“Clearly.”
Wendy points to the couch and says, “Sit.”
Riley does.
“I have iced tea,” Wendy informs her. Riley can only assume that this is her version of Can I get you anything?
Wendy pulls a pitcher from the refrigerator, and Riley continues perusing the apartment until she stops at a framed photo that rests prominently on top of the entertainment center. It takes a moment to realize the picture is of Wendy—a different Wendy—from quite some time ago. A pretty woman with silky blonde hair and high cheekbones. Arms wrapped around a handsome young boy. Both smiling, probably giggling, actually, the resemblance between them unmistakable. Looking at this photo is like peering through the window at Wendy’s once-normal world, a beautiful one. She wonders why it never occurred to her that Wendy wasn’t always trapped in this dungeon called life.
A glass of iced tea clacks on the side table, startling her. She turns from the photo, then stutters a thank-you.
Wendy lowers herself into the love seat so they’re facing each other and nervously twists a ring on her finger. A beautiful ring, featuring a moderate-size emerald-cut stone the color of green sea glass, so brilliant it nearly takes Riley’s breath away.
“My son gave it to me as a Mother’s Day gift,” Wendy tells her. She holds up her hand as if admiring the ring, but it’s not pride Riley sees—it’s something else. A momentary stab of joy, of unmistakable love. Wendy adds, “He worked and saved for a whole year.”
“It’s beautiful,” Riley says, then goes back to the photo.
“That’s him.”
Riley nods.
“He was fifteen in the picture.”
The same age as Clarissa.
“After his dad left, we got closer than ever.” Wendy looks as if she’s grinning at a memory. “Such a little joker, that kid. And ornery?” Through a repressed giggle, “Good Lord, he was always causing trouble.”
“You look so much alike.”
“We did.” Wendy stares vacantly at the photo.
Riley wrestles to speak, but all that comes out is, “You . . .”
“I lost a child, too. I did.”
Riley had wondered what horrible event could have happened to make Wendy quit life. To hide away from the world. But never once had she imagined it was because the two share a similar kind of pain.
“His name was Sean,” Wendy says.
“When did he die?”
“Ten years ago. The day after that picture was taken.”
Riley lowers her head and closes her eyes for a long moment. Wendy’s life fell apart around the same time hers did.
“It was his birthday.”
“Wendy, I’m so . . .”
Wendy’s voice is coarse, and her eyes glisten when she says, “One of the best days we ever had. Followed by the absolute worst.”
Riley sees a box of tissues on the coffee table and hands it to Wendy. Wendy takes the box, pulls one out, but doesn’t use it, as if refraining might keep her tears from coming.
Riley says, “How come you’ve never told me? I could have helped . . . or at least listened.”
“Don’t like talking about it.” Wendy points to the door. “Out there I may have to, but in here I don’t.”
“I can understand that.”
“I imagine you would,” Wendy says, looking out through her window at some faraway place.
“We don’t have to talk about it if it makes you uncomfortable.”
“You know . . . it’s kind of strange, but for the first time in a very long time, it feels okay, like you’re the only person I know who understands—really understands—what I’m feeling. What I’ve felt.”
If a smile could be both happy and sad at the same time, Riley’s would be the image of it.
“It happened right in front of me,” Wendy says.
Something else we have in common.
“What I wouldn’t give to wipe that memory from my mind.”
And something we don’t.
“But it’s a part of me—the memory—like a sick, putrefying organ. Every damned day it kills me a little more.”
“What happened?” Riley asks gently.
“A maniac happened. A madman. He walked into Burger Palace with three guns strapped to his back and opened fire on a crowd of innocent people. One minute we were all enjoying lunch, and the next we were scrambling for our lives. People hid under tables, ran for the exits. A guy at the rear of the restaurant crashed through one of the windows and bled out onto the sidewalk. The parking lot looked like a bomb went off, littered with injured people, blood, and broken glass. After he was done, twenty were dead and twenty others were injured. The whole incident was so terrifying that it felt like it couldn’t possibly be real. It was all over the news, one of the biggest mass murders in California history.”
Riley remembers now.
“I jumped on top of Sean—on top of my baby—to cover his body, to protect him,” Wendy says as if each word is being squeezed out of her. She’s clutching the armrests, trembling. “But I wasn’t fast enough.” Her voice falls into a ruptured whisper. “I . . . I couldn’t save him.”
I couldn’t save her.
How many times has Riley echoed that statement? How many times has it punished her? She looks out the window, too, seeing Wendy’s world from a brand-new perspective. A world that, on so many levels, has betrayed this woman in the worst of ways. A world so horribly damaged that Wendy can no longer face it, let alone be a part of it.
A world that Riley knows all too well.
“My baby didn’t stand a chance,” Wendy says, wiping her wet face, barely able to finish the sentence.
Riley reaches across to put a hand on Wendy’s knee and leaves it there. She can hardly draw oxygen, can’t make her voice work, and even if she could, she wouldn’t know what to say. There are no words for this. Nothing to comfort a mother going through this level of suffering.
“Our situations may be different,” Wendy says, trying to clear her throat, “but our pain is much the same. Know what I mean?”
