The Perfect Stranger

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  If she picks up the phone to talk to her cousin tonight, there will be no concealing the fact that something’s wrong. And if she were to tell Barbie June what happened to Meredith, she’s certain she wouldn’t be met with much sympathy.

  The phone goes silent, and after a long pause, it beeps to indicate a new voice mail message.

  Moments later the home phone begins to ring.

  Barbie June again. If her cousin doesn’t get an answer on one number, she always tries the other—­and sometimes she’ll even call Rob’s phone, trying to reach her.

  Landry ignores the ringing, letting it, too, go into voice mail.

  Guilt settles over her as she tries to go back to her book. What if the call was about a family emergency rather than the usual chit-­chatty check-­in?

  Worried, she reaches for her cell phone to listen to the message.

  “Hello there, darlin’. That was a divine picture of you and Rob and the Sandersons in the paper on Sunday, and I’ve been meanin’ to call you ever since I saw it. I know it’s Rob’s golf night so I figured you might be lonely. But—­you’re not pickin’ up. Where the heck are you without your phone? I’ll try you at home. Buh-­bye.”

  Ah, the usual chit-­chatty check-­in—­laced with a slight hint of accusation.

  Landry deletes the message.

  Beck leans back, rubbing her eyes.

  She’s just spent hours sitting at the kitchen table on her laptop, alternately reading every entry and subsequent comment on her mother’s blog and still trying to figure out the password to her e-­mail.

  She’s tried every combination of her parents’ initials, plus her own and her brothers’, along with various symbols and phone numbers and birthdates in chronological and reverse order . . .

  Nothing has worked.

  She’s been keeping track, at least, on a yellow legal pad, so that she won’t waste her time on duplicate guesses. Now she flips the pages, scanning the list of everything she’s tried, feeling as though she’s missing the obvious.

  Hearing a floorboard creak in the next room, she looks up. It’s either her father or Keith. Her brothers again drove back home for the night, promising to come back first thing in the morning.

  After they left, Keith said he was going to bed and disappeared up the stairs, ever-­present phone in hand. Since there’s only a twin bed in her old bedroom, he’s sleeping across the hall, in one of the bunk beds that once belonged to her brothers.

  Dad adjourned to the den around the same time, presumably planning to spend the night in his recliner once again. Beck had offered him her room, pointing out that she can sleep in the other bunk in the boys’ room where Keith is, but Dad turned her down.

  That was fine with her—­and not just because she understood how hard it would be for her father to climb the stairs to go to bed, no matter which bedroom he was sleeping in.

  She’s just not eager to share space with Keith right now, and she’s pretty sure he feels the same way.

  “What did you tell them?” she asked him after he spoke to the detectives this afternoon.

  “What do you think I told them?”

  “I have no idea. Why do you think I’m asking?” she said aloud.

  To herself, she thought, Jackass.

  Thank God she never confided in him about her father—­about what she saw, that one time.

  The incident did nag at her for a few weeks after it happened, and at the time she considered telling Keith about it, but she kept it to herself in the end.

  Thank God. Thank God.

  The floorboard creaks again.

  “Hello?” she calls.

  As much as she hopes her father is finally getting some sleep, she’d prefer to see him pop up in the kitchen doorway right now, rather than her husband.

  “Dad? Keith?”

  No reply. She’s just starting to think she imagined the creaking when a shadow falls across the floor.

  Keith.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “Why are you still up?” he asks, simultaneously.

  He’s still dressed—­or perhaps dressed again—­in jeans and a T-­shirt. And he’s wearing shoes, she notices.

  “I’m hungry,” he says with a shrug. “Is there any more of that chicken casserole from dinner?”

  She looks from his face to the phone in his hand to the fridge.

  “Help yourself.”

  He crosses over to the refrigerator and opens the door. “So what are you doing up, Rebecca?”

  He always calls her by her full name, unlike her family and friends. That never really bothered her until now. In fact, when she first met him she thought it was sweet and refreshing.

  But lately—­especially here in her childhood home, where she’s been referred to as Beck all her life—­her given name, particularly on her husband’s lips, seems stiff and formal.

  “I was just rereading my mother’s blog,” she tells him.

  And trying to hack into her e-­mail account . . .

  But Keith doesn’t need to know that. For some reason, she feels like he might not approve.

  “Why?” he asks.

  “Why, what?”

  “Why are you reading her blog?”

  “I was just looking for . . .” She trails off, watching him lift a corner of foil off the casserole dish in the fridge, peer inside, and fold it back down.

  “What were you looking for?” he asks.

  “I was just looking to see what she’d written lately. That’s all. It makes me feel close to her.”

  “Oh.” He opens the crisper drawer, takes out an apple, closes the fridge.

  “I thought you were hungry.”

  “I am. I’m having an apple.”

  “I thought you wanted that chicken casserole.”

  “So did I, but . . . it’s congealed.”

  “You can heat it in the microwave.”

