The Surrogate Mother

by Freida McFadden

  She blinks a few more times. “Who?”

  What?

  “Monica Johnson,” I say again. “Your roommate.”

  She shakes her head at me, her brow furrowed like she’s really trying to figure it out. And now I really think I’m losing it. Did I imagine the whole conversation? Was this entire thing a meth-fueled fantasy?

  But then her eyes light up. “Oh! You’re that lady who wanted the baby!”

  I’m not insane. Thank God.

  “So how’d it go?” she asks me.

  “I’m assuming you don’t live with Monica anymore.”

  “Uh…” She scratches her upturned nose with the hand not holding the Hot Topic bag. “The truth is…”

  I raise my eyebrows at her.

  She smiles crookedly. “Monica and I were never roommates. She just asked me to say we were.”

  What?

  “So…” I narrow my eyes at her. “How do you know Monica?”

  She shrugs. “We were sort of friends in college. Not really though. Mostly, I used to be close with her roommate.”

  “So why didn’t she give me the number of her actual roommate so I could talk to her?”

  She laughs so loudly, a few people on the street turn to look at us. “Oh, she wouldn’t want you to do that.”

  My stomach churns. This was the whole purpose of Sam’s plan to vet Monica—to find out if she was a wack job. But then she gave us all made up friends and family. I never tried calling her mother again, but now I wonder if the woman on the phone was even really her mother.

  Maybe that’s why Monica said she was a Red Sox fan. Because the story of her being from Indiana was total bullshit.

  “So Monica’s roommate didn’t like her?”

  Chelsea snorts. “That’s an understatement.”

  “But you didn’t like her either. Did you?”

  “No, but…”

  “But what?”

  She hangs her head. “Monica paid me two-hundred bucks to say I was her roommate and that she was awesome.”

  Oh my God. This isn’t a matter of Monica falling in love with Sam after she got pregnant. She was planning to deceive me all along.

  Was Monica the one who pushed Gertie down the stairs? Was she trying to get my assistant out of the way so she could worm into my life?

  What the hell? Why would she do that? Why me?

  Chelsea—or whatever her real name is—sees the look on my face and flinches. “Hey, I’m sorry about this. I didn’t think anything I said that day would make a difference one way or another. Also, I’m, like, a starving actress, and I really needed the money.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I say, even though I’m actually quite irritated with this girl for what she did. My whole life is destroyed over two-hundred bucks. Couldn’t she have at least held out for five-hundred? “But I do need your help.”

  “Sure,” she says. “Whatever you want.”

  Chapter 33

  The first thing I extract from Chelsea, whose real name is apparently Taylor Reynolds, is her real phone number. Sam doesn’t believe one word I’ve told him about Monica, but maybe he’ll believe another person. More than anything, I’m determined to convince him I’m innocent. I can’t get through this if Sam isn’t on my side.

  The second thing Taylor does for me is she gets out her phone and places a call to Cynthia Holloway, the girl who used to be roommates with Monica. Taylor’s information may be damning, but it sounds like Cynthia’s got a whole lot of other things to say. If I could prove Monica is certifiably crazy, which I’m convinced she is, maybe I can save myself.

  Maybe.

  “I really appreciate this,” I tell Taylor, as she searches for Cynthia’s number in her phone. I remember the days when I would have all my friends’ number memorized. Now I’m lucky I know my own number.

  “No problem,” she says, flashing me a smile. She’s fascinated by the whole thing. I’m probably giving her a story she’ll tell all her friends at happy hour tonight.

  We stand on Broadway together, stepping aside to allow all the people by with their shopping bags. She locates the number and presses the green button for the call to go through. I stand there, a blister throbbing in my big toe. This is the last time I run in heels. If there’s any chance I’m going to be doing hard labor, I need my feet in good shape.

  No. Can’t think that way. I’m going to fix this.

  “Cynthia?” Taylor’s face brightens. “Hey, it’s Taylor! What’s going on?”

