Goodnight Nobody

by Jennifer Weiner

  "Hello?"

  "Janie, take the kids and get out of there!"

  "Huh?"

  "Janie, listen to me. Think of an excuse and get them out of there right now. It's important!"

  "Okay," she said dubiously.

  "I'm on my way." I scooped my clothes off the bathroom floor, pulled on my shirt and pants, dispensing with underwear and bra, and pushed my wet feet into my sneakers. I sprinted down the stairs, praying that Janie had thought to leave her keys when she'd taken my van. I shoved my hands through the clutter on the table in the entryway hall: junk mail, old newspapers, two-week-old fingerpaintings the kids had brought home, before I found the keys on a monogrammed key chain.

  I ran out the front door, sprinted through the snow, and threw myself behind the wheel of Janie's Porsche with my cell phone pressed to my ear. "I'm sorry, Chief Bergeron's not on duty this afternoon," said the same bored-sounding dispatcher I'd talked to the day I'd found Kitty, the one who'd scratched at her scalp with the tip of her pencil.

  "Page him!" I screeched.

  "Can you spell your name for me, please?"

  I jammed the key into the ignition, stomped on the clutch, and went lurching backward down the driveway, right into my mailbox. "Shit!"

  "Ma'am, there's no need for profanity."

  I put the car in drive, pulled forward, backed up again around the splintered wood, and roared off toward the end of Liberty Lane.

  "Have somebody meet me!" I said. "I'm going to Twelve Folly Farm Way. The woman there, Sukie Sutherland, is armed and dangerous!" I shouted.

  "Can you repeat that, ma'am?" the dispatcher asked.

  "Twelve Folly Farm!" I yelled. I turned left, almost hitting an SUV, whose occupant glared at me and leaned on her horn. Forty miles an hour. Forty-five. Fifty. The Porsche's suspension groaned as I ground the gears and rounded the curve just before Folly Farm Way. I dialed Evan's cell phone. "...'lo?"

  "Evan? Can you hear me?"

  "...can't...out."

  "Goddamn this fucking quaint asshole town!" I yelled at the top of my lungs. Snow was splattering on the windshield, and I couldn't figure out how to work the windshield wipers.

  "Okay," said Evan. "That I heard."

  "You need to come here!" I screamed. "I know who did it, and--"

  "Kate? Say that again!"

  "Twelve Folly Farm Way!" I said over the roar of the engine. Then I hung up, slammed on the brakes in front of Sukie's house, left the keys in the ignition and the car door open, and I sprinted for the door.

  I didn't knock, and I didn't ring. The door swung open as soon as I put my hand on the knob. Sukie Sutherland stood in the entryway, smiling.

  "Kate!" she said, brown eyes wide but unsurprised, like I'd stopped over to borrow a cup of sugar and join her for a cup of coffee and the latest neighborhood gossip, like I was perfectly dry and completely dressed instead of standing in front of her out of breath and dripping wet, without a hat or coat or socks on a thirty-degree day in the snow. Sukie was the picture of grace and competence in her mommy uniform. Her brown hair was shining, and her neatly pressed khakis and pink pearl-buttoned angora sweater were accented nicely by the little silver gun she held in her hand. "Come on in and stand over by the refrigerator, okay, Kate?"

  I followed her inside on leaden legs. "Where are my kids?"

  "Kate?" I relaxed a little bit as I heard Janie's muffled voice coming from behind the basement door. "Hey, we're down here!"

  "Hang on!" I shouted. Sukie leveled the gun at my heart.

  "Your friend tried to make a break for it," she said, shaking her head sadly. "I would have left them alone, you know. I would have left you alone too, but you just don't quit!" She scratched her shoulder with the barrel of the gun and shook her head. "This is going to take up my entire afternoon!"

  I wobbled over to the refrigerator as she directed me with the gun. I could hear Sophie's hiccuping sobs, and Janie trying to keep them calm. "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands," I heard her sing, followed by two hesitant claps. Sukie Sutherland. A part of me had probably known it all along. Wasn't there something a little suspicious about a woman who named her kids Tristan and Isolde and alphabetized her canned goods?

  "Where are your kids?"

  "At Marybeth's house," she said. "I sent them over to play. They'll be there until four. That should give me plenty of time." She looked at the watch on the hand that wasn't holding the gun. "Let's see," she said, ticking off items in the manner of a woman running through her grocery list. "Get the kids in your car, get your friend in the car." She looked at me. "You've got enough booster seats for everyone, right?"

