Goodnight Nobody (12 page)

I lent her a necklace, beads of Murano glass my mother had brought me back from Italy. She lent me some earrings, platinum and diamond hoops whose cost I couldn't bring myself to think about. We spritzed each other with perfume, toasted each other with the bottle of cheap champagne the owners of
New York Night
had given us in lieu of a holiday bonus, and headed out into the cold.

By eleven o'clock, we'd completed our Tina Turner medley ("Proud Mary" with a segue into "Private Dancer," complete with Janie in a silver-fringed minidress and complementary wig) and climbed off the stage, sweaty and breathless and fifty dollars richer, to the enthusiastic applause of two hundred liquored-up revelers. "Told you we'd win!" Janie said as we wiggled through the crowd, accepting high fives and glasses of champagne on the way back to our table.

I grinned back at her, then whirled around, glaring. "Did somebody just pinch my butt?" I shouted.

"That was me," Janie shouted back, shaking her fingers joyously. "Happy New Year! I'm going to powder my nose!"

I waved her goodbye and threaded my way through the crowd back to our table, where there were two vodka and cranberry juices waiting.

"From the gentleman at the bar," the waitress said, pointing. I followed her finger and my heart stopped. Unless my eyes were deceiving me and I was experiencing some sort of acute New Year's Eve desire-induced hallucination, Evan McKenna was sitting at the bar, in a tuxedo, without a tie. Alone.

"Evan!" His name burst out of my mouth, a lot louder than I'd intended. Here he was, as if I'd imagined him into being. Only in my daydreams he wasn't drunk, I thought as he got to his feet, staggered left, leaned against a barstool to steady himself, tugged at his cummerbund, and finally lurched to our table. Onstage, a quartet of guys who barely looked old enough to drink launched into "Ninety-Nine Luftballoons" as Evan listed, then righted himself again.

"Kate," he said, trying for a smile as he collapsed into a chair. Clearly, he'd spent a long night drinking somewhere, and I doubted it had been Windows on the World. He had a baseball cap pulled over his hair. He smelled like he'd been marinating in Scotch, and he looked utterly miserable. "Thought I'd find you here."

"And here we are." I smoothed Janie's pink sweater against my chest. "Aren't you supposed to be at dinner?"

"Supposed to be," he said. His green eyes were bloodshot, and his words weren't quite slurred, but they were definitely a little mushy around the edges. "I like your shirt." He reached out and ran one finger along the neckline.

My heart was hammering in my chest. "Are you all right?" He stared down at the table. "Evan?" I reached out tentatively and laid my hand on top of his. "Did something happen?" His lips trembled. He pressed them together.

"Hey! You!" called a grinning guy in a tuxedo with a forty-ounce bottle of Coors in his hand. "Proud Mary!" he said, and gave me two thumbs-up. I gave the guy a quick smile and didn't remove my hand from Evan's.

"You go on," Evan said, getting to his feet. "I don't want to wreck your night."

"No, no, it's okay, we're done. We did our thing. Our thing is done. What are you doing here?"

He slumped back in his chair again. "Michelle and I were supposed to meet at the apartment at six. She never came home," he said. I swallowed hard and only barely managed to keep a cry of
Thank you, God!
from exiting my lips. My heart felt as if it were expanding in my chest, growing bigger and bigger and lighter and lighter until it would lift me right out of my seat and I'd float above this smoky, crowded, noisy room, over the chairs patched with duct tape and the fraying carpet, above the stage flanked by two television screens and a smoke machine, through the roof, and out into the clear night sky.

I bent down to murmur in his ear, the very portrait of the solicitous gal-pal, a true friend. "Do you think she's all right? Do you have any idea where she is?"

"I know," he said. He grabbed one of the drinks and drained it in two long gulps. "I know." His voice cracked on the final word, and he barely seemed to notice when I laid my free hand between his shoulders, patting him gently, making soft crooning noises over the karaoke.
Remember this,
I told myself, feeling the warmth of his skin under his cotton shirt, breathing in the smoky air of the bar, memorizing every mirror and neon light, the smell of fried dumplings and cheap champagne, the sweet scent of the fake smoke they pumped onstage as a tiny Asian girl in a blue satin dress sang. "Once upon a time, I was falling in love, now I'm only falling apart."

