“This is good, very good,” Wyatt says. “Now, it’s clear you need financial help. We just want some answers. I’m pretty sure we can work this out so we all walk away happy, or at least satisfied.”
Miraculously, Wyatt seems to have taken control of the situation, but he’s being crushingly naive if he believes this will end so neatly. Nevertheless, this was the plan they agreed on. He’ll play the diplomat. She’ll be here to ferry them to safety when things finally blow up.
“This isn’t about cashing in,” Vicki says. “I’m not going to let you cheapen it like that.”
Nadia asks, “So then why the move to Lake Forest, to this particular house, no less? Why target Phoebe specifically? You saw her family in the news lately and thought she’d be easy to milk for money, is that right?”
Vicki sighs and rubs her temple. “Ron, please get the pictures from the mantel for me.”
He looks at her like she just asked him to make a soufflé. “Are you serious? All the pictures? There are dozens of them.”
“You know the ones I’m talking about! God, why can’t you be supportive and do what I ask just once without fighting?”
His face reddens, and he looks like he’s going to unleash a nasty retort, but his eyes flit down to the gun on the table and that’s enough to bring him around. He leaves the room, and half a minute later returns bearing an unwieldy armload of picture frames.
“Arrange them down the middle facing the two of them,” Vicki orders. When she sees that Ron isn’t working to her satisfaction, she grumbles to herself and stands up. “Just let me do it. You never appreciated why this was important to me, anyway.” She spends the next minute or so swapping the order of the pictures, apparently so they can demonstrate some kind of narrative.
When she finally stands back, she gestures toward the far left end. “They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. For me, it’s only a start. This is a condensed version of my life story. A visual aide, if you will. I want you to start with my childhood and then work your way up to the present. By the time you reach the last one, this should all make a lot more sense to you.”
Nadia wants to chide her for being so dramatic, but her curiosity gets the better of her, and she begins with the first picture, which features a young dark-haired girl of about four, sitting on a woman’s lap. Presumably, this is Vicki and her mother. It’s hard to miss the matching hair, eyes, noses, and chins. Next, she sees snaggletoothed Vicki a few years down the line sitting in front of a birthday cake with a candle shaped like the number seven on top. Mom is peeking in from the right side of the frame, both thumbs raised, all smiles. Then there’s Vicki around the age of nine or ten dressed for a ballet recital, all dolled up in her pink tutu, her hair pulled back tight into a bun, cheeks rouged bright pink, clutching a small bouquet of white roses while her kneeling mother beams proudly beside her. Nadia is starting to sense a theme. Vicki really loves her mom. She keeps going.
The next frame features Vicki in her awkward acne-and-braces years, but she’s still pretty in a pink taffeta monstrosity of a dress. Maybe freshman homecoming? Next to her is a woman in a wheelchair, unsmiling, staring off into space, withered to a husk with her talonlike hands bunched up at her chest. Recognition hits Nadia like a hammer to the head. This is Vicki’s mother. Something happened to her between her daughter’s middle school years and high school. And unlike in the other pictures, Vicki’s smile looks almost sewn on.
It’s the same for the rest of the pictures down the line, from Vicki’s prom to her high school graduation, and finally her wedding. Mom is there in all of them, a wraith in a wheelchair positioned just behind and off to the side of her daughter, as if haunting her.
It all makes some kind of sense in how it demonstrates Vicki’s emotional fragility, but it doesn’t really achieve that perfect narrative magic until the final picture, which whisks the observer back in time, so that they can understand how the promising story of a young girl’s life could evolve into this current nightmare. There’s Vicki’s mother in her prime, resplendent in a red off-the-shoulder cocktail dress, her raven hair—which reminds Nadia painfully of her own mother’s—styled in the feathered puff that was popular for the time. She’s raising a champagne flute, her nails and lips lacquered the same shade of red as the dress. Standing beside her—a handsome gentleman who needs no introduction, because he turned out to be no gentleman at all—is Daniel Noble.
