Page 52 of Under the Stars

Meredith

Winthrop Island, New York

Mike finally calls while she’s outside, walking Audrey’s dog.

The dog seems to know something’s wrong.

He keeps begging to be let out of the house, but when Meredith tries to walk him around the fringe of the property—she can’t have him pooping on the lawn, which she frequently crosses in the dark of night, and she for God’s sake is not going to scoop any damn poop—he drags his nose along the ground like he’s sniffing something, but really he’s just buying time.

She shakes the leash. “I’m on to you, all right? Just do your business and put us both out of our misery.”

The truth is, she doesn’t mind. Anything to keep her mind off Mike, who’s racing up Interstate 91 to reach Audrey before that bastard husband of hers does something even more idiotic than he’s already done.

Anything to keep her mind off this craving for a nice clean double vodka, neat.

Now the phone vibrates inside the pocket of one of Isobel’s old cardigans. (Yes, she’s started wearing her mother’s old cardigans—they’re soft and comfortable and kind of sexy when you wear them half-buttoned, with nothing underneath.)

Meredith puts the phone to her ear. “Did you find her? Is she alive?”

“Yeah, she’s alive,” says Mike. “But we have a situation.”

—

It was Mike who told her she had to stay here at Greyfriars and await news.

“But she’s my daughter !” Meredith said.

Mike cast his gaze at Erica Burnside, who sat on a barstool in her navy suit, legs crossed, and nursed a club soda with lime.

Erica Burnside was aware of the developing situation.

It was her legal duty, she had told them, to remain onsite and monitor developments on behalf of her client, whose stolen painting was at risk.

For the last time, Mike roared. It’s not his fucking painting.

Erica Burnside shrugged her procedural shrug, as if to say— We’ll just have to settle this in court, I guess.

“Mair, honey, I think we both know you’d be a big distraction and no help at all,” Mike said. “Go home to Greyfriars and feed Audrey’s dog, okay? Poor guy’s been home alone all this time. Probably shitting on all your rugs. I’ll take care of everything, okay? Don’t worry. I’ll bring her back safe.”

Meredith looked into his eyes and the weirdest thing happened. She believed him.

She nodded and said, “Don’t screw this up, okay? I can’t live without her.”

“ You can’t?” Mike looked at the ceiling beam of American chestnut directly above his head and blinked a few times. He mumbled, “The inn would go back to shit, for one thing.”

So Meredith bicycled back to Greyfriars and Mike raced down to Little Bay Marina where a buddy waited with his Boston Whaler to take him across the channel to Groton and a rental car that was supposed to be ready for him at a Hertz satellite office, because the next scheduled ferry wouldn’t land him in New London for a couple more hours.

By then they’d heard from Sedge that the Range Rover had traveled up route 12 to Norwich, where it met up with route 2 and eventually merged onto Interstate 91, heading north.

Mike tried calling 911 but because Audrey wasn’t a minor and he couldn’t offer any evidence that she was abducted— You have a hunch, sir?

the operator said in disbelief—they hadn’t picked up the chase.

Then Erica Burnside picked up the phone and called 911 herself. The vehicle in question was being driven by a fugitive carrying stolen property, she announced—a valuable painting that belonged to the prominent Irving family.

Oh, in that case, said the Massachusetts State Police. (Audrey and David had crossed the state line by now.)

That was the last Meredith heard, almost two hours ago. She’s never in her life wanted a drink so badly.

And now, according to Mike, there’s a situation.

“What’s the situation? Where are you?” Meredith thinks she can hear sirens in the background.

“I’m at the hospital in Springfield.”

“The hospital!” Meredith crumples to the grass and drops the leash. “Is she okay? What’s happened?”

“She’s okay. She’s hurt—”

“ How hurt? Where? Mike, could you start from the beginning, for God’s sake!”

Audrey’s dog nudges her hand with his nose. Without thinking, Meredith lifts her arm and wraps it around the smelly beast. Honeybee, she thinks. Honeybee, please. Please.

“Okay, so Sedge was following her on the interstate, right? State police were setting up a roadblock up near Greenfield or something. All of a sudden the fucker takes an exit. I don’t know, maybe he figured he was being followed. And he gets a blowout and goes off the road—”

“Oh, shit,” says Meredith.

“And there’s this standoff, and he’s got a gun—”

“Oh shit, honeybee, oh God—”

“Hey, take it easy. He didn’t shoot her, okay? She’s banged up, nasty cut to the head. They’re giving her a scan right now to make sure everything’s good in there.”

Relief swamps Meredith. “Shit,” she gasps again. The good kind.

“But here’s the thing, Mair,” says Mike. “She’s sort of under arrest.”

—

Of course Meredith knows about the paintings.

Audrey’s been going on about her precious Irvings for weeks now—Mallory says this, Mallory says that, how iconic they are, how groundbreaking, how they will revolutionize our understanding of nineteenth-century American art and artists, how important it will be to recenter the narrative on the subject herself, and all kinds of bullshit like that.

Personally, Meredith has no curiosity about the portraits themselves, still less about this Victorian maidservant who posed for them and ended up—so Audrey tells her—on Winthrop Island, to have the magnificent honor of giving birth to Mike Kennedy’s great-great grandfather.

The last she heard, Audrey was talking about holding a gala unveiling at the Mo. Opening up all that precious wine from the Greyfriars cellars. Meredith’s been planning to use the presence of said wine as an excuse not to attend.

But then this Erica Burnside woman turns up.

Look, Meredith has no problem with other women, so long as they understand their relative positions in the pecking order—underneath her, in other words. Likewise, should she ever encounter a woman who outranks her, she’ll be happy to step aside. That’s how it works.

