There are tears in his eyes now. “It wasn’t until Monday, when she didn’t come home and I couldn’t get her on the phone that I even realized something was wrong.”
His bleary eyes focus on my face, and now there are no smirks, no gross lines. “I swear to you, I had nothing to do with any of it. Yes, I was there, and yes, I should’ve told the cops that immediately, but I was afraid of…” He makes a strained sound that’s too sad to be a laugh. “This. Fuck, I was afraid of this.”
His hands clutch my shoulders, hard enough that I think I’ll have bruises there. “I’m telling you, leave. I didn’t get on that boat, but my fingerprints are on it. I didn’t buy fucking rope and a hammer, but someone using my credit card did.”
There’s so much information coming at me at once that I barely know how to process it all, and I blink, trying to step out of Tripp’s hold, trying to wrap my head around what he’s implying.
“You’re saying someone framed you?”
“I’m saying you still have the chance to walk away from these fuckers.”
He lets me go, stepping back. “I wish to Christ I had.”
* * *
I tear the house apart.
I don’t know what I’m looking for, only that there has to be something, some proof that Eddie did this.
That’s what Tripp was trying to tell me, I know it, and so here I am, opening up closets, yanking out drawers.
Adele rushes around my feet, barking frantically, and there are tears in my eyes as I survey my destruction.
Books off shelves, heedlessly tumbled to the floor. Cushions pulled off the sofa.
I pick up anything heavy, all those tchotchkes from Southern Manors, looking for drops of blood. I go through the pockets of Eddie’s clothes. I push the mattress off our bed.
Something, something, there has to be something, you can’t kill two people and not leave some sign of it, you can’t. There are receipts, he’s hidden a murder weapon, there will be clothes with blood, I will find something.
An hour later—no, two, almost two and a half—I’m sitting on the floor of the coat closet at the front of the house, my head in my hands. Adele has lost interest in me now, and sits in the hall facing me, her snout resting on her paws.
I’ve lost my fucking mind.
The house is a wreck, and I’m too exhausted to even think about putting it back together again.
Tripp is right. I should leave. Get out while I can because even if it wasn’t Eddie, there’s something going on here, something so fucked up that no amount of money can make it worth it.
I’m just getting up from the floor when I see a jacket in the corner of the closet. It must’ve fallen off a hanger while I was in here acting like a madwoman, but I don’t remember seeing it.
I also don’t remember the last time I saw Eddie wear it.
When I pick it up, I notice immediately that it feels a little heavier on one side than the other, and my breath catches in my throat as my fingers close around something in the pocket.
But when I pull it out, it’s just a paperback book.
I imagine him, taking it to read somewhere, maybe at the office, maybe on his lunch break, and shoving it back in a pocket, forgetting about it.
I’ve seen Eddie reading plenty over the past few months, but always some boring military thriller. This is a romance novel, an older one with a pretty lurid cover, which doesn’t strike me as Eddie’s thing.
Maybe it was Bea’s. A favorite read, something he kept close to him.
I open the cover.
It takes me a minute to realize what I’m seeing, the spill of words written over the typed pages confusing and messy to my eyes.
And then I see Blanche scrawled on a page, and feel like my heart stops beating.
Murdered my best friend.
Locked me away.
My shaking hands turn the pages so fast, I can hear paper tear.
And then there’s my name.
Jane.
Bile floods my mouth, and I whimper, muscles seizing up.
Killed Blanche, locked me away, fucked him, Jane.
The words are blurring, and I’m so sure I’m going to be sick, but I can’t be, I can’t because Bea Rochester is not in that lake, rotting away like Tripp said, she’s here, she’s right over my head, and oh my god.
I rush out of the closet, my feet skidding on the marble floor in the hallway.
Adele looks up and barks once, sharp, as I run for the stairs, the book still in my hand.
A code, the same one as the lock at the lake house.
Another closet, this one smaller, one I’ve never even paid attention to because I hardly ever come upstairs, and oh god, oh god, the thumps, those noises, transitional seasons, that asshole, it was her, it was Bea—
My hands shake so badly I can barely open the panel at the back of the closet, but I manage it, punching in the numbers even as a part of me says she won’t be in there. That this can’t be fucking real.
A whirring sound, a click, and I push the door open.
At first, I’m just surprised to see what a big room is behind the door. Like a hotel room, almost, decorated, cozy despite the lack of natural light. A big bed in the center.
And next to that bed, a woman.
Now I really think I will be sick.
Bea Rochester didn’t drown in the same accident that killed Blanche.
Bea Rochester never died at all.
Bea Rochester is standing right in front of me.
“Is he here?” she asks.
30
My head is spinning, and my stomach is still lurching.
Not help me, not who are you, but is he here?
I shake my head. “N-no. He’s at work, he…”
“It doesn’t matter,” Bea says, and holds out her hands to me.
After so much time spent looking at her pictures, seeing her here, in front of me now, is almost too surreal to fathom, and maybe that’s why I find myself crossing the space, putting my hands in hers.
