“You, too. And thanks,” he said, holding up the check.
She closed the front door without bothering to respond.
The McCabes had owned the house for a year and were in the thick of the remodeling process. She had anticipated the work being finished by now, but there seemed to be no end to it. The contractor was over budget. His bid was supposed to be firm, but he kept running into stumbling blocks. Take the matter of the master bedroom, which had looked fine at first sight. The Pruitts, from whom they bought the house, had added the new master suite, which included his-and-her bathrooms, two spacious walk-in closets, a steam room, and an exercise room. But when the contractor started work on the adjacent wing, where the kitchen walls were coming down, he discovered that the foundation was cracked; probably earthquake damage that had gone undetected until now. He said the Pruitts couldn’t have known about it because the cracks wouldn’t have come to light at all if the McCabes hadn’t tampered with the basic footprint. She and Hollis had discussed it at length and neither could see a way around repairs to the foundation.
The whole of it made her all the more anxious because she and Hollis weren’t yet comfortable with extravagance. Early in their married life, they’d been preoccupied with keeping track of pennies so the dollars wouldn’t catch them by surprise. It was only after Hollis had gone to work for Tigg Montgomery that the money started rolling in. After years in the banking industry, Hollis had been tapped to oversee the wealth management arm of Tigg’s investment firm, a dream job from his perspective. At first Lauren had reveled in the sense of safety after years of feeling financially insecure. In the past two years, his salary had soared and there were generous year-end bonuses as well. They had to do something with all the money and at least real estate was tangible. Tigg encouraged them to celebrate their good fortune. He said she and Hollis had limited their options; their horizons had shrunk in exact proportion to their scrimping mentality. He said it was time to “expand and embrace,” time to let abundance into their lives and enjoy the many perks of Hollis’s success.
To Lauren, having been poor all her life, this newfound wealth still felt impermanent. What came so easily could just as easily be taken away. Gradually, she’d come to believe in their good fortune. Hollis had hitched his wagon to a star. Tigg was a man who seemed to see into the future. He anticipated market trends. He foresaw shifts in the economy that he manipulated to his own gain. The better he did, the more appealing his company became. Friends and acquaintances were so eager to benefit from his financial savvy that Tigg had reached the point where he was turning people away, which only increased the clamor for his investment savvy.
Tigg himself lived modestly and she admired that about him. He was still in the same house in Colgate he’d bought the first year he and Joan were married. True, he had rented a large office complex downtown, but the space wasn’t pretentious. He and Joan had divorced. He’d married a second time and when that didn’t work out, he’d married again. Lauren had liked the first two wives, but she could barely tolerate the third, despite talk of the third time being the charm. His latest—Maisie—was a raven-haired, blue-eyed twenty-eight-year-old, who’d made a point of involving herself in numerous feel-good causes around town. She was stylish, loved travel, adorned herself in designer clothes and expensive jewelry. She had no children, so she had a gorgeous figure on top of everything else.
Of course, the McCabes and Montgomerys spent inordinate amounts of time in one another’s company, even going so far as to vacation together. Tigg was Hollis’s boss and it was important to him that the two couples remain close. On the many occasions when Lauren and Maisie entertained back and forth, Maisie always managed to do it better. Lauren had taken note of that. Maisie had a flair for simple but elegant dinner parties, and she harbored perhaps a wee, nearly spiteful sense of competition. Hollis made sure no whisper of distaste ever escaped Lauren’s lips. The subject of Maisie and Tigg was sacrosanct and Lauren had learned to keep any negative comments to herself.
At five o’clock, Lauren poured herself a glass of wine and did what she thought of as a “walkabout,” her personal tour of the construction to see what had been accomplished, which never looked like much. She and Hollis usually did this together, but he wouldn’t be home until seven and Fritz was at a tennis lesson that lasted until six. Given all the noise and the dust, the beeping of the heavy equipment backing up, and countless worker bees trooping in and out, she expected miraculous changes. Occasionally she’d note that a hunk of wall had been torn out or an inexplicable two-by-four had been nailed between two joists. Most of it was the same grim wasteland she’d been looking at for months.
She was relieved when she reached the wing where the guest bedrooms were located. When the time came, they’d freshen up the paint and wallpaper, but for now it was fine. Lauren and Hollis had taken the original master suite and Fritz was in a bedroom in this wing off the den. Fritz had asked them to put in a separate entrance for him, but Lauren had put her foot down. At fifteen, he didn’t drive, but he was hard enough to keep track of as it was. Once he had his license, he was going to take off like a shot. She didn’t want to give him carte blanche to come and go as he pleased. For now, he was good about showing up for meals, coming in at a decent hour, and helping around the house. In return, she’d instituted an open-door policy with his friends, who were welcome at any time. This measure of hospitality allowed her to keep an eye on the kids Fritz was hanging out with and gave her some assurance that he was behaving himself. She’d had a rough couple of years with him. At ages twelve and thirteen he was argumentative, rude, and uncooperative. She’d put him in counseling and that helped, as did the medication his shrink had prescribed. Now he was back to his old sunny self—the bright, funny boy she’d so adored since birth.
