The Girl in Kellers Way Page 4

  Chapter Seven

  Julie

  It was Matt who insisted on going out with the Marshals. He said something about wanting to make nice with Stephen, who’s just been appointed to the university research-funding board. The thing is that Matt doesn’t need to brownnose Stephen to secure funding. They’re old buddies. They play racquetball every week for goodness sake. This dinner is about Stephen’s wife Chelsea. And me.

  We take Matt’s car. That suits me fine as I can’t drive properly in heels. He turns on the radio as we back down the driveway. The car fills with the booming voice of a sports reporter giving a preview of the weekend’s baseball games.

  Matt is a baseball nut. When we were first married, we’d go to games all the time, doing it the way it should be done, with hotdogs, shelled peanuts and Cracker Jack. The whole nine yards. I find baseball boring but I never let on. Not once.

  We’re ten minutes late when we walk into the restaurant. It’s mostly my fault. I couldn’t find my grandmother’s diamond necklace. My turquoise wrap dress looked incomplete without something around my neck. Chelsea is always immaculate. Never a hair out of place. I’ll be damned if I turn up looking like a poor relative from the wrong side of the tracks. I’m not ashamed of my background, but I don’t need to wear it carved into my forehead either.

  Matt takes the blame. I knew he would. ‘Sorry we’re late,’ he says smoothly as we reach the table. Chelsea and Stephen are sipping wine and trying not to look pointedly at their watches. ‘It’s my fault. I was held back at work by a student having a crisis over her final-year paper. Julie was furious with me for making us late.’

  He reaches out and squeezes my hand. Chelsea’s jaw tightens as her eyes shift to our intertwined hands and Matt’s damp hair. She knows exactly why we were late.

  We’re at a new restaurant that has great reviews. It’s not my preference. I’m a vegetarian. Not by taste, by ideology. I actually love the taste of meat, I just can’t stand the thought of what happens to get that meat on a plate.

  It drives me crazy sitting in a restaurant filled with the aroma of grilled meat and having to dig into greens. I order skewers of roast vegetables and halloumi cheese with a side of Greek salad. Everyone else orders steak. Deep inside I hate them for it, especially when the waiter arrives with three medium-rare steaks that sizzle on hotplates.

  ‘You’re looking fit, Julie.’ Chelsea’s tight smile is filled with insincerity. ‘Do you work out?’ I’m more than ten years younger than Chelsea. It’s obvious that she resents it like hell.

  ‘I jog occasionally,’ I respond, hoping someone will change the subject.

  ‘Don’t be so modest. I hear you could run a marathon without breaking a sweat,’ says Stephen. That comment annoys his wife, though she masks it well.

  ‘I didn’t know you’re a competitive runner,’ Chelsea chimes in.

  ‘It’s just a hobby.’ I try to play it down. I hate the attention.

  ‘Where do you run?’ asks Chelsea.

  ‘Around our neighbourhood. I like running on hills because it’s good cardio.’

  ‘You’re brave. I’m a treadmill girl myself,’ Chelsea says. ‘The roads around here are too quiet. I worry about something happening. There are so many crazy people in this world.’ Stephen kicks her gently under the table as Matt turns pale.

  There’s an awkward silence. Chelsea swallows as she registers the faux pas. ‘If you’re interested I could arrange a visitor pass to our gym. I have the most amazing personal trainer. His name is Emilio. It’s hard to get bookings with him but I could pull some strings.’ Full marks to Chelsea as she valiantly tries to dig herself out of that hole.

  ‘I’d love that,’ I say just as insincerely as she made her offer.

  Chelsea has never liked me. She’s always been polite, even friendly, in a breezy, officious sort of way. But we’ve never been friends. There’s a decade separating us in age. Her kids are teenagers. One is going to college next year. We don’t have much in common.

  She disapproves of me. Don’t get me wrong, not an unkind word has ever crossed her lips. But still. One gets a feel for these sorts of things.

  There is a gaping distance between us that goes beyond age. Chelsea and Laura were best friends. By all accounts, the two couples were inseparable. They went on joint weekends to the Marshals’ beach house, ski trips, dinner parties, doubles tennis matches. They did everything together.