  “No, thanks. This is fine.”

  You weren’t hungry at all, she thinks, watching him wash the apple at the sink.

  In all the years they’ve been married, he’s never been a midnight snacker. If anything, she’s the one who gets up and roots around the fridge in the wee hours.

  Besides, when she served the chicken casserole the neighbor dropped off for their dinner, he picked at it. The recipe was probably straight off the label of a can of cream soup, and Keith—­who works for the department of animal and food sciences at the university—­isn’t big on packaged foods as ingredients for anything.

  She’d bet anything that he has his car keys in his pocket. He was probably going to sneak out of the house like a wayward teenager, probably thinking he could rendezvous with . . . whoever . . . and be back at dawn.

  Sorry, pal, she thinks, watching him crunch into the apple. Guess I foiled your plan.

  At last Landry hears the garage door going up.

  Rob is home, thank goodness. He might not understand about Meredith, but he’ll listen patiently, and he’ll care. Or at least pretend to.

  “Which one is she?” he’ll ask, never able to tell her online friends apart when she talks about them.

  If Landry explains, “She’s the older woman who lives in Ohio,” or “She’s the one who writes the Pink Stinks blog,” he’ll murmur as if he knows who she means, but he won’t. He’ll be sympathetic, though he won’t understand how the loss of a woman she’s never met can hit so hard.

  That’s how he reacted in January, when Nell died.

  She, too, was a blogger. She lived in England.

  “Whoa Nellie died today,” Landry told Rob when he walked in the door that night.

  Concern immediately etched his face. “Who?”

  “My friend Nell. Whoa Nellie. That’s the name of her blog.”

  The concern dissipated
and she could see the wheels turning: No one I know. No one in real life.

  Landry can hear him in the kitchen, going through his nightly ritual: electronic beeping as he sets the alarm on the panel beside the door, water running as he washes his hands at the sink, the fridge door opening and closing as he grabs a bottle of water, footsteps creaking the wide old floorboards as he makes his way through the dining room, calling, “Anybody home?”

  “In here.”

  He walks into the living room. Tanned, lean, and handsome, he’s wearing khakis and a golf shirt, carrying his briefcase and a garment bag containing the suit he’d worn to work this morning.

  “What’s going on?” he asks, setting the bags on a chair and walking over to her lamplit reading nook. “Where are the kids?”

  “Tucker’s playing video games at Jake’s. Addie’s at a movie with her friends. She’s going to pick him up at ten and drive him home.”

  “So you’re here all by your lonesome?” He perches on the arm of her chair and kisses the top of her head. “Why are all the shutters closed?”

  She follows his gaze to the wall of windows facing the bay. Ordinarily, they don’t bother to draw the plantation shutters at night. The boardwalk is sparsely traveled after dark, and though anyone out there would ostensibly have a clear view into the house, it’s not, typically, a troubling thought.

  Tonight is not typical.

  “I just . . . I didn’t want to sit here thinking that anyone could see in,” she admits to Rob.

  “You feeling okay?”

  “Not really.”

  Feeling him stiffen, she reads his mind, quickly saying, “No, not that. Physically, I’m fine.”

  “For a second I thought—­”

  “I know.” He thought cancer. “It’s just . . . I got some bad news today about one of my online friends.”

  “I’m sorry. What happened?”

  She hesitates, remembering the first time she’d ever introduced him to Meredith—­online, of course.

  She remembers how Rob studied the photo of a smiling woman with grayish blond hair and glasses, and read over the brief bio beneath it.

  “How do you know that’s really her?” he asked—­of course he did, because as an attorney, he rarely accepts anything at face value.

  “Because this is her Web page.”

  “No, I mean . . . anyone can post any picture online and claim it as their own. For all you know, this Meredith person might actually be a twenty-­year-­old tattooed jailbird.”

  “She’s not. This is her.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do.”

  Meredith’s entries resonated too sharply to be anything but authentic.

  “What happened?” Rob asks again, and he strokes Landry’s hair while she tells him the tragic news, shaking his head and wearing a grave expression.

  “So her husband was away on business when it happened?”

  “Not on business—­he was out of town taking care of his mother.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She told me.”

  “She told you—­or she wrote about it online?”

  Realizing where he’s going with this line of questioning, she bristles. “She blogged about it.”

  Rob shakes his head but says nothing.

  He’s always worrying about what the kids are doing online, equating social networking Web sites with letting them walk into a room filled with predators.

  Landry opens her mouth to tell him that Meredith wasn’t murdered because she blogged personal details about her life, then closes it again.

  Oh, really? How can you be so sure about that?

  She’d been assuming that her friend had been killed by an intruder who randomly broke into her house . . .

  But there is a chance—­however slight—­that Meredith might have been targeted by someone who knew her, or at least, knew that her husband was out of town, leaving her alone and vulnerable.

  Maybe he overheard Meredith talking about it at the supermarket, or in a restaurant, or . . .

