She turned off the blow-dryer and gathered the clothes she’d rejected that morning from the floor, in case Kimber decided to walk all over them or pitch them into the hallway. Opening the door from the bathroom to her own bedroom, she tossed the clothes onto a chair. She liked having cute clothes and bought as many as she could with the money she earned at the steakhouse. Kimber didn’t care much about clothes and sometimes even wore the same flannel shirt, or T-shirt and jeans, to school twice in one week. It was like they weren’t even related. Kimber also read their father’s cast-off Wall Street Journals (which he hardly read anyway) and carried a shabby leather briefcase to school instead of a backpack. More than once Michelle heard Kimber tell their exasperated mother that she had more important things to think about than clothes.
“Let’s go!” Kimber popped into Michelle’s room. “Dad’s almost done with breakfast.”
“Just a minute. Get out of my room.”
“Hey, what’s wrong with your eyes?” Kimber stared at her, suspicious. She wore no makeup and was dressed in a mustard T-shirt, her usual hoodie, baggy jeans, and the Doc Martens she’d bought with birthday money.
“Nothing. I said get out of my room.” Michelle turned away, looking for her backpack.
“They’re kind of red. Are you stoned or something? Wait. You’ve been crying, haven’t you?”
Michelle spun around. “Don’t you dare tell Mom and Dad I was crying. Swear, Kimber.” She cried more often than anyone else in her family. She cried about hurt animals, sad movies, and sometimes just because her life felt too difficult. Usually she didn’t bother trying to keep her tears a secret. Kimber teased her about it, but she was used to it. That morning she’d been crying because she kept thinking about their father leaving them. Wasn’t that what the notes were hinting would happen?
A familiar shrewd look came into Kimber’s eyes. “Okay. Give me two dollars.”
Michelle detested that look. She and Kimber had once been close, but Kimber’s jealousy had turned her into a tattletale and an occasional blackmailer. Although when Michelle balked at her demands, Kimber usually negotiated rather than told on her. The whole thing made Michelle sad, and made her pity Kimber.
“Fine. But it has to be quarters,” she said. “Take them off my dresser.”
Kimber’s brief hesitation told her that she suspected she could’ve demanded more. But she stayed silent and clomped over to the dresser to stuff eight quarters into the front pocket of her jeans.
Their father called from downstairs. “In four minutes I’m pulling out of the driveway, girls.”
“We’re coming, Daddy!” Kimber shouted. She looked at Michelle. “You better be ready or I’m telling—money or not.”
Michelle slammed her bedroom door in her sister’s face. But they both knew she would be ready.
Chapter Eighteen
On the way back to Diana’s, Kimber stops at Sephora in the Galleria to replace what’s stranded in her bathroom at home. She didn’t take much to the lake. Shopping feels like a weirdly normal thing to do at a time when nothing feels normal at all. Like going to the grocery store on Christmas. But she soon loses herself in the rows and rows of lipstick and eye shadow, plumpers and highlighters. When she dallies between eye-shadow brands, a consultant asks her if she wants her to do her eyes, and she surprises herself by agreeing.
She’s relieved that her finished face looks much more like the person she was a week ago. Same small but bright eyes, good brows, and naturally full lips. The over-fullness of her cheeks has always disappointed her. Her dream has always been to have high, delicate cheekbones like Diana’s. Kimber’s mother often talked about how Michelle had the best cheekbones in the family. But the consultant has done an excellent contouring job, and Kimber buys every product she suggested.
Her mood improved, she stops in Nordstrom to buy new bras. She could certainly get through even the next couple of weeks with the two she took to the lake, but one is old and limp.
Why are you worried about what your bra looks like?
I deserve something nice. It’s the only reason I need.
The pajama department is right beside the bras, and she flicks through the sale rack, looking for something a little less extravagant than the confection Diana’s shopper selected. She finds a simple heather-gray Flora Nikrooz cami-and-shorts set and a Natori knit chemise in her size, and lays them on the checkout counter near the dressing room. There’s no salesperson in sight. She has to take her time picking out bras, remembering now why she hates to go bra shopping. There are too damn many, and the sizes aren’t really uniform. Finally she takes nearly a dozen into the dressing room, cursing the absent salesperson who might have helped with fitting her.
