by Minka Kent
I can’t stop.
The exterior of Erica’s house is ornate and over the top. It’s a bit Gothic, a bit Victorian. I imagine she got a pretty settlement after her divorce from Andrew and purchased a house just as big as the last one simply because she could.
And because a woman like that doesn’t settle for anything less than exactly what she wants.
Pressing the doorbell, I hear the faint song of the chime from behind a pair of wooden double doors, and when the door lock clicks a second later, I’m expecting to see a maid or a butler or someone Erica pays to boss around, but it’s her.
In the flesh.
Curlers in her hair and a silk floral robe cinched at her tiny waist.
Her eyes narrow when she sees me. She hasn’t the slightest clue who I am, and while we’ve never formally met, I feel like I know her because of all the horror stories Mer used to share.
“Greer,” I say. “Meredith’s sister.”
Her lips form a straight line, and her forehead is smooth as glass. Everything about her is contradictory, from her baby-soft complexion to her pointed glower. I’ve never understood women who can stand in front of a mirror and obsess over the size of their chin or the width of their nose or their barely-there crow’s-feet.
Must be nice to have the time to care about those things and the money to “fix” them.
“Can I help you?” she asks, head tilted.
“I was wondering if you had a minute?” I try my hardest to be cordial.
She exhales, gripping the lapels of her bathrobe. “I’m getting ready for a date.”
“It’ll just take a sec.”
Her nose wrinkles, and she studies my face with a pause.
“I’m not here to accuse you of anything. I just wanted to ask a few questions . . . things that only you’d be able to answer.”
“You want to grill me about Andrew.” Her lips draw into a sly smirk. “Come on in, honey.”
She leads me into the foyer, closing the door behind me before swaying to the bottom of a curved staircase. Erica motions for me to follow her, and we wind up in a master bath the size of my apartment.
“You know I did get a call from some detective a while back wanting to interview me, but when I called back, I got his voice mail and haven’t heard anything since,” she says, sighing. I don’t tell her about the affair. “I suppose I should be used to being an afterthought by now.”
A velvet chaise beneath a crystal chandelier centers the space, and Erica points for me to have a seat.
Moving toward a vanity and retrieving a tube of Chanel mascara from a table spread with high-end makeup and face creams, she swipes the wand over her lashes, giving them a little wiggle at the tips, and her eyes intersect with mine in the mirror.
“So what do you want to know?” she asks, a haughty half laugh in her tone. “You want to know if I think he did it?”
I take a deep breath and nod. “Yeah. Basically.”
“Andrew is a lot of things,” she says. “Materialistic. Conceited. The most insecure bastard you’ll ever meet.” She turns to face me. “But he’s not a killer. Or a kidnapper. He’s a smart man with too much to lose. Trust me, if he wanted to be done with your sister, he’d be done with her. He wouldn’t do something reprehensible. That would be . . . beneath him.” Turning back to her reflection, she slicks her lips with a bullet of lipstick in a shade of screw-me red. “I don’t care how much he loves her, he loves his money and his freedom more, and no woman is worth losing that. Not to him.”
Erica begins removing her curlers, letting her shiny auburn waves fall to her shoulders before combing them with a boar bristle brush. If I squint, she looks like a 1940s film star.
“That said”—her eyes find mine again—“the man has resources for days. And the entire Glacier Park Police Department worships the Price family. If he wanted to make something happen, he could. And he’d get away with it. He’s probably the only person who could.”
“So what are you saying?” My arms fold, and I sit straight up on the end of the chaise. Her bathroom is glamorous and everything shimmers, but it’s not welcoming. I wonder if all these shiny, sparkly things are her way of making up for her dull, unlikable personality. “First you say he wouldn’t do it. Then you said he could.”
She laughs, her manicured hand tracing her collarbone. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. He wouldn’t, but he could.”
Disappearing into a closet off the bathroom, she returns a few minutes later, a tight black dress hugging her body and a set of diamond earrings in her hands.
