“Look, all I said was Callie has a singing lesson this afternoon.”

  “And all I said was, ‘Early ripe, early rot.’”

  “Which seems to suggest you have a problem with singing lessons.”

  “Three-year-olds don’t need private singing lessons. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Fine, Stafford. Tell that to Mrs. Pugh, because it was her suggestion, not mine, okay? Go on. Call her up and tell her she’s ridiculous.”

  “She doesn’t already know?”

  “Mrs. Pugh says Callie’s the only one who won’t sing in the singing circle. She says if we don’t build up her confidence, our daughter won’t be able to sing in the fall concert.”

  “Mrs. Pugh is the bride of Satan. Tell her I’m not paying ten thousand dollars a year for preschool to have Callie excluded from anything. What time is it?”

  “Are you going somewhere?”

  “I have a meeting.”

  “But it’s Saturday.”

  “I’ll tell them.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Secrets

  “I will multiply thy sufferings.”

  —Genesis 3:16

  “THE VEGETABLE DRAWER IS jammed again, Mrs. Hopkins. You know, the one in the main fridge. I mean, the one I just cleaned for you like you told me to. Well, it’s really jammed.”

  “Yes, I noticed that too, Kelly.”

  “I don’t want to break it, you know, if I pull really hard? But I don’t know. Maybe it’s just stuck or something.”

  “I’ll have it fixed.”

  “’Cause it should pull out easy. Like the other one, you know? It just rolls out easy. See?”

  “Right.”

  “Is there anything else you want me to do, Mrs. Hopkins?”

  “Not today, Kelly.”

  “I’ll be in a little later on Friday, okay? My daughter’s kids are coming for the weekend.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh yeah, they’re something, I know, but my daughter’s starting another night shift. So I’ll be late on Friday.”

  “What time were you thinking you’d stop by?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Noonish? Something like that. But I can stay late ’cause my youngest grandson’s got kickboxing after school, and my boyfriend’s out of work so he can watch Jade, and that just leaves the older boys and they’re okay on their own.”

  “I’m having a dinner party on Friday, Kelly, and I’d like the main rooms done before the caterers arrive.”

  “A party? It’s supposed to rain on Friday. Well, what time are they coming? The caterers, I mean.”

  “About two thirty.”

  “In the afternoon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll be done before then for sure. Unless there’s ironing.”

  “There won’t be any ironing on Friday.”

  “Well, okay, if you say so. Then sure, yeah, I’ll see you on Friday. Have a good one! Too bad about the rain.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Don’t forget about the fridge, Mrs. Hopkins!”

  “I won’t.”

  “’Cause that drawer is jammed.”

  “Right.”

  She had been waiting quite patiently, she thought, for the stupid woman to leave so she could have a few cigarettes in peace before Stafford returned, but if they had to do another round on the fridge, she’d snap. This one, this Kelly woman, had only been with them for six months and she had talked too much from the start, quickly assuming that air of familiarity that was far more irritating than corners not swept and cabana towels folded with the edges out instead of in. Unfortunately, Cheryl Sasson had recommended her, and she had been obliged to take Cheryl’s advice because she knew Cheryl and Jim’s son was back in detox for an ongoing drug problem. Stafford would not understand that firing a housekeeper too quickly would send a message to Cheryl that she had no more ability to pick competent help than she did to raise a competent son, and that would undermine Cheryl’s authority as the alpha female in their particular social group, which could be interpreted as a challenge from Stafford’s wife, which would ruin the foursome he had with Jim.

  She waited until she heard the side door to the house shut with its usual thud, followed by the sound of the courtyard security gate, and slowly she felt the tension ease from her hands. After thirty years, she had started smoking again—but only in the mornings, because that had always been the best time for cigarettes and, more important, the only time she could get away with it. Stafford liked to bring her a cup of coffee in bed of all places, and she was expected to make a great fuss over it, but once that was done, he left the house and walked down the hill before the heat of the day made walking difficult. From there, he took the back road into Napili, where he bought the morning papers and read them at a breakfast counter in a cheap coffee shop. His morning routine took two hours, and those were her smoking hours.