In the end, she spends more than fifteen minutes trying them all on but finds only one that works. Leaving the others in the dressing room, she takes it out to the counter, where a salesperson has finally shown up.
“Did you find everything all right?” the woman says, as though Kimber hasn’t spent the last twenty minutes helping herself.
Kimber glances around the counter, puzzled. “I put a nightgown and a cami set right here.” She touches the countertop.
The woman adjusts her tortoiseshell reading glasses and smiles. “Your friend said he wanted to surprise you. He paid for them and said he’d have them waiting for you at your house. I wish I had friends like that! Shall I put this on your Nordstrom account?”
“I wasn’t shopping with anyone else.”
It could be a mistake. Just a weird mistake.
Sure it is.
Recovering, Kimber asks calmly if the man gave his name and if she could remember what he looked like.
The woman hesitates, and Kimber can see she knows she screwed up in some way. Surprises like that don’t happen. Finally the woman leans forward.
“Are you in a dangerous domestic situation? It did seem a little odd to me. And he paid cash.”
“What did he look like?” Kimber barely gets the words out.
Just tell me it was him, dammit!
“He seemed…ordinary. Brown hair. Glasses. Oh, and he had biking clothes on. You know. Yellow and black, like a bumblebee.”
Kimber scans the adjoining departments for Lance Wilson with a growing sense of dread. It’s late on a Wednesday afternoon, and the other departments are empty. Thank God. Hurrying toward the escalator, she throws a “Thank you” over her shoulder, leaving the woman staring after her.
Shaun answers right away. “I was going to call you tonight. How are you?”
Kimber’s hands are sweaty on the steering wheel, and the right one shakes if she lifts it away. “Shaun, he followed me to the Galleria. He bought me freaking pajamas! He told the woman he was going to take them home and surprise me. Who does that? What’s he trying to do?” She’s almost shouting now, and Shaun tells her to take a breath because he can’t understand her.
“Wait a minute.” She pulls into the lot of the little market across from the Carmelite monastery so she can concentrate enough to explain.
When she finishes, he gives a low whistle. “That’s major-league bizarre.”
“I want him arrested.”
“For buying you pajamas?”
“This isn’t funny.” She wipes her damp palms on her shorts. “He’s stalking me.”
Shaun sighs. “You don’t have evidence of anything serious enough to have him arrested. He’d have to do way more egregious things, like show up at your work or troll you online or—”
“Move into my house, maybe?”
“Now who’s being funny? Listen. I have better news.”
Kimber looks around the parking lot and at the stacking early rush-hour traffic out on Clayton Road. No sign of Lance Wilson or his bike. Cyclists don’t spend much time on heavily trafficked roads during rush hour unless they have a death wish.
I’ve got a death wish for you, you bastard.
“What is it?”
Shaun tells her that the social sec
urity number Lance Wilson used on the lease, the one the police have, does belong to someone named Lance Wilson. “But that Lance Wilson has been in a coma in a nursing facility for the past seven months.”
She pounds the steering wheel. “I knew he was a fraud.” Some of the fear and anguish of the past half hour drops away.
“It explains why the police didn’t find anything on his record. The real Lance Wilson is clean as a whistle. Not even a parking ticket. Once we let them know this, you’ll be golden. ID theft will get his ass out of your house and thrown in jail.”
Then he’ll have nothing to lose. He’ll tell them about Michelle. He’ll tell them about me.
“I don’t want the police to know yet, okay? If they bust him for that, I’ll never find out why he did it. He’ll go to jail, and it will be over.”
Shaun’s voice is stern now, and he sounds like an irritated father explaining something to a child. “That’s what we’re trying to do. End it, remember?”
