The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes Read online

  She tried to pay for their dinners, which had been the deal, but Tim brushed her offer aside. She wanted to tell him, No more tips, ever, and that she would pay for everything when they went out, but since he hadn’t acknowledged he’d sent the money, she couldn’t do that.

  After dinner, he drove her to the house he shared with his brother, and she knew for sure that he’d been the one to send the money. The house—a tall, stately brick mansion surrounded by manicured lawns and boxwood hedges—was in the moneyed, historic heart of Chapel Hill. Once inside, CeeCee stifled a gasp. Tim obviously had someone to care for the grounds, but if he also had a housekeeper, she hadn’t worked in a very long time. Clothes, dirty plates and pizza boxes were strewn on the small antique tables and chairs in the otherwise elegant foyer. She spotted an overturned chair in the dining room on her left and a broken vase in the living room on her right. The odor of marijuana drifted down the curved staircase, along with the sound of the Eagles singing “Hotel California.”

  “Maid’s day off,” Tim joked. “Hope you don’t mind a little clutter.”

  A man, straggly haired and barefoot, walked into the foyer from the living room carrying both a beer and a cigarette. He stopped short when he saw them.

  “What’s up, bro?” Tim asked.

  The man looked at CeeCee, and she took an involuntary step backward toward the door. His eyes were bloodshot and he wore several days’ growth of beard. He looked like some of the homeless guys who sometimes hung out on Franklin Street.

  “Who’s this?” He nodded toward her.

  “This is CeeCee.” Tim put his arm around her. “And this is my brother, Marty.”

  Marty’s nod was curt. “How old are you?” he asked. “Twelve? Thirteen?”

  “Give her a break,” Tim said.

  “I’m sixteen,” she said.

  Marty let out a whistle and walked back into the living room. “Tim, get your ass in here,” he said over his shoulder.

  Tim looked at her apologetically. “Kitchen’s in there.” He pointed toward one of the arched doorways off the foyer. “Help yourself to something to drink and I’ll be there in a second.”

  The disaster in the kitchen made the foyer look like something out of Good Housekeeping. The sink was piled high with dirty dishes. The long blue granite countertops were littered with pizza crusts and beer bottles and dirty ashtrays. Gingerly she opened the refrigerator, expecting to be greeted by the stench of rotting food. It wasn’t bad, though. There were bottles of condiments, a few blocks of cheese, a shelf full of beer and a single can of Coke. She took the Coke, popped it open, then tiptoed toward the door, straining to hear Tim and Marty’s conversation. Their voices were muffled, but she heard Marty say, “You don’t have time for this shit now. You gotta focus.”

  Was he talking about Tim’s schoolwork? It seemed bizarre for someone as clearly out-of-it as Marty to lecture Tim about anything.

  “…mess up the plan,” Marty said.

  “Up yours,” Tim responded, and she heard his footsteps approaching the kitchen. She leaned back against the counter and sipped her Coke.

  “Sorry about that,” Tim said when he came into the kitchen. “Marty can be a little paranoid sometimes.”

  “That’s okay,” she said, but she wished Marty would go out and leave them alone. She didn’t feel comfortable with him in the house.

  Tim took the can from her hand and set it on the counter. Then he put his arms around her, smiled his green-eyed smile and bent down to kiss her. She’d stood like this with a couple of boys before. She’d kissed them and even let them touch her breasts, but that had been it. Tim, though, was not a boy. This kiss was a first for her—a kiss linked by delicate electric threads to her nipples, and that made her instantly wet.

  Tim seemed to know the effect he was having on her. “Let’s go upstairs to my bedroom,” he said.

  “I’m not on the pill or anything,” she said.

  “I’ve got condoms. Don’t worry.”

