The Other Widow (10 page)

No,
Dorrie feels like saying.
Afraid I don't have time for you today. Maybe tomorrow afternoon. Maybe next month.
“Of course,” she says. She stands up and a pile of papers slides to the edge of her desk. She catches them, makes it a point to look the woman straight in the eye. She vaguely remembers reading somewhere that it's a sign of guilt not to. Or was it weakness? Or maybe it had to do with dogs.

“Maggie Brennan,” the woman says, and she extends her hand. She's young. She looks a little like Lily with her long dark hair, her brown eyes.

“I know.” Dorrie shakes her hand, a firm shake, which she has also read is a sign of openness or honesty or something. “I heard you in with Edward the other day.”

Brennan nods. “I won't take up much of your time. I just have a couple of questions.”

“Sure.” Dorrie gestures toward a chair. “Please,” she says. “Sit.”

“Thanks.” Brennan perches on a wooden, straight-backed chair. “Nice office,” she says, although it isn't, really. It has large windows and an interesting poster, but otherwise it's kind of bare and clammy. Brennan takes out a little notepad. “These old buildings have character,” she says, and Dorrie nods.

“Character, wheezy heat, leaky windows . . . creaky floors.”

“Comes with the territory, I guess.” Brennan smiles. “So. I'll get right to it. Anything unusual going on with your boss the last few weeks?”

She's pulled her chair up square with Dorrie's, so they're sitting face-to-face, like speed daters or contestants on a game show. Dorrie squints out the window and cocks her head as if she's concentrating very hard.
Well, let's seeee. Someone's trying to kill me?
she's tempted to say, and she worries, suddenly, that she'll start babbling all her secrets. “I think he was upset.”

“Why was that?” Brennan takes out a pen, snaps it open, and jots something down.

“There were financial issues. I think they were going to have to lay some of us off.”

“How about on a personal level?” she says. “Any problems?”

Dorrie squints at a gray cloud. She can feel Brennan studying her face. She shifts her gaze to a poster Jeananne bought and tacked onto the wall above her desk back when they shared the office.
Believe!
it says. “Well, that.” Dorrie forces herself to turn and look at Brennan. “
That
I wouldn't know, Ms. Brennan.”

“Maggie,” Brennan says. “Please. That's a nasty cut.” She tosses this out into the room, bending to pick up a dropped pen as it rolls across the newly waxed floor. Her hand trembles, giving Dorrie a little shot of courage.

“Excuse me?”

“On your forehead there. Under your bangs.” Brennan push-buttons the pen point in and out a few times and her hand stops shaking. The clicks echo in the silence of the room. “What happened?”

“I slipped.” Dorrie tries to meet her eyes again, but ends up looking at the left side of Brennan's bottom lip. She knows her limitations. She's a terrible liar. Too much Catholic school. “On the ice,” she says. “I slipped in my driveway.” Her office seems unbearably hot suddenly, as if someone's turned up the heat in the usually icy building, and Dorrie wonders if she's spun into menopause.

“Did you go in?” Brennan leans forward for a better look. Her face is not unfriendly. She actually looks a tiny bit concerned. “To the hospital?”

Dorrie shakes her head. “Mass General is such a— It was so icy,” she says, “that night. I just put on a bandage and—”

Brennan scribbles some more notes. “It must be hard,” she says, “being here without your boss. Sounds like everybody really liked him.”

Dorrie sighs. “He was great. We all miss Joe.”

“So you do virtual design, I hear. Like on HGTV.”

“Just like.” Dorrie smiles. “I follow up, make sure the clients are happy. Plus, I was being trained to take Francine's place in finance when she retires. I'd just started when Joe—when Mr. Lindsay . . . Actually, Maggie, I really need to get back to my—”

“Of course.” Brennan stands up. “Thanks. And good luck, Dorrie.”

“You, too.” Dorrie stares at a stack of papers, runs her thumb along the edges.

“You think of anything, give me a call.” Brennan places a card, face up, on the desk. “Anything at all. Oh,” she says from the doorway. “You've got some—”

Dorrie's heart stops.

“You've got some oil or something on your boot there.”