  I nodded dumbly, thinking, She's going to kill all of us and she's worrying about booster seats? "Wh-what are you going to do?"

  "Take you to the river," she said. "Drop you in the water. Such a shame," she said, brandishing the gun at me until my back was flat against her stainless-steel refrigerator. "How you killed Kitty, then cracked from the guilt and the strain of keeping the secret. Killed your kids, killed your best friend, and drove your car off the bridge. That's the part I regret," she said, grinning so I could see all of her gleaming white teeth. "It's going to be the waste of a perfectly good minivan."

  "You." I raked the stiff mat of my wet hair off my forehead and tried to make my legs stop shaking.

  "Me," she confirmed, nodding pleasantly, as if we were discussing whose turn it was to be Parent of the Day at the Red Wheel Barrow.

  "You killed Kitty."

  She nodded.

  "You left that note on my car." Keep her talking, I thought, as my knees began to shake. Keep her talking, and I'll...what? Scream? Run? Hope the dispatcher's actually going to send the cops, even though I didn't give her my Social Security number and my mother's maiden name?

  "Yep," she said, grinning like she'd just won the Nobel Prize. "And if you'd just minded your own business, instead of running around like Nancy Drew with varicose veins, you'd have saved yourself a lot of trouble. Oh, well," she added with a shrug, "your loss. It's funny, isn't it?" She tilted her head. "You always thought you were the smart one. So smart! So sophisticated! So much better than us dim-bulb mama bears in boring old Connecticut, right?"

  "Is that what you thought?" I asked. Nancy Drew with varicose veins, I thought, and realized that if she didn't kill me, I was going to do my damnedest to kill her.

  "All of us except Kitty." She shook her head in exaggerated sorrow. "Kitty thought you were just swell," she said.

  "Sh-she did?"

  Sukie shrugged. "Of course, Kitty turned out not to be such a great judge of character. She thought her husband really loved her. She thought I was her friend. Give me your hands," she said, pulling a pink and gold silk scarf out of her pocket.

  I ignored her request and shoved my hands in my pockets. "Philip did love her," I said, which caused the smug expression to slide right off Sukie's face.

  "He did not," Sukie said petulantly. "Not the way he loved me."

  "You?" I scoffed. "Oh, please." My keep-her-talking ploy had evolved into a new strategy: get her pissed. Get her so angry that she'd make some stupid mistake that hopefully wouldn't involve shooting me on the spot. Not that I thought she'd actually kill me in her kitchen. She'd never get my blood out of her hand-painted Mexican tile backsplash. "You were filler," I sneered. "Kitty was the one he-really wanted. And why wouldn't he? Kitty was smart. She was successful. And, seeing as how the world of work gave him problems..." I shrugged.

  "What are you talking about?" Sukie snarled.

  "Nothing everyone in town doesn't already know. Phil needed a successful, ambitious wife because he couldn't cut it. The only job he could get was working for Daddy, and even then he was a fuck-up."

  "That's not true!" she screeched, leveling the gun at my chest. "He's very smart, it's just that nobody ever gave him a chance!" She stared at me, panting. Then she held up the scarf. Hermes, I'd bet. My first designer scarf. Too bad I might not live to appreciat
e it. "Hands together."

  I edged forward toward her island with my hands dangling loose at my sides. "What were the two of you going to do after you'd eliminated the competition? What were you going to do to keep him in handmade shirts and shoes? Sell flaxseed muffins on the street? Do Pilates for pay?"

  Lucky for me, Sukie lived in a Montclaire too. Her kitchen was my kitchen, minus the dishes in the sink and the crayon scribbles on the wall. I ran my fingertips underneath the granite countertop of her island and eased the top drawer open.

  "We were going to be fine," Sukie said, tossing her flat-ironed locks.

  "Down in Florida?" I guessed, and saw the word register in her eyes. "Is that what he was telling you? Was he talking about fun and sun in South Beach when he wasn't diddling Lexi in the equipment shed."

  "Never mind Lexi," she said. A muscle underneath her eye twitched.

  "Why not? What'd you do to her?" I asked. "I hope you didn't toss her off the bridge too. That's a whole lot of housewives for one river, don't you think?"

  "Shut up," she said. She pointed the gun between my eyes, and I saw her arms trembling.

