Girl in the Rearview Mirror Read online

  “Ah, that’s right,” she said. “I forgot about your thing with him. It was funny, how miserable you were, thinking he was sleeping with me.”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking. He’d never touch someone like you.”

  She shook her head. “Here’s the Philip I know. When I met him, I pretended to want a job. He took me up to his office and shut the door. He kept touching me. Rubbing my arm. ‘The trays get heavy, let me see your muscle,’” she said, making her voice deep. “He wanted to hire me to work the closing shift. ‘You’ll have to be up late.’” Her disgust was palpable. “When I told him who I was, you wouldn’t believe how fast his pretty face got ugly.”

  I breathed through my teeth. “You’re lying.”

  She stepped toward me, and I backed away. “I gave Stacy some money. I felt bad for her. Not for you. If you hadn’t come around, Amabel would be alive. Your niece.”

  She jabbed her finger at me. Her nails were bitten to the quick. “That’s not on me. Guy told me you were there. It was your fault.”

  I lunged toward her, furious, and she snatched at my purse. Her bony fingers fastened around the strap. I pulled back, but she had a better grip. She was ferocious, teeth gritted, the tendons in her wrists tight as cords. She was much stronger than me, and frighteningly determined, her tall frame bearing down. Her breaths came hard and fast, and utterly unself-conscious. My hands were sweating. The strap snapped, and she yanked the bag away with a triumphant grunt, dumped it onto the patio. The knife clattered out. She hooted. “A knife! Are you kidding?”

  She picked it up and held it in front of her. The tip danced in the air between us. I didn’t move. I kept my eyes on it.

  “Did the two of you ever fuck? Guy and I argued about it. He thought yes. I had a feeling no. I think Philip was afraid of you.” She was still amped up from our struggle, and her win, and she slashed the air with the knife, mockingly, giggling. Moving back, I stumbled and twisted my ankle. I caught myself on a chair.

  Still smiling, Iris flicked the knife into the pool. She snapped up the envelope of cash from my scattered things. Opening it, she swore appreciatively. “Stacy said it was a lot, but I didn’t know whether to believe her!” She stuck the envelope into the waistband of her jeans, dropping the hoodie over it.

  I stepped forward again, caught her by the arm, but she shoved me, hard. I’d miscalculated my distance from the pool. The splash seemed like an explosion in the courtyard. I thrashed to my feet, gasping. The water was up to my chest. My clothes were immediately sodden and heavy. I dragged myself to shallower water.

  Iris backed away, her face shadowed under the hood. “Watch out for yourself, Finn. Philip’s bad news. You think you know him, but you don’t.”

  “You’re crazy.” I didn’t know if she could hear me. I was still breathless.

  “Look at Clint,” she said. Or something about Clint. She was already turning, beginning to jog, and then she vanished into the dark.

  38

  I was desperate to wash the smell of chlorine from my skin. When I entered the condo’s gym, overhead lights flipped on automatically. A wall of windows exposed me to the courtyard. I moved quickly toward the bathroom. The hulking exercise machines cast strange shadows on the carpet. There was a trembling pressure in the air. I realized it was the motors, emitting a low, grinding hum I could just register.

  I locked myself in the bathroom. There was a toilet, a waffled white curtain across a shower stall, a wire basket of folded towels. Everything smelled of bleach. After I undressed, I rinsed and wrung out my clothes and hung them up. I stood under the water for a long time.

  The cheap hair dryer got the worst of the wet off my clothes and hair. In the quiet when I’d finished, I was wincingly aware of how loud I’d been. The faucet dripped, echoed off the tile. I hesitated at the door, dreading going back out.

  I quickly undid the lock and strode into the gym as if I weren’t afraid. The lights flashed on. For a moment, my eyes faltered, dark blotting over my vision. I thought I heard a sigh. A rustle? When my eyes cleared, the room seemed normal. I made it across the courtyard, was pressing my pass to the door sensor, when I heard something for sure: the scrape of a deck chair against the patio. Iris? Guy? Someone else? I didn’t wait. I slipped inside and pressed the door shut behind me.

