A Stranger in the House

by Shari Lapena

  “You have the right to remain silent, and you’re going to use it,” Calvin said bluntly. “We’re going to listen to their questions, get a feel for what they know, or suspect. You’re not going to say anything. That will come later, when you’re ready to make a statement.”

  She nodded nervously. “Okay.”

  “The state must prove its case against you. Your job is not to help them do that. Your job is to follow my instructions. If you listen to me, and do what I say, it all may work out.” And then he added, “Although I can’t promise anything, of course.”

  She swallowed, her throat dry. “They must have enough, or they wouldn’t have charged me,” Karen said, her voice tense.

  “There’s a higher standard of proof at trial,” Calvin told her. “Courage. Let’s take it one step at a time.”

  And then she was brought in here.

  Her handcuffs have already been removed, perhaps because she’s a woman, she thinks, or perhaps because of the nature of her alleged crime. She’s probably not considered dangerous; they think she’s a woman who killed her husband in cold blood, but surely they don’t think she’s likely to kill anyone else?

  At the sound of the door opening, Karen starts nervously. Rasbach and Jennings enter. “Can I get you anything?” Rasbach asks her politely. “Water? Coffee?”

  She shakes her head no.

  After the necessary preliminaries, the videotaped interview begins.

  Rasbach says, “We know that Karen Krupp is a new identity for you, one that you adopted about three years ago.” He’s sitting directly across from her, a buff folder closed on the table in front of him. The detective looks down at the file and opens it.

  Karen immediately sees the photograph there of her as Georgina; she recognizes the picture. She knows he wants her to see it. She merely glances at it, and raises her eyes again.

  He reviews the file silently for a moment, then looks up at her. “We know that you are actually Georgina Traynor, and that you were married to Robert Traynor, the man shot to death last week. And we can put you at the scene of the murder.”

  She says nothing. Beside her, Calvin sits quietly. He seems to be completely relaxed, but alert—not unlike the detective who sits diagonally across from him. She’s grateful that she has Calvin here. If she were alone in this room with Rasbach, she might make a mistake. But Calvin is here to make sure that doesn’t happen.

  “I tell you what,” Rasbach says. “I’ll tell you what I think, and you can just nod if I’m on the right track.”

  “She’s not an imbecile,” Calvin says mildly.

  “I’m well aware of that,” Rasbach answers curtly. “Anyone who can successfully fake her own death is clearly not an imbecile.” He turns his gaze to Karen. “Maybe we should talk about that first. My hat’s off to you. You’re obviously a very clever woman.”

  He’s trying to get her to talk by appealing to her ego, she thinks. It’s not going to work. She’ll talk when it suits her, when she’s ready. She knows she’s going to jail, because Calvin has told her that there’s no bail on a charge of murder. The thought of jail petrifies her.

  “Tell me how you did it,” Rasbach says.

  She says nothing.

  “Okay, then tell me why you did it. Why did you fake such an elaborate, convincing death, and start over as someone else?” When she still doesn’t speak, he says, “My guess is that you were running from your husband. My guess is that you were a battered wife, and you had to get away. He wouldn’t let you leave. You couldn’t just divorce him; he would come after you. So you faked your death. But then, after three years, he calls you up on the phone. You’re in your kitchen, in your new life. You hear his voice. You’re shocked, terrified—you panic.”

  She lets him talk. She wants to hear what he has to say. What he thinks he knows.

  “He asks you to meet him,” Rasbach continues. “Perhaps he threatens you that if you don’t, he will come after you and kill you. He knows your phone number; he no doubt knows where you live. So you agree to see him. You fly out of the house that night. You’re so rattled that you don’t think to leave a note for your husband, you don’t bring your phone, or your purse, you don’t even lock the door.” Rasbach sits back in his chair. She’s watching him; their eyes are locked. He waits a long moment. “Or maybe you were thinking more clearly than we’ve all been giving you credit for.” He pauses for effect. “Maybe there’s a reason you don’t bring your phone or your purse—you don’t want to risk leaving anything behind. Maybe you didn’t bring your phone because you were afraid it could be used to locate you. Maybe you were thinking pretty clearly after all, because you brought a gun, a thirty-eight-caliber handgun, which we’re still looking for, by the way, and you brought your rubber gloves with you.” He adds, “All of which looks like premeditation to me.”

