Not a Happy Family

by Shari Lapena

  The truth is, they’re all so much better off now that their parents have been murdered. No long years—perhaps decades—of waiting for their inheritance. No more jumping to their father’s tune, no endless years of depressing, dutiful visits to old-age homes. They’ve been spared all that. They can start to live. If it wouldn’t be so unseemly, they really ought to be having a celebration. He feels like popping a bottle of champagne into the fridge.

  * * *

  • • •

  ted is distracted from his study of Dan when Lisa returns with a tray of coffee cups, milk, and sugar. There’s a weird vibe in the room and it’s making him uncomfortable. Also, he’s been thinking about what Catherine said to him on the phone. Why does she not want anyone to know that she went over there later that night? Surely she’s being foolish about this. Of course she must tell the police—it will help them to better establish a timeline of what happened. He’ll have to talk to her about it as soon as they get home.

  He tries to read Lisa’s face as she places the tray on the coffee table, but it’s hidden by her thick, brown hair swinging forward. Dan is being a bit odd—he seems overexcited, and Ted wants to know if he’s the only one who’s noticed. He looks from Dan to Catherine, wondering how well he understands either of them. They shared an unusual childhood, Catherine, Dan, and Jenna. A childhood of privilege and pain. Of their parents withholding love and playing favorites. From what Catherine tells him, it has caused long-standing rifts and rivalries among them, but it also binds them in some strange way too. Ted doesn’t have any siblings, he doesn’t know how it works. Catherine has tried to explain her relationship with her brother and sister to him, but as an only child, it’s hard to grasp. There are things going on here that he just doesn’t get. Catherine reaches for a coffee, and they each busy themselves with their cups for a moment.

  Dan says, “We should call Irena. Ask her to come over.” He picks up his coffee—his cup trembles a little as he brings it to his mouth. “After all, she’s family, she should be here at a time like this.” Then he looks apprehensive and says, “It’s strange that she didn’t call us, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll call her,” Catherine says, digging in her purse at her feet for her cell phone.

  This is another thing Ted has never really understood—the relationship of the rich to their hired help. They say Irena is like family. But from what he’s observed, Fred and Sheila treated her like a domestic worker and not much else. Irena had left with the rest of them when Easter dinner blew up—she’d sided with the kids. They, at least, seem to think of her fondly. Catherine has told him that Irena practically brought them all up. She was much more hands-on than their own mother. He wonders if Irena, too, will be secretly pleased at the turn of events, once she’s over the shock. She will be out a client, but maybe there is something for her in the wills.

  The wills. That’s what they’re all thinking about. Even though no one has mentioned it yet. He wonders who will be the one to finally bring it up. Jenna, probably.

  Being pleased that someone is dead isn’t something you admit to, but Ted knows you can be glad when someone dies. When his own father died of cirrhosis of the liver, Ted was twelve years old and mostly relieved. His mother was perfectly appropriate as the grieving widow, but when they were home alone at night, and he was in his bedroom, he would hear her humming about the house, sounding happy for the first time in years. He’d be the first to admit that the world is better off without certain people in it.

  Catherine puts down her phone. “Irena said she’ll come right over.” She adds, “And when Jenna gets here, we can start making plans for the funeral.”

  Dan nods and says, “Since she found them, maybe Irena can tell us what’s going on over there. What the police are saying.” He looks back at them all, at their silence. “What, aren’t you curious?”

  Ted is curious. He suddenly wonders who killed Fred and Sheila, if it was a robbery at all. He wants to know what Irena can tell them—he’s sure they all want to know. He finds himself looking at Dan and wondering. He remembers the exchange between Dan and his father Easter Sunday in the living room, the flush of impotent rage creeping up Dan’s neck. Ted knows about Dan’s financial troubles—Catherine has told him. Lisa has been confiding in her about how strapped they are for cash. And he knows Catherine has been worried about Dan lately.

  He wonders when, exactly, Fred and Sheila were killed. He thinks back to Sunday night, after that miserable family dinner. Catherine had gone back over there, and he’d gone to bed. When she got home, he doesn’t know when, he was asleep. He woke briefly as she crawled into bed beside him.

  “Go back to sleep,” she whispered.

  “Everything all right?” he murmured.

  “Yes, everything’s fine.” She kissed him and turned on her side.

  The next morning she’d told him at breakfast that she and her mother had talked the night before. She explained that her mother had left her cell phone downstairs, and that’s why she missed her call.

  “What did she want to talk to you about?” he asked.

  “She wants me to talk to Dad about Jenna. He wants to cut off her allowance, and she asked me to intercede. She doesn’t want Jenna moving home.” Now, Ted looks at his wife and feels his stomach curdle a little. It’s just occurred to him that she might have missed the murders by a short time. What if she’d arrived there in the middle of it?

  She’d be dead too.

  12

  Audrey is feeling much better, having mostly recovered from her nasty flu. The only sign of it is a lingering redness around her nose. She’s in the car on her way to the grocery store to pick up some milk and bread. She has the radio on, and she’s humming along when the news comes on. The lead story is about a wealthy couple murdered in Brecken Hill. She turns the volume up. That’s a little too close to home, she thinks.