  Or maybe he read it on her blog.

  It’s not very likely—­but it could have happened, she supposes.

  “Her husband must be devastated,” Rob says.

  “I’m sure he is. And she has kids—­they’re grown and married. Two sons and a daughter. There are grandchildren, too. Three, I think, with another one due in October. She called them her stinkerdoodles.” She smiles, remembering the affection Meredith had for her growing family.

  “She wrote all of that on the Internet?”

  “Yes, but . . . it’s not like that. We’re basically just friends who share things online, just like friends do in person.”

  “But in person, we’re careful about what we say when other ­people can overhear. Online, it’s easy to forget that there’s an audience. ­People shouldn’t post anything they wouldn’t be comfortable sharing with millions of perfect strangers, including opportunistic rapists and murderers.”

  “I would consider rapists and murderers imperfect strangers, wouldn’t you?” she quips to lighten the topic.

  He offers a sort-­of smile, but he’s still shaking his head. “It’s just basic Internet Safety 101. You’re inviting trouble when you—­”

  “Are you saying Meredith brought this on herself?” she cuts in. So much for lightening things up.

  “No. I’m just saying . . . I’m worried. I’ve seen social networkers post way too much personal information.”

  “So have I. But I’ve never put down our last name or even our first names, or where we live . . .”

  No, but many of the other bloggers—­Meredith included—­do share all those details. Rather than calling her spouse and children DH, DS, and DD—­widely used Internet shorthand for Dear Husband, Darling Son, and Darling Daughter—­Meredith referred to her family members by their first names. Hank was her husband; her kids were Neal, Teddy, and Beck, short for Rebecca. She occasionally posted photos, too . . .

  Landry feels sick to her stomach remembering that Meredith had proudly posted pictures of her master bedroom last fall, with the new king-­sized bed and bedding and curtains she’d just bought on sale at Macy’s.

  And then there was a more recent picture accompanied by a caption: View of our home, sweet home from the street with the lilacs in full bloom.

  There were plenty of compliments in the comments section from the usual followers: Pretty! . . . Love Lilacs! . . . Ooh, wish it was scratch and sniff!

  But how many other pairs of eyes had also seen the photo of the modest house? How many silent lurkers had noticed the dense shrub borders along the property lines, which, as Meredith had cheerfully pointed out to her online friends, offered privacy and shielded her house from the neighbors’ views?

  Landry thinks back over her own posts, wondering if she’s inadvertently been just as careless.

  “You didn’t write on your blog that I’m going away on a golf outing Father’s Day weekend, did you?” asks Rob the mind-­reader.

  “Of course not!”

  She did, however, mention it to Meredith in a private message exchange just last week. They were going back and forth about how having a husband away can be a mixed blessing—­more so, Meredith thought, when you have kids still at home.

  It’s kind of lonely when you’re the only one rattling around the house day after day—­well, mostly, night after night, Meredith wrote, almost echoing what she’d written in her blog.

  Exactly—­don’t think I’m a big baby, she wrote back, but sometimes I still get scared at night when Rob’s away!

  Now, remembering that exchange, she feels a twinge of guilt. It was only Meredith—­but what if it had been someone else? Someone she trusted, but shouldn’t have?

  Rob is looking a little guilty himself. �
��Sorry, I know you wouldn’t write something that personal on the blog. You’re pretty good about keeping things nonspecific.”

  “I am. So please don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried. Not about myself.”

  No. He worries about her.

  Until she got sick, she was okay with that—­with letting him protect her, take care of her.

  But cancer changed that. Made her stronger, more determined to take care of herself, and . . .

  More aware that Rob can’t protect her. He can want to, and he can try, but her big strong husband isn’t in charge after all. He—­and she, for all those years—­only wanted to believe that he was.

  Stronger, more independent and self-­aware . . .

  Sometimes she still bristles when Rob assumes the old role of protector, and she knows it bothers him when she won’t let him.

  She changes the subject, asking about his workday, his golf game, and who was at the club tonight. As he tells her, she manages to ask questions in all the right places, and to laugh at quips she knows are meant to make her laugh, though she doesn’t really comprehend a word he’s saying.

  This is how it was back when she was sick, going through the motions of ordinary conversation.

  Later—­much later, long after the kids are home and the house is quiet, Landry lies awake in bed staring into the dark, still preoccupied with Meredith’s death and wondering why Elena never called. She must have gotten home too late.

  Uneasily remembering what Rob said, Landry wants to ask her whether she thinks there’s any chance some online predator might have deliberately targeted Meredith.

  Are the police also considering that angle?

  Probably. They must be going through the blog word for word, looking for clues.

  Meredith was really open, sharing information that Landry would never have put out there for just anyone to see.

  But that doesn’t mean you haven’t let your guard down, too, from time to time.

  Just today she handed out her phone number to a bunch of ­people she’s never met—­and she told Jaycee her first and last name.