by Sara Shepard
I blink. “I-I don’t know,” I finally say. “I found him like this.”
And then, I remember: Aurora. I need to find her. I dash upstairs.
The second-floor landing is dark. The hectic sounds from downstairs fall away. The wood floor makes a spooky creak under my feet as I travel down the hall. I stop halfway down, my eye on a shadow in the guest room. Shit. What if whoever did that to Greg is hiding up here now? My heart pounds. I snap on some lights. The hallway is empty, lined with perfectly even photographs.
I head up the second flight of stairs to the top level, where Aurora and, until recently, Sienna sleep. After moving in here, Greg paid to have the top floor remodeled, breaking down the walls of the chopped-up little bedrooms and creating one big loft space that the girls share. The room is full of Lovesac beanbags, a ballet barre, a giant-screen TV; and we carved out two big walk-in closets. But there’s no Aurora in the pink Jenny Lind bed by the window. My heart nose-dives. “Aurora?” I call weakly. Nothing.
I fumble for my phone and manage to successfully dial her number after the third try. The phone rings once, twice . . .
“Mom?” Aurora sounds sleepy. “What time is it?”
“Where are you?” I screech.
“I’m at Lilly’s.” Aurora sounds confused. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Ma’am?”
The voice floats up the stairs. I glance down the staircase. It’s not one of the EMTs but a short, muscular police officer. He has close-cropped red hair and squinty eyes, and he’s blinking hard like a man who’s drunk too much Red Bull.
“Aurora, I’ll call you back,” I murmur. I blink at the officer. I’m sweaty suddenly. I wonder if I stink of booze.
“Are you his wife?” the officer asks.
I nod. I think I nod.
“Mind coming down here for a sec?”
I nod, but I don’t move. It feels like I’ve just been dropped into a bucket of ice. I don’t know how I suddenly know, but I’m positive my husband is going to die. Maybe he’s already dead.
And then I think of how I’d ordered him not to come with me to the benefit. “Why are you punishing me?” Greg had protested. “You’re really going to believe some stupid website?”
“You really think a hacker went to the trouble of making up e-mails in your account?” I snapped. “Just admit it, Greg! Just admit you did a terrible, terrible thing!”
But he wouldn’t. He kept shaking his head. Deny deny deny. I was so humiliated that I threw a shoe at him. A high, spiky-heeled shoe: I flung it right at his head. “What the fuck?” Greg screamed, ducking before the thing clocked his skull.
Those will be the last words he ever says to me: What the fuck?
I rake my hands down my face. I remember, too, the thought that kept drifting into my mind for the past day. In the cheese section, after I read those e-mails. At the benefit, when everyone was staring. And if I’m honest with myself, maybe even before that, too. In Barbados, when Greg refused to go to therapy and acted like an asshole. In Philly, when Patrick and I pressed together in the elevator. It would be so much easier if Greg were just . . . gone.
I thought it over and over again. It became a fantasy. A best-case scenario. And now, here it is, happening for real. I got my wish.
PART
2
8
WILLA
FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 2017
It’s 6:00 A.M. in Pittsburgh when I step out of the airport, but because I’m still on California time, I’m feeling like a skin-snapping, pupils-going-in-two-different-directions swamp creature. A rickety Ford minivan with the logo IRON CITY CHECKER CABS rolls out of the gloom like something in a haunted house ride. The driver, a gap-toothed, yellow-skinned fellow with a Marlboro 100 balanced between two fingers, leers at me out the window. I step back a little, a dangerous whoosh going through me. “Need a ride?” he asks in a kind-enough voice.
I, Willa Manning, can’t get in a car with a smoker. I drink cold-pressed beet juice. I check for parabens on my shampoo label. Climbing into this car is my equivalent of sitting in a bathtub of plutonium. I really should never leave Los Angeles.
