What do I know about Mimi Mar
That last one stuck in his mind like an upturned tack. Mimi Mar, Mimi Mar, Mimi Mar. She had become his foil, his heartburn, his agita. Mimi Mar stuck in his craw. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something about Mimi was just not right. Mimi wasn’t a local, Denny knew that. She had moved to Massachusetts for college and had met her husband, Franklin Mar, in 2003 at a bar in Boston. By 2007, the two were married and living in a condo in Charlestown. By 2009, Mimi had quit her job in public relations, and by 2012 they were living in Nancy’s Corner in Hamilton in a three-million-dollar house. Two years later, she was pregnant, and her trajectory was complete. College grad to the PTO in just a few easy steps.
What Denny didn’t know about Mimi Mar was what concerned him, and although he knew that maybe there wasn’t much rational about his dislike or distrust for her—except what he had inherited from his wife—he felt a compulsion to keep digging. He needed to find out more about her—where she had lived before Massachusetts, and what her parents did—but she was practically invisible. Search anyone on the Internet and you’re bound to find a trail, but Mimi wasn’t like that. Her life began and ended in Massachusetts. It was as if her past had been engineered to fit this adult version of her, as if she had scrubbed whatever came before, projected a new and improved part of herself onto the world. And Denny wanted to know more about what came first.
He had heard rumblings that she was from Baltimore. But the trail then went cold. What he needed, he realized, was someone as inquisitive and bold as he wished he could be. He needed Anna, of course, but, in a pinch, he could use Di, the enigmatic best friend,who was fearless and bold, and never afraid to find trouble, even if trouble was happy to find her first.
“The first thing I would do, personally, is a good old-fashioned Facebook stalk,” Di said. She arrived at the house with corn from Meadowbrook Farm, first of the season, along with blueberries and biscuits, Richardson’s vanilla ice cream, steaks, handfuls of fresh basil, a bag of tomatoes, her two boys, and her husband all in tow. “Take this,” she said, foisting the groceries upon Denny and moving right into the house as if she owned the place, ever her signature move. Outside, it was balmy still. The cicadas were singing. The construction around the pool was finally complete, and the backyard had been transformed into a serene oasis, bluestone pavers leading to a cerulean pool that sparkled in the late afternoon sun. Squinting, Denny could almost see a completely different reality, all of them sitting down for a July dinner, his wife emerging from the pool, the steaks hissing on the grill.
“Meaning what, exactly?” he asked.
“Meaning, who she is friends with can tell you plenty about who she really is. Maybe you can’t find anything aboutheronline, but you can probably find out aboutthem.” Di had already made herself plenty at home, rooting around in the fridge for a bottle of rosé—old, unopened, Anna’s—and a portable insulated cup that was half of a set the two had shared.
The kids ran around outside, jumping in the pool and savoring the delights of late July. July was Denny’s favorite month, and he usually hated to see it go, but this year time seemed to mean nothing at all. Coming home, there was no joy in that. You could not look forward to the next steps, it turned out, when you hadn’t resolved the last ones. They were loud and preoccupied with the pool, setting up camp at a far table.
“We’ll eat out here,” Louisa called, and Denny knew the adults would have plenty of time—and space—to themselves.
When he finished grilling, Denny came back to Di’s proposal.He hadn’t thought much about how hard Mimi had tried to erase herself.
“Di, do you think she did it on purpose?”
“Anna never trusted her,” Di said. “Especially . . .”
“Especially what?”
Di’s husband offered a look. He reached a hand out, as if to say,No, don’t,but it was too late, the conversation was too far gone.
“There was just an incident. At Life Time.” Di and her husband, Mark, exchanged looks. He had been a friend of Anna’s, too, all of them childhood friends, and sometimes Denny felt as if he had been on the outside looking in on some multisided relationship that he could never quite crack.
“When?” Denny asked. “Why am I just fucking hearing about this now? Sometimes I feel like it was a vault between you two, a vault I can’t pry open, even after Anna’s death . . .”
“I think,” Di said, “because we weren’t exactly convinced, at the time, that it was real.”
Mark—prototypical New England type, preppy, swoop of brown hair, loafers, an accent that could never disappear despite accumulated wealth, swaddling a beer—tapped the ring of condensation his drink had left on the teak. He didn’t make eye contact. He had known about this, Denny surmised. Whatever this was.
“I still don’t really understand what we’re talking about here,” Denny said.
“There was this day at Life Time, right before Memorial Day last year,” Di said. “Anna and I were in the pool. Louisa tripped running to get back in after the guards blew the whistle.”
“I remember that,” Denny said. “She came home bandaged up.”
“That part she told you,” Di said, looking at Mark again.
“I assume there’s a part she didn’t?” Denny said.
“At the time, I didn’t really believe her. She swore she saw Mimi hip-check Louisa,” Di said.
“Intothe pool?” That was a wild revelation. Denny could feel his heart beating twice as fast as normal. His daughter pushed into a pool by none other than Mimi Mar. That instinct, the one that kept him up at night, hadn’t been wrong, but now it pulsed into overdrive, firing on all cylinders. If his friends hadn’t been at the house, he would have raced upstairs and set about investigating this new information, crawling into a whole new wormhole. He could picture his wife’s backup laptop, asleep in her lacquered office. What secrets could he uncover with this new information?
But Denny felt something else, too, beyond his anger at his wife’s murder. There it was again, that familiar sadness. Here was something else that Anna had withheld from him, something else she hadn’t trusted him with. Maybe she thought he would think she was losing her mind. Maybe she just thought it wasn’t important after all. Whatever it was, she hadn’t told him about it, thisincident,thisthingthat haunted her, the pool, the moment that happened—or maybe didn’t. He ached for Anna, and for his daughter, for the things he had missed when his family was whole.
“It seemed pretty hard to believe, to be honest,” Di said. “Even for Mimi.”
But now, in the pink light of evening, nothing seemed hard to believe, certainly not a grown woman sending a seven-year-old spinning into a pool with the nudge of a hip. In fact, it seemed to Denny very easy to believe. What if it had been a warning? What if Anna had misjudged the potency of the message? What if to misunderstand the enemy was to do so at your own peril?
“Explain this. Explain why she didn’t tell me these things,” Denny said.
“You know what she loved about you?” Di asked.
