Hush Hush (9 page)
P.M.
Ruby had learned as a child that attempting to muffle or conceal a sound only drew attention to it. If you whispered, people leaned in
to catch what you were saying. If you tried to tiptoe, or close a door without being heard, people wondered why you didn’t want to be heard. So when Ruby went to her listening post late at night, she simply got up and walked downstairs. If someone ever challenged her, she would say: “I’m going to get a glass of water.”
But no one ever challenged her, possibly because no one else, not even Alanna, had discovered that one could hear everything being discussed in their father’s bedroom while standing in the hall closet.
Ruby wasn’t sure why this acoustical anomaly existed. Everywhere else, the house seemed to smother or distort sound. She assumed it was some shortcut in construction, a missing layer in the wall that the closet and bedroom shared. Atypical of her father, a perfectionist known for overseeing every detail, but then the house was atypical for him. Brand-new, built from scratch, not rehabbed. Suburban. Beyond suburban. Rural in feel, surrounded by trees, yet almost close enough to hear the humming cloverleafs of the Beltway and various interstate exchanges. Now, late winter, was the most light-filled time in the house. And when the trees were bare, one could see the house’s glowing windows from a great distance, and that was cozy—from a distance, looking in. As spring turned to summer, the house would grow darker and darker.
The house was also unusual in that it had a master bedroom suite on the first floor, with the other bedrooms on the second and third floors. It made Felicia crazy, going up and down the stairs so much. She had taken to wearing a pedometer to show Ruby’s dad how much she walked. Silly, but then Felicia thought it mattered, how many steps a person took in a day. Ruby specialized in getting out of gym class whenever possible, no small thing at a physically rah-rah place like Roland Park Country, especially when one’s sister was a track star. Her latest condition, supported by a forged doctor’s note, was an enlarged spleen. That should be good for a week or two.
She slipped her coat from a hanger, careful not to make a sound, then made a nest, leaned her back against the rear wall.
“I don’t see why this concerns us,” Felicia was saying.
Her father’s voice was indistinct; he must be in the bathroom. Luckily, Felicia had trouble hearing him, too, and he had to come out and repeat himself.
“It concerns us, Felicia, because we gave the girls permission to see Melisandre if that’s what they want.”
“You gave permission. I wasn’t consulted.”
“Jesus, Felicia. Can we not have that conversation again?”
“It was really hurtful. When they said they didn’t want me to adopt them.”
“Understood. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I waited until I was pregnant to ask because I wanted to emphasize that we would be one family.”
This old thing
. It wasn’t the first time that Ruby had heard Felicia complain about their refusal to be adopted. She had felt bad at the time, but she was glad now. Alanna had been right to say they shouldn’t go along with it. Alanna used to have Ruby’s best interests at heart, but now it wasn’t so clear that she did, not after what Ruby had heard in this same spot a few days ago, Alanna agreeing with her father that it might be better if they avoided seeing their mother as long as possible. Ruby hadn’t heard enough of the conversation to know why Alanna was suddenly on their father’s side, and you couldn’t go to someone and say: “Last night when I was eavesdropping, I didn’t quite catch everything, could you fill me in?”
“Is that why Melisandre came back?” Felicia asked. “Because she knows I asked the girls to let me adopt them?”
“She came back to make this stupid film, best I can tell. But she has been getting threatening notes, apparently, which I just found out about. And now this.”
“I know Silas, a little. He was just getting started when I sold my business. What a crazy thing. Do they know what happened?”
“It’s just a clusterfuck as I understand it. He knocked the sugar bowl to the ground when he fell and it smashed, and some maid with a Dustbuster cleaned it up while they were out getting him medical attention. Tyner Gray is trying to spin it as a good thing—he says the Four Seasons will probably be more cooperative with his private investigator if there’s not a police investigation, that the promise of discretion is a powerful carrot. I don’t know. I don’t really care. Look, I’m worried for Missy, even if the seizure, whatever caused it, probably wasn’t the intended outcome. Her doctor thinks someone used a drug, maybe GHB.”
“What would be the point of drugging her?”
“To scare her. To put her on guard. Same with the notes. And in both cases, there’s a sense that the person knew her back—back then. She used to be a sugar junkie. Before. She had gestational diabetes with Isadora, and her sweet tooth never came back.”
A memory swam into Ruby’s mind, almost overwhelming her with its power.
