Chapter 12 #2
Around the outside of that center area, there was a restaurant, a bar, a gift shop, and the registration desk.
People were milling around, and most of them had golf bags nearby.
It was a beautiful morning in April, unseasonably warm, already sixty at 11 a.m. The golfers had been shut inside all winter.
But the spring thaw had finally arrived.
Christine scanned every area in the place, but did not find Dangerous Dan, even though she’d seen him go in. She’d followed him there, but valet parking took time.
She decided to check the new spa rooms in the back, just in case.
Nobody stopped her or questioned her business back there because Christine walked like she knew what was doing, with an attitude that she belonged and you’d best not question it.
The designer clothes didn’t hurt, a spring yellow dress with a macrame belt.
She’d developed her confident stride early in her marriage to Jeff.
She’d needed it to hold her own with the upper crust of Central New York.
She and Jon had been middle class, all the way.
Marrying Jeff had elevated her, socially.
On the other hand, the natural invisibility of older women might also be to blame for her going unnoticed. Once you were no longer an object of lust for the male eye, the majority of them no longer saw you at all, and younger folks tended not to even look.
So for one of those reasons, or both, nobody noticed her, met her eyes, said anything, or even cast a glance her way as she crossed the lobby into the long hallway to the spa wing.
She wound up in a circular waiting room, with chairs on one half of the circle, and doors off the other half. Four of them. One was a back exit, one was marked “Showers” and the other two were marked by small placards: “Pink Room” and “Blue Room.”
And there in the corner was the ugly plaid golf bag of Dan Fitzpatrick. She’d seen him carry it inside when the valet had taken his car, with its N0TP00R license plate.
He had to be behind one of those doors. Christine moved closer, listened at each of them, and only heard movement from one.
She’d texted Diane immediately, and now, she was looking for…
ah there it was. She pulled her sleeves over her hand, in case of fingerprints or whatever, and pulled the fire alarm.
Then she quickly ducked into the shower room, stepped into a stall to hide, and waited for everyone to exit the building.
As she waited, she ran her fingertips over the immaculate swirly yellow tiles. Italian marble she thought. There were multiple shower heads, too, and even a steam setting.
“Hell, I have got to start coming to the club.”
Bonnie’s daughter-in-law Marina finally came through her front door, and Bonnie greeted her with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “I’m so proud of you, Marina,” she said. “Opening your own law office. That’s amazing.”
“Thanks, Bonnie. That means a lot to me.” Her hand was on Bonnie’s shoulder, and she squeezed gently. “I wish we’d hung out more.”
That was an odd way to say it, Bonnie thought.
In the past tense like that. “Well, let’s start now, then,” she said.
“You’re moving home. We’ll be closer, so it’ll be much easier to do things together.
” Then she held up a hand. “I promise, I won’t make a pest of myself.
Come on, the quiche came out perfectly. I swear it had to be in your honor, I almost never get one perfect. ”
Marina was looking past her though, at Sam, and her eyes looked like they were straining to generate a death ray.
“Everything okay?” Bonnie asked, looking from her daughter-in-law to her son and back again. Marina so often seemed irritated with Sam for no apparent reason.
Marina gave a slow blink and then smiled brightly. “Everything looks great, Bonnie. You didn’t have to do all this.”
Bonnie walked beside her to join the others.
Surely, they were going to start to rebuild their relationship now.
She was going to be more understanding about Marina’s overbearing ways.
After all, she was certainly raising her granddaughters to be strong, self-assured young women.
Bonnie was going to just accept her for who she was and stop wishing she’d be nicer.
The kids hugged their mom hello. Bonnie got them all busy eating, said she needed a moment, then headed toward the stairway as if to go up, but instead sailed past it to the den, her gaze darting behind her the whole time.
Nobody noticed her.
She opened the den’s door silently and slipped inside, then she closed it behind her.
For an instant, the smell of the room swept her away, because it smelled like Mark.
She never disturbed anything in Mark’s den, and never cleaned it, only dusted.
She didn’t want to wash away the smell. Sometimes, Mark would smoke a pipe in there.
Sometimes he’d have a glass of his favorite rum, Captain Morgan. Fancy, he wasn’t.
God, she missed him.
She crossed the carpeted floor to the rectangular desk. It was dark cherry wood with a matching chair upholstered in tweed. Its casters rested on a rubberized mat to protect the floor.
Every wall was either bookshelves or windows.
Mark had loved his den.
She took a breath. “Help me out, here, hon. Keep our son busy so he doesn’t catch me snooping.”
There were file folders on the desk, and she opened them fast, pulling out her burner phone and turning on the desk lamp. Then she started snapping pictures of every page, barely taking time to skim them as she went. She noticed a toxicology report, an evidence list, notes from the forensics lab.
She tapped the phone, flipped the pages. Tap, flip, tap flip, tap flip, tap flip. How much time had gone by? His laptop was right there. Most of the evidence was probably on that, but she didn’t think there was time.
Too late, she heard footsteps right outside the door, closed the folder, turned off the lamp, and sort of threw herself toward the nearest reading chair, the one near the window.
She landed kind of sideways, but the door was opening by then, so she tried to make it look natural and thought of the scene in Airplane!
where the flight attendant tells the passengers to “assume crash positions.”
“Mom?”
Sam’s voice. She was caught like a rat in a trap!
Her eyes shifted toward the desk as her hand, hidden by the way she’d landed, slipped the burner phone into her apron pocket. Since her position suggested a fainting Regency miss, she gazed out the window she’d landed facing and gave a heavy sigh.
“I love this room…I feel him in here, you know?”
Oh, she felt downright evil using her precious Mark’s death to cover for her snooping. But from somewhere way down deep inside, she could’ve sworn she heard her husband’s low, familiar chuckle.
Yes. Mark would approve. And why was she feeling guilty anyway? Sam was lying to her, the whole lot of them were. She’d been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for whatever it was they had to tell her. It was obvious there was something, and she suspected she knew what it was.
Their marriage was in trouble.
She extended a hand, and her son helped her up, put his arm around her, and walked her back to the dining room where Marina and the twins were laughing and talking.
Everyone smiled like they’d been worried about her. She returned the most innocent grandma smile she could muster. And then she channeled her pal Christine, and said, “So when are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on with my family?”
If their eyes had widened any further, they’d have fallen out.
Then Sally said, “Ohmygod, Grams, I love you so much.” She came over and fist-bumped her.
Sadie joined her, at her grandma’s other side. “Told you she’d see through your bullshit.”
“Mouth, Sadie.”
“Mouth, Grams.”
Bonnie offered a fist and got another bump.
The parents stood there, side by side but not touching. Marina said, “Hey, don’t look at me. Sam’s the one who thinks you can’t handle the hard things.”
“You don’t get to be my age if you can’t handle the hard things,” Bonnie said.
“That’s what I keep telling him,” Marina said.
“You’d just lost Dad.” Sam sounded defensive. “I didn’t want to—”
“Just tell me, hon.”
They looked at each other, then at her, then they opened their mouths, then they closed them again.
Beside her, Sadie said, “They’re divorced, Grams.”
Bonnie blinked, not surprised, but very sad. “You’re getting divorced?” she asked her son and daughter-in-law.
“Not getting, already done,” Sally said. “Like Dad said, it was around the time Grampa died.”
“We kids stay in the house,” Sadie said. “Mom and Dad take turns staying with us.”
“Right,” Sally said. “But then Mom wanted to move back here. Said it wasn’t right being so far away. And Dad started looking for an opportunity.”