“Oh, Jordan . . .” She swallows hard and gathers him close, examining the picture and complimenting him on the beautiful colors and the way he’d tried to stay inside the lines. “Great job, sweetie.”
“You can hang it on the fridge like Grammy used to.”
“I will.” She stands and crosses over to the refrigerator, looking for a magnet that isn’t already holding up a grandchild’s artwork.
“No, I meant your fridge at your house.”
“Oh. I will. I’ll do that.” Just as soon as I figure out where my house is going to be.
“Aunt Beck? Can I watch TV now? Please?”
Well aware that his parents limit his screen time, Beck is pretty sure she should say no. Instead she says “Absolutely,” her thoughts consumed by her mother’s e-mail account—and what she might find there.
Standing at the baggage claim with Kay and the other passengers from their flight, Elena looks at her watch. “Why is this taking so long?”
“You’re in the South now. Everything probably takes a little longer,” Kay tells her. “Just be patient.”
“Patience isn’t exactly my thing.”
“Really?” Kay asks dryly, watching Elena pace until at last there’s a buzzing noise and the conveyer jerks into motion.
Bags—none belonging to Kay—begin to topple down the chute.
“I think the connection was too tight,” Elena tells her as one passenger after another grabs luggage and rolls it away. “I bet your bag didn’t make it.”
“Don’t say that! I need it!”
“You should have carried on, like I told—”
“There it is!”
Looking triumphant, Kay hurries forward to grab a small black carry-on that could have easily been stowed above—or even beneath—an airplane seat.
Elena fights the urge to chide her again. The bag made it. That’s all that matters, right?
“Now all we need is Landry,” she mutters. Then, seeing the look on Kay’s face, she adds, “Patience. I know, I know. I need patience.”
That, and a nice big, strong drink to relax my nerves.
She paces again.
At last Landry hurries around the corner, phone in hand. “Oh, good! You got your bag, Kay! Are y’all set to go?”
“More than set,” Elena can’t help saying pointedly.
“Sorry my phone call took so long,” Landry tells her. “He’s at work, so it took a few minutes for them to track him down.”
“I thought he was in North Carolina.”
“No, my husband is in North Carolina.”
“Isn’t that who you went to call?”
“Is that what I said? I meant my son.” Landry gives a flustered little laugh.
“I bet it’s easy to get them mixed up, now that Tucker is growing up,” Kay tells her.
Elena says nothing at all, regarding Landry through narrowed eyes.
What if something strange is going on here?
What if I just walked into some kind of trap?
Landry is the one who, last weekend, had so much to say about the potential for Internet imposters. What if she, herself, is one of them?
Elena studies her now as they walk out to the parking lot. She’s fiddling with her car keys, checking her cell phone every couple of seconds.
“Are you waiting for a call back or something?” she asks.
“What? Oh, no . . . just checking the time.”
Right. She’s wearing a wristwatch.
An expensive one, Elena noticed earlier. She certainly looks like the wife of a fancy lawyer.
But what if she’s not?
“Do you want to try to reach Detective Burns again?” Landry asks Kay.
“We should probably just wait for her to get back to us.”
“I can’t believe it’s taking this long. Are you sure you called the right number? She said she always picks up.”
“I know, but she didn’t. I left a message for her to call as soon as she can. I’m sure she will.”
Landry nods, clearly on edge.
They exit the airport into the glare of heat so humid that Elena feels as though she’s trying to breathe through a sopping towel pressed against her mouth and nose.
“Wow. It’s hot here,” Kay observes, and the needless comment gets on Elena’s nerves. Everything is getting on her nerves right now. Her friends’ languid pace as they cross the blacktop, the trickling tickle of sweat on her hairline, the weight of the bag she’s pulling along, the fact that she’s here at all.
At last they reach a black BMW. Landry aims the key chain to unlock the doors, then opens all four of them and starts the engine with the air-conditioning blasting. She loads their bags into the trunk but tells them not to get into the car yet. “Let’s wait a minute for it to cool off. It’s an oven in there.”
It’s an oven out here, too. They wait in silence.
Then Elena asks, “Do you really think Jenna Coeur is planning to blindside us?”
She wants them both to say it’s ridiculous.
Neither does.
“Why else would she come down here?” Landry is grim.
“If it really was her . . . then maybe it’s a coincidence,” Kay says.
“You believe in coincidences?”
Kay hesitates. “No.”
“Me neither.” Landry bites her lip and shakes her head, looking down at her phone yet again.
“I do,” Elena tells them with a shrug. “I’m not saying this is one of them, but I believe in—”
She breaks off as Landry’s cell phone rings.
“There’s a coincidence now,” Kay says. “You were looking at your phone, and it rang.”
Not really a coincidence, Elena thinks, since Landry has done nothing but look at her phone, clearly expecting a call.
“I’ve got to take this.” She hurriedly motions them to get into the car. “Go ahead. Get in. It’s cooled off.”
