Cobble Hill Page 5

  Foot in Hudson River Linked to Staten Island Woman. Blood Found in Ex-Boyfriend’s Home

  Yesterday a foot was found by a kayaker in the Hudson River near Battery Park City. Police have matched the foot to the dismembered torso of the murdered Staten Island woman found by a Brooklyn man early Monday while out walking his dog. The torso has since been identified by a family member who recognized the rose tattoo on the torso’s upper arm. Police have been investigating the woman’s family and close friends. The women’s ex-boyfriend is now in custody after police discovered traces of blood on the cement floor of his garage. The woman’s head and other remaining body parts have not yet been found.

  * * *

  Wendy Clarke rocked back and forth in her expensive, ergonomically correct, springy, gold metal and white leather swivel chair and tapped her manicured nails against the white Italian marble desktop. She clicked her way chronologically through The Brookliner links, grimacing as the gruesome story unfolded. She read The Brookliner religiously, hoping it would make her feel more Brooklyn-y. Nothing this morbid ever happened in England. England was full of thieves, not murderers. They cleared out your house while you were eating dinner in a restaurant. Wendy’s closed office door rattled and she reduced the page, returning to the article she was supposed to write about the history of the French perfume industry. Tanners in Grasse. Catherine de’ Medici. Dior. Chanel. The May rose. It was an amalgamation of pieces she’d written before. She reached across her keyboard and squirted two pumps of $130 La Mer hand serum into her palms, as if that would help.

  Wendy occupied the coveted southwest-facing office on the thirty-first floor of a five-year-old office tower near the World Trade Center, home to Fleurt, one of the few fashion magazines still in print. It had been her idea to move to New York, and she’d courted this job for eight months until she got it, sending witty, erudite emails to Lucy Fleur, its glamorously absent founder—who wore only pale yellow and seemed to exist exclusively at fashion shows—and completely abusing the privilege of being married to a well-known author. Roy had no idea, but he’d basically gotten Wendy the job. Finally, Lucy Fleur had caved, just as Wendy hoped she would. Lucy Fleur just had to have the features editor with the famous author husband, the editor who had once compiled the now infamous Brexit Suppers, a series of snarky, irreverent vignettes and alcohol-heavy recipes using only British ingredients, like “Gin and Ewe” and “English Sherry with One French Strawberry Found on the Floor of the Ferry.” Never mind that Wendy had always been freelance, with no office at all. Now she was a senior editor.

  An excruciatingly uninspired senior editor.

  A whole year had gone by. Wendy hid in her office, reading The Brookliner and shopping online, pretending to be extremely busy and acting overly curt and officious toward the assistants. Lucy Fleur hadn’t introduced herself to Wendy even once. Their communications had been reduced to Lucy Fleur’s cryptic, condescending emails: Cutoffs, cutouts, cowgirls. Take me to Texas. Or, Perfume. Grasse. Chanel. Roses. You know the drill. Make me smell it.

  What kind of person sawed up another person? Was the woman dead when he started, or did he just knock her unconscious and turn on the chain saw? Did she wake up when he was sawing at her waist? Did she look down and see her bottom half fall away? Wendy exhaled noisily, well aware that there was no one to hear her. She didn’t know why she was so fascinated, but she felt connected to the drifting dead woman somehow.

  Perfume. Grasse. Chanel.

  Wendy pumped more hand serum into her palms and rubbed the excess on her neck, which could use all the help it could get. Why couldn’t she concentrate? Why had she been so fixated on getting this job and moving to New York when it was clear to her now that it was not what she wanted at all?

