Authors: Kimberly Belle
“Give him some time, Abigail. He’s got a lot to work through. Big, life-changing issues. He’s going to have to work through them before he can move forward with you or anyone else.” She pauses to give me a kind smile. “He’ll come around.”
I want to tell her she is being overly optimistic. That his face, the way he ducked his head and avoided my eyes this morning in Eagle Rock, made things more than clear. That I, myself, betrayer of trust and bearer of bad news, am one of the issues Gabe must work through. That no amount of space or time could heal the hole learning the truth must have ripped through his heart. I want to tell her all of this, but I don’t, mostly because I so profoundly, desperately, painfully want to believe her.
Mom pats my arm as if she understands. “My turn?”
I nod and give her a shaky laugh. “Please, distract me.”
“Okay. Your uncle Chris is a sneaky son of a bitch and a pompous ass. How’s that for distraction?”
Considering the fact that Mom never cusses, pretty damn effective. My tears dry up with the shock of it. “Are you referring to the tail Chris put on me? The one who came after me and Rose?”
It’s not a long stretch to make. When my father refused to claim Members Only man as his tail, that left just one other general he could belong to.
Mom nods. “Yes, and that phone call from you and Rose almost sent your father over the edge. But I’m also talking about the transcript. Both things had nothing to do with you, and everything to do with Chris and your father. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
I think about her words for a beat or two, but it doesn’t take much longer for the meaning to drop. “So by getting me involved, Chris was sending Dad a message?”
“Bingo. Your father still has a lot of important people’s ears, and Chris wanted him to back off, to let him handle the Armstrongs. From the start, Chris has been the motor behind this whole mess. I swear, that man would still be running all over town, hawking Zach’s story as his own personal PR campaign if your father hadn’t stopped him. That memo of his was effective in stopping Chris, but it came with a whole host of unintended consequences.”
“Like early retirement?” I think of how it came up out of nowhere, how he explained it away with a wish to go on trips he never took, how ever since he whiles his days away by moving bushes around the backyard.
“Like early retirement,” Mom confirms. “He didn’t have much of a choice after that memo.”
An overwhelming sadness surges in my chest. My father didn’t just sacrifice his reputation for Zach Armstrong, he sacrificed the career he loved, and walked away from the organization he’d spent his entire life serving.
Talk about duty, honor, country.
“The truth was supposed to be the end,” I say, reaching for my napkin to staunch a fresh wave of tears. “It was supposed to give everybody closure.”
Mom sighs, loud and long. “Sweetheart, that’s what makes a tragedy a tragedy. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, only heartbreak. The only thing you can do once the ground stops shaking and the waters recede is try to save whoever’s left.”
27
The next few days are a blur. I barely eat, I sleep in fits and starts, I lose all sense of time. I cry until I think I have no more tears to shed, and then I cry some more. I stare at my phone, which lights up often but with all the wrong numbers. The digits on my voice mail and text icons climb well into the forties. I ignore all of them.
But I do finish the bathroom.
I work like a woman possessed, grouting the tile, installing the vanity, cutting and fitting the moldings. I seal, I sand, I paint. I hang towel holders and toilet roll holders and mirrors, put down candles and soaps, mop and scrub and polish until fatigue burns like cinders in every inch of my body. And then I peel off my filthy clothes and stand under the showerhead for what feels like a week, until my skin is wrinkled and red, until the water turns lukewarm, then cool, then frigid, until my teeth are chattering hard enough to chip a filling.
A door slams, and Mandy’s voice floats up the stairs. “Abigail?”
I shut off the water, wrap my shivering body in a towel. “Up here.”
Her heels make dull thwacks on the hallway hardwoods, pausing every now and then to check a room, then finally, stepping through the bathroom door. She’s still in her coat, still clutching the stack of mail she must have pulled from my mailbox, a good week’s worth of flyers and catalogs and envelopes, to her chest.
She takes me in, shivering and wet and dripping onto my brand-new bath mat. “You do know I called you, like, a thousand times, right?”
I nod.
“And that I left increasingly frantic voice mails, the last of which saying I was on the way to the police station to file a missing-persons report?”
I duck my chin into the terry-cloth towel.
