Chapter 24 People in the Know
People in the Know
Later that evening, Frankie sits at the kitchen table with a bowl of tomato soup and saltine crackers on a plate. Steam has already tapered off and disappeared; the soup must be cool, but she just moves the spoon around, not hungry.
A door slams; her roommates are home. Virginia heads straight to a bottle of wine that she got from a friend, who got it from a friend. “So if it was another man,” she says, “then she wasn’t in love with Jack?”
Frankie looks up. “Another man?”
Susan takes two juice cups off the drying rack.
“You didn’t hear? It got back to my boss.
June didn’t love Jack, and he knew it.” She turns to Virginia.
“You’re exactly right, it’s just like their movie.
Jack killed her because he couldn’t have her.
Because he couldn’t live with someone else having her. ”
Frankie lets go of her spoon. “That’s what people are saying?”
Susan nods. “People in the know.”
“But then where’s the necklace?” Virginia asks.
“Exactly,” Susan says. “Where’s the necklace? They searched Jack’s house.”
“They searched his house?” Frankie’s question comes out too loud, and both turn to her, surprised. “When?”
“It was on the radio,” Susan says, pouring the wine. “Out of all of us, you’re the one who should know this.”
Virginia takes her glass, and grimaces with a sip. “To think, I broke up with Fred because of Jack, but he might have actually killed her. At least Fred wouldn’t do that.”
Frankie’s losing patience. “First, Jack didn’t kill her. Second, what do you mean you broke up because of Jack?”
Virginia shrugs. “I’m partially kidding. But I suppose when I looked at them, I saw a whole lot of what I was missing.”
“Is this regret I’m hearing?” Susan asks.
“I’m back and forth.”
Frankie pushes her soup bowl away. “What changed? Him being friends with Jack Sawyer?”
She’s said it before thinking. The kitchen goes quiet, and Susan suddenly takes interest in a speck of something on the counter.
At last, Virginia says evenly, “I’m angry about that. It hasn’t made me change my mind, it’s made me more mad. Fred could’ve told me that’s who he was with on certain nights, and I would’ve kept it to myself, but he didn’t trust me. So no, Frankie, that’s actually made it worse.”
Frankie starts to apologize, but Virginia won’t let her.
“I know my relationship wasn’t perfect, I know that. And sure, I might’ve ended it regardless, but it didn’t help comparing it to what looked like the greatest love story ever. When you think that’s even possible, it’s hard to be happy with what you have.”
Frankie, of course, knows that Fred was never out with Jack on the nights in question. “Maybe the lie did you a favor.”
“Frankie,” Susan says, shocked. “What’s gotten into you?”
But Virginia doesn’t let her answer. “Fred made me laugh and was my best friend and would’ve given me a very nice life. Maybe you think I was settling because of whatever you think is important, and maybe I’m wrong or weak or stupid—”
“No, I never said that.”
“But the way I see it is people look up and see a big, grand story, and all it does is make them question their own lives. How does it help if I spend my whole life thinking I could’ve had it better, because of a lie?
Because I believed in some”—her hand flutters in the air as she searches for the word—“impossible perfection? And what if I decide to leave something that was actually pretty good because of a lie? My relationship might’ve actually been pretty good if I gave it a chance, if I wasn’t comparing it to a lie. ”
Frankie breaks a cracker in half, salt gritty on her fingertips.
“The question is,” Susan says, swirling the wine in her glass, “what he did with the necklace. Jack doesn’t need the money.”
Now Frankie stands up, wiping her hand on her leg. “Jack didn’t kill June because Jack didn’t kill June. End of sentence.”
When neither roommate says anything, Frankie sets her bowl in the sink.
Tomorrow she’ll return to the bungalows.
Maybe she missed something. If the person who killed June didn’t take the back path toward Arlington Way, then they left via Glenhollow.
At this point she needs to find anything she can, because the damage to Jack’s reputation is snowballing.
Ducking into her bedroom, she shuts the door. Her roommates’ silence in the other room tells her they’re whispering. Worried about her, most likely. Wondering why she’d take an accusation against Jack so personally before chalking it up to their usual complaint that she takes her job too seriously.
Lined up against the wall are five sad boxes, all the possessions Frankie has in the world. Her whole life amounts to boxes that barely get in the way. She stares at them. There’s so much she doesn’t have—dishes, a phone, even.
A phone.
It’s possible Nico just didn’t tell her that Darlene called him.
Like he didn’t tell her about the Jack-and-Donna situation until much later.
An omission is not the same as a lie, but the worry that he’s hiding something has settled beneath her skin like a splinter.
Tomorrow, she’ll find a way to ask him about it.
Lying down, she draws her quilt around her, the lights still on.
In less than a week, she’ll have her little house, the independence and the privacy and silence she’s always dreamed of.
The thought, though, leaves her apprehensive—not excited.
She never told Jack about the house, because she didn’t want him to think she was going along with enforcing the studio’s wishes in exchange for the house, and now she wonders if, in fact, that’s what she did.
Somewhere along the line, she lost her conviction that what she’s done was right. Or that why she did it was right.
Her roommates’ voices peal in laughter, and even though she’s not in the room with them, there is comfort from their presence.
Suddenly Frankie doesn’t want to leave, doesn’t know how she’ll sleep when there are too many noises in the night and a killer who walks the streets and blends in and could be anyone.
Why did she think being alone was the goal?
Was it simply that the noise of her childhood taught her to dream of silence?
Maybe she can stay. Tell Nico that since June’s death, she no longer wants to live alone.
But then she remembers Virginia telling Susan about someone who won a “caption this” contest for Coca-Cola—a competition to see who could come up with the best caption to go along with an image of a man pretending to toast the Empire State Building with a soda.
Being creative is great, sure, but let’s hope she’s got enough muscle to clean the kitchen sink, Susan replied, because I have a recollection that it used to be white.
The “caption this” winner—that must be the new secretary the studio’s arranged to move in.
Just like that, Frankie will be replaced, something she brought on herself.
It’s too much. Jack is in custody as a murder suspect, and something is off with Nico—the two people she trusts most in life.
She has no one she can talk to about any of this, and she’s somehow alienating her roommates, who are her closest friends.
She eyes the boxes against the wall. All this time, she’s thought that the goal was to work hard in order to not need anyone, but never once did she consider what it would mean to be truly alone.