“I’ll tell them. But I don’t want to tell them yet. Let’s see if Gabriel can get a judge to force him out first. He says he can get it scheduled for early next week. Just see what else you can find out about him. Please, Shaun?”
Chapter Nineteen
Kimber lets herself in Diana’s front door, ready to go straight up to her room. All she wants to do is clean up, have a glass of wine, and crash for a while before dinner. So much has happened. She should call Gabriel and bring him up to date. Still, the confirmation that Lance Wilson definitely isn’t who he says he is pleases her enormously. Her feet are already on the stairs when she hears someone moving around in the family room. She stops, listening. Diana’s car was gone from the garage. She quietly makes her way down the hall.
Kyle stands by the bar in the family room, one hand in the pocket of his khakis, the other wrapped around a crystal Old-Fashioned glass. She doesn’t have to see what’s in the glass to know it contains a single ice cube and two fingers of an inexpensive blended Scotch called The Famous Grouse. She also knows his friends give him a hard time for drinking a blend because they’re all single-malt guys. But when he starts toward her, slowly, wearing a relaxed grin on his sun-darkened, handsome face, she glances away, uncomfortable. On the bar beyond him is an unfamiliar bottle with the cartoon face of a man and the words BIG PEAT on the label.
“Where’s the Grouse? You changed your Scotch?” In her current freaked-out emotional state, she’s wary of Kyle. “I thought you had a thing tonight.”
“You look like you’ve had a rough day, baby. Let me fix you something. G and T, lime, not lemon?”
The thought of the sour drink makes her tongue tingle. Baby. She hasn’t been anyone’s baby in a long time. “That sounds good. Thanks.” Despite the circumstances, she can use a drink.
Where are you, Diana? Come rescue us.
You’re on your own, honey.
As though reading her thoughts, Kyle tells her that Diana and Hadley have gone to the grocery store in search of bread and the hobby store for supplies for a craft project. “They left about half an hour ago. My meeting got cancelled, so I came on home.”
She sinks into the overstuffed sofa facing the fireplace. Outside the French doors to the patio, the August heat shimmers above the paving stones. Kyle hands her the cool crystal glass and sits beside her. His scent is familiar: bergamot and heather. In her Kyle-obsessed days, she’d bought a tube of his aftershave cream and kept it in her bedside drawer, smoothing it across her chest, her head full of him as she masturbated those nights when he was home with Diana and Hadley. The tube is nearly empty, but she never threw it away, even though the affair was long over by the time she moved into the house. Has Lance Wilson—or whoever the guy is—found it? Perhaps he’s even used it.
Part of the thrill of her affair with Kyle was the wrongness of it. She knew he had a wife named Diana and a daughter. He had to pursue her at first, but the potent attraction between them meant she wasn’t hard to convince.
I’m not a nice person. I don’t want to care, she’d told herself. Neither of them wanted to be married to the other. Kimber liked being on her own, and Kyle loved Diana. When he confided that sex was physically painful for Diana and surgery hadn’t helped, she’d thought it was his bullshit rationalization. Still, she was happy, and she wasn’t hurting anyone. The affair lasted two years.
Nothing would be riskier than screwing him right now on this sumptuous sofa in the perfectly decorated Christie family room. Nothing would be more exciting. But her sense of self-preservation quickly surfaces, and a vulgar phrase she picked up from one of the DJs flashes into her mind: Don’t shit where you eat. Diana is a better person than either of them, and Kimber doesn’t want to hurt her any more than she already has, whether Diana knows she’s been hurt or not.
Still, the image of that pink garment at Gabriel’s nags her like a cavity, on top of the hell she’s gone through the last few days. She could screw Kyle’s brains out simply for mental relief.
Drinking deeply of the G and T, she lets her head sink into the generous cushion. It’s then she clearly hears the Jewel song playing softly from the speakers built into the walls.
“Come on. Tell me what’s up.”
Kyle runs one finger along her arm, from wrist to shoulder, making the tiny hairs tingle. They have sat here like this before.
“Gabriel’s a good guy, Kyle. You don’t need to be such a dick to him. What I did to him was bad enough.”
