The Perfect Mother(70)
No.
Francie knew women who didn’t like their own kids. She grew up with one of them. Winnie was nothing like that.
A door slams across the street. She picks up her camera, zooming in on a woman in yoga pants and a tank top skipping down the stairs of No. 584, the address Nell copied from Token’s profile at May Mothers. The woman stops to stretch her hamstrings on the steps and then turns toward the park, breaking into a jog a few buildings down. Francie is growing impatient. She’s been sitting on this stoop for more than an hour, and people are beginning to arrive for appointments at the chiropractor’s office on the ground floor. Lowell’s mother, Barbara, made a hair appointment for noon, and Francie said she’d be back to take the baby long before then. She picks up the camera, promising herself she’ll stay just ten more minutes, scrolling through the photos stored on her camera—the babies from the May Mothers get-together five days earlier she still hasn’t done anything with, the images of Hector Quimby, wearing the light-yellow golf shirt, standing outside Winnie’s building.
Francie closes her eyes, seeing Hector as she watched him from her spot on the bench, his hands clasped behind his back, pacing slowly in front of Winnie’s building. Who was he? According to Patricia Faith, Hector’s body was discovered after his wife called the local police, saying her husband had gone to take care of a few things at the Ross property and hadn’t come home. They had been married for fifty-two years. Ten grandkids. A volunteer driver for Meals on Wheels. He’d been working for the Ross family for nearly thirty years, thought of Winnie like a daughter. The forensic evidence suggests he was killed and then his body dragged to the woods, that it had been doused in gasoline and lit on fire.
Francie stands up, returning the camera to her bag, knowing it’s time to call it a day and go home. It’s too hot to sit here any longer. One good thing about Barbara visiting is that Lowell came home last night with a brand-new air conditioner, after his mother complained about the used one. Francie will go home and turn it on and play with Will for a few hours in the cool apartment. Her stomach rumbles as she trudges down the stairs and turns to walk down the hill back to her apartment, but then she hears something: the door of Token’s building closing once again.
It’s him.
Autumn is in the sling, and he’s putting on a pair of sunglasses, walking down the stairs, turning west toward the park. Francie drapes her bag across her chest and follows him up the hill, trying to ignore the painful rub of the blister, careful to keep a half block behind him. He turns north on Eighth Avenue and walks two blocks, into the Spot. She crosses the street and crouches behind a Volvo station wagon, peeping through the car’s windows. When he takes a seat on a bar stool at the window, Francie lifts her camera and watches through the viewfinder as he pages through a newspaper left behind on the counter and stirs his coffee—the double shot of espresso with a touch of steamed milk that he used to bring with him to every meeting.
He drinks his coffee in three smooth sips, makes a phone call, and then heads toward the door. Francie steps behind another car and holds her phone to her ear, pretending to speak to someone. She turns cautiously, seeing him walking up the hill, and follows from the opposite side of the street, trying to remain out of view behind the parked cars between them. It appears he’s going to make a right, to head away from his apartment, and Francie begins to cross the street. But suddenly he stops and turns around. She’s in the middle of the street, in his line of sight. She pivots and runs back to the sidewalk, but she trips on the curb, trying to protect her camera, feeling the sting on the heels of both hands and a pain in her knee where she hit the pavement.
“Oh dear. Are you okay?” An older woman is standing above her, a small dog wearing slippers on a leash at her heels. “Here, let me help you.”
“I’m fine,” Francie says, standing. There’s a large gash in her knee, and a trail of blood runs down her shin.
“Are you sure? Let me get you a tissue.”
“I’m fine,” Francie says, waving the woman away. She picks up her bag and turns, spinning straight into Token.
Token walks out of the galley kitchen just off the living room, holding an ice pack in one hand and two cups of coffee in the other. “Shit,” he says, placing the mugs on the coffee table. “I forgot that unlike me, who lives on the stuff, you’re off caffeine.”
“Not anymore.” Francie takes the mug and ice pack.
“Hang on. Let me get something for that cut. It’s pretty bad.”
He walks through the French doors at the other end of the room, disappearing into a bedroom. A large-screen television set inside a built-in bookcase is tuned in to The Faith Hour, showing the scene of Winnie’s property upstate, shot from a helicopter, where more than one hundred people have come to help search the area. Patricia Faith, filming live all week from the ballroom of a Ramada hotel, which has been designated the headquarters of the search, sits at a banquet table talking to the pastor of a nearby church. Patricia seems particularly concerned today.
“The way I see this,” she says, “is, there are two options.” She holds up one perfectly manicured finger. “Hector Quimby was involved in the disappearance of Baby Midas. Maybe he was paid by someone—let’s not speculate who just yet—to take Midas and then dispose of him. And maybe that plan went awry.” She holds up another finger. “Or, he’s another tragic victim in this already tragic story. Maybe he knew something he wasn’t supposed to know. Maybe he had to be silenced.”