“No.”
Bianchi pointed at the naked windows—she’d torn down the toile drapes and now they were landfill. “I see you’re suffering from a brownout like the rest of the block. No air-conditioning. Your windows are open. How did you sleep, though?”
“Was it noisy? I have no idea! Will she be okay?”
“Who?”
“Gertie Wilde.” Just saying her name made Rhea’s heart beat faster.
Bianchi didn’t answer, and she had the feeling he thought he’d caught her out. Which he hadn’t.
“That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what they said this morning. Gertie was hurt?” He kept looking at her, fixated. A thrill built up inside Rhea, scary and good. And it wasn’t because she wanted Gertie or her baby dead. She didn’t even want Arlo jailed. She just wanted them to understand what they’d done. She wanted them to feel so bad about hurting poor Shelly that they couldn’t stand to live. That they killed themselves. Julia, too. And even Larry. Their heavy deaths would pull a pocket out of time. This pocket would gather all the murk and bead into oblivion, washing clean all that remained.
“Yes, it was Mrs. Wilde.”
“Is the baby going to live?”
“I have a witness. He says a man of your son Fritz’s build threw the bricks.”
Terror. A delicious candy bath of it. “FJ? You mean my son, FJ? Or my husband, Fritz?”
“Your son.”
“I don’t think that’s likely. I mean, he’s got a ride to Hofstra! He wouldn’t blow it for something like that… It’s just not possible! And I certainly wasn’t up in the middle of the night, playing with bricks. We don’t even have bricks! Our house is a Tudor!”
“Why do you think my witness believes he saw you and your son?”
Rhea let out breath, affected sorrow. Whisper-talked. “Do you know he’s a drug addict?”
“I’m aware he has a medical condition.”
“You might check with the pharmacy on that. Most people’s legs don’t still hurt a decade after the amputation… It can’t have been easy to see the rest of Maple Street grow up and move away while he’s been stuck. His poor parents have gotten frail. Has it occurred to you that what he saw wasn’t what he thinks? I mean, it’s strange Arlo’s song was played. What was it? ‘Achy Breaky Heart’?”
“?‘Wasted.’?” He had that same expression, like he’d caught her in a lie. But he wasn’t smart enough for that. No one was.
“Oh, I don’t know that one. Well, it’s strange, isn’t it? It makes me wonder if it was his fans. You know how people get about celebrity.”
“How do they get?”
Rhea shrugged as if to say: Look what happened to my poor child. I should know best of all: this world’s a crazy place!
Bianchi grinned a tiny grin. “I’ll leave you. Thanks for your time.”
“That’s it? You sure I can’t help with anything else?”
“You and FJ can come by tomorrow.”
“We most certainly will! We feel very badly about the Wildes. Really—an awful thing. But I have to admit, we’re filled up right now. We’re just so sad about Shelly it’s hard to think about anything else. If it’s all right by you, could you respect that? Give us peace unless you have news of her?”
He looked at her. In her eyes. Calm and piercing. “We’ll find her.”
“What do you mean? Do you have a lead?”
“Peter Benchley,” he said.
“Hm?”
“I never named him, but you knew he was the witness who spoke out against your son.”
Rhea shrugged. Their eyes stayed locked. Tense. She was afraid she’d look guilty if she looked away. “People talk on this block. Good or ill, we’re all in one another’s business. I hear everything.”
Bianchi’s eyes moved at last. They scanned the hall, which she’d neglected, she now realized. Her own bitumen shoeprints marked the edge of the carpet. He looked toward the dining room, too. Shelly’s bloody cushion in plain sight. He looked right at it and a crazy urge filled her, to bludgeon him. With a chair or the metal base of a lamp. Right there, right then. Wait till dark and dump his body down the hole. And if anybody else saw, she’d kill them, too.
“She should be well preserved in that cold water. There are people whose job is to examine every detail. We’ll know exactly who’s to blame,” he said.
He looked back at her. Locked eyes. In her mind, she saw a girl, slumped against the bathroom floor, unconscious.
Quite against her will, Rhea Schroeder gagged.
He saw that, too. Then he was walking slowly down the steps, so unassuming as to seem invisible.
Obstetrics, NYU Winthrop Hospital, Mineola, New York