Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [90]
As she stared at the floor, one of her ankles wobbled in the high shoes. The movement seemed to wake her from her thoughts.
She looked at me again and took a deep breath. “I’m going away tonight.”
“Why?” I said.
“It’s just for tonight. I’ll be back in the morning.” But she looked down the hallway, no longer at my eyes, and that look made me think she didn’t mean what she had said.
“But Daddy isn’t home.”
She returned her eyes to me, and I think she knew what I meant. It wasn’t just that he was away at the moment. He’d been away for longer than usual now. He hadn’t come home the last few weekends. And now she was going to leave, too.
“Caroline is here. She’ll watch after you.” She gave me a warm smile, and for a second I thought maybe everything would be okay, but then came the sound.
My mother jerked her head a little so that her ear was toward the stairs, toward the door. It came again, and I recognized it as a horn from a car, but not Dad’s car. He used to honk every time he pulled into the driveway on a Friday night. He hadn’t done that in a long time, but I could remember the sound. Three short bleeps. These honks, though, were two long tones. Deeper sounds.
When my mother turned to me again, her face had changed. Her eyes were wide, her cheeks pink, as if she’d been running in the cold. “I have to go now, but I’ll be back tomorrow, okay?”
“Sorry I can’t help you more,” Chief Manning said.
“No. Uh…no problem. That’s…that’s fine.” I knew I was mumbling.
I kept hearing the two long tones of that car horn.
The machine picked up in Maddy’s apartment. “Maddy,” I said, in case she was screening. “It’s me.”
After talking to Chief Manning, I had nibbled at my room-service salad and taken a few halfhearted sips of wine. I called the New Orleans number again, but it only rang incessantly. I talked to my investigator, who told me the number was registered to a management company that rented less than stellar houses around New Orleans. The tenants rarely stayed more than a month, and so the company didn’t do background checks or even keep good records about who was staying in the apartments, as long as the tenants paid weekly cash. The investigator had found the address, though, a place on a rough little stretch of Magazine Street. He’d asked if I wanted him to fly there and run some surveillance. It would be very expensive, I knew, and there was no case on which to write it off. I told him I would think about it.
Now, my mind was like a locomotive, running over new ground with a driving, fierce intensity. That night. Those car horns. It must have been my mom’s boyfriend. She was going out with him that night. She was planning on staying with him. And my seven-year-old self hadn’t believed that she would come back. I could see my mother crouching before me. I could see her holding her head and moving to the door. I could see her in bed the next morning, her hair like a curtain over her face. But what had happened in between those spaces? Had my father come home? Was Dan there? Was he in that house in New Orleans now? And that man with the ring, who was he?
Which brought me back to Maddy.
“Hailey?” she said, picking up in the middle of my message. She sounded distinctly sleepy. Or maybe in the throes of some sexual romp.
“Hi, hon. Sorry to wake you.”
“No problem,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Is Grant with you?”
“No, he’s traveling this week. I’m not even sure where. I didn’t talk to him today.”
“What’s his last name again?” I asked.
“Mercer.”
“M-E-R-C-E-R?”
“Yeah, why?”
“No reason. So, did you ask him about the ring?”
Maddy made a soft groan. “What would I ask him exactly?”
“Where he got it. How long he’s had it. If he knows who designed it and where it came from. If he ever lived in Woodland Dunes.” I said the last sentence lower, knowing it would probably