“You didn’t listen to them. Of course you didn’t.” She sighs, tossing the mail onto the sink. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She knows, of course, about Gabe and me, about my growing feelings for him, about how we found Ricky and were in touch with Graciela. I told her everything, all the way up to the morning that Gabe and I motored down to Portsmouth. The rest—what happened with Ricky, with Nick and Zach—is not my secret to tell.
I shake my head.
She shrugs as if she couldn’t care either way, but I can tell it’s a front. Mandy believes in doing things, fixing things, changing things. Whatever things I don’t
tell
her, she can’t help me mend. She doesn’t like it, but she lets it go.
She focuses her attention on my bathroom instead, doing a slow loop around the room, admiring the sparkling tile and inhaling the new-paint smell, running her fingers over the white porcelain of my sink, the walls, the brushed nickel hardware. And then she’s standing back in front of me, looking impressed.
“You did all this yourself?”
“All except the plumbing and the shower.” I gesture to the shower pan Gabe told me how to build, tucked behind a thick plate of glass jutting up from the ledge. He was right; it
is
perfect. The height of the lip, the slight pitch of the floor, the way the water rolls right into the drain. “That was his idea.”
Mandy gives me an I’m-not-touching-that-one look, gestures to the first thing her gaze lands on. “I like the pebble backsplash. Nice touch.”
“Thanks.” I try to sound as if I mean it, but my voice is dull and detached, kind of like Gabe’s
hey
. It slices through my mind, reminding me that he still hasn’t called, still hasn’t texted, still hasn’t
anything
, and I wince.
Mandy shakes her head, and she looks at me so tenderly it makes my eyes sting. “Throw on some clothes and meet me downstairs.”
“Where are we going?”
She turns and disappears out the door, calling out from halfway down the hallway. “To get you good and drunk.”
* * *
Alone again in the bathroom, I notice the envelope.
Actually, scratch that. It’s not the envelope that I notice sticking out of the pile of mail, but the neat block handwriting that spells out my name and address across the front. The fat, round letters, the way they tip to the left. I’ve seen those letters before. I know whose hand wrote them.
Maria Duncan.
I check the date on the stamp. October 28, a little over a week ago. I rip open the envelope’s gummy seal and reach my hand inside, closing my fingers around cool metal. A key, silver and so nondescript that it could be for just about anything, and a hot-pink USB stick. I peer inside the package and find nothing more.
If I were still a journalist, I would call this my lucky break, that pivotal moment when a story cracks wide-open. I would race to my computer, pound out a story, file it with Victoria and watch my byline light up the internet sky. Instead, I pull on a bathrobe, carry everything downstairs, slip the stick into my laptop and wait for whatever Maria wanted to tell me.
A table of contents pops onto my screen, and I scroll through what must be twenty different files.
“What’s this?” Mandy says, and a glass of clear liquid on the rocks appears over my left shoulder. I take the drink and click on the first file.
“Amateur porn.” It was a guess, but it’s the right one. The video opens with a close-up of her naked torso, then jerks back for a wider shot. For about ten seconds, the image stops just under her neck, and then...full frontal of her face, glossy lips and plastic-doll eyes.
“Is that—”
“Maria Duncan,” I finish. “Otherwise known as Maisie Daniels.”
Mandy leans in closer to the screen. “Holy shit. Her boobs are—”
“Ginormous,” I interrupt again, Ben’s word rolling off my tongue. There’s really no other word that does them any sort of justice. “I know.”
“Your job is so much more interesting than mine.” Mandy pulls up a chair and settles in next to me. “I feel like we should have popcorn or something.”
I snort and take a long pull of my drink, and God bless her, it’s a stiff one. The vodka hits my empty stomach and bursts into a welcome cloud of warmth.
Maria’s costar says something from offscreen, and it takes me a second or two to realize I understood him. This is the unedited, uncut version of the clip. No Darth Vader voices, no blurred-out faces. So Maria wants to show me who’s been financing her lifestyle. I lean back in my chair, sip my vodka and soda, and watch.
