cloak-and-dagger scenario that would buy Caroline some time with Grant and the rest of her family and the Sturgises had agreed. Lucy had flown to Detroit the previous night and would return on the flight that Caroline would reportedly be taking. Lucy would be in an obvious disguise and when Grant met her at the airport they would lead any intrusive reporters on as long as chase as they could. If it gave Caroline a day of peace to reconnect with her children and meet with her lawyer, that would be enough.
Caroline led me into their immaculate kitchen. The only thing that was incongruous was a mountain of unopened mail on the credenza opposite the central island. There were no mimosas this time, only a pot of herbal tea. She brought out a blue tin of Danish butter cookies that I’d seen stacked up at the local Costco.
“Grant’s been amazing. But look at this,” she said, fingering the top of the tin. “He’s been living on the pantry. If I hadn’t gotten out, when I did he would have been down to the cocktail onions and foil packets of coffee and cheese from last year’s holiday gift baskets.” She pointed to the spotless kitchen. “He’s trying so hard to be normal, he even wrote ‘Mommy home!’ on the whiteboard.”
There was a catch in her voice as she said it, but she was remarkably composed for a woman who’d been through the ordeal that she’d had.
“We’ll survive this,” she said. “Our marriage may even be stronger after the dust settles. If it wasn’t for the kids, I’d be glad this came out. You don’t know what it’s been like, keeping it in all these years. Thank you for finding out how it happened. I wouldn’t have cared, but Grant had to know who was responsible. It would have driven him crazy.”
She shook her head and smiled. “Jeff Warren. I recognized him immediately, even with the beard and mustache. He was always a nice boy.”
“That’s what his mother says. Did you recognize anyone else who was new in town? Someone at Mossdale’s, perhaps?”
“No,” she said. “I usually just go out with Becka and we rarely see anyone. You mean the priest, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“Never saw him before in my life. He just scared the heck out of me. He used exactly the same words another priest had used years ago when I went to the St. Ann’s shelter. I send them a check every year for their Holiday Fund Drive.”
“What are you gonna do now?” I asked.
“Wait until the judge decides. Until then, whatever they let me do. The people who used to be in my life. You, the moms, my book group.”
“I’m here, aren’t I? Give the rest of them time,” I said. “They don’t know how to process this.” Privately I thought all it would take was one well-connected person to step up and welcome her back, to remind the rest of the pack that she was still Caroline, the woman they all loved a month earlier. For goodness sake, we forgave Nixon, didn’t we?
I was betting that person would be Becka Reynolds. She had a good heart and had helped before, but I made a mental note to give her a little nudge if she needed it.
“Is there anything else I can do?”
“Yes.” Caroline looked quite serious now. “That’s really why I called.”
She pulled a light blue bubble pack mailer out of the stack of mail on her credenza, hidden in plain sight. It had been stapled closed but was now just folded over. There was no postage and no address; it had been hand- delivered that morning.
“Grant doesn’t know about this.”
Caroline had turned into a light sleeper; perhaps a week in prison did that to a person. She’d heard a sound in her driveway around 6:30 A.M.when Grant was in the shower. She didn’t dare open the door but peered out through her bedroom window and noticed the envelope on her doorstep leaning against a cedar planter. In her peripheral vision she saw a car that had been parked across the road take off, but she couldn’t be sure the two actions were connected. And it was still too dark to identify the car or the driver.
“You shouldn’t have opened it,” I said, staring at the envelope but not touching it. “It could have been dangerous.”
“Like what, a dead rat from one of my neighbors? Anthrax?”
“Who knows?” I started to say you never really knew people, but thought better of it.
Caroline slid something out of the envelope and onto the table. It was a glossy blue jewelry box. Inside was an item wrapped in tissue paper. And a note typed on ivory card stock.
It’s not over till it’s over.
“Well, looks like someone has a problem with your release.”
“There’s more to it than that. It’s not over till it’s over? That was a cheer we did when our team was down toward the end of a game. Whoever sent this knew me when I was Monica.”
And despite what a judge in Michigan might decide, that person didn’t think anything was over. Caroline unwrapped the tissue paper. It was a silver megaphone charm with the letters NHS on it. Newtonville High School. On the other side were the initials MJW, Monica Jane Weithorn.
Caroline’s cell phone rang, announcing she had a text message: Want it to be over? If you can pay one million dollars in bail you can damn well pay back the money you stole from me.
Thirty-one
I put the water on for tea and made Caroline go over the story she’d kept to herself for years and had undoubtedly repeated out loud and to herself a dozen times in the last month.
“I guess I was pretty, but who thinks she’s pretty at that age-only the most confident girls, and I wasn’t one of them. I was the poor girl, pretty enough to make out with but not presentable enough to bring home to your parents. Until I met Eddie and Kate. They made me feel special. Kate even gave me some of her clothes and convinced me to try out for cheerleading. She knew the coach. Cheerleading made me popular, at least I thought that’s what it was. Once I started dating Eddie, I had lots of friends. Coach Hopper even encouraged Eddie and Kate to come along to games. He gave them credit for bringing me out of my shell.
“I never knew what they were doing, and I didn’t steal anything,” Caroline said. “Honestly.”
“Caroline, I’m not going to judge you and I’m not sure that’s the hot issue right now. Someone I would characterize as one of the bad guys thinks you did. And knows your phone number and knows where you live. He may even know that you’re holding this thing right now.” As I said it, the two of us looked out the sliding glass doors into Caroline’s backyard and the reservoir behind it. A beautiful spot. Peaceful. Wooded. Remote. She pushed a button under the island and sun shades rolled down, allowing us to see out but obscuring the view from outside. Then she went into her living room to retrieve a bottle of vodka.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Let’s have some more tea, okay?”
“Tea is not going to do the trick. I’m screwed. My life has been unalterably changed, my kids must think I’m a hypocrite, my mother-in-law wants custody of my children. Lord knows how Grant’s clients will react. What else can they do to me?”
What they could do, and she’d realize it once she calmed down, was to make her look as bad as possible so that a judge in Michigan would have to send her back to prison to complete her sentence, otherwise risk being thought of as too liberal.
“You have to call the police,” I said.
She shook her head vigorously and I couldn’t blame her. The last time she trusted them, she was sentenced to twenty years in jail for a crime I still wanted to believe she hadn’t committed.
“No,” she said. “We just have to find this man and see what he wants.”
“Caroline, we know what he wants-money. Some measure of revenge. And from the tone of that note, scaring the pants off you would be a nice little bonus for him.”
“You have to help me. You found Jeff Warren, you can find this guy.”
I had to admit I was getting good at locating things and people. I found myself wondering what Nina Mazzo charged for this line of work. It had to be more than gardeners earned, and the work was a lot less strenuous, if