  I shook my head ruefully while my fingers slid across cutting boards and pot lids and finally closed around something cool made of marble.

  "I bet Phil kept telling you he'd leave Kitty, but that wasn't what happened, was it?"

  "Kitty was a slut," Sukie said shrilly. "You don't know anything about her. She was a slut just like her mother, she never even knew who her father was--"

  "But she found out, didn't she?" The muscle in Sukie's cheek twitched faster. "She found out, and she was going to leave him. No more money." I said and made a sad face. "No more book advance. Ol' Phil was actually going to have to work for a living until you did this thing for him. No more Kitty and he'd be free--with all of her money. With her life insurance and no ugly custody battle. And what does he do? Takes up with Lexi Hagen-Holdt." I shook my head again, making a great show of my puzzlement. "That's some way to treat your old sweetheart."

  "You bitch!" Sukie wailed. She pulled her arm back as if she was going to belt me in the face with the gun. I brought the rolling pin up as hard as I could, slamming it into her forearm, hearing a satisfying crack. The gun flashed silver as it slid across the island into the corner. Sukie wailed and lunged at me, hands hooked into claws and aiming for my eyeballs. I stepped around the island and head-butted her chest. The air rushed out of her in a whoosh, and she staggered, then fell to the floor.

  "Don't move!" I screamed, going for the gun in the corner while simultaneously trying to yank my cell phone out of my pocket. Sukie shot one leg out, kicking me hard in the shin. My hip slammed into the island and I hit the floor so hard the walls rattled. My teeth snapped shut on the tip of my tongue, and warm blood spurted into my mouth.

  I screamed and got to my feet. Sukie screamed louder as she flung herself at my back, grabbing at my hair. I twisted sideways, slamming her body into the island's base. She fell off and landed hard, groaning and kicking at my legs. Until I fell down beside her. Then we were both on the floor, crawling, gasping, dragging ourselves toward the gun. Sukie's arm was sticking in the air at an odd angle, and my mouth was full of blood. I saw her fingers curl around the gun, and I shoved myself sideways as hard as I could and came down on her with all my weight, grabbing for the hand holding the gun, thanking God that I wasn't one of those hundred-and-ten-pound aerobicized mommies. The gun fell to the floor and I grabbed it, just as the front door burst open and Stan ran into the kitchen.

  "Put that down, Mrs. Borowitz!" Stan shouted.

  Sukie tilted her blood-streaked face up beseechingly. "Please, get her off me!" she begged. "She's trying to kill me! And she's very heavy!"

  I grabbed a handful of hair and slammed Sukie's head onto the hardwood floor. It felt, I had to admit, tremendously gratifying. "She killed Kitty Cavanaugh, she killed Lexi, she's got my kids in her basement!"

  "Your best friend too!" Janie yelled indignantly.

  Stan stared at us, bewildered. Then he pulled out his gun and pointed it. Not at her but at me. Sukie was screaming, Janie was yelling, my kids were crying from the basement.

  "She did it!" I yelled, ignoring the pain in my mangled tongue.

  "Stand up," said Stan. I'd started to when Sukie's teeth closed on my thumb. I shrieked in surprise and pain. The gun fell out of my hand. Quick as a cat, Sukie snatched it. She got to her feet, looking down at the gun, then up at me, then over at Stan. Underneath the blood and the swelling that had already started, her face was pale and blank as a mannequin's. Blood was running down her face, pattering on her pink-angora-covered breasts, and I saw in her eyes exactly what was going to happen next.

  As Stan held his gun aimed at us, I held out my hands. "Don't do anything crazy, Sukie, please, just...just give me the gun and we'll...we'll talk! I'll make some tea or something...I'll get you some ice for your arm..."

  I could hear Janie pounding against the basement door, trying to make a game of it. "Knock, knock!" she called, and my children repeated it. "Knock, knock!"

  "I loved him," she whispered.

  "I know," I said. I took a step forward, then another. "I know you did, Sukie. I know how that feels."

  "Loved him," she said again. Three steps. Four. I was almost close enough to touch her.

  "I know."

  "We could have been..." She lifted the gun in slow motion, with the barrel pointed not toward my head but toward hers. Her last word was almost a sigh. "Happy."

  "Sukie, don't--"

  "Mrs. Sutherland, please--"

  Stan and I reached for her at the same instant, an instant too late. The sound of the gun was the loudest thing in the universe as she shut her eyes and pulled the trigger.