“My date’s going to be here any minute,” she says, head tilted as she places a stud into her earlobe. “Are we done?”
Refusing to have wasted my time, I rise, shoulders tight. “Do you think he had anything to do with this or not?”
Erica brushes a perfect wave off her shoulder. “How the hell should I know? He liked her. That’s all I know.”
“Did you ever see them interact? Was it ever strained, or was anything ever . . . off?”
“Honey, you’re fishing in an empty pond.” She returns to her closet, emerging with a set of black stilettos with red bottoms and crystals on the heels, the same style my sister wore in New York a few years ago. I couldn’t believe she’d become one of those women, the ones we always swore we’d never be. “Every time I was around, the two of them seemed happy and in love—as much as I hate to admit it. Now as far as whether or not it was genuine or for show, I couldn’t even begin to tell you. Closed doors and that sort of thing.”
The doorbell chimes. I check my watch. “Isn’t five o’clock kind of early for a date?”
“Oh, darling.” Erica passes me, leaving a lingering cloud of expensive perfume. “He sent a car for me. I’m meeting him at his helipad in Salt Lake City. We’re going to Vegas for the weekend.”
Her heels click across the glossy tile, her brows arched as she waits for me to follow, and with the flick of a light switch, the chandelier darkens. Erica makes walking in stilettos look natural, and her soft palm slides down the smooth railing of the curled staircase as she descends to the foyer.
She doesn’t seem like a woman who gives a flying shit about her ex anymore. And especially not his wife. It’s undeniably apparent that she’s moved on.
Answering the door, she greets a man in a black suit and points to her luggage, which is placed neatly against a nearby wall. How one woman needs three suitcases for a weekend in Vegas is beyond me, but I’m not surprised.
“It was lovely meeting you . . . ,” she begins to say.
“Greer.”
“Greer, that’s right,” she says, her head tilted and her smile frozen. “How did you get a name like that, anyway? I’ve always had a thing for names. Growing up, there were four other Ericas in my grade. Always swore I’d never give my children a name they’d have to share. If you can find your name on a souvenir shot glass at a drugstore, it’s far too common.”
She doesn’t wait for me to answer her, but that’s fine. I don’t need to explain the intricacies of my mother’s misshapen logic to a woman who’s essentially a stranger with a take-it-or-leave-it mentality toward my missing sister.
In the seventies, there was a Manhattan “society girl” named Greer Forbes. She was the talk of the town, a fixture in most gossip columns, and the woman other women whispered about when they weren’t busy idolizing her.
My mother always loved the juxtaposition of a harsh, masculine name on a gorgeous woman. She thought it was equal parts classy and interesting. Years later, she went on to admit she should’ve named me Emily or Elizabeth, something timeless and easy to spell.
I step onto the landing beneath Erica’s front porch, realizing I haven’t yet called a cab, but rather than lingering like some weirdo, I hit the road and prepare to walk for miles along the snowy pavement until I find a place to grab a hot drink.
When I’m two blocks down, their black limousine crawls to a stop beside me. The back window rolls down, and Erica leans fo
rward.
“There was this one time,” she says. “Maybe ten, eleven years ago. Andrew thought I was cheating on him with my personal trainer.” Erica’s red lips curl at the sides. “Which is hilarious in retrospect because he was gay. Anyway, Andrew about lost it. Had the poor man fired and basically blacklisted from every gym in a sixty-mile radius, which was a big deal because he was one of the most sought-after trainers in the area. But my point, Greer, is that the man has a jealous streak. Do with that information what you will.”
And just like that, she gives a little wave, rolls up the window, and speeds away.
CHAPTER 23
MEREDITH
Twenty-Two Months Ago
“Mer.” Ronan’s lips pull up at the sides, flanked by dimples when he sees me. Pulling me inside, he peers out the door before closing it, catching a glimpse of the taxi parked in his driveway. “Where’s your car?”
“I took a cab.”
His face twists. “Why?”