Don’t tell Daddy
. A wink and a smile, as they settled in for gelato at Vaccaro’s. Did Ruby really remember that? Or was it something that Alanna had told her? She was not quite four when their mother left forever. Alanna was only six. It seemed unfair that Alanna should have so many memories, Ruby so few.
Then again, Ruby didn’t have migraines. Maybe that was the trade-off.
“At any rate, she’s out of the hotel. As of tonight. I think she had a mattress delivered to 13 Stories and she’s sleeping there until her things are delivered from storage.”
“I still think it’s weird that she wants to live in one of your buildings. Maybe she wants you back.”
Her father laughed as if this were the most ridiculous thing in the world, and Ruby felt as if a hand had grabbed her heart and choked
it. “Not a chance, Felicia. And you should be glad she bought that apartment—it’s a big chunk of money for us. I’ve never been able to sell that penthouse. It’s out of line, price-wise, with that part of town.”
“Still—she wants to see the girls. Ten years, no communication, and now she wants to see them.”
“Or wants to be seen as wanting to see the girls. Her film can milk it either way, right? Heartfelt reunion or isolated by the evil ex. At any rate, it doesn’t matter what she wants. And it no longer matters what the girls want. Not after this. No visits anywhere, anytime, until we understand what’s going on. On top of everything else, she fired her bodyguard without a replacement. That’s insane.”
“Insane,” Felicia said, and the word seemed to echo for a very long time.
What do I want?
Ruby thought, sitting on the floor of the closet in the long T-shirt she wore for sleeping. Before her mother arrived in Baltimore a month ago, Ruby had had a long-range plan, one she hadn’t shared with anyone. She was going to go to a college with a good foreign exchange program, then do a year abroad in London. Her mother had family in London, or had had. Even if she had sold the apartment there, she probably still visited. Ruby figured she could go see her mother on her own terms, by herself. In London, no one would care if Melisandre Dawes walked down the street with a young woman, met her for lunch. In London, Ruby could have had her mother all to herself, something she had never known.
Don’t tell Daddy. I’m not supposed to be eating sweets during my pregnancy, but this one won’t hurt
. A wink, a smile. Did Ruby remember it? Or did she remember Alanna telling her about it? She pressed her face into her hands, leaned into the memory with all of her senses. Stracciatella, flakes of chocolate in vanilla. Yes, the memory was hers, she could taste what she had eaten that day, see her mother struggling with the tiny café table, her enormous belly pushing and
prodding, making it awkward for her to eat. Ruby had put her hands on her mother’s belly, felt the kick.
What should we name the new baby? It’s a girl, of course. One more for our team. One for all, all for one, the four musketeers
.
“Isadora,” Alanna had said, offering no explanation
. Isadora it was.
Transcript of Interview with Ethan Hinerman, his office, March 12
| | SPEAKER 1: Harmony Burns | |
| | SPEAKER 2: Ethan Hinerman | |
| | INPUT: HB | |
| HB: | | We are in the office of Dr. Ethan Hinerman, in the five hundred block of Cathedral Street, Baltimore, Maryland. We really appreciate you agreeing to speak to us, Dr. Hinerman. |
| EH: | | I’m not a doctor. I have a doctorate, but I’m not a medical doctor. |
| HB: | | My mistake. I thought you used to identify yourself as a doctor. |
| EH: | | I use my title as appropriate. That was never meant to confuse anyone. It only became an issue when—Well, there was a piling on. I suppose that’s natural. I made a mistake. An honest mistake, but it was costly to some. |
| HB: | | Right. The one thing I have to caution you about is speaking from what I’ll call deep context. Not everyone knows everything, the ins and outs. So we have to be very linear. It helps to tell the story in chronological order. So let’s start with how you knew Stephen. |
| EH: | | Stephen and I met at Gilman when we were eleven years old. He was a scholarship student who enrolled in sixth grade. I mention that only because it’s often forgotten, in the wake of Stephen’s success, that he’s self-made. His family wasn’t poor, but his mother was a widow, a schoolteacher, and they lived pretty simply. They lived in Hampden, actually, when it was one hundred percent working class, no yuppies. I think part of Stephen’s philosophy, if you will, is a desire to create more organic spaces, buildings that don’t fight the neighborhoods so hard, don’t make the old-timers feel as if they no longer belong. That’s why he used existing structures, like schools and churches, whenever possible, and tried to add ground-floor tenants that were open to the community, local businesses. Anyway, he had good timing, for the most part, and he ended up richer than most of the kids he went to school with. But he still had a fascination with people who were born with money. That was a big part of Melisandre’s appeal. |
