As they entered the apartment, Rannie composed herself. No way in hell was she letting Nate know where she’d been. And what would she say anyway? “Where was I? Oh, just had to dash down to the morgue to identify a murder victim. No, sweetie, not the woman I found the other day. Someone else.”
Fortunately, Nate had the typical teenager’s interest in her work life—zilch. He’d never met Ellen. So even if Nate heard about a murder in Central Park, he’d remain ignorant of any link it had to Rannie as long as she kept her trap shut.
“Honey, I’m home,” Rannie said plastering on a smile that felt like a cross between June Cleaver’s and the Joker’s. It was all for naught. No Nate, only a note, a scolding one at that: “No food here so I went out.”
“What’s he talking about?” Rannie said to Tim as she pointed to the dining room table, where the serving bowl with linguine remained half full. Ditto for the salad bowl. And Nate knew there was always a ready supply of Skippy’s superchunk peanut butter, Smucker’s raspberry jam, and Wonder bread, which together provided nourishment as well as comfort any time of day.
“Know what? I’m desperate for a PB&J.”
“Make it two.” Tim followed her into the kitchen.
Rannie slung her bag and coat on a counter and began constructing two perfect sandwiches with exactly the correct ratio of peanut butter to jam. Focusing on mundane tasks, getting out plates, pouring glasses of milk, pushed away, at least for the moment, where she’d been and what she’d seen. But she hadn’t even taken bite one when her cell started trilling inside her bag. She fished it out. The number wasn’t instantly familiar.
“Oh, God, what if it’s Dina. Ellen’s assistant. What’ll I say?”
“Don’t answer,” he said and took the phone from her. “You’ve been through enough tonight. Besides, the cops have to notify the family first.”
Rannie nodded. They sat at the counter, eating in silence. According to the clock it was only ten after ten. Exhaustion made it feel hours later. Tim was yawning.
Rannie looked at him. “I better leave Nate a note.” Then she made a face. “How do I put it—about you staying?”
“Keep it simple, Rannie. Say ‘Tim’s here.’ Nate’ll get it.”
So she said exactly that on a Post-it that she stuck on top of Nate’s note. Tim was right, of course. Keep it simple: Don’t answer Dina’s phone call. Don’t overexplain to Nate. Tim did his best to live by the touchstones of AA. The problem was that, for Rannie, nothing, with the possible exception of making a peanut butter sandwich, ever seemed simple.
When she returned to the kitchen, Tim’s plate was clean. “Come on, kiddo. Finish up. I’m beat.”
“Okay, but I want to turn on the news. Maybe there’s an update. Or something on Ret.”
She saw Tim’s face grow red.
“Never mind! Forget I said it! Bad idea!” she said.
Too late.
Tim’s fist came pounding down on the counter. “I don’t get you, Rannie! I really don’t!” he erupted. “We just came from the fucking morgue. Can’t you give it a rest?”
This wasn’t the first time he’d blown up at her; nevertheless, it always caught her off guard. Tim angry was scary. And he was incapable of being merely a little pissed off or somewhat irritated; he always went straight from zero to enraged.
“Ellen was my friend! I want to know why she’s dead. Why is that so crazy?”
“Oh, no! I know you! There’s more to it than that! You remember the last time you decided to do a little investigating? Huh? Do you? You nearly got tossed off your roof.”
Rannie didn’t reply. Tim continued to stare at her, shaking his head, but already she could see the fury had subsided. He looked repentant. “You make me nuts. You really do,” he finally said, rubbing his forehead and raking a hand through his hair. “I just don’t want anything happening to you.”
“I know.” Then suddenly Rannie grew alarmed. “Hold on. Is there stuff you’re not telling me that you’ve heard? ’Cause if there is—”
He cut her off. “No. I’m just trying to explain how I feel and doing a shit job of it.” Then with her napkin, he came over and wiped peanut butter off the corner of her mouth.
Right then the front door opened.
“Ma?”
“In the kitchen,” she called with false cheer.
A second later Nate appeared. “Hey,” he said to Tim. He took in the open jars of peanut butter and jam. “So Ma has you hooked?”
Had he seen the note? Maybe so because Nate avoided eye contact with Rannie and beat a hasty retreat to his room.
“Come on. No more dawdling,” Tim said a moment later. Rannie took the hand he extended and followed him to her bedroom. They took turns brushing their teeth and flossing. Then they undressed, Tim stripping down to boxers.
“I’m warning you. I’m a covers hog,” Rannie said as she pulled back the quilt. “And I feel about as sexy as I look.” She was wearing a Chapel School T-shirt, XX-Large, which came down to her knees. That and a pair of white cotton socks.
“Understood.”
