“You look worn out,” her former first-grade teacher—an old friend of her mother’s—comments, after informing Beck that the powder room under the stairs is running low on toilet paper.
“It’s been a long day.”
“One of the longest days of the year, unfortunately,” the woman mentions before drifting back to the crowded dining room as Beck heads up the steps to grab a spare roll of toilet paper from the hall bathroom.
Glancing out the window on the landing, she sees that the sun is, indeed, still riding high in the sky. It won’t be setting for at least a few more hours. By then, she can’t imagine having the stamina to climb these stairs again and get ready for bed.
Maybe she should just lie down now for a quick nap. No one will miss her if she’s gone for half an hour.
She slips past the bathroom and the closed door to the master bedroom, unable to imagine ever opening it again.
She just can’t stop picturing her mother here alone at night; an intruder in the house; a violent attack . . .
We need to get rid of this house—the sooner, the better.
In her own room, she takes a moment to swap her high-heeled black pumps for a pair of loafers, not caring what they look like with her dress. Her feet ache. Her heart aches.
Oh, Mom . . .
She sinks onto the bedspread she and Mom picked out so long ago in Macy’s—they both fell in love with the splashy pattern.
“The colors remind me of the bright blue sky and yellow sunshine,” Mom said. “It’ll always be a beautiful summer day in here!”
Today doesn’t feel like a beautiful summer day inside or out. Beck massages her forehead with her fingertips and finds herself staring at her laptop on the desk across the room.
Does it hold the key to her mother’s murder? If she could just figure out the password and get into the e-mail account . . .
But what are the odds that she’ll find a clue to the killer’s identity somewhere in the files? Does she actually believe Mom was exchanging e-mails with him in advance? That it was someone Mom knew?
If it was—if it was someone I know, too, like . . . like . . .
She can’t even bring herself to entertain the thought.
Maybe she’s better off never uncovering the truth.
What does it even matter now? Mom is gone. Nothing is going to bring her back. The worst has happened; it’s in the past.
“Beck? Beck! Are you in there?” Teddy’s wife, Sue, is knocking on her bedroom door.
She hurriedly wipes tears from her eyes. “Yes, I’m in here.”
Sue opens the door. Roundly pregnant, with Beck’s sleepy-looking nephew Jordan on her hip, she asks, “Are you okay?”
Then, catching a look at Beck’s face, Sue shakes her head and answers her own question. “Of course you’re not okay. Sorry.”
“No, I’m okay. I am. Well . . .”
“You are but you’re not. No one is. I’m sorry to bother you. The minister’s wife is stuck in the powder room without toilet paper, and I can’t find any under the sink in the hall bathroom, so—”
“Are you serious?”
“No, there were just some cleaning supplies, and—”
“No, I mean about Mrs. Alpert stuck without toilet paper?” Beck finds herself grinning through her tears.
“Totally serious. She was calling through the door for help and Jordan heard her. She said there are no tissues in there or anything, so . . .”
“She can’t wipe her keister,” Jordan reports solemnly.
That does it. Beck bursts out laughing. Sue joins in, and so, after a moment, does Jordan.
Beck laughs until her sides ache—a good kind of ache—then heads back downstairs with Sue and Jordan, the e-mail account forgotten for the time being.
Lying on the bed in her hotel room, head propped against the pillows and laptop open on her lap, Kay tries to focus on the screen. She’d been hoping to catch up on some blogs, but her energy is zapped from the drive, the funeral, the anxiety over meeting Landry and Elena . . .
And now a meeting with the detective investigating Meredith’s murder?
It’s all too much. I can’t handle this. I can’t.
She’d give anything if she could throw her belongings back into the seldom-used, slightly musty-smelling suitcase she pulled last night from her mother’s attic; if she could just walk out of this hotel and go home and hide, make it all go away.
But she can’t leave Landry and Elena. They’re her friends—her family—and they need her, just as Meredith needed her. As long as the three of them stick together, everything will be okay.
A tone from her laptop’s speaker indicates that a new e-mail has arrived in her in-box.
She opens it and finds that it’s from Elena—a note to Jaycee, with both Kay and Landry on the cc list.
I’m here in Cincinnati with Landry and Kay. Meredith’s funeral was moving and very much a tearjerker, as I’m sure you would guess. The rest of us need each other now more than ever. We’ve already made plans to get together again for a girls’ weekend at Landry’s house in Alabama next weekend. Is there any way you can join us? Details to follow. I just wanted you to know that we’re thinking of you and wish you were here with us.
Kay nods with approval, glad Elena thought to include Jaycee and extend the invitation despite wrestling with some pretty serious problems of her own. Remembering what she shared about her stalker—Tony—Kay feels worried all over again, and she knows Landry does as well.
I really don’t need this kind of stress in my life. It’s dangerous . . . breast cancer patients who have daily stress have much shorter survival times . . .
What if something happens to Elena now?
What if, one by one . . .
No.
Nothing is going to happen to anyone else. It can’t.
They’re my friends. My family.
