Read Online Hints of Heloise by Laura Lippman - Free Book Online Page A

that way? Don’t you at least want to spare Mark?”
    Meghan wants to snap: What about Scott? How are you going to feel when someone, possibly me, tells him his mother is a whore? But Heloise is here, she has acknowledged Meghan’s power over her, and there really is nothing she can do to help. What had Meghan hoped, when she called Heloise? She assumed her half sister had some mysterious, nefarious connections, men who could make problems disappear. Really, Heloise is kind of bourgeois, not at all the libertine that one might expect in a madam. Meghan almost regrets confiding in her.
    â€œI’ll call in a favor, con another mom at practice into taking Mark home for dinner,” she says, checking her watch, a tenth-anniversary gift from Brian. She had wanted a Patek Philippe, but he had given her a Rolex.
    â€œAnd then?”
    â€œI’ll figure something out. I’ll do the right thing,” she says, knowing that she and Heloise may not agree on what that is.
    Two hours later, Mark safely at the Pizza Hut with the Bonner family, she creeps back into the house. “Brian?” No answer. She stands at the top of the stairs, but it takes her several minutes to tiptoe down, to investigate. Oh, miracle of miracles, he’s not breathing. She feels a quick pang, wondering how long he suffered. She decides he died instantly, that the rise and fall of his chest was an illusion, a trick of the dim light. She’s a widow. What a glorious thing to be. There will be money enough and nothing but sympathy for her. Except from Heloise, of course, but if Heloise dares to be too open in her disapproval, Meghan knows how to bring her in line. She’s a widow, her problems are solved, it’s the happiest day of her life.
    She’s about to bound up the stairs to call 911, begin her new life as a tragic figure, when she sees something she hadn’t noticed before, a large tufted pillow, one of the decorative ones from her bed. How has this gotten here? What was Brian thinking? There’s a tiny viscous stain. Brian has always been a drooler in his sleep, but this one looks fresh, still slightly damp, and it smells—she inhales—of Brian’s shaving lotion, which makes no sense at all.
    Unless someone held it over his face while she was gone, finishing what she started.
    She races up the stairs and—after putting the pillow back on her bed—discovers that terror makes it that much easier to sound hysterical with grief when she calls 911.
    THREE
    H eloise has a strange insight in the church: this is the first funeral she has attended in her adult life. How could this be? Her mother is still alive and she refused to attend her father’s funeral a few years ago, deciding she could never put up the required façade of sorrow. Too bad, she thinks now. If she had attended, perhaps she would have seen Meghan and they could have swapped notes on where they lived, and she would have planted the idea that Turner’s Grove was simply not—what was the word they used now to describe those who wanted to move up, up, up— aspirational enough. Then Meghan would not have moved here, and Heloise would never have confided in her, and she would not be stuck now in a murder conspiracy. Would Brian still be alive? She doesn’t know, and to be unattractively candid, she doesn’t really care. Heloise cares about only one person: Scott. Not Audrey, not her other employees, although she likes them well enough and wants to be a good boss to them. Not her clients, god knows. And not even herself, except to the extent that she’s the only one who can take care of Scott. To compare her to a mother bear or lioness is inadequate because, for all their ferocity, they are spared the constant worry and anxiety. An animal roars to life when a threat is imminent but can otherwise relax. Heloise lives in a state of eternal vigilance, worrying about every aspect of Scott’s life,