Silver Girl (3 page)

Connie sat down for that.
A hundred and fifty years?
She thought,
The judge is making an example of him.
Well, Connie hated to say this, but Freddy deserved it. So many people had been left penniless; futures had been destroyed, kids were forced to drop out of college, family homes had been foreclosed on, eighty-year-old women had to get by living on Social Security, eating from cans.
A hundred and fifty years.
Connie thought,
Poor Meredith.

Connie was angry with Meredith for her own personal reasons, but unlike everyone else, she didn’t blame Meredith for Freddy’s crimes. Meredith couldn’t have known what Freddy was doing. (
Had
she? Okay, there was always room for doubt.) But when Connie closed her eyes and searched inside of herself for an answer, she thought,
There is no way Meredith knew.
There was
no way
Meredith would accept fraud in her life. She was a straight arrow. Connie should know: growing up, it had driven her crazy. And still, Connie wondered, just as the rest of the world wondered, how could she
not
have known? Meredith was a smart woman—she had been the class salutatorian at Merion Mercy, she had gone to Princeton. How could she be blind to the crimes going on under her own roof? So, she knew. But no, she couldn’t have.

Connie had opened her eyes in time to see Freddy, looking gaunt and nauseous and wearing an ill-fitting suit, being led from the courthouse, back to his dungeon.

You bastard,
she thought.

It was a few hours later that the phone had rung. The caller ID said,
NUMBER
UNAVAILABLE
,
which always stirred up hope in Connie, because any unidentified number might be Ashlyn calling.

Connie picked up. “Hello?”

“Connie? Con?” It was a woman’s voice, so familiar, though Connie was slow to identify it. It wasn’t her daughter, it wasn’t Ashlyn, so there was an immediate stab of disappointment to experience before she realized… that the woman on the phone was Meredith.

“Meredith?” Connie said.

Meredith said, “Thank God you answered.”

What had she done? Why had she said yes? The truth was, Meredith had been on Connie’s mind for months. The truth was, Connie felt sorry for Meredith. The truth was, Connie had been closer to Meredith than to any other woman in her entire life—her own mother included, her own daughter included. The truth was, Connie was lonely. She yearned for another person in the room, someone who knew her, who understood her. The truth was, Connie didn’t know why she had agreed, but she had agreed.

Connie had balked when she saw the throng of reporters outside Meredith’s building. She had nearly cruised on past, but she knew Meredith would be waiting for her in the dark alley behind the building and that to abandon her there would be cruel.

When Connie pulled up, Meredith ran from the back door and leapt into the car. She was wearing the same white button-down blouse, jeans, and flats that Connie had seen her photographed in months earlier when she went to visit Freddy in jail. Connie barely waited for Meredith to shut the door before she hit the gas and reversed out. A photographer got a shot of the car departing; thankfully, Meredith’s head had been down. Connie floored it up Park Avenue, although she didn’t feel safe until they were off the
FDR
and on I-95. That was when Meredith had wanted to talk, but Connie had held up her palm and said, “Let’s not discuss anything until we’re safely in the house on Nantucket.”

Though there was much, of course, that she wanted to know.

When the announcement came over the loudspeaker that the ferry was pulling into Nantucket harbor, Connie startled awake. Meredith was in the front seat, and there were two steaming cups of coffee—light, with sugar—snug in the console. Connie and Meredith drank their coffee the same way, a habit learned together at age six during tea parties with Meredith’s grandmother, Annabeth Martin, who unorthodoxly served the little girls real coffee from a silver pot.

Meredith was wearing a baseball hat and sunglasses. When she saw that Connie was awake, she said, “I got coffee. A guy in line stared me down, but he was a foreigner, I think. I heard him speaking Russian.”

Connie said, “I don’t want to burst your bubble…”

Meredith said, “Believe me, there is no bubble.”

Connie said, “You’re going to have to be incredibly careful. No one can know you’re here with me. No one Russian, no one Swedish, I mean no one.”

“Except for my attorneys.” Meredith took a sip of her coffee. “They have to know where I am. Because I’m still under investigation. Me, and Leo, too.”

