The Other Widow (11 page)

She never comes out here. It's Samuel's space. She looks around, takes in the photographs of Lily—in her soccer uniform and graduating from sixth grade, Lily standing proudly in her skis—a shot of Samuel's mother in her old Victorian two-family in Chelsea, and a few nice black-and-whites of Dorrie performing on stage. Samuel is an excellent photographer.

She turns toward the door and something catches her eye in all the mess and chaos of her husband's automotive lair, a baggie on the second shelf beside a box of nails. She reaches for it but then she stops, stares at a piece of black cloth on the back of the workbench, sticking out from behind a stack of books on engines and a jar with pens and cutting tools. She walks across the room and gives a little tug, and there it is. A black glove—the one she lost the night Joe died. The lined leather Bloomingdale's purchase she thought she'd never see again lies boldly on the bench. What the
hell
? Or maybe it's the mate, she tells herself, the one she lost earlier. But if so, why would Samuel hide it?

She sticks it behind the books where Samuel had it hidden. She backs away as if the glove is some wild creature she has inadvertently awakened, and slips through the garage door into the kitchen. Suddenly she's back inside her nightmare, but this time she's awake.

XI

MAGGIE

M
aggie steps out of her heels and pulls a pair of boots from under her desk. Sometimes she feels as if she's in a strange sort of play, here in this office of beige, her desk a small, unsturdy fortress on a plastic-feeling floor. Not that she's particularly knowledgeable about such things, but she once had a boyfriend who was an actor. Daryl. He'd taken her to a few off-Broadway shows that Maggie didn't understand and suspected Daryl didn't, either. “It was a little esoteric,” he might say afterward, as they hunched over their coffees in some earnest little café he'd discovered, or “He takes some getting used to,” of a screenwriter with an unpronounceable last name.

She reaches down to tie her boots and heads out to Southie to check on Joseph Lindsay's old Audi, which has been down at the O'Brien brother's place since the night of the accident. She won't bother Hank with this. It's not as if they're partners at this point.

She drives the long way to South Boston, avoiding Chinatown. It makes her skittish. Edgy. Makes her remember that night with the kid in the slouchy jeans. She makes a wide loop and keeps her eyes on the road. She hasn't done anything even remotely like police work in months. Hasn't had to, not since she left the force. Maggie plays it safe these days, sticks to the forms and sticky notes, some investigations. She stays on her beige stage, alone, except for the occasional phone call to a client—
Your husband, Mrs. Randolph, was he seventy-eight or seventy-nine? I can't quite read the writing on page three—
and sporadic conversations with the agents, the greetings and leave-takings, the swapping of vital information. Aside from these brief contacts, she usually has very little interaction at work, which Maggie thinks might be a good thing. At least for now.

She glances at the street. Shops are less expensive here than downtown; it's a mix of old and new. Southie's up-and-coming, but the people are more casually dressed, the sidewalks far less crowded. She pulls into the lot at O'Brien's and takes out her notepad. A car backfire echoes against the hollow insides of the building and Maggie shudders. It's almost imperceptible. She's gotten good at not reacting visibly. She's better now, she tells herself, but when she's honest with herself, she knows she's only managed to suppress her feelings, that her nerves are raw and that open wounds run along her bones and veins and skin. She knows that fear goes somewhere, shock and guilt and fear. It doesn't simply go away.

She waits for her heart to slow down, takes a couple of deep breaths, and then she walks over to the garage, shakes hands with Ian, one of the O'Brien brothers, tells him why she's there, and Ian points her to the Audi, out back in an old shed. “All this snow and ice.” He shrugs, makes a sideways motion with the flats of his hands. “Hell. If the car was outside, there'd be nothin' left of it to see, let alone sell. Parts'd be ruined.”

“Mind if I take a look?”

