Goodnight Nobody (33 page)

I edged forward toward her island with my hands dangling loose at my sides. "What were the two of you going to do after you'd eliminated the competition? What were you going to do to keep him in handmade shirts and shoes? Sell flaxseed muffins on the street? Do Pilates for pay?"

Lucky for me, Sukie lived in a Montclaire too. Her kitchen was my kitchen, minus the dishes in the sink and the crayon scribbles on the wall. I ran my fingertips underneath the granite countertop of her island and eased the top drawer open.

"We were going to be fine," Sukie said, tossing her flat-ironed locks.

"Down in Florida?" I guessed, and saw the word register in her eyes. "Is that what he was telling you? Was he talking about fun and sun in South Beach when he wasn't diddling Lexi in the equipment shed."

"Never mind Lexi," she said. A muscle underneath her eye twitched.

"Why not? What'd you do to her?" I asked. "I hope you didn't toss her off the bridge too. That's a whole lot of housewives for one river, don't you think?"

"Shut up," she said. She pointed the gun between my eyes, and I saw her arms trembling.

I shook my head ruefully while my fingers slid across cutting boards and pot lids and finally closed around something cool made of marble.

"I bet Phil kept telling you he'd leave Kitty, but that wasn't what happened, was it?"

"Kitty was a slut," Sukie said shrilly. "You don't know anything about her. She was a slut just like her mother, she never even knew who her father was--"

"But she found out, didn't she?" The muscle in Sukie's cheek twitched faster. "She found out, and
she
was going to leave
him.
No more money." I said and made a sad face. "No more book advance. Ol' Phil was actually going to have to work for a living until you did this thing for him. No more Kitty and he'd be free--with all of her money. With her life insurance and no ugly custody battle. And what does he do? Takes up with Lexi Hagen-Holdt." I shook my head again, making a great show of my puzzlement. "That's some way to treat your old sweetheart."

"You bitch!" Sukie wailed. She pulled her arm back as if she was going to belt me in the face with the gun. I brought the rolling pin up as hard as I could, slamming it into her forearm, hearing a satisfying crack. The gun flashed silver as it slid across the island into the corner. Sukie wailed and lunged at me, hands hooked into claws and aiming for my eyeballs. I stepped around the island and head-butted her chest. The air rushed out of her in a whoosh, and she staggered, then fell to the floor.

"Don't move!" I screamed, going for the gun in the corner while simultaneously trying to yank my cell phone out of my pocket. Sukie shot one leg out, kicking me hard in the shin. My hip slammed into the island and I hit the floor so hard the walls rattled. My teeth snapped shut on the tip of my tongue, and warm blood spurted into my mouth.

I screamed and got to my feet. Sukie screamed louder as she flung herself at my back, grabbing at my hair. I twisted sideways, slamming her body into the island's base. She fell off and landed hard, groaning and kicking at my legs. Until I fell down beside her. Then we were both on the floor, crawling, gasping, dragging ourselves toward the gun. Sukie's arm was sticking in the air at an odd angle, and my mouth was full of blood. I saw her fingers curl around the gun, and I shoved myself sideways as hard as I could and came down on her with all my weight, grabbing for the hand holding the gun, thanking God that I wasn't one of those hundred-and-ten-pound aerobicized mommies. The gun fell to the floor and I grabbed it, just as the front door burst open and Stan ran into the kitchen.

"Put that down, Mrs. Borowitz!" Stan shouted.

Sukie tilted her blood-streaked face up beseechingly. "Please, get her off me!" she begged. "She's trying to kill me! And she's very heavy!"

I grabbed a handful of hair and slammed Sukie's head onto the hardwood floor. It felt, I had to admit, tremendously gratifying. "She killed Kitty Cavanaugh, she killed Lexi, she's got my kids in her basement!"

"Your best friend too!" Janie yelled indignantly.

Stan stared at us, bewildered. Then he pulled out his gun and pointed it. Not at her but at me. Sukie was screaming, Janie was yelling, my kids were crying from the basement.

"She did it!" I yelled, ignoring the pain in my mangled tongue.

"Stand up," said Stan. I'd started to when Sukie's teeth closed on my thumb. I shrieked in surprise and pain. The gun fell out of my hand. Quick as a cat, Sukie snatched it. She got to her feet, looking down at the gun, then up at me, then over at Stan. Underneath the blood and the swelling that had already started, her face was pale and blank as a mannequin's. Blood was running down her face, pattering on her pink-angora-covered breasts, and I saw in her eyes exactly what was going to happen next.