“Oh, Meredith,” Connie said. Connie found herself feeling both concerned and annoyed. Meredith should have told her this before she asked Connie to come get her, right? Would that have changed Connie’s mind? And poor Leo, Connie’s own godson, one of the greatest kids she had ever known. Still under investigation? But why? Connie refrained from asking the obvious:
Do they have anything to charge you with? Am I going to become some kind of accessory to conspiracy?
Instead, she said, “I almost called Toby last night, to tell him I was bringing you here.”

“Toby?” Meredith said.

“Toby, yes.”

“Do you mind if I ask where he is?”

Connie metered her breath. She said, “He’s in Annapolis, running a wildly successful charter sail business. In the winter, he takes off and barefoots through the Caribbean.”

“Meaning he sleeps with models half his age in Saint Barth’s,” Meredith said.

Connie couldn’t tell if Meredith was being playful or bitter. She decided to go with playful. “I’m sure that’s correct,” Connie said. “He’s never really grown up. But that’s what we love about him, right?”

Meredith bleated.
Ha.
Connie felt the old ambivalence about Meredith and Toby’s long-ago relationship return. There was jealousy—once Meredith had fallen in love with Toby, he had become far more important to Meredith than Connie was; there was guilt that Toby had so mercilessly trampled Meredith’s feelings; there was disbelief that all these years later, Meredith still cared about him. Even after Meredith was married to Freddy and ludicrously wealthy with her twenty houses and her fleet of Rolls-Royces and a private jet for every day of the week, she always asked: How is Toby? Is he still married? Dating anyone? Does he ever ask about me?

“Listen,” Connie said. It was weird having Meredith next to her like this. There was so much shared history—years and years and years, and many of those years they had been together every single day—and yet so much had changed. “I know you don’t have anywhere else to go. But it’s possible that this won’t work. I’ll be miserable, you’ll be miserable, we won’t be able to mend the friendship. You’re under investigation, but
I
can’t be under investigation. You understand that? If anything happens that I’m not comfortable with, you’ll have to leave. You’ll have to find your own way.”

Meredith nodded solemnly, and Connie hated herself for sounding harsh.

“But I want to try it,” Connie said. “I want to give you a place to rest your mind. I want to spend time with you. I’m not completely selfless, Meredith. I’m lonely, too. I’ve been lonely every hour of every day since Wolf died. Ashlyn has made herself a stranger to me. We don’t speak. There was a misunderstanding at the funeral.” Connie shook her head. She didn’t want to think about that. “She has no idea how cruel she’s being. She won’t understand until she has children of her own.”

“I’m sorry,” Meredith said. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m not allowed to contact either of the boys because of the ongoing investigation. And although Freddy isn’t dead, he might as well be.”

There was symmetry in their situations, but Connie didn’t want to contrast and compare to determine whose situation was worse. Thankfully, at that moment, the cars in front of hers started pulling off the ferry, and Connie edged the Escalade forward. As she did so, the panorama of Nantucket in the morning sun was revealed: blue sky, gray-shingled houses, the gold-domed clock tower of the Unitarian Church. Meredith had owned homes in glamorous places—before their falling out, Connie had been to visit her in Palm Beach and Cap d’Antibes—but for Connie, the vista of Nantucket Island was the most breathtaking in the world.

“Wow,” Meredith whispered.

“Get down,” Connie advised. “Just in case.”

There were no cameras, no satellite trucks, no reporters—just the relaxed pace of a Friday morning in early July on Nantucket. There were tourists on Steamship Wharf and the usual crowd on “the strip”—people ordering sandwiches for the beach, renting bicycles, getting their surfboards waxed at Indian Summer. Connie drove past the Nantucket Whaling Museum. Wolf had loved the whaling museum; he had been a maritime buff, reading all of Nathaniel Philbrick’s books and everything by Patrick O’Brian. Wolf’s family had owned the land on Nantucket for generations, and when Connie and Wolf had the money, they tore down the simple cottage that sat on three acres of beachfront land and built a proper house.

