Turtle Moon (21 page)

Past the beeches, and the gate, not much has changed since Lucy first came here. On that day, she was wearing a pleated skirt and a blue blouse with a round collar. She had two suitcases with her, and her long hair was pulled into a ponytail.

As soon as she walked through the door and stood in the marble foyer, she felt sick. She barely made it to the powder room, where she threw up in the pink-veined sink with its gold-plated handles.

And although that was more than twenty years ago, Lucy feels queasy again when she rings the doorbell. She decided to come here sometime near dawn; it is the sort of decision that seems shakier when considered in the bright light of morning.

When she'd left Julian, she went up to the guest bathroom and ran the shower as hot as she could, and still she couldn't stop shivering.

After she folded her white dress into the wicker trash basket, she ran her hand over her throat, where he'd left a line of raised love bites.

Since then, Lucy has thought, again and again, of her parents' final embrace in their car. She can almost taste their last kiss. A kiss so sweet and deep it could turn you inside out. They seemed so ridiculous to her, the way they couldn't keep their hands off each other, the way they'd reach for each other in the morning, at the kitchen table, still sleepy from being out so late. At sixteen, when she came to this house, and locked herself in her bedroom for nearly a whole summer, she'd had no idea why her mother had always seemed so flustered when Scout grabbed for her hand instead of the coffee she set before him on the table. A silly woman, so careless she hadn't heard the train headed straight for them.

And now, standing here, at her aunt and uncle's door, Lucy finally understands how this might have been possible; she herself had not heard the news vendor's truck this morning until Julian quickly threw the torn dress around them so they wouldn't be seen.

When she rings the doorbell a second time, Lucy expects a housekeeper to answer, but instead it's her Aunt Naomi. For just the slightest instant, Naomi doesn't seem to know who Lucy is; she has that put-upon look she always had when Lucy didn't come down to dinner on time.

"You should have phoned," Naomi says. She quickly embraces Lucy, then draws her into the foyer. "I could have canceled some of the appointments I have today."

Naomi has always been able to make Lucy feel guilty; during dinner she would stare at Lucy across the table just at the moment when Lucy happened to knock over a goblet of water or drop her butter knife on the floor.

"I saw Andrea last night," Lucy says. "Didn't she tell you?"

"Actually, she did," Naomi says.

Naomi is nearing sixty, but she looks very much the way she did when Lucy first moved in. Her hair is a little blonder, her jewelry smaller and more expensive. "But I know you never come to visit us," she says.

"God forbid."

They go into the airy dining room, with its arched windows that overlook the gardens and the pool, and Naomi pours them both hot coffee.

Lucy reaches for her cup and immediately spills some coffee on the white linen tablecoth.

"That's all right," Naomi says smoothly, but her forehead puckers as she frowns.

Lucy looks out to the garden. There is the pool house she remembers so well, and the stone path bordered by rhododendrons and lilies. Someone is already swimming laps in the pool. Her Uncle Jack.

"His heart," Naomi says. "There's nothing wrong with it," she adds quickly. "We just want to keep it that way." She takes a sip of her coffee, then adds some low-fat miik. "What did you think of Andrea?"

she asks casually.

"A big success," Lucy says.

"Well, she deserves every bit of it," Naomi says.

"Her reaction to you was our fault." She has clearly been wanting to say this for a long time. "Actually Jack's."

Out by the pool, Lucy's uncle rises from the water and grabs a thick towel.

"He had so much damn guilt about your father that you instantly became his favorite, and that wasn't easy on Andrea."

"I wasn't his favorite," Lucy protests.

"You were, for all the good it did him. Did you know he turned sixty last month? Did you consider sending a card?"

Lucy puts down her coffee cup. She remembers that her mother often wore a bathrobe until noon and sang along with every song that came on the radio. Lucy could hear her mother's deep, sweet voice, even when she tried not to, when she fled into her room and slammed the door shut. She could hear her father slide back his kitchen chair and applaud at the end of each song.

"Pardon me for being honest," Naomi says. "He idolized your father.

