The Widower's Wife: A Thriller (33 page)

Sophia whimpered.

“Okay. Okay,” I said.

“After the policy pays, Soph, you’ll get a nice, new nanny, and later, we’ll send you to a great boarding school. Someplace far away. Maybe there you’d even be able to see Mommy. As long as she pretends to be someone else.”

Eve’s hand moved from my kid’s chest to her chin. She clasped it and turned her head so that the gun pressed against my daughter’s forehead. The sight of my kid staring down the barrel robbed me of my fight. Tears swam in my eyes.

She doesn’t know what a gun looks like
, I thought.
She won’t know what it is
.
Please, God, don’t let her realize
.

“If Mommy ever reveals her existence,” Eve continued, “the policy will become void and we won’t be able to take care of you anymore. I’ll have to take you to the soundproof basement to watch a movie—a very sad movie that your Mommy doesn’t want you to see.”

“Please.” My voice cracked. “Stop pointing that at her.”

“Then leave,” Eve commanded, as though she were shouting at a dog. “Go play dead.”

I opened the side door beside the garage, leading outside. Eve flinched as the bell dinged. Her movement stopped my heart.

“Say good-bye to Mommy,” she said to Sophia.

Tears tumbled down my daughter’s cheeks, but she didn’t wail or scream. She sensed the danger.

The side door locked behind me. I watched through the transom window as Eve put the gun back into her pocket and led my child toward the alarm system. She armed it with Tom’s code. Afterward, she led my baby up the back stairs, to Sophia’s hideout beneath the covers.

My body shuddered with rage and sadness. Hopelessness. I had no choice. To keep my daughter alive, I would have to stay dead.

41

December 4

R
yan pressed the accelerator to the rubber mat. The revelation about Tom’s past cast Eve’s refusal to return his calls in a new light. Maybe she wasn’t avoiding him. Maybe she, like the other women in Tom’s past, had become expendable.

He called Vivienne while weaving in and out of the light traffic heading to the outer boroughs, bringing her up to date on Camilla’s testimony and Tom’s history. She agreed to meet him at Eve’s apartment. Her backup was a favor. With Michael out of the picture, she wasn’t on the case, nor would she be unless he could convince a prosecutor that Tom had killed his wife for the insurance benefit.

It took him fifty minutes to get to Eve’s, with traffic. He pulled up to a major crime scene. Police cars lined the street in front of Eve’s building. Most of them were marked. Blue-and-white was bad. It meant that whatever had happened no longer required discretion.

He saw Vivienne as he approached the building. She stood on the landing, just outside the building’s front doors. Her arms were folded around her small torso.

“We were too late,” she said, her face grim.

Ryan’s gut clenched. “Where is she?”

Vivienne jerked her head toward the building’s entrance, and together they went inside, passing the large doorman on the way to the elevator.

Upstairs, the door to Eve’s apartment hung open. Ryan got a whiff of fresh blood and fireworks. The smell left a metallic taste on his tongue.

The victim lay sprawled on the loveseat. From the neck down, she appeared normal. Pretty. Her shapely legs stretched out in front of her, extending from underneath a royal-blue dress that flared around her thighs. Above the neck was a disaster. Her head, or what was left of it, hung over the back of the chair. There was a large hole in her temple. Brain fragments stained her blond hair red.

The sight of the wound sent Ryan’s leg pulsing. He winced at the memory of his own injury, his thigh peeled back and exposed like the back of Eve’s skull.

Vivienne’s partner, David, stood in front of the body, talking to a man in rubber gloves. The medical examiner. Ryan sidled up next to him, tearing his eyes away from Eve’s ruined face.

“Gunshot to the head, close range,” said David. “Her fingerprints on the trigger. The weapon’s registered to her.” David turned to his partner. “The television had been blasting when the cops first came in, masking the sound of any gunshot. Her roommate found her.” He pointed to the coffee table. “There was a suicide note.”

Vivienne acknowledged David’s report with a nod. She looked at Ryan.

“Note is bullshit.” Ryan rubbed his nose. The smell was getting to him. “Pretty young women don’t shoot themselves.”

