Contents

Cover

One True Love: A Story

Scratch a Woman: A Story

Form 95: An Original Story

An Excerpt from And When She Was Good

Title Page

Monday, October 3

1989

Tuesday, October 4

1990

Wednesday, October 5

1991

Thursday, October 6

Also by Laura Lippman

About the Author

Copyright Page

One True Love: A Story

His face didn’t register at first. Probably hers didn’t either. It wasn’t a face-oriented business, strange to say. In the early days, on the streets, she had made a point of studying the men’s faces as a means of protection. Not because she thought she’d ever be downtown, picking someone out of a lineup. Quite the opposite. If she wasn’t careful, if she didn’t size them up beforehand, she’d be on a gurney in the morgue and no one would give a shit. Certainly not Val, although he’d be pissed in principle at being deprived of anything he considered his property. And while Brad thought he loved her, dead was dead. Who needed postmortem devotion?

So she had learned to look closely at her potential customers. Sometimes just the act of that intense scrutiny was enough to fluster a man and he moved on, which was the paradoxical proof that he was okay. Others stared back, welcoming her gaze, inviting it. That kind really creeped her out. You wanted nervous, but not too nervous; any trace of self-loathing was a big tip. In the end, she had probably walked away from more harmless ones than not, guys whose problems were nothing more than a losing card in the great genetics lottery—dry lips, a dead eye, or that bad skin that always seemed to signal villainy, perhaps because of all the acne-pitted bad guys in bad movies. Goes to show what filmmakers knew; Val’s face couldn’t be smoother. Still, she never regretted her vigilance, although she had paid for it in the short run, taking the beatings that were her due when she didn’t meet Val’s quotas. But she was alive and no one raised a hand to her anymore, not unless they paid handsomely for that privilege. She had come a long way.

Twenty-seven miles, to be precise, for that was the distance from where her son had been conceived in a motel that charged by the hour and the suburban soccer field where he was now playing forward for the Sherwood Forest Robin Hoods. He was good, and not just motherly pride good, but truly skilled, fleet and lithe. Over the years, she had persuaded herself that he bore no resemblance to his father, an illusion that allowed her to enjoy unqualified delight in his long limbs, his bright red hair and freckles. Scott was Scott, hers alone. Not in a smothering way, far from it. But when he was present, no one else mattered to her. At these weekend games, she stayed tightly focused on him. It was appalling, in her private opinion, that some other mothers and fathers barely followed the game, chatting on their cell phones or to one another. And during the breaks, when she did try to make conversation, it was unbearably shallow. She wanted to talk about the things she read in the Economist or heard on NPR, things she had to know to keep up with her clientele. They wanted to talk about aphids and restaurants. It was a relief when the game resumed and she no longer had to make the effort.

She never would have noticed the father on the other side of the field if his son hadn’t collided with Scott, one of those heart-stopping, freeze-frame moments in which one part of your brain insists it’s okay, even as another part helpfully supplies all the worst-case scenarios. Stitches, concussion, paralysis. Play was suspended and she went flying across the still-dewy grass. Adrenaline seemed to heighten all her senses, taking her out of herself, so she was aware of how she looked. She was equally aware of the frumpy, overweight blond mother who commented to a washed-out redhead: “Can you believe she’s wearing Tod’s loafers and Prada slacks to a kids’ soccer game?” But she wasn’t the kind to go around in yoga pants and tracksuits, although she actually practiced yoga and ran every morning.

Scott was all right, thank God. So was the other boy. Their egos were more bruised than their bodies, so they staggered around a bit, exaggerating their injuries for the benefit of their teammates. It was only polite to introduce herself to the father, to stick out her hand and say: “Heloise Lewis.”

“Bill Carroll,” he said. “Eloise?”

“Heloise. As in hints from.”

He shook her hand. She had recognized him the moment he said his name, for he was a credit card customer, William F. Carroll. He had needed a second more, but then he knew her as Jane Smith. Not terribly original, but it did the job. Someone had to be named Jane Smith, and it was so bogusly fake that it seemed more real as a result.

“Heloise,” he repeated. “Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Heloise. Your boy go to Dunwood?”

His vowels were round with fake sincerity, a bad sign. Most of her regulars were adequate liars; they had to be to juggle the compartmentalized lives they had created for themselves. And she was a superb liar. Bill Carroll wasn’t even adequate.

“We live in Turner’s Grove, but he goes to private school. Do you live—”

“Divorced,” he said briefly. “Weekend warrior, driving up from D.C. every other Saturday, expressly for this tedium.”

That explained everything. She hadn’t screwed up. Her system simply wasn’t as foolproof as she thought. Before Heloise’s company took on a new client, she always did a thorough background check, looking up vehicle registrations, tracking down the home addresses. (And if no home address could be found, she refused the job.) A man who lived in her zip code, or even a contiguous one, was rejected out of hand, although she might assign him to one of her associates.

She hadn’t factored in divorce. Perhaps that was an oversight that only the never-married could make.

“Nice to meet you,” she said.

“Nice to meet you.” He smirked.

This was trouble. What kind of trouble, she wasn’t sure yet, but definitely trouble.

WHEN HELOISE DECIDED TO MOVE to the suburbs, shortly after Scott was born, it had seemed practical and smart, even mainstream. Wasn’t that what every parent did? She hadn’t anticipated how odd it was for a single woman to buy a house on one of the best cul-de-sacs in one of the best subdivisions in Anne Arundel County, the kind of houses that newly single mothers usually sold post-divorce because they couldn’t afford to buy out the husband’s 50 percent stake in the equity. She had chosen the house for the land, almost an acre, which afforded the most privacy, never thinking of the price. Then she enrolled Scott in private school, another flag: what was the point of moving here if one could afford private school? The neighbors had begun to gossip almost immediately, and their speculation inspired the backstory she needed. A widow—yes. A terrible accident, one of which she still could not speak. She was grateful for her late husband’s pragmatism and foresight when it came to insurance, but—she’d rather have him. Of course.

Of course, her new confidantes echoed back, although some seemed less than convinced. She could almost see their brains working it through: if I could lose the husband and keep the house, it wouldn’t be so bad. It was the brass ring of divorced life in this cul-de-sac, losing the husband and keeping the house. (The Dunwood school district was less desirable and therefore less pricy, which explained how Bill Carroll’s ex maintained her life there.) Heloise simply hadn’t counted on the scrutiny her personal life would attract.

She had counted on her ability to construct a story about her work that would quickly stupefy anyone who asked, not that many of these stay-at-home mothers seemed curious about work. “I’m a lobbyist,” she said. “The Women’s Full Employment Network. I work in Annapolis, Baltimore, and D.C. as necessary, advocating parity and full benefits for what is traditionally considered women’s work. So-called pink-collar jobs.”

“How about pay and benefits for what we do?” her neighbors inevitably asked. “Is there anyone who works harder than a stay-at-home mom?”

Ditchdiggers, she thought. Janitresses and custodians. Gardeners. Meter readers. The girl who stands on her feet all day next to a fryer, all for the glory of minimum wage. Day laborers, men who line up on street corners and take whatever is offered. Hundreds of people you stare past every day, barely recognizing them as human. Prostitutes.

“No one works harder than a mother,” she always replied with an open, honest smile. “I wish there was some way I could organize us, establish our value to society in a true dollars-and-cents way. Maybe one day.”

Parenting actually was harder than the brand of prostitution that she now practiced. She made her own hours. She made top-notch wages. She was her own boss and an excellent manager. With the help of an exceptionally nonjudgmental nanny, she had been able to arrange her life so she never missed a soccer game or a school concert. If sleeping with other women’s husbands was what it took, so be it. She could not imagine a better line of work for a single mother.

For eight years, it had worked like a charm, her two lives never overlapping.

And then Scott ran into Bill Carroll’s son at the soccer game. And while no bones cracked and no wounds opened up, it was clear to her that she would bear the impact of this collision for some time to come.

“WE HAVE TO TALK,” said the message on her cell phone, a number that she never answered, a phone on which she never spoke. It was strictly for incoming messages, which gave her plausible deniability if a message was ever intercepted. His voice was clipped, imperious, as if she had annoyed him deliberately. “We have to talk ASAP.”

No we don’t, she thought. Let it go. I know and you know. I know you know I know. You know I know you know. Talking is the one thing we don’t have to do.

But she called him back.

“There’s a Starbucks near my office,” he said. “Let’s meet accidentally there in about an hour. You know—aren’t you Scott’s mom? Aren’t you Billy Jr.’s dad? Blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda.”

“I don’t think we really need to speak.”

“I do.” He was surprisingly bossy in his public life, given his preferences in his private one. “We need to straighten a few things out. And, who knows, if we settle everything, maybe I’ll throw a little business your way.”

“That’s not how I work,” she said. “You know that. I don’t take referrals from clients. It’s not healthy, clients knowing each other.”

“Yeah, well, that’s one of the things we’re going to talk about. How you work. And how you’re going to work from now on.”

HE WASN’T THE FIRST BULLY in her life. That honor belonged to her father, who had beaten her when he got tired of beating her mother. “How do you stay with him?” she had asked her mother more than once. “You only have one true love in your life,” her mother responded, never making it clear if her true love was Heloise’s father or some long-gone man who had consigned her to this joyless fate.

Then there was Heloise’s high school boyfriend, the one who persuaded her to drop out of college and come to Baltimore with him, where he promptly dumped her. She had landed a job as a dancer at one of the Block’s nicer clubs, but she had gotten in over her head with debt, trying to balance work and college. That had brought Val into her life. She had worked for him for almost ten years before she had been able to strike out on her own, and there had been a lot of luck in that. A lot of luck and not a little deceit.

People who thought they knew stuff, people on talk shows, quack doctors with fake credentials, had lots of advice about bullies. Bullies back down if you stand up to them. Bullies are scared inside.

Bully-shit. If Val was scared inside, then his outsides masked it pretty well. He sent her to the hospital twice and she was pretty sure she would be out on the third strike if she ever made the mistake of standing up to him again. Confronting Val hadn’t accomplished anything. Being sneaky, however, going behind his back while smiling to his face, had worked beautifully. That had been her first double life—Val’s smiling consort, Brad’s confidential informant. What she was doing now was kid stuff, compared to all that.

“Chai latte,” she told the counterwoman at the Starbucks in Dupont Circle. The girl was beautiful, with tawny skin and green eyes. She could do much better for herself than a job at a coffee shop, even one that paid health insurance. Heloise offered health insurance to the girls who were willing to be on the books of the Women’s Full Employment Network. She paid toward their health plans and Social Security benefits, everything she was required to do by law.

“Would you like a muffin with that?” Suggestive selling, a good technique. Heloise used it in her business.

“No thanks. Just the chai, tall.”

“Heloise! Heloise Lewis! Fancy seeing you here.”

His acting had not improved in the seventy-two hours since they had first met. He inspected her with a smirk, much too proud of himself, his expression all but announcing: I know what you look like naked.

She knew the same about him, of course, but it wasn’t an image on which she wanted to dwell.

Heloise hadn’t changed her clothes for this meeting. Nor had she put on makeup, or taken her hair out of its daytime ponytail. She was hoping that her Heloise garb might remind Bill Carroll that she was a mother, another parent, someone like him. She did not know him well, outside the list of preferences she had cataloged on a carefully coded index card. Despite his tough talk on the phone, he might be nicer than he seemed.

“The way I see it,” he said, settling in an overstuffed chair and leaving her a plain wooden one, “you have more to lose than I do.”

“Neither one of us has to lose anything. I’ve never exposed a client and I never will. It makes no sense as a business practice.”

He looked around, but the Starbucks was relatively empty, and in any event, he didn’t seem the type capable of pitching his voice low.

“You’re a whore,” he announced.

“I’m aware of how I make my living.”

“It’s illegal.”

“Yes—for both of us. Whether you pay or are paid, you’ve broken the law.”

“Well, you’ve just lost one paying customer.”

Was that all he wanted to establish? Maybe he wasn’t as big a dick as he seemed. “I understand. If you’d like to work with one of my associates—”

“You don’t get it. I’m not paying anymore. Now that I know who you are and where you live, I think you ought to take care of me for free.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because if you don’t, I’m going to tell everyone you’re a whore.”

“Which would expose you as my client.”

“Who cares? I’m divorced. Besides, how are you going to prove I was a customer? I can out you without exposing myself.”

“There are your credit card charges.” American Express Business Platinum, the kind that accrued airline miles. She was better at remembering the cards than the men themselves. The cards were tangible, concrete. The cards were individual in a way the men were not.

“Business expenses. Consulting fees, right? That’s what it says on the bill.”

“Why would a personal injury lawyer need to consult with the Women’s Full Employment Network?”

“To figure out how to value the lifelong earning power of women injured in traditional pink-collar jobs.” His smile was triumphant, ugly and triumphant. He had clearly put a lot of thought into his answer and was thrilled at the chance to deliver it so readily. But then he frowned, which made his small eyes even smaller. It would be fair to describe his face as piggish, with those eyes and the pinkish nose, which was very broad at the base and more than a little upturned. “How did you know I was a personal injury lawyer?”

“I research my clients pretty carefully.”

“Well, maybe it’s time that someone researched you pretty carefully. Cops. A prosecutor hungry for a high-profile case. The call girl on the cul-de-sac. It would make a juicy headline.”

“Bill, I assure you I have no intention of telling anyone about our business relationship if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“What I’m worried about is that you’re expensive and I wouldn’t mind culling you from my overhead. You bill more per hour than I do. Where do you get off, charging that much?”

“I get off,” she said, “where you get off. You know, right at that moment I take my little finger—”

“Shut up.” His voice was so loud that it broke through the dreamy demeanor of the counter girl, who started and exchanged a worried look with Heloise. A moment ago, Heloise had been pitying her, and now the girl was concerned about Heloise. That was how quickly things could change. “Look, this is the option. I get free rides for life or I make sure that everyone knows what you are. Everyone. Including your cute little boy.”

He was shrewd, bringing Scott into the conversation. Scott was her soft spot, her only vulnerability. Before she got pregnant, when she was the only person she had to care for, she had done a pretty shitty job of it. But Scott had changed all that, even before he was a flesh-and-blood reality. She would do anything to protect Scott, anything. Ask Brad for a favor, if need be, although she hated leaning on Brad.

She might even go to Scott’s father, not that he had any idea he was Scott’s father, and she was never going to inform him of that fact. But she didn’t like asking him for favors under any circumstances. Scott’s father thought he was in her debt. She needed to maintain the equilibrium afforded by that lie.

“I can’t afford to work for free.”

“It won’t be every week. And I understand I won’t have bumping rights over the paying customers. I’m just saying that we’ll go on as before, once or twice a month, but I don’t pay for it anymore. It will be like dating, without all the boring socializing. What do the kids call it? A booty call.”

“I have to think about this,” she said.

“No you don’t. See you next Wednesday.”

He hadn’t even offered to pay for her chai or buy her a muffin.

SHE CALLED BRAD FIRST, but the moment she saw him, waiting in the old luncheonette on Eastern Avenue, she realized it had been a mistake. Brad had taken an oath to serve and protect, but the oath had been for those who obeyed the laws, not those who lived in flagrant disregard of them. He had already done more for her than she had any right to expect. He owed her nothing.

Still, it was hard for a woman, any woman, not to exploit a man’s enduring love, not to go back to that well and see if you could still draw on it. Brad knew her and he loved her. Well, he thought he knew her and he loved the person he thought he knew. Close enough.

“You look great,” he said, and she knew he wasn’t being polite. Brad preferred daytime Heloise to the nighttime version, always had.

“Thanks.”

“Why did you want to see me?”

I need advice on how to get a shameless, grasping parasite out of my life. But she didn’t want to plunge right in. It was crass.

“It’s been too long.”

He placed his hands over hers, held them on the cool Formica tabletop, indifferent to the coffee he had ordered. The coffee here was awful, had always been awful. She was not one to romanticize these old diners. Starbucks was taking over the world by offering a superior product, changing people’s perceptions about what they deserved and what they could afford. In her private daydreams, she would like to be the Starbucks of sex-for-hire, delivering guaranteed quality to business travelers everywhere. No, she wouldn’t call it Starfucks, although she had seen that joke on the Internet. For one thing, it would sound like one of those celebrity impersonator services. Besides, it wasn’t elegant. She wanted to take a word or reference that had no meaning in the culture and make it come to mean good, no-strings, quid pro quo sex. Like…“zephyr.” Only not “zephyr,” because it denoted quickness, and she wanted to market sex as a spa service for men, a day or night of pampering with a long list of services and options. So not “zephyr,” but a word like it, one that sounded cool and elegant but whose real meaning was virtually unknown and therefore malleable in the public imagination. Amazon.com was another good example. Or eBay. Familiar yet new.

But that fantasy seemed more out of reach than ever. Now she would settle for keeping the life she already had.

“Seriously, Heloise. What’s up?”

“I missed you,” she said lamely, yet not inaccurately. She missed Brad’s adoration, which never seemed to dim. For a long time she had expected him to marry someone else, to pursue the average family he claimed he wanted to have with her. But now that they were both pushing forty with a very short stick, she was beginning to think that Brad liked things just the way they were. As long as he carried a torch for a woman he could never have, he didn’t have to marry or have kids. Back when Scott was born, Brad had dared to believe he was the father, had even hopefully volunteered to take a DNA test. She had to break it to him very gently that he wasn’t, and that she didn’t want him to be part of Scott’s life under any circumstances, even as an uncle or Mommy’s “friend.” She couldn’t afford for Scott to have any contact with her old life, no matter how remote or innocuous.

“Everyone okay? You, Scott? Melina?” Melina was her nanny, the single most important person in her employ. The girls could come and go, but Heloise could never make things work without Melina.

“We’re all fine.”

“So what’s this meeting about?”

“Like I said, I missed you.” She sounded more persuasive this time.

“Weezie, Weezie, Weezie,” he said, using the pet name that only he was allowed. “Why didn’t things work out between us?”

“I always felt it was because I wanted to continue working after marriage.”

“Well, yeah, but…it’s not like I was opposed to you working on principle. It was just—a cop can’t be married to a prostitute, Weezie.”

“It’s my career,” she said. It was her career and her excuse. No matter what she had chosen as her vocation, Brad would never have been the right man for her. He had taken care of her on the streets, asking nothing in return, and she had taken him to bed a time or two, grateful for all he did. But it had never been a big passion for her. It had, in fact, been more like a free sample, the kind of thing a corporation does to build up community goodwill. A free sample to someone she genuinely liked, but a freebie nonetheless, like one of those little boxes of detergent left in the mailbox. You might wash your clothes in it, but it probably didn’t change your preferences in the long run.

They held hands, staring out at Eastern Avenue. They had been sweeping this area lately, Brad said, and the trade had dried up. But they both knew that was only temporary. Eventually the girls and the boys came back, and the men were never far behind. They all came back, springing up like mushrooms after a rain.

HER MEETING WITH SCOTT’S DAD, in the visiting room at Super-max, was even briefer than her coffee date with Brad. Scott’s father was not particularly surprised to see her; she had made a point of coming every few months or so, to keep up the charade that she had nothing to do with him being here. His red hair seemed duller after so many years inside, but maybe it was just the contrast with the orange DOC uniform. She willed herself not to see her boy in this man, to acknowledge no resemblance. Because if Scott was like his father on the outside, he might be like his father on the inside, and that she could not bear.

“Faithful Heloise,” Val said, mocking her.

“I’m sorry. I know I should come more often.”

“It takes a long time to put a man to death in Maryland, but they do get around to it eventually. Bet you’ll miss me when I’m gone.”

“I don’t want you to be killed.” Just locked up forever and forever. Please, God, whatever happens, he must never get out. One look at Scott and he’ll know. He was hard enough to get rid of as a pimp. Imagine what he’ll be like as a parent. He’ll take Scott just because he can, because Val never willingly gave up anything that was his.

“Well, you know how it is when you work for yourself. You’re always hustling, always taking on more work than you can handle.”

“How are things? How many girls have you brought in?”

Unlike Brad, Val was interested in her business, perhaps because he felt she had gained her acumen from him. Then again, if he hadn’t been locked up, she never would have been allowed to go into business for herself. That’s what happened, when your loan shark became your pimp. You never got out from under. Figuratively and literally.

But now that Val couldn’t control her, he was okay with her controlling herself. It was better than another man doing it.

“Things are okay. I figure I have five years to make the transition to full-time management.”

“Ten, you continue taking care of yourself. You look pretty good for your age.”

“Thanks.” She fluttered her eyelashes automatically, long in the habit of using flirtation as a form of appeasement with him. “Here’s the thing…there’s a guy, who’s making trouble for me. Trying to extort me. We ran into each other in real life and now he says he’ll expose me if I don’t start doing him for free.”

“It’s a bluff. It’s fuckin’ Cold War shit.”

“What?”

“The guy has as much to lose as you do. He’s all talk. It’s like he’s the USSR and you’re the USA back in the 1980s. No matter who strikes first, you both go sky-high.”

“He’s divorced. And he’s a personal injury lawyer, so I don’t know how much he cares about his reputation. He might even welcome the publicity.”

“Naw. Trust me on this. He’s just fucking with you.”

Val didn’t know about Scott, of course, and never would if she could help it. The problem was, it was harder to make the case for how panicky she was if she couldn’t mention Scott.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” she insisted. “He’s a loose cannon. I always assumed that guys who came to me had to have a certain measure of built-in shame about what they did. He doesn’t.”

“Then give me his name and I’ll arrange for things to happen.”

“You can do that from in here?”

He shrugged. “I’m on death row. What have I got to lose?”

It was what she wanted, what she had come for. She would never ask for such a favor, but if Val volunteered—well, would that be so wrong? Yet the moment she heard him make the offer, she couldn’t take it. She had tested herself, walked right up to the edge of the abyss that was Val, allowed him to tempt her with the worst part of himself.

Besides, if Val could have some nameless, faceless client killed from here, then he could—she didn’t want to think about it.

“No. No. I’ll think of something.”

Not my son’s face, she told herself as she bent to kiss his cheek. Not my son’s freckles. Not my son’s father. But he was, she could never change that fact. And while she visited Val, in part, to convince him that she had nothing to do with the successful prosecution that had been brought against him when undercover narc Brad Stone somehow found the gun used to kill a young man, she also came because she was grateful to him for the gift of Scott. She hated him with every fiber of her being, but she wouldn’t have Scotty if it weren’t for him. She wouldn’t have Scott if it weren’t for Val.

Maybe she did know something about divorce, after all.

FIVE DAYS WENT BY, days full of work. Congress was back in session, which always meant an uptick in business. She was beginning to resign herself to the idea of doing things Bill Carroll’s way. He was not the USSR and she was not the USA. The time for Cold Wars was long past. He was a terrorist in a breakaway republic, determined to have the status he sought at any cost. He was a man of his word and his words were ugly, inflammatory, dangerous. She met with him at a D.C. hotel as he insisted, picking up the cost of the room, which was usually covered by her clients. He left two dollars on the dresser, then said: “For housekeeping, not for you,” with a cruel laugh. Oh, he cracked himself up.

She treated herself to room service, then drove home in a funk, flipping on WTOP to check traffic, not that it was usually a problem this late. A body had just been discovered in Rock Creek Park, a young woman. Heloise could tell from the flatness of the report that it was a person who didn’t matter, a homeless woman or a prostitute. She grieved for the young woman, for she sensed automatically that the death would never be solved. It could have been one of hers. It could have been her. You tried to be careful, but nothing was foolproof. Look at the situation she was in with Bill Carroll. You couldn’t prepare for every contingency. That was her mistake, thinking she could control everything.

Bill Carroll.

Once at home, she called her smartest girl, Trini, a George Washington University coed who took her money under the table and didn’t ask a lot of questions. Trini learned her part quickly and well, and within an hour she was persuading police that she had seen a blue Mercedes stop in the park and roll the body out of the car. Yes, it was dark, but she had seen the man’s face lighted by the car’s interior dome and it wasn’t a face one would forget, given the circumstances. Trini gave a partial plate—a full one wouldn’t have worked, not in the long run—and it took police only a day to track down Bill Carroll and bring him in for questioning. By then, Heloise had Googled him, found a photo on the Internet and e-mailed it to Trini, who subsequently had no problem picking him out of a lineup.

