“Get out of here!” I said.
“Julie, I . . .”
I squeezed the button on my lanyard. “The police are coming.”
Her mouth formed an “O,” and she seemed to come back to herself.
“I wasn’t here to—”
“Just go!”
She tried to speak again, but the wail of an approaching police siren cut her off. She looked left, then right, looking for an exit.
“I’m sorry,” she said, then ran away straight up the hill.
“I didn’t mean . . .” Detective Grey looked flustered. “Forget it. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“You don’t think . . . it was an accident. It was.”
“Perhaps. Thanks again for your time.”
I watched him walk to his car, then shut the door.
“What was all about?” Daniel asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Maybe there’s something we don’t know?”
“For a change,” I said, and Daniel grimaced.
I found him at the kitchen table a couple of days later at dawn.
I’d woken to find him missing from our bed. I was the restless sleeper, and I could count the number of times I’d woken with him gone on one hand. I listened to the quiet dark. No noise from the kids’ rooms, only birds chirping outside, greeting the day. I rose, feeling that sense of precognition I get sometimes, imagining him sitting exactly where I found him, a cold cup of coffee in front of him, his hands flat on the table because he’d tried to push himself back but couldn’t quite make it. His hair was a halo of red spikes, his beard two weeks past a trim. I wanted to slip my hand into the frayed collar of his T-shirt and feel the warmth of his skin. Instead, I sat at the table.
“What’s going on?” I said, placing my hand over his as I sat next to him. “Can’t sleep?”
“Nope.”
“Is this my fault?”
“Nope.”
“Is your mother okay?”
He shuddered. “It’s not that.”
“What then, Daniel? This isn’t like you.”
He pulled his hand away. “I did something bad.”
That’s the problem with precognition. It’s not like a radio station you can tune in to whenever you want. Sometimes you get the feeling something’s off without any warning about what it will be. So I had no idea what he was going to say, only that I wasn’t going to like it.
“What do you mean?”
“In Tacoma.”
“You . . .” I was choking on the words. “You slept with someone?”
“No!” His retort echoed around the room. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be so loud.”
“It’s okay. Just tell me.”
“I’m not sure where to begin.”
“What’s the first thing that comes to mind?”
“I hired a private detective.”
“What?”
“A private detective.”
“To do what?”
“To investigate the things that were happening here. To you.”
I sat back. The chair rungs dug into my back. “When? When did you do this?”
“A few months ago.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“At first, it was because I didn’t want to get your hopes up. If he didn’t find anything . . . I didn’t want you counting on him to find a solution.”
“And then?”
He tucked his thumbs into his fingers, forming two fists. His hands were chapped, fraying almost. He’d been washing them more than usual lately, trying to wipe the accident away, I thought.
“And then I didn’t want you to see the results.”
I knew what that meant. “He thought I was doing it?”
“Yes.”
“And you believed him?”
“I didn’t know what to think. He said that when he checked the electronic stuff, it looked like you’d been the one posting online as Heather.”
“What? That’s ridiculous.”
“Everything tied back to an e-mail address that was created from our IP address.”
“But that’s exactly what happened last time! She knows how to do that. Or knows someone who will help her. What the hell, Daniel?”
“There was other stuff.”
“Such as?”
“He found a bank account. One I didn’t know about.”
My face burned. “Okay, that’s true, but that was only because I was starting to feel uncomfortable about all the money I was making. It doesn’t have anything to do with Heather.”
“There were payments going to her out of it.”
“What?”
“You’re paying her money every month.”
“I am not.”
“I’ve seen the transfers.”
I stood up, my heart hammering, adrenaline coursing through me. I grabbed my laptop off the kitchen counter and slammed it down on the table. I pulled up my online bank and entered my password, making sure to let Daniel see me do it, that it was the same password I’ve used since we’ve banked online, that he’s always known.
The balance was higher than I remembered. I rarely looked at this account. My agent deposited most of what I earned in there directly, and I only transferred money out when I needed it for our joint expenses.
I opened the account and looked through the details for that month. There was nothing I didn’t know. I went back a month. Still nothing. But three months earlier, in July, I found a transfer of $5,000 I didn’t remember making. And the month before that, another. Going all the way back until January when we were in Mexico and someone was trying to access my e-mail.
“I never made these transfers,” I said to Daniel, but I had no idea how I was going to convince him of that.
“I know,” he said. “Heather did.”
I flopped down in my chair. “Now, I’m completely confused.”
“I went a bit crazy when I got that information from the PI. I didn’t want to believe it. I felt so guilty, but it seemed like there couldn’t be any other explanation.”
“Because you didn’t know about the bank account.”
“That was part of it.”
“So what happened? Why do you believe me now? Assuming you do.”
He hung his head. “That’s why I was in Tacoma. To find out.”
“Wait, what? Your mother isn’t sick?”
“Not really. She isn’t well, but . . . I had to know. I had to find out. I felt like I was going crazy.”
