“Winston wasn’t a dog.”
“Winston was an English bulldog,” Billie told me. “He passed gas all the time, and at my grandmother’s parties, she would follow him around in her gown, lighting matches behind him.”
“But philanthropy means ‘love of humans,’ ” the grandmother reminded us. “Not dogs.”
Billie looked stricken and forced herself to kiss her grandmother’s cheek before we went to look for her diving gear.
“It should be in my old closet.” Billie led me into — not a bedroom, but a suite. Not a suite — a wing! Where were the equestrienne trophies and ribbons? Where was any sign of a headstrong girl? Nothing in these rooms said that a child had grown up in them. What was missing in addition to any childhood mementos was furniture. The floors were carpeted wall to wall in the whitest of wool. The walls were painted the same white — and the sheen told me that an expensive egg tempera had been used. On the walls were paintings that even I recognized: Franz Kline, Ellsworth Kelly, de Kooning, Motherwell — it was a gallery.
“The Kline was my grandfather’s first purchase,” Billie said. “You’ll appreciate this: when Kline brought his mother to his first exhibition of large abstractions — slashes of black paint across white canvas — his mother said, ‘I always knew you’d take the easy way out.’ ”
“What did the rooms look like when you were growing up here?”
“My grandmother had her decorator do Young Girl’s Room. I had a four-poster canopy bed with linens from Frette, framed horse prints on the walls, a Princess Anne Victorian dollhouse. In the bathroom: Baccarat tumblers; the mouthwash was decanted. As Rebekah Harkness said of her family’s mansion in Manhattan, ‘It’s not home, but it’s much.’ ”
Billie opened one of the walk-in closets, which was as crowded as the rooms were spare: boxes of plastic horses, games of Scrabble and Parcheesi, countless stuffed animals, computer games, a large box filled with toy soldiers, a row of Slinkys, Rollerblades and badminton racquets, a pogo stick, skis, but no diving gear.
Was there anything Billie had not been given as a child?
She did not find her diving gear. “Fucking hell.” Billie slammed the closet door. She did not stop for the peach cobbler.
24
When I was sixteen, I took a summer job at a mall, while my best friend went on the grand tour of Europe. While I sold cheap earrings to girls who had just pierced their ears, Julia sent me a chocolate bar from every country she visited. I should have been touched. But I tore into each new bar of chocolate with fury, jealous that I was stuck in the mall while Julia had everything. I hadn’t thought of Julia in years, until I saw Billie in her grandmother’s house. I wondered what Billie might send me from St. Thomas and felt stupid for thinking like that.
“Turn on your TV,” Steven said, when I picked up the phone later that night. I had just finished four hundred-calorie chocolate bars.
“What channel?”
“CNN.”
The suspect in Pat’s murder, the migrant worker, had been indicted. Pat’s family had put up a reward for information, which I knew only slowed down an investigation, luring nut jobs and opportunists eager for the money. The TV showed a small-boned Central American man being taken from a police car and led into the Suffolk courthouse.
“It’s over. You can have your life back.” Steven thought my life could be returned to me as if I had merely misplaced it. “They found Pat’s credit cards on him. He claims he found them in the woods.”
“Billie and I went to look at a sanctuary for Cloud.”
“And?”
“I could see Cloud having a life there.” This was, after all, the point, I reminded myself.
“I’d like to see you having a life here.”
“How much resilience can a person have?”
“You’d be surprised.”
A different reporter was covering another story so I hit the mute button. “No more surprises.”
• • •
I cleared the pad thai I had had for dinner, recalling my friend Patty’s saying that in New York “home cooking” was any food you bought within six blocks of your apartment. I took Olive out for a last, short walk. Back in the apartment, I found the expensive bath gel I had splurged on a while back and filled the tub with hot water. The bathroom soon held the heady scent of night-blooming jasmine. I slowed my movements in contrast to my racing thoughts. I poured a glass of prosecco and got in the tub, the tub I had hidden in on that day.
Though it was just Olive and me, I had closed the bathroom door. The window in the bathroom looked onto an air well, but if you angled yourself just so, at a certain time of night, you could see the moon. I looked at my feet at the end of the tub, sticking up above the bubbles: Frida Kahlo in her self-portrait What I Saw in the Water, although that painting has surrealistic images — a skyscraper shooting out of a volcano, two tiny women lying on a sponge, a tightrope walker sharing his rope with a snake — floating in the tub with her.
I lay back, my neck fitting into the small waterproof pillow for this purpose. I did the exercise in which you consciously relax each part of your body individually. Eyes closed, I was up to my shoulders when I heard Olive scratching at the door to get out. Diabolical dog.
It was the new door, the one Steven had installed because of the damage the dogs had done to the old one the morning of Bennett’s death. The claw marks on the inside had reached as high as the doorknob. It reminded me of those gruesome stories about people buried in Victorian times, later coming out of a trance in their coffins. Why were my dogs so desperate to get out? Who had shut them in the bathroom?
Wait. Who had shut them in the bathroom? They were loose when I entered the apartment and found Bennett’s body. They were not in the bathroom. When had they been put in there? The inside of the bathroom door had been intact when I went out that morning. I had only been gone two hours. Bennett had been asleep when I left.
I felt a chill, though steam rose from the water.
Did the police question the scratched door? The dogs had scratched the cabinet where I kept their kibble, they had scratched the front door to go out, it wasn’t as if a scratched bathroom door would stand out in that apartment. But these were new scratches, and they were deep. I saw them when I shut myself in and hid in the tub. The dogs had been whimpering to be let into the bathroom with me. How had I not wondered how they could be locked in but also be the killers? Why didn’t the police question this?
Would Bennett have shut the dogs in the bathroom? He might have if someone had come to the front door. They were not the calmest greeters. But he didn’t know anyone in the city, or said he didn’t. He must have known who it was because he had to buzz them in. While a person climbed the stairs, he would have had time to shut the dogs in the bathroom. But then what?
I let some water out of the bath and turned on the hot water tap to replace it.
No human could have done what was done to Bennett.
I wished I had brought the bottle of prosecco into the tub with me. I wasn’t willing to get out of the hot water to fetch it. I could not stop my thoughts, but I wanted to slow them down. Logic — just use logic. But no — I thought back to the horror of Pat’s heart being cut out of her chest. Obviously no dog could do that, and her own dog was missing. But in my apartment, I had seen my bloodied dogs and Bennett’s savaged body. What was I not seeing?
What if Bennett was killed by a person he let into the apartment, and the person let the dogs out of the bathroom before he left? What if the dogs had attacked a dead body? The ME who examined Bennett’s body should have been able to distinguish between wounds inflicted by a human and a mauling by dogs. But maybe he had missed something, since everyone assumed the dogs had done it.