  That’s why we’re all here at this awkward dinner, to re-establish those bonds. Except instead of Laura, it’s me. And I can’t pull it off.

  Matt’s a psychologist so he notices things that your ordinary, obtuse male might miss. I don’t do well in large groups. I find it nearly impossible to establish a rapport with people with whom I have nothing in common. It’s become worse since the haemorrhage.

  I’ve done my best to keep up with Matt’s social circle. Even when I feel at a low point, I attend cocktail parties and faculty functions. I dress up, smile, and make the requisite small talk. At the end of these evenings I feel deflated, as if I said something inappropriate or acted excruciatingly gauche.

  Chelsea fits into Matt’s milieu effortlessly. She’s around Matt’s age. Maybe a year or two younger, with a similar pedigree. They ran with the same crowd as teenagers. They both grew up with more money than they knew what to do with. Her mother plays bridge with my mother-in-law. I’m perfectly aware this dinner may be repeated in blow-by-blow detail at their next game.

  Matt’s friends are a tight-knit group. I blend in physically. God knows I’ve done enough to make sure I look and dress the part to neutralise any doubts on that score. My trailer trash origins are buried deep. But I’m the first to admit that I come up short in other ways. I read enough to sound intelligent, but that’s only paper-thin. Don’t they know it. I can almost hear them wondering why Matt chose me after being married to the vivacious, brilliant Laura, summa cum laude at everything. Even today, all these years after her death, people who knew Laura speak about her with genuine affection and admiration.

  Beautiful, brilliant Laura, who could light up a room with her smile and sharp intellect. That’s how she was described in an obituary I found in Matt’s papers.

  So why am I sitting here while Laura’s best friend judges me and finds me wanting? Because Chelsea is the apex predator in her group of faculty wives. The real reason we’re at this dinner is to help me get accepted by her clique. All these years and I’m still an outsider.

  The first time I met the faculty wives was at a Christmas party at the university. That’s when Matt and I first came out publicly as a couple. Nothing has changed since that night. The winter draught in the room was nothing compared to the frosty reception that I received from his friends’ wives. Cold handshakes. Icepick eyes surreptitiously giving me the once-over with a hint of amusement. A brief burst of small talk before the faculty wives delicately backed away to resume their conversations, abandoning me like an unwanted puppy.

  Matt left my side to talk with a colleague recently returned from a sabbatical in England. Leaning against a column with a glass of red wine in his hand, he was oblivious to the toxic atmosphere. There I was in the midst of a room of people I didn’t know, overdressed, with eyes boring into me. Watching me. Judging me. Comparing me to Laura. And finding me falling woefully short.

  To hell with them. I pasted a confident smile on my face and walked over to the bar for a drink. I wouldn’t allow them to grind me down. When in doubt, fake it.

  I was on my second drink when Matt found me.

  ‘There you are, darling,’ Matt said, taking my empty wine glass and putting it on the bar. He kissed me, a long lingering kiss to let everyone know this was not an ill-advised flirtation. He was in love. With me. A woman more than a decade younger. That was another reason why they disliked me. They disliked me because Matt couldn’t keep his hands off me. They disliked me because I tarnished Laura’s memory. They disliked me because I was a poor substitute.

&nb
sp; Sometimes I think Matt chose me in a last-gasp bid for normality. Matt’s embarrassed by his family’s wealth. It’s not something that anyone outside the family might notice, but I see it. His mother, Anne, does too. It irritates her no end. She thinks his marriage to me is just another example of Matt slumming it.

  Matt likes to pretend he’s living a normal middle-class life. Take his car: he drives a Lincoln. It’s top of the range, but the rest of his family wouldn’t be seen dead driving anything other than an Audi, BMW or Porsche.

  Matt’s younger brother Stuart is an investment banker with the opposite tendency. He likes to flaunt his wealth. Anne must wonder why her sons went to such extremes. One son lives relatively modestly, trying to blend in to his middle-class college town surroundings, the other is tastelessly flashy, with a garish platinum-blond wife who’s a former model. Though not the type of model Anne might boast about at her weekly bridge game. High fashion would have been acceptable. Photographs in tawdry magazines are entirely different.