From the first, Bill Carroll insisted that Heloise Lewis would establish his alibi, but he didn’t mention that their assignation was anything more than two adults meeting for a romantic encounter. Which it technically was, after all. No money had exchanged hands, at his insistence. Perhaps he thought it would be a bad idea, confessing to a relationship with one prostitute while being investigated in the murder of another. At any rate, Heloise corroborated his version. She told police that they had a date in a local hotel. No, the reservation was in her name. Well, not her name, but the name of “Jane Smith.” She was a single mother, trying to be careful. Didn’t Dr. Laura always say that single parents needed to keep their kids at a safe distance from their relationships? True, hers was the only name on the hotel register. He had wanted it that way. No, she wasn’t sure why. No, she didn’t think anyone on the staff had seen him come and go; she had ordered a cup of tea from room service after he left, which was why she was alone in the room at 11 P.M. She spoke with many a hesitation and pause, always telling the truth, yet never sounding truthful. That’s how good a liar Heloise was. She could make the truth sound like a lie, a lie sound like the truth.

Still, her version was strong enough to keep police from charging him. After all, there was no physical evidence in his car and they had only two letters from the plate. Witnesses did make mistakes, even witnesses as articulate and positive as the wholesome young GW student. That was when Heloise told Bill she was prepared to recant everything, go to the police and confess that she had lied to cover up for a longtime client.

“I’ll tell them it was all made up, that I did it as a favor to you, unless you promise to leave me alone from now on.” They were meeting in the Starbucks on Dupont Circle again, but the beautiful girl had the day off. That, or she had moved on.

“But then they’ll know you’re a whore.”

“A whore who can provide your alibi.”

“I didn’t do anything.” His voice was whiny, put-upon. Then again, he was being framed for a crime he didn’t commit, so his petulance was earned.

“I heard there’s a police witness who picked you out of the lineup, put you at the scene. And once I out myself as a whore—well, then it’s an established fact that you traffic in whores. That’s not going to play very well for you. In fact, I’ll tell the police that you wanted me to do something that I didn’t want to do, an act so degrading and hideous I can’t even speak of it, and we argued and you went slamming out of the room, angry and frustrated. Maybe that poor dead girl paid the price for your aggression and hostility.”

He very quickly came to see it her way. He muttered and complained, but once he left the Starbucks, she was sure she would never see him again. Not even back in the suburbs, for she had signed Scott up for travel soccer, having ascertained that Bill Carroll’s son was not skilled enough to make the more competitive league. It was a lot more time, but then—she had always had time for Scott. She had set up her life so she was always there for her son. If there was a better gig for a single mother, she had yet to figure it out.

Her only regret was the dead girl. Heloise’s debts to the dead seemed like bad karma, mounting up in a way that would have to be rectified one day. There had been that boy Val had killed for no crime greater than laughing at his given name—Valery. She had told the boy, a drug dealer, Val’s big secret and the boy had let it slip, so Val killed him. Killed him, then driven off in the boy’s car, just because it was there and he could, but it was the theft of the car that made it a death penalty crime in Maryland. And even as Heloise had soothed Val and carted shoeboxes of money to various lawyers, skimming as much as she had dared, she was giving Brad the information they needed to lock him up forever. She had used a dead boy to create a new life for herself, and she had never looked back.

And now there was this anonymous girl, someone not much different from herself, whose death remained unsolved. If it had been Baltimore, Heloise could have leaned on Brad a little, pressed to know what leads the department had. But it was D.C. and she had no connections there, not in law enforcement, and Congress’s relationship with the city was notoriously rocky. The Women’s Full Employment Network offered a reward for any information leading to an arrest in the case, but nothing came of it.

Finally, there were all those little deaths, as the French called them, all those sighing, depleted men, slumping back against the bed—or the carpet, or the chair, or the bathtub—temporarily sated, briefly safe, for there was no one more harmless than a man who had just orgasmed. Even Val had been safe for a few minutes in the aftermath. How many men had there been now, after eight years with Val and nine years on her own? She did not want to count. She left her work at the office, and when she came home, she stood in her son’s doorway and watched him sleep, grateful to have found her one true love.

Scratch a Woman: A Story

ONE

The third woman in the pickup line at Hamilton Point Elementary School looks, more or less, like every other woman in the line, although a truly discerning eye might notice that she spends just that much more money and time on her appearance. She has chin-length hair, expertly cut and colored. She wears dainty silver-and-sapphire earrings, a crisp blue shirt, and lightweight wool trousers in the latest style—flat front, tapered at the ankles, fitted through the thighs, which means one had better be doing the latest style of exercise, Pilates or yoga or whatever fitness trend has finally drifted down from New York in the past few months. If Pilates, preferably the kind with machines. If yoga, it should be kundalini or Vikram, true Vikram, licensed Vikram. “You can do ashtanga, I suppose,” Connie Katz told Heloise the other day, at the Saturday soccer game, “but, as my kundalini teacher likes to say, ashtanga will work up a sweat, but it won’t fix your spine.”

“My spine’s fine,” Heloise said with a smile, but Connie was already moving away from her, ostensibly to follow her son’s progress down the field. Other women always seem to be moving away from Heloise, putting distance between them, disturbed by her aloofness, her lack of giddy complaints about the lives they lead, their mutual misery. As one of only two single moms with kids in Mrs. Brennan’s fourth-grade class, shouldn’t Heloise complain more, not less, than the rest of them? But Heloise doesn’t have a husband, and husbands are the fodder for the majority of the stories, the endless anecdotes about how much these women put up with, the heroic tales that tend to end: “And it was in his closet”—or the refrigerator, or the garage, or the front-hall powder room, or even the man’s own pockets—“the entire time!”

Heloise could live somewhere else. Self-employed, she can live anywhere she chooses. But Turner’s Grove is convenient for work, equidistant to Washington and Baltimore and Annapolis, and the schools are excellent, consistently in the state’s ninety-ninth percentile on testing. In fact, she has switched Scott from private school to the public one just this year, deciding that a larger student body was safer for them. It’s in small groups that curiosity gets excited, that idiosyncrasies are more readily noticed. No, a change of address wouldn’t change anything except the name of the street, the school, the soccer team. The same vigilance would have to be maintained, the same careful balancing act of not drawing attention to herself, and especially not drawing attention to the fact that she doesn’t want to draw attention. Heloise is constantly adjusting her life to that end. She used to have a full-time babysitter, for example, but that stirred up too much envy, too much speculation, so she calls the new girl, Audrey, her au pair and keeps her out of the public eye as much as possible. Her au pair is from Wilkes-Barre, but as it happens Audrey has a hearing loss that causes her to speak in a slightly stilted way, so neighbors assume she’s from some Eastern European country they should know, but don’t. Here in Turner’s Grove, Scott has a good life, Heloise has an easy one, and that’s all she can ever hope for.

“And your family’s here,” neighbors observe, and Heloise nods, smiling a tight-lipped Mona Lisa smile. Easy and good natured, she has managed the trick of seeming totally accessible, all the while sharing almost nothing about herself. She wouldn’t dream of confiding in anyone, even loyal Audrey, that discovering her half sister lived one development over was far from ideal. Hard to say who was more horrified when they realized they were in the same school district, Heloise or Meghan. Estranged for years and now virtually neighbors.

Checking her makeup in the rearview mirror—is that a bruise? No, her eyeliner just got smeary at her last meeting—she spots her sister several cars back in the line. If she could see her sister’s face, it would not be much different than glancing in this mirror. Only smaller, a little sharper and foxier. And frowning, begrudging Heloise her better spot in line, as Meghan begrudges Heloise everything. They are not even six months apart, beyond Irish twins. If they had been boys, the doctor might have thrown in the second circumcision for free. Then again, they probably only do that when Irish twins have the same mother. Heloise and Meghan share a father, a not particularly nice one, who left Meghan’s mother for Heloise’s, then spent the rest of his life making both women miserable.

But while Heloise has their father’s long-legged frame, Meghan favors her little sparrow of a mother, growing smaller and tighter with the years, her bones feeding off her skin. She doesn’t have an ounce of fat left on her body, and there are unhealthy hollows beneath her eyes. Heloise wonders if her sister still gets her period. Knowing Meghan, she probably willed it to go away after having four children in five years. Her husband refused to get a vasectomy on the grounds that it wasn’t natural. Heloise tries to figure out the chicken-or-egg implications. Did Meghan become borderline anorexic to punish her husband, to make herself less desirable to him, or did she stay that way because she welcomed the side effects? There has always, always, been a tightness about Meghan, a kind of controlled fury. You can see it even in baby pictures, her long, skinny body propped up on a sofa, her face pinched with resentment. The youngest child by a bit in Hector Lewis’s first family, Meghan believes she was short-changed on everything in childhood: allowance money, new clothes, extra helpings, her father’s attention. She has been making up for lost time ever since she landed Brian a year out of college. She keeps score by stuff, and her primary anxiety about having Heloise close seems to be that Heloise is in the top-tier development in Turner’s Grove, while Meghan is in Phase II. Larger, but with fewer custom details. Meghan lives for custom details.

Come to notice—Meghan is driving a new SUV today, although her previous car couldn’t have been more than three years old. She has moved up to a Lexus, the hybrid. The last time she and Heloise spoke—if one can call their chance encounters conversations—she was torn between the Navigator, by far the largest of the SUVs on the market, and the Range Rover. “The Rover makes a better statement,” she told Heloise, “but Brian vetoed it.”

“Statement about what?” Heloise was genuinely confused, but Meghan rolled her eyes as if Heloise were trying to provoke her. Disapproving of Heloise makes Meghan feels so good that Heloise almost—almost—doesn’t resent it. If Meghan ever comes to resent her too much, it will be bad, very bad indeed.

The final bell rings and the school seems to inhale before expelling the children in one big breath. Scott used to be one of the first out the door, but he’s infinitely cooler now that he’s nine and it’s a minute or two before he saunters out with his two best friends, Luke and Addison. But he is still young enough to light up when he sees Heloise, to remember, at least for a moment, that no one loves him more than his mother. He doesn’t let himself run to the car, but he picks up the pace, walking faster and faster until he bursts into the backseat, bringing noise and light and that wonderfully grubby little-boy smell, all dirt and glue and school supplies.

“Good day?” Heloise asks.

“Pretty good. We talked about genes in science.”

“Blue jeans?” she asks, setting him up to correct her.

“The genes that make you what you are. Did you know that two brown-eyed people can have a blue-eyed child, but two blue-eyed people can’t have a brown-eyed one? Not without mu-mu—” She lets him struggle for it. “Mutation.”

“Really?”

“Yes. So my dad must have had brown eyes, right?”

“Right.” She waits a second, then prompts: “And?” She doesn’t want him to grow up incurious like so many men, programmed only for their own outgoing messages.

“Oh.” He stops and thinks about what he’s supposed to say. “How was your day?”

“Pretty good.” Wednesday is one of her busiest days. She had two lunch appointments back-to-back.

“Washington, Baltimore, or Annapolis?”

“Washington. I had lunch at Red Sage. Tamales.”

“Luc-ky.”

She worries for a moment that she has trained him too well, that he might have follow-up questions, and then she’ll really have to gild the burrito, pile on more details about the lunch she didn’t actually eat, because she seldom eats the expensive meals purchased by her clients. Luckily, Scott launches into a complicated story about that day’s science class, and she knows she is safe. For now. But it is only a matter of time before Scott thinks to ask one day, “What does a lobbyist do exactly, Mommy?” Only a matter of time before she will have to muster an explanation boring enough to discourage him from asking still more questions. Sometimes, Heloise wishes she had settled for pretending to be, say, an importer-exporter, but then she would have been forced to do even more research to make her lies plausible. She may not be a real lobbyist, but her work has always centered on politicians and the kind of businessmen who court them, and she has absorbed quite a bit—more than she wants to, actually—about various state and federal issues. She has to watch herself sometimes, when a neighbor says something ignorant about Iraq or the Middle East and she’s tempted to contradict. Easier to stay silent than explain how she happens to know more about foreign policy than some fat-ass neighbor, that she actually does have sources in the State Department. And the CIA, come to think of it.

Heloise would have been a great CIA agent. Heloise could have been anything she wanted to be, according to the only man who ever really loved her, which is to say, the only man who never raised a hand against her. “But I am,” she tried to convince him. “I am exactly who I want to be.” He could never accept that, which is why they’re not together. Well, it’s one reason they’re not together. The unfortunate truth is that Heloise didn’t love him back, although she wanted to, and even tried for a while. But a cop, especially an honest one like Brad, couldn’t begin to provide for Scott and her as well she does. Economic inequity. It’s a problem in relationships.

For someone keen to avoid exposure, Heloise has a strange fantasy: She likes to imagine being invited to Career Day at Scott’s school. She sees herself in an elegant black suit. (Which is, in fact, what she wears to work—tailored suits, silk blouses, and beautiful shoes.) She would sit on the teacher’s desk, crossing what everyone agrees are a pair of exceptionally well-kept forty-year-old legs, kundalini or no, and make eye contact with the one girl she knows she will find about two thirds back, in the row closest to the windows. A girl like her, hiding behind too-long bangs and a book, pretending she’s not interested in anything. A girl who daydreams during Career Day because she has yet to hear anything that sounds remotely plausible, much less interesting.

Heloise would clear her throat, once, twice, then say: “I work for myself, at a company licensed with the state of Maryland as the Women’s Full Employment Network. I make $200 to $1,000 an hour, depending on the services I provide. I wear beautiful clothes and set my own hours. I have been in the finest hotels in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area, even in New York, eaten sumptuous meals, gone to gorgeous parties and Kennedy Center galas. There is so much demand for my services that I can pick and choose as I desire, taking only the clients I find acceptable. I work perhaps fifteen hours a week and employ four to eight other women, providing them base salaries and health insurance in return for commissions on the jobs I book them.

“I am, of course, a whore and a madam. And I am here to tell you what no one wants you to know—it’s one of the best jobs a woman can have, if you can do it the way I do it.” Heloise has done it the other way, too, on the street with a pimp and scant money to show for all her work. Talk about economic inequity in relationships…

But Scott is suddenly in a panic in the backseat, and Heloise abandons her daydream. It’s music lesson day, and he has left his exercise book in his locker at school. Fearfully, anxiously—although Heloise is always gentle with his mistakes—he asks if they can go back.

“Of course,” she says, making a smooth U-turn in her car, a Volvo sedan that the other mothers pretend to envy. But their envy is a kind of condescension—Oh, if only I could get by with a car that small, but there are five of us in our household. You’re just the two. On Old Orchard Road, she passes her sister Meghan, her narrow face so tight that it has lost the heart-shaped curve it once had and become a triangle. Heloise knows that Meghan still has several more trips—dropping one child at swimming practice, another at soccer, then trying to entertain the youngest two at a Starbucks as there’s not enough time to go home before it’s time to pick up the one at swimming and the one at soccer. Funny—Meghan, so determined to flee her mother’s way of life, has ended up replicating it, albeit with a lot more money and a husband who will never abandon her. Of all Brian’s traits, his steadfastness is second only to his income potential. Still, Meghan is her mother all over again, endlessly exasperated, chauffeuring four children around, with no help, except part-time housecleaning, because that’s the one thing Brian is stingy about, hiring help. Brian, who hates his job, can’t stand the idea that all the money he makes might allow Meghan to enjoy herself. At least, that’s what Meghan told Heloise one night last December, when she dropped by to get homework that her youngest son needed, then stayed for a glass of wine, then two, then three. “He says, ‘You’re free all day.’ He says, ‘We eat macaroni out of a box and Chinese takeout three days out of five. What more help do you need?’ And when I point out that you have an au pair, he says: ‘Well, Heloise has a job.’ As if I don’t! As if four kids is as easy as one!”

Heloise had a few glasses of wine that night, too, and her heart went out to her sister, half though she may be. Meghan never got over the loss of her father, although Heloise thinks she should consider it a blessing. Hector Lewis was a violent, brutal man, who so resented the trap he created by knocking up his girlfriend that he spent most of his time at home beating Heloise’s mother and, eventually, Heloise. But he always made his child support payments to his old family and even went so far as to pay for Meghan’s college education. Her degree led to a good job in D.C., which brought her into Brian’s orbit. Still, Meghan seems to regard Heloise the winner in this nongame because Heloise has managed to create a life of ease and serenity, while Meghan has to bully, cajole, and beg for every dollar she gets out of her husband.

So Heloise told her sister how she did it, how she covered costs in Turner’s Grove, the kind of suburb that almost no single parent could afford. There had been no husband, no accident, no life insurance, inferences that she had let stand uncorrected in the community since she moved there. She paid for it all on her own, through her own work. “Call me madam,” she said, raising her glass, feeling a rare sisterly camaraderie.

Meghan had not been shocked, not at all. She asked several quick questions—How did you get started, what about diseases, how much do you make? Do you charge more for the really kinky stuff? What’s the worst thing you’ve ever had to do?—and Heloise deflected all of them, especially those about money, although she was scrupulously honest with the IRS about her earnings, if not their exact source. It was Meghan’s very lack of judgment, her matter-of-fact acceptance, that scared Heloise. She realized her sister was filing the information away until it might be useful to her. Meghan had always been a bit of a squirrel, a saver of money and secrets. Since that night, they were uneasy with each other.

“There’s Aunt Meghan! And Michael and Mark and Maggie and Melissa!” Scott squeals. Poor Scott, with no siblings and no grandparents, was thrilled with the sudden gift of four cousins, with one, Michael, exactly his age. He waves wildly, but his cousins have their eyes fixed on their laps, probably fiddling with iPods or video games, and Meghan’s terrifying gaze doesn’t seem to see anything, not even the curving road in front of her, a gorgeously landscaped death trap of a parkway. Heloise remembers a scrap of a childhood story, something in the moldering, fragile books that her father brought with him when he finally divorced Meghan’s mother, in which an animal or magical creature had simply torn himself in pieces from his rage. Meghan looks more than capable of doing just that.

MEGHAN DUFFY PEERS at the small print of the insurance policy, squinting. She’s only forty, she can’t possibly need reading glasses, but sometimes the fine print is truly fine, designed to keep anyone from reading it. “In the case of an accident that results in injury…”

“MOM!” Maggie’s thin screech echoes from somewhere out in the family room, put-upon and choked with tears. “Mark changed the channel and it’s my turn to pick the program.”

“It was on a commercial and I changed it back,” Mark shouts, and Meghan knows by his tone that he is fudging the facts, as full of shit as his father when trying to avoid her disapproval for some forgotten chore or absentminded error.

“I missed the part where they sing karaoke,” Maggie complains bitterly, and Meghan thinks, Well, thank your lucky stars. Because seventy, eighty years from now, when you’re on your deathbed, you are not going to be thinking about the day your brother changed the channel and you missed twenty seconds of some stupid pop tart singing karaoke. You are instead going to wonder why you spent sixty of those years married to an idiot who had bad breath and a repertoire of sexual moves that basically boil down to thrust-in thrust-in thrust-in and areyouthereyet?

No, wait, that was Meghan’s deathbed. Maggie will have to make her own deathbed and then lie in it.

Meghan shoves the papers back into the cherrywood pigeonholes above her desk, a touch meant to evoke an old-fashioned roll-top. Meghan’s work area is really a corridor, a narrow stretch of hallway between the family room and the mudroom that the Realtor insisted on calling “Mom’s office.” This not-quite-room is just wide enough to accommodate this built-in shelf, which in turn is just wide enough to hold a computer and a drop tray for a keyboard. “A place for all your work,” crooned the salesman, Paul Turner. No, Meghan had yearned to correct him, Mom’s work area is every square foot of this 6,800-square-foot house. What Mom needs is a soundproof bunker in the basement. Meghan would trade the whirlpool in her en suite bath, the laundry room that is bigger and nicer than her childhood bedroom, and even her Portuguese-blue Lacanche range for such a retreat. Especially her Portuguese-blue Lacanche, which mocks her with its smug French competence, its readiness.

She marches into the family room and an uneasy truce settles as soon as she appears, so she moves past, into the kitchen, checking to see what ready-made dishes she can pass off as homemade. Meghan once liked cooking, but the level of rejection possible when making food for five people is simply too staggering. She doesn’t take it as personally when the rejected salmon comes from the Giant, when the mashed potatoes are whipped by the folks at Whole Foods. She still winces at the waste, but at least she’s spared mourning her own time. Her mom had been one of the last of the mackerel snappers, insisting on fishy Fridays despite the Vatican’s relaxed rules—and despite the fact that the Catholic church wanted no part of her, after the divorce. The Lewis children had not been allowed to turn up their noses at her worst concoctions. If you didn’t clean your plate in the Lewis household, it just followed you through the next three meals. Until it spoiled, you didn’t eat again, not in Mother’s sight. This was her father’s rule originally, but her mother enforced it even more strictly after he left.

She remembered asking Heloise, in their wine-coaxed moment of candor, if things had worked the same way in her version of the Lewis household. “Not exactly,” Heloise said, refusing to elaborate, infuriating Meghan, for Heloise was clearly implying that her version of the Lewis household was all lovey-dovey, the place where true love triumphed and who cares if the first Lewis family was left in the dirt, with only support checks and occasional visits from Hector. Visits, Meghan knew, where he often banged the first Mrs. Lewis once Meghan was asleep, or so he thought. Her own mother always called the second Mrs. Lewis that-whore-Beth, just one word, said very quickly. Meghan was eleven or so before she realized it wasn’t an actual name, Thatwhorebeth, a distant cousin of Terebithia.

She pulls out the plastic boxes of prepared food—salad, a roasted chicken, asparagus—and places them on the broad granite counter where they eat most of their meals. She could put the food on actual serving platters, but why bother to disguise its origins? Brian, who flew to the home office in Atlanta this morning, won’t be home until almost ten, and he’s the only one who cares if food is homemade, and only because he hates to think she’s had a free moment to herself. As if, she thinks, gathering up the pair of Crocs that Maggie has left in the middle of the kitchen floor, then rinsing the glasses and plates left over from the kids’ snacks, which almost certainly ruined any appetite they had for dinner. The phone rings. Once, the kids would have vied to grab it, but the two oldest have cell phones and the youngest have IM accounts, so the phone holds no interest for them. She lets it ring, thinking it might be Brian, whining for an airport pickup, which she has no intention of providing, but then notices that the caller ID is displaying her insurance agent’s cell number.

“Meghan,” Dan Simmons says. “I didn’t think I’d catch you.”

“Oh, I’ll always let you catch me, Dan.” More cute than pretty, Meghan has been an outstanding flirt since her early teens. Much better than Heloise, with her ice princess shtick. Does she drop that superior manner when she is with her clients, or is that part of her appeal? Her sister’s secret life excites Meghan, a fact she barely admits to herself. On those rare occasions when Brian wants to have sex with her and she manages to muster up the energy, she pretends she is Heloise and he is a client. That she is in charge and he has to leave when they are done, handing her a nice stack of large bills. As if.

“You’re working late,” she says.

“Yes and no. I’m in my little home office, returning all my calls, but already starting on cocktail hour, as you can see.”

The Simmonses are next-door neighbors, their house a mirror image of Meghan’s, only Dan has availed himself of “Mommy’s office.” Sure enough, she looks through the window over her kitchen sink and sees Dan across the way, hoisting a martini. Dan is fun.

“Ah, Daddy’s little helper,” she says, walking over to her refrigerator and locating a bottle of wine, suspiciously deep on the bottom shelf. The health education segment at Hamilton Point turns children into anti-alcohol Nazis, and Michael keeps hiding her wine behind the milk. “We’ll have a drink together. What’s up?”

“You called me,” he reminds her. “Two days ago. Left a message at the office.”

“Sorry. I forgot.”

“Hey, it’s a pleasure to have a client who calls me,” he says. “Most people run when they see me coming, like I’m that guy in Groundhog Day.”

She laughs, although she has no idea what he is talking about. Movies, sports—most of men’s conversational milestones are lost to her, but she pretends to get them. “Well, with four kids and a husband who’s on the road three days every week, I have to make sure we have all the coverage we need.”

“Don’t worry,” Dan says, “if a plane goes down, you’re fine.”

“I worry that the airlines are so broke these days that we won’t recover a cent.”

