by A. J. Banner
Images of Kieran had rushed in to fill the space. She remembered how he had not turned his back on Jenny, had gone overtime in appointments with her, just to talk, to listen to her concerns. He’d called to check on her, made suggestions for extracurricular activities to keep her occupied, even recommended therapy.
The first date had been three weeks ago, a day after Elise’s C-section, when she lay drugged and exhausted in her hospital bed. Chantal had seen Kieran come home to rest for a while and had prepared in her subtle ways. Curled her eyelashes, applied mascara. Chosen a modest long-sleeved knit top that nevertheless revealed her shape, accentuated her curves. Her spandex jogging pants. Practically painted on. She’d taken over homemade muffins, the kind she knew he liked, carrot cake with bits of walnuts. He’d politely offered her coffee—again. And she had offered him an ear and sympathy.
“Elise is so fragile,” he said. “She can be exhausting.”
“Needy,” Chantal said, nodding. “Bill was like that. Wanting me to take care of his emotions.”
“The last few weeks have been hard,” he said. “She’s so damn moody. Up and down. She’s mentally unstable.”
“Hasn’t she always been that way?” Chantal said, reaching out to rub his shoulder. “You’re so tense.”
“Yeah, work has been rough, too.” Dark circles under his eyes.
“You need to relax—did you know I trained to be a massage therapist?”
“Before you became a computer geek? Seriously?” Kieran gave her a wan smile.
“It’s been a while, but I think I remember a few things.” She stood behind him and began to rub the poor man’s stiff shoulders. In another minute he reached up to hold her hand, pulled her down to kiss her. He was good at it, the kissing. Experienced. She was sure he could tie a cherry stem with his tongue.
They’d stolen free moments after that—mainly at her house, not his. Elise had come home a few days after the C-section—hospitals didn’t keep people for long—and he’d been preoccupied with caring for her and the baby. But still he slipped away every few days.
“It’s such a relief to be with you,” he said one morning, stroking Chantal’s hair. “Elise is completely paranoid. She’s suffering from severe postpartum anxiety.”
“What are you going to do about it?” she said, kissing her way from his chest down.
“Do about it?” he said. “What is there to do about—” He lost the thread of his thoughts just then.
Afterward, they lamented the way islanders knew everyone’s business, the way they gossiped. He admitted to a quick fling with Diane, who had left the island for good. He’d made sure not to be seen with her in public places.
“I wish I could be with you all night,” he said, kissing her cheek. “I wish I could be seen with you. I would show you off.”
She suggested a new restaurant on Orcas Island—and more. “My friend has a cabin near there, reachable only by boat. There’s a protected harbor and a dock.”
“My dinghy could make it,” he said.
She brought up the idea again the next time he appeared through the woods—oh, to be alone with him!—and he agreed to the getaway.
She told him of her grand plan to sell the house, to move to Mercer Island now that Bill was gone for good and Nick showed no interest in returning to the United States. She showed him the house she coveted.
“Stunning,” Kieran said, clicking through the house’s spacious rooms on the Realtor’s website. He didn’t ask how Chantal could afford the place, but she knew he was aching to. If he’d asked, she would’ve told him about her smart investment decisions, about the stocks in her portfolio that had grown in value exponentially.
“What if I were to go with you, get a job on the island?” he’d said at last, rubbing her arms. “I can’t stand the thought of being apart from you.”
The plan had taken shape gradually, once it had been made clear—the idea blooming within him as if on its own—that Elise had conspired with Brandon to do him in. And if she’d tried it once, why would she not try again?
Chantal had no answer for that.
He’d finally seen the need for a kind of poetic justice. Giving Elise just the right dosage of the Juliet, doing to her what she and Brandon had tried to do to him. No obvious cause of death would be found—the autopsy results would be inconclusive. He’d wanted to give her an untraceable anesthetic instead, but Chantal had warned him about the paper trail. About how someone might notice at his clinic. She knew what she was doing. “You have to let me mix the powder,” she’d said. “Selene taught me how. There are other things in it. Everything works together synergistically.”
