Cut to the Quick (19 page)

“Kaitlyn meant well, Nan.” Wes held out his hands, appealing to her. “It wasn’t as bad as Emily is making it out.”

Emily leaned toward her father, her face red, the tears building. “You don’t understand, Dad!” She swatted the dress. “I
hate
this dress. I
hate
you for making me wear it.” The tears flew from her eyes as she ran out, and they heard her footsteps pounding on the stairs to her bedroom.

Adolescence, in addition to filling out Emily’s figure,
had awakened a previously hidden talent for high drama.

Wes frowned in the direction Emily had fled. “I don’t know what’s gotten into her lately.”

Vining hiked her shoulders as if it should be obvious. “She’s a fourteen-year-old girl. And you, Dad, made it worse by picking sides.” She wagged her index finger. “Furthermore, it was insensitive and just plain wrong for Kaitlyn to insinuate that the dress Em and I bought was tacky.”

“For the last time, she never said tacky.”

Vining looked at him with incredulity. “There you go again.… And who the hell is Kaitlyn, former Supercuts hairstylist from a lower-middle class neighborhood in West Covina, daughter of a corrugated-cardboard-factory foreman and a part-time home-care worker, to put on airs? We’re
all
poor white trash. Kaitlyn can bleach her hair, but those roots will keep coming back, even if she can afford to stay at the Four Seasons.”

She brushed him aside and headed out the door.

“Nan, don’t start anything,” Wes said with alarm. “It’s just a dress.”

She turned back, her hand on the doorknob, and leveled a gaze at him.
“Just a dress.”
She grunted with frustration.

The brand-new Mercedes SUV parked at the curb still had the dealer plates.

Vining distributed warm greetings. “Hello, Kaitlyn. Hi, Kyle and Kelsey. Aren’t you two cute?”

She had to admit that the boys were adorable. “Look how big you are. Did you have a good time on your trip? Did you really? How fun. Hey, Kaitlyn, could I speak with you for a minute?”

“Sure, Nan.”

“Could you step out of the car, please?” Vining’s tone
conveyed that it wasn’t a request. She didn’t wait for a response, but walked a few yards away and stood with her hands on her hips.

Kaitlyn seemed baffled but climbed out of the car.

She had an attractive face that at first glance looked prettier than it was due to skillful hairstyling and makeup. Vining and she were nearly the same height, but Vining outweighed her by twenty pounds of muscle earned from serious weight-lifting at the gym. Kaitlyn’s workouts seemed to focus on keeping her figure reed thin. Her arms looked liked tanned pencils. Vining thought she was even thinner than the last time she’d seen her, which hardly seemed possible. She was seven years younger than Vining, but her face looked gaunt.

Vining could have broken her in half, and had enjoyed many such fantasies in the early years, when Kaitlyn was whispering into Wes’s ear while Vining was struggling to make ends meet and put food on the table. Vining’s raging flames of resentment had cooled over the years, but she still had no use for Kaitlyn and her ilk. Yeah, she had a chip on her shoulder, but she’d earned it, every gram of it. She’d love to see one of them try to knock it off.

Now, not content to simply spend Wes’s money and be happy, Kaitlyn had again dug the heel of her designer shoe–clad foot into Vining’s business.

“Cute shoes.” Kaitlyn pointed at Granny’s jeweled flip-flops on Vining’s feet.

“Thanks.”

Kaitlyn tugged at her halter dress, which had a plunging neckline. Figure-revealing clothing seemed to be the clan uniform. Then Vining noticed something different. Cleavage. A lot of it. Kaitlyn had had her boobs enlarged. How had Emily missed passing on that gossip?

Kaitlyn noticed what had attracted Vining’s rude attention.

“Oh … Guess you haven’t seen these yet.” Kaitlyn cradled her breasts in a manner that Vining thought she would never have considered before the enhancement. The inorganic material somehow put them in the public domain, a commercial product to be prodded and admired, like a nicely marbled rib eye.

“Wes bought them for my thirtieth birthday.”

“But you just turned twenty-eight.”

“I know, but after two kids … I needed it for my self-esteem.”

Vining never knew quite how to respond to declarations of plastic surgery. “Ah, very nice.” It seemed to work. “Hey, Kaitlyn, look. Regarding Emily and this dress issue—”

“I didn’t mean any—”

“I don’t care—”

Kaitlyn burst into tears.

