The Affliction Read online

  “Yeah.”

  A burglary had gone way wrong. A toddler was shot, and a father beaten nearly to death. So far, no suspects.

  * * *

  “I don’t know who you had to kill to get those tickets,” Hope said, “but it was worth it.” Angus Westphall, his sister Caroline, and Hope had just seen the Saturday matinee performance of Hamilton at the Public Theater.

  “Money should be fun,” said Angus, beaming. They were all exhilarated from the show. Angus spotted his driver across Lafayette Street, and signaled to him to stay where he was, they would come to him.

  “I am not gonna give up my . . . shot,” Hope chanted as they crossed the street.

  “Oh, how Hugo would have hated it,” said Caroline happily. She was climbing into the backseat as the chauffer held the door. Hope’s and Angus’s eyes met over her head.

  “He would have?” Hope asked, settling into the seat beside her. Angus was in front. “What is wrong with him?”

  “He hates perspiration,” Caroline said. And then, as if she had just heard what she herself had said, let out a peal of laughter.

  “He what?” Hope would have been galvanized by this even had she not had a hidden agenda.

  “Hates it,” Caroline said happily, as if she had just noticed how ridiculous it was. “I think it’s one of the reasons he loves that Lily is a swimmer. No matter how hard she works out he doesn’t see her sweat.”

  “Calling Doctor Freud—can you explain that?”

  “He has his little quirks,” said Caroline. She was still too happy to be baited.

  “I’ll say,” said Angus.

  “Angus, don’t be mean.”

  “At least be honest—he’d hate to see Jefferson played by a black man.”

  Caroline just looked out the window, smiling. She turned to Hope and chanted, “Nobody else was in the room where it happened.”

  “Where is Hugo, by the way?” Angus asked.

  “He took Lily and some friends to the country for the weekend,” Caroline said. “He’d rather be up there than in the city anyway. And Lily loves it now that it’s warm enough for swimming outdoors. At school she can only practice when the coach is there and she gets so frustrated. For a while she had her own key to the pool building but someone found out.”

  “She dives alone?” Hope asked. “We were never allowed to do that when I was young.” What she meant was, You let her dive alone? Are you out of your mind?

  “No, she wasn’t supposed to either. She confessed to her father before anyone could turn her in, and he took the key away from her. Secretly he was proud I think. His little Olympian, he likes to call her. His little chip off the old block.”

  “Not if the old block hates perspiration,” Angus said, turning in his seat to join the conversation.

  “So he promised her he’d take her to the country every weekend he could when the weather got warm.”

  “Is she allowed to practice all alone up there?” Hope asked, deeply skeptical.

  “There’s always someone around. But you don’t know what it’s like to try to stop Lily. She’s relentless. I’ve known her to go out there in the pitch-dark, turn on the pool lights, and go to work. It drives her crazy to go to sleep when she’s tried something new that day but not nailed it. I’ll be in the bathroom, brushing my teeth for bed, and I’ll hear the boiing of the springboard.” She shrugged. “At some point, you just have to let them make their choices.”

  The car had arrived at Angus’s building.

  “Come up for a cocktail, ladies?” Angus said, turning to them hopefully.

  Caroline looked at Hope. Who said “Oh, why not?” and they all climbed out of the car.

  The Hollisters’ country place had been a simple Dutchess County farmhouse when they bought it. Over the years, they’d redone the kitchen, added porches and a swimming pool, and eventually built a guesthouse. Hugo spent more and more time working from there until eventually Caroline built him his own separate studio. It was designed to look like a farm structure from the outside, except for the bank of windows high up the wall, under the eaves. Inside it resembled nothing used in agriculture. It was climate controlled, with a full bath in the back, high-speed Internet, racks for storing framed artwork, and flat cabinets for drawings and prints. Another wall held a built-in desk and worktable, and shelves and shelves of art books.

  “My father’s kingdom,” said Lily, leading her friends into the room. Her father, at his desk, whirled around in his chair to see four girls in tiny bathing suits backlit by brilliant sunlight at the open door.