But for some law bird in a knee-length navy suit to claim that her daughter— Meredith Fisher’s daughter!

—had no right to the paintings that were discovered in the basement of her own ancestors—well, that not only went against the grain of common sense, it went against Meredith’s sense of the natural order of things.

She couldn’t give a fuck about the paintings themselves, to be honest.

But for Audrey’s birthright, she’ll fight to the death.

—

“Under arrest?” she says to Mike. “For what? Being abducted by a lunatic?”

“It’s the painting. Because that Burnside woman’s claiming it’s stolen property.”

“But it’s not stolen property! It’s hers.”

“Mine,” says Mike. “Whatever. We can’t prove that it’s ours.”

“Other than the fact that it’s been sitting in your basement for a couple of centuries?”

“But we don’t have the receipts. They’ve got the receipts.”

“They?”

“The Irvings. I guess they have them cataloged or some shit. The family archives. The portraits were in Irving’s studio when he died, according to some police inventory, and when this Dare woman went missing, they were gone.”

“ Dare woman?”

“Providence Dare,” he says. “My great-great-great-grandmother. At least, that’s what we think.”

Meredith closes her eyes and thinks of Audrey in some blue hospital gown, going through the MRI tunnel. The dog wriggles his way onto her lap and lays his head on the crease of her thighs. She strokes his soft ears.

“What about that bastard husband of hers?” she says. “David. Why don’t they arrest him ? He’s the one who took the painting.”

“He’s saying it was Audrey. His story is that she loaded it up in his car and asked him to sell it for her.”

“Well, he’s lying.”

Mike sighs. “Yeah, we know that. The police, on the other hand. Husband and wife driving up 91 toward the Canadian border in a stolen Range Rover with a priceless work of art stuffed in the back, which the artist’s family claims is stolen.

How do you think that looks to them? I’ll go ahead and answer that for you. Not fucking good.”

“Then we’ll hire a good lawyer.”

“Yeah,” he says tiredly. “I guess we’ll have to do that.”

Meredith opens her eyes and looks down at the dog, Audrey’s dog, resting its muzzle contentedly on her knee.

“Sedge!” she exclaims. “Sedge is with you! He’ll set them straight. He’ll explain everything.”

On the other end of the phone, there is silence. The faint rustle of Mike’s breath. A tiny, distant siren. She can almost smell the chicken broth, the disinfectant. God, she hates hospitals.

“Mike?” she says. “What about Sedge?”

“I was getting to that, Mair,” he says. “Sedge got shot. He got out of his car to help Audrey and the fucker shot him. He’s in surgery right now.”

—

What was Meredith thinking, purging all the booze in the house? Not one single bottle in case of emergency.

Meredith goes back down to the cellar to make sure.

She shines the flashlight from her phone into all the corners.

One promising wooden crate turns out to be filled with china from a long-forgotten dinner party.

She climbs back up the stairs and goes through each cabinet, room by room, because you never know where some previous Greyfriars drunk might have hidden a stash and then died before she could drink it.

Nothing.

The damn smelly beast follows at her heels.

Each time she opens a cabinet door, she feels the weight of his judgment.

“Screw you,” she tells him. “You have no idea what a shit show this world is. You waltz through our lives, eating all this fresh damn dog food that lands on our doorstep each week. In my day, dogs ate Purina dog chow and slept outside in a doghouse, if they were lucky.”

The dog stares worriedly at her.

“It’s not that I give two shits,” she says, “it’s just that Audrey’s been through enough. Having a mother like me to raise her. No dad in sight, thanks to me. She deserves a break, you know?”

The dog stretches his neck and licks her hand.

“Gross,” Meredith says. But she keeps her hand where it is.

—

Mike promised to call with any news. He said they were keeping Audrey overnight for observation. In the morning, he would post her bail and bring her home.

What about Sedge? she asked.

He said Sedge’s family were on their way.

Meredith reclines on the sofa in the sunroom and stares at the hot golden light as it slides down the wall, deepening as it goes. The dog settles on the rug next to her dangling hand.

“You don’t think she’s suffering for my sins, do you?” Meredith says. “Because of what happened that night with Coop?”

The dog nudges her fingers with his hand. Reluctantly she scratches his ears.

“It wasn’t my fault, all right? I mean, yes. If I hadn’t been there to begin with. But I only did what I had to do. I’ve only ever done what I had to do. But it’s not Audrey’s fault, that’s for damn sure. So it’s not fair…it’s not fair…”

The sobs catch up with her. Her chest wracks and wracks.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair.

She did what she had to do.

Then her eyes fly open. Of course.

—

As every alcoholic knows, the perfect drink exists. Seventy proof. Virtually undetectable on the breath. Available in every supermarket.

She goes through the shelves and drawers in the kitchen. Audrey will have it somewhere, she knows. No decent chef goes without a stash. Rummage, rummage. Spices, sauces. Getting warmer.

Meredith opens a cabinet door and there it is. Tall, dark, beautiful bottle.

Finest pure Madagascar vanilla extract. Only the best for Meredith’s little chef.

She pulls it from the shelf. At her feet, the dog whimpers.

“I don’t want to hear it,” she says. “This is for your protection.”

She puts her fingers on the lid to unscrew it. The doorbell rings.

Meredith’s fully prepared to ignore the doorbell. Mike’s gone, so is Audrey. Nobody else should have any business with her, especially without calling first.

The doorbell rings again. Two demanding chimes.

She sighs and puts the bottle back on the shelf and closes the cabinet. “To be continued,” she says.

Meredith walks to the front door and opens it.