“Well, it’s true, if Brian actually died in a plane crash, there probably would be a war of deep pockets, with my company fighting the airlines’ carrier over who had to pay out. But it’s also true that we’re talking about something that has virtually no odds of happening. What you really have to worry about are the kind of mundane accidents that no one thinks about. Slip in the bathtub, a fall down the steps. And cars, don’t get me started on those death traps. I think you have adequate coverage for that, but I’ll review everything. I know you told me that Brian has a handgun, but it is kept in a safe, right?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Okay, because we require that. Meanwhile, I don’t think you have enough disability coverage, but almost no one does. And have you thought about some of the financial products I mentioned to you the last time you both were in—”

Screams rise from the family room, providing her a graceful way to end the conversation. “I better run before blood is shed,” she says. “It’s so hard to get out of leather.”

Dan laughs. He probably wishes that his own wife was so chipper and cavalier about household calamities. Lillian Simmons is a big-boned slob who looks ten years older than her age, but she is also absolutely reliable, the go-to mom of Hamilton Point Elementary, the one who can be counted on to bail out any forgetful snack mom. That’s the thing about wives. All men want them, they just don’t necessarily want the ones they have.

A slip in the bathtub. A fall down the stairs. An accident on the twisty snake that is Old Orchard. A plane falling out of the sky. She should be so lucky. She trips over another pair of Crocs—the things seem to be breeding—and calls the children to dinner, and something in her voice silences the bedlam instantly, bringing them to the table with heads down. Mom’s mad. Walk carefully. She hates seeing her children like this, controlling them through her anger, but her incipient fury seems to be the only power she has over them, over anyone.

BRIAN DUFFY SQUEEZES into the last open spot at the bar, putting his elbows down before he realizes the wood is still damp from the bartender passing a wet dishrag over it. As if that filthy bit of cloth could make anything cleaner, he thinks with a shudder. It takes him several minutes to get the bar wench’s attention, and in the time he waits, his order somehow mutates from a defensible light beer to a vodka martini, a double. Sure, add a quesadilla and some chips. It’s not like he’s going to get dinner on the plane and there’s never anything waiting for him at home.

Airport bars used to be kind of sexy, based on the movies and television shows he had watched as a kid. Sweeping views of planes taking off and landing, well-dressed people sipping cocktails and speaking low, charged encounters between strangers. Now they tend to be like this one, a cramped windowless room in Atlanta Hartsfield, where you have to fight for every inch of space. On the trip down, he read a paperback that began with a man meeting a beautiful blond in an airport bar and he had found that one detail more far-fetched than the high-tech crime caper that had followed. Airport bars are the new saltpeter.

Look at this one. On his left, two honeymooners, post-honeymooners by all appearances, weary beneath their red-tinged tans, barely speaking to each other as they contemplate the rest of their lives together. To his right, one of those corporate women who travels with a roller bag she can barely lift, the kind of woman who won’t make eye contact with a man until she drops her suitcase on his head. A bitch, a ballbuster. Just his type. In fact, she looks uncannily like the woman who fired him three hours ago.

He still can’t believe he had to fly to Atlanta to be fired. All the signs were there—the lack of a clear agenda for today’s meeting, the fact that they wanted him in and out in a day, when they usually brought people in the night before, put them up at the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead. Funny, he was the company’s de facto executioner for seven years, flying into various branches and firing people under the rubric of “reorganization,” and yet he didn’t see his own death coming. “You know we always do these things face-to-face, Brian,” said Colleen Browne, whom he thinks of as Cold-Faced Bitch, a woman he has wanted to bend over a desk since the first time he saw her, and never more so than when she was firing him. He considered it, for a fleeting second, thought about grabbing her, ripping away her little black suit, forcing her facedown onto her BlackBerry so hard that she would end up sending text gibberish to everyone in her address book.

But negotiating a decent severance had seemed more pressing. At least he had the context to do that, to get a good package. Six months’ salary, a full year of medical, no small thing with four kids. Still, he thinks of the CEOs who fuck up companies and walk away with ten, twenty million, and he thinks maybe he should have fucked the brunette instead. The country’s tiptoeing into a recession; his sector, financial services, is in particularly bad shape. Six months might not be enough, and thanks to Meghan’s free-spending ways, they don’t begin to have the savings they should. He orders another drink. He can’t bear the thought of going home, having to tell Meghan about this. What would happen if he missed his plane? It happens, and he’s in Atlanta Hartsfield, so anything is credible.

But then he would be in some dopey airport hotel, with nothing but porn to keep him company. He wants the real thing, but he can’t kid himself, he has no game left. The only way for him to have sex tonight is to pay for it, something he’s never done. Okay, something he says he’s never done. There have been a few furtive hand jobs here and there, on the way home from Baltimore, but nothing more because he’s worried about catching something.

He pulls out a card given to him by a guy he met three weeks ago, a lobbyist employed by the company, who got a little loose over dinner and started talking about this amazing escort service in the Baltimore-Washington area. The card has nothing but a number and a set of initials: WFEN. Sounds like an AM radio station. His plane gets in at eight, if he’s lucky, but he always fudges his arrivals, tells Meghan he’s coming in at least two hours later. What if he just went to this place instead, telling Meghan that he was still in Atlanta? Ah, the beauty of cell phones, the liar’s best friend.

The woman who answers the phone has an odd voice, a little toneless and loud. “Yes?”

“Is this…WFEN?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to make…a date.”

“And how did you hear about us?”

“How…” He provides the name of the guy and there’s endless clicking, like at an airline ticket counter.

“Name and birth date, please, along with the credit card you plan to use.”

“What?”

“We do not take new customers without a referral and all customers must be subjected to a criminal background check.”

“What if I want to pay in cash?” Meghan does the bills, no way he’s putting this on a card.

“That’s fine, but we still have to have a credit card on file.”

Even in his frustration, he admires the setup. Someone has thought this through. Plus, they’re not asking for the security code, so he doesn’t think they can charge anything, and if they did, it would be easy enough to get the charge off his card. And the lobbyist said the one he had was worth every penny, a real pro. Brian’s just drunk enough to give his real name, although he lowers his voice while reading the card number into the phone.

“Wait, please.” He’s put on hold, very pleasant jazz music to keep him company. The woman comes back on the line faster than most service reps, that’s for sure.

“I’m sorry, we cannot take you.”

“Hey, that card is good.” Shit, has Meghan pushed it beyond the limit again? And he needs this, he has never needed anything more, he decides, than anonymous, nasty sex with someone who has to do whatever he says.

“We cannot take you.”

“Look, if you want another card—”

“We cannot take you.”

“Did something come up on the background check? It has to be a mistake because I’m clean as a whistle.”

“I’m sorry.” The woman hangs up, and when he redials, no one answers.

Seven hundred miles to the north, give or take, Heloise and Audrey sit in Heloise’s refinished basement, the one where Heloise keeps her office, and look at the number on caller ID. Audrey opened a document on the computer as soon as she picked up the phone, per Heloise’s instructions. But there was no criminal background check, no quick peek at credit records. The moment Audrey put the caller on hold, she summoned Heloise to the basement and asked her what to do.

“My brother-in-law,” Heloise says. “My fucking brother-in-law. What are the odds?”

“He would have been eliminated geographically even if he weren’t a relative,” Audrey says. “He’s within the ten-mile radius.”

Heloise won’t take any client with a home address in her son’s school district.

“I almost wish I could take him on as a client, give him to Staci down in D.C.,” Heloise says. “If Brian got rid of all that tension he’s carrying, he might be a better husband and Meghan might not look so furious all the time. But I can’t risk it. And, frankly, he can’t afford it, based on what I know of that household’s finances. If he wants sex, he’ll have to sleep with his wife or settle for good old-fashioned adultery with someone at work.”

Audrey frowns. She has rather strict views on the sanctity of marriage, an interesting position for a woman who oversees the office of a thriving sex business. It is an even more interesting position for a woman whose hearing loss was caused by a vicious beating by her own husband, who also happened to be her pimp. Still, she was faithful to him, within the compartmentalized system that defined their relationship. She had sex with other men for money, but only her husband had her heart, and this remained true right up until the moment she killed him in the middle of another beating. Paroled a year ago, she was referred to Heloise by an old friend.

“Better to use a street-level worker,” Audrey says, using the term Heloise prefers. “As long as he wears a condom. Don’t you always say adultery is more expensive in the long run?”

“Indeed,” Heloise says. “Now who’s out tonight?”

“Gwen, in Annapolis. The senator got a bill out of committee, and he wanted to celebrate. But he never goes late. The GPS shows they’re already at the hotel and I expect her safety text within the hour.”

Audrey’s phone buzzes at just that moment and the two women look down to see the message: “Babycakes.” Just as bondage freaks have their safe words, Heloise assigns each of her girls a silly, frequently changing term to text when a date ends. Between that and the GPS that each girl wears on the inside of a wide bangle bracelet—Ho-jacks, the girls call them—she hasn’t had a problem. Yet. But that’s the nightmare that looms largest, the fear that she will be summoned to the morgue one day, asked to identify one of her employees.

“That was fast,” Audrey says. “Even for the senator.”

“Well, getting a bill out of committee,” Heloise says. “It can be pretty exciting.”

She goes upstairs to read to Scott. He’s getting too old for this, but Heloise argues that it’s really for her, that she won’t read the Harry Potter books if they don’t read them together. She has a date at ten, but Scott will be tucked in by then, safe under Audrey’s care.

TWO

Why did we let him sign up for travel soccer?” Brian asks, and not for the first time. “It’s not like he’s going to grow up to be, what’s his face, Beckham. And it’s such a drag on the household when he has one of these games out in butt-fuck, Maryland.”

Meghan, who actually thinks the same thing all the time, fixes Brian with a disapproving stare. “How does it affect you? The Marshalls are driving Michael, both the girls have already left for sleepovers, and I’m taking Mark to that all-day rehearsal for the regional band competition. By the way, his teacher says he’s going to need a new trumpet next year, he can’t keep using the school instrument.”

“Great, how much is that going to cost?”

“Jesus, Brian, who cares? You make plenty of money.”

“Actually, I don’t.”

He stands up, carries his plate to the sink and rinses it, then puts it in the dishwasher, which is full of clean dishes, but never mind, Meghan knows a sign of the apocalypse when she sees one. Brian has occasionally removed his own dishes from the table, but to rinse it and put it in the dishwasher? Things must be very bad indeed.

“What are you saying, exactly?” Pay cut, pay cut, pay cut, she prays. Please be a pay cut. Or maybe a bonus didn’t come through.

“I was fired.”

“When?”

“Almost ten days ago.”

Yet he has been putting on a suit every morning and driving away. “So where have you been—”

“Starbucks. I thought I would find something so fast that there was no need to trouble you with it. And I did get severance.”

“How much?”

“Jesus, Meghan, don’t overwhelm me with your sympathy and concern.”

“How much?”

“Six months.”

“You’ll find something new.” It’s a question, a plea.

“Yeah, but—it’s bad out there, Meghan. I may not make as much. We may have to move. Who knows?”

Who knows? Meghan knows. She knows what it’s like to live in a house where money is tight. She knows what it’s like when a family falls back a step, what it feels like to try to get by with less than one is used to, how it’s almost impossible to catch up ever again.

“Clean the basement,” she says.

“What?”

“You have a Saturday free, you’ve been sitting in Starbucks for two weeks, doing nothing, while I run myself ragged—the least you could do is clean the fucking basement.”

“You know what, Meghan? This is way harsh, even for you. I lost my job, for no good reason. You’re supposed to be on my side. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I have to take Mark to this thing. Which you knew. So don’t blame me because I can’t sit at the kitchen table and rub your head, talking about the job you lost two fucking weeks ago. We’ll talk later. You promised to clean the basement months ago, so do it. It might feel good, accomplishing something. For a change.” She raises her voice, which has been a tight hiss for this entire discussion. “Mark! Time to go.” Then back to the hissing register: “There are boxes in the garage and the county dump is open until two P.M. on Saturdays. Don’t forget that broken old computers can’t go in the landfill.”

She stares him down and he drops his head, shuffling off to the basement. She checks her watch. “Mark!” This is her second-warning voice, louder than the first but still not angry. The children know what Brian has just been reminded, that it’s Meghan’s softest voice that is to be feared. Funny, because she’s never gone beyond that voice, so what is it that they fear, what power do they assign to her? Mark comes bounding down the stairs, ready for the battle of the bands. It will be a long day, and once he’s with his friends, he won’t want anything to do with Meghan. He certainly won’t stop to think what the day is like for her, how it feels to sit for hours in the drafty arena in downtown Baltimore, with only a library book, a mystery from the library, to keep her company. And the girls are giggling with friends while Michael is chasing a soccer ball down a muddy field somewhere in Western Maryland, and there are Melissa’s fucking Crocs again, or maybe Maggie’s, left in the middle of the mudroom floor.

“Mom, why are you shaking?” Mark asks.

“It’s cold for March.”

BRIAN GOES UP AND DOWN, up and down, up and down. He considered stopping as soon as Meghan left the house. Who does she think she is, talking to him that way? But the chore is a good distraction and, fuck her, she was right: he feels as if he’s accomplishing something for the first time in weeks. Months, actually.

But as the morning turns into afternoon, he begins to lose his enthusiasm. How did one family ever acquire so much crap? Why do they have all these broken camp chairs? A box full of board games that are missing key pieces? In the early going, he thought there might be money to be made, that they would have a yard sale or maybe take things to one of those stores that sells your stuff on eBay, does all the grunt work. But it’s all junk, worthless. It makes him feel even worse, the fact that he’s been living on top of this storehouse of crap, and he doesn’t really seem to be making any progress. Up and down, up and down, up and down. Wasn’t there some story about a guy in hell who has to do this? He has a beer, checks in on the NCAA tournament. Okay, why not another? He looks for some food, but most of it requires at least minimal preparation, and he doesn’t want to go out, so he returns to the job. Really, the stuff seems to be breeding, there’s more of it now than when he started. He comes up with a box full of mysterious hardware, screws and those Ikea wrenches and a broken towel rack. He can barely see over the top of the box, but he does hear the garage door opening. Footsteps in the hall.

“Meghan?” he says, assuming that the person he can’t see on the steps must be her. Maybe she sneaked home to make up, he thinks. God, when was the last time they had sex in the afternoon? He gets hard just thinking about the possibility of some quick, ordinary sex with his wife. It is the most erotic thing he has considered in ages, better than the porn sites he sometimes checks out on his laptop, always remembering to erase his cache. He doesn’t need a stranger or anything extra. He won’t need to imagine he’s with someone else. All he wants is to get on top of his wife and go at it. Maybe make it nice for her, too, if there’s time before she has to go back to the band practice thing.

“Hey, Meghan,” he says, “give me a hand with this.”

She does, in a sense. She presents him with two hands, thumping them hard on the chest, as if beginning CPR, and sends him flying backward down the steps, screws and towel racks and Swedish wrenches racing him to the bottom. He sprawls like a starfish, looking back at her, amazed, his mind trying to catch up with everything that has happened, and all he can think is, So I guess we’re not going to have sex, after all.

HELOISE IS MAKING SCOTT LUNCH, glad that his one weekend obligation, soccer, is behind them. She encourages him to do everything he wants—soccer, music lessons, art classes at the Baltimore Museum of Art—but she prefers the quiet afternoons, when there is nothing on his schedule and they simply steep in each other’s company, watching television, running errands. She tries to make Saturday dinner an event—Around the World with the Lewis Family, she calls it—and tackles new recipes from different countries. She’s going to make Thai food tonight, and she won’t have to cut back on the spice for Scott’s sake. His mouth is as inquisitive and open as his porous little mind, keen to try new things. He is such a satisfying companion in every way. She has to remind herself that he won’t be with her very long, that she has only a few years in which he will find it acceptable to spend Saturday night with his mother.

And then? Then she will be alone. She’s through with men. Not through with love, as the song has it, but that’s because she never really started with love. Oh, she used the word quite a bit when she was young. She loved the boyfriend who encouraged her to leave home, the boy she followed to downtown Baltimore, only to end up dancing in a strip club, then tricking. She said she loved Val because he demanded that; the fealty of the word was almost as important to him as the money she kicked back, and she said it so often that she came to believe it for a while. She looks at the redheaded boy, eyes fixed on a nature show as he waits for his soup and grilled cheese, and wonders again at the capacity that allows her not to be scared when she sees that miniature version of Val, a man she so feared that she made sure he would be locked up forever. Val doesn’t know about Scott. She was only three months pregnant when he was arrested and she managed to conceal her growing girth when she visited him in prison, coming up with a cover story for the last few months, claiming she had to go back home to tend to her ailing mother. As if she would be bothered to do anything for that woman. It was one thing for men to disappoint her, but Heloise can never forgive her mother for failing to protect her.

It was Scott, growing inside her, who changed everything. On her own, accountable only for herself, Heloise could not imagine getting free of Val. She understood the fact that her life was destined to be a short one, that her usefulness as a whore and her biological life span would probably run out about the same time. Val was violent, but he didn’t like to damage the goods, as he called them, so as long as she was a good earner, he employed a certain restraint. But as her market value decreased, she knew the violence would escalate. And she accepted it. She could not see a way out. She had a high school education, no money in her own name, and a career that lasted about as long as a pro athlete’s, but with far less compensation.

She didn’t even have official confirmation of her pregnancy when she resolved to change. She was sitting in a diner in the early evening, drinking a cup of coffee with a friend, and she couldn’t get beyond the first sip. She asked the waitress to bring her a cup from a fresh pot, but the new one was bitter, too, no matter how much milk and sugar she added. “Maybe you’re pregnant,” Agnes said, meaning it as a joke. But Heloise knew at that moment that she was and she suddenly understood what it took to make a great change in one’s life.

Agnes was dead within the week, killed by a john. They never found the man, although Heloise gave them a detailed description. She and the other girls had known he was trouble, had seen something in his eyes that scared them. Agnes laughed at their fears; Agnes was found in a vacant lot, her throat slit. If Heloise ever spoke of her real life to anyone, if she ever had the luxury of telling people about herself, they would probably reduce this story to simple cause and effect. Heloise was pregnant and needed to start a new life. The death of her friend inspired her to escape Val, get out on her own, and set up a business where women who sold sex could be safe, above all. Safe and well compensated, with health benefits and flexible schedules. But the linear story line was not quite right. Even if Agnes had not died, Heloise would have found a way to do this. No disrespect to Agnes, but a mouthful of coffee, acrid and syrupy, was what changed her life.

The phone rings, making her jump, because it rings so seldom, the home line. She has no friends. It is lonely at times, but friendship is a luxury she can’t afford. One day, perhaps when Scott graduates, she hopes to sell the business and retire on the proceeds, or reinvent herself as a real lobbyist. Once Scott is out of college, she can afford the drop in income. The fact is, she has the contacts, and one of the big wheels in Annapolis has all but given her a standing offer to come on board, help him advance the case of alcohol and tobacco in the state legislature. He wants her to go back to school, though, get one of those weekend MBAs, and she can’t do that until Scott is older.

“Meet me at Starbucks.”

It takes her a second to realize the caller is Meghan, speaking through gritted teeth.

“I’m just getting Scott’s lunch—”

“Now. Leave him with Audrey.”

“I give Audrey the weekends off. I mean, she’s around, but she’s not on the clock, and—”

“This is life and death, Heloise. I need you. And if you can’t be there for me—well, I can’t be responsible for what happens.”

Is Meghan threatening her? The thought is almost laughable, except…there is something steely in her sister’s voice, something cold and resolute that Heloise recognizes. It is a quality she remembers from Val, the willingness to destroy others, even at the risk of destroying oneself. Val killed a boy just for laughing at his name, and the striking thing to Heloise is that he has never expressed any regret about it. He has never said, I can’t believe I ruined my life over such a silly thing. Or: What was I thinking? In fact, whenever he spoke of the crime to Heloise it was in the context of the inevitable death-sentence appeal. He mused how, if he had to be in prison for the boy’s death, he wished he could go back and inflict more pain on him, not kill him with the relative speed and kindness of a single bullet to the brain. The cliché about bullies is that they back down when confronted. But Heloise has known a different kind of bully, men—and women—who will happily upend your life just because they can. Meghan knows what Heloise does for a living. Meghan has the power to ruin her and she won’t stop to think about how it might boomerang on her.

“The Starbucks by the mall?”

“Yes. As soon as possible.”

“I’M A WHORE,” HELOISE SAYS. “I charge men money for sex. That doesn’t mean I know how to help you cover up a murder.”

“Keep your voice down,” Meghan says, although she knows it’s her voice that’s closer to being out of control. Then: “And who said murder? That’s the problem. He’s still breathing, I think. His chest looked like it was moving.”

“And you left him there?”

It’s a curious feeling, seeing the horror in Heloise’s eyes, being judged by a whore, Heloise’s very word.

“Temporary insanity,” she says, gauging Heloise’s reaction, wanting to see how this theory might play. “No, seriously, I just lost it. I was sitting there at Mark’s battle-of-the-bands practice, and I kept getting angrier and angrier, and when they broke for lunch, I couldn’t help myself, I drove back home to have it out with Brian. Don’t you hate that thing men do, where they drop some huge piece of information on you when they know there’s no time to discuss it?”

Heloise, happily manless, looks baffled.

“I just wanted to talk to him. I don’t know why I did what I did. But if he’s dead, then it’s over, there’s nothing to be done. But what if he’s not?”

“Maybe he has a head injury. Then if he regains consciousness and starts talking about how you shoved him—”

“I really didn’t mean to.” She’s beginning to believe this, the more she says it.

“You can say it’s the result of the fall. If he regains consciousness. You could have crippled him for life, Meghan. Your husband could be a paraplegic now.”

It takes a second for Meghan to process the horror of this, the idea that she has created an invalid, someone who will require a lifetime of care and provide nothing in return. Dead, Brian is worth a lot to her. Permanently disabled, all he will cough up is a small lump sum, eighteen months of mortgage payments, and then they have to petition to get on the federal system. She knows this thanks to Dan Simmons, insurance agent extraordinaire. He’s been trying to tell her that they don’t have adequate coverage for disability, and she’s been blowing him off.

“Go home, Meghan,” Heloise says. “Don’t leave him there, whatever you do.”

She shakes her head. “I have to go get Mark. The practice ends in less than an hour.”

“But…then he’ll be with you when you go home. Do you want to do that to your son, have him see his father that way? Don’t you at least want to spare Mark?”

Meghan wants to snap: What about Scott? How are you going to feel when someone, possibly me, tells him his mother is a whore? But Heloise is here, she has acknowledged Meghan’s power over her, and there really is nothing she can do to help. What had Meghan hoped, when she called Heloise? She assumed her half sister had some mysterious, nefarious connections, men who could make problems disappear. Really, Heloise is kind of bourgeois, not at all the libertine that one might expect in a madam. Meghan almost regrets confiding in her.

“I’ll call in a favor, con another mom at practice into taking Mark home for dinner,” she says, checking her watch, a tenth-anniversary gift from Brian. She had wanted a Patek Philippe, but he had given her a Rolex.

“And then?”

“I’ll figure something out. I’ll do the right thing,” she says, knowing that she and Heloise may not agree on what that is.

Two hours later, Mark safely at the Pizza Hut with the Bonner family, she creeps back into the house. “Brian?” No answer. She stands at the top of the stairs, but it takes her several minutes to tiptoe down, to investigate. Oh, miracle of miracles, he’s not breathing. She feels a quick pang, wondering how long he suffered. She decides he died instantly, that the rise and fall of his chest was an illusion, a trick of the dim light. She’s a widow. What a glorious thing to be. There will be money enough and nothing but sympathy for her. Except from Heloise, of course, but if Heloise dares to be too open in her disapproval, Meghan knows how to bring her in line. She’s a widow, her problems are solved, it’s the happiest day of her life.

She’s about to bound up the stairs to call 911, begin her new life as a tragic figure, when she sees something she hadn’t noticed before, a large tufted pillow, one of the decorative ones from her bed. How has this gotten here? What was Brian thinking? There’s a tiny viscous stain. Brian has always been a drooler in his sleep, but this one looks fresh, still slightly damp, and it smells—she inhales—of Brian’s shaving lotion, which makes no sense at all.

Unless someone held it over his face while she was gone, finishing what she started.

She races up the stairs and—after putting the pillow back on her bed—discovers that terror makes it that much easier to sound hysterical with grief when she calls 911.

