Goodnight Nobody (6 page)

"Aren't you going to finish?" I asked, pointing toward Pago Pago. A random sentence jumped off the page.
Until 1980, one could experience the views from the peak by taking an aerial tramway over the city harbor.
Was
tramway
one word or two? I didn't know. I wasn't sure I cared.

Janie gave me a pitying look that encompassed the dingy eggshell paint on the walls, the disreputable light brown carpeting, the water cooler gurgling in the corner like an old man with indigestion. "I think I'd rather die than work here."

"But...," I spluttered. "Norman Mailer! Tom Wolfe! Saul Bellow! Jerzy Kosinski!"

There was a framed copy of the first two pages of
The Scarlet Letter
on the wall, the sole literary touch in the room. Janie stood on her tiptoes and used the reflection in the glass to reapply her lip gloss. "Last time I checked, they're all married."

"Jerzy Kosinski's actually dead."

"See? That's even worse." She smoothed her hair and picked up my coat and purse. "Come along, grasshopper. Let's blow this taco stand."

She reached for the doorknob. I sat back down defiantly, picked up my blue pencil, and circled the word
tramway.
"No," I said. "No thanks. You go ahead. I'm going to finish this."

"Kate," she said. Her voice held an edge of impatience, but her eyes were kind. "Look around. Ugly cubicles, pretension, and no single men. Do you really want to work here?"

I thought about it. All of my professors had spoken about the
Review
the way believers spoke about heaven, the way country music fans talked about Branson, the way my mother described the Met. My father would have been thrilled if I'd landed the job. But did I want to work as a fact-checker? I wasn't sure I'd ever considered the question, and when I did, the answer surprised me.

"No. Not really. No, I don't."

"Then come on!"

"I can't," I told her.

"Oh," she said. "Okay." She slowly buttoned her coat and started humming.

"Good luck," I said.

"Good luck to you too," she said, and started humming louder. Then she started singing. "When I was young...I never need-ed anyone. And making love was just for fun..." She shook her head sadly. "Those days are gone."

"Excuse me?"

"All by my-sellllf," she sang. Not softly. "Don't wanna be...alll by
my-self.
"

I couldn't help it. I started laughing. Her voice was beyond terrible, and she was loud, loud, loud. "Janie--"

"All! By! My! Self!"
she sang at top volume. Someone knocked softly at the door. I doubted it was either John Updike or Philip Roth. "Excuse me. Could you keep it down in there?"

"All by myself," Janie sang mournfully. I put down my pencil, picked up my coat, and followed her out the door.

In my living room, years after we'd left the
Review
together, Janie stared at me with a familiar look of mischief in her eyes. "So where is Ben?"

"In California," I said. "Business trip. Home tomorrow." I picked her glass up and took a hasty swallow. Janie lifted her eyebrow. I looked back at her defiantly and drank some more.

"Is that post-murder-discovery nerves or something else?" Janie inquired.

"It's..." I cleared my throat. "Um. Evan McKenna."

Janie's expression darkened. "I thought we pinkie-swore never to speak his name again."

"We did, and while it pains me to break a pinkie swear, the thing is..." I held the little pillow against me and told her everything--how I'd found Evan's name in Kitty's kitchen, how the police had found his number on Kitty's caller ID.

Janie got so excited that she shoved herself out of the couch and started bouncing in her high heels. "Oh my God! What if he's the killer! Then he'll get the death penalty!" She whipped out her cell phone. "Does this stupid state even have the death penalty?"

"I'm not sure. But Janie--"

She shushed me and started to dial. "Sy knows someone in the governor's office." She stopped dialing and stared out my window. "I think it's the governor, actually. Maybe we can be the ones to pull the switch, or give him the lethal injection, or whatever!"

"Janie!" I grabbed the phone away from her. "Listen! I don't think Evan killed her."

"Oh." She frowned. "Then who did?" She sat back on the couch. "Maybe it was that Marybeth woman." She nodded, looking pleased with herself. "A woman who'd raise a child without diapers is capable of anything."

