“I want to know why you started hating me overnight. What did I do to you? I loved you. I was faithful.”
Her impatience grows. There isn’t any time for this, and even if there was, she doesn’t see the point of opening up a wound just to make it bleed more. But he doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere, and if she wants him gone in the next few minutes, she sees no choice but to give him the fight he wants.
“I was nothing but a baby factory to you.”
“Excuse me?” There’s the fire in his eyes now. It never takes long when the subject turns to pregnancy.
“Did you ever care about what it was putting me through? How many miscarriages would it have taken before you finally got it, Wyatt?”
“Of course I cared!”
“Yes, you cared so much that you watched me go through four failed in vitro cycles without even once suggesting we give it a rest. You’d probably still be jerking off into a cup if I hadn’t said anything.”
“What did you expect me to do, read your mind?”
“No! I expected you to see me! How was it not obvious to you, a shrink of all people, that I was falling apart and I needed help?”
He shakes his head. “It’s so typical of you to put your share of responsibility on someone else. You insist on complete autonomy, but only when it suits you.”
“And it’s so typical of you to wait for me to be the bitch, so you never have to do any of the heavy lifting.”
“Oh, so now I never did anything for you? Incredible!”
She stands up. “Am I really so far off base? What did you bring to this marriage, exactly?”
“There she is. There’s Daniel’s daughter. I knew sooner or later, you’d make this about money.”
“This was never about money! It’s about emotional support and your inability to provide it.”
He rolls his eyes. “Yeah right. Keep telling yourself that, princess.”
He’s turning away from her, signaling he’s finished. She should be relieved, but she’s too fired up now. He doesn’t get to claim victory on some false belief that their demise had anything to do with his lack of wealth. It’s just another way to make himself into a victim, and she refuses to let him get away with it again. “Thank you for proving my point. You prod me to tell you how I’m really feeling, and then when I do, you’re done.”
He whips around. “That’s right, Phoebe. I’m done, with all of this. Are you really surprised? It’s clearly what you wanted.”
“You were never interested in the truth. Just a pat on the head. You act like you’re one of the good guys, but you’re just a spineless fraud.”
His eyes narrow as his cheeks deepen to the shade of beets. The hand wrapped around his coffee mug is trembling, white-knuckled. “What did you just call me?”
She draws herself up to his height, strong and defiant. The dragon inside him has stirred awake, but she isn’t afraid. She’s fireproof, and there are wings on her back. Soon she’ll take flight, and he can burn himself and this prison to the ground for all she cares. Phoebe Miller doesn’t live here anymore.
PART 2
THE OTHER MRS. MILLER
CHAPTER 12
SOMEWHERE A PHONE is ringing, but Nadia barely notices. Internally, she hasn’t stopped screaming since she got here. The raw, almost meaty stench of blood in the room reminds her of the slaughterhouse back home. She’s clinging to that memory now, staring down at Phoebe’s lifeless body, hoping it’s enough to keep her from falling apart. And as she fights against wave after wave of shock, she realizes she almost expected to find something like this after what happened earlier this morning.
Phoebe’s husband backed out of the garage at speed, clipping the mailbox post with his Audi’s bumper and then swerving to avoid hitting Nadia’s car, which was parked a bit closer to the driveway this morning as she waited for her moment. Then he stopped and got out, arms waving as he approached her thankfully locked door. “You! Get off my street! You’ve harassed us long enough! I’m calling the police!” After unsuccessfully trying to open the door, he pounded on her window for emphasis, instead.
And there was blood on his hand. He left behind smudges, but the skies had opened up in a torrent of rain only minutes before, and they quickly washed away in the downpour. The fog inside her windows gratefully obscured their faces, but she could still make out the whites of his eyes in the murk, blazing bright with fury.
She sped away in a panic, no particular destination in mind, her mind whirring with questions all the while. What happened back there? Was this because of her note, or something else? What should she do now?
