A Stranger in the House

by Shari Lapena

  Everything would still be perfect, she thinks bitterly, tears leaking down the sides of her face, if it weren’t for Robert finding her. She wonders how he did it, three years later. How was he able to track her down?

  Finally, she crawls under the covers and falls into a brief, exhausted sleep.

  —

  Rasbach sits at his desk and rubs his tired eyes. He picks up the picture of Georgina Traynor again, and thinks about Karen Krupp, in her comfortable suburban home. She’s probably frightened out of her wits, he thinks.

  His next thought—she’s been frightened before, and found a way out. She’s a survivor.

  He looks at the facts, the way he’s been trained to do: married woman fakes death, turns up somewhere else with a new identity. Three years later, the husband she left behind turns up dead, and it looks like she was there. He knows what it looks like, but he mustn’t jump to conclusions.

  If she was a battered wife, trying to escape an unbearable situation, then truth be told, he’s sympathetic to her. He’s sympathetic to any woman who’s ever been driven to take such extreme measures to protect herself. These things shouldn’t happen. But he knows they do, every day. The system does a rather poor job of protecting these women, and he knows it. It’s a damaged, messed-up world.

  He’s feeling very negative tonight; it’s not like him. He wants to solve the case; he always wants to solve the case. He thinks he knows what happened here, and he thinks he knows why. But then it will go out of his hands into the hands of the lawyers, and there’s no predicting what will happen. The whole thing depresses him.

  He thinks about Tom Krupp. He tries to imagine what he must be going through, but he can’t, quite. Rasbach has never been married. The right woman has eluded him all these years. Perhaps it’s because of the job. Maybe he will still meet her, someday. And when he does, he tells himself, taking another look at the photo of Georgina Traynor, he’ll do a thorough background check on her himself.

  —

  Tom has come home again, and they’ve had a quiet dinner together, with only the scrape of cutlery on plates to break the silence. Now Karen stares out the living room window into the darkness, unwilling to go to bed. She’ll only stare at the ceiling again. She tells herself that there’s no one out there. Robert is dead. There’s no one to be afraid of now.

  Except for that detective. And she’s terrified of him.

  Tom’s upstairs in his office, working late. She doesn’t know how he can work at a time like this. Perhaps it’s his way of avoiding thinking about things. He’d rather stare at lines of numbers than into his own appalling future. She doesn’t blame him; her own thoughts are driving her crazy.

  Rasbach is going to be back. She’s sure of it. She’s wound up tight, as if poised for flight. But she’s made Tom a promise. She has to place her faith in Jack Calvin.

  She decides to go upstairs and have a long, hot bath. Maybe it will help her relax. She puts her head in the upstairs office and tells Tom. He looks up briefly, nods, and looks back at his computer screen. She turns away and goes into the bathroom and starts filling the tub, trying to decide between bubble bath and Epsom salts. But what does it matter? Rasbach is still going to arrest her.

  As her eyes fall briefly on the vanity, she freezes. Something’s wrong. Her pulse begins to race. Her heart knocks painfully against her ribs and she feels slightly dizzy. She scans the vanity quickly, trying to take in details. It’s her perfume. Someone has taken the stopper off her perfume.

  She knows it wasn’t her.

  Karen stares at the perfume bottle, paralyzed with fear, as if she’s found a snake curled on the vanity. She didn’t use that perfume today, she’s certain of it. And she would never leave the stopper off. “Tom!” She calls his name frantically. But he doesn’t seem to hear her over the rushing water of the taps. She runs down the hall to his office, screaming his name.

  She collides with him in the office doorway.

  “What is it?” Tom asks her, his eyes wild. Before she can find the words to tell him, he rushes past her into the bathroom. She comes up behind him. “What? What is it?” he asks. He can’t see what’s scaring her so badly, but he’s infected by her panic.

  Karen points at the perfume bottle, with the stopper lying on the vanity behind it. “My perfume. Someone took the stopper off. It wasn’t me.”

  Tom looks at the perfume bottle, then back at her, relieved, but irritated. “Is that all? Are you sure? Maybe you just left it off and forgot.”

  “No, Tom, I didn’t,” she says sharply. She can tell that he doesn’t believe her.

  “Karen,” he says, “you’re under a lot of stress. Maybe you’re just forgetting things. You know what the doctor said. I can hardly keep things straight these days myself. Yesterday I left my car keys in the office and had to go all the way back up to get them.”

  “That’s you,” she says, “not me.” She looks at him and she can feel a hardness coming into her eyes. “I can’t afford not to notice details like this,” she says, her voice taking on a tone of underlying rage. “Because for years, if I didn’t do something just right, if things weren’t just so, I’d get the living shit beat out of me. So I notice the little things. And I did not leave the stopper off that perfume bottle. Someone has been in this house.”

  “Okay, calm down,” Tom says.

  “Don’t tell me to calm down!” she screams at him.

  They stand in the small bathroom facing one another. She can see that he’s as shocked as she is at her reaction. Her raw emotion has unsettled and appalled them both. They’ve never been this way with each other before. Then she notices the bathtub and hurries over to turn off the taps before the tub overflows.

