She gives him a wide grin. “Actually beat you to it already.”
He lets out a relieved sigh. “Well, that’s good to know.” He slowly bends down to kiss her. It’s the first time they’ve done that since before they walked to the house across the cul-de-sac. That bit of itchy doubt recedes as a new warmth floods in. Maybe this is when things start feeling better. She’ll have to wait and see.
After signing the necessary documents for the tow truck driver, they watch the truck slowly drive back up the street, looking a little like a turtle with an exotic shell. “You want to get the Uber or should I?” Wyatt asks.
She’s pulling out her phone when she sees another car turn onto their street, this one a late-model Ford sedan that just screams “cop.” The cue-ball head of the driver confirms her suspicions, and a boulder turns over in her gut. “Shit.”
“At least he’s alone. That’s probably a point in our favor,” Wyatt says, though he’s failed to scrub the worry completely out of his voice.
Detective Kelly parks at the base of the driveway, gets out, and ambles toward them. He looks friendly, but that’s just part of his getup, like the tactical vest and the cargo pants. “Good morning, Detective,” Nadia says, happy with the warm ease of her greeting.
He nods. “Mrs. Miller. Mr. Miller. Headed somewhere, by the looks of it?”
“We decided a little decompression was in order,” Wyatt says. “Given what happened the other night.”
Kelly throws a long glance at the Napier house, which already looks a little haunted with its darkened, empty windows. “Yeah, a hell of a sad thing. I’ve seen my share of suicides over the years, and they don’t get any easier.”
“Yes. I’ve lost a few clients in my therapy practice the same way. Her husband and son have a long road ahead of them.”
Kelly nods and turns back to them. “That they do.”
No one speaks for a bit, and Nadia has to fight not to shift her feet or do anything else to show her nerves. “Is this what your visit’s about?” she asks.
“Oh no. Not much to investigate there, really. It was an obvious self-inflicted wound. She’d recently purchased the gun. Medical history noted some treatment for depression and anxiety. That’s that.”
“Gotcha,” Nadia says. Which means Kelly is very likely here on a previous matter. And she’s picking up that speculative vibe from him again, like he’s trying to compare her features to those of the girl he’s looking for. Though she’s been happy to slip back into some of her old garments lately, she’s grateful she selected a white blouse and black Gucci blazer from Phoebe’s wardrobe today. Anything to help throw off the scent.
“Actually, I’m still on the Bachmann case, and I’m here because I had something I wanted to run by you. It will only take a second. I know you’re on your way somewhere.”
This is the part where she wants to tell him she didn’t have any answers for him before, so what makes him think she’ll have any now, but it’s just that kind of skittishness he’s hoping to see. So she says, “Yeah, no problem. Anything we can do to help.”
He pulls out his phone again and starts tapping the screen. “We’ve uncovered some pictures from Bachmann’s email you might find interesting.” He holds up the phone to show them the picture of a very familiar blue car. One that should still be resting under some brush on a remote Indiana farm. Nadia’s mouth goes dry. “As you might be able to see, that’s your house in the background. And that car? It belongs to our suspect. You can even see a silhouette, presumably hers, behind the wheel. Do you recall seeing this car parked on the street here at any point in the last month or two?”
She and Wyatt both peer closely at the picture, knowing exactly what they’re seeing. “I think I’ve seen that car around, yeah,” Wyatt says. “I see a few Executive Courier vehicles a week coming and going.”
“Same,” Nadia adds.
Kelly’s expression is unreadable. “I was able to verify Miss Pavlica was not affiliated in any way with Executive Courier Services, so for whatever reason, she was disguising herself.”
“I wonder why,” Wyatt remarks.
“How often would you say you saw this car on your street?”
She shrugs. “I couldn’t say. It’s one of those things where you see a delivery vehicle and your brain basically forgets it.”
Wyatt concurs.
Kelly shakes his head and puts away his phone. “It’s just funny to me. I’m looking for a girl who is, and I know I said this before, the scariest spitting image of you that you’ll find anywhere, and it turns out I find a picture of her parked out in front of your house. Not once, mind you. This Bachmann character took pictures of her over several days. It’s like she had specific business on this street.”
She isn’t sure what more to say that would convince him of her ignorance. Nadia knows what obsession looks like, and Detective Kelly is at the start of one. If he continues down this rabbit hole, will it lead him to the truth? She doesn’t think so now, but she’s sure there are possibilities she hasn’t yet considered, and she’ll probably be working them out in her head as she crosses the Atlantic Ocean a few hours from now.
“I do wish we could be more help, Detective,” Wyatt says.
He doesn’t take his eyes off Nadia. “She’ll turn up eventually. They usually do. And I bet she’ll have a really interesting story to tell.”
“I don’t doubt it,” she says.
Kelly wishes them farewell and walks back to his car. Nadia doesn’t breathe again until it turns the corner and is out of her sight. Once it’s gone, Nadia takes a deep breath and a last look around the neighborhood. Phoebe Miller doesn’t live here anymore.