  Stafford had never smoked, gambled, or drunk to excess and had no compassion for the addictions of healthy people. Over the years, she had watched him lure others, his industry colleagues and even their closest friends, literally into temptation as if determined to expose their weaknesses on his own terms. But she knew it was more than simple revelations that captured his interest. Above all things, Stafford admired his own kind of intelligence, which lay less in an innate grasp of complex matters than a will to command. There was a coldness in him when confronted with the fragility of others, and she had learned to protect herself from it with secrecy and bravado. Sometimes, though, and especially on warm and balmy Hawaiian mornings when Stafford was gone and the smoke she exhaled shielded her like a cloud, she allowed herself to remember this or that without his scrutiny. The events of her life had always been stored in separate chambers, but doors could be opened from time to time, if you were careful and alone.

  Therapy had never worked for her. She had tried it, of course, at various times, along with vitamin shots, mega-doses of serotonin, hot yoga, shopping, boxing lessons, massage therapy, long-distance cycling, cold plunges, and a few thousand facials. But the telling of her story over and over again was exhausting and in the end, she realized she was tired of herself. Bored senseless, in fact, with the I did this I did that offerings served up at weekly sessions to someone paid to listen to yet another rich white woman talk about a Thanksgiving dinner gone wrong. Drinking wasn’t her thing. Prescription drugs knocked her flat. That left coffee and cigarettes. Those two, and a good dig in the garden where she could smoke, dig, and bury the butts in one easy session without talking about the time blah blah blah.

  Stafford was wrong per usual. She was not clinging to a happy ending with an estranged adult daughter, spoiled beyond recovery by her self-absorbed parents. She was grieving for that misshapen mess that tried to be a little boy. Her first baby, born at a Catholic hospital in Kingston, Ontario, only to die in Stafford’s arms a few hours later.

  Anencephaly had not been a word in even Stafford’s remarkable vocabulary, but when an early ultrasound revealed the baby’s condition in the second trimester, it became one. There would be no will to command for a baby born with a complete or even partial absence of the bones at the rear of the skull, no intelligence for a baby born without the cerebral hemispheres of a human brain.

  Ultrasounds, or ultra-sonograms as they were called then, were not common, but when Stafford heard about a medical study at the university involving something called static B-mode equipment, he persuaded her to volunteer. They had nothing to fear. She was young and healthy, an ideal candidate for an international research study in prenatal technology. And this was landmark science, he said, painless and safe. Safe as houses, their own doctor said, and what rational human being would want an unpleasant surprise in the delivery room in 1972? Better to have it in the doctor’s office, she thought later, a test drive of the anguish to come.

  It seemed they were among the first documented cases in the world in which a prenatal diagnosis of anencephaly was confirmed by ultrasound. They were advised that arrangements could be made to terminate the pregnancy, but Stafford had refused. If she had an abortion, he said, he would divorce her and have their marriage annulled. The staunch Catholic teachings of his childhood allowed him no other option. He had spent too much of his youth hovering on the edge of hell to deny its existence now. They would do the right thing and it would make them stronger. They would carry the baby to term and they would have the baby baptized, and when the baby died, they would donate its body to the hospital for research so that future babies could be saved. This was the path laid out for them and this was the path they would take. She felt, but did not say, that if he wanted spiritual compensation for this deed, it was entirely dependent on the hospitality of her womb. She suspected, but did not say, that her very intelligent husband was a fool or worse—just another standard-issue, male-chauvinist hypocrite. The staunch Catholic teachings of his childhood? Seriously, Stafford? What the fuck?

