Bright Young Women

Tina dropped her fork as Ed started to claw at his throat, wheezing through a windpipe that had constricted to the diameter of a cocktail straw. “We need to call an ambulance!” she cried, pushing back her chair.

Frances stood up too. “The phone is in the living room,” she said. She put her arm around Tina and led her to the kitchen, where there was a container of shellfish stock, open next to the saucepan. She held Tina firmly by the shoulders and quizzed her on Piaget’s stages of moral development to drown out the sounds coming from the next room, uncannily like those of a baby first learning to burble.

He was an old man who lived a long, prosperous life and died surrounded by a dear friend and his beloved wife, eating his favorite meal. As peaceful a death as one could hope for, seemed the presiding sentiment at the funeral back in Dallas. Though every time Tina looked over at Deb, she found her staring back with watery black eyes.

The plan, after the funeral, was to gather at Ed’s Highland Park home and make some decisions about what to do with his various properties. But when Tina arrived, she found the doors barricaded and the locks changed, all five of Ed’s children wandering the perimeter of the house in their funeral attire, trying to figure out how to get inside. Tina counted again, more carefully this time. No. Not all five, actually.

A window on the second floor cracked open, and Deb’s hard voice ricocheted against the grounds. “I need to speak to Tina.”

The two of them sat in the grand room, where, at Christmastime, hundreds of presents ringed the base of a fourteen-foot Douglas fir like an impassable moat. Underprivileged children from underprivileged neighborhoods were invited into the Highland Park grand room and given their pick—Tina’s mother was one of them once. Now Deb was there to offer Tina another kind of gift.

Ed had noticed Deb’s withdrawal from the family several years prior, and had tried to buy back her affections by modifying his will to make Deb the executor, saying in the codicil that only his firstborn could see to dividing his assets fairly. To that effect, Tina would inherit the Maui house, retain the Seattle residence, and receive a small but substantial portion of the proceeds from the sale of the real estate company. Everything else belonged to Deb, and if any of her siblings tried to fight her on this, she would go to the press and destroy the memory of their father.

The offer was good on one condition—Tina was never to step foot in Highland Park again, because Deb couldn’t stand to look at Tina. In Tina, she saw only what her father had done to her when she was young too. She had been asked to divide the assets fairly, and this, she had decided, was fair.

Tina thought about her mother and what she had said through the scrim of antique lace, whitened with lemon juice and salt for her wedding day. Rising from the couch, hand extended in Deb’s direction, she punched out.





PAMELA


Aspen, 1978

Day 13

I woke in the hotel room in Aspen seconds shy of three a.m., only, instead of lying pancaked to the bed in fear, I bolted straight up as if I had overslept for class. Something had resolved for me with those few hours of sleep, something so important that it could not wait until the morning.

I reached over and switched on the tableside lamp. Immediately, my eyes went to Carl’s duffel. The hotel had promised to send someone up to take my bag to Carl’s room and Carl’s bag to mine, but they must have knocked on the door when I was downstairs talking to Tina. I knew he was staying in room 607 because I’d noted the engraved brass numbers on the key fob when Tina had passed them out. I dressed in the previous day’s clothes and ran my fingers through my hair, brushed my teeth, and pinched life into my cheeks. I looked as good as I could, given the circumstances. Anyhow, I was engaged.

I went down the hallway toward the elevator, glancing over my shoulder every few steps. The carpet under my feet was orange and gold, a trippy diamond pattern that made my vision swirl and shapes loom menacingly in the shadows. I was out of breath by the time I reached Carl’s room, beady-eyed as a fox in a hunt. It took all my restraint not to pound on the door and scream for Carl to let me in. I knocked, a rapid, soft rhythm, whispering as loudly as I dared, “Carl? It’s Pamela.”

Carl came to the door sooner than I expected him to, his expression zombie-like and movements heavy and uncoordinated. He stumbled, trying to see around me out into the hallway, as though someone really had been chasing me, and I lost the last dregs of my composure. I practically lunged into the room and slammed the door behind us, drawing the lock chain tight on the track.

“I have your bag,” I said ludicrously. I patted the army-issue duffel resting against my outer thigh.

With sleep-slugged eyes, Carl looked me over. I’d noticed, of course, that although he’d fallen asleep in his pants, he wasn’t wearing a shirt, but with the door closed behind us, it was an oppressive fact. Carl was half-naked. I stared at my feet, over his shoulder, anywhere but his narrow, woolly torso. I was pleased to find that Carl’s room was remarkably neat. The covers were peeled back just where he’d been sleeping, and a bath towel was folded in half and left to dry on a hanging rack in the bathroom. My small weekender bag was hooked to the back of the desk chair. I crossed the room and went to swap them, and that was when I noticed two empty airplane-sized whiskey bottles in the trash can. I averted my eyes, not wanting Carl to know I’d seen that.

“What time is it?” Carl asked in a froggy voice, his throat sounding ragged and dried out from the whiskey. He put a fist to his mouth, coughing, and went into the bathroom for water.

“I realized something important,” I said, reddening, rather than answer that it was three a.m., “and I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

The tap went off and Carl appeared in the bathroom doorway, gulping from a glass. He drew a forearm across his mouth and motioned for me to go on.

“Gerald said he was the wrong guy to ask for information, and that we had to talk to the right one. It was like he was toying with us, giving us a riddle to solve. But maybe that’s because he had to, because he’s not free to say what he knows. And then I remembered—the sheriff’s plaque on his door. His name is Sheriff Dennis Wright.”

“The Wright guy,” Carl said, instantly revived and alert.

“I think the police in Colorado know something about where The Defendant was headed,” I said. “What if they saw what happened down in Florida and are purposely staying out of it? It’s bad enough that they let him get away again, but if he went and committed another horrible crime and it comes back to them? God”—I realized something truly upsetting—“they probably don’t even want him caught. This is blood on their hands.”

Carl leaned against the bathroom doorframe, arms strapped across his bare chest and a distant kind of excitement on his face. “If it’s true, it’s a career-making story.”

“How do we prove it, though?”

Carl brought a hand to his jawline, mottled with scruff, and thought a moment. “Tina has money, doesn’t she?”

“She does,” I said, and felt a stab of something, not quite anger, thinking about the adversarial conversation we’d had at dinner.

“I can’t be a part of anything like that,” Carl said. “But I’m speaking to the waitress tomorrow. Maybe you can drop me off, head back over to the jail…” He raised an eyebrow at me.

“And what?” I laughed. “Bribe the sheriff?”

“No. Stay away from the sheriff. But maybe a guard or someone would be willing to talk to you.”

I furrowed my brow, trying to picture myself doing something like that. “I don’t know that I have it in me to bribe someone.”

“Stop saying bribe, Pamela,” Carl said in a passionate way that made my toes curl in my ugly white sneakers. “It’s reward money for the truth.”