Silver Girl (9 page)

Connie shivered. She looked out at her front yard and thought,
What is this? Who put this here?

She looked at the photo again. It had been taken the night before. Meredith was turned toward the sliding door and she was smiling.

All day they passed the photograph back and forth between themselves, and when one or the other of them wasn’t looking at it, it sat on the dining table like a time bomb.

Meredith had blanched when Connie showed her the photograph. Someone had been out there taking her picture, but where? Meredith thought it was the same guy they’d seen by the Dumpster in the alley behind 824 Park Avenue—he must have followed them all the way from the city!—but Connie made her see this was unlikely, if not impossible. It was someone else.

“The only way they could have gotten that shot of you was from the beach,” Connie said. “Did you see anyone walking on the beach?”

“No one,” Meredith said.

“Or it could have been taken from the water,” Connie said. “Did you see anyone in a boat? Or a kayak?”

“I saw the seals,” Meredith said. “That was what I was smiling about, remember? Harold had a friend.”

Connie said, “Harold’s ‘friend’ was a photographer in a wet suit. Is that possible?”

“Oh, God,” Meredith said. She approached the sliding glass doors, then backed away. “You know what scares me?”

Connie wasn’t sure she wanted to know. What scared Connie was the whole thing. Someone taking the picture, someone leaving it for them on the front porch. A person trespassing on her property. Meredith couldn’t stay here. She had to go. The whole thing was chilling. Someone was watching them.

“What scares you?” Connie asked.

“If it was just the paparazzi, they wouldn’t have left the photograph for us. They would have published it, and we would have woken up this morning, and it would have been splashed across the front of the
Post.
HAPPY
HOUR
FOR
MRS
.
DELINN
.
”

“So if it wasn’t the paparazzi, who was it?”

“Someone who wants me to know they know I’m here. One of Freddy’s enemies. The Russian mob.”

“The Russian mob isn’t real,” Connie said.

“There were Russian investors who lost billions,” Meredith said. “There are a lot of people who want Freddy’s head. And since they can’t get to Freddy, they’re coming after me.” She looked at Connie. “I’m putting you in danger.”

“No,” Connie said. “You’re not.” But she was. She had to go. Connie racked her brain. Meredith had made it clear that she’d lost everybody else in her life. But Connie had friends. Maybe she could ship Meredith quietly off to Bethesda? She could live with Wolf’s brother, Jake, and Jake’s wife, Iris. Iris was a know-it-all busybody. She had a degree in psychology from the University of Delaware and she was constantly expressing concern over others’ “general state of mind,” and especially Connie’s, since Connie had recently lost her husband and her daughter and, in Iris’s estimation, wasn’t doing terribly well. Connie would take great pleasure in inflicting Meredith on Iris, but she couldn’t bring herself to inflict Iris on Meredith. There was Toby? God, no, that could backfire in any one of a hundred ways. Plus, if Meredith left, Connie would be alone, and the absolute best thing about the past two days was that, for the first time in years, Connie hadn’t been alone.

Connie flung open the sliding door, and Meredith scurried to the other side of the room, as though she were a vampire, allergic to daylight. Connie went outside and stood on the deck. The jig was up. Meredith was here. Connie wanted to face the ocean and anyone hiding in it and shout,
She’s here! Meredith Delinn is here!
The world could tell Connie she was unstable, insane, or just plain stupid, but at that moment, she made a decision: Meredith was staying.

Meredith was afraid to read on the deck. Meredith was afraid to walk on the beach. Connie sat on the deck herself. She peered at the water. Around noon, Harold appeared, alone. Connie watched him frolic in the waves, then felt lonely. She went inside and made turkey sandwiches.

“Meredith!” she called. “Lunch!”

Meredith didn’t answer.

Connie went upstairs and tapped on Meredith’s door.

Meredith said, “
Entrez.
”

Connie opened the door. Meredith was lying on her bed wearing her bathing suit and cover-up, reading.

“Come out on the deck and have lunch.”

“No,” Meredith said.

Connie wondered if Meredith was more frightened of the Russian mob or the
FBI
.

“No one is trying to hurt you. They’re just trying to scare you.”

“They succeeded.”

“Well, they didn’t succeed with me. I’ve been sitting on the deck all morning and nothing’s happened.”

