I WON THE prize for best stand at the Cherry Blossom Art Fair, as I had predicted. I would invest the $7,500 in the purchase and maintenance of Olivia’s pony, since I didn’t need the money. I had an even better prize: my two twenty-seven-inch monitors that showed my forty-eight cameras. Forty-eight fishbowls in thirty-four houses. To see the spectacle of monochromatic daily life—I had set them all to black-and-white to make the image more fluid—was a kind of small miracle. I never thought I’d make it so far. Soon euphoria gave way to anxiety because even if I was only reaching a small percentage of the houses on the island, around 25 percent, that constant flow of information was unfathomable. If I wanted to watch everything that was happening, I wouldn’t have time for anything else. I had run too much and now my heart was pounding. I had taken too big a leap. The feeling that I was falling, which had been with me since Chris’s death, intensified at times. You don’t have to see it all, all the time, I repeated to myself without knowing where to look. Little by little, you’ll start getting a handle on the situation, be able to distinguish what’s important.
Curiously, the first few days I always ended up turning my attention to the familiar, to the first camera I put up, the one in Karen’s Petite Maison, and the second, Frank’s in Family Pet Land. Watching Karen do the same thing as always—drinking and not much else—calmed me down. What at first made me feel frustrated, as though I wasn’t getting anywhere, now calmed me, made me feel at home. Besides, not much time was left before John’s longed-for return.
And watching Frank was like gazing at the horizon to rest your eyes after spending a long time at the computer. It was another way of being alert. It wasn’t about looking for clues or a suspect. It was about taking care, worrying about a specific person and his health. I didn’t mind running off to Family Pet Land in the golf cart in the middle of the night to try and prevent him from eating the can of cat food he had just opened and spread ceremoniously on a bagel, ready to enjoy it as if it were pâté. I suppose that humanitarian effort made me feel good, or a little less bad. Because contemplating all those fishbowls and keeping my conscience clear was mission impossible. So Frank, with his mishaps, his recently acquired taste for cat food, and his Rose here, Rose there, served to justify this whole scenario I had set up.
Another thing that helped me to control my vertigo was scanning the fishbowls in search of possible locks where the Master Key would fit. I took screen grabs of the different rooms to blow them up and look at details. Focusing on something as concrete as that helped placate my overflowing mind.
For the first few weeks after the art fair, the list of suspects multiplied by three. Which I think was a response to my need to justify that large layout of fishbowls rather than the appearance of real, solid evidence.
Carrie Anne Kowalsky, single twin sister of Mindy Bishop, owner of Le Café, lived in Hartford, Connecticut, but came regularly to the island to “visit” her sister, really to drag her hookups there. She stayed in a little cottage connected to the Bishops’ house, but it was private and had an open-air Jacuzzi. While looking through Chris’s WTT contracts, I found one from three years ago to renovate the courts of the Hartford Tennis Club. That turned Carrie Anne Kowalsky into suspect number seventeen.
Suzette Tompkins, the island’s marvelous Pilates instructor, tried out for The Voice. I saw her recording an audition video at her home:
Hi, my name’s Suzette Tompkins, and I live on Robin Island, a little island almost no one knows between Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. I’m twenty-eight years old and I’m a Pilates instructor, but my dream has always been to be a singer. My idol is Taylor Swift. That’s why I’m going to sing “You Belong with Me.” Here goes.
She did it well, to tell the truth. And while she sang the song, I remembered that the last person Chris had started following on Instagram was Taylor Swift, even though he’d never shown the least interest in her or her music. For all that, I considered Suzette Tompkins suspect number eighteen, even if she didn’t make the cut for the show.
Mike kidnapped Sandy, Miriam’s dog. He went into her house while we were at our weekly Pilates class, and when she got back, the dog was gone. No trace of her. Chief Margaret, in collaboration with Mayor Gwen DeRoller and the fire brigade, set up a search party to find Sandy. A group of volunteers split up and combed the island without success.
“Mommy, what are we looking for?”
“Sandy, Miriam’s dog.”
“Is that why Miriam’s sad?”
“Yes, Oli.”
“I don’t want Miriam to be sad.”
“Me neither, honey.”
“I have a good idea, Mommy.”
“If you’re going to suggest we give her Pony, the answer is no.”
“How did you know?”
“Because I’m a witch and I can read your mind.”