At last, after all these years, she finally knows where—and to whom—she belongs. She only prays that cruel fate won’t rip them from her life as it did Meredith.
“They’re late.” Sitting beside Crystal in the hotel lobby, Frank lifts his wrist and taps his Timex.
“One minute late.”
“Late is late.”
Crystal shrugs, considering the possibilities.
That the bloggers might have lied about where they’re staying doesn’t rank very high on the list. Nor does the prospect that they skipped town.
Either of those scenarios would mean that there’s some kind of conspiracy involved here, and Crystal doesn’t buy that for a second.
Far more likely: they lost track of time, or they dozed off, or they’re reluctant to sit down and discuss their friend’s murder . . .
Perhaps all of the above.
“They’ll be here soon, I’m sure,” she tells him.
He shrugs and continues tapping his foot. Patience is not Frank’s strong suit.
Glad the lobby is almost deserted, Crystal keeps an eye on the grouchy-looking, pockmarked teenage boy parked at the computer kiosk, who is oblivious to their presence, and on the desk clerk, who is not. She’s been casting curious glances their way ever since they arrived and arranged with the on-duty manager to conduct their questioning in a conference room down the hall.
They didn’t mention that it involves a homicide. But maybe the desk clerk has put two and two together. It’s a small town, after all; the guests might have asked her for directions to the funeral home earlier.
Or maybe the desk clerk is just being vigilant, as she should in her position.
Hell, if everyone were a little more vigilant—or nosy, as it were—her own job would be much easier.
Hearing the elevator bell ring at last, Crystal and Frank look over expectantly. The doors sl
ide open and Landry Wells—aka BamaBelle—steps out.
Standing to greet her, Crystal notes that she’s changed out of her black dress, now wearing a pair of trim off-white linen pants with a sea-foam-colored summer cardigan. Her blond hair is caught in a neat ponytail and she’s got on a fresh coat of pink lipstick that matches her manicure and pedicure polish.
How is it that certain women—often, southern women—always manage to look so pulled together, even under duress?
Crystal—who rarely looks in a mirror after she leaves the bathroom in the morning and would never think to reapply lipstick in the middle of the day—is not one of those women.
“I’m sorry I’m late.” Landry walks quickly toward them, heeled sandals tapping on the tile floor. “I had to call home and check on my husband and kids and it took longer than I thought.”
“Do you know where the others are?” Crystal asks.
“They should be here any second. We all went to our rooms when we got back.”
“Okay. Why don’t you and I go have a quiet talk in the conference room while Detective Schneider waits here for your friends?”
“Sure.”
Crystal escorts Landry down the hall behind the front desk as the clerk pretends not to watch them over the open romance novel in her hands.
With a view of the side parking lot and part of the pool’s chain-link fence, the conference room is a no-frills rectangle that contains little more than a long table with eight chairs and a blue plastic water bottle cooler.
Crystal closes the door behind them. “Have a seat, Ms. Wells. Or do you go by Mrs.?”
“Either, but you can call me Landry.” She perches on the chair nearest the door, giving off the expectant, anxious vibe of a mom sitting in the Little League stands as her child comes up at bat, or in the audience as her kid takes a turn in a spelling bee.
She doesn’t belong here, in the middle of a murder investigation, Crystal finds herself thinking as she takes the adjacent seat at the head of the table. She should be back at home, with her family.
“All right, Landry. Let’s get started.” Crystal sets her bag on the floor, taking out her laptop and a notebook and pen, but leaving the recording equipment inside.
No need to make Landry Wells needlessly skittish. She always records witnesses she has a hunch might later become suspects, but she’s certain that won’t happen in this case. Her Internet search on Landry’s name had resulted—among other things—in a photograph from an Alabama newspaper’s society page. Snapped Saturday night at a charity ball, it depicted an elegantly dressed Landry accompanied by her husband and another couple identified as the husband’s law partner and his wife.
So there we have it—an alibi, she thought, when she noted the date.
Crystal opens the laptop and it instantly buzzes to life, already bookmarked on Landry’s most recent blog post—written several days ago, presumably before she found out about Meredith.
She flips her notebook to a clean page, picks up a pen, and clears her throat. “I just want to talk to you a little bit about your relationship with Meredith, and about her blog, and yours, and . . . I’d like your take on how the whole thing works.”
“You mean blogging?”
“The dynamic you have with other bloggers, that kind of thing.”
“Oh. Okay. Well . . .” Landry looks as though she has no idea where to begin.
“Why don’t you tell me first what made you decide to write your own blog?”
“Have you read it?”
Crystal nods. She’d first stumbled across it a few days ago, having noticed that someone named BamaBelle commented often on Meredith’s page, and tracing the comments back to the blog. She did the same with a number of others.
Today at the funeral home, after asking the three women about their online identities, she’d finally been able to connect the blog titles and screen names with real women behind them.
