Goodnight Nobody (8 page)

"Kate," he said, and nodded, as if this pleased him. "I'm Evan McKenna. Four-A."

"Nice to meet you." There. I'd gotten a complete, socially appropriate sentence out of my mouth without babbling or mentally molesting him. Progress! I set the box into the hallway closet and put my hands in my pockets.

He cocked an eyebrow at the mess, the suitcases and boxes leaking crumpled newspaper and packing peanuts onto the floor, the movers sweating and cursing as they shoved the headboard along the hall to Janie's bedroom.

"So how many of you are there moving in here?"

"Huh? Oh, um, just two. Me and my roommate Janie. Janie Segal of the carpet Segals." Shit. Now why had I said that?

"Janie Segal of the carpet Segals," he repeated.

I nodded. I'd decided that speed was not my friend.

The eyebrow lifted higher. "Did she have some kind of reversal of fortune?"

"Oh, no, no," I said, shaking my head more vigorously than I had to. "She just likes to keep it real, you know. With the Village people. Well, West Village people. Ha ha."

Evan--Evan! Had there ever been a more beautiful name!--surveyed the mounds and piles and teetering stacks of Janie's belongings. "Do you guys need more help?"

"Oh, no, no, we're fine, we've got it..." Just then, there was a loud crash from the kitchen, followed by some even louder cursing. Evan and I hurried into the kitchen, where Janie was on her hands and knees.

"Damn!" she said, picking up the pieces of a broken soup bowl. "So much for our service for eighteen."

"Careful with that," I said, kneeling down beside her as she picked through the shards. "Hey, Janie, this is Evan McKenna. He's our neighbor."

She raised her head, swept her index finger dramatically beneath each eye, then looked at him...then at me...then at him again, as something in her bedroom crashed to the floor with a wall-rattling bang.

"Very pleased to meet you," she said. She stood up, gave Evan's hand a brief shake, and bounded out of the room.

"Huh," said Evan, watching her go.

"Yeah, she, um, she's a little..." God, he was handsome! Like a
General Hospital
-era Rick Springfield, only without the mullet. Just then, as if I'd willed it, or as if Janie had read my mind, the Abba was replaced by the opening notes of "Jesse's Girl."

Evan grinned. "Are you ladies Rick Springfield fans?"

"I love this song," I babbled. "I wrote Rick Springfield a fan letter when I was twelve, I think, and he sent me back an autographed picture. My mom always called him Rick Springsteen."

"Rick Springsteen," he repeated.

"Yeah," I said. "She's an opera singer. She doesn't like any music that was composed in the last fifty years," I said. "Well, I guess I should, you know, get back to it."

"Let me put on something better."

I stared after him. Then I opened a box labeled Hairspray, which turned out, unsurprisingly, I guess, to contain about two dozen half-empty cans of hairspray. I'd started sweeping up the broken bowl when Rick was replaced by Bessie Smith's bemused crooning, courtesy of Janie, playing DJ in the living room.

"Comes a rainstorm, get your rubbers on your feet. Comes a snowstorm, you can get a little heat. Comes love, nothing can be done."

My heart lifted and thrummed in my chest as Evan hummed along. It meant something. It had to.

"Comes a fire, then you know just what to do. Blow a tire, you can get another shoe."

I sang softly, tipping the dustpan into the trash can. "Comes love, nothing can be done."

"Hey." I looked up. Evan was looking at me...really looking at me, with that grin still on his lips. "What?"

"Hold still," he said. He reached out with two fingers and deftly plucked something out of my ponytail. "You had this stuck."

I looked down into his palm, where a curled pink feather rested. "Wow. Huh. Wonder where that came from?" My guess would have been Janie's feather boa, which I'd removed a few hours before from a box labeled Feather Boas, but I wouldn't have been able to say so even if I'd wanted to. He was staring at me, I was looking at him, and my mouth was dry, and my heart was pounding, and...

Evan pulled a beeper out of his pocket. I hadn't noticed that it was ringing. "Oops," he said. "Appointment. Gotta run."

"Oh. Sure! Okay, um, nice meeting you..."

He waved at me, edged through the thicket of Janie's stuff, and then out the door, leaving me standing there, staring after him, my heart in my throat and a feather in my hand.

The movers had left Janie's nine-foot mirror in a baroque gold frame leaning against the wall. My heart sank as I studied myself two hours later. Why couldn't I have worn a little foundation, I thought, gazing at my flushed cheeks and shiny forehead...or lipstick...or a bag over my head? A bag would have solved all my problems, although it would have made it difficult to schlep boxes around.

I yanked at the hem of my shirt and sucked in my cheeks. The SAT tutor I'd dated had had a bit of an overbite and an unfortunate tendency to spit when he talked. The MBA candidate was handsome but a head shorter than I was. A guy like Evan McKenna would have never looked at me twice--if he hadn't noticed my music first.