“Really? What am I thinking right now, then?”
“Now you’re not thinking; now you’re counting the posts on the wooden fence around the Burrs’ house.”
“Wow, you really are a witch!” she said, at once frightened and astonished.
I had a recording that put the blame on Mike, but for obvious reasons, I couldn’t use it. Even so, I suggested to Miriam that Mike might be behind it, and Miriam herself already suspected as much: she had the sense he was going to use the dog as a bargaining chip in the custody battle over Chloe. But Chief Margaret went to interrogate Mike and affirmed that he didn’t know or care anything about the matter. Sandy showed up from out of nowhere; she probably disappeared the same way. Mike wouldn’t allow WasteWorks to be searched without a warrant, so that was out of the question. What worried me most was that he might have killed the dog. More than once, I’d tried to put a snitch or a fishbowl in WasteWorks, but it was more or less impenetrable. Mike had cameras watching the exterior. The only way to get inside, I thought, was to get intimate with him, and I wasn’t willing to go that far. For now.
Three weeks after Summer gave birth, I took Olivia and Ruby to pay her another visit. It was already the fourth time I’d gone. I had tried to take advantage of any lapse or absence to get a sample of the baby’s saliva, but I hadn’t gotten lucky. I’d also started gaining her trust to see if she would reveal something about the child’s supposedly dead father. No luck. I usually tried to go when Jennifer was out getting groceries. Summer was much more docile without her there. She let down her defenses and showed herself as she really was: a lost, frightened girl who had just given birth.
“Are you sure you don’t mind taking her for a walk?”
I had offered to take the baby out for a walk for a few hours. That didn’t seem remotely necessary to Jennifer, because she was there to do that. In fact, she spent more time with the girl than the baby’s mother did. Summer just breastfed her (in the end, she’d negotiated with Jennifer to do it three times daily; the rest of the time, it was the bottle) and stayed shut up in her room. But I told Jennifer that she too could use a little rest—she really looked exhausted. It was as if both of them were suffering from postpartum depression.
“No, of course I don’t mind,” I said to Summer. “You’ve spent months looking after my kids, and you’ve done great. Just rest. Talk to your aunt. And when I say talk, I don’t mean argue; I mean talk. I’ll bring her back in a few hours for her three o’ clock feeding.” Oops—screwup, I wasn’t supposed to know that one of the feedings she’d negotiated was at three in the afternoon. What a slip. Bad. But Summer was so out of it she didn’t even notice. “By the way, have you named the girl yet?”
Summer shook her head. Her eyes grew damp.
“Don’t worry, it’ll come to you. There’s no rush.”
I thought that by this time, I would be used to doing bad things and wouldn’t judge myself or put myself down so much. But no, because when I took a discreet saliva sample from her in the light of day in Shoreline Park, I felt like my blood wasn’t flowing right, as if I were playing hide-and-seek. Nor did it help that there was the remotest possibility that the baby belonged to Chris.
“Can we call her Olivia?” Olivia asked.
“She can’t have the same name as you, honey.”
“But it’s a really pretty name.”
“Yeah, but for everyone else it’ll be a pain.”
“Then Olivia II.”
“That’s enough with your numbers, babe.”
“Mommy, can you have more babies?” she asked me point-blank.
“Of course.”
“With Daddy?”
“Olivia, I think the three of us are good for now, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, for now, sure. But if you want to have one later, can it be with Daddy?”
Pause. What to tell her?
“No, Oli, it can’t be with Daddy.”
“Oh. OK,” she said, trying to mask her disappointment. One more for the list?
Before stopping in at the DNA laboratory in Mashpee, I left Olivia in her weekly therapy session. After she’d gotten over her suspicion during the first few appointments; she loved being able to talk, as she put it, about her things. It made her feel like an adult. Ruth, her psychologist, had told me Olivia frequently had a hard time at school because she couldn’t suppress her obsessive-compulsive behavior. She was embarrassed that people saw her counting things, and sometimes she didn’t go out to recess, staying behind instead to line up the desks and chairs, which she said were super-disordered, or cleaning the chalkboard because the traces of leftover chalk bothered her. The good thing is that she seemed to have stopped adding compulsions to her repertoire. The birth of Sunset, starting horseback riding classes with Barbara and fantasizing about growing up to be a great Amazon had yielded fruit, no doubt about it. It was a huge help for her to have a goal in life, something to grab onto. Now, little by little, we had to negotiate so she would let go of some of her compulsions and realize that the world wouldn’t end.
