The Other Mrs. Miller

by Allison Dickson

  “I’ve already set out plates on the breakfast bar. Coffee?”

  That she can at least do. “Sure.” She takes a seat and watches him maneuver gracefully in his sweatpants and White Sox T-shirt to fill her mug from the French press.

  “Cream and sugar?”

  “I drink it black,” she says.

  He looks impressed. “Same. That’ll simplify the shopping list. Phoebe always liked a little coffee with her cream and turbinado.”

  She stares at him while waiting for her coffee to cool. “Hey, are you all right?”

  He brings the plates holding pancakes and bacon over to the bar and then goes to the microwave to retrieve a small carafe of maple syrup. “I’m fine,” he says, though he doesn’t make eye contact. “Now dig in. I know you have to be starving.”

  Quite the opposite, in fact, though the smells are beginning to tug at her a bit, and she’ll probably force herself to nibble something before too long. She watches him drown his pancakes in butter and syrup. “Why are you acting this way?”

  “What way?”

  “Like nothing happened.”

  He sighs and puts his fork back down. “I know very well I’m standing in the middle of a murder scene. If it wasn’t for my friend Klonopin last night and my other friend Xanax this morning, along with a tiny dose of Irish in my coffee, I would still be holed up in the fetal position in my room right now. Cooking breakfast makes me feel normal for a minute.”

  She sees the glassy, bloodshot state of his eyes and bows her head, properly chagrined. “I’m sorry. I hadn’t considered that you might actually be, like, stoned.”

  “Therapist, medicate thyself. I think that’s how it goes.” He takes a bite and chases it with a sip of his doctored coffee. “But I wouldn’t recommend trying this particular combination at home. I am a trained professional.”

  “You don’t have to push yourself so hard. It’s only been a day.”

  “On the contrary, I do have to push myself. I can feel the terror in me just waiting to grab hold and paralyze me forever. So this is me trying to stuff it into a box, so I can keep moving. The hope is eventually, with the help of a few chemical training wheels, that part of me will suffocate and die.”

  “Compartmentalization. I get it. Must be something you use a lot in your work.”

  “Necessary part of the job, I’m afraid.” He picks up his fork again, and she follows his lead. Nadia didn’t think she would have a taste for pork after last night, but the body wants what it wants. When they’re finished, he clears their plates while she refills their mugs. They take their coffee into the living room.

  “You’re not a bad cook,” she says.

  “You have officially eaten one of three meals I can make without embarrassing myself.”

  “Oh yeah? What are the other two?”

  “Nachos and boxed mac and cheese.”

  “You have the blue box in this house?”

  “I might have one stashed somewhere. Phoebe was no stranger to junk, but she liked expensive junk. The ten-dollar pints of ice cream, the organic chips and frozen pizzas. But she also never had a ten-dollar weekly grocery budget, so our palates differed.”

  “You were poor once?”

  He shrugs. “My folks had high times and low times, like most people in the middle.”

  “Good to see you’ve stuck to your roots.” She laughs a little as she slowly falls into the easy rhythm of their banter. It’s been a long time since she’s talked to anyone about nothing, and after recent events, she didn’t think moments like this would ever exist again.

  “I’m only mediocre at golf no matter how hard I try, and I’ve never been sailing. Probably why I don’t have many friends around here.”

  “That White Sox shirt probably doesn’t help.”

  “You got me there.”

  They sit together in an easy silence, sipping coffee. Then he leans forward and rubs his face. “Look . . . now that we’re up to our necks in this, it’s time for you to be up-front with me about something.”

  She has a good guess what this might be about, and braces herself. “What’s that?”

  The humor winks out of his eyes, and he’s all business now, save for a little bit of the medicated glaze. “I know the police are looking for you over the recent stabbing at the grocery store.”