  Rasbach leans forward and looks deeply into her eyes, his blue eyes piercing hers. She’s frightened by his gaze, but is determined not to show it. Rasbach’s ignoring her lawyer and the other detective, as if it’s only the two of them in the room. She has to remind herself that she’s not alone with this detective. But his eyes are mesmerizing.

  Calvin breaks in. “You’re dreaming about the gun, and you have no idea whose gloves those are. You can’t prove they belonged to my client.”

  “I think I can,” Rasbach counters. He doesn’t take his eyes off Karen to look, even briefly, at her lawyer. “I think you took a gun, and those gloves, and drove down to that abandoned restaurant on Hoffman Street and parked in the little parking lot nearby. You went into the deserted restaurant, where Robert Traynor was waiting for you, and you shot him, in cold blood.”

  Karen remains stubbornly silent and reminds herself that they don’t have the weapon that killed him, and even if they find it, it can’t possibly hurt her. She’s confident about the gun. They can’t prove that she had a gun when she went into that restaurant. They can only prove that she was there.

  “What did you do with the gun?” Rasbach asks.

  She feels a sudden stab of fear and quickly smothers it. He doesn’t know about the gun, she thinks—he might guess, or assume, but that’s all.

  “It’s more than possible,” Rasbach continues, “even likely, that you owned a gun illegally. A woman as smart as you, a woman who faked her death, fooling all and sundry, a woman who began over with a new identity and didn’t get caught until her husband found her . . . how do you think he found you, by the way?”

  Her thighs tense under the table, but she will not be drawn into conversation with him.

  Rasbach tilts his head at her. “And then, after you shot him, then you panicked. You saw that you’d killed him. Did you drop the gun? Because you panicked? Or because you knew it couldn’t be traced to you and didn’t have your prints on it and it didn’t matter? Or did you take it with you and toss it out the window somewhere?”

  The detective pushes himself away from the table, and the sudden movement startles her and she flinches in her seat. He gets up and starts walking around the room, as if he’s thinking it through as he speaks. But she’s not fooled. This is all an act. He’s an actor, just as she is. They are each other’s audience. He’s planned everything he’s going to say.

  “When you get to your car, you tear off the gloves and drop them there, in the parking lot. This is why I know you were panicking at this point, because why leave the gloves behind? There could be traces of your skin, your DNA, on the inside of the gloves.” He turns and looks at her intently.

  She looks away. She can feel herself begin to tremble and tenses her body hard to stop it. She does not want him to see how frightened she is.

  “And we both know how important those gloves are, don’t we, Georgina?” He stops in front of her and looks down at her. She refuses to lift her head to look at him. “Because if we get DNA off those gloves, they prove without a doubt that you were
there. And because those gloves show intention.”

  He pulls his chair out and sits down again, and waits until she raises her eyes to him. “By then you were so panicked by what you’d done that you got in your car and drove as fast as you could to get away from there. Everyone agrees that you never go over the speed limit. Everybody goes over the speed limit sometimes, but not you. You never go through a red light. Why? Because you never want to get pulled over by the police. Because the number one rule for people who have taken on new identities is: Keep a low profile. And that’s what you did, for years. Everyone we spoke to was shocked at the way you drove that night. It was so out of character. You know what? I’m wondering what your character is really like, when you’re not pretending to be someone else.”

