The Hand That Feeds You (22 page)

“Will you two be staying for dinner?” Cook asked.

“I’ve got theater tickets,” Billie said.

Cook asked me what we were going to see. I looked to Billie, who said, “I have a date.”

“Well, I’ll send you home with a peach cobbler,” Cook said. “Your grandmother is in the library.”

I had tons of books, but most were still in milk crates.

Billie led me through several corridors and then upstairs. The door to the library was open. I could see red lacquered walls and glass-fronted bookcases. The couches looked like feather beds in a fairy tale.

Billie’s grandmother was seated at her desk, her back to us. Her long gray hair was loose and reached below her shoulders. Rebellious, I thought, that she didn’t have it colored and still wore it long.

She finished signing a check before she turned around. “You smell like a kennel, darling.”

“Cook said you were disappointed about last night.”

“Who is your friend?” the grandmother asked, not looking at me.

“She’s a client of the lawyer I’m working with. Morgan Prager.”

I said it was nice to meet her. I held out my hand, but took it back before she could shake it, apologizing that I hadn’t had time to clean up after we visited the dog sanctuary. Billie’s grandmother seemed relieved not to have to make contact.

“Do you remember where I left my snorkel and fins?” Billie asked.

“Where are you off to now?”

“I’m going down to pick up some patty-cakes in St. Thomas.”

Billie said nothing acknowledging
my
annual trip to save these dogs. She hadn’t known what a patty-cake was until I had told her. Still, how could I begrudge this lapse—she was going to do something good. I could begrudge her because I figured she was going to do it with McKenzie.

“There aren’t enough stray dogs for you here?” the grandmother asked.

This was an old argument, I saw.

“I thought I’d get a couple of swims in. A little R and R.”

I hoped the grandmother would ask if Billie was going alone. Instead she asked Billie to look up an old friend of hers on the island. “She keeps a boat there.”

“Like I’ll have time.”

“It doesn’t cost you anything to be nice,” her grandmother said, and then to me, “I’ll bet
you
would make time.”

“I’m not going.”

Billie said to me, “You’d think my grandmother didn’t like dogs.”

“Winston wasn’t a dog.”

“Winston was an English bulldog,” Billie told me. “He passed gas all the time, and at my grandmother’s parties, she would follow him around in her gown, lighting matches behind him.”

“But
philanthropy
means ‘love of humans,’ ” the grandmother reminded us. “Not dogs.”

Billie looked stricken and forced herself to kiss her grandmother’s cheek before we went to look for her diving gear.

“It should be in my old closet.” Billie led me into—not a bedroom, but a suite. Not a suite—a wing! Where were the equestrienne trophies and ribbons? Where was any sign of a headstrong girl? Nothing in these rooms said that a child had grown up in them. What was missing in addition to any childhood mementos was furniture. The floors were carpeted wall to wall in the whitest of wool. The walls were painted the same white—and the sheen told me that an expensive egg tempera had been used. On the walls were paintings that even
I
recognized: Franz Kline, Ellsworth Kelly, de Kooning, Motherwell—it was a gallery.

“The Kline was my grandfather’s first purchase,” Billie said. “You’ll appreciate this: when Kline brought his mother to his first exhibition of large abstractions—slashes of black paint across white canvas—his mother said, ‘I always knew you’d take the easy way out.’ ”

“What did the rooms look like when you were growing up here?”

“My grandmother had her decorator do Young Girl’s Room. I had a four-poster canopy bed with linens from Frette, framed horse prints on the walls, a Princess Anne Victorian dollhouse. In the bathroom: Baccarat tumblers; the mouthwash was decanted. As Rebekah Harkness said of her family’s mansion in Manhattan, ‘It’s not home, but it’s much.’ ”

Billie opened one of the walk-in closets, which was as crowded as the rooms were spare: boxes of plastic horses, games of Scrabble and Parcheesi, countless stuffed animals, computer games, a large box filled with toy soldiers, a row of Slinkys, Rollerblades and badminton racquets, a pogo stick, skis, but no diving gear.

Was there anything Billie had not been given as a child?

She did not find her diving gear. “Fucking hell.” Billie slammed the closet door. She did not stop for the peach cobbler.