Meredith said, “Someone knows I’m here.”

Connie sighed. “What can I say? Someone knows you’re here. You know, we might feel better if we called the police.”

“We can’t call the police,” Meredith said. “Absolutely not.”

“Why not?” Connie said. “You’re scared, you feel threatened, you call the police; they write up a report, wave their guns, anyone watching us knows we’ve called the police, they get intimidated, they leave us alone.”

“No one can know I’m here,” Meredith said. “Not even the police. If this gets out, everyone’s going to hate you.”

“No one’s going to hate me,” Connie said, “and the police would keep it quiet.” But she knew Meredith was right: the police talked to the fire department who talked to Santos Rubbish who talked to the guys at Sconset Gardener, and soon everybody on Nantucket knew that Meredith Delinn was hiding out at 1103 Tom Nevers Road. “Okay, we won’t call the police. Just please come outside.”

“No,” Meredith said.

For dinner, Connie made cheeseburgers and salad. The cheeseburgers had to be cooked on the grill, which put Connie out on the deck with her back to the ocean. It was unnerving, she had to admit. She kept whipping around, but when she did, no one was there.

At Meredith’s request, they ate inside. They needed a safe topic of conversation, which meant they had to venture pretty far back. Growing up, high school—but not Toby. Meredith again unearthed the names Wendy Thurber and Nadine Dexter, and once Connie had sifted through the archaeological ruins of her mind and figured out who these names belonged to, she hooted. Wendy and Nadine had been good, close friends. They had once been a part of Connie’s everyday, though she hadn’t seen them in over thirty years. What were Wendy and Nadine doing now? Meredith remembered Wendy as clingy and pathetic, and Nadine as a stout lesbian in the making.

“Yes, so do I,” Connie said, although really it had been so long ago and Connie’s memory was so poor that she was helpless to do anything but agree.

At nine thirty, Meredith said she was going upstairs. “It’s my bedtime,” she said, and Connie remembered that both Meredith and Freddy had always stuck to an early bedtime, as though they were children with school in the morning.

“Freddy’s not here,” Connie said, pouring herself a third glass of wine. “You can stay up with me.”

Meredith said, “Are you afraid to stay up by yourself? Admit it, you are.”

“I’m not
afraid
to stay up by myself, no. But I’d like company.”

Meredith moved toward the stairs, meaning she didn’t care that Connie wanted company (and yes, actually, Connie
was
a little afraid). She said, “I wonder what it’s like for him.”

“Who?”

“Freddy. In prison.”

Connie was tempted to say something ungenerous. But instead she said, “I’m sure it’s perfectly awful.”

“I’m sure it is, too,” Meredith said. “But what if ‘perfectly awful’ is something even worse than you and I can imagine?”

“Do you care?” Connie said.

Meredith didn’t answer that.

“Do you still love him?” Connie asked.

“I’m going up,” Meredith said, and Connie was glad. They had ventured way off their safe topics.

Connie’s mind was on the phone call from Tallahassee. All Connie had to do was call the number back and
find out—
but she was afraid this new number would prove to be a dead end, and her hopes of reconnecting with her daughter would be crushed. The longer she held off calling, the longer the potential for reconciliation lived. And, too, Connie was afraid that she would call the number and Ashlyn would answer, and what would Connie say, after nearly two and a half years of silence? How would Connie keep from breaking down and crying, or breaking out and screaming—and in either case making things worse?

She finished her third glass of wine and then polished off Meredith’s unfinished glass of wine as she did the dinner dishes. By that time, her fear had all but dissipated. She checked her cell phone again. The Tallahassee number was on her display. This was the moment.

She pushed the button that dialed the number. Then she steeled herself. One ring, two, three… seven, eight… voice mail. It was a computer-generated voice, one that gave no hint or clue who Connie had called.
Please leave a message.

Connie took a breath. Leave a message? She left a message each and every Sunday on Ashlyn’s cell phone and had never once gotten a response. Why expect that this would be any different?

And yet, she couldn’t resist. She said, “Ashlyn, it’s Mom. I see that you called. If you want to call me back, I’m here on Nantucket. As I’m sure you realize. If you call me back, I’ll tell you something unbelievable.” She paused. She couldn’t stand using news of Meredith as a bribe, but she didn’t have anything else to offer as enticement. “Call me back, please.” She looked at the display of her phone, at the seconds ticking off, as if expecting her phone to answer. “Call me,” she said again, and then she punched the phone off.