I haven’t seen him in over a week. A weekend with Andrew and the kids turned into an extra week with them when Erica decided to extend her Jamaican girls’ trip by an extra six days.
He takes my hands in his, bringing them to his lips and warming them with his breath. “You’re freezing.”
“The heat was broken in the cab,” I say.
“And you’re trembling.” He leads me to the sofa, pulling me into his lap. “What’s going on?”
The number of times I had sex with this man last month, I can’t even begin to count. The number of times I thought of him while lying next to my husband is disgraceful. Sitting here, beside him, my body is tense and electric, wishing I could let him ravish me one more time and knowing that I can’t.
“We can’t do this anymore.” I blurt out the words I came here to say before I lose the strength to say them.
He’s quiet, which is exactly the reaction I expected from my even-keeled Ronan.
“Are you happy, Meredith?” he asks, breaking the uncomfortable silence.
“What are you talking about?”
“In your marriage. With Andrew. Are you happy?” His brows meet.
“That’s beside the point. This is wrong. And we have to stop.”
“You’re miserable,” he says. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have been coming here.”
“You were my escape,” I say. “I’m a bored, pathetic woman, and you were exciting.”
“You and I both know I’m more than that to you,” he says. “And you’re not pathetic.”
“I’m pathetic for getting caught up in something I had no business being caught up in.”
“You’re only human.” There’s compassion in his voice, and I don’t deserve it.
I rise from the sofa, pacing his living room and stopping before the picture window, my gaze trained on the waiting cab in the driveway. “You’re trying to talk me into staying. Please stop. My mind’s made up.”
“He doesn’t deserve you, Meredith.” Ronan sucks in a deep breath, his head in his hands. I’ve blindsided him. “But you already know that.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to be with you,” I say. “It’s that I shouldn’t be with you. It’s wrong. I don’t want to be that woman anymore.”
I don’t say goodbye—I can’t.
Instead, I show myself out.
I climb into the back of the cab.
I will go home to my husband, hoping I can forget what I’ve done, that my marriage is still salvageable.
But as the cab backs out and veers down the familiar, tree-lined street, I find myself missing Ronan already, and I can’t help but wonder if I’ve made the wrong decision . . . if I’ve chosen the wrong man.
CHAPTER 24
GREER
Day Seven
“You know he has a housekeeper,” I say to my mother as she stands over the granite sink in the Price kitchen.
“I’m just trying to help.” She’s elbows deep in soapy water, washing Calder’s and Isabeau’s dinner dishes. Her gaze is transfixed on some cable news show on the TV, where a screen full of pundits and crime analysts are discussing my sister on the eve of the one-week anniversary of her disappearance.
“Ugh, turn this off.” I reach for the remote, but my mother slaps my hand.
Just this morning the police released a statement about Ronan being a possible suspect and being placed on paid administrative leave, and it seems to have breathed new life into this story, placing it front and center on all the cable talk shows again.
It doesn’t help that the tips that were flooding into the tip line the first few days all led to dead ends. I had hopes for the conversion van sightings, but with a license plate number, they were able to track down the driver and determine he was in Missouri the day Meredith went missing.
So now everyone’s focused on Andrew and Ronan, scorned lovers, the usual suspects.
“If you ask me”—a man in a gray suit and yellow tie tries to speak over the rest of the crew—“my money’s on the ex-boyfriend. The detective. Never in my twenty-five years in law enforcement have I seen anyone pull a stunt like that. You take an oath. You do your job. And if you didn’t do anything, you don’t have anything to worry about. Not removing himself from the case is the biggest clue we have so far. How you people are ignoring that is beyond me.”
“It’s got to be the husband,” a woman with strawberry-blonde hair, a dusting of freckles, and pale pink lipstick chimes in. The screen says her name is Lindsey Chatham, and she’s the president of a not-for-profit domestic abuse center. “It’s always the husband. He’s the one with the most to gain here. Money, fortune, fame, publicity for his business. His cheating wife goes missing? It’s win-win for him.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Yellow Tie says, “but the husband didn’t know the wife was cheating.”
