Beautiful Little Fools(93)

“Everyone likes pie, Miss Baker.”

I put my hands on the table and sighed. “All right, I suppose I’ll eat the goddamned pie. Now, the suspense is killing me. Why are we here?”

He reached into his jacket pocket, put the diamond hairpin he’d bothered me about last fall back on the table. I closed my eyes for a second. It had been in my hair that morning when I’d gotten tangled up in the bushes by Jay’s pool. I’d gotten rid of the gun, staged everything perfectly, and then there was one little detail I hadn’t thought about. It wasn’t until hours later, when I went in for a much-needed bath at Aunt Sigourney’s, that I’d realized the diamond pin was gone.

Here I was months and thousands of miles away from West Egg, and sometimes still, even now, I awoke in a sweaty tangle of sheets in the middle of the night, caught up in a never-ending nightmare filled with gunshots and Jay Gatsby’s threats. Maybe it would all haunt me for the rest of my life. Detective Charles, too.

“I already told you,” I finally said, “that’s not mine.”

“Half-truths have served you pretty well this past year, haven’t they, Miss Baker?”

“I’m the most honest woman I know.” I managed to say this with a straight face. The waitress plunked our pie slices down on the table and I dug into mine aggressively with my fork.

“Here’s what I think,” Detective Charles said. “I’ve done a little digging, spoken extensively with Mr. Carraway. Even telephoned down to Nashville, talked to your old roommate from the golf tour.”

“Mary Margaret.” Her name escaped my lips in a whisper. I hadn’t said it out loud in so long, it didn’t even feel real. She didn’t even feel real. I dropped my fork and held my hands together to keep them from shaking. She was a married woman now, and there wasn’t any way she’d told the detective what had really happened between us.

“I learned some interesting things. For one thing, you weren’t on the golf tour at all last summer even though you told everyone you were. You didn’t play in any matches. They’d asked you to leave. I guess you really did cheat, huh?”

I shook my head. “I simply took a little break,” I snapped. “I’m back now, aren’t I?”

“And for another thing, this may be Daisy’s hairpin, but she gave it to you to wear. Nick Carraway said you had it in your hair all last summer.”

I laughed a little. “Nick Carraway? You trust that man’s eye to notice how I wore my hair?”

“And then I thought a lot about our conversation in South Jersey. You remember that, Miss Baker?”

“Sure.” I nodded curtly. “You seem to have a penchant for harassing me in the middle of a tournament, Detective.”

“I asked you about this hairpin then, and you suggested Daisy might’ve dropped it at Gatsby’s.” I shrugged, not quite remembering what I’d said to him that afternoon, only that my mind had been back in the game, at long last, and I’d wanted so badly for him to leave me alone so I could focus on golf. “But the thing is,” he said now, “I never told you where I’d found the hairpin.”

His words felt like a sudden punch in my gut, and for a moment everything in the diner seemed to stop moving. The entire world got silent and still and blood rushed through my ears until all I could hear was my own pulsing heartbeat. “Well, wasn’t it obvious?” I finally said. He raised his eyebrows. “Why else would you have asked me about the hairpin?”

“So here’s what I think happened,” Detective Charles continued. “I think Mr. Gatsby found out you were lying about the golf tour and threatened to tell your friend Daisy. Maybe he even blackmailed you. He wasn’t the nicest guy.” I frowned, remembering that last gin-soaked afternoon at the Plaza, the way Tom and Jay were going at each other, the way the Saturday before he’d threatened to destroy me. “I think Mr. Gatsby threatened to tell Daisy your secret, and you shot him.”

I closed my eyes. Inhaled. Exhaled. It was uncanny how close he was, and how far away, too. How much he didn’t understand. And how I knew that I could never make him understand. Never tell him the truth. I promised. We all did. If my lie unraveled, Catherine’s and Daisy’s would come with it. I would never let that happen, no matter how many times the detective came to talk to me.

I opened my eyes and stared at him, unflinching. “You have quite the imagination, Detective. That sounds like some kind of a crazy made-up story to me.” I pushed my pie away. “And even if it were true, you’d never prove it.”

There it was, the only truth I’d ever tell the man, clear as day. He could think what he wanted, but he’d never prove anything unless I confessed. And that would never happen. Even with the hairpin. Daisy or a hundred other women really could’ve dropped it at a party last summer.

I flashed him my best Jordan Baker tournament smile, the one I put on up on the podium when I was proud and hot and tired and longing for a past I knew I’d never have again. And then I stood, and I walked out of the diner, just like that.

On the sidewalk, it was still hot, but it was almost dusk. The orange-pink sun fell and skimmed below the sparkling Pacific Ocean in the distance. I inhaled the delicious smell of the sea air, and I walked on, toward my hotel.