  It made sense at the time. Roy was floundering. He hadn’t published a book in years. The older girls were almost finished at Oxford and Shy was only one year into high school. Wendy had been hosting the same dinner parties and game nights for the parents from her girls’ schools, cooking the same meals, complaining about the English winters, writing the same tiredly trendy copy for the same tiredly trendy magazine supplements for newspapers that no one cared about anymore. Roy’s longtime agent had died. Two of the couples they were friendliest with had moved away from their London suburb to South Africa and Australia. They needed a fresh start, she’d decided, in New York, where she’d grown up. And once she’d decided, she became fixated, spending all her time searching online for real estate, magazine jobs, and schools. She was going home, where she belonged. Where no one said “prawns and avos” when they meant shrimp and avocados, where virtually no one drank instant coffee, and where she wouldn’t have to take a bus to get a fresh bagel. The move had taken up all her time and planning and organizational skills. The new house had five bathrooms! But now that they’d actually moved and had lived in the city for a whole year, Wendy felt more restless and exasperated than ever. Roy still hadn’t written anything. Shy was struggling at school and hadn’t made any friends. There were no dinner parties or game nights to plan and host. And Wendy’s job, despite its title and salary and shiny trimmings, was painfully dull. Over the course of a year, all three of them seemed to have retreated into their discomfort and were more lonely and isolated than they had ever been before. Wendy had always maintained a certain bravado. She was Wendy Clarke. Editor of her Upper East Side girls’ school newspaper and NYU’s Washington Square News. Editor of Brexit Suppers. Mrs. Roy Clarke. Her bravado was what had gotten them here. But now that she was here, she didn’t know who she was anymore.

  There was a light knock and Manfred poked their head into Wendy’s office.

  “How’s it going?”

  Manfred was new, one of several gender-fluid editorial assistants at the magazine, but by far the most gorgeous. Incredible legs, perfectly shaped shaved head, beige skin, and wonderful greenish-gold eyes. They were also extremely efficient. The perfume story was due today.

  “I’m all right, thank you.”

  “I’m getting coffee. You know you want some,” Manfred offered. “Lucy’s not back from Italy until tomorrow.”

  Not that anyone ever actually saw Lucy when Lucy was “in,” but the office got very quiet. The rest of the time, when the assistants ran the place, it smelled like pad thai and squealing was rampant.

  “Sure,” Wendy agreed. “Coffee would be nice, thank you.”

  “Milky and sweet, just the way you like it.” Manfred glanced at Wendy’s gigantic computer screen, which was split between the dead-woman story on The Brookliner, complete with photos, and her perfume story, which was one long, boring paragraph. “Oh my God, have you been reading about the torso?”

  Wendy nodded, embarrassed to be caught not working.

  “It’s so sick.”

  “There were a lot of pieces,” Wendy agreed and then frowned, remembering that she was supposed to be Manfred’s superior.

  “Creepy boyfriend. He probably thought he was being all sneaky and careful. The dum-dum.”

  Wendy was still not used to working in an office. There seemed to be a strange combination of the familiar and the formal. Was she supposed to delegate to Manfred or invite them to lunch? She turned back to her computer screen, reached for her mouse, and closed The Brookliner window. Sensing that Manfred was about to leave, she whipped around again.

  “It’s a good story. I still want to know if they find the head.”

  Manfred’s glossy black eyebrows shot up.

  “We live quite close to where they found it,” Wendy continued. “How could she be living with that man for so many years and not know what he was capable of?”

  “You don’t seem like the Red Hook type,” Manfred observed. “Not that I’d know. I go to work and then I go back to Williamsburg. I love Williamsburg.”

  All of the assistants lived in Williamsburg. They were always meeting up for tacos and tequila or going to spinning classes or buying aromatherapy diffusers for their desks at the Williamsb
urg outpost of Muji.

  “I live in Cobble Hill,” Wendy clarified. “It’s very safe.”

  “I hope so.” Manfred bit their top lip. “Everyone said you were scary. You’re not scary.”

  They looked at each other in silence for a moment.

  “Sometimes I give people the wrong impression,” Wendy admitted. When anxious she resorted to snobbery, just like at Shy’s school. But she couldn’t possibly be snobbish to Manfred. Manfred was perfection.

  “There’s a rumor that you took a pair of size eight Gucci sneakers from the fashion closet,” Manfred went on teasingly. “Only the assistants get to do that, and only if it’s not an in-demand size, like a five or an eleven.”

  Wendy was horrified. The sneakers had been there for almost a month, collecting dust, before she rescued them and gave them to Shy.

  “I didn’t know.”

  Manfred laughed. “You’re supposed to be able to buy them on your salary, but don’t worry about it.”