Except this guy is the only cab this time of the morning—and for some reason, my Uber app isn’t working. Sighing, I climb in and perch on one of the minivan’s captain’s chairs, trying not to look too closely at the mysterious stains on the upholstery. My eyes water as the cigarette smell wafts out the vents. I can practically feel the cancer cells growing in my lungs. “Colton Street,” I tell the driver as he pulls away from the curb. “One block from Aldrich University.” And then, even though it’s only 21 degrees outside, I roll down the window and stick my head out like a Labrador.
The driver raises a bushy eyebrow. “Aldrich, huh?” He whistles. “You hear about the murder?”
I almost laugh out loud. Um, yes, Marlboro Man. You might say I heard.
“They got any leads on that yet?” the cabbie asks. As if I’m a cop.
I mumble something ambiguous, shut my eyes, and pretend to go to sleep. I still can’t wrap my mind around what’s happening. Yesterday morning, I’d been minding my own business, driving to my job at the West Coast office of “The Source,” a highly respected news site that specializes in deep, intense investigative reporting. I was pissed because there was a mysterious leak in my apartment, but the landlord wasn’t taking my calls about it. And then I’d heard an annoying, nosy-aunt voice in my head saying, If you had a man in your life, Willa, he could fix the leak instead of you having to bother Mr. Jenkins.
Who was this woman in my head? I’d been hearing her voice for months, and she pissed me off.
Then my father called. I don’t often answer calls while I’m driving, but something told me it was important. And he told me, in a panicked, jumbled rush, that my older sister’s husband had been murdered. I should probably come home.
And here we are.
Apparently, Greg was stabbed in his kitchen. Kit came upon him after getting home from a work gala. (Side note: I had a couple of missed calls from Kit at about 5:00 P.M. Pacific time. I’d been in an interview with my latest subject, a female arsonist about to get out of prison.) At about 2:00 A.M., Greg died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The funeral is set for tomorrow.
My first thought, when my father told me all this: Kit’s now a widow twice over. My second thought: Blue. But then, I’ve been wondering about Blue lately anyway. I pushed him out of my brain fast.
Before getting on the red-eye, I searched to see if the story popped up on any of the news feeds yet. Yep: “Prominent Surgeon Murdered in Pittsburgh Home—Possible Hack Link.” As I read the story, I felt a little jealous. Not because of its content, but because this is actually the sort of investigative story I like to report on for my job: a tragic murder of a prominent person in society, with an unclear culprit and motive. I like the puzzle of figuring them out. They’re always more complicated than you think, and they often have surprising endings.
The story went on to talk about the Aldrich hack, the database full of e-mails, and how someone had leaked some of Greg’s onto a bunch of social media portals. Seems that Dr. Greg wrote some filthy fantasies about sex on the MRI machine to a woman who wasn’t my sister. Classy. Full disclosure: I never really got why Kit fell for Greg Strasser. He’s good-looking, he’s successful, he has money . . . had money. Jesus. But he always struck me as . . . fake. Deceitful. Maybe even predatory. Not that I wished him dead or anything, but . . .
Changing planes in Chicago, I tried calling Kit. Her mailbox was full. After getting through some work voice mails of my own, I trolled the news again. There’s a new story featuring an interview with a man named Maurice Reardon; he would be the lead detective on Greg’s case. Detective Reardon hinted that Kit might be a person of interest—but that was ridiculous. The chance of my sister murdering someone is about as great as the chance of
me ingesting anything colored with blue dye #1 or #2. (Don’t even get me started on what just a few Froot Loops can do to your immune system.) Though here’s an unnerving little blip: I finally got around to listening to my voice mails from yesterday, and one was from Kit. When I played it, I heard fuzzy, blurry sounds, the phone shifting around this way and that. Almost twenty seconds in, I heard Kit’s voice. I think it was Kit’s voice—it sounded slurred, despairing, not like this shiny thing my sister has become. “Should I get revenge?” Her voice echoed. “Should I?”