Sam and Jack came racing into the living room with Sophie wailing behind them. The boys, I saw, had used a bungee cord to strap Uglydoll in his western wear to the top of one of the cars. "Chapter two hundred and thirty-eight," growled Janie, "in which I am hijacked by a band of pint-sized ruffians."

I freed the doll, consoled Sophie, and sent the boys into the Uncooperative Corner, then glanced at the clock. Somehow, it had become five thirty, and I'd forgotten dinner.

"There's more. Kitty was a ghostwriter for Laura Lynn Baird."

Janie's eyes widened. "You're kidding me!"

I shook my head. "It was all over the Internet this morning."

"But not the magazines yet, right?" She scrambled for her phone again. "I shouldn't be surprised," she said. "Everyone's been saying that there's no way Laura Lynn could be doing everything she's been doing unless she cloned herself. Every time I turn on my TV, there she is, yap-yap-yapping about affirmative action or something. I always figured she was outsourcing her columns to some twenty-three-year-old in a think tank in Madras, not some mom in the suburbs." She caught her breath.

"Because no mom in the suburbs could string two sentences together," I said dryly.

"Present company excepted," said Janie. "God, this is a fabulous story. Fabulous." Her bobbed nose wrinkled as her editor's voice mail picked up. "Segal. Call me." She got to her feet, fingers already flexing for the keyboard. "Where's your computer?"

"Janie, listen to me." I pulled her back onto the couch. "Do you think you could get me an interview with Laura Lynn Baird?"

"Huh?" She gaped at me. "Why?"

"Because..." I took a deep breath and tried to think of what to tell her that would get me what I wanted. "Because if Evan's involved in this somehow--"

"Oh, no." Janie held up her hand and shook her head. "Oh, hell no. You wasted enough of your life on that man-shaped pile of dog poop. If it turns out he did it, I will lead the parade. And I'm making you be grand marshal." She paused thoughtfully. "Grand marshals get the good hats."

I tried again. "Maybe Laura Lynn knows something that she hasn't told the cops. And Kitty was my friend."

She glared at me. "You told me you didn't have any friends out here." She sniffled. "You said I was your one and only!"

Strike two.

"It's my community," I finally said. "My neighborhood. It's where my kids live."

Janie placed one hand gently on my shoulder. "When the pod people took over your body," she asked, "did it hurt?"

"Okay, you know why? Because there's a murderer running around, which even you have to admit is a little alarming, and you know what else? I'm bored." I stared at her defiantly, knowing that I'd just spoken the dirtiest word in the Upchurch lexicon. As far as my fellow mommies were concerned, saying you were bored was admitting to being about two steps away from drowning your babies in the bathtub, something so sinful and forbidden you could never 'fess up to it. But here I was, 'fessing. "I'm bored, and this murder, while horrifying, is also the single most interesting thing that's happened here since the Langdons next door broke ground for their guesthouse and cracked their septic tank. It's interesting, and I want to find out more."

Janie sat back, looking satisfied at last. "That's my girl," she said.

Seven

Once upon a time, there was a woman who'd lived in New York City, then moved to Connecticut with her baby and her husband--a woman not too different from me, or Kitty Cavanaugh. Except Laura Lynn Baird was famous, and she didn't have to deal with boredom. When her son was born, she'd kept working (although, paradoxically, much of that work seemed to involve flying around the country or appearing on television to tell other women that they were bad mothers if they had jobs that took them outside of the home).

I parked my minivan in front of 734 Old Orchard Lane in Darien, Connecticut, checked my lipstick in the rearview mirror, and tucked my bangs behind my ears. Janie had worked her magic, getting Laura Lynn on the phone with me. "H-hello," I'd stammered. It had been years since I'd interviewed anyone except a potential babysitter. I'd fumbled through the basics: I was working on a tribute to my departed neighbor and colleague, and I would be deeply appreciative if Laura Lynn, busy though she must be, could possibly spare--

Laura Lynn cut me off. "Ten o'clock, tomorrow morning. I can give you twenty minutes." Click.