“But what would being in Tacoma—oh, no. You didn’t?”
“I did. I went to see her. Heather.”
“You brought the kids with you when you knew you were going to do that?”
“They were never in danger. I made sure of that.”
I told myself to calm down. The kids were fine, and the last thing I needed was another fight in my life.
“What was the point of going to see Heather?” I asked. “Did you think she’d tell you the truth?”
“I didn’t know. I thought I could . . . get it out of her.”
I felt as if I was talking to a stranger. This wasn’t the Daniel I knew. The gentle man who kissed our children’s bruises better and was everyone’s friend within moments of meeting them. But yet, I also felt grateful he was willing to step so far outside of himself for me. For us.
“And did you?”
“Eventually.”
“But how?”
“I can be very persuasive when I want to be.”
“What does that mean?”
“I didn’t hurt her.”
“I know you wouldn’t.”
“I wanted to.”
I reached out for him and he took my hand. I rubbed his raw skin gently.
“I’m not proud of what I did do, though.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
But he did. How he waited outside her apartment and then followed her inside, rushing her in, scaring the hell out of her. How he’d threatened to
harm her if she didn’t tell him everything. And it worked. Heather curled into a ball on the floor and cowed like a child about to be beaten, which I gather she had been, more than once. I felt sick for both of them, listening to Daniel, and sicker still about the part I’d played, making him feel as if those kinds of tactics were necessary, the risks he’d taken for me.
“What did she tell you?”
“That she’d broken into our home system. That she managed to get your banking info after she accessed your e-mail. That she’d staged those online profiles to make it look like you were the one writing about yourself.”
“What about the crap that was left? The note?”
“She didn’t know anything about that. Or the doll, or the calls. She hadn’t been here.”
“Are you sure she was telling the truth?”
“It doesn’t make sense for her to admit to all those other things and not that. Taking that money—that’s illegal, right? And I was recording everything. She agreed to that.”
“So who was doing those other things?”
“Probably some kids in the neighborhood, like we thought.” He looked pained. “Do you forgive me? For not believing you.”
“Of course I do.”
“Really?”
“It’s nothing, Daniel. In the grand scheme of things, it’s really nothing.”
A sob broke from him. “It’s not. It’s not nothing.”
“You forgave me for John. I forgive you.”
“But it’s my fault. It’s my fault she’s dead. If I hadn’t gone to see Heather, she never would have come here. And if Heather wasn’t there that morning, the accident wouldn’t have happened.”
The Truth
John
One month ago
The truth is, Heather was there that morning because of me.
I don’t know what I thought I was doing when I contacted her. Why I felt like I needed answers to the mystery of Julie. Why it seemed like there was a mystery in the first place.
Julie was a woman. A woman I spent too much time with. A woman I spent too much time thinking about. An unhappy person, mostly. A writer. Someone who lived in her head most of the time. She’d lost a close friend in law school. Maybe she had something to do with that, but I doubt it. More likely, rumors followed her—and others—because people like sensational explanations. A beautiful girl with a bright future drinks too much and smothers herself with a pillow at a party and no one notices? No. A group of clever law students see an opportunity to get away with the perfect crime by killing her right under the noses of two hundred partyers? Perhaps.
Heather had been more than willing to tell me her theories. All I had to do was tell her that Julie had moved across the street from me and had been acting oddly. That I’d read some of Heather’s blogs and thought she was on to something.
I think, now, conspiracies appeal to something base in human nature. That was the only explanation I could come up with as I spoke to Heather. But they’ve never appealed to me. And as she unfurled her conspiracy about Julie and her friends, I felt my body resist. I was wound up at my desk like a tight spring. I kept thinking, That’s ridiculous. So there were similarities between Julie and her main character, Meredith. So what? So Julie and her friends played something like The Murder Game. What did that prove? So Julie worked for a year as a prosecutor and then quit abruptly. Who could blame her? These weren’t clues to a conspiracy. They were, perhaps, signposts of her creative path. She used what she knew to breathe life into her characters. There wasn’t anything wrong with that.
And if you treated books like horoscopes, you were sure to see similarities where none existed.
So I told Heather I thought she was wrong, and I hung up, vowing to forget I’d ever spoken to her. Erase her insidious voice from my head.
I should’ve known she wouldn’t let me get off so easily.
It started with an e-mail an hour after I’d hung up on her. And then another. Then texts. Then she called my cell phone until I blocked her number because I’d made the mistake of calling her without hiding it. I couldn’t keep her from e-mailing me as easily. I’d block one e-mail address only to have another pop up a few minutes later. She was relentless. After a week of it, I thought about abandoning my e-mail address altogether, though I’d had it for most of my adult life. After two weeks, I did, advising only those closest to me that I’d been attacked by spam. Asking them to keep the new address to themselves. Then she found the e-mail address I’d set up for my company and flooded that. And so on.
