The Drowning Girls Read online

  And of course—Kelsey would deny everything, from her obsessive behavior to involvement with the vandalism. She would throw the blame on Danielle or me, and in the end, I wasn’t sure I could prove anything. Calling the police would be like flinging a boomerang of trouble and not being able to duck when it zoomed back toward me.

  I shivered, remembering that day on the stairs. I could still feel the skin above her elbow, pinched hard between my thumb and forefinger. I could still see her shocked blue irises. But clearly, threatening Kelsey hadn’t worked. She’d simply fired a shot, knowing I couldn’t fire back.

  That afternoon, Liz brought me aspirin and crackers to wash down with a 7Up: the food of the sick. I didn’t look at my phone again until that evening, not wanting to see the texts from Myriam and the missed calls from various higher-ups at Parker-Lane. Those were there, but so was a notification of an email from [email protected], sent at 10:37 a.m. this morning. The subject line was blank, and I steadied myself before opening the message, not sure what I would find. If it was a picture—another suggestive shot, or an incriminating one of her with a can of spray paint, for example—I was going to keep it this time. It would be evidence.

  But her message held only a single question.

  Did you like it?

  I stared at the screen for a long time, the words burning into my retinas, before replying.

  We need to talk.

  * * *

  It felt, even to me, like a last-ditch effort. End this—whatever this was—now, before anything else happened, before anyone else found out. The ship was taking on water too fast, and all I had to bail us out was a paper Dixie Cup. But it was a shot worth taking—if only because I had no other shots to take.

  I would start with flattery.

  You’re a beautiful girl.

  Believe me, if circumstances were different...

  If I were a younger man...

  If I didn’t have a family...

  If you weren’t such good friends with my stepdaughter...

  Maybe that was what she really wanted, deep down. She was a teenage girl, after all, and I knew something about flattering women. I’d sold homes this way, following a basic principle: make the wife happy, and the husband would be happy, too. It was sexist, sure, but that was the way the world operated. Whenever I turned on the TV, women had their noses buried in fresh-smelling laundry, were marveling at the capacity of paper towels. Liz scorned that crap, citing Betty Friedan and the sexual sell, but I was banking on Kelsey to have a shred of naïveté. Either that, or a kernel of goodness, buried deep down. I could sell this to her.

  If that didn’t work—and I was prepared for it not to—I would show her the letter I’d spent Saturday night drafting and Sunday refining. It was a record of everything that had transpired between Kelsey and me, dating back to June, that first day she’d plopped herself down in the chair in my office. It was a formal request—stop now before I seek legal action. If I had to, I would send the letter (to her parents, to Parker-Lane), although it would come at a high cost. At the very least, I’d have to leave The Palms, and I hadn’t been with Parker-Lane long enough for them to see me as anything but a liability. But there were other jobs. There were other homes.

  I’d have to show the letter to Liz, of course. That, too, felt like a risk. I’d waited too long, kept things from her that she should have known up front. But if I showed her the letter, let her read the words I’d carefully crafted, it might be better than the chance of ad-libbing it, watching the emotions play over her face. Disgust. Anger. Distrust. But we could talk it through, work it out, get ahead of it. Together we could talk to Danielle, a united front, a team.

  Kelsey’s reply didn’t come until Monday, when she was at school. I felt dizzy thinking of her on her cell phone in class, a teacher droning away at the front of the room and Kelsey sitting in a standard-issue student desk, flirting away with her married, imaginary lover.

  Your wish is my command, master.

  * * *

  She came right after school, fresh out of Liz’s car, minutes from saying goodbye to Danielle. I’d been waiting for her soft knock, for the doorknob to turn and for Kelsey to slip inside my office, closing the door behind her. It was as if she’d dressed for dinner and a movie—tight black dress, silver jewelry, red lipstick.

  I didn’t stand. “Kelsey, I’m glad you could come. Have a seat.” I was trying for a fatherly tone—grandfatherly, even. It was time to establish the relationship that should have been there from the beginning.

