The Perfect Stranger

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The Perfect Stranger Page 19

by Wendy Corsi Staub


  Realizing she’s the first to arrive in the lobby, even though she’s late, Landry perches on the arm of a chair perpendicular to the couch and exchanges curious glances with the young mother, wondering if it’s possible . . .

  No. No way. The woman is a blonde, and anyway, neither Elena nor Kay has children.

  Unless one of them does and didn’t mention it.

  But if this woman happens to be one of the bloggers, wouldn’t she be expecting Landry? Wouldn’t she speak up and introduce herself?

  What if she doesn’t recognize me? After all, I was younger in my picture, and not nearly as weary, or frumpy, as I am now . . .

  And what if . . .

  Suddenly, Landry’s situation seems to have gone from promising to precarious. Rob’s warnings—­months, years of warnings—­fill her head.

  You never know who you’re dealing with online. It could be anyone . . . ­People can make up whatever they want . . . Men can pass themselves off as teenage girls—­predators do it all the time . . .

  Elena and Kay are her friends, just as Meredith was her friend, and yet . . .

  There’s no getting around the fact that they’re strangers. All of them. Strangers, lifesavers . . .

  They know her deepest, darkest secrets. They know where she is, and that she’s all alone in a strange city, and what if . . .

  What if none of it was real?

  She nervously toys with the bracelet, rolling the two silver beads etched with Meredith’s initials between her thumb and forefingers.

  What if none of her friends even exists in real life? What if all those personalities were made up; figments of some twisted imagination? Even Meredith?

  No—­Meredith was real. She has to be real. She was in the newspaper.

  But what if—­

  Behind her the elevator doors ding open.

  A woman steps out.

  Middle-­aged, tall and heavyset, she has plain features and graying shoulder-­length hair parted on the side. She’s wearing a black pantsuit that’s a little on the dowdy side for a woman who’s at least a decade shy of her retirement years. With a tentative expression, she looks toward the seating area.

  Kay.

  It’s her; it has to be her.

  Paranoia evaporating, Landry utters the name impulsively, punctuated by an exclamation rather than a question mark.

  The woman breaks into a relieved smile and walks toward her in sensible shoes most likely bought on sale at Kohl’s, plus an additional thirty percent off with a coupon, knowing Kay, Landry thinks affectionately.

  Getting to her feet, she realizes belatedly she doesn’t know how to greet her friend for the first time.

  Handshake? Hug?

  Hug, she decides in the last moment.

  Kay’s stocky frame seems to stiffen for a moment, and Landry thinks she’s made the wrong choice.

  Kay has intimacy issues. Anyone who’s read her blog knows about that. All those years spent with a cold, unfeeling parent, and working in a federal prison, hardly a cozy environment . . .

  But then Kay relaxes and she hugs back. Hard. And when they pull away to regard each other at arm’s length, Landry sees tears in Kay’s eyes and can feel them in her own.

  She hastily wipes them away with her sleeve, as does Kay.

  “Sorry—­I didn’t mean to jump on you with a big ol’ hug like a long lost friend without even introducing myself.”

  “It’s all right.” Kay smiles, shyly, but warmly. “Landry, right? BamaBelle?”

  “That’s me. I was beginning to think no one was going to show up!”

  “I thought the same thing! I had to force myself to come down here. I’ve been up there in my room for hours, pacing and trying to convince myself not to turn around and drive back home.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “Me too.”

  They smile at each other, and Landry is suddenly conscious of the young mother watching them, listening with interest, oblivious to her toddler rolling the luggage cart away again, this time toward a corridor lined with first floor rooms.

  “Have you seen Elena?”

  Kay shakes her head. “I just saw the texts she sent before she took off, saying that her phone was dying.”

  “Hopefully she made it here.”

  “Hopefully she did.”

  There’s a crash down the hall. “Mommy!”

  The woman on the couch jumps up, thrusts the baby and its bottle on the man with the cell phone and heads in the direction of the noise.