Did you know that? But he did what his parents told him and cut Scout off, and he's had to live with that."

Lucy looks down at the linen tablecloth. There is a vase of pink roses in the center of the table.

Naomi has always preferred pink to red, which she thinks of as vulgar.

"You never knew Grandma and Grandpa, but everyone did what they said, or else. Except for Scout, of course, who never listened to anyone."

"So what's your point, Naomi? My father's dead.

Is there some further punishment you'd like to dole out to him?"

They stare at each other over the roses. Unless Lucy's mistaken, Scout once bought her mother a chiffon scarf that was exactly the same shade of pink; she wound it around her hair on windy evenings and let Lucy borrow it to wear with a burgundy jumper.

"No," Naomi says thoughtfully. "I just wish he'd never existed in the first place."

The glass doors slide open and Jack comes in, wearing a long terry-cloth robe.

"I don't believe my eyes," he says. "Lucy?"

Lucy rises and goes to kiss his cheek. He tastes like chlorine and suntan lotion.

"I saw Andrea last night," she tells him.

"Ah," Jack says proudly. "My attorney."

That's when Lucy knows her Aunt Naomi is wrong. She was never his favorite, though he might have tried to make himself believe it.

"Did she tell you she was pregnant?" Jack asks.

"It took them forever trying."

"Jack!" Naomi says.

"It's good news," Jack says. "Good n I ws should be told. Of course, she's still too skinny."

Jack sits down and accepts the coffee Naomi pours him out of a separate pot.

"Decaf," she tells Lucy.

If Scout were alive today, Lucy doubts that he'd be drinking decaffeinated coffee, but you never know. He wasn't yet forty when he died. He didn't have to think about decaffeinated coffee and life insurance and what staying out all night could do to you, let alone what it meant to be out on a raft when you entered middle age.

"Where's the boy?" Jack asks as he breaks apart an onion roll.

"Where's Keith?"

"No fats," Naomi tells him when he reaches for the butter.

"He's back in Florida," Lucy says. It's true; she doesn't have to feel guilty about saying that.

"Still as smart as he always was?" Jack asks.

"Will you stop?" he says to Naomi, who has pushed a tub of butter substitute toward him.

"This woman is my health consultant all of a sudden," he tells Lucy.

"Did you get your M.D. while I wasn't looking?" he asks Naomi.

Lucy's aunt and uncle smile at each other, but that doesn't stop Naomi from handing him the butter substitute.

"I should have called you when I moved to Florida," Lucy says. "But things got so complicated with the divorce."

"Divorce is never pretty," Jack agrees.

Lucy runs her fingers over the coffee she's spilled. She sees now how easy it is to be cruel without even trying; children do it every day.

"I'm sorry," Lucy tells her uncle.

"Don't worry," Jack says. "The tablecloth can be dry-cleaned."

But it will never be the same, Lucy knows that.

There will always be a slight yellow stain, and, if it's not thrown out, the tablecloth will never again be used with the good china. They drink their coffee and have their onion rolls and discuss the traffic on the Long Island Expressway until enough time has passed for Lucy to leave politely.

"Scout," Jack says suddenly, after he's walked her to the door. The name escapes out of his mouth. He has never said his brother's name in Lucy's presence, and when she came here she was almost grateful for that. She took nothing from her parents' house, except her own clothes, and now she regrets not searching for her mother's pink scarf, for Scout's battered briefcase filled with sheet music. When Lucy looks at her uncle he explains, "It's just with your hair so short, I can see him in you. The profile. The nose."

They can hear Naomi in the dining room, as she clears the table. They can hear the hum of the pool filter out back.

"I was the baby," Jack says. "Believe it or not."

After Lucy leaves their house she finds she's having trouble breathing.