  She took the chair across from my desk, crossing her legs. Seated, the bottom half of her dress almost disappeared, leaving only the long line of her legs visible.

  I made sure to keep my gaze up, on her face. “I think you know why I asked to see you today.”

  Cocking her head to one side, she played with a dangling earring. Looking at her face was dangerous, too.

  I pressed on. “Kelsey, you’re a beautiful girl, and I’m flattered, believe me.”

  She smiled. “How beautiful?”

  “If we were the same age—if I were one of the boys in your class, say...” I stopped, disconcerted by her smile. It had gone well in my head, the dozen times I’d rehearsed it. But the reality of Kelsey sitting in front of me was a different story.

  “What? What would you do then, Mr. McGinnis? Would we be boyfriend and girlfriend?”

  The words were innocent enough, but somehow, it was like being in a porno, something with a hideous title like Boning the Boss or Office Sex. I’d been growing more nervous all afternoon, but now my shirt was sticking to my back, sweat puddling at my armpits. It occurred to me suddenly that she might be recording our conversation, a microphone taped close to her skin. And if someone walked into the room—Lindsey, or one of the kitchen staff—they would take one look at my sweaty face and Kelsey’s naked legs and jump to all the wrong conclusions.

  I took a deep breath and pushed the letter across the table to her.

  She picked up the paper and read for a minute, frowning. “What is this?”

  “It’s a letter I hope never to send, Kelsey. I’m only showing you because I want you to understand what a serious situation we’re in. Like I mentioned, I’ve been very flattered by your attention, but I’m going to have to stop it right here. It can’t go any further.” I could smell my own fear now, rising sour from my armpits.

  She read to the bottom of the page, then pushed the paper back to me. “I don’t understand why you would say these things.”

  “So far no one else has seen this letter, Kelsey. Only you and me. And no one has to see it. I could slip it right in there—” I gestured to the shredder against the wall. “It’s to protect both of us, the way I see it.”

  She stared at me. “I mean, if you’re going to write it all down, you should be accurate. You’re missing some things.”

  My heartbeat picked up the pace, a canter to a gallop. “What am I missing?”

  “Well, let’s see.” She frowned, as if she were trying to remember. “What about that time you exposed yourself to me in your backyard? Or the picture you sent me. Or the time we kissed in your office.”

  I sat back hard, cracking my spine against the chair. Talk about a colossal misjudgment. This wasn’t just a prank. It might not even be a criminal matter. Kelsey was delusional. She needed a doctor’s care, psychotropic drugs. Shock therapy. “I think we’re done here, Kelsey. If that’s the way you want it to be, I’ll send the letter out tomorrow. I’ll hand-deliver it to your parents, if that’s what I need to do.”

  Anyone else—a kid, a teenager, an adult—would crack, I thought. Kelsey wasn’t normal. She just shook her head, a smile still playing on her lips. “I saved that email you sent me. I look at it every day.”

  “The game is over,” I told her, more forcefully. “It’s done.”


  “You’re the one who started the game. If you didn’t want me, why would you send me that picture? And from your work email, too. That wasn’t very smart.”

  I stared at her and then glanced, reflexively, at my computer screen. “You were the one who emailed me, Kelsey. You sent me that picture from school, and I told you to knock it off.”

  Kelsey looked up at the ceiling, as if she were trying to remember something. “It was August 10, I think. I was at your house, hanging out with Danielle, and all of a sudden my phone beeped. That was pretty gutsy, with your family right there. But don’t worry, I didn’t tell anyone. I knew you wanted it to be our little secret.”

  I was already navigating the icons on my computer screen, my fingers clumsy, impatient. I clicked on my outbox, scrolling through the list of emails I’d sent to Parker-Lane, to Myriam and the HOA committee, to contractors and suppliers. There it was: an email to [email protected] on August 10 at 10:55 a.m. I had no recollection of the day, six weeks ago now. “You hacked into my email,” I said.