  A split second later a woman in a black dress—­Elena, is it Elena?—­appears in the hallway, shaking her head as she strides toward the lobby.

  Spotting Landry and Kay, she breaks into a smile and calls out, “Is that you, guys?” Without waiting for a reply, she adds, “I just had a close call! I nearly just got run over by a luggage cart.”

  Cart is pronounced “caht,” New England style. Landry grins. Definitely Elena.

  This time a hug feels right from the start.

  As she and Elena embrace, Landry catches a whiff of alcohol on her breath. She must have had a drink on the plane, or maybe after she landed. Probably nerves. Who can blame her?

  Elena steps back to take a better look at them. “You’re both just the way I pictured you.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Landry agrees. “I’d know y’all anywhere.”

  “Me too. I just wish . . .” Kay trails off, shaking her head.

  Remembering Meredith, Landry touches Kay’s hand. Her fingers are icy. “I know. It’s hard.”

  Kay moves her hand away to look at her watch. “We should go. It’s late. Can one of you drive? I . . . I forgot to fill up the gas tank after we got here.”

  “I will,” Elena offers, but Landry is already pulling her own rental car keys out of her pocket.

  “That’s okay. I’ll drive.”

  “I don’t mind. I’m parked right out front.”

  “I’ve already got the address plugged into the GPS,” Landry tells Elena firmly. “Really. I want to drive.”

  “That’s fine if you’re sure you really want to. Just so you know you don’t need to,” Elena says, and for a moment Landry is taken aback.

  Then she sees Elena’s smile.

  “Remember that blog Meredith wrote?” Elena asks them. “The one about the difference between wanting something and needing something?”

  “I remember it,” Kay says as Landry nods. “It was one of her better blogs. But there were so many good ones. A lot of the things she wrote keep coming back to me now. It’s kind of comforting. Almost like she’s still talking to me, you know?”

  “Sometimes I feel the same way,” Landry says, and Elena agrees that she does as well.

  As they head out into the bright June sunshine and across the parking lot, Landry can’t help but think that she really doesn’t just want to drive—­she needs to. After all she’s been through—­and all the lectures she’s given her teenagers—­there’s absolutely no way she’s getting into a car with a driver she suspects has been drinking. Elena doesn’t seem the least bit inebriated—­for all Landry knows, that was just mouthwash she sniffed on her breath—­but there’s no need to take chances.

  As the rental car comes into view, Landry aims the electronic key and presses the button to unlock the doors. If she were back home with her kids, this is the point where they’d both yell, “I call shotgun!” and race each other for the front passenger seat.

  She turns to Kay and Elena to joke about it, but quickly changes her mind. Elena has stopped in her tracks behind them, frowning as she looks at her cell phone. Her energy is completely different now, Landry notices; not a hint of the bubbly, upbeat woman who burst into the lobby a few minutes ago.

  “Everything okay?” Landry asks her.


  “Hmmm? Oh . . . yes. It’s fine. I was just getting a call from a friend back home that I’d rather not answer right now. Some ­people will drive you crazy if you let them, you know?”

  Landry thinks of Barbie June. “I know.”

  “I’m just going to turn off the phone.” Elena holds down the power button. “I didn’t have time to fully charge it back up anyway, so I might as well conserve battery power for now.” She shoves it back into her purse and looks up.

  “Okay—­I’m good to go,” she says brightly, and resumes walking toward the car at a jaunty pace.

  Noticing that Elena seems to have bounced back just as quickly as she’d faltered, Landry can’t help but wonder about the friend who’d tried to call her just now.

  The drive to McGraw’s Funeral Home takes less than five minutes, though there’s more traffic now than when Kay did her morning drive-­by.

  She’s glad to see that although the bowling alley parking lot looks busy, no one is using the swimming pool at the duplex next door, as she’d feared. It would be disrespectful to Meredith if ­people were splashing around and having a good old time in their bathing suits just a stone’s throw from her remains.

