Hush Hush by Laura Lippman Read Free Book Online Page B

there are literally dozens of people who know it.”
    “Could the notes be written by your ex or his wife?” Sandy asked.
    “Stephen and I have a decent relationship, all things considered. The new wife—Well, not to be rude, but I’d be surprised if she’s clever enough. She was his physical trainer, I hear. I wasn’t around, but it’s my understanding that she landed her big fish quite expertly. But not, I think, via the power of the written word.”
    An old commercial jingle ran through Tess’s head. Meow, meow, meow, meow. Meow, meow, meow, meow .
    “Are you sure?” Tess asked.
    “Sure of what?”
    “Sure that you have a good relationship with your ex?”
    Again, that intense, measuring stare. It was like being sized up by a velociraptor. A not very hungry one, because a hungry one would snap you in half, while Melisandre seemed to be deciding whether Tess was even a worthy snack.
    “Do you know what I am, Tess?”
    “A woman with enough money to make a documentary about herself?”
    Tyner looked as if he wanted to bang his head on the table orthrottle Tess, but Melisandre was unruffled by her directness.
    “I’m every woman’s worst nightmare. Because whenever a woman kills her child, every other mother—at least, every one who’s honest with herself—has a flash of sympathy. Not empathy. They don’t want to have done it, cannot imagine doing it. But they know .”
    “I didn’t have a child when you”—Tess faltered, hated herself for showing that chink in her armor, and therefore had to double down on the active voice—“when you killed your child. But I can’t imagine that would ever be my reaction.”
    “Wait and see, then,” Melisandre said. “Wait and see. Because it will happen again. It’s never going to stop happening. Filicide has been with us forever.”
    “Do you even consider yourself guilty of filicide? You were found not guilty by reason of criminal insanity. You were beyond choices, rational thinking, right?”
    Tess thought she had scored a point off Melisandre at last, but the woman’s smile appeared quite genuine. “Now, see? Wouldn’t that have been a lovely exchange to have on film? You’re a marvelous foil, Ms. Monaghan.”

11:15 A.M.
    Felicia collapsed at the kitchen table with a glass of green iced tea and her laptop, overwhelmed by how much she needed to do, how little energy she had to do any of it. The house was quiet. At last. Mornings were horrible. Joey was usually up by five, six if Felicia was lucky, and just as he began to calm down, there was the chaos of Stephen and the girls leaving, which seemed to set Joey off. He was still getting up in the middle of the night, too, despite no longer needing to nurse at 2:00 and 4:00 A.M. Nine months old, sixteen pounds, and he still wasn’t sleeping through the night. Felicia had tried followingthe precepts of The Happiest Baby on the Block , she really had. Irony of ironies, this former personal trainer was a washout at sleep training. Felicia, who had literally made grown men cry for their own good, could not let her son cry it out for even five seconds.
    “Well, if he’s like everyone else in this family, he’ll be out of tears before he’s in kindergarten,” Alanna had said at breakfast this morning, which for her was a cup of black coffee that she never finished. It killed Felicia that an athlete of Alanna’s caliber ate so poorly, but she suspected her stepdaughter’s black coffee was an attempt to provoke her, so she ignored it.
    Alanna added: “If he makes it to kindergarten. Not all Dawes children do.”
    That was harder to ignore.
    Welcome to the Unhappiest Family on the Block. Also the only family on the block, so they were the happiest, the unhappiest, the richest, the poorest. It was the Big House in the Big Woods, a lonely fortress that felt as if it were in the middle of nowhere, although the Beltway hummed with traffic not ten minutes away. It was everything Felicia had ever wanted—a