I never liked Wesley Fitzpatrick. He was a smug piece of shit and I knew there was something deeply wrong about him. I could do without seeing his face plastered all over the news. Now that he’s in the running for serial killer status, he’s going to be national headlines. There’ll be no escaping his ugly fucking mug for months.
It’s past midday when we reach our destination. I pay the guy and grab my own bags from the trunk, then head for the entrance to the looming building constructed out of glinting glass and steel that towers over the corner of 5th Ave and West 59th St.
The Excelsior was completed seven year
s ago with much pomp and celebration. The architects hoped it would dominate the New York skyline as one of the city’s tallest buildings, and it did for almost a year, but construction doesn’t rest in this town. It wasn’t long before the luxury apartment building was ranked number fifteen in height. God knows where it stands these days. Doesn’t really matter to me. I don’t give a shit. My mother owns the sprawling penthouse, and from that vantage point I’d say the building’s plenty high enough, thanks very much. I mean, what parent buys a penthouse apartment in a high rise when their son is deathly afraid of heights? Meredith Davis, that’s who.
It takes twenty-three seconds to get from the ground floor to the penthouse. I normally count them out. Not today, though. I blow down my nose, uncomfortable, too spent to do anything but wait out the ride. Eventually, the car glides to a whooshing stop, my ears popping right on cue as the doors peel back and my mother’s ostentatious-to-the-point-of-ridiculous foyer appears.
High ceilings. Parquet flooring. Mirrors everywhere. Boujee framed works by some of America’s most acclaimed contemporary artists. Dried flowers, and soft, off-white, feminine furnishings. This penthouse is an accurate representation of who Meredith is as a person—classy, subtle, effortless, well-heeled. Everything I’m not.
Meredith breaks out in hives if I dare sit on one of her precious white sofas. She shoos me out of the living room more often than not. Never really got over the injustice of my sex, I think. They told her I was a girl when she went for her gender scan. Imagine her disappointment when I came out with a penis. As a boy, she assumes that I exude dirt from my pores. No matter how recently I’ve showered, she’s convinced that her precious white sofas are unsafe around me. The irony of a chair that can’t even be fucking sat on, people. I fucking tell you.
I brace myself for the familiar smell of this place, readying myself for the delicate hint of apricot—the smell of my mother’s expensive hand cream—that normally lingers in the air. Only…the place doesn’t smell at all. I enter the hallway and look both ways, toward the main living area and down the long hallway that leads off toward the bedrooms.
Nothing. No cleaning products. No perfume. The warm, animal scent of polished leather that used to dominate the penthouse disappeared after my father died and Meredith tossed his ancient briefcase down the garbage chute, but her smell…her smell has always been here.
She really hasn’t been home in weeks.
“Just get to work, asshole,” I growl at myself under my breath. “Sooner you’re done, sooner you can go to sleep.”
I leave my bags by the elevator and venture toward the panel of switches on the wall beside the entryway to the kitchen, where the controls for the penthouse’s temperature/lighting/audio system are located. I hit a series of buttons, and the blinds at each of the huge floor-to-ceiling windows whirr, unfurling like sails, until the iconic view of New York City’s skyscrapers is blotted out.
Thank fuck for that. The taut ball of tension in the center of my chest loosens.
There’s a stack of mail on the kitchen island. The vase on my mother’s favorite console is empty. A few desiccated petals lie on the smooth surface of the mango wood, telling a very distinct story—there were flowers in the vase, but my mother left and she didn’t come back. The flowers rotted. The housekeeper, not knowing any better, threw the bouquet away but didn’t replace them. They also neglected to sweep up the fallen petals—something Meredith would never have done.
Out of habit, I brush the paper-dry petals off the console and into my hand, dumping them in the trash can in the kitchen. In here at least, everything is as it should be. In order. Shipshape.
Amongst many other things—lawyer; art collector; critic; orator; staunch and highly superstitious Catholic—my mother’s a germaphobe. Even the smallest spot on a tablecloth will send her into fits of hysteria. A fingerprint on the bowl of a wine glass? A hair in the sink in her dressing room? Heaven fucking forbid. Of all the areas in the penthouse, the kitchen is Meredith’s largest area of concern. Sometimes, her anxiety over the cleanliness of the countertops is so great that she slams a couple of Xanax and puts herself to bed for three days so she can calm the fuck down.
Today, the stainless-steel appliances are spotless. The subway tiles are immaculate. No dirt or dust in sight. You could eat off the counter, but that would be a bad idea—Meredith would know what you’d done and never forgive you for it.
I exit the kitchen, shuddering at the sterility of the place. Down the hall, at the very end, on the right-hand side, the door to the room where I sleep is firmly closed, just like all the others. Meredith calls this my room, but it isn’t. There are a few of my books in here. Some clothes. Some old lenses and camera bodies, and a couple of my notebooks squirreled away in the drawers, but even this room hasn’t escaped Meredith’s OCD. The surfaces of the chest of drawers and the nightstands are free of clutter. The sheets on the king-sized bed are crisp, clean and perfectly wrinkle free. Anything that belongs to me is put away, hidden, secreted out of sight.
Even the stack of black and white prints that I developed last time I was here (that she swore she would not touch) have either been disposed of or buried in a drawer somewhere, out of sight. Color me surprised.
Corsican sand scatters across the polished hardwood when I pull off my shoes. I’m too tired to take off my clothes, so I leave them on and crawl up the bed, grateful that the blinds in the penthouse are excellent at blocking out not only the dizzying height but nearly all daylight as well. I’m asleep before my head hits the pillow.
Tomorrow, I’m supposed to go and visit Meredith.
But fuck that.
Fuck her cancer diagnosis and fuck her for not telling me about it herself.
Tomorrow, I return to Wolf Hall.
3
PAX
* * *
Nothing draws a crowd like a dead body.
And murder? A murder can capture the attention of an entire country, especially if it was violent. As I navigate the long, winding road up the mountain toward Wolf Hall, not one but two news vans burn past me, swinging over onto the wrong side of the road in their hurry to get around my Charger. The police must have released new information about my deceased classmate. Awesome. Now the vultures are circling, ready to risk their lives in order to reach ground zero, the scene of the crime, ahead of the competition. As an aspiring photojournalist, I know how important the public’s first reactions are. A dead high school senior’s friend, though? Her teachers? Capturing their reaction to whatever macabre tidbit the police have let slip is a fat payday if you can air it before anyone else. You can bet your ass every reporter in a hundred-mile radius is booking it to Mountain Lakes, New Hampshire right now. I must have seen five more news vans in town just now, too—the place is literally crawling with press. They’re like flies swarming around a steaming pile of shit.