  She straightens up and looks at him. She’s calmer now, but still frightened. “I’m sorry Tom. I don’t mean to yell at you. But someone must have been in here.”

  “Karen,” Tom says. He’s using a soothing tone, as if he’s speaking to a child. “Your former husband is dead. Who else would break into our house? Any ideas?”

  When she says nothing, Tom asks, rather delicately, “Do you want me to call the police?”

  She can’t tell for sure if he’s being sarcastic—Do you want me to call the police about an opened perfume bottle? Or whether he’s just exhausted and overwhelmed with everything that’s happened. But there’s something in his tone.

  “No, don’t call the police,” she says. When he stands there saying nothing further she says, “Go, I’m going to have a bath.”

  He leaves, and she locks the bathroom door behind him.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Brigid sits and watches out the window; she never tires of it. Every now and then she sniffs delicately at her wrist. She will stay up until Tom and Karen go to bed, until they are safely tucked in and all their lights are out.

  Her husband, Bob, has been home briefly for dinner, but he’s gone out again tonight for another function. That’s every night this week. She wonders if it’s really all work, or whether he’s seeing someone on the side. She finds she doesn’t really care. Still, she’s simmering with rage beneath her cool, white skin—the cool, white skin that he hasn’t touched in weeks, and they’re supposed to be trying to have a baby. Sometimes she hates Bob. Sometimes she hates her life and everybody in it. Except there aren’t that many people in her life anymore. She’s let a lot of things drop. Except for her knitting blog. And the Krupps.

  Mostly, Brigid keeps an eye on Karen and Tom.

  She would like . . . she would like to be someone else, in some other life. That’s what she’d really like. She’s slightly surprised to realize that what she wants most in the world isn’t, after all, to be pregnant at last with Bob’s baby. She’s wanted that for so long that the wishing for it, the fantasizing about it, has become automatic. How refreshing to realize that she actually, earnestly, wants something else for a ch
ange; that she would actually like to be someone else, in another life entirely.

  Someone with a handsome, caring husband, a husband who pays attention. Who comes home every night. Someone who would make her feel special and take her to Europe and kiss her at odd moments for no reason and look at her the way Tom looks at Karen. She puts her knitting down.

  She hasn’t been able to resist the pull of the Krupps’ house. She can’t help sneaking into their house across the street sometimes, and being there, alone, imagining herself living there with Tom. Lying in their bed. Going through Karen’s things, going through Tom’s things. Holding Tom’s clothes to her face and smelling them—she even took an old T-shirt of Tom’s from his drawer and hid it at home. Trying on Karen’s clothes in front of her mirror. Using her lipstick, her perfume. Pretending that she’s Tom’s wife.

  It’s easy to do—she has a key. Tom had given her one during their brief affair, and she’d secretly made a copy before she returned it. She can take the path alongside the Krupps’ house that leads to the park beyond, and as long as there’s no one looking, she can sneak in the unlocked gate and go in through the back door, with no one to see her do it.

  She’d left the glass on the counter that day.

  She’s really never stopped wanting Tom. It’s just a question of what she’s willing to do to get him back.

  This hits her rather hard and she holds her breath for a second.

  Lately, she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about what they were like together, back when they were lovers. They had some serious chemistry. And Tom was such a pleasure to seduce, so eager to try new things. So willing to follow her lead. How perfect it all was, before he broke it off with her and started seeing Karen instead.

  He hadn’t been comfortable with the fact that she was married, but he’d swallowed her flirtatious little lie and been happy to sleep with her anyway. That changed when he learned the truth—he dumped her. God, how it hurt. She’d made things difficult for him for a while—she couldn’t help it, she felt so out of control. Bob had no idea what was going on, but he could see how upset and unhappy she was. He insisted she see someone. Eventually she adjusted. She’d even been able to agree with Tom—quite civilly, she thought—not to tell anyone about their affair. They’ve kept it secret from Karen all this time. Oh, all the times Brigid had wanted to tell her, over coffee, about what she and Tom had done together!

  Now, Brigid recalls the electricity that went through her body the other night when she touched Tom’s arm. She’s sure he felt it, too, that intense sexual energy that they’d shared flaring up again—surely that’s why he stepped away from her so quickly. He can’t admit that he still has feelings for her. He’s married now; he’s too decent a man for that. But she’s sure those feelings he had for her are still there.

  She wonders if he’s getting tired of Karen by now. She’s picked up on the tension between them.

  Brigid knows that Karen thinks of her as her best friend, even though Karen doesn’t know how to be a very good friend sometimes. Karen has disappointed her again and again. It’s hard to think of Karen the same way now, after everything that’s happened. After all she’s put Tom through. Especially since Brigid’s realized that she might be able to get Tom for herself.

  Karen’s not her friend; she’s her rival. She’s always been her rival.

  A whole world seems to be opening up before Brigid, a new future unfurling.

  Brigid has sat in this spot by the window these last few days, avidly following the goings-on across the street. She knows Karen’s in deep trouble. Maybe soon the police will arrest her for murder.

  And then Tom will be all alone, and understandably shattered. He’ll be doubting Karen and everything they had together. And Brigid will be there, helping him pick up the pieces. Nudging him in the right direction—away from Karen, toward her.