As Stan held his gun aimed at us, I held out my hands. "Don't do anything crazy, Sukie, please, just...just give me the gun and we'll...we'll talk! I'll make some tea or something...I'll get you some ice for your arm..."

I could hear Janie pounding against the basement door, trying to make a game of it. "Knock, knock!" she called, and my children repeated it. "Knock, knock!"

"I loved him," she whispered.

"I know," I said. I took a step forward, then another. "I know you did, Sukie. I know how that feels."

"Loved him," she said again. Three steps. Four. I was almost close enough to touch her.

"I know."

"We could have been..." She lifted the gun in slow motion, with the barrel pointed not toward my head but toward hers. Her last word was almost a sigh. "Happy."

"Sukie, don't--"

"Mrs. Sutherland, please--"

Stan and I reached for her at the same instant, an instant too late. The sound of the gun was the loudest thing in the universe as she shut her eyes and pulled the trigger.

Forty-One

"I don't need to go to the hospital," I told Stan after he'd liberated Janie and my children from the basement and led us all outside. The police cars I'd seen cruising our neighborhood since Kitty's murder had come screeching down the cul-de-sac, and the pink-faced officer who'd driven me back to Kitty's house after her murder was cordoning off the lawn with yellow Crime Scene Do Not Cross tape. I saw several news vans roll up behind the cruisers. I could picture the newscasters inside of them, patting powder on their faces, getting ready to tell the world how this story ended.

"You should go anyhow. You and the kids. Just to be sure." He'd wrapped a crinkly silver blanket around my shoulders, but I couldn't stop shaking. All three kids were in my arms, and Janie was standing beside me, her makeup in stark relief against skin that had gone white as the snow on Sukie's lawn.

"We're fine," I said, as two of the officers wheeled a stretcher out the front door. They'd covered Sukie's body completely with a sheet. I pressed the kids' heads against me so they wouldn't see.

"You should talk to someone," Stan said.

"I'll talk to you," I said. "You'll need a statement, right?" My teeth started to chatter.

"Do you want me to call your husband?"

I closed my eyes.
I'd never do anything to put the children in danger,
I'd promised him. I hung my head. "No."

"I'll call him," Janie said in a tiny voice that barely sounded like her own.

I dislodged Sam and Jack long enough to dig my phone out of my pocket and handed it to Janie. Sophie had her thumb stuck in her mouth. The boys looked dazed. "You guys?" I said. "I know that was scary, but everything's okay now. Mommy's fine, Aunt Janie's fine..." I paused to spit out a mouthful of blood, realizing too late that it wasn't the most reassuring sight.

"You should have someone look at that," Stan said. I nodded and let him herd all of us--me, Janie, Sophie, Sam, and Jack--into the back of another ambulance for the trip to the hospital.

Three hours later, I ended up with four dissolvable stitches in my tongue, a prescription for high-test painkillers, and phone numbers for three different children's therapists. The kids were taken away to some place called the family room to talk to a social worker. Janie called Ben, then managed to score some Valium and a cute intern's phone number. The five of us were huddled on my bed, and I'd swapped my wet, bloodstained T-shirt for a hospital gown, when the door burst open.

I was bracing myself for Ben, but instead, a familiar, fur-clad figure swooped into the room, with a billow of heavy perfume proceeding her.

"Grandma!" said Sophie--the first word I'd heard her speak since the scene in the kitchen.

"Grandma! Grandma!" echoed Sam and Jack.

"Kate!" Reina hurried toward my bed, coat flapping, bracelets glittering, and gathered me into her arms. I surprised myself by letting myself be gathered and, about ten seconds later, by bursting into tears.

"Oh, Mom."

"Shh, shh," she said, stroking my hair. "It's all right, it's all right. You're fine."

I was sobbing so hard that I couldn't catch my breath. "The kids," I wheezed. "The kids were in the house. Sukie had a gun--"

"Shh, shh. It's over, Kate. You're going to be fine."

"Ben's going to kill me!" I blurted, before I had time to consider my choice of words. "He told me to stay out of this and I didn't--"

"Shh, shh," she crooned. "You're fine. You're fine."

I pressed my cheek against her fur coat and tried to believe that it might be true.

She and Janie carried the kids out into the hall. The painkillers had started to turn things pleasantly fuzzy around the edges, and my limbs took on a comforting heaviness, like someone had filled them with warm sand.

"Kate."

I lifted my head slowly off the pillow. My husband was standing in the doorway. "Sorry," I said thickly.

I squinted at his face as he slumped against the doorframe. "Kate," he said. His voice echoed, like he'd been calling down to me from on top of a canyon. "I'm sorry too."