  Then—I swear to God—the two of them chat for like five minutes. Like I’m not standing right there next to Taylor, with my whole life hanging in the balance. I’m convinced she’s forgotten I’m even there. When she launches into an account of everything she got at this great sale at Anthropologie, I finally tap her on the shoulder and clear my throat loudly.

  “Oh!” Taylor says. “Hey, listen, Cyn, you remember Monica Johnson?”

  Even from a foot away, I can hear the female voice on the other line say, “Oh God.”

  Taylor giggles. “So I’ve got this lady here who is having some major issues with Monica, and she was hoping to talk to you.”

  “In person, if possible,” I add.

  “Yeah, in person,” Taylor says. She listens for a moment, then looks me over. “No, she doesn’t look nuts. I mean, she seems nice. Sounds like Monica’s done a number on her.”

  I wait, shifting between my feet. I hope this woman is willing to talk to me. If I can get an old roommate of Monica’s to talk about how crazy she is, at least Sam might be willing to consider I could be right. I know it’s hard for him to think ill of her, considering she’s pregnant with his child, but he’s got to see reason if there’s enough evidence staring him in the face. He’s got to.

  Taylor pulls the phone away from her ear. “Cynthia says she’s got to go to work in an hour, but she’s available till then. She lives in the village.”

  I nod. “Give me her address.”

  _____

  It’s a half-hour cab ride to Cynthia’s apartment, and I make the driver speed the whole way, promising I’ll foot the bill if he gets a ticket. Everyone I know seems to think Monica is a saint—it’ll be vindication to meet someone else who recognizes she’s not what she seems.

  I hope that’s what this is, anyway. If all Cynthia’s got are stories about how Monica ate all the Frosted Flakes and didn’t buy a new box, I’m going to be disappointed.

  Cynthia lives in a brown brick building in the west village with fire escapes zig-zagging back-and-forth across the front of it. I find the last name Holloway and press the button. After a moment, a loud buzz sounds off and the door to the building unlocks.

  The apartment is on the fourth floor and it would be too much to hope for an elevator. I huff it up the stairs, the blisters multiplying on my poor toes. I ignore the pain though. I need to talk to this woman. She’s the key to everything—I’m sure of it.

  Cynthia Holloway turns out to be a petite girl around Monica’s height with a funky black pixie cut and a nose ring. She smiles broadly at me when she opens the door, revealing a crooked incisor. “So you’re a victim of Monica’s, huh?”

  “Abby,” I say, as I struggle to catch my breath.

  “Right.” She nods, and glances at the back of the apartment. “My other roommate Ellie is here too. She wants to get in on dishing on Monica too.”

  “Are we doing Monica stories?” Another voice rings out from the back of the apartment. A girl with light brown hair swept into an effortlessly messy bun comes into view, wiping her hands on her skinny blue jeans. “Can I go first?”

  Cynthia winks at me. “Why don’t you have a seat, Abby?”

  I sit down on a bean bag chair in the middle of their living room. I don’t know if I’ve ever sat in a bean bag chair before. I gingerly settle down into the middle of it, clutching my purse in my lap, and I immediately sink down amongst the beans. I don’t know how I’m going to get up from this stupid thing. It is pretty c
omfortable though.

  “So how do you know Monica, Abby?” Cynthia asks me as she settles into a papasan chair.

  The whole story would take more time to tell than the time I’ve got. Better keep it quick. “I worked with her. Until she got me in trouble with our boss, and I lost my job.”

  The two girls exchange looks. “Sounds like a Monica special,” Ellie comments.

  I cough into my hand. “So, um, what was your experience like with her? She was… a difficult roommate?”

  Cynthia laughs bitterly. “‘Difficult’ doesn’t even describe it. She was a psychopath. Honestly, by the end, I was scared she was going to murder us in our sleep.”

  My heart skips in my chest. Okay, this sounds promising.

  “She wasn’t going to murder us in our sleep.” Ellie rolls her eyes. I suppress the urge to tell her what I know. “But yeah, she was nuts.”

