Nell stops the mug inches from her mouth. “She’s an actress?”
“She was. Star of a big cult television show twenty-some years ago. Bluebird?”
“I had no idea.”
“You ever watch it?”
She remembers the girls at her high school talking about that show, always gushing about how cutting-edge it was, the risks it took—a gay character, a teenage pregnancy. “I heard of it, but I never watched it. More into math than TV at that age, to be honest.”
Schwartz steps forward for another cookie. “And you’re the one who hired Alma Romero to babysit that night.”
It hadn’t come out as a question. “Yes.”
Hoyt takes a sip of his coffee and nods at Sebastian, who has returned with Nell’s water. “Very good, thanks.” He keeps the mug in his hands. “You insisted Mrs. Romero watch Midas so Ms. Ross could go out?”
“I don’t know if I insisted—”
“Couldn’t she have found her own sitter?”
“Yes, but—”
“And also, in an e-mail you sent, you offered to pay Alma, if Winnie agreed to come out?”
Nell takes the water and swallows half of it. “It’s silly now,” she says. “But at the time, none of us knew about Winnie’s money.”
“Uh-huh. Where did you find Mrs. Romero?”
“I got her name in the classified section of The Village.”
“And how long did you know her before offering her the job of caring for your baby?”
Nell thought the interview would last no more than an hour—Alma was, in fact, the sixth potential nanny Nell had spoken to. None of the other women were right, and then Alma arrived, all sunshine and laughter. She stayed nearly the entire afternoon, sitting with Nell in the living room, drinking tea, sharing the big bag of M&Ms Alma kept in her purse, passing Beatrice back and forth. Alma told Nell about her village in Honduras, where she’d been a midwife, delivering her first baby at the age of twelve. About coming to the United States three years earlier, slipping alone into the United States, across a shallow stretch of the Rio Grande, six months pregnant, doing whatever it would take to give her son a better life.
Before leaving, Alma offered to take Beatrice while Nell showered and enjoyed a few minutes to herself. When Nell lay down on the bed, her legs clean-shaven for the first time since giving birth, she could hear Alma over the monitor, singing to the baby in Spanish. She woke with a start two hours later and rushed down the hall to the nursery. Beatrice was fast asleep on Alma’s chest, her tiny fingers grasping Alma’s thumb, Alma’s romance novel forgotten on her knee. “Five hours or so,” Nell says to Hoyt.
“Did you check her references?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Run a criminal background check?”
“No.”
“No? That’s a little surprising.”
“Is it?”
“My wife thought about hiring a nanny once.” He shoots Schwartz a haughty look. “Man, she did so many background checks on those women, I told her I should stay home and she should go to work for the FBI.” He looks back at Nell. “But who can blame her? It can be terrifying. The things you read.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Nell says. “I’ve never known a criminal to perform ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’ in two languages. But maybe that’s just me.”
“And what is your understanding of her immigration status?” Hoyt asks.
“Her immigration status?” Nell pauses, careful to keep her eyes off Sebastian. “We didn’t discuss it.”
Sebastian takes a seat beside Nell on the sofa, and the movement of the cushion sets off a wave of nausea. “I don’t understand,” Sebastian says, leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “Why are you asking these questions? You can’t think Alma had anything to do with this.”
“Just trying to dot our t’s. Cross our eyes.” Hoyt chuckles at the blunder and consults his notebook. “What about when you got to the bar? Notice anything strange? People coming or going that seemed out of the ordinary?”
“No, we mostly kept to ourselves. We were out back, on the patio.”
“And Winnie stayed with the group the whole time?”
Suddenly, Nell sees herself. She’s standing at the sink of the women’s bathroom, breathing in the fetid smell of urine and bleach, drinking water from her cupped hands, her vision cloudy. Darkness crosses behind her in the mirror.
“Ms. Mackey?”
“We’d been there for about an hour, I think, when Winnie went to the bar.” The words echo in her ears. “Token went with her. That was the last anyone saw of her.”
“There’s a mom in your group named Token?”
“No. He’s a man. A dad.”
She can feel someone’s hands on her, pulling at her shirt, fingers digging into her shoulder. Hot breath at her neck.
Schwartz’s eyebrows rise again. “A dad? In your mommy group?”
“Yes. I think he’s gay.”
He nods, and Hoyt marks something in his notebook. “Token. What is that? An Indian name?”
“No. He’s white. It’s a nickname. I called him that at one of the first meetings because he was the only bloke—you know, the token male. It stuck. I don’t even remember his real name, to be honest. I’m not sure anyone does.”
Sebastian laughs nervously and reaches for Nell’s hand. “She’s notoriously bad with names.”
“Can you give me a minute? I have to use the loo.” Nell stands, her hand on Sebastian’s shoulder to steady herself, and walks down the hall to their bedroom and then into the bathroom, closing the door behind her, looking into the mirror. It was just a dream. It had to be.
She crouches on the floor in front of the toilet. It’s been a few years since she’s had one of those nightmares—the kind that once jarred her awake on a nearly nightly basis. Being followed. People waiting for her around the next corner. It has to be that. She would have remembered if someone had been with her in the bathroom, touching her.
She hears Beatrice crying, and then a knock at the door. It’s Sebastian. “Nell. You okay?” She sees her shirt from the night before, in a ball on the floor where she left it. Sebastian knocks harder. “Nell.”
“Be right out.” She picks up the shirt. It’s ripped along the seam of her right shoulder.
She apologizes to Hoyt when she returns to the living room.
“No problem. Just a few more, and then we can get out of your hair. What do you know about the father?”
“Winnie’s father?” Nell asks, glancing at the video camera. “Nothing.”
“No, ma’am. Midas’s father.”
“Oh. Nothing. I only recently found out she was single.” The heat is building around her. “I had Winnie’s phone for a while, but then I couldn’t find it. Her key was in the phone case.” She swallows. “Did someone find it? Is that how they got in?”
“That’s all part of what we’re trying to figure out,” Hoyt says.
“How much did you have to drink last night?”
She looks at Schwartz, who asked the question. “How much?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. Two drinks, maybe? I hardly touched the second.”
“Were you drunk?”
She knows she should just tell them the truth. She knows the risk of lying to the police. “No,” she says, her stomach in knots. “Of course I wasn’t drunk.”
Sebastian appears in front of her, circling the coffee table, refilling everyone’s mug. She steals a look at him. At his cap of brown curls, his lean soccer boy’s body, imagining him the first time she saw him: sitting at the opposite end of a moody London bar, sipping a Guinness in the shifting light of late Sunday afternoon, sketching in a Moleskine notebook, the face of a man intent on his art. His eyes were kind when he approached her later, asking if the seat beside her was taken, if he might buy them another round.
Nell clenches her palms in her lap as she tries to concentrate on Hoyt’s next question, but her gaze is drawn back to Sebastian as he slowly paces the living room, their daughter cradled in the nook of his arm, seeing an entirely different face than the one she remembers from that day six years earlier. The face of a man, terrified and worried.
A man having the same panicked thought as she. Please. Not this. Not again.
Chapter Five
Day Two
To: May Mothers