by Pamela Crane
‘Hey, you okay?’ I asked, grabbing a box of tissues from the pantry and pulling out a chair beside her.
She shook her head. I passed her the tissues. She pulled out two.
‘What’s going on? You’re not pregnant too, are you? Because I’ve never cried more in my life.’ I grinned weakly and she chuckled drunkenly. We were quite a pair of emotional messes.
‘Yeah, pregnancy hormones are a bitch.’ She blew her nose and glanced over at me, her eyes rimmed in drippy mascara. ‘But no, I’m not pregnant. I’m just having a hard day. Nix that – a hard week.’
‘Is this about your mom’s visit with the cops last night?’ I knew the feeling well, wondering if my mom was okay. My entire childhood was spent worrying about my mother.
‘Yes, partly that, and this.’ She turned her gaze to something in her hand. A pen. She examined it, then set it down. ‘The stupid pen.’
‘Please tell me you’re not crying because you ran out of ink.’
‘It’s not that. I’m just … dealing with a lot of memories lately. And this pen brought them all up … again.’
I picked up the pen, flipping it over so I could read the print.
‘The Durham Hotel. Was that a special place for you and Ben?’
She sniggered, a harsh, bitter sound. ‘No, it wasn’t a special place for me, but it was for Ben.’
‘What do you mean?’
She didn’t speak, not at first. Then the sounds formed words and the words formed sentences as the story poured from her lips. ‘It was at this hotel where I … I found … him … Where I found out for sure that Ben was cheating on me. I saw him there with another woman. It shook my world.’
‘Oh no.’ I rested my hand on her shoulder, almost afraid to touch her through her grief.
We sat in silence for a long time, so long I shifted to get up, figuring the conversation was over. She needed time alone. Then she spoke, her story forcing me back into my seat.
‘It started with a strange credit card charge from this hotel. I didn’t even usually check the credit card statements, but that particular day I did. So I called, thinking it was a mistake. We hadn’t been to a hotel in ages, and never that one. When they told me that it was accurate – they even line listed the extra room charges for me – I thought maybe the credit card had been stolen. Never in a million years did I think my husband would cheat on me. Not after everything I’d been through, all we’d been through together. So I activated alerts on my credit card in case it was used again. Then one day I get a notification text that the card had been charged. Same hotel.’
Harper raised the pen to eye level, fixated on it.
‘I needed to know for sure, so I went there. I had to see for myself. There I am, standing at the front desk asking the check-in lady what the person who used the card looked like, when she pointed him out. Across the room in the lounge stood my husband, arm in arm with another woman. A young, blonde homewrecker with a tight body. How cliché is that? Well, I couldn’t face him, not like that, so I ran outside and down the sidewalk. I ran and ran and ran until I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to die that day. Part of me wishes I would have. That was the last time I saw my husband alive.’
‘Oh my goodness, Harper. I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine …’ And yet I could.
‘It’s unimaginable.’ She lifted the wine bottle to her mouth and emptied the remnants in one long gulp. ‘To discover the man you love with all your heart has betrayed you in the worst possible way. It’s … worse than death. I thought I’d been through the worst after losing a child. Well, I was mistaken. That day I met parts of myself I never knew existed, and I could only feel darkness inside of me. Now I have no idea who I am anymore. I lost the best parts of me because he took them from me. I’ll never be able to trust someone ever again.’ She paused. ‘Other than Lane, that is.’
‘I understand.’ And I truly did. ‘Betrayal changes you.’ It was like falling into a pool. The initial shock is cold and unfamiliar, but as you get used to it, it starts to become part of you, soaking into you. ‘I feel terrible that you had to go through that.’
‘If it would have ended with Ben’s death I might have been able to move on. But it didn’t. I ended up doing something terrible that I can’t fix, and now I don’t know what’s going to happen. The irony is that Ben’s cheating was nothing compared to what I’ve done.’
‘What do you mean?’
She stopped. Realization sparked in her eyes. She hadn’t meant to share that, had she?