  Forty-One

  "I don't need to go to the hospital," I told Stan after he'd liberated Janie and my children from the basement and led us all outside. The police cars I'd seen cruising our neighborhood since Kitty's murder had come screeching down the cul-de-sac, and the pink-faced officer who'd driven me back to Kitty's house after her murder was cordoning off the lawn with yellow Crime Scene Do Not Cross tape. I saw several news vans roll up behind the cruisers. I could picture the newscasters inside of them, patting powder on their faces, getting ready to tell the world how this story ended.

  "You should go anyhow. You and the kids. Just to be sure." He'd wrapped a crinkly silver blanket around my shoulders, but I couldn't stop shaking. All three kids were in my arms, and Janie was standing beside me, her makeup in stark relief against skin that had gone white as the snow on Sukie's lawn.

  "We're fine," I said, as two of the officers wheeled a stretcher out the front door. They'd covered Sukie's body completely with a sheet. I pressed the kids' heads against me so they wouldn't see.

  "You should talk to someone," Stan said.

  "I'll talk to you," I said. "You'll need a statement, right?" My teeth started to chatter.

  "Do you want me to call your husband?"

  I closed my eyes. I'd never do anything to put the children in danger, I'd promised him. I hung my head. "No."

  "I'll call him," Janie said in a tiny voice that barely sounded like her own.

  I dislodged Sam and Jack long enough to dig my phone out of my pocket and handed it to Janie. Sophie had her thumb stuck in her mouth. The boys looked dazed. "You guys?" I said. "I know that was scary, but everything's okay now. Mommy's fine, Aunt Janie's fine..." I paused to spit out a mouthful of blood, realizing too late that it wasn't the most reassuring sight.

  "You should have someone look at that," Stan said. I nodded and let him herd all of us--me, Janie, Sophie, Sam, and Jack--into the back of another ambulance for the trip to the hospital.

  Three hours later, I ended up with four dissolvable stitches in my tongue, a prescription for high-test painkillers, and phone numbers for three different children's therapists. The kids were taken away to some place called the family room to talk to a social worker. Janie called Ben, then
managed to score some Valium and a cute intern's phone number. The five of us were huddled on my bed, and I'd swapped my wet, bloodstained T-shirt for a hospital gown, when the door burst open.

  I was bracing myself for Ben, but instead, a familiar, fur-clad figure swooped into the room, with a billow of heavy perfume proceeding her.

  "Grandma!" said Sophie--the first word I'd heard her speak since the scene in the kitchen.

  "Grandma! Grandma!" echoed Sam and Jack.

  "Kate!" Reina hurried toward my bed, coat flapping, bracelets glittering, and gathered me into her arms. I surprised myself by letting myself be gathered and, about ten seconds later, by bursting into tears.

  "Oh, Mom."

  "Shh, shh," she said, stroking my hair. "It's all right, it's all right. You're fine."

  I was sobbing so hard that I couldn't catch my breath. "The kids," I wheezed. "The kids were in the house. Sukie had a gun--"

  "Shh, shh. It's over, Kate. You're going to be fine."

  "Ben's going to kill me!" I blurted, before I had time to consider my choice of words. "He told me to stay out of this and I didn't--"

  "Shh, shh," she crooned. "You're fine. You're fine."

  I pressed my cheek against her fur coat and tried to believe that it might be true.

  She and Janie carried the kids out into the hall. The painkillers had started to turn things pleasantly fuzzy around the edges, and my limbs took on a comforting heaviness, like someone had filled them with warm sand.

  "Kate."

  I lifted my head slowly off the pillow. My husband was standing in the doorway. "Sorry," I said thickly.

  I squinted at his face as he slumped against the doorframe. "Kate," he said. His voice echoed, like he'd been calling down to me from on top of a canyon. "I'm sorry too."

  "Hot dogs!" Janie called in a hearty voice.

  "Hot dogs!" said Sophie, scrambling off the couch and over to the oval oak table big enough for ten. Sam and Jack followed, holding hands, as Janie helped them into their booster seats and my mother dished out the food: hot dogs, baked beans, cut-up carrots and zucchini to dip in ranch dressing, with lemonade to drink. Everyone tucked in, and for a minute all we could hear was the low roaring of the waves as the tide rolled in, and the wind whipping silvery against the walls. It was three months since Sukie had killed herself in front of me. And the children and I had settled in at the home in Truro, the one that turned its back on the world.