Goodnight Nobody (9 page)

Ten

In most other towns in America, the opening of a chain coffee shop isn't that big a deal. When Starbucks wanted to come to Upchurch, it occasioned no fewer than three town meetings that packed the town hall's auditorium, a month's worth of outraged letters to the editor of the
Upchurch Gazette
decrying the "degradation of our downtown," and a demonstration on Main Street, where the protestors held placards with red slashes through mugs beneath the words
No Corporate Coffee.
Evidently, they were perfectly satisfied with Tea and Sympathy, where you could buy lapsang souchong for four dollars a cup, crumbly scones, and Danish that could have doubled as doorstops.

The town selectmen finally decided that Starbucks could open, but it couldn't have a sign out front, because a sign would compromise the quaint character of Main Street. Thus, the Secret Starbucks, on the corner of Maple and Main, with nothing but the smell of roasting House Blend to give it away. It was like a speakeasy, in need of only a password to get you through the unmarked glass and metal door.

I sidled inside, dressed in Janie's suede stiletto boots and light blue cashmere sweater--a size medium, which I couldn't have comfortably fit into even before I'd breast-fed three babies--and a clean pair of cargo pants that had been modified to show the small of my back and about two inches of my butt crack ("I need to test my theory!" Janie had said. I'd nodded my consent, then snuck into the bathroom to change my underwear, so that now the pants revealed the small of my back and two inches of faded grayish Hanes Her Way briefs.)

Janie had trailed my minivan in her Porsche. We'd found three broken pay phones before locating one that worked, but Evan's phone just rang and rang before voice mail picked up and Janie cut the connection before I'd said a word. "No leaving incriminating messages," she said. She'd gotten behind the wheel of the van to take the kids back home, tossed me the keys to her car, and told me to call her when I was done interrogating the sitter.

Once I'd placed my order, I scanned the room looking for--I'll admit it--a busty blonde, because that was the image the words "twenty-four-year-old babysitter" had conjured: every suburban mommy's nightmare; every suburban daddy's happy dream.

Under different circumstances, Lisa DeAngelis, with her big blue eyes and buttercup blond hair, might have fit the bill. But when she gave me a listless wave from her table in the corner, she wasn't looking like anyone would be begging her to pose in lingerie any time soon.

"Kate?" she asked tonelessly.

"Hi," I said, and wobbled over to her table in Janie's boots. "Can I get you anything?"

Lisa pointed at a plastic cup in front of her that seemed to be filled primarily with whipped cream. Her eyes looked glazed, whether from sleeplessness or something chemical, I couldn't tell. Her hair was pulled back in a listless ponytail at the nape of her neck. A canker sore bloomed in the corner of her mouth; a pimple was flourishing in the center of her forehead; and the tiny gold stud in her left nostril was surrounded by puffy, infected-looking red flesh. She might have had a drop-dead figure, but since she wore baggy gray sweatpants and an oatmeal-colored sweater, it was impossible to tell.

"Thanks for meeting with me," I said. She shrugged.

"I've got some free time now?" she said. She had the habit remembered from my own younger days of turning every statement into a question. "Now that..." She sighed and stared into her coffee cup. I was grateful that she wasn't staring at me, the way the three baristas and the six other patrons all seemed to be. The sweater and the boots, I thought sadly, had been a mistake.

"Well, if you're looking for kids, I've got 'em!" Oy. "There's Sophie, my four-year-old--well, she's four going on forty--and my twins, Sam and Jack, are three..." I shut my mouth as a tear made its way slowly down Lisa's check. "Are you okay?"

I handed her a napkin. She wiped her eyes, then blew her nose. I slid more napkins across the table.

Lisa blinked, wiped her cheeks, then tilted her head back and fanned at her lashes. "I still can't believe it?" she said.

Just the opening I'd been waiting for. "It is unbelievable," I murmured.

She spun her cup in a circle. "She was nice, you know?" she said. "She'd talk to me. And there was never any
Oh, could you please unload the dishwasher?
or
Oh, if the kids nap, can you fold some clothes?
They had digital cable, and TiVo, and actual ice cream in the freezer. Ice cream just for me," she said. "The girls had that sugar-free whole fruit stuff."