Vining took her tears in stride. She’d made bigger and meaner people cry.

Kaitlyn turned her back to the house and car and began sobbing.

Vining wasn’t completely callous to the woman’s obvious distress. She put her hand on her shoulder. “Kaitlyn, what’s going on?”

Kaitlyn choked out a sob while trying to speak, so Vining wasn’t sure she’d heard her correctly. She hoped she hadn’t.

“Say again …”

“Wes is having an af—” Kaitlyn clapped her hand over her mouth but soon tried again. “He’s sleeping with this woman he’s building a house for.”

Vining was stunned. Wes was up to his old tricks again. She had always thought Wes’s infidelity was her fault. Now she saw that it was a character flaw in him. Even the implacable sprite inside her couldn’t gloat over this news.
She realized that she was probably the only one Kaitlyn had confessed this to. Maybe the only one she could tell. Who else would fully grasp the tragedy in all its colors and not blab the news around her social circle?

“I’m sorry, Kaitlyn. What an asshole …” Vining hugged her. She wondered if Wes was stupid or arrogant enough to leave Kaitlyn. She hoped practical concerns would make him think with his head instead of his crotch. He’d have to pay child support for three children and likely alimony to Kaitlyn.

“Come on, woman.” Vining held Kaitlyn upright with her hands on her shoulders. “Your children are watching.”

“I’m sorry for breaking down.”

“It’s all right. Does he know you know?”

“I confronted him when we were away.”

Vining raised an eyebrow. That accounted for the excessive shopping. Here she’d been having her own pity party about having to deal with human carnage while they were lounging by the pool at a five-star hotel. One never knew what went on behind closed doors.

“Nan, I didn’t mean to hurt Emily’s feelings.”

Vining wasn’t sure how anger against Wes got translated into an attack on a teenager’s dress, but she responded, “Apology accepted.”

Wes came out of the house and walked toward the car. “Ready to go?” He attempted cheerfulness, but the look of trepidation he gave the two women, one of whom had obviously been crying, suggested he felt the wind from the guillotine blade speeding down.

Back inside the house, Vining sought Emily out in her room.

The girl was in her pajamas, the dress thrown over a chair.

Vining didn’t rag her about not hanging it up. “It is a pretty dress. It’s a sophisticated look for you. Kaitlyn meant well.”

“Actually, I like it,” Emily confessed. “I just wanted to wear the one we bought, and I didn’t appreciate Kaitlyn’s attitude.”

“Well, hon, Kaitlyn’s stressed right now.”

“Something’s going on between her and Dad, isn’t it?”

There was no hiding anything from Em.

“She’s dealing with some things.”

Emily picked at the appliquéd pattern along the dress hem. “Why is he like that?”

“Let’s talk about this tomorrow.” Vining didn’t want to talk about it, and harbored a foolish hope that Emily would forget, knowing full well that she wouldn’t.

She kissed her daughter on the forehead and headed for bed.

Vining got ready for bed, but was too wired to sleep. She poured a glass of milk, grabbed a box of vanilla wafers, her favorite one-after-the-other cookie, and curled up in Granny’s favorite spot, the La-Z-Boy recliner in the TV room. She clicked on the classic movie channel and covered up with a chenille throw. After a while, she fell asleep watching an old movie about a murder,
A Place in the Sun
.

SEVENTEEN

M
ark Scoville
was in Pasadena earlier than he needed to be. He wasn’t sure what he was going to accomplish, but here he was. All too often lately, he felt like a voyeur in his own life, spectator rather than participant, impotently standing on the sidelines, watching what might well turn out to be, he feared, a train wreck. The whole mess had probably started with gambling. But then his drinking fueled his gambling, so maybe it had started with alcohol. It was a chicken-or-egg dilemma, weakness taking nourishment from weakness.

In some ways he was living out his destiny: His father’s perennial fuckup son had
really
fucked up. Once and for all. Amen.

He’d spent the morning at his office, following up on mundane tasks already being attended to by his efficient staff. The day-to-day business ran well without him. He had mastered one skill at which his father was inept: delegating. He was the big-picture guy, in charge of overarching decisions. As such, plus the fact that he was finding it impossible to concentrate or sit still, he decided to make the rounds of his local billboard faces, to make sure none had been hit with graffiti or were covered by trees or other obstructions. He’d also scout new locations. The billboard industry was notorious for squatting—illegally putting up billboards without the
required permission or permits, collecting advertiser rent until the local city agencies discovered and acted upon the trespass. It had been a fun, father/son activity when old Ludlow was alive, heading out in the middle of the night with a crew.