I tucked my unruly hair, still damp from a shower I'd taken that morning, up into a twist. He must have seen something in me, even if I couldn't see it myself.

"Vietnamese or Thai?" asked Janie, waving a sheaf of takeout menus. "Senegalese? Laotian? Cuban-Chinese?" She closed her mouth as she caught sight of me in the mirror. "Oh, so it's like that, huh?"

"Like what?" I asked innocently, even while I was trying to remember where I'd packed my lucky black sweater.

"Don't play dumb with me, sister," Janie said. "You've got it bad."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said. "And Cuban-Chinese sounds great." I slipped past her into the kitchen. We had beer in the refrigerator, six six-packs we were going to give to the movers, plus tips, when they came back with Janie's living room furniture the next day. I took the coldest one out of the back, combed my hair, located my sweater, borrowed Janie's lipstick and mascara and one of her bracelets, and proceeded down the hallway to 4-A. I took a deep breath, licked my lips, and smiled as the door swung open.

"Hey..." The witty remark I'd been preparing died in my throat as I looked up at the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. She had russet hair that hung in waves almost to the small of her back, and almond-shaped aquamarine eyes, the kind of cheekbones that looked like they'd been carved, and upturned lips full and soft as pillows.

"Yes?" she asked politely, as her eyes flicked once, up and down, taking me in with a single pitiless glance and instantly dismissing me:
no threat here.

"I'm sorry, I must have the wrong apartment."

I looked for a number by the door and got ready to apologize when Evan appeared in the doorway. "Hi, Kate!"

I thrust the beer out at him. "Hi. Um, I wanted to thank you for, uh, helping us."

"You didn't have to get us anything," he said.

"Oh, it's nothing."
Don't panic,
I thought. Maybe she was his sister. Or just a friend. Or a lesbian, one of those hot makeup- and miniskirt-wearing ones who'd recently been discovered by
New York
magazine. Or--

Evan looked at me kindly. With what I hoped wasn't pity on his face. "Kate, this is Michelle," he said, placing his hands on her shoulders, with the look of a man who's just cashed in a winning lottery ticket. "My fiancee."

"Nice to meet you," I said, and tried to smile. Michelle ignored my efforts.

"Yum," she drawled, plucking the beer out of my nerveless fingers.

"Say thank you, Michelle," said Evan.

"Thank you, Michelle," she recited, and turned on her heel. Evan gave me an apologetic shrug. I could hear music in the background, not Billie or Bessie but something loud and atonal and repetitive, like a CD that was skipping.

"That was really nice of you." When he smiled, his eyes crinkled in the corners. "So I guess I'll see you around."

"Sure," I said. "Sure thing."

"Kate," he called, as I started back down the hall. When I turned around, he was still smiling. "Atlantic City," he whispered. "Don't forget."

Back in our apartment, the living room was lined with empty boxes, and Janie was hanging her coats in the front closet.

"So?" she asked.

"So what? I just brought the guy next door some beer."

"Is that what the kids are calling it these days?" she asked, hanging a plastic-wrapped full-length shearling coat next to something she'd told me was sheared beaver.

"Janie, he's just a nice guy!"

"Umm-hmm," she said, pulling a fluffy white stole out of its plastic bag.

"And," I sighed, pulling more coats out of Janie's box and hanging them, "he's living with the most beautiful woman in the world. And she's kind of a bitch."

"Oh, dear." She shook her head. She'd twisted her hair into a bun that she'd anchored with a pair of lacquered chopsticks. "Well, look. Better you find this out now than get your hopes up."

"My hopes weren't up," I said.

"Oh, grasshopper," she said, and gave me a hug, almost skewering my eyeball with her chopstick. "What a bad, bad liar you are."

Nine

"Like I said, miss, I don't want to question her," Stan Bergeron explained patiently from my driveway the next morning as I made my way downstairs in my bathrobe. "This isn't official. I'm just checking in."

"Not without a lawyer," said my best friend, standing at my front door with her arms crossed over her chest, a stance that would have been more imposing if she hadn't been wearing pink silk pajamas and giant raccoon-shaped slippers and had my kids peeking out from behind her legs.

I yawned. It was ten o'clock in the morning, a good four hours past when I normally woke up, but I hadn't been able to sleep until after two in the morning. I'd wanted to call Evan back but couldn't think of an excuse to leave the house without the kids, and there was no way I'd be dialing the former love of my life while under the roof I shared with my current husband. When I finally dozed off, I'd had terrible dreams, nightmares of being lost in a library where all the books had Kitty Cavanaugh's byline and, when I opened them, the blank pages slowly filled with blood. "I'm looking for something a little different," I told the librarian, who was Mrs. Dietl from the Red Wheel Barrow. She tapped her watch face and held out her hands for the books. "Late again," she said.