It hasn’t.
But Elena and Kay climb in and Landry closes their doors after them, sealing them into the oven. Still outside, she answers her phone as she closes the driver’s side door.
Elena hears her say, “Addie? Listen, I need you to do something for me . . .”
In the front seat, Elena turns to look at Kay in the back.
“Addie,” Kay observes. “That’s her daughter. Addison.”
Yeah. No kidding.
Biting back the sarcasm, swallowing her craving for a calming drink, Elena says only, “She’s really freaked out that you saw Jenna Coeur in the airport.”
“Maybe I just thought it was her.”
“What, are you thinking you’re delusional or something?”
“No! I just—I didn’t get a close enough look to be sure. Maybe . . .” Kay shrugs and rubs her forehead, as though it’s hurting her. “I don’t know. I could have been wrong.”
“I hope you were.”
A minute later Landry is back, climbing into the driver’s seat with a strained smile. “Ready to go?”
They paste on their own smiles and tell her that they are.
The Day My Life Changed Forever
Back when I was an English major in college and planning to become a writer one day, I read a lot of poems. One of my favorites was Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” It begins:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both . . .
I went many years without remembering that poem—decades spent being a wife and mother and day care provider, but not a writer. Not yet. I figured there would be plenty of time to reclaim that childhood dream and make it a reality when I retired, when my children were grown and out of the house . . .
Then came the day I found myself sitting in a doctor’s office as he deliv
ered the bombshell I never expected to hear.
I had breast cancer? Me?
Two roads diverged . . .
The old poem barged back into my brain and hasn’t left since. The road not taken has new meaning when you’re faced with a life-threatening illness and you realize you might never have time to do all the things you once wanted to accomplish.
Chances are, you wouldn’t have done them anyway. Chances are, you stopped wanting to do them years ago. But until you got sick, they were still out there, floating randomly in the realm of possibility. Now they’d been snatched out of reach, but somehow you knew your life had been purposeful and well-lived even if you never become a Pulitzer prize winning author or even a college poetry professor. Just living—that was meaningful enough.
As I sat that day listening to my doctor describe the journey that lay before me and the decisions I would have to make, I wanted nothing more than to backtrack to the happy, simple days I’d left behind. But that, unfortunately, wasn’t one of my choices. Neither was stopping in my tracks and doing nothing at all. There was only one option: choose a path, keep forging ahead, and do my best to never, ever second-guess the road not taken.
—Excerpt from Meredith’s blog, Pink Stinks
Chapter 15
Landry was planning to serve lunch—tea sandwiches and fruit salad—in the air-conditioned dining room. Behind locked doors.
The others overruled her, though. They’d prefer to be outside—in the “fresh air,” as Kay calls it, apparently having missed the memo that no such thing exists at high noon on a Deep South summer’s day. Not even here on the porch, where the ceiling fan does its best to diffuse the afternoon heat that swaddles like a wet towel, allowing not even a breath of breeze off the water to stir the live oak boughs that shade the yard.
Torpor has fallen over the world beyond the porch railing. In the rose garden, fat bumblebees barely seem capable of moving from blossom to blossom. Out on the water, a mere smattering of this morning’s fishing boats remain and there isn’t a kayaker in sight. It’s too hot for paddling. Or pedaling, though occasionally a pair of flushed-looking tourists will pass on bicycles that seem to move more languidly, even, than the bumblebees.
Sweat rolls down the back of Landry’s neck as she fills tall green glasses of sweet tea and decorates each with a sprig of fresh green mint. She sets the coordinating green pitcher down beside the vase of pale pink roses she carried out on a tray from the kitchen with a stack of china plates, linen place mats, and napkins.
“You don’t have to go to all this fuss,” Elena protested as Landry set the outside table as nicely as she’d have set the one in the dining room.
“I want to. Y’all are my guests.”
The well-bred belle in her won’t forget that, even now.
But that’s fine. All she has to do is get through one moment at a time. Not so difficult, really, now that she knows her kids will be safely out of the house—and harm’s way—for the remainder of the weekend.
That was her first instinct all along. She should have gone with it, instead of having to put a contingency plan into place when she found out that Jenna Coeur might be on her way here.
Her first phone call—after Bruce—was to Everly. She knew her friend would take both kids overnight, no questions asked.
But Everly didn’t pick up at home, and when she answered her cell sounding too groggy for eleven o’clock even on a Saturday morning, Landry belatedly remembered her friend had gone away for Father’s Day weekend, visiting her widowed dad who retired to Hawaii years ago.
“Is everything all right?” she asked Landry, reading the tension in her voice.
“Everything’s fine.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I just needed a quick favor, but it’s not a problem, I can ask someone else.”
Her mother, or Barbie June. Neither fell into the no-questions-asked category, though.
She had lunch with her mother two days ago, feeling as though she’d been neglecting her, and was grateful when Mom mentioned her busy weekend ahead, taking a senior bus trip to Mobile to see the Saturday matinee of a touring musical, with dinner afterward.
