“I didn’t. At least, not like that. I thought I could use the bruises to force his hand. Like, I’d tell his job that he was beating his wife unless he tore up the prenup. But that probably wouldn’t have worked—he would have made it look like I was lying.”
“You were lying,” Alison said with another bitter laugh.
Heather looked sulky. “I didn’t even think about killing him until you guys did. You’re the ones who said I should defend myself, and Julie gave me the gun, and Sarah said I wouldn’t be charged if it was self-defense.”
“Yeah, well, maybe if you hadn’t shot him in the back of the head, dummy,” I said, tossing back the rest of my wine and heading to the island to refill my glass. Julie beat me to it, but instead of pouring another glass, she gave me a dirty look and deliberately stuffed the cork back in the bottle.
“Why did you do it like that?” Alison said to Heather. “Why that night? Why in his car?”
“Because he found out about the baby! He was going to leave me.” Heather sank back down in the chair, looking exhausted.
“So it was true about the vasectomy?” Julie said.
Heather nodded. “He had one before Janice got sick. She couldn’t risk having any more kids, she almost lost Daniel.”
“And he didn’t think about reversing it after you got married?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t want kids. Or at least I didn’t think I did.”
“Vasectomies fail,” I said. “Why not try to claim it was his child?”
“He’s a doctor, dummy!” Heather snapped, glaring at me. “They have tests to prove those things. Besides, it didn’t matter, somehow he found out about the affair and then he found my pregnancy vitamins, and the camera you guys gave me. He said he was going to divorce me. He was leaving me that night.”
“It was his suitcase in the doorway,” I said, putting it together. “Not yours.”
“So you shot him,” Alison said in a flat voice.
“What else was I supposed to do?” Heather cried. “Let him leave me with nothing? Leave us with nothing?” She cradled her stomach for a moment as if the baby were still there and then she remembered, her hand falling along with her face, and she started to weep.
No one moved to comfort her. I thought of all the times we’d done that. Opening our arms and our homes and our hearts for poor, fragile, abused Heather. I looked at her face contorted with tears and couldn’t believe that I’d ever found her beautiful.
“You are a greedy, selfish bitch,” I said, spitting each word at her, and she flinched as if they were blows.
And then the doorbell rang. That ridiculous, overproduced, twinkly peal echoing through the house.
chapter forty-two
ALISON
For a moment, nobody moved, and then Julie whispered, “What if it’s the police?”
“We can say we came because of the miscarriage,” I said. “We’re just helping a friend.”
“It’s not the police, it’s Ray.” Heather was looking at one of her phones. “He sent a text.”
“Don’t answer,” Julie said, clearly panicked.
“That’s not going to work—he won’t go away.” Heather sounded resigned.
“Good, let’s get our money back.” Sarah started walking toward the front hall.
Julie grabbed her by the arm. “Are you crazy? He could hurt you!”
“We don’t want to provoke him,” I said. “The last thing we need is the police showing up.”
“Just wait here,” Heather said. “I’ll try to get rid of him.”
We held very still, listening to Heather open the front door. We heard her say that she was tired and she’d get in touch tomorrow, and then a male voice, demanding to know “where the hell” she’d been.
More muffled conversation, and then Heather’s voice rose and she cried, “You can’t just barge in here!”
“Quick, we’ve got to hide,” Julie hissed, and we grabbed our things and ducked in the laundry room, leaving the door ajar, just before Ray Fortini stepped into the kitchen with Heather at his heels.
“What the fuck are you acting so nervous about?” he demanded, looking around. “You two-timing me? Got someone hiding in here?”
“Of course not.”
“Yeah? Then what are all these from?” He flicked a finger against one of our wineglasses.
“My friends were over earlier,” she said, hurriedly grabbing the glasses and taking them to the sink. “Do you want something to drink?”
“Sure, I’ll have some of your chichi wine,” he said, tilting the bottle back to read the label. “What is this? Like, a fifty-dollar bottle?”