Lindsey shrugs. “So he says. We don’t know that. Only he does.”
“I’d have to agree with Lindsey on this,” another man says, identified as Utah criminal defense attorney Vince Barbetti. “With a case like this with nothing to go on but basically zero hard evidence, we have to examine motives. Let’s look at the husband. Why would he want her gone? Well, for one, she was cheating on him. Maybe he wanted revenge? Second, money. Was there a life insurance policy? An inheritance? Was she worth more dead than alive? Anything she’d have would go to her spouse. Instant windfall. Third, crime of passion. Maybe something set him off and the husband just snapped?”
“He’s a multimillionaire, so you can remove money from your list of motives. Also, he was at work when she was reported missing.” Yellow Tie defends Andrew.
“So he says,” Lindsey counters. “From what I understand, his receptionist says he was there, but she didn’t say if she actually saw him between the hours of ten a.m. and three p.m. He claims he was in his office, working. There are no witnesses to that effect.”
“All right, so you want to examine motives?” Yellow Tie asks. “Let’s look at the lover. So we know Meredith was pregnant—presumably with Andrew’s baby. She’d been seeing Ronan McCormack for years, off and on from what I understand, and she finally has to end it because she’s having a kid with her husband. That easily could’ve been enough to set him off. He’s angry because he’s losing her. He’s jealous because she chose to go back to her husband instead of staying with him. He doesn’t want to lose her. You want me to go on here? Because I can.”
I wish I could take a side, but they all have valid arguments. At this point, everything’s a matter of opinion regardless of their expert backgrounds. We’re all just trying to make sense of something that doesn’t.
The host, a spitfire with pencil-thin eyebrows named Jeannie Jones, cuts Yellow Tie off midsentence as he rambles on, announcing they’re Skyping in a former girlfriend of Ronan McCormack’s, and the screen cuts to a woman with mousy-brown hair, dark circles under her eyes, a narrow chin, and slender shoulders. She’s seated in what appears to be a living room, with beige walls cover
ed in picture frames and an old piano in the background.
“Okay, coming to us live from Haverford, Utah, is Alana Nash, former girlfriend of person-of-interest Ronan McCormack,” the host says. “Alana, what can you tell us about Ronan? When did you know him? How long did you date? Was there ever anything he did that would lead you to believe he was capable of hurting anyone?”
The girl clears her throat, splotches of skin turning red. She’s nervous as hell, but clearly something compelled her to speak up and let the world know about Ronan.
“We dated just after high school,” she says, her voice as mousy as her hair. “I met him at this store we both worked at, Pitino’s Lumber Supply in Crestwood. Anyway, we dated for about a year. He was really nice. And I thought we were in love. But we got in a fight once. He’d been drinking. We were at a party. He thought I was hitting on some guy, and he got really mad. He pulled me outside and . . .” Her eyes begin to well as she glances down. The host tells her to take her time. “And pushed me up against the side of this house. He put his hand around my neck. I couldn’t breathe.”
My blood runs cold. I can’t so much as picture Ronan touching a woman like that.
“How the hell was this guy able to become an officer of the law?” Jeannie asks, her mouth pulled down in the corners. “Someone explain that to me. Vince?”
Vince Barbetti chimes in, claiming that he’d have to examine the case, but sometimes these charges get dropped and records get scrubbed. It’d be a rare exception, but it was possible. “Alana, did you report this to the police?”
“I didn’t. I was too scared at the time,” Alana continues. “He had a temper, and I knew if he let it get the best of him one time, it could happen again. I just wanted to be done with him. We broke up after that. I haven’t seen him since.”
“So what?” Barbetti scoffs. “You can’t tell me we’re all the same person we were at eighteen. People change. I’m sure that was a wake-up call for him. Clearly he had a respect for the justice system if he cleaned up his act and took an oath.”
“Maybe,” the host says. “Corruption exists in nearly every department at nearly every level.”