| HB: | | Her money. |
| EH: | | Not money, per se. Class, status. Stephen’s probably worth more, at this point. And Melisandre comes from one of those WASPy Baltimore families that don’t spoil kids. She was comfortable, but she didn’t have control over the family fortune. I assume she does now. I heard her mother died. |
| HB: | | From whom? |
| EH: | | I don’t know. Someone. |
| HB: | | Stephen? |
| EH: | | Maybe. |
| HB: | | How did they meet? Stephen and Melisandre. |
| EH: | | At a regatta. The Charm City Sprints. Stephen had just taken up rowing, but he was already quite good, which was typical of him. I’m not sure why Melisandre was there. I think she knew one of the coaches or rowers with another club. He introduced them, I think. |
| HB: | | Were you present? Or did you just hear about it? |
| EH: | | I was, actually. I mean, I was there that day. I can’t tell you that I remember their first meeting or saw it. But at one point that afternoon, Stephen pointed her out to me. “I got her number,” he said. Boy, that marks us as old, doesn’t it? If you can remember a time when all you aspired to was a phone number? And then you used it to call someone, not text. This was long enough ago that you didn’t even Google your dates. I got divorced a few years ago. It’s a different landscape out there. Most of the people I know are meeting online. What does it say that I, as a therapist, don’t trust online dating? Why am I holding out for chemistry when I spend my days counseling people who had nothing but chemistry and are now making each other miserable? |
| HB: | | Not to get too far ahead, but you did not see Stephen and Melisandre professionally, right? You were not their therapist. |
| EH: | | No, that would have been unethical. |
| HB: | | And you were Stephen’s best man? At his wedding? |
| EH: | | I was. Almost a year to the day after they met. He proposed to her three months after that regatta, at the boathouse. It was like a surprise party. He brought her there, to a big tree where he had tied a jewelry box to a ribbon hanging from a low branch. I actually had to stand guard over that jewelry box until I saw his car pulling into the parking lot, then I sprinted inside. It’s not the greatest neighborhood, you know? He proposed beneath the tree, she accepted, then he brought her inside for the party, where all their friends were waiting. It was great. Better than the wedding in some ways. |
| HB: | | Why? |
| EH: | | Oh, weddings are so stuffy, you know. This was looser, more fun. Plus, I think Melisandre was—well, not a Bridezilla, but she did sweat every detail on that wedding. She was one of those women who had to be as skinny as possible, so she basically didn’t eat for a while there and it made her pretty darn tense. She was always high-strung, in her way. I think that’s why it was hard for Stephen to notice at first. When things went wrong. Moodiness, depression, a tendency toward drama. Big highs, bigger lows. That had been part of the package from the start. It just became more pronounced after Isadora’s birth. |
| HB: | | But, as far as you know, she was okay during the first five years of the marriage. Happy? |
| EH: | | If you’re asking me what I know, as a trained professional, then—yes, I saw a normal woman with the usual highs and lows. In hindsight, there seems to have been mild postpartum depression with Alanna and Ruby. At least, that medical opinion was presented in court, by one of the experts she hired. I don’t really have the credentials to make that judgment. But she never received an official diagnosis before the, uh, incident, nor was she treated. I do know that it wasn’t Stephen who pushed for a third kid. That was what Melisandre wanted. And she was the one who said she should stop working, for good. She had taken two leaves by then. She wasn’t a partner and she probably wasn’t going to be one. It also was her choice to hire a nanny to be with the two older girls. Look, Stephen is a wealthy man, but given his background, he chafes at some expenses. He couldn’t justify two nannies if Melisandre was going to stay home full-time. I mean, why was she staying home? It was her choice to care for the baby and let the nanny take over the two older kids, do all the driving and after-school stuff. I heard the way her lawyer was trying to spin it in court, that Stephen was this heavy-handed sexist who wanted a traditional wife. But that wasn’t true and it wasn’t fair. If she was not guilty by reason of insanity, then she was not guilty by reason of insanity. But the defense attorney was trying to suggest that Stephen’s behavior caused her psychosis. That makes no sense. Okay, I understand it intellectually—they throw everything at the wall to see what sticks, they don’t have to be consistent. They just have to create a reasonable doubt. But a man’s reputation was being dragged through the mud. Stephen’s daughter was dead. His wife appeared to have lost her mind. He had two small children to protect. |