The dashboard clock said 9:54. I pulled a sheaf of papers out of my bag. I'd printed every single one of "The Good Mother" columns, and I'd highlighted pertinent passages the night before, after I'd put the kids to bed. "Feminism's Big Lie is a two-headed Hydra, a snake that whispers into the modern woman's ears that her own happiness is primary, that having it all is possible, and that both can be achieved without her children suffering, or even noticing," Laura Lynn Baird-slash-Kitty Cavanaugh had written. "The truth, as any woman who's honest with herself knows, is that children were meant to be raised by their mothers. In this case, and for a finite number of years, biology really is destiny. Shame on the woman who exchanges her role as the dispenser of good-night hugs, consoling kisses, and lullabies for the transitory pleasures and cocktail-party cred of the corner office and the fancy title. And pity the working-class child-care provider who doesn't realize that the real villain in her life isn't a stereotypical sexist pig, but the woman wearing recycled-fiber clothing, eating organic produce, and calling herself your sister even as she profits from your off-the-books, under-the-table toil."

Heady stuff. It was hard to imagine Kitty, with her pleasant smile and inoffensive chatter, writing it. I tucked the pages back in my bag, called home to make sure that nothing was burning or broken, and exited the car, making my way up Laura Lynn's crescent-shaped driveway, stepping onto her pillared porch, and knocking on the green front door. At ten on the dot, a tanned, bony hand snaked out of the six-inch gap between the door and the jamb, grabbed my sleeve, and pulled me inside.

"You're Kate Klein?" Laura Lynn Baird snapped.

"Yes," I said.

Laura Lynn had looked slim but imposing every time I'd seen her on television, gleefully trashing some Democratic congressman or feminist lawyer. In person, she was tiny, a flat-chested androgynous sprite the size of a starving fifth grader, clad in a pink Chanel suit with tufted cream trim at the hem of the skirt and on the jacket pockets. She had on cream-colored pumps, a double strand of pink pearls, and pearl and gold earrings. Her obligatory blond tresses, dyed the color of straw, had been blown out and sprayed until her entire head looked like it had been stuck under a broiler and crisped.

"Come," she instructed, tightening her grip on my arm, drawing me into a cloud of hairspray and sour coffee breath, and leading me into a living room, a high-ceilinged space sparsely furnished with a few pieces of leather and metal furniture as hard-edged as she was. "Sit." She pointed, and I perched on a corner of a white suede love seat. There was a trio of panel-style television sets hanging on the wall like paintings. They were flanked by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with hardcovers. All the conservative heavy hitters were there: Ann Coulter and Peggy Noonan, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, the Michaels (Medved and Savage), and her fellow Lauras (Ingraham and Schlessinger).

I stared at the titles, blinking at the yellow Post-its stuck to the spine of each title, each bearing two numbers and the words "How High" and "How Long."

"The
New York Times
bestseller list," Laura said. "I like to keep track."

I looked around for the baby paraphernalia--the bouncy seats, the Exersaucer, a couch cushion stained with spit-up--but couldn't find any. I did, however, see a framed eight-by-ten of her father, Byron "Bo" Baird, posed in front of an American flag. Bo Baird, with iron-gray hair and a complementary steely gaze, had owned twenty-eight newspapers nationwide at the height of his powers, each of them more right-leaning than the next. He'd dined with presidents and advised senators before dropping dead at the age of seventy-eight in a bed he turned out to be sharing with a woman who, regrettably, was not his wife. I'd been in high school when it had happened, but I remembered the late-night talk show hosts having a field day. The rumors--never confirmed, but extremely persistent--were that not only had Bo expired on top of another woman, he'd been wearing her high heels at the time.