“I don’t know,” she said, over the sound of glasses clattering in the sink. “Viktor bought the wine.”
“What the fuck?” he exclaimed, and for a moment I thought he was angry that she’d mentioned her husband, but as I edged my face closer to the door I spotted, too late, what we’d left behind on the island.
“Where did you get that phone?” Ray demanded.
“Where do you think I got it?”
Silence for a long moment. I pressed my face even closer to the door, trying to see if Heather was secretly communicating with Fortini, but they were just standing there, staring at each other.
“So it’s true,” Heather said, when it became clear that Fortini wouldn’t answer. “I can’t believe you’ve been blackmailing me. How could you?”
“That’s my insurance,” he said. “You think you’re going to leave me? I told you—it’s over when I say it’s over.”
“I don’t understand—how did you know where to find us that night? I didn’t tell you what we were going to do with Viktor’s body. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I called you.”
“I tracked you. I’ve been tracking you for months on that phone I gave you and on the one your dead husband gave you, too.” He laughed.
“You are such a loser,” Heather spat. “I don’t know what I ever saw in you.”
He just laughed again. “What you saw in me? What did I see in you? Just look at you—you’re a mess! You don’t even have your sweater on right. Is that ’cause you were out fucking someone else tonight?” He sniffed the air. “Is it a doctor? I can smell him on you.”
“You can keep my money, but you’ve got to give theirs back,” Heather said, her voice trembling as she started speaking, but steadying as she went on.
He kept laughing, too brazen and too stupid to take her seriously. “I’m not giving back anything.”
“You have to—they know all about us, about you. They’ll go to the police.”
“They’re not going to talk to anybody,” he said with a laugh. “I’ve got copies of the photos and I’ll show them to the cops.”
I watched through the crack in the door as Heather shook her head. “No you won’t,” she said, and gave him a tight little smile. “They’ve been erased. All your files have been erased.”
Fortini’s easy grin vanished. He struggled to speak, looking and sounding like someone who’d been hit across the head by a two-by-four. “What the hell does that mean? Did you fuck with my computer?” He moved toward her and Heather backed away, around the island.
He followed, grabbing her by the arms and pushing her up against the counter. “Answer me, bitch!” He slapped her hard across the face.
The smack was loud, echoing off all the marble and glass. I slammed open the door, reacting on impulse, forgetting my fear, forgetting what Heather had done, forgetting everything except the child I’d been, hiding in that closet as my father had grabbed my mother just like that, had her hit her just like that.
“She didn’t touch your computer, you asshole. I did.”
He whipped around, still holding Heather pressed up against the counter, that same stupid stunned look crossing his face. “Where the fuck did you come from?” And then his eyebrows rose as I heard Julie and Sarah step into the room behind me. He looked from us to Heather. “You let them into
my apartment? You stupid bitch!” He slapped her again, a casual backhand that knocked her sideways.
It was just like my father had lashed out years ago, that same animalistic anger, fueled in his case by alcohol and the sense that the world owed him. I didn’t know the demons driving Ray, but Heather cowered from him just like my mother had done, trying to shield herself, helpless in the face of that rage.
“Let go of her!” I screamed, my own rage, the rage of the scared child I’d been finally bursting free. I grabbed the wine bottle from the island and this time there was no hesitation as I swung.
Fortini moved and the blow only clipped him, but it was enough for him to drop Heather and clutch his head, yowling in pain. He stumbled back, scrambling to get away from us, trapping himself in a corner of the countertops.
“Get away from me, you crazy bitch,” he said as I advanced on him with the bottle raised for a second blow.
“You’re going to give us our money,” I said. “Pass me your wallet and your bank card.”
“I’m not giving you anything.” He tried to laugh, but he looked nervous.
“You’ll give it to me or I’ll tell the police you shot Viktor Lysenko.”
He snorted at that. “You think they’d believe that I shot him? She’s the one who stood to gain from killing him.”
