You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone (8 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

 

“A
lot of people here have talked about how beautiful she was, but what I remember most about my dear friend Evelyn was her laugh . . .”

Evelyn's chum since college, Cynthia Werth-Hyland, stood at a podium in front of about a hundred people in folding chairs on the terrace of the Ballard Bay Club. It was a gorgeous venue—just off Shilshole Beach with an unencumbered view of the sun setting beyond Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. It had just started to get chilly.

Luke sat on the aisle of the first row. The three chairs beside him were empty. He missed Andrea, who had stayed home—in her apartment in Ballard. The reporters outside Luke's town house had at long last dispersed, but Andrea and Spencer still hadn't moved back in with him yet.

Since last Thursday, he'd been wandering around in a daze most of the time. Andrea had helped set up this memorial service. Because of the murders and the suicide, none of the churches wanted to take them. They were able to talk this spot into hosting the memorial by assuring the management it was just a gathering—with no coffins or urns or anything along those lines. The large terrace was off a ballroom, which had white-linen-covered tables and chairs for the guests. They'd hired a caterer, who had set up the hors d'oeuvres buffet and wine bar. The memorial service was by invitation only. “In cases like this, where there's public interest, it's the best way to go,” Andrea had explained. “We'll get some funeral crashers. But that comes with the territory. We can have someone at the door taking names. That'll discourage it a bit.”

Luke asked how she knew so much about planning a service like this. Andrea said she'd done it all before—when Spencer's parents had died in that car accident.

After all her help making this memorial service happen, Andrea had decided not to attend. It was probably a good call. Most of the attendees were Evelyn's friends and relations. They knew about the separation and the impending divorce. Despite her change in marital status, Evelyn still hadn't altered her will. So, as her surviving spouse, Luke was in line to inherit about four and a half million dollars. He couldn't have cared less about the money. But others cared a lot—and they were bitter.

In advance, Luke had asked certain people to get up and talk. It had been easy to find friends of Evelyn's who were willing. But he'd been hard pressed to come up with people to say something on Damon's behalf. Damon's godfather had just been up there, telling a cute story about taking Damon to the zoo when he was a kid. The anecdote got some polite chuckles. But Luke knew it must have been tough for people to laugh over the funny things that little boy had said, knowing years later he would kill his mother, himself, and two others. For her speech, Damon's godmother, Evelyn's cousin, chose a poem from William Wordsworth.

Damon's friend Tanya McCallum had volunteered to say something about him. Her turn hadn't come yet. Luke wasn't sure what to expect. The slightly pudgy girl had come to the service dressed in an unflatteringly tight black party dress—and a black hat with a wide brim. The outfit appeared to have been bought at some cheap vintage clothing store. Throughout the Wordsworth poem, she kept sighing loudly as if in pain. It was pretty distracting.

Sitting next to her in the third row, Spencer looked uncomfortable. He'd come, despite his aunt's absence. But Andrea must have briefed him, because earlier when Luke had overheard a friend of Evelyn's ask Spencer how he knew the deceased, he'd answered, “I was in Damon's class at Queen Anne High.”

It was a polite group. No one had asked Luke about his girlfriend.

Cynthia Werth-Hyland was telling a story about Evelyn in college. She probably had no idea that Evelyn called her “Mole Face” behind her back.

Luke had once made the mistake of mentioning to his wife that he thought Anne Francis was incredibly sexy in
Forbidden Planet
, and that he liked the beauty mark by her mouth.

“Well, my friend Cyndi has two moles on her face,” Evelyn pointed out. “Do you have the hots for her, too? I hope not. I used to sit in our dorm room watching her trim the hair off those things. It was disgusting.”

After that, her dear pal Cyndi was “Mole Face”—and not such a dear pal anymore.