  Wendy had the feeling Manfred wanted to say something nice about her outfit now, and was struggling. When she’d started at Fleurt she’d decided on a chic and easy uniform—black trousers and a black top. Today’s ensemble was particularly unremarkable.

  “You have the most beautiful hands,” Manfred said finally.

  Wendy looked down at her hands. They were her thinnest feature. “Thank you.” She looked up. “I like your earrings.” Manfred wore tiny, classic pearl studs.

  “Back in a few with coffee,” Manfred promised.

  Wendy watched the door close and reached for her phone. At her most lonely and vulnerable moments she texted Roy or Shy, presumably to help organize them in some way, but really just to garner a response. Should she confront Shy about the meeting she’d had with her teachers? She’d come off a bit more demanding and terse and scary than she’d meant to. But what about that smug, unclean, burrito-eating, overly tattooed Latin teacher? All she wanted was for Shy to succeed. Not as a student per se, but as a person. She began a long, urgent, motherly text.

  I know you hate it when I meddle, and I know you like Latin, but you’re simply not putting the time into your other classes. The headmistress said something about peer tutors, which I think sounds like a cop-out. We can find you a proper tutor. It’s ok to ask for help when you need it.

  She read over the text and then deleted it. Shy did hate it when she meddled. Her most meddlesome had been her excitement about the move itself, which Shy had found simply annoying. “What color do you want your new room to be?” Wendy would ask. “I honestly don’t care, Mum,” Shy would answer. “Should we give away all our old clothes and just get new ones when we get there?” Wendy would ask gleefully. “Why would we do that?” Shy said. “Should we put in one of those taps by the stove in our new kitchen so we can fill up pots for pasta?” Shy didn’t even bother responding to that. Should she text Roy? Maybe Shy was in the wrong school. But Roy might be writing. Wendy didn’t want to disturb him.

  She turned back to her computer and dragged the cursor away from the perfume article and into the search engine. Maybe if she found them a country house they could spend time together as a family on weekends, go apple picking or antiquing. Roy could write in a restored barn overlooking a babbling brook. Shy could have a horse. She clicked on a map of the Hudson Valley. Millbrook, Rhinebeck, Milan, Hudson. There were real estate offices in every town, with websites. Oh, here was a pretty house, in someplace called Ancram—with a pool!

  * * *

  “Hello? Dad?” Shy called as she closed and locked the front door to their four-story brownstone. The parlor floor consisted of a giant great room with French doors that led to a terrace overlooking the garden. The house had been built in the early nineteen hundreds and had been modernized and remodeled many times, but it maintained its old New York charm. Upstairs were four enormous bedrooms. Downstairs was an entire apartment.

  “We could do Airbnb,” Shy’s father had suggested once. “Let out a room or two to travelers.”

  “And have a bunch of strangers tromping around, stealing things and stopping up the toilets? I don’t think so,” Wendy said, ending the conversation.

  “I’m home,” Shy called again. “Are you here?”

  “Here,” Roy Clarke called from the library, which was really just the far right-hand portion of the gigantic open-plan living room. Somehow Wendy had convinced them to call it the library because it was where most of the bookshelves were. “All writers have libraries,” she declared, and thus it was so.

  Roy Clarke was sprawled in his favorite armchair, his bathrobe tied over his clothes, a book in his lap. The TV was on but muted, a cooking show.

  “I showered and got dressed and went out this morning. I brought my computer and everything,” he announced as Shy came into the room. “I even wrote a few words over a nice cup of tea at the most perfect old bar. I’m so glad I discovered it. I wrote the beginning of a chapter, or the beginning of something anyway. Then I got pretty famished from all the writing, so I went to the supermarket. And then I came home.”

  “I’m not Mum,” Shy said. “I don’t care.” She sniffed the air. It smelled like cinnamon. “Did you bake something? It smells amazing.”

  Her father’s gray-whiskered face turned pink. “You know those cinnamon buns that come in the tins that you pop open and bake and then squirt that pasty sugary stuff on?”

  She nodded.

  “I’d never had them before,” her father went on. “I went to Key Food for bread and cheese and came out with those. I baked them, and then I ate them all. Marvelous.”

  “What about that guy’s cat, the invisible one?”

