“I’m pretty talked out,” Ellie called after her. “Tomorrow?”
“How did you get onto the Pharminex story, anyway?” Meg went on as if Ellie hadn’t answered. Ellie could hear her puttering in the kitchen, drawers opening and closing, cabinets too. “You never talk about that.”
Ellie pretended to think. She got up from the couch, feeling trapped, and regretting her misguided idea for them to bond. So much for being the good guy.
Her phone buzzed across the coffee table, its black plastic cover whirring against the familiar polished wood. Gabe. Maybe she could use this as an excuse to leave?
“Hello?” She kept her voice low. “I’m still—”
“Yeah, listen.” Gabe’s tone was all business, edgy and somber. “I’m at the front door. Buzz me in.”
Ellie stood, confused and concerned. “Sure. But what’s up?”
“Can you just let me in? It’s freezing.”
“I’m still at Meg’s,” she whispered. Ellie couldn’t risk using the word trapped.
“Let me in. I’ll be Will.”
“Will’s back,” Ellie called out to Meg. “I’ll go let him in.”
“Goody,” Meg’s voice carried from the kitchen. “I’ll get more cheese and stuff. We’ll have a party.” She appeared in the arched entryway to the kitchen, cheese knife in hand, leaning against the jamb. “I guess that’s pretty terrible,” she said. “I mean, Lydia Frost is dead, and Kaitlyn.” She winced. “I’m a total jerk tonight.”
Gabe was stomping his feet on the front stoop when Ellie opened the door. Outside, snow swirled, and the street had filled with cars, many already covered in a layer of white. Leading Gabe inside, Ellie headed for the stairs instead of the elevator to give them more time.
“What’s so important?” she asked, as they tramped their way up. “You okay?”
“It’s about Lydia Frost.” Gabe stopped on the first landing, unzipped his coat and unwrapped his plaid muffler. Stuffed his gloves into pockets. A scatter of white snowflakes melted into his hair. “And Kaitlyn Armistead. The police think their tires were … compromised was the word they used.”
Ellie put a hand on a wooden newel post, her legs momentarily unreliable. “How? By who?”
“No idea,” he said. “So they tell me.”
“They who?”
“My employer knows guys.”
“Did his guys say how it was done?”
“There were stabs in the sidewalls of both cars. The leaks from that would be slow but inexorable.”
Ellie considered this, pictured it. “And that’d be enough to cause a crash?”
“Might’ve been. If road conditions were bad, maybe. They—you know how those accident reconstruction people are.”
“Reconstruction,” Ellie said. Monteiro, she thought. That’s who his boss talked to?
“Point is—” Gabe began.
“Point is,” Ellie interrupted, “I’m no expert, but how could someone rely on such a thing to kill someone?”
She plopped down on one of the steps, her flats on the landing’s hardwood floor, elbows on her knees, chin in her hands. Picturing it again, putting herself in the driver’s seat.
“Someone knew those cars,” Gabe said. “Targeted them. And vandalized them, without getting caught. No matter what the outcome, that’s…” He paused, leaning against the stairway wall, apparently to let her imagine the possibilities. “Your Passat is out there on the street, isn’t it? I drove by it myself.”
“Do you think it was Pharminex?”
“That’s all I can think of.” Gabe’s eyes narrowed. “And, theoretically, if they decided to get rid of Kaitlyn for some reason, or even just scare her…” He pressed his lips together for a second. “It’s so out there, Ellie. Lydia too? But, okay, say this wild theory is true. Pharminex is—” He shrugged. “I can’t even finish such a sentence. But you’ve got to be the reporter they’re searching for. So…”
Ellie stared at the carpet. Envisioned people with knives, or whatever implement, how easy it would be—wouldn’t it?—to weaponize a tire. “Gabe? Shouldn’t you be careful too? You’re helping a law firm sue them. That case could ruin them.”
Being two people was twice as confusing as being one, and Gabe was the only person who knew both Ellie and Nora. She had to trust someone besides herself.
“Ellie, I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about you. That’s why I’m here. I think you should be careful.”
“Me, Ellie? Or me, Nora?” Ellie grabbed the wooden bannister, hauled herself to her feet.