Afterward, when she wasn’t fruitlessly searching for a link between Jenna Coeur and Meredith Heywood, she’d spent the better part of the last hour reading—and in some cases, rereading—Landry’s, Kay’s, and Elena’s blogs, noting their interaction with Meredith, each other, and fellow bloggers.
It came as no surprise to her that the attractive, genteel southern stay-at-home-mom was behind the homey, conversational Breast Cancer Diaries, or that the reserved midwesterner wrote the staid I’m A-Okay.
The shocker was that the saucy Boobless Wonder blog was penned by a first grade teacher. But a few minutes in Elena Ferreira’s presence revealed an engaging, if somewhat frenetic, personality that seems convincingly reminiscent of the voice she uses in her blog.
Nothing unusual jumped out at Crystal in any of the blogs, other than a remarkably casual level of intimacy among a collection of strangers who had ostensibly never met in person. But then, she’s seen that phenomenon within other online communities. When people come together on the Internet, the usual social constraints fall away with the promise of anonymity.
“If you’ve read my blog,” Landry says, “then you know that I was diagnosed with breast cancer. That’s why I blog.”
Crystal shoots straight, as always. “But lots of people have breast cancer and don’t blog. Why do you?”
Perhaps taken aback, Landry tilts her head.
Crystal is about to rephrase the question, but then Landry answers it in a soft voice, as if she’s conveying a secret. Maybe she is.
In a lilting drawl that sometimes takes Crystal a moment to translate, Landry talks about the fear and shock and—more importantly—the loneliness that set in after her diagnosis. She describes the support group she visited early in her treatment, and the horror of coming face-to-face with doomed patients. She smiles faintly when she mentions her first foray onto the Internet in search of information, finding not just that, but also companionship—ultimately, friendship.
“I wasn’t isolated anymore,” she tells Crystal. “I realized these women were talking about things I could relate to. And that maybe I had something to say, too. Something I couldn’t say to the people I saw every day.”
“Because . . .”
“Because they just wouldn’t get it.”
Crystal asks her a few more questions about the evolution of Landry’s own blog before leading into how she got to know Meredith.
“She was kind of like the older sorority sister who takes a new pledge under her wing, you know?”
Crystal nods, though she doesn’t know. Not from experience. But she bets Landry does.
Sure enough, the question is met with a nod and a faint smile. “I was Alpha Gamma Delta at University of Alabama.”
“Roll Tide.”
Landry’s smile widens to a full-blown grin. “That’s right!”
“So Meredith was . . . what, like a big sister? A mentor?”
The smile fades promptly at the mention of the dead woman’s name.
She forgot, for a moment there, Crystal realizes. Forgot why we’re here; forgot her friend was murdered.
Now that Landry remembers, renewed sorrow taints her pretty face as she contemplates the question. “Maybe she was more motherly than sisterly . . . is sisterly a word?”
“You’re the writer. You tell me.”
“You know . . . it’s funny, I don’t really consider myself a writer, but . . . I guess that’s what blogging is, right? I kind of like thinking of it that way, and I know Meredith did, too. It’s what she always wanted to be.”
“A writer?” Crystal knows this—some of Meredith’s blog posts referred to the literary road not taken—but she waits for Landry to elaborate.
“We talked a lot, privately, about stuff like that. She said she’d always dreamed of writing a book, and she recently told me she’d been toying with the idea of compiling
some of her blogs into a collection and trying to get it published.”
“You talked on the phone?”
“No, usually e-mail.”
“Is that how you all communicate privately?”
“That, or instant-messaging.”
“No phone.”
“Well, I can’t speak for the others—maybe some of them call each other—but we don’t. At least, we didn’t, until this week, after Meredith . . .”
Crystal nods. “And by ‘we,’ you mean . . .”
“The bloggers I’m closest to. There’s a little group of us—Meredith was a part of it.”
“And the other two women who came with you to the funeral?”
“Elena and Kay—yes, them, too.”
“Who else?”
“The others aren’t here. I’ve never met them. And one is—Nellie passed away.”
Crystal raises an eyebrow. Another one? “When? What happened?”
“Oh, it wasn’t . . . she wasn’t . . . killed. It was cancer.”
Right. Of course it was. Crystal even vaguely remembers reading about the death in past entries on several of the blogs, including Meredith’s.
But for a moment there her mind jumped to the possibility of an opportunistic serial killer preying on this vulnerable group of women, perhaps even posing as one of them . . .
Again she thinks of Jenna Coeur.
But she wasn’t a serial killer, she reminds herself. She just killed one other person . . .
Just?
Crystal wants to ask Landry if Meredith ever mentioned her, but she’s getting ahead of herself. First things first.
“So there was . . . Nellie, did you say?”
Landry nods. “She was from England. Whoa Nellie was her screen name.”
“Hang on a second.” Crystal turns to the laptop, searches, and finds herself looking at Whoa Nellie’s blog. The photo shows a thin middle-aged woman sporting a crew cut—no postchemo head scarves for Whoa Nellie—and the top entry was written by her husband, reporting her death and linking to her obituary.
The Perfect Stranger Page 24