The Deepest Secret

  EVE

  It’s a horrifying errand. Felicia’s the one who insists that Amy not be buried in a dress she’d owned, and so Eve drives them all to Nordstrom, to roam the aisles in search of something sweet and pretty while the piano music from the lobby drifts upward; the cheerful salesclerks, the gleaming marble floors. They spin around Eve. She bumps into a rack of dresses, sending them swinging on their hangers.

  Felicia brings dress after dress to Charlotte, who nods woodenly at every suggestion. Yes, the pale pink dress with cap sleeves and a big satin bow is darling. Yes, the lacy gown in tiered yellows would be just the thing. Yes, the sky blue dress with wisps of tulle peeping from beneath the full skirt is special. Charlotte’s been receiving emails at her business address, messages that run the gamut from accusation to outright death threats. You should die you miserable bitch! Someone should KILL you. The FBI’s looking into them all, and Charlotte’s been told to close her email account. But what good’s a realtor without a way for clients to contact her? Felicia’s argued. Charlotte herself doesn’t say anything.

  Eve stares at the skirt of the dress she is clutching, the fabric cool and silky. She’s leaving damp fingerprints everywhere. “Why don’t we take a break and get something to eat?” Sit in a dark booth somewhere, no one looking at her with any particular interest, and she can hold a bracing glass of ice water to her forehead.

  Charlotte doesn’t answer, her attention focused on turning over a dress tag to find the size. Over and over, she tries to grasp the small rectangle. Eve takes the tag and holds it so Charlotte can see. Charlotte blinks, looks up. Eve looks into Charlotte’s stunned eyes and realizes that there’s no chance of taking her friend someplace safer.

  Detective Watkins is waiting at the house when they return. Gloria greets them at the door and takes the dress bag from Felicia. “Nikki’s upstairs, taking a nap,” Gloria says, and Charlotte nods.

  They sit in the living room. Eve has no choice but to stay. Charlotte wants her. She’s holding onto Eve’s arm, so Eve sits beside her on the couch, Gloria on Charlotte’s other side. Felicia stands, her arms folded.

  “We’ve gotten the autopsy results,” Detective Watkins begins, and Charlotte’s fingers dig into Eve’s skin. “There were multiple injuries down one side of her body.”

  “I don’t understand,” Charlotte says.

  “The pattern of her injuries makes it pretty clear she didn’t just fall.”

  “Was she pushed?” Felicia says.

  “No. The medical examiner believes her injuries are consistent with her being struck by a car.”

  Eve’s sweating, in her armpits, down her spine. Her skin is covered with goose bumps. Detective Watkins isn’t paying her the least bit of attention. She’s entirely focused on Charlotte. Still, Eve’s clammy, trembling. She feels as though she might be sick. Shh, quiet. She remembers cradling Tyler as a newborn, rocking him to sleep in the dim glow of his nightlight. She thinks of his round head, his even breathing, the barely perceptible puffs of air against her skin.

  “A car?” Gloria repeats. “Someone hit her with a car. Who?”

  It had been dark, rain splashing hard all around. No one could have seen anything. But they had video surveillance at gas stations, didn’t they? Had a camera caught her on tape stopping at the exit before turning right? They’d have her license plate number. They’d know she had headed in the opposite direction. Maybe she hadn’t escaped the camera at the carwash. What about when she’d driven to the auto body shop?

  “So now you know.” Felicia’s furious, jabbing her finger in the air. “You made Charlotte take that polygraph. You made everyone think she was guilty. You didn’t have to put her through any of it.”

  “She was just doing her job,” Charlotte says quietly.

  “So you think someone ran her over by mistake?” Felicia demands. “Do you think they knew what they’d done and just left her there?”

  “We think it’s likely, yes,” Detective Watkins says.

  So calm, so even, these words of condemnation. It wasn’t like that, Eve wants to insist.

  “I don’t understand,” Charlotte says. “They hit my child and just left her?”

  “How did she end up in the river?” Gloria asks.