‘Sorry, I don’t know what I’m saying. I really should have kept that to myself,’ she hastily muttered.
What sin could a throw-pillow-loving, gluten-free homemaker possibly have committed that she couldn’t come back from? I wanted to Heimlich the details out of her, but her mouth was clamped shut. Conversation closed.
‘Did you ever confront the woman he was cheating with?’
‘No, I was too shaken up at the time, and honestly, if I ever did meet her again I’d probably kill her. So it’s for the best I never got the chance.’ She pushed her chair out and stood, balling up the used tissues and grabbing the neck of the now empty wine bottle.
‘I had no idea you had been through so much. And then, after all that, losing your husband …’
‘I lost him a year ago, Candace. I had been trying to save a marriage that was already dead. When I found out he was at that hotel with another woman – when I really knew it – I couldn’t bear to see Ben or my kids or my mother or Lane. I was humiliated and broken. I spent the rest of that night crying in my car wondering why I had lost him. Wondering what I could have done to prevent him from cheating. You know what conclusion I came to? Nothing. I couldn’t have done a damn thing differently.’
‘And that’s on him, not on you. You didn’t force him to cheat.’
‘No, but I pushed him away. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I made his life a living hell, just as he did to me.’ She shrugged, walking toward the kitchen. ‘In that way I suppose we were perfect for each other.’
I didn’t know what to say, how to console her.
She paused, her back toward me. ‘I’m sorry I’m so protective of Lane.’ When she turned to face me, her cheeks were wet with tears.
‘I understand that.’
‘And I know it’s not right of me. I judged you wrongly from the moment I met you, and I’m sorry. I can’t seem to let my brother go, and I don’t know why.’ The tears came fluidly now, and I rushed to her side.
‘Hey, I get it, okay? You don’t need to apologize anymore. And you don’t need to cry over it.’ Emotions made me uncomfortable. Maybe it was because my father never allowed me to have them.
‘It’s just … I love him more than I love myself,’ she sniffled, ‘and I’ll do whatever it takes to make him happy. But I’m sad over what that has turned me into.’
As Harper tossed the bottle in the recycling bin, I returned to the dining room to pick up the paper she had left on the table, not meaning to read it as I carried it to the kitchen. I paused in the doorway, my eyes glued to the letters and words in front of me. A last message from Ben to Harper:
My darling Harper,
You saw this coming, didn’t you? You knew one day you’d walk into our home and find me like this, taken by my own hand. You had to, after all the suffering. All the secrets. All the pain …
And I wondered why the police hadn’t seen this yet.
Chapter 29
Harper
Now that I was starting to sober up, I could feel the regret. Why on earth did I open up to Candace? God only knew what she thought of me after discovering that my husband had cheated on me, so I had stalked him, and now he was conveniently dead. I might as well have confessed to murder.
It was too late to take it all back, or plead drunken rambling. Note to self: Never drink a whole bottle of wine alone. In my defense, the alcohol had done most of the talking, and some of the conversational details were a little v
ague. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure about what I had said or left unsaid, but as snippets of the conversation pieced together in my head, the big picture was concerning. I had said too much.
I checked the time. Candace was down for her afternoon nap, and Lane was working at the hospital until dinnertime. I still had a couple hours before the kids were due home from school, so I grabbed my keys and headed to the car. I couldn’t stand another minute in this house. I stood beside the car, aiming my key fob at the moving target as the world tilted back and forth. Damn, maybe I wasn’t as sober as I thought. My first attempt at unlocking the car failed as I hit the lock button on my fob, then the alarm.
‘Come. On!’
As the alarm blasted throughout the neighborhood, I punched every button on the fob until it shut off. In the haze of slippery thoughts I knew this was a bad decision. A terrible decision to drive. Don’t drink and drive. I’d heard the slogan repeatedly since I was a teenager. But right now, in this moment, I didn’t care about anything, because chances were high I was going to be arrested soon anyway. Might as well go out with a bang.