Scoville had set off in the early afternoon intending to be in Pasadena to attend Bowie Crowley’s reading and book signing that night.

After a few hours driving around, he thought about heading to one of the Indian casinos out on the edge of civilization, but didn’t want to get stuck in drive-time traffic on the way back. He disliked those casinos, filled with Asians and Latinos, and considered it only out of desperation, like calling a therapist or an old friend whom he’d left on bad terms. Drinking, however, was more flexible. While surveying some of his billboard faces in the San Gabriel Valley, he’d stopped in a couple of bars, winding up in a Pasadena haunt of Oliver Mercer’s where they’d raised a glass to the success of their partnership.

Mindful not to overdo, Scoville only drank Grey Goose and tonic, topping off his drink with more tonic water and ice. He wanted only to take the edge off. Keep his thoughts, swirling like toxic free radicals, from creating a deadly chain reaction.

With time yet to kill, he found himself at the last place he wanted to be—Mercer’s house. Meandering through Pasadena, he’d come upon the Colorado Street Bridge, from which he picked out the house on the ridge beyond the freeway. While filled with dread at the thought of seeing the murder house, his car almost seemed to take him there against his own volition. The yellow barricade tape across the locked driveway gate and around the surrounding hedges warned:
POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS
. The bright plastic tape jarred him more than the
images in the media of the blanket-draped corpses being rolled out.

He wasn’t the only one there. A ghoulish driver had been bold enough to park in the driveway in front of the gate. A man posed a woman and two children for a photo with the house in the background. A couple of punks crossed the tape and jumped onto the bottom crossbar of the gate. They debated hoisting themselves over it.

A young man and woman in uniform carrying handheld radios exited a dark sedan parked across the street. A patch on their sleeves said “Cadet.” They looked like college students, the same age as the pranksters on the gate.

The family taking pictures didn’t need to be asked twice. Giggling for having been caught, they scurried to their car and left.

The female cadet ordered the pranksters, “Come down off the fence.”

“What are you? A girl scout?” one of them joked.

She held up the two-way. “I’ll have a patrol car here in two minutes. So unless you want to be arrested for trespassing, I’d advise you to leave.”

They did, piling into a high-end SUV, the noise from their squealing tires their final rebellious act.

The cadets returned to their car, parked in the shade of a tree.

Scoville got out of his Porsche 911 Carrera 4S. He crossed the street and got as close as the barrier tape would allow. He knew the cadets were watching, but he wasn’t going to do anything. He just wanted to see the house one last time.

He’d always thought the minimalist structure looked like a shoebox with a second shoebox standing on end beside it. A narrow row of windows lined the first story.
A large round window was embedded near the top of the tower. Precisely trimmed vines cascaded over the roof. A flagpole atop the tower was barren. The exterior was gray on gray, and the interior, Scoville knew, was shades of white. The only color was provided by Mercer’s copious art collection.

Scoville had been inside three times. Twice to pick Mercer up before heading to a meeting in downtown L.A., once for cocktails before dinner—an effort at team-building by the new business partners. That’s when he and Dena had met Lauren Richards. Of course Mercer had warned Scoville prior to the dinner that, while he liked Lauren a lot and she was a great gal, inviting her didn’t mean he was
serious
about her. That had caused Dena to dislike Mercer before she’d set eyes on him.

Standing in the street, his hands limp at his sides, the day’s heat stored in the asphalt radiating through the soles of his loafers, Scoville’s mind willfully skirted around the Grey Goose and tonic fog and went to the last place he wanted to go—inside that house. A kaleidoscope of images about what had happened and what might have happened swirled even with his eyes wide open. He shook his head to stop them, but they kept on, the lights spinning in hues of flesh, blood, and bone.

He vomited in the street.

He staggered to his car, fell against it with his hands on the hood, and retreated when the hot steel burned him. Veering away, he grappled with the car door, got it open, and plopped onto the driver’s seat, his feet in the street. He looped his arm over the steering wheel to get his bearings. Again feeling nauseated, he flopped forward with his head between his knees, upchucking until he was dry heaving.