Chickadees played in the bushes along the road, and their mechanical call cut through the riot of Laura’s thoughts.
A car drove past, going too fast down the icy country road, and almost clipped Laura on her elbow before she could safely get to the side berm. Once the car passed, she promptly bent over and threw up the small bit of food she’d managed to eat today. She put her hand against a tree to brace herself and tried to steady her vision, which was spinning.
A bit of vomit landed on the top of her boots, and she rubbed them in the leaf litter scattered on the ground. Laura was thankful she hadn’t worn the dress.
A trail opened up to her right, marked with a painted blaze of red and orange. Laura had forgotten the Midwest Appalachian Trail cut through her road. She and Dermot had never hiked this one. He always preferred to take her further afield, to see new spots and visit lookouts that weren’t familiar.
She stopped, trying to decide whether she should turn back home and rest or keep going towards town, her friend, and some more answers to where her life was about to head. Her fingers on the tree trunk rubbed against something smooth, and Laura looked up to see initials carved into the bark. Cut fresh enough to still be seeping sap from the gouges, she brought her fingers to her nose and smelled the bright spark of pine.
Laura took a step further to the right, where the initials faced the inner part of the trail. D.C. + J.L., with a heart drawn around them.
Dermot had done something similar when they were on the waterfall trail, taking out his pocketknife and marking a tree with D.C. + L.T. Dermot Carine loves Laura Taylor.
That’s what she assumed it’d meant, anyway.
Laura knew there was a chance of another D.C. carving their initials into this tree, but her instincts told her it was Dermot. After all, he’d done the same thing with her.
Which left her wondering: Who the hell was J.L.? And riding right behind that question, like an avalanche about to crack, was another one. How many secrets could one man have?
CHAPTER TWENTY JOYCE
She followed Simon to where he met up with Trina at the park. Joyce was constantly surprised by her husband’s failure to recognize that she was in fact the jealous type, although she hated to admit to even herself how she fit such a familiar mold.
Her mother had also been a jealous wife, folding her tired children into the back of the family Buick and following her husband when he returned to the office after dinner, supposedly to catch up on paperwork. As Joyce remembered it, most of these reconnaissance missions were unproductive. Joyce and her brother would sit in the car, taking up a distant place in the parking lot, for what felt like ages, until their mother decided she’d seen enough and it was time to go home. They always made it back before their father, who Joyce realized now must have been working long hours as a way of avoiding his home life. She’d seen Simon do it, too.
This was the way her childhood weekday evenings went, until one night. Her mother was dozing off in the car, her head bobbing onto her chest, but Joyce was wide awake and terribly bored, blowing her breath onto the cool glass of the back window and writing messages in the steam. Joyce saw a woman, perfectly done up with her sleek black coat pulled tight around her shoulders and red lipstick outlining a pouty mouth. She remembered the woman had curly blonde hair piled on top of her head, like a poodle. She was very pretty, and Joyce found herself waking up her mother to point her out.
“Who’s that pretty lady?” Joyce had asked.
Her mother woke with a start, took a look at the back of the woman as she went through the entrance to her father’s office building, and then instructed the children to stay there. Joyce remembered her mother paused a moment before getting out, like she was making a decision. Then she leapt out from the car, through the glass double doors of the building, and disappeared into the darkness of the foyer. She returned what must have been only a few minutes later, her eyes red and bulging and wiping at her nose, started the car without a word to Joyce or her brother, and drove them home.
Her father never came home that night, and a few months later Joyce found herself living in a run-down apartment with her mother during the week and sharing her old home with her father and the poodle-woman, whose name turned out to be Marla, on the weekends.
But so far Simon had proved to be faithful to Joyce when it came to Trina, as far as the physical aspect of intimacy was concerned. But just like Joyce learned in one of her archaeology courses when she was at university, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Simon didn’t touch Trina the entire time he was with her at the park, but Joyce knew her husband. Even from a distance, she could read his face. He’d somehow convinced himself that he was in love with this woman, through some special alchemy of guilt and attraction and—if she were honest with herself—neglect.
She followed Trina now, driving behind her car at a distance. Simon was still in the park. The appointment with the lawyer was coming up soon though. Joyce saw it scheduled on Simon’s calendar when she checked it this morning. But after seeing Trina’s reaction to him, Joyce assumed Simon was giving her space before they joined up for the meeting with the lawyer Simon arranged for Trina.
The thought made Joyce feel sick to her stomach. Yet another of Trina’s tentacles grasping at Joyce’s life.
As she drove along, they passed the center of town with its patch of green and welcoming gazebo. They headed out of town a distance, through the strip mall with the nail place that Joyce liked to go to for a quick manicure when she was in a hurry, and finally pulled into a lawyer’s office mimicking an old colonial building with its candles in the windows and brick façade.
Joyce didn’t pull in after Trina. She didn’t want Simon to see her there, too, when he joined Trina for the meeting.
Joyce decided to turn around and get a manicure at the nail place. Her nails were bitten down to the quick, and it would soothe her to have the ritual of it all. There was only one other car in the parking lot during the odd midday time. It was the expensive kind of shiny and black and almost as out-of-place in the strip mall as Joyce’s Jaguar.
The tinkle of the bell soothed Joyce immensely as she stepped through the door, but upon entering the salon she saw the young woman who she usually worked with was busy with another client. Middle-aged, with a blunt blonde bob and expensive clothes. Her voice rang through the small space.
“I’m here just visiting for a bit,” the blonde said as the nail technician scrubbed her nail beds. “It’s all rather tragic, and I don’t really want to talk about it.”
Joyce sat down at the next station, her ears pricked at the woman’s declaration. When people make the point of saying they don’t want to talk about something, they usually really do.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Joyce offered. And she was. She knew how tragedy could hang around your neck—your family’s neck—like a millstone.
The woman looked up at her, her blue eyes wide and searching. “Thank you. It’s been difficult.”
Joyce held her hands out across the table, and another young woman took them in hers and started to remove the chipping polish Joyce chose last time, and will choose again, because it’s her color. Cherry Bomb Red.
“We don’t want to pry,” the blonde’s nail technician said, keeping her eyes lowered and looking up through her lashes.
“Well, it’s just all so upsetting.” The blonde woman made to tuck her hair behind her ear, but stopped herself, realizing her polish would smear. Joyce noticed she’d chosen a dark purple. “You see, my brother and I were estranged. And then he sent this letter to me, totally out of the blue, telling me all about his life and certain—mistakes—he’d made.”
“And then, oh God, it was awful. I get a call from the police a few days later, before I even had a chance to reach out to him, and they tell me he’s dead.”
There’s an audible gasp across the nail salon, as though everyone stopped breathing at the same time.
“Oh, my dear,” one of the older nail techs said. “That’s terrible.”
The blonde woman rubbed her wrist under her eyes. “You don’t need to call me ‘dear’. Susan is fine.”
She sniffed, and a shudder went through her shoulders. “But it’s not just that he died before I could make amends with him.” She looked up and made eye contact with each of the women in the room, including Joyce.
And Joyce, as nasty as it sounds, had to stop and ask herself if perhaps this was some sort of performance. If perhaps this Susan had done this before. She’d seen it, in Simon’s practice. People who clung to tragedy, and fed off it in their own, maladjusted way.
Susan took a deep breath, as though to steady herself, and went on. “He didn’t just die. My brother was murdered.”
Joyce flinched at that word and accidentally knocked the bottle of nail polish over on her table, the creamy red spilling over the white surface like blood.