  There it is. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He frowns. “Are you really being coy right now? This is serious, Nadia. Your picture has been in the news. I already had a feeling I’d seen you somewhere before. Something jiggled loose last night, I think when I saw an Earthbound Foods shopping bag in your car, but I couldn’t be sure until I did some Googling this morning. And there you were. A person of interest in a murder investigation. Really fucking nice of you to tell me this in the beginning when I asked if you were in any kind of trouble.”

  “Do I get to explain any of this?”

  “Explain why you lied to me? Go ahead. Though it makes a lot more sense why you came up with this idea of yours yesterday. Only a fugitive would be so willing to swap her own identity with someone else’s. I feel stupid for not figuring it out right away, or I would have told you to take a hike.”

  “Listen, you’re getting way too worked up over this. There is no Nadia now. There is only Phoebe. They’re tracking a ghost.”

  “You’re making a lot of dangerous assumptions right now, like that they won’t ever trace you back to this street, or that this disguise of yours will even hold, or that they won’t find your car. When that happens, we’ll both get taken down. I was better off taking my chances calling the police yesterday when I got home . . . when I found her.”

  She shakes her head. “Everything would be a lot worse for us both right now if you’d done that. We’ve covered ourselves well. We just have to keep each other’s backs and trust that this is going to work.”

  Another thought seems to hit him, and he sits up board straight. “What if they’d spotted your car last night and pulled me over? Were you prepared to just let me go down?”

  His voice is rising. Soon his anger will override the power of the calming drugs in his system. “Listen, I’m sorry. It was bad of me not to tell you what you were getting yourself into, but it would have been far riskier for me to be spotted driving that car.”

  “You’re goddamn right it was bad of you. Trust is hard enough to come by right now, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes. But I was worried that if I told you what I was dealing with too soon, you would refuse outright to participate.”

  He shakes his head. “And now neither of us has a choice but to deal with your baggage when it comes back to haunt us.”

  “If it does. And it won’t.”

  “Forgive me if I’m not so quick to believe that, or anything else you’ve told me so far.”

  The silence that falls between them now isn’t so easy this time. The guarded wall is going back up. “I know what you’re thinking. If I stabbed one guy, then it wouldn’t have been too hard for me to stab Phoebe.”

  He looks at her for a moment and then looks away again. “Something like that.”

  “He was attacking me. I did what I had to do to get free.”

  “And yet you ran.”

  “Do I really need to explain to you why that seemed like the best option at the time?”

  “I guess not,” he says grudgingly.

  “Then I have to ask. Do you really believe in your gut that I killed Phoebe? Especially after what we saw across the street and discussed yesterday?”

  More ponderous silence as he appears to consider her question seriously. “No,” he murmurs. “In spite of all this, I . . . I don’t think you did it.”

  “Good. And if it makes you feel better, I’m feeling pretty sure you didn’t do it, either.”

  “God,” he croa
ks before covering his agonized face.

  Nadia frowns at the gesture, feeling a sudden hard weight in her gut. “Or . . . did you?” She can only get the words out in a shaky whisper. What would she do if he did confess right now? What might he do to her?

  “No. But I still feel like I had a hand in it. That fight we had . . . I think I understood how people could be pushed into dark places, and she had me there, and I was on the ropes.” He looks at his bandaged hand. “I squeezed a goddamn coffee mug until it shattered, and I’m not even a particularly strong guy.”

  “That’s when you cut yourself,” Nadia says.

  Wyatt shakes his head. “Actually, not quite. When it broke, there was one perfectly pointed piece of ceramic left in my hand, and I . . . closed my hand around it, like . . . like I wanted to use it.”

  He’s crying freely now, and Nadia watches him in paralyzed shock, her mouth increasingly like dried-out leather.

  “I remember seeing the realization creep into Phoebe’s eyes, first amusement, then fear. And it only spurred me on, because in all our years together, Phoebe never looked at me that way. She always looked down on me, always made me feel just a little inferior. I never believed it was intentional, but in that moment I figured something out too: that’s why she kept me around for so long, so she could feel bigger than someone else, because her father had always made her feel so small. I was just boiling inside. I barely recognized who I was.