“We have to get out of here before he gets back,” she says, and I nod even as I say, “Tripp.”
She frowns at me, confused.
“What?”
I shake my head, the shock turning my thoughts to a kind of thick, heavy sludge. “I talked to him today. Just a few hours ago, and he said he was there that night, that Eddie was there that night. It was him, wasn’t it? Eddie killed Blanche. Oh my god.”
The words come out a moan, and Bea grabs my shoulders. She’s smaller than I thought she would be, somehow, but strong, especially for a woman who’s spent so much time locked away.
Jesus, locked away. Locked up here. By Eddie.
“Jane,” she says, and I think of Eddie telling her about me, telling her my name, and want to scream, but there’s another sound.
The closet door opening.
PART X
EDDIE
31
Something has to give.
That’s been the one thought spiraling through my mind for the past few weeks, and it was still there as I parked the car in the garage, turned it off, stared through the windshield.
Tripp charged with Blanche’s murder, Bea locked away upstairs, and Jane …
Fuck, Jane.
Sighing, I opened the car door and headed into the house. It’s late, and the weather is shit, and I should’ve come home earlier, but I was waiting out Jane, hoping she’d already gone to bed.
I wanted to talk to Bea.
Bea would know what to do here, how to fix this. Even though I snapped at her the last time for suggesting that the situation couldn’t stand, I also knew she’d be the only one to get us out of it.
Opening the front door, the house felt too quiet and a little too cold, especially after the heat of outside, but I didn’t mind.
And then I saw it.
It looked like a goddamn tornado had torn through. Like it had been ransacked.
Jane.
I didn’t even remem
ber going up the stairs. Just that I was there at the closet, opening the door.
It actually took me a minute to realize what I was seeing. That the doors were open. That Jane was in there.
That she and Bea were standing there together.
It felt enough like a nightmare or some kind of stress-induced hallucination that I just stared at them for the longest time. Bea, her face pale, Jane, nearly gray, her eyes huge in her face.
And even as I looked at them, my brain was trying to whir into motion, trying to explain, to fix this.
Too late, I saw Jane reach for the silver pineapple on the table by the door. One of those knickknacks from Southern Manors I’d taken from somewhere else in the house to put up here, trying to make it look nicer.
As it swung toward me, Jane’s face screwed up in fear and anger, I realized my mistake.
But Jane made a mistake, too.
The hit was too hard and badly aimed, crunching against the side of my face so that I immediately felt teeth break, tasted blood, the world just white-hot crushing pain.
Then darkness.
32
I really should’ve fucking known it.
My head ached, and as I opened my eyes, it seemed like they might explode out of my skull. There was a thick, heavy feeling in my stomach, and I turned my head to the side, suddenly afraid I was going to puke, but nothing happened. I just coughed and retched and wondered how the hell I didn’t see this coming.
Bea was always too smart for this to be a permanent solution. Hell, I was too smart for this to be a permanent solution. But that first night, I’d been freaking out and panicking, and this had seemed … okay, it had seemed insane even then, but I was improvising. It’s what I’d always done, made things up on the spot, adapted to my circumstances.
Usually it worked.
But this was Bea. This was my wife.
Of course it ended up like this, me on the floor, bleeding, missing several teeth—and Bea out there, somewhere, with Jane.
The thought caused a quick surge of panic, and I tried to sit up, but that wasn’t happening. I collapsed to the floor in the fetal position, staring blurrily at my own blood as somewhere downstairs, my wife and my fiancée … what, called the cops? Shared a glass of celebratory champagne?
Christ, I hoped it was one of those options, because anything else scared the fuck out of me.
* * *
It’s not like I went to Hawaii with the express purpose of seducing and marrying Bea Mason. I hadn’t known she’d be there—I’m not a stalker, for fuck’s sake. But I’d gotten good at spotting opportunities over the years, and that’s what seeing Bea Mason on that beach was.
Not just an opportunity.
The opportunity.
I hadn’t known who she was, initially. I didn’t exactly keep up with the home décor industry, but the girl I was traveling with, Charlie, did.
“Holy shit,” she’d said as we’d been sitting by the pool.
I’d looked up from my phone to see a woman walking by in a deep purple one-piece, a flowered sarong around her waist. She was pretty and petite, and even from a distance, I caught the sparkle of diamonds in her ears, but I didn’t think anything about her really warranted a “Holy shit.”
“What?” I’d asked, and Charlie had thumped me with a rolled-up magazine.
“That’s Bea Mason,” she’d said, and when I’d just stared at her, she’d rolled her eyes and said, “She owns Southern Manors? It’s, like, huge? I got that gingham skirt you like so much from there.”
I had no idea what skirt she was talking about, but I smiled and nodded. “Oh, right. So, she’s a big deal?”
“To women, yeah,” Charlie said, then wrinkled her nose. “But I wonder why she’s staying here? This isn’t even the nicest resort on the island. If I had her money, I’d be at the Lanai.”
And that’s when Bea Mason suddenly got a lot more interesting to me.