  “Do you think she was alive?” Charlotte asks. “My God, do you think she could have been saved?”

  No! Amy had been gone by the time Eve found her. No one could have saved her. Detective Watkins keeps talking, words landing with terrible accuracy all around her. Amy hadn’t drowned. She’d fallen to her death after being struck by a car. Everyone’s listening, Gloria with her fingers against her mouth, Charlotte’s face drained of color. A word pierces the fog. Bruises. Eve sits up. Amy had bruises on her upper arms.

  “Maybe the fall—?” Gloria says, but Detective Watkins shakes her head. Amy had sustained those bruises separately.

  Eve had grabbed Amy to her. She’d held her tight.

  “Detective Irwin will be taking over the case,” Detective Watkins tells them. “He’ll be in touch with you shortly. You can talk to him about all of this.”

  “Who’s he?” Felicia says.

  “He’s from Homicide. This isn’t a case for Family Services anymore.”

  Homicide. The word is a knife. It presses against Eve’s skin, drawing a precise line of blood. She welcomes the pain.

  DAVID

  Renée had offered to work through the weekend for him. Your family needs you. He’d liked her for that. She’s in the conference room when he opens the door to say good-bye. He’s leaving early, wanting to be home. She looks at him, and it’s clear she’s been crying. “You okay?” he asks with surprise. Just thirty minutes before, she’d been intent on her work, her head bent.

  “Hold on. I’ll walk you out.”

  She keeps close as they go down the hall. She walks a little unsteadily, but he thinks it’s not her ankle that’s bothering her. “What’s the matter?” he asks as they step into the corridor, and the door wheezes shut behind them.

  “That was Jeffery.” Her eyes are green, startlingly so. “The wedding’s off.” She steps forward and his arms go up, automatically, around her. She weeps against his shoulder. He feels her warm breath against his collar, smells the fragrance of her shampoo.

  “Everyone gets cold feet.”

  She shakes her head, rubbing her cheek against his shirt. “He says he doesn’t love me. He says he doesn’t think he ever loved me.”

  He pats her shoulder. She’d never forget Jeffery saying that. Even if they reconciled. The words would lie between them and fester. “His loss.”

  “I’m sorry.” She steps back and puts her hands to her face. “I know you have a plane to catch. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  “My whole life. What am I going to do?”

  “Do you have anyone you can stay with tonight?”

  “All my friends are Jeffery’s. Where am I going to go? I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  “Stay at my place.”

  “Oh.” She sniffs. “Yeah, that could be good.”

  “He won’t have any idea where you are.”

  “Yeah. Fuck him.”

  “I can’t promise the bathroom will be clean, but you can run on the trail.” He fishes in his pocket for his keys, presses them into her palm.

  “Yeah. Yeah.”

  When he steps outside the terminal in Columbus, the air is humid and warm. He can feel the afternoon seep into his clothes, his skin. He walks to the taxi stand at the curb. He’s texted Eve to let her know he’ll make his own way home. He’s glad he doesn’t have a talkative cabdriver. He watches the familiar skyline in the distance as they drive down the highway, all the tall buildings poking the sky, beige and brown and black.

  “The house with the gray roof.” He points, and the cabbie pulls the taxi into the driveway. The man’s got a radio program on, but David hasn’t been listening. Then Charlotte’s voice rings out over the
speakers. “That was nothing,” she’s saying, and he leans forward. “Could you turn that up?” he asks the driver, who obliges, just in time for him to hear, “Charlotte, did you harm your daughter?”

  “That woman should be locked up,” the driver says.

  The garage is cool and dark. Eve’s car’s there, but she’s nowhere to be found. He washes his hands in the small hall bathroom. Melissa’s things are all over the counter, her scrunching gel, her pinkhandled razor. He remembers when there used to be hair elastics everywhere, on the counter, underfoot, looped over a doorknob, twisted around Melissa’s wrist. In the kitchen, he pours himself a glass of water, glances at Eve’s color-coded calendar in the kitchen—black marker for Tyler’s dental appointments, purple for dermatology, and green for ophthalmology—and there in red, driver’s test! Tomorrow he takes Melissa in for her driver’s test. She’s already driving. He can remember her pedaling that little plastic car down the sidewalk with her bare feet. Her Flintstonemobile, Eve called it.