  “Oh my goodness, the parking lot is completely full,” Landry murmurs, slowly driving past rows of occupied spots. “Do y’all see anything?”

  “I think you’d better follow those signs for the overflow lot,” Elena advises, pointing.

  “Wait—­is that a space?” Landry hits the brakes.

  It isn’t.

  “Let’s just go to the overflow,” Elena urges again, checking her watch.

  There’s no denying she’s a bit of a backseat driver. If she were at the wheel, Kay thought, she’d be intimidated by Elena’s control freak tendencies, but she notices they don’t seem to bother Landry. The two of them have kept up a steady stream of conversation on the way over. Kay couldn’t get a word in edgewise—­not that she’s tried.

  Most of the chatter was about kids—­Landry’s two teenagers and Elena’s first grade students.

  Having never had children—­or, really, even known them in the course of her adult life—­Kay has nothing to contribute in that regard. But lack of conversational connection isn’t her sole reason for keeping quiet. Mostly, she’s preoccupied with what lies ahead.

  In her opinion, Landry and Elena aren’t quite mindful enough of the reason they’re all here: to say good-­bye to Meredith.

  The solemn nature of the occasion does seem to sink in as they walk toward the funeral home, though, as the other women fall silent at last.

  That Meredith left behind dozens—­no, hundreds—­of ­people who loved her is obvious the moment they cross the threshold into the large chapel adjacent to the foyer. An endless line snakes through the hushed room, weaving up and down rows of folding chairs.

  She, Elena, and Landry join the mourners gradually making their way up to the bereaved family standing beside the large urn that holds Meredith’s remains.

  As they await their turn, Kay studies the Heywoods.

  She’s heard so much about them over the years that it’s easy for her to tell them apart. Gray-­haired Hank, of course, is obviously Meredith’s husband. But Kay can easily see which of the three young women is her daughter—­Beck looks a lot like her mother.

  She can tell the two daughters-­in-­law apart, too: Teddy’s wife, Sue, is pregnant; Neal’s wife, Kelly, is the redhead.

  As for the brothers, they look quite a bit like each other and their father, but Kay remembers that Neal, the middle son, is the tallest one in the family, much to his older brother’s frustration when they were growing up. Meredith blogged about that once.

  By default, the fourth man in the family—­the serious-­looking bearded fellow—­would have to be Meredith’s son-­in-­law, Keith.

  Only the grandchildren—­her beloved “stinkerdoodles”—­are missing.

  So these are the ­people Meredith lived for, the ­people she couldn’t bear the thought of “abandoning,” as she put it.

  It’s not that I don’t think they’ll survive without me, Meredith wrote to her on the day they both confessed that their illnesses had progressed. In fact, financially, they’ll be better off, that’s for sure. I’m like George Bailey.

  Kay didn’t understand that reference, not even after she quickly Googled the name and found that George Bailey was a character in the old movie It’s a Wonderful Life. She’s never seen it. She isn’t big on movies; hasn’t caught a film or even turned on the television in years.

  When she asked Meredith what she meant by the comment, Meredith explained that the plot revolves around a character, George Bailey, who winds up destitute, other than a life insurance policy.

  “But he’s the richest man in town in the end, of course,” Meredith said, “because he had friends, so many friends who loved him.”

  As did Meredith.

  The room is warm and crowded, the air thickly scented with the perfume of hundreds of women and all those funeral flowers. They’re everywhere, in vases and baskets and wreaths surrounding the urn and spilling over into the seating area—­further testimony to just how much Meredith meant to so many.

  Kay thinks of her own solitary life.

  Mother’s raspy voice echoes in her head: It’s not better to have loved and lost . . . If you don’t love, you can’t lose.

  No. That isn’t the case at all, Kay thinks, inching forward with the line of mourners waiting to connect with the Heywood family.

  You were wrong, Mother. As wrong about that as you were about everything else.

