Chapter Thirteen Piper
Chapter Thirteen
Piper
Piper turned off the GW Parkway, then turned right again, onto a smaller road that twisted downward, toward the Potomac.
The road ended abruptly at a cul-de-sac where six massive homes sat side by side, fronting the river. She slowed her car and took in the scene, trying to figure out where to park.
Tasteful landscaping lights illuminated five of the homes. A homey yellow glow emanated from somewhere deep inside each one, probably a family room or a kitchen with river views on the backside of the house.
But the home in the center blazed like a sparkler at midnight on the Fourth of July, every door and window open, spilling wanton light into the rising dusk of a mid-September sky.
And not just light . . . but sound too. She cocked her head and listened as thumping bass notes infiltrated her car.
A suburban block party . . . or a rave?
She opened the driver’s side door and stood on the running board of her SUV, craning her neck as she tried to see around the corner of the house, searching for the bouncy house, or the Build-A-Bear mobile workshop, or the American Girl doll tea party, or even just a lone magician.
Instead her gaze landed on a tiki bar beside the pool and a woman wearing a vintage cigarette girl costume with an ostrich plume in her hair, handing out Jell-O shots in small plastic cups.
Piper gripped her purse a little tighter. This was not what she expected when she set out to speak to the fellow parents of a Hollin Terrace Middle School student.
She glanced at the number above the front door: 783 Potomac Shores.
The right house, but everything felt wrong.
In her experience, people with school-age children did not have the energy to attend, much less throw, wild parties with thumping bass music.
Wild parties were tossed overboard the moment parents arrived home from the hospital with their first child and sleep suddenly became the single most important survival tool in the parenting lifeboat.
Maybe that’s why this party was happening at 6:00 p.m.?
Maybe these people had found a way to combine the pleasures of youth with the responsibilities of middle age?
Maybe their parties began after the last youth soccer game of the afternoon ended and wrapped up promptly at 10:00 p.m., when it was time to take the babysitter home?
She glanced up at the stone-and-stucco house as a blond woman in a low-cut sequined dress waved energetically from a turret and hollered to someone named Trey.
Were Italian villas supposed to have turrets?
Admittedly, she was not an architectural critic. But the scale seemed off somehow, the proportions wrong. Like a Disney version of an Italian villa, rather than an actual Italian villa.
Or maybe this house was perfect in every way and she was just jealous because it probably had massive closets and a walk-in pantry, while she had to share a closet with her husband and keep half her wardrobe in plastic bins under the bed and switch everything out when the weather changed.
She got out of the car, straightened her shoulders, and clicked her key fob. Party or not, she needed to go inside and get this over with.
She wove through the cars that lined the cul-de-sac, an odd assortment of high and low, with BMWs, Mercedes, and Teslas parked beside Ford Fiestas, Dodge Darts, and a Honda Civic that had clearly seen better days.
Her eyes narrowed. Not a single minivan.
None of the cars sported bumper stickers, either, touting the Mount Vernon Soccer League, the Potomac Landing Gators Swim Team, or Ollie the Owl, the Hollin Terrace school mascot, who sat on a pile of books clutching in his talons a scroll emblazoned with the words Learning is Fun.
Ahead of her, a very attractive couple in their early twenties climbed the steps to the front door, which stood wide open.
She followed behind them and stepped into a raging party.
Either Alex Orlov lived in the Barbie Dreamhouse or her daughter was being harassed by the Great Gatsby of Hollin Terrace Middle School.
Had she somehow wandered into one of those really hip whiskey commercials that ran during NFL games? Or an old Benetton ad?
The young people were an arresting mix of global beauty, like a Miss Universe pageant for men and women. Even the White people didn’t look like domestic White people. They looked European somehow—Scandinavian or possibly Russian.
Maybe one of the Bright Young Things could help. She tapped the shoulder of an elegant woman with lush dark hair in a strapless dress. “Excuse me, I’m looking for the people who live here.”