“She was a brilliant engineer,” Vicki says when Nadia picks up the picture for a closer look. “Graduated at the top of her class from MIT and started with Noble Industries as an intern. She spent years working her way up the ladder, which for women of that time was no easy feat. And of course, he only sees the skirt and what’s under it. I didn’t learn about all that until years later, from the aunt I went to live with in California when my father couldn’t take caring for an invalid wife anymore and shipped us both out there. I never saw him again. When I was fifteen, my aunt told me everything about Mom’s affair with Daniel, and that she’d become pregnant and then had an abortion at his insistence, so she could maintain her status with the company, and—let’s face it—him.”
Nadia is reminded painfully of her own mother’s similar experience with Daniel, and wonders how many other unwitting Noble half-siblings there might be, or could have been, in the world.
“Only the procedure didn’t go as planned,” Vicki continues. “They punctured her uterus and she nearly bled to death. Then she went into cardiac arrest and was starved of oxygen for several minutes. The doctors had the nerve to claim they’d saved her life. I guess living out the rest of your life with such severe brain damage you’re basically a turnip was good enough for them.” She laughs. “But one thing I can say for Daniel is he sure knew how to pay his debts. He quietly kept the money coming for her care for nearly thirty years. One of the best facilities in California. But we all know from the news that he didn’t have a plan to keep his hush money flowing after he died. The bills started coming to me almost immediately. Maybe that was his plan. ‘Hey, I’m outta here. You deal with it now, suckers!’”
Nadia and Wyatt sit silently as Vicki delivers this stunning summation. A million questions swirl around Nadia’s mind, but none of them feel quite formed enough to bring into the world. Then Vicki says, “And you could argue that Daniel’s responsibilities should end when his life does. Why should his family continue to pay for his sins? I agreed. When the bills first started coming to me, I paid them. I was mad, but I didn’t want to be vindictive. I just wanted to live my life and take care of my family. Besides, my husband is a big-shot neurosurgeon, right? We can swing this. But then, of course, that neurosurgeon turned out to be a butcher of patients.” She flings those last two words at her husband like fecal matter. He winces accordingly.
“I watched your drinking get worse year after year, Ron. I begged you to get help. I threatened to leave, but you knew I couldn’t, because I had everything tied up in you.” Her voice cracks, and she swipes the tears from her eyes. Ron keeps his mouth shut for once. Maybe he’s feeling especially wary given the gun on the table.
Vicki turns her gaze to Jake. “So I focused everything I had on you. I made sure you had a good future waiting, that you got into a great school. I pushed you hard to earn a tennis scholarship, even though you always asked why we couldn’t just pay for school ourselves like all your other rich friends. But I didn’t want you to know how shaky things were getting, that your father was in serious trouble at work and was being investigated after his second botched operation. I didn’t want you to know that I couldn’t shake this feeling that things weren’t going to end well for us . . . But you were all set, Jake. I pushed you to greatness, even though you threw it all away.” Jake, red-eyed, opens his mouth to speak, but she holds up her hand. “Don’t. Just don’t.”
“We know Ron lost his license to practice in California,” Wyatt says, finding his voice. “And about
the patients who were hurt.”
Vicki nods. “I guess it would all be public record, wouldn’t it? It took a couple years for it all to happen, but right around the time Daniel Noble was taking his last gasps, the medical board decided Ron was finished practicing in California. They also imposed a stiff financial penalty due to the costs of the investigation. With all our debts and legal expenses, we were wiped out basically overnight. But then Ron swooped in to save the day he’d helped ruin by getting a job with one of his old pals back here, with the promise he wouldn’t turn any more of his patients into corpses or quadriplegics.” She looks at him. “Good thing you got licensed to practice in other states back when your record was still clean, honey. I always wondered why you bothered, but it’s like you always knew you would need an escape hatch.”
“Vicki, goddamn it,” Ron warns through gritted teeth, breaking his silence.
She places her hand on the pistol and looks at him. “Do you really want to challenge me on this right now?”