“I do.”
“So this is my life. Constantly living on edge, jumping out of my skin every time a car backfires or some jackass sets off fireworks outside. Can you imagine? To always be looking over your shoulder. To see every person as a potential danger. To . . .”
“To lose faith in everyone and everything,” Riley says, hearing her raw helplessness. And she does know. She’s living it.
Wendy looks at her through the tears and nods.
The room grows quiet, but at this moment silence feels so much bigger than any words could ever be.
Wendy says, “You don’t know how many times I’ve wished that bullet had hit me instead. I’d give anything to be the one who died that day—anything—and in a way, I did.”
Different situations, same outcomes, Riley thinks.
“So instead,” Wendy goes on, “I live inside this self-imposed jail, terrified that if I walk out the door, what happened to Sean will happen to me. It’s not that I mind dying—Lord, I wish every day that I could—it’s about what happens before that, being forced to relive the horrific nightmare. To see my child die all over again. I . . .” She hugs herself, folds over, and bursts into tears. Almost begging, “I can’t. I just can’t do it again.”
Riley moves to sit beside Wendy. No conversation between them, but none is necessary. Their mutual and tragic histories are the bonds that connect them in a most profound way, are all that matter during this heartbreaking moment.
But Wendy is only telling half the truth. There is no difference between the two sides of that door. Riley knows. Each day, she wanders between both worlds, and each day pain and anguish travel right along with her. Clarissa will indeed never leave her, nor will the painful memories that are left in her wake.
But that doesn’t mean Riley has to remain a victim of her own mind.
Not anymore.
70
Get out. Stay strong. Tr
ust your truth.
She’s ready. All she needs to do now is get the gears spinning.
Each day, without fail, the daughter I lost still lives on, she said to Samantha during one of their first meetings.
“This one’s for us, Clarissa,” she says now.
She’s dressed and ready to go. She peers out between the drapes. The Mercedes is in its spot below. A few minutes later, Samantha appears in the lot. She steps into her car and drives off to work.
Riley punches the security code that will grant access to Samantha’s building. Then she strolls through the lobby as if she owns it.
After letting herself into Samantha’s apartment, Riley heads straight into the office and picks up where she left off last time, digging through files on the hunt for any information that will give her a leg up on Samantha.
In a filing cabinet beside the desk she finds a folder marked RH. When she opens it, the oxygen scuds from her lungs.
Samantha had been building a dossier on Riley for a long time. Inside is a boatload of newspaper stories about her, including the recently leaked info that Erin had mentioned, detailing Riley’s progress and expected release. This one was dated five months before she got out.
Mother Accused of Burying Daughter Alive Improving at Psychiatric Hospital. May be Released in a Few Months.
And this one.
Riley Harper to be Discharged from Glendale Next Week.
She shuffles through the folder, pulls out two sheets of paper. One is an online brochure, detailing Glendale’s Hospital Release Housing Program with one interesting section.
List of locations currently booked.
Riley’s building is the only one available, and it’s circled with a black marker.
Samantha was definitely on a mission to find information. The next few pages are notes from either a visit or call to the hospital after inquiring about treatment for the father she no longer has, then about housing assistance upon his release.
Who’s been following whom?
Samantha was obsessed with figuring out where Riley would live before even Riley knew. Talk about the lengths some people will go just to be loved.
Her gut twists like a nine-strand rope. Had Samantha gone so far as to stalk Erin while she visited Riley’s apartment complex to make living arrangements?
She digs deeper, comes across a billing statement, which illustrates a string of unpaid visits to Patricia that began shortly after she and Riley met.
Then she thinks about the time Samantha found that appointment card on the floorboard during their drive. Riley didn’t walk in on Samantha’s first visit with Patricia. She’d been seeing the therapist throughout the entire friendship. No wonder Patricia looked so blown away. She had no idea she’d been treating Riley and Samantha at the same time. And look: Samantha used a different name.
Christina Henry.
The same initials as Clarissa’s.
If that isn’t a sign she was trying to replace my deceased daughter, I don’t know what is.
She slams shut the drawer. As she walks toward the doorway, she slows; she can feel a slight bump beneath her feet. After pulling up the corner of the swanky shag rug, she finds a stack of yellow loose-leaf pages filled with writing. She takes a look at the first page, and a grin blossoms across her face.
I’ve got you.
She shoves the papers into her waistband and leaves as unobtrusively as she came.
Outside the building, she steps up her gait, periodically glancing over her shoulder. Nobody’s watching, and she’s relieved.
Until a hand, firm and harsh, clamps onto her arm.
71
The nemesis stares Riley in the face.
Not Samantha. The other one.
Detective Demetre Sloan doesn’t say anything, but there’s no need to. Her presence, her flinty stare, her unforgiving grip on Riley’s arm, say everything.
“Let go!” Riley shouts. “You’re hurting me!”
“I wouldn’t have to grab it in the first place if you watched where you were going.” She lets go of Riley’s arm after practically shoving it back, a small and sensible gold hoop swinging from each ear. “You almost plowed right into me.”