“Not sure what world you’re living in, Ellie,” Gabe said, “but whatever happens to Nora happens to you. And vice versa.”
BEFORE
CHAPTER 51
LACEY
They probably thought she couldn’t hear them whispering, the ruthless sleek women in their funeral-black sheaths and their careful hats sitting in the church pew behind her for Trevor’s memorial service. But she could. Every word. She wouldn’t say their phony-solicitous poor-Lacey sympathy was entertaining, but it reassured her in a way she hadn’t predicted.
She touched the puff of black netting that fell artfully from her own black hat, a widow’s veil designed to allow privacy in her grief but that now also allowed her to watch the sideshow of mourners in this perfect little seaside church, and listen to their not quite muffled discussions of her travails and sorrow.
Poor thing. Poor Lacey.
“They’d only been married eight years.” That was Claire Demarchi, who, Trevor’s mother once confided, had staked her claim on him since they crewed as junior sailors together at the Bayellen Yacht Club’s summer sailing camp. She probably thought she’d dodged a bullet now, with poor Trevor dying so young. Sailing, of all things. He’d always been such an expert sailor.
Brooke, the doctors were saying, still had no memory of it.
“And didn’t they want children?” She recognized India Nee’s breathy whisper. Claire never went anywhere without India, her tennis partner, bridge partner and, according to double-entendre country club whispers, quite a bit more.
“So sad.” Claire’s perfume wafted over the pew, mixing with the pale lavender lilacs and white peonies Brinn Vanderwald had ordered for the service.
Lacey hadn’t seen her mother-in-law since they’d arrived at St. Erasmus an hour earlier. Stoic Brinn wore her grief as a mask of brittle emotion—her eyes red-rimmed, lips pale, hair slicked back, taut as the thin line of her mouth. She spent her days now at Maryland Rehab, sitting by her precious daughter’s bedside, waiting for her to recover.
Why hadn’t Brooke saved her brother? Lacey had said the words out loud, one wine-sodden night on her deck, the words she knew everyone was thinking. Or maybe Trevor had died trying to save her, Lacey had continued, watching Brinn’s face crumble. Maybe your son died to save his little sister. Who may now never recover. It’s awful, isn’t it? So awful? So awful to lose a child? Maybe both your children?
Trevor had vanished. After days of imagining “miracles” and tear-drenched reunions, there’d been another visit from shore patrol. The Caduceus, apparently swamped, was “unsalvageable” and “unrecoverable,” they reported.
Soon after, the search ended. “We’ve done all we can,” a somber lieutenant had told her. “Now we wait.”
Lacey had watched the whole thing on the news, over and over, and described in numbing detail. She’d unwittingly observed it in real life too, the same night it happened. Helicopter rescue beacons—those had to be the lights she’d seen from the deck, the moment her husband was drowning, somewhere in that inky darkness, and she’d been viewing it as if it were entertainment. The red lights of the arriving on-shore ambulances, and blue of the police cars and then the white glare of the TV spotlights. The news showed what Lacey hadn’t been able to see from her deck: Brooke in the netted basket, winched aboard the hovering copter, a limp and sodden marionette fished from the murky bay below.
“Brooke Vanderwa
ld had the presence of mind to hit the Mayday on the boat’s radio,” one coast guard officer told a reporter that night, his rescuer’s face wind-chapped and solemn in the TV crew’s harsh lighting. “Could be she went in to save him, or maybe the wave took her overboard too.”
The reporter’s voice had haunted Lacey, the woman’s dark hair flying wild in a blustery wind as she closed her story. “Officials say they’ll have to wait to hear what Brooke Vanderwald remembers when—and if—she recovers.”
“She’s all we have now,” Brinn had sobbed later, in the bleak empty hours after midnight as they hovered in the stale-green emergency room corridor of Anne Arundel Hospital. Lacey, who was right there in the hallway at the time—right there!—felt her existence begin to blur around the edges, as if she were being erased. She drew her black shawl around her shoulders, her eyes stinging and red-rimmed, her grief over Trevor unabashed and relentless.