  She took his hand and they walked back into the foyer and up the curved staircase, past the room that was the source of the blaring music and the sweet herbal scent of marijuana, and down the hall to Tim’s bedroom. It had once been a lovely room, she was sure. The wallpaper was a masculine blue stripe. The double bed and dresser and desk were all made from the same dark red cherry. But it was hard to notice the details with clothes and books strewn on every surface, and she didn’t let herself think about how long it had been since he’d changed his sheets. She didn’t care. He closed his door and locked it, then drew her down next to him on the bed, and she let the electricity in her body take over.

  They cuddled together afterward. He’d left his closet light on, and she was just able to make out his features on the pillow next to her. He ran his fingers down her cheek and wound them in her hair.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you sore?”

  “I’m better than okay,” she said. As her mother had warned her, the earth hadn’t moved. At least not when he was inside her. He’d already made her come three times by then with his expert fingers and amazing mouth, but once he was inside her, she didn’t feel much at all. Maybe it was the condom. If she hadn’t loved being so close to him in whatever way she could, she would have been disappointed.

  There was a knock at the door and she tightened the sheet to her chest.

  “Going out,” Marty said.

  “Hold on.” Tim got up, the closet light catching the long line of his body. He unlocked the door and walked naked into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him. “Did you take your meds?” she heard him ask Marty.

  “You know, if you need to get laid, you’ve got the van to do it in,” Marty said. “You don’t need to…” The rest of his sentence was muffled. CeeCee thought of getting out of the bed and dressing quickly, but her body felt frozen beneath the sheet. Could that be all she meant to him? An easy lay?

  After a few minutes, Tim came back into the room, lying down next to her with a sigh that told her the mood was broken and unrecoverable.

  “He thinks I just want you for your body,” he said. “And I want you to know that’s not it. I like you. I liked you the first day I met you in the restaurant when you spilled coffee on me. I think you’re…adorable and I love being around you because you have such a great attitude. You’re a little naive when it comes to what’s happening in the world, and maybe that’s why you’re so upbeat most of the time. Ignorance is bliss and all that. I don’t care.”

  She listened until she thought he was finished, relishing the compliments and embarrassed by the allusions to her naiveté.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I hardly know anything about Vietnam, for example, except that there were a lot of protests about being there. And it messed up some guys. Like, what happened to Marty. What kind of medication is he on?”

  Tim lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. “You heard our conversation?” he asked.

  “Part of it.”

  “He’s paranoid. He thinks every sound is something coming to get him. And he doesn’t trust people much. If you could’ve known him before, you would have liked him. You’d understand why I care about him. I’m just glad he came back alive. So many people didn’t. And he’s still smart. Smarter than my sister and me.”

  “You have a sister? Does she live here, too?”

  “Nope,” he said in a way that told her the subject was off-limits.

  She sat up, hugging her knees through the blanket, and surveyed the dimly lit trash heap that was his room. She had to face it: she was in love with a slob. An idea popped into her head. A way to put a smile back on his face.

  “I’d like to clean up your house for you,” she said. “I’m a fantastic organizer.”

  “No way,” he said.

  “I want to do it. Please let me.” It was the least she could do for someone who’d, in all likelihood, given her five thousand dollars.

  He stroked her bare back with his fingers. “
Are you going to apply to go to school in the spring?” he asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then the house is yours,” he said. “Do what you like with it. Just…stay out of Marty’s room.”

  “I plan to stay out of Marty’s way,” she said.

  “Good thinking.”

  “Do you have some studying to do?”

  “I need to do some typing,” he said. “But I don’t need to—”

  “I’ll start right here, right now,” she interrupted him. “You don’t mind me doing things in your closet and your drawers?”

  He laughed, reaching beneath the sheet to stroke the side of her breast. “You’ve already done some pretty good things in my drawers,” he said, and it took her a minute to get it.

  She gave him a little shove. “You study and I’ll straighten up,” she said.

  He got out of bed and pulled on his jeans. She followed close behind him, feeling his eyes on her body as she got dressed. When she looked up he was smiling at her. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to just sit here while you’re slaving around in my room looking cute as a button.”