THREE

Heloise has a strange insight in the church: this is the first funeral she has attended in her adult life. How could this be? Her mother is still alive and she refused to attend her father’s funeral a few years ago, deciding she could never put up the required façade of sorrow. Too bad, she thinks now. If she had attended, perhaps she would have seen Meghan and they could have swapped notes on where they lived, and she would have planted the idea that Turner’s Grove was simply not—what was the word they used now to describe those who wanted to move up, up, up—aspirational enough. Then Meghan would not have moved here, and Heloise would never have confided in her, and she would not be stuck now in a murder conspiracy. Would Brian still be alive? She doesn’t know, and to be unattractively candid, she doesn’t really care. Heloise cares about only one person: Scott. Not Audrey, not her other employees, although she likes them well enough and wants to be a good boss to them. Not her clients, god knows. And not even herself, except to the extent that she’s the only one who can take care of Scott. To compare her to a mother bear or lioness is inadequate because, for all their ferocity, they are spared the constant worry and anxiety. An animal roars to life when a threat is imminent but can otherwise relax. Heloise lives in a state of eternal vigilance, worrying about every aspect of Scott’s life, determined there will be nothing lacking.

And yet, the only thing Scott really desires is the one thing she took away from him before he was born: his father. A father. Any father. Should she have married Brad, the detective who had yearned after her, the man who was more than willing to pretend Scott was his child? But she couldn’t see how Scott’s desire for a father would manifest itself as he grew. She barely had one, to her way of thinking, and had wished she had less of one. She yearned to see him…not dead, but gone. Heloise has made the mistake that so many parents make, assuming her child will want exactly what she wanted, only to be confronted with the fact that her son is a person, too, and he wants what he wants.

She thought about sparing him this farce of a funeral, balancing what was best for Scott against what would cause the least gossip. She doesn’t want to see Meghan’s mother, the other half-siblings, but, of course, Meghan’s mother looks through her, still desperate to pretend that Hector didn’t have another family, and Meghan’s brothers are so much older—Meghan was born after a long, sad string of miscarriages—that they never really knew Heloise. In fact, there’s an uncomfortable moment when one of them seems to be cruising her, and she is almost grateful for Michael’s quavering “Hello, Aunt Heloise.” Yes, she tells the uncle with a look. We have the same daddy. Move along.

Still, hearing that note in Michael’s voice, she wishes the two families were close, that it would be natural to sweep him up in a hug. But while she and Meghan have allowed Scott and Michael to have a friendship of sorts—Heloise even more reluctant than Meghan, more fearful of the complications—the two families have never really interacted. The polite fiction is that Heloise and Scott have established their own holiday rituals—Deep Creek Lake for Thanksgiving, someplace warm and sunny for the Christmas holidays. Once, just once, Heloise accompanied Scott to Meghan’s annual Easter egg party, an exhausting affair that had clearly taken weeks to prepare but was forced indoors by a rainstorm. It was Heloise’s only prolonged exposure to Brian. She wasn’t impressed; he was self-absorbed and of no help to Meghan, who seemed about one egg shy of a nervous breakdown. But did he deserve to die? Heloise, who deprived Scott’s father of his freedom and may yet see his life taken because of her betrayal, can’t make that case.

Meghan can, has begun to. She has called three times since their meeting at the Starbucks. The first was a simple call of notification, left on the answering machine: “Brian’s dead, Heloise. It’s a horrible accident and things are in a state. Is there any chance you could send Audrey over to stay with the kids tomorrow while I tend to arrangements?” It wasn’t really a question. Heloise sent Audrey over and ran the office that evening.

The second time, again on the machine. “I can’t believe how long the police were here on Saturday. It’s almost as if I were a suspect, when it’s so clear what happened. In fact, the autopsy came up with some strange findings, and it’s possible Brian had a ministroke just before he fell. At least, I think that’s what the medical examiner was trying to tell me. It’s all so much to take in.”

Third time, one A.M., voice slurry with drink. “He was vicious, Heloise.” Visshus, Hell-wheeze. “I’m not saying he beat me, but you don’t have to hit someone to terrorize them.” Tear-ize ’em.

Heloise picked up.

“Not on the phone, Meghan. If you need to talk, I’ll come by tomorrow. I’ll come by now. But please, do not call me here at home and talk about this.”

She starts to sob. “He was bad. He was, he was.”

“Tomorrow.”

But when tomorrow came and Heloise called Meghan to ask if she wanted to have lunch—which would mean a bit of shuffling in her schedule, because although the state legislature had ended, it was now cherry blossom time in Washington, and that was always a busy time for her, for reasons she had stopped trying to fathom—Meghan seemed surprised. “There’s so much to do,” she murmured absently. And then—“You weren’t here, were you?”

“Not on the phone, Meghan.”

“You’re a good big sister. Thank you.”

“I’m coming over, right now.”

They sat on Meghan’s deck, drinking coffee, two sisters enjoying each other’s company on a fine spring day.

“There was a pillow…”

“That he tripped on?”

“No, although I did throw Melissa’s Crocs down the stairs. She was always leaving them everywhere, so it’s utterly plausible that he tried to step over them, then fell.” Meghan caught Heloise’s look, the intent, the judgment, and added: “They really do think he had some kind of brain function episode. He might have died anyway.”

Uh-huh. “So what’s the thing about the pillow?”

“It was from our bed.”

“Why was it in the basement?”

“Exactly. Heloise, I think someone came in and…made sure to finish what I started. I thought it might be you.” A pause. “I hoped it was you.”

“As I told you that day, I charge money to sleep with men. I don’t kill them. I barely do bondage, and then only with customers with whom I have an established history.”

“Then someone—”

“Are you sure? Maybe Brian took the pillow down with him, planned to take a little nap or something.”

Heloise knew she was groping and Meghan’s withering look confirmed it.

“If it wasn’t you—”

A large woman came out on the deck of the house next door and gave Meghan a solemn wave. Heloise was impressed by how much compassion the woman seemed to put into that small gesture. She was less impressed by the approximation of sadness on Meghan’s face.

“I’m so sorry, Meghan. Let me know if I can do anything.”

“Thank you, Lillian, but you’ve already done so much. I might not have to cook for a month, given all the food you and the other moms have brought me.”

The phone rang, and they never finished that conversation. But Heloise remains uneasy with the calculus of it all: If Meghan is right, then someone knows Meghan’s secret. And Meghan knows Heloise’s secret, so she is drawn into this against her will. Her silence is a crime, and while Heloise’s business was built on violating several sections of the Maryland, D.C., and even Virginia penal codes, she is scrupulous about obeying other laws, keeping her nose clean. Here at Brian’s funeral, she still feels that grip of anxiety and fear, something she thought she left behind her when she got Val locked up for life.

IN ALL OF MEGHAN’S FANTASIES of Brian’s funeral—and, to be truthful, there were several over the years—she had never thought to imagine her own children. Here they are, shattered, and she wants to…shake them. I did this for you. Okay, perhaps not directly. But if her marriage was going to end, it had to be in a way that would shield her children from financial harm, and she has accomplished that much. She has not only Brian’s life insurance but a whopping policy from his former company, which is still in force because of his six-month severance package. She has not sorted out all the financial implications—she has decided it would be a little unseemly to be too focused on such details, just yet—but it’s her impression that she and the children can live extremely well, if she’s prudent. She wonders if Heloise is smart about investments. She can’t be planning to be a whore forever, right?

Meghan will marry again. The thought surprises her, for she knows that her next marriage will, in fact, have all the frustrations and irritations of her first. She has no illusions about the institution’s limits, about what it takes to live with another person. But—big but—she will be the widow of a beloved man. Her next husband will live in the shadow of dead Brian’s perfection and her eternal frailty. Her next husband will be permanently on notice, and she won’t have to say a thing. No pick up your socks, why are you late again, please rinse out the basin after you gargle and spit. She will simply look at her next husband—two years sounds about right—widen her eyes, and he will fold. It’s like rock, scissors, paper, and widow trumps everything.

And what about the pillow?

The thought is like some horrible corpse that cannot be buried, no matter how she tries to shove it down into its hole. It comes back to life again and again, often at the most inopportune times; Meghan needs enormous self-control not to have a physical reaction when it does. Here, at least, it’s not suspect when she begins shaking all over. There has to be a logical reason for the pillow, right? Not Heloise’s stupid supposition, but something similar. Still—why was it damp in the middle? Try as she might, she cannot remember if she locked the door on her way out, if she closed the garage behind her, and everyone in the neighborhood knows each other’s garage door codes anyway, and the garage door, the one that leads into the mudroom, is never locked. She really can’t remember anything about that afternoon. Temporary insanity is not a bullshit excuse in her case but the only plausible explanation. She went to Mark’s band practice, fury mounting in her until it was a fever, until the need to express it overwhelmed her. When the kids broke for lunch and Mark headed out with his bandmates, while parents were left with what the e-mailed schedule had called “lunch on your own,” it made perfect sense to drive home and confront Brian. But had she planned to push him, as she did? No, she couldn’t know that she would find him at just that moment, in that split second when he was lifting his right leg toward the final step, his posture unsteady because of the box. She saw an opportunity that might never have come again, and she took it.

Meghan has never confided this in anyone, but she has long been susceptible to something she thinks of as “anger dreams.” She slaps people, she screams at them, she flails and she wails, she beats her fists on their chests like a cartoon femme fatale, and they…laugh. No one feels her blows, no one registers the pitch of her screams. The fact is, it has taken enormous self-control never to raise a hand against her children. She wonders if killing Brian will, at least, exorcise this demon, if the anger has been appeased.

Or if it has simply whetted its appetite.

The pillow—the thought hits her again, and it’s like a nudge from a cattle prod this time, goosing her so hard that she lurches forward and one of her brothers has to steady her. She’s going to burn that fucking pillow when she gets home. But that would probably draw attention, earn her some sort of environmental citation from the county. She’ll just order new sheets instead. Porthault? No, better not. Too expensive, too impractical, especially given that Michael has been crawling in with her at night and—once, just once—wetting the bed. But something nice, something new, something in a purely feminine color and pattern to signal this new chapter in her life.

I LOVE YOU, THINKS A MAN in the back of the church. I love you, Meghan. I can’t wait to be with you. And he reaches for his wife’s hand.

FOUR

The clichés about time, like the clichés about almost everything, happen to be true. It passes, it heals, it even flies. Especially, Heloise thinks, when the problem is not one’s own. Well, not strictly hers. In a legal sense, she is accountable. Her silence is a crime, a crime that protects her own crimes. She knows enough to realize that police might offer her immunity from prosecution if it ever came to that, but police cannot offer her immunity from the destruction of Scott’s life should the details of her business become public. Still, days go by when she doesn’t think about the compromising position in which Meghan holds her. Summer is an interesting time in Heloise’s line of work: while she loses many of her political regulars, the growing custom of summer shares, in which Daddy stays in the hot city while the family is at the Delaware shore, produces a nice, steady stream of income from nice, steady men. Oh, a few seem to think they should try to be more decadent than they really are, but they are clearly relieved to find out that not that much imagination is required. She puts the girls on a Monday-through-Thursday schedule, which everyone likes, and handles the few weekend kinkmeisters, as she thinks of them, longtime customers with specialized needs.

On this particular Saturday night, for example, she’s meeting a seventy-five-year-old man who really could be happy with the services of a good reflexologist, assuming he could find one who agreed to work naked. All he wants is for someone to squeeze his toes in a very particular pattern, almost as if they were bagpipes or a cow’s teats. Easy money, and his feet are beautifully kept, especially for a man his age—the toenails freshly cut and only faintly yellow—but tonight he takes longer than usual to complete, and when he pays Heloise, he shakes his head sadly.

“What happened to Veronica?” he asks. “The dark-haired one?” (And, yes, Heloise has a blond named Betty in her employ as well, and they often tag-team a man who insists on being called Archie. Unless he’s calling himself Gilligan, and then they’re Ginger and Mary Ann.)

“I try to give the girls weekends off in the summer.”

“The thing is—you look great, Heloise. Truly. For your age. But for me, it takes a younger girl…”

“I understand,” she says, patting his hand. He’s not the first one to say this to Heloise in the past two years or so. The fact is, another cliché applies: this hurts him more than it hurts her. He only thinks it’s youth he wants. It’s novelty he craves, and she’s been taking care of him for more than five years. Some men like that, actually, love the groove, the pattern, discover a way to be monogamous twice over, with their spouses and their whores. But, obviously, some are going to get bored, even a man such as Leo, who doesn’t even open his eyes while he’s being serviced and does most of the heavy lifting himself. At forty, Heloise plans to continue taking calls for at least five more years, tops, and she doesn’t think she’ll lose that many customers along the way. But when she stops, she will have to hire two girls to take her place, and the way she sees it, every employee elevates her exposure to risk. Plus, it’s a bitch, managing other people.

Still, she feels a little pang, leaving Leo that evening. For whatever reason, age or novelty, Heloise has been rejected, and she is unused to rejection, given that she eschews recreational sex, with all its irrationality and head games and confusion.

Her cell phone throbs in its dashboard-mounted holster. “Meghan.” Speaking of people who are a bitch to manage.

“You’re on Bluetooth,” she warns.

“Is there someone else in the car?”

“No, but—”

Meghan’s voice rushes ahead, heedless. “He’s been in touch.”

“Who?” Heloise is confused, and her mind rolls to Brian. Is Meghan having some sort of paranormal episode?

“Pillow man.”

“Humph,” she says. Then: “I’m on the way back. Why don’t I swing by?”

“Heloise…” Meghan’s voice is urgent, needy, whiny.

“I’m twenty minutes away.” More like thirty-five, but Meghan will keep talking if she tells her that. “No phones, Meghan.”

MEGHAN LOOKS AT THE PLAIN PIECE of paper, mailed in the area and postmarked two days ago. She almost didn’t open it—the fussy handwriting looked machine generated, junk mail attempting to masquerade—but she saw at the last moment, before pitching it into the recycling container, that it was, in fact, real handwriting, just enormously fussy.

Inside, a plain piece of paper, unsigned of course: “Remember the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I did my part. Now it’s your turn.”

She tells herself that it’s not related, that it’s some sort of freak chain letter. There are some crazy Christians around here, although most of them home-school. It’s a coincidence, like that urban legend about the girls who prank-call various numbers—“I saw what you did!”—only to reach someone who’s just tidying up after a murder.

Murder: don’t go there.

Do unto others—what, exactly, has her correspondent done for her? Finished a job? Saved a man from suffering? Murder? Again, she tries to wall off that thought, but it’s awfully hard to avoid. She pours another glass of wine. She drinks less since Brian died, more proof that he was bad for her. But wine goes to her head faster as a result, and she worries that she’ll be a little tipsy by the time Heloise arrives. A car in the driveway—it’s her! A part of her mind detaches as it always does when Meghan sees Heloise, wonders at the sheer perfection of her sister’s appearance. Hair, perfect; nails, perfect; clothes, perfect. Heloise takes care of herself because it’s part of her livelihood. But might it not become Meghan’s livelihood, too, now that she plans to start hunting for a new husband? Can she afford to keep herself as Heloise maintains herself? Meghan has tried to work out the math, but it’s too discouraging. Sleeping with the same man, even a mere twice a week, over a couple of decades simply cannot produce as much income as Heloise’s thriving business does. Unless she lands a billionaire, and those aren’t found in Turner’s Grove. Equity millionaires, men with a lot of house under them, but no real money.

Heloise comes to the front door and knocks, then waits to be admitted. Very unlike Meghan’s female friends, who push open the door with a cheery “hello,” sure of their welcome. Since Brian’s death, Meghan has paid special attention to how people enter her home. Was the door unlocked that day? Did she leave the garage door up when she left, shaking with adrenaline? Heloise, of course, is the one person who could not have sneaked back to kill Brian. Or wait—why not? Meghan went back to band practice. Who knows what happened in those intervening hours?

But the fact is, she cannot imagine Heloise doing that for her, which makes her kind of sad. A real big sister would have done it, and Heloise is the older by six months. But then—a real big sister would have owned up to it, too.

“Look,” she says, thrusting the note at her sister. “It was in the mail today. I thought—”

Heloise takes her wrist, gently but authoritatively. “Let’s go out, to that wine bar on the highway. Talk there. You can leave the kids, can’t you? Melinda can look after them, right?”

“Yes, but—isn’t it safer to talk here?”

“It’s safer not to talk anywhere. But if we have to talk, let’s do it in public, where we’ll have to make an effort to be circumspect. Drive with me and we’ll agree on some code words.”

Meghan is torn. She doesn’t want to be careful. She wants to let the pent-up words and emotion spill out. There’s no risk from the kids. Kids never register their parents’ secrets, not unless those secrets affect them directly. At the same time, she likes the idea of a drink, on a Saturday night, in a popular place. The food is good, the wine list varied. There might be men there. And a drink with her sister in public—the normalcy of it has an appealing novelty. Perhaps Heloise even has some tips for how to meet men.

“Just give me five minutes to change.”

THE WINE BAR IS, IN FACT, called the Wine Barn, and it’s in a converted barn. Infelicitous, he thinks. Is he using the word correctly? It was on his word-a-day calendar last week and he liked the sound of it, but he’s not sure the usage is precise. “Regrettable” may be better. “Cheesy.” But it gets away with the hideous name because the interior décor is simple and chic, by the area’s standards, and because it is an unrelievedly adult place in a suburb where everything else is kid-centric. The Wine Barn allows children in the dining room, but they have to play by its rules, eat from its menu. No chicken fingers or other kiddie menu concessions. He never gets to eat here because his wife thinks that’s a kind of bigotry.

Saturday is date night for the older folks here, cruising night for those in their twenties, the teachers and firefighters and other essential types who live in the townhouses and apartments at the outer ring of the burg. He used to have quite an eye for those teachers. But now, all he sees is Meghan. I’m your knight, he wants to sing out. Your knight in shining armor. I saved your life. You owe me everything. But it will be so much sweeter for her to realize this on her own, then do what he needs her to do, just as he has done what she required. Unbidden. Selfless. That’s true love.

The sister is handsome, too, but a little self-contained and self-sufficient for him. Once, he saw her on the side of the road with a flat tire, and he offered to change it for her. It seemed the least he could do, given that he was the one who had deflated it back in the parking lot, during their sons’ soccer game. “I’ve already called Triple A,” she said with a polite but dismissive wave of her hand. “I’ll wait until they show up.”

Most women wanted the company, and that’s all it ever was, company. It seemed a harmless habit, creating situations from which women would need rescue, then extricating them. A quick poke of a tire gauge. A vaguely ominous note left on someone’s windshield. Anonymous phone calls, although caller ID had ruined that pastime. “I’ll take care of it,” he said time and time again to the women in his social set, requiring nothing more than a smile, acknowledgment that he was needed, that he could help, something he never got at home, where he felt superfluous.

But Meghan—he never dared that trick with Meghan. Perhaps that’s because she was too needy. If he helped her once, it would be criminal to stop. Criminal! Heh. Seriously, he had a hunch that Meghan would see through him, that she would figure out that her secret admirer, her benevolent benefactor, was also her malefactor, another new word he had learned in the past month. Malefactor. Male factor. He wants to be the male factor in Meghan’s life and there’s really no reason he can’t be. He simply needs her to kill his wife. The problem is how to introduce this in conversation. He has seen Meghan several times since Brian’s death, even allowed himself a quick hug at the funeral—those fragile birdlike bones, so frail in his arms; they could definitely have sex standing up, something he hasn’t done for years. But there never seems to be a right time to explain that he finished off Brian and now needs her to return the favor. He wants her to figure it out, to volunteer. Hence the note, which must have arrived by now. He watches carefully through the narrow windows on the addition to the barn, a kind of sunroom. What if she shows the note to her sister? Does her sister know? That would be inconvenient. And traitorous. Brian’s death is their secret, his and Meghan’s.

A threesome with the sisters would be hot, though. No use denying that. He and Meghan would gang up on the other one, and she wouldn’t have that cool, contained smile when they were through with her.

FIVE

The notes continue through the summer. There are Bible verses, snippets of poetry, one CD with a single song burned into it (“If Loving You Is Wrong”). Meghan wants to scream, I get the hint. Only she doesn’t, and Heloise cautioned her to do nothing as long as possible. “If the person really knew something, he would press you, make demands.” Meghan wonders if it’s Heloise, playing a game with her, keeping her on her toes. But, more often than not, she believes that these notes are from her…helper. But what does he want? Blackmail seems likely. Brian’s death left her pretty well fixed. The insurance company was a little hard-ass at first, demanding a tox screening when it was revealed that Brian had lost his job, fishing for something that would allow them to build a case for suicide. A formality, the family lawyer said, and the screen had come back with only moderate amounts of alcohol, consistent with a beer or two at lunch. Meghan was retroactively pissed when she heard that—I’m out schlepping the kids, per usual, and you can’t clean the basement without breaking for a beer, and probably some couch time. Her hands and jaw clenched, the emotions of that day rushing back. She was never so angry in her life and she hopes never to be that angry again. But then, with Brian dead, how could she be? Brian was the source of all her problems. Look at how smoothly the house runs without him, how well the kids are doing overall. (She prefers to gloss over Melinda’s sudden goth phase and Mark’s decision to drop out of band. They have to grieve a little. It’s healthy.) The fact is, the house always functioned independently of Brian, given his travel for work. His infrequent appearances were what had kept them from establishing rhythms and norms. Really, Brian was like a houseguest, not a father.

The doorbell, a knock, then a “Hello???????,” although it’s a male voice today, not one of the girlfriends. Who, come to think of it, don’t come around as often.

“It’s Dan Simmons, Meghan. Some more paperwork came in today and I thought I’d bring it over. It’s about those various annuities you wanted.”

The annuities. Dan has been a little pushy about shepherding her investments, and although Meghan thinks the financial arm of his insurance business is not particularly impressive, it’s been easier to let him handle everything. She says as much now as they settle in at the dining room table: “I’m so grateful to you, Dan, for handling all this.”

He pats her hand. “My pleasure.” He leaves his hand there a second too long. Then five seconds, then ten.

“Dan…” He’s not the first husband to flirt with her, although it happened more in the early days, before she was tired and angry all the time. Only then it was at parties, where there had been some alcohol. This is much more wanton. It’s a little exciting, although she’s not attracted to Dan. But she likes the idea of him being attracted to her.

“Better be careful,” she teases lightly. “Lillian could be standing in your kitchen, looking right at us.”

“There’s no direct sight line into the dining room. I know because I know where to look to find you. And Lillian’s in Rehoboth with the kids all month. I rented a house and even arranged a spa visit for her, for our twentieth anniversary.”

“You’ve always been so thoughtful that way.” She tries to move her hand away, but Dan won’t let her.

“I thought about plastic surgery. She never mentions it, but it couldn’t hurt. And women do die that way, don’t they? Even if she didn’t die, she would be weak afterward, taking lots of pain meds. Anything could happen.”

“Dan—”

“Accidents happen every day. No one knows that better than an insurance agent. Car accidents, slipping in the bathtub, falling down stairs. Stairs are so dangerous. If people only knew. But you know, don’t you, Meghan? How dangerous stairs can be?”

Meghan has finally extricated her hand, only to have Dan grab her wrist. She decides to stop fighting him, and when he lets go, she flips her hand so the fingers are facing up. She gives his palm a light, tickling touch.

“Money?” she asks.

“You,” he says. “And we have to figure out how to take care of Lillian. I can’t afford a divorce. But then—you couldn’t, either, could you, Meghan?”

“You were watching that day?”

“Actually, I didn’t see what happened. The sight lines again. But I saw you come and go so quickly. Then I came over here to ask Brian if he had a level. I was trying to install one of those closets, from the Container Store. At first I thought only of myself. I didn’t know I was finishing what you had started. Then I thought, I’ll leave the pillow behind, just in case. If it showed up in the police report—and the insurance company would receive all the reports, of course—I would know that Brian fell. If there was no mention of a pillow…well, I would have my answer.”

“It was an accident,” she says.

“Officially, yes.” He caresses her palm. “Smart girl.”

“No, I mean that I didn’t plan it. I came home to have it out with him. He dropped this bomb on me as I was heading out, which was his way of avoiding arguments, and, for once, I wasn’t going to be denied the fight. When I saw him coming up the steps with that box of stuff—I didn’t think. It was an impulse. He tripped on the Crocs.”