“Oh.” Dorrie rubs at the greasy blob with a tissue, blurs it into a large mess across her boot. “Right. For some reason there was a puddle of oil in Joe's old parking space. I must've stepped in it this morning on my way to the elevator. Actually—” She's babbling, relieved it wasn't something else Brennan had noticed—
you've got some fingerprints there that look like a match for the ones in your boss's car, you've got blood that's the same exact color as some drops they found in the front seat, and the glove we found at the scene—huh—looks like the size you'd take.
“Actually, there was someone in the garage this morning when I got here,” Dorrie says. “It was probably nothing, but—it just felt strange. Eerie, you know?”

“Noted. Oh.” Brennan says from the hall. “You might try some Goop. For your boot. They sell it in auto parts stores. Stuff's like magic. Both my brothers work on cars, so I learned a few things over the years.”

A moment later a chair grates across the floor in Jeananne's office on the other side of the wall. The popinjay, Joe used to call Jeananne—small and chatty. Maggie Brennan has just hit the mother lode.

Dorrie makes three more phone calls. She stretches. There's been a little burst of business—a couple of teardowns and renovations in Chelsea, and three kitchens, two in Jamaica Plain, and one in Martha's Vineyard. On paper, at least, the company seems pretty solid. She yawns. She turns on her computer and scrolls through her e-mails. She's been so backlogged, she hasn't even glanced at any of her e-mails since Joe's death.

A few messages pop up. Most of the company e-mails went directly to either Edward or Joe, and the few clients whose messages went unanswered have already phoned her at the office. Her eyes scan the names. Joe. She looks at the date: January 9. He sent this on the day he died. She takes a deep breath before she clicks it open. A name and a phone number jump on the screen along with a link. Only that.

Tears of disappointment blur her vision, even though she knows this is her business e-mail and that Joe would never send a personal message to her here. Even so. She wipes her eyes and looks back at the screen at a name she doesn't recognize.
Paulo Androtti.
The number must be his. The link is probably to this guy's website, and she promises herself she'll look at it. Later. She closes out and grabs her purse, searching for a tissue to repair her blotched mascara just as Jeananne says, “I wonder. Do people ever really get over something like that? Like his wife and his—”

“And his—?”

Dorrie runs her index finger under her eyes and scrunches her chair over a few inches closer to the wall. Like tissue paper, these walls. Jeananne's voice drifts through.

“Oh. Yes. His wife and his—and his sons, I was going to say.”

“Joe had a girlfriend.” Brennan's voice is flat, but Dorrie knows she's bluffing. Of course, she's bluffing.
Please, please, please, Jeananne. Just keep your stupid mouth sh—

“I think so,” Jeananne says. “I heard him talking a few times. Two or three. He was meeting somebody ‘. . . only an hour,' he said this one time, ‘but I'll do my best to make it . . . ' ” She stops. Dorrie lets out a long breath and Jeananne pipes up again. “And then another time, he said he loved her, whoever it was.”

“Could have been his wife, no?”

“Yeah,” Jeananne says. “Sure. Maybe. Except he said it like he meant it, you know?”

Dorrie rubs at her mascara with her fingers as Jeananne's chatter flutters through the wall. After a minute or two, Brennan leaves to talk to Len in the back, and Dorrie blows her nose, pulls up Joe's e-mail for the second time. She sighs. She touches his name with the tips of her fingers and clicks on the link beneath Paulo Androtti's name, but it doesn't take her to his website as she'd thought; it takes her to a news story. She turns down the volume and leans in toward the computer screen, where a young newswoman is reporting a house fire in Jamaica Plain. “Tragic,” the anchorwoman says. She looks excited. Eager. A couple trapped inside, the woman pregnant, in her last trimester. Awful. Horrific. Investigating for arson or any foul play, she goes on to say, and then the newscast cuts to the weather.

Dorrie replays the clip. The couple's last name was Robbins. Sheryl and Alex Robbins. Curious, she looks them up on Google, finds two short articles and their obituaries, a sad and poignant picture of the couple walking a small dog.

The name is vaguely familiar. Jeananne must have mentioned them—mentioned
this
. Or, no. It wasn't Jeananne; it was Lola. Lola from the front desk. So horrible, she'd said. So senseless. Such a sweet couple.

Dorrie pulls up the Home Runs file on renovations and scrolls down to the R's. Alex and Sheryl Robbins. And then their address is typed in, along with three contact numbers and an e-mail address for Alex.

