Claire is five miles on the road to Cambridge before she even knows she’s in motion. A quick call to Donna first, but the phone goes straight to voicemail. Seconds later Claire’s in the car; minutes after, she’s on the Beltline, the lakes to either side like dark glass, like black mirrors, opaque, implacable. It feels a bit like a row with a boyfriend, back in her drinking days, when rage would overtake her and she’d up-end a bar table and be halfway down the street, her body doing the thinking for her overloaded brain. Look at her now, frightened, shaking, blinking back tears, blazing down the 12-18 trying to get ninety out of the Pacifica without the old heap collapsing in steel ribbons all over the highway.
Barbara and Irene, Barbara and Irene, Barbara and Irene. As soon as she saw poor Mr Smith’s body, any solace she found in the signs she thought Danny had left was swept away. Something bad has happened. Please let it not have happened to the girls. If they’re not at Donna’s, then God knows where they are. Neither Danny nor Claire have any other family in the area, and Donna is their only steady babysitter. Claire can’t think of anywhere else Danny might have stowed the girls before taking off. Unless he’s taken them with him. Either choice works better than the alternative: that they’ve been taken against their will.
Not for the first time, Claire’s hand hovers over her cell, ready to call 911. Not for the first time, she tries to talk herself down. Danny ran out with the girls, knowing the bad guy or guys – meaning whoever killed Mr Smith – were on their way. That’s as much as Claire can cling to for the time being. Never mind that the entire house had been stripped of furniture and belongings, suggesting a certain amount of forward planning. Never mind the question of why bad guys could possibly be after her husband, a suburban bar and grill owner with no criminal record or major gambling or drug addictions. The girls were with their father, and he would never let anything bad happen to them. Don’t think about their coming to harm.
Forget about bad guys. Kids probably killed Mr Smith, some kind of horrible Halloween prank. Vicious kids; spoilt, decadent rich kids, high on drugs, too impatient for Freakfest tomorrow night, goading each other into cruelty and wickedness. Just kids.
Approaching the house, she tries Donna’s number again, with the same result as before. She parks the Pacifica outside the big wrought-iron gates and hits the buzzer once, twice, three times. The house is not visible from here, and there’s no sign of light in the garden. Maybe they’re all on the lake side. Maybe they’ve all gone to bed. She buzzes a fourth, fifth time, and leans on it. Nothing.
Maybe Donna’s away. If so, Claire doesn’t have a clue where she might be. She doesn’t really know very much about her sister-in-law, and doesn’t want to know any more than she knows. There was a time when they might have made friends. Claire can see that, despite her sharp tongue and fearsome temper, Donna is funny and smart and a good aunt to the girls – strict but fair, like an old-style teacher, in fact, which is what she would probably have been in another age, an age before drugs and biker gangs and serial monogamy. When Claire and Danny married, she could have done with a strict-but-fair presence to help her settle, an older sister who could have given her familial advice and whose know-it-all bossiness she would have enjoyed resenting. But Donna was either indifferent or actively unpleasant, more like Danny’s ex-wife than his sister. It’s not impossible to dislike someone at first and later become her friend – she flashes on the title of Barbara’s first Beacon Street Girls book: Worst Enemies/Best Friends – and Claire certainly feels she gave it a good shot with Donna, above and beyond. But there’s a point you reach with someone where you realize that even if you wanted to forgive her, you’re no longer capable. The nerve endings are trashed, the synapses have been burned away, the affection cannot be restored. It’s good that the girls have an aunt, have any family at all beyond her and Danny, and it’s clear that Donna is trustworthy and responsible. And that’s the end of it.
No one home, Claire says aloud into the crisp night air. She shivers, releases the buzzer and sits back in the car. She tries Danny’s cell again, redials half a dozen times, hangs up without leaving a message. There’s no one else to call. There’s nowhere else to go except home. But nobody’s home, at home. Where are you?
‘So which is it, sweetheart: you want to call the cops, you don’t want to call the cops, or you’re not sure either way? Because a decision always brings relief. Unless, of course, it doesn’t. Tell you what: while you’re deliberating, have another drink.’
Dee is here, at least. When Claire got back, she hoped the whole thing might have been, if not quite a dream, at least a mistake; there’d be a removals truck in the drive, Danny and the kids in the house and an explanation for everything. But everything was just as mysterious and empty as it had been, and that’s when she cracked and called Dee, her best friend, who joins her now on the couch because Claire is not so much crying again as leaking a little, and instead of giving her a shoulder, goes for the upward-palms-cupping-the-elbows, gently-rocking, come-on-now, grief-coach approach.
