The day is sweltering, the mountains hunched around the lake doing little to ward off the glare from the water. The torched beach shrub is static, and she feels a slow trickle of sweat worming down the space between her shoulder blades. Duke is pooled in the shade of the parasol, panting audibly, his jowls hanging with slobber.
“An arrow? Holy moly.” Margot takes a sip from the bottle, swallows. “That’s not your average stab-and-go.”
She hears Elsie tut.
It’s been more than a week since Cheryl Herrera’s body was found, on the night of the police gala, and Beverley has not stopped talking about it. Still, Margot supposes she doesn’t really mind when the details are as juicy as this.
“It’s got to mean something.” Beverley pulls her swimsuit strap tothe side and vigorously applies Coppertone sun cream beneath it. “It has to be some sort of message, right? Some cult thing? Who would do that?”
“How come you’re so interested in this case, Bev?” Margot props herself up on an elbow.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I get why Elsie’s interested. That’s a great story: an arrow in the eye. I’d read the hell out of that. But you?”
Bev sighs, shakes her head. “It’s strange,” she ventures after a pause, “but I feel sort of connected to her—to Cheryl.”
“Okay,” Margot replies dubiously. Bev’s always been like this. Fatalistic. Seeing connections that aren’t there, reading the daily horoscope in the newspaper. That’s not Margot’s style, but whatever you’ve got to do to get yourself through…
“I don’t know, but the way they spoke about her, like she was some sort of spectacle, and the fact that it happened nearby, while I was up there talking about Henry—it all just feels weird.”
“The universe sending you a message, Bev?” Margot gibes, regretting it when Bev doesn’t smile in response.
“I just want to know who did this to her.”
“I asked about that gang at work, Bev.” Elsie pulls up the brim of her sun hat.
“Ah, thereissomeone alive under there,” Margot quips. She does not get why Elsie insists on dressing like a nun. There’s a decent figure beneath all that fabric. It’s as if, Margot sometimes thinks, Elsie does whatever she can to avoid drawing the eyes of men, in order not to snag the attention of another bad apple.
“The Kings,” Elsie continues, unfazed. “They’re a street gang, started in Chicago but with offshoots across the country. Mainly, they deal in narcotics trafficking—cocaine, heroin, marijuana—but there are homicides, too. And gangs do leave warning signs and messages…”
“Interesting.” Beverley wipes her lotioned hands on a towel.
“But why would a gang like that target a college student?” Margot asks.
“And it’s such a visceral thing to do to a body,” Bev muses, “to get an arrow and…” She trails off, eyes flicking briefly out to the water. “Isn’t that odd? Kind of showy? I mean, that’s not what Henry did, not what—” She glances at Margot and stops. Margot knows she’s thinking about the kneecaps, the grim details of Stephen’s crimes splashed across the news.
“The wig, too,” Elsie agrees. “That’s overkill”—she grimaces—“for want of a better word. I mean, it involves a lot of thinking, preparation, a lot of handling of the body. It’s not like stabbing someone with a knife. It’s not impulsive. It’s as if whoever did it is some sort of professional.”
“Is there a way of finding out if Cheryl had links to people like that, though?” Bev asks. “To these gangs?”
“I can do some more digging at work”—Elsie tucks a sweaty strand of hair under her hat—“but the crime guys didn’t seem to think it was the Kings.” She pauses briefly. “The wig, I think—it’s not their style.”
“Well, it’s got to be someone out of their mind”—Margot reclines on her elbows—“to do a thing like that. Crazy.” She swigs her beer, her eyes roving the beach. A group of state university students has assembled by the volleyball nets, all hard chests and mahogany limbs. They look like something from a Dr Pepper commercial. She turns her body toward them, waits for them to see her, for that familiar beat of warmth to spread across her skin. It’s like a drug, knowing that she is being admired. She might be on the wrong side of thirty-five, but she can still draw glances. She’d felt the same thing when Stephen first put his eyes on her, from across the room at a dull political function at the Plaza. She’d gone there only because her friend Susie was waitressing and let her in through the back door. They’d thought Anouk Aiméemight be there, and they were desperate to catch a glimpse of her. There were rumors that she was having an affair with the new district attorney. But she never showed, and Margot got stuck in conversation with some aide from Milwaukee who had dandruff and halitosis. She was sinking her fourth grasshopper when she felt a strange but not unpleasant sensation at the back of her skull. She turned to find its source and was met by the eyes of a handsome stranger. He was old. Notoldold, but at least twenty years older than Margot. His suit was expensive, his hair was jet-black cut through with silver, and his eyes creased as he smiled and raised a glass to her. He was toasting her beauty, she knew, and while other women might have found it inappropriate, Margot basked in it, soaked it in. She couldn’t let him know straightaway that she was interested, so she’d turned back to the guy with the bad hair and forced conversation about Eisenhower’s coronary thrombosis for another few minutes. The stranger’s eyes never left her back; she could feel them there.
Stephen took her home that evening, and she never left. The house was palatial, with Ford Thunderbirds in the driveway and columns around the front door that gave the whole place a Romanesque feel. It wasn’t hard for Margot to act as if she belonged among the marble tiles and the Jackson Pollock paintings. She was used to being a social chameleon. How was anyone to know she wasn’t rich—yet—and that her family did not have connections, or a beach house in the Hamptons? If she acted as if they did, then it could be so.
Cookie. That was what Stephen called her, showering her with gifts from the get-go—Italian lingerie, perfume, expensive jewelry whisked out from a sock drawer and presented with a flourish. In turn, Margot let Stephen watch her. She let him parade her around to his friends as if she were some rare, exotic bird. She was the consummate performer, acting the coquette, the party girl, the cozy girlfriend who’d massage his feet and fetch his slippers—whatever he desired. But when shecaught him doing what he did, she was sure that she must have put in too many bad performances, that the lines on her face had started to show, that she’d failed to be entertaining enough for him. It enraged her to have been bested. For Margot, the worst thing about discovering that she was married to a killer was not the stories, the judgments, that came with it, but that it meant she was someone who could be duped.
“Margot.” Her attention snaps back to the beach. Elsie is glaring at her expectantly, waggling a large silk scarf in her direction. “Your shoulders are burning.”
She waves it away and sits up on her lounger. Shrieking comes from the water as one of the jocks lifts a girl easily onto his shoulders.
Bev is recounting the plan. “Elsie, you look further into the Kings, see if there’s any connection with Cheryl’s family. Margot, you and I will have a think about this arrow, see if there’s any sort of symbolism to it, or any archery clubs in the area, anyone else who might have access to a weapon like that.”
Margot nods, reaches for her beer. She’s already caught one killer; she’s sure she can do it again.
Eight