  He’s getting to her. She feels angry and threatened, but she must remain in control. She wonders why her lawyer doesn’t say something. She knows she can’t deny who she is. They can easily prove that she’s Georgina Traynor. They know she faked her death and ran away and took on a false identity. These are things she will admit to. She might have to admit that she was there. But they cannot prove that she killed him. They have no weapon, no witness. They have motive, though, and that’s what scares her. She had plenty of motive to kill her husband, and they all know it.

  “So let’s just say you panicked,” Rasbach continues. “You got in the car, drove too fast, lost control, and hit a pole. Rather unfortunate. Because if you hadn’t panicked, you would probably have gotten away with murder.”

  She looks up at him now; she hates him at this moment.

  “If you’d calmly driven home, put the gloves back in your kitchen, made up some story for your husband about where you’d been, then no one would ever have connected you to the dead body in that abandoned restaurant. We would eventually have figured out who he was. And we would have seen that his wife had predeceased him years earlier, but that’s it. That would have been the end of it, as far as you’re concerned. There wouldn’t have been any red flags—no car accident, no tire tracks, no gloves—to connect you to the crime. No one to look at you and find out that you’re not who you say you are. You would have gone on with your nice, suburban life with your new, unsuspecting husband.”

  She wants to slap his smug, superior face. Instead she drives her fingernails into her palms under the table, where he can’t see.

  “But the thing is, I can understand why you did what you did. I really can. You don’t want to tell me what life with Robert Traynor was like, but I think it will come out at trial. If the state proves that you killed him, of course you will want everyone to know why you killed him. You will want to paint as monstrous a picture of the man as you possibly can. More power to you. He probably was a monster, to drive a nice woman like you to murder.”

  She looks straight ahead at the wall in front of her, digging her fingernails into her palms.

  “I think that’s all, for now,” Rasbach says. The interview is over.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Brigid knows what’s happened. She saw the two detectives arrive around lunchtime. She’d been waiting—hoping—for such a development. She watched them bring Karen out of the house in handcuffs. She could hardly contain her satisfaction.

  She has been keeping a restless eye on the house all day, waiting for Tom to come home so that she can comfort him. He’ll be alone now in that house, his life all but destroyed. Brigid knows it’s all over for Karen; she will be convicted. She’s sure of it. And then Tom can begin again, with her. They’ll be happy together, happier than he ever was with Karen. And she will never tear his life apart the way Karen has.

  Someday, Tom will see that Karen being taken away in handcuffs was the best thing that ever happened to him.

  —

  Tom returns home in a state of shock. His wife has been arrested for murder. And he’s pretty sure she did it.

  He wanders aimlessly into the kitchen and opens the fridge. He stands there, staring inside, suddenly remembering that other time he stood here, staring sightlessly into the refrigerator. The night Karen disappeared. The night this all began.

  This is going to destroy their marriage. It’s going to destroy their lives. And now his wife is caught up in the workings of the legal system. This is going to bankrupt him. He reaches in for a beer. He screws the cap off almost violently and then turns and hurls it across the room. The cap hits a cupboard and ricochets around the kitchen, ending up somewhere under the table. What the fuck is he going to do?

  He paces the house angrily. There’s nothing he can do. He can’t believe it’s come to this. And he’s sure it’s going to get worse in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

  He doesn’t bother making himself something to eat. He has no appetite for food. He finishes the first beer quickly and returns automatically to the fridge for another. He’s never been tested like this before, and he doesn’t like what he sees. He’s weak, and he’s a coward, and he knows it. He’s been trying to be strong for Karen. But his wife is much stronger and braver than he is. She appears to be made of steel.

  He stares in the mirror over the fireplace. He hardly recognizes himself. His hair is wild from nervously running his hands through it. He looks haggard, almost mean. He expected everything to be sunshine and kisses when he married Karen. It’s as if life made him a promise the day that he married her, and now life has broken that promise. He feels intensely sorry for himself.

  He steps out the sliding glass doors to the backyard and sits outside on the patio in the summer night, as darkness falls upon him.