David made a face. Ryan ignored it. Politically correct or not, it was true. Young women who killed themselves took pills or, in rare cases, inhaled toxic fumes from the car. The ones intent on dying more dramatically slit their wrists. The profile for female suicide by shooting victims was different: middle-aged, married, and often significantly overweight, which made poisoning more difficult because of the required quantity of medicine.

“The note was addressed to her parents,” David said. “It was filled with the usual relationship drama. She fell for a married man and couldn’t bear the thought of living without him. He
doesn’t want her.” David looked at three uniforms hovering by the desk. “They’ve probably bagged it.”

“Has anyone called her folks yet?” Ryan asked.

“Local detectives did an hour ago, right after they reported to the scene.” David said. “The parents were surprised, but not entirely shocked. She’s been on and off psych meds for years. Borderline personality disorder.”

Ryan shook his head. Tom knew how to pick his victims. “No way she shot herself.”

David pointed to two plainclothes cops standing in the kitchen. “They talked to the roommate.”

Vivienne walked over to the detectives. Ryan didn’t follow. His ears filled with the sound of his own heartbeat, blocking out Vivienne’s questions. He wanted out of here. Blood and guts weren’t in his job description. Besides, he didn’t need to hear detectives talk about planned handwriting analysis or gunshot residue or prints. Tom wasn’t an idiot. He would have worn gloves when he forced Eve’s hand to hold the gun and put it to her temple. He would have had a gun on her when she wrote the note.

The only question Ryan had was what had Tom done with Sophia while killing Eve? Had he left her with Lena? Was Lena at the house now, ready to provide Tom with another false alibi? Was Lena next on his list?

Vivienne was waving him over. His leg throbbed with remembered pain as he limped over to her. “I told the guys that you were the one calling the cell and brought them up to speed on the Bacon case.” She gestured to the detectives. “Your apartment was going to be their next stop.”

The two men eyed him as though he hadn’t been fully crossed off the suspect list. One carried a notepad in his hand. Ryan pointed to it. “You guys have to track down a woman named Lena Mclean. She works at a wine store in Fort Lee, New Jersey, called the Wine Thief. She was also seeing Tom. My guess is that he was dumping the victim for Lena. Eve didn’t take kindly to it, maybe threatened to talk to me about Tom wife’s death, and . . .” Ryan trailed off. He didn’t need to state the obvious.

The detective scrawled as Ryan spoke. “She might be in danger. He’ll want her to either provide him with an alibi or disappear.”

“What about Tom?” The detective addressed his question to Vivienne. “You have enough to book him on his wife’s death?”

“Like I said, the body is in the Atlantic Ocean.” Vivienne coughed. The smell had to be getting to her too. “All we’ve got is a shaky alibi, abuse allegations, and motive. And now the violent death of the woman that Ana’s friend says was seeing Tom and might have known something about him plotting his wife’s death.”

“It’s got to be enough probable cause for an arrest,” Ryan said. “And either way, we don’t have time to gather more. We’ve got to get to him before he kills anyone else.”

42

December 4

A
white minivan swerved in front of a brick mansion, ready to collect the women shivering at the curb beside trash bags full of cleaning supplies and take us to our sixth house of the day. I loved and loathed the appearance of the car. For the past four months, it had transported me to and from my old neighborhood, dropping me at one lavish home after another until it dumped me back at the Newark row house where I rented a room. Without the vehicle, I wouldn’t be able to scrub toilets and wipe hair from bathroom drains for ten hours. But I also wouldn’t be able to see my daughter.

The side of the van featured a cartoon decal of the robot maid in
The Jetsons
. A tagline scrawled across the sliding door read, “Robomaids: Out with the Dirt, in with the Sparkle.” When I first saw the vehicle outside my apartment window, more than three months ago, I’d felt this weird sense of déjà vu. It was the same car that had made the rounds in my old town, heading from house to house with its brigade of women, Swiffers over their shoulders like old-fashioned muskets. I thought it strange, and somehow fitting, that I’d now be one of the nameless servants sweeping through town. Part of me had always felt that way.

The van’s sliding door opened. I filed in along with six other women. We scrunched inside, our thighs touching, butt cheeks raised off the seats to make more room. Nobody wore safety belts. Our gear went on the floor: paper towel rolls, scrub brushes,
brooms, buckets, mops. The van’s interior smelled like a hospital, all bleach and musty linens.