  Kelly clearly appealed to Stuart’s more carnal instincts; her chest measurement is probably on par with her IQ. I’m not being bitchy. That’s what everyone thinks. Nobody realises that Kelly is smarter than they give her credit for. Not the smarts you learn at university. Street smarts. Based on her street IQ, I’d say Kelly is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. After all, she snagged Stuart, and she has him wrapped around her manicured little finger.

  And then there’s Matt, who opted for academia when he could have done anything. His mother’s words, not mine.

  He’s a leader in his field. He has recently published research that has been hailed as a major breakthrough in cognitive psychology. Despite all of Matt’s accomplishments, his mother never understood why he’d want to play academic when he could be doing something ‘useful’ with his life. As the daughter of a state senator, that meant politics. The thought makes Matt shudder. His mother is equally confounded by Matt’s decision to marry me.

  Chelsea pushes her food across her plate with a fierce determination. Her taut lips are arranged into a smile that does nothing to cover the hardness in her eyes. She too disapproves of me. Of my marriage. She scrapes her cutlery against her plate as she slices through the undercooked steak on her plate. I notice that she eats none of it.

  It’s obvious she’s here because Stephen made her come. She barely hides it. ‘You phoney bitch,’ I want to tell her. I don’t. Instead, I take a sip of Matt’s wine. It’s a decent French burgundy. Matt gives me a nudge under the table. Alcohol interacts with my medication.

  To hell with it, I think, and drink it all down. I let Stephen fill the glass with more wine. I see a flicker of irritation in Matt’s eyes as I take another generous sip. Or is it concern? Don’t worry, Matt. I’ll give you what you want. Don’t I always?

  The wine warms me. I close my eyes for the briefest moment and then open them with my attention focused just on Chelsea. God, I can be charming when I turn it on. A thousand watts of charm to melt Chelsea’s permafrost.

  ‘Chelsea, I’ve been meaning to tell you just how much I enjoyed the charity brunch two weeks ago.’ That was a total lie. It was stuffy and agonisingly boring. I hated every damn second of it. I drone on enthusiastically about the catering, the flowers, the inspiring speeches.

  My sycophantic ramblings break through her guarded expression. Her smile expands. This is a woman who craves nothing more than recognition for what she sees as her own accomplishments. By the end of the evening, Chelsea and I walk arm-in-arm to our car, giggling tipsily as Matt and Stephen shuffle along behind us bemused. When we get to the car, we kiss each other on the cheeks and release each other’s arms reluctantly, like best friends at college parting for summer vacation.

  ‘I’ll see you Monday afternoon then.’ I inject a wistful tone into my voice.

  Matt opens the car door. I scramble into my seat and clip on the safety belt.

  ‘It’s time to take your meds,’ says Matt, looking at his watch. He hands me the capsules and passes me a bottle of mineral water from the car door. I figure I’ll slip the capsules under my seat while Matt is driving but he patiently waits for me to swallow them before starting the car engine.

  ‘The evening went well, don’t you think?’ says Matt as we drive through town. He’s pleased. I feel a warm flush of pleasure at his praise. We sit together in a comfortable silence. It feels like the old days.

  ‘What are you doing on Monday with Chelsea?’ Matt’s voice breaks into my thoughts.

  ‘Lunch at the country club. And then a round of golf before school pick-up.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like golf?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t. But anything for you, darling. Anything that gets you funding, or whatever it is you wanted from tonight’s dinner.’ My voice is flat. My elation is gone. The meds have kicked in.

  Matt flinches at the change in tone. We say nothing for the longest time. As he turns the car into our street, I unzip his pants and bend my head down into his lap.

  Chapter Eight

  Mel

  It took me twenty minutes to drive to the tree-fringed golf club north-west of town. The clubhouse was a renovated old plantation house with long balconies where you could sip iced tea in the summer while watching golfers tee off. Not that I had time for that sort of thing in my life. A genteel clubhouse wasn’t exactly the place you took two teenage boys on the weekend. And it wasn’t like I had a social life outside of work and family.