Charlie had money. Lots of it. None of it was really hers, I guess, more her family’s, but she was still comfortably loaded. Which meant that Bea Mason must have even more.
“It’s her company?” I asked, looking back at my phone, keeping my tone casual.
“Oh yeah,” Charlie said as she reached to pick her daiquiri up off the nearby table. I could smell the sugary strawberry scent of it from my chair. “She’s super inspiring. Built it up from this little internet business to a massive thing in like five years. Self-made multimillionaire. There was an interview with her in Fortune that my dad sent to me, and I was like, ‘Goals.’”
I’d looked up from my phone then, and caught a glimpse of Bea walking away.
It wasn’t just the money. The money was a big part of it, sure, but I liked that idea—that she’d made something out of nothing. And while Charlie ordered another drink and went back to her magazine, I’d done some googling.
The Southern Manors website had been charming, if a little cloying, and the pictures of Bea had proven that she was as attractive as I’d guessed. Not in the same showy way Charlie was, forever Instagram ready, but in a subtler, classier way.
Learning her net worth added a certain sheen to things, too, of course.
Two hundred million dollars. That’s what Google said, although I knew those things weren’t always accurate. Charlie’s dad was supposed to be worth fifty million, but most of that was tied up in real estate and trusts. Charlie was even on an allowance. A generous one, definitely, but it wasn’t exactly carte blanche.
“I’m gonna go up to the room for a bit,” I’d told her, standing up from my chair and stretching, letting her gaze slide over my bare chest, my abs. I’d been up early to hit the gym, a chore, but a necessary one.
“Want company?” she’d purred, and I’d been sure to grin at her, chucking her underneath her chin.
“No, because I’m gonna nap, and I won’t sleep if you’re around.”
She’d liked that, and caught my hand, pressing a kiss to the tips of my fingers before shooing me off. “I’ll be up in a bit, then. Rest up.”
I’d gone back to the room, but I hadn’t napped. Instead, I’d thrown most of my things back in my bag.
I was good with people, figuring them out, predicting what they’d do, and I had a hunch Charlie was on to something with the Lanai. Bea Mason hadn’t stopped to sit at our pool, after all, just walked through.
And I was right, I learned later. She’d just been checking out our pool area because she was trying to get an idea of what kind of bathing suit prints were popular among, as she put it, “normal women.”
Looking back, that probably should’ve been a hint, too.
At the time, I just patted myself on the back for guessing correctly.
I wish I could say there was some special trick to doing the kinds of things I do, some kind of secret code. But the fact of the matter is, I never really tried all that hard. All it took at the front desk of the Lanai was a chagrined smile to a pretty receptionist, a sheepish story about chasing my girlfriend all the way to Hawaii because I’d realized missing our vacation for work was the stupidest thing I could’ve done.
Not only did I get confirmation that Bea was there, I got a free glass of champagne for my troubles.
I’d asked the front desk to hold my things for me because obviously, I was hoping all would be forgiven and I’d be staying in my “girlfriend’s” room that night.
Which wasn’t quite how it turned out, but close enough.
My reasons for pursuing Bea might have started out a little mercenary, but I honestly did like her, right from the start. When I saw her sitting there on the beach, deep in thought, I was impressed. Most of the women I’d been spending time with were rich, but on someone else’s dime. I liked that Bea had her own money, her own company. I liked the way she was always thinking about how to make it better rather than resting on her laurels.
And look, I’m not a total bastard. I sent Charlie a text, let her know that I’d had a sudden emergency and been called ba
ck to New York, but that I’d definitely give her a call next week.
She’d bought it, and I hadn’t heard from her again until that email she sent after she saw that Bea and I were engaged.
And it’s not like I’d read that all too closely, obviously. I hit delete as soon as I saw who it was from, although I did pick up a few key phrases before I hit the trash icon.
Motherfucker, that was there. Manipulative, toxic, seriously psychotic, nothing all that unexpected, although years later, when things with Bea started going wrong, I’d wondered if those words had been about me or my wife.
Well, the motherfucker was clearly me.
Talking to Bea that first day was so easy. Like it was meant to be. Honestly, I would’ve thought she would’ve had her guard up so much more.
Except Bea wasn’t like that, not really. She wasn’t always looking over her shoulder, she wasn’t naturally suspicious. Later I’d work out that it was probably because she always knew she was the most dangerous thing in any room. Why should she have to look out for anyone else when she’d always win?
That probably sounds bitter, but I don’t mean it that way. If anything, I was in awe of her. At first, at least. Before the murders.
33
I’d never seen anyone more determined to get what she wanted than Bea. Not even me. Like I said, I’d always been the type to seize on opportunities that presented themselves, rather than the person to go out and make those opportunities happen, which is what Bea did.
I think that’s why I liked Jane so much right from the start. She was like me—always looking for an opening, then twisting to fit that opening. I’m sure she thought she was fooling me, thought I’d bought her whole act, but I recognized too much of myself in her not to see what she was doing. Whatever souls were made of, mine and Jane’s were the same—or at least similar enough.
The Wife Upstairs Page 21