“Let me do the thinking for both of us. The important thing is, this is our secret, right? No one else knows?”

Instinct, as swift and certain as the impulse to shove Brian down the stairs, tells her to lie. “I haven’t told anyone. You?”

“No.”

“And you haven’t been reckless enough to write these things down somewhere, to keep a record that someone else might read?”

“No,” he says with a laugh, tapping his head. “It’s all up here.”

She looks around the room, then past it, into the kitchen, at the big windows. She realizes now how often Dan has looked at her through those windows, how her kitchen, a replica of his but in a different color scheme, came to seem better somehow. While Meghan was dreaming of life without a husband, Dan was persuading himself that all he needed was a change of partner, that the thinner, slightly younger woman he saw could make everything right in his life. Okay, then.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she says, pleased to see how he shakes, just a little. She’s in control. For now.

HELOISE IS HEADING HOME from the grocery store when she has to pull over for the cop car, then an ambulance, then another cop car, rushing down Old Orchard. Another car accident, she thinks, but then sees the convoy turn onto her sister’s small street, which has no more than a dozen houses, and it gives her pause. What are the odds? Mathematically, one in twelve. She thinks about the recent glimpses of her nephews and nieces, how sad they all are since their father died. She thinks about Meghan’s mother, who took a halfhearted swipe at her wrists in a desperate attempt to win back Hector Lewis when the birth of Meghan wasn’t enough to bring him home.

A police officer stops her when she tries to enter the house, and it takes enormous self-restraint to remember that he is not a street cop, grabbing the young prostitute she once was. She never feels at ease around cops.

“Ma’am, this is a crime scene—”

“But it’s my sister’s house.”

“Is that Heloise?” It’s Meghan’s voice, croaking from inside the house. “Please, let me see my sister. I want my sister.”

Meghan’s eye is freshly bruised, her lip split. She is wearing a robe and a pair of socks, and presumably nothing else. A female police officer sits with her at the kitchen counter, pushing a cup of tea toward Meghan, who keeps pushing it away.

“Our neighbor,” Meghan tells Heloise. “Dan Simmons. He came over here with some of the paperwork for the trusts I’m putting together for the kids and he raped me. I—all I was trying to do was protect myself. I thought he was going to kill me.”

Paramedics trudge down the stairs, shaking their heads, and now the attendants from the medical examiner’s office march up, followed by detectives with rubber-gloved hands. Heloise wants to follow, but she knows they will think her morbid, unnatural. Still, she wants to know, wants to survey the scene.

Some unnerving inconsistencies start to surface as the policewoman talks to Meghan in her deceptively conversational way. Why is Dan Simmons naked? How did he manage to take his clothes off while keeping Meghan under his control? Did she really keep a loaded gun, unlocked, in her nightstand drawer? With kids in the house? Was she crazy? Heloise wishes her sister would stop talking. But Meghan points to the marks on her face, admits how frightening it has been, living without her husband, admits her ignorance and negligence with the gun but says she believes it is the only thing that prevented Dan from killing her. He choked her when they had sex, see? There are marks on her neck. She was blacking out, she thought she was dying, there was nothing to do but reach into that nightstand table, grab the gun, and blow his brains out. Look—there is brain matter in her hair, a fine spray of blood on her face. She knows she has to go to the hospital and talk to police at greater length—Heloise puts in here that she wants her sister to have a lawyer, a good one. She won’t use her own man, but she’ll ask him for a recommendation.

“Can’t my sister drive me to the hospital for the rape kit? Do I really need to go in the ambulance or a police car?”

Meghan walks stiffly to Heloise’s car, carrying a duffel bag with clothes to change into after the exam.

“So,” Heloise says, letting that one word stand for the two dozen questions she wants to ask.

“I told him I like it rough. It took him a while to warm up—I had to beg him to hit me, bully him, even scratch him a little—but he caught on. And then I told him I wanted to do the autoerotic thing.”

“With Brian’s gun?”

“Oh, no. I had him wait downstairs, told him I wanted to get ready for him. That gave me time to get it out of the lockbox and load it, then put it in the nightstand.”

The hospital is only a mile away now. They will never speak of this again, Heloise knows.

“Are you sure?” she asks. “That he was the one?”

“Yes. And he wanted me to kill his wife, Lillian. Isn’t that awful?”

“Awful,” Heloise agrees.

“I saved her life, if you think about it,” Meghan says. “What a terrible, terrible man.”

“Yes.”

SIX

Meghan sits in the little dressing room adjacent to the green room at the Today show, waiting for the makeup and hair people. She had hoped for something a little loftier—Oprah, to be exact—but she supposes Today is the best thing to do if you can’t get Oprah. She did get Oprah, though; Oprah just didn’t get her. She was asked to be one of several women, up to a half dozen, featured under the theme “She Fought Back.” Meghan doesn’t want to be one in a crowd, her story reduced to a mere trend. Besides, there were some indications that Oprah might ask a lot of questions about the gun—why was it so near to hand, in a house with children—and the publicist who has been advising Meghan found the course of the pre-interview worrisome and recommended pulling-out. Today is more interested in Meghan’s decision to speak publicly about being a rape victim, her assertion that women have nothing to fear by coming forward. “There’s not just one way to be a rape victim” is the line the publicist impresses upon her to use in interviews, something he apparently cribbed from an Internet site.

“And what are you talking about today?” the makeup girl asks, beginning to apply foundation.

“I was raped and I killed my attacker,” Meghan says.

“Oh.” The makeup girl’s eyes slide upward, meeting the gaze of the hairdresser, who’s standing behind Meghan, twirling a round brush through her hair. Meghan sees it all in the mirror—the concern, the pity.

“It’s okay,” she assures them. “That’s why I’m here. Because women should talk about these things. It was horrible, what happened to me, what I had to do to survive. But I have no regrets, and certainly no shame.”

Again, her lines are rehearsed, but that doesn’t mean they’re not true. Even when Meghan allows herself to think about what really happened—something she does less and less—she can’t imagine taking a different course of action. No regret, no shame. She was on top of Dan, their second go-round, riding him and encouraging him to choke her, when he saw her reach for the drawer. “What are you getting?” he gasped. “Something to make it better. Close your eyes.” He did as he was told and she managed to grab the gun, hold it behind her back. “Flip me, you on top.” “I’m too big for a little girl like you, I’ll break you.” “I’ll be fine.” Gracelessly, they switched positions, and she let him have a few more seconds of pleasure—“Eyes shut, eyes shut,” she crooned—until he finally asked, “Where’s the surprise?”

She had never fired a gun and it bucked in her hand, but it didn’t matter, given how closely it was pressed to the spot behind his left ear. He looked surprised. Brian had looked surprised, too. Dan flopped a little and there seemed to be a delay before blood and other things began leaking out of him. It didn’t bother her. She was the mother of four kids. She had been vomited on, peed on, shat on, wiped snotty noses. A little blood and brain matter was nothing to her. Besides, she did this for her kids, all of it. Killing Brian, killing Dan.

So why not kill Lillian, as Dan wanted? He loved her, she wanted a second husband. Eventually. Why not kill Lillian? But that struck Meghan as wrong. She wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. She did the things she did only when backed into a corner. She did what any mother would do, given the same proclivity for quick thinking. It’s not as if she enjoyed it, not quite. She appreciated the power it bestowed, however briefly, the sense of besting men who were making her miserable. But it wasn’t recreational.

It’s pleasant, being tended to, the feel of the soft brush across her cheekbones, her hair being blown and teased into something larger and grander than it is. She also enjoyed checking into a hotel room last night, being by herself, ordering room service. A single mother, she is at once alone and yet never alone in her daily life, and this pure solitude was something to cherish. The producers had offered to bring the whole family up, make it a vacation, but she had quickly demurred. “Oh no, that’s hardly necessary.” Her eyes drift upward, to the monitor above the makeup mirror, and she watches Matt Lauer explaining something, his face grave. Utterly relaxed, she closes her eyes at the makeup woman’s instruction, thinking: I could break Matt’s neck like a little twig. If I had to, if it came to that.

SEVEN

Why can’t I walk home?” Scott asks. It is the first day of school, the first day of fifth grade for him, his last first day ever at Hamilton Point Elementary School. Next year he will be in middle school, which means a bus. A bus will take him away from Heloise every morning and return him in the afternoon. It’s the beginning of his leaving her.

“Why?” he repeats. “Billy does.”

“Billy doesn’t have to cross Old Orchard.” The prettily named street, a monument to a place long gone, a place torn down to make room for the houses there, has the distinction of being the suburb’s most dangerous. Three high school students died in a head-on crash there the last weekend before school started, a tragedy so enormous that it has eclipsed the gossip about Dan Simmons going nuts, trying to rape his neighbor.

“I’ll be good. I’ll look both ways. There’s a crossing guard.”

Heloise begins to repeat her argument, then says: “We’ll talk about it. Maybe soon. But you know what? I like driving you.”

She glances in the rearview mirror, sees Scott make a face, but also sees a guilty flush of affection beneath it. “Mom.” Two syllables, verging on three.

“What did you learn in school today?”

“Nothing, it’s the first day. But I think science is going to be neat. We get to do yearlong projects if we want. Not experiments, but reading projects, where we take on a topic and learn everything about it. I think I want to do nature versus nutria.”

“Nurture? Nutria’s an animal, I think.”

“Right, nurture. It’s like, we used to think it was all about how you were raised, but now we think it’s about what’s in your genes.” A pause, a heartbreaking pause. “Why don’t we have any photographs of my dad?”

“I’ve never been much of one for taking photos, except of you. Children change. Grown-ups, not so much. Your father lives in my memory.” And in my scars.

“But he had red hair, like me?”

“Yes.”

“And he was a businessman, who ran a com-, com-, com—” Bright as Scott is, as many times as they have gone over this story, he stumbles on this word.

“Commodities exchange.” Oh yes, Val traded in commodities. “I never really understood it. Soybeans. And something to do with pork belly futures.” And the bellies and breasts and thighs and cunts of young women.

“And he was nice.”

“So nice.” Especially after he had beaten a girl. He was never nicer.

“But he had a bad accident.”

“Very bad.” His gun ran into a young man, and the woman he thought loved him made sure the police got hold of that weapon, and if he ever finds out, he will arrange to have her killed just for spite. Unless he finds out about you. Then he’ll instruct his old friends to kill you in front of her and leave her alive, knowing that will be the truest hell he can fashion.

“I wish I had even one memory of him.”

“I do too, baby. I do too.”

Nature versus nurture. Hector Lewis had two families. Hector Lewis had two daughters. He beat one. She grew up to be a whore. With the other, he spared the rod, blew hot and cold, providing money and love in fitful amounts, and she grew up to be a cold-blooded killer. Just last week, Meghan moved her family to Florida. A fresh start, she said. It was too awkward, she said, living next door to Lillian after all that had happened. Not that Lillian was going to be living there long. Just as the cobbler’s children go barefoot, the Simmons heirs turned out to have hardly any insurance. Except for Lillian, on whom Dan had taken out a huge policy earlier this summer. That information, along with the selected correspondence that Meghan showed the police—the CD, the poetry, but never the Bible verses—and the autopsy findings of some odd, calcified spots in Dan’s brain, probably months old, took care of everything. Dan had lost his mind. His obsession with Meghan, the rape, his plans for Lillian, the disturbing pornography that he had neglected to clear out of his computer before he died—it didn’t exactly add up to anything, but it served the scenario Meghan had created. Unhinged Dan tried to rape Meghan and she killed him. It made as much sense as anything. It certainly made more sense than the truth. And if the police ever looked into the death of Brian Duffy for any reason, Dan would probably take the rap for that, too. Who was going to contradict Meghan? Not Heloise, certainly.

Nature versus nurture. Heloise glances in the rearview mirror, sees her redheaded son looking out at the passing landscape, thinks of the redheaded man who fathered him, of the grandfather he never knew, of the aunt who has killed two men, of the mother who lies as naturally as breathing.

“Mom!” Scott’s yell is horrified, embarrassed. “You’re crying.”

“Sorry, honey. You’re just growing up so fast.”

Form 95: An Original Story

To: Captain Hookes

Jan. 21, 2000

Began assigned surveillance of subject, name unknown, connected to Valentine Day Deluca, target of CID vice investigation. Subject was identified via hotel clerk who is familiar with Deluca’s operations. Clerk indicated that of all the women who work for Deluca, the subject is the only one who ever leaves hotel during the day. Purpose unknown.

Subject arrives at 10:40 in white van with four other women. She and two of those women enter hotel; the other two walk west. Men begin arriving at hotel shortly after 11 and appear to stay in increments of 45 minutes to 90 minutes. What appears to be the last customer on the noon "shift" departs 14:25. Until 16:00, all traffic in and out of hotel seems to be legitimate guests - older couples, foreigners. (Asian.) Then there is another steady stream presumed customers until 19:45. Subject never leaves hotel. Can’t blame her. It’s cold as fuck and the storeroom above the soup kitchen is unheated, although I can smell the cabbage they’re cooking for dinner. Nineteen degrees for the high today. I love my job.

The van, driven by a No. 1 male, arrives at 19:30 and departs by 20:00.

Respectfully submitted,

Detective Tom Bradford

February 3, 2000

To: Captain Hookes

Subject finally left premises for first time since surveillance began. I was beginning to doubt the clerk’s info and am still skeptical about the clerk overall

Subject arrives at 10:45. Clients begin to arrive at 11:00. Last client clears premises at 14:15. Lull generally lasts until 16:00. It appears that Deluca has worked out some sort of lunchtime/post-work trade, which allows men to make appointments during the workday, thus keeping spouses and/or bosses from being suspicious. The appointments are probably run through a phone booker in another location, although not Deluca’s home, per results of wiretap last year. Hotel staff almost certainly paid off, as the only people who don’t realize what’s going on are the foreign tourists who must think the Lady Baltimore Hotel is a lot more central than it is. I realize that Simpson swears by clerk as a reliable confidential informant, but we should consider possibility that CI is playing both sides against each other and tying up a good police (me) on a completely bogus detail (this).

There are two men who alternate driving duties, but neither one matches the DMV photo that goes with the name on the registration, Julian Deluca, whose photo shows a No. 2 male with dark hair and eyes. Both drivers, names unknown, are No. 1 males with very dark skin, but one is small and reminds me of the ferret in The Lion King, while the other is massive and, although not wearing a cape, reminds me of Darth Vader. Assume Julian Deluca is a relative of target, given surname, but Julian Deluca has no criminal record in Maryland. Could be a brother, but why not Christmas Day Deluca, or Labor Day Deluca, or even Fourth of July Deluca? Mom missed a real opportunity there. DOB 2/3/1975. (Hey, happy birthday, Julian Deluca! I hope you did something fun today. Something better, for example, then sitting in a storeroom above a soup kitchen, with its incomparable view of the front and side entrances of a hotel in midtown Baltimore that is basically used by hookers and confused tourists.)

Subject leaves motel at 14:55. Using my super powers, I manage to get to the street and follow her before she has traveled more than a block. It helps that she is wearing ridiculous hooker shoes. (Strappy shoes made from that shiny stuff. Possible anniversary gift for Mrs. Hookes?) Also, she has long, dark hair, which makes her easy to track on a city sidewalk. Subject walks three blocks and goes to the Enoch Pratt Free Library on Cathedral Street between Franklin and Mulberry Streets. Inside, she browses the for-sale books on the top floor, picks out one, takes it to the front desk and pays two dollars for it, in cash. She puts book in purse, then returns to the hotel, stopping at sandwich shop for soda and what appears to be a Hostess Cupcake. Does not leave hotel again until 19:55, when all women are rounded up and returned, presumably, to Deluca’s home.

Respectfully submitted,

Detective Tom Bradford

February 5, 2000

To: Captain Hooker

Subject arrived at 10:45, left motel at 19:55.

Respectfully submitted,

Detective Tom Bradford

(Is that better? No "extraneous detail" whatsoever.)

(Okay, seriously, I am sorry that I suggested your wife would look good in those strappy shoes, but isn’t that better than saying she has enormous cankles like some other guys’ wives, not naming names,? Also, thanks for the heads up on The Lion King, that it’s a meerkat, not a ferret. I’m really glad to know that.)

(And I’m sorry that I deviated from the assignment and added all that speculative crap about Deluca’s business model, but I wanted to justify the time spent on this. I accept that I am just a little cog in this big machine that is trying to make this case against Valentine Deluca, but seriously - what the fuck? You’re going to bust balls over me trying to do more work than I was asked to do? Fine, I’ll take my cue from the legendary Polk and Mahone, the dynamic duo, and never do one thing more than I’m asked to do, possibly less. If an alien spaceship comes down, lands on Mulberry Street and sucks subject into the spaceship via some weird transporter and the spaceship promptly levitates and leaves Earth’s orbit, my report will read simply: Subject was observed entering dome-shaped vehicle at 13:30 and did not exit.)

(Finally, "Hooker" instead of "Hookes" was totally inadvertent. I’m a two-finger typist, must have slipped. No insubordination intended whatsoever. If I was going for a joke, I would have called you T.J. Hooker.)

(And, no, I don’t think I over-use parentheses.)

Respectfully submitted,

(Tom Bradford)

February 21, 2000

To: Captain Hookes

Subject arrived at 10:45, left hotel at 19:35. (Val Deluca is to hookers as Mussolini was to trains.) At 15:15, subject left hotel via side entrance. I followed at a discreet distance. Still no name on the subject, who appears to be in her 20s. She’s actually very attractive, compared to the other women working for Deluca, the usual mix of pudgy and pockmarked girls with bad habits. But she doesn’t seem to have a drug thing. When I opened this file on her, I assumed that she was leaving the motel to cop or generate business on her own. Even after first library visit, I thought that might be the case. But she leaves only to go to library or bookstore down in the Inner Harbor, although that’s a haul in those high heels. Possibly into Deluca for money? His business ventures are reputed to include some loan-sharking on the side. Can’t figure out how she got mixed up with him.

Today, she went back to the library and to the third floor, but instead of browsing the for-sale books, she went into the women’s restroom. Obviously could not follow her there, but the door is kept open for some reason and I could linger outside without drawing too much attention because information desk on that floor was unmanned while librarian was walking around eye-fucking homeless men sleeping at the tables. I believe subject was weeping. I went back to the first floor because it is the only possible exit from the library from what I can ascertain. She left at 15:55 and when she returned to hotel, #1 male (the meerkat) (see, I do listen to you) (only not about parantheses) was out front. He grabbed her arm, appeared to be scolding her.

Subject departed motel in van at 20:05. (Really, Deluca ought to be running public transpo for the State of Maryland.)

Respectfully submitted,

Tom Bradford

To: Captain Hookes:

February 29, 2000

Subject arrived at 10:45, appeared to be moving stiffly, as if achy with that flu that’s been going around - or recovering from a physical attack. Given distance of surveillance, could not ascertain that subject had bruising on her face, but it seemed possible. And, for the first time since I have observed her, she was dispatched to the streets for the day. Did not feel it was smart to try to follow her on the streets, although I can’t imagine she did much business. My hunch is that she hid out in the library most of the day. High was 40, relatively mild for this time of year, but she had no hat, no gloves and only a short fur (probably fake) jacket over short skirt.

I bet Deluca doesn’t even do his own dirty work when it comes to beatings. What a punk.

Respectfully submitted,

Tom Bradford

To Captain Hookes

March 27, 2000

Subject appears at motel for first time since that freak blizzard last week. No point in bringing girls downtown if the customers can’t get in. Great job of snow removal, Baltimore City. I guess that’s one thing that’s not going to change under Mayor O’Malley. My two cents: Put Deluca in charge of it. He knows how to motivate his people.

Subject arrives in van with other girls at 10:45 - seriously, could this guy be more punctual? I stand by my belief that punctuality is highly over-rated, possibly sign of deviancy. Enters motel. Departs 20:05 in van.

April 3:

Subject arrived at 10:45, departed 20:05 in van.

:

Subject arrived at 10:45, departed 20:05 in van.

April 4:

Subject arrived at 10:45, departed 20:05 in van.

April 5:

Subject arrived at 10:45, departed 19:55 in van.

April 6:

What happened? I dozed off. Oh: Subject arrived at 10:45, departed 20:05 in van.

April 7:

Message received, mein kommandant! Subject arrived at 10:45, departed 20:05 in van.

April 15

Subject arrives at 10:45. At 14:02, leaves hotel and proceeds in usual direction toward library, then changes direction and heads west, then south to Rite Aid at Baltimore and Calvert where she shoplifts feminine hygiene product.

(I briefed you in person on all subsequent events. The bottom line is that I could have charged her, but to what purpose? Deluca beat her up for going to the library. What do you think he’ll do if he hears she got popped for shoplifting? Guys doesn’t like any attention drawn to him, no matter how trivial. And how grateful will she be to us if we get her in trouble with him? I stand by my decision to release her and set up a meeting to see if she can be persuaded to be a CI. She’s got the potential to be a much better one than the hotel clerk, that’s for sure.)

Respectfully submitted,

Tom Bradford

April 22

Oh Captain, My Captain!

Subject arrived at agreed-upon meeting place at 14:15. Her name is Helen Lewis, but she declined to provide ID (says she has none, not even a driver’s license) DOB or even place of birth. Says she dropped out of school and followed a boyfriend to Baltimore in 1992, which would put her at 24 or 25. I brought her a pregnancy kit, figuring she must need one badly if she was willing to shoplift it. (I didn’t put that in the original report because she was nervous about it. And "feminine hygiene" is technically correct because the tests are sold on that aisle.) She’s a cautious person in her own way.

She’s also very smart. She’s the one who, when I told her you were kind of a dick, said "Oh Captain, My Captain," then told me to start the report that way, said it was from a poem. She’s very up on current events and history. We ended up talking about the Elian Gonzalez case and she had a very nuanced view of it. Has very little sympathy for the biological father, but also says that the diplomatic relationship between the U.S. and Cuba shouldn’t be affected by a custody battle. I told her that, that her ideas were "nuanced" and she seemed surprised that I would use a word like that. I didn’t tell her I knew it from the movie Diner. She was probably five years old when that movie came out.

Close up, even in a diner with crummy lighting, she’s pretty, but in a quieter way than I expected. The clothes that Deluca makes her wear, they don’t do her justice. She should shop at Saks, out at Owings Mills, or maybe Nordstrom. I can’t buy all my suits at places like that, but I always manage to pick up one or two at the sales, and I get all my ties at Saks. She’s one of those women who can be a knock-out if she wants to be, but also could just disappear from view. Seriously, like one of those women in an old movie who takes off her glasses and lets down her hair and suddenly you realize she’s beautiful. Only in her case, it’s when she pulls her hair back, twisting it into a knot that somehow holds itself and eases her feet out of those stupid shoes - she says they give her corns - that you realize how gorgeous she is.

I could have talked to her all day. She just has that way about her. She’s not super chatty, but she’s a good listener and, as I said, she’s smart. But time was short. I had to make sure she was able to sneak back into the hotel before 16:00. It’s no good for us if she’s on the outs with Deluca. And it’s definitely not good for her. She has to stay in his good graces to be any good to us. She explained that’s what happened back in February - she got caught, sneaking out, which she’s never supposed to do, and Deluca beat her, then put her on the street to teach her a lesson. She said that hadn’t happened for a long time and she never wants it to happen again. I wanted to hold her when she told me that. Anyone would want to hold her. She says one of the drivers lets her slide and the other one doesn’t, and she made the mistake of trying to get around the one that doesn’t, the meerkat. She claims not to know their full names, says that Deluca calls them George I and George II. But she knows a lot about how Deluca does business.

I wanted to hold her when she told me about the beating. I wanted to do more than hold her. Driving her back to the hotel, I thought about stopping the car, trying to kiss her. Only kiss her, because - well, there’s a reason she was trying to shoplift a pregnancy test. I wish I could take care of her. I would, if she would let me, but she doesn’t trust me, I can tell. Not yet, but she will. She doesn’t trust anyone. Anyone, it’s not just men. She doesn’t trust women, either. It’s almost like she’s another species. Remember when I made that joke about the spaceship? (Screw you, it was, too, funny.) She could be from another planet. She’s that unusual. I have to protect her. I promised I would. And maybe when I do - who knows? Who knows what could happen between us? Would it be so different from what’s-his-name marrying a state’s attorney? She’s not typical. She’s smart, she doesn’t use drugs, although she admits she did, at one time. But the main thing is, we have to figure out a way to protect her if she hands county homicide this case. I think you’re going to be more pissed about that than everything else, the fact that I am going to deliver Deluca to county homicide. But her safety is more important than the petty political bullshit in-house. Get Deluca cold on a murder and he goes away forever. I don’t care if I get credit and I did all the legwork, so why should you?

