Meredith’s tirade left Lindsay momentarily without words. Compulsory outing was one of the few subjects on which she didn’t have definite and strong views. She was for it when it came to hypocrites who abused their power over the lives of others, like politicians who failed to support gay rights issues and churchmen who preached one thing and practised another. But when it came to people who merely happened to have become celebrities, she was considerably less certain. She’d heard all the arguments about role models, but what message was being sent by a role model who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the daylight? Clearly not one Meredith relished. ‘Mmm,’ Lindsay eventually muttered. ‘And Penny thought it was going to happen to her?’
‘She’d already been threatened. We were at a party about three months back at Samoa Brand’s house. Samoa has this new baby dyke lover, just graduated from college. And since she’s twenty years younger than Samoa, she gets indulged all she wants. So this moron comes up to Penny and starts in on her with, “My kid sister’s read all your books. Don’t you think it’s time to pay back? People like you should be outed, don’t you think? Shouldn’t we show the world we’ve got a middle class too?”’
Lindsay raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s just one motor-mouth kid, though,’ she said. ‘Surely Penny wasn’t getting herself in a state over that?’
‘She didn’t think the kid was going to do anything, but it made her start to wonder how long it would be before somebody did. So she decided the best way to deal with the fallout was to take control and out herself. She knew there would be a lot of publicity round the new book, with it being her first adult novel. She figured that would be a good time to spread the word.’ Meredith rubbed the palms of her hands over her face.
‘And you didn’t think it was a good idea?’
Meredith sighed. ‘This is really difficult for me. No, I didn’t think it was a good idea. I knew it would hurt her sales, but that would’ve been her price for her choice. That wasn’t what it was about for me. I told Penny she was forgetting something important. She was forgetting there were two people in this relationship.’
‘But her coming out wouldn’t automatically implicate you, would it? You didn’t technically live together. You have separate postal addresses, separate front doors. Your lives are legally detached,’ Lindsay protested.
Meredith shook her head. ‘You don’t understand the kind of job I do. Every damn year, I get vetted. That’s why you never see me the second half of March and the first half of April. That’s when it’s my turn, so I have to look like Little Miss Prim around then. I need top security clearance to do my job. Soon as it became public knowledge that the person who lives in the other half of the house is a lesbian, they’d start to look a lot more carefully at me. If you know what you’re looking for, you’ll find it. Besides, you know what it was like for Pen. She wasn’t some literary writer that nobody’s ever heard of. She was a celeb. There isn’t a literate teenager in America who hasn’t read a Penny Varnavides Darkliners novel. She comes out and there’s going to be media interest. And they’re going to want to know exactly who her lover is. I had no chance of surviving if she came out.’
Lindsay closed her eyes momentarily. ‘I’d avoid saying that to the police, if I was you,’ she sighed. ‘So, Penny was talking about coming out and you were trying to dissuade her. That about the size of it?’
‘I guess.’
‘So how did you get from there to splitting up?’
Meredith looked away. ‘The whole thing was so dumb.’ Her voice was bitter.
‘It usually is,’ Lindsay said.
‘We were fighting a lot. That’s something we’d never done before. Things never used to escalate like that between us. But it seemed like every time we were together we ended up fighting about whether she should come out.’ Meredith ran her hands through her hair in a gesture of frustration. ‘It was driving me crazy. I need to be clear-headed at work, I need to be able to think straight. And Penny was making me nuts. She just wouldn’t be logical about the situation.’
Lindsay waited. Eventually she said, ‘It’s a lot of pressure, when things start going wrong between you and your lover. Something’s got to give.’
Meredith nodded. ‘It did. I slept with somebody else. I was out of town, we had dinner together. She was all the things Penny used to be with me – warm, funny, sympathetic. And I slept with her. I didn’t even need a few drinks to get me there, I went sober and willing.’
Lindsay thought back to a time when infidelity had been something infinitely casual to her. It was so alien to her relationship with Sophie, it felt like a past life experience. But memory helped her construct a glimmer of what that urge to betrayal felt like. ‘You’re not the first and you’re not going to be the last. There are other kinds of treachery that cause just as much damage. I take it Penny found out and confronted you?’
‘I told her,’ Meredith said bleakly.
Oh, great, thought Lindsay. Why couldn’t she have been a Catholic and off-loaded the guilt to a silent priest? ‘You didn’t think she’d take it badly?’
‘I knew she’d take it badly. That’s why I told her. I figured it would make her realise how upset I was about her plan to come out. I guess I thought she’d realise that if I felt backed into a corner so far that I had to do something that went so fundamentally against everything our relationship was about, it was real serious and she should think again about what she was doing.’
‘And that’s not what happened.’
Meredith snorted ironically. ‘You got it. She could not see past her own concerns. All she could see was that I’d been unfaithful to her. She didn’t stop to think why I might have felt driven to do that. She just didn’t get it. Far as she was concerned, I’d committed one of the cardinal sins against the relationship. She was judge and jury and there was only one sentence she could pass. Had to be the death sentence. No mitigation.’
‘Didn’t you try and explain?’
Meredith leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped. ‘What do you think?’
Lindsay gave a wry smile. ‘I think you showered her with flowers and cards, filled her answering-machine tape with messages and kept a constant watch on the deck so that if she so much as stuck her nose out the door of an evening, you’d be able to saunter casually up to her and throw yourself at her feet and beg for mercy. That’s what I think.’
‘Not far off the mark.’
‘And she ignored all your messages, dumped the flowers on your doorstep and didn’t set foot outside from the moment you came home from work to the minute you left again in the morning?’
‘She tell you all this?’ Meredith asked, resigned to embarrassment.
‘She didn’t have to. Like you said earlier, I’ve known the pair of you right from the start. So you followed her over here to try and change her mind?’
Meredith nodded. ‘Waste of time and money. She’d have no more to do with me over here than she would back home. I guess she just about wore me down. The day she died, I left her another message on the answering machine. I swore it was going to be the last, and I told her so. I said it was her last chance to put it back together, otherwise I was going to assume she meant what she said and take appropriate action.’
‘Ah.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I was wondering how the cops got to you so fast.’
‘Wonder no more,’ Meredith said wryly. ‘I left the number, of course.’
‘And you knew all about the plot?’
‘Oh,