It took four tries for me to properly insert the key into the ignition. Then two tries to successfully back out of the driveway. It took so much focus I strained my eyes, igniting a headache. The stretch of street before me was wobbly and blurred, so I leaned forward in my seat, nearly pressing my face to the windshield. As I turned onto the main street, a police cruiser pulled up behind me at the stoplight.
‘Crap!’ I shouted to the dead air. How long had he been following me?
Concentrate, I reminded myself. Just drive normally. Except that the street was swimming and swaying and making it hard to drive normally. Turn right. Blinker on. Green light. Slowly hit the gas. It was like being sixteen, learning how to drive for the first time, with my mother screaming directions at me from the passenger seat: Put your blinker on! Accelerate slowly! Red light half a mile ahead! Slow down before you kill us! Every instruction an exclamation point.
I prayed over the next mile as the cop car followed me, mumbling pleasedon’tswerve pleasedon’tswerve pleasedon’tswerve. Several glances in the rearview mirror later and he was still there, still following me. Two turns, always behind me. Was he tailing me on purpose? Had Detective Meltzer told him to keep tabs on me?
A burst of blue and red lights sent my heart into overdrive. The siren cut through my concentration. He was pulling me over. My first DUI. I slowed to a crawl, aiming the car toward the berm, and prayed he wouldn’t give me a breathalyzer test. If I could talk my way out of it, I still had a slim shot of not getting caught. I hadn’t broken any driving laws … that I knew of, at least. As I mentally prepared my defense – I thought I was going the speed limit, Officer. I used my signal for every turn, sir – the cruiser shot out from behind me, flying into the open lane beside me, careening ahead with siren blaring and lights flashing.
It hadn’t been for me after all. Thank God for bigger criminals than me. Heart attack averted!
At last I reached the turn-in to my mother’s subdivision. Exhaling a breath of relief – had I held my breath the entire drive here? – I passed my mom’s house twice before crookedly pulling into the driveway.
I stumbled my way out of the car, up the walkway, onto the porch stoop, and dizzily knocked. Mom answered in a huff.
‘Harper.’ Ouch. Her shrill voice hurt my ears. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I … I need you, Mommy. I need your help.’
‘Oh my God. Are you drunk?’
So I wasn’t hiding it as well as I thought.
‘Nooo,’ I blurted, then tripped over my own foot while just standing there. ‘Okay, maybe a little tipsy.’
She exhaled an annoyed sigh and dragged me inside by my arm. ‘Get in here. I’ll make you a coffee. You can’t possibly drive home like this. You’re lucky you made it here alive.’
The fragrance of lilac assaulted my migraine-sensitive nose.
‘Sit,’ she ordered.
Wobbling my way into the living room, I fell into the first armchair I came to. From the kitchen I heard her tinkering with coffee mugs and the coffeemaker.
‘You hungry?’ she asked. ‘You should probably eat something to help soak up the alcohol.’
Silly Mom. I was already two sheets to the wind. No amount of food was going to soak up the wine flowing through my veins. But I was craving something salty, so I shouted, ‘Got any chips?’
‘Lord help me,’ she mumbled. ‘What is wrong with you?’
‘I heard that!’ I yelled. ‘Are you mad at me?’
A clatter of ceramic later, Mom entered carrying two mugs of coffee and took a seat on the sofa across from me. While I sobered up on black coffee, Mom topped hers off with cream and sugar.
‘No, I’m not mad at you. Disappointed though, yes.’
‘Don’t pull that motherly disappointment on me. I wrote the book on it.’ I often used that same line on Elise when she disobeyed. I wonder where I learned it from.
‘So what’s going on that has you drunk as a skunk in the middle of the afternoon?’ she asked, resting her hand on her bare collarbone.
‘Where’s your necklace?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I must have forgotten to put it on today. I still need to fix that clasp before I lose it. So …? Don’t deflect, Harper. Spill it. What’s going on?’
‘Everything’s gone to shit, Mom.’
