Wait a minute.
This is supposed to be her cell phone.
Landry lowers the phone and looks at the screen to see which number she just dialed.
It’s not the one Detective Burns gave her on that card, the one she’d committed to memory. The one Kay swore she’d called.
Why would she lie?
Does it matter? She’s dead. It’s not as if she killed herself, much less Meredith, or Tony Kerwin . . .
There’s no evidence, even, that Tony was murdered.
She replays everything Bruce told her about that. He said it would be possible, that certain drugs mimic a heart attack and wouldn’t be detected in an autopsy if—
“Oh my God.”
Stunned, she remembers exactly what he was saying when she was on the phone with him earlier, right before she thought she heard someone on the stairs.
“There are very few places where those drugs would even be found. Succinylcholine alone—SUX—is used in anesthesiology and it’s used along with liquid potassium chloride for lethal injection executions.”
Those last three words were lost on her at the time.
Now . . .
She turns around to stare at Kay, lying on the floor, remembering . . .
Remembering how she’d posted about her brush with fame: having worked at the federal prison where the Oklahoma City Bomber was executed over a decade ago.
But why would she want Tony Kerwin dead?
Because Elena hated him?
Because . . .
Because of the stress he was causing?
Dangerous stress. Stress that could cause a recurrence.
And what about Meredith? Why would Kay ever want Meredith dead? She loved her; everyone loved her. She was truly shaken up at her funeral; you can’t fake that kind of emotion.
Landry can hear sirens in the distance.
They’re coming. Thank God, they’re coming.
She and Kay had talked about the dying process the night of Meredith’s funeral. About the so-called blessing that their friend hadn’t suffered a long, lingering death; hadn’t wasted away like Kay’s mother, or Whoa Nellie, or so many of the others . . .
Kay had agreed with Elena, that it was better to go quickly—to never know what hit you. She agreed that only dying was to be dreaded, not death itself . . .
The sirens are closer.
Landry walks over to the window and peers out, watching until the red domed lights appear, rotating on the top of the first police car.
Then she unlocks the door and slowly goes down the stairs to greet them, no longer frightened that a murderer lurks somewhere in the house.
Later—much, much later, after the investigators confirmed that Kay’s fatal knife wound did, indeed, appear to be self-inflicted, though further tests are needed to confirm it; after Landry has repeatedly reassured her children, via telephone, that she’s all right; after Rob has boarded a flight home from North Carolina—she sits outside on the back porch with Elena, watching fireflies in the dusk.
There are still several police officers inside the house, wrapping up the investigation. Bruce is there, too. Earlier, Landry heard him and one of the cops discussing last week’s three-game series between the Braves and the Reds.
This is merely a day’s work for them. They’ve seen it all.
But for Landry . . . for Elena . . .
“I keep wondering if Meredith knew what was happening,” Landry says quietly. “If she knew . . . you know.”
“That it was Kay?” Elena shrugs. “I hope she didn’t. I hope she never knew what hit her.”
Landry hopes so, too, and yet . . .
Meredith never got to say good-bye.
That her cancer had progressed and was most likely terminal—news Detective Burns shared over the telephone a little while ago, believing it had contributed to Kay’s twisted motive—is irrelevant.
She should have died on her own terms—not on somebody else’s. Some people fear dying, others fear death . . .
Still others fear nothing more than life itself.
Not me, Landry thinks. I’ll take it. Every scary, glorious minute of it.
She looks at her watch. It’s after eight. Rob is landing in about an hour. She didn’t try to talk him out of it when he said he’d be on the next plane home. She told him to hurry.
Landry takes a deep breath, inhaling warm air scented with rain and roses.
Elena slaps her arm. “The mosquitoes are coming out.”
“Yes,” Landry says, “but so are the stars.”
And together, they sit in silence for a while longer, gazing into the darkening sky until the heavens are ablaze with pinpricks of light.
The Day My Life Changed Forever
When the doctor’s receptionist called to say that they had the results, it never dawned on me that it might be bad news.
“Hi, hon,” Janine said—she calls all the patients “hon”—and casually requested that I come by in person this afternoon. She even used just that phrasing, and it was a question, as opposed to a command: “Can you come by the office in person this afternoon?”
Come by.
So breezy. So inconsequential. So . . . so everything this situation was not.
What if I’d told Janine, over the phone, that I was busy this afternoon? Would she have at least hinted that my presence at the office was urgent; that it was, in fact, more than a mere request?
But I wasn’t busy and so there I was, blindsided, numbly staring at the doctor pointing the tip of a ballpoint pen at the left breast on the anatomical diagram.
The doctor kept talking, talking, talking; tapping, tapping, tapping the paper with the pen point to indicate exactly where the cancerous tissue was growing, leaving ominous black ink pockmarks.
I nodded as though I was listening intently, not betraying that every word after “malignancy” has been drowned out by the warning bells clanging in my brain.