“Have at it.” Ian nods his head, walks back to the heated garage to work on something worth saving, something that the Audi, Maggie sees the second she opens the shed door, is definitely not. She's surprised at how hard the car hit. Newbury's not a main thoroughfare, so even if Lindsay was skidding on ice, the brakes should have slowed it down enough to avoid the kind of damage she's looking at here. She snags an old crate with the toe of her boot and pulls it closer to the car, glances around her at the building that was probably a warehouse before O'Brien Towing bought it with the land decades ago. She sits against the wall and squints at the car. Wind drifts in through spaces between boards and Maggie wonders if it was always this drafty or if all the winters have together warped the wood, made the gaps. She remembers coming here with Hank to check on cars involved in robberies, jackings, hit-and-runs. She leans back. The floor smells like straw.

She'd left the Boston Police Department on her own. There'd been no sanctions from on high, no slap on the hand. No one really knew the truth of it except Hank, and even that was because Maggie finally told him. It was just after her fourth-year anniversary, not that anyone besides her mother and her sister actually kept track. Summertime. July. Middle of a heat wave, lots of people on the street. A shop owner in Chinatown hit a silent alarm in the middle of a robbery, and Hank and Maggie got the call.

They'd maneuvered through the cramped, tight neighborhood and turned on Hunter Street, with its vibrant sounds and colors, the glut of signs and people, the lack of space. They'd turned off the engine and coasted to the front of the store. There was a kid with a hoodie, slouchy pants, the usual, but when Hank and Maggie got inside, the place was a mess. It looked like someone had gone crazy in there—bags all over, food spilled everywhere, and the owner hunkered down on the floor against the wall, looking scared to death.

“Put your hands behind your head and turn around real slow,” Maggie told the kid. “
Real
slow.” But the boy reached inside his pocket, grabbed something, and whirled toward them, pointing it at Maggie.

“Fuck!” Hank was right behind her in the doorway, and Maggie aimed her gun at the kid, but she couldn't pull the trigger. She froze.

It turned out all right. In truth, it was the best possible outcome. The weapon the boy pulled on them was just a pipe he'd picked up from the street, a construction site, his own
house,
maybe, but it wasn't a gun like they'd both thought.

“Good call as it happens,” the chief told her and Hank the next night when they came in. “But sheer luck it went down the way it did. You don't ever wanna take that kind of chance. He could easily have killed you. Either that or messed you up for life. The both of yous.” And Maggie knew it wasn't a good call, even if Hank didn't, even if he thought she'd seen the kid only had a pipe. It was something else that rendered her unable to react, froze her like a statue in the doorway to that shop on Hunter Street, that put her somewhere else for those few crucial seconds, put her in a jeep in Iraq, as snipers fired out of a window in a building somewhere down the road. For that small space of time she was every bit as helpless as she was the day several rounds of bullets killed three friends behind her in the Humvee she was driving into Baghdad.

She'd given her notice four days later. She'd stayed on for a couple of weeks, rode with Hank the same as always, but things were different after that night. Maggie was different. She couldn't trust herself to not screw up when it really mattered. She wasn't sure she'd act in the best interest of the ones around her, protect the lives she was supposed to save. “I need my eight hours of beauty sleep,” she'd told her partner. “This night shift's killing me.” And it was only months later, when she'd been at the insurance company for a while, that she told Hank the real reason she had left the force.

For a second, Maggie wonders if that's why she's here—if it has nothing to do with Joseph Lindsay's life insurance policy or an extra Starbucks cup rolling around the front seat of his car. Did seeing Hank the other day spark something, make her miss the old days, when she felt connected, alive? Was this her chance to put things right, to prove that she's got what it takes, not only to the chief and the department, but to herself?

She starts to get up. She takes a last look at the Audi and shakes her head. What a waste. And then she sees something, a piece of plastic. She squats down and then she lies on her back and pulls herself under the wrecked front end of the car.

It looks like a tie wrap.

What the fuck?

She looks closer, touches the thing. She knows about cars. She takes a few shots with her iPhone before she stands up, and then she takes more photos of the outside and the inside of the car, where she finds a lid jammed down beside the seat. She grew up in that kind of family, the kind that pieced together junkers and kept them on the road—jalopies they'd've scrapped if they weren't so broke all the time, eking out a living, making engines run way past their prime. She stoops down again, fiddles with the tie wrap pulled against the scuffed brake line. She grins. All those afternoons spent helping out her brothers paid off every now and then. It made sense to come here after all. Now, with this goddamn tie wrap fastening a damaged line. Someone tied the brake line to a rough piece of the suspension and over time, the scraping of the line would cause the brake to fail. On a night like that Friday night Joe Lindsay died, the swerving of the steering wheel, his sudden desperate jamming on the brakes just might do it.