Passing his room, she reached out automatically and tried the doorknob, pleased to find the room unlocked. During the difficult years, he’d guarded his privacy, protecting his possessions as though he lived among traitors and spies. She knew for a fact that he was smoking dope back then because she smelled it through the heating vents, a phenomenon he was happily unaware of. She liked keeping track of what he did behind her back. It was a form of containment, insurance that his rebellion was well under their control. If he’d strayed too far, she would have stepped in, but he seemed to have gotten what his shrink had referred to as “oppositional defiance” out of his system. Now his vice of choice was an occasional beer, which she decided was harmless in the face of other, far more serious possibilities. His academic record at Climping Academy, the private school in Horton Ravine, had been another indication that he was on track. He wasn’t a brilliant student, but the “average” student at Climp was still miles ahead of anyone at the public high schools in the area.
She had named her son Friedrich after her father, but Hollis had started calling him Snickle-Fritz when he was not quite two and Fritz, the shortened version of the name, had stuck. The boy was of medium height, slightly built, which made him appear younger than he was. He wore his brown hair with a side part that was all but obliterated by the natural curl, more pronounced now that he was wearing it longer. His eyes were brown, his complexion clear. He was still baby-faced, though she imagined within a year his features would lengthen and mature. She had seen photographs of Hollis at fifteen and again at seventeen and the transformation had been dramatic.
After years as a loner, Fritz had recently befriended three boys who were also students at Climping Academy. One was a kid named Troy Rademaker, whose father had died the year before when a heart attack took him down. Troy was currently attending Climp on an athletic scholarship, which had been arranged in deference to his reduced financial state. Troy was the youngest of five boys in a family of Irish Catholics. His dad had been a draftsman in an architectural firm when he was stricken. He’d left enough insurance to pay the house off, but with not a lot left over, which meant that Troy was forced to fend for hims
elf. Lauren thought this was a good example for Fritz, who tended to take his good fortune for granted. There had never been much chemistry between the two, but recently the boys had discovered interests in common, filmmaking being prime.
Troy was stocky, with a buzz cut of red hair and blue eyes. His smile was goofy, showing upper teeth that were crooked and really should have been corrected by now. The second kid was Austin Brown—again, someone Lauren had known for years. Troy and Austin were well regarded, made top grades, and were generally considered all-around good guys.
The third kid in the mix was Tigg’s son, Bayard, who was now living with his father and stepmother. He’d been with Joan in Santa Fe for the twelve years since she and Tigg divorced. Tigg didn’t get to see him often, but from what she’d heard, the boy was doing well until he reached puberty, when he’d started getting into trouble: truancy, failing grades, acts of vandalism that had cost Tigg plenty in restitution. The previous spring, in desperation, Joan had sent him back to his father with the clear understanding that the arrangement would be permanent. She’d had it with him.
The sudden friendship among the four had taken Lauren by surprise. Fritz was a sophomore, while Austin, Troy, and Bayard were juniors. As a result, when the cheating scandal had come to light, Fritz was mercifully in the clear. Lauren’s instinct was to shunt the subject to one side. After all, Fritz hadn’t been involved directly, so in some respects he’d been unaffected. The incident involved what was known as the California Academic Proficiency Test, given at the end of eleventh grade to determine eligibility for advancing to their senior year. Austin and Bayard were apparently in no danger of failing, but Troy’s grades were critical to his keeping his scholarship. He’d been caught cheating, as had a girl named Poppy Earl, another of the privileged Horton Ravine kids.
She did a quick tour of Fritz’s room, gratified to see things reasonably tidy. The bed had been made, and while the covers were lumpy and off-kilter, she appreciated the attempt. She’d learned long ago that if you wanted a job done, you couldn’t then turn around and criticize the outcome if it wasn’t quite up to your standards. Fritz had picked up his dirty clothes and jammed them in the hamper. The trash hadn’t been emptied, but at least all the trash was in the can and that was an improvement over the usual chaos. The shades were drawn and the room smelled of adolescent male, a musky unpleasant scent of oil glands and sweat.
She set her half-finished wineglass on the bed table and straightened the spread. The desk was littered with books which she was tempted to reshelve, but she didn’t want to tip her hand. Fritz didn’t need to know she’d cruised through in his absence. In the VCR, she spotted a video cassette with a hand-lettered label that read “A Day in the Life of . . .” She smiled to herself because she had a fairly good idea what this was. For his birthday in March, she and Hollis had bought him what he called an “awesome” sound system, as well as a television set and a video cassette player, the latter apparently providing the inspiration for the four boys—Fritz, Bayard, Austin, and Troy—to make a documentary. Many meetings ensued and it amused her to listen to the tenor of their negotiations. They had adopted and discarded half a dozen ideas, but they’d finally settled on a topic they were very secretive about. She had been curious, but she’d curbed her natural tendency to probe. She assumed they’d need a script, but one of the other three must have been in charge of the writing. It certainly wasn’t Fritz, whose grades in English languished in the C to C+ range. Whatever the subject, they’d taken the project seriously, working into the wee hours the weekend before.