"I've got twenty minutes," Laura Lynn said, making a production of looking at the gold watch on one itty-bitty wrist. "And before we get started, I want to make one thing clear: Kitty Cavanaugh was not my ghostwriter. We worked together. Those goddamn fucking bloggers are already getting it wrong, big surprise, the
Times
had it wrong this morning, my lawyer's already drafting a cease-and-desist motion..." She paused for breath and snatched a can of Diet Coke from an LLB-monogrammed ice bucket on the chrome and glass coffee table. "You saw the obit?" she barked.

"I...uh..." I fumbled through the slurry of broken crayons and juice-stiffened napkins at the bottom of my WGBH totebag and pulled out a notebook with a pink, glittery cover featuring Hello Kitty. It was Sophie's--the only thing I'd been able to find on short notice.

"O-bit-u-a-ry," she said, pronouncing each syllable as if she were speaking to someone who'd just come back from her lobotomy. "In today's so-called paper of record." She snatched the offending pages off the coffee table and tossed them at me. "Connecticut Mother, Writer Slain," said the two-column headline on page B-6. "Katherine Cavanaugh, a Connecticut woman who worked in the editorial department of
Content
magazine writing 'The Good Mother' column beneath the byline of conservative social critic Laura Lynn Baird, was found dead in her kitchen on Friday afternoon. Mrs. Cavanaugh, thirty-six" was all I saw before Laura Lynn grabbed the newspaper out of my hand.

"Don't read it," she rapped, her jaw clenched and tiny eyes glittering. "It's all lies, lies and bullshit, typical liberal smear garbage. My lawyer's already spoken to their ombudsman--oh, excuse me," she said, her husky, clipped voice heavy with sarcasm, "their ombuds-person. Gotta be gender neutral these days, right? Right?" She threw back her head, exposing a scrawny, corded neck, and made a noise that must have sounded like laughter when she was on TV.

"How long had Kitty been, um, working with you?"

"Five years, six years, something like that," she said.

I wrote it down. "How did you meet her?"

"We were introduced," she said. "Joel Asch, he's the editor in chief of
Content,
had been her professor at Hanfield. He spoke highly of her, I interviewed her, she seemed intelligent, and capable enough, so that was that. There you go." She tapped her foot on the hardwood floor. "What else? What else?"

I blurted out the first thing I could think of. "Where's your son? Is he napping?"

"He's at the park with my mother. She takes care of him when I'm working," she said. She lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes at me, daring me to call her a hypocrite.

"Oh."

"And when I travel. I used to take him with me--he was more portable when he was little--but it just got to be too much. Last year I was on the road one night out of every three. That was why Kitty was so perfect," Laura Lynn said. "I supplied the politics, the ideology, the spin. She provided some of the details. You know. All that messy domestic stuff. Dirty diapers and drool." She whipped one manicured hand through the air. I imagined I could hear the air whistling in its wake.

"So..." I wanted to ask
who did the writing,
but I knew I couldn't. So I said, "How did you divide the labor?"
There,
I thought.
Much better.

Laura Lynn shook her head in frustration. Not a single hair moved. "We'd talk on the phone, or we'd email. I'd give her ideas, we'd have conversations, and then she'd send me the final product. When you think about it, I was doing her a real service," Laura Lynn said.

I couldn't help raising my eyebrows at that one, and I tried to camouflage my disgust as deep interest. "Oh?"

"I believe in earned equality," she said. I recognized the catch-phrase from one of her TV appearances. "And unlike the so-called feminists"--she hooked her spindly fingers into air quotes and lifted her lip in a sneer--"I actually support women."

"Oh?"

"Absolutely," she said, nodding vigorously. "You see, a woman like Kitty, a mom with two kids..." She drummed her fingers on her knee, looking disconcerted, even upset, for the first time in our conversation. "She had two kids, right?"

I nodded.

"Two kids, in the suburbs, what other work could she possibly do? She couldn't go to an office, couldn't go back to school. I allowed her the luxury of staying home with her children, and a chance to have a voice in the world!" she concluded triumphantly.

Hv voice in world,
I scribbled, keeping my eyes assiduously on my page, knowing that if I risked looking at Laura Lynn, my face would give me away. "So she worked from home?"

