened my closet. “Maybe he went back to the city,” she said.

“That cute cop took him to the station to grill him.” She faced the mirror and tugged on the front of my shirt. “Do you have anything lower cut?”

“What cute cop?” Clare asked.

“The dark-haired one who wasn’t wearing a ring. Detective Miller. Think he’s Jewish?”

“Since when do
you
care?” I asked.

“I’m just saying. Why is it a big deal if I care if a guy is Jewish?” She took off the black shirt and tossed it onto my bed.

“In college you slept with half the international dorm,” I said. “I think you conquered more countries than Genghis Khan.” I folded the shirt and put it away, then handed her a plum-colored Lycra tank top I almost never wore.

“Maybe I’m on a different path now.”

“Yeah, right,” I sneered. “I’ll call Grandma Elsie today and see if we can make a match for you. I hear Lazar Wolf is available.”

She ignored me and put on the tank top. It looked sexy as hell on her. She stared at the mirror, admiring herself from the front and the side.

“You can have it,” I said, anticipating her question.

“You sure?”

I nodded.

“Do you have any skinny black jeans?”

I frowned. She knew I did because I wore them all the time, but I was reluctant. I really liked those pants.

“I’ll give them back,” she said. I must have looked dubious because she added, “I promise.”

I went to my closet and fetched the jeans she was talking about. “They’re my favorites,” I said as I handed them to her.

She sat down on my bed and pulled them on. “You’ll get them back.” She flipped her hair over her head and went to work scrunching it from underneath.

“Feel free to lend me something you hate,” Clare said.

I laughed and fished out a beige shirt with red piping from my drawer. “How about this?”

I knew it was kind of ugly, but I wasn’t prepared for Clare’s reaction, which was to put her hand to heart and gasp as if she was in cardiac arrest. “Oh, Bev. They wouldn’t force someone in
prison
to wear that shirt.”

“Is it that bad?”

“Please.” She pulled it from my hand and dropped it in the trash.

I took the shirt from the wastebasket and put it back in my drawer. “This is not an episode of…whatever you call that show you like so much.”

“Trust me,” she said, “if this were an episode of
What Not to Wear
, Stacy would burn that shirt and Clinton would bury the ashes.”

Joey went into the bathroom and helped herself to my makeup. Minutes later she was out the door and in front of the Waxmans’ house. Clare and I watched from the window as a reporter rushed to her. Joey arched her back and looked very
serious as she spoke to the woman, whom I recognized as a field reporter for NBC. Joey pointed to the backyard and the curb as she spoke, obviously explaining how we had moved the drum. By the time she came back upstairs, Clare had gone into our mother’s closet and found clothes to wear that weren’t too terribly offensive, and I was lying in the middle of my bed examining the letter again.

Joey flopped down next to me. “I’m going to be on the eleven o’clock news,” she said.

“What did you tell them?” Clare asked.

Joey shrugged. “How we brought the drum to the curb and all that. You’ll see.”

My little sister, Joey, worked a camera like magic. It awed me. She could be funny, charming, sexy, disarming, alluring, sassy, and adorable all at once. I once asked her how she did it and she told me you have to dig deep inside to where your self-love resides. “If you believe you’re hot shit,” she had told me, “even just for those ten minutes you’re on camera, they will too.”

“Is that mom’s skirt?” Joey asked Clare.

“Shut up, Joey,” I said. Clare was too curvy to fit into any of my pants, and I thought Joey was rubbing it in.

“What did I say?”

I changed the subject and asked if the TV people recognized her.

“The cameraman did and told the reporter. It’ll be interesting to see how they spin that.”

“I bet they’ll find that stock shot of you with a tiger,” I said, “and flash it on the screen before the segment.”

She laughed. “And the voice-over will be, ‘Has-been Joey Bloom finds body deader than her career.”

I smiled and glanced at Clare to see if she was on the same page or stinging from Joey’s previous remark. She seemed
more distracted than upset. I patted the bed and she sat down.

“Maybe it’ll be your chance for a comeback,” she said to Joey.

“God forbid.” Joey took the letter from my hand. Her expression changed as she studied it, and I braced myself, waiting for her to say something.

“I know this is going to sound weird,” Joey said.

I cleared my throat. “Probably not as weird as you think.”

Clare picked up a brush from my nightstand and ran it through her hair. “What’s not weird?”

“This letter to Sam,” Joey said. “Do you think it could have any connection to the dead body?”

“Of course not,” Clare said.

“Think about it,” Joey said. “If he got a woman pregnant and she threatened to tell his family…”

“You watch too much TV,” Clare said. “Sam Waxman is not a murderer.”

“How do you know?” Joey asked.

“Because he’s Sam Waxman. He went to temple on Saturdays. He played bridge with Mom and Dad. He made plastic flowers for a living. That is
not
the profile of a murderer.”

“I’m not so sure,” Joey said. “What do you think, Bev?”

They both looked at me. I think they sensed I had something to say. I kept my head on the pillow as I took the letter from Joey and held it in front of my face. Clare lay down next to me, and the three of us studied it.

“Does this handwriting look familiar to you?” I asked.

“Should it?” Joey said.

I closed my eyes and pictured the letter Lydia had written to her lawyer. It was a draft on notebook paper, written in longhand. I remembered how exotic her curvy European capital letters looked and how evenly sized her lower case ones
were. I opened my eyes and stared at the page in my hand. It looked exactly as I had remembered Lydia’s script.

“Doesn’t it look…European?” I said.

“European?” Clare asked. “It looks, I don’t know, old-fashioned.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe that’s all it is.”

Joey rested her head on her elbow and looked at me. “Are you going to tell us what you’re thinking, or do we have to beat it out of you?”

I sat up, holding onto the letter. I wanted to get off the bed and walk around so I could deliver the news facing them, but they had me sandwiched between them. I stared at the letter again.

“I think Lydia wrote this,” I finally said.

“What?” Joey sat up and took the letter. “Lydia? You think Lydia had an affair with Sam?”

Clare sat up too. “Disgusting!”

Joey stared down at the note. “You think Sam got Lydia pregnant?”

I nodded.

“You don’t think he…” She looked at me and her expression changed. “You think the body in the drum could be Lydia?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Clare took the page from Joey and examined it. “Nonsense.”

“But she disappeared,” I said.

“That doesn’t mean he killed her,” Clare said. “If he got her pregnant, it would make perfect sense for her to leave. How could she possibly stay?”

“But the timing,” I said. “Lydia disappeared right around the time the Waxmans built that extension on their house.”

“The same time the drum appeared in the crawl space,” Joey added.

“And Kenny said he never heard from her again,” I said. “Don’t you think that’s telling? They’d been so close. Wouldn’t she have kept in touch?”

Clare rubbed her forehead. “You’re making so many assumptions. This letter could be from
any
one.”

“You’re right,” I said. “But if it
is
from Lydia…”

“Then that hand,” Joey said.

That hand. The earlier queasiness I felt started to creep back again. I put my head between my knees.

“You okay?” Clare asked.

I pulled myself into a tight ball, remembering how I used to play hide-and-seek in Kenny’s backyard, making myself as small as possible so I wouldn’t be seen from behind the bushes. I could almost hear Lydia’s voice as she pretended to look for me. “Where are you, my dear girl? Have you gone forever?” Now I was tempted to answer back, “Have you?”