  Upstairs, Bryant’s condo was dark and still. I kicked off my shoes and climbed the stairs quietly. He was in bed, turned away from the door, the sheet tucked under his arm. He didn’t stir, even when I lay beside him. The sheets were cold and crisp. He ironed them, or had them ironed. Tentatively, I reached my hand under the covers until I touched his side. He still wore his boxers and undershirt. It couldn’t have been him out there, I thought.

  His skin was warmer than mine.

  I lay awake. Everything ran together smoothly in my mind, until Clint’s death.

  Once Iris had extracted the Martin name from Clint, she’d gone to work. When I walked in on Philip and Clint in the office, they’d been plotting to keep her away. Have to take steps. Perhaps realizing how visible they were at the restaurant, they rendezvoused at the motel. Philip paid him. I could imagine Philip saying, Don’t hurt her, but—. Clint made his phone calls. Set fire to her car. Then Iris had been afraid. When I’d met her after the gala, she’d no longer wanted to see Philip.

  Days later, Clint was dead. Had Philip blamed him for Ammy? But he should have blamed Iris.

  I reminded myself of the key—Philip wouldn’t have broken into Clint’s room. But the thought wasn’t as comforting as it had been.

  Beside me, Bryant slept, or didn’t sleep.

  In the morning, he pressed his nose to my cheek. A quick kiss before work? I didn’t feel his lips. He might have been smelling the pool. I thought he whispered something.

  I woke again later, and he was gone. A note on the island read: Sorry, something came up. Home by 4.

  My head ached. I’d woken from the middle of a dream, something intense and unsettling, and tiredness clung to me, turned my head cloudy.

  Ordinary signs of Bryant were scattered about the kitchen. The day’s paper, already read and folded into a tidy roll on the island. A coffee cup with a drop trailing down from the rim. Our highball glasses. I tried again to remember the night before, what we’d talked about. I’d asked him something—about Marina? Everything was cloudy. I must have had too much to drink. The thing I most vividly remembered was the steak, dripping onto the white plate. And sitting on the edge of the bed, reaching up to unclasp my necklace, my arms so heavy, my fingers thick and clumsy.

  I drank two cups of coffee. Bryant’s fridge had been restocked with fruit, eggs, macadamia-nut milk, a pile of raw granola bars, some bottled cold-pressed juice. If he kept junk in the house, he’d told me, he’d eat it all. So he didn’t. His self-control was exacting.

  I chewed one of the soft, crumbling bars. I idly unfolded the newspaper. Beside the date was the weather: a yellow sun icon, high of 113. Bryant had left the paper open to the middle, a patchwork of half stories, continued from earlier pages. And, at the bottom, a headline.

  motel death ruled accidental

  I read it quickly. Police closed their investigation of a man’s sudden death . . . An autopsy determined the cause to be an overdose of painkillers . . . The discovery in-line with the scene . . . The death was the latest instance of the opioid epidemic . . .

  I rubbed my eyes with my fists. Clint, an addict, had died of an overdose. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. I’d trusted Brenda Argyle, even though she was obviously eager to gossip. And Iris, a pure liar. Philip’s bad news. She must have laughed all the way home.

  I threw away the last of my breakfast. I went out onto the balcony. A worker in white overalls leaned a ladder against the palm trees and pruned dead fronds. Suspicion lingered like a toxin in my muscles. Bryant had left the paper just so, like a gift to me, wrapped up on the island.

  I was still standing there, watching the palm fronds fall to the ground,
when my phone rang. A local area code.

  “Finn, this is Philip.”

  The reception flickered. “Philip?”

  “I was hoping we could meet for lunch. Are you free?” He sounded calm and pleasant.

  “Really?”

  “I wanted to call sooner, but things kept preventing me. Are you up for it?”

  We arranged to meet at The Grove at twelve-thirty. After we hung up, I went inside to dress, trying to decide if I was feeling excitement, or dread.

  My taxi dropped me off fifteen minutes early. I lingered in the restaurant’s garden. A wasp was bothered by my presence, and kept darting at me, its body a striped bullet.

