Jesse showed no sign that Mr. Plum had spoken.
“So when you thought he was off to Tallahassee to open the new store,” Jesse said to Mrs. Plum, “he was, in fact, driving up to Boston to see Florence.”
Mr. Plum spoke in the same gentle voice.
2 8 2
S E A C H A N G E
“What he’s saying is wrong, Mommy.”
She stared at him for a moment. He sat very erect, his ankles together. He drank his Manhattan carefully and patted his lips with a napkin. Jesse thought he looked prim.
“Mommy,” Mr. Plum said.
“Do you have any theory, Mrs. Plum,” Jesse said, “why he went up there?”
“No,” she said.
“Do you have any theory on why he pretends he didn’t?”
“I never went, Mommy.”
Mrs. Plum didn’t look at her husband. She kept her gaze fixed on Jesse.
“No,” Mrs. Plum said. “I don’t.”
The room was silent. The sky was very blue above the terrace. The bay beyond the terrace looked clean and bright.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Mr. Plum said.
Mrs. Plum stared at Jesse. Jesse walked over to the railing and leaned on it beside Ortiz. Mr. Plum poured himself a Manhattan from a silver shaker beaded with moisture. He offered the shaker to Mrs. Plum who shook her head. She sipped from her still-sufficient glass.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Mr. Plum said.
Ortiz ate his sandwiches. Kelly Cruz sat with her legs crossed, her hands clasped over her right knee. Jesse waited.
No one spoke. Slowly Mrs. Plum shifted her gaze from Jesse to her husband. He smiled at her.
He said, “It’s going to be all right, Mommy.”
2 8 3
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
She continued to look at him. He sat calmly with his Manhattan delicately held with thumb and forefinger. His face was toward her, but he didn’t appear to be looking at anything.
“You are a monstrous pig of a man,” Mrs. Plum said to him.
Her voice was calm and the tone was simply the assertion of an obvious fact.
“Mommy,” he said, “please. Not in front of guests.”
“You killed her,” Mrs. Plum said. “Didn’t you.”
“Mommy,” he said again in his pleasant detached way,
“please let’s mind our manners.”
“She sent you the tape and you went into a jealous frenzy and drove up there and killed her.”
“Tape?” Mr. Plum said.
“You think I don’t know about the tape? You think I didn’t recognize her handwriting when it came? You think I didn’t find it in your study while you were out? You think I didn’t play it? You think I don’t know about you?”
Her voice went slowly, almost ploddingly, up the scale until she was almost screaming.
“That tape was private,” Mr. Plum said.
“Private?” Mrs. Plum’s voice was down into calm again.
“That is my daughter.”
“And mine,” Mr. Plum said. He seemed still to be looking at nothing. “It was private between me and my daughter.”
“Whom you have been fucking since she was thirteen,”
Mrs. Plum said.
Mr. Plum suddenly looked at her.
2 8 4
S E A C H A N G E
“Mommy,” he said firmly, “don’t be crude.”
She stared at him and then looked at Jesse and Ortiz, then at Kelly Cruz.
“He’s been doing it since they were little girls,” she said to Kelly Cruz. “All three of them. We never talked about it.
Maybe he thought I didn’t know, but I knew.”