  “She took a step back, and I grabbed her by the arm and jerked her toward me. That’s when the shard finally cut into my skin, and the pain brought me back from wherever I’d been locked away for those few seconds. The whole thing, from the moment the mug broke to that cut, was only a few seconds, but in the moment, everything felt so slowed down. I dropped the piece and she immediately slapped me across the face. Then I left. The next time I saw her . . .” He trails off. Nadia can fill in that blank on her own. The next time he saw Phoebe, she was dead.

  Phoebe’s phone rings and they both jerk as if slapped by an invisible hand. Nadia gets up and heads toward the kitchen. Wyatt follows. “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “I’m going to answer my phone.” After some searching, she finds the device—a rose-gold iPhone, naturally—on the kitchen floor in the toe-kick space of the countertop farthest from where her body was, which is why they missed it when cleaning up yesterday. Phoebe might have had it knocked from her hand, or the killer kicked it there to keep it out of her reach. Nadia picks it up. The name on the screen doesn’t surprise her, but she can’t help but feel a jolt of wicked validation: Jake.

  Wyatt peeks over her shoulder. “Ah, Jesus. Well, if he’s calling her, he must not know she’s dead, right?”

  “You saw how he looked at me last night. He knows something.” The ringing stops, and she can’t help but feel like she just missed an opportunity. Maybe he’ll leave a voicemail.

  “Now what?” Wyatt asks.

  The phone vibrates and chimes in her hand, indicating a message. “What’s her passcode?” Nadia asks.

  “Her birth date is May twenty-second, eighty-seven.”

  Nadia types in 052287. The phone rejects it. “Got any other ideas?”

  “Try it again.”

  She knows she typed it correctly but indulges him. Same result. “She must have changed it.”

  Wyatt shakes his head. “That’s not like her at all. She always forgot her passwords, which is why she used her birthday for everything. I always nagged her about how unsafe it was.”

  “People who have something to hide learn new passwords. Maybe she wrote it down somewhere.”

  He shrugs. “And now we’ve arrived at the needle-in-a-haystack part of the game.”

  “Not necessarily. She probably kept it close at hand.” Nadia examines the phone. A smudge of blue ink catches her eye on the bottom edge of the clear silicone case. On closer inspection, she can make out actual writing. “Can you read that?” she asks. Wyatt comes in a bit closer.

  “Looks like it’s inside the case. Maybe pry it off?”

  She removes the case and looks again. Another six-digit number. “I think we found it.”

  He shakes his head. “How could she be so stupid?”

  She isn’t sure if he’s talking about Phoebe’s affair or the method of storing her passcode, but it’s a fitting enough remark for both. “We should be grateful for her stupidity. I was about to start regretting I didn’t keep one of her fingers to use on the fingerprint sensor.” She sees his wince out of the corner of her eyes. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  He clears his throat. “It’s okay.”

  She types in 070901. “Could be another birthday. Maybe Jake’s.”

  “Jesus Christ—if so, he’s only just eighteen,” he mutters.

  The phone unlocks and she navigates to the voicemail list to select the most recent one. “This isn’t the only message she has from him,” she says, showing him the screen. “Far from it.”

  “Just play the damn thing,” he says.

  She taps the screen. Jake’s voice is so low that even with the volume all the way up, they still have to lean in close to hear.

  “I don’t know what to say. Nothing feels real. When I saw you in my living room yesterday like nothing even happened, I thought I was going out of my mind, and I think I still am.” There’s a long pause, where they can only hear his shaky breath. “You and I should be in London right now.” His voice breaks. “And you know, I blame you for why we’re not! I’m sorry, but I do. We could have done this my way, but you had to be so fucking . . . stubborn.” He takes another sniffling pause. “I still love you. Always will. Maybe it’s a curse I deserve.”