The couch is upstairs in the tower. At first Claire figured the removals guys didn’t take it because it would have had to come out the window by winch, since that’s the way it came in, the spiral staircase barely wide enough for one person not being nearly wide enough for a couch. But then she saw that everything else was here as well: her theater posters and photos and mementoes, all her plays and bound playscripts, everything from Chicago, and before. All the things she used to be.
Once she had called Dee, she’d made her way out to the apple trees and hunkered down by Mr Smith’s body for a spell. What kind of savages would do something like this? She felt she should bury him, but if the cops were summoned, they’d need to see what had been done to the poor dog. She settled for getting one of his old blankets from the car trunk and covering him with it where he lay.
Fearing she was going to lose it again, she made herself walk the yard, breathing the cold night air, trying to recover her nerve, her focus, her clarity. She established a route, her sandals crunching on the frosty grass. She found that if she got close enough to the rear of the house, the sensor light finally came on and flooded the yard. She walked in a broad oval between Mr Smith’s body and the house and then down towards the gate that leads out to the Arboretum. That’s about as far as she could get before the light cut out. Each time she completed the route, she felt a little more self-posessed, a little less panicked. The ground was bumpy underfoot – she had wanted a wild country garden, not a manicured suburban lawn – and she thought of Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby when she loses a heel, chanting ‘I was born on the side of a hill.’ She didn’t feel much like chanting though, not when she remembered that the dog who played George in Bringing Up Baby also played Mr Smith in The Awful Truth, which is where they got the idea for the name. Danny had wanted to call him Asta, the role he took in The Thin Man, but Claire had won out. She didn’t feel like chanting, but she wasn’t going to curl up and die. So when she finally saw the wolf’s head stuck on the bough of an old apple tree, she was not only able to process the sight without screaming, she also realized almost instantly that it was no wolf’s head but a werewolf mask. The sensor light cut out, but she approached the tree and examined the mask by the light of her phone. It was a full face job with fake fur and vulcanized rubber teeth bared in a grimace. The mask came away from the tree easily – it had just been wedged between two branches – and something fell from it as she tugged it free. Claire bent down and picked up a postcard which bore the simple legend: Trick or Treat!
She had guessed correctly – Mr Smith’s horrible death was someone’s sick idea of a Halloween prank. One mystery solved, at least. She made her way inside, fully resolved now to call the cops. But when she found herself back in the house, she noticed just how much of Mr Smith’s blood there was on her feet and legs and hands, and when she reached the bathroom she saw she had blood on her face. She grabbed body wash and shampoo from her suitcase and took a long shower. Beneath the torrent of hot water, the tears came again, not just for her dog, but for her pathetic, deluded self. One minute she had been headstrong and reckless, giddy with notions of escaping the nest, high on a vision of freedom spied through the distorting lens of a vacation flirtation; the next she had been reduced to a whimpering animal pining for her master, a panicked child praying: Let this be a sign; let that be a sign. Anger bubbled up next, this time directed at her husband. Never mind hints and signs, what kind of bastard would abandon his wife like this without a concrete message? If he couldn’t phone, could he not have, what, left a note in back of the photo frame in the study (she checked, no dice) or under the mat, or in one of the goddamn cars?
What had she done? Nothing. Nothing really; nothing in Chicago, nothing to merit this, surely she had done nothing else? She tormented herself with the idea that this must be her fault, but could find nothing beyond the mild feelings of discontent and disaffection and, frankly, boredom that must visit fifteen-year-old marriages the world over. A big fat dose of Is That All There Is? Cause for concern, you bet, but for this? Insufficient grounds.
She had no towels in her case and was reduced to drying herself with a t-shirt. At least she had clean underwear, and socks, and a top and jeans that had only been worn once. She pulled her boots on, zipped up her scuffed old suede jacket (the reassuring feeling, like the protective arm of an old friend) and gave the house one last go-round. That’s when she climbed the spiral staircase from the office to discover her nook still intact. And that’s when Dee arrived.
They say a best friend is one who’ll drop everything, no matter when, and come to your aid. The only person Claire knows she could ask to do that is Dee St Clair. And here they are, Claire wiping her tears away, Dee doing that thing with her face (she’s known for her faces) where she warns you she’s going to say something serious by setting her mouth and going all scowly with her eyes, which always makes Claire laugh, even now.
‘Crying, laughing, mother of God, if it was the fifties, I’d get to slap you for being hysterical.’