It figured. I could remember Kitty on the playground peeling fresh clementines for her kids. When mine had asked for a snack, I'd been reduced to offering them each a breath mint.

"I should have..."--Lisa paused and wiped her eyes--"appreciated her more, you know?"

"How long had you known her?"

"Three years?" she sniffled. "Since the girls were in nursery school? I'd do three days a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from one to six thirty. When she went to the city, she'd take the one twenty-two, and she'd be home by six, almost always, and she'd always call when she was going to be late."

"How often did she go to New York?"

Lisa twirled her cup around the table some more. "Depends. Sometimes a lot. And sometimes she'd just be home. She had a computer in the bedroom. She'd work there." I looked down at her hands and saw that her fingernails were bitten to the quick, her cuticles were ragged and scabbed.

"Do you know what she was doing in the city?"

Lisa shook her head. "She never told me. I never asked."

Never told. Never asked.
Very interesting. According to Laura Lynn Baird, Kitty had worked from home. They'd collaborated by phone and by email--the perfect, flexible part-time gig for a stay-at-home mother who'd told me she never left her kids. So if Kitty wasn't going into the city to work, what was she doing there? I had an idea. A guess, at least.

"Did she dress like she was going to work or going to..."
Meet up with a mystery man in a midtown hotel for hours of illicit passion and overpriced liquor from the minibar?
"Do something else?" I concluded.

"I don't know," Lisa said, after she'd paused for a long look at my underwear-baring ensemble. "She just wore clothes. Skirts and sweaters. Normal things."

Ah, yes. Normal things. I remembered them well. "I'll bet you've got intuition," I said, using one of Janie's techniques: when in doubt, flatter. "Anyone who's good with kids--and I've heard great things about you--you must have kind of a sense about people."

Lisa shrugged, but I could see from the faint flush in her cheeks that she was pleased. Or maybe not. Maybe she was just having some kind of allergic reaction to underwear.

"What was your sense of Kitty?" I asked. "Was she happy, or anxious, or bored? Do you think she could have been..." I paused, gathering myself. "I don't know. Maybe having an affair?"

Lisa's flush deepened. "I don't know," she said. "I really have no idea." She picked at the cuticle on her left thumb until she'd drawn a bead of blood. "How many hours a week are you looking for?" she asked.

It took me a minute to remember why I'd ostensibly asked her out for coffee. "Oh, um...ten? Fifteen, maybe? It would be really basic. You'd just have to watch the kids. You wouldn't have to do any housework or even answer the phone." I paused to sip my drink and regroup before asking, as casually as I could, "Did you ever answer Kitty's phone?"
Good one, Kate,
I thought. Subtle. Like a fart in an elevator.

She shook her head...and I saw she was starting to look puzzled. "She said to just let voice mail pick up, so that's what I did. You don't have voice mail?"

"Well, we do, sure, but sometimes, I guess, the personal touch is nice." Oh boy, was this going nowhere fast. So much for my career as Kate Klein, ace investigator of suburban wrongdoings from eight-thirty to eleven forty-five on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I stared into Lisa's eyes, trying to pin her down with my gaze so that she wouldn't bolt or, worse, start talking about babysitting again.

"You know, I used to babysit when I was your age," I said. Flattery hadn't worked, so maybe empathy would. "I loved it, except sometimes the fathers would think it was, you know, their constitutional right to try and hit on me." This was, of course, a complete fabrication. I had picked up the occasional babysitting gig when I was in high school, but none of the fathers had so much as shaken my hand for too long, probably because they were all musicians and Reina could have ruined their careers with a look. Also, I doubted that my bad skin-baggy sweatshirts-slouch combination was much of a turn-on. "I guess times have changed," I said, before I got a good look at little Lisa and saw that her flush had deepened and that her lips were trembling.

"I...," she whispered.
She has a computer in the bedroom,
she'd said of Kitty. How would she know that, unless the lady of the house had shown her? The lady, or the man of the house?

I leaned across the polished wood table and lowered my voice. "Did something happen between you and Kitty's husband?"

She shook her head wordlessly and pressed her lips together as two large tears plopped onto her gray shirt.

"Have the police talked to you?" I asked.

She nodded, sniffling.

"Do you need a lawyer?"