The first two are men I recognize from the social pages of newspapers. Mandy comes up with their names, and they sound vaguely familiar in my ears. Playboys, and from what she knows of them, not very wealthy ones. Maria quickly moves on to bigger fish. Politicians, businessmen, athletes. It’s like watching Maria climb a social ladder of progressively influential and wealthy men. Naked men, and it strikes me that most do not live up to their illustrious reputations. I snort and polish off my drink.
After about the fifth or sixth clip, Mandy ducks into the kitchen to refresh our drinks. I keep my eyes on my computer screen, but I’m only half watching. I’m more focused on the key, and what’s behind the door that it opens. Money, most likely, but where? And why does she want me to have access to it?
“Why are we still watching these?” Mandy says when she returns. “If we’re going to watch porn, let’s at least pay for the good stuff.”
I pluck my drink from her fingers. “I’m still waiting for Maria’s message.”
“Which is?”
“I have no idea.”
And I really don’t. Why would Maria send these to me? What is she trying to tell me? I pick up the envelope and check inside again. Nothing. No note, no card telling me what the key’s for. I go back to the table of contents, scroll through the files again. All video files. I click on the next one, working my way down the list, watching and waiting for her message, but by now the vodka is clogging my brain, and I’m having trouble stringing thoughts together. What is Maria trying to say? What does she want? What’s her message?
Message!
The image of my voice mail icon, its little number ticking up, up, up, flashes across my mind, and I sit back with a gasp.
“What?” Mandy says.
I dig my phone from my bag on the floor and scroll through the voice mails until I find the ones I’m looking for. The ones with a string of numbers my cell phone doesn’t pair up with a contact name.
“Oh,
now
you’re going to listen to your voice mails?” Mandy rolls her eyes. “Figures.”
I start with the oldest and work my way forward. “Hi, Abigail, this is Nathalie calling from Bloomingdale’s. Friends and Family starts this—”
I delete it without listening to the rest, scroll to the next string of numbers.
“Oh, my,” Mandy says, pointing to the screen. “Do you think she does yoga? She’s very bendy.”
“Shh,” I tell her, putting the phone back to my ear.
As soon as I hear her voice, high and breathy, every atom in my body goes completely still.
“Abigail, hi. It’s Maria... Duncan, in case you were wondering. Surprise!” A high-pitched giggle. “Anyway, by now you should have received the package I sent you. At least, I hope you’ve gotten it. The memory stick is pretty self-explanatory, but the other item...well, I’d really rather not talk about that in a voice mail, so, please, call me. 443-555-4303. I need to talk to you in person.”
“Holy mother of God,” Mandy says, her voice breathy and low.
With shaking fingers, I move on to the next.
“Me again. Maria. I haven’t heard back from you, and I’m starting to get a little worried. Scratch that, I’m a lot worried. Are you still mad at me? Is that what this is about? Because now is not the time to be holding grudges. Now is the time to be calling me back.” A long pause, then, “I think I might be in trouble.”
“Seriously, Abby,” Mandy says. “You need to see this.”
I swivel my chair to give Mandy my back, then click on the next one, working my way through the rest—seven in all. In each message, her tone becomes increasingly frantic, and she sounds more and more...loony. Certifiably insane. A slightly hysterical tinge to her voice, the words wild and at breakneck speed. How did I never hear it before?
Finally, I reach the last of them, this one from five days ago.
“I will not stand for this. I will not be ignored. Are you not appreciative of everything I did for you? I put your name on the front page of every news website there was. I made you viral. And this is how you thank me? Not everything is about you. This is about married men using
me
, using
my
body in every possible way, for their sick, disgusting, perverted pleasures, so stop judging me and
call me motherfucking back
!” She puffs a trio of sharp breaths that seem to calm her voice by a thousand degrees. “No. You know what? Never mind. I’m over it, and I’m over you. I want my key back.”
I’m going back to listen to them all over again when Mandy latches on to my arm and physically turns me around on my chair. “Abby, look at the screen.”
That’s when I hear another voice, a male voice drifting up from my laptop speakers, and I don’t have to look at my screen to know. I hear his moans and grunts and dirty talk, and I want to cover my ears so I don’t.
I recognize his voice. I recognize his face. I recognize everything about him.
The man on my screen is Uncle Chris.