Лиза Гарднер - Never Tell - A Novel (A D.D. Warren and Flora Dane Novel)

Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren recruited me for a reason. Law enforcement officers have their resources. But I have mine.

I know then whom I’m going to call. A man who’s been waiting six years for this moment. Sending me countless e-mails, from the sweet, to the bragging, to the nagging, to the just plain whining.

I’ve always ignored him.

Now, thanks to one shooting, I’m going to make his day.

I don’t need the FBI after all.

I just need the right true-crime nerd.

I rise to standing. Samuel can tell from the look on my face that I’ve made a decision. We know each other that well. He cares about me that much.

“Be careful,” he says softly.

“Be there for her,” I say, because what I’m going to do next will definitely break my mother’s heart.

Chapter 7 EVIE

DO YOU EVER FEEL ALONE in a crowded room? That when other people laugh, you don’t get the joke? That everyone knows something—the secret to life, the true meaning of happiness—that you will forever fail to understand?

That is the way I have always felt.

Even when my father was still alive.

• • •

MY MOTHER DRIVES me home. She is talking excitedly, completely oblivious to my lack of answers. That’s okay; my mother has never required my thoughts or opinions, and most of her questions are rhetorical anyway.

She is nearly sixty years old, I find myself thinking. The age of a grandmother, which makes sense since I’m carrying her first grandchild. She doesn’t look a day over fifty. In fact, today I’m willing to bet she looks younger and better than me. The frosted Jane Fonda hair, not a strand out of place. Her signature pearls around her neck. She wears a spring-green cashmere sweater with camel-colored slacks. She looks like Cambridge. She looks like what, in her mind, she’ll always be: a professor’s wife.

She paid half a million dollars, cash, for the pleasure of my company. I don’t ask where she got the money. Mortgaged the house? Probably couldn’t do that in a matter of hours. Maybe she extracted it from a Swiss bank account, remains from my father’s life insurance. Hell if I know.

We’ve stayed in touch over the years. Kind of. She’d tell you whatever coldness exists between us is of my making—assuming she admits there’s any strain in our relationship. My mother is one of those women who don’t have problems. Or really, problems wouldn’t dare to bother her.

She’s never moved from her and my father’s house. She spent a year in black, widow’s weeds, I believe they used to be called. She played up the tragedy. Her loving husband, killed in the prime of his genius life. Her poor daughter, who would surely never recover from the horror of the experience.

One year. Exactly one year. Then, like some heroine from a Victorian novel, she put away the black Chanel and returned to her signature spring palette. And took up the very important role of preserving her Husband’s Legacy.

My father’s legacy? Again, hell if I know. He was active in many projects. Most likely, he had unfinished theorems, theories, research projects, research papers. I’m sure his various assistants rushed to fill the gap. What my mother with her cashmere sweaters and Mikimoto pearls had to add to that, I have no idea.

But she continued to be the hostess with the mostest among the Harvard crowd. I think people came in the beginning, attracted to the drama. Unfortunate accidents such as shotgun blasts don’t happen much among the academic set. Best I can tell, however, my mother’s charm has prevailed. Sixteen years later, she continues to hold court among the intellectual elite.

Only I keep my distance.

Conrad tried to fix us. In the beginning, when he viewed my relationship with my mom as something salvageable. She’s such a lovely woman, he’d tell me time and time again. I’d nod, because my mom is a lovely woman. And charming and smart. Can’t argue with any of that.

She’s also a fucking wack job.

No one wants to hear that sort of thing, but my father got it. During her more trying times or dramatic tirades, he’d offer me a conspiratorial wink. I think, however, that her kind of crazy fit him.

My mother isn’t mean, at least not intentionally. She’s neither violent nor cruel. She’s just—herself. She sees what she sees, she knows what she knows, she believes what she believes, and nothing is going to change that. I think for my father, who lived in the land of the abstract, she was refreshingly tangible. You always knew exactly where you stood with her, which was mostly on the outside, looking in. She also worshipped my father’s brilliance, took genuine pride in being the wife of one of the greatest minds in mathematics. Last but not least, I heard some noises as a kid that—later, as an adult—I realized meant my parents had a very robust sex life.

Together, they worked.

Meaning our issues aren’t that my mother didn’t love my father. Or that that I didn’t love my father. It’s more like each of us, for various reasons, wanted him all to ourself.

My mother pulls into the drive. Same stately Colonial. Historic gray paint, black-painted shutters, white trim. My mother adheres to a strict maintenance schedule—her hair, her face, her home. I believe the exterior paint is on a five-year plan. Many wait seven to ten, she’d tell you. But why have three to five years of a tired-looking home, when it can appear clean and fresh always?

The front porch has a pair of whitewashed Adirondack chairs framing the huge solid black-painted door and leaded side windows. This time of year, the door is draped with a holiday garland of various greens and festive berries. Beside the Adirondacks sit enormous pots of spruce branches, white-frosted twigs, red bows, and pinecones.

Conrad and I hadn’t even gotten to a tree yet.

I feel that pang again. Will myself not to think of the stair bannister, the study, the smell. My husband. My father. Too much blood.

The story of my life: too much blood.

Now this.

My mother turns off her Lexus. Turns to me. And smiles.

• • •

I DID THE best I could without you,” she says as we walk into the house. “Of course, since you’re here, you can help with the final decisions. When will you find out the sex of the baby? Soon, right? I don’t remember exactly when they can tell you that sort of thing, but it seems with today’s technology, anything’s possible.”

I have no idea what she’s talking about, only half listening to her prattle as I enter the childhood home I’ve done my best to avoid for the past sixteen years.

Like many historic homes, the house doesn’t have a garage. My mother parks on the driveway; in the winter, some college student will get paid to shovel out and clear her vehicle. As family members, we use the side door off the kitchen. For the full effect, however, my mother prefers to greet even longtime friends at the front door, which better showcases the full impact of the home, including the huge oil portrait of our family. I was four when my mother had it commissioned. Too young to realize no one should ever be painted in a marshmallow-shaped white dress with a giant white bow in her hair. My mother is sitting in a wingback chair, which was custom-upholstered to be nearly the exact same shade of blue as her eyes. My father stands behind both us, his hand on his wife’s shoulder, smiling benevolently at the painter. He is wearing a gray tweed jacket over a dark green sweater-vest. His face is slightly rounded, his sandy beard perfectly trim. He looks kind and powerful and maybe just a tad bemused by the whole production.

When I was little, and my father worked late, I used to climb onto the wingback chair just to touch the portrait and my father’s curving smile.