“She’ll get better,” Lacey promised. “And of course we hope there’s nothing that’s—do we know how long she went without oxygen?”
The look on Brinn’s face. “I’m so sorry, darling, of course she’ll recover, fully recover. I’m just so devastated. They might still find Trevor. He might be fine. He might be on the shore somewhere. Hurt, and dying and waiting to be found. They have to find him!”
A high-pitched alarm bell beep-beep-beeped through the antiseptic corridor, and Lacey gasped, as if the noise came from inside her brain. A white-uniformed nurse rushed by, ignoring them. The hospital alarm stopped.
Lacey had plopped onto a hard plastic chair in the waiting room corridor. “I know they’re looking, but I can’t stand it. I should be out there. Helping. What if he’s somewhere, hurt and waiting?” She felt her face dampen with tears. “I don’t even know who I am anymore. Oh, Brinn, we’ve both lost … all we have. All.”
Winton Trevor Vanderwald III had not been hurt and waiting, officials had decided after a few days.
“If afraid we’re suspending the rescue operation,” Officer Something had told them. “We are now calling it a recovery, not a rescue. Only wind and tide can provide a time frame.”
The officer had been the one to catch Lacey when her legs finally gave out. Brinn, without a hint of irony, had offered pills, yellow ones and white ones, and Lacey had taken them. She always did what Brinn said. Even still.
Now an unseen church organ began to play, velvet with funereal sorrow, and Lacey recognized “Nearer My God to Thee,” like they played on the Titanic, and whose idea was that? She bit the inside of her cheek, hard, because she had to concentrate on something, and she had to get through this memorial service. Thank goodness for her veil. Maybe she could wear it forever. She’d taken an extra yellow pill. Because what more could hurt her now?
“We’re so sorry, darling.”
Lacey peered through the mesh of her veil at whoever it was—she’d seen these people, at the club, or on her deck, maybe guessing at constellations and drinking her gin. Were they sorry? Was anyone honestly anything?
“Give our best to Win, could you? Tell him we understand why he can’t be here.”
“Of course,” she lied. She watched the couple, all linen and pale silk, slide into a polished oak pew. To them it was Winton Vanderwald who mattered, the man whose son had vanished, had probably died. She didn’t matter, not at all. Not Lacey, his wife, who’d now not only lost her children but her husband, and if she wasn’t careful, she’d be alone, alone, alone.
Winton Vanderwald would not join the mourners for his only son. Trevor’s father had “not been able to cope with it,” so went the proffered explanation of his absence. For Winton, Lacey imagined—hoped for—endless bourbon and endless regret. According to the buzz Lacey overheard, his “indisposition” was being viewed almost reverentially, as if the bond between father and son was too tender and private to put on display.
Poor Brinn. Poor Winton. Their only son had been taken from them. And their daughter, who’d finally come home—bottom line, the moment they’d longed for and now look what had happened—was still in the hospital, tranquilized and uncertain. Lacey, cloaked in black and with only a hint of makeup, had gone to see her, as one did.
The sixteen-year-old girl who had been her reluctant bridesmaid now rested, Ophelia-like, on the starched sheets of the Vanderwald wing of Maryland Rehab. Brooke, sedated and closed-eyed, hadn’t seen Lacey of course, and Lacey felt as if she were at some sort of viewing of a body in limbo, a face bereft of cognition, a mind deciding whether to return. How much would Brooke remember? Doctors said the prognosis was good, and all they could do was “let nature take her course.”
Lacey had a moment, an unworthy flash of schadenfreude, that all the Pharminex horses and all its men could not put their Brooke together again. Only nature could do that.
The sanctuary whispering had started again.
“They’d tried and tried to have children, hadn’t they? So incredibly well off, everything anyone could ever want, and yet … She’s only, what, twenty-eight?” India’s inquiry could not hide her subtext. People relish disaster when it happens to those they envy. Some sort of proof that money can’t buy happiness.
Of course it can, Lacey yearned to correct them. She leaned back, the better to hear, not wanting to miss a syllable. She was hooked on this dissection of her life, on their envy and spite.
“It’s all they talked about. All Brinn talked about too. They didn’t adopt. I’d always wondered about that, but,” Claire paused, “one cannot ask.”