She shook her head. "Phil--Mr. Cavanaugh--he got me one. Kevin Dolan? He's a friend of theirs?" She blew her nose on a recycled paper napkin. "I shouldn't have...," she whispered.

"Shouldn't have what?"

Her neck was a pliant white stalk beneath the straggling ponytail as she cradled her head in her hands. I leaned even farther across the table and managed to knock her drink onto the floor with my right breast. "Shouldn't have what?" I asked again, ignoring the crushed ice seeping through the suede of Janie's boot.

She shook her head again and got to her feet so fast that her chair tipped over, hitting the Secret Starbucks floor with a bang that startled all three of the baristas. Then she spun around on her sneakers and ran out the door.
Well,
I thought, tossing out the dregs of my drink.
Well, Kate, that went just fabulously.

Eleven

"Question for you, my friend," Janie said to Evan one night over dinner. We'd been in our Jane Street apartment for six months, and we'd made it our project to work our way through the cuisines of the world, or at least the ones represented by New York eateries that delivered. Tonight was Greek, and we were feasting on a spread of souvlaki, grilled grape leaves, and taramasalata on warm grilled pita bread. Janie served herself more olives and feta and asked, "Do you have a job, or what?"

Evan grinned and swallowed a last mouthful of moussaka. "She thinks I'm a wastrel," he stage-whispered to me across the table.

"Isn't that a bird?" asked Janie.

"No, that's a kestrel," I said.

Janie glared at us. "Please don't try to educate me. And don't change the subject."

"Wouldn't dream of it," he said, getting up to clear our plates and stack the Styrofoam-packed leftovers neatly in the refrigerator. "Do you know," he asked, decrumbing Janie's placemat, "that the verb form of
butler
is
buttle
?"

"Do you know," Janie asked sweetly, "that the verb form of
fiance
is
affianced
? Speaking of which, have you and Michelle set a date yet?"

Evan shook his head. "We can't even agree on a place. Or a season. She wants Malibu in the summertime, I want New Jersey in the fall." He grinned at her. Michelle was off in Miami shooting swimsuits for a catalogue, and Evan was mine--well, ours--for the weekend. This had become our routine. Michelle would leave and, in her absence, Evan would adopt us. We'd come home from work with our arms full of research (i.e., the tabloids) to find him hanging around the mailboxes.

"Hello, ladies," he'd say. "What news, what news?" Janie would roll her eyes and make faces at me while I'd fill him in on which celebrities had been arrested/incarcerated/shipped off to rehab, and what they'd done to deserve it. He'd trail us into the elevator, talking in what I think was meant to be a Cockney accent--"Carry your bags, mum? Shine your shoes, guv'ner? Take that package? Take a message? Need any 'elp?" Once we were up in the apartment, he'd flop onto the floor or whatever piece of furniture was empty--our couch, my bed--and magically regain his ability to pronounce the letter
h.
"So!" he'd say cheerfully. "What's for dinner?"

We'd order out, or sometimes we'd cook. Evan's specialty was stir-fry, I could make pastas and casseroles, and Janie had her old reliable cheesy toast. Evan and I would try to stump each other with increasingly obscure blues songs, swapping tapes and compact discs back and forth and arguing over the meaning of Nina Simone's self-imposed exile and whether her cover of "Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl" was, as Evan maintained, superior to all others.

At midnight, Janie would kick him out, except for those precious handful of nights when he fell asleep on the couch and I'd convince her to just let him sleep. After she'd gone into her own room, I'd pull my comforter tenderly up over his shoulders, brushing his hair off his forehead. Once--only once--I'd dared to bend down and brush my lips against his cheek, knowing that what I was feeling was the very definition of
unrequited.
As soon as Michelle came back, she'd claim him like he was a piece of luggage she'd left on the carousel. He'd amble back down the hall with a friendly wave and a "See ya, pal," and that would be the end of it.

That night, Evan returned to the table bearing a waxed-paper bag. "Baba au rhum!" he announced.

Janie poked at hers skeptically. "Don't think you're getting out of this. I still want to know what you do for a living, and I can't be bought off with pastry."

"I can," I said, and took a bite.

Evan handed out fresh napkins and gave Janie what was meant to be an inscrutable look. "I am a man of constant sorrows," he said, with his wineglass in his hand.

