All the Things You Are (16 page)

‘She can't help that. Her mom is from England or Europe or somewhere.'

‘So?'

‘So she sounds like her mom.'

‘Does her mom have a la-di-da accent too?'

‘I don't think it's so la-di-da.'

‘Law-dee-daw, law-dee-daw.'

‘Shut up, Irene, you're being annoying.'

‘Dougie doesn't have a law-dee-daw accent.'

‘Shut up shut up shut up!'

‘You're not allowed say shut up!'

And the girls walk on through the yard towards the house, bickering cheerfully, as if the wolf had never existed.

Donna has found her phone. The missed call is yet another from Claire. No voicemail. She should phone her, let her know the kids are OK. She doesn't want to mess with Danny's plan though, however half-assed it might prove to be. What did he say? That he'd ‘left her a sign.' And that if she called, to tell her the kids were OK, that they were with Danny. She doesn't want to do that, doesn't want to tell an outright lie, doesn't actually want to talk to Claire at all. She's a good mother, that's clear from the girls, although actually it's a little dubious, in Donna's opinion, extrapolating from the children to the parents. What if your parents are idiots? Surely you have the chance to survive that, and to thrive, to become your own person, with no credit to the wretches who gave you life? Isn't that after all what this country is founded on, the belief that you can triumph over your own circumstances? Yeah right, and in so many cases, isn't that just the most unrealistic bullshit?

Donna unlocks the glass door and slides it back, and the girls head upstairs to the shower, tossing their wet swimming things on the floor as they go, their little voices chattering. So does that suddenly make Claire a bad mother? And Donna a cranky aunt? She's about to yell ‘dump them in the laundry,' but she doesn't. Who cares? She assumes their parents yell at them every now and again. They'd have to. She won't. This is a house where they can come and never be yelled at, and that's how they'll remember it. As if the girls can somehow sense the wave of indulgence washing towards them, they stop at the top of the stairs and wave down at her. Sometimes, when she's with them and they're talking and laughing and goofing around, brewing up a head of noisy steam, they can seem older, seem close to grown. And then she spots them from afar, and they look so tiny again, so fragile, so vulnerable. She waves back, and finds she has to turn away. How did they get to be so beautiful?

All right, she has it. She goes to the Settings section of her iPhone, disables her Caller ID and composes the following:

You must be worried, but whatever you do, don't worry about the girls: they're fine.

She sends the text, thinking there's a fair chance that Claire will deduce it's her anyway, that this is a reply to her call, and that she'll be on the doorstep within the hour. And maybe, whatever Danny thinks he's doing, and despite the fact she'd like to keep the girls indefinitely, maybe that would be for the best.

W
hen Claire makes up her mind to go, she can go pretty fast, and here she is already, back in Chicago less than twenty-four hours after she left, at the bar of the Twin Anchors restaurant on Sedgwick Street, waiting for Paul Casey to show up. He's late, which has always been his way, and not surprising, but much less endearing than it used to be, even last week. Last
week.
It's not simply that it feels like such a long time ago, it feels like it happened in an entirely parallel reality, an alternative Claire in an alternative life. And yes, that was the point, she realizes, that was the entire point of the exercise: to be the Claire she hadn't been, had failed to be, to try it on and see how it felt and … well, there wasn't much thought beyond that. Wasn't much reality to it at all. Even as she was walking up the drive of the house last night, before she discovered what had happened, it was click-clacking into her brain, in quickstep with her hangover:
it's very nice to go traveling, but it's so much nicer to come home
. Except when it isn't.

She orders a Diet Coke – she's tempted by the idea of a bracer, a Greyhound would be her preference, vodka and grapefruit juice, breakfast of those at their wits' end, but she doesn't think she has the stomach for it – and looks at the text message again.

You must be worried, but whatever you do, don't worry about the girls: they're fine.

