The Stranger Inside

by Lisa Unger

  “I thought I’d see you last week at Gillian’s birthday party,” she said, trying to keep it light.

  He issued a grunt. “Gillian doesn’t want to see me,” he said. “Even if she thinks she does.”

  Gillian’s gathering had been a rare—only—solo night out for Rain, baby and hubby back at home. It wasn’t exactly how she imagined it. She’d been nervous, checked the monitor and home security cameras about a hundred times to see Greg crashed on the couch, Lily sleeping peacefully in her crib. She’d spent most of the evening comforting her friend.

  “Just like a man,” Rain said. “To think he knows what a woman wants.”

  Silence. She was used to waiting for him to talk. He was king of the awkward pause. “Did you call to talk about Gillian?”

  “Markham.”

  “Thought so.”

  “Well.”

  “I’m not your guy anymore,” he said.

  Street noise carried over the line, horns and voices, a distant siren. “Feds came in today. The scene is closed. Strict information control. The press conference has been moved to tomorrow, if they give one at all.”

  “Why?”

  One of the burning questions, the one that always interested her the most. Who? What? When? Where? All important. But “Why?” In news it didn’t matter so much.

  But in story—Story with a capital S—it was heart and soul.

  “What do you care?” he asked.

  Lily stirred downstairs, the sound carrying up to Rain. Ticktock.

  “I thought you were out,” he said. “Home with the kid full-time.”

  She heard it, the weight of judgment. A little flame of anger lit inside her. Some people judged you for staying home. Others judged you for wanting to work even though you had taken on the all-sacred role of mother. Rain had never been overly concerned with what people thought. But even she felt the trap of it, how nothing was ever quite good enough. Was there always someone waiting to put you down?

  “I’m producing a podcast,” she said. Why did she say that? That was the furthest thing from her mind. Impulsive, reactionary. That’s what her dad always said about her. But he meant it as a compliment. “A crime podcast. You know—long-form journalism.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Why not?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “That’s what everyone says these days, why not? Anyone can do it.”

  “I’ve made my bones,” she said easily. Ten years investigating, writing and producing news, she had. “Besides—these days—podcasts? That’s the only real journalism left. Everything else is bought and paid for, beholden to advertisers and their agendas. It’s called democracy, remember that old idea? Freedom of speech. Not speech controlled by whoever happens to be paying the bills.”

  She didn’t realize she’d felt so passionately about this. She didn’t. She just didn’t like being marginalized.

  “Most of it’s crap.”

  “Most of everything is crap.”

  He issued a little chuckle, reminding her that he had a grim, serious face. A heavy, deeply lined brow and a searing, pin-you-to-the-wall kryptonite-green gaze. He had a cop voice, granite-cold and just as hard. But when he smiled or laughed, his whole face lit up like a kid on Christmas morning. She wished she was sitting across from him somewhere. It was so much easier to get what you wanted in person.

  “You got me there,” he said.

  Rain walked to the top of the stairs. She could see Lily’s chubby little legs, perfect pink toes kicking. Ticktock. Ticktock. Rain had left Lily’s squishy book in reach, hoping it would buy a little time when Lily woke up. She heard it crinkle as the baby picked it up and made a happy coo. Score. She’d just earned herself about four minutes.

  “Come on,” she said. “You must have something.”

  He sighed into the phone. He just liked to argue for the sake of arguing. She could relate; a good verbal sparring session was one of the most satisfying encounters you could have with a man—especially when you won. And cops, even though they pretended otherwise, loved to talk—it was downright painful when they couldn’t tell you what they knew.

  “All I can say is that it wasn’t a rage killing like you’d expect. It was organized, clean. Someone planned it.”

  She already knew that. “That’s what you told Gillian.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And the Feds moved in this morning, took over the investigation.”

  Both pieces of information she already had. He was holding back.

  “What else?” she pushed.

  She heard a car door slam on his end, footfalls. There were voices, another phone ringing. Lily was making noises downstairs, fishing for Rain.

  “Okay, look,” he said finally. “All I know is that they think it connects to another case they’re working. An older one.”

  “What case?”

  Another long pause. This time she thought he’d hung up, which he also did quite a bit. Then, “Google the Boston Boogeyman. That’s it. That’s all I can say.”

  A jolt through her system. She knew the name. Knew it well.

  She realized that she was gripping the phone so hard it actually was making her hand ache. Release. Breathe. Rule number one of news investigation: just keep asking questions.

  “How was Markham killed?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Come on.”

  “It’ll be out there soon enough,” he said. “You’ll have to hear it in the news along with all the other civilians.”

  Ouch. That hurt.

  “Shot?”

  “Hey,” he said, his voice going softer. “What I hear—it’s yours, okay? I promise. I’ll call you.”

  He always promised that, and he’d never once made good on it. It was just a way to get off the phone.

  “So, you just don’t know?” He knew. Of course he did. Why wouldn’t he tell her?

  “Goodbye, Winter.”