  “Fed it already.”

  Shy unzipped her hoodie and kicked off her sneakers. “I’m starving.” It was cold in the house. She flopped down on the sofa and pulled the cashmere throw over her legs and feet. By assuming the pose of a sick girl, she now felt a true chill coming on. “Will you make me a cheese toastie?” It was what her father called a grilled cheese and what she craved whenever she had a cold or cramps.

  “Are you poorly, my sweet?” her father asked, exaggerating his accent.

  Shy missed England. It was so much less stressful. People sat in their sitting rooms watching telly and eating toast soldiers and drinking sweet, milky tea. There was so much less walking. But her mother was from Manhattan and felt very strongly that New York City was the only real city in the world and that they needed to move there. It was her father who’d insisted on Brooklyn because it felt more authentic. Manhattan was just a giant tourist attraction. Her mother resisted at first. “Brooklyn isn’t really New York,” she’d said. When it turned out living in Brooklyn was so much more fashionable than living in Manhattan, and that they could buy a whole house with a garden instead of living in an apartment, Wendy gave in. As long as Shy attended private school.

  Roy Clarke went into the large, open kitchen area, located the electric sandwich press, and set it atop the butcher-block island in the center of the kitchen.

  “I’ll make you a cheese toastie if you tell me what you’re doing home so early.”

  Shy had hoped her father wouldn’t notice. “I don’t know,” she told him honestly. “Mum was at school, talking to my teachers. I went out for lunch and kept walking. I just wanted to be home. I had Latin this morning.”

  Roy knew it was wrong, but he liked that his daughter enjoyed his company and was willing to eat in front of him but not her mother. He made two sandwiches. They ate them directly off the kitchen counter, gobbling them up so quickly they didn’t have time to talk. Then he made two more.

  Gold. Every time he blinked, there it was in 28-point bold italics, centered in the middle of his mind’s eye. That hadn’t happened with Black and White. It was a good sign. His American fans would love it, if any of them were still alive by the time he finished writing the book. If he were still alive. Or maybe Black, White & Gold? No, that sounded like a law firm. He didn’t do legal writing either. No cou
rtroom dramas or anything too technical. Too much research. Too much room for error. Black and Gold and Gold and White White on White with Black or Gold. Blimey.

  Shy never asked about his writing. Either she wasn’t interested or she didn’t want to nag.

  “Hey Dad, do you want to go see a movie?” she asked him now.

  “I thought you were ill.” He retrieved the cloth from the sink and wiped the sandwich crumbs from the counter.

  “I feel well enough to watch a movie.” Shy dug an unopened can of Coke out of her schoolbag and cracked it open. Wendy refused to keep soda in the house. What did she think Shy subsisted on—air?

  “I was going to call and check on your sisters, but I’m sure they’d rather I didn’t.”

  Shy’s older sisters—Chloe, twenty-two, and Anna, twenty-one—lived in Oxford, where they’d gone to university, and worked in a lab. They were science nerds and extremely dismissive of their father, mother, and little sister. They especially disapproved of the move to New York.

  “I’ll watch a film with you if it’s at the local cinema and if we can get those tiny chocolate buttons with the white sprinkles on them.”

  “Hold on.” Shy looked up the showtimes on her phone. “There’s one at one p.m. that looks good. That was like three minutes ago. Leave the crumbs. Come on, Dad, let’s go.”

  “All of a sudden we’re in a huge rush,” Roy grumbled, but secretly he was grateful. If Shy left him alone he’d feel compelled to try and write something.

  They hurried out to the cinema.

  “Don’t eat them all before the trailers are over,” Shy whispered as Roy removed the cellophane wrapper from his box of sweets.

  “Hush.” Roy slid down in his seat. “You’re supposed to be in school, remember?”

  Shy hadn’t warned him that this was an R-rated French comedy about two bored teenage boys who snuck onto a cruise ship on a mission to lose their virginities. The trailers were all for foreign R-rated films too, full of sweaty naked people drinking wine and throwing vegetables at each other. Roy hunkered down in his seat, imagining the headline: Pervy Author Kidnaps Daughter from School and Forces Her to Watch Pervy French Film.