She reaches across the table for a book lying by the half-eaten lunch of a woman whose hair is pulled back so tightly in a bun it makes her eyes look all wrong. My focus snaps from the bun to the soft expanse of Claire’s waist when I notice the hem of her sweater ride up as she stretches to take the book. I think I see the swirl of dark ink peeking out, and I wonder when or if she ever got a tattoo. Whose hand did she hold when the needle pierced her skin? Claire sits back down and looks at her watch. She’s counting the minutes until lunch is over. Her knee starts jumping. She still has thirty minutes but doesn’t want to stay another second.
The rest of her party speak loud across the table to each other, laughing raucously. Yet Claire’s silence seems the most cacophonic.
I don’t know much about Claire now. I did, once, another lifetime ago. And honestly, I haven’t thought about her for a while, not until a few days ago. Not until my life got pulled out from underneath my feet. Now, I’m trying to get to know her again, trying to see what kind of a person she turned into. I’ve been following her for four days. I know where she lives, where she works. I know she’s almost always alone. And when she’s home she reads too many romance novels and needs to make herself cum in utter silence twice before she can fall asleep, filling herself with her own fingers instead of any one of the willing men who circle around her perimeter like vultures. Is she waiting for her very own love story?
I think she’d enjoy a family drama or a phycological thriller better, she’d relate to it more with all her mommy and daddy issues.
I’m almost finished with my coffee when Claire’s cellphone rings. It takes her a moment to fish it out of her old worn bag and another to stare down at it curiously. Jackass leans over and says, “Where’s that area code from?”
She doesn’t answer Jackass. She knows the area code, she knows where the call is from, she just doesn’t want to speak to anyone in that area. But she answers anyway. Which is good. It’s an integral part of this game and part of what must happen.
“Hello?” she says into the phone, pushing herself away from the table, her colleagues. Jackass watches her closely, circling and circling, waiting to pick at her bones.
“Yes, this is Claire Radcliffe.” She moves closer to my table as she listens to the voice on the other end of the phone. I already know what the voice is saying.
Claire’s beautiful face turns a stark white, her free hand lifts up and trembling fingers touch her mouth. Her eyes squeeze closed and now she’s so close to my table and my empty cup of shitty coffee I could hear the person’s voice she’s listening to. “…found the body of one Libby Radcliffe, who hanged herself inside the living area of her home approximately four days prior.”
“M-my mother’s dead?” she whispers into the phone. Jackass teacher guy jumps up to her rescue, running his hand through his hair pretending her worst news is his as well. He stands in front of her, waiting to comfort her, but she doesn’t get off the phone fast enough for him so he manhandles her into his chest. Jesus, Claire, I hope you’re not sleeping with this guy. She’s on the phone, crying into Jackass’s chest. He shrugs over her head at their other colleagues that are watching her meltdown. His hip bumps into my table. He doesn’t even say excuse me.
Claire is inconsolable.
Just the way I need her to be.
Her colleagues gather up all her belongings and they rush her outside.
I sit back and smile, waiting for my next move.
Chapter 2
Claire
My mother had been dead for four days when they found her body hanging from one of the beams of her vaulted ceiling. It would have taken a longer time to find out about her suicide if the driver delivering whatever she ordered on Amazon hadn’t looked in the front window and called 911. Her body had already passed through rigor mortis and back into a relaxed state where bacteria started breaking down the tissues, eating away at her skin.
I can still smell it, days later, as I pack up her few belongings.
“Claire? Would you mind terribly if I head down the mountain before the storm fully hits? I don’t want to get stuck in the snow.”
I look up through my tears toward the voice. Maria Lowell hadn’t changed a bit in the last ten years. Still the Montgomery’s maid, still keeping all their dirty little secrets. I sniffle and nod my head. I don’t want to be alone, but I can’t ask her to stay. This is far too personal, and I have way too many questions that I doubt she’ll be able to answer for me. Besides, I want to get out of this place as fast as I possibly can, before anyone finds out I was ever here. I don’t want to be tangled up in any of this. I have my own problems that are piling up at an alarming rate right now; my mother’s suicide is just the icing on a shit-filled cake.
I hang my head in my hands and press my palms into my tears. Instantly the couch cushion dips next to me and Ms. Lowell takes my hands and pulls them to her lap. “Oh, Claire. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for your loss.”
My loss. Right.
I clear my throat and shrug. “Yeah, thanks.” Inside my blood boils and my teeth clench. Losing someone means at some point you had them, and I never had Libby Radcliffe. And now I’ll really never have her, because she’s dead. And all of it was her choice. Everything was always her way or no way at all.
Ms. Lowell tilts her head and sighs. “When was the last time you saw your mother?”
I dart my eyes up to meet hers and bark out a bitter laugh. “Uh, let’s see,” I say, removing my hands from her grip and wiping my eyes again. “Five years, maybe.” Five years. I didn’t even know where she lived. And I would have never thought it was less than an hour’s drive away from me, in a luxurious mountain retreat.
Ms. Lowell sighs next to me and pats my back.
“I didn’t know she lived here. I didn’t know about—” The words die on my tongue. I just gesture vaguely at a framed pictured of my mother and Mr. Montgomery. After all this time, after all that’s happened, how could she still have been his mistress?
Selfish fucking assholes, the both of them.
In my back pocket my phone beeps. I cry more.
“Oh, Claire. You poor thing.” She shifts her body to face me. “I never did feel right about their arrangement. But your mother and Silas Montgomery were—”
“Please don’t. I don’t want to hear about any fairy tale love story. They were two very selfish people, and I just want to clean up whatever she had here and put it all where it belongs, in the trash.”
“You need to forgive her, Claire.” She leans closer and pulls my chin up gently with a finger. “You look just like her, you know?”
A chill crawls down my spine and I lean back, away from her touch. “Yeah, well that’s been pretty much a curse for me, you know? Looking exactly like the whore who tore through the famous Montgomery family.” I didn’t even bat my eyes two weeks ago when I heard the news about Mr. Montgomery’s passing. I hadn’t seen a Montgomery in ten years, and I certainly hadn’t spoken to one or even about one.
I heard about it on the morning news as I got ready for work. Apparently, multi-billionaire Silas Montgomery went for an hour-long jog each morning around his estate, rain or shine, even if it snowed. Except, on that particular day, he never came home. By the time anyone in the house realized he’d never returned from his daily exercise routine, it was dinnertime, and he’d been dead of a massive heart attack a quarter of a mile into his run.