"Yeah...well..." He shook his head. My palms were tingling, and my heart was beating too fast. He'd come all the way downtown to find me. Just like Daniel Day-Lewis in
The Last of the Mohicans.

Evan stared at me with his glassy bloodshot eyes. "Pretty," he said, in a tone I'd only ever heard in my daydreams. His eyelids drooped. "You look so pretty tonight."

We both looked up as Janie cleared her throat. "What have we here?" she inquired, plopping down in her chair and readjusting her wig.

"Hi, Janie," said Evan.

She stared at him. "Jesus. Did you get the license plate number of the truck that ran you over?"

I cut my eyes at her, hoping to psychically communicate the pertinent facts--that Michelle had ditched him on New Year's Eve, that he appeared to have learned of the presence of Mr. Pantene. Unfortunately, Janie wasn't psychic. "What's going on?" she asked, fiddling with the spaghetti strap of her fringed minidress.

Evan flinched, then got to his feet. "Excuse me," he said blearily, and headed off into the crowd.

I watched him as he staggered away. "What happened?" Janie demanded. I told her what he'd told me.

Janie grabbed my hands and stared up into my eyes. "Okay, Kate. You need to listen to me," she said.

I knew what she was going to say--another version of her don't-shoot-the-messenger/don't-shit-where-you-live lecture--and I didn't want to hear it.

"His heart has been broken," she began. "He's lonely. He's hurting. He's vulnerable. By the looks of his pupils, he may be abusing prescription painkillers. Do not--I repeat--
do not
sleep with him."

"I wasn't going to sleep with him," I said, even though that was, of course, exactly what I'd been planning on doing. This was my shot. On a level playing field, there was no way I could compete with a six-foot-tall redheaded model imbued with the allure of the unattainable. But if Michelle had broken Evan's heart and run off with the shampoo boy, if he was drunk, despondent, and maybe even drugged, then there was a possibility I could stand a chance.

I got to my feet. "Be right back."

"Kate..." Janie stared up at me, hazel eyes beseeching. "I'm serious!"

"Bathroom!" I said, and started walking, faster and faster, my high heels sliding on the carpet. I rounded the corner when I felt someone grab my bra. Firm fingers yanked me backward hard, then released the strap, which thwacked painfully against my back.

"Ow!"

"I'm sorry if I hurt you," Janie said, "but Kate, I will burn this village in order to save it."

I gaped at her. "Huh? Am I the village in this analogy?"

Janie tugged at her wig. "Hang on...let me work through it. Yes. You are the village. Yes. Now listen to me. Give it time. Don't throw yourself at him. Be patient."

I whispered, "Gotta go," thinking that patient was for girls who looked like Janie, and opportunities like tonight were made for girls like me. Evan was slumped outside the bathroom at the end of a dim little hall. I took his hand and pulled him through the door marked Emergency Exit that had been propped open with a chair, out into an alley, out into the night.

We spilled onto a street filled with New Year's Eve revelers, tourists in Statue of Liberty foam headbands, women teetering in tight dresses and high heels, bellowing bunches of guys clutching one another with bottles dangling from their fingers, bottles of beer, bottles of wine, more champagne. Evan pulled me onto a side street lined with import shops with red cloth awnings and gold-fringed paper lanterns blowing in the wind. Everyone, it seemed, was planning on staying open all night. "Where's your coat?"

"I didn't bring one," I said, leaning close to his cheek so that he could hear me. I should have been cold, but I wasn't, even though I could see our breath condensing in the frigid air as we spoke. "Janie has her father's car...we weren't going to walk anywhere, and we'd just have to carry our coats around all night..."

He pulled me into the vestibule of a Chinese pastry shop and there, underneath the glow from the plate-glass windows, in front of the trays filled with flaky gold red bean paste buns, he took off his own coat and wrapped it around my shoulders. He pulled me against him, and there we were, eye to eye, chest to chest, hip to hip.

"Katie," he whispered.

"Evan," I whispered back. When he kissed me, I could feel his heart beating against mine. I leaned back against the window, underneath the lanterns, the delicate wind chimes above our heads. It was as if I were breathing him and drinking him, and all of the sights and sounds of that New York New Year's Eve vanished as he held me.

Fifteen

Ben was standing at the closet door when I woke up, scowling at the depleted row of hangers and idly scratching his belly. I sat up in bed, yawning.

