by Shari Lapena
Stephanie sits back in her chair. She hadn’t known. She wasn’t much into social media, but she had googled her husband’s name once, when they were first dating, of course. But there were so many Patrick Kilgours that she’d immediately given up. She googles his name again now. She has to go through several pages before she finds this news report again.
She looks once more at the photo of her husband. That expression, that grainy black-and-white image will haunt her now, for the rest of her life.
She can’t help herself, she looks for more. She finds other stories, with the same pictures of the car, of her husband. But in some articles there’s a picture of his first wife, too, smiling into the camera. And what strikes Stephanie about this photo is that she looks so happy.
13
Niall knows there’s something going on. Something is bothering his partner, Patrick, and he thinks it’s more than just colicky twins. He remembers their recent conversation.
Patrick had slumped in the chair in front of Niall’s desk, looking both nervous and deeply exhausted at the same time. He’d apologized for his recent poor performance, particularly the lackluster client meeting earlier in the week. He’d blamed it on lack of sleep, said he felt like he was walking in a fog half the time from sheer tiredness.
“Can’t Stephanie take care of the babies?” Niall asked. “I mean, she gave up her job and she’s home with them, right?”
Patrick had given him a sharp look, which Niall didn’t care to interpret. Okay, maybe he was being harsh, and his own wife would have kicked him in the shins for that one, but they couldn’t afford mistakes. Patrick’s performance was making Niall worried these days. They’d built up quite a good business in the last four years, and he doesn’t want to lose it all now.
“You don’t know what twins are like,” Patrick said. “Your kid never had colic either.”
This was true. Niall had a four-year-old and they weren’t planning to have another. Henry had not been a difficult baby. Nancy had stayed home and dealt with it all so that he could focus on the business. Obviously things were a bit different in Patrick’s household. But it was frustrating that there was nothing Niall could do about it.
Niall decided to take a gentler approach. “You know how important you are to this enterprise, Patrick,” he said. “We both need you at the top of your game.”
“I know,” Patrick admitted. “I’ll—I’ll try to figure something out.”
And they’d left it at that, with no concrete plan to deal with the problem.
Now Niall stands perfectly still over his drafting table. He’d just heard Patrick on the phone, talking loudly, as if he were arguing with someone. He’d distinctly heard him say, “What’s going on?” Niall froze, listening. But then Patrick lowered his voice and he wasn’t able to hear anymore.
Now, he pops his head into Patrick’s office and asks, “Is everything all right?”
“Yeah, fine,” Patrick says. But he looks distraught, and as if he’s trying not to show it.
“I thought I heard you arguing with someone on the phone,” Niall says.
“Oh, that,” Patrick answers, giving a little laugh. “Just talking to Stephanie. The twins were both crying and she couldn’t hear me. It can be a little frustrating sometimes.”
“Okay,” Niall says, and returns to his own office. He wonders again if there’s something else going on, something that Patrick is keeping from him.
Patrick isn’t the only one around here keeping secrets, he thinks, his mind turning to Erica, and how she looks lying on her back, naked against the sheets. He wants to see her again. She knows he’s married, and she’s fine with it. He just has to make sure Nancy doesn’t find out.
She’d only found out about Anne because he’d been careless. He won’t make that mistake again.
* * *
• • •
PATRICK GRABS HIS SUIT JACKET and leaves the office. He feels like Niall is breathing down his neck—the last thing he needs right now.
Patrick is anxious and unfocused, unable to concentrate on anything but his immediate problem. He needs to check on his family. Suddenly the urge to see them, to know that they’re all right, is overwhelming. He walks quickly to the lot where he parks his Audi.
I really think your wife and I could be friends. The idea makes his blood run cold. She was sitting within feet of Stephanie and the twins when she texted him to call her. She’d guessed that he might refuse to pay her, and she was applying pressure. She could lie to Stephanie, tell her that they’d been having sex in a hotel room somewhere. Erica is toying with him. Showing him that she could blow his world apart if she chose to.
He reminds himself that Erica just wants money. She’s not going to harm his family.
He drives out of the parking lot and toward home as fast as he dares. Suddenly his phone pings. He glances at it and sees it’s another text from Erica. His hands immediately begin to get clammy on the wheel. He pulls over at the first opportunity, into a gas station, and parks the car. He sits for a moment, breathing deeply, before he opens the message. Now, he’s a little more afraid of her. Of what she might say or do. He’ll tell her to go to hell. He’ll tell her he’s going to go to the police.
He reads the message.
Let’s meet. Now.
He hates her peremptory tone. He wants to tell her to go fuck herself. He responds,
I can’t. I’m busy.
She immediately answers.
I’ll be at the park at the foot of the Skyway Bridge in twenty minutes.