I’m going to die, I thought with the absolute certainty of someone trapped on a railroad track, staring helplessly into the glaring roar of an oncoming train. I’m going to be one of those ravaged bald women lying dwarfed in a hospital bed, terrified and exhausted and dying an awful, solitary death . . .
I’d seen that person before, too many times—in the movies, and in real life . . . but I never thought I’d ever actually become that person. Or did I?
Well, yes—you worry, whenever a horrific fate befalls someone else, that it could happen to you. But then you reassure yourself that it won’t, and you push the thought from your head, and you move on.
“Would you like to call someone, Kay?”
Call someone . . .
Would you like to call someone . . .
Unable to process the question, I stared at the doctor.
“A friend, or a family member . . . someone who can come over here and—”
“Oh. No. No, thank you,” I said.
Because back then, in that moment . . .
There was no one. No one at all. No one to call. No friends, no family.
You know what? I thought that was the unluckiest day of my entire life. But really, in the end, it was the luckiest.
Cancer was, ultimately, my greatest gift—because it led me to you, the only friends—the only family—I have ever known.
—Excerpt from Kay’s blog, I’m A-Okay
Read on for a sneak peek
at the next thrilling novel
THE BLACK WIDOW
by New York Times best-selling author
WENDY CORSI STAUB
Prologue
“Some things,” Carmen used to say, “just don’t feel right until after the sun goes down.”
It was true.
Mixed drinks . . .
/>
Bedtime stories . . .
Turning on the television . . .
Putting on pajamas . . .
All much better—more natural—after nightfall, regardless of the hour or season.
There are other things, Alex has since discovered, that can only happen under cover of darkness. Such endeavors are far less appealing than the ones to which Carmen referred. Unfortunately, they’ve become increasingly necessary.
Alex opens the door that leads from the kitchen to the attached garage, aims the key remote at the car and pops the trunk.
It slowly opens wide. The interior bulb sends enough light into the garage so that it’s unnecessary to flip a wall switch and illuminate the overhead bulb.
Not that there are any windows to reveal to the neighbors that someone is up and about at this hour . . .
And not that the crack beneath the closed door is likely wide enough to emit a telltale shaft of light . . .
But still, it’s good to practice discretion. One can’t be too careful.
Alex removes a sturdy shovel from a rack on the side wall. The square metal blade has been scrubbed clean with bleach, not a speck of dirt remaining from the last wee-hour expedition to the remote stretch of woods seventy miles north of this quiet New York City suburb.
Into the trunk goes the shovel, along with a headlamp purchased from an online camping supply store.
Now comes the hard part.
Alex returns to the house with a coil of sturdy rope and a lightweight hand truck stolen a while back from a careless deliveryman who foolishly left it unattended behind the supermarket. It’s come in handy. Alex is strong—but not strong enough to drag around well over a hundred pounds of dead weight.
Well, not dead yet.
The figure lying prone on the sofa is passed out cold, courtesy of the white powder poured into a glass of booze-laced soda that sits on the coffee table with an inch or two of liquid left in the bottom.
Alex dumps the contents into the sink, washes it down the drain, and scrubs the glass and the sink with bleach.
Then it’s back to the living room.
“Time for you to go now,” he whispers, rolling the hand truck over to the sofa and unfurling a length of rope. The end whips through the air and topples a framed photo on the end table. It’s an old black and white baby photo of Carmen, a gift from Alex’s mother-in-law the day after their son was born.
“He’s the spitting image of my Carmen as an infant, isn’t he?”
On that day, gazing into the newborn’s face, all patchy skin and squinty eyes from the drops the nurses had put in, Alex couldn’t really see it.
But as the days, then weeks and months, passed, the resemblance became undeniable. Strangers would stop them on the street to exclaim over how much parent and child looked alike. At first it was sweet. But after a while Alex started to feel left out.
“He looks like you, too,” Carmen would claim, but it wasn’t true.
“You’re just trying to make me feel better.”
“No—he has your nose. See?”
“It’s your nose, Carm. It’s your face. Everything about him is you—even his personality.”
The baby had been so easygoing from day one, quick to smile, quick to laugh . . .
Like Carm. Nothing like you.
Alex leaves the photo lying facedown on the table.
Carmen—even baby Carmen—doesn’t need to witness what’s about to happen here.
Five minutes later the car is heading north on the Taconic Parkway, cruise control set at five miles above the posted limit—just fast enough to reach the destination in a little over an hour, but not fast enough to be pulled over for speeding.
Even if that were to happen, nothing would appear out of the ordinary to a curious cop peering into the car. Alex would turn over a spotless driver’s license and explain that the sleeping person slumped in the passenger seat had simply had too much to drink. No crime in that statement, and quite a measure of truth.
Three hours later the first traces of pink dawn are visible through the open window beyond the empty passenger seat as Alex reenters the southbound lanes on the parkway. All four windows are rolled down and the moon roof is open, too, despite the damp chill in the March wind.