I thought that Conrad, the director of the bank branch, had died. One Friday night, he fell asleep in front of the TV eating tortilla chips with peanut butter. Nothing out of the ordinary. The next day, he was still asleep on the sofa. Nothing out of the ordinary there either. But he hadn’t gotten up by one in the afternoon, either, and his dog, Chubs, had eaten the peanut butter straight from the jar and had licked Conrad’s face, and he hadn’t reacted. Was he or wasn’t he breathing? It was hard to tell, but he wasn’t making a sound, and Conrad was a heavy snorer. I had his number. He had given it to me some time back, saying, When you feel like it, we can go out one weekend and take the dogs for a walk and see each other without a conference table between us, but I had never called him. Until then. He didn’t pick up. What do I do? I thought. In fact, if he was dead, there was little I could or should do. I called a second time. And finally he woke up. He didn’t have time to get the phone. I was glad. He seemed to be OK, a little groggy, but OK. What could he have taken to pass out like that for fourteen hours? He shouted at Chubs for eating the peanut butter. He made brunch—waffles with strawberry syrup, scrambled eggs and bacon—took a shower and called me back.
“It was so nice to see you called, Alice. But I was worried, I thought maybe something had happened. Everything OK?”
“Yes. I was just seeing if you wanted to go walk the dogs. But maybe it’s a little late at this point . . .” I said, trying to get out of it.
“What do you mean too late?! Give me a break. It’s the perfect time. We can see the sunset together.”
I couldn’t say no. It was inevitable that spending so much time looking at the inhabitants of the fishbowls, I would start to worry and feel responsible for their well-being.
The walk with Conrad was agreeable. He clearly appreciated the company, and I felt good and bad. Good for having agreed to take the walk, and bad because I hadn’t done it before. Plus, he turned out to be a first-rate mimic. He cracked me up with his chronological rundown of the US presidents and their best-known phrases and blunders. Just when he was about to start on Bill Clinton and his memorable “I did not have sex with that woman,” we ran into Mark and he saw me laughing. He couldn’t cover his expression, You traded me for that tub of lard? At least that’s what I thought he was thinking. And since we were there, I took advantage of that obligatory walk to ask Conrad, as if I just happened to be curious, what happened to the money in a checking account when a person died and no one claimed it. He said if there were no other account holders or beneficiaries or it was impossible to contact them, the money was left in limbo. There’s more than thirty billion dollars unclaimed in the United States. It’s crazy. He told me there was a webpage, MissingMoney.com, where you could look for it. I went on there as soon as I got home and put in Chris’s name and mine, without results.
A few hours after he saw me walking with Conrad, Mark sent me the following message—corroborating my theory that he’d gotten jealous:
Let’s go to New York together one weekend. I miss you.
I got mad when I read it. You’ve got some nerve . . . You want everything: home, wife, kid, dog and lover. The true American Dream. If you’re good with Julia now, go to New York with her. And by the way, you should thank me for it, because hey, things were pretty rocky when I met you both . . . So please, enjoy your wife and your perfect life and leave me in peace! I said this to myself to snuff out my desire to go to New York with him. It worked. Halfway, but it worked.
What I didn’t know was that his message had a bomb attached to it. I only realized when it exploded.
Mark and Julia’s bedroom.
17:30 hours.
Mark comes out of the shower. He has a towel around his waist. Julia is standing next to the dresser, looking stern.
JULIA: Who’d you invite to spend the weekend in New York?
MARK: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Mark realizes Julia has his phone.
MARK: What are you doing looking at my phone? Why the fuck did you take my phone?
I ran for the prepaid cell phone that I used exclusively for Mark. It was in my bag on silent. I looked to see if anyone had called. No one had. I had to think back to recall that I’d deactivated the voicemail.
JULIA: For weeks now, you’ve been the same as before.
Mark puts on a white shirt even though he’s still wet. He’s nervous.
JULIA: It’s happening again.
MARK: What’s happening again?
JULIA: You’re avoiding me; you’re not present.
Why didn’t he erase the message? He did it on purpose. He wanted her to catch him. It’s the only explanation I can see.
MARK: I’ll remind you that what happened last time was your fault.
