Laura Lippman - Hardly Knew Her

But then, the Morrows were among the most generous clients in Terri’s circle. Most families, even the rich ones, hid what they considered precious-not just liquor, which interested Terri not at all, but also expensive chocolates and macadamia nuts and the asiago cheese dip from Cross Street Wine amp; Cheese in Baltimore. The last was especially dear, a souvenir from the parents’ hip, carefree lives, when they lived where they wanted, with no worries about school districts, much less backyards and soccer leagues. The asiago dip was like the tiny little treasures that pioneer families kept in their sod houses-a single silver spoon, a pair of diamond earrings, a china-head doll. Almost laughable, yet touching somehow, a symbol of a foreign land from which they had chosen to exile themselves for some vague dream of betterment.

Terri always found these forbidden snacks but left them undisturbed, obeying another unwritten rule: you may snoop all you like, but you must not move or in any way tamper with the secrets of the houses left in your care. Read the dirty books and magazines by all means, catalog the couple’s birth control (or lack thereof), poke through medicine cabinets and those mother lodes known as night-stands, but make sure everything and everyone is tucked in its respective bed before the parents return home.

The fathers’ cluelessness is understandable, but why would mothers, most of them former babysitters, leave so many embarrassments to be discovered? Yet Terri never stopped to wonder about this. Like most teenagers, she assumed her generation had invented depravity-and she was not entirely off the mark. Her clients remembered their pasts as one might remember a dream-hazy, incoherent, yet vaguely satisfying. Indulged in their youth, they had little need for rebellion in adulthood, and even less energy for it. Those who know the gin-soaked suburbs described in Cheever and Updike would be disappointed in River Run, where there was so much money and so little imagination. Sure, there was a sex toy here, a prescription for Viagra there, but Terri’s systematic sleuthing did not uncover anything truly shocking-not until the day she found the beautiful little handgun, no bigger than a toy, nestled in Mrs. Delafield’s lingerie drawer.

Now the Delafields had been considered odd from their arrival in the community two years ago. Mrs. Delafield (“Call me Jakkie, it’s short for Jakarta, can you believe it? My mom was nuts”) was very young, so young that even an incurious teenager such as Terri could see she did not belong in this overdone, overlarge, grown-up house in River Run’s Phase V development. Local gossip put her at no more than twenty-five, which was worth gossiping about because Mr. Delafield was fifty-two. He was divorced, of course, with children in college, and now he had Mrs. Delafield and the baby, a shockingly large child of sixteen months, a child so big that he was having trouble walking. Hugo’s short, chubby legs simply could not propel his mass forward, and he continued to crawl, when he deigned to move at all. It was hard, looking at Mrs. Delafield, to figure out how such a huge child had come out of this lanky size 2, with hips narrower than most of the boys in the River Run freshmen class. No one knew what Mrs. Delafield had been before she was Mrs. Delafield. The one time Terri had dared to ask, Mrs. Delafield must not have understood the question because she said: “Oh, I was at my height when I met Mr. Delafield. You have no idea. I can’t bear to look at the photographs because I’m such a mess now.” Her hands shook, she chewed her nails when she thought no one was looking, and her hair was an odd shade of yellow. She was the most beautiful woman Terri had ever seen outside a magazine.

No one knew why the Delafields had chosen River Run, not at first. For while River Run was an extremely desirable place to live-great school district, beautiful countryside, and convenient to I-83, that was the locals’ litany-not even its biggest boosters expected billionaires in their midst. The grandest house in Phase V could not compete with the waterfront estates outside Annapolis, or even the rambling mansions on Baltimore ’s north side. Plus, Hugo was so young, and the Delafields so very rich, they didn’t have to worry about public schools.

The mystery was explained when Mr. Delafield’s corporate helicopter landed with a great, ear-shattering roar in a clearing behind his property, acreage dedicated as permanent open space according to the master plan for River Run. The community and the River Run board fought the helicopter, of course. Mr. Delafield insisted he had been promised use of the land, that he would not have purchased the house otherwise. Yet the Delafields decided to stay in the house even after a zoning judge decided Mr. Delafield could not use the land. The corporate headquarters for his pharmaceutical company were in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, no more than an hour’s drive away. His chauffeur-driven Town Car pulled out of the quarter-mile driveway promptly at seven every weekday morning and returned thirteen hours later. Mrs. Delafield, who did not work, was left at home with Hugo and a live-in housekeeper, who apparently terrified her. She hired Terri to come on Tuesdays, the housekeeper’s day off, and spell her for exactly four hours, from three to seven, for $5 an hour. Finding something to do with those four hours was a terrible chore for Mrs. Delafield. She tried tennis, but she wasn’t coordinated. She tried shopping, but she found the nearest stores disappointing, preferring to purchase her clothes on seasonal excursions to New York. She signed up for ceramics class, but she didn’t like what it did to her acrylic nails. Still, she was strict with herself, throwing herself into her Porsche SUV every Tuesday as if it were a grim duty.

She always returned promptly at seven, sometimes stepping out of her clothes as she crossed the threshold-whatever she had been in her past life, it had left her without modesty. She then handed Terri $25 and fixed a drink. Terri wasn’t sure if the extra five dollars was a tip or a math error, and she didn’t ask Mrs. Delafield for fear of embarrassing her. Mrs. Delafield was shy about her lack of education, to which she made vague, sinister references. “When I had to leave school…,” or “I wish I could have stayed for prom, but there was just no way.” Sometimes she examined Terri’s armload of textbooks, as if just touching them might convey the knowledge she had failed to acquire. “Is algebra hard? When they say European history, do they mean all the countries, even the little-bitty ones? Why would they want to you to study psychics?” The last was a misreading of “physics,” but Terri didn’t have the heart to correct her. Instead, she told Mrs. Delafield that River Run High School had been founded at a time when there were a lot of alternative theories about education-perfectly true-and that it still retained a certain touchy-feely quality. Also true, although parents such as Terri’s, who had known the original River Run, were always complaining it had become a ruthless college factory.

Given that the Delafields’ house, like the Delafields’ baby, was so huge, it had taken Terri a while to inventory its contents. Still, the wonders of Mrs. Delafield’s underwear drawer were well known to her long before she found the gun. Drawers, really, because Mrs. Delafield had an entire bureau just for underwear and nightgowns. The bureau was built into the wall of a walk-in closet, one of two off the master bedroom, both almost as big as Terri’s bedroom, but her family lived in a Phase II house. Terri had been through those drawers several times, so she was certain that the elegant little handgun she found there one March afternoon was a new addition, along with the rather nasty-looking tap pants of transparent blue gauze, with a slit where the crotch should be. Terri did not try on the tap pants, which she considered gross, but she did ease an emerald-green nightgown over her bra and panties. Small and compact, with thin legs and rather large breasts, Terri could not have looked less like Mrs. Delafield. Still, she rather liked the effect.