This is fucked up. Completely fucked up. He smashes his hands against the steering wheel, feels the pain radiate up his forearms. What does he do now? He’s never been blackmailed before. What are his options? He could go to the police and tell them Erica is threatening him and stalking him and his wife. He could call them right now. The police could meet her at the park. But what happens then?
His phone pings again.
There’s something you need to know.
As soon as he reads the message, he knows he’s going to meet her.
14
Erica puts her phone down and looks at herself in the rearview mirror. She’s pretty sure Patrick will show up, and she wants to look her best. She takes her hair out of the ponytail and brushes it. She puts on fresh lipstick. She looks a lot better than his current wife does. It’s not Stephanie’s fault—she’s postpartum and it takes a while to get back to looking good after you’ve had a baby. She’s sure Stephanie is an attractive woman, just not right now.
She thinks about going to see her son before she left Denver to move to Newburgh. She hadn’t seen him in years—not since he was born. But she needed to get a current photo. So she’d watched the house and then followed the family from a distance one evening when they went to the park. Fortunately he looks a lot like his dad. She got a nice shot of him, had it printed, and put it in her wallet.
She drives closer to the Skyway Bridge, parks her car, and walks toward the river and sits down on a bench where she can easily be seen. She knows exactly what she’s going to say.
* * *
• • •
PATRICK DRIVES AROUND for a few minutes, killing time. He doesn’t want to go back to the office and park the car and leave again on foot. Niall might wonder what he’s up to. He’ll drive to the bridge and leave the car somewhere nearby.
Patrick parks on a side street and walks down to the river. His body is tight with tension. There’s a small park at the foot of the Skyway pedestrian bridge that spans the Hudson to the Catskills on the other side. Sometimes he and Stephanie sit on the benches here and enjoy the view, with an ice cream. This will spoil it for him.
When he enters the park, he sees her immediately. She’s sitting on a bench, looking out at the river. She’s not watching for him; it’s like she knows he’ll sit down right beside her, like a good dog. It ma
kes his blood boil. He’s told her he won’t pay her. What happens now?
Like an automaton, he walks over to her and sits down next to her on the bench. He can’t bear to face her. Instead, he looks out at the river too. It’s like they’re two spies, pretending they don’t know each other, he thinks, about to conduct business. It’s all too surreal.
“I’m glad you could make it,” she says.
Finally he turns to her. She looks so innocent—with her fine skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, her serene smile. Almost angelic. He knows better. A flash of something carnal arises from his memory, flits through his head. He musters up his courage and says, “I don’t know how to get this through your thick head. I’m not afraid of you. We’re not going to pay you anything. This is the last time I’m going to meet you.” She just smiles at him. “If you don’t drop this, I’m going to the police. They’ll arrest you for attempted blackmail.”
“I don’t think so. Not when you hear what I have to say.”
He turns on her then. He hisses, “What is it you think you have? What makes you think you can get them to take another look at a perfectly open-and-shut case? It was an accident! Everybody knows that. You can’t change that, no matter how much you may want to. There was never any question that it was anything else.”
“But they don’t know everything,” she says. “They don’t know that you had a motive to kill your wife.”
“Motive! What motive? You can’t be serious!”
“Oh, I am deadly serious,” she says, in a lowered voice.
His heart is pounding furiously. She means to go on with this—he can’t believe it. “You can’t honestly think that because I had meaningless sex with you, that I deliberately murdered my wife! No one will believe you.” His voice is low but he can hear the desperation in it; he knows he needs to calm down. He shouldn’t let her see how riled up he is.
“Perhaps it wasn’t as meaningless as you say,” she says slyly.
He feels a chill down his spine. She’s going to make it out to be more than it was. “You lying bitch,” he says venomously. “It’s your word against mine.”
She reaches into her purse, takes out her wallet, and withdraws a small photograph. “What you don’t know is that I had a baby. It’s yours.” She holds out the photo of a newborn in a blue crocheted hat. He looks down at it in horror, then back at her, stunned. “What?” He can’t process it. This must be another lie. “That’s impossible.”
“Why is it impossible? We had sex.” She leans in closer to him now and says, “And if you remember, it was very, very good.”
He recoils from her. “You’re lying. There was no baby.”
“How would you know? You got the hell out of Colorado as fast as you could. But yes, about eight months after the funeral, I gave birth to a bouncing baby boy.”
“It’s not mine.”
“I know he is.”
“You can’t prove it,” he says, and then immediately realizes, stupidly, that he’s wrong. Of course she can prove it—she can force him to do a paternity test. His fear grows, threatening to overwhelm him.
“He’s almost nine years old now.” She takes the photo of the infant and returns it to her wallet, and pulls another one out. She hands it to him.
Patrick takes it from her reluctantly. It’s a picture of a boy with dark eyes and hair and a crooked grin. A cute kid. His anxiety spikes. The boy looks remarkably like he did at that age.
