Goodnight Nobody (31 page)

While he looked at Janie, I looked around. I'd expected more of a maritime theme in the office--a pirate flag fluttering in front, maybe, or crisp white and navy pillows on the couch, or windows shaped like portholes. At least a few nautical touches. Instead, Philip Senior had gone for rich guy generic: heavy dark wood, paneled walls and leather, with a humidor in the corner. It would have been impressive, save for the fact that business clearly wasn't booming. The secretary's desk out front was empty except for a rotary-style telephone. The waiting room was empty, and the walls were bare except for pale squares where pictures used to hang. The only car in the parking lot was the ten-year-old Jaguar I recognized from Kitty's memorial.

"Not really," Janie said. "My dinghy's actually insured already."

He blinked at us. His eyes were set deep into twin pouches of flesh, and threaded with red. "Oh?"

"We were hoping to speak with you about your daughter-in-law," I said.

He pulled off his half-moon glasses and polished them on his tie. When he replaced them, his gaze had sharpened. "I recognize you now," he told me. "You're the young lady who spoke at Kitty's service."

I bit my lip and nodded.

Janie jumped right in. "Were you Kitty's father? Because, honestly, if you were, and then she married your son, not to judge, but--"

"Janie!" I hissed.

Philip Cavanaugh's liverish lips worked for a minute, and his bulky body seemed to deflate inside his suit. "I wasn't," he said.

"But you could have been," I said.

He seemed to gather himself, straightening his back and glaring at me. "I knew her, but only briefly. Kitty told me that her mother had had a long-term involvement. Judy and I..." he shook his heavy head. "It wasn't a lengthy thing."

"Tell me how Kitty found you," I said.

He shook his head heavily. "The same way you did. The phone book. She came to see me nine or ten years ago, telling me she needed background for an article. We had offices in New York then..." He looked around unhappily, as if he were just then realizing that he didn't have those offices anymore. "She asked intelligent questions. Took notes. At the end of an hour, she slid an envelope across the table. There was a photograph inside."

"Judith," I said.

He nodded slowly. "We had been acquainted. Back in New York."

"So what happened then?" asked Janie.

"Kitty asked me to take a blood test," Philip Cavanaugh Senior said. "She told me that her intentions were honorable--that she wasn't after money, just information. Medical background and what-not." He looked up at us slyly. "Well, of course I had my suspicions."

"You thought it was a shakedown," said Janie.

He nodded unhappily. "I told Kitty I needed time to think. Explained that it would be awkward: I'd already been married to Flora, of course, and we'd had Philip. As soon as she left, I got on the phone with my lawyer. Eric Brannon. Old family friend. I told him the specifics of the situation. He drafted an agreement, sent it overnight."

"What did it say?"

"That she promised not to sue me," Philip said. He pulled off his glasses again and looked at me like that should have been self-evident. "That if I was the...er. Uh." He gathered himself, face flushed, jowls wobbling. "Father. If I was, I'd make an effort to...I believe the agreement said 'integrate her into the family unit.' "

I nodded, wondering how well that would have gone.
Hi, Flora! Hi, Phil! Meet my love child from the sixties!

"The agreement also promised, er, certain financial recompense. She turned me down. She wasn't interested. Not in the money, not in meeting anyone. She just wanted to know the truth."

He walked over to the cut-glass decanters on a dark oak table beside the humidor and poured himself a slug of Scotch. "It was all moot. The blood test came back negative," he said, with relief still visible on his face. "I told her I was sorry. She took the news well enough, I thought. Didn't cry or get emotional. She shook my hand and thanked me for my time. I should have known..." His voice trailed off again. "I was so relieved, you see, not to be the...that it wasn't me. I should have known I was getting off too easily."

"What happened?" asked Janie.

Philip Senior adjusted his bulk. "My son came into the office that day and saw her," he said.

"Ah." I could imagine how that would have gone--Philip Cavanaugh Jr. walking into his father's office and seeing tall, slender Kitty, with her blue eyes and shining hair. And what would she have seen, looking at him? A man who'd grown up with every luxury, every privilege--a mother and a father; money, and the comforts it could buy. He would have looked at her with longing, with lust. She would have looked at him and thought,
He has my place in the world. That's where I belong.
"Love at first sight," I said.

"For my son," Philip Senior said, nodding sadly. "He chased her. Even when he was going with other girls, she was the one he really wanted. And he got her," he said heavily, and shook his head again.

"And then, it all went wrong," Janie intoned, in the manner of a VH-1
Behind the Music
narrator.

Philip appeared not to notice. Maybe he wasn't a
Behind the Music
fan. "I don't know how he ever convinced her--what he said that made her think that he was what she wanted, that Upchurch was what she wanted. But one day we were all having brunch at the club--Flora, my wife, and Philip, and some little girlfriend he was with--and in comes Kitty. She walks right up to him like there's nobody else in the room--like there's nobody else in the world--and she says, 'I accept.' I didn't even know he'd proposed." He shook his head, fumbling with his glasses.

