“Maybe I can help you get it. If you—”
“I want to put the world right. I want what’s fair,” she interrupted, and it was a cry right from the center of her. It shook her voice into something younger somehow, because the world was not fair, and anyone her age already knew that. “If you drug Spencer Shaw, I can make him do right by us.”
I felt the power between us shift, just a bit. I had asked, and she had answered. She had given me something. “But it’s not fair to take Robert.” I used her word. “He’s innocent. I don’t know you, but I don’t think I ever did you wrong?” I made it a question, afraid of angering her.
I heard that thinking little hum she’d made before. “I am sorry for that.” It sounded like she meant it. “This isn’t about you, and I’m not without feeling. I know it’s hard, especially for a girl like you. You were raised soft, everything laid out on a pillow. Most folks open their eyes onto a harsher world.”
I had to protest this. “I’m not soft.”
She didn’t believe me. I could tell. She made a click noise with her tongue, almost a tutting sound, then said, “You married who you married, and he chose to work hand in glove with Spencer Shaw. So here we are. It’s not fair to you. But I am nigh out of time, and what happened to me and my daughter—it’s not fair either.”
Her voice stayed quiet, but I heard steel beneath it as she spoke about her child. This was the part of her I understood most, feared least. The part that clearly loved her daughter. I had no name for this woman, but of all the things I’d seen her be—kidnapper, stalker, witch—she was somehow tying herself tightest to this one: mother. A warm word, but so cold and strange when it was touching her. My own sweet-hearted, timid little mother was never called that. I called her Mom. Mama when I was small. Peyton had only just this year given up Mommy.
This woman, this mother, said to me, “Before I leave this earth, I am going to set things right.”
I smoothed on foundation, thinking hard. “Fair” might be the only word she’d said that truly mattered, if I wasn’t going to be blindly obedient. It was a clue to who she was and why she’d done this awful thing, and yet my mind shied from pursuing these questions further. She had Robert in her arms. She’d told me if she saw or heard any sign of the police, she would twist his— The very thought brought me back to her heel, obedient and good.
I wanted to please her. I wanted to turn the things she’d said about fairness into a story that would make her into the kind of person who would do right by me and my son.
But what if this feeling of communion were only in my head? If I could figure out who she was, what wrong she was trying to set right, then I should. In case things went wrong. In case I couldn’t get the pills down Spence, or she was lying, or she changed her mind.
Fairness. I turned the word over and over as I gave myself a smoky eye. Fairness was a thing people went to courtrooms to try to get, though Trey often joked that in his job cash trumped fairness every time. Was this about one of Trey and Spence’s lawsuits? Had Spence bent or broken a rule?
They’d worked together on so many cases, including the large, uneasy merger that had taken Trey off to Chicago. What had Trey said about it? This is not a marriage of equals we’re officiating. Our groom is a cannibal.
How many of their clients had been cannibals? Could I narrow it down?
I striped my lids in black liner, thinking. If this was about a case, she was not their client. A client could have simply made a date for drinks with Spence and doped him up herself. Also, she didn’t talk like someone who’d be a main player in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. Her accent sounded like my mom’s. Like mine, before my college adviser told me, No one is going to cast a redneck Juliet, and registered me for dialect class.
She was from the small-town South, like me. Had her family been caught in the cross fire of something big and cold and corporate?
She was sick, she’d said. Was her daughter sick, too? Perhaps a client of Spence’s had done something with chemicals or food or the groundwater that had made them sick. Or perhaps she’d lost her job in some merger and with it the health insurance that could have cured whatever was now killing her.
I shook my head. It could be one of a hundred cases, some decades old. Without more details, all I could do was hope she’d taken Robert to get something concrete from Spence—information, a file, a taped admission of wrongdoing—because I could help her do that. I could drug him so he wouldn’t remember giving it to her. I could do it for Robert.
“Will the drug hurt Spence? Three seems like a lot.” I was afraid to question her, but I didn’t want to harm Spence.
Though if I had to roofie someone . . . Spence took advantage of my husband, skated close around ethical corners, and I didn’t love how he treated women. There was a basic disrespect there, in the way he talked over us at dinner parties or let his eyes drop lower than our faces. He’d cheated on both his wives. If whatever she took from him during his lost time cost him money or embarrassment, even his career, I would not regret it. Not if I got Robert back.
She said, “He’s a big man. Tall and broad, carrying some extra weight. One won’t do it. Two might, but I can’t play with ‘might.’ Three is sure, so make it three. My daughter will be watching, waiting for the drugs to hit.”
Her daughter would be at the party? I asked a question without thinking. “If she’s there, can’t she just give him—”
She interrupted, her voice harsh. “You think we didn’t try? We went to his office before. We couldn’t even get past that receptionist. But you? He’ll talk to you. He’ll be sweet and drink whatever you give him. Because you matter.”
“I only matter because I married Trey,” I said, but she was still talking.
“That receptionist wouldn’t so much as give us an appointment. I insisted, said I needed a lawyer, and she tried to pawn me off on some little bitty black girl who passed by. That child didn’t look half old enough to be a lawyer. He didn’t have time for the likes of us. We don’t blend with your kind of people.”
“My kind of people?” She was saying I was soft again. A noise came out of me. Not a laugh, but related. “Everyone at this party belongs to Trey. I don’t blend either.” I faltered at the end, because in midsentence I knew that what I was saying wasn’t true. I might not be fully at home with Trey’s old-money Buckhead crowd, but I wasn’t like her. Not anymore. “I know how to look the part. I’ve been married sixteen years. But I grew up in Hurd County, just me and my mom.” She hadn’t mentioned a husband, and I’d never met my father. Our families sounded similar. If she knew how much she had in common with my own mother, she might feel softer toward me. “I didn’t have a college fund or private school. We lived in a two-bedroom ranch house that leaked every time it rained.” I could also hear myself easing a little more South into my vowels. Nothing obvious. Not fake so much as regressive. One step closer to seventeen-year-old Sabreena Kroger’s diction. “Every fall my mom would drive me two towns over to go to the Goodwill there, so my ‘new’ school clothes wouldn’t be recognized by whoever threw them out.”