  “You won’t be just sitting there, you’ll be working.” She flipped on the overhead light, took his arm and guided him to his desk. “And I love doing this kind of thing. Honestly. When I left one of the homes I was in, my foster mother told the social worker she’d miss how I always straightened up after everyone.”

  “I’d miss a lot more than that,” Tim said, taking a seat at his desk.

  She bent over to kiss the top of his head. It was hard to believe that twenty-four hours ago she’d thought this relationship was over. Now she felt at ease, as though they’d been together for years. She hoped that’s what was ahead of them: years of being together.

  She started with his clothes, tossing the ones that were obviously soiled into the overstuffed hamper and hanging and folding the others. Then she worked on his bookshelf, where papers and notebooks were piled helter-skelter. Tim typed at his desk. He was a good typist, and she worked to the clacking sound of his fingers flying over the keys.

  After an hour or so, he pushed back from his desk and looked down at her. She sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by piles of books and papers. She rested her hand on one of the stacks.

  “These are things I don’t know what to do with,” she said. “And what’s this?” She held up a packet of papers she’d found stapled together. On the cover sheet was a line drawing of a man with his head over a block, an executioner standing next to him, ax raised and ready to fall. The picture gave her the creeps. Across the top of the paper, in large handwritten letters, was the word SCAPE. “What’s SCAPE?” she asked.

  Tim looked at the sheaf of papers in her hand. He stared at it a long time as if trying to remember where he’d seen it before. Then his eyes met hers. “If I tell you something, can you keep it between us?”

  “Tim,” she said, as if she couldn’t believe he’d ask such a question. “Of course,” she said. “Look at everything I’ve told you.”

  He still looked dubious. Then he stood up and held out his hand for her. She got to her feet and walked with him from his room, down the hall and into a huge bedroom that she guessed had belonged to his parents. It was a relief to be in a room the brothers had yet to trash. The queen-size bed was a four-poster and the floor was covered by a red-and-beige Persian rug that stretched nearly wall to wall.

  Tim sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up one of the framed photographs from the marble-topped night table. She sat next to him, and he put his arm around her as he held the picture on her knees. It was of three teenagers, two boys and a girl, grinning at the camera in a moment of simple joy. The boy on the left was Tim. His blond curls were longer and wilder, and his smile was different than it was now. More open. Less jaded by time and experience.

  “That’s you,” CeeCee said.

  “Right.” Tim pointed to the boy on the right. “And that’s Marty.”

  The grinning young Marty bore the clean-cut, steel-jawed good looks of a soldier. “Wow, I wouldn’t have recognized him.”

  “He’d just turned eighteen here,” Tim said. “Shipped out the next week. Andie—” Tim pointed to the girl standing between them “—and I were fifteen.”

  “She’s your…this is your sister?” CeeCee asked.

  For the first time since she’d asked him about SCAPE, Tim smiled. “My twin,” he said, his fingertips lightly touching the glass over Andie’s picture. His voice sounded swollen with love for his sister. “And that’s where SCAPE comes in.”

  “I don’t get it,” she said.

  Tim let out a long sigh. “A couple of years ago, Andie was arrested for murder.”

  CeeCee caught her breath. “Murder?” she asked. “Did she do it?”

  Tim didn’t answer the question. “When she finally got her day in court last summer, the jury came to the conclusion that she did.”

  CeeCee suddenly understood Tim’s concerns about prison reform. “Why did they think she did it?”

  “Because they didn’t really know her. Andie couldn’t hurt anyone. And the thing is… Marty screwed things up for her. I don’t blame him for what he did, but he still feels like crap about it.”

  “What did he do?”

  Tim stared at the picture. “See, what happened was, this photographer was supposed to come take pictures of our house to do a spread for Southern Living Classics. You know, the magazine?”

  She nodded, although she didn’t know the magazine at all.