  “Why don’t you give her a call?” Just a hook to keep him on the line. Gillian and Christopher weren’t good for each other and they all knew it.

  “Gilly?” he said. No one else on earth called her that. “I’m not sure I’m the man she deserves.”

  He sounded a little sadder than she would have expected.

  “Maybe you should let her decide.”

  “Good luck with your podcast,” he said.

  Rain ended the call just seconds before Lily started crying. She sat on the top step for a moment, buzzing with frustration.

  Then she got up and went to Lily, unstrapping her and carrying her back up to the nursery.

  It was another world. Stars on the ceiling, a white-and-blue ocean mural on the wall. The nightlight projected buttery-yellow sea turtles that languidly circled the room. The gauzy shades were always drawn, casting the room perpetually in a peaceful milky light. Lily was warm and soft in Rain’s arms, smelled like the lavender shampoo Rain used on her every night. The baby’s eyes glittered, smile big and gurgling.

  “Hello, sunshine,” Rain said, peering into her daughter’s perfect flushed face.

  She sat in the glider, rocking and nursing again. It was hypnotic, the quiet of the room, the warmth of her child, that flood of oxytocin, the low sound of waves from the noise machine. Her frustration eased; the belly of fire cooled.

  It was enough, wasn’t it?

  Maybe. If this room, pretty and safe, was the whole world.

  But it wasn’t.

  Laney Markham would have had this. But her husband, a sociopath, brutally ended her life, and the life of their child. Then, he escaped justice, walked free while Laney’s brokenhearted father raged. And Laney’s mother sat stoic, pale and rigid, as though the blood had stopped moving through her veins. Grief had turned her to stone; it was more devastating to see than the father’s fury.

 
That was it. It was the case that did her in. The ugliness of it; she was sick with it, like a flu she couldn’t shake. Gillian’s words knocked around her head for weeks and months.

  Bad people win. They win all the time.

  When just a few weeks after the crushing acquittal, Greg asked if she would consider staying home with the baby for a while, she agreed, surprising him—and herself. Money would be a bit tight, but whatever. She worked in news; layoffs were always looming. Money was always tight.

  She gave it up—the work that had defined her.

  Now, Markham was dead. She felt a tickle of relief. A sort of justice had been delivered, something in line with her good-always-triumphs-over-evil belief system. Murder? Suicide? Home invasion robbery gone wrong? Accident?

  A federal investigation underway. A connection to the Boston Boogeyman.

  Let it go. It’s not your story anymore.

  Lily gazed up at Rain and started kicking her legs happily.

  Or is it?

  FOUR

  The rain knocks on the tin roof and the sound of it always makes me think of you. Not because of the name you gave yourself. I never called you Rain.

  The sound reminds me of your childhood home. I used to love that old house, how it was deep back in the woods. Rooms dim, with wind chimes on the porch. Your father still lives there, doesn’t he?

  Your mother seemed always to be cooking, some black-and-white movie playing on that tiny portable television perched on the kitchen counter. Your father’s study smelled of leather and cigarette smoke.

  I’d marvel at his shelves and shelves of dusty books, the typewriter on the rickety wood table by the window. He had a computer, of course. But he’d write on that old thing and give your mother the pages to enter into “the box,” as he liked to call it. His keyboard clatter echoed down the hardwood floor of the hallway. I loved his tall thinness, the way his suit jackets hung off his broad shoulders. He was a writer, a real writer. You were often mad at him because he cared more about the page than he did about you, or so it seemed. I think you were wrong about that. You didn’t see the way he looked at you. As if you were a princess and a unicorn and a rainbow all rolled into one perfect girl.

  My house was different, sprawling and frigid, filled with light, professionally decorated, museum white and gray, expensive pieces of modern art chosen by my mother not for love, or because she had any idea what was truly beautiful, but because it “went with the room.” My father only cared about numbers. My mother, I’m not sure what she cared about then, before. Afterward, she had a kind of awakening, became someone else. But then, they worked all week, lay by the pool all weekend. They watched television in bed at night with the lights out. Sometimes I’d wake up and it would still be on, its blue glow flickering through the crack of the door left ajar. There were no books in my house, except in my room. My parents didn’t read. They didn’t have time, they said.

  Your parents used to play cards with us. Your mother had an art studio in the garage. We’d all make a big mess out there—drip paint on the floor, get it all over our clothes, the walls, each other. She’d only laugh and tell us that whatever creation wound up on the canvas, that it was beautiful. Your dad gave us a summer reading list. We saw him on the news sometimes, came across articles about him in magazines. You didn’t seem impressed; you were used to his brand of fame. But I was awed by him. Hey—remember that horrible review, written by some former friend of his? He sulked about it for days, muttering, shutting doors too hard. Your mother told us to play outside, not to hang around the house that week. But then the keyboard started clattering again. Because that’s what you do when you’re a writer, I guess. You just keep writing, no matter what they say about you.

  I’m rambling.

  Does that happen to you? Do you get lost in the memories of who we were before?