Fritz told her Bayard was editing the footage, using some kind of computer software that allowed him to monkey with the tape. He’d worked on it for two days and finally dropped it off the night before. Troy had come over for supper and afterward, he and Fritz had been closeted in his room with their heads together, laughing away like crazy. She’d tried to jolly them into giving her a preview, but Fritz said the film still needed work.
This, then, was their project in its current state. She checked the cassette window, noting that the tape hadn’t been rewound. She’d have given anything to have a peek, but did she dare? She hesitated, glancing at her watch. 5:22. Troy’s mother had dropped the boys at their tennis lesson and Lauren had agreed to pick them up at six. The country club was less than ten minutes away so she had a good thirty minutes before she had to leave. The remote control device was on the cart. She picked it up and turned on the set, then pushed the tape all the way into the slot. It took her a minute to figure out how to switch from cable reception to the VCR. She pushed Rewind and waited while the machine whirred and finally clicked to a stop. She knew she was being nosy, but she couldn’t help herself.
She pushed Play, keeping half an ear tuned in case Hollis came home early. He disapproved of her prying into Fritz’s business, but she didn’t like the distance puberty had created between them. She understood that a boychick had to separate from his mother in order to develop into a man. Fritz needed male role models and male bonding. Where she’d been close to her son right up until middle school, Hollis was the one whose company and counsel he now sought. Her instincts and impulses were 180 degrees out of phase and nothing she said seemed to carry any weight. Hollis was, at the same time, the tougher disciplinarian and the more laissez-faire in his concerns. He thought their job was to stand back and let Fritz make his own decisions. Hollis felt the only way Fritz was going to learn anything was to take risks, make mistakes, and suffer the consequences. She thought their job was to keep watch over the process and step in if he was headed down the wrong road. If Fritz veered into dangerous territory, it was their responsibility to correct him before the effect of his choices blew back on him. He was a minor. They were liable if his decisions turned out to be poor ones.
Lauren perched on the desk chair, already smiling again in anticipation, wondering what sort of half-baked drama the boys had cooked up. The first images that appeared she recognized as the rec room in the Rademakers’ basement. The camera did a slow pan from the stairs, across the pool table, to the wet bar where Troy and Fritz sat in conversation, dressed in bathing trunks. They were drinking beer, or what appeared to be beer, judging from the many bottles lined up to the left and right of them. They’d apparently been in the swimming pool because she could see Fritz’s hair was curling with dampness. Troy, a year older than Fritz, was muscular, his chest covered in a fine mat of red hair and freckles where Fritz’s chest was hairless and narrow. He and Troy started horsing around in the clumsy way of drunks. Their laughter was shrill and it was clear they were more tickled with themselves than they had any reason to be. The sound quality was poor and there didn’t seem to be any coherent dialogue. As she watched, Fritz rolled and lit a joint, taking a deep hit before he passed it over to his friend. Were they seriously smoking dope on film or was the whole scene staged for “documentary” purposes?
The camerawork was shaky. “Handheld” it was called, a technique used to make a film look like authentic found footage. Maybe the boys were making a horror flick. That seemed to be the level of sophistication they were operating from. She half expected a mummy or a zombie to appear, walking stiff-legged into the frame. There was commotion to the right and someone else appeared—a girl wrapped in a bath towel. This wasn’t anyone Lauren recognized. If she was a student at Climping Academy, she wasn’t a junior or senior because Lauren knew all the kids in both classes. The girl’s feet were bare and her wet hair was plastered against her head as though she’d just gotten out of the swimming pool as well. She reached for a beer bottle and chugged it, clutching the towel to her chest. She seemed to be as goofily drunk as the boys, which made Lauren uncomfortable even if the three were mugging for effect. Fritz poured her a tall glass of gin and she chugged half of it down. The two boys began urging her to strip. She did a halfhearted bump-and-grind and when Troy reached for the towel, she backed away from him, holding on for dear life. She was doubled over with lau
ghter, shrieking, “Troy, get away!” As the scene continued, the girl stumbled and nearly fell, but the horseplay was good-natured and she didn’t seem upset.
The film stopped abruptly and then took up again. The girl was now on her back, naked and sprawled on the sofa. She lifted herself on her elbows, perhaps intending to speak, but she was apparently not sufficiently coherent. Her movements were clumsy and she seemed to be having trouble focusing her eyes. She was well-developed for someone who looked so young. Her breasts were generous and her pubic hair was a dark bush highlighted vividly against her pale skin. Laughing, she tried again, addressing someone across the room.
“Hey, handsome. Gimme a hand. I need help.”
“Who, me?” The voice was one Lauren had heard before but couldn’t quite identify.
“Come on and give me a kiss.”
The camera made a clumsy rotation turn until Austin Brown was center stage. It never even occurred to Lauren to wonder who was doing the camera work. Austin was sitting sideways in an overstuffed chair, his legs flung over one arm while he leafed through a magazine. He was wearing his usual sport coat, dress shirt, and tie, which seemed incongruous in light of the others in their bathing suits.
“Pretty please?”
He smiled without bothering to look up. “Kiss you, Iris? No way. I’m the director, not a bit player. I’m the guy in charge.”
“The auteur,” the older of the two boys interjected.