Nineteen years ago, when he'd first started dating Evelyn Barrens, he had no idea how jealous and possessive she could be. He'd fallen in love with a beautiful, elegant blonde. She had panache, a snappy wit, and, indeed, a wonderful laugh. It wasn't until things got serious that Luke discovered she was an heiress. For a struggling playwright, this revelation might have been a godsend, but Luke felt uncomfortable about it. When they married—during an impulsive trip to Las Vegas—he made her promise they'd live on their combined incomes, which wasn't bad at all. For his “day job,” he wrote press releases for a Seattle-based pharmaceutical company. Evelyn sold ad space for the
Seattle Times
. They had a cute one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a duplex on Capitol Hill.

It was probably their happiest time together. He'd already written a couple of plays that had done well in Seattle, but had never gone anywhere else. He was struggling to get noticed. At the time, he had no idea she was trying to sabotage his career.

He'd thought it was an accident when she'd erased half of his new play,
Return Again to You
, on his word processor. Still, Luke had managed to finish it, and get several New York agents interested. Evelyn volunteered to FedEx the manuscripts to them. And somehow, those agents never received his play.

Luke didn't realize until years later that she must have tossed out those manuscripts. Evelyn didn't want him to be a success. She'd known even then that if he became an established playwright, she couldn't have him all to herself. When
Return Again to You
became a Broadway sensation, Luke could see she wasn't really happy for him.

Evelyn became pregnant around that same time. She considered having an abortion. But Luke was so thrilled about the prospect of becoming a dad—and so attentive to her—that she reconsidered. Nevertheless, Evelyn had a few suspicious “close calls” while pregnant—including a nasty fall down the stairs from their second-floor apartment. Then there was the time she accidentally took too many sleeping pills, which she shouldn't have been taking in the first place.

Looking back, Luke wondered how he could have been so stupid not to have figured out what she was trying to do.

“Playwright Luke Shuler shows a keen awareness of the neurotic female mind and sensibility,” the
USA Today
critic had written in his four-star review of
Return Again to You
. And yet Luke was practically clueless about his own wife.

Despite everything Evelyn had done to prevent it, Damon Barrens Shuler was born healthy.

“I don't want to hear how natural it is, or how I'm going to pass along my immunities to him, or how we're going to bond through breast feeding,” she told the nurses at the hospital. “He's getting a bottle. He's ruined my shape enough as it is.”

There was another good reason for the bottle method. She didn't have to get up in the middle of the night to feed him. Luke did it most of the time. They went through a series of nannies—none of them under fifty-five, and none lasting very long, because Evelyn didn't get along with any of them.

One of the nannies got fired late in January while Luke was at an out-of-town opening for a new play. Damon was two at the time. The woman called Luke after it happened.

“I came over there at eight in the morning,” she said. “And Mrs. Shuler was in the kitchen having coffee. The baby was screaming upstairs. I found him in his crib with a wet diaper on—and nothing else, not even a blanket. He must have been marinating in that wet diaper all night. And all the windows in the nursery were open, Mr. Shuler. I could see my breath when I stepped inside the room. If that poor, sweet baby catches pneumonia, you can blame her. I've never seen anything like it . . .”

Evelyn maintained that the woman was lying—just trying to stir up trouble because she'd been fired. “Maybe if you were home—for a change—you'd see how lousy she was at her job. You have no idea what's happening here. You've been gone for the last two weeks! What kind of husband and father are you anyway? Goddamn you for believing her lies and taking her side in this!”

Luke called a moratorium on his traveling. He hired an au pair—a smart, resourceful fifty-two-year-old widow who agreed to let them install a nanny cam in the nursery.

Evelyn continued to smother Luke with so much affection and attention that it became exasperating. She never left him alone. She was jealous of the time he spent writing and with their son. She was oddly cold toward Damon and talked about sending him to boarding school as soon as he was old enough. She and Luke quarreled about it.

The irony was that little Damon adored her. He was always reaching out to her, smiling at her, trying to catch her eye. After starting school, whenever he came home with a gold star on his paper or a drawing, he'd always go to his mother first to show her what he'd done. Half the time, Evelyn would practically brush him off. Luke could do cartwheels over Damon's smallest accomplishment, and it still didn't seem to fulfill a need in his son. Like a faithful puppy that got kicked around by its owner, Damon kept coming back to his mother for the small crumbs of approval and affection she dished out.

