The Other Widow

by Susan Crawford

  “He was shouting at the train,” Brennan tells the cop who bends to write something down on a small pad he’s taken out of his coat pocket. “Something about Karen. Most likely Karen Lindsay, maybe—the widow of the businessman who died on Newbury a few weeks back. Suspicious death.”

  Dorrie nods. “Karen was on the train. The last car.”

  “Anything else?” The cop taps his pen against a little notepad. “You see anything that might—”

  Dorrie shakes her head. “It all happened so fast. I was standing there. I was just . . . It all happened before I could really even—”

  “We’re good for now, Mrs. Keating,” the cop says. “A detective will most likely be in touch. Later,” he says. “To get a more detailed account.”

  “She was trying to warn me,” Dorrie says. Her voice sounds fuzzy, very far away, as if she’s in a storm and a squall is blowing it around her head, tossing it here and there. “Karen. She was trying to tell me. She was trying to warn me.” She hears her words zipping repetitively in the air. Faint. Insubstantial. They sound like someone else’s words. She wonders if she’ll always feel like this. Mad like this.

  “You’d better get yourself out of this cold,” the cop says. “You’re shaking like a leaf. Plus, you don’t look so good. You sure you’re okay? He didn’t do anything to—?”

  “No.” Dorrie tugs on her coat, tightens the woolen belt, fiddles with it. Her hands shake. “He didn’t touch me. He just—I just saw him flying toward the train—the tracks.”

  She walks out with Brennan and stands on the sidewalk in the cold. “How did you know?” She feels a little better in the sunshine, out of the cave of the station, away from the tracks. “How’d you know to be here?” Sunlight slants down, touches Brennan’s hair as they stand on the cold street, turns it a bright copper.

  “Once a cop . . .” Brennan shrugs. “It was pretty clear you were in danger. After the other night outside Starbucks . . . I had an eye out for you, is all.”

  “Thank you.” It sounds so meager, considering all that’s happened. “Really, Brennan. You saved my life. Again!”

  Brennan smiles. “Glad I could,” she says. “But to be honest, if you hadn’t moved in just that split second . . .”

  “Yeah. Thank God for Karen.”

  “But the way you moved—totally incredible! I have never in my life seen anybody move the way you did!”

  Dorrie hesitates. “It was my—” She starts to tell Brennan about her mother, about how she is always there when Dorrie really needs her, the vision of her. She closes her eyes for a split second, sees her mother skating on the pond in Boston Common the day before Lily was born, young, beautiful, the sky bright-bright blue and thick as honey—her mother so graceful, so free. She skated over to the very edge of the ice and took Dorrie’s face in her hands, softly, gently, like a breeze, like the brush of a butterfly wing.

  She listens for her mother’s voice, but there are only the sounds of the station, the squeals and whispers of the trains. Dorrie clears her throat. “So,” she says. “Today. With this guy— Was it about Joe’s death?”

  “It’d be one hell of a crazy coincidence if it wasn’t. They’re getting a warrant to search his place right now. Tomas Ramirez. Ever heard his name mentioned? At work or anything?”

  “No.” Dorrie gazes out over the gray street. Everything is fading. Late afternoon is turning into night.

  “Well.” Brennan tugs her coat up under her chin, glances at her watch. “If there’s anything there to find, they’ll find it.”

  Listen,” Dorrie says. “There’s something I have to tell you. About the night Joe died. I was there. I just—I’d lost so much already, I—”

  “Maybe you should keep that to yourself.” Brennan tucks her hair under her hat and looks down the street as if she’s searching for someone. “It’s not exactly news, anyway, whatever it is you’re about to not tell me. There’s footage,” she says, “of that night. But they’ve got all they need. The rest is just—”

  “Footage?”

  “Little bakery one street over from Newbury,” she says.

  Dorrie reaches up, touches the cut that’s healed into a small white scar above her eyebrow, remembers the window, the cakes, blood seeping along the blue of Lily’s borrowed hat. “Thanks,” she says. “Really.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re even talking about,” Brennan says. “But it’s freezing out here. Drop you at your house?”