"Constant sorrows pay the bills?"

"I'm a man of many talents," Evan said. "A jack-of-all-trades."

"A jack with a trust fund?" Janie asked. "There's nothing wrong with it," she reassured him. "I've got a trust fund!" Like he hadn't figured that out. "But I work," she said, and then repeated it. "I
work.
" Like the two of us spent our days toiling in the salt mines instead of sitting in ergonomically designed chairs in a climate-controlled office typing search strings like "Chris Farley AND hookers AND cocaine" into the LexisNexis database.

"I work too," Evan said easily. "I freelance."

"Freelance writer, freelance musician, freelance proofreader...?" Janie asked.

"That," said Evan with a grin, "is for me to know and you lovely ladies to try to figure out." He finished his dessert, gave Janie a showy smack on the cheek, then bent down briefly and kissed my forehead, allowing me a tantalizing whiff of his skin. He smelled so clean, I thought. "Gotta go," he said, tipping his glass into the sink and walking out the door.

Janie watched him go, hazel eyes narrowed, rubbing one finger against the diminished bridge of her nose. "He's dealing drugs," she finally said.

"No," I said. "No way."

"Well, how else do you explain it?" she demanded. "We come home at night, he's here. We leave in the morning, he's here. I came home for lunch last week..."

"Lunch?" I asked, deadpan.

"Okay, sex," said Janie. "We're walking back to the elevator and who should stick his head out of his door? He's always here, except when he's taking off for three days in a row and says he's on quote-unquote vacation, or we're playing Scrabble and his beeper goes off and he not only leaves the room or the apartment, he leaves the building to answer it. He's always got money in his pocket, and I know for a fact he's not going to an office--"

"So you just jump to the conclusion that he's selling drugs?"

"Well, it does explain a lot of things," she said. Her finger was back against her nose. "Although I can think of one other possibility."

"What's that?" I asked, even though I wasn't sure I wanted to know. As far as I was concerned, Evan was charming, sweet, funny, sincere, and, best of all, genuinely interested in me, plus he kept me supplied with bootleg recordings of Diana Krall. Except for the minor obstacle of being engaged to somebody else, he was perfect...and I wasn't ready to hear news that would burst my bubble.

"Maybe he's not selling drugs," Janie said. "Maybe he's selling..." She paused dramatically and widened her eyes. "Himself!"

"Oh, come on," I said, and started wiping the perfectly clean table.

"It happens!" Janie said.

"I'm sure there's some other explanation. You know, a rational one," I said, tossing the sponge in the sink. Meanwhile, my mind had instantly conjured up a classified ad for Evan, something that would run on the back pages of the
Village Voice--Handsome, charming, well-built twenty-eight, available for fun and games and maybe more...

"Then why's he so mysterious about it?" Janie asked. "If it's legit, why won't he tell us?"

I turned on the water to drown out the sound of her questions, because I knew that she was right. If Evan had a legitimate job, there was no reason he wouldn't tell us about it.

Michelle came home the next day, and Evan disappeared, and I tried to walk as fast as I could past their apartment door, certain that if I slowed my pace, I'd hear things I didn't want to hear. Two days later, there was a languid knock at our door, and when I opened it up, Michelle was there, resplendent in leather pants and a boned bustier--the exact thing, I thought sourly, that I normally wore for lounging around the house.

"
Hola,
Michelle," said Janie.

Michelle frowned. Lately, she'd been styling herself
ME-shell.
Janie had made a major point of pronouncing it the plain old American way--or, worse, calling her Micky.

"I'm having a Halloween party," Michelle announced.

"Fun!" said Janie.

"Great!" I added.

"Around eightish on Saturday night," she said. "It's a costume party. Can you bring some beer? And some food and stuff? And help with the coats?"

"You know, there's people you can hire," Janie began.

I cut her off. "We'll help."

"Great," said Michelle. "Eightish. Did I say that already?" She flicked at her long turquoise and silver earrings and wandered off down the hall. Janie scowled. "That is one presumptuous beeyotch."

I set down the Ruth Rendell book I'd been reading and asked the question that had been plaguing me since my first encounter with Michelle. "Why is he with her? Is it just because she's beautiful?"