  I found Lenny sitting on the front verandah in a cream hessian chair, drinking a cold beer from a glass covered in condensation.

  ‘Detective,’ he said, standing up and reaching out with a tanned hand dotted with age spots. ‘I just heard your message. I keep my phone on silent while I’m playing.’ He gave an apologetic smile as he shook my hand. ‘What’s so important that it brings a homicide detective all the way out here?’

  I pulled a chair over and sat close to him. I didn’t want to be overheard. The case had no media attention at that stage and I liked it that way. ‘We have the body of a female, found in a forest just out of town. Kellers Way. I can’t find anyone in the missing-persons database who seems to match the vic. I figured that if she was from these parts then you might remember the case.’

  ‘There were a lot of cases over the years,’ Lenny said matter-of-factly.

  ‘I’m sure there were,’ I agreed. ‘Except there is something about this victim that makes me think she would have stood out when she disappeared. That you would have remembered her.’

  ‘What do you have?’ he asked, after a sip of beer.

  ‘Female, probably in her thirties. Dark hair, we think, though we’re still waiting for hair analysis in case she dyed it. She was found wearing a red jacket with brass buttons. Black boots and black pants. She wore gold and diamond earrings, eighteen-carat gold. Also, she wore a gold chain necklace with a semiprecious pendant. The stone is rare. From Madagascar apparently. Oh, and she was wearing a ladies’ watch. It looks expensive. All the personal belongings are tasteful, classy, the jacket might even be custom-made. Her nail polish is, well, I’m pretty sure it’s a forty-dollars-a-bottle kind of nail polish.’

  Lenny had a pensive expression on his face as he listened, looking out at a golfer hitting a drive.

  ‘These are the missing persons I’ve pulled out so far.’ I handed him a brown envelope filled with face shots I’d printed at the office.

  Lenny examined each and every photo as if he was trying to pull out the cases in his mind. It took him a good ten minutes to go through them all. Wordlessly, he put the photos in a pile and slid them back into the envelope. He said nothing, just pursed his lips and looked out at the fairway below.

  ‘You know,’ he said, breaking the silence, ‘the one thing I’d hoped for when I got old – I’m almost seventy now – was to forget. The trouble is that half the time I can’t remember where I left my car keys, but I still remember these faces, the faces of the missing.’


  ‘I’m sorry, Lenny,’ I said. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have come to you.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about it,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You mentioned jewellery. Do you have photographs of the items found on the victim?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, passing him photographs of the necklace, earrings and watch. ‘Anything look familiar?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he shrugged, squinting as he held the photos away from his face. I noticed he kept returning to the photo of the pendant.

  ‘There was a woman who went missing about five or six years ago.’ He took a sip of beer. ‘She was wearing expensive gold jewellery on the day she disappeared, including a pendant. We thought the motive was theft. I personally went to pawn shops to look for those pieces because we figured the killer fenced them.’

  ‘That’s strange,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t find a single missing person in the state who was last seen wearing jewellery that came even close to matching the pieces we found on the Kellers Way victim.’

  ‘That’s because it’s not a missing-persons case,’ Lenny said. ‘It wouldn’t be in the database anymore. It’s a closed case. We caught the killer.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Lenny,’ I said. ‘I don’t quite understand.’

  He leaned forward and wrote a name on a golf club membership brochure.

  ‘This is the guy you need to speak with,’ he said, handing me the brochure. ‘I suggest you go in person, because he’ll stonewall you given half a chance. He built his career on this case.’

  I slipped the paper into my bag. I’d follow that up the next day. I had to rush to a parent–teacher meeting across town at Joe’s junior high. That’s what I liked about living in a town this size, it didn’t take very long to get anywhere.

  Our town is relatively small but the people living here are an eclectic mix of locals and outsiders. We have three universities around town and a fair-sized population of intellectuals and researchers enjoying the trappings of a middle-class lifestyle without the hassle of big-city living.