XII

KAREN

K
aren double-bolts the door behind her and tosses her coat across the arm of the living room sofa. She takes off her boots and lets the dog out in the snowy backyard—she doesn't have the energy to take him for a walk. Anyway, it's nearly dark and she won't chance coming home to a bunch of footprints or some stranger with his nose pressed up against her windows. She lets Antoine inside again, locks the doors, and heads to the back of the house. There are so many questions. They make her head throb, all these questions—that and her abysmal lunch with Edward. She rummages through her purse for a bottle of aspirin.

Edward is mistaken. He must be. Joe was many things—a procrastinator, a womanizer. But not a thief. Besides, Joe lived and breathed Home Runs. He kept the company impeccable, beyond reproach, and, despite his philandering, Karen will do anything she can to defend his legacy. Her future—her life—is inextricably tied to Home Runs Renovations. If the company goes under, so does she. It isn't only the money, her livelihood, her husband's legacy, but the chance it offers her to do again what she did for years, the one thing she was really good at—the one job she really loved.

She crosses her arms and looks around at the small back room, her husband's makeshift office, sprinkled with doggie beds and toys. Antoine preferred him to her, spending hours on end sprawled at Joe's feet with a chew toy lying, damp and gummy, between his sturdy little paws.

It should all be here. Joe spent half his life on the road—surely what she needs will be on his computer. Doubtless, he's made copies too. “Covering all the bases,” he used to say, so it must be here in this mishmash. She'll find it. Even though she isn't sure exactly what she's looking for, she'll find it and prove Edward wrong. She'll stay up all night if she has to, see for herself if Joe has tampered with the finances. And if he has, she'll figure out how deep a hole they're actually in. She'll look for clues about his girlfriend, too. If there is anything about her here, Karen will find it.

She puts in Joe's password and pulls up the spreadsheets on the company accounts, the invoices, the payments. Thankfully, they're recent, the ones from farther back are saved in separate files. Karen grabs three aspirins and swallows them dry.

She scans the screen in front of her and then she studies it more closely. Confusing. The dearth of clients she'd expected is not what's here in front of her, unfolding like graphed witnesses across the monitor. She compares the latest pricing to matching invoices from previous years and finds little change. In fact, the most recent invoices show slightly elevated pricing, so, clearly, the company has not been forced to lower their charges to keep customers. She scrolls back through the cost sheets, the invoices, scrutinizing each line to see if people simply haven't paid. But according to the spreadsheet, they have. All of them. Some were late, but even they paid eventually. And there were several more accounts last year than the year before.

So, what's Edward talking about?

She stretches, makes herself a salad. The excruciating headache is receding, but it's still there, lurking, reminding her she's let her body get completely out of whack since Joe's death. Her face, when she looks in the mirror, is thin and puffy at the same time. Too much wine, too much chocolate, too much Xanax, no protein to speak of, and it's difficult to even picture vegetables, she's ignored them for so long. She takes a deep breath, spears an artichoke from a jar, and adds it to a giant wedge of lettuce. She'll get herself on track. She needs her wits about her now.

Back in Joe's old office, she fumbles through her husband's briefcase and comes up with a small day planner filled with lines, crammed with details. Maybe she'll find something here about the company or maybe he'll have penciled in his trysts. Bastard. She gives it a cursory look and finds that it is basically a travel log. Nothing shocking here. Not a word about understudyfork. At least not at first glance. She sits; she studies every boring word. Nothing. Not until she reaches the loose papers Joe's stuck in the back of the planner. “Meet with Arthur Reinfeld,” he's scrawled across the first sheet. She flips through the rest of the loose papers and there's another small scrawl at the corner of a blank page. “Met with A.R.” Reinfeld, Karen supposes. The company accountant. She's never met him, but she knows the name.