The Affliction Page 12

  “Who?”

  “Them. Us. Everybody.”

  “Ah,” said Maggie. “And you, you coach both swimming and diving?”

  “Yes, I was a diver first. But when my dad realized I had a shot at being competitive, he made me specialize. My build was better for the butterfly, so.”

  “You and Honey are both Olympic athletes, I’m told.”

  “We met at the summer games in Beijing.”

  “And you’ve been together ever since?”

  “Not always together-together. A few months after Beijing, I ripped up a shoulder, diving when I wasn’t warmed up. Showing off, really. Stupid. During rehab, I decided it was time to grow up. I’d been swimming six hours a day since I was nine.”

  Hope came in with a teapot and three mismatched mugs on a tray.

  “I’m making Greta tell me her life story,” said Maggie.

  “Excellent. How far have we gotten?”

  “I was just saying that I turned pro in 2008. I took a teaching degree back home in Minnesota. Then I coached in Minneapolis for a couple of years.”

  “And where was Honey?”

  Greta shot a look toward the door. Probably didn’t even realize she’d done it. She said, “Honey doesn’t like anyone speaking for her.”

  “Fair enough,” said Maggie. “Let’s talk about the pool. How many people have keys to the building?”

  Greta pondered the question. “The maintenance crew, of course. The front office. Me. Security. I told the detectives this.”

  “I know. Do you mind telling us again?”

  “I guess not. I mean—no. I don’t mind.”

  “Who provides security?”

  “That’s a fancy name for not much. Ray Meagher during the day. At night, or when he’s not here, his buddies on the auxiliary police keep an eye on things, but I don’t think they have keys. There used to be a night watchman but I guess it was a budget item they thought they could cut. It’s such a quiet town.”

  Maggie and Hope were careful not to look at each other. Or at the massive lock on the apartment door.

  “Where do you keep your keys, Greta?”

  “When I’m in the building, they’re on a hook in my office. When I’m here, they’re in a drawer in the kitchen.”

  “In other words, they are basically wherever you are.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you ever lend them?”

  “Yes, sometimes. No one ever told me not to. Some evenings when there’s nothing else on the schedule, faculty families or school staff will use the pool. If I know them, I leave them to lock up, and they bring the keys back to me when they’re done.”

  “Have you ever lost your keys?”

  Greta bristled slightly, a little defensive. “No. I thought I had once, but I’d just dropped them on the floor.” Maggie was looking at her steadily. Maggie had a way of gazing without blinking that most people found unnerving. Greta added, “One afternoon when I went to lock up, the keys weren’t on the hook in my office. I went up and borrowed the office keys, but when I got back, of course there they were, on the floor. They’d slipped off the hook and somehow I’d missed them. Dumb.” She looked at her watch. “Look, I’m sorry but I have to take a lunch table down at school today. If I can be any help, another time . . .”

  Hope and Maggie rose to go. “Oh, I meant to say,” said Maggie, “that’s some pretty impressive hardware on the door. Is it a Fox Lock?”

  Greta looked at the door, where a second dead bolt and massive double-brace affair spanned from doorframe to doorframe in addition to the standard double cylinder lock set into the door.

  “A new brand, but yes. Basically.”

  “Show me how it works,” said Hope. Greta demonstrated. A knob in the center of the mechanism was pulled toward you, then turned to rotate the braces outward into steel brackets bolted onto the doorframes, barring the door with steel beams from frame to frame. A key in the center of the lock on the other side of the door could turn the whole arrangement from the outside.

  “Was this here when you got here?”

  “No. We put it in a couple of months ago.”

  The three women stepped outside together. “Can I try it?” Hope asked.

  “Sure,” said Greta, after a beat. She handed her key ring to Hope. “The one with the blue marker.” Hope locked the door and handed the keys back, remarking with surprise that it worked so smoothly.

  Greta left them. On the walk back down the hill, Maggie said, “Well, Auntie Mame, are you really going to go back to muck out stalls?”