Kyle deflects, as he so often does, gently pushing her hair away from her cheek and behind one ear. “You got a lot of sun at the lake. You should take better care of your skin.”
Is he twitting her about her age? “I wish I hadn’t gone to the stupid lake. It was one of the worst cabins I’ve ever been to. If I’d stayed home, none of this would’ve happened.”
“Random. You can’t help that it happened to you.” Now his hand moves back to her arm, his fingers slowly trailing back and forth over her skin, and she doesn’t resist. It’s dangerous. Her body screams for her to put her hand on the erection pushing against his khakis, but she doesn’t want to give in. The voice in her head whispers, Oh, go ahead. You deserve some attention.
“Don’t worry so much,” he says. “I’m sure the valiant Gabriel will have him out of there in no time. He’s such an eager beaver.”
Ah. Is that all? She can feel herself retreating from him. It’s been two years since he dumped her, and even though she and Gabriel aren’t dating anymore, Kyle sees Gabriel as some kind of competition. Glancing down, she notices his erection hasn’t abated. He’s always gotten off on the idea of competing with another man. She thinks back to the time he brought another, younger man into her bed as a lark. It hadn’t gone all that well because he was so competitive.
“I’ll be damned. You’re jealous.” She laughs, breaking the tension.
“Hey, you were mine long before you were his.”
“I’m not a freaking football. And Diana is going to be home any minute.” She playfully but firmly pushes at him.
He stands up, one hand flicking over his pants front, discreetly, as though brushing away the erection. Then he leans down, caressing her shoulder, his palm warm against her skin. “You could’ve asked me to handle this thing at your house. I’m a little hurt you didn’t.” His smile is friendly, but his eyes are serious. For a startled moment she has a fleeting fantasy that he means someone could go to the house and beat up Lance Wilson, or kill him. Kyle is in the building trade and she suspects he does business with all kinds of shady people. People who are never invited to the Christies’ beautiful house.
As he leans closer, she thinks he might kiss her on the lips. At the last second, he ducks his head and gives her a tender, brief kiss on her sun-freckled shoulder. He’s playing with her now.
“Daddy, does Kimber have a boo-boo?”
They turn to see Hadley, standing on the single step leading into the family room from the open patio door.
At dinner, while
Hadley prattles on about her project and Kyle eats, seemingly unfazed, Kimber observes Diana. What, if anything, did she see? Maybe she didn’t even hear what Hadley said. She gave no obvious reaction, just followed Hadley in with the shopping bags. Why is it that being around Kyle and Diana at the same time affects her like some kind of strange drug? There have been times, mostly when she and Diana have drunk too much wine, that she imagines confessing, seeing the look on Diana’s face as she realizes their relationship is based on a big fat lie. But even though she fantasizes about it—and knows, seriously, that it’s kind of sick—she would never actually do it. Diana has been her best friend, really her only friend these days, almost as long as Kyle was her lover.
After dinner, Hadley begs Kimber to listen as she reads several books, and for an hour they’re wrapped in the worlds of Amelia Bedelia and two girls named Ivy and Bean. Hadley reads quite well, of course, and Kimber half listens as she absently strokes Hadley’s fragrant curls. Every so often she sneaks a glance at her phone, wondering if Gabriel or Shaun will have some news. When Hadley is finally tucked in, she goes downstairs to catch Diana up on what she found out earlier in the day, particularly about Gabriel’s theory that it could all be a plot by an unhappy client or a massive joke. Somehow she must try to build a plausible explanation for what’s going on, even though she knows it’s misdirection. If they look too hard for the truth, they will see her as she is and not how she needs them to see her.
Diana smiles up from her kitchen desk, where she’s working on some fundraiser. She sets her reading glasses, which she is vain about wearing in front of other people, discreetly to the side.
“Long day,” Kimber says, her voice tentative. “Busy.”
“I have to get this plan out tonight. They’ve moved up the meeting. I’m hoping to get to bed before midnight.”
The Stranger Inside Page 9