  Philip seemed to materialize in the tunnel of flowering trellises. He wore a pale linen suit and gold-framed sunglasses, as if already ready for his cruise. His face was tired but kind, the Philip I knew, though his hair was shot through with gray.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said, kissing my cheek. He was clean-shaven, smelled of peppermint.

  “I didn’t expect to hear from you.”

  He took off his shades, and I saw how the skin around his eyes was thin and blue. “I wasn’t comfortable with the way we ended things. I hope you understand it wasn’t to do with you. Marina was upset.”

  “I shouldn’t have shown up like that,” I said. “At the funeral.”

  He brushed his hand in the air. “Enough. Let’s go in, shall we?”

  A hush fell as we crossed the dining room.

  Tommy was at the bar. He took Philip’s hand in both of his, as he’d done to me. “I’m so sorry. We all are. We’re sleepwalking here.”

  Philip thanked him with a grimace, and I thought later he’d have the manager tell the staff not to mention it. “I stopped in for lunch. Something light. And wine.”

  We went up to his office with two bottles. He closed the door, and I was uncomfortably reminded of Iris’s story—how Philip sealed them in together, isolated from the restaurant. I hung back by the door. He shrugged out of his jacket and hung it from the basketball hoop. He loosened his tie, undid the top two buttons of his shirt. Reclining in his chair, he yawned until I thought his jaw might crack. “Are you going to sit?” His smile, how well I knew it, that sudden twitch, lips gathered slightly off to the side; the way he sometimes cocked his head first, like his smile was a weapon aimed at you.

  I smiled back. I always did.

  I perched on the chair opposite. Where Clint had sat.

  “Did you come from business?” I asked.

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “Just wrapping some things up. We’re about to go out of town for a while.”

  “The cruise.”

  “You must think it’s barbaric.”

  “No,” I lied.

  “It is, of course,” he said. “But everything feels barbaric now, anyway.” He poured the wine. He lifted his glass to me before we drank.

  The wine was sweet and effervescent. Something harder would have been welcome. Something that stung. But I was nervous, and drained my glass.

  “I’ve been wanting to apologize to you since it happened.”

  He winced. “You don’t have to.”

  “I’m so sorry. I never should have left her alone, not for a minute.”

  “You can’t watch them every instant. What, were you in the bathroom?”

  This felt like the moment to confess, here in this quiet room, with Philip’s newly gray scalp bowed. But the words stuck in my throat.

  “You’re not alone,” Philip said. “The guilt. I hardly saw her this summer. I’d go past the playroom, peek at the two of you, and then—I’d keep going. It makes me sick.”

  “You were a wonderful dad.” I swallowed. “Ammy adored you.”

  “And you,” he said. “Now please, enough. It’s not necessary between us.”

  I bit my lip. He was being too nice. He’d lost that blustering, talking-over quality I liked, that sideways, teasing slant on everything.

  “Why did you invite me here?” I asked.

  “Does there have to be a reason?”

  I thought of Marina escorting me from the church, of Bryant lifting my legs into bed, of Iris backing away from the pool. Watch out for yourself.

  “I think so.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Not what I expected you to say.” He lifted the wine bottle and filled my glass at my nod. “I heard you’ve decided against going back to the Midwest.”

  I pinched the stem of my glass, swirling the wine back and forth. “Honestly, I never planned to go back. Bryant suggested it, and apparently he told everyone that’s what I was doing.”

  Philip smiled wryly. “You won’t hold it against us that we asked about your plans, surely?”

  I shrugged. “I guess not. But I’m not going home.”

  “Good. I have a better idea for you.” He flopped his wallet on the desk and rifled through the bills.

  “I don’t want any money. You were already too generous.”

  He tossed a business card on the desk. “This is better.”

  I picked it up. Meredith Willis, Director, Willis Design and Remodel, etched in copper lettering on velvety gray card stock.

  “What’s this?”

  “Friend of mine. You used to be in design, way back when, weren’t you? I made a few calls. Meredith is looking to hire an assistant. She said it won’t be a design job to start, but it’s certainly a foot in the door. A major foot in a major door. Meredith’s is one of the top firms in New York.”