“Shhh.” India hushed her BFF.
Lacey heard more footsteps entering the sanctuary, the same one where they’d been married eight years before. More ironic symmetry. And the voices of the mourners, their gone-too-soons and such-a-shames and he-was-so-youngs seemed far more prevalent than the poor-Laceys.
She dabbed a lace handkerchief at her lips.
She and Trevor had moved away from Maryland, and her difficult pregnancies had often prevented her from returning to the Vanderwald home for holidays and special occasions. She got the feeling that they hadn’t missed her, the one who’d married their dear son in such a celebration of love and family, only to disappoint them again and again with possibilities that turned out to be false alarms. Failures.
Then they’d returned to Maryland, where she could no longer hide what her body was doing. Then Brinn—I’m-here-to-help-you Brinn—took over. Brinn had been a mother. She knew how it felt. It felt a way Lacey had to experience. Then Brinn took that away.
It’s rare. She kept hearing that doctor’s voice. Remembering how it felt in that blue paper johnnie, hearing her future laid out in platitudes and actuarial tables. Who cares how rare it is when it’s you?
A photo of Trevor, windblown and smiling, ocean in the background and that orange spinnaker with the damn Pharminex logo—branded even in death—billowing out behind him, had been placed on a silver easel at the front of the church. There was no casket, because there was no body. Lacey tried not to think about that. Would they find him someday? A beachcomber, a sunbather, a child? She’d had a moment, a yellow-pill moment, when she’d imagined him having concocted some grand escape plan, conniving to free himself of his Pharminex responsibilities. To free himself from Lacey, no matter what the cost. Imagined that he was somewhere, selecting a new life, same as she had.
But that was the pills, and this church was real, and Trevor was never coming back.
Now Lacey Grisham Vanderwald had to figure out what to do next.
Her life depended on it.
CHAPTER 52
ELLIE
Ellie stood inside her apartment building’s chilly entryway, holding her second coffee of the morning in a paper cup, waiting for a five-star Uber driver named Xavier to arrive in his white Prius to take her to Channel 11. She knew it was silly, probably paranoid and possibly embarrassing. But as Ellie tapped her cell phone to call the ride share service, she figured it was better to be safe than sorry. Especially if it turned out sorry me
ant she wouldn’t be alive to discuss her choice. Four minutes until arrival, the app promised. Last night’s snow had settled into this blustery Tuesday, leaving an icy coating on everything. Easier, she’d rationalized, to call a ride than to clean off her car.
You should be careful. Will—Gabe—had told her that again last night as she’d walked him to the front door two glasses of wine later. As the two had lingered on the front stoop, she’d given him a quick rundown of her perplexing evening—Meg’s you-never-liked-me outburst, and the disconcerting confession about her brother.
“Just like you said after you saw her at Pharminex. Kind of the same memory you had.” Ellie had worried that Meg might be eavesdropping, and tried to gauge Gabe’s reaction through the gloomy darkness. “Even to the bad skin, and the angst and the brother.”
Gabe had listened, eyes locked on hers. Seemed to be searching her face. “What do you make of that, El?” he’d asked.
Meg had appeared then, breathless, carrying a plate covered with shiny aluminum foil. “Cookies to take! For the kids!” She’d thrust the plate between them. “So glad you’re still here.”
Will—Gabe—had sneaked Ellie a look; then, carrying the plate, he’d turned back onto the streetlighted sidewalk. She’d watched him, Meg by her side, until he vanished into the night.
What did she make of Meg’s story? Gabe had asked. Good question, Ellie thought now. She stared out the foyer’s leaded front window into the dour morning, imagining tires and skids on highways. If anything happened to her, at least Lieutenant Monteiro was aware she was looking into Pharminex. Later today, she’d call him and ask for updates. See if he thought she should watch her back. Or her tires.
Two minutes, the ride share app said.
Plenty of time. She tossed her empty cup in the entryway wastebasket, yanked open the building’s front door and picked her way down not yet shoveled front steps. She wasn’t the first to leave today, she could tell from the footprints, but she couldn’t tell if any were Meg’s.
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