JULIA: Oh really. So what’s this, then, your revenge? No, sorry, the consequences of your revenge . . .
Mark puts on underwear and jeans, as if he’s ashamed of arguing naked or he wants to be dressed in case he has to dash out.
JULIA: Who’d you send the message to?
MARK: Give me the goddamn phone!
JULIA: You’d rather I call and find out?
MARK: Give it here!
JULIA: I’ve got the number memorized.
Julia tosses him the phone calmly, without violence. But Mark still fails to catch it, and it falls onto the carpet, without suffering any apparent damage.
MARK (making sure his phone is all right): I sent it to a colleague.
JULIA (quoting from memory): “Let’s go to New York together one weekend. I miss you . . .” To a colleague? You think I’m an idiot? You don’t even have the number saved.
MARK: Well, great then, you’ve caught me; now you’ve got material for your novel. Run, go write.
What are you after, Mark? Getting her attention? Paying for what you’ve done? Purging? Revenge? On her? On me? How can you be such a moron?! Both of us are morons!
Mark leaves. He’s barefoot, with a pair of sneakers in his hand. Julia stays by herself. She grabs his phone and dials a number.
Don’t call, Julia.
She stops before making the call. She finally gives up.
Half a Valium.
I erased all the messages. I took the SIM card out of the phone. I was going to break it. I stopped. What was the point in breaking it? It was better to keep it, better to keep the situation under control.
Mark didn’t dare call me or message me for the next forty-eight hours. I was thankful for that, because, enraged as I was, I didn’t think I could have held back from throwing all I’d seen back in his face. I didn’t understand his cool, evasive attitude. It stunned me to see him acting like a completely different person from the one I knew. Was he playing a game with me? Just like me with him, I supposed. When I saw him with Julia, I got jealous. But there was something else that bothered me more: I didn’t like to see this gruff Mark. It pushed me away. That was good, right?
In any case, leaving aside all the emotional connotations, the important thing was finding out what Mark meant when he said, I’ll remind you that what happened last time was your fault. What had happened last time? The only thing that brought me slightly closer to Mark and his attitude was finding out that he hadn’t brought about Julia’s crisis/depression, whether it was personal, emotional or creative. It had been Julia herself who seemed to have stepped into that morass and who had provoked their marital crisis. Could it have something to do with Chris? I doubted it, but . . . Why hadn’t Mark told me anything about it? Why hadn’t he justified his own adultery? But on the other hand, I liked it that way. It’s not very flattering to tell a person that you’re hooking up with her out of pure spite.
Julia went to Le Café every morning. The name didn’t need to be more original because it was the only café on the island. She would sit with her laptop at a table by the window that looked out onto Grand Avenue and write for hours. I could see her through the fishbowl in the café. The owner of the café, Mindy Bishop, had ordered a clock shaped like a steaming cup of coffee from me and had put it on the wall just over the counter, where she had the first dollar the shop had ever earned in a frame. It gave me a bird’s-eye view of the interior and the customers.
I went in and acted clueless, as if I hadn’t gone there deliberately to see her. I went to the counter, waved to Mindy and asked for a mocha to go.
“Hey there, sister,” Julia said to me, still typing, barely looking up from her computer.
“Oh, hey, Julia, what’s up? I didn’t know you came here to write.”
“I’m not writing. Banging keys isn’t writing.”
Angry, Julia slammed her laptop shut. I got scared, thinking she was going to confront me, that she knew Mark’s message was for me. Julia must have noticed my reaction, because she smiled to calm me down.
“Today’s not a writing day. It’s better not to force it. When it doesn’t come, it doesn’t come.”
“So what do you do when it’s not a writing day?”
“Feel bad, question myself and trade in my coffee for a glass of wine. You in?”
“I’m in.”
“Mindy, can we get a couple of glasses of white wine?”
Mindy was putting out her homemade cupcakes.
“I don’t have a license to sell alcohol.”
“So . . . ?” Julia asked, motioning around to show we were there alone. “Two glasses of that Chardonnay you keep in the fridge, please.”
From that day on, from that wine on, my meetings with Julia in Le Café became frequent. I liked her, she was easy to talk to, to get close to and to wheedle information out of. But above all, I think I was doing it because the closer I felt to her, the further I pulled away from Mark, keeping temptation at bay. As if there were a rule in my mind that forced me to take sides: one or the other. Mark or Julia. Not both.