"Who do you think would want to kill Kitty Cavanaugh?" I asked.

He shrugged without turning around. Janie was, presumably, still asleep in the guest room, and the kids, I guessed, were downstairs destroying the kitchen in their quest for breakfast.

He pulled out a shirt, a suit, and a tie. "I don't know," he said, pulling on his pants. "That's for the police to worry about."

"You really think Stannie Bergeron's going to crack this case? He could barely figure out our alarm system."

Ben put on his shirt, tied his tie, looked in the mirror, and tugged the knot slightly to the left. "Well, neither could you."

"Touche," I grumbled, flinging back the covers. "When are you coming home tonight?"

"Late," he said. "Sorry. I've got a town hall meeting in Massapequa."

"Better you than me," I said. "So you don't have any theories? Insights? Anything you can share with me before you leave for the wilds of Long Island?"

He shook his head, then fingered a scrap of toilet paper stuck to a shaving cut on his chin. "I didn't know her at all, and I've only seen him once or twice on the train."

"Well, the train. There you go. What was his job?"

Ben turned his back to me, tossing last night's shirt into the closet, where it would join the knee-high pile of clothes I'd been meaning to take to the dry cleaner's for the past two weeks. Possibly three. "I'm running out of shirts." This remark was delivered under his breath, at a volume just loud enough for me to hear.

"I'll drop off the dry cleaning this morning." I hopped out of bed, bent over, and scooped dress shirts into my arms, hoping that the view would entice him to stay a few minutes longer.

"Insurance," said Ben. Score one for my black silk underwear. "His father runs a maritime insurance business--they do boats, shoreline properties, summer camps with lakes--and Philip worked for his father. What I heard is that he wasn't very aggressive about bringing in new business. He liked the perks of the job and the title, but he wasn't very good at the work itself. Business wasn't booming."

"Ah." I imagined Philip in an impeccably tailored suit rolling into the office after ten, leaving for lunch at eleven thirty, and spending the afternoon on the golf course.

"Gotta go," he said, bending down to kiss me. "You and the kids have a wonderful day."

"See ya," I said to his back.

The Red Wheel Barrow was closed that morning--teachers in-service day, I thought--so I bade a reluctant farewell to Janie, who was headed back to the city. Then I fed the kids, helped them get dressed, and drove them to the park, where the mommies were assembled, bundled up and huddled together underneath a forbidding gray sky.

It looked, for a moment, like one of those children's games where you have to figure out what's missing in a picture. There was Carol Gwinnell, in her fringed poncho and hoop earrings, and Lexi Hagen-Holdt in head-to-toe fleece and spandex Nike, and Sukie Sutherland in dark red lipstick and leather driving gloves, standing beside the bench where Kitty had customarily sat.

I made my way over slowly. The ladies were listening to Marybeth Coe run down the theories that were making their way through the town. Kitty Cavanaugh had been the victim of a gangland-style hit. Kitty Cavanaugh had been bludgeoned by terrorists. Kitty Cavanaugh had been strangled to death with her BabyBjorn and left stiffening on the kitchen floor.

"I still think it was feminists," Sukie Sutherland said. She'd lowered herself onto the bench and was fiddling with her cell phone in between sips from her spirulina smoothie. She wore wool trousers that hung from her hipbones and put her flat, cashmere-sheathed belly on display. Her soft leather boots and shearling coat were a painful contrast to my own sneakers and sweatshirt. "And I don't care what it says in the Constitution, I say anyone who made a threat about her over the Internet should just be rounded up and arrested."

"It's the Bill of Rights, actually," I murmured. Unlike my husband's murmur, mine wasn't loud enough for anyone to hear. Carol Gwinnell inched closer to Sukie. Lexi Hagen-Holdt shifted so that her back was almost, but not quite, turned to me. "We're going with the motion-activated security system," she announced.

