Page 47 of The Newcomer
Looking back on it now, Letty realized, someone—the cops, maybe even Joe DeCurtis—really had interrogated Tanya, and once again, she’d managed to talk her way out of a jam.
For as long as Letty could remember, her sister had gotten into what their mother affectionately termed “youthful scrapes”—shoplifting a tube of mascara from the drugstore, getting kicked out of school for selling diet pills stolen from a friend’s mother, and once “borrowing” an elderly neighbor’s Buick for a weekend-long drunken joyride with her boyfriend that had ended when she’d smashed the car into a telephone pole. But Tanya had always walked away from those youthful misdemeanors by batting her eyelashes and placing the blame solidly on someone else’s shoulders.
What, Letty wondered, was the truth about Tanya and Declan Rooney? The date on her arrest record showed that she’d been right here, at the Murmuring Surf, ripping off old ladies when she claimed to be living in Atlanta and working as a model. Obviously she’d lied. Were they really married?
Once again, she was grateful for Florida’s “sunshine law,” which made public records so readily available. This time, she found what she was looking for on the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics website. She typed in Tanya’s name and Declan’s name and waited a moment, holding her breath as she waited for results.
She finally exhaled when the red letters appeared on screen.NO RECORD FOUND.
Letty thought about it. This didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t married. Tanya had been using an alias at the time of her arrest, so maybe Declan Rooney had one, too?
The lies, she thought. So many, many lies. And why? She downed the rest of the wine in her glass. She was ashamed of how gullible she’d been, at how easily she’d bought into Tanya’s tale of woe.
“No, no, no!” She looked over to see Maya, batting her arms wildly in the air, although her eyes were still tightly closed. “Nooooo!”
Letty pulled back the covers and climbed into bed with the little girl, snugging her close against her chest, inhaling the sweet scent of baby shampoo.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “I’m here. Go to sleep, baby,” Letty said, stroking her back and smoothing the hair from her damp forehead.
“Letty?” Maya sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. “I got a bad dream.”
Not again,Letty thought. They’d had three good nights in a row without the night terrors.
“Can you tell me what happened?” Letty asked.
“The bad man came,” Maya said tearfully. “He tried to get me.”
“That was just a dream, sweetie. There is no bad man here. I would not let a bad man come in here. Okay? I promise you. Never, ever will I let that happen.”
Maya snuffled and buried her nose in Letty’s shirt. “Okay.” She looked up at her aunt. “Will you do the bunny song?”
Letty rolled her eyes but began to sing, letting her fingertips trail along Maya’s back. “Little Bunny Foo Foo, hoppin’ through the forest, scoopin’ up the field mice and boppin’ ’em on the head…”
Maya giggled and chimed in on her favorite part, wagging her finger at her aunt. “Down came the Good Fairy, and she said, Little Bunny Foo Foo, I don’t wanna see you scoopin’ up the field mice and boppin’ ’em on the head.”
Letty lost count of the number of choruses she repeated until Maya finally drifted back to sleep. When she was sure the child wouldn’t stir, she crept into the bathroom, brushed her teeth, undressed, and crawled back to bed.
She’d opened the windows earlier, and now she heard laughter and music coming from the direction of the pool.
“B-10,” she heard a man’s voice call. “G-59.” She recognized the voice as Joe’s. “O-74.” Ironic, she thought. It was eight o’clock on Sunday night and she, the youngest guest at the Murmuring Surf, was already in bed, while the Murmuring Surf’s elderly regulars were still chowing down on free barbecue and a hot bingo game.
Maya let out a long sigh and threw an arm across Letty’s chest. The child was a whirling dervish while she slept, spinning this way and that, like Tanya that way, Letty thought. In their childhood days they’d frequently shared a bed in whatever mobile home or cheap apartment Terri was renting. Tanya thrashed around in her sleep, what Mimi called “starfishing,” with both arms and legs spread wide across the bed, driving Letty, many nights, to sleep on a sofa, or even on a pallet on the floor.
She gingerly removed the child’s arm and rolled over on her side, facing the window. She was almost asleep when the thought struck her with such intensity she sat bolt upright in the bed. She tiptoed over to the table, picked up her phone, and reread her sister’s arrest report from five years earlier, this time paying closer attention to the date. Tanya had been arrested, here in a unit at the Murmuring Surf, on February 2, 2015. According to Joe DeCurtis, Declan Rooney, her accomplice-slash-boyfriend-slash-husband, was already in the wind.
Tanya’s urgent distress call and subsequent move to New York had come only days later. Early February, and before Valentine’s Day, because Letty remembered feeling sorry for her heartbroken sister and buying her a tiny heart-shaped Whitman’s candy sampler as a joke. How long after that had Letty taken up with Evan? And how soon after that had Tanya announced her “surprise pregnancy”?
Maya had been born seven months later, a tiny but surprisingly healthy preemie with blond curls like her mother’s, and blue eyes, not the same pale blue as Tanya’s, or their mother’s, but eyes that Tanya described as “the deep blue of a mountain lake you wanted to dive naked into.”
Letty scrolled back to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s website, punched in payment information, then typed in the name Declan Rooney.
The screen lit up with citations. There were warrants out for Declan Rooney in Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade Counties, for fraud, theft by taking, wire fraud, and more. The only photo she found of Rooney was a booking photo taken in Jacksonville. Itshowed a man with shoulder-length, dark wavy hair, a square jaw, and a prominent nose. He did have lush, dark eyelashes, but nobody, thought Letty, would ever mistake him for a young Pierce Brosnan. Nobody except Tanya.
She clicked the phone for a screenshot of the booking photo, then put the phone on the nightstand. Maya burrowed into her side and sighed softly in her sleep.
17
“WELL?” EVAN PUSHED THE PLATEwith his half-eaten breakfast away.