Janie straightened her blouse, smoothed her hair, and assumed a professorial attitude. "It's not just because she's beautiful. It's also because she's smart."

"Smart?" I scoffed. I hadn't spent as much time in their apartment as Evan had in ours, but the only Michelle-centric reading material I'd glimpsed was a magazine called
Hair Style Monthly.
Michelle didn't watch anything on television besides Madonna's videos, didn't listen to any music except Madonna's songs, and didn't talk about anything but herself, her hair, her skin, and, most recently, the series of oxygen facials she'd embarked upon just like her idol. "She spent three weeks in Paris and she still thinks Bain de Soleil is spelled exactly the way it's pronounced."

"Not smart smart. Man smart," Janie said. "She never lets Evan think that she's a sure thing. She's always leaving. Thus, he's always chasing after her. As long as she keeps herself unattainable, he'll keep trying to catch her."

"Even though she's boring?"

"Even if she's boring, the chase is exciting," Janie explained. She rubbed her nose. "Also, she could be double-jointed."

I groaned and threw my book at her. Janie caught it, then looked at me sternly. "Forget him," she said.

"I don't--"

She held up her hand. "Kate, I see how you look at him. You're going to get your heart broken. She's got him hooked, and he's not interested in breaking it off. Find someone who deserves you."

"She doesn't deserve him," I muttered, even though I knew that what Janie was telling me was true.

"Probably not," Janie said. "But as my father's four ex-wives have remarked, frequently in front of judges, life isn't fair." She slung her arm around me, then steered me toward her bedroom. "Come on, let's find you a costume."

"So tell me," drawled Michelle, tilting her fine-boned face to its most photogenic angle and pursing her lips in a dramatic pout. "What was college like?" Michelle had come to her party as a sexy witch, with a lot of dark red lipstick, high-heeled lace-up black boots underneath a black satin and tulle dress with a tattered hem, and a pointed hat perched at a fetching angle. Given that there'd be a room full of Michelle's fellow models, all of them dressed as sexy somethings--a sexy nurse in an abbreviated white uniform; a sexy cop with handcuffs dangling from her hot pants; a sexy French maid in fishnets and a starched wink of an apron--I'd decided to not even compete, ignored Janie's entreaties, and gone as a pirate. Not a sexy pirate, either, unless you thought that boots, an eyepatch, a plastic hook, and a stuffed plush parrot I'd duct-taped to my shoulder spelled "Do me."

"It was great," I said. "I really loved my classes and having time to just read."

Michelle didn't look impressed. Then again, I wasn't sure I'd ever seen Michelle looking anything other than bored. Bored and lovely, of course. "Maybe I'll go someday," she said, picking a fleck of dried mascara out of one extralong eyelash. "When I'm too old to model anymore. Where'd you go?"

"Columbia."

She stared at me with cool aquamarine eyes. "Maybe you could call someone there, and I could go too."

"Well, that's not normally how it works. Maybe you could talk to an admissions officer."

Michelle smiled, a sly, satisfied smile. "Make sure it's a boy admissions officer," she said, and patted my arm. "I won't have any problems." She peered down at me. "What are you supposed to be, exactly?"

Before I could answer, she'd spotted someone more interesting, waved, and sashayed away. I took a gulp from my glass of rum-spiked cider.

"Arr,"
I said, and looked around. The apartment was crowded with bodies, all of them far more beautiful than mine. To my left, a stunning blonde in a psychedelic print minidress and white go-go boots was gesturing with her Marlboro and complaining that her booking agent had grabbed her ass again. To my right, a gorgeous brunette with cafe con leche skin, a tumble of glossy black curls, and a spiderweb inked on her cheek was telling everyone within earshot that she hadn't eaten anything but cabbage soup for the past ten days. I carefully sidled upwind of her and looked at the door. I was wondering how to escape, when two more long-legged lovelies with about six guys in their wake came striding arm and arm through the door. They pulled off their coats, revealing matching Daisy Duke outfits (minuscule cut-off denim shorts, sleeveless shirts knotted to reveal flawless midriffs, not much else) and piled their outerwear into my arms. I edged my way through the throng to the bedroom, thinking I could dump the coats on Evan and Michelle's bed.