“All right,” he’d said, pulling her down on top of him. “I love that word, synergistic.”
Now they were on their way to Orcas. He kept rowing the dinghy, but he was slowing down, fumbling with the oars. The little craft was rock solid, though. She knew that a tender like this one, similar to an inflatable Zodiac dinghy, was virtually capsize-proof, unlike a deep-hulled boat. A man could throw his entire weight on the side, and the boat would barely shudder. So she had relaxed, pointing them toward the protected shallow bay on the rugged shoreline and monitoring his increasingly halting progress.
“I might need a nap.” He yawned again, his eyelids drooping.
“Want me to row?”
“I’ll bring us in . . .” His voice trailed off. His chin bobbed against his chest. He dropped the oars. One nearly fell in the water, but she retrieved it.
“Kieran?” she said.
“Hmmm.” He shifted a little, slumped sideways.
She looked toward the island, the shoreline dotted with the lights of distant homes. “Are you feeling all right?”
He mumbled something, groaned.
The waves had begun to rise—the moon was barely a sliver hiding behind the clouds. “Do you know what you drank in the Manhattan?” she asked.
He moaned, mumbled again.
“Yeah, the Juliet,” she said. “I messed up the first time. Wrong dose, right?”
“Hmmm,” he murmured, and squinted at her. “You . . .”
“I saw Elise out there that night, all those months ago, messing around in the shop, sleepwalking, but then she went back to bed. She always does. She never locks any doors in her sleep. So I went into the shop and I took over for her.”
“Hnnnn,” he said, his vocabulary in the dumps.
“Brandon didn’t know the first thing about mixing a formula. I’d been paying attention, reading the journals, testing things out. He did just what he said he did. He moved you here to the dinghy. Too bad you woke up.”
Kieran’s lashes fluttered, but he didn’t open his eyes.
“You don’t remember offering me coffee that morning, do you? Flirting like always.”
No response. She hoped he was hearing her, understanding her. She liked to think it was as if he’d fallen down a well, her voice echoing down to him from above.
This was the tricky part—she’d known it would come. She had offered to row the boat, but, of course, he had insisted on doing the hard work. She stood up slowly—still somehow expecting the boat to tip, but the rubber tender was virtually untippable. She leaned over him, grabbed his coat, and heaved him straight forward, past her. The boat shuddered a little as he wiped out face-first on the seat she had just vacated. With all her strength, she shoved him out of the way so she could take up his position at the oars.
She steered the dinghy away from the dock, back out into open water. “I thought it would look like you’d just dropped dead,” she said. “I was going to clean up the mess in the shop afterward, but then I heard Elise coming downstairs. I didn’t have time. I had to book it out of there.”
Kieran’s breathing slowed.
“She was so upset about everything. She didn’t know what to do. But I did. Or I thought I did. I was so surprised to learn that you’d come back from the dead.”
Now he appeared not to breathe at all, and she
felt a stab of panic, maybe a touch of guilt? No, not that. “It’s funny, but even before I found out about you for sure, every time I saw you, these last few years, I’ve wanted to kill you. I would feel this need . . . these flutters. It worried me a little, until it didn’t anymore. I trusted my instincts and kept an eye on you. Because you’re a bad man.”
He had killed Jenny, or he might as well have. He’d made her walk into the sea. Chantal knew this.
“Did you really think I would want Elise dead? Or, hell, that I would want to move to Mercer Island? Sorry to tell you—I’m not rich. I never was and probably never will be. I could barely stand having sex with you. I almost threw up. For the record, you slobber.” Even now she wanted to scrub the foul memories from her mind. “But I had to do it. I always do what I have to do.”
She waited for a reply, but nothing came—only the ripple of waves on the sea, lapping against the side of the dinghy.
“And then I did find out about you for sure,” she went on, “when I was helping Elise with her mess. With you.” She shook her head slowly. When she spoke again, her voice was deeper and broken. “It was a shock to see those pictures on your computer. Of my Jenny. With you. Your arm around her, kissing her. My Jenny, naked on your machine? She was just a girl. What kind of man are you? Wait, I know. I already knew. I almost smashed your computer.”