The radio is blasting a classic rock station. Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” opens with a powerful electric guitar; eerie, wailing, lyric-free vocals from Robert Plant.
The fresh air and the music make it better somehow. Easier to forget throwing shovels full of dirt over the still unconscious human being lying at the bottom of the trench. Easier not to imagine what it would be like to regain consciousness and find yourself buried alive.
Maybe that won’t happen. Maybe it never has, with any of them. Maybe they just drift from sleep to a painless death, never knowing . . .
But you know that’s not very likely, is it, Alex?
Chances are that it’s a frantic, ugly, horrifying death, clawing helplessly at the weight of dirt and rocks, struggling for air . . .
Alex reaches over to adjust the volume on the radio, turning it up even higher in an effort to drown out the nagging voice.
Sometimes that works—with the voices.
Other times, they persist, refusing to be ignored.
Not tonight, thank goodness.
The voices give way to the music, and it shifts from Led Zeppelin to the familiar opening guitar lick of an old Guns N’ Roses tune.
Singing along—screaming, shouting along—to the lyrics, Alex rejoices. There is no more fitting song to punctuate this moment.
It’s a sign. It has to be. A sign that everything is going to be okay after all. Someone else will come along. Another chance. Soon enough . . .
“Oh . . . oh-oh-oh . . . sweet child of mine . . .”
Chapter 1
“No, come on. That one wasn’t good either. You look annoyed.”
“Probably because I am annoyed,” Gabriella Duran tells her cousin Maria, watching her check out the photo she’s just taken on her digital camera.
Yes, digital camera.
Gaby had assumed a few snapshots on a cell phone would suffice, and would make this little photo shoot far less conspicuous. But Maria, who took a photography class at the New School not long ago, insisted on using a real camera, the kind that has a giant lens attached. It’s perched on top of a tripod, aiming directly at Gaby.
Which might not be a terrible thing if they were in the privacy of her apartment. But in the middle of jam-packed Central Park at high noon on the sunny Sunday before Memorial Day . . .
Yeah. Definitely a terrible thing.
“Can’t you please just smile for two seconds,” Maria says, “so that I can get a decent shot? Then we can be done.”
Gaby sighs and pastes on a grin.
“You just look like you’re squinting.”
“I am squinting.” They’ve been here so long that the sun has changed position, glaring directly into her eyes. “How about if I just turn the other way?” She gestures over her shoulder, preferring to face the clump of trees behind her rather than the parade of New Yorkers jogging, strolling, and rolling past on the adjacent pathway.
“No, I need the light on your face. Here, just take a few steps this way . . . no, not that far, back a little, back . . . back . . . okay, good!”
A pair of long-haired teenagers roll past on skateboards.
“Say cheese!” one of them calls.
Gaby shakes her head at Maria, who is raising the viewfinder to her eye again. “Okay, smile . . . without clenching your teeth.”
“Maria, I swear—”
“Remember, Mami—” her cousin cuts in, using the Latina term of endearment, “you’re trying to attract the perfect guy with this picture. Trust me, he’s no
t going to be interested if you—”
“Okay, first of all, the perfect guy doesn’t exist.”
“Not true.” Maria shakes her head, her dark ringlets bobbing around her shoulders. “He exists. But he doesn’t know you exist. Yet. And he won’t unless you let me take a picture that captures the real you.”
The real me . . .
Gaby has no idea who that even is these days, other than knowing that the real Gabriella, who once laughed her way through life, doesn’t seem to remember how to smile anymore.
She hasn’t felt remotely like herself since last summer before she and Ben split up. After five years of marriage—and three years together before that—life without him was frighteningly unfamiliar. Even now, she begins every day with the momentarily frantic feeling that she’s woken up in a strange body in a strange place, having swapped someone else’s life for her own.
Then again, she really hasn’t felt like herself since . . .
No. Don’t go there.
She doesn’t dare let herself think about it even three years later—especially not when she’s supposed to be smiling.
Dr. Ryan—she’s the shrink Gaby has been seeing lately—says it’s okay to distract herself when she feels like she’s about to burst into tears over morbid thoughts of the past.
“Get yourself out of the moment,” the doctor advised. “Read a magazine, go for a run, call a friend—anything that you enjoy.”
She nodded at the advice, rather than admit that there’s very little she enjoys anymore. Even the things that once gave her pleasure have been reduced to mere obligations.
Yet here she is, allowing her cousin to take photos to create a profile on the InTune dating Web site. Even Dr. Ryan thought it might be a good idea—another positive step toward getting over Ben, making a fresh start.
“Gaby, I wish you’d try to relax,” Maria cajoles. “It’s for your own good. Try and have fun with it.”
“Okay, fine. Let’s see how Mr. Perfect likes this.” She sticks her thumbs into her ears and wiggles her fingers, rolls her eyes back and thrusts out her tongue.
The Perfect Stranger Page 35