I rubbed my eyes and surveyed the situation. Janie appeared to have things well in hand, with a few minor exceptions: the kids were still in their pajamas (judging from their hands and faces, they'd enjoyed a breakfast consisting entirely of syrup), and there was a police cruiser parked in my driveway. "Hey, Stan."

He nodded at me fearfully as I edged past Janie. "Good morning, Kate. I just came by to give you an update."

"Um, excuse me? Law-yer? Was one of those syllables not making sense to you?" Janie inquired.

"It's okay," I told her.

"It is not," she said. "If you talk to the police, you need a lawyer." She rolled her eyes and turned to Sophie. "Did I watch ten seasons of
NYPD Blue
for nothing?"

"No way!" Sophie said. She had Uglydoll under her arm, dressed, I saw, in his police uniform ("Chapter 108: In Which I Join the Force").

"You don't have to say anything!" Stan called. "You can just nod."

I nodded. "What's going on, Stan?" I asked. "Did you find out who did it?"

"No." Then he brightened. "But we found Evan McKenna!"

My heart leapt like a stupid fish at the sound of his name. "Good!" I managed. "Good for you!"

"Is he a suspect?" Janie asked hopefully.

"We won't know until we question him," said Stan. "He was down in Miami."

"He says," Janie muttered. She raised her voice. "How about the husband?"

"The husband?" Stan repeated.

"Is he a suspect?" Janie asked.

"Nooo..." Stan said, dragging the word out. "No, he's got an alibi. He was in the city all day."

Janie flipped her hair over her shoulders. "Well, there you go. Sounds like you've eliminated everyone. Maybe the butler did it."

I glared at her.

"Has Mr. McKenna been in touch with you?" Stan asked.

I started to answer, caught Janie's finger-across-the-throat gesture, and shook my head instead. Stan stared at me. "Let us know if you hear from him," he said, and wandered back down the driveway to his patrol car. I watched him as he backed out over my hydrangeas.

"Well!" Janie said. "If that's Connecticut law enforcement at its finest, might I suggest the name of a few Realtors?"

We sent the kids upstairs to get dressed. Back in the kitchen, I started in on the sinkful of dishes while Janie helped herself to coffee.

"So, Sherlock," Janie said. "What next?"

I shrugged as well as I could with my hands full of silverware.

"Call Evan back, I guess."

"In my presence, and not from your house," Janie said. "We'll find a nice quiet pay phone somewhere else."

"Why a pay phone?"

"So after they arrest him there's no record of you consorting with criminals."

"And why do you want to be there?"

She rolled her eyes. "Hello! I have to be there so you don't pledge your undying love to him--which, if you'll remember, didn't work out very well the last time--and run away and ditch me with the rug rats."

"Don't pretend you don't secretly dig them," I said, even as the memory of the last time I'd pledged my love to Evan McKenna twisted in my heart like a straightened paper clip. I bent down to put the silverware in the dishwasher while Janie flipped through the newspaper.

"Who were Kitty's friends in town?" she asked.

I scrubbed a frying pan and thought about it. I knew who Kitty hung around with, but I wasn't sure they were really friends. I'd never heard them talk about the things that friends would talk about: their marriages, their parents, their former lives, preparenthood. In fact, most of their conversations seemed to revolve around scintillating topics such as whether the organic milk they sold at the local convenience store was really organic.

"I don't know," I said slowly.

"You don't know who her friends were?"

"I don't know if she really had any. Maybe everyone else was afraid of her," I said. "Lord knows I was." I squirted soap into the dishwasher. "I should probably talk to the sitter," I said. "If she worked, she had to have a sitter. Someone who was in her house. Someone who saw her, and her husband, and her kids."

"Sitter. Excellent." Janie tossed me the phone, and I called Sukie Sutherland, who seemed to know everything, to ask if she knew the sitter's name.

"Lisa DeAngelis," Sukie said, and rattled off home and cell phone numbers. "Why?"

"Well..." I hadn't considered that Sukie would want to know why I was trying to get in touch with Kitty's sitter.

Luckily, she gave a cool little laugh. "Don't be ashamed. You're only the third person who's called me to ask for her number. Listen, a good sitter's hard to find."

I saw the lifeline, and grabbed it. "Do you think she's got any time left? I'm desperate for a little help."

"If I were you, I wouldn't wait too long to call."

"Great. Thanks. I'll see you at the park!"

"See you there," Sukie said, and hung up.

"Good job," Janie said, nodding her approval from behind the Business section. "Call her up. See if she's free. I'll hang out with the kids."

"Don't you have to go back to the city? And work?"

She waved the concept away as though it were a fly. "I'm supposed to write a trend piece. Gray is the new black, black is the new pink, belly buttons are the new nipples." She drummed her fingernails on the table. "Hmm...Ass cleavage is the new cleavage?"

"Works for me," I said. I closed the dishwasher, hit the buttons for heavy wash, and wiped my hands on my bathrobe.

"Excellent. Only, Kate? No offense, but you might want to let me help you pick out an outfit before you go."