  In the far side of the central room, there was a door that might have led to a bedroom or study. Hugo stood up from his desk as Lily led her friends through to it across the studio. “My father’s favorite child,” said Lily drily, opening it.

  The room was more like a den than a garage. It had wainscoting on the walls and three small windows high above eye level, and at the back, a broad Dutch door like the door to a luxurious box stall. In the middle of the room there was a polished concrete pad set into the wood floor. On it sat a gleaming powder blue 1954 Berlinetta Maserati.

  “Just giving the tour, Dad,” said Lily as he followed them. An expression that might have been annoyance had become a proud smile of welcome. “Isn’t she gorgeous?” he said to the girls. “There were only . . . only . . . only four made.”

  “Does it, like, run?” asked Ann, who hadn’t been to the house before.

  “Like a dream.”

  “Wow,” said Ann. She was hoping to be offered a ride, but Hugo said nothing.

  “We better let Dad get back to work,” Lily said to her friends.

  “Wait, I wanted a picture of you with the car,” said Steph. Lily leaned against the car, and with an arm draped across the hood she pursed her lips and made a duck face.

  “Hot,” Steph said. She snapped the shot and posted it on Instagram tagged @LilyHollister with her sister.

  “Does he really drive it, though?” Ann asked as Hugo closed the door behind them and they walked back to the pool.

  “He does. He likes to drive eight hundred miles an hour over the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge because once you’re on it, the police can’t do a thing to you till you get to the other side.”

  “Cool,” said Ann wistfully.

  “I wish it was a convertible,” said Lily.

  * * *

  Hope and Caroline had ended up having supper with Angus. He had produced a very creditable spaghetti carbonara with his own lily-white hands, and Caroline made a salad. After Caroline went home Hope had stayed for a nightcap, because there was something she wanted to discuss with him alone, and if she didn’t do it tonight she’d have to see him again, and she feared her liver couldn’t take it unless she made a trip to the Betty Ford Center first.

  After he had finished telling her the provenance of the Armagnac he had poured for her, Angus settled down beside Hope on the plush sofa. He stretched his arm along the back of it, inches from her shoulders, and said wistfully, “Ah Hopie—it’s been a lovely evening, hasn’t it?”

  “Lovely. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “You can thank me by promising we can do it again,” he murmured. He was gazing at her, which she could tell without looking at him. Hope tested the fumes in her snifter, then swirled the liquid and watched it thoughtfully as the silence stretched.

  “Did I say something wrong?” Angus purred. His fingers behind her head flicked a lock of her hair. She knew these moves—she’d first encountered them at a drive-in movie outside of Bar Harbor when she was fifteen, and they hadn’t been any more welcome then.

  She said, “Angus, what are we going to do about Caroline?”

  He suddenly straightened, and his arm came back to his side as he took a slug of Armagnac. That was not the conversation he’d thought they were having.

  “I thought we just did it,” he said.

  “It was a lovely evening, yes. But I mean about Hugo.”

  Angus cracked
his knuckles and took a handful of chocolate-covered coffee beans from a dish on the table. When he had crunched and swallowed them, he said, “I’ve been down that road. You can’t tell my sister something she doesn’t want to hear.”

  “Are you so sure she doesn’t want to hear it?”

  “Who knows what goes on behind closed doors? Maybe he makes her happy,” Angus said. “Maybe he’s great in the sack. If she doesn’t bring it up, I’m not going to.”

  Soon afterward they both realized it was later than they thought and Hope was on her way back to her club and to bed.

  Chapter 19

  Sunday, May 10

  Hope’s plan had been to collect her car after breakfast and head back to Boston, with a stop in Rye-on-Hudson to see Maggie and Christina. When her mobile rang as she was getting out of the bath, she assumed it would be Maggie, or possibly Angus, or even perhaps her Realtor. She’d seen a rental she loved in the melted Frank Gehry building on Spruce Street. The last person she expected was her son, Buster. Buster never called her. Was it Mother’s Day?