Laura Lynn nodded, sighed audibly, and glanced at her watch again. "That's right. After that first time we met in the city, it was just easier for us to do it on the phone or with email."

"That was all right with your editor? With..." I looked at my notebook. "Joel Asch?"

"Anything was going to be okay with him. He loooved her. He might have been fucking her, for all I know," she added, her voice suddenly vicious.
So much for sisterhood,
I managed to keep from saying.

"Did she agree with your point of view? Your take on motherhood?"

Laura Lynn scowled at me. "Well, of course she did. Why wouldn't she?"

I wrote it down without answering. I wasn't touching that one. It was probably true. A woman who'd tell an almost stranger, "I would never leave my children," with her face and eyes glowing, like she was in the grip of some religious passion, or insane--probably would buy what Laura Lynn was selling.

"Look," Laura Lynn continued, leaning forward and laying one hand on my knee for emphasis, "I would have been perfectly happy with a double byline. Honest to God. But the editors felt..."--she gave a tiny shrug--"that my name was the draw, and that sharing the credit would just muddy the waters. And Kitty was fine with it. Really. Especially once we got the book deal."

"Book deal?"

She gave another impatient exhale and cracked open another can of soda. "We sold our manuscript three weeks ago," Laura Lynn said. "At auction. Six houses were bidding." She held her soda can like a microphone. "A collection of essays about the contested nature of motherhood in modern-day America. We got a seven-figure advance."

"Did you have a title? I'd like to mention it at the memorial service."

She blinked at me as I congratulated myself on my quick thinking. "
The Good Mother.
Of course."

Of course.

"And we were both going to have bylines!" Laura Lynn concluded, as if that fact alone put her halfway toward sainthood. "Make sure you mention that. Well, you know. It would say, 'By Laura Lynn Baird with Kitty Cavanaugh.' "

I nodding, remembering a line I'd read in a hundred different detective stories:
follow the money.
A seven-figure advance meant that there was plenty of money to follow. "I don't want to get too personal, but would you mind telling me how you planned to split the advance, and the royalties?"

"Well..." Laura Lynn set down her soda can and fiddled with her pearls. "We hadn't quite finalized it." She gave me a wide-eyed look. "But it was going to be fair. You can be assured of that. See, I believe in treating women fairly, and in paying them fairly."

I nodded and wrote that down too, then kept nodding as Laura Lynn expounded on her views of motherhood (pro), feminism (con), and a woman's impact on the world (significant and favorable, provided she attended to her children first, thus effecting change on a micro level, but from little acorns spring great oaks, and there would be no need for gun control, campaign finance reform, or government regulation of the Internet, if only the mothers of the world would do their job).

"Jane Segal said you found the body," Laura Lynn said. "Was it...was she..." She tilted her soda can back and forth, then raised her hands to her necklace. "Did she suffer?" she finally asked. Her pearls chattered between her fingers.

"I don't know," I said.

We sat in silence for about ten seconds before Laura Lynn chugged down the remnants of her soda and set down the can. "Gotta go," she said, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. "I'm taking the train to D.C."

I knew my cue. "Did Kitty ever mention someone named Evan McKenna to you?" His name seemed to hang in the air like a mobile. If I looked up, I'd see it dangling over my head.

"No," said Laura. "Why? Who's he?"

"Nobody," I said. "He's nobody." As always, his name twisted through my heart.
Nobody.
How I wished that it were true.

She got to her feet. "So, listen, I'm sorry for your loss. Was Kitty a good friend of yours?"

I shook my head. "I didn't really know her that well. Just from the playground, or the supermarket, or soccer games."

That admission seemed to relax Laura Lynn. "That's a shame. She was nice," she said. "Very reliable. Very thorough." She paused, perhaps realizing that what she'd said sounded more like a reference for a cleaning service than a eulogy for a departed colleague. "You know what Kitty was? She was a
good mother.
Just like the column said."