  “No.” Dorrie isn’t really ready to go home. Not yet. “I’m okay,” she says. “I think I’ll stop and get a cup of hot chocolate or something. But, really, Brennan. Thank you. For everything. You’re a damn good detective.”

  “Not yet.”

  XLII

  DORRIE

  Through the large front window, Dorrie watches Viv rush down the sidewalk. She sees her slip and slide across a patch of ice, sees her coat fly open when she turns into the doorway of the coffee shop, notes her friend’s unbuckled belt, hanging loose from the loops. She really did rush to get here and it really is extremely cold. Viv could so easily have said she couldn’t come or just not responded. She could have said she didn’t see Dorrie’s frantic little text until it was too late. She watches Viv push through the door. Life is just too short to hold a grudge. Anyway, Dorrie needs a best friend, especially right now. She needs a confidante.

  “I forgive you,” she says when Viv gets to the table, puffing and fumbling with her coat. “I’m not mad at you anymore.” She takes a sip of hot chocolate and wraps her hands around the cup as Viv drapes her coat over the back of a chair.

  “Oh. Thank God!” Viv just stands there. She looks as if she’s afraid whatever she says will be the wrong thing and throw their friendship back off track.

  “Just stay away from Samuel.”

  “No worries there,” Viv says. “Absolutely none.” She walks over to stand in line and comes back with a coffee. “So your text,” she says. “It sounded urgent. I— Am I even dressed?” she says. And she is. But badly. She’s wearing a sweatshirt with something that looks like grape juice down the front, juice or wine, sweatpants that don’t match. Her hair is a tangle of thick curls, and she’s wearing only a little makeup that looks like it’s left over from much earlier or possibly the night before.

  “Yeah,” Dorrie says. “Sort of. Not your usual glam.” She takes another sip of her hot chocolate. “I was nearly murdered in the train station today,” she says.

  Viv goes pale. “Oh my God! What happened? Who was it? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I didn’t know him. Never saw the guy before in my life. It was so bizarre. He came at me. That’s all I know. Karen saw him from the train and warned me. And then Brennan was—”

  “Wait. Karen? Joe’s Karen?”

  “Yeah,” Dorrie says. “Joe’s Karen. It was all so totally—surreal. I was kind of following her, actually.”

  “Why?”

  Dorrie shrugs. “I’m not sure.” She stares out the window, where night is beginning to fall, where streetlights come on, suddenly, like lights on a Christmas tree. “Curiosity. Closure, maybe. I’m just glad it wasn’t Samuel,” she says.

  “Samuel?”

  “Yeah, Samuel. My husband? Samuel, the anger-issues-guy-who-passes-out-on-my-friend’s-hotel-bed-Samuel? I found one of my gloves from the night of the accident. I’d lost the other one and I only had the one glove. It was in the car, on the seat. It was in Joe’s car the night he died.”

  “So?”

  “So I found it hidden behind a bunch of Samuel’s stuff in the garage. I never would have found it. I never even go near his stupid workbench, but I was looking for something to clean.” She takes another sip of hot chocolate. “It doesn’t matter. I found it. That’s why I wanted to meet you that night, but then we got into that whole thing about you and Samuel, and I . . . Anyway, he must have been right there on Newbury Street the night Joe died. He must have grabbed my glove. And he has been acting creepy. And you said he
was—that you thought he was dangerous.”

  “I got a little got carried away,” Viv says. “Samuel is about as dangerous as Purrl, probably.”

  “Wait. You told me he was . . . ‘Watch out for him, Dorrie!’ Didn’t you tell me that? Several times?”

  Viv takes a sip of her coffee. “I did. I know. But I was a little down on men at that point. Well, at this point.” She sighs. “I suppose I’ve got issues. And he was really angry that night. I mean, he really didn’t seem like the Samuel we all know and love.”

  “Careful.”

  Viv fiddles with her napkin, folds it into a tiny square. “Maybe I exaggerated a little.”

  “Okay. Granted, you do tend to overdramatize. But there’s still the glove!”

