Мэри Эндрюс - The Newcomer

Then it was Vikki Hill’s turn. She was crisp and devastatingly professional, but Letty wasn’t really paying attention to the gist of her statement.

Finally, the judge gestured at Evan. He directed him to stand, facing the spectator benches. Letty’s eyes bored into him, but Evan’s return gaze was blank, seemingly focused on a wall-mounted clock on the far wall.

Good, Letty thought. She hoped Evan Wingfield would watch clocks for the rest of his life. Let him mark all the seconds and minutes and hours as they ticked off in endless drudgery. She decided she didn’t need to hear him speak after all, so she stood up, turned her back on him, and walked briskly out of the courtroom.

The heat and sunshine on the sidewalk outside were a relief after the arctic chill of the courthouse. Letty walked a few blocks, then hailed a cab. She called Zoey and told her about her plan for the afternoon. Then she called Sammi, who agreed to meet her at Tanya’s town house.

“You sure you want to do this today?” Sammi asked, as she punched the security code into the new lockbox the real estate agent had recently installed.

“Yes,” Letty said.

Her heart was thumping wildly as she stepped into the dimly lit foyer. Sammi flipped a switch and the immense crystal chandelier blinked on, its prisms catching the afternoon light.

The black-and-white-checkerboard marble floor was waxed to a high gleam. Letty let out the breath she’d been holding. There were no ghosts here. Only the faint scent of lemon polish.

“The real estate agent thinks it will show better furnished, if that’s all right with you,” Sammi said. “And of course, if you like, you can just sell it furnished and not have to bother with all this stuff.”

“Let’s sell it furnished,” Letty said. Tanya had loved the opulence of her home, had reveled in how far she’d come since that long-ago double-wide in West Virginia, but none of the gilt-edged furnishings held any sentiment or attraction for Letty.

She and the lawyer walked from room to room, snapping on the lights, looking around, and then moving on.

They climbed the stairs and went into Maya’s bedroom. The fairy-tale furnishings that Tanya had obsessed over seemed garish and overdone now. “You don’t think Maya wants any of these toys or books?” Sammi asked, gesturing at the shelves overloaded with picture books and playthings. She pointed at the large walk-in closet. “What about all those beautiful clothes?”

“She’s got Ellie, the only toy she really cares about,” Letty said. “And she’s outgrown all her clothes. Let’s donate it all to a children’s charity.”

Sammi hesitated in the hallway outside Tanya’s bedroom. “Do you want to go in there?” She gestured at the closed door. “I know this must be hard for you.”

Letty’s hand grasped the crystal doorknob. “I need to make sure there’s nothing of Tanya’s that she’d want Maya to have. Let’s just rip off the Band-Aid, shall we?”

Inside the bedroom, she trailed her fingers over the mirrored dressing table arrayed with Tanya’s cut-glass bottles of perfume and the row of sterling-mounted brushes and combs neatly arranged on the tabletop. Letty opened a deep drawer and stared down at all the bottles of foundation, the eye shadow palettes and eyeliner pencils and tubes of mascara. She closed the drawer and opened another, finding the small silver-mounted baby brush Tanya had used to brush Maya’s curls before bed every night. She put the brush in her purse and closed the drawer.

Sammi stood near the enormous walk-in closet, gazing in. “It’s like being back in Bergdorf Goodman’s,” she whispered, as though she were in a church instead of a dead woman’s bedroom.

Letty smiled. “I’m not going to keep any of these things, but if there’s anything you’d like, Sammi, please, help yourself. That’s what Tanya would want.”

“She was always so generous,” Sammi said, stepping into the closet. “So spontaneous. If I commented on a pair of earrings she was wearing, or a pair of yoga pants, the next thing I knew, she’d insist on giving them to me.”

“That was Tanya,” Letty agreed. She went over to the freestanding jewelry cabinet in the middle of the closet and rifled through the velvet-lined drawers. She didn’t know or care which pieces were costume or which were the real thing.

In the middle drawer of the case she spied a brooch she recognized, probably the cheapest piece in the jewelry box: a circlet of fake pearls. The faux-gold mounting was greenish with age. The brooch had been a Christmas gift to Mimi from their bopbop, and she’d worn it on Sundays, pinned to the collar of her church dress. Letty hadn’t seen it in decades, and she’d certainly never seen Tanya wear it.

She fastened the pin to her blouse and turned to the racks of clothes and shoes.

Sammi was holding a pair of wickedly sexy sling-back black pumps with red soles. “These look like your size,” she said. “And they’re Louboutins!”

“Take them if you want them,” Letty said. “I couldn’t walk a step in those things.”

“Really?” Sammi squealed. “They don’t look like they’ve ever been worn. We could take all these designer shoes to a consignment shop. And the handbags too. Gucci, Prada, Chanel. They’re worth a lot of money, Letty.”

“You keep those and whatever ones you like,” Letty said firmly. “I’ve been thinking. Since you know more about this stuff than me, take all the designer stuff, the jewelry, clothes, shoes, whatever to a consignment place. You keep part of the money, because you did the work, and all the rest of the money, and whatever is left of the clothes, I want to donate to charity.”

Sammi nodded. “That’s a great idea. I bet Tanya would like that.”

“See if you can find a battered women’s shelter, okay?” Letty asked. “Tanya would absolutely hate that anybody thought of her as battered. Or a victim. But that doesn’t change the fact that she was.”

She turned to the racks of handbags. There were dozens of them, lined up on shelves that reached nearly to the ceiling of the closet, many in soft flannel bags with the designer’s name stitched or stenciled on the outside. She squatted down on the floor, reading the labels, shunting the bags aside, then stood and repeated the process, shelf by shelf.

Finally, she fetched a velvet upholstered bench from beneath the closet window, stood on it, and searched the top shelf. When her hand closed on the worn, pebbly surface of a particular handbag, she knew she’d found what she was looking for.

Letty set the pocketbook on the top of the jewelry cabinet.

“Louis Vuitton,” Sammi said. She ran an appraising finger across the frayed stitching of the shoulder strap and peeked inside the bag. “And it’s the real thing. See? Here’s the date code. There’s a huge secondary market for these bags. It’s too bad about the condition, though. There are stains in the canvas lining.”

“This one’s not for sale,” Letty said firmly. “She was so damned proud of this silly purse. She bought it with the money she earned from her first television commercial. At the time, she didn’t have enough money in the bank to buy a full tank of gas. But she had to have a Louis Vuitton bag. She took it to all her auditions and casting calls. She said it was better than a good headshot. It meant she was a success.”

Letty reached inside the bag and was surprised to see that it wasn’t empty. She emptied the contents onto the top of the cabinet. A half-empty tube of Tanya’s favorite Chanel lipstick, crumpled tissues, a plastic TicTac box, some faded Duane Reade receipts, and a prescription pill bottle tumbled onto the surface, along with a pale lavender sealed envelope.