  “My parents were in Europe,” Tim continued, “so the guy was just going to photograph the exterior and do the rest when they got back. Andie was home, but she was studying in her room. We were both finishing up our sophomore year at Carolina. She’d—we’d—just turned nineteen. Anyhow, she said she didn’t even know the guy was here taking pictures, and the next day, one of our neighbors saw him dead in the backyard. He’d been stabbed about a dozen times with a kitchen knife. The neighbor said she saw Andie outside talking to him the day before.” Tim set the photograph back on the night table and stood up, running his fingers through his hair. “So, then things got all screwed up,” he said.

  CeeCee tried to mask her horror. A man had been murdered in the yard behind the house she was sitting in. Stabbed a dozen times. She shuddered at the thought.

  “The cops interviewed Andie and Marty and me separately.” Tim idly touched objects on the long dresser. Another photograph. A hand mirror. A silver cigarette lighter. “And we all said different things. I told the truth. I said I was on campus around the time they figured the guy was murdered, which I was, and that I’d met Marty for lunch. He’d just gotten back from Vietnam and was kind of a mess.”

  Tim opened one of the top dresser drawers and pulled out an unopened pack of Winstons. CeeCee sat quietly as he lit a cigarette and let out a stream of smoke. He held the pack toward her and she shook her head.

  “Marty lied, though,” Tim said. “He said he was home with Andie all afternoon, that she never went outside. He said it to protect her, of course.” He laughed mirthlessly. “This is so screwed up,” he said.

  “And what did Andie say?” she asked.

  “That she was home alone and never saw the guy. Her prints were on the knife, and she said that was because it was from our kitchen and she used it all the time. So, Marty got a slap on the wrist for lying and Andie got put in jail for a year and a half while she waited for a trial. My parents came home right away and got her a decent lawyer, but Andie’s story was screwy and the jury knew it. The prosecution made the case that it was premeditated. That Andie killed him for his camera equipment, even though they could never prove anything was missing. The thing is, Andie never believed she’d be convicted, so she never told anyone what really happened. She lied during the trial and lied to her lawyer because—” he took a long drag on the cigarette and looked squarely at CeeCee “—because she really did kill him, but thought things would go worse for her if she
admitted it.”

  “She did it?” The scene in the yard grew more vivid in her eyes. She saw the pretty blonde in the photograph plunging a knife into a stranger’s heart. Twelve times.

  “She told the truth after she got convicted. It was…devastating. We were all in the courtroom when the verdict was announced. My mother started sobbing, and Andie stood up and shouted, ‘I want to tell the truth! I want to tell the truth!’ It was a little late for that.”

  “What was the truth?”

  “The guy raped her.” Tim raised the cigarette to his lips, his hand trembling. “He got her to let him inside to shoot some of the interior and then he—” Tim stopped himself. “Let’s just say he was a brutal son of a bitch. She went a little crazy after he left the house and she grabbed the knife and went out in the yard and let him have it. Got him back for what he did to her. I believed her. We all did. But her attorney didn’t and it was just too little too late. If she perjured herself once, she’d do it again. That’s what they figured.” Tim leaned against the dresser, his arms folded across his chest, and looked directly at CeeCee. “She got the death penalty,” he said.

  Everything fell into place. “Oh,” she said.

  “And our mother couldn’t take it. Mom always had problems with depression and she felt guilty that she and my father traveled so much and she hadn’t been there for Andie. Even though we were all old enough to take care of ourselves. So,” Tim said, and raised his hands in a helpless gesture, “I came home a few days after the trial to find my mother dead of an overdose.” He looked at the bed where CeeCee still sat, and she knew that’s where he’d found his mother. She stood up.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, overwhelmed. His family, apparently once prosperous and happy, had quickly turned to dust. A daughter sentenced to death. A brother gone crazy in Vietnam. A mother’s suicide. She wrapped her arms around Tim, pressing her cheek to his bare chest. “It’s all so horrible,” she said.