I hope he’s happy now, Jenny had written in her suicide letter. He. The boyfriend. She had been seeing someone, secretive as always. Chantal had imagined what the mysterious boyfriend must’ve said to Jenny to break her heart so completely. Not interested. It’s over. I’ve got someone new. Kids could be cruel in high school, she’d thought. But at Kieran’s computer, she’d realized the boyfriend had not been a high school student.
“I write back to Jenny,” Chantal said to him. “I leave notes on her grave. I like to believe she reads my words, that she knows I love her. I wrote to her that I would never give up on finding the boy—the man—who broke her heart.” She stopped for a moment, to let him absorb what she was saying. Then she went on. “I almost told Elise. But I couldn’t. The thing is, I suspected you without even knowing I did. There was something about the attention you paid to Jenny. You were so caring. But then you didn’t even show up at her memorial service. You sent her favorite flowers, purple hydrangeas in a pot. But you couldn’t show your face.”
He couldn’t hear her—or maybe he could. The hearing was the last thing to go. Or so she’d been told. She gave his shoulder a little shake where he lay, his face mashed against the rubber side of the dinghy.
It was difficult for Chantal to maneuver him, to push him. After much frustration, much heaving, she finally managed to angle his head and shoulders over the side, then work him forward until his center of gravity began to shift. She let him teeter there for a moment. “This is for Elise and Bella,” Chantal said. “But most of all, this is for Jenny, for my sweet baby girl.” Then she stood, gripped his feet, and heaved them skyward. The boat tipped only a little, its stability working to her advantage as he slipped almost soundlessly into the sea, barely a splash, his body sinking swiftly out of sight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Chantal floored the Kia on the way home. Please, please, she thought in a continuous mantra. Let me get there in time.
When she had returned the yacht to the harbor, it had been well past midnight. She had pretended to have no knowledge of sailing as Kieran had navigated out of the harbor. She had let him work on his own. He’d been susceptible to flattery.
After she had dumped him and rowed back to the yacht, she had set the dinghy free, halfway between Orcas and Chinook Islands. Then she had moored the Knot on Call to its usual slip in the harbor. Not a soul had been around, and anyway, so what if anyone had seen her? Just a woman walking along the dock.
She had pulled up her hood, jogged down the road to her Kia, which she had parked on the shoulder the day before. She had ridden her bicycle all the way home, a workout, but she was used to it.
Her hands were numb now, and she shivered as she pressed her foot to the accelerator, rubbed the fingers of her left hand, three of which Mike had broken all those years ago. They had healed wrong, still ached sometimes when the weather was cold and damp. As she raced past the graveyard, where he and Jenny were buried, Chantal thought about every time she had tried to leave and he had tracked her down, had hauled her home, had torn out a handful of her hair once. Her scalp tingled at the memory. She’d believed Mike could walk through walls, that he would find her and kill her no matter where she was. Selene had told her to be careful with the Slumber powder—only a couple of teaspoons to make him sleep long enough, Selene had said. To help you get away. But Chantal had dumped the whole bag of powder into his energy drink. That had been the first time, when she had still been Chantal Farrell, C. Farrell in Selene’s journal, married to Mike Farrell. The second time had been the morning she’d dosed Kieran’s coffee, without Selene around to check the mixture. Chantal had done her best.
It took forever to reach Lost Bluff Lane. She parked next to Elise’s Honda, tore through the garden to the back door. Pulled Kieran’s keys from her pocket—he hadn’t even noticed that she’d stolen them from his pocket—and let herself in. The house was dark, save for the hood light over the stove.
She turned on the lights as she moved from room to room. She found Elise lying in the bed in the library. Her eyes were half-open, and she was pale and unmoving.
“You didn’t get the full dose,” Chantal said. “Not even close. Wake up!”
No response from Elise, and she did not appear to be breathing.