  “It was our senior year of college and I rented this place with Ellie and another friend of ours,” Cynthia explains. “But at the last minute, our other friend decided to move in with her boyfriend. I put an ad in the college paper, and a week later, Monica was moving in.”

  “And…” I bite my lip. “She was… bad?”

  “She was fine for a couple of weeks,” Cynthia says. “And that’s when the crazy started.” She scratches at her knee thoughtfully. “She’d, like, accuse me of finishing her yogurt or something dumb like that. No big deal, right? I hadn’t, by the way—I hate that stupid yogurt that makes you poop. But anyway, she’d get so angry. She’d start sifting through the trash, looking for the containers. And then she’d storm out, leaving the trash all over the floor. Tell me—who does that?”

  “Oh, and she’d accuse us of going through her room.” Ellie leans forward, getting into the story. “She put a lock on her door, so how could we, right? But she was convinced. She said she was putting a camera in there, so she’d know if we went in.” She shakes her head. “She’d get so angry over it. I mean, we’d be sitting out here with some friends, and she’d just come out and start screaming at us at the top of her lungs.”

  “Not to mention that she called the police on us,” Cynthia adds. “Repeatedly. Like, she thinks we’re being too noisy, so instead of knocking on our door and saying to turn the music down, she’d call the cops and puts in a noise complaint. I almost had a heart attack when the police showed up at our door. More than once!”

  “Or the building manager,” Ellie says.

  “Right.” Cynthia shudders. “Oh, and she almost got me fired too. She called my boss and told him I was stealing office supplies.”

  Ellie grins. “Well, you were stealing office supplies.”

  “Yeah, but she didn’t need to tell on me!” She pounds her fist on the coffee table. “Who does that, seriously? I confronted her about it, and she’s all like, ‘Stealing is wrong. You deserved to get caught.’”

  “Crazy Monica.”

  “Yep, Crazy Monica.” And then Cynthia’s eyes widen. “And what about the smell?”

  Ellie gasps. “Right, I totally forgot about that!” She turns back to me. “So here’s the creepiest thing ever. She was dating this guy for a couple of months, but it was a sort of tumultuous relationship—like, they’d always be yelling at each other. We could all hear it through the walls. And then one day, they’re having a really loud fight, and we hear this huge ‘thump’ and the fighting suddenly stops.”

  “And then,” Cynthia continues, “over the next week, we start to notice this awful smell coming from her room. Like, really, really bad. Like something rotting in there. I was convinced she murdered the guy and he was rotting in her room.”

  “He totally wasn’t.”

  “He was!”

  If I were a neutral third party hearing this story, I would have said they were being ridiculous. But knowing what I know now about Monica, I bet she killed the poor guy. He’s probably at the bottom of the Hudson River.

  “We tried to look for him in the papers,” Cynthia says. “But we didn’t know his name, so… you know, we couldn’t. But I’m sure she must have killed him.”

  Ellie rolls her eyes. “She was nuts but she wasn’t a murderer.”

  “Yeah, well, what about that stake we found under her bed?” Cynthia turns back to me. “After she moved out, I found this broomstick she’d whittled into a stake hidden under her bed. I swear, she was planning to impale both of us. We’re lucky to be alive.”

  I chew on my lip, trying to decide if this is enough. Yes, it makes Monica sound loony, but it’s nothing definitive. I don’t know if these two flaky girls will be enough to convince Sam of anything. And that’s the point of being here—to get him on my side.

  “Oh, and the worst part,” Cynthia says, “was Monica’s mother. Oh my God, that lady was so creepy. And she was here all the freaking time.”

  “Yeah, she was the worst!” Ellie agrees. “Cyn, did I tell you about that night I left my room to get some water, and Monica’s mother was just… like, standing in front of my door. It was two in the morning!”

  “She was a good cook though,” Cynthia says. “Did you ever try her brownies?”

  “Um, no. I wouldn’t eat anything that woman cooked! It was probably spiked with, like, cyanide!”