It arrived just after the cops left. They had stayed another half-hour, asking her about the knife, which she said she didn't recognize, which was true insofar as it was kind of generic and she never used it, but they quickly found the matching set of knives in a block in the kitchen, and asked her again, and she just repeated what she had told them. They knew she wasn't telling them everything, and Detective Fox in particular began to lay a trip on her about the children and how Claire had to be sure, even for her own peace of mind, that she was doing absolutely everything; in cases like these, the merest minutes, that was the phrase she had used,
the merest minutes
could be vital. And then they wanted photographs, and she'd managed to find a shot of Gene Peterson she'd kept.

And then they left and, stricken with guilt, she phoned Donna again. The phone went to message and she hung up, but pretty sharply afterwards, she received this text message.

You must be worried, but whatever you do, don't worry about the girls: they're fine.

Was it from Donna? The message showed up as Blocked, and she had gotten texts from Donna before that had displayed her ID. She called her sister-in-law again two or three times, but the phone went to voicemail as before. Another mother would have called the cops. Maybe every other mother would have called the cops, showed them the message. Don't they have some way of figuring out the caller ID even if it is blocked? They go to the phone provider and get the subscriber details. Wouldn't any mother have done that for her children?

It might have been Donna. It might have just been a coincidence. It might have been Danny. It most likely was Danny, she thought, and that's why she wanted the cops out of the picture: because she wants to get to him first.

‘Have you considered the possibility that your husband might himself be in danger? Or worse?' Detective Fox had said to her, as a parting shot. Of course she had, and if he was, it could well be because of what had happened in Chicago back in the day. It could well be her fault. But why would anyone who wanted to harm – or who had, God forbid, already harmed – the children have sent her that message?
Don't worry. The girls are fine.
Believe in it, and behave as if it is true.
Behave as if
– the actor's credo. Get to Chicago and figure it out.

After that, it was all pretty brisk: a shower, the last of her clean clothes, the bag she brought with her yesterday. The crime scene team were still all over the yard, photographing and forensicing and whatever else it is they do. She called Dee, and then a cab; when it arrived, and she went outside to meet it, Officer Colby, the uniformed cop who'd found the knife, was waiting at the gate.

‘Ms Taylor. You mind telling me where you're going?'

‘I'm going to visit my friend Dee.'

‘And can I ask you the purpose of your trip?'

‘The purpose of my trip? The purpose of my trip is food, and furniture, that type of thing. Clothes, for that matter. Shampoo. Soap. None of which I have here. That's the purpose of my trip.'

Claire gave Officer Colby Dee's address and got in the cab.

Dee lives downtown in a seventh-floor apartment on East Wilson that overlooks Lake Monona. Claire spent the cab ride trying to figure out how to block her own caller ID, having suddenly succumbed to another fit of the jitters over the girls. She decided that if she couldn't figure out a way to talk to Donna on the phone (and she feared Donna wouldn't take her calls, since apart from anything else, she didn't like her) she would have to drive out there again, not such a long trip but a ways out of her way. Finally, she located Show My Caller ID in the Phone section of Settings and turned it off. Standing on the sidewalk outside Dee's building, Claire called Donna – and this time, Donna picked up.

‘Hello.'

‘Donna, it's Claire, Claire Taylor. Did you by any chance just send me a text message?'

‘Claire? No. No, I didn't …'

‘Sorry. I guess I'm kind of freaking out here, I suppose. I don't know if he's told you, your brother's taken off, and foreclosure proceedings have been issued against the house?'

‘
Foreclosure?
'

‘Three months ago. I got a visit from the sheriff this morning, we have thirty-one days to quit. Or, I do. And he cleared out all our stuff. And there was a dead body there this morning, one of Danny's old friends from school. And Mr Smith … someone
killed
Mr Smith, Donna, cut his
throat
…'

Claire's voice broke now, and hot tears filled her eyes. Before she could say another word, Donna spoke.

‘The girls are here, Claire. I looked after them last week, while you were away. Then Danny came by last night and asked me to keep them.'

‘They're all right then? Oh, thank God.'

‘They're fine. Do you want to talk to them?'