She remembers she's always been slightly allergic to lilacs. Keith was the same way. His nose was sniffly from May until July, then again during ragweed season at the end of August. When he was a baby, Lucy used to keep him indoors as much as she could during these months, but even before he could walk, he'd bang on the screen door until it opened and he could escape into the yard. She takes a hard left out of Jack and Naomi's driveway, so that fine bits of gravel hit against the paint of Evan's Celica, but when she reaches Middle Neck Road, she slows down, since it must be much more difficult to tail someone here in New York than it is in Florida. More traffic, for one thing, and faster, ruder drivers. She should probably be angry, since she told Julian not to follow her, but at least he's staying far behind. Still, it's disconcerting to be trailed, even when you know it, as if your shadow were lagging three blocks behind, instead of following right at your side.

If she tried to figure out why she wanted him so much last night, she would never be able to.

This is not rational, it's way beyond that. She's not going to think about Julian, that's all there is to it, although not thinking about him takes so much energy that Lucy is exhausted by the time she finds a parking space in the crowded municipal lot. When she gets to Salvuki's she has to introduce herself to the receptionist all over again before she's allowed access to Salvuki himself.

She approaches him as he combs out a whitehaired woman who already has a terrific tan, even this early in the season. Salvuki pauses for a moment after Lucy tells him who she is; he studies her reflection in the mirror.

"You haven't been here in almost a year," he says accusingly. Salvuki looks more like an accountant or an assassin than a hairdresser. "What did you let them do to you?"

"I had a problem with cHorine," Lucy admits.

"It's almost all out."

"I don't know if there's anything I can do with that," Salvuki tells her.

"Actually, I'm just trying to find someone who was a client of yours,"

Lucy says.

She roots through her purse and brings out the photograph of her neighbor. Once he identifies this woman, Lucy will be free. She can swoop down on Verity with the victim's name, dazzling both the Verity police and Paul Salley; she may be able to rescue her son and get herself a frontpage byline all at the same time. If she's lucky, she won't even remember Julian Cash, she won't think about him every time she closes her eyes.

"This woman wasn't my client," Salvuki says, handing Lucy the photograph and reaching for his comb.

"She was," Lucy presses. "She told me Just look at her one more time."

"I'd remember that hair color," Salvuki says.

"I'd remember that face."

"The hair color is new," Lucy says, panicked.

She has never imagined the possibility of his faulty memory. It is quite conceivable that if someone had brought Salvuki a photograph of Lucy, with all her hair chopped off, standing beneath the Florida sky at noon, he would have never known her. She sees now that as Salvuki combs out his client, he's studying only her hair; the rest of her is nothing more than baggage.

"Please," Lucy says. Think back."

"Look, if you need help, I'll try," Salvuki says.

"But I can't make any promises. Your hair is too damaged for that."

Outside, standing on the sidewalk, Lucy can't catch her breath; it's as if she were caught in a net of lilacs. She has nothing to show for this trip, nothing to show for all her certainty. She had one simple fact and it isn't enough. Without a name, Keith will be the only lead; when they take him into the police station for questioning, he'll freeze, or he spit and utter a hundred curses, and if they finally have to restrain him, they won't believe a word he says. Lucy stands facing a children's shop whose window is decorated with a castle made of Legos. Soft pink dresses hang above the castle like clouds.

She remembers this place; she used to come here for birthday presents for Keith. On impulse, Lucy goes inside. She picks up a puppet in the shape of a dragon, with soft green wings made out of satin, and silk fire shooting from its mouth.

"Great, isn't it?" the owner of the shop calls.

Lucy carries the puppet up to the counter and takes out her wallet.

"Is it a boy or a girl?" the shop owner asks.

When Lucy looks at her blankly, she adds, "The new owner of the dragon?"

"A boy," Lucy says. One much too old for such nonsense as puppets.

"Boys love any sort of monster, don't they?" the shop owner says.

As Lucy reaches for her MasterCard she sees the dead woman's face right in front of her driver's license.

"Is that Bethany?" the shop owner asks.

Lucy looks up; she can feel her heart race.

"It is. I remember that adorable baby."

"That's right. Bethany," Lucy says evenly.

"She used to come in twice a week," the shop owner says as she rings up the dragon. "And then she just stopped. She special-ordered one of those." There is a pink rocking horse decorated with rhinestones and garlands of handpainted flowers at the rear of the store. "She gave me a deposit, then never came back to get it."