Probably best not to turn over that voice mail to the detectives.
My cabbie sets his radio to a local news station. I listen as a reporter quietly updates us on Donald Trump, a failed uterus transplant, and then new details about the multi-university hack. My heart jumps. I lean forward to hear.
“Analysts haven’t yet been able to trace the hacker who stole hundreds of thousands of e-mails linked to those working at and attending Aldrich University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island; and Princeton University in New Jersey,” the reporter says. “Alfred Manning, who has been Aldrich University’s president for more than fifteen years, has reported that an IT task force has been working around the clock to fix the breach. Other presidents have weighed in as well, saying their security teams are taking similar measures.”
My shoulders tense. Scandals are starting to leak right and left—at all the colleges, but I only tune into the ones about Aldrich. A professor at Aldrich’s medical school actually doesn’t have a medical degree. The head of the history department is selling cocaine out of his office. A few players on the school’s prestigious basketball team are paying kids to take their tests.
Lives are crumbling. I listen as the reporter floats a few theories of who might have done it: A kid who’d been rejected from every Ivy he applied to. ISIS. North Korea.
The driver continues down 376, and soon enough we cross through the Fort Pitt Tunnel and drive toward the steep embankment to Blue Hill, the neighborhood where I grew up. Home sweet home—or not. Dread and shame rise inside me. I come back to Pittsburgh only when it would be ridiculously inappropriate not to—Christmases, the birth of my sister’s daughters, Kit’s first husband’s funeral, her weddings—otherwise, I stay far, far away.
We drive past the neighborhood’s main drag, which is peppered with trendy boutiques and yoga studios. I can list the stately order of homes before my parents’ by heart: first the Queen Anne Victorian with turrets and third-floor decks, then the Arts and Crafts splendor with stained glass, then the marble monolith that looks like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the end of Logan Street is the house I know best: a huge, stately colonial of brick and slate standing on a freshly mown lot. My parents bought the place in the 1970s using every scrap of savings—this was long before my dad made bank at Aldrich. “It’s the kind of house one sacrifices for,” my mom said. “As soon as I saw it, I knew we’d make wonderful memories here.”
I can still hear her voice all these years later. She’s one of the reasons I find it so hard to come back. Every landmark I pass, every bend in the road—it still makes me think of how she was taken too soon. My mother never visited LA—she never even knew I’d chosen to move there. This means I can pass through the city untouched by her memory, not suddenly and unexpectedly plunged into sadness.
Two news vans are parked in front of the house. As my cab slows, two reporters step toward us. “Holy shit,” my driver says.
I toss him some crumpled-up twenties and wrench the sliding door open. Popping flashbulbs assault me. I hitch my carry-on over my shoulder and jog toward the house. The reporters jog alongside me.
“Excuse me?” a male reporter with a microphone asks. “Do you have a comment about the murder?”
“Do you know Kit Manning-Strasser?” cries another voice. “Is it true she found Greg’s body?”
“Do you think she did it?” someone shouts. “Because of the e-mails?”
The front door is unlocked, so I wrench it open and hurry inside, slamming it behind me. Someone rings the bell. “Dude,” I shout to the closed door. “It’s not even seven A.M.!”
I bolt the lock. Then I turn and look at the house. The foyer still smells like it did when Kit and I were kids: leather, dust, furniture polish. There’s the notch on the railing where Kit chipped her tooth when we’d been flying kites down the hallway. There’s the spot against the radiator where I sat for what seemed like days after I found out that a drunk driver killed my mother. I shut my eyes. This is too much.
I hear a creak. I can smell my father’s Old Spice before I see him. “Willa,” he says as he walks forward from the kitchen, his arms outstretched, his eyes sad. “Thank you for coming.”
He looks even thinner than he was at Christmas, when he’d started a juice cleanse to “lose the whiskey belly.” His sandy hair, normally so groomed—Dad is one of those men who used to take longer to get ready for an event than my mother—is Einstein-crazy around his face. I step closer to him, and he pulls me in for a hug. I feel the same as I always do—like we are distant islands, not really familiar to one another anymore.