  The message ends there, and Nadia immediately hits “play” again. A second listen doesn’t provide her any new insight. “They were leaving town together,” she says, and immediately switches over to the email app. The most recent message that doesn’t appear to be spam of some sort is an airline ticket confirmation. “She bought two tickets to London the night before last, departing yesterday afternoon. One way. But what stopped them?” The answer is clear enough to her, but Wyatt doesn’t respond. He turns on his heel and walks off toward the stairs.

  Nadia follows him up to the master bedroom. He throws open the closet doors, looks for a second, and grabs the thing Nadia knew he was coming up here to get: the bag she told him was standing at the ready.

  He tosses it onto the bed and unzips it. Inside is a stack of neatly folded garments and leather pouches she assumes are for toiletries and cosmetics. Basic travel fare. She packed light for such a big trip, but that was probably Phoebe’s intention, to shed her old skin and buy a new one. She was also probably wanting to move quickly. Because of me, and my note. Has to be. This is my hand in this. Nadia feels like she’s been gut punched and sits on the ottoman at the end of the bed.

  Wyatt starts riffling through the clothing, turning it into a snarl of cotton and lace, so much pink it could almost belong to a young girl. Next, he unzips a toiletry bag and dumps out an assortment of cosmetics and small bottles of shampoo, toothpaste, and hair products onto the bed. The second one reveals more of the same. He then flips the lid of the suitcase back down and unzips the front pocket. Inside, he finds an envelope holding a passport and other vital documents one would take with them if one were looking to establish residency elsewhere. In the back of her mind, Nadia is grateful he located those. She’ll need them herself someday.

  “Wyatt, what are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know. Confirmation, I guess. Now I have it. She was flying away with the kid. I think Ron or Vicki must have gotten wind of this and put a stop to it.”

  “Jake sounded pretty upset with her in that message.”

  Wyatt shakes his head. “But did he sound like he was talking to a dead woman?”

  Nadia thinks on it. “I guess you could read it e
ither way. Let me see if there’s anything else in here that can shed some light.”

  She unlocks the phone again and checks for other telling messages either sent, received, or saved. She finds one in the Sent folder for Wyatt with the subject simply reading, “Good-bye.”

  “Did you get the email she sent you the morning of?”

  Wyatt frowns. “What email? Let me see that.” He takes the phone before she can hand it over. A few seconds later, his jaw clenches tight as he reads. He taps the screen a few times and hands it back with a blank look. The message is no longer there. It doesn’t seem like the right time to ask what the email said, but Nadia feels it’s safe to assume it wasn’t a love note.

  She checks the call logs instead. There are several incoming from Wyatt on the previous morning, no doubt the source of the incessant ringing in the background while Nadia stared down at Phoebe’s corpse. He was probably trying to apologize for the fight. There are a few calls from Vicki sprinkled here and there too, checking in on her friend, who’d ducked out on their scheduled brunch, the one Vicki had said was so important. There are no calls from Jake between the night before Phoebe died and the call he just made. That’s interesting.

  Satisfied she’s extracted all the useful information out of Phoebe’s phone, she sets it down on the bed. Wyatt is sitting on the edge with his back turned to her, his shoulders slumped. “Are you okay?” The dumbest question in human existence, and yet it’s always the closest at hand.

  He stands and turns to her, his expression blank. “I need to go out for a while. Being here is a little suffocating right now.”

  “Do you want company?”

  He shakes his head.

  “I understand.” She supposes it wouldn’t feel so much like a break to have his dead wife’s lookalike tag along.

  Once he’s gone, she goes over to the closet and grabs the bag of essentials she kept from her old life. Inside is her trusty laptop, covered with stickers and scratches from years of heavy use. It has been her reconnaissance workhorse, and it’s about to be put back into service once more. She could have chosen to use the newer and faster iPad now at her disposal, but it doesn’t feel right. The world may see her as Phoebe Miller now, but this is a Nadia job, and it requires a Nadia tool.