  “Wait!” Viv bends over the table. Her eyes are bright in the overhead glare of the cheap lighting. “Was it a black glove?”

  “Yes.”

  “Leather?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You left it in my car,” Viv says. She takes another sip of coffee.

  “So. Wait. So how did Samuel—?”

  “I gave it to him,” Viv says. “The night he came up to my, um, to my room. When he was leaving, I remembered the glove. I hadn’t seen you since you left it in my car. ‘Take this to Dorrie, will you?’ I said, and he told me he would. I guess neither of us thought about how he’d explain exactly why he had it, which is probably why he never gave it to you. He just must have stuck it somewhere and figured he’d deal with it later. He was furious with you anyway. He couldn’t have cared less about your chapped hands at that point! And then he must’ve forgotten about it.”

  XLIII

  MAGGIE

  Two weeks later, Maggie stands up and straightens her uniform in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. She’s meeting Hank at the diner up the street from the station. They aren’t partners, but Maggie hopes at some point they will be. They work well together. They always have, but even though Johnson isn’t Maggie’s favorite person—or Hank’s, either, apparently—he is Hank’s partner, at least for now. Her own partner is a nice enough guy. Gus. Not much of a talker. Their rapport is fine at work, but there’s no overlap the way there was with Hank. They’re not really friends.

  She never went back to work at the beige office with the wavy floor after the day in the Park Street Station. She wasn’t a good fit for Mass Casualty and Life. She wasn’t built to sit in an office, to push buttons with a manicured finger, to swivel on a cheap metallic chair. Maggie knew she was meant to do less passive things, more hands-on things, and the day with Tomas only reinforced her conviction. She’d called in to give her notice that next morning, but her boss had let her off the hook. “Just come by and get your stuff,” he’d told her, and she had. Even though she’d wondered since the incident in Chinatown if she would ever be all right back in the field—worried that she might freeze again or hesitate, that she would let her partner down or put someone at risk—she hadn’t. Not at Park Street. Despite her fear of making the wrong choice, despite Iraq, despite everything, she’d come through when it really mattered. She won’t let anybody down. She knows she won’t.

  The timing couldn’t have been better. After the article in the Globe—after all the accolades—they’d called her down to the station that next morning. Her old station. Her old boss. “Glad to have you back, Brennan,” the chief had said. No prying. No fanfare. That was the chief.

  Really, this is not the place she wants to be, not forever, and Maggie understands this now, accepts it. She can forgive herself for wanting more, for wanting to make the most of every minute she has left. To pay it forward, this gift. This life. She’ll take the test to be a detective for the Bureau of Investigative Services as soon as she possibly can, set things up herself this time, go through all the hoops and channels, work her way through the ranks, but she will take the test. And she’ll ace it.

  Sometimes she thinks back to her first date with Lucas, tries to picture the guy watching her from the back of the restaurant, but she never saw his face. Most likely it was Tomas. Most likely he was stalking Dorrie that night outside Starbucks until Maggie happened along, calling Dorrie’s name, foiling his plan. Would he have killed her then? That night? Would he have stalked her to the trains, shoved her down onto the tracks and disappeared?

  Maggie pulls up in front of the diner. Hank’s already at a table, already on his phone, gearing himself up for a new day. She can almost hear him smacking his lips, almost see him rubbing his hands together. Same old Hank.

  “So?” She slides in across from him with a cup of coffee, and he sticks his phone back in his jacket pocket.

  “So the guys went over Ramirez’s place with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “Find anything?”

  “Naw.” Hank leans back in the little plastic chair, cheap, like a McDonald’s chair. “Buuuut . . .”

  “What?” Her coffee tastes like water.

  “They didn’t find anything there. Absolutely zip. Clean as a whistle. But they did find something in one of the cars behind the garage where Ramirez worked. He drove it on occasion, according to the owner—Buick with a bashed-in headlight out in the back lot. So, when the detectives searched it, they found an old coat on the front seat. These were in the pocket—the originals. I made a couple copies; knew you’d want to see them.” Hank reaches into a case on the floor beside his chair and pulls out a few papers, marked with creases, as if the originals had been folded for a long time, folded and refolded, read and reread. Words are typed across the pages in twelve-point roman font.