  “Hi, Ma,” said Buster.

  “Greetings, sweet pea. Is everything all right?”

  “Fine. How are you?”

  “Good. I’m just getting ready to go back to Boston and see if all my plants are dead.”

  “Where are you?”

  “New York. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “You might have.”

  There was a pause.

  “Work going well?” she asked.

  “Yuh, fine. I’m studying for the detective exam.”

  “Yes.” She already knew that.

  Another pause. She was not going to ask him about the weather. Not.

  “How’s Brianna?” she asked finally.

  “She’s good,” said Buster. “She’s pregnant.”

  Hope sat down and tried not to scream or burst into tears. Finally she said, relatively calmly, “Well darling, that is just wonderful news.”

  After another pause, Buster said, “Yeah?” He sounded relieved.

  “Yes of course it’s wonderful news, I couldn’t possibly be happier. How long have you known?”

  “About a month,” said Buster.

  Once again she managed not to say anything she should not. “Oh how lovely. Then she’s seen a doctor and everything?”

  “Yuh.”

  “When is she due?”

  “Uh—”

  “Darling, is Brianna there?”

  “Yuh.”

  “May I talk to her?”

  Buster lived in perpetual dread that his mother would mortify him or otherwise shatter his hard-won self-esteem, but Brianna, who had been raised in a school of hard knocks, had apparently formed some effortless bond with his mother, which he had seen with his own eyes and yet still not believed. Brianna had tattoos on both arms and worked at a nursing home doing things with bedpans.

  “Hi, Hope,” Brianna said.

  “My dear girl, you have made me unbelievably happy. When are you due?”

  “Doc thinks November sometime.”

  “And how do you feel?”

  “Not too bad.”

  “I just have a million questions. Do you know yet, boy or girl?”

  “Not yet.”

  “And is your mother thrilled?”

  “That’s not a word you’d really use about my mother.”

  “But you’ve told her . . .”

  “Not yet. We thought we’d tell you first.”

  Hope was so pleased by this that she started to cry.

  “Well, darling, I’m just as happy as I can be. Will you keep me posted and let me know what I can do for you both?”

  “Will do,” said Brianna, sounding happy. She handed the phone back to Buster and after a few more exchanges of burbling, they ended the call. Hope could not wait to tell Maggie how proud she was to have gotten all the way through it without asking if they planned to get married.

  Lily was up early Sunday morning. Although she had her own bedroom in the house, she slept in the guesthouse with her friends. She was sharing the king-size bed with Steph, glad it was so big because she didn’t really like to be touched. Ann and Melanie had the twin beds in the room down the hall. Steph snored a little, then turned over and was silent, breathing deeply. Lily slid out of bed without jiggling the mattress.

  The living room of the guesthouse smelled like popcorn and looked like a frat house after a football weekend. Clothes and backpacks were all over the room. Half-empty cans and bottles of soft drinks and juices and eight kinds of water stood on every horizontal surface. She crossed the room, silently slid the glass door on the pool side open, and stepped out into the morning.

  It was cooler than she’d expected and the grass was wet under her bare feet. The scent from the lilac hedge outside the door was fresh and spicy and heavy with spring. Her bare feet left wet prints on the bluestone apron around the pool as she passed. She turned once to look at the main house. All was silent and dark. Not even the lights on automatic timers had come on yet. Lily was wearing only the T-shirt and gym shorts she slept in and didn’t have her phone, so she didn’t know what time it was, but early. She went on to the studio.

  The front door to the studio was locked, but not the wide Dutch door at the back for the Maserati. She slipped in quietly and stood stock-still, waiting to be sure the alarm system hadn’t been armed. It never used to be, when someone was at home, but.