"Hot dogs!" Janie called in a hearty voice.

"Hot dogs!" said Sophie, scrambling off the couch and over to the oval oak table big enough for ten. Sam and Jack followed, holding hands, as Janie helped them into their booster seats and my mother dished out the food: hot dogs, baked beans, cut-up carrots and zucchini to dip in ranch dressing, with lemonade to drink. Everyone tucked in, and for a minute all we could hear was the low roaring of the waves as the tide rolled in, and the wind whipping silvery against the walls. It was three months since Sukie had killed herself in front of me. And the children and I had settled in at the home in Truro, the one that turned its back on the world.

"Absolutely!" Brian Davies had told me, in the too-hearty voice that people use when dealing with the recently injured or mentally ill. "Sure, you can stay. House'd just be sitting there empty, anyhow! Stay as long as you need to! Stay as long as you'd like!"

So, the morning after Sukie's suicide, I had signed myself out of the hospital, kissed my husband goodbye, and loaded the kids, plus Janie and my mother, into the minivan. We went shopping for basics: overalls and sweatshirts, pajamas and underwear, toothbrushes and hairbrushes. Reina sat in the food court with an untouched cup of hot water in front of her and her telephone in her hand staring at the people passing by like she'd just landed on our planet and had never seen a mall before. Occasionally we'd pass her and I'd catch a phrase or two in French or Italian.
Emergencia
and
famille
seemed to be figuring prominently. I bought her the kind of tea she liked, a dehumidifier, and the first pair of non-high-heeled shoes I'd bet she'd worn in years, and she took the kids to Tower Records. "They like
polka
?" she demanded, loudly enough to turn heads two stores over. "Kate, that's
obscene.
"

Before we left town I dropped Janie off back at Sukie's house. One of the cops had pulled her Porsche up to the curb, locked the door, and brought Janie's keys to the hospital. The car sat in front of the empty house, looking somehow forlorn, with snow covering its windows and a bit of yellow police tape caught on its antenna.

"I can come up next weekend," she said, hugging me goodbye.

"I could never thank you enough for..."
Helping me,
I wanted to say.
Believing in me.
"Being my friend."

She hugged me hard and kissed my cheek. She got in her car, I got in the van and I drove my children and my mother east, with the sun setting at our backs, a hundred and eighty miles back to the ocean.

The first weeks went by in fits and starts. We bought two cords of wood and built fires every morning and gathered around them at night, toasting marshmallows and watching movies, bundled up in blankets as the wind whipped off the sea and made the walls shudder and moan. We shopped for groceries at the Super Stop 'n Shop in Orleans. We signed the kids up for music class in Eastham, and drove them to storytime at the libraries in Truro and Provincetown and Wellfleet, then took them out for chowder for lunch.

In the afternoons while the kids napped and Reina talked on the telephone, I'd bundle up and head to the deck overlooking the bay, feeling the rough wind in my hair as I sat on a chaise longue, thinking that I should have figured it out faster. In retrospect, it was all so clear how Sukie had been leading everyone down the wrong path. She'd been the one to tell me about Kitty's ghostwriting, and I'd bet anything that she'd been Tara Singh's anonymous tipster too. She'd given me the sitter's phone number, she'd told me about Kitty and Ted Fitch, knowing that every wrong step I made took me further away from her.

I would stare at the waves and consider Kitty Cavanaugh. What would she have said to me if she'd lived long enough for our lunch date? Would she have enlisted me in the search for her father? Did she want a friend? A witness? Would she have envied me my two parents, the same way I'd once envied her beauty, her slim figure, her shiny hair, the ease with which she seemed to manage all the things that left me confounded? And would I have told her that her focus on the past was jeopardizing her present, and that there's always a price to pay for looking back?

Only the national edition of the
New York Times
was available on the Cape in the wintertime, and I had to drive all the way to Provincetown to get it, but between those flimsy editions and a cranky dial-up Internet connection, I managed to spend those first few weeks in Truro following the fallout, the ever-widening ripples that Kitty Cavanaugh's murder had set into motion.

Sukie Sutherland had been buried on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where her parents had retired, not in Upchurch, where she'd spent her whole life. Her husband put their house on the market the week following the funeral, then took the kids off to parts unknown.

Lexi Hagen-Holdt remained a missing person. The police had called in a diving team from New York City, and they were dredging the Connecticut River, where Sukie had planned on taking me, for her body. The
Times
had no word on what had happened to Denny and Brierly and Hadley. I couldn't bring myself to think about them for very long.