"We installed electronic gates this morning," Marybeth Coe piped up. She lowered her voice. "And I hear the Raglins actually hired a bodyguard." A noise moved throughout the clutch of mommies, and it wasn't a snort of disbelief. It was, instead, the sound of the women rummaging in their paisley silk diaper bags for paper and pen, or Palm Pilots, to scribble down where this bodyguard had been obtained and whether more were available. I sighed and shoved my hands in my pockets as the mommy circle formed, with me, as always, on the outside. I'd planned on stretching my term as queen for a day to at least the end of the week, but Sukie had clearly usurped me. Both Channel Six and Channel Ten had led their six o'clock newscasts with interviews, in which Sukie (who, I noticed, hadn't been so debilitated with shock and grief that she'd been unable to slip into Mr. Steven's salon for a blowout), recited her sound bites:
Kitty was kind, Kitty was brilliant, Kitty was a wonderful mother, and what a horrible loss this was for us all.

"Mommy." Little Peyton tugged on Marybeth Coe's arm. "I'm hungry!"

Ten seconds later, half a dozen mothers opened up half a dozen insulated snack bags and removed half a dozen studies in healthful eating. Peyton nibbled from a Tupperware container full of steamed edamame. Charlie Gwinnell munched vegetable puffs, while Tristan and Isolde snacked on soy nut spread on nine-grain bread. My three kids trotted over and stared at me expectantly. I made a show of rummaging in my tote bag like I'd actually remembered to put something in there, or like the Snack Fairy had visited during the night. All I found were two cough drops and half of a melted Nestle Crunch bar.

"Um..."

"Here," said Sukie, briskly distributing sandwich quarters. "I packed extra."

When the kids were eating, I sidled over to Carol Gwinnell, hoping that the only other mother on the playground who wore a size that wasn't in the single digits might feel some kind of natural affinity, and tapped her shoulder.

"Do you know a good lawyer in town?"

She rezipped her Ziploc bag of cut-up bell peppers and handed her son Charlie a paper napkin. "What kind?"

"Someone who does wills." The lies came easily, once I got going. "Ben and I did one after the kids were born, but now...with everything that's happened...I mean, not to be morbid, but there are some things we've been meaning to update, and I guess now with everything that's happened..."

She nodded, pale blue eyes round and serious.

"Do you know a guy named Kevin Dolan?" I asked, ever-so-casual as I invoked the name of Lisa the sitter's lawyer and Philip Cavanaugh's friend.

"Kevin, sure," she said, helping Charlie onto a swing. "He's got offices in that big old Victorian on the corner of Elm and Main. He's a nice guy." Carol licked her chapped lips and inched closer to me. "Sukie told me you were talking to Kitty's sitter."

I gave a noncommittal nod.

"And you talked to Phil?"

"I dropped off a pie. I wanted to tell him how sorry I was," I said, deciding to leave out for the time being the way Philip had seemed desperate to find out whether his dead wife had been happy while trying to maneuver me onto the marital bed.

Carol's bracelets jingled over the low voices of the mommies murmuring, talking about which channel was giving the story of Kitty's murder the best coverage and how many reporters had called their houses. Every once in a while someone's voice would rise sharply. "Peyton! Stay where I can see you!" "Tate! No eating dirt!"

"Did he try anything?" she whispered.

I feigned shock. "Who? Phil?"

Carol's milky skin flushed as she licked her lips again. "He's got kind of a reputation."

I widened my eyes and lowered my voice. "Did he ever try anything with you?"

Carol's blush deepened. Her head bobbed once, up and down, as she dragged one purple ballet slipper along the bumpy rubberized mat beneath the slides. "He's tried something with everyone."

I amped up the disbelief. "Lexi? Marybeth?"

Carol shrugged, then ran her fingers through her fine red hair. "He tried to kiss me at a Christmas party three years ago. But we were under the mistletoe, so maybe..."

"Wow. Poor Kitty."

She nodded vigorously and gave Charlie's swing an extra-emphatic shove. "It's so sad. Just so sad."

Sophie ran up to me, tugging my hand. "Mommy, Sam and Jack are blocking the slide from everyone."

By the time I coaxed the boys down the slide, Carol had rejoined the mommy collective. I spent twenty minutes by myself pushing Sophie on a swing while she sang "Peggy's Pie Parlor Polka" six times in a row. Finally, I cajoled Sam and Jack off the teeter-totter, got everyone into the van, drove to the nearest minimart, and bought juice boxes and the kind of prepackaged peanut-butter crackers so loaded with preservatives and hydrogenated fats that a single glance at the nutritional information would cause the average Upchurch mommy to swoon.