CHAPTER 26
Three months later
SHE SITS UP in the bed of their rented Ibiza flat to the sound of the ocean and Wyatt’s light snores. She’s shivering and filmed in sweat, but this isn’t a sickness or fever setting in. Ever since they left the tarmac at O’Hare, Nadia has been waiting for the tight knot of unease in her stomach to slowly unwind. But the more miles they’ve put between themselves and Lake Forest, the more restless she’s become. At first, she chalked it up to the dramatic change of lifestyle. But at last the source of her recurring little itch has revealed itself in the form of a dream, and it’s more terrifying than any nightmare, because she already lived it once. She’s relived it almost every night since it happened: the evening of Vicki’s suicide.
A few of the details always change in the dream world. Sometimes they’re in Phoebe’s dining room instead, with that odd glass monstrosity of a chandelier casting sickly prisms everywhere. Sometimes Nadia stops Vicki from grabbing the gun. Sometimes it’s Nadia or Ron who winds up getting shot instead.
But some details are static. Vicki lining up the picture frames on the table just so. A visual aide, if you will. Jake’s face when he learns Phoebe had been stabbed. That’s why you ran me out of there! Ron bowing his head when he tells Jake he’s free to leave. I won’t stop you, son. And Wyatt, at the peak of his impassioned plea for Vicki to accept the real truth of Phoebe’s demise. I loved her. I stared into her lifeless eyes and told her so.
I stared into her lifeless eyes.
Her lifeless eyes.
There’s the snag.
A question occurs to her, turning her blood to cold jelly: But how could he have done that? She’s reminded of the voice that had slithered into her mind the night at the farm when they buried Phoebe, when she’d briefly lost contact with Wyatt and wondered if he might be lying in wait to finish her off.
The scales fall from Nadia’s eyes and she sees the truth at last. Wyatt couldn’t have looked into Phoebe’s lifeless eyes, because Nadia had closed them herself, before he showed up. The lids almost didn’t want to come down. She’d struggled with it, but they stayed closed. The memory of that sensation has never left her. He might have looked into Phoebe’s life
less face, but most definitely not her eyes. That cool voice returns: Unless he’d found Phoebe before Nadia had, and turned an accident into a murder.
Gently she gets out of their bed, desperate not to wake him. She needs space to think, to process. She throws on some clothes and heads out of the flat down to the beach. It’s not unusual that she’d go for a morning stroll, so he won’t come looking for her—she’ll have some time to formulate a plan.
Once she’s safe on the sand, the waves lapping at her toes, she turns her attention to what she knows. Now that she has some distance from her dream, she feels less certain. Perhaps Wyatt added that detail about Phoebe’s eyes for extra theatrics, to really punish Vicki. But then other questions start rolling in. Like why was Vicki so up-front about everything but stabbing Phoebe? It was the one detail on which she would not budge. Wyatt said she was lying in order to make herself look better in Jake’s eyes, and that made some sense. But Vicki had already gone a long way toward destroying her standing with her son, so why stop there?
And Wyatt worked so hard to manipulate Jake and Ron into believing it too. He’d taken control of the confrontation and beaten Vicki down, pulling all the right emotional strings to push her until she felt she had no other choice but to grab that gun.
But wait just wait a goddamn minute. Her more pragmatic self chimes in this time, the same self that always reminds her to take things one mess at a time. Before you really start believing this, consider the logistics. Wyatt left the house after his fight with Phoebe, railing at Nadia as he went. She sped away after he threatened to call the police, and went for a drive to clear her head and consider her next options. By the time she decided to turn back, almost two hours had passed. That was plenty of time for the confrontation with Vicki to occur that resulted in Phoebe’s fall, and for Wyatt to also return home.
Nadia can so clearly now see Wyatt kneeling over his struggling wife and having another of the dark and tantalizing thoughts he’d morosely confessed he’d had when he shattered the coffee mug. After succumbing to that thought and staring into Phoebe’s lifeless eyes, he probably wasn’t sure what to do about the body, though he probably stared into those lifeless eyes for a bit. Overwhelmed with the enormity of what he’d just done, he left again to formulate a plan. Perhaps part of that plan was to make several phone calls to his dead wife to set up an alibi—right around the time Nadia showed back up and made her grisly discovery.
The snowball keeps growing as it rolls down the hill. Wyatt had an opportunity to plant the knife in Jake’s room the night Ron stitched up his hand. Nadia had thought he was going to snoop around, and she’d been right. Snooping for a place to shift the second most incriminating piece of evidence. The idea that Vicki had hidden the knife in her son’s room never quite sat right with Nadia, no matter how many ways she tried to make it fit.
Then, of course, Nadia helped him get rid of the biggest piece of incriminating evidence, Phoebe’s body, later that night. All to Wyatt’s benefit.
But there’s one burning question that Nadia can’t answer: Why? What would have pushed him to such a decision? Something had to have happened during that fight that truly enraged him. But what could have set him off in such a way to make him come back after he’d already left? Maybe they continued to fight over the phone or via text? Another memory slams home. Nadia, checking Phoebe’s emails and spotting one she’d sent to Wyatt with the subject line “Good-bye.” When she mentioned the email to Wyatt, he took the phone and deleted the message.
