by Shari Lapena
She’s glad to be alone, for now. If she can’t have Tom, she doesn’t want anybody. She will bide her time.
—
The weeks pass and the summer slips gradually into autumn. The leaves have turned orange and yellow and red, and the air is crisp, especially in the morning. Tom has found a new job with a rival accounting firm, and he is once again working downtown in a high-rise office building, doing excellent work as a senior accountant and wondering about his chances of making partner. Maybe next year he will make the time to take up golf.
Karen’s happy again, for which Tom is grateful. And Tom is happy, or as happy as he can ever be, now that life has shown him just what it can do to you. Tom will never again live in a comfortable, unsuspecting bubble, thinking that nothing bad is ever going to happen. He knows better now. He worries sometimes that Brigid will confront him, that she’ll come running out of her house with her hair all a mess, her expression wild, and try to put out his eyes with her knitting needles.
They’re waiting for a sign to go up on the lawn across the street. Now that Bob has left her, Tom and Karen hope that he’ll force Brigid to sell the house and move into something smaller, somewhere else. Tom has twice screwed up his courage and called Bob at work to ask him about their intentions regarding the house. But Bob refused to take his calls. He thinks about Bob sometimes, always with guilt and regret. If the Cruikshanks don’t put their house up for sale, Tom and Karen may have to sell theirs. How can they live across the street from a crazy woman who’s obsessed with him? It’s unnerving. Tom would like to move, but nothing is selling right now and they would take a big loss. Better that the Cruikshanks sell, since they’re divorcing anyway. So Tom and Karen are staying put for the time being.
It’s not ideal.
Chapter Forty-nine
Karen sees Tom off to work and returns to the kitchen and finishes her cup of coffee. She’s in a buoyant mood. She’s taking the train into New York City today, to treat herself to a day of shopping.
She gathers up her purse and keys and a fall jacket and carefully arms the security system. She checks across the street. It’s automatic now, the glance across to Brigid’s house, to see if the coast is clear. She certainly doesn’t want to run into Brigid.
Karen takes a city bus to the train station downtown. She’s going to take the express to New York. She loves the train. One of her favorite things is to look out at the passing scenery as the train eats up the miles, and think and plan and dream. She likes to pretend that she could be going anywhere, be anyone. She’s always been tempted by the road not taken.
She purchases her ticket and looks around, to make sure that Brigid isn’t there, somewhere, lurking. She starts. That woman over by the magazines, could that be Brigid, in different clothes? Karen’s entire body tenses. The woman turns, and Karen sees her profile. No, she’s someone else entirely. Karen tries to relax.
Finally she’s seated on the train, at the window. It’s not busy today, and the seat beside her is empty. Karen puts her handbag on the empty seat, hoping no one comes along and wants to sit there. She wants to be alone.
Over the last few weeks her memory has completely returned, in pieces at first, and then in a flood. Now she can look back, push that grimy door open in her mind’s eye, and watch everything unfold, the way it really happened. Dr. Fulton was right; it did come back, it just took time.
Now, she watches the landscape speed by, and thinks about Tom, about how much she loves him, how trusting he is. She really doesn’t deserve him.
It’s so sweet that he believes everything she tells him. He’s so protective—her knight in shining armor. She almost thinks that if Robert weren’t already dead, Tom would go after him for her, he’s so outraged by Robert’s terrible ill treatment of her. But she’s not a woman who needs a man’s protection. She’s never been that kind of woman. She’s the kind of woman from whom men need to be protected. The thought makes her smile.
She loves Tom. She loves him so much that it surprises her a little. She hopes that she will love him this way for the rest of her life. But just because she loves him, and he loves her, it doesn’t mean he knows her. What is love anyway, she thinks, but a grand illusion? We fall in love with an ideal, not a reality. Tom loves who he thinks she is. He’s proven himself to be remarkably adaptable in that regard. She loves who she thinks he is. And that’s the way it is the whole world over, she tells herself, watching out the train window, people falling in and out of love, as their perception of reality changes.
She is nobody’s victim. She’s not an abused or battered woman, and never has been. The idea almost makes her laugh. The day any man raises his hand to her will be the last day he’ll try that ever again.
Robert had never been abusive. He’d been a decent enough man, not terribly good, but not terribly bad either. But she knew that he could be violent if someone got in the way of his money. He ran with those sort of people. And he obviously knew how to pick a lock. She had never been in love with him. Tom is the only man she has ever been in love with. No, Robert was an opportunity. Because of Robert, she has a safety deposit box with Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City with more than two million dollars cash in it. Her safety net. And now he will never be able to find her and demand it back. He’s dead. She was always sure that if he found her again, he would kill her for it.
She remembers it all as she looks out the dirty window on her way into the city, how she met Robert in Vegas, at a casino. He was handsome and flashy—he had money and liked to spend it—whereas she had none. He was instantly taken with her. He told her that he dealt in antiques. That was true, but she soon realized that his antiques business provided him with an excellent cover for another role—part-time money launderer. Karen’s no dummy. She lived with him for a while, watching how he did things. Sometimes he had a lot of cash to put in the safe at home, hidden behind an uninspired oil painting in the bedroom. He never told her the combination. She spent months trying to figure it out.