By the time their son was thirteen, Luke had completely fallen out of love with Evelyn—and she knew it.

But he stayed with her for Damon's sake, and threw himself into his work. On the surface, they were an ideal couple. There was even a brief profile of them in
People
magazine's “Sexiest, Happiest Couples” issue. But they both were miserable. While he'd resigned himself to their situation, Evelyn became frustrated, bitter, and a little crazy. Luke wanted to go to couples counseling, but Evelyn refused. “I had my fill of headshrinkers in college, thank you very much,” she snapped back at his suggestion. “And by the way, if you think you're going to leave me, you can just forget it. I'll get custody of our son. And I can afford the best, most ruthless divorce attorney in the business. You won't even get visitation rights . . .”

“I never said I was going to leave you, Evelyn,” he replied calmly. All her threats weren't going to change the fact that he didn't love her anymore. He wanted to tell her that, but instead, he asked, “What happened in college that you ended up having to get some psychiatric help?”

Evelyn didn't want to talk about it.

“She had sort of a nervous breakdown,” Cynthia Werth-Hyland told him over a clandestine brunch at Anthony's Pier 66. Luke had contacted Evelyn's longtime friend and asked if they could meet in private. Thanks to his carefully worded questions, and a couple of glasses of Chardonnay with her salmon cakes, Cynthia was in a talkative mood.

“You mean, she didn't tell you about it? Well, it was all on account of some guy who dumped her. Evelyn was always the one doing the dumping, never the dumpee. Anyway, after he left her, she took an overdose of sleeping pills. They had to pump her stomach. She was a total wreck. She never told you? The guy's name was Josh. In fact, he looked a lot like you. Her mother made her see a shrink. Her father was dead by that time. She saw this doctor for about two months—and then claimed she was just fine, and quit.”

Luke was stunned at how much he still didn't know about his wife—after fourteen years of marriage.

By this time, Damon was developing his OCD tics. Luke got him to a psychiatrist, despite Evelyn's protests. He didn't tell her how much he knew about her time in therapy during college. He guessed she had an aversion to it, because her analyst had probably picked up on a lot of issues she wasn't ready to acknowledge.

Unfortunately, Damon was his mother's child—and not very cooperative with the doctors. Evelyn had a toxic influence on their son. She'd even managed to pit Damon against him. Luke found himself on the receiving end of a lot of eye-rolling and backtalk. He figured this came with the territory when raising an adolescent. But his kid radiated utter contempt for him. By the time Damon was in high school, he'd become an arrogant, snobby mama's boy.

Luke still loved his son, but he didn't like him very much.

Ten months ago, Evelyn had started having an affair with a narcissistic, lowlife actor named Troy Slattery. He'd recently been fired from the cast of one of Luke's plays. It was as if she'd picked the most repugnant person she could as her new lover. And she wasn't discreet about it either. Luke figured she was hoping he'd get jealous and rescue her from this sick relationship—then fall in love with her all over again.

Instead, he moved out.

He told Evelyn he wouldn't fight her for custody of Damon. He knew his son wouldn't want to live with him anyway.

As he sat there on the terrace in the front row, listening to “Mole Face” talk about Evelyn's wonderful, infectious laugh, Luke told himself that he should have known it all would come to this. He wondered if things would have been different if he'd stayed.

He hadn't totally given up on Damon. They actually had some nice weekends together—at least, Luke thought so.

Apparently, Evelyn's affair with Troy Slattery lasted only a few weeks. After that, whenever Luke dropped Damon off at the house on Garfield, he'd find Evelyn out there, waiting for them. She'd always have an excuse for talking with Luke or asking him inside: “I still don't know how to operate that thermostat” or “The kitchen light is out, and you're the only one who knows how to take the shade off to change the bulb . . .” She'd always look gorgeous—and just a little sad.