In a minute they were both settled in bed, Tim behind her with an arm cradled around her shoulder. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck.
“Sorry I lost it before. Didn’t your mama warn you about the Irish?”
“Lucky for you, I never listened to anything she said.”
He held her closer and kissed her hair.
Rannie let out a long, slow sigh and in a little while her eyelids grew heavy and her body began to relax, her muscles unknotting one by one. Here in the darkness with Tim beside her, she could almost trick herself into believing that the world outside the bedroom, where such horrible things happened, didn’t exist. There was nobody else she wanted to be with.
Then—was it five minutes or five hours later?—she awoke. Her mouth was dry and she was shivering; somehow the quilt had migrated to the other side of the bed and morphed into a cocoon with Tim inside it, in an annoyingly peaceful sleep. Rannie fumbled for her glasses and peered at the clock. Almost three. She drank a glass of water in the bathroom and padded back to bed, where first she gave Tim a gentle tap, and when that didn’t work, poked him hard in the back.
“Wake up, Tim.”
“Wha?” Only a faint stirring.
Rannie shook him by the shoulder. “Wake up!”
His head emerged from the cocoon, his hair spikier than ever. He blinked and as he returned to a conscious state smiled groggily at Rannie.
“You’re the covers hog! I’m freezing.”
“Sorry.” His voice was raspy from sleep. He managed to unfurl part of the quilt and held it over her tentlike. “Come on in.”
Rannie nestled beside him. Almost immediately the heat radiating off his body enveloped her.
In no time, Tim fell back asleep. Rannie did not.
How odd . . . When she’d gone to sleep a few hours earlier, Tim’s presence had been nothing more than comforting; now it was arousing. She swallowed hard as she felt a familiar tingling in her breasts and farther down, deep inside her. Oh, the magic of endorphins; when all else failed, you could at least count on pure animal drive to restore some glimmer of hope about life and the future. Rannie peeled off her T-shirt and socks, snuggled closer, hooking a foot around Tim’s leg.
“Hey, you,” she whispered, kissing him on the neck, on the ear, on his jawline.
Instinctively, Tim reached out and drew her closer. As soon as he felt her bare skin, he murmured, “When did you lose that hot negligee?”
“Listen. I can’t get back to sleep and it’s your fault. So you owe me.”
He was wide awake now. Tim sat up and shimmied out of his boxers.
“Lie back,” Rannie said, and, straddling Tim, began flicking her tongue back and forth over his right nipple, then the left, then the right again. Tim murmured something unintelligible. When he started to maneuver himself inside her, Rannie pushed his hand away. She wanted to call the shots tonight, and she wanted to stretch out the “intro.”
Tim understood. Obligingly, he raised both hands over his head, signaling “I’m all yours.”
With one hand, she traced the outline of his eyebrows, the rim of his eyelashes, and the curve of his nose and lips. It was like she was drawing a picture of his face, a face that was better than beautiful to her. When she bent down to kiss him, his mouth opened and she ran her tongue over the place where one of his front teeth overlapped the other. Then she leaned back and stroked Tim’s chest with one hand, while with the other, she stroked her breasts. However and wherever she touched Tim, she touched herself as well.
Tim was watching her. “You are something,” he said.
Yeah, this was one thing she was good at, something that had always come naturally. Rannie closed her eyes, slipped in Tim’s cock, and started rocking back and forth, slowly at first, squeezing him inside her, ratcheting up the rhythm little by little. Every time she felt herself edging too close to an orgasm, she’d lean back, not moving until the tension in her body lessened a bit; then she’d start moving again. Tim met her thrust for thrust. He wasn’t a talker; he didn’t ever make a lot of noise. He was purposeful, intuitive, and almost calm about fucking.
Brushing away Rannie’s hands, he cupped her breasts. Even their breathing was in sync, quickening at the same instant. One part of her wanted to hold back; if she didn’t, this would be over. But she couldn’t and so there was nothing to do except go with the moment.
One of them came a nanosecond before the other but who—Tim or Rannie—she had no idea. She remained stone still until the last little waves had finished rippling through her, then lay beside Tim.
He held her hand in both of his. “So it was me instead of an Ativan,” she heard him say. Already her eyes were closed: she felt peaceful. The last thing Rannie remembered was Tim carefully arranging the quilt over her.
She slept deeply but not nearly long enough. The next time her eyes opened, the room was filling with a harsh and cheerless gray light. Shreds of an upsetting dream floated before her but were disintegrating rapidly; in the dream Rannie was somewhere with Ellen and Ret, who were dead but neither one realized it. Dream Rannie was in anguish, unable to decide whether to break the news or leave them happily ignorant.