Riley rubs her forearm, mindful not to let the papers in her waistband under the jacket make noise. She looks at a dark-colored sedan parked several feet away against the curb. It’s identical to the one she’s seen spying on her. She points a finger at Demetre and says, “It’s been you all along! You’re the one who’s been creeping around my parking lot!”
Sloan cocks a brow. “Sure it wasn’t one of your imaginary friends?”
“Bitch,” Riley says.
“Watch it.”
“I will when you stop persecuting me.”
“I’m doing my job. You know, investigating leads. Solving crimes.”
Riley nods toward the dark-colored sedan, looks toward her own parking lot, and says, “You sure have been investigating lots of leads within a confined perimeter. Don’t they let you out to travel the streets like a big girl?”
Sloan tilts her chin toward the top of Samantha’s building. “I’m thinking that unless you’ve inherited some serious green—or robbed a bank—you can’t possibly afford a place like this. So I’m curious what you’re doing here.”
“Wow. Not much has changed. Still chasing after the wrong suspect.”
“Am I?” Sloan says through a smirk as rotten as spoiled vinegar. “I bet Patricia Lockwood would beg to disagree.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re under the microscope. It means we know you were the last patient to see her before the murder.”
Riley’s teeth are clenched so tight with anger that her jaw aches. She pulls the phone from her pocket and says, “Detective, are you arresting me? Do I need to call my sister?”
“Not this particular moment, but you may want to keep her on speed dial.”
Riley says, “Is there anything else you need from me, Detective?”
“Not yet.”
“Is there anything else you need from me right now, Detective,” she says, but this time it’s not a question—it’s a stern warning to either put up or shove off.
“Nope. That is, unless you finally got smart over at Glendale and want to fess up.”
Riley walks away, blowing off the woman like a horrid stench.
When she comes back to her apartment, she pulls out the papers she found under Samantha’s rug, pages torn from Patricia Lockwood’s consulting notebook, which Samantha must have stolen after killing her.
Notes from both Riley’s and Samantha’s sessions.
The further she reads, the more her neck stiffens with mulish tension, followed by revulsion that sends blood pumping through every vein in her body like searing magma. She skims the notes from Samantha’s visits with Patricia.
Patient has trouble expressing grief over daughter’s murder. Never allowed herself to. Suppressed anger. Anxiety with depression.
Samantha changed the circumstances so well that Patricia would have had difficulty making the connection.
A penetrating shiver ticks over every bone in her spine. Page after page, it’s the same. Samantha claiming ownership of Riley’s feelings purely as a data-mining effort, to learn all the right words, to have all the right reactions, to cultivate trust. To dominate.
Riley then reviews Patricia’s notes from her own sessions, which only lead her deeper into another stage of frightening comprehension.
Used example to describe Samantha—If someone is nice to you but rude to the waiter, they are not a nice person.
What Samantha parroted to Riley during their scuffle to try to rattle her.
Another mystery solved.
But one more still remains. Why did she kill Patricia? To eliminate anyone who could corroborate Riley’s story? Or was it pure rage after she and Samantha got into that fight outside the office?
Or was it something else?
A prod
uct of Samantha’s deadly possessiveness? Riley saw the way she acted when she found the appointment card from Patricia that day. Was it raging jealousy because someone other than her was getting close to Riley?
Her skin crawls just thinking about the lengths Samantha went to intrude in every part of Riley’s life.
Another thought slides in over the last, and this one is just as troublesome. Samantha’s invasiveness probably hasn’t stopped there.
Angst returns. Vulnerability magnifies.
Her sight flits around the apartment.
Could Samantha have the place bugged? Or even worse, have put in hidden cameras?
It’s conceivable. After all, Samantha already gained access to this apartment those other times.
The thought is mortifying.
What about her food? Is it possible she put something in it?
“Okay . . . okay . . . okay . . . calm down.” She places both palms against her thighs, blows out a series of short breaths. “I might be overreacting.”
Then she immediately goes on the hunt for recording devices. She looks under every piece of furniture, looks behind pictures on the wall, even looks inside vases big and small.
After an extensive search, she finds nothing, then Patricia’s murder comes crashing through Riley’s mind.
I could be next. I have to go on the attack before she does.
72
Riley sits on a coffee shop patio a few miles from her apartment. Her dark hair is gone, replaced by the original flaxen color with scattered accents of strawberry. What once flowed past her shoulders now barely covers the tops of her ears.
Her intent is purposeful. It’s strategic. She knows that the only way to beat Samantha at her game is to play it. Putting herself in plain sight will be the first step. The next will be to take back the control she lost. This is an extremely dangerous effort, and she’s nervous, but hopefully, being in public and in close proximity to others will keep her safe.
She does a quick inspection of her surroundings. No sign of the enemy yet, but that could soon change.
In the meantime, she makes herself look busy by drinking coffee and scrolling down the screen of her laptop. About ten minutes later, she notices someone standing still behind her in the screen’s reflection. The face is blurred, but she can make out the long, dark hair, the white T-shirt, the jeans.
What She Doesn't Know: A Psychological Thriller Page 20