“You mean Bruno?”
Did she mean Bruno? Bruce and Irina Orlov were listed in the directory as Alex’s parents. Bruce could be Bruno.
“Yes. I think so,” she said, almost shouting to make her voice heard above the music.
The woman raised a bare shoulder in a half shrug. “Try the basement.” Then she turned back to her partner and continued her conversation.
Piper gave her a tight smile. “Thank you.”
She’d faced armed and dangerous people over the years, but she’d never realized before that beauty could also be a weapon. She hoped that when her own daughter grew up to be impossibly gorgeous, she would also be kind.
Maneuvering through the crowd, she made her way down the stairs and into a rec room with a billiard table in the center of the room. Six television screens hung on the main wall, each displaying a different sporting event.
A soccer match took pride of place on the biggest screen, in the center of the wall. Her eyes narrowed as she glanced at Cyrillic lettering on the back of the jerseys. A team with a lion logo played a team with an ornate letter D on their uniforms.
She approached a group of men clustered in front of the screens, picking up snatches of conversation peppered with phrases like “parlay” and “over-under.”
Sports betting. Not illegal. Necessarily.
She cleared her throat. “I’m looking for Bruno.”
The group went silent; then a large man with small eyes stepped forward. “I’m Bruno.”
He had the face of a boxer. His nose had obviously been broken, possibly more than once, and his features were thick, as though he’d been drawn with a Sharpie instead of a pencil. Blond, with sharp blue eyes, he looked like a henchman in a Bond movie.
He wore a blue polo shirt with an ornate D embroidered over his heart, the same D worn by the soccer players running across the TV on the wall.
“Lovely party,” she said, fabricating her most disarming smile.
He moved closer. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
The alcohol on his breath tickled her nose, but she couldn’t read his tone or his expression.
“Sorry for crashing,” she said with a little shrug. “But our kids go to school together, and I need to speak with you . . . privately.”
He gave her an appraising look. Then he said, “Follow me.”
She could feel the men in the basement watching as they left the room. Weaving through the partygoers, he led her up the stairs to an office on the main floor. He opened the door and gestured her inside.
A whisper of fear caressed the back of her neck as he pulled the door shut with a soft click.
How many times had she told the young women taking her self-defense classes to read Gavin de Becker’s book The Gift of Fear? How many times had she told them to listen to that prickle of unease?
And now here she was, in an enclosed space with a man she didn’t know, failing to follow her own advice.
She reached inside her purse and surreptitiously removed her keys, and the Mace attached to her key chain, fisting them inside her closed palm.
She’d had this key chain for years. Did Mace degrade over time? Did it have an expiration date, like canned tuna? Expired Mace was such a poor substitute for the Glock she’d always carried for work.
Focus, Piper.
She took a steadying breath as Bruno moved to a table beside the empty fireplace and filled a crystal glass with amber liquid from a decanter.
“Drink?” he asked, raising the glass.
She’d addressed this exact situation when she taught self-defense classes. Never accept an opened drink from a strange man.
“No, thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” He took a sip, then moved to the leather wingback chair behind an enormous mahogany desk in the center of the room.
“Please, sit.” He gestured to a leather chair in front of the desk. Smaller. Lower. The supplicant’s chair.
She sat with her purse on her knees, keeping her fist hidden behind it. Suddenly she felt silly, like a little old lady gripping her handbag to ward off pickpockets.
Relax. He’s a fellow parent. Not Pablo Escobar. Or some guy trying to roofie a coed in a college bar.
She glanced around the room. Dark wood paneling, a chess set in front of the window. Bookshelves lined one wall, but she noticed the shelves held no actual books.
“So,” he began. “You are a mother . . . from the school?” He spoke with an accent, but she couldn’t place it.
“Yes. My name is Piper Mondello. Your son Alex and my daughter Caitlin are classmates.”