  Funny, he thinks now, three beers in, it hasn’t occurred to him until this moment to remember what a hard time he had getting her to say yes. Of course it all makes sense now. She was already married.

  The first time he asked her to marry him she laughed it off, as if he couldn’t possibly mean it. Although he was careful not to show it, he’d been both taken aback and hurt. He wondered why she treated his proposal so flippantly; he was completely serious when he asked her. They were lying all bundled up on a scratchy wool blanket, looking at the stars. They’d gone to a little inn in the Catskills for the weekend to see the fall colors. He grabbed the blanket from the back of the car and found a private spot. They lay down together and he propped himself up on one elbow and gazed down at her. He can still remember the way the moonlight lit her face, and the happiness in her eyes. He asked, “Will you marry me?”

  And she laughed, as if he were making a joke.

  He looks up at those same stars now, twinkling in the dark. How changed everything is.

  He remembers how he hid his hurt and disappointment, both at the time and in the weeks following. He waited a bit, and then bought a big, expensive diamond ring—he wanted to show her that he was serious. He presented it to her on Valentine’s Day over a glass of pricey champagne at her favorite restaurant. Perhaps that was a mistake, Valentine’s Day. But it doesn’t make any difference now. What she said, he recalls, as he sits in the dark on the patio with his beer in his hand, was, Why can’t we have a love story instead of a marriage?

  This is their love story, come crashing down around their ears.

  Does he wish now that she’d never said yes, that she’d never agreed, finally, under his steady pressure, to get married? He doesn’t know, and anyway it’s too late to change anything.

  And yet, these last two years have been the happiest of his life.

  Until all this happened.

  Tom sees something moving in the dark, at the side of the house. He freezes. He hasn’t turned the light on in the back, not wanting to attract bugs to the light, so it’s completely dark except for the stars. He can see someone approaching, but he can’t tell who it is. It can’t be the police. They’ve already arrested his wife. Surely they’re not going to arrest him, too?

  He thinks it might be Dan, come to check on him. Dan had called earlier, but Tom hadn’t
called him back, and he must be worried. All this runs like quicksilver through Tom’s head as he gets to his feet. He puts the almost empty bottle of beer down on a side table and squints into the dark.

  It’s not Dan coming toward him in the dark, he sees with dismay—it’s Brigid. He doesn’t want to talk to Brigid. He wants to go back inside the house and close the door, but he can’t exactly do that.

  Brigid always makes him feel uncomfortable. He’d been so intimate with her, so unrestrained. There was something reckless and exciting about her that he found irresistible at first, and that touched something reckless in him. But she soon became too intense for him, too much; he felt that she might swallow him whole. He never knew what to expect from her; she was too emotional. When he broke it off with her he’d had quite a few anxious weeks—afraid that she would tell her husband about them and he would throw her out, and that she’d come banging on his door. Or later, that she would tell Karen, embellishing what happened with lies, and destroy their promising new relationship. But she seemed to calm down. And then, quite unexpectedly, she’d become such good friends with his wife. There was nothing he could do about that.

  “Hi, Brigid,” he says. He says it crisply, enunciating carefully. He’s not drunk, after three fast beers on an empty stomach. He’s what might be called “happy,” except that he’s not happy at all. Tom realizes rather suddenly that he doesn’t want to be alone. “Would you like a drink?” he asks her.

  She looks at him as if surprised. “I knocked at the front, but nobody answered. I came over to talk to Karen,” Brigid says. “Is she here?”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” Tom says, and he can hear the bitterness in his own voice coming across loud and clear.

  “What’s wrong?” Brigid asks.

  He sees her eyes taking in how wrecked he looks, sliding to the beer bottle on the side table.

  Tom knows that it would be foolish to unburden himself to Brigid, but there’s no one else right now. He realizes how terribly lonely he feels without Karen. He’s never felt so lonely in his life.