I could imagine that scene too--Kitty in a linen dress, bittersweet brown hair in a flippy ponytail, stepping lightly in high-heeled sandals. She'd look around at the people, at the china and the crystal, the gold watches and diamond rings, the sedans in the parking lot. She would consider the heavy carpets and the chandeliers and the clipped greens of the golf course through the window, and maybe she'd imagine her mother's life and death, the promise someone had made to her, then broken, and how her own life, and her childrens' lives, would never be like that with a man like Philip Cavanaugh by her side.

"I should have warned him," Philip said bleakly. "I should have told him that there was history. Night after night, I lie awake and think of what I could have done...My poor granddaughters." He glared at us, his mottled cheeks flushed and his heavy hands splayed on his desk. "Did you get what you came for, young ladies?" he asked, in a voice laced with sarcasm and sadness.

"All we want to know is who killed her," I said.

He shook his head. "Not me, if that's what you're thinking. And if you want my best guess, it's this: Kitty was looking for her father, and she found him. Or he found her."

I stared at him until he snorted and pushed his blotter across his empty desk. "The police have checked my alibi. And I have no motive. She was my son's wife. My daughter-in-law. The mother of my grandchildren."

"She was also a threat to your reputation," I pointed out. "Kitty was born in 1969. You were already married to Flora when you were acquainted with Judy Medeiros."

"It would have been embarrassing," he admitted. "But I would have survived. Men do." He swept one thick pink palm across his leather blotter.
True enough,
I thought.

Forty

That night at the dinner table, Ben poked his fork suspiciously into his pasta, twirling a few strands around its tines. "Was this frozen?" he asked.

I nodded. He sighed, probably adding another black mark to the growing column underneath my name.
Doesn't listen. Isn't thin. Puts children in danger. Serves Trader Joe's heat-and-eat fettuccine Alfredo to me after a hard day at the office.

I looked at him. His eyes were tired, and he had a strand of pasta stuck to his chin. "It's not bad," he said. He reached across the table, trying to take my hand, but only succeeded in knocking over Sophie's milk.

"Daddy!" she said, scowling at him. I got up for the paper towels. Janie tossed me a sponge and Ben poured Sophie more milk, then bent down to help me with the cleanup. The boys, giggling, decided that the sight of their parents on their hands and knees swabbing up two percent was the absolute height of hilarity and dumped their glasses out too. "Boys," I said. I straightened up and knocked my head on the edge of the table, sending Janie's Diet Coke tumbling onto my head.

"Ow! Fuck!" I said, wiping soda out of my eyes.

"Mommy said the
F
word," Sophie announced.

"Kate, are you all right?" asked Janie, bending down with concern on her face and a sponge in her hand.

"How do people drink this stuff?" I asked, picking up the empty can and picturing the first person I'd interviewed: Laura Lynn, her spindly hand shooting through the door, her emaciated frame and crisped hair, her ice bucket full of the very beverage currently blinding me, and the silver-framed picture front and center on the living room bookshelf. A picture of her father.

"Flowers in the Attic," I said softly. "Oh, my God."

"What, Kate? What is it?" Janie asked.

"Are you all right?" asked Ben.

"Not a brother, but a sister," I babbled. "Do you remember Bo Baird?"

"He was on the list Kitty gave...on Kitty's list," Janie said, wisely reluctant to invoke Evan's name in front of my husband.

I jumped to my feet. "And Tara Singh told me there'd been rumors about Laura Lynn having some kind of breakdown after her father's death."

Ben thrust three fingers in the air. "How many fingers do you see?"

"Bo Baird!" I repeated, and ran past him to my laptop, which I'd left set up in the breakfast nook. "Ben, were there ever any rumors about him and an out-of-wedlock child? Or using drugs? Heroin?"

"What?" Ben followed after me, still with the gallon of milk in his hands. "Kate, slow down! Who's Tara Singh?"

I ignored him. "He died in a hotel room in Boston with another woman, right?"

"Should I call an ambulance? Are you having double vision?"

I looked up from the keyboard long enough to glare at him. "My head is fine and I'm asking you a question!"

He put the milk down on the island in the middle of the kitchen and began speaking in a dry, lecturing-to-the-freshmen voice. "Bo Baird was infamous for his infidelities, but I never heard anything about an illegitimate child or heroin. Now tell me what you're talking about, or I'm calling the doctor."