“How nice.” He gazed at her under heavy-lidded eyes. “So what can I do for you?”
His accent tugged at her mind. Azerbaijan? Valletta? One of the former Soviet satellite states?
She relaxed her grip on the keys and pulled out her phone. She held up a screenshot. “Your son took a picture of my daughter’s butt during PE class and posted it on Instagram. Then he made an account called Caitlin’s Ass.”
He looked at her evenly. Then he shrugged. “Boys will be boys.”
She tossed the phone back into her purse and clenched her fist around her keys again. “What he’s doing is illegal. It’s online harassment. We could have him expelled. We could take him to court. He could be charged with disseminating child pornography.”
She wasn’t entirely sure if this was true.
The law hadn’t caught up with the technology in most states.
Penalties were sketchy when it came to adult online harassment, and even murkier where juveniles were involved.
But it could be true—it should be true, damn it.
She threw it out there so he’d take the situation seriously.
It didn’t work. He looked completely unfazed. “I will tell him to delete this. Is that what you want?”
“It’s a start,” she said, keeping her voice cool, unemotional. “I also want him to stop speaking to my daughter, to stop texting her, to stop taking her picture, and to leave her alone. He’s sexually harassing her. And it needs to stop.”
He tilted his head. “You look familiar.”
Oh no. Not this again. He didn’t look like the kind of person who read The Washington Post. He looked like the kind of person who got his news from scantily clad women in TikTok videos. But still. He probably watched cable TV, and they’d had a field day with the Incident on Fox and CNN.
“I very much doubt we’ve met at a PTA meeting.”
His eyes narrowed. “I never forget a name. Or a face.”
Was that a threat? The fear rose first, skittering across her skin like an insect, followed by a sharp stab of anger. She lifted her chin, nostrils flaring.
“You will tell your son to stay away from my daughter and delete the account and the picture, correct?”
“Yes. I will ask him to do this.”
“No. You will tell him to do this.”
His face remained expressionless. “Fine.”
“Good.”
“So what’s the occasion?” she asked, breaking a silence that grew more menacing the longer it continued.
“What do you mean?”
She jutted her chin in the direction of the noise outside the door. “The party.”
“My wife and I are social people. We run a business, and this is just a little gathering, for our special friends.”
“Is it legal?” she asked sweetly.
He threw his head back and laughed. “Mostly.”
“Money laundering? Uranium smuggling?” she suggested with a bright, false smile.
“Property development.”
Property development, my ass.
She’d seen a lot of shady characters in her career.
And she’d found that shady characters were almost invariably flashy as well—an odd, but reliably consistent combination of traits.
And this Bruno character screamed shady, from the gold chain at his throat to the expensive Ferragamo loafers on his feet.
“Property development.” She rose from her chair. “Right. Of course.”
She was done listening to this man. She’d call in some favors and learn everything she could.
“I understand you have a small but lovely home, Mrs. Mondello.”
She froze.
“A lovely home on Beaverbrook Lane, if I’m correct,” he continued, gazing at her over the rim of his glass.
The back of her neck prickled. “How do you know where I live?”
“The same way you know where I live.” He made an expansive gesture with his arms. “The school directory works both ways, you know.”
“Is that a threat?” she asked quietly, heart thudding so loudly she was afraid he could hear it.
“On the contrary.” He spread his fingers over his chest in an expression of innocence. “It’s a compliment. You have lovely river views.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Only in the winter.”
“Yes,” he said softly. “Only in the winter.”
Silence filled the room again as her mind raced. He didn’t know she’d be coming. He couldn’t have looked her up in the directory. So how did he know where she lived?
Then he stood. “Thank you for coming, Mrs. Mondello.”
“Have a good evening,” she said stiffly. Then she turned and left the room. Pushing through the party, she made her way back to the car. She climbed inside and locked the door. Her foot trembled as she slammed down on the accelerator, spun out of the driveway, and raced home.