It was nearly six o’clock. The police must have called Ellen’s parents by now. Was there any news worse than hearing your child had been murdered? How did a parent go on for even a minute, much less a day, a month, a year? Rannie no longer expected good luck; nowadays a glass somewhat less than half full seemed acceptable. All she asked from the God she didn’t believe in was to avoid life-shattering bad luck.
All at once an icy, irrational panic seized hold of her, forcing Rannie out of bed, back into her T-shirt and socks and down the hall, where she peeked in on Nate, her pulse slowing at the sight of him asleep on his back, mouth open, safe and sound.
She was up for good. After grabbing her bathrobe, a pink terrycloth number from Mama Bookman, she made a pot of Zabar’s house blend and sat in the living room with her mug, waiting for the caffeine to kick in. On the coffee table was the Times crossword puzzle that Tim had been working on last night. A Monday puzzle and almost half was blank. It irked Tim that Rannie dismissed the early weekday puzzles as being too easy to bother with. And it irked her just as much that he actually liked the word scrambles in the Daily News. The snob in her wondered if such a difference could count as the root problem of their relationship.
Rannie gathered up all the sections of yesterday’s paper for recycling. Underneath them lay the copy of Tattletale, Ret Sullivan’s face suddenly staring up at her. It was unsettling.
The photo was from Ret’s red lipstick, French twist glory days. A sly taunting smile played on her lips, a smile that said, “I know lots of secrets.” Rannie found herself picking up the book. For some reason, the credit line caught her eye. “Written by Lina Struvel.” The longer she looked at the name, the phonier it started to sound. A pseudonym?
Rannie located a yellow legal pad and a Bic. First she wrote out the name backward and came out with Anil Levurts. No cigar. After that, she tried a code that she and her friends used for passing notes in elementary school, a code that had seemed so “top secret” to ten-year-olds. Rannie rewrote the name, substituting B’s for A’s, C’s for B’s, D’s for C’s, and so on. She wound up with Mjob Tusvwfm. No cigar, not even cigar ash.
Then all of a sudden certain letters in the author’s name started jumping out at her, calling attention to themselves. The “R,” the “E,” the “T.”
To be sure, Rannie wrote out “Lina Struvel” first and then wrote “Ret Sullivan” underneath and began drawing lines between matching letters. Well, what do you know! A word scramble!
Ret had written Tattletale, every over-the-top flattering word of it! It wasn’t a biography at all; it was Ret’s autobiography, actually more like a really long mash note to herself.
Rannie sat back on the couch, sipping coffee, and mulled. She bet the idea had been Larry’s. It was so like him to play a game like this. “Who better to write it?” Rannie could almost hear him saying to Ret. “It’ll be a hoot. Say whatever you want about yourself.” Why wouldn’t Ret have jumped at the offer?
So everything Larry had said yesterday about being out of touch with Ret for years was a bunch of baloney. Rannie tried to be objective about his deception. She hadn’t seen Larry in ages. There was no earthly reason for him to tell her who wrote Tattletale . . . was there? Nevertheless, Rannie wished he hadn’t lied so blatantly and so convincingly.
“You okay? Whatcha doing out here?”
Startled, Rannie turned. Tim was standing behind the couch. He was unshaven but already had on the khakis and polo shirt he’d worn last night. He leaned over and, clasping her around the shoulders, nuzzled the back of her neck.
“Mmmm. You smell good.” Rannie, closing her eyes, was settling into his embrace when abruptly his hands pulled away.
“Aw, come on!”
Her eyes flew open. She turned and saw Tim pointing at Tattletale. “That’s what you’re reading first thing in the morning?”
“I wasn’t. Scout’s honor. I was just sitting here with my coffee and the cover caught my eye. C’mere. Look at the author’s name.” Rannie moved over and patted the sofa. Tim didn’t move.
“Then look.” She proffered her sheet of yellow paper. “I thought there was something strange about the name. Lina Struvel.”
Tim glanced at it. This was when Tim, dedicated fan of word scrambles, was supposed to marvel at her cleverness. Instead all he did was nod and say, “Yeah. I get it. So Ret Sullivan wrote her own biography.”
“I know the editor. I saw him just yesterday. For freelance. We were talking about Ret. But he never said a word. He told me he hadn’t been in touch with Ret for years. The police have already questioned him.”
“What’s the guy’s name?”
“Larry Katz. Why?”
“No reason. Don’t even know why I’m asking.”
Tim was not a practiced fibber. Once again, the unnerving thought occurred to Rannie that Tim might be more looped into the investigation than he was letting on. But she didn’t press the issue. Instead, she offered breakfast, which he declined, claiming that a meat delivery truck was arriving at seven. He was gone five minutes later. No good-bye kiss.