  He’s pulling the mail out of the box, bill after bill after bill, when music thumps down the street and he turns to see a small white car headed his way. Brittany and Melissa sit turned toward each other, arguing. Brittany should have her eyes on the road, but she’s letting the car drive itself. She refocuses just in time to bump the car into the driveway and finally sees him standing there.

  She straightens and reaches to turn down the radio, as Melissa climbs out. Brittany’s smile is absolutely false, and it disappoints him to realize this. She’s always seemed to be a transparent creature, and good-humored. “Hi, Mr. Lattimore.”

  “Hi, Brittany. How’s school going?”

  “Fine.” Another fake smile and she backs out of the driveway with a squeal, turns around, and heads for the corner. Whatever they’d been talking about hadn’t been about something banal like musical groups or smoothie flavors.

  “What was that about?” he asks his daughter. She has Eve’s shining black hair, her slanted eyes. She’s wearing a green T-shirt of some thin silky material and jeans with the denim distressed to white threads. Her fingernails are chewed to the quick and painted metallic blue; long jangling gold wire earrings swing as she trudges up the driveway. He loves her with an intensity that astonishes him.

  “Nothing.” She stands beside him in the garage and he punches the button. The door slowly starts to lower.

  “How are you doing?” She’s wearing that adolescent mask, his little girl who used to be so wide open with him, leaning close, confiding. I want to be famous when I grow up. Cauliflower looks like brains. My teacher wore a purple dress today. He hates to admit it, but sometimes he tuned her out, focused on whatever he was doing, fixing the lawn mower, replacing a light bulb. Now he’s lucky if he gets a couple of syllables out of her, the tiniest glimpses of what was going on in her world, the softest brushstrokes depicting who she was and who she was becoming. He wishes he could reach back in time and shake himself, force himself to stop and actually listen. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”

  “It’s okay.”

  She doesn’t want to talk about Amy. He understands. He knows how fragile life is. Not everything has to be put into words.

  The door slides down, darkness creeping in all around them. He can barely see her in the gloom. Her heart will be broken, too, by some boy, at some time. He wishes he could stop it from happening.

  “Those reporters won’t be back, will they?” she asks.

  “Have they been bothering you?”

  She shakes her head. “No, but they just make everything worse.”

  “Things will settle down.”

  “When?”

  Melissa has such a concrete mind. She believes there are discernible parameters to everything. As a little girl, she wanted to know precisely where the earth’s atmosphere ended and outer space began. If he said he loved her, Melissa wanted to know how much, without the least bit of coyness, as if something like that could be contained. So when she asks when, what she really wants to know is whether there will come a time when she won’t feel sad and confused and lost, and he knows the answer to this is no. There are events in everyone’s life that mark it and leave a permanent impression that can never be rubbed away. But of course he can’t tell her that.

  “Soon,” he promises her.

  The garage door hits the concrete floor with a soft thud. The darkness is complete, making them invisible to each other. His little girl. She could be twenty-one, thirty-one; she could be older than he is now and she’ll always be his child. He opens the kitchen door and they step across the threshold into the dim, waiting light.

  He’s in the kitchen slicing tomatoes when he hears the garage door shudder against its tracks. A moment later Eve comes through the back door. “You’re home.” She crosses toward him and slides her arms around him, puts her head against his shoulder. He hugs her with his free arm. He can’t help thinking of how much slighter Eve is than Renée, the top of her head reaching his chin. It’s not fair to compare them, but he finds himself doing it anyway. “I ran into Albert just now,” she says, moving away. He feels the loss of it. “He says he caught someone looking into the Farnhams’ windows last night.”

  “He sure about that?” Albert’s getting on in years. Ever since Rosemary’s death, he’d gotten a little eccentric, letting his yard go, keeping odd hours, and wearing the strangest collection of hats. “Could it have been a reporter?”

