Never Have I Ever(77)

I had seen criminals on television hide things inside toilet tanks, under area rugs, between mattresses and box springs. I’d seen multiple movies where bad guys in cheap hotels unscrewed the vents and hid fat wads of money or drugs or guns behind them. I’d seen that trick so much that my guess was Roux would never use it.

“Think, Amy,” I said aloud.

The house was Char’s, only backward, which meant I knew it intimately. I knew that the door in the foyer that looked like it would open on a coat closet was actually hiding the ill-placed furnace. I knew there was a small hatch up to the attic in the hallway outside the master. But these were places I might choose to hide things. I needed to think like Roux, not me.

I made myself stop and breathe. I had to pick a place and start. If it were me, I would want my secrets near me while I slept. It felt safer. Roux wasn’t all that interested in being safe, but she dripped sex and talked about it as if it were a craft. The bedroom was her power center. I went to it.

It was carpeted in a fuzzy shag so old that the color had become unnameable. Something between sludge and old oatmeal. There was a matchy-matchy pecan bedroom set straight out of the eighties, with large round bulbs on the legs of the dresser and the posts on the queen-size bed. The bed itself was a mess, five or six pillows tossed about, and the sheets frothed up like a heap of meringue. Either Roux was a restless sleeper or she’d had company. I touched the pile of bedding. It had not come with the house. The sheets and the duvet looked and felt like something from a five-star hotel.

I searched the dresser first. I doubted Roux would hide things in her panty drawer like a thirteen-year-old girl with a hot-pink diary, but she might tape something to the undersides of the drawers, or behind them. I checked every hidden surface, especially behind the mirror—a very Roux-like spot. I could imagine her here, preening and primping, knowing that as she looked at herself, she was also looking at her secrets.

Nothing.

The master had two long, shallow closets, side by side, taking up an entire wall. All four louvered folding doors were cocked askew. The one closer to me held dive gear, all of it high-end. In the other a row of her beautiful dresses hung beside a shelving unit filled with folded items, the fabrics all expensive and the tailoring exquisite.

Rummaging through her clothes felt weirdly intimate. She had searched me, and now it was as if I were searching her back, running my hands over the shape of her body. She had a lot of shoes. Heels, sandals, flats, booties in buttery-soft leather. They stood in a tidy triple row, filling the floor entirely, but they yielded nothing when I knelt and jammed my hands into them.

There was a bedside table on the far side, under the window. It had a single, shallow drawer. I opened it, releasing the scent of patchouli and almond oil, and saw a box of condoms, a pale blue vibrator shaped like a large-caliber bullet, and a row of lubrication and massage oils. To use on lawyers, I thought bitterly. Behind all this was a vape kit and some boxed cartridges, each containing a different kind of pot. If I were looking for her power center, here it was, and yet I found nothing taped to the bottom or behind this drawer either.

I closed it a little too hard, frustrated, and at the exact same time, I heard the unmistakable sound of another door opening. The front door. The sound of footsteps, light and rapid, were already coming down the hall toward me. I hadn’t heard the purring of that sleek red car. I had almost no warning.

I dropped flat onto the filthy carpet behind the bed and rolled under. I ended on my back, staring wide-eyed up at Roux’s box springs. My breath sounded so loud. I forced myself to slow down, pulling air silently through my nose.

I was sharing the space with still more shoes. Another row was lined up just under the side of the bed that was closer to the door. Three pairs of athletic shoes and a couple pairs of ballet-style house slippers. Between the sneakers I saw Roux’s feet in elegant sandals, framed by the hem of her jeans, walk into the room.

I kept my breath even, hoping my pounding heart was audible only in my ears. What was she doing here? These were her gym hours. The feet came directly toward me, to the far edge of the bed. She kicked off the sandals, and I heard the soft thump of what must be her purse landing on the bed. Then I heard a zipper. The jeans dropped around her ankles. She stepped out, and her hand came down and picked them up.

Dear God, was “the gym” a euphemism? Maybe she’d sent Luca to my house so she could open up her sex drawer and work over some hapless, too-chatty lawyer.

Something damp was under my left shoulder. Moisture was now seeping through the fabric of my lightweight summer sweater, a slimy, coin-shaped wetness. My skin wanted to crawl off my body and put itself directly into bleach. If she were meeting a man here, there was no way I could stay in whatever this little wet spot was, the box springs scraping my nose as Roux banged secrets out of some puffy old banker’s freckled hide.

When her cell phone started to ring, I almost screamed over the cheery electronic jangling, so startling was the ringtone in the quiet room.

“Hello?” Roux said. A brief pause, and then, in a bored voice, she said, “Never on the phone.”

Silence. She must have hung up, just as she had when she’d said those words to me.

At least the call wasn’t some man checking to see if Luca was gone yet so he could come over. It was a poor soul who was caught in her web, like me. Maybe someone I knew. I hoped not Tate. If Tate was paying her, I would have my answer about Phillip. I almost wished Roux had taken the call, so I would finally know.