W
hen I was sixteen, I took a summer job at a mall, while my best friend went on the grand tour of Europe. While I sold cheap earrings to girls who had just pierced their ears, Julia sent me a chocolate bar from every country she visited. I should have been touched. But I tore into each new bar of chocolate with fury, jealous that I was stuck in the mall while Julia had everything. I hadn’t thought of Julia in years, until I saw Billie in her grandmother’s house. I wondered what Billie might send me from St. Thomas and felt stupid for thinking like that.

“Turn on your TV,” Steven said, when I picked up the phone later that night. I had just finished four hundred-calorie chocolate bars.

“What channel?”

“CNN.”

The suspect in Pat’s murder, the migrant worker, had been indicted. Pat’s family had put up a reward for information, which I knew only slowed down an investigation, luring nut jobs and opportunists eager for the money. The TV showed a small-boned Central American man being taken from a police car and led into the Suffolk courthouse.

“It’s over. You can have your life back.” Steven thought my life could be returned to me as if I had merely misplaced it. “They found Pat’s credit cards on him. He claims he found them in the woods.”

“Billie and I went to look at a sanctuary for Cloud.”

“And?”

“I could see Cloud having a life there.” This was, after all, the point, I reminded myself.

“I’d like to see
you
having a life
here.
”

“How much resilience can a person have?”

“You’d be surprised.”

A different reporter was covering another story so I hit the mute button. “No more surprises.”

•  •  •

I cleared the pad thai I had had for dinner, recalling my friend Patty’s saying that in New York “home cooking” was any food you bought within six blocks of your apartment. I took Olive out for a last, short walk. Back in the apartment, I found the expensive bath gel I had splurged on a while back and filled the tub with hot water. The bathroom soon held the heady scent of night-blooming jasmine. I slowed my movements in contrast to my racing thoughts. I poured a glass of prosecco and got in the tub, the tub I had hidden in on that day.

Though it was just Olive and me, I had closed the bathroom door. The window in the bathroom looked onto an air well, but if you angled yourself just so, at a certain time of night, you could see the moon. I looked at my feet at the end of the tub, sticking up above the bubbles: Frida Kahlo in her self-portrait
What I Saw in the Water
, although that painting has surrealistic images—a skyscraper shooting out of a volcano, two tiny women lying on a sponge, a tightrope walker sharing his rope with a snake—floating in the tub with her.

I lay back, my neck fitting into the small waterproof pillow for this purpose. I did the exercise in which you consciously relax each part of your body individually. Eyes closed, I was up to my shoulders when I heard Olive scratching at the door to get out. Diabolical dog.

It was the new door, the one Steven had installed because of the damage the dogs had done to the old one the morning of Bennett’s death. The claw marks on the inside had reached as high as the doorknob. It reminded me of those gruesome stories about people buried in Victorian times, later coming out of a trance in their coffins. Why were my dogs so desperate to get out? Who had shut them in the bathroom?

Wait. Who had shut them in the bathroom? They were loose when I entered the apartment and found Bennett’s body. They were not in the bathroom. When had they been put in there? The inside of the bathroom door had been intact when I went out that morning. I had only been gone two hours. Bennett had been asleep when I left.

I felt a chill, though steam rose from the water.

Did the police question the scratched door? The dogs had scratched the cabinet where I kept their kibble, they had scratched the front door to go out, it wasn’t as if a scratched bathroom door would stand out in that apartment. But these were new scratches, and they were deep. I saw them when I shut myself in and hid in the tub. The dogs had been whimpering to be let into the bathroom with me. How had I not wondered how they could be locked in but also be the killers? Why didn’t the police question this?

Would Bennett have shut the dogs in the bathroom? He might have if someone had come to the front door. They were not the calmest greeters. But he didn’t know anyone in the city, or said he didn’t. He must have known who it was because he had to buzz them in. While a person climbed the stairs, he would have had time to shut the dogs in the bathroom. But then what?

I let some water out of the bath and turned on the hot water tap to replace it.

No human could have done what was done to Bennett.

