Last to Know: A Novel(36)
Rose wondered why it was that, until she sat them down at the table, her guests inevitably gravitated to their own sex. She went over and joined the women.
Of course they were talking about the fire. “Just like something from one of Wally’s books,” someone said. “And that poor child, losing her mother, the entire house gone … I never saw anything like that blaze … that explosion … I thought we were all going to be blown to heaven.” Good old Rose, they said admiringly, if privately a little doubtful she had done the right thing, taking on such a burden with that girl. Such a tragedy.
Sipping their champagne they looked out of the corners of their eyes at Bea, wondering what was to become of “that girl” when she left Rose.
Rose excused herself and went and stood by the deck rail with its festive fairy lights, staring across the rippling dark lake at what used to be a house. A home. Only she knew there had been a murder. Someone here, in Evening Lake, had killed that woman. Maybe even someone she knew.
24
Divon Formentor was in jail and Jemima Forester felt like a traitor. Guilt-ridden, she paced her apartment, inasmuch as she could “pace” a mere six hundred square feet while dodging the blue sofa and the white IKEA coffee table, while tripping over the shag rug that had been the latest thing for young people a year ago and which she guessed was probably already out of style. She gave the rug a vicious kick, tripping herself up again in the process.
Sinking onto the rug, she stared blankly around her small home. The walls were lacquer-red. She had painted them herself over the course of several weekends and several coats. Now, though, she wondered about it; a redhead could get lost among all this red. And the mouse-color shag rug was wrong too; somehow she’d expected it to set off all the color, the indigo blue sofa, the red walls, but all it did was look like it belonged somewhere else. Besides, her heels always caught in it. If she could have gotten rid of it she would but she could not afford another right now.
Her parents had donated the forty-six-inch TV clamped to the wall opposite the sofa, which she kept permanently on because it gave the illusion of company. “Other voices, other rooms”—hadn’t someone once said that? Capote, she thought. Anyhow, the sound of voices was company when she was up at 2 A.M. watching old movies, or “working.”
Working at what? she asked herself, still plumped on the shag rug, staring into space. She was a twenty-eight-year-old actress. At least she had told herself for twenty years she was an actress, starting out as a child doing juice commercials, graduating to appearances on children’s TV, then teenage shows, then in a well-known exercise and fitness video that brought her some kind of temporary acclaim and a fair bit of money, enough anyhow to get her own small apartment, fix it up, and begin to think of another life because acting jobs were not coming her way. She was too “unusual,” the casting directors said, too distinctive with that fiery red hair, alabaster skin, and pale eyes. “We’ll think of you when we have something more ‘Goth,’” was what had put the final knell of doom into Jemima’s actress ambitions. She had contemplated going blond but realized it would not work, said thanks but no thanks and quit on the spot.
That was a year ago. Having watched too much TV, she told herself it was easy, she would become a private detective. She would start at the bottom with cheating husbands and anxious wives, to make a bit of quick money, then move on to “the good stuff.” Real income. She told herself she was now a grown-up and had immediately taken an advanced computer course where she had learned a few “special” tricks from fellow students, like for instance how to hack, which she thought might be illegal but if she had to use it to catch a criminal, in her new career as a private eye, it probably didn’t count. She’d put an ad on Craigslist and in the local newspapers touting her services, so far with no results. She was, in fact, an unemployed private detective, with not even a wife wanting to keep tabs on a cheating husband. Now, she sat in front of her sixteen-inch MacBook Air trying to figure out what to do next with her life, while checking out other people’s. Which was why she was involved with Divon really.
Because of her friendship with Divon, she had been doing a bit of investigating into where the drugs were coming from—not on Divon’s level, but beyond that—and had come up with some interesting, though scary findings. Divon had admitted to her he’d been involved with Lacey Havnel, the lake house woman, and intimated he knew who she was involved with, “higher up.” Divon had not actually told her that last bit but Jemima knew he knew. And if she asked herself why he wasn’t telling, she knew the answer to that too. Because he was scared shitless.
She untangled herself from the rug, kicked it back under the coffee table, and began to pace again. What she really needed to pace properly, though, was a dog she could take for a brisk walk, with the dog tugging on the lead and her bracing herself, stepping fast after it. A dog like Squeeze, she thought. Which brought her back to Harry Jordan again.
She went back to her MacBook and Googled Jordan. There he was, a simple one-liner, if you wanted any more go to his Facebook. She couldn’t do that, couldn’t just sign on to his Facebook, then he’d know she was into him. Sighing, she typed in “Havnel.” There were a lot of Havnels listed and she typed in “Lacey.” To her surprise there she was. Or rather an obituary. No picture, just a short bio … a seemingly blameless life, apart, that is, from three dead husbands and no children. And that she had died several years ago.