  “I can’t wait,” said Hope. “Do you think Greta is afraid of Honey?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Honey had a temper; in fact I think I’ve seen it in action. But somebody in that household is afraid of something. I haven’t seen locks like that since Southeast Washington in the 1970s. What did you find in the kitchen?”

  “Lots of vitamins and protein powder. The only kitchen appliance is a blender the size of an outboard motor. It looks like they live on smoothies and power bars.”

  “Or else they make a killer margarita.”

  “Thought of that, but I couldn’t find any tequila.”

  Hope had to nip into the village to buy a pair of suitable boots for the barn, but she presented herself, stylishly turned out, at the stable at two o’clock. A sullen rain had begun to fall, and Honey had two students who’d balked at working in the outdoor ring, tacking their horses for an indoor class. The garden cart was where Hope had last seen it with the pitchfork still leaning against it. If Honey was at all surprised that Hope was as good as her word, all she said was, “Got work gloves?”

  Hope pulled out the soft gloves she’d bought at the hardware store in spite of the fact that brown was not her color. Honey gestured toward the cart and pitchfork, then turned back to the girl whose horse was cross-tied in the grooming area.

  “Linda—start at his knee and run your hand down to the fetlock. He’ll give you his hoof. Good. Be careful with the pick, don’t hit the quick.” The girls curried and brushed the horses while Honey brought them their tack, and Hope bent and forked, spun and carried, until her stall was clean. She was just about to ask what to do next when an enormous thud right behind her made her jump. She looked up to see that Honey, in the hayloft above her, had just tossed a bale of straw down to the stable floor. “Bombs away,” she called as she threw down a second one. This seemed to startle the horses not a whit, although Hope could see that you could break a person’s neck or maybe a horse’s back if you hit him. Had she thrown the first one without warning on purpose? Testing Hope’s nerve, or just acting out of habit?

  Honey slipped swiftly down the ladder affixed to the stable wall and came with her wire cutters to unbind the nearest bale so that Hope could fork off slabs of clean horse bedding and scatter it in the stall. Hope finished the first stall and moved on to the next as the girls warmed up their horses. Eventually they worked up to a slow canter and practiced changing leads while Honey stood in the middle of the ring and called corrections. With her back and arms aching, Hope thought it was as pleasant an hour as she’d spent since she left home, absent the falling straw bales.

  Near the end of the hour, as the girls were cooling their horses and the rain pelted against the slate roof high above them, Honey came to join Hope, who was finishing a stall and actually dripping with sweat.

  “How was that?” Honey asked.

  “Heaven,” said Hope. “I’m so tired I feel as if I’ve been beaten up.”

  Honey smiled. “You know your way around horses?”

  “Just enough to know that those flying lead changes are no easy tricks.”

  “They’re coming along well, those two. Helps to have good horses, of course. Thanks for the work.”

  “You’re welcome. You wouldn’t have a beer upstairs, would you?” Hope asked, knowing there was a six-pack of Sam Adams in the fridge.

  “Happen I do,” said Honey. “Is that your price?”


  “Yes, I’m nonunion.”

  Honey said good-bye to her girls and led the way upstairs. She unlocked the door with a key from a ring she kept clipped to a belt loop, the keys tucked into a hip pocket. Inside, she produced and opened a beer bottle for Hope, and handed it to her without a glass. She herself drank half a bottle of smartwater standing up, and put the rest back in the refrigerator. She leaned against the counter, her muscles loose, looking as if she were trying to figure Hope out.

  “You know, if you could open a chain of stables as exercise studios in New York City you’d make a fortune,” said Hope.

  Honey snorted. “That sounds like a great business plan.”

  “Did you grow up with horses?”

  “I did. Maryland. My father took care of other people’s horses to finance his habit; he rode steeplechasers. My brother still does.”

  “I went to the Maryland Hunt Cup once.”

  “So you know,” said Honey.

  “The horse I bet on fell and broke his leg. They put him down right there on the course. I never went again.”

  “That’s why I went into dressage.”

  “Expensive sport.”

