Sunburn: A Novel(16)
No, it was fair for Anna to leave her. Not so fair of her to raid the little safe where Sue kept some cash, or to take the Le Creuset Dutch oven that they had picked out together, but for which Sue had paid. It had been a nice winter, making stews and Bolognese in that bright-red dish. Then Anna had started complaining about her weight. I’m getting fat, look at me. She would grab her nonexistent belly with two hands while Sue contemplated her undeniable apple of a midriff, wondered if Anna’s distaste for her own body extended to Sue’s.
Anna then began carping about Sue’s house. A neat, well-kept, but undeniably suburban house, a brick one-story that had the potential to be transformed into a midcentury marvel, but only if one spent twice as much as the house was worth. Baltimore’s housing market was flat, flat as Anna’s belly. The house hadn’t gained a dollar in value since Sue bought it five years ago and it seemed crazy to Sue to take a second mortgage, harvesting what little equity she had managed to build. Anna brought home brochures for the condos going up along the waterfront, the promises of new developments where canning factories and shipyards had once stood. As if, Sue wanted to laugh. But Anna wasn’t from Baltimore. She didn’t know how often these dreams had been floated, how seldom they materialized.
The Pauline Hansen case was a nice distraction from her thoughts about Anna, although she doubted it would end happily. She can find almost anyone, she told the client, but she can’t make them do anything. It is not, alas, illegal to stop loving someone, as Sue knows all too well. Odd, sure, to walk away from your own daughter in the process. Maybe even creepy. But legal. Sue has been clear with Gregg that she won’t try to engage his ex if she finds her. She’s not a go-between, she’s a pointer. I find, you shoot.
God, she hopes there’s not shooting involved. But while the guy has a hothead vibe, he’s never been arrested for anything violent and there have been no police calls to the house on Kentucky Avenue.
He probably hasn’t told her everything, but that’s okay. They never do. She hasn’t told him everything, either, the ramifications of the name change that popped out of the Chicago Title investigation. Maybe that’s why Pauline Hansen ran, to put more distance between herself and her past. Again, it’s legal to change one’s name, legal not to share everything with a new partner. This lady wanted a fresh start, and Sue won’t deny her that.
If only Gregg Hansen knew that losing his wife could be the healthiest thing that could happen to him.
Sue steals a look at the photo in her wallet, glances back at the woman behind the bar. Yeah, it was her, no doubt about it. She’d done nothing to disguise herself. Probably too vain to lose that amazing red hair. Still, it was a lucky break finding her so swiftly. She’s been careful not to create a paper trail. No charges on the joint credit card, no withdrawals from the ATM. Finding her had been a bitch, but that just meant more hours, more money for Sue.
She’s going to buy another Dutch oven. Only not red this time. Maybe blue or hunter green.
Sue had started the week in Bethany, showing Pauline Hansen’s photo around. If you work hard, you make your own luck and, lo and behold, Sue found a geezer who copped to giving the redhead a ride, saying he offered to take her all the way to D.C., but she surprised him by getting out of the car only an hour into the trip. No, he couldn’t remember where. A hundred dollars later, he gave up the name. Belleville. He had dropped her off in Belleville.
Once in Belleville, Sue made the tactical decision not to ask questions because it was way too small. Her queries would have gotten back to her quarry, could startle her into running again. So she walked around town, studying the shops, the restaurants. It’s summer. Strangers aren’t normal here, but they aren’t completely unknown this time of year. There’s a neighborhood of pretty Victorian houses and nineteenth-century stone homes. She pretended interest in those, all the while going in and out of various businesses. There’s only a few places where a person’s going to be able to work off the books and this dump, the High-Ho, was so clearly one of them.
And, bingo, there she is. Better looking than her picture. Or maybe just sexier. Sue can tell that this one would sleep with a person if it advanced her agenda. Not a moral judgment on Sue’s part, merely an assessment. Sex is currency to this woman. Sue knows the type. Sue dates the type, although she doesn’t mean to.
Sue doesn’t try to talk to her. She doesn’t want Pauline to remember her, even in hindsight. There’s no real reason to do her job this way, except it amuses Sue to be invisible, to use her seeming deficits as assets. In a day or two, maybe a week, the husband will show up here and this Pauline Hansen will search through her mind, try to remember the moment she was caught. She’ll never find it. Sue Snead. Sue Stealth, moving through the world without attracting attention. She knows what people think when they see her. Dyke. Dyke, dyke, dyke. They file her away under that heading and forget her. Great, makes her job easier.
“Refill?”
Pauline Hansen looms over her with an iced tea pitcher.
“Sure,” Sue says. The woman has an almost literal scent on her, but it’s not perfume. She smells like June itself, on its best day, warm and wild and promising. She reminds Sue of the tiny strawberries she used to find on that hill near her house, the ones she could never decide if they were safe to eat.
Sue didn’t grow up dreaming of being a private detective, but that was only because she didn’t realize girls could be PIs. Sure, she read Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden, but did anyone notice that those girls never got paid? Sue wanted to be Mannix or Barnaby Jones or Paul Drake, the investigator that Perry Mason used. Instead, she started out as a middle-school English teacher. But she was scared to have any kind of social life as long as she was teaching, even a secret one. She decided she had to find another gig. Around this time, her cousin, who had a small insurance agency, asked her to follow a guy claiming a back injury. Just that easy, Sue found her new vocation. She started in another PI’s office, apprenticing until she could get her own license. She loves her work. It is the perfect job for people who are curious enough, but not randomly, promiscuously curious. An incurious person—this target’s husband, for example—could never do it. But a supercurious person would also fail. You have to be willing to leave some doors closed, to focus on the task at hand. Some people are like rabbit holes and you can fall a long, long way down if you go too far.