Fool Me Once(34)

“That’s it.”

“Does a club called Leather and Lace mean anything to you?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Eddie?”

“No. It means nothing to me.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“You’re not going to tell me what this is about?”

“Not yet. Bye.”

Maya sat there and stared at the website. Why would Claire be calling Leather and Lace?

No reason to keep coming up with unfounded theories. She wanted to drive right now and go the club, but she had no sitter for Lily. Growin’ Up closed at 8:00 P.M.

Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow, she would get to the bottom of Leather and Lace, so to speak.





Chapter 11


Maya had the strangest dream about the reading of Joe’s will. The dream was surreal, one of those through-the-shower-stall nocturnal visions where you really can’t remember what was said or where exactly you were or any of that. She only remembered one thing.

Joe was there.

He sat in an opulent burgundy leather chair, wearing the same tuxedo he’d worn the night they met. He looked handsome as hell, his eyes fixated on a fuzzy figure reading a document. Maya couldn’t hear a word the figure was saying—it was like listening to Charlie Brown’s teacher—but she knew somehow that the figure was reading the will. Maya didn’t care. Her entire focus was on Joe. She called out to him, tried to get his attention, but Joe would not turn her way.

Maya woke up to the sounds again—the screams, the rotors, the gunfire. She grabbed the pillow and wrapped it around her head, covering her ears, trying to muffle the terrible noise. She knew, of course, that it would do no good, that the sounds were coming from inside her head and, if anything, her efforts would keep them locked there. But she did it anyway. The sounds rarely lasted long. She just had to close her eyes—another bizarre move: closing your eyes when you are trying to drown out sounds—and ride them out.

When the episode subsided, Maya got out of bed and made her way to the bathroom. She looked in the mirror and then wisely decided to open the medicine chest so at the very least she didn’t have to look at her gaunt expression. The small brown pill containers were there. She debated taking one or two, but she would need to be sharp today, what with the reading of Joe’s will and facing his entire family.

She took a shower and chose a black Chanel pantsuit Joe had picked out for her. Joe had liked to shop for her. She’d tried it on for him, loving the feel and cut, but she’d pretended not to like it because the price was obscene. But she hadn’t fooled Joe. The next day, he went back to the store and bought it. It had been lying on the bed, just as it was now, when she came home.

She slipped on the suit and woke up Lily.

Half an hour later, Maya dropped Lily off at Growin’ Up. Miss Kitty wore a Disney princess costume Maya didn’t recognize. “Do you want to dress as a princess too, Lily?” Lily nodded and went with Princess Miss Kitty, barely bothering to wave good-bye to her mother. Maya got back in her car and booted up the Growin’ Up app. She checked the in-room camera. Lily was slipping into an Elsa-from-Frozen costume.

“‘Let it go,’” Maya sang to herself as she started driving to her in-laws’.

She flipped on the radio to get her own voice out of her head and replace it with whatever inanity was on the morning drive. People who host morning radio programs cannot believe how funny they are. She moved it to AM—did anyone listen to AM anymore?—and put on the all-news channel. There was comfort to the almost military precision and predictability. Sports on the quarter hour. Traffic every ten minutes. She was distracted, half listening at best, when a story caught her attention: “Notorious hacker Corey the Whistle has promised a treasure chest of new leaks this week that he claims will not only embarrass a leading official in the current administration but also will definitely lead to resignation and, most likely, prosecution . . .”

Despite it all, despite what she said about being out of Corey the Whistle’s awful reach, Maya still felt a fresh shiver surge through her. Shane had wondered why Corey hadn’t released it all, if he was just biding his time to drop the bigger bomb—and yes, the word choice was worthy of a sad ha-ha—on her. She had, of course, wondered that too. Maya Stern was old news now, but the potential was there. Big secrets don’t stay secret. They have a way of coming back when you least expect them, rippling and reverberating and causing—again she recognized how often military lingo slips into our regular vocabulary—massive collateral damage.

Farnwood was an old-school rich-people estate. Before Maya met Joe, she had assumed such places were the stuff of history books or fiction. They are not. She drove up to a gate manned by Morris. Morris had been working the gate since the early eighties. He lived in the same workers’ compound as Isabella’s family.

“Hey, Morris.”

He scowled at her, as he always did, reminding her in his own way that she had just married into this family and really wasn’t blood. There might have been more to Morris’s scowl today, something that could be explained by either lingering sadness at the death of Joe or, more likely, the gossip surrounding Isabella and the pepper spray attack. Morris grudgingly pressed the button, and the gate opened so slowly it was hard to see with the naked eye.

Maya drove up the rolling hill, past a grass tennis court and a full-size soccer field (“It’s called a pitch,” Joe had told her), neither of which Maya had ever seen used, and arrived at a Tudor mansion that reminded her of Bruce Wayne’s on the old Batman TV show. She half expected a bunch of men dressed for a fox hunt to greet her, but instead, her mother-in-law, Judith, stood alone by the door. Maya parked by the stone path.