Her e-mails began by talking about Julie, her theories, all the things she’d told me on our call spun out and out until they were in outer space. But then they switched to me. Photos she’d found of me online. Photos she’d found of my family. How she’d heard something in my voice. She knew I understood her. She thought we were meant to be.
Against my better judgment, I replied to that e-mail.
You are delusional. There is nothing between us and there never will be. Please leave me alone or I will call the police.
She wrote me a long diatribe in return. I’d used her, she said. Used her to get the information I wanted about Julie, whom I was clearly having an affair with. She had the proof. She attached e-mails between us. Ones she’d intercepted. Flirty exchanges mixed in with perfectly innocent inquiries. Rereading them made my face burn. Not because there was anything explicit. More that reading them all together, the few words that seemed innocent, separated by days, told a different picture. How they’d been leading to something. Increasing in frequency up to the morning Julie and I kissed, then stopped.
I didn’t answer that e-mail or any of the others Heather sent. I only hoped she didn’t start writing Hanna. Wondering if, what, I could tell her to make sense of it all, if Heather did.
Then the e-mails stopped. An hour. Two. A whole day stretched out in silence. I breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps she’d come to her senses. Or exhausted herself. Or . . . I really didn’t care what had happened to her. I was just glad she was gone.
She wasn’t.
The day before the accident I received an e-mail that simply said:
I’ll see you soon.
So I was the reason Heather was there that day. She was there to see me.
And none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been such a fool.
Every night after the accident, those last moments leading up to it replayed as if I was watching a movie projected in my mind. Whether I was asleep or awake made no difference. It was always the same.
It began with me in my house. Becky upstairs. Brad snoring on the couch. Then that scream.
I yelled at Becky to stay where she was, then bolted outside. I saw a jumble of people down the street outside Cindy and Paul’s. I ran down the street. Julie was right behind me. Ashley yelled accusations at Cindy, goading her until Cindy snapped and slapped her.
Heather appeared from nowhere and wrapped her arms around Cindy, pinning them against her side. She was shrieking at Cindy. Telling her she shouldn’t hurt a child like that. No one should ever hit a child. Ashley was backing up. Away, trying to get out of the tangle Heather and Cindy made. Julie circled them. Our eyes met and she nodded. I took a step forward and put my hands on Heather’s shoulders.
“Let her go,” I said. “Let her go right now.”
Heather thrashed against me, but her grip on Cindy relaxed. Cindy struggled free and fell to the ground. Julie started toward her, then stopped. She looked to Ashley, who was standing in the street, her arms by her side, rigid in shock, a red handprint visible on her face.
“Help her,” I said to Julie.
Heather started emitting a noise I can only describe as a growl. Animal. I wrapped my arms around her chest, holding her tighter. She was doughy and smelled sour. Her greasy hair washed over my face.
“Stop it,” I said. “Stop it. What’s wrong with you?”
Julie ran to Ashley. She stood beside her, wrapping her arm around her shoulders. I ble
w Heather’s hair away. It struck me, as it had the first time I saw them together, how much Julie and Ashley looked alike. They were both in shorts and tank tops—Julie in her running clothes, Ashley in cotton. Each had their brown hair tied up in a ponytail.
Julie said something I couldn’t hear over Heather’s sounds.
Ashley shook her head, shrugging Julie off.
Heather started thrashing again. Cindy tried to stand.
Julie moved forward. Ashley stepped back, her hands up in front of her as if she was warding off danger.
As the church bells started to gong, I heard the sound of a car engine. Someone driving down the street too fast. It hit the first speed bump with a whump.
I couldn’t see who was driving.
“Watch it,” I yelled over the crescendo of bells. “Get out of the way!”
Julie turned and took a step backward, onto the safety of the sidewalk.
“Ashley!” she cried.
The car hit the second speed bump. It lurched to the side, first right, then left. I dropped my arms and waved frantically.
“Ashley!” Julie said again.
Another bump. An awful crunch. Tires squealed.
The car shuddered to a stop. The bells stopped. The car door flung open. The ding, ding, ding warning that the keys were still in the ignition filled the awful silence.
The air smelled of burned rubber. And something worse. Something metallic.
We all ran to Ashley, who lay crumpled on the ground.
Heather. Me. Julie.
And Chris.
Today
Julie
6:00 p.m.
I haven’t been able to sit still all day.
I was up at my usual running time, earlier even, but all I ended up doing was watching John and Hanna’s house, waiting for them to exit. I’d spent many hours doing that in the last two months, particularly during the hours when the twins were at school and Daniel was at work. It’s my reward for writing. Perversely, a few days after Daniel’s confession, something opened up in me. I cast my old draft aside and started anew. For the last month and a half, I’ve churned out pages like in the glory days of The Book, 2,500 words a day, most days, sometimes more. My fingers flew over the keyboard and, almost to my surprise, I wrote “The End” yesterday. I even printed the whole thing up to start reading it on paper, my final step before turning it in to my editor.
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