He draws away from her, shaken. This is terrible news, the worst news. He might have a son. A nine-year-old son. With her—a lying, manipulative bitch. If it’s his. But he knows it’s quite possible that it is. The timing is right. The photo is convincing, but what if there is no baby, and this is just another lie? “Why didn’t you tell me back then?”
She looks out at the river. “I was afraid to. After Lindsey died, I thought—I still think—that you killed her on purpose. So that we could be together. We talked about it, remember?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief. They had never talked about that. It was just sex between them. “What utter horseshit.”
“We talked about being together,” she amends, “not about you killing her. I thought you meant divorce.”
There’s a funny buzzing in his head. He feels like he’s having trouble breathing. “No. We didn’t,” he says, appalled. “You’re making it all up!”
She looks at him through narrowed eyes. “Of course, you say that now.”
His heart is pounding furiously; he’s afraid.
“I thought you’d killed her to be with me,” she says again. “It did something to me. It really messed me up. And I’d just lost a close friend. I couldn’t bear to look at myself and I couldn’t bear to look at you. I was sick with guilt at what you’d done.”
She looks so convincing, he thinks, staring back at her in horror. Anyone would believe her. A jury would believe her. He’s absolutely terrified now. He swallows, his throat dry, and says, “I didn’t kill her at all—it was an accident and you know it! You’re making all this up; you’ve never felt guilty about anything.”
She turns wide eyes on him, smiles, and says coyly, “But I don’t believe you, you see. And it’s been bothering me all this time.”
“Bullshit! Then why wait all this time? You only came to me now because you want money. Everyone will see that.”
She shakes her head. “I was young, and stupid, and afraid after what happened. Afraid they might think I was a part of it. You know what we’d been doing. I’d just learned I was carrying your child. I was even afraid of what you might do to me, because I knew what you’d done. And I knew you were clever—I mean, you got away with murder.”
She seems to almost believe her own lies. He finds himself clenching his hands and forces them open. He’d love to wring her neck.
She continues. “So I moved away and had the baby. But now I’m older, and not so stupid. I’ve had time to think. I have leverage, and I mean to use it. And I’m not afraid of you anymore.”
“No?” he says. “Maybe you should be.” He didn’t mean to threaten her, it just slipped out.
She looks at him as if taking his measure. “Yes, maybe I should be,” she agrees.
“So is that what this is all about? You want child support? Why didn’t you just fucking say so? We could have worked something out. You don’t need to make all this up about what happened to Lindsey.”
“I’m not making anything up,” she says. “I’m just telling the truth.”
“You are so full of shit,” he says acidly.
“I think the authorities would appreciate having all the facts, don’t you?”
They stare at each other for a moment. He has to set her straight. “I told you—we’re not going to pay you anything. Stephanie knows everything. She knows I would never hurt anyone, and she’s very tight with her money.” He takes a deep breath, exhales. “Look,” he says, trying to sound reasonable, which is difficult, because he is completely enraged. “A child is different. If it’s mine, and you can prove it, I’ll pay the appropriate support. Out of my own earnings.”
She glances at him. “Are you going to tell your wife about our son?”
He cringes at the words our son. He bites back his immediate response. “I tell Stephanie everything.”
She snorts derisively; he lets it go.
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” he says desperately. “I didn’t kill Lindsey on purpose. And even if I wanted to pay you, I couldn’t get you any money—not without Stephanie knowing, and she’d never agree.”
“You have to find a way. I want two hundred thousand dollars. In cash.”
He gapes at her in disbelief. “That’s not going to happen.” He shakes his head. “For the last time—I didn’t murder her—it was an accident!” He’s hissing at her now, spit flying.
; She waits for him to calm down and then says coolly, “If your wife was dead, you’d have lots of money.”
He stares at her, aghast, as the silence lengthens. He lowers his voice and says, “Surely you’re not suggesting I murder my wife?”
“You did it before,” she says coldly. “Don’t pretend you haven’t thought about it.”
“You’re out of your mind,” he says. He clenches his hands tightly again. “You’re a fucking psychopath!”
“Takes one to know one,” she says, rendering him speechless. He stares at her in horror. After a moment she says, in a reasonable voice, “If she were to meet with a fatal accident, it would make things easier—for both of us.”
Patrick continues to stare at her, his eyes unblinking. Finally he says, his voice trembling with rage and fear, “You stay away from her or I’ll go to the police.”
“No, you won’t.”
Silence stretches out between them as the awfulness of his situation sinks in.
“You got the insurance money,” she says eventually. “What, you didn’t think I knew about that? Two hundred thousand dollars,” she says. “That was quite a bit of money, nine years ago, for someone in his early twenties. Enough for a fresh start, back in New York. Enough to get started in business, maybe.”
“You absolute bitch,” he whispers, his face contorting with emotion.
“The authorities will be interested in that, I think, don’t you? And they’ll be interested in us.”
“How do you know about the insurance?” he spits at her angrily.