| HB: | | That’s twice now that you’ve hedged Melisandre’s mental illness. “Appeared” to have lost her mind. Do you doubt it? |
| EH: | | I didn’t treat her. I have no standing to pass judgment. |
| HB: | | You harbored doubts at the time, certainly. That was evident in your testimony. |
| EH: | | I made a mistake. A mistake born of memory, nothing more. That has no bearing on what I’ve said here. |
| HB: | | I know it’s probably painful, but will you tell the story about what happened when you were called to testify? |
| EH: | | The prosecution, as you may know, has the option to present additional evidence after the defense has put on its case. That’s how it worked in Melisandre’s trial. I contacted the prosecution after the trial was under way because I remembered something disturbing: I had seen a folder of clippings on infant deaths in the Dawes house. |
| HB: | | Tell me about these clippings. |
| EH: | | Some of them centered on children dying when they were left, usually by accident, in a car on a hot day. That was right around the time Isadora died. Look, I’ve tried very hard not to have an opinion on this. But it was the prosecution’s contention that Melisandre’s defense, not guilty by reason of insanity, would be more convincing if she had done something, well, more violent to her child. What she did—it’s still a horrible way to kill a kid, but it wasn’t hands-on. It was passive. She didn’t even have to be there. All she had to do was park the car and wait. I know she later said that she believed it was her plan to drive into the Patapsco with all of her children, to kill herself and all three daughters. And maybe it screwed her up, even in that psychotic state, to find out that Alanna and Ruby couldn’t come with her. There are parts of her story that make sense—going to the summer camp, having no memory of the field trip. |
| HB: | | To get you back on track—you testified, right? For the prosecution. But you didn’t come forward until the trial was under way. |
| EH: | | I remembered that I had seen this folder of clippings at the house, on a little table that Melisandre used as a desk. I didn’t think much about it at the time—that is, I assumed that Melisandre, like a lot of mothers, was overly concerned with her children’s safety, that she had a morbid habit of reading that kind of stuff because it was what she feared most. I picked up the folder and read it. I remember one article was absolutely brutal because it was about an assistant principal who simply became overwhelmed, forgot that she was supposed to take her kid to day care, and drove to work, parked in the lot outside her school, came out at the end of the day to find her child dead in the backseat. |
| HB: | | Were you in the habit of picking up things in other people’s houses and reading them? |
| EH: | | No. No. But—Stephen was like family. I was over there all the time. It was like, it was like picking up a magazine. |
| HB: | | Right. At any rate, you testified about seeing those clippings. You mentioned that one article in great detail, right? |
| EH: | | Yes. I mean, if Melisandre had read that article before Isadora died, it would have been relevant. |
| HB: | | But she didn’t, right? You were wrong. Those clips had been gathered after Isadora died. How did you make that mistake? |
| EH: | | I don’t know how I got the time line confused—perhaps because I was trying so hard to understand what had happened, and my mind changed the sequence of things. You can see why I thought I had to testify. It was embarrassing for me, but I’m glad they caught the mistake when they did. |
| HB: | | Why? |
| EH: | | Because, well—she would have served time, right? If the mistrial hadn’t been declared then and there. She might have been found guilty and gone to prison. And that wouldn’t have been fair. |
| HB: | | Have you ever thought about why you got confused? As a therapist, do you wonder if there was something, well, Freudian about the way you flipped the events? |
| EH: | | I’m a clinical social worker. I don’t tend toward Freudian interpretations. But, no, I didn’t have any subconscious desire to present false evidence against Melisandre. It wasn’t a lie, what I said. I found a folder of articles on Melisandre’s bedside table. It would have been normal to take that information and try to create a narrative that made sense. Why would she have those clippings after the incident? It didn’t occur to me that it was Stephen’s file, that he was working through his grief by reading about other people who had lost their kids in horrible ways. That certainly wouldn’t have been my professional advice. And that’s why I didn’t speak to him about what I saw before I went to the state’s attorney. |
| HB: | | But it turned out the chronology was wrong, that you had switched the dates in your head. How did that come out? |