She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘Language, Harper. You know better than to talk like that.’
‘Apparently I don’t know better. I told Candace about Ben.’
‘What about Ben?’
‘That he had been cheating on me. That I saw him at the hotel with the other woman. I don’t think – now I could be wrong, because the details are fuzzy – but I don’t think I told her that Lane and I tampered with the scene that night. But God knows what all I said. The whole conversation is a blur.’
‘Oh, Harper.’ She plunged back in her seat, shaking her head. Coffee sloshed onto her pants. ‘That is bad. Please tell me you’re kidding.’
‘I wish I was.’
‘Certainly you didn’t tell her everything?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ I wasn’t sure at all, to be honest, ‘but more than I should have. I can’t imagine what’s going through her head right now.’ I groaned. As Julia Roberts so aptly said in Pretty Woman, ‘Big mistake. Big. Huge.’
Sipping the black coffee, I winced at its bitterness. ‘At least I didn’t tell her about Medea Kent.’
‘Medea Kent? Who’s that?’
That’s right, I hadn’t told Mom about that fun little discovery. ‘Oh, the other beneficiary on Ben’s life insurance policy. The name of his mistress.’
‘He named his mistress on his life insurance policy? You can’t be serious.’
‘Yup, I have officially hit an all-time low.’
I set my coffee on the white-painted table between us. A lilac-scented candle flickered like a jagged talon, its spear point hot and alluring. Staring at the flame, my vision glazed over as a disk of wax pooled at the base of the wick. While my mother’s voice wah wah wah’d in the background, my thoughts drifted back to Jackson in his bedroom, setting the pictures aflame. I wondered what it felt like to be engulfed by fire, to watch everything burn, and for the first time I understood my little pyromaniac.
‘Harper!’ Mom’s stridence shook the daydream loose. ‘Where’d you go off to inside your head?’
‘Sorry, my brain keeps wandering.’
‘As I was saying, there’s nothing you can do except to regain the upper hand. And you can only do that by gaining Candace’s trust, restoring family order.’
I grinned. Candace. So Mom did know her preferred name.
‘Ha! Family order? What order do we even have? I’m probably a suspect in my cheating husband’s murder, Lane married a pathological liar, my son is now an arsonist, my daughter has become a horror enthusiast, you’re being questioned about Michelle’s murder, and
Ben’s mistress is taking half my money. If you have any idea how to restore family order, I’m all ears, Mom. Because I’m feeling clueless right now.’
‘Stop your wallowing and do something about it!’ Mom was missing the part of the heart that doled out empathy. ‘First things first, we need to get Candace out of the way. She’s no good for your brother. Then we need to sell your house and take care of your family. Use that money to start over. Help each other heal. Then, when you’re emotionally ready, you can move forward again. But like I said, Candace has got to go. By any means necessary. Do whatever it takes.’
‘Mom, you’re sounding an awful lot like you did when you talked about wanting Ben gone. And now he’s dead.’
I eyed her warily, the dark overture sobering me more than the coffee ever could. She stared into her cup. Avoidance. What wasn’t she telling me?
‘I just want you to get back to normal, and you can’t do that with a manipulative liar in your midst.’
I shook my head. ‘I can’t afford to piss her off. Lane blindly loves her, for better or for worse, and if I get on her bad side I’m afraid I’ll lose him. Plus, Candace knows too much. And I already told you I’m not selling my house. Not yet. Maybe not ever. What is your obsession with me selling it?’
‘I haven’t been totally honest with you.’ Mom raised her hands, as if surrendering the truth. ‘I’ve found myself in somewhat of a … financial predicament. I was hoping you would be willing to sell the house so that you could loan me a little money to pay off some bills.’
‘I would if I could, Mom, you know that. But it’s too risky for me to try to sell the house anyway. What if they seize my earnings on top of everything else? Then I would be left with nothing. Literally. They haven’t unfrozen my bank accounts yet. And it might be months before I get my insurance payout. Have you asked Lane?’