Fool Me Once

“If you’re trying to imply that Claire and Joe…”

It was too preposterous to even finish.

“You’re the one saying she had an affair,” Eddie said, shrugging his way back to his feet. “I’m just telling you where she was.”

“So you had some inkling that maybe there was someone else?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yeah, you did. How come you never told the cops about that inkling?”

Now it was his turn not to reply.

“Oh, right,” Maya said. “You’re the husband. They were already looking at you hard. Imagine if they knew that you suspected her of having an affair.”

“Maya?”

She waited. He took a step toward her. She took a step backward.

“Give me that goddamn phone,” he said. “And get out of my house.”

“I’m taking the phone.”

Eddie stood in her path. “You really want to test me?”

Maya thought about the gun in her purse. The truth is, you never forget it. If you carry a weapon, it is always in your thoughts, always weighing you down or pulling at your sleeve. It is always, for better or worse, an option.

Eddie took a step toward her.

There was no way Maya was giving up the phone. Her hand started toward her purse when she heard two more familiar voices.

“Aunt Maya!”

“Yay!”

Daniel and Alexa crashed through the door as only the young can. They gave their aunt a big hug. She hugged them back, making sure neither pressed up against her purse. She kissed them both a little hard, quickly made her excuses, and slipped out the door before Eddie could do anything stupid.

* * *

Five minutes later, Eddie called on her mobile.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I loved Claire. God, how I… You know all this. And we had troubles, sure, but she loved me too.”

Maya was driving the car. “I know, Eddie.”

“Do me a favor, Maya.”

“What?”

“Whatever you find on that phone, no matter how bad, I need you to tell me. I need to know the truth.”

In the rear window Maya spotted the red Buick again.

“Promise me, Maya.”

“I promise.”

She hung up and took another look in the rearview mirror, but the red Buick was gone. Twenty minutes later, when she got to the Growin’ Up Day Care Center, Miss Kitty had her fill out the rest of the paperwork and arrange payment. Lily didn’t want to leave, which Maya took as a good sign.

Back at the house, Maya got Lily settled and opened what she referred to as the Drawer of Many Cords. Like most people she knew, Maya never threw out a power cord. The drawer was stuffed past capacity, like a snake-in-a-can, with dozens, maybe hundreds-heck, there was probably a cord that could work a Betamax-for her to go through.

She found an adaptor that fit into the bottom of Claire’s phone, plugged it in, and waited for it to have enough juice to work. It took about ten minutes. The phone was rudimentary-just the facts, ma’am-but it did indeed have a call history. She pressed the icon and started to scroll through the calls.

They were all to the same number.

Maya scrolled down and counted sixteen calls. The number was unfamiliar. The area code was 201. That meant northern New Jersey.

Who the hell was Claire calling?

She checked the dates. The calls started three months before her death. The last call came in four days before the murder. So what did that mean? The calling pattern was fairly uneven. There were a lot in the beginning, a lot toward the end, a scattering in the middle.

Was Claire setting up rendezvous?

For a moment Maya flashed back to Jean-Pierre. Her imagination started toying with her then. Suppose Jean-Pierre had gotten in touch with Claire after all these years. You hear about that all the time, especially in the Internet Age. No lover ever completely vanishes when you have Facebook.

But no, it wasn’t Jean-Pierre. Claire would have told her.

Really? Was she so sure about that? Claire had been up to something, no question about it, and she hadn’t seen fit to tell Maya what it was about. Maya had always thought that she and Claire shared everything, that they had no secrets from each other, but then again, let’s be fair here. Maya was on the other side of the world when all this happened, fighting for her country in a forsaken desert instead of being here, home, protecting her sister.

You were keeping secrets, Claire.

So now what?

Do the easiest thing first. Google the phone number. See if she got lucky and something came up. Maya typed the numbers into the search engine and hit the return button.

Bingo. Sort of…

The number came up right away, which surprised her. Most times, when you google a number, you get some offer to buy information or background checks on its owner from a third party. The phone number Claire had been calling was a business of sorts, but like everything else surrounding the swirling insanity of the past few weeks, it led to more questions than answers. The place was indeed in northern New Jersey, near, if the Google map was to be believed, the George Washington Bridge. It was called Leather and Lace-A Gentlemen’s Club.

Gentlemen’s Club. Euphemism for a strip club.