  My head is spinning. I talked to a woman on the phone named Jean Johnson, who claimed to be Monica’s mother. But I suspect Jean Johnson was just as fake as Chelsea Williams. “So Monica’s mother didn’t live in Indiana?”

  “God, I wish,” Ellie laughs. “Monica was originally from Boston, but her family moved to the city, and they have a place uptown. Or at least, they did back then.”

  Monica’s mother. Her real mother—not that phony I talked to last year, who probably had been reimbursed a couple hundred bucks. I bet whatever her mother has to tell me will be a lot more convincing than the word of these two young girls.

  “By any chance,” I say, “do you have her parents’ phone number?”

  “No,” Cynthia says. My heart sinks. “But I have their address. We had to forward Monica’s mail there for a while.”

  Well, that would work.

  Chapter 34

  My phone was buzzing inside my purse during the entire ride to Cynthia Holloway’s apartment, but I was afraid to look at it. I ditched Sam while he was stuck in traffic and never told him why—he had to be freaking out. After I get out of Cynthia’s apartment, I finally dare to pull my phone out of my purse. Unsurprisingly, there are six missed calls from my husband, as well as several screens full of text messages:

  Where are you?

  Abby, where are you??

  Can you tell me where you are?????

  You jumped out of a moving car. Can you at least let me know you’re okay???????

  It wasn’t a moving car. We were stopped at a light, for God’s sake.

  I bring up Sam’s number on the screen. I’m itching to hit the green button to place the call, but something stops me. If I tell Sam what I’m up to, he’ll think it’s nuts. Just like he thought it was nuts when I accused Monica of spiking my coffee. He’ll say, “So what if Monica had a couple of roommates who didn’t like her?” And he wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

  That’s why I’ve got to get more information. The fact that Monica didn’t want me to talk to her parents is a good sign they’ve got plenty of juicy details to clue me in on. I have a feeling Mom and Dad Johnson are the key to everything.

  The Johnsons live all the way uptown, which means I need to hop in another taxi to get there. I can’t call them and give any sort of warning I’m coming, but that could be a good thing. I’m sure they’re not going to love me showing up to tell them I think their daughter is a murderer. Especially since it sounds like from what Cynthia and Ellie said, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  The Johnsons’ building is a modest-looking apartment building with a green awning and a doorman at the entrance. The lobby is dotted with marble tables and tacky bright red sofas. I smooth out the blouse I
put on this morning for my visit with Frisch, and put on my best, professional smile.

  “Excuse me,” I say, using the same confident voice as I do with our clients. “I’m looking for the Johnsons.”

  I must look important because the doorman doesn’t seem at all suspicious of me. “They’re in 6B. May I ask your name?”

  “Abigail Adler,” I say. “Please tell them I’m their daughter’s boss.”

  I had been debating in the taxi ride over what I should say. Ultimately, I decided to stick with something close to the truth. I have no idea how much Monica tells her parents. If her old roommates are to be believed, she may be very close with her mother. But I suspect most people would allow their daughter’s boss upstairs, especially if she looks respectable.

  I hold my breath, waiting for the doorman to call upstairs. Even if my story is solid, it’s the middle of the afternoon—Monica’s parents aren’t even necessarily home. This could all be for nothing.

  But fortunately, the doorman gets through to someone on the other line. He repeats what I told him, listens for a moment, then smiles and waves me upstairs.

  This time there’s an elevator, at least, but my stomach is doing somersaults the entire time I’m riding upstairs. I have no idea what to expect. Monica’s parents could be anything from completely normal to batshit crazy. For all I know, Mrs. Johnson is going to pull a knife on me at the door. Probably not, but who knows?

  So I’m not feeling great about the whole thing by the time I knock on the door to 6B. My knees are weak and I feel queasy.

  Mrs. Johnson is the one who opens the door for me. She’s an inch or two taller than I am, with plain brown hair swept back from her face into a simple ponytail and rimless glasses. She appears to be roughly in her fifties based on the patterns of lines on her face. She looks…

  Very normal.