They got married in one of those god-awful chapels in Vegas where sad, desperate people get married, but she didn’t care, she had a plan. He wanted to get married, so they got married. She’s always been a long-term planner. That’s how she’s gotten as far as she has. It’s only when she panics that things go wrong. She’s learned that the hard way.
She lived with Robert as his wife for three years. She kept an eye on the patterns of cash going in and out of the safe. She finally discovered where he hid the record of the combination, which he changed every week. That’s when she started going to the Open Arms in Las Vegas to build her story of being a battered wife. Because she knew then that she would be able to get the money out of the safe and that she would take it and leave him. She knew he wouldn’t report the stolen cash—he couldn’t. But she didn’t want him coming after her for it. She carefully planned her apparent suicide and her resurrection as Karen Fairfield. She knew that if he did come after her, and wanted his money back, she would have to kill him, and if she were ever caught, she would have her carefully built defense of battered wife ready.
But it shouldn’t have come to that. It should have been okay. She’d planned ahead for just such an eventuality. She acquired an unregistered gun that she was careful never to get her prints on. And she had her gloves. If she hadn’t lost her cool that night, it would have been fine. Just like Detective Rasbach said—she would have gotten away with murder, with no one the wiser.
But she was more rattled than expected when she actually heard Robert’s voice that night. And when it came to the moment she was face-to-face with him, and she had to kill him . . . it wasn’t as easy as she thought it would be. It wasn’t easy at all. She’s never been a violent person. Greedy, yes, but not violent. He looked so surprised when she lifted the gun and pointed it at him. Her hand was shaking; they could both see it. He didn’t think she had it in her. She couldn’t do it. He laughed. She was about to l
ower the gun when he lunged for her, and in a panic—she hadn’t meant to do it—she pulled the trigger. And then again, and again. She can still remember the kick of the gun in her hand, the explosion of gunshots to his chest and face, how sick it made her feel, the smell of the rubber gloves when she put her hand to her mouth to stop herself from retching.
If only she hadn’t panicked! If she’d kept her head she could have driven away and dropped the gun in the river. She could have snuck the gloves back into the kitchen and told Tom some simple lie about where she’d been. The police would have found Robert, figured out who he was, and learned that his wife had died years before. But there would have been absolutely nothing to connect her—Karen Krupp—to Robert’s death. If she hadn’t panicked and dropped the gloves and had her stupid accident.
If Rasbach hadn’t been so clever.
And if Brigid hadn’t followed her. That’s the second thing that almost did her in.
She hadn’t seen that coming.
But it all worked out. She’s actually grateful to Brigid. If Brigid hadn’t wanted Tom so desperately, if Brigid hadn’t followed her, and planted the gun, Karen would still be in jail.
And now Tom will never know the truth, because Robert is dead.
Karen is perfectly happy. She’s going into the city to check on her safety deposit box, and then she’ll go shopping. She will buy Tom a little gift. Life is good. She loves Tom, and she hopes their love story lasts forever. Maybe they will start trying in earnest for a baby.
She’ll have to find some way to come into some money at some point, so that she and Tom can actually enjoy the money that she went through so much effort to get—or part of it, anyway.
She’s sure she’ll think of something.
—
Brigid, alone in her empty house, sits at the window and watches and waits. She bides her time. The only sound is the clicking of her busy knitting needles. She’s so angry.
She knows Karen killed that man—Brigid was there—and yet she still got away with it. She got away with murder, even though Brigid told the truth about what she saw and heard that night. And Karen tried to turn it around on her, to make her look like the guilty one. How dare she.
And now Karen has everything she wants. Not only did she get away with murder, she still has Tom wrapped around her little finger. At least it looks that way. But perhaps not; it’s hard to tell from here. Brigid wishes she could be a fly on the wall inside that house. But she thinks Tom still loves Karen, in spite of everything. How can he still love her, she wails to herself, her heart beating in anguish, after everything she’s done, after all her lies? It’s outrageous. How can he not know that she’s a murderer? How can he believe her?
Brigid realizes that she blew it when she planted the gun. She should have left well enough alone. Her eyewitness account would have been enough. And now Karen has gotten away with murder, and humiliated her. Humiliated her in front of the police, her husband, their friends, everyone. Accusing her of murder, saying she planted the gun, that she stalked her inside the house. Charging her with trespassing, getting that ridiculous restraining order against her.
Karen obviously thinks Brigid’s not as clever as she is. Well, they’ll see about that.
Brigid isn’t giving up, and she’s not going away. She has a new plan. She’ll make Karen pay.
And—she has a secret. Brigid smiles and looks down at the item that she’s knitting with the utmost care: an impossibly small baby sweater in the softest ivory baby yarn she could find. She has lots of things to knit now. A matching bonnet and booties for the sweater on her lap. She’s also just finished the butter yellow baby sweater that she’d been making for someone else but abandoned a few weeks ago because working on it made her angry.
It doesn’t make her angry any more.
Brigid admires the adorable little sweater in her hands and her heart swells. She lifts her eyes to the house across the street.
Everything is going to be perfect.
SHARI LAPENA worked as a lawyer and as an English teacher before turning to writing fiction. Her suspense debut, The Couple Next Door, was a New York Times and an international bestseller. A Stranger in the House is her second thriller.
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