  “I did?”

  “You must have.” I clicked on the message and it opened, the photo slowly appearing, top to bottom. I recognized the backdrop of my house, light tan and darker brown, and then my own head, shoulders, chest, my own naked and erect penis.

  I grabbed the wastebasket under my desk and retched drily into it.

  “It’s a lovely picture,” Kelsey said over my shoulder. “Impressive.”

  I remembered the night, of course. The Mesbahs’ party. Liz and I had both been tipsy, elated to have our new house entirely to ourselves. I remembered undressing and standing at the edge of the pool, watching Liz on her back, floating, her breasts bobbing and ebbing with the water. But Liz wasn’t part of this image. This was just me, grinning and aroused.

  My mind spooled back, as if it were going through an old film. The party had been in June, after Kelsey had visited my office. Had she been camped out on the golf course, spying on us? On me? Was she plotting, even then, how she would get inside our house, how she would worm her way into our lives?

  That had been months ago. Naively, I’d thought I could get ahead of this today with my letter, but she’d been planning for ages. She’d been on checkmate before I’d made a move. She must have taken the picture and then bided her time, waited for an opportunity to get into my office. What had I been doing on August 10 at 10:55 a.m.? Had I stepped into the bathroom? Stopped by the kitchen to chat with someone on staff? Was there anyone who could vouch for me, give me an alibi? Maybe there would be someone who had seen Kelsey in my office? Not that this was unusual—she’d stopped by a dozen times before then, a dozen times since.

  I closed the photo, not wanting to see it for another second. “This was a private moment with my wife. There has to be some kind of law against taking a photo of a person at his own home—”

  “I’m sure there are sexting laws, too. Aren’t there? I know someone who got in big trouble for sending a naked picture.”

  I could smell her behind me, her lotion flowery and overpowering.

  “Aren’t you going to delete it? Of course, I don’t think that matters. Obviously I have a copy of it.”

  I whirled around in my chair, knocking my knees against hers and causing her to take a step back. It took a great effort to keep my voice calm. “I’m trying to figure out what I can do here, to fix this situation. But I don’t understand what you want, except for something you can’t have.”

  She lowered herself onto the corner of my desk, spread her thighs slightly, teasing me.

  I almost retched again, fighting off a horrible creeping feeling of arousal and a sick disgust at her. Imagine someone coming in, I told myself. Lindsey. One of the contractors working on the bathrooms. Liz, for God’s sake. “You need to leave. You need to leave now.”

  “I’ll let you off the hook,” she said. “One kiss.”

  I shrank back, buying myself a few inches of safety. “It’s not going to happen.”

  “One tiny kiss,” she said.

  “I can’t do this, Kelsey. I’m a married man.”

  “Please. That’s such a cop-out. One kiss and I keep quiet.”

  It was blackmail, plain and simple. You couldn’t give in to blackmail—everyone knew that. It started small and it grew. It built into this untenable thing, unsustainable. You were pinched, put into a tight spot. The proverbial rock and a hard place. Blood out of a turnip. How had it come to this?

  Her eyes grew watery, her lip wavered. “Don’t you even find me pretty at all?”

  Of course I did. She was beautiful and hideous, fascinating and repulsive. She was every middle-aged guy’s fantasy, heroine and villain at once.

  “Kelsey,” I said, softening. I was trying to find my way back to the script, back to I’m so flattered and if only, but she slipped off the edge of my desk, her bare knee parting my thighs. I put my hands on her arms to stop her from moving forward, and her mouth was on mine for the briefest of moments before I shifted her away, her lips grazing my neck.

  She pulled back, patting her hair into place. “It was nice,” she said. “Tell me it wasn’t nice.”

  “Kelsey, we can’t. Look, whatever I can do to convince you—”

  She opened the door, still facing me. “Oh, I’ll take you up on that. I think there’s a lot more you can do for me.”

  I was coming back to my senses, the life I’d been living flashing before my eyes. It was less of a kiss than a near-death experience. “We’re not going to tell anyone about this.”