She’d wound up heading south, and then west on I-90. The storm cleared just as she spotted the blazing white turrets of Medieval Times all the way out in Schaumburg. The sun brought back a measure of courage and sanity, enough to convince her to stick to her original plan and go back. It was all she could do, short of going on the run with nothing but what she had on her now, enough money for a few tanks of gas and a little food, assuming nothing else went wrong. Besides that, she was worried something might have happened back there. How right she’d been.
The phone stops ringing, and silence rushes in to fill the void, trapping her in a vault of nightmares new and old. This is nothing like the Jesse Bachmann scene, where the lighting was dim enough in the stockroom to make the blood look more like crude oil. By contrast, in the gleaming bright of the Miller kitchen, the blood has nowhere to hide. It’s screaming for attention. There are obvious signs of struggle. Broken dishes, overturned chairs, spilled coffee on the floor near the large island, a crock of kitchen utensils overturned across its surface.
Near the puddle of coffee is Phoebe sprawled in a wide pool of blood that appears to have spilled from two separate wounds: one on the temple, one in her chest.
A veil falls over Nadia’s mind as she tries to piece together what happened here. A fight of some sort, obviously. Then the weapons came out. A blunt object for the head, and a knife for the chest.
Nadia scans the area for a knife block, finds one on the island. The top center slot stands empty, the one reserved for the biggest in the collection. That definitely would have done the job. She next spots a swatch of dark red on the nearest corner of the island’s white quartz slab countertop. Perhaps in the middle of the scuffle, Phoebe slipped and hit her head there. She goes down, and then the attacker finishes the job. The wound is on the appropriate side of her head given the position of the body. Nadia would bet, if she checked the soles of Phoebe’s bare feet, she’d find coffee on them.
She looks down at herself. Red on her hands from when she slipped in the blood puddle and caught herself; smears across the front of her shirt where she wiped it off; more of it on her legs, especially the knees, from when she knelt next to Phoebe’s body to see if there was any chance of saving her, as if all the blood weren’t clue enough about what a waste of time it would have been to try. Instead, she closed Phoebe’s open eyes. It was unsettling how much effort it had taken, but having them remain open and staring would have been worse. It also felt like the only decent thing she could do in the moment.
The blood on the floor is already beginning to coagulate, revealing yellowish plasma at the edge of the pool. Her stomach begins undulating, verging on revolt. She stumbles away from the body, slipping in the blood and nearly falling. Where’s the bathroom? She’s studied the floor plan of this house, as she has so many of the houses in the public records of this town. It’s part of the hobby. But she might as well be in a maze now. Going left around the first corner, she finds herself in a formal sitting room that probably never gets used. Exiting through the other side and making another left lands her in a dark and cavernous dining room with an enormous table running the whole length of it. Straight ahead is the front foyer, which puts her back in the main hallway. Now she has a choice of several doors, one of which has to be a bathroom.
First one on the left. No, that’s a closet. Fuck. The first door on the right, however, is jackpot.
The phone starts ringing again as she flips on the light. The series of chimes would be cheerful in any other setting, but it feels hideously out of place now, like giggles at a funeral. She needs to find that phone and see who’s calling, but she’s too preoccupied with not missing the toilet. Her throat burns as she raises the lid. Invisible hands wring her guts like a wet towel for what feels like several minutes and then subside just as the phone falls silent again. Red smears mar the toilet bowl where she gripped it, and she distantly notes how pristine this bathroom is, even the floor behind the toilet. In all her time watching, Nadia never saw evidence of a maid. If Phoebe was this much of a clean freak, she must have hated her very messy death.