  There will be more of that electricity between them, she’s sure of it. And he won’t be able to resist coming back to her. They were meant to be together.

  Everything happens for a reason.

  She’ll leave Bob; he’ll probably barely notice. And she’ll move in across the street. She’ll have everything she’s ever wanted. Karen’s beautifully decorated home. Her smart clothes—as luck would have it, they’re the same size—her handsome, attentive husband. She suspects Tom has a good sperm count, too, unlike her useless husband, Bob.

  Brigid’s heart flutters at the prospect of her future, as she watches the lights across the street.

  —

  That night, Tom lies awake, unable to sleep. Karen is moving around fitfully in the bed.

  It wasn’t until that overwrought moment in the bathroom, with Karen screaming at him, that he really began to understand what she must have been through and what it must have done to her. For the first time he realized that there are whole parts of her that he’s never had any access to. Dark, angry parts of her, and a grim history that she’ll never share fully with him. He now knows the broad outlines of how she’d lived, but he doesn’t know all the ugly details. This sudden glimpse into her, into the darkness at the heart of her past, has shaken him badly. She really isn’t the woman he thought she was. She’s much tougher, much harder, and much more damaged than he ever suspected.

  She’s not the woman he fell in love with. The woman he fell in love with, Karen Fairfield, was a mirage.

  He never knew Georgina Traynor. If he had, would he have fallen in love with her? Would he have been man enough to fall in love with a woman with her kind of baggage? Or would he have stayed the hell away?

  He likes to think he would have fallen in love with her just the same, and taken her safely away from all that.

  But the lies . . . He’s not sure he can get past the lies.

  Yes, Karen had her—excellent—reasons for what she did. But she lied to him. Her wedding vows were a lie. And he’s sure she would have kept lying to him if the police hadn’t tripped her up. That’s what’s bothering him.

  The question he keeps asking himself is: If she hadn’t had the accident that night, if she’d managed to calm herself down and come home, would she have made up some story about a friend calling her with an emergency—a story he wouldn’t have questioned? Would she have gone to bed with him that night and lain beside him, knowing that she’d shot a man dead—with him never being any the wiser? Because Tom doesn’t believe that she wasn’t capable of killing her former husband; he’s sure now, after that outburst in the bathroom, that she is capable of it.

  If things had gone just a little differently, he might have continued in his happy, ignorant bubble, unaware of her crime. But he can’t ignore it now.

  And the one other thing he can’t forget. The gloves. She took the gloves with her.

  Tom is certain that she intended to kill her former husband—or why take the gloves? There’s no doubt in his mind about that. As far as the law is concerned, he’s pretty sure she’s guilty.

  Whether he can live with that or not . . . the jury’s still out.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  The next day, just before noon, Karen’s alone in the house when she hears a firm knock at the front door. When she peeks out and sees the detectives, she knows the time has come. She has only a moment to pull herself together before she opens the door.

  Rasbach stands on the front porch, looking more serious than she has yet seen him. That’s how she knows—they’ve figured out who the dead man is.

  “May we come in?” he asks, his tone surprisingly gentle.

  She pulls open the door. She wants it to be over. She cannot bear the tension any longer.

  “Is your husband home?” Rasbach asks. She shakes her head. “Do you want to call him? We can wait.”

  “No. That won’t be necessary.” She feels calm, detached, as if none of this is really happening. It’s like a dream, or as if it’s happening to someone e
lse. She’s lost her opportunity to flee. It’s too late now.

  Rasbach says, “Karen Krupp, you are under arrest for the murder of Robert Traynor. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. . . .”

  She holds her hands out in front of her as Jennings puts the handcuffs on her. Her legs suddenly go weak. She tells herself she will not faint, hears, as if from a distance, Catch her. She feels strong arms at her back—and then nothing.

  —

  Tom bolts out of the office and races to the police station. Jack Calvin has called him and told him that Karen is already there, under arrest. Calvin, too, is on his way.

  Tom’s knuckles are white from squeezing the steering wheel, and he’s clenching his jaw, hard. His world is coming completely apart. He doesn’t know what to do, how to act. He hopes Jack Calvin will be able to advise him.

  He was expecting this, but it’s still a shock. You don’t exchange wedding vows expecting one day to hear that your wife is at the police station under arrest for murder.

  He stops at a red light. He doesn’t understand Karen; he doesn’t understand why she did it. There were other options. She could have told him. They could have gone to the police. Why didn’t she go to the police? She didn’t have to go there that night and kill that son of a bitch.

  The light changes and he pulls ahead impatiently with a jerk. He’s angry at her. For lying to him, for bringing this madness down upon them unnecessarily. She’s going to go to prison. He’ll have to visit her there. He feels for a moment like he might throw up. He pulls over into a store’s parking lot to wait for the feeling to pass.

  Now he’s grateful that they hadn’t yet had children. Thank God, he thinks bitterly, for that.

  —

  Karen is sitting in an interview room, with her lawyer on her right side, waiting for the detectives to arrive. Before they were brought in here, Calvin told her what to expect.