“Where’s Kit?” I ask, pulling back.
“Still asleep.”
I nod. I can’t fathom what Kit’s day was like yesterday—hospitals, morgues, police stations, funeral homes. She can’t go to her own house on Hazel because it’s crawling with forensics people. I bet she took something to knock herself out last night. I would have.
“So I’m supposed to be at the college—this hack thing.” My dad pinches the bridge of his nose. “You heard?”
“Of course. Hacks are our bread and butter at work.”
“Kitty didn’t do this, you know.”
I fix my gaze on a knot in the stair finial. At first, I think my dad means my sister didn’t do the hack, but then I realize—he means she didn’t kill Greg. “I know that,” I say.
“We need to keep her safe right now. Away from the gossip. And whoever did do this? He’s still out there.”
That tagline would definitely bump Aldrich University up a spot on the US News & World Report Best Colleges ranking: Come for the e-mail hack, stay for the serial killing! I sigh. “Go to campus, Dad. They probably need you.”
“Are you sure?” His eyes are concerned. Unsteady.
I nod. “I’ve got Kit. It’s fine.” Then I scrutinize his thin face. “You look terrible. Are you sleeping enough?”
“Of course.”
“Eating enough?”
But then we’re interrupted. “Aunt Willa?” says a shocked voice.
On the landing stands Kit’s nineteen-year-old, Sienna. Behind her, like a smaller Matryoshka doll that could nest perfectly inside her older sister, stands sixteen-year-old Aurora. It’s only now that I remember my father said on the phone that the girls are staying here, too—even Sienna, who could technically escape to her dorm room. They are negative images of one another, Sienna fair and blond, Aurora with more olive skin, like her father, Martin, but they both have the same bright, upwardly sloped eyes, Cupid’s bow lips, and rounded faces. Aurora looks as ballerina-scrawny as ever, but Sienna wears a tight black dress that reveals curves. Shit. When did that happen?
“Oh my God,” I say, rushing for them. “You guys.”
I’m assaulted by a mixture of smells: fruity bubble bath, sour bedding, sticky-sweet hair products. Their bodies feel frozen stiff, like they’ve turned to wood. Their skin is cold. Beneath my arms, Sienna is trembling.
There’s a cough a few risers up, and here is Kit. There are circles under her eyes, and she looks dazed. Despite the fact that she is wearing a thick oatmeal cardigan and wool pajama bottoms, she has her arms wrapped around her body like she’s spent the night in a snowdrift. She sees me and stops short, her eyes going wide. “Why are you here?”
>
Somewhere in the room, a gasp. Maybe it’s me. This isn’t exactly the welcome home from her I expected.
But then again, I also kind of deserve it.
9
KIT
FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 2017
I’m sorry,” I say to Willa. “I didn’t mean to say that. I’m just . . . surprised.”
“It’s okay,” Willa answers in a clipped voice, then turns. “Come on. Let’s get out of this drafty foyer, okay? Do you need coffee?”
She heads toward the kitchen, and I wilt against the banister. Willa. Just looking at her makes me well up. I so rarely see her. She only turns up at sad events—funerals, accidents, divorces—so of course I’m plunged into memories of the sad moments I saw her last. But more than that—Willa. The tie to my past. The tie to my mom. She has Mom’s eyes, and they’re looking back at me, but I don’t know what they’re thinking. Who’s at fault for the emotional chasm between us? Or maybe it’s no one’s fault. Maybe we are just normal sisters who don’t speak as much as we should. Yet that makes her being here now even more momentous. I know she didn’t want to come. I know it was a huge sacrifice to get on that plane. My chest feels tight with a mix of embarrassment for the charity I didn’t ask for as well as gratitude that she’s done the difficult, uncomfortable thing just for my sake.