‘If it was the fifties, I’d probably take it.’
‘You’d probably like it. Here, drink some more whiskey.’
‘I don’t even like whiskey.’
Claire drinks some anyway – Woodford Reserve, bourbon Danny got as a gift that mysteriously found its way up here. For which relief much thanks: there’s nothing else in the house, and she needs a drink.
‘Atta girl,’ Dee says. ‘Now. Let me try and recap on our situation here. Your husband has cleared the house of possessions, furniture and fittings and split the scene with kids in tow but without letting his wife know where he’s going, or why he’s going, or even that he’s going. Now, it’s unlikely that Danny’s done this of his own free and rational will. Either he’s been coerced, or he’s lost his reason: either way, the girls are in danger. How am I doing so far?’
‘He could well have a good reason.’
‘And what might that be?’
‘I don’t know, obviously.’
‘Another woman? Money troubles?’
‘Hey! Back off, Nancy Drew, and let me think.’
‘I’m sorry. Between the helpful friend and the bossy bitch, it’s a fine line.’
Claire takes a sip of whiskey, grimaces and looks at Dee, who is midway through her third without any apparent ill effect. Dee with her sallow skin and black eyes and corkscrew curls, raven feathers skeined with silver now, Dee with her velvet and leather and lace, her bangles and beads and hoop earrings, Dee working her Californian gypsy rock chick thing. Dee landed in Madison because the guy she met and married in LA when she was nineteen ran an antiques business here. Before he was killed in a traffic accident a couple of years later, he set her up in her own hair and beauty salon on Dayton.
They met when Dee cut Claire’s hair the Christmas of her second year at university. They’ve been friends ever since. Maybe it’s on account of Claire having no family outside Dan and the kids (even her adoptive parents are dead, and she has no step-siblings) that Dee gets bumped up the ranks and accorded family status. And Dee has no family either, just a flaky mom who shows up beween husbands for sympathy and understanding which she doesn’t deserve, but invariably gets. They are effectively sisters and, as with sisters, love can quickly turn to hate, usually within the time it takes to empty a glass.
The brashness, the outspoken, loudest-girl-in-the-class quality that Claire loves about Dee (because Claire may have worked in the theater, but in manner she is anything but theatrical) can in an instant appear crass or gauche. The constant stream of sexual innuendo and inquisitiveness runs sour and desperate. And even though Dee does seem to have sex on her mind at all times, there’s something, not quite prissy or repressed, but, for all the flirting with wine waiters and bell hops, a tangibly non-sexual, almost other-worldly vibe about her. Maybe it’s the sacred and profane Californian divide – in the mountains, the quest for the spiritual, the lure of every new pseudo-religion and cult; in the valleys, the all-night debauch of movies and pornography – hence the ability to be naive and cynical, idealistic and venal, pure and lecherous. Claire can imagine her in school, the bossier girl in the group who knew what dirty words meant first, found her mom’s boyfriend’s porn, was brash and forward with boys and actually turned out to be a bit prudish and was the last to lose it. Turned out, beneath it all, she was a bit frightened and uncertain.
But that could be Claire applying an actor’s technique to real life: confidence is always a front for some kind of insecurity or neurosis; the talkative person is blustering to cover some up some guilty secret; the sexy girl will be a lousy lay. It could as easily be the other way round: that Dee’s sassy-girl-with-a-dirty-mouth act is just that: a routine, a burlesque got up to pass the time, or to conceal the real her, or even – and Claire can totally identify with this – to stand in for a personality she’s not sure she possesses. Claire felt that way about acting – sure she liked to show off, to be the center of attention, but she also needed for sustained periods of time to pretend to be someone else. It was so much easier than pretending to be yourself.
‘All right, sweetheart,’ Dee says, in her talking-the-suicide-down-from-the-ledge voice. ‘Look at it another way. Can you think of any reason he might have done this? According to your account of it, married life has not been the most exciting for the last stretch, but storming out after a row and crashing in a hotel for a couple nights usually works for most people.’
‘No. I can’t think of any reason he might have done this.’
‘No little amour you might have confessed to him?’
‘Shut up!’
‘Money worries?’
‘The business is booming, far as I can tell. There was no real hit from the recession, not in Brogan’s. And Danny owns the freehold. And there’s no mortgage on the house. So, you know, there’s no major overheads, there’s a limit to how exposed we could be.’
‘No investments that went wrong?’
Deep breath, Claire.
‘Well … since you mention it … we had some money … the girls’ college fund, basically … with Jonathan Glatt.’