“You have no proof that you didn’t,” I said. “We’d tell them that you were the one. You did it.”
“They’re not going to believe that, because it’s a crock of shit. She killed him because he found out about the affair. Cut and dried. Your average domestic homicide. They’ll know the truth because I’ll tell them the real story. I’ll tell them how I told Viktor.”
Heather cried out, and I saw that she’d gone pale.
“Told him what?”
“I told him his wife was cheating on him, that’s what.” He laughed. “She wasn’t ever going to leave him so I helped speed up the process.”
There was a strange sound, a snick as Heather pulled a knife from the block on the counter, and before we could stop her she ran toward Ray with the blade raised.
“You bastard! You killed my baby, you asshole!”
He stopped her, grabbing her wrist and trying to turn it, and Julie was screaming, a tinny, high-pitched hysterical sound, and I tried to stop them, pulling Heather back, but she was immovable. Then, all at once, she gave a strange “Oh!” and her weight fell against me and I stumbled back with her in my arms. And that’s when I saw that the knife was stuck in her chest, and blood was pouring from it, a stream of crimson across the blush pink sweater.
“Call 911!” I cried, folding onto the kitchen floor still cradling Heather. Sarah hurried to phone the police as Julie grabbed dish towels and we pressed them against Heather’s chest, trying to stop the bleeding that was now a bright red river gushing from the wound.
“No,” Ray Fortini moaned. “No, Heather, no, baby, no.” He pushed past Sarah, who tried to block him, dropping to his knees by Heather and trying to take her from me.
“Get away from her!” Julie screamed, hysterically shoving and kicking him. “Don’t you touch her! Don’t you touch her again!”
He backed away, hands raised, trying to block her onslaught.
None of us heard him leave. All I know is that he was gone before the ambulance came screaming up the hill, before the paramedics raced into the kitchen, equipment clanking and radios squawking, before they transferred Heather from my arms onto the stretcher, careful not to dislodge the knife. But it was too late. I think we all knew that, watching her face turn gray as each dish towel we pressed against her soaked through with blood. It traveled down her body, mingling with the baby’s blood that stained her jeans. Heather was gripping my hand and staring, unseeing, up at us when the paramedics reached her side.
chapter forty-three
ALISON
Funerals for murder victims are distinguished from other services by the curiosity seekers. Those who come even though they have no real relationship with the victim, but have been fooled by the publicity surrounding the death into thinking that they had a personal connection.
We watched them, these sobbing and wild-eyed men and women, and endured the long service in stiff pews, part of the much smaller crowd of the truly bereaved. We were very aware, in the way the others weren’t, of two guests who didn’t pass by Heather’s casket, the men standing at the back of the chapel in forgettable suits, watching us with gimlet eyes.
They waited until we rose, stiff-legged, and followed after the coffin, which rose and fell on the shoulders of the pallbearers like a small ship at sea. They waited until we’d stepped into the cold chill of that winter morning, all of us blinking in the hard light, wind whipping the corners of our coats as we grabbed the hands of our children. They waited until we’d loaded into our cars behind the hearse, queuing up to follow Heather’s body to its final resting place, high on a hill on the outskirts of town. And then they got into their nondescript sedan and joined our procession slowly wending its way through slush-covered streets toward the gravesite.
The estate paid for Heather’s funeral and she was buried next to Viktor, which surprised me given her mother-in-law’s hostility. Julie assumed it had been done for the sake of appearances, but Sarah had a different theory. “Every time Anna looks at her son’s grave she has the satisfaction of knowing that his wife didn’t outlive him, at least not by much.”
Perhaps that’s too harsh—it might have been a simple act of charity given that Heather’s parents probably couldn’t afford a funeral for their daughter. They were there, at the front of the church, looking both devastated and confused, and just as out of place in Sewickley as they’d ever been. I remember seeing Heather’s mother reaching for her grandson’s hand, but he wouldn’t take it and took Anna’s instead. She didn’t even pretend to mourn, but that was no surprise and who could blame her. I saw her smile as she walked away from Heather’s grave, firmly holding on to Daniel. She no longer had her beloved Vitya, but she got all of his money and her grandson.