  There is no name or address given for the victims. She pulls over into a plaza and calls Fred to see what he knows about it. When there’s no answer on the landline, she tries his cell, which goes to voice mail. Still, she’s not really concerned. She doesn’t live far away, although her home is in a much less wealthy neighborhood, and out of curiosity she decides to head to Brecken Hill.

  She drives through the familiar winding enclave of wealthy homes. It’s only when she’s approaching Fred and Sheila’s house that she sees all the activity. There are police cars stationed at the end of the driveway, and as she tries to pull in, her heart thumping hard now, she’s turned away. She catches a glimpse of an ambulance and other vehicles up closer to the house, yellow tape, and swarms of people, and it suddenly hits her.

  She has to pull the car over to the side of the road for a few minutes to process it, her hands trembling on the steering wheel. Fred and Sheila are the murdered couple. It seems impossible. Fred, murdered. He’s the least likely murder victim she can imagine—he’s always been so powerful, so intimidating. He must be furious, she thinks.

  This changes things. She’s going to get her windfall a little sooner than she expected.

  She reaches for her cell and calls Catherine’s house—she doesn’t have her cell number. There’s no answer, but Audrey realizes she’d be at work. She forgets about the groceries. She decides to drive to Dan’s house first since there’s no answer at Catherine’s. If there’s no one there, she’ll try Catherine’s. She knows there will be a gathering of the family at either Dan’s or Catherine’s, and no one is going to tell her.

  * * *

  • • •

  after leaving catherine Merton’s office, Reyes and Barr return to the crime scene. The vultures are still circling overhead, dark against the pale-blue sky. Reyes catches Barr glancing up uneasily at the birds. He spots the medical examiner, Jim Alvarez, and he and Barr walk over to speak to him.

  “Quite a messy one,” the ME says, as Reyes nods agreement. “We’ll move the bodies
in a bit, get to the autopsies later this afternoon. Probably start with the female.” Alvarez adds, “Why don’t you come by tomorrow morning, we should have something for you by then.”

  Inside the house, in the kitchen, Reyes approaches May Bannerjee. Fred Merton is still lying on the kitchen floor. “Anything interesting?” he asks, Barr at his elbow.

  “I think we found the murder weapon for him,” Bannerjee says. “Here, take a look.” She leads them over to the sink and shows him a knife in a clear evidence bag lying on the adjacent counter. “It’s the carving knife from the knife block there,” she says, pointing to it. “It was all cleaned up and put back in the knife block.”

  Reyes glances down at the knife and then at the knife block. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “Any prints?”

  “No. It’s been thoroughly washed and wiped down. But there are still microscopic flecks of blood—it’s harder to wash those away. We’ll know for sure in a bit.”

  Reyes looks at Barr, who is as surprised as he is. This doesn’t fit with the kind of crime scene they found here. You would expect the killer to take the knife and throw it away somewhere it will never be found—in the Hudson River, for instance. Why clean and return the knife to its place? “Any sign of what was used as the ligature on the wife?”

  “No, but we’re still looking. Anyway, I’m not finished about the knife,” Bannerjee tells him. “Look, here,” she says, squatting down and pointing out some markings in the blood on the floor. “The knife lay on the floor beside the body for quite a while—you can see the outline of it, where the blood dried. It was there for perhaps a day or more before it was picked up, cleaned, and returned to the block.”

  “What?” Barr exclaims.

  “So—not by the killer,” Reyes says.

  Bannerjee shakes her head. “Not unless he came back, and there’s no evidence of that.”

  “The cleaning lady,” Barr says. “Her bloody footprints go right to the sink.”

  Reyes nods thoughtfully. “Maybe she did it. And there’s only one reason she would do that.”

  Barr completes his thought. “To protect somebody.”

  Reyes bites his lower lip. “What about the rest of the house?” he asks.

  “We’ve got several sets of prints to eliminate—probably from family over for dinner on Easter, and the cleaning lady.” She adds, “Won’t get any tire tracks off that paved drive.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Reyes tells her. “Let’s take a closer look around,” he says to Barr. They head back upstairs. There are two technicians in the master bedroom, still dusting for fingerprints. One of them looks up when he sees the detectives. “Blood smears but no prints on the wallets, handbag, drawers, and the jewelry box—whoever it was wore gloves.”

  Reyes nods, unsurprised, and he and Barr move into the en suite bathroom. Reyes opens the medicine cabinet with his gloved hands and looks at the medications on the shelf. There’s an assortment—the kinds of things you’d expect to find in the medicine cabinet of an older couple. There’s a prescription for strong pain medication for Fred. He picks up another vial, for Sheila Merton. He checks the date. The prescription was filled less than two weeks ago. Alprazolam. He turns to Barr. “Do you have any idea what Alprazolam is?”

  She looks at the vial in his hand and nods. “Xanax. It’s a powerful antianxiety medication.”

  “Look at the date,” Reyes says. “What was Sheila so anxious about lately?” He places it back inside the cabinet, and Barr notes the name of the medication and the doctor who prescribed it in her notebook.

