“Another cup?” he asks, and even though I still have half my coffee left, I push the mug away.
“No, I should probably get going. Let Bear finish up his walk.”
Eddie puts his own mug in the smaller sink there by the coffeemaker. All the houses have that because god forbid rich people have to walk the extra three feet to use the main sink, I guess.
“How many dogs are you walking in the neighborhood?” he asks as I slide off the stool, reaching for Bear’s leash.
“Four right now,” I tell him. “Well, five, the Clarks have two. So five dogs, four families.”
“Could you squeeze in a sixth?”
I pause as Bear pushes himself to his feet, stretching.
“You have a dog?” I ask.
He smiles at me again, a real smile this time, and my heart turns a neat flip in my chest.
“I’m going to get one.”
4
“Since when does Eddie Rochester have a dog?”
Mrs. Clark—Emily, I’m actually supposed to call her by her first name—is smiling.
She’s always smiling, probably to show off those perfect veneers that must have cost a fortune. Emily is just as thin as Mrs. Reed and just as rich, but rather than Mrs. Reed’s cute sweater sets, Emily is always wearing expensive athletic wear. I’m not sure if she actually goes to the gym, but she spends every second looking like she’s waiting for a yoga class to break out. She’s holding a monogrammed coffee thermos now, the E printed in bold pink on a floral background, and even with that smile, I don’t miss the hard look in her eyes. One thing growing up in the foster system taught me was to watch people’s eyes more than you listened to what they said. Mouths were good at lying, but eyes usually told the truth.
“He just got her,” I reply. “Last week, I think.”
I knew it had been last week because Eddie had been as good as his word. He’d adopted the Irish setter puppy, Adele, the day after we met. I’d started walking her the next day, and apparently Emily had seen me because her first question this morning had been, “Whose dog were you walking yesterday?”
Emily sighs and shakes her head, one fist propped on a narrow hip. Her rings catch the light, sending sprays of little rainbows over her white cabinets. She has a lot of those rings, so many she can’t wear them all.
So many she hasn’t noticed that one, a ruby solitaire, went missing two weeks ago.
“Maybe that’ll help,” she says, and then she leans in a little closer, like she’s sharing a secret.
“His wife died, you know,” she says, the words almost a whisper. Her voice drops to nearly inaudible on died, like just saying the word out loud will bring death knocking at her door or something. “Or at least, we presume. She’s been missing for six months, so it’s not looking good.”
“I heard that,” I say, nonchalant, like I hadn’t gone home last night and googled Blanche Ingraham, like I hadn’t sat in the dark of my bedroom and read the words, Also missing and presumed dead is Bea Rochester, founder of the Southern Manors retail empire.
And that I hadn’t then looked up Bea Rochester’s husband.
Edward.
Eddie.
The joy that had bloomed in my chest reading that article had been a dark and ugly thing, the sort of emotion I knew I wasn’t supposed to feel, but I couldn’t really make myself care. He’s free, she’s gone, and now I have an excuse to see him every week. An excuse to be in that gorgeous home in this gorgeous neighborhood.
“It was so. Sad,” Emily drawls, apparently determined to hash out the entire thing for me. Her eyes are bright now. Gossip is currency in this neighborhood, and she’s clearly about to make it rain.
“Bea and Blanche were like this.” Twisting her index and middle finger together, she holds them up to my face. “They’d been best friends forever, too. Since they were, like, little bitty.”
I nod, as if I have any idea what it’s like to have a best friend. Or to have known someone since I was little bitty.
“Eddie and Bea had a place down at Smith Lake, and Blanche and Tripp used to go down there with them all the time. But the boys weren’t there when it happened.”
The boys. Like they’re seventh graders and not men in their thirties.
“I don’t even know why they took the boat out because Bea didn’t really like it. That was always Eddie’s thing, but I bet he never gets on a boat again.”
She’s watching me again, her dark eyes narrowed a little, and I know she wants me to say something, or to look shocked or maybe even eager. It’s no fun to spill gossip if the recipient seems bored, so that’s why I keep my face completely neutral, no more interest than if we were talking about the weather.
It’s satisfying, watching her strive to get a reaction out of me.
“That all sounds really awful,” I offer up.
Lowering her voice, Emily leans in even closer. “They still don’t even really know what happened. The boat was found out in the middle of the lake, no lights on. Blanche’s and Bea’s things were all still inside the house. Police think they must’ve had too much to drink and decided to take the boat out, but then fallen overboard. Or one fell and the other tried to help her.”
Another head shake. “Just real, real sad.”
“Right,” I say, and this time, it’s a little harder to fake not caring. There’s something about that image, the boat in the dark water, one woman scrabbling against the side of the boat, the other leaning down to help her only to fall in, too …
But it must not show on my face because Emily’s smile is more a grimace now, and there’s something a little robotic in her shrug as she says, “Well, it was tough on all of us, really. A blow to the whole neighborhood. Tripp is just a mess, but I guess you know that.”
Again, I don’t say anything. Mess does not even begin to describe Tripp. Just the other day, he asked if I’d start packing up some of his wife’s things for him, since he can’t bring himself to do it. I was going to refuse because spending any more time in that house seems like a fucking nightmare, but he’s offered to pay me double, so I’m thinking about it.
Now I just watch Emily with a bland expression. Finally, she sighs and says, “Anyway, if Eddie’s getting a dog, maybe that’s a sign that he’s moving on. He didn’t seem to take it as hard as Tripp did, but then he didn’t depend on Bea like Tripp did on Blanche. I swear, that boy couldn’t go to the bathroom before asking Blanche if she thought that was a good idea. Eddie wasn’t like that with Bea, but god, he was broken up.”
Her dark hair brushes her shoulder blades as she swings her head to look at me again. “He was crazy about her. We all were.”
I fight down the bitter swell in my chest, thinking back to the one photo I pulled up of Bea Rochester on my laptop. She was strikingly beautiful, but Eddie is handsome, more so than most of the husbands around here, so it’s not a surprise that they were a matched set.
“I’m sure it was a really big loss,” I say, and finally, Emily waves me and the dogs away with one hand.
“I’ll probably be gone when you get back, so just put them in the crate in the garage.”