  I ran my thumb over the raised lettering. “New York?”

  “No better place to go when you’re young. Phoenix is for old people.”

  “Does Bryant know about this?”

  “You wouldn’t give up an opportunity like this for that boyfriend of yours, would you?” His grin dropped when he saw my expression. “But seriously, New York and D.C. aren’t so far apart. You know Bryant will be over there full-time after the election. Assuming all goes well, of course.”

  My stomach hurt. He hadn’t told me. I wondered if he knew about this job prospect. Probably so. They all seemed to know everything about me.

  “I don’t think I can accept this.” I pushed the card across the desk. “Even though I appreciate the gesture.”

  Philip’s eyebrows lifted. “Why the hell not?”

  I ran my thumb along the zipper of my purse. “It’s a generous offer. But I think it’s for the wrong reason.”

  Philip frowned. “This is one of those opportunities that shapes everything else. Work. Life. Everything.” He pressed the card firmly back at me. “Trust me, Finn.”

  I wondered what Philip believed shaped his life. His brother’s death? His car accident? Or just the Senator, steering Philip through all of the accidents, controlling the fallout, so that Philip would inevitably land in this chair, would inevitably remark in a confident, self-mocking tone that “all would go well” in November, that the Martin family would steamroll along, inevitably.

  There was a sharp knock on the door, and the waiter entered without a pause. He greeted me by name as he set down my plate, and asked if we needed anything else. He bowed and went out.

  Philip unrolled his napkin and shook it into his lap. He took up his knife and fork and began eating with relish. They’d prepared some kind of silver meat, a leg bone jutting up like a flag, in a winey broth of vegetables.

  The face of Philip’s watch reflected the desk lamp as he cut. “I can’t sleep, but I’ve been eating like crazy.” He glanced at me. “Don’t you like rabbit? It’s not a principle thing, is it? Rabbit is good peasant food.”

  He knew I’d be tempted to tease him about his fancy peasant rabbit, his eating too quickly and too much. He’d be confident he could charm me into accepting his favor.

  “I went to Verde the other day,” I said. “To confront Iris. I blamed her for— Anyway. When I was there I met her sister. Stacy.”

  Philip’s chewing slowed. He washed the bite down with more wine.

  �
�I just lost my child.” His soft voice was reproachful.

  “I don’t care about Iris, or Stacy. I’m not going to tell anyone. I just want to know your side. Why you did it.”

  A frown flashed across his face—pain, or irritation. He tapped the table, his wedding ring making a hard clear knock.

  I touched his wrist, imploring. I remembered taking his arm to climb out of the pool, and the way he’d smiled at me, the thousand drops of water on his shoulders glittering in the sun.

  “All right.” He sighed. “But this stays here. I don’t want you telling that boyfriend of yours. Or anyone else. Agreed?”

  I nodded.

  His pale blue eyes, framed by dashes etched into the skin, appraised me. A muscle at his jaw tightened and released.

  “We had to do it,” he said. “It was our only choice.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “You mean . . . Marina couldn’t get pregnant?”

  “We were pregnant.”

  I frowned. The smell of the heavy food was stultifying. “I don’t understand.”

  He shifted in his seat. “It took a while. Years, actually, but it finally happened. A girl. We had a name picked out and everything. We were five months along. We went in for an ultrasound. Just routine. I remember, the doctor was talking to Marina while she watched the screen. All of a sudden she trailed off. She tried to cover it up. Told us she needed to run a few tests.

  “We were there another hour, maybe longer. Waiting alone in that little room. Marina didn’t realize—she was nervous, but it didn’t occur to her how bad it could be. She hadn’t seen the doctor’s face. But I knew. The tests were only protocol. The baby was gone. Something genetic. It can happen, they said.”

  His fingers reached up and clamped his ear, a rougher version of Marina’s tic.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  He told me Marina was devastated. She stayed in bed. Refused to get dressed, to eat, even to talk about it. Sometimes Philip found her in the baby’s room. They’d had it all set up, they’d been so sure. She’d sit in the rocking chair, foggy with misery.