  “He doesn’t think so. The police found a flashlight. Larry swears it’s not his, and they fingerprinted it.”

  “We’d better keep our drapes closed, just in case.”

  “I hate to do that.”

  “We could set up motion detectors,” he suggests. She likes to keep the drapes open in the evenings, to make up for keeping them closed during the day.

  “Aren’t they more trouble than they’re worth, going off all the time?”

  “I don’t like the idea of you and the kids home alone while someone’s creeping around.” Another reason why they need to live in the same city. She hears this, too. She goes to the stove and lifts a pot lid. “Dinner smells good. What are you making?”

  “Pasta puttanesca.”

  They used to laugh at the fancy-sounding name for what is essentially a spaghetti sauce assembled in haste from ingredients they have on hand. It’s clear Eve hasn’t been shopping in days. He should run to the store, do a load or two of laundry. He’d gone in to dump his dirty clothes and found he could barely push the door open, there were so many clothes on the floor.

  “Hey, listen,” he says. “You remember Renée?”

  “Your running buddy.” She’s at the counter now, going through the mail.

  That, so simple. “She broke up with her boyfriend. I told her she could stay in my place over the weekend.”

  “That was nice of you,” she says, her distraction plain, and just like that, they slip through this thorny discussion unsnagged. She hesitates at the credit card bill and looks over at him.

  He nods. “We’re going to have to hold off charging anything for a while, at least until we catch up.”

  “What if we make the minimum payment?”

  “It doesn’t make sense. Not at those rates. We’re going to have to pull money out of Melissa’s account.”

  “Her college fund? David, we can’t.”

  Does she think he wants to? “Look, we can’t keep falling behind like this. Right now all we’re doing is paying off penalties.”

  “But I’m not spending any money. I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  “We could cut Melissa’s riding lessons.” Four hundred dollars a month, not including her gear, which she goes through at an alarming pace.

  “We can’t take that away from her. That’s the only thing she does. She loves riding.”

  “We were two days behind on the mortgage this month. We bounced checks. Maintaining two households is expensive.”

  She darts a look at him. “Maybe I can get more clients.??
?

  “You could work eighty hours a week and it wouldn’t be enough.”

  “It’d be better than nothing.” She glances at her watch. “Oh no. I should have texted Tyler to let him know he could come out.” She goes out into the hall and calls up the stairs. “Tyler, honey! It’s time!” She comes back into the kitchen. “I can’t believe I forgot. He was in there for fifteen extra minutes.”

  She agonizes over every extra minute Tyler spends in his room. It’s exhausting. She used to be so lighthearted. She used to make him laugh. “It’s fifteen minutes, Eve. That’s all.”

  “How can you say that?”

  She’s got that self-righteous tone again, as if she’s the only one suffering. It sets his teeth on edge. “You’re so focused on the minutes that you’re not paying any attention to what’s really happening here. What kind of life is it if he spends his life watching the clock?”

  “It’s the most life he has.”

  “I know how much you’ve done. I know how hard this is for you. But sometimes I think he’d be better off if he wasn’t reminded all the time.”

  “You’re blaming me for being careful?”

  “Remember Jamal, Hanna? Their moms were careful, too. Tyler will never be in the clear.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  But he does know that, and, damn it—so does she. “I can’t do it, Eve. Pretend he’s normal, pretend everything’s fine. Every time I look at him … I just see the end.” He says this pleadingly, wanting her to understand, but her face is narrow with anger.

  “You’re the one who’s taking life away from him.”

  He takes a ragged breath. “Look. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we do need to talk to someone. Let’s try that guy, the therapist you found for Tyler. You said he had some experience with this sort of thing.”

  “I can’t,” she says. “I just—I can’t talk to anyone. I’m going to go check on Tyler. He should be downstairs by now.”

  Her footsteps sound down the hall. The sauce is burning. He turns off the flame and drops the pot into the sink, where it sizzles and smokes.