We worried about Daniel, of course. Heather had been the only mother he’d ever known, but our attempts to arrange playdates were rebuffed by Anna, and I have no doubt that she’s doing her best to rewrite history as if Daniel were actually her son.
Sarah was the one who gave the cops a description of Ray Fortini and his motorcycle. I don’t remember that, but she told me later. We were asked to explain the scene to the police many times; it all blurs together.
Later that long night, we heard that Ray Fortini died. He raced away from the house on his Harley, trying to run from the murder or his guilt, going well beyond the speed limit, making it all the way to Route 65 before he heard the first siren pursuing him. It was the sort of death he might have appreciated, high-intensity and cinematic, crashing through a guardrail and plunging thirty feet into the river. A swift end to a short life, but people like that seem destined to die young.
I remember Detectives Tedesco and Kasper arriving in Heather’s kitchen, their narrow-eyed appraisal of the three of us standing there, bloodstained and shaken, but it wasn’t our first murder scene. We’d had time, before the paramedics arrived, to figure out what we were going to say and what we weren’t.
“Keep it short and simple,” I’d said as Julie and I kept pressing dish towels to Heather’s chest even though by that point we both knew it was futile. “We tell them we didn’t know about Ray Fortini before tonight. We came here to comfort Heather because of the miscarriage and he showed up.”
I remember Julie weeping, leaving traces of Heather’s blood on her face every time she swiped at her eyes. Sarah stuffed the phone she’d stolen from Ray—the one he’d used to blackmail us—into her purse to be disposed of later, before clearing all of the texting related to the blackmail off Heather’s phones.
“What do we do with her second phone?” Sarah picked it off the table.
“Put it back in the hospital bag for the police to find,” I said.
“It shows her relationship with Fortini.”
The story we told was mostly the truth. We hadn’t known about Ray Fortini, she’d kept him a secret from us. He stabbed her in a fight because she was trying to leave him. We had Heather’s second phone as proof of their affair, which provided a motive for Viktor’s murder.
It was a neat and tidy explanation, although I’m certain that Tedesco and Kasper knew there was more to the story. Lying by omission—isn’t that what they call it? I’m sure they would love to have charged us with that at least, but ultimately there was no concrete evidence to support any charge at all.
In the end, we were just the friends, bystanders to what had happened to Viktor and Heather. As I said to Detective Tedesco that night, “You never really know what happens in someone else’s marriage.”
As for our own marriages, our husbands asked a lot of questions, too, but were more easily satisfied than the police by the explanation we offered. I remember the warmth of Michael’s arms as he pulled me to him that night despite the blood coating my clothing. “It’ll be okay,” he murmured, but I felt his fear in how tight he held me. It was only when he brushed a gentle hand against my face that I realized I was crying.
Apparently Brian and Eric reacted this way, too, each of our husbands, like the best of spouses, moving quickly from questions to providing comfort and support. And don’t we all want to believe that everything is going to be okay?
Almost four years have passed since I first noticed that bruise on Heather’s wrist, and everything that happened after has started to fade a bit in my memory, the events less sharp, their exact sequence less clear. My family moved five months after her funeral, the job transfer for Michael back to Philadelphia that I’d once dreaded. He waited to tell me, afraid of my reaction, only to be surprised when I didn’t protest leaving Sewickley.
The children are settled in a new school with new friends and we’ve lived in this new house long enough that I’ve stopped opening the wrong drawer in the kitchen or hesitating before making the turn onto our street. It’s been long enough that Lucy and Matthew don’t talk as often about their old neighborhood or their Pittsburgh friends. They’re so young that it’s something they’ll barely remember; that past won’t haunt them the way it does me.
Just Between Us Page 35