  Today, the black fingers of despair tug at me. They always do in the days that follow one of my—excursions; there’s a heavy grayness that settles. A sense of loss.

  In the planning, there’s so much energy and tension, the intensity raw and alive. And then when it’s done, some engine inside me sputters and dies, gears grinding to a halt. In that silence, I return to that moment right after I called to Mrs. Newman and just before I heard the sound that stopped me in my tracks on that dirt path to the woods. And I wish and wish anything had turned me back toward home.

  But, as you have told me more than once, we can’t go back. Everybody knows that.

  The rain is heavy, which is odd for this time of year. Maybe if it were cooler, it would be snow. The water sluices down the window as I build a fire in the great room. It’s too hot for a fire. But I haven’t built it for warmth.

  Article by article, I burn the clothes I wore last night, the gloves, the balaclava. And soon, everything I brought into Markham’s house with me is gone. The car is hidden. There’s no trace of me.

  Who am I? I often wonder the day after. Sometimes there’s even regret. What have I done? What does this make me? In the planning, in the hunt, in the execution, there’s nothing like that. But after, there’s a heaviness I carry. You told me once that the thoughts I harbored, the things I couldn’t let go, that it was wrong, that nothing good had ever come from wanting revenge. But what do you know about right and wrong?

  When the clothes are burned, I brew some coffee. I boil water and pour it over the grounds, the liquid trickling into the carafe through the brown filter. The Chemex, it’s elegant, simple. It’s the way your father brewed coffee. I used to admire him. I guess I still do, even after everything.

  When your heroes reveal themselves as human, it exposes your own flaws, too. Naivete, mainly, a willingness to believe in someone, something. Do you remember that book signing he did in that tiny store off of Main Street? We were kids then, but we tagged along with your mother. His big bestselling days were behind him. But his fans turned up in droves, repeating back lines to him that he’d long forgotten writing. In print, they referred to him as the father of dystopian fiction. Remember how people stood around the small store, how hot it was, how the line snaked outside and down the street? His flop of white hair, those round specs. I thought he was the coolest man alive.

  I drink my coffee and watch as the fire dies to embers, everything reduced to ash. I look at the row of his books on my shelves. All of them signed, first editions. They’re worth quite a bit, I think. Not that I’d ever part with them. Not that I’d ever part with any piece of you, or anything that connects back to the time when we were young together. The last safe place.

  Upstairs in my study, I get online, start scrolling through the news headlines. I miss seeing your name in print every day, Rain Winter. All your stories, even when later you started producing and editing instead, had a certain energy to them. A quiet authority. You let the facts tell the tale, never hyping, never proselytizing even in that subtle way that some journalists do. I loved the longer pieces, when you dug in deep to your subject, the characters at its heart. It was personal; I could tell.

  You’re still trying to understand, aren’t you, in your way? I am, too.

  I scroll through your social media feeds. A picture of your baby. Really? You and Greg, a selfie in the park. Come on. Your professional sites are wastelands of retweets and shares. On Insta there’s an artful shot of one of those smoking martinis, some party, moms’ night out. Christ. How long can you go on like this? I might have predicted it, though. Your retreat into the cocoon of domesticity.

  That look on your face when Markham got off. It wasn’t despair, exactly. It was more like a bitter resignation, the look of a child who discovers there’s no Santa. A part of you knew it all along. You shook your head slightly; your mouth dropped open just a little. You folded into yourself. You gave up on justice.

  You were back there in the woods with me. Remembering.

  Anyway, if I know you, you’re on fire today
. That’s not why I did it. But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t part of the reason. There was no rush; I could have done it anytime over the next few months. But your social media posts are downright depressing.

  Come back to life, Lara.

  My phone buzzes and the sound moves through me like electricity. The front gate.

  I touch the app to activate the camera and see a black sedan with a young woman sitting in the driver’s seat. There’s someone beside her, but I can’t see a face, just the thick thighs of a large man, a hand with a wedding ring. Interesting. I don’t get many visitors out here.

  “Can I help you?” I ask.

  She says my name. Her voice is husky, eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. She holds her identification up to the camera.

  “We have a few questions about a case we’re working on,” she says. “I’m wondering if you can help us.”

  I could ask for her to identify her partner. But even through the rain and the grainy camera image, I can see her credentials are legit. There have been other visits from people like her over the years.

  I buzz her in and listen to the gate slide open with a squeal.

  FIVE

  Turkey tenderloin rubbed with herbs and sweet potatoes in the roasting pan, cooling on the stove, a kale salad tossed, wrapped and sitting in a bright red bowl in the fridge. Table set for three. Lily happy nearby with her blocks on the living room carpet—gotta love the open-plan room.

  At the kitchen table, laptop open, Rain scrolled through her contacts and paused when she came to the name that had been kicking around in the back of her head.

  She took a deep breath and dialed.

  “Well, well,” he answered. “I’m surprised, and I’m not surprised.”

  “Hey, Henry,” she said, already regretting her choice.