And once things quiet down and Helen’s taken care of what she has to do - I’ll help her find a legitimate job, see what else I can do for her. I could be a father to her kid. It’s not like the real father is going to do it, or that the kid is ever going to know Deluca. Not if she gets her way and I have a feeling she’s pretty good at getting her way. We could be a family. It’s funny, I’ve never had this strong urge to marry, settle down, I just thought it wasn’t in me, but maybe it was only a matter of meeting someone who so clearly needs me. Everything looks different from what it did a day ago. Deluca’s going to be forced to close up shop and I’m going to stop being such a smart-ass. Notice - no parentheses, no stupid jokes. I’m responsible for people now. For her, and this kid that she’s carrying. It’s time to step up.

Respectfully submitted,

Tom Brad--

His left index finger had barely smacked the computer’s recalcitrant "d" key when he deleted the file and started over. He always knew he was going to kill this file, that’s why he had gotten so carried away, started with that "Oh Captain" bullshit, playing that game where you find a way to keep talking about the person you’re crazy about, stroking the little memories. Her ability to quote poetry and talk about current events. The way she lifted the mug of tea to her lips, how she absentmindedly reached across the table and took a piece of his bear claw. He had been like a goddamn teenage girl, pouring his heart out to his diary. Okay, he was over it. Time to be a man, which was what she needed.

It can’t ever come out, she said. Ever.

Forever’s a long time.

That’s why I’m asking you to promise. Forever. Say it. Forever and forever and forever. He’ll never know. He must never know.

Forever, he said, meaning it, yet somehow knowing it wouldn’t be forever. But it was what he could do now and he’d deal with forever later.

April 22

Met with subject. She cannot help us. Has no details of Deluca’s enterprises and is justifiably terrified of consequences if she cooperates. However, I have cultivated another CI who is close to one of Deluca’s former girls and I think he may have valuable information, although it may end up in the county’s jurisdiction if incident did, in fact, take place in Deluca’s home.

Respectfully submitted,

Tom Bradford

Author’s note: Form 95 is the correct term for the kind of report used by Baltimore City detectives of this era and the format here is more or less correct. There is an apocryphal story about a Baltimore City homicide detective who was once ordered to write a 95 on why he was late, who then filed a flagrantly false report claiming that a U-boat was parked in his driveway, blocking his car. Actually, it’s not the least bit apocryphal. At any rate, I interpreted this oft-told tale as giving Tom Bradford some license with this official form. All other details (including weather, the Lady Baltimore Hotel and its location, which does not track with other geographical details within the story) were cheerfully invented.

An Excerpt from

And When She Was Good

By Laura Lippman

On Sale August 14, 2012

Monday, October 3

SUBURBAN MADAM DEAD IN APPARENT SUICIDE

The headline catches Heloise’s eye as she waits in the always-long line at the Starbucks closest to her son’s middle school. Of course, a headline is supposed to call attention to itself. That’s its job. Yet these letters are unusually huge, hectoring even, in a typeface suitable for a declaration of war or an invasion by aliens. It’s tacky, tarted up, as much of a strumpet as the woman whose death it’s trumpeting.

SUBURBAN MADAM DEAD IN APPARENT SUICIDE

Heloise finds it interesting that suicide must be fudged but the label of madam requires no similar restraint, only qualification. She supposes that every madam needs her modifier. Suburban Madam, D.C. Madam, Hollywood Madam, Mayflower Madam. “Madam” on its own would make no impression in a headline, and this is the headline of the day, repeated ad nauseam on every news break on WTOP and WBAL, even the local cut-ins on NPR. Suburban Madam dead in apparent suicide. People are speaking of it here in line at this very moment, if only because the suburb in question is the bordering county’s version of this suburb. Albeit a lesser one, the residents of Turner’s Grove agree. Schools not quite as good, green space less lush, too much lower-cost housing bringing in riffraff. You know, the people who can afford only three hundred thousand dollars for a town house. Such as the Suburban Madam, although from what Heloise has gleaned, she lived in the most middle of the middle houses, not so grand as to draw attention to herself but not on the fringes either.

And yes, Heloise knows that because she has followed almost every news story about the Suburban Madam since her initial arrest eight months ago. She knows her name, Michelle Smith, and what she looks like in her mug shot, the only photo of her that seems to exist. Very dark hair— so dark it must be dyed— very pale eyes, otherwise so ordinary as to be any woman anywhere, the kind of stranger who looks familiar because she looks like so many people you know. Maybe Helois is a little bit of a hypocrite, decrying the news coverage even as she eats it up, but then she’s not a disinterested party, unlike the people in this line, most of whom probably use “disinterested” incorrectly in conversation yet consider themselves quite bright.

When the Suburban Madam first showed up in the news, she was defiant and cocky, bragging of a little black book that would strike fear in the hearts of powerful men throughout the state. She gave interviews. She dropped tantalizing hints about shocking revelations to come. She allowed herself to be photographed in her determinedly Pottery Barned family room. She made a point of saying how tough she was, indomitable, someone who never ran from a fight. Now, a month out from trial, she is dead, discovered in her own garage, in her Honda Pilot, which was chugging away. If the news reporters are to be believed— always a big if, in Heloise’s mind— it appears there was no black book, no list of powerful men, no big revelations in her computer despite diligent searching and scrubbing by the authorities. Lies? Bluffs? Delusions? Perhaps she was just an ordinary sex worker who thought she had a better chance at a book deal or a stint on reality television if she claimed to run something more grandiose.

A woman’s voice breaks into Heloise’s thoughts.

“How pathetic,” she says. “Women like that— all one can do is pity them.”

The woman’s pronouncement is not that different from what Heloise has been thinking, yet she finds herself automatically switching sides.

“What I really hate,” the woman continues, presumably to a companion, although she speaks in the kind of creamy, pleased-with-itself tone that projects to every corner of the large coffee shop, “is how these women try to co-opt feminism. Prostitution is not what feminists were striving for.”

But it is a choice, of a type. It was her choice. Free to be you and me, right? Heloise remembers a record with a pink cover. She remembers it being broken to pieces, too, cracked over her father’s knee.

A deeper voice rumbles back, the words indistinct.

“She comes out of the gate proclaiming how tough she is, and when things get down to it, she can’t even face prosecution. Kills herself, and she’s not even looking at a particularly onerous sentence if found guilty. That’s not exactly a sign of vibrant mental health.”

Again Heloise had been close to thinking the same thing, but now she’s committed to seeing the other side. She may be mentally ill, yes, but that doesn’t prove she chose prostitution because she was mentally ill. Your logic is fallacious. She happened to get caught. What about the ones who don’t get caught? Do you think they catch everybody?

The deep voice returns, but Heloise is on the couple’s wavelength now; she can make out his words. “She said she had a black book.”

“Don’t they always? I don’t believe that truly powerful men have to pay for it.”

At this point Heloise can’t contain herself. Although she always tries to be low-key and polite, especially in her own neighborhood, where she is known primarily as Scott Lewis’s mom, she turns around and says, “So you don’t think governor of New York is a powerful position?”

“Excuse me?” The woman is taken aback. So is Heloise. She had assumed the self-possessed voice would belong to another mom, fresh from the school drop-off, but this is a middle-aged woman in business attire, talking to a man in a suit. They must be going to the office park down the street or on their way to a day of brokers’ open houses or short sales. There has been an outbreak of auctions in the community, much to everyone’s distress and worry.

“I couldn’t help overhearing. You said powerful men don’t pay for sex, yet the former governor of New York did. So are you saying that’s not a powerful job?”

“I guess that’s the exception that proves the rule.”

“Actually, the saying should be the exception that tests the rule. It’s been corrupted over the years.” Heloise has spent much of her adult life acquiring such trivia, putting away little stores of factoids that are contrary to what most people think they know, including the origin of “factoid,” which was originally used for things that seem true but have no basis in fact. There’s the accurate definition of the Immaculate Conception, for example, or the historical detail that slaves in Maryland remained in bondage after the Emancipation Proclamation because only Confederate slaves were freed by the act. The purist’s insistence that “disinterested” is not the same as “uninterested.”

“But okay, let’s say an exception does prove the rule,” she continues. “Let me run through a few more exceptions for you— Senator David Vitter, Charlie Sheen, Hugh Grant. Tiger Woods, probably, although I’m less clear on whether he visited professional sex workers or women in more of a gray area. I mean, you may not think of politicians, actors, and sports stars as inherently powerful, but our culture does, no?”

People are looking at her. Heloise does not like people to look at her unless she wants them to look at her. But she is invested in the argument and wants to win.

“Okay, so there are some powerful men who pay for sex. But they wouldn’t risk such a thing unless they were very self-destructive.”

“What’s the risk? It seems to me that sexual partners whose ser vices are bought and paid for are more reliable than mistresses or girlfriends.”

“Well— ”

“Besides, they didn’t get her on sex, did you notice that? She was arrested on charges of mail fraud, racketeering, tax evasion. They couldn’t actually prove that she had sex for money. They almost never can. Heidi Fleiss didn’t go to jail for selling sex— she served time for not reporting her income. You know who gets busted for having sex for money? Street-level prostitutes. The ones who give hand jobs for thirty bucks. Think it through. Why is the one commodity that women can capitalize on illegal in this country? Who would be harmed if prostitution were legal?”

The woman gives Heloise a patronizing smile, as if she has the upper hand. Perhaps it’s because Heloise is in her version of full mom garb— yoga pants, a polo-neck pullover, hair in a ponytail. It is not vanity to think that she looks younger than her real age. Heloise spends a lot of money on upkeep, and even in her most casual clothes she is impeccably groomed. The woman’s companion smiles at her, too, and his grin is not at all patronizing. The woman notices. It doesn’t make her happy, although there’s nothing to suggest they are more than colleagues. But few women enjoy seeing another woman being admired.

“You seem to know a lot about the case,” the woman says. “Was she a friend of yours?”

Heloise understands that the point of the question is to make her disavow the dead Suburban Madam with a shocked “No!” and thereby prove that prostitution is disreputable. She will not fall into that trap.

“I didn’t know her,” she says. “But I could have. She could have been my neighbor. She was someone’s neighbor. Someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s mother.”

“She had kids?” This is the man, his interest piqued, in Heloise if not in the topic, although Heloise has never met a man who isn’t fascinated by the subject of prostitution.

“No— that was just a figure of speech. But she could have been, that’s all I’m saying. She was a person. You can’t sum up her entire life in two words. You didn’t know her. You shouldn’t be gossiping about her.”

She feels a little flush of triumph. It’s fun to claim the higher moral ground, a territory seldom available to her. And Heloise really does despise gossip, so she’s not a hypocrite on that score.

But her sense of victory is short-lived. The problem, Heloise realizes as she waits for her half-caf/half-decaf, one-Splenda latte, is that people can be reduced that way. How would Heloise be described by those who know her? Or in a headline, given that so few people really know her. Scott’s mom. The quiet neighbor who keeps to herself. Nobody’s daughter, not as far as she’s concerned. Nobody’s wife, never anyone’s wife, although local gossip figures her for a young widow because divorcées never move into Turn-er’s Grove. They move out, unable able to afford their spouses’ equity in the house, even in these post-bubble days.

What no one realizes is that Heloise is also just another suburban madam, fortifying herself before a typical workday, which includes a slate full of appointments for her and the six young women who work at what is known, on paper, as the Women’s Full Employment Network, a boutique lobbying firm whose mission statement identifies it as a nonprofit focused on income parity for all women. And when people hear that, they never want to know a single thing more about Heloise’s business, which is exactly as she planned it.

1989

“You have a nothing face.”

Helen hadn’t realized that her father was even in the house. She had come home from school, fixed a snack for herself, and was heading upstairs when she heard his voice from the living-room sofa. He was lying there in the dark, the television on but muted. The remote control was broken, which meant one had to get up to change the channels or adjust the volume. So her father stayed in the dark, stuck on one channel. Helen thought of a saying used by her AP English teacher, the one about lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness. Her father preferred to curse the darkness.

“I mean, it’s just there, you know?”

She stopped, caught off guard. She should have kept going. Why did she stop? Now she was stuck, forced to listen to him until he granted her permission to leave.

“Not ugly, but not really pretty either. Unmemorable,” he continued.

From where she stood, she could see her face in the cuckoo-clock mirror that hung at the foot of the stairs, a curious item to her, because it combined two things that shouldn’t be combined. If you glanced at a clock, you were usually running out somewhere, worried about being late. Yet the mirror invited you to stay, linger, attend to your reflection.

“Just another face in the crowd. There must be a million girls that look like you.”

Helen had brown hair and blue eyes. Her features were even, proportionate. She was of medium height, relatively slender. But her father was right. She had noticed that unless she took great pains with her looks— put on makeup, wore something showy— she seemed to fade into the background. It bugged her. And Hector Lewis was very good at knowing what bugged people about themselves. If only he could make a living from it.

“If I looked like you, I’d rob banks. No one would be able to describe you. I can’t describe you, and I’m your father.” A beat. “Allegedly.”

Helen knew he was challenging her to contradict him, to defend her mother’s honor. But she didn’t want to prolong the encounter. This was fairly new, his verbal abuse of her, and she wasn’t sure how to handle it despite watching him dish it out to her mother for much of her life. It had never occurred to Helen that he would start to treat her his way. She had thought she was immune, Daddy’s little girl.

“What are you gawping at?”

That was her signal that he was done with her. She climbed the stairs to her room and started her algebra homework, which required the most focus. Math did not come as easily to her as her other subjects. She charted her points, drew lines, broke down the equations, imagining the numbers as a wall that she was building around herself, a barricade that her father could not breach. She put an album on her record player, one of her mother’s old ones, Carole King. Most of her albums had been her mother’s, which wasn’t as strange as it might sound. Her mother hadn’t even been twenty when Helen was born. The music was yet another boundary, the moat outside the wall of algebra.

But Helen knew that if her father decided to get up off the couch and follow her into her room, continue the conversation, nothing could stop him. Luckily, he seldom wanted to get up off the couch these days.

Helen had been baffled when her father started in on her the week before last. If he saw her eating dessert, he warned her about getting fat. “You’re not the kind of girl who can get away with an extra pound. You take after your mother that way.” If she was reading, he pronounced her a bookworm, a bore. If she tried to watch a television show, he told her she’d better bring home a good report card, yet she had been close to a straight-A student for most of her life.

She asked her mother why her father was irritable, but she shrugged, long used to her own up-and-down dynamic with him.

Then Helen finally got it. Her father was putting her on notice because she had seen him at McDonald’s with Barbara Lewis, even though Helen hadn’t given it a second thought at the time. In a town of fewer than twenty-five thousand people, everyone ends up at the McDonald’s at some point. They had been in the drive-through lane. Why not? she told herself as she locked up her bike, skirting his eye line as she walked inside. She went to McDonald’s with all sorts of people, didn’t mean anything. Money went a long way at McDonald’s. You could get a large shake and fries for what some places charged for a shake alone. Her father wouldn’t want to go someplace expensive with Barbara, because she was always trying to shake him down for money. He wasn’t treating Barbara, he was showing her how little he cared for her.

In Barbara’s defense, she did have four kids with Hector Lewis. So even though she had a decent job and he had none, he probably should be helping her out, at least a little.

Hector had left Barbara fifteen years ago, after impregnating nineteen-year-old Beth Harbison. Helen was born seven months later. Meghan, Barbara and Hector’s youngest, was born four months after Helen, and Helen had no trouble doing that math. “That was the last time he was ever with her,” Helen’s mother often said, as if it were something of which to be proud, that he went back to have sex with Barbara only once. “And she still won’t give him a divorce. So why should he pay her any support? A woman can’t have it both ways.”

But someone was having it both ways, Helen realized that day outside McDonald’s. There might not have been another baby after Meghan, but there had been sex. They had probably had sex that very afternoon. Perhaps it was Hector who kept persuading Barbara not to divorce him. That way he never had to marry Beth, whom he blamed for keeping him in his own hometown, an indistinct place just north of the Mason-Dixon Line, not quite a town yet too distant from anywhere else to be a suburb. “Like a wart on somebody’s asshole,” her father said.

Helen had not told her mother about seeing her father at McDonald’s with Barbara. She wondered if he knew that. If Helen had a secret and another person found out about it, she would be extremely nice to that person. But Hector Lewis didn’t behave like most people did. “He just loves us so much,” her mother was always telling Helen. He loved them so much that he left his other family when Beth became pregnant. He loved them so much that he refused to work more than a few hours a week, and then only jobs where he was paid cash money, which he spent on himself. He loved Beth so much that he made fun of her and, on the occasional Saturday night, beat the crap out of her. “He gets frustrated he can’t do better by us, but if he got a good job, on the books, Barbara would take everything. He just loves us so much.”

Please, Helen prayed, make him love us a little less.

Shoot. She had left her history book in the kitchen. She couldn’t do her homework without it, but she couldn’t get it without walking through the living room again. She imagined she was invisible, hoping that would make it so. Sometimes if you acted as if something were true, it became true.

“But you better not do anything bad,” her father called out as she walked by. She was confused for a moment. She was in the middle of her homework. What could she be doing that was bad? Then she realized he was still having the one-sided conversation he had started an hour ago, about her nothing face. Having suggested that she had the perfect look for a criminal, he was now outraged that she might become one, which she had no intention of doing. Helen wanted to be a nurse. Actually, she wanted to be a history professor, but she understood that wouldn’t be allowed, that it would take too much time in school with no guarantee of a job. A nurse could always find work. Her mother was an RN, and her pay supported the household.

“I won’t,” Helen promised, hoping it was the right thing to say.

“You better not,” he said, his voice rising as if she had disagreed with him. She wondered if she should try to get out of the house until her mother came home. It was five o’clock on a winter Thursday, too dark and cold to pretend a sudden errand on her bike.

“I said I wouldn’t.” Despite her best efforts, a note of exasperation crept into her voice.

“Are you getting smart with me?”

“No, sir.” Her voice was very tiny now, a mouse squeak.

“I said, Are you getting smart with me?”

She tried to speak so he could hear her. “No, sir.”

“ARE YOU GETTING SMART WITH ME?”

“N-n-n-”— she could not get the words out. This was new, at least with her. But this is how the fights with her mother began. Her father kept hearing disagreement where there was only appeasement. “N-n-n-n-”

He threw his beer can at her head. His aim was impressive; the can struck her temple. Empty, or close to, it didn’t hurt, but she flinched, then continued to the kitchen, trying to remember why she had started to go there in the first place.

The house was small, but it was still shocking how fast he came up from the sofa and into the kitchen behind her, grabbing her shirt at the collar and whirling her around to face him.

“I— will— have— respect— in— my— house.” Each word was accompanied by a slap. The slaps were surprisingly dainty and precise, as if he were beating out a staccato rhythm on some improvised piece of percussion. Helen had had a drum set when she was a baby. She knew because she had seen the photos of herself playing with it, but she didn’t remember it. She looked so happy in those photos. Did all babies—

Now he was banging her head on the kitchen table. Again he seemed to have absolute control. It was so slow, so measured. He was still speaking, but it was hard to focus on the words. Something was bleeding. Her nose, she thought. She heard another voice, from very far away. “Oh, Hector, oh, Hector.” Her mother was standing in the doorway that led from the carport, a bag of groceries in her arms.

Her father acted as if he were coming out of a trance, as if he had no idea how he came to be holding his daughter by the scruff of her neck.

“She was very disrespectful,” he said.

“Oh, Hector.” Her mother put the groceries on the kitchen drainboard, dampened a paper towel, and applied it to Helen’s gushing nose.

“I think I might have a concussion,” Helen whispered.

“Shhh,” her mother said. “Don’t upset him.”

And that was the day that her father went upstairs and broke every single album she had, cracking them across his knee as if they were very bad children who needed to be spanked. That was okay. Albums weren’t cool. Not that she could afford CDs or a player, but she could live without the albums. She liked to listen to WFEN, a station that broadcast from Chicago, available on her little portable radio late at night. It wasn’t a particularly good station— it played soupy ballads, things that were old-fashioned even by her mother’s standards— but she liked the idea that her radio could pick up something from Illinois, even if it meant a night listening to Mel Tormé and Peggy Lee.

“That’s old people’s music,” her father said, standing in the door.

She started, but he was already gone. Maybe he had never been there at all.

That weekend her father went out and bought her a Sony Walkman and ten tapes from Lonnie’s Record & Tape Traders. Indigo Girls and Goo Goo Dolls and De La Soul, Dream Theater and Depeche Mode. She couldn’t begin to figure his selection criteria. He also bought her a heart-shaped locket from Zales. Her mother exclaimed at how pretty it was. She wasn’t envious that it was Helen who had gotten all these gifts. She seemed happy for her. Helen understood. Every beating she got was one her mother didn’t get. Hector’s beatings were a finite commodity. A man had only so much time in the day.

A few weeks later, when her mother fastened the locket around Helen’s neck as she prepared to go to a school dance— with a group of girls, because she was not allowed to date until she was sixteen— Helen said, “I saw Daddy at McDonald’s. A week or so before.”

Before was understood. Her mother didn’t say anything, just smoothed Helen’s thick dark hair, which she was wearing in a ponytail very high on her head, so it cascaded like a plume. With eye makeup and a new dress, she wasn’t a nothing-face tonight.

“He was with Barbara,” Helen said. “Barbara Lewis.” She picked up the purse that her mother had lent her for the evening, a beaded bag, one of the few nice things her mother still owned, and sailed out the door.

Tuesday, October 4

Heloise stops at one of her favorite sushi places on her way out of Annapolis. Tsunami, an unfortunate name in 2011. What can the owners do? Heloise is sympathetic to the challenges inherent in rebranding. When she had to change her name, she felt the need to stay connected to her original name, and not just for business reasons.

Why? Chopsticks poised over her sashimi, she can no longer remember why it was important to her to keep the first syllable of what some might call her Chris tian name while holding on to the surname of the man she despised more than any other.

Is her father the one she despises the most? The competition, after all, is notable. She considers the top candidates. Billy. Val. No, her father’s still the champion asshole of the world, because he was supposed to love her and he didn’t. The other men didn’t owe her anything, except perhaps the money and time stolen from her. Besides, if her father had been a different person, perhaps she wouldn’t have ended up with a Billy, much less a Val.

Usually Heloise has no use for the blanket blame applied to parents. This was true even before she became one. Earlier this year she was entranced, almost in spite of herself, in a murder trial featuring a seeming monster of a mother who eventually was acquitted of killing her daughter. The woman’s behavior did seem inexplicable— if she didn’t kill the child, she did something. Yet the hate for the woman is so virulent that Heloise can’t help trying to find a way to empathize with her.

Heloise and Paul Marriotti, one of her oldest and favorite clients, had ended up talking about the case in the lazy half hour they allowed themselves after business was done. Heloise didn’t linger with many men— most didn’t want their paid companions to linger— but Paul enjoyed her company and often bounced ideas off her, paying for the extra time if he went on too long.

“This Florida murder case,” he’d said to her. “It’s the kind of thing that makes people want to write legislation just to showboat. I’m dreading the kind of stuff that’s going to come through committee next year. As if we need to make it illegal for women to kill their children.”

“Only women?” Heloise’s challenge was smiling, good-natured.

“Oh, the bills will be gender-neutral, but this is the case that will be in the back of everyone’s minds. The bills will be framed as better oversight of abusive, neglectful parents, but everyone will know the subtext— the next bitch must not get off.”

“You mean the next white bitch. With pretty little big-eyed white kids whose photographs make them suitable poster children. I don’t recall the same national outcry when they discovered that child in Baltimore who had been starved and so deprived of basic care that his development was essentially stunted for life.”

“Heloise, if you want clients with bleeding-heart-liberal politics like yours, you’re never going to make a dime. Social workers and public defenders can’t afford you.”

“I’m a socially progressive libertarian,” she said.