She shouldn’t have left a message.

Had she sounded like she’d been drinking? She had slurred a little bit in there with the “As I’m sure you realize.” Would Ashlyn notice?

Connie lay down on the sofa. She hated herself.

She didn’t see the graffiti until she was in her car the next morning, on her way to the Sconset Market for the newspaper. It was the Fourth of July, and Connie was wondering if Meredith would want to go to see the fireworks that night. Probably not, definitely not, too many people. Then, Connie caught a glimpse of something unexpected, a color. A garish neon green. Huh? Connie looked in her rearview mirror and hit the brake as hard as she might have for an oncoming deer. She closed her eyes and tried to calm herself. She had a headache like a door repeatedly slamming. She opened her eyes.
Oh, my God.
She threw the car in reverse and backed all the way up to the house. She parked. She got out of the car. She studied the damage to her beautiful, beloved house.

Someone had spray painted, in letters that had to be six feet high, in a color that assaulted the eye, that noxious green, the word “
CROOK
.
”

Connie couldn’t believe it. She had to touch the paint on the gray shingles. The paint was still wet; some of it came off on Connie’s fingertips. So, this had been done when? Late last night? Early this morning? Connie felt violated. She felt—if she could say this without sounding melodramatic—like she’d been raped. Some depraved, hateful person had vandalized her home. He had trespassed onto her property—with extension ladders and what must have been ten cans of spray paint—and graffitied the front of her house.

CROOK
.
Meredith would be devastated. God, this was a hundred times worse than the photograph. Connie couldn’t stand the thought of telling her.

She gave herself a minute to repeat the obvious things in her head: She should have known something like this would happen. The photograph had been a warning:
We know you’re here. Now we’re coming after you.
Freddy Delinn had enemies, dangerous people who had lost a lot of money. One of them, or a group of them, was behind this.

Connie touched the paint again. It would come off, right?

Inside, she found Meredith wearing a white nightgown, sitting in a chair at the head of the dining-room table as if waiting for a banquet to be served. A banquet of humiliation and sorrow, Connie thought. Meredith wasn’t reading or drinking coffee. She was just sitting. Meditating, perhaps. When the screen door slapped shut behind Connie, Meredith startled. She looked up.

“Back already?” she said. “Did you forget something? Your wallet?”

Connie sat in the chair next to Meredith and took Meredith’s hands in hers in her best imitation of a grief counselor. She had known this person since she was a child, since before rational thought or lasting memory. She had never imagined having to tell her something like this.

“I have to call the police,” Connie said.

Meredith clenched her jaw. She nodded, though barely.

“Someone vandalized the house,” Connie said. She tried to swallow, but her mouth was a sandbox. She was parched, hung over, heartsick. Her house! If Wolf had been alive to see this…

“What?” Meredith asked. Her hands were small and very cold.

“Green paint, big letters.”

“What does it say?” Meredith asked.

“Crook.”

Meredith hid her face in her hands. “Oh, God,” she said.

Connie rubbed her back. She was tiny and frail. But no. She
wasn’t
frail, and neither was Connie. “So I’m going to call the police.”

“Okay,” Meredith said.

Connie had thought they would send a lackey in a squad car, someone to witness the damage and write up a cursory report, especially since it was a holiday, but the chief of police came himself. He was a pleasant-looking middle-aged man with a short haircut, brown going gray around his ears. He was tall and impressive in his white uniform shirt, his crisp black pants, radio on his hip. When he climbed out of his car, he greeted Connie first, very kindly keeping his eyes off the vandalism.

“Mrs. Flute?” he said. “I’m Ed Kapenash, chief of police.”

“Nice to meet you,” she said.

Then he regarded the house. “Wow.”

“I know,” Connie said.

The chief, too, seemed most immediately interested in touching the paint. “The good news is that this appears to be water based, which is lucky for you. In the city, they have all kinds of nasty oil-based paints that never come out. You’d literally have to reshingle your house to have this gone. As it is, I can give you the name of a good power washer. I can pull some strings and see if I can have him out here today, assuming he hasn’t gone fishing or to the beach with the rest of the world.”