  When it’s her turn to meet the Heywoods, she moves robotically down the line with Landry and Elena, introducing herself as one of Meredith’s blogger friends.

  “You all meant so much to Mom.” Meredith’s daughter clasps her hand. “She was always telling us about you.”

  “She talked about all of you, too,” Kay tells her. “She was so proud of you. She told me all about the beautiful Mother’s Day party you all had a few weeks ago. She even e-­mailed me pictures, and she said you made her favorite cheesecake . . .”

  “Actually, I wound up buying it,” Rebecca Heywood replies with a sad smile. “I wish I’d had a chance to make it for her that day.”

  “I’m sure it didn’t matter. What mattered to her was that you were all there with her. That’s what she remembered.”

  And then the person behind her is reaching for Rebecca’s hand and it’s time for Kay to move on.

  The rest of it—­everything else she’d wanted to tell Meredith’s family—­will have to be left unsaid.

  Jaycee’s cell phone buzzes in her oversized bag on the passenger’s seat of the rental car as she pulls into the parking lot behind McGraw’s Funeral Home. She reaches inside without looking at it and turns it off. Whoever it is—­probably Cory—­can wait. The ser­vice was scheduled to start ten minutes ago. She wanted to be late—­but not any later than this.

  Clearly, Meredith was as popular with her real-­life friends as she was with the online group. Every spot in the lot is taken.

  Jaycee can’t help but flash back to another funeral in another time, another place. Empty parking lot, with only herself and the pastor to stand beside her grandmother’s simple pinewood casket.

  She sobbed through that ceremony. Not because her grandmother was dead—­she’d hated her. Not because she was pregnant, either. But because Steven Petersen—­her one true friend, the love of her life—­hadn’t had the decency to show up. He could have come for her sake, not for her grandmother’s; Steve had hated her, too.

  That was the last time she allowed herself to shed tears in public. It was the last time she ever lost someone who truly mattered.

  Steve.

  After all they’d been through together . . .

  No. Don’t think about that no
w.

  Thoughts of Steve always lead to thoughts of her . . .

  Pushing the blood-­drenched memories from her mind, Jaycee follows the signs and drives around the ugly yellow brick building to the overflow lot. The gravel patch there is nearly full of cars. On the far end, across from the last ­couple of empty spaces, she spots the sedan Landry rented at the airport.

  Obviously, she, too, arrived late—­despite her flight having landed with plenty of time to spare. Did Landry also dawdle in her hotel room, having second thoughts about showing her face here today?

  In the end, Jaycee opted to come. The funeral, after all, is why she flew to Ohio in the first place this morning—­aside from needing a convenient escape hatch.

  She wasn’t going to allow herself to come all this way without paying her last respects to one of the few friends she had left in this world.

  She pulls into a spot across from Landry’s rental, turns off the engine, and glances into the rearview mirror. Between her broad-­brimmed black hat and oversized sunglasses, only her mouth, nose, and jaw are visible. No one is going to recognize her if she slips quietly into the back and then leaves early.

  Her heels poke into the gravel as she steps out of the car. It’s slow going until she reaches the pavement. Now her pace is steadier, heels tapping along briskly. As she makes her way toward the entrance, she spots a black Crown Victoria—­an unmarked cop car?

  Of course.

  Meredith was murdered. It would make sense that there would be a police presence at the ser­vice today. They’ll be watching the crowd carefully, looking for suspicious behavior, perhaps pulling ­people aside for questioning—­a thought that’s almost enough to send Jaycee straight back to her car.

  Before she can turn around, the door opens and a man in a dark suit beckons to her. The funeral director, she realizes. He’s been watching her approach through the glass panel. There’s nothing she can do but walk up the steps and cross the threshold.

  “In there,” the man whispers, gesturing at a pair of closed doors.

  She nods her thanks and crosses the foyer, conscious of his eyes on her. Reaching for the knob on the right, she gives it a gentle tug. Both doors swing open, but the one on the left quickly closes again with a loud sound before she can catch it.

 

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