  She was an outsider, yes, but they had been married almost two years at that point, and aside from a few funerals and the occasional local wedding where he fell in line with the kneeling, mumbling, and hand gestures of others at a Catholic service, he showed no interest in a religious life—which suited her just fine. They were married at a courthouse with two witnesses they dragged in off the street, and his mother’s after-the-fact pleas they get remarried in a Catholic church went unanswered. He was an intellectual. A philosopher. Handsome. Funny. Reasonably good in bed. Surely that was enough for one man. And now, with a doomed baby inside her, he talked about hell? Well, he would find out what hell was. She would make sure of that, after which he could annul, divorce, freeze-dry, or shrink-wrap their marriage for all she cared. It wouldn’t be the first time little Agnes Gardener had started over and likely not the last, but when she felt the little one move inside her, she wept.

  “You don’t need to come to any more of my checkups,” she told him after the termination date to end the pregnancy came and went.

  “Why not?” he said.

  “Well, there’s not much point now,” she said. “And you have your thesis to finish. How’s that going?”

  At her next appointment, she asked the doctor for pictures of other babies born without skulls and brains, but this seemed to anger the man so keen on full disclosure prior to reality.

  “Why?” he asked. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “I just need to be prepared,” she answered. “It’s better for me to know what’s coming. And my husband feels the same. It’s better if we know.”

  “It serves no purpose at this point in your pregnancy. It won’t change the outcome.”

  “It will help us get through it. Isn’t that worth something?”

  “I don’t have any photos to give you, Mrs. Hopkins.”

  So she had gone to the Queen’s University medical library, armed with Stafford’s library card, where she scoured the journals until she found what she was looking for—a long clinical study on anencephaly, complete with graphs, stats, a lot of medical mumbo jumbo, and pictures.

  The baby in the photo was unnamed and presumably dead when the picture was taken. The large, protruding eyes were unopened and covered with a pale, transparent layer of skin, reptilian in size and structure relative to the rest of the baby’s head, and she immediately thought of the way frogs looked, their lidless eyes opening suddenly and without warning. There was a flat, oddly constructed nose placed above an upper lip cleft into two parts, with the lower lip strangely intact. And of course, there was no enclosed skull. That was clearly evident in all of the pictures. Merely the beginning of a forehead above the froglike eyes, which ended abruptly as if nature had come to the edge of an open canyon and simply lost interest.

  She must have backed into the library stacks when she dropped the journal, because there was a bruise on her spine that took a long time to heal. Someone asked if she was all right, and someone else asked her to be quiet. Can I help you? someone said. She said she was sorry, and when she left the library, pregnant and distraught, she took the long way home to avoid running into anyone from the philosophy department.

  When Stafford came home that night, loaded with books and lecture notes from class, she didn’t tell him about the pictures, because it had never been her intention to warn him what lay ahead. He would suffer more if he wasn’t prepared in advance, and she wanted him to suffer greatly, although she was sorry about that later when she witnessed his despair.

  “Have you seen my library card?” he said.

  “You left it in your other pants,” she said. “I was at the laundromat.”

  The pregnancy ended in the seventh month and the baby was delivered by cesarean section on a breezy afternoon in July. Stafford had insisted on being present, but when the baby was placed into his arms by the nurse, an older woman with sad eyes, he collapsed and began to moan, and then he began to cry until those present, alarmed by the onset of what appeared to be a mounting hysteria, tried to remove the baby from his arms. And at that point all hell broke loose because Stafford refused to hand over the baby, keeping everyone at a distance with the wide, sweeping motions of his free arm. The priest, who had been hovering outside, waiting to administer the sacraments of baptism and last rites, was quickly ushered into the room in the hope that his presence would calm the situation and help settle the young father.

  “Don’t let your child go to God unblessed, my son,” the priest had said. “We have to baptize the baby before it dies.”

  But Stafford had turned then and deliberately smacked the priest with his free hand, knocking him flat to the ground, where he lay senseless.