Ardelle Quackenbush is the kind of woman who would drop everything in a heartbeat to be there for her family; Landry knows she’d insist on missing the show just to be on standby for teenagers with weekend plans of their own. Nor does she want to inflict upon the kids her mother’s early bedtime and house cluttered with fragile antiques that must not be touched.
She correctly guessed that her cousin—also a well-bred belle—would graciously accept overnight guests in a heartbeat despite feeling neglected lately, as long as Landry framed the favor properly: “Sweetie, how would you like to put those two beautiful guest rooms of yours to good use tonight? We have company this weekend and the kids have to give up their beds, and of course they’d much rather sleep at Aunt Barbie June’s than share the pullout here at home.”
Next she texted the kids at work and told them both to call her during their breaks. Neither was thrilled to be shuttled off to Aunt Barbie June’s for the night but they grudgingly agreed.
Now only she is here to face whatever is going to happen next.
Hopefully nothing at all. Bruce is at the airport, waiting for the next flight from Atlanta. Waiting for Jenna Coeur.
If she’s on it.
Landry passes the platter of sandwiches, the bowl of fruit salad, and keeps the conversation going. She asks Elena about the last few days of school. Wants to—but doesn’t—ask Kay again about the woman she saw in the airport.
Wants to tell her to try calling Detective Burns yet again, even though she’s overheard Elena encouraging Kay to do that as well—twice—since they got back from the airport. The first time, as they headed upstairs to settle into their rooms, Kay replied that she’d wait another half hour before calling again; the second time, as they took their places at the lunch table, Kay told Elena she’d just left another message.
If she hadn’t spoken to Bruce already, Landry thought, she’d probably be leaving messages of her own for Detective Burns.
“Look, it’s not as urgent as you think,” he told her when she brought it up in a whispered phone call from the laundry room before lunch. “There’s not much she can do with the information except follow up on it the way she would any other potential Jenna Coeur sighting. She needs to know, but I can pretty much guarantee you that she’s not going to jump on the next flight to Alabama—especially since you said your friend isn’t even positive it was her.”
He’s right. They’re all preoccupied and jumpy.
“Hang in there. I’m at the airport and I’m not budging until that flight arrives from Atlanta. She won’t get past me. You can all relax.”
“I haven’t told them about you yet.”
“You might want to.”
“I will,” she promised, but has yet to do it. Maybe because a part of her still clings to a shred of suspicion about the others.
She forces herself to nibble a cucumber sandwich and tries to focus on what Elena is saying.
“ . . . and I don’t know, all I could think was, thank God he isn’t here. I’ll never have to see him again. Maybe it makes me an evil person, but . . .” She shrugs, stabs a grape with her fork, and pops it into her mouth.
Tony Kerwin, Landry realizes. That’s what she’s talking about: her relief that she didn’t have to face him at school this week.
It doesn’t make her an evil person.
But then a terrible thought occurs to Landry, and the tiny bite of sandwich lodges in her throat.
What if it hadn’t been a heart attack, after all?
What if Tony Kerwin had been murdered?
Thoughts racing, she excuses herself to go inside and get dessert ready. The others offer t
o help, but she waves them away. “I’ve got it. Just relax. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
She hurries up the stairs, past the closed bedroom doors. She put Elena in Tucker’s room and Kay in Addison’s.
“I thought your kids were going to be home tonight,” Elena protested when she showed them upstairs.
“Change of plans.”
“That’s too bad. I was hoping to meet them.”
What if Elena—and not Jaycee, or Jenna Coeur—is the person she should have been worried about all along?
In the master bedroom, she closes and then—after a moment’s hesitation—locks the door. She grabs her laptop from the desk and sits on the edge of the bed, opening a Google search.
Déjà vu.
She did this when Meredith died, trying to figure out what had happened to her— though not as frantically.
She types Tony—then corrects it to Anthony—Kerwin, taking a guess on the spelling.
She got it right; an obituary pops up.
She scans it.
. . . died suddenly at his residence on Monday, June 10 . . .
But of course the cause of death isn’t listed. It never is.
If he’d been murdered, though, there would be online newspaper coverage, as there was after Meredith’s death.
There is none for Tony.
Going back to his obituary, she rereads it, then the funeral notice.
In lieu of flowers, the family would appreciate donations in Tony’s memory to the American Heart Association.
That, Landry thinks, would certainly indicate a heart attack.
He died at home. There would have been an autopsy. If it had shown anything unusual, that would have come up by now. Because you can’t disguise murder as a heart attack . . . or can you?
She returns to the search engine.
Two minutes later she has her answer—and the implications rock her to the core.
Beck has gone through every e-mail exchange in her mother’s files, going back a couple of years.
Nothing in her sent or received folders indicate that anyone was out to get her; not a shred of evidence to incriminate anyone.
The Perfect Stranger Page 31