"She's Kitty's half sister," I muttered. It all made sense. Kitty wasn't just Laura Lynn's ghostwriter, she was her half sister and, coincidentally, a walking, talking condemnation of everything two generations of conservatives stood for, the illegitimate sister of a woman who thought single mothers signaled the end of Western civilization--as well as a fellow writer with a legitimate claim on her seven-figure book advance. I snatched my keys and purse from the breakfast bar. "Come on, Janie!" I called. Janie picked up her purse from the breakfast bar and ran after me as the kids stared.

"I'll be back soon! Drink your milk, kids! And, um, brush your teeth, and don't give your father a hard time!" I ran for the garage door with Ben on my heels.

"Where are you going?" He grabbed my shoulder and spun me around, and I couldn't come up with a single thing to tell him. Loose filling? Female trouble? Jury duty that I'd just remembered at six thirty on a Monday night?

Janie placed one hand calmly on his cheek. "Something suddenly came up," she said.

"We have to go," I said. I wrenched myself free and threw myself behind the wheel of the car. As I pulled out of the garage and zoomed down the driveway, Ben was standing in the doorway, watching me. His hands were in his pockets, and there was a look I couldn't read on his face.

Laura Lynn Baird opened her door, saw my face, and started to close it. Janie jammed her stiletto-clad foot inside. "Let us in or we're calling the cops."

"And telling them what?" Laura Lynn demanded in her clipped voice. "I should call the cops on you."

"Never mind the cops. We'll call the press," I said. "We'll tell them that Bo Baird fathered a child out of wedlock."

Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I saw the blood drain from Laura Lynn's face. "You're crazy," she said, baring her lips so that I could see her teeth before she shoved the door shut. I pushed back, remembering Kitty's body on the kitchen floor, her two little girls saying,
She was the best mother in the world.

"How'd it feel to have your own sister killed?" I asked. "I bet that would make a hell of a story for
Content.
"

Laura Lynn's scrawny body sagged against the doorjamb. "She wasn't...I didn't..."

Janie pushed past me, then grabbed Laura Lynn's arm and goose-stepped the smaller, scrawny woman into the living room, where all three wide-screen TVs were on, one tuned to CNN, one playing MSNBC, the third frozen on a close-up of Laura Lynn's own face. "Ma!" Laura Lynn screeched in the direction of the stairs. "Give the baby his bath!"

Ma shouted back something I couldn't hear. In the living room Laura Lynn, breathing hard, positioned herself on the couch. She was wearing another in her series of Chanel suits--this one was caramel, with gold-colored fringe--but her feet were bare. There was chipped pink polish on her toes. Her stiff, processed blond hair hung in sticky spikes around her shoulders, and her face, bare of makeup, was an unhealthy red that spoke of a recent chemical peel.

Janie faced her as I stepped behind the couch and started asking questions. "What happened, Laura? Did Kitty tell you who she was? Did she say she wanted her own byline or more of the book advance money? Or maybe," I mused, as she turned on the couch, staring at me, "she was just going to write her own book. Tell her own story. A hell of a story. Right-wing newspaper magnate as the father she never knew, half sister who's a media princess, mother whose death might not have been an accident. How long until she turned into the one all the TV shows wanted to talk to?"

Laura Lynn tugged at her stiff-as-straw hair and glared at us without saying a word.

"She was your half sister," I repeated. Laura Lynn's lip curled.

"She was competition," said Janie.

"And so I killed her? That's what you two think?" She snorted. "You need to get out more." She got to her feet, blond hair obscuring radiation-red cheeks. "Why don't you start right now?"

"Fine," said Janie, easily grabbing the cordless telephone next to Laura Lynn's monogrammed ice bucket. "I think we'll just make a few calls first. The newspapers, maybe a few of those television talk shows. Or maybe," she said, extending the phone toward Laura, "I should let you go first. Why don't you give a holler to Ma upstairs. Give her a little heads-up so she can get ready for another go-round with the late-night talk shows." She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "I wonder if Judith Medeiros let your father wear her clothes too?"

Laura Lynn's eyes filled with tears. She brushed them away fiercely. "That's enough," she said. She snatched a remote control off the coffee table, waved it at the TV sets, flicked them all into blackness, and popped the top off a can of Diet Coke.

"I knew she was looking for something the first day we met," she said, wiping her mouth with the fringed sleeve of her jacket. "It was supposed to be a job interview, and all she wanted to hear about was my life. Did I have brothers and sisters, where did we go on vacations, did I ever live in New York? I didn't want to answer, but she was Joel's darling. I didn't have a choice."

Janie leaned against the bookcase and opened Laura Lynn's copy of some conservative woman's book of dating tips for God-fearing girls. "How did you figure out what Kitty really wanted to know?" she asked, flipping through the pages.

Laura Lynn kicked the bottom of the couch with her bare heel, like a little kid who'd been sent to time-out. "She told me that her mother and my father..." She groped for her soda, raised the can to her lips, and gulped. "I didn't believe her at first," she said. "She told me to go home and ask him. I said forget it, my father wasn't well, and I wasn't going to do anything to put his health in jeopardy. She said if I wouldn't, she'd drive up there and do it herself. I told her she'd never get through the front door."

