The Guest Room(36)

“There, there,” her mother was saying. “There, there.”

…

Melissa ran her fingers over the waist-high border of the wainscoting that ran along the dining room walls. She was afraid to continue into the kitchen because she could hear her mother crying in there. Again.

Before this weekend, the only other times she could recall her mother crying were when Grandfather had died and then, a year later, when Cassandra’s brother—their other cat, Sebastian—passed away. Sebastian had cancer and there was nothing more the veterinarian could do, and so they had put him to sleep. The lumps, and they were everywhere at the end, were horrible. Melissa recalled how she had cried, too. The veterinarian had come to their house, and Sebastian had been in her mother’s lap when the vet had put him down. Her father had sat rubbing her mother’s shoulders. They’d all been in the living room. Even Cassandra.

She recalled Sebastian’s death a little better than her grandfather’s, because she had been younger when Grandfather died. Not too long ago she had asked her dad if Mommy had cried more for Sebastian, and he had explained that she had been in shock when her father had died. It had been so sudden. So horribly sudden. But still, he had said, her mother had cried plenty.

Nevertheless, Melissa knew that the crying she was hearing now was much worse than anything she had heard from her mother before. It was louder. It was almost childlike in its inconsolability. Hysterical. Her grandmother was trying to comfort her, but having very little success.

Melissa understood that these sobs were brought on because her mother was hurt. Her father had done this. Daddy. She had seen the TV coverage, but she couldn’t imagine her father with any woman but Mommy. In truth, she couldn’t even really envision that. But it was clear that this…wailing…was triggered by whatever her father had done with the women at the party, and not because two people had been killed at their house.

Yet when Melissa tried to re-create in her mind whatever had occurred in Bronxville on Friday night, it was the violence that was most real to her. Two dead people. Strangers murdered with knives and guns, their bodies in the living room and the front hall. She recalled the moments she had seen from scary movies; though those moments were few, they were indelible. Surreptitiously—with babysitters or at her friend Claudia’s house—she had seen her share of zombies and vampires and corpses on late-night TV. And though she had been frightened, she had always taken comfort in the idea that this was make-believe. There were no such things as zombies and vampires; the corpses always were actors in Halloween makeup. But whatever had occurred at her home on Friday night? That was very real.

Now she leaned against the wall and listened to her mother blowing her nose. She was telling Grandmother that she had to get her act together for Melissa. She had to figure out what she was going to say to her daughter. A second later the wooden chair slid against the kitchen tile. Her mother was standing up. Quickly Melissa retreated through the dining room and down the corridor to the guest bedroom. She didn’t want her mother to know that she had been listening. But the one question she was going to be sure and ask her mother when her mother joined her in the bedroom was this: Just how much danger were they in? That was what she wanted to know. She was pretty sure her mother would answer “none,” but Melissa was going to try and read her face when she responded. She also wanted to know when Daddy would be back. She feared she was going to need both of her parents to feel secure—but she had a sick feeling that this just wasn’t going to happen.

…

Richard tossed his cell phone down onto the hotel bed and watched it bounce on the mattress. He took comfort in his restraint: his initial thought had been to hurl it as hard as he could—a baseball and he was twelve—against the wall with the framed black-and-white photograph of construction workers high atop a Manhattan skyscraper in (he presumed) the 1920s. He had just gotten a call from a lawyer. A fellow who worked at Franklin McCoy and whom Richard had never met. Said his name was Hugh Kirn. Apparently, Richard’s boss—Peter Fitzgerald, great-grandson of Alistair Franklin himself, a keeper of the firm’s torch, and utterly humorless—thought it best if Richard took a leave of absence. Seems all the managing directors and the CFO himself felt that way. Paid, Hugh had made clear. Paid. Of course. At least for now. And if this blew over? Then they could revisit what to do next, and whether it made sense for him to return.

“Revisit?” he asked the lawyer. “Do you have any idea how long you want this leave of absence to be?”

“No. Let’s wait and see.”

“Can I talk to Peter? I mean, tell him what really happened?”

“I told you, I’m calling for him. For the whole management team.”

“I understand. But can I call him as a friend? Just talk to him?”

“You shouldn’t. Please don’t talk to anyone at the firm.”

“Look, I can’t go home. The police won’t let me. So, I was planning on going to the office this afternoon and doing some work. God knows I have plenty to do.”

There was a pause at the other end of the line as Hugh gathered himself. Then: “No. You can’t go there. You’re barred from the office.”

“I’m barred? You make this sound punitive!”

“It’s in everyone’s best interests.”

“Look, it should be pretty empty. I would just—”