  Honey laughed bitterly. “Tell me about it. Most of my competition had three or four horses, I had one. I bought him as a colt and trained him myself. He was a genius. I called him Baryshnikov.”

  “I don’t like the past tense.”

  “Oh he’s fine, he’s still in the game. But London was as far as I was going to go, without a rich backer. I sold him so we could buy this place.”

  Hope startled. “Buy it?”

  “Yes, a really talented dressage horse goes for a lot, and the sport is growing. There’s less and less open land for fox hunting or point-to-point. If you want to ride seriously and you can’t go cross-country, you do dressage.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I was surprised that the school doesn’t own this. This building, do you mean?”

  “I own the building and about an acre around it. They needed a swim coach and were thinking about phasing out the stable. I needed a place I could live and teach. The long-range plan is I’ll train young horses for competition here and sell them, but I’ll also teach at the school as long as they want me to.”

  “You didn’t want to train and teach in Maryland?”

  There was a minute pause. “It wouldn’t have been as good for us. Nothing there for Greta to do. And other reasons.”

  “Does your father still own the stable there?”

  “He died. Broke his neck in a fall.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s exactly how he’d have wanted to go. Maybe not quite as young as he did, but— He left the stable to my brother and me, and my brother bought me out. That’s how I could afford Baryshnikov in the first place.”

  “Do you have horses in training now?”

  “I do. The pretty chestnut mare in the first stall on the left as you come in. She’s still flighty but I think she’s going to turn out.” Honey checked the time on her phone, and Hope took the hint.

  “I won’t keep you. Thanks for the workout.”

  “Any time,” said Honey, though Hope couldn’t exactly tell if she meant it or not.

  * * *

  Alison Casey had a roommate, but they hated each other. Alison was from an extremely rich Connecticut suburb and the roommate was from small-town Texas, and forget what you heard, folks, those are not in the same country. Willie Nelson records? Oh please. Her parents probably went line dancing on Saturday night. Her mother probably served dinner wearing an apron. Alison’s parents had a cook.

  The roommate’s name was Pinky. Hee-haw! Stinky Pinky. Alison had thought she’d be with her two roommates from last year, Becky and Jill, who had shared the coolest three-room in Sloane II with her, but just at the last minute, when it was too late for Alison to find someone else, Becky and Jill told her they’d made a plan with another girl and she was out. So the school stuck Alison with Stinky Pinky, who was new this year. Nobody came new in junior year.

  Stinky Pinky rode western style. She was a 4H-er. She had a Justin Bieber poster. Alison’s dad did NetJets, so Alison almost never flew commercial. Pinky didn’t even know what Alison meant when she said NetJets; she thought it was a sports team. Pinky didn’t fly commercial either; Pinky had come from Texas by bus.

  EEeew. So, Alison didn’t have a cohort in Sloane this year. In fact, since the thing last spring, she was just as happy to keep to herself. Her parents would fix it. Meanwhile, Ellie Curtin wasn’t really that pathetic. The cool kids didn’t normally hang with the day students, but Ellie’s mother worked, so they had her house to themselves in the afternoons. Ellie’s mom wanted to teach Alison to knit, which was not happening, but she made them penuche fudge, which Alison was totally going to get their cook to make at home, and they could smoke in Ellie’s backyard, or in the basement when it was cold. They took an electric fan down there and opened the little dirt-level window high up in the basement wall, and by the time Ellie’s mom got home, the smell was gone, or gone enough that Ellie could say they’d been toasting marshmallows over the stove burners and Mrs. Curtin believed her.

  Before Alison came into Ellie’s life, Ellie’s best friend was Gussie Spoonmaker, who also lived in the village and also transferred to the Manor when Ellie did. Gussie really was pathetic; she didn’t seem even to have hit puberty, and she was, like, sixteen! In the beginning she used to show up at Ellie’s house when Alison was there, wanting to study with them or watch the Apple TV, but Alison put a stop to that.