  When all remained quiet, she padded to the car and peered in. Front seat. Backseat. Nothing that shouldn’t have been there. In fact, there was nothing in the car at all except a lap robe in the backseat in a tartan her father liked to say belonged to the Caldwells. Who knows, maybe it really did. After a moment’s pause, she opened the trunk. Though the light was dim she could see that it was pristine and empty. She closed it again as quietly as she could and went on into the studio. Again stood listening. She padded across the room to her father’s desk and turned on the arc lamp that lit his work area. Then she sat down in his chair and studied what was before her.

  The desktop was orderly to the point of fussiness. The papers on the blotter were neatly stacked and carefully aligned in a pile with the edge of the desk. Anything that couldn’t be made to line up or match was banished to drawers. She checked the shallow top drawers first. She knew she wasn’t going to find anything. She knew that. So there was no reason not to look. Just to see if he still had it, after all these months. Why should anyone care if she wanted to know?

  The next drawers had been built to hold hanging files, but now Hugo scanned papers and stored them digitally, the files discarded. One now held a pair of running shoes and socks, and a bottle of single malt scotch, half-empty. The other held a Rolleiflex camera she’d never seen her father use, an old-fashioned answering machine, its cord wrapped around it, and an assortment of empty eyeglass cases. Weird, what people couldn’t seem to throw out.

  She moved on to the other side. Pencils, boxes of rollerball pens, rubber bands, paper clips. A bottle of clear nail polish. Really? Why? Some random unlabeled thumb drives. An old external hard drive. An antique silver magnifying glass, black with tarnish, on which she could just barely discern the words sterling and denmark in tiny letters. Some Caldwell family thing? She’d never seen it before. On the other side of the handle was the monogram BB. Who was BB?

  “You’re up early,” said her father.

  Lily jumped visibly and thought for one second that her heart might not restart. She spun around in the chair. He was close enough to touch her.

  “You scared me,” she said, when she was able to.

  “I can see that,” he said softly. “You were looking for something?”

  She took a deep breath to calm herself, but it shuddered on the inhale.

  “Nothing particular. I was awake, and I—didn’t want to disturb anybody.”

  “I see,” he said, regarding her steadily, thoughtfully. She’d seen this look before but not combined with that creepy soft uninflected vo
ice. They stared at each other. If the thoughts flying between them had been visible the air would have been thick with colliding currents of them, curtains of words. At last, he shifted his weight to one foot, extended a hand toward her, and cocked his head toward the door.

  “Why don’t you come up to the house now. I’ll put the coffee on.”

  It was not a suggestion. Lily rose and walked past him to the front door. Outside, he pulled it carefully closed behind them, making almost no noise. Then he followed her across the lawn to the kitchen door. Once inside, he indicated wordlessly where she should sit. She sat. He turned on the lights and pushed the button on the coffeemaker. Then he turned, crossed his arms, and quietly looked at her. She looked back. It went on a long time as the coffee machine began to pop and gurgle behind them.

  Hope was so excited about Buster and Brianna that she drove straight toward Boston, forgetting to stop in Rye. Maggie called her in the car and found her halfway across Connecticut instead of pulling into Christina’s driveway. Maggie laughed, and they had a long talk about whether Hope should call Brianna’s formidable mother, and decided no. Ditto no calling Buster’s sister; that was for Buster or Brianna to do. Hope said she would just pack a new suitcase, go to see Lauren and get her grandbaby fix, then be back down, either to Rye or back to the city, depending. She was hoping Maggie would at least let her send Brianna a layette, and a Pack ’n Play, and a Maclaren stroller, and a thousand Onesies.

  With her day suddenly open, Maggie went to find Pinky. A grateful parent had given Maggie an iPad as a retirement gift. She didn’t use it much except for doing jigsaw puzzles on the subway, but she decided to grasp the nettle. With Pinky’s coaching she had managed to transfer the contents of the thumb drive Florence’s sister had given her into the iPad. She felt guilty that she hadn’t even looked at Florence’s book, let alone been in touch with Suzanne since the memorial service. On the other hand, she couldn’t bear to sit indoors on a beautiful afternoon in May or to spend it staring at a computer screen. Instead, she was on her way to the weeping birches with a book bag and a lightweight lounge chair.