Femme Fatale and other stories by Laura Lippman Read Free Book Online Page A

obeying another unwritten rule: you may snoop all you like, but you must not move or in any way tamper with the secrets of the houses left in your care. Read the dirty books and magazines by all means, catalog the couple’s birth control (or lack thereof), poke through medicine cabinets and those mother lodes known as nightstands, but make sure everything and everyone is tucked in its respective bed before the parents return home.
    The fathers’ cluelessness is understandable, but why would mothers, most of them former babysitters, leave so many embarrassments to be discovered? Yet Terri never stopped to wonder about this. Like most teenagers, she assumed her generation had invented depravity—and she was not entirely off the mark. Her clients remembered their pasts as one might remember a dream—hazy, incoherent, yet vaguely satisfying. Indulged in their youth, they had little need for rebellion in adulthood, and even less energy for it. Those who know the gin-soaked suburbs described in Cheever and Updike would be disappointed in River Run, where there was so much money and so little imagination. Sure, there was a sex toy here, a prescription for Viagra there, but Terri’s systematic sleuthing did not uncover anything truly shocking—not until the day she found the beautiful little handgun, no bigger than a toy, nestled in Mrs. Delafield’s lingerie drawer.
    Now the Delafields had been considered odd from their arrival in the community two years ago. Mrs. Delafield (“Call me Jakkie, it’s short for Jakarta, can you believe it? My mom was nuts”) was very young, so young that even an incurious teenager such as Terri could see she did not belong in this overdone, overlarge, grown-up house in River Run’s Phase V development. Local gossip put her at no more than twenty-five, which was worth gossiping about because Mr. Delafield was fifty-two. He was divorced, of course, with children in college, and now he had Mrs. Delafield and the baby, a shockingly large child of sixteen months, a child so big that he was having trouble walking. Hugo’s short, chubby legs simply could not propel his mass forward, and he continued to crawl, when he deigned to move at all. It was hard, looking at Mrs. Delafield, to figure out how such a huge child had come out of this lanky size 2, with hips narrower than most of the boys in the River Run freshmen class. No one knew what Mrs. Delafield had been before she was Mrs. Delafield. The one time Terri had dared to ask, Mrs. Delafield must not have understood the question because she said: “Oh, I was at my height when I met Mr. Delafield. You have no idea. I can’t bear to look at the photographs because I’m such a mess now.” Her hands shook, she chewed her nails when she thought no one was looking, and her hair was an odd shade of yellow. She was the most beautiful woman Terri had ever seen outside a magazine.
    No one knew why the Delafields had chosen River Run, not at first. For while River Run was an extremely desirable place to live—great school district, beautiful countryside, and convenient to I-83, that was the locals’ litany—not even its biggest boosters expected billionaires in their midst. The grandest house in Phase V could not compete with the waterfront estates outside Annapolis, or even the rambling mansions on Baltimore’s north side. Plus, Hugo was so young, and the Delafields so very rich, they didn’t have to worry about public schools.
    The mystery was explained when Mr. Delafield’s corporate helicopter landed with a great, ear-shattering roar in a clearing behind his property, acreage dedicated as permanent open space according to the master plan for River Run. The community and the River Run board fought the helicopter, of course. Mr. Delafield insisted he had been promised use of the land, that he would not have purchased the house otherwise. Yet the Delafields decided to stay in the house even after a zoning judge decided Mr. Delafield could not use