I squeezed between a broad woman and a girl with dark-brown hair, bleached at the ends. They smiled at me and then turned away. Both women spoke Spanish, some English. I wasn’t letting on that I was fluent in English, lest it raise questions about my identity and how I’d ended up in debt to coyotes. To my coworkers, I was near mute. I think they believed me pathologically shy, or dumb.

The van traveled east, up the hill toward my old street, a block marked by large homes and landscaped properties, all maintained by immigrants. My familiar road welcomed like a wet doormat. It was Friday. The worst and best day of the week.

Dina’s house was cleaned on Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons. Hers was the one home where I had a chance of being recognized. I feared her calling the cops, negating my death benefit and pushing Eve to retaliate against my child. But it was also at Dina’s that I could watch out the window for a glimpse of my baby.

As the van turned onto my block, my body hardened into cheap armor. I needed to endure this. As long as I stayed “dead,” Eve and Tom had to keep Sophia as healthy and happy as possible. If they abused her, my parents could get custody and control the money.

The driver slowed as she passed the stucco exterior of my French-styled château before pulling into my former neighbors’ massive home. Dina had built nearly to the property line. Sophia’s bedroom window looked straight into her master bathroom, a fact that had always made me pull her curtains closed.

The woman closest to the door slid it open. I grabbed a bucket, mop, and a milk jug filled with a mixture of white vinegar and baking soda. I stepped outside, feet from my former front door.

We passed columns worthy of the Lincoln Memorial and stood in Dina’s covered archway waiting for her to invite us inside. Memories of a different time flashed before me. A
Christmas party. Tom in a velvet blazer. Mistletoe dangling above marble floors. A kiss. Laughter. Manhattans on silver trays passing above my pregnant belly. I’d never fit in here.

The lead woman rang the doorbell a second time. I dropped my gaze to my canvas sneakers, purchased from a convenience store along with blond hair dye and the oversized reading glasses that hid my sometimes faux-blue eyes. Dina had countless boxes of disposable colored contacts beneath the sink in her master bath. I’d taken a twelve pack the day I’d heard her going on about an insurance investigator. I’d needed a better disguise than glasses and dyed hair, especially once I’d agreed to meet with him in person. Had he recognized me, I would have surely been charged with attempted fraud and lost my insurance for Sophia’s safety.

I focused my eyes on the floor as the mistress of the mansion opened the door for us. I recognized her sky-high Jimmy Choo boots. Stilettos ruined floors, yet Dina still stomped around her house in heels.

I shuffled into the foyer behind the other women. We all removed our shoes and set them at the edge of the gray-veined marble floor. Dina said something about starting upstairs and then clacked into the living room.

I headed to the first bathroom, cleaning supplies in hand. Dina’s master bathroom reminded me of an overdecorated vanilla birthday cake, all cream and curved lines. A vanity ran alongside one whole wall of the room. The mirror above it had to be at least twelve feet long. Toiletries were scattered atop the counter: retinol, bronzer, blush, antiaging eye serum, and a box of Dina’s signature eye color.

I caught the reflection of my daughter’s bedroom in the mirror. Sophia was sitting on her floor, having a tea party with a circle of stuffed animals. The backside of her curtains framed her play, as though I were watching a silent film in a movie theater. I touched her reflection in the glass. Her image was only about the size of my thumb. I wanted to wave to her, to open the window and try to talk, but I couldn’t. If Eve saw, she might flee with Sophia to somewhere I’d never find them.

Tears streaked the cheeks of the unfamiliar blonde in the mirror. The woman weeping in front of me was gaunt with goofy glasses perched on jutting cheekbones, a nerdy heroin addict. My bangs, which had once defined my look, had completely grown out, elongating my face. The blond hair made my skin tone somehow darker. I looked more ethnic as a towhead, and younger.

I told my reflection that my kid was okay. But I couldn’t convince myself. Even if Tom and Eve were trying to be model parents, Sophia would not feel loved—not by those two. As good a liar as Tom was, he’d never been able to fake emotion with her. She’d always seen through him. It was why she’d tried so hard to make his feelings genuine. If I couldn’t get her away from them, all that rejection would rub her emotions raw until she had scar tissue, until she was as numb and unfeeling as her father.