Philip Cavanaugh had been questioned by the police to determine what he knew and when he knew it. What emerged wasn't enough to get him anything more than a stern talking-to. Yes, he'd been carrying on with Sukie, and with Lexi, and, for a while, with Lisa the sitter and Luz the personal trainer and--God help me--he'd even made a play for Mrs. Dietl, the not-so-prim-and-proper grandmother who ran the Red Wheel Barrow. Yes, he'd had what the
Times
termed "general conversations" with Sukie about his wife's work as a ghostwriter and what life might be like without Kitty, but he'd never encouraged her to do anything about it or known that she was planning on it.

As for Delphine Dolan, she'd started calling herself Debbie again and had sold her story to the tabloids. "Housewife Hooker Tells All!" blared the headline on one of the magazines Janie brought me. There was a shot of Delphine, lovely in a low-cut blue dress, and another photograph in which she was looking coyly over her shoulder, wearing nothing more than bikini bottoms and a smile.

"Her husband's standing by her," Janie read between sips of the Pedialyte and vodka she'd requested. We were bundled up on the deck, wrapped in down comforters, mittens, and hats, with the hard wind whipping off the water, reddening our cheeks and turning our fingers numb. " 'I love my wife,' blah blah blah...Ooh, look, they're developing a sitcom based on her life!"

I nodded. "Good for Delphine."

Janie smiled shyly and handed me another magazine. I saw a copy of
Content,
with Kitty Cavanaugh's face on its front cover. It was the shot I'd recognized from her mantel. A wedding picture. Kitty was all shining dark hair and big blue eyes, a white lace veil and a white satin gown and a smile that made it seem as if the whole world was hers for the taking. "Kitty Cavanaugh: A Life," read the headline. Janie's byline was five times the size it normally was. "My first piece of legitimate journalism," she said proudly. "Sy's going to have it bronzed!"

The article was five pages long and utterly engrossing. Janie had tracked down all of the players and gotten many of them to give her quotes on the record. The one they'd used in eighteen-point type came from Dorie Stevenson. "She was the best person I knew."

It was all there: the story of Kitty's mother Judith Medeiros's life in New York and overdose death and Kitty's de facto adoption. Then came Hanfield, where Joel Asch had been her professor--"not her father, but a father figure. I wanted to help her. I hope that I did." Then, the roster of men Judy Medeiros had known, both in the biblical and nonbiblical sense. There was a prominent lobbyist and a network executive, the poetry professor and the ophthalmologist. "New York Attorney General Ted Fitch voluntarily took a paternity test in the days following Suzanne Sutherland's suicide," Janie had written. "The results were negative. The question of Kitty Cavanaugh's paternity and Judith Medeiros's death remains a mystery--one that the New York Police Department's detectives have recently reopened. If Cavanaugh herself found the answer before she died, she took it to her grave."

Our days fell into a comforting rhythm. We'd have breakfast, then take a trip to the library or the supermarket or the pirate museum in Provincetown. Lunch, then nap, crafts and coloring, a video when it rained. After dinner, we'd build a fire, and Reina would sing--sometimes opera, sometimes polka. After I'd tucked the kids in, I would lie alone in the bed beside the big windows, listening to the ocean, looking at the lights of Provincetown twinkling across the water, the stars that filled the sky. I planted bulbs in the blank spaces laid out to be a garden--tulips and daffodils and, when the weather got warmer, seeds for daisies and impatiens, petunias and pansies. On Wednesday and Friday mornings I'd drive the kids to the dock in Provincetown and we'd take the ferry into Boston, where we'd visit the offices of Dr. Birnbaum, a child psychologist. She'd usher the kids into her comfortably cluttered office, complete with dollhouse, easel, and every kind of toy, and close the door with a click. I'd sit in one of the hardwood chairs, trying not to press my ear to the door, trying to believe that Sophie, Sam, and Jack knew they were loved and that, in spite of what had happened, they were safe and would eventually be all right.

Ben came every weekend. He played with the children, went out to dinner with us, popped popcorn, sang polka, dressed and undressed Uglydoll, and watched every movie Disney ever made. At night, he would sleep in the bed beside me without reaching for me. "When you're ready to talk about this...," he said late one night. I shook my head no. He'd sold our house and rented a condo in Cos Cob for himself, for the time being. He'd hired another partner, promised he'd cut back his hours, promised he'd be home more, promised we could move wherever we wanted to--another town in Connecticut, New Jersey, even New York City again, the same neighborhood, the same apartment building, if he could swing it. He wanted us to be a family again. It didn't matter where. "It'll be better," he whispered, running one finger tentatively along my cheek. "It'll be like it was before."