He gave her an affectionate smack on her now-clothed hip. Yes, they had an easy, playful rhythm much like— what? Not a marriage because there were never recriminations or resentments. Not a friendship, although they were friendly. They were collegial colleagues, two people who had worked together for a very long time, with positive benefits for both. She could disappear tomorrow and Paul wouldn’t miss her that much.

Yet it surprised her when Paul said, “Next week— do you have anyone new?”

“New?”

“New to me. I need a little novelty.”

“Of course,” she said, conscious not to allow any emotion to show on her face. Would the cashier at the diner care if the man who always bought a York Peppermint Pattie at the end of his meal decided that he wanted a roll of LifeSavers instead? Not if she owned the diner and made a profit either way. Besides, it wasn’t the first time that Paul had branched out. One couldn’t call it straying, right?

“I’ll send you January.”

“January? Get out.”

“We have a new theme right now. January, April, May, June, July. You wouldn’t like November, though. She’s very frosty.”

The joke, groaner that it was, allowed her to establish equilibrium. Paul wanted to try someone new. That was fine. It wasn’t a comment on her. She would bet anything that he would switch back to her after a time or two or three with January. Which was no knock on January, whom Paul really would enjoy. He liked a little ice, a coolness, a reserve. Heloise would never send him June, busty and ripe, a volcanic Italian girl in the mold of the 1950s knockouts Loren and Lollobrigida. Besides, whichever girl she sent, he would return to her. He always did. As much as Paul needs novelty now and then, he likes talking about his work even more. And as smart as Heloise’s girls are, they can’t sustain long conversations about the inner workings of a statehouse committee, which is really Paul’s principal turn-on. He loves to talk about his work, and she, the perpetual student, likes to listen. How does a bill become a law? What does it take to get it out of committee? What will happen if there’s a House version of the bill? It’s like Schoolhouse Rock. With sex. Heloise wouldn’t say that the sex is secondary to Paul, not at all. He always gets right down to it, makes sure he gets his money’s worth. In that way he reminds her of someone paying for one of the big fancy brunches at a downtown hotel, the kind of guy who loads up on shrimp and lobster, whatever the most expensive items are. But once sated, Paul starts to talk, and she doesn’t always bill him for that part, although she would not tolerate that kind of laxness from one of her girls. She especially likes the secrets he entrusts her with, the feeling she has when something she’s has known for weeks finally shows up in the news.

No, she’d told herself back in the hotel room. It would all be okay. This was why most madams didn’t compete with their own girls, just sat back and took the fee off the top. She had to concede that ego, and even a little greed, had kept her in the game long past the point where she could have retired to a straight management gig. She relaxed, listened to what Paul was saying about a brewing scandal.

Then, all at once, she could barely listen at all. She felt light-headed, heard nothing except her own blood— not so much a pounding in her ears but the sense that all her blood was draining away. She was like an animal in fight-or-flight mode, only she couldn’t choose. She jumped up from the bed, saying she had to go, sat back down, glanced about frantically for her purse.

“Hey, don’t look so stricken,” Paul had said. “I told you, I just need variety. It’s no big deal.”

It had been easier, Heloise thinks now, stabbing at her sashimi, to let him assume that she was unnerved by his request for a new girl. Because she had no idea how to tell Paul that her unmasked moment of panic had nothing to do with him. It was the confidence Paul had shared about an investigation into the faked credentials of a ballistics expert, someone who had testified in dozens of homicide cases over the past ten years. It has turned out that everything on the man’s résumé related to his professional credentials is pretty much bogus. So far the gossip has been kept in check, but it’s going to get out, and then every case in which he testified will be up for grabs. Possible retrials, petitions for pardons.

Paul had nattered on as if it were just another bit of gossip, an interesting inside story. To him it was.

He had no way of knowing that one of the men sentenced to life in prison, based on the expert’s testimony, was Scott’s father. But then Paul doesn’t even know that Heloise has a son. Scott’s father doesn’t know either.

She looks around the sushi bar, almost empty at this hour of the day, and fantasizes about jumping a busboy and taking him into the bathroom and telling him her life story. Forget the zipless fuck. What Heloise wants is a conversation with no consequences.

Maybe she could start gabbing to the sushi chef, who doesn’t seem to have a great grasp of English. Who could be a better confidant, smiling and nodding without comprehension as she tells her life story between sips of green tea. I never really wanted that much. Maybe that was the problem. My dreams were so small— to be a nurse or a history teacher, to marry a nice boy, to love and feel loved. I might as well have aspired to win a Nobel Prize or fly to the moon. And I never meant to hurt anyone, yet people around me have gotten hurt, over and over again. It’s not my fault. It can’t be my fault.

Instead she asks for the check. She tips well. She always does. But her hand shakes as she fills in the amount, puts her copy of the receipt in her billfold. If Scott’s father was to be released— No, no, no. It’s not fair. Possible, she corrects herself. It’s not possible. Heloise long ago reconciled herself to the idea that all is fair in love and war, which is just another way of saying that nothing in life is ever fair, because life is love and war.

1990

Helen could never understand how her father had landed any woman, much less two. But as her studies in world history advanced— she was admitted to the AP class as a junior, a real achievement— she gained insights into how the scarcity of a commodity made people irrational. She read about the tulip boom and bust of the seventeenth century and figured there would have to be a Hector Lewis bust eventually. Not that men were scarce in her town, not in general. If anything, Helen wished there were fewer of them, that she could get through the day with less catcalling and trash-talking as she rode her bike to and from school. She may have had a nothing face, but her rear end, propped up on a bike seat, was apparently quite memorable.

Yet the pool of men available to women such as her mother and the first Mrs. Lewis, as Helen thought of Barbara— it was tiny. And Hector was good-looking, she supposed, although it’s hard to see one’s parent in that light. A few girls at school had said as much. His looks were secondary, however. By refusing to belong to either woman wholeheartedly, Hector kept both in a state of dynamic tension. When Helen’s mother dared to complain about anything, he disappeared for a few days, probably to visit Barbara, although he always denied it. And every time he spent the night at Barbara’s, he reset the clock on their separation, making it more difficult for either one of them to obtain a divorce. It wasn’t often, no more than once a year, but that was all it took. Each woman wanted what the other had. Barbara wanted Hector to live under her roof and resume being a father to their four children. Beth wanted the surname of Lewis, the official status of Mrs.— and the obvious sexual chemistry he enjoyed with Barbara.

This, too, was new information for Helen. She thought men left women for fresher, more exciting sex. But her parents seemed to have a most lackluster life in that department, even though Beth Not-Really-Lewis was prettier in every way than Barbara Lewis— thinner, younger, better kept. Eventually Helen worked out that her father preferred sex with Barbara because it was forbidden, dirty. Sex with her mother had been that way only in the beginning, when he was cheating on his wife with the naïve nineteen-year-old country girl who worked as a carhop, of all things, across the street from where he sold cars. Once he got Beth pregnant and decided to move in with her, it wasn’t furtive anymore, and therefore it wasn’t fun. When he returned from his weekends at his first wife’s home, there was a brief interlude where he had loud— and, presumably, satisfying, at least to him— sex with Helen’s mother. But that honeymoon phase wore off quickly, and then the only way they could have sex was if he hit Beth first.

When he started hitting Helen, she knew enough to worry that it might become sexualized. She wasn’t that much younger than Beth had been when she met then-thirty-six-year-old Hector. But her father never transgressed that boundary and seemed to think well of himself for it. He talked a lot about filthy perverts who had sex with their own daughters, how disgusting they were, what he would do to any man who dared to commit such a crime. Helen was not comforted by these diatribes. She worried that her father was protesting too much, that he was locked in a battle with himself he might lose. She kept herself as plain and unprovocative as possible, wearing her hair in two braids in an era when other girls had big, teased hair, and sticking with a preppy style that was considered out of fashion unless one was an actual preppy or a mean girl in a John Hughes movie. She became grateful for her nothing face, which she did little to enhance and then only at school, where she daubed eyeliner beneath her lashes. She was learning that her father was right in a way: There was a virtue in not attracting attention.

Still, throughout high school she could feel the tension building in the house. Something’s gotta give, Ella Fitzgerald sang on her father’s record player. He loved old jazz standards, which was the hardest thing for Helen to reconcile with her sense of him. He was an oaf, a boor, a lout in so many ways. Yet he loved beautiful music.

And Hitler wanted to be an artist, she learned in world history.

The breaking point, oddly, came over her report card. Oddly because it was a very good report card, all As except for a B in home economics. Yet her father focused on that B. She couldn’t remember her father ever looking at her report card before. She had long given up on trying to impress him. But he found this one on the table, awaiting her mother’s signature— and, Helen could admit, maybe a little praise, wan and tired as her mother’s praise tended to be— and he began to harangue her for not making straight As. Yet she knew it wasn’t the lone B that bothered him but the As themselves. He did not want her to think she was better than him.

Too late.

“World history,” he said with a sneer. “Trigonometry.” He stumbled on that one. “English III. Aren’t you good enough for English I?”

“English III is what they call junior English.”

“French. Freeeeeeeeeeennnnnnch. The only thing on here that’s going to help you in this world is home ec, and that’s the one you got a B on. There’s nothing worse than being book-smart and world-stupid.”

Her mother sat quietly at the table all the while, working the jumble. She worked the jumble, then the crossword puzzle; she read the advice from Dear Abby; she absorbed the hints from Heloise. She read every single word in the slender local newspaper.

Helen knew better than to defend herself, yet—“It’s not my fault that we don’t have a sewing machine at home. That’s what pulled my grade down. I couldn’t work at home, like the other girls, and— ”

He hit her, the report card crumpled in his fist. He was smart about how he hit people. Usually to the side of the head, with his fist, maybe in the stomach. Sometimes a kick. But he almost never left a mark.

“Oh, Hector,” her mother said, picking Helen up, whispering in her ear not to antagonize him, not quite able to conceal her relief that it was Helen’s turn to be hit. “I’m sure she’ll bring the grade up next semester.”

“Why should there be another semester for her? She’s sixteen now— she can drop out and go to work. Why should she have it better than you or me?”

Neither Helen nor her mother dared to point out that Beth had finished high school and gone on to get a nursing degree while Helen was a baby. Facts only infuriated Hector Lewis. He considered them a personal affront, unfair and sneaky. Give Hector Lewis a fact and he’d answer with a fist.

“If she wants to go to school, then she has to get a job, kick in her share of the rent and the food she eats. She eats a goddamn lot of food.”

“Hector— ” Her mother cared enough about education to want to see Helen finish school. Or maybe it just galled her that Barbara Lewis’s kids would all have high-school diplomas, maybe even college degrees, and Beth was very competitive with Barbara. The three older ones were all at the local satellite campus of the state university, getting by on grants and student aid; the youngest, Meghan, was almost as good a student as Helen.

“It’s only fair,” he said again. And Helen understood, even though she didn’t want to. She understood her father in a way that no sixteen-year-old girl should have to understand a parent. Where most people wanted their children to have more than they did, Hector wanted Helen to have less. Perhaps it was his guilt over the other four children, essentially abandoned. Perhaps the only way he could keep getting up in the morning was not to be left behind by anyone close to him. At any rate, he meant it. She would have to get a job, pay her way. It would be harder to keep her grades up, which would make it harder to get a scholarship. He was setting her up to fail.

He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Wednesday, October 5

Scott plays soccer. His grandfather probably would have been appalled if he had lived long enough to see this. Not that Heloise would have allowed him to see Scott, much less have a relationship with him. Watching Scott now from the sidelines, she wonders how many grandchildren Hector Lewis has in the world. She knows that her half sister, Meghan, has four children, but Meghan has moved to Florida, and Heloise never kept in touch with the other, older children from her father’s first marriage. Why would she? When she was a kid back in Pennsylvania, they didn’t even acknowledge her on the street, although the oldest boy sometimes screamed after her, “Your mother’s a fucking slut!”

It was interesting how hot and red one’s ears could get on the coldest day in a Pennsylvania winter.

No screams here on the sidelines of Scott’s soccer game. No one would dare. There is a long list of protocols for how parents are to behave. They must be models of good sportsmanship. They must not make suggestions to the coaches. No excessive celebration. Even cheers must be muted. Not that Heloise is a person given to excessive celebration, but still. She hates rules derived from the bad behavior of a few.

She always stands apart on the soccer field, her conversations with the other mothers polite yet fleeting. She’s not sure whose fault that is. She has stopped trying to figure out if she’s standoff-ish because the other mothers snub her or if she’s snubbed because the other mothers sense she’s standoffish. For the most part, she tells herself that she’s happy for their neglect. It makes life that much easier, and Heloise is not the kind of person who disdains anything that makes life easier. Cake mix for the class cupcakes? Bring it on. Hiring a tailor to make the “simple” priest costume that Scott wore as Father Andrew in the school play on the founding of Maryland? Yes, please. Heloise doesn’t necessarily throw money at problems, but she does apply it in bold, confident strokes.

True, she encourages incuriosity in most people. Yet it’s still hurtful to see how easily people fall into line with one’s desire to be ignored. What if she needed their attention? What if she had a crisis? There are only two people she could call: her au pair, Audrey, and the man who is standing here next to her, Tom. Come to think of it, the mothers are paying attention to him, and he’s not even that attractive. Broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, which has never been Heloise’s type. Pleasant-looking but not handsome. He is undeniably masculine, however, a man who somehow projects his ability to take care of those he considers his responsibility.

Heloise is lucky enough to fall into that small group of people.

“You don’t have anything to worry about,” he is saying now, in the most conversational tone possible. Tom and Heloise long ago mastered the knack of having serious talks in casual tones. “They’re not going to release a lifer like Val because of one bad expert. There was an eyewitness, remember? At worst they might agree to a retrial. But the evidence will be reexamined by a certified expert, and it will hold up, because ballistics are pretty cut and dried. Val’s staying put.”

“You’re always so certain. You told me I’d be safe forever once he was locked up.”

“And so far I’m right.” Tom shields his eyes against the late-afternoon sun. He actually tries to follow the game, and Scott within it. Heloise has never allowed him to meet Scott, at least not since babyhood, but Tom enjoys watching him from a distance. Tom would have liked to be Scott’s stepdad, but it just wasn’t to be.

“Forever is a long time,” Heloise says.

“True. So let’s say I don’t see this being a threat in your lifetime, based on those insurance charts about life expectancy.”

It is October, usually the most beautiful month in Maryland’s most glorious season, although lately it has become hot and undependable. Still, Heloise feels that fall is a new beginning, as many people do.

“It’s interesting,” Tom says, “that you called me today. Because I was going to call you.”

“About the ballistics expert?”

“No. Damn, you have a one-track mind at times. Fact is, I’m coming up on my twenty, Hel. I think I’m going to retire, move over into private security.”

“I can’t afford you on the payroll full-time.”

He smiles, acknowledging her joke. He’s never taken a dime from her. “No, no, you can’t. And you won’t have anyone else like me, going forward. This is something you actually should worry about. The guy coming up behind me, he wants to make a name for himself. He wants to make big busts, get attention.”

“I’m a small fish. They almost never go after anyone at my level.”

“Your client list has some folks that would be of interest to any prosecutor trying to make his bones.”

“I don’t live in the city limits.”

“But you conduct a lot of business in the city. I’m pretty sure I know which hotels are friendly to you.” Tom and Heloise have always been very careful not to share too many details, although Heloise has never been shy about providing Tom with information on other vendors, those she perceives as threats or competition.

“Okay, so I just won’t cross city lines for a while. There are plenty of hotels near the airport. Besides, half my business is in private homes.”

“Be careful, Hel. That’s all I’m trying to say. I’m not going to be there to tell you what’s going on, where they’re looking. It’s true your operation should be fine. But if you get sloppy or hire someone untrustworthy— ”

“Won’t you stay plugged in, at least for a little while?”

“The new guy’s going to want to make the office his. You can’t blame him for that. I’ve got to give him space— or risk having people wonder why I’m still so interested.”

“Maybe I really could hire you full-time.” If she got rid of the two drivers who work for the car ser vice— after all, their primary job is providing security for the girls— or found another way to economize, she could probably come up with a competitive salary.

“No thank you, Heloise.” Very formal of him. He seldom uses her “new” name, although at this point Tom has known her as Heloise much longer than he knew her as Helen.

“Oh, don’t be so gallant. Revenues aren’t what they were, but I bet I could match your current salary, for a lot less work, and you’d be drawing your pension, right?”

“I can’t work for you.” Eyes on the game, hands in his pockets.

“Why not?”

“Because what you do is illegal.”

Oh, so he wasn’t being gallant at all.

“That’s never stopped you from being my friend.” Or wanting to be more, she yearns to add.

“I owe you. You gave my department a big case, put yourself at risk. I want you and Scott to be okay, so I’ve done what I can to look after you. But I can’t take your money.”

“It’s not blood money, Tom. Jesus.”

“Look, just because I turn a blind eye to what you do, that doesn’t mean I approve. I’m a captain in vice, Heloise. I’m supposed to arrest people like you.”

“So why don’t you?”

She holds her hands out to him, fingers dangling toward the ground, wrists bent. The other mothers probably think it’s a tender gesture, a woman asking her husband or boyfriend to warm her hands in the deepening chill of a fall evening. But Heloise is miming the act of being handcuffed. Something, by the way, she has never been, not even once.

“Stop,” he says. “Just stop.” Then: “Scott’s team is lining up for the penalty kick. Another soccer match ends in anticlimax. I swear, I do not understand the fascination this game has for so many people. It’s boring as crap.”

He’s trying to extend an olive branch. She takes it, dropping her hands and the subject. “What do you think about that . . . situation?”

“Situation?”

“The next county over. The one in the garage.”

“Oh.” Tom’s face is a study. “About that— be careful, Hel.”

“I always am.”

“Be extra careful.”

“What are you telling me?”

“As much as I can for now.”

Scott’s team wins. He’s more interested in the snacks offered after the game than he is in the victory. The light has disappeared very quickly, as it does this time of year, leaving a pink stripe on the horizon. Tom vanishes before Scott finds her on the sidelines. Tom has always respected the fact that no one— well, almost no one— can have access to both sides of her life. He’s unusual in that he even knows that Scott exists, a fact she has kept from her clients and employees.

Yet he has been judging her, as it turns out, all these years. The moral relativism of the situation sends her reeling. She knows men. She knows that Tom desires her, would have given anything to marry her, raise Scott as his son. Is this payback for her not wanting him in return?

Or did Tom imagine that he could rescue her from herself, bring her back to the legitimate world? The way Heloise sees it, the legitimate world kicked her out when she wasn’t that much older than Scott. Turned away from her, shut the door in her face.

Besides, if she’s being honest— she always knew she could do better by herself than being a cop’s wife. Than being anyone’s wife. Because being someone’s wife would mean being dependent on someone else for money, which was where the trouble always began. It wouldn’t matter if the guy was a cop or a Wall Street bond trader— to go to a man, palm out, asking for money, to seek approval for every purchase— Heloise doesn’t want to do that again, ever. When her father made her get a job, he unwittingly taught her the power of money.

She is so busy brooding about Tom’s insult that she forgets at first to consider the real problem he has handed her. Tom is retiring. She will have no one on the inside. Careful as Heloise is, he has been invaluable to her a time or two. But mainly there was the idea of Tom, which gave her confidence, an indefinable asset in business.

Snack time is over, and Scott runs across the field. He’s no longer one of the best soccer players, but he’s beautiful when he runs. Her son is eleven now, almost twelve, but in seventh grade because of his December birthday. There is a lankiness that wasn’t there last year. It might not have been there yesterday. His red hair is darkening, his freckles are less numerous, his brown eyes more foxlike since his face shed its baby fat. She wishes she couldn’t see his father’s face in his, but it’s there, always. She can live with that, though— as long as she never sees anything else of his father in him.

“Mom, could we have a date?”

“Audrey put hamburger meat out to defrost.”

“It will be okay for another day,” he says, quite earnest. “We studied food safety in science last year. The important thing is to defrost food in the refrigerator, not on the counter.”

“Oh, Audrey always does that.”

“Then can we go to Chili’s?”

She hesitates. Part of her wants to teach him about thrift and value, remind him that one can’t always have what one wants. But that was the kind of lesson Hector Lewis claimed he was teaching her. Besides, Scott called it “a date.” And it’s Chili’s he wants, not the Prime Rib. A plate of nachos, free refills on soda, the televisions on in the bar, whereas Heloise never allows any screens at dinnertime.

“Of course,” she says, yearning to smooth down his hair, ruffled in the wind. But she knows better. “Of course.”

At the restaurant, over fajitas for Scott and a taco salad for her, she listens to Scott’s cheerful report about school, her eyes catching the scroll of headlines on the television behind his head. There’s the Suburban Madam again. Why did Tom tell her to be careful? She’s always careful. Fastidious with her records, within the law on taxes, scrupulous about screening clients.

She decides that Tom’s just a grump. Perhaps it wasn’t his idea to retire at all and he is being forced out, and that’s why he was unkind to her. Another reason not to marry. If a man wants to be grumpy with her, he has to pay for the privilege.

1991

Il Cielo was supposed to be the best Italian restaurant in town. Given the town, this was not saying much. It wasn’t even true. There were small roadside taverns that did much better by the hearty, pasta-heavy dishes that people thought of as traditional Italian fare. Il Cielo was the most pretentious Italian restaurant in town, with gilt-frame chairs and white tablecloths and tiramisu, considered avant-garde at the time, in that place. The ceilings were painted to resemble a pale blue sky with wisps of clouds. The effect might have been pretty if the slipshod brushwork hadn’t been so noticeable. Plus, the sky had been filled with chubby angels that floated across the ceiling, most with harps, one with a bow and arrow.

The owner’s wife, noticing Helen’s eyes drifting upward, mis-took her gaze for admiration.

“Don’t you love my cherubs?” she said.

Helen, who had written a paper on cherubim in her class on comparative religions, yearned to show off her knowledge, to explain to Angela Papadakis that she had made the common mistake of thinking that cherubs were little angels, when they really occupied a much more interesting and specific role within Judaism and Chris tian ity. The figures on Il Cielo’s ceiling were, more correctly, putti.

But she wanted a job, so all she said was “Yes.”

Although Angela’s second husband, Gus, owned the restaurant, it was Angela’s project, the kind of gift that a smitten widower bestows on a second wife. Gus was in his sixties, a dour-faced Greek man who ran two successful diners. But plump, pretty Angela, twenty years his junior, wanted something with class, and he had given her Il Cielo instead of a lavish wedding. She paid far more attention to the decor than to the menu. The result was that the food was mediocre but inoffensive, whereas the dining room was painful to contemplate.

Part of the problem was that Il Cielo was very dark for a place meant to evoke the sky. The pale blue paint, the light colors throughout, could not combat the inherent gloom in the squat, windowless building, a random piece of real estate that Gus owned. (He may have been enraptured with his new bride, but there were limits even to rapture.) Often Helen ended her weekend lunch shifts thinking she was going out into a dim, dark world, only to wind up blinking at the sun, which had been shining all along.

The weekend lunch shifts weren’t the best, but she was the new girl and she needed to schedule work around school. She waited on Saturday shoppers, women who, true to stereotype, took forever to split the bill and almost always undertipped. She waited on men who tried to cup her behind. She found that if she started at their touch yet said nothing, they left larger tips. She even waited on a few rich kids from her school, the kind with cars and endless allowances, but they pretended not to recognize her. She was like a bad smell, a fart, and the only polite thing was to ignore her. She preferred the men who reached for her behind.

She was surprised that anyone wanted to touch the waitresses, given the drabness of their uniforms. They were brown velour, short sleeved and V-neck, perfectly straight, with fabric belts. The thinnest girls appeared shapeless in them, while the girls with shapes looked like bulging sacks of potatoes tied at the middle. Helen could not understand why Angela wanted the girls to be so drab and clunky, clashing with the dining room. It was rumored that Angela had landed her then-married husband-to-be while waitressing at his diner, where the girls wore short skirts and tight blouses. But could Angela really think that the young women here wanted gloomy Gus just because she had?

Then Helen met Angela’s son, Billy.

“Watch out, new girl,” said Rhonda.

“I’m not interested,” Helen said. She wasn’t. Oh, Billy was very good-looking. He had dark hair and eyes, a charming manner. But she didn’t have time for a boyfriend. A job and school were all she could handle, and she was barely handling school. Her grades had dipped here and there, just as her father had hoped.

“Doesn’t matter if you’re interested, only if he’s interested.”