She closes her door and copies the entire page, saves it on her desktop in her “Upcoming Auditions file—empty now except for this. She's tried to keep up with her acting over the years, but lately, these past weeks, she's let it go. Lately, she feels as if her whole life is a play. She prints a copy of the page and zips it into a small compartment in her purse.

At exactly five, Dorrie grabs her coat and walks to the garage, still buttoning it when she hears Jeananne's voice behind her. “Wait!”

She's wearing the ugly coat Dorrie brought in to the office, and it hangs down off her arms. “I just saw that insurance woman again.” Jeananne's voice echoes in the empty garage. “I'm working late tonight, so I ran up to Mug Me for some coffee, and when I got back, she was just standing in front of a parking space, staring at the cement.”

“Where?”

“There.” Jeananne shuffles her coffee around to point. “In front of Joe's old space. She even squatted down to stick her finger in that—what?—gunk there, that little puddle of—”

“Huh.” Edward
had
mentioned at some point that Brennan used to be a cop. Old habits die hard, apparently. “Interesting,” Dorrie says, and even though she's still slightly annoyed with her gossipy co-worker, she watches from her car until Jeananne is safely in the elevator.

Dorrie inches home along slushy roads and pulls up in the driveway, holds her naked hands in front of the heater vent before she hurries inside. Cold sticks to her clothes and she shivers in the hallway, sorts through hefty stacks of mail, separating bills from ads and catalogs. Newspapers still in their bags are piled up on the desk. She'll stick them in with the recyclables. Later.
I'll think about it tomorrow!
she says in her best Scarlett voice and she takes off her coat, shakes the snow onto the round bright rug in the small entryway. She turns on a desk lamp.

“Lily?”

The house is silent. The air is thick with odors from the kitchen. Burnt bread or toasted Eggo waffles.

“Up here,” Lily calls from her room. “On the phone.”

“Finish your homework first,” Dorrie yells, but her heart's not really in it. She can't concentrate; lately, her brain is in a fog.

“I am,” Lily assures her. “
We
are.
Math
.” Dorrie adds a bill from Boston Gas to a hefty pile of mail. She smiles, remembering Lily mentioning a new guy at school—a math and science geek, she'd said and rolled her eyes.

Dorrie stands at the foot of the stairs, leans forward toward her daughter's room. “Did you find the cobbler?” Clearly not. If she had, the house wouldn't smell like burnt toast. A second later, Lily sails down the stairs.

“Raspberry?” she mouths, her cell phone tight against her ear. Raspberry is her favorite. Raspberry anything—When Lily was three and deathly sick with strep throat, Dorrie, hovering over her daughter's tiny bed with the heart-shaped headboard, asked her if there was anything at all she felt like eating. Lily's voice was such a tiny fevered wheeze, she couldn't hear.
Only
. . .

Dorrie had pushed closer.
What, sweetie. Anything at all you think you could— Lily whispered “raspberry sorbet.”

“It's almost dinnertime,” Dorrie says now. “Just take a bite.”

Lily gives her a hug. “Thanks, Mom,” she whispers. She points at Dorrie with the hand not holding her cell. Awesome, she mouths again, sliding back upstairs, plate in hand with not so much as a hiccup in her conversation.

Dorrie makes herself a cup of tea and glances down at her boot, the smear of grease. Goop, Brennan had suggested. She sticks her coat back on and heads out to the garage. If Goop has even the slightest connection to cars, Samuel will most likely have a jar of it out here somewhere. He's methodical. He'll have it on a shelf with other cleaners. She yawns again. Tired. She never seems to really sleep. She sees it in her dreams, that car sliding over into their lane, the tree, Joe's eyes, staring toward the window, seeing nothing. Or did he? The look of surprise on his face. She wonders, sometimes, if he saw her mother in that last instant, her hand, white in the dark car, soft against the hard edges of death, leading him carefully from the wreckage.

The garage is a mess, but somehow Samuel's shelves are in some kind of order. Jars. Cans. Combustibles. She sorts through. There it is. Goop! She grabs it, reads the directions. Toxic, of course. Samuel's big on toxins. She opens it and takes a little whiff, decides to stick her boot outside on the front porch after she's Gooped it.