  “What’s this?”

  “Take a look,” he says. “It’s weird as hell.” He wolfs down a doughnut; white powder sticks to his mustache. “This guy was being played big-time.”

  “By—?”

  “No way to tell. No prints besides Ramirez’s. Standard computer paper—no clues there. Total anonymity on this one. Whoever wrote these notes thought it all out pretty well.”

  Maggie reaches for the little clump of papers. There aren’t many. Three or four sheets.

  “Take your time,” Hank says. “Bein’ on second has its upside.”

  “Yeah.” It isn’t Maggie’s favorite shift, especially now, with Lucas in her life. Still, Maggie knows that this is what she signed on for. And there’s always day shift to look forward to. “You have got to be fucking kidding me!”

  “I know. Right?”

  Maggie looks down at the papers on the table. Most of them are only one or two lines. One of them is only three words. She isn’t sure exactly what she was expecting, but it sure as hell wasn’t this!

  She looks at the first note: Karen’s husband plans to kill her. He and his girlfriend. He beats her. I have seen the bruises. She is two people, the Karen you know, yes. But she’s a battered wife as well, and she will keep this secret because she’s terrified of him. She will protect this cruel man until he kills her.

  Maggie thinks back. She tries to remember if Karen ever so much as hinted that her husband might be violent or abusive or even forceful. She shakes her head. Karen Lindsay didn’t strike her as the helpless type.

  She reads the second note: You are the only one who can help Karen. She trusts you. She loves you. If she wasn’t so afraid of her husband, she would already be with you. Don’t tell her that you know. Don’t ask her any questions. It isn’t fair to put her through any more than she’s gone through already. You must act alone.

  And then: Last night they nearly killed her. He beat her senseless.

  And, finally: Help her! Please!

  Maggie straightens the little pile. “So, Tomas thought he was saving Karen by getting rid of her abusive husband. Not the sharpest pencil in the box, apparently.”

  “No. ‘Love doth make fools of us all.’ Any idea who would do this?” Hank sticks the papers back in his case.

  “Where were these? How did Tomas get them? Were they mailed to him?”

  Hank nods. “To the shop where he worked. H
oods. No return address, according to the owner—anyway, the envelopes are long gone at this point. Seems the husband wasn’t abusive in the least. They called the widow in and asked her about it. This was the first she knew. She seemed genuinely shocked.”

  “Yeah. Even Dorrie said Karen was—you know—trying to warn her from the train that day.”

  “So who would want Joe Lindsay dead? And what about the woman? This Dorrie? Who’d want her dead? Was she Lindsay’s girlfriend?”

  Maggie shrugs. “He was training her to take over the company finances, so she pretty much knew everything Joe Lindsay knew. I’m thinking Lindsay’s partner, Edward, wanted them both gone, so he could cover up what he was doing with the business.” Maggie slugs down the last of her bad coffee. “But proving it will be almost impossible.” Someday, she thinks. When she makes detective, she’ll take another look at this. She gathers her things, puts on her coat. She’ll call Karen from the car—drive to Waltham straight from here if Karen’s around. There’s still time before her shift begins.

  “When Tomas saw Dorrie in the station that day, right where Karen was—who knows?” she says. “Maybe he thought she was after Karen. The husband’s whatever. Girlfriend or whatever.” She glances at her watch. “I’d better get going,” she says. “Thanks for keeping me in the loop, for showing me the notes. This is so— Damn . . .” She shakes her head. “What people do for love, eh? Hey, Hank,” she says from the doorway, one foot already on the sidewalk. “What color was the coat they found? The one in the Buick?”

  “Black,” he says. “One of those heavy puffy coats. Down or something.”

  XLIV

  KAREN

  Karen is happily surprised when Brennan phones. She wants to drop by, she says, to tie up some loose ends. She won’t stay long.