‘Maybe in a minute. Let me get my act together, I'm a mess here. What did Danny say?'

‘Very little. He's in some kind of danger, he's being blackmailed, or pursued, he has money worries. I don't know. He seemed to think it wasn't a good idea for you to know the girls were here, in case anyone is watching you. I asked him were you in danger, but he didn't think you were. I don't know, I mean the whole thing seems ridiculous—'

‘And then there's a dead body, and a dead dog, and the cops swarming over the backyard of my house, a house that soon won't belong to me any more. Whatever it is, it's not ridiculous.'

Donna was silenced by this. All Claire could hear was the boom of traffic on East Wilson, and the beat of her heart as it subsided slowly from her mouth. Barbara and Irene, Barbara and Irene, Barbara and Irene. Did she ever really believe the worst?

‘Tell me what you want to do, Claire. Come and see them, come and pick them up. Barbara's coming down the stairs, will I put her on?'

Dee was approaching now, Claire could see her in the distance, coming down Pinckney. She thought hard. Of course she wanted to talk to Barbara and Irene, to hear their voices, there was nothing she wanted more in fact than to go out there and spend the day with them. But that wasn't going to get her anywhere. And if they were happy with Donna – and they always were – then that was all she really needed to know. She needed to get moving. Some of this was down to Danny, no doubt, but some of it was down to her as well.

‘Donna, I'd love to, but don't, it would just upset them, upset us all. Tell them I called, and I'm fine, and I love them.'

‘Will do. I did … send you that text.'

‘I know.'

‘I'm sorry, I … thought I was being loyal to my little brother. I should have known it would spook you. I don't really know what's going on, Claire.'

‘Neither do I. But I have to try and find out. I've got to get back to Chicago as soon as possible.'

‘Good grief. You and Dan are the same. One day you're suburban mom and dad, the next you're Nick and Nora Charles.'

Only Asta is dead.

‘Well. I can't do that with the girls to worry about,' Claire says.

‘Don't worry about them, Claire. And good luck.'

Claire will always think of this moment, waiting for Dee to cross the street at Pinckney and East Wilson, this moment when, if she had spoken to the girls, Irene in particular, they would have worked on her so hard that she would have had no option but to travel to Cambridge to see them, and then no one else might have had to die.

And then Dee was upon her, having walked the five minutes from the salon on Dayton. They embraced, and took the elevator to Dee's apartment in silence. Inside, amid the Indian hangings and Persian rugs and Greek statuary, the musk of aromatic oil and scented candles on the air, in sight of the mist drifting above the lake, Claire drank chai tea and quickly told her friend everything that had happened since last night. When she was finished, instead of telling her what she had done wrong, or what Dee would have done in her place, or what an ass Danny was, Dee simply found her car keys and handed them to Claire, and held her close, and they took the trip back down to the parking lot beneath the building and Dee led them to her blue Toyota Corolla.

‘Are you sure?' Claire said. ‘The Volkswagen is older, I don't want to damage this and fuck up your insurance—'

‘The Volkswagen is a rusty old heap. It's only fit for rural trails and trekking and hiking and so on.'

‘But you never use rural trails. You're not the trekking and hiking type.'

‘I know, I know, I got it when I was with that guy with the beard, the outdoor guy. But it turned out, I'm not an outdoor girl.'

‘If only they made hiking boots with heels,' Claire said.

‘Take the Toyota. Can't have you bowling around Chicago like some cheesehead on a day trip.'

When Dee said goodbye, she had her sad face on, for real, with tears in her eyes.

‘I'm frightened for you, baby,' she said, and Claire had to work hard not to lose it there and then.

‘I'll be fine. The kids are safe, that's the main thing.'

‘That's right. Everything else, you can work out.'

‘Or not,' Claire said.

‘Danny's not a bad man,' Dee said, her face having morphed from sad to tragic, and Claire nearly laughed.

‘Aren't you supposed to be reassuring me? I don't
think
he's a bad man.'