“That’s illegal.”

Rhonda laughed. “Yeah, well, enjoy taking it to the Supreme Court while you’re out of a job. Look, the best way to handle it is to give him what he wants right away, and he’ll leave you alone. If he gets too interested, his mom gets mad and you’ll be history.”

“I’m not interested,” Helen repeated.

“Well, then you’re really fucked.”

Rhonda’s dire warnings seemed off base. Billy was kind to Helen, nothing more. He was being trained to manage the restaurant, at least according to Billy and his mother. His stepfather seemed less convinced of this plan. He had a point: Billy came and went as he pleased. For a day or two, he would appear in a nice suit. Then several days would go by when he wasn’t seen at all. Or he would show up late in a shift “to go over the receipts.” This involved shoving a few twenties into the pocket of his very tight, acid-washed jeans. They were fashionable— at that time, in that town— and Helen wouldn’t have minded having her own pair, but she couldn’t afford them. She could pay for them, but she couldn’t afford having her father notice them. She had realized early on that the advantage of being a waitress was that her father couldn’t know how much she made in tips. She’d been squirreling money away ever since. But he would get suspicious if she showed up with anything new and expensive. So while she hid money in books and soap boxes and in the toes of her shoes— never all the money in one place, because then she couldn’t be wiped out— she could never figure out what to spend it on that wouldn’t catch her father’s eye.

At any rate, she thought Rhonda was wrong. Billy had no use for her. There were other, prettier girls at the restaurant, closer to Billy’s age and therefore with more freedom to date. He helped her at times, but that was in keeping with his need to learn the ropes. For example, the restaurant had a “signature” dessert, which was nothing more than Marshmallow Fluff with syrupy canned strawberries worked through it and then spooned on top of ice cream. The Marshmallow Fluff, purchased in bulk, often arrived frozen, and Helen found it impossible to stir the strawberries through it in order to achieve the even color and distribution that Angela required. Angela was always more interested in how things looked than in how things tasted.

“Let me show you,” Billy said when he found her struggling with the mix one day. He led her to the sink, instructed her to wash her hands up to the elbows, almost to the hems of the cap sleeves on her ugly uniform.

Billy then rolled up his sleeves. He had nicely muscled arms for a slender man. Olive skin, which was odd, given how fair his mother was. Big brown eyes. Helen still didn’t have aspirations toward him. He was twenty-three, he drove a nice car, he wasn’t looking for some silly high-school girl who was still forbidden to date despite being almost seventeen. Besides, Angela wouldn’t like it, and Angela, not Billy, made the schedule. Helen wanted to get weekend evening shifts, which meant the best tips— and, better still, being out of the house on the long weekend evenings, when Hector was often at his surliest.

“Do what I do,” Billy said, then plunged his arms into the fluff, almost up to the elbows. “It’s the only way,” he said, seeing how startled she looked. “That’s why you wash up so thoroughly. You have to squeeze it through. It’s a little like milking a cow. I bet you did that, right? On the field trip to Wentworth Dairy? Every kid in this town has milked a cow at Wentworth.”

This was true, and the acknowledgment of this insubstantial bit of shared history made her like him. It was unusual for people to include Helen in things, to point out what they shared. People always seemed more interested in cutting her out.

Timidly, she followed. It was cold; she suppressed a squeal. Billy, after all, hadn’t squealed. But it didn’t feel awful, and after a bit the sensation was oddly pleasant. “You can squeeze too hard,” Billy said, “and then you’ll break up the berries. You have to massage it.”

Deep in the fluff, she felt his fingers brush hers. A mistake, she thought, but he twined his fingers in hers before moving on, looking deeply in her eyes. At that moment Rhonda came into the prep area, and her expression of disgust shamed Helen. Was this what Billy did with all the girls?

He swore it wasn’t. He began driving her home. Of course, given her family situation, she didn’t dare let him linger in front of the house. When she explained, leaving out the uglier details, why she couldn’t sit in a car with him in front of her house, he began stopping a block away, two blocks away, and then, one afternoon, many miles away, at his mother and stepfather’s house, which was grand and new by local standards.

“I just need to check on the dogs,” he said. “The folks are out of town.”

She had just turned seventeen, but she knew what was going to happen. She wanted it to happen, had already told the lies— she was working a double shift, she’d just stay at the restaurant between the lunch and dinner hours— to make it possible. She wanted Billy as she would never want another man as long as she lived, although she didn’t know this at the time. But Billy turned out to be the only man she ever selected for herself, for her own pleasure. And she didn’t really choose him, unless taking a job at Il Cielo was a way of choosing.

He undressed her in front of the fire in the living room, carried her into the bedroom that surely must be shared by Angela and Mr. Gus. If she were watching a movie, Helen would have found the scene cheesy. But she was living it, and she loved every minute.

For the rest of her life, Helen would hold on to this memory. The fact that it ended badly didn’t corrupt how it began. Whatever his intentions— and, in his own way, Billy did care for her— her intentions were pure, she was honest, she was in love. Later, when she was older, she would even dare to ask herself if her mother might have felt the same way with her father, that first time, but she couldn’t bear to believe that. Her mother knew that Hector Lewis was married, with kids. She had no reason to hope for a happy ending, because she had already chosen a story in which someone had to get hurt— herself or the other woman and her kids. Hector Lewis, overachiever, managed to hurt them all.

That first night with Billy, it was possible to believe in a world where no one ever got hurt. The pain was minimal, and he coaxed her through it, gentle and considerate, stopping as needed. He used his mouth on her. Later he would patiently instruct her on how to use her mouth on him, and that became his preference. He would do less and less for her. But that first night he took good care of her. It was natural to believe that she had found someone who might be able to take care of her in all sorts of ways. Was it so wrong to want that? No one had ever taken care of her. Not her father and not her mother, not really. Helen didn’t doubt that her mother loved her, but where was the ferocious maternal love that should have prompted her to protect Helen against her father? So many stories in childhood center on this alleged fact, that a mother will do anything for her child. Having a mother who fell short of that standard made Helen wonder if there was something wrong with her, if she were at fault for not inspiring true maternal feelings. Billy was the first person who made her feel cared for.

“You’re lucky he’s asleep,” her mother said when Helen came home at 1:00 a.m., hours after the restaurant would have closed.

“I’m allowed to hang out with friends on weekend nights, I guess.”

“I hope you’re using birth control,” her mother said, sighing.

She was. Condoms that first night; then Billy took her to Planned Parenthood, had her ask for an IUD while he waited in the parking lot. “Shouldn’t we keep using condoms, too?”

“You don’t need those if you’re faithful,” Billy said. She thought that meant they were going to be faithful to each other, then later realized that Billy meant only that he was sure she would be faithful to him, that he was not at risk from anything she might do.

As it turned out, he was wrong about that.

Thursday, October 6

When Heloise began shopping for a house in Turner’s Grove, she was amused by the standard feature known as “Mother’s office,” a small built-in desk, usually in a corridor between the kitchen and pantry, where a woman could keep a laptop and— the realtors always showed this with a grand flourish, as if it were truly something wondrous— the household papers, in a drawer already set up for legal-size hanging files.

“Isn’t the whole house Mother’s office?” her half sister, Meghan, once observed.

Besides, Heloise’s files could never be kept in a drawer next to the kitchen, where a child in search of scratch paper might end up pulling out the applications used by would-be customers of the Women’s Full Employment Network.

The issue of paper was central to Heloise’s life long before various companies began begging its customers to go paperless and save the environment— along with their overhead. (Heloise has always been amused by the good causes that capitalism will embrace in order to save money. Paperless billing! No daily laundry in hotels! Adjusting thermostats! But ask them to reduce their actual dependence on fossil fuel? Impossible.)

Heloise, like the best madams, keeps an enormous amount of information in her head, but she still has to maintain some financial records, and paper is actually the least vulnerable medium. When she had the basement office of the Turner’s Grove house renovated, she ended up designing her own file cabinets, then searched for the least curious contractor she could find. The winning bidder was a Polish immigrant who never smiled, although she thought she saw the wisp of one when he studied the drawings for her file cabinets. They look like old-fashioned barrister cabinets, not at all Heloise’s usual taste, but she sacrificed her sleek aesthetics for this project. The banks of stacked cabinets alternate— hanging files in drawers with false bottoms are placed above drawers fitted with shredders. The top drawer has two locks. One is a real lock, the other releases the files through the trapdoor of the false bottom into the always-on shredders. Last year Scott had worked on a project for school about reducing the family home’s energy usage, and he was appalled to find out how much power dormant appliances required. He dutifully followed the instructions, hooking up everything he could find to surge protectors, then turning them off in the evening. He was disappointed how little their energy bill dropped. Heloise couldn’t bear to tell him it was because of her office, where Audrey mans the phones until midnight and the shredders are never turned off.

Heloise is aware that there could be a raid in which neither she nor Audrey would be able to get to the files first, or that the cabinets could be carted away and opened in a different location. Still, it was the best system she could figure out, and most of the paper is benign, although a good forensic accountant might be able to piece together how her business works. If she could, she would conduct all business by carrier pigeon, throw the papers into a fire, then roast and eat the pigeon for good measure. After all, isn’t that what squab is? But such a system is impossible, so she saves what she must save— payroll, the necessary tax records, the expenditures she files with the state to prove that she’s within the lobbying regs— in her hanging files and hopes she never makes the mistake of using the wrong key.

She has pulled out her files today to go over the quarterly filing, due next week. Her accountant, Leo, is a young man, at least chronologically. He carries himself with an older man’s stooped, defeated posture. He has large, unblinking eyes behind thick glasses, and he always wears a suit, even for an afternoon meeting such as this. He has worked for her for five years, and Heloise isn’t sure if he’s ever figured out the gigantic ruse that is the Women’s Full Employment Network and its rather baffling subsidiary, The Store Unlimited. Whatever he’s managed to glean about her business, it’s more important that he be absolutely nonjudgmental, which he appears to be. The Leos of the world, single men with no social skills, are some of her best customers. If he ever tells her that he’s figured out what she does, she’ll happily have one of her girls ser vice him. In lieu of fees, of course. But so far Leo cares only about receipts and documentation, all of which Heloise maintains scrupulously. He comments on nothing.

Once he did ask about her inventory costs, but that’s because there were tax implications. Where was she stocking the items— the jewelry, the Hermès scarves, the Vuitton luggage— she sold through her Web site?

“I have no inventory costs,” she said, having anticipated the question. When Heloise can’t sleep, which is often, she uses the time to try to think of any question she might be asked and how she might answer it. “I’m more of a personal shopper. People hire me to find exquisite things for them. I then charge a percentage of the full retail cost after procuring it at a discount, sort of like an interior decorator. The photographs are examples of what I might find, not actual items in stock.”

Leo didn’t blink. Of course. She wishes he would, every now and then, because that unwavering stare makes him hard to read. He doesn’t even slide his eyes to the right or left. She assumes this is possible because he never lies. That makes one of them.

Heloise runs four businesses— two of them essentially legitimate, or would be if they weren’t used primarily in the ser vice of an illegal one and a bogus one. The legitimate ones earn the least, barely breaking even, but they save her money and reduce risk.

There is the main company, the Women’s Full Employment Network, and she is a registered lobbyist with the state of Maryland, in case anyone checks. Much of her paperwork is generated by the reports she has to file with the state. She also has to make sure she shows enough expenditures to look legitimate. She takes care of that by sending all the state pols food baskets the day after sine die, when the legislature adjourns, and making lunch dates when the legislature is out of session.

She also maintains a very discreet online store, one that cannot be found by any search engine. Cannot be entered, in fact, without an invitation and a password. There, customers who insist on using credit cards for WFEN’s ser vices can select various luxury items. These charges then appear on the monthly bills as “The Store Unlimited.” Heloise resisted taking credit cards for as long as she could, but it was costing her business, so she now allows Visa and MasterCard. She still tries to dissuade her clients from using them, saying it’s for their own good to deal in cash. But some of her customers are single, with no wives peering at their credit cards, and others insist— insist— that their wives never see the bills. These are the men who get caught. When they do, Heloise procures the item for which they have been billed and it arrives in the distinctive black-striped box designed by a local graphic artist. She doesn’t bill them again, which allows them to show their wives that the gift was always meant for them, not a mistress or a girlfriend. They then pay her back in cash.

And she records it, every cent. Tax evasion is the big risk for her, not sex. Tax evasion is what took down Al Capone. It is very hard to prove that someone has been paid for sex, the difference between an hourly rate and cab fare on the dresser, an appreciative gift. One clever call girl spells it out on her Web site: “I don’t take money, but you are free to give me gifts.” She even has a registry of sorts. The other night Audrey was watching one of those god-awful reality shows about so-called housewives, and one of the women proudly proclaimed that she blew her husband for diamonds. A straight-up confession on national television about trading sex for items of value. If that’s not prostitution, what is? But no one’s going to arrest that woman, nor should anyone. Although someone might want to give her a few pointers about what class really is.

Heloise’s other two businesses, the legitimate ones, were set up when she realized she required certain ser vices and that she might save money— and protect herself from exposure— by providing them herself. There is a travel agency, which handles booking trips— relatively rare, but Heloise likes pocketing the percentage she gets back. And she also has a very small car service, with only two leased sedans and two drivers. The drivers, who are allowed to work as independent contractors when not being used by Heloise, provide an extra layer of security for her girls. Also, if the girls are going to drink or even do drugs with their clients— and all do the former and some do the latter, despite the fact that both are prohibited under WFEN’s rules— it’s better for them not to drive. A drunk girl crashing her car while on Heloise’s payroll could end with her being sued.

Besides, Heloise also cares about the girls’ personal safety. They all wear so-called slave bracelets, designed by her, with a GPS chip hidden inside. She hates the connotation of “slave,” but that’s the proper term for a bracelet that can be removed only with a key, which the girls never carry. Of course, the bracelets won’t save them if they meet someone sick enough to remove a girl’s left arm. That’s another one of the worries that leads to Heloise’s insomnia, the nights of staring at the ceiling trying to think of questions she might have to answer.

The girls think the bracelets are funny, call them HoJacks. And when they leave her employ— and they all do, after they’ve graduated from college or solved their money problems— they can have the chip removed and keep the bangle as a souvenir, a badge.

Heloise also gives the girls a safe word, which changes weekly: At the end of each date, the girl must text that word to Heloise and Audrey. The text also serves as a time stamp on the appointment, confirming that the client has not gone overtime. Customers are screened by a private investigator that Heloise keeps on retainer. The PI, a pragmatic young woman from the city, probably has an inkling that Heloise’s business is not exactly on the up-and-up, but there is nothing illegal about what she does for Heloise. She once told Heloise that the same results could be achieved for less money just by subscribing to one of the various Internet-based ser vices, such as Intelius. But then those names, those histories, would be on Heloise’s hard drive somewhere, a de facto black book. Again Heloise is paying in part for the privilege of paper. She takes the reports and she shreds them once read. Her arrangement with the PI was set up by Heloise’s lawyer, so their transactions are confidential. No one can get to her clients— or to Heloise— through the PI.

So yes, she has gone to great lengths to do everything she can to protect the men who pay her and the girls who work for her. Everything she can think of, but it turns out that no one can think of everything. She has failed one of her girls, which is one reason her accountant is here tonight.

“Sophie’s prescriptions now cost seventeen hundred dollars a month. Your health plan doesn’t even have a prescription component, and you’re paying that out of pocket. How long is she going to be on leave?”

“I’m not sure, but I said I would pay it, so I am.”

“But why are you paying her cash, under the table? It’s the same as income, doesn’t matter if she uses the money for prescription drugs. Does she understand that? Is she reporting it?”

“I think so.” Heloise doubts it.

“Look, you can afford this kind of outlay— for now— but it can’t go on this way indefinitely.”

“Sophie’s on a paid medical leave.”

“For how long?”

“For as long as she needs to be.” Forever. For fucking forever.

“So you’re paying her base salary and you’re buying her drugs. Fine, that’s your choice. But as her medical bills start to rise, that will impact the group. You might see a big increase in premiums. If you don’t expect her to return to work, it actually would better to let her go, then use your money to cover her COBRA costs for eighteen months. Then she’s guaranteed medical insurance through one of the big insurers and the group policy doesn’t take the hit.”

“And what will she live on? How will she pay for those prescriptions?”

“She can work,” Leo says, but it’s really more of a question. “I mean, I don’t really know her, I don’t know what her skills are or what kind of education she has, but she might be able to work again, right?

“I promised to take care of her,” Heloise insists.

“Okay, but you’re putting the cost of the plan at risk. Except for you and Scott, because you’re on your own family plan. Which, by the way, now costs seven hundred fifty a month.”

“If that’s what it costs, it’s what it costs.”

“You and Scott have to have more comprehensive coverage, because kids see doctors a lot oftener. But that’s all the more reason for you to find another way to help Sophie out.” Leo sighs. “All I can do is advise. I realize you feel sorry for the girl, but it’s not your fault she has HIV.”

Except it is.

Sophie, like most of Heloise’s employees, was recruited through an ad in a college newspaper. She was premed at Johns Hopkins, very beautiful, very brainy— and very bored. Like Leo, she’d been born old, but a different kind of old, the preternatural weariness of being desired from a very early age. Boys chased her. Girls chased her. Professors chased her. She had a wealth of sexual experience, but it had provided her no genuine pleasure.

“I feel,” she told Heloise at their first meeting, “as if I have this really valuable commodity— myself— and yet I’m not supposed to do anything with it.”

“Absolutely,” Heloise said. “Beauty is a commodity in our world.”

They were at One World Café, directly across from the Hopkins campus, eating vegetarian fare. Sophie had explained that she was very particular about what she put into her body. No meat, no soda, no alcohol. She said this with a young woman’s earnestness, as if no one else in the world had ever thought of such a thing.

“The way things work, I’m allowed to trade it to only one man, and then it’s on his terms, you know? And it’s totally a transaction. Like, if I find some rich guy, he might ask me to sign a prenup. At the very least, I’d have to live where he wants to live, have his kids. Whereas if I could sell it piecemeal, I’d make so much more. It’s like a really big diamond— sometimes it’s worth more if you make lots of little diamonds from it.”

Heloise wasn’t sure that was true, but Sophie probably knew more about diamonds than she did. Although Sophie’s family wasn’t rich, she had grown up in New York City, in proximity to people with great fortunes. Still, Heloise understood how Sophie felt. Her beauty, her sexual allure, was a commodity, yet she was prohibited to trade on it. To be sure, Sophie could “make” more by marrying a millionaire than she would working for Heloise for a few years, but she would be on call 24/7. Why not work eight to ten hours a week and earn thousands?

When Heloise hired Sophie, she gave her the talk she gave all the girls: No drugs, they’re illegal. Bondage had to be preap-proved; don’t let just anyone tie you up. And it was better to use condoms, always, for everything. Yes, Heloise asked her clients to submit blood tests, but they could be up to six months old. (Most men who went to prostitutes didn’t mind taking regular blood tests, she had found. She just wished she could get a piece of that action, own a lab. The fees they charged were ridiculous.) But there were men who would pay extra for not wearing a condom. Technically, Heloise forbade this, but it was ultimately between the girls and the clients, just like tipping. And, as with tipping, she couldn’t prevent it or regulate it. She recommended reporting cash income, or at least some of it. She recommended using condoms and avoiding drugs. What the girls did, however, was between them and their consciences.

Some people would call what Heloise did turning a blind eye. But she wasn’t blind. She knew. She knew. What she had given Sophie was a winking eye— go ahead, have unprotected sex for the extra bucks! What had it added up to, in the end? A pair of beautiful shoes, a dress, a sofa? Not enough for a modest car, even. And certainly not enough to buy Trizivir every month, at seventeen hundred bucks a month, for the rest of her life, which would probably be at once too short and too long.

Leo was right: There was nothing to keep Sophie from working some kind of job, technically. Except for her raging self-pity. She sat in the little apartment she rented in North Baltimore, in one of the older, shabby-chic buildings along University Parkway. It was the same building that housed the One World Café, not that Sophie cared about what she put into her body anymore. She ate the most astonishing array of junk, although she remained thin, too thin. She was still beautiful, but it was more ethereal now. The juicy promise that had attracted everyone to her was gone.

All of Sophie’s regular clients were gone, too, expunged from Heloise’s rolls. She had been straightforward, notifying each that he’d been with a girl infected with HIV. She urged all of them to get tested. Of the ten men who had been with Sophie in the three months before her diagnosis, seven railed at Heloise, said she was running a slipshod business and that they would take her for everything she was worth if they found out they were infected. Three accepted the news quietly.

Heloise was pretty sure that the man who had infected Sophie was one of the first group, although she could never decide which one it was. Deny, deny, deny. That’s the way it goes. To be safe, she felt she had to let them all go, which she could ill afford. Ten regulars, gone from the rolls. After Sophie, new girls were told that failing to practice safe sex was grounds for firing. Barn door, meet the gone horse.

“I’ll visit her soon,” Heloise promises Leo. “See what she wants to do.”

“I talked to her not long ago,” he says.

“You did? I would prefer you not talk to the employees directly.”

“She called me. Said it was a question about her W-2, but she also wanted to know if she qualified for workers’ compensation. I told her that was only for injuries and liabilities that were part of a job, not for long-term illnesses, no matter how grave. I’m not sure even a hospital worker could get coverage for HIV— that is, unless the worker could prove some sort of negligence on the employer’s part. But, of course, it has no bearing here.”

Leo’s face is bland, so bland. He doesn’t blink. Then again, he never blinks. This is trouble, Heloise thinks. She’s just not sure what brand of trouble it is.

ALSO BY LAURA LIPPMAN

The Most Dangerous Thing

I’d Know You Anywhere

The Girl in the Green Raincoat

Life Sentences

Hardly Knew Her

Another Thing to Fall

What the Dead Know

No Good Deeds

To the Power of Three

By a Spider’s Thread

Every Secret Thing

The Last Place

In a Strange City

The Sugar House

In Big Trouble

Butchers Hill

Charm City

Baltimore Blues

About the Author

LAURA LIPPMAN has published eighteen books, which have been awarded every major American award for the mystery novel, including the Edgar, the Agatha, the Shamus, the Anthony, the Nero Wolfe Award, the Gumshoe, the Barry, the Macavity, the Strand Magazine Critics Award, and the Romantic Times Award for Best PI Novel. She has also won the Maryland Author Award and the Baltimore Mayor’s Award for Literary Excellence. In 2007 she received the Quill Award for Mystery/Thriller for her New York Times bestseller What the Dead Know. That book was also nominated for Britain’s prestigious CWA Gold Dagger.

In 2011, Laura had four books on the New York Times bestseller lists— The Most Dangerous Thing in hardcover, I’d Know You Anywhere and The Girl in the Green Raincoat on the trade paperback list, and Baltimore Blues on the e-book list. Since 2007, when she published her breakthrough novel What the Dead Know, all her novels have been New York Times bestsellers. Her books have also been on the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists as well as being New York Times Notable Books of the Year. I’d Know You Anywhere was one of Stephen King’s Best Books of the Year in Entertainment Weekly. The Most Dangerous Thing was chosen as one of the best crime novels of 2011 by Publishers Weekly, Amazon .com, and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. In the annual poll conducted by Baltimore’s City Paper, she has twice been chosen by the readers as their favorite Baltimore writer.

Every Secret Thing has been optioned for film by the actress Frances McDormand. The Tess Monaghan series has been optioned for television by Bill Haber of Ostar; Jay Cocks has written the pilot. Laura’s books have sold to England, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Holland, Portugal, Sweden, Spain, Russia, Croatia, Taiwan, China, Poland, Norway, Brazil, Czech Republic, Korea, Turkey, Thailand, Denmark, Romania, and Indonesia.

Laura is a former journalist and worked at the Baltimore Sun as a features writer and reporter for twelve years. She has been featured on CBS News Sunday Morning in a piece on her dual role as journalist and novelist and was on the CBS Early Show to discuss her books in 2005, 2006, and 2007. She was profiled in the New York Times on August 21, 2004, in a long piece by Mel Gussow and profiled again in the New York Times on July 28, 2005, in a piece on the subject of young girls’ friendships, which she explored in The Power of Three. She has most recently been on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson three times. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her family.

Copyright Page

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

HINTS OF HELOISE: THREE STORIES. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub © Edition JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780062240538