So the whole town knew that Philip Cavanaugh had wandering eyes and a vagrant tongue and that he hadn't set the world of maritime insurance on fire. I pulled out of the parking lot, feeling a frisson of pleasure that was immediately followed by a crushing wave of guilt. The pleasure was at the realization that pretty Kitty Cavanaugh's life hadn't been as beautiful and put together as it looked from where I was sitting. The guilt was for the pleasure. She was dead, I thought, turning onto Main Street. She was dead, and her little girls would grow up without a mother, and only a horrible person would feel happy about any of that.

Kevin Dolan, Attorney at Law, worked out of a lovely white Victorian with leaded-glass doors and a discreet painted wooden sign on the corner of Elm and Main. I smoothed on some lipstick, twisted my curls into a bun, and made sure the Cat in the Hat Band-Aid on my ankle was covered by my sock before leaving the car.

"Can I help you?" the receptionist asked as I led Sam, Jack, and Sophie inside what must have formerly been a parlor, arranged them in chairs with needlepoint cushions in front of a marble-mantel-topped fireplace, and gave them my very best behave-yourself stare.

"Hi, I'm Kate Klein Borowitz," I said, tossing Ben's name into the mix, hoping it would lend some gravitas, along with the extra syllables. "I was a friend of Kitty Cavanaugh."

"Such a tragedy," the receptionist murmured from behind a desk that looked like a genuine antique. She was in her fifties, with carefully styled gray hair, a maroon blazer, and a pleated maroon and white plaid kilt.

"I know that Kevin was a friend of the family," I said. Then I unfurled the guaranteed-to-get-me-in excuse I'd come up with on the way over from the playground. "I was wondering if he'd have a moment to speak with me about a speech I'm working on for her memorial service."

She gave a sympathetic nod, pressed a button on the phone, murmured briefly, and said, "He'll see you now."

I patted the kids and gave them a look that promised dire consequences if they failed to sit quietly or made a raid on the bowl of Hershey's Kisses set on one of the many delicate end tables. "You guys behave yourselves," I said cheerfully, in a tone that wouldn't give the receptionist any reason to expect that they wouldn't. "Mommy will be out in a minute."

I turned toward the office door. The receptionist put her hand on my forearm. "I just want you to know he's been terribly upset by this," she whispered.
And if you upset him any more, I'll throw your kids in my oven and roast them for dinner,
her look promised. I nodded, walked through the office door, and found Kevin Dolan, short and round-shouldered in a too-tight Oxford shirt and a too-long tie, sitting behind a heavy oak desk.

He had an egg-shaped head on a plum-shaped body, plump cheeks, twinkly brown eyes, and a warm smile. Not a matinee idol, but very appealing: the guy who'd be voted class clown or, alternately, get a few degrees in political science and hire my husband to help him run for the Senate. I could see why his receptionist wanted to protect him. There was something sweet about Kevin Dolan, something that reminded me of my own boys.

"Hello!" he said, bounding out of his seat, shaking my hand, pulling out a wooden chair for me, and waiting until I sat down before heading back around his desk.

"Thank you for talking with me. I'm Kate Klein."

"Happy to help. I heard that you were the one who..." He lowered his voice and stilled the knee that had been bouncing up and down. "That must have been terrible."

I nodded and decided that honesty--relative honesty--would be the best policy with this sweetly solicitous man. "I didn't know her all that well, but our friends--the other mothers--we'd like to do something in her honor."

He drummed his fingers on the desk, crossed his legs, and bounced one foot briskly up and down. "That's a wonderful idea."

"So tell me," I said, pulling out my notebook. (Kevin raised his eyes at the glitter on the cover but said nothing.) "How would you describe Kitty? If you could pick three words to remember her by, what would they be?"

"Devoted," he said. One hand slipped into his pocket and started jangling his keys. He didn't seem nervous, though. Maybe he was just one of those natural twitchers--the kind of guy who'd squirm in his seat through the credits before a movie and have to get up at least twice to stretch his legs during the film. "She was the most devoted mother I've ever seen."

Devoted,
I wrote, trying to quell the pang of disappointment. Well, what was I expecting? That the first of his three adjectives would be "unfaithful"?

"Devoted to her kids?" I said.

"Devoted to her children, to her marriage, to her home," Kevin said, tapping the edge of a manila folder on the desk and slipping it into a drawer. "Her house was--is--beautiful."