  She stepped into the hallway. “Oh, I promise. It’s our little secret.”

  * * *

  I locked my office door behind her, ready to burst out of my skin. Delete the photo. Yes. No. Obviously I hadn’t taken it—someone had taken it of me. Could I prove that I hadn’t sent it, either?

  I fumbled in my desk drawer and came up with a flash drive, a cheap promotional trinket that Parker-Lane gave out to visiting guests. I took a screen shot of the email and saved it. It was hard to look at my grinning face without seeing what a parent would see, or a prosecutor. It was hard not to imagine it plastered across Twitter and the evening news, maybe with a little black censor bar across my genitals. Fuck.

  I stashed the flash drive and went back to my email where I deleted the picture, deleted the deleted picture, emptied my trash can. I deleted the email Kelsey had sent me earlier that day—Your wish is my command—and wished I had the IT skills to wipe it from the hard drive. Then I scanned the rest of my emails, my inbox and my sent folder and my saved mail and my drafts and my deleted mail before being satisfied that there was nothing else.

  But of course, there was something else.

  Or there would be. It was coming.

  I wouldn’t be able to solve this, and it was too late to get ahead of it.

  I wiped off my mouth with a tissue, rinsed and spit into a trash can and popped a piece of gum into my mouth. Get rid of her taste—strawberry lip gloss? Get rid of the feeling of her thigh, her chest leaning over mine.

  It never happened. Deny, deny, deny.

  There was a knock on my door, a jiggle on the handle. “Mr. McGinnis?”

  I made it to the door on unsteady legs and opened it to find Lindsey holding her ubiquitous clipboard.

  “Sorry,” I said, gesturing to the door. “Figured I’d grab a moment to myself to get ready for the meeting.”

  “No worries! I just needed to check on something, actually. I’m thinking you might want to use the dining room rather than the regular conference room. That way we can pull in some extra chairs—”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “Okay. I can let Myriam know about the change, if you’d like.”

  “Perfect. Thanks, Lindsey.”

  She smiled at me. “One more sugge
stion, though.”

  I leaned against the door frame, exhausted. “Shoot.”

  “You might want to change your shirt.”

  * * *

  I rushed home, my collar turned inward to hide the pink smear of lipstick. I remembered Kelsey’s lips brushing my neck, a deliberate action. And she’d simply left me to explain myself. What if I’d gone to the HOA meeting like that, or run into Liz?

  Thankfully, Liz was sitting on the couch in the den and didn’t look up as I rushed up the stairs, pulling my shirt over my head. In our bathroom, I squirted some hand soap onto the collar of my shirt and worked the fabric back and forth under the faucet. I only succeeded in smearing the color, in creating an even bigger pink stain. I would have to get it downstairs to the laundry room, where there was bound to be a gallon of bleach and a dozen other laundry-related products, none of which I’d ever used. Or I could bring it back to the clubhouse later, toss it in the trash. Maybe it was safer that way. For now, I stashed it underneath the bed.

  From the doorway, I asked Liz if she was coming to the meeting. “I could use your support, Liz,” I said. She looked up at me but didn’t reply. Something was going on—a bad day at school, a fight with Danielle. But I didn’t dare to come closer, not with my heart thudding in my chest. In the bathroom mirror, my face had looked normal, the same old Phil. But would it be visible to Liz—an illicit kiss, horrible and thrilling in its own way? Would she take one look at me and see how guilty I felt about something I’d never intended?

  * * *

  The meeting was a blur of faces and complaints—Myriam and Deanna and Helen and Sonia, yes, Sonia, sitting so close behind me that I could hear her phone vibrate. Was it Kelsey, texting her mother that she’d been assaulted by Phil, the creepy community relations specialist? I hardly dared to turn around, for fear that Kelsey would be in the audience herself, sitting in a folding chair with her legs parted invitingly. A quick scan of the room revealed that she wasn’t there—but neither was Liz.