  Alison’s Christmas present to Ellie had been a pair of gold studs for pierced ears. Eighteen karat gold, from Alison’s mom’s favorite jeweler in Greenwich. They were practically the cheapest thing in the store and cheap they were not. Alison had bought them when she was home for her suspension. A week before Christmas vacation, when they were at Ellie’s house supposedly working on their Modern European History papers, Alison produced the package, wrapped in shimmering green paper that looked like taffeta, and said, “This is half your Christmas present.”

  Ellie was moved practically to tears, but not entirely because she was at the same time horrified that she had nothing for Alison. She hadn’t even thought of getting something for Alison. She had almost no pocket money, and what she had she’d been saving to get her mother a faux fur hat she knew she wanted because her head got cold now that she had the butch Peter Pan haircut. She and her mother always only did Christmas presents for each other.

  When Ellie unwrapped the little box, which looked like a fancy jeweler’s box, and then saw what was inside, she really did almost weep. They were exactly, but exactly, what she had wanted. And thought she would have to wait years for, and then get fake gold ones with silver posts, because she knew the posts had to be real or you’d get infected but she didn’t expect real gold ever. She was so undone at Alison’s generosity, as her eyes teared and her nose started to run, that instead of saying “but I don’t have anything for you,” she said, “but my ears aren’t even pierced.” Which Alison very well knew.

  “I said it was half your present,” Alison said, with her trademark cackle.

  “Oh! . . .” Ellie’s mind darted, trying to guess what that meant, as she searched her pockets for a tissue. Was Alison going to take her to New York to a piercing place? When? How?

  “We are going to pierce your ears! Right now!” Alison produced a cork with a long needle stuck into it, and a bottle of rubbing alcohol.

  Ellie didn’t know whether to cry “Oh thank you,” or just to cry. She hated pain, and it was hard to believe a sixteen-year-old would really know what she was doing, making a hole in a body part, and she’d promised her mother she wouldn’t. On the other hand, she knew instinctively that saying no to this would be to fail a very important test and it wasn’t a very important body part, healthwise, and she had been like literally dying to have pierced ears.

  “You know how to do that?” she finally said weakly, thinking
suddenly, also, of how angry her mother would be.

  “Of course,” Alison said, as if to say “doesn’t everybody?” In fact, she had had her own ears pierced by their family doctor and it didn’t seem to be a big deal, and she had read about it on the Internet. “Don’t worry. You don’t really have many nerve endings in your earlobes. We need some ice.”

  First, they went to Ellie’s mother’s bathroom and decided where on the earlobes the holes should go.

  “Not too low, or when you get older your earlobes will stretch like Mrs. Moldower’s and you’ll have Ubangi ears. You want to be able to support those great big rocks your husbands will shower you with,” and Alison cackled. Avaricious dreams of marrying astoundingly rich men was one of their fantasies that Alison at least maybe wasn’t kidding about.

  Alison marked Ellie’s ears with a red felt-tip pen after a lot of elaborate measuring to make sure the ears would match. Then she got a bowl of ice from downstairs and gave Ellie an ice cube to hold against her ear to numb it. When the cold of the ice was hurting more than Ellie feared the needle would, Alison dried the ear, put the cork behind it with her left hand, and with her right, tried to push the needle through what she’d expected would be a mere veil of yielding flesh, like firm butter.

  It turns out there is cartilage in earlobes. Or can be. After a pause in which Alison ran down to the kitchen for a rubber glove with which to keep her fingers from sliding down the resisting needle, she succeeded in ramming the point through the lobe to lodge in the cork. So apprehensive was Ellie by now about the detergent smell of the gloves and worried images of where those gloves had been lately, that she agreed with a flood of relief that the pain hadn’t been as she had feared. Alison mopped the lobe front and back with alcohol, then drove the post through the angry little hole she had just made. This stung like blazes and when Ellie asked, frightened, if she was bleeding, Alison said, “Not much,” but sounded as if this weren’t the whole truth.

  But when she let Ellie look in the mirror, there she was with an only slightly red-looking ear, and a gleaming ball of fine yellow gold right in the middle of the lobe. Alison stood behind Ellie and winked at her in the mirror.