"So then what?" asked Janie.

For the first time since we'd barged through her door, Laura Lynn seemed to falter. "I...my father...I didn't want to put him through that, through some stranger showing up with those kinds of accusations. So I lied to him," she said. "I told him my doctor needed a blood sample for my family history. He and I went into town together, saw his doctor, and I went back to New York with a blood sample. And lo and behold..." She crossed the room and slid one of the televisions away from the wall, revealing a safe. She twirled the tumblers and opened the door. There was an envelope inside, and a paperback book bound in plain red paper. Laura Lynn pulled both items out--I caught the words "uncorrected proofs" on the cover of the book, and the dual byline she'd spoken of: "by Laura Lynn Baird and Katherine Cavanaugh." She opened the envelope and extracted a single sheet of paper, yellow, a carbon copy of a form from Lenox Hill Hospital that had been written in triplicate.

"See here?" She pointed to a line in the center of the page and read the words in a voice rich with triumph. "Results negative."

I felt my heart contract as I scanned the form and found Bo's name, and Kitty's. "Oh."

"Yeah. Oh," she said, snatching the page out of my hand. "You can show yourselves out."

Her tone was just as furious as it had been when we'd shown up, but her face looked fragile and exhausted, like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother's suit; a little girl in need of nothing more than a good shampoo and a nap. When she plunked back on the couch, I saw that the soles of her feet were dirty. I looked at the date on the page.

"This was six years ago," I said.

She nodded.

"So if you knew that Kitty wasn't related, why let her keep working for you?"

She looked down at her lap. "I felt sorry for her, I guess. She was so perfect, so smart, but when she got going about her mother, she just..." She fluttered her thin hands in front of her. "Cracked. Here. Keep this." She handed me the book. I saw the words
The Good Mother
written on the front cover in heavy black ink above Kitty's name. "I told you the truth. She was a good writer. Probably she was a good mother too."

"Too bad," said Janie as we pulled out of Laura Lynn's driveway and into the icy black night. I squeezed my eyes shut, shivering, and groaned out loud.

"What am I going to tell Ben?"

"Let me handle that," Janie said.

I shook my head, cringing at the excuse that she'd concoct, but it turned out that I didn't need to worry. By the time we pulled into the garage, the house was dark, the doors were locked, all three children were sleeping, and the master bedroom was empty. Ben had apparently chosen the guest bedroom again over the pleasure of my company, and by the time I woke up the next morning, he was gone.

By ten o'clock I'd pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt I'd plucked from the basket of unwashed laundry, dropped my kids off at Sukie Sutherland's for a playdate, and mixed a pitcher of extra-strength, very spicy Bloody Marys. Janie and I spent the morning sitting at the kitchen table, drinking.

"It's too bad," said Janie, shaking more Tabasco sauce into our glasses. "It would have been so cool if Philip was her husband...her brother...her husband...her brother."

I took a long sip, then pushed my glass away. Sukie said she'd take the kids until two, but it wouldn't do for me to show up tipsy and fall even further in the Upchurch mothers' esteem. If such a thing were even possible.

"Or if Laura Lynn was her sister," Janie said. "That would have worked for me too."

"Not Philip Cavanaugh," I said. "Not Bo Baird. Not Joel Asch. Not Ted Fitch. What do I do now? Just walk around New York City trying to figure out who else Judy Medeiros slept with?"

"You know I love you," said Janie. "But if that's your plan, you're on your own." She lifted her glass in a toast. "That woman had some social life."

I cut a lime into wedges and squeezed juice in my glass. "What about Judy? Have the cops told you anything?"

"It was a cold case--well, actually it was barely a case at all. Single white female and would-be artist dying with a needle in her arm didn't exactly raise eyebrows in Greenwich Village in the seventies. The coroner's report did say that she didn't have track marks..."

"You saw the coroner's report?"

Janie flashed me a satisfied smile.

"Can you get them to reopen the case?"

Ice cubes rattled against each other as she stirred her drink. "I'm trying."

"Maybe Evan's got more names," I said. The thought of starting from scratch, finding more men, tracking them down, asking them questions, had exhausted me before I'd begun.

"Let's start at the very beginning," Janie said. "Why do people murder? Love or money. Crimes of passion or crimes of...of being broke."

"Very eloquent," I sighed, feeling so drained from the disappointment and the liquor and the previous day's Pilates that even breathing was an effort. I crossed my arms on the table and rested my head against them.

"You know what? Go take a bath," said Janie. "I'll fetch the little ones."

"Are you sure?" I asked as I scrabbled for my keys and tossed them across the table.