What if Chantal had made a mistake again? No, I didn’t. This time I knew what to do. She ran into the kitchen, ejected some ice cubes from the freezer, filled a glass with water and ice, grabbed a dish towel, ran back to the library. She dipped the cold dish towel into the water, dabbed at Elise’s forehead, her cheeks.
“Elise! Wake up.” Chantal shook her, rubbed the palms of her hands. Elise’s fingers were limp. “I got back as fast as I could,” Chantal went on. “I thought you would be awake by now. I made a mild blend. He didn’t have enough to kill you, even if he gave you the whole bag. I’m so sorry—I needed to know for sure that he was a killer. I was hoping he wouldn’t go through with it . . . but he did. I almost lost it. But I kept my cool. You have to wake up. We’ll go to the babysitter and pick up Bella, and it’ll be like none of this ever happened. Like he never happened. You’ll both be safe. Okay? He’s not coming back this time, not ever again. Please, Elise.”
Chantal rested her head on Elise’s unmoving arm. How could this be happening? She should never have allowed Kieran to try this. But then Elise would have always been running away, and Chantal would never be at peace. Who knew what he would have done? Elise had returned to trusting him, thinking Brandon had tried to kill him. “It was never Brandon,” Chantal said, pushing Elise’s hair away from her forehead. “It was always me.”
Did a finger twitch? Was that a touch of pink in her cheeks? Yes, and a sharp intake of breath, an exhale. Then a gasp. Elise stirred, gasped again. Her lashes fluttered. She opened her eyes, looked around. Her chest rose and fell. The color returned to her skin. A growing panic crossed her face as she bolted upright. “Where am I? What are you doing here?”
Chantal wiped the tears from her cheeks and laughed. “Welcome back to the world, my friend.”
EPILOGUE
“Mama, Mama!” Bella runs toward the shop in the sunlight. I’m standing behind the counter, ringing up a tonic for Deputy John Russell. We both turn toward her as she bursts inside. Her hair shines blonde—someone must’ve had hair that color back a few generations. Certainly not me and neither of my parents. And not Kieran. His hair was darker. She’s got my brown eyes, not Kieran’s blue ones. But sometimes, when she frowns or turns a certain way, I can see a flash of him in her, like a phantom, and then it’s gone.
“What is it?” I say, bending down to hug her.
“Hey, Uncle John,” she says. “I need to talk to my mom.”
“Go right ahead,” he says, “but you owe me a bike ride in the park. I’ll push you with the training wheels?”
“Tomorrow,” she says, her voice sober. “This is really important.”
“Okay, then. Tomorrow it is. Promise?”
“It’s a date,” she says, nodding vigorously.
He tousles her hair, grabs his bag of tonics and tinctures, and heads for the door. When he gets there, he turns to wink at me, and I smile. He has been a good friend all these years. Dependable, loyal, a fun uncle for Bella. Almost like a father.
After he leaves, I crouch down to look into her eyes. She’s so worried; I can tell. She’s clutching something in the palm of her hand, something hidden.
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Chantal through the sashed windows, standing in the garden to adjust her sun hat. She’s helping me tend to the vegetables. Soon we’ll harvest beans, broccoli, and cherry tomatoes to donate to the food bank. She glances our way and waves at us with one gloved hand. I wave back. She’s probably thinking what I’m thinking, hoping four-year-old Bella has not found another poor baby bird that somehow fell from the nest. Or a squished caterpillar for which we’ll have to perform a funeral.
Bella’s compassion expands to fill the world. Where there is barren soil, she plants a seed. Where there is destruction, she creates hope. Where darkness has spread, she breathes light.
“A fairy lost a wing,” Bella says soberly, sitting up on a stool at the counter. She’s in a sunflower dress—she herself in constant bloom now, although she was not an easy baby. I didn’t sleep much after Kieran disappeared. Sometimes I wake from a nightmare in which he has returned from the dead, covered in seaweed, to kill Bella and me. I can still imagine he’s out there alive somewhere, although I know he is not. His dinghy was found floating out beyond the island, but his body was never recovered.