He slumps back in his seat. Vicki turns again to Nadia and Wyatt. “The job didn’t pay nearly as much, and we had to leave my mother behind, but Ron insisted we’d get over the hump and we’d bring her out here when the time was right. I wasn’t so sure, so I presented him with another idea. If we’re coming back to this hellhole, why don’t we get in touch with the Nobles, explain our situation with Mom. We can at least keep her in the place she’s been all these years. It’s only right since, you know, it’s Daniel’s fault she’s there to begin with, and unlike the others looking for a piece of the pie, she has actual medical needs.”
“That sounds fair,” Wyatt says neutrally.
Vicki tosses up her hands. “Thank you! But tell that to my husband here. He thought it was a terrible idea.”
“It was,” Ron mutters. “I didn’t want anything to do with their money, and you of all people shouldn’t have, either.”
“Oh, you didn’t want anything to do with it. Because it’s all up to you, right? It didn’t matter that we were in a crisis of your making. You couldn’t bend even a little. When Ron speaks, we’re all supposed to just shut up and obey. Is there a diagnosis for something like this, Wyatt? Is it some form of narcissism?”
Wyatt treats the question as rhetorical and says nothing.
“Anyway, I was done letting him hold the reins after the ditch he’d run us into. I took initiative. Of course, there was no getting through to anyone at Noble Industries after the media shitstorm started over their fallen god, and I didn’t want to get myself caught up in the tangle of accusers, either, especially given Ron’s recent professional woes. So I came up with a different plan. Using most of what liquidated resources we had left, I got us this house. I drove a hard bargain and made it happen. Hell, I could practically be a Noble myself for how ruthless I was. I researched, planned, and rehearsed.”
Nadia feels a little sick at how similar this sounds to her own mind-set as she geared up for her journey to Lake Forest. Phoebe had probably thought she was at a safe enough distance from the storm of events her father’s death had triggered. Meanwhile, here sit two people who had her directly in their sights because of it, if for different reasons.
“When I met Phoebe, I knew it was going to be perfect, because I actually liked her right off the bat. It surprised me. I expected this cold, stuck-up fish. But she was just cool, you know?” She directs this at Wyatt, expecting him to echo her in agreement, but all he can do is continue to stare at his hands. “Of course, she didn’t tell me she was Daniel’s daughter at first, but who could blame her given what people have been saying?”
“So how did you go about asking her for the money?” Nadia asks.
Vicki shakes her head. “That didn’t go at all how I planned. Every conversation we had, I kept looking for the right opening, but never quite found it. It always seemed too soon or like the mood wasn’t right. Then other drama started getting in the way. This house ended up needing a ton of work. The remainder of our money was draining faster than my already dwindling patience. But I was also on borrowed time with Mom and the nursing home, so I couldn’t put it off too much longer.”
Despite her feelings of bitterness, Nadia can’t help but relate. She nods quietly.
“But I finally achieved success,” Vicki continues. “As we got closer, I told Phoebe about some of our recent struggles. I didn’t mention Daniel’s connection to my mother, but I didn’t need to. The problems with the house, my marital stress, and Ron’s professional setbacks seemed to be enough to inspire her to help out. She wrote me a check before I ever had to ask. It wasn’t going to solve all our problems, but it could catch us up with the nursing home, at least, and maybe we could breathe a bit. But then I made a very big mistake.” She turns a withering look on Ron. “I told my husband. I should have just quietly cashed that check and taken care of things, but I had to gloat a little. I thought I’d earned it. And what does he do? He gives the goddamn money back!”
“I wasn’t going to let you just . . . whore out our family for a handout!” Ron shouts. “I was getting us back on our feet.”
Vicki laughs and gestures at her barren surroundings. “Is this what you call ‘being back on our feet’? Sitting in an empty house with the bills piling up, and you still swilling booze night after night?” She shakes her head. “Whoring out our family. Nice choice of words, considering what was going on behind my back. I’m sure that’s why she really wrote that check.”