She flushes the toilet and rests on her knees for a bit, reeling from the severe turn of events, the sense of loss. So much time spent waiting and watching, building up her nerve just to introduce herself to Phoebe, only for all of it to go as wrong as anything can. Nadia can’t help but feel she played a role by leaving that note, but she’ll never know for sure. And she’ll never know Phoebe, either. Not the way she’d wanted to when she came all the way to Lake Forest, her mind burning bright with something completely foreign to her: hope. If only she introduced herself sooner, before Jesse Bachmann forced her into a shoddy, desperate attempt at blackmail. They could be sitting in the kitchen right now having coffee instead, swapping stories. Now she has to plan all over again for her basic survival.
Uh, in case you didn’t notice, Phoebe has been murdered. If you’re smart, you’ll hightail it out of here before the husband comes back to clean up his mess. A man who killed his wife is probably going to be a lot less discriminating when it comes to the stranger who just discovered his ugly deed.
She closes herself away from the harried animal in her brain and stands back up. “One mess at a time,” she says. It’s a mantra she’s used a lot in difficult circumstances when the walls started closing in: the other night after Bachmann; three months ago, as she watched her mother take her final breaths in the wee hours while her stepfather, Jim, slept in a chair nearby, oblivious. One mess at a time. Get through the next minute. Then think about the next one.
“I can’t go anywhere looking like this,” she says aloud. Yes, excellent point. She’s already a person of interest in one murder. Probably a good idea to avoid witnesses while covered in blood. First wash your hands, then change your clothes. If he shows up, do what you’ve always done when there’s a sudden fork in the road: improvise.
Under water so hot she can barely stand it, she scrubs her hands. It’s hard work. She learned from her years on the farm that blood doesn’t wash off without a fight. It bonds to clothes and sticks to the skin like an incrimination, staining the cuticles and nails. She needs a brush to do it right, but she makes do with a hand towel she wets under the faucet, turning it and the water instantly pink. Eventually, she’s satisfied and dries off with the other towel on the rack, then wipes up the bloody smudges she left on the toilet and floor, making a mental note to take these towels with her when she goes. She risks a glance at herself in the mirror. Pale skin, haunted glassy eyes. It’s a face she’s seen far too often lately, what she’s coming to think of as her Murder Face.
“I’m not a murderer,” she says, but her voice quavers with a lack of conviction. There are now two people dead because of her in the span of a week. She can argue that she didn’t plunge the knife into Phoebe’s chest the way she plunged it into Bachmann’s leg, but there’s no denying she was alive before Nadia delivered her that little note, and even she has a hard time believing in that level of coincidence. You got the ball rolling, didn’t you, foolish girl? That’s Jim’s voice. He only ever pops up when she’s really hating herself.
She closes her eyes and breathes. Clothes. But before she takes another step, she dips into her pocket for her trusty butterfly knife just in case a certain someone decides to come home. She feels a bit safer with it now that she knows she can use it when she has to, but hopefully it won’t come to that. No more blood. Please.
She is just grasping the rail of the staircase when the front door flies open, startling her so hard she drops the knife. Helplessly she watches it skitter across the tile toward the dining room just as a man storms in.
In her dawning panic, Nadia isn’t sure if this is the husband, one of the men from next door, or some other player in this drama she hasn’t accounted for yet, but it doesn’t matter, because her guts have frozen into a solid brick, weighting her to this very spot and removing any hint of the forward momentum she mustered only seconds ago. Recognition finally filters in, thanks to not only this morning’s encounter but the dozens of mornings she’s watched this face pass her by from the driver’s seat of his shiny black Audi. He’s still wet from the rain, but he’s since bandaged his hand. Little rosettes of blood have seeped through the gauze. Must be a nasty cut.
Stages of comprehension slowly dawn on his face, from dazed bewilderment to horror. This isn’t my wife. This is a stranger. This stranger is covered in blood.
“Who the hell are you?” he asks.
CHAPTER 13
OF ALL THE clever things she might have thought to say before this moment, she can only manage to say, “Nobody.” Bravo, Nadia. Bravo.
His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows hard, tracking his eyes down her body and back up again. “Is that blood?”
“You know very well it is.”