  The baby, unnamed and never baptized, went to its grave a day later, and in the springtime of the following year, Stafford and his wife left Kingston for Los Angeles, where Stafford would embark on another path, this one unencumbered by the spiritual needs of others.

  CHAPTER 5

  Temptations

  “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.”

  —Genesis 3:13

  “THERE YOU ARE. WHAT took you so long?”

  “It’s hot. I brought you something.”

  “A jelly donut?”

  “They’re fresh.”

  “Oh, Stafford, you know I won’t eat that.”

  “Why not?”

  “A jelly donut? Covered in sugar and filled with—what is that stuff?”

  “Apple jelly.”

  “Yeah, sure it is. Nice color.”

  “Go on, have one. Look, there’re two.”

  “No thanks. Well, don’t shove the whole thing into your mouth. Stafford!”

  “Mmmm.”

  “That’s disgusting. I’ll get you a napkin.”

  She was sitting in the kitchen, flipping through a catalog of tropical perennials. The creation of the Maui house had allowed her to participate in the planning of the grounds, and this had awakened an interest in gardening. She wanted to replace the reflecting ponds on the east side of the house with gardens and scented flowers, but she was unsure how to proceed. The design team hired to work with the architects had stressed the importance of allowing what they called “the Asian thing” to permeate the house, and the result had been twice photographed for international publication. The general consensus was that former network heavyweight Stafford Hopkins’s Maui retreat was an eight-thousand-square-foot masterpiece of scale and design that seamlessly blended the drama of the landscape with an interior that, as one writer effused, overcame the tension between indulgence and whimsy. But the reflecting pools, while lovely to look at, generated a dank odor, and since her morning room had windows that opened directly over them, she wanted something else. The pools could be drained and filled with dirt, she reasoned, without upsetting anybody’s sense of whimsy.

  “Did you come in the side gate?” she asked him.

  “I did.”

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “The gate was open. Are you sure you don’t want the other donut?”

  “I don’t like the new gardeners, Stafford. I think one of them leaves the gate open. It’s happened before.”

  “You sure it’s not the cleaning lady?”

  “Kelly. Her name is Kelly. And she’s not a cleaning lady. She’s a housekeeper.”

  “Noted.”

  “I heard her shut the gate when she left.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying you left. Kelly left. The gate was shut. And somewhere between then and now, somebody else left the gate open. Not me. Not you. Not Kelly. Over to you, Sherlock.”

  “Call security. Get the codes reset.”

  “You think?”

  “Just in case. You want a bite? Last chance.”

  “No!”

  Security was generally not a source of anxiety for either of them, but they had long since recognized that their standard of living required professional protection. Already part of a gated community, their Maui estate had a built-in security system that was designed to quietly monitor the perimeter of their property and various interiors. The tiny cameras, carefully recessed into ceiling pockets and outside walls, were unobtrusive and functional. Multiple monitors throughout the property allowed them to anticipate the arrival and departure of others without feeling too voyeuristic. They knew many of their friends complemented their own home security systems with handguns, but Stafford’s Canadian background made him resistant to having one in the house.

  “You call, would you? I have a tennis lesson.”

  “I’ll call and then I’ll drive you down.”

  “I’ll be late, Stafford.”

  “No, you won’t. It’ll just take a minute. I have the number upstairs.”

  He dropped the napkin she had given him on the counter and left the room before she could argue. Stafford’s office was the only living space in the house situated on the second floor, and the stairs leading to it were deliberately hidden from public view, tucked down a hallway next to the wine cellar. Unless invited and escorted up the stairs, few visitors to the house had any idea that a second story existed at all, because the scale of the rooms and the height of the ceilings seemed to preclude the possibility. Away from the main house and farther down the hillside at the bottom of the property, the second level was more evident, and the house itself resembled the prow of an elegant ship, cut into the terraced hillside with such precision, it seemed to have pushed its way through. From the upper road and the main driveway that approached the property, though, there was no visual way of determining this.