The house was located in the hinterlands of Tom Nevers. When Wolf and Connie mentioned that they lived in Tom Nevers, people who knew the island said, “Really? All the way
out there?
”

It was true that Tom Nevers was “out there” by island standards. It was a six-mile journey down the Milestone Road, and it wasn’t as chic as the village of Sconset, nor was it as prestigious as owning a home that fronted the harbor. Tom Nevers had no restaurants and no shopping; to get coffee and the paper, Connie had to drive to Sconset. Because Tom Nevers faced southeast, it was frequently blanketed in fog, even when the rest of the island was bright and sunny. But Connie loved the peace and quiet, the rugged, deserted beach, and the friendly seal that swam offshore. She loved the low horizon and the simplicity of the other houses. Tom Nevers wasn’t glamorous, but it was home.

As soon as Connie turned into their long, dirt driveway (marked by a weathered wooden plank that said “Flute”) she told Meredith it was okay to sit up.

“Wow,” Meredith said again. The driveway was bordered on either side by eelgrass and wind-flattened Spanish olive trees. They drove on, and Connie wondered what Meredith was thinking. It had been a sensitive topic—long before the thing with Wolf and the money—that Meredith and Freddy had never deigned to visit Wolf and Connie here on Nantucket. Meredith had promised to visit the summer after she graduated from college; she had been on her way with her bus and boat tickets already booked, but she’d canceled at the last minute because of Freddy. And then once Meredith and Freddy were married, Meredith became wrapped up with her fabulous life in the Hamptons.

The house came into view, and the ocean beyond.

Meredith said, “My God, Connie, it’s
huge.
It’s
magnificent.
”

Connie felt a bloom of pride, which she knew she should usher away. They had learned, hadn’t they, that material things were evanescent. Meredith had once had everything in the world; now, she had nothing. And yet, Connie couldn’t help feeling a certain satisfaction. It had forever been the case that Connie was considered the pretty one, Meredith the smart one. Connie had been given a life filled with love; Meredith had been given a life filled with fortune: money, places, things, and experiences beyond one’s wildest dreams. Meredith’s home in Palm Beach had once been owned by the Pulitzers. Meredith had hosted Donald and Ivanka for dinner; Jimmy Buffett had sung to her on her fortieth birthday. It was rumored that she even had a star in the heavens named for her.

In the face of this, wasn’t it okay for Connie to feel pleasure that Meredith was impressed by the house? It
was
huge; it
was
magnificent.

It was, alas, empty.

That was the thought that met Connie when she opened the front door. Connie’s footsteps echoed in the two-story foyer. The floors were made from white tumbled marble, and there was a curved staircase to the right that swept up the wall like the inside of a nautilus shell. The house had been Wolf’s design.

Wolf was dead. He would never walk into this house again. This reality hit Connie anew in a way that felt unfair. It had been two and a half years; friends and acquaintances had told Connie that life would get incrementally easier, her sorrow would fade, but that day hadn’t come.

Connie struggled for a breath. Beside her, Meredith looked very small and overwhelmed, and Connie thought,
We’re a couple of basket cases.
Me, once voted “Prettiest and Most Popular.” Meredith, once voted “Most Likely to Succeed.”

Connie said, “Let me show you around.”

She led Meredith through the foyer into the great room, which ran the whole length of the house, and flooded with rosy light at dawn. To the left was the kitchen: maple cabinets fronted with glass, countertops fashioned from blue granite. The kitchen had every bell and whistle because Connie was a gourmet cook. There was an eight-burner Garland stove, a porcelain farmer’s sink, a wine refrigerator, double ovens, a custom-made extra-wide dishwasher, a backsplash of cobalt and white Italian tile that she and Wolf had found on their trek through Cinque Terre. The kitchen flowed into the dining room, which was furnished with a glossy cherrywood table and twelve chairs. Beyond a break for the double doors that led to the back deck was the living area, also decorated in white and blue. At the end of the room was a white brick fireplace with a massive mantel made of driftwood that Wolf’s grandfather had found on their beach after Hurricane Donna in 1960.

“It’s wonderful,” Meredith said. “Who decorated?”

“I did,” Connie said.

“I never decorated a thing in my life,” Meredith said. “We always had Samantha.” She wandered to the far end of the living room, where Wolf’s barometer collection lined the shelves. “That always felt like a privilege, you know, to have Samantha pick things out for us, put things together, create a style for us. But it was phony, like everything else.” She touched the spines of Wolf’s books. “I like this so much better. This room is you and Wolf and Ashlyn.”