She looks at Wyatt, her gaze hardening. “Did you know what Phoebe and my son were up to?” Jake winces as the subject of the affair is finally broached.
Wyatt only shakes his head. The therapist in him has gone into hiding as the situation has escalated well above his pay grade. Though the doctor in the room doesn’t seem much better equipped to handle it.
“She had us all fooled, I guess,” Vicki mutters.
“Mom, please stop this.” Jake has never looked or sounded more like a scared little boy since Nadia met him.
Vicki doesn’t seem to hear him. “Phoebe once said her father didn’t care much for her, but I’m sure he would have been proud of her for going after a teenager.”
“Shut up!” Jake cries.
That gets through at least. Vicki gives a small, pained flinch, but she fixes her gaze on Nadia. “She was going to run away with my son! She knew he was all I had left that mattered. I admit that I came into this whole thing with an agenda. But I also came to see her as a friend, and I was so sure she felt the same about me. Her level of betrayal . . . I still can’t wrap my mind around it. How could she look me in the eye day after day, and then turn around and sleep with my son?”
“So you killed her because of it,” Nadia says. “You discovered she and Jake were about to run away together and it set you off.”
Vicki is momentarily speechless and can only shake her head.
Nadia rolls her eyes. “Will you just come off it already? You’ve spent all this time detailing every single excuse you had for killing her. Money, anger, revenge, et cetera. So why not just admit it?”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about!” Vicki shouts, finally finding her words.
“It was an accident,” Jake says, bringing all the eyes in the room to him. Vicki freezes in place alongside an equally shocked Ron. Nadia and Wyatt trade a glance, but neither seems inclined to interrupt. After a long, shaky breath, Jake forges ahead. “Phoebe was running late giving me the green light to come over that morning so we could go to the airport. My guess was something was going down between Wyatt and her.” He glances at Wyatt, but only for a second. “I got tired of waiting and decided to head over anyway. When I walked in, Mom was there.”
Vicki jumps in. “I went over to check on Phoebe after I saw Wyatt drive off like his hair was on fire.” Wyatt’s jaw clenches, but he doesn’t try to defend himself. “Jake came in through the kitchen door and I saw the luggag
e he was carrying—it didn’t take long for me to put it all together with their guilty looks, but it wasn’t like either of them really denied it. I told Jake to go home. He tried to argue, but I convinced him I deserved to speak to Phoebe, my closest friend, about this alone.”
Jake shakes his head. “That isn’t really how it happened, Mom. Stop trying to take me out of the equation.” He turns away from Vicki and focuses on Nadia, probably because it’s less awkward for him than talking to his dead lover’s husband. “I admitted everything, that Phoebe and I were in love, that we were leaving town together. Mom blew up. I’d seen her and my dad throw down at home a lot over the years, screaming at each other, sometimes getting a little physical. But that was the first time she’d turned that anger on me.” He looks at both of his parents, who are suddenly studying the pattern of wood grain on the table. Neither of them denies it.
“She started screaming at Phoebe first, though. But when Phoebe could say nothing other than how sorry she was, Mom only got angrier. She didn’t want to listen. I think she wanted to fight. I got in between them to try and break it up.” Perhaps unconsciously, he rubs at the remnants of the scratches on his neck. “That’s when Mom turned on me, telling me to get out and go home so she could settle this with Phoebe herself, but I refused to back down. She pushed me a few times. Then I pushed her back.” His chin trembles.
“Jake . . .” Vicki murmurs.
He looks at his mother, his face brimming with heartbreak. “I told you I was done letting you control me, that Phoebe and I were both adults who’d made a decision. But that only made you angrier. Your arms just started flying at me.”
Hence the scratches, Nadia thinks. Vicki covers her face, overcome with shame. Ron looks at his wife with a mix of shock and distaste. A faint “My God, Vic,” is all he can manage at first, as if he’s only a bystander who didn’t play any role in the eventual breakdown of his wife. Nadia itches to slap him herself. He takes a breath. “You told me he fell into some bushes on one of his runs.”
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