Nadia can see Phoebe, fresh from her fight with her husband, dashing off a cruel missive to him before the rest of the morning’s festivities commence. Wyatt reads it, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes later, and it sets him off all over again, enough to turn him back around toward home. She needs to find this message to know for sure, otherwise she has nothing but conjecture.
Back in their bedroom, she observes Wyatt’s prone form beneath the light sheet. Slow, even breaths indicate he’s still sleeping deeply. His phone is within easy reach. She even knows his passcode. He isn’t as smart about hiding it as he thinks. Nadia would bet anything that message is still resting deep within his inbox. She can imagine him returning to it now and again as a way to water his dubious tree of rationalization. Though she can just as easily imagine Wyatt convincing himself that no matter what his intentions had been when he returned home that morning, he did her a mercy when he found her grievously injured.
Listening carefully for any movement or changes in his breathing pattern, she creeps over to the bedside, nabs the phone, and retreats to the bathroom to do her searching. His email is well organized, everything divided into various subfolders for work, social networks, newsletters, spam, and another one that piques her interest immediately: wife. She taps on that, and a long list of emails bearing Phoebe’s address pop up before her, but she’s interested in only the one at the very top, the last email Phoebe ever sent her husband. “Good-bye.”
“Thank you for making it easy for me,” she whispers. Steeling herself, Nadia opens it.
Wyatt,
I had a nicer letter planned for you, but after what happened this morning, I’m no longer feeling so charitable. I’m leaving you. In just a short while I’ll be headed halfway across the world with someone who on his worst day makes my blood pump harder than you did on your best one. Hope you find the baby breeder you’ve always dreamed of, with a taste for jazz and a much higher tolerance for mediocrity. If I had any advice to offer you in your next relationship, I’d say try not to nearly stab her. Trust me, it won’t go over well.
—P
Nadia reads the letter at least half a dozen times, engraving it in her mind, feeling sicker with every passing second. Phoebe must have been referring to the incident with the broken mug. At least Wyatt had been honest about that part. It’s probably the closest he’ll ever get to an actual confession.
Before finishing with the phone, she forwards a copy of the message to herself, careful to erase the trail.
When she returns the phone to Wyatt’s nightstand, she notices he’s flipped onto his other side since she went into the bathroom, and one of his arms has strayed to her side of the bed, likely searching for her in his sleep like he often does. Thankfully he didn’t wake up wondering where she’d gone. He won’t find her back in the bed now, if ever.
She goes out onto the veranda overlooking the water, curls up on the chaise and begins considering her future. After an hour, despite her best efforts to remain awake, the waves create a strong enough lullaby and she sleeps again.
■■■
INTERLUDE
THIS IS THE first time I’ve thought of you in a while, but you were bound to haunt me today. It’s our anniversary. I might have gone the whole day without realizing it if my phone hadn’t reminded me this morning. I’ve removed the entry from my calendar so that next year, I might be able to let this date pass in blissful ignorance, because the memories I’m having now are more recent ones I’d rather go on forgetting.
I didn’t think I would ever be able to lose sight of past events. I thought they would stay lit up in the forefront of my mind like a neon sign; but the longer I’m here, the more it all starts to feel like something I saw in a movie. It helps that Nadia and I don’t talk about it. We seem to do best by staying anchored firmly in the present, though I find myself drifting a bit farther ahead, wondering what’s next for us, if she might share a dream for a family life you didn’t want.
I don’t think she realizes the significance of this day, and I would feel awkward telling her. It’s probably a good idea to keep it to myself, like the other things I still haven’t worked up the nerve to confess. I’ve come close a few times. We’ll be in the middle of a great conversation or taking in an incredible view together, and a thought gets into my head that she would understand why I did what I did. She would forgive me, because she’s also taken a life, and because she’s the kind of person
who can look at a soul stripped nearly naked, revealing all its warts and scars, and barely flinch. That fearlessness is what I love most about her. She’s the version of you that would have come to be if Daniel had been absent from your life, or if your two sisters had been there for one another from the beginning.
And that’s why, as badly as I want to tell her what really happened that morning, to clear my conscience once and for all, I stop short. She’s your sister, and even though she never knew you, she feels a bond. So much of this new journey of hers has been for you.
I also think of Vicki and how I led everyone to believe it was she who’d used that knife. That’s the biggest rub of all, more unforgivable than all the rest. I’m not sure I can forgive myself, though I do know that the man who did these things is not the man I know, not the man standing here now a whole ocean away from a place he will gladly never see again.
You’d be furious to hear me say that what I did to Vicki was worse than what I did to you. Some days I succeed in convincing myself I was doing you a kindness, stopping the pain, ending the misery. But that opens another door—whose pain and misery was I ending, really? Because I was beyond fury when I stormed back into our house that day, so angry at you for destroying us. And I know deep down that’s why I ended rather than saved you.
Some things are better off staying buried. Eventually they break down and become one with the earth again. Like you. Like that long internal scream I’ve been holding on to since the day I walked into the house and saw her standing there. It’s barely more than a whisper now. Soon it’ll be gone, and although it still hurts me a little to say this, and that I should be grateful for everything you left behind that made this new life possible for Nadia and me, I hope you will go with it.
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