The color drains from his face. “What have you done?”
Before she can answer, he rushes off down the hall, calling out Phoebe’s name. She grabs her knife from the floor and follows him at a distance, certain this is all theater. When he sees Phoebe’s body, she expects him to go full maudlin, screaming and sobbing, maybe even trying to resuscitate the body with grotesque and inaccurate CPR. Anything to convince his audience that he didn’t kill his wife this morning. But when she finally enters the kitchen and finds him standing over Phoebe’s body, many silent seconds pass. A faint tremor in his shoulders betrays some distress, as does his sickly pallor, but otherwise he’s a statue.
“Ph-Phoebe?” His voice is small, almost frail. “Oh God . . .” He covers his mouth.
For the first time, she doubts his guilt. This stance of shock is too familiar. Didn’t she and Jim both stand over her mother’s body this same way for several minutes when it was clear she was really gone? It was like waiting at a station for the grief train to arrive and whisk her away to some tear-filled landscape, but it seemed like it was running a little behind. And while she waited, she struggled to find a piece to complete the circle of this newly extinguished life, something that would give it a little meaning. Nadia tried for so long to remember her mother’s last truly conscious moment, what her last word was before she slipped off into a coma. It didn’t come to her then, and it still hasn’t, but she’s sure it must have been something mundane, dredged up from a brain short-circuiting from all the end-of-life demands the body makes.
Right now, Phoebe’s husband is probably thinking of the last moment he had with his wife before he stormed away, trying to match it up with what he’s seeing now and coming up empty. If Nadia still wasn’t half-convinced he did kill her, she would tell him that it will never make sense. One minute, Phoebe’s heart was pumping blood through her veins, her brain crackling with electrical impulses, carrying myriad thoughts. The next, she’s lifeless, all those thoughts, all that electricity, obliterated. How can something so simple be so impossible to understand?
He leans down, peers a little closer, careful of all the blood, and then rears back when the truth of it really hits him. “No no no. Oh, fuck. Oh God, what is this?” He looks around at Nadia, confusion and despair etched into every feature. But fear is quickly supplanting them as his eyes go wide and glassy, especially when he sees the knife in her hand. He falls back a few steps. “Wha
t do you want? Is it money? It has to be money. I can get that for you. Just please put down the knife, okay? There’s no need for anyone else to be hurt here.” Does he think she’s robbing him, or does he know about the note Nadia left? It’s impossible to tell. She needs to be careful.
“I didn’t do this. I found her like this.”
“You’re lying.”
“I promise I’m not. I tried to save her!”
“That’s not right. None of this is actually happening.” He staggers away toward the farthest corner of the room. By the time he reaches the wall, he’s wracked with shakes and his skin is practically translucent. Nadia flashes back to just the other night, when she sat shuddering behind the wheel of her car, her brain pulsing with the words, YOU KILLED HIM YOU KILLED HIM YOU KILLED HIM. Is that what’s happening here? Is a similar truth settling into him like a fever?
When he doesn’t say anything, she grips the handle of her knife just to remind herself it’s there and then goes to him. Mercifully, they’re out of view of the body. “Look, you can drop the act, all right? Just tell me why you did it.”
He looks up at her. “Who the hell do you think you are, accusing me of anything?”
“It’s not hard. Remember your rage fit this morning? The bloody prints you left on my window when you pounded on the glass? That cut doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me. But I guess she just tripped and fell, right?”
Recognition fills his face as he glimpses the logo on her shirt, a three-dollar thrift store find that gave rise to the idea that if she was going to be creeping around wealthy neighborhoods, she should try to look like she’s on some official business. A courier seemed like the perfect ruse. No one wants to be responsible for interrupting someone else’s deliveries. “Oh, that’s right, you’re the little spy in the blue car, aren’t you? The one who had Phoebe in a fit for weeks. Jesus . . . to think I told her she was being paranoid. Turns out she was right all along to be worried.”
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