  Together they systematically go through the rest of the house, but other than the downstairs and the master bedroom, the place appears to be untouched by the intruder. On the same floor as the master bedroom is a spare bedroom, another bathroom, and another large room with an attached sitting room and an en suite bath that used to be Irena’s when she lived with them. They know this from their earlier walk-through with Irena. Reyes enters Irena’s old bedroom now, his mind turning to the cleaning lady.

  She moved out long ago. The dresser drawers are empty, the closet is bare; there are no books, no trinkets on the shelves, nothing in the adjoining bathroom or sitting room. The rooms haven’t been inhabited for years. He wonders what it was like for Irena when she lived here. It’s a luxurious suite, but she was still the hired help. Ready to wake up in the night if one of the children called out in their sleep and needed to be soothed. Up early to get the breakfasts ready, to make the school lunches. Then the cleaning, taking orders. He wonders how close Irena really was to the family. Perhaps she was closer to some of them than others. What were the dynamics here? Do any of the adult children confide in her? He thinks about the carving knife, returned to its place.

  He turns away from the room and climbs up the stairs to the third floor. These are the children’s old rooms. There are three spacious bedrooms up here, a former playroom, and two bathrooms. They have been emptied of anything from the Mertons’ childhoods. They have been done over as attractive guest rooms, redecorated so they look like they never had children living in them at all. Reyes thinks of his own cluttered house and wonders where all their stuff is—their pictures, sports equipment, books, school projects, Lego models, dolls, stuffed animals. Is it all packed away in the basement somewhere?

  “Not exactly sentimental, were they,” Barr says.

  13

  Jenna has had the entire drive up from New York City to think. Her parents are dead, and this changes things profoundly. For all of them.

  She thinks about how it will affect her first. She will get a third of her parents’ estate. It’s a lot of money. She doesn’t know how much exactly or how long it takes to settle an estate and get it paid out. She knows it takes a bit of time, but how much time? Presumably the allowance she is currently receiving will continue until she gets her share. She’s going to be rich. She can buy a place in New York, a studio maybe, on the Lower East Side.

  She thinks of Dan next. Of the three of them, he is the weakest. Emotionally, mentally. She has always wondered if it’s because of how they were brought up, or whether he was just born that way. They’re all so different, and yet they all grew up in the same fucked-up family. But they weren’t treated the same, so there’s that. Maybe Dan’s scars run deeper. But now their father can’t hurt him anymore. He’ll be rich. He won’t have to work at all if he doesn’t want to.

  It’s funny how they all turned out. Catherine, the oldest, is the most conventional. Hardworking, conservative, not wanting to rock the boat. Of course she became a doctor. Of course she wants the house. She wants to become their mother. Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh.

  People think there’s no harm in Catherine, but Jenna knows better.

  People also think that Dan was given every opportunity to succeed, but Jenna knows that isn’t really the case. It was more like he was sabotaged by their father at every turn. Their mother wasn’t that interested in them. She could be warm sometimes, and occasionally fun, but she would also simply disappear whenever things got demanding or difficult or tense. Not that she’d go anywhere, she just disappeared inside herself. She could detach herself from any situation. Poof, and she was gone. She never stood up to their father; she failed to protect them and they resented her for it. It was pathetic really, Jenna thinks, how much they all craved her attention, how they continued to turn to her, knowing she’d let them down. They all hated their father. She’s glad he’s dead. She’s certain the others feel the same way.

  It’s awful, the way they died. But it’s for the best really. It’s a lot of money, and it’s theirs now. If their parents hadn’t been murdered, they would probably have lived for a long time.

  As she drives north on the highway toward Aylesford, the city falling behind, her thoughts turn to Jake. She and Jake hadn’t left the house right after the others on Sunday. They’d
stayed longer, and there had been an argument. She’d called Jake while leaving his apartment on her way to her car. She’d cried down the line, made a big deal about how her last words with her parents had been harsh, and how much she regretted it. Then she worked in that it would be best if nobody knew about that argument, better to say, if anyone asked, that they’d left right after everybody else, and that he’d been with her all night. It would just be easier.

  Jake had been supportive. He told her not to worry. He has that manly, protective streak in him, and she kind of likes it.

  She remembers the night they met, about three weeks earlier—in a loud, pulsing, underground nightclub. She’d gone into the city to party with friends. She was spaced out on Molly, drinking heavily, but she looked good on the packed dance floor and she knew it. She likes to enjoy herself; she’ll admit she’s a bit of a hedonist. She caught him watching her from the sidelines. She stumbled over to the bar. He bought her a drink. She guessed from the smell of him—paint and turpentine—that he was an artist, and she found herself attracted to him right away. He was sexy and brooding and didn’t talk too much and he wanted to take her home with him. She was more than willing, but she wasn’t ready to leave. She told him to wait for her and went back out onto the dance floor with her friends, where she proceeded to strip off her tight T-shirt and dance topless. She likes to push the boundaries, likes to get a reaction. She’s an artist, after all; she’s supposed to challenge the status quo. She knew he was watching her. Everyone was watching her. When a bouncer tried to give her a hard time, Jake made his way over to her, wrapped his leather jacket around her—her T-shirt was lost somewhere, trampled underfoot—and took her home.