I wished I had brought the bottle of prosecco into the tub with me. I wasn’t willing to get out of the hot water to fetch it. I could not stop my thoughts, but I wanted to slow them down. Logic—just use logic. But no—I thought back to the horror of Pat’s heart being cut out of her chest. Obviously no dog could do that, and her own dog was missing. But in my apartment, I had seen my bloodied dogs and Bennett’s savaged body. What was I
not
seeing?

What if Bennett was killed by a person he let into the apartment, and the person let the dogs out of the bathroom before he left? What if the dogs had attacked a dead body? The ME who examined Bennett’s body should have been able to distinguish between wounds inflicted by a human and a mauling by dogs. But maybe he had missed something, since everyone assumed the dogs had done it.

But back up—who wanted Bennett dead? Susan Rorke had been killed before Bennett died. Pat had a reason, but who killed her? Samantha, recipient of months of e-mails from a dead man—was that an act to cover herself? I had been kind to her the last time we had talked, but I had refused to side with delusion—it is never a good idea to side with delusion. I had not said I believed that Bennett was alive, but I had tried to be gentle with her. But was it a delusion? Maybe she was e-mailing herself. Or maybe she was just telling me he was e-mailing her. The police would know how to trace this, if I could figure out how to persuade a detective to get a search warrant.

I climbed out of the tub and pulled the plug. I wrapped myself in a towel, watching the water drain. Steven had said I could have my life back. He was wrong.

“T
here’s something that bothers me, and it wasn’t addressed in the police report.”

I heard weariness in Steven’s voice when he asked what I was talking about. When I told him about the scratches on the inside of the bathroom door, he said he remembered scratches on the outside of the door, not the inside. “You just got back from the guy’s funeral. Let it go.”

“I think I’m right about this.”

“I think I would have remembered that. And even if you’re right, what’s the difference? What does that prove?”

“It proves that someone else was in the apartment with Bennett.”

“I’d really like you to talk to Cilla.”

“This is not a psychological problem,” I pointed out. “This is about evidence that was overlooked.”

“Who is it you think was in the apartment with him?”

If I told him I thought it was Samantha, he would have me committed.

“Samantha. I need to hack into her e-mail.”

“Do you really want to provoke an insane person?” Steven asked.

“It’s not provocation if she doesn’t know I did it. Do you know someone I could hire to do it?”

“I could be disbarred, but that’s not why I’m not helping you with this. Promise me you’ll call Cilla.”

I called McKenzie instead. He answered his own phone—because I had called his cell phone. If I could trust my sense of him, he sounded happy to hear from me. But I could not trust my sense of him, so I trampled over it. In my preoccupation, I rushed into the business at hand. I told him I needed to check out something in the police report on Bennett’s death: “Don’t you have a copy of it?” I told him what I needed to verify.

He offered to stop by my apartment with the police report after work. I did a quick inventory of everything that needed cleaning, thought, the hell with it, and thanked him.

An hour later, I was pushing an old straw broom across the floors. I had never been able to figure out a Swiffer. I popped open a plastic container of premoistened, antibacterial cloths with bleach and went down on my knees to scrub the bathroom floor. I wished Steven had not replaced the door so quickly. But if McKenzie brought over a photo that showed no scratches on the inside of the door, I would let it go. Till then, I gave myself over to a Zen-like approach to cleaning. I slowed my movements, cleaned mindfully. You couldn’t help but be thorough in that state of mind. I should do this more often, I thought. Then, naw.

I had been listening to “You Go Down Smooth” by Lake Street Dive on earbuds, my iPhone safe in my pocket, when the music stopped and the ringtone sounded. The number had a Maine area code. Renee was furious. She told me she did not appreciate my giving her number to a crazy person, that she had been harassed by the woman, who accused her of lying about the death of her own son. Renee said that the woman claimed to be engaged to him. She didn’t need this, Renee assured me, and would I please respect her privacy from now on.

“I did not give that woman your number,” I said. “Renee, I’m so sorry.”

But the woman who spoke next was not Renee, but Vanessa, as angry as she’d been at the funeral. “This may be some big joke to you—all you gals claiming to be engaged to my dead brother—but we don’t think it’s funny, and you’re destroying my mother.”