Just Between Us

“What did he do to you?” I said to Heather, picturing her hiding from Viktor. “Are you bleeding badly? Can he get to you?”

“No!” A long, drawn-out wail.

“Where is he?”

She didn’t answer, her sobs increasing. I tried to listen for background noise, expecting to hear Viktor pounding on their bedroom door, but it was impossible to make out any sounds beyond her wails.

“Heather, where is he? Where is Viktor?”

“He’s dead!”





chapter thirteen





ALISON


What is it about the dark that transforms the ordinary into something frightening and otherworldly? The plane trees along the narrow, winding road were ghostly in the headlights, their branches outstretched like arms reaching to stop me as I raced toward Heather’s house. My pulse was racing just as fast. At a traffic light I cried out at the sudden flutter of a large gray moth batting against my windshield. How was that creature alive in this cold? How could Viktor be dead? I struggled to believe it. Julie didn’t seem to believe it either. “He’s dead?” she repeated when I called her from the car.

“I don’t know—that’s what Heather says. I’m on my way to her house. Call Sarah, okay?”

“Yes, of course. Maybe it’s a mistake?”

“Maybe.”

But Julie hadn’t heard Heather’s voice, her panic. “Hurry,” she’d sobbed on the phone to me. “Hurry, please!”

I almost missed the entrance to her house; the gas lamps that topped the stone pillars weren’t lit. Braking hard, I quickly reversed and jerked the wheel to turn onto her drive, the grind and groan of my car’s engine jarringly loud. The lights that lined either side of the road weren’t lit either, and I jumped as a branch from a bare forsythia bush brushed against my car.

The drive wound up and up, seeming twice as long as it did in the daytime, and I felt a slight panic that it would go on forever. Finally I reached the top of the hill and the house came into view, lights blazing from the first-floor windows and pouring from an open bay in the three-car garage to the right. As I parked, I saw a dark shadow step into the light of the open garage door, a figure in black, pacing nervously. It was Heather, wearing jeans and a black turtleneck, her blond hair in disarray.

“What happened?” I said breathlessly as I got out of the car.

She pointed toward the open garage door, giving me an unblinking stare, clearly in shock. As I hurried toward her, another car crested the hill, the sweep of the headlights startling both of us. It was Julie, and as she stepped out of her car, Sarah’s car pulled in behind her.

“I shot him,” Heather said, and then she just kept repeating it, “I shot him, I shot him,” her voice as blank as her face, while she tugged at the fingers of one fine-boned hand, then the other.

Sarah pushed past her into the garage, and I called after her, “Careful! Don’t touch anything.” Julie looked from Heather to the open door and back again. Then we heard Sarah moan, “Oh, God,” and Julie followed me as I headed into the garage.

Viktor’s bottle-green Mercedes was parked inside, but the lights were on, and now that I was close I could hear the faint pinging of a key left in the ignition. I saw a foot first, clad in a black leather men’s dress shoe, sticking out of the open driver’s door. As I got closer, I saw Viktor’s body slumped sideways in the driver’s seat, his head falling forward onto the passenger side. He might have been napping except for the gaping wound in the back of his head. Blood and what I guessed was brain matter, a dark, sticky mass in his light brown hair, dripped in rivulets onto his face and pooled on the leather passenger seat. There was an overpowering smell, like raw meat, with a faint rotten-egg odor on top of it. I gagged, rearing back and covering my mouth.

“Jesus!” Julie cried. “What happened? What did you do?”

“I had to do it, he was going to kill me,” Heather said in a dull voice behind us.

“Where’s Daniel?” I asked. I looked around, terrified that he’d seen this final, awful violence between his parents.

Heather was staring at the car. Up close, under the garage lights, we could see that she had a fine mist of blood freckling her face and hair and spattered across her shirt.

“Heather?” Sarah snapped her fingers in front of the blank face. “Daniel. Where’s Daniel?”

“He’s not here.” Her voice was a scary monotone. A new chilling fear swept through me—had she killed him, too, in some misguided act of motherly love?

“Where is he?” I persisted.

She finally blinked, looking away from the car to me. It seemed to take her forever to form the words. “He’s with Viktor’s mother.”

“Thank God,” I said. She was trembling and I reached to try to comfort her, only then realizing that I was trembling, too.

“Where’s the gun?” Julie asked.

Heather slowly raised a finger, pointing, and we saw a small black handgun lying in a corner of the garage floor as if it had been tossed or kicked over there.

“We need to call the police,” I said. “This was self-defense, the police will understand.” I pulled out my cell phone, only to have it snatched away by Sarah.

“Don’t,” she said.

“We have to call now,” I said, trying to take it back from her. “The blood is congealing.”

The word made Julie moan, but Sarah only shook her head. “Not yet. Not until we know what happened.”

I realized she was right. What would the police say if they saw Viktor’s body and his blood spattered all over Heather? Sarah gave me back my phone and I slipped it into my coat pocket as she leaned into the open driver’s door, careful not to touch anything. “Where were you standing when you shot him, Heather?” she asked as she stepped back, crossing around the front of the car to peer in through the passenger window.

“Over there,” Heather said, pointing to a spot about five feet from the car where Julie was standing. Julie immediately moved away, as if that spot was tainted.

Sarah stepped back around the car to us and said to me in a low voice, “He was shot in the back of the head.”

“Did Viktor hit you?” Julie said, sounding desperate. “Is that what happened? He was hurting you?”

Heather nodded slowly. “He was going to kill me.”

I looked around the garage, trying to make sense of it. It was the closest bay to the house, with a connecting door, and against the back wall, beyond Viktor’s car, was a workbench with drawers and some tools mounted with hooks. It was hard to imagine Viktor, much less Heather, using any of them; they looked untouched. Viktor was inside his car and nothing else seemed out of place. “Did he have the gun?”

Heather shook her head, clearly still dazed.

“Listen, you need to start at the beginning and tell us everything,” Sarah said. “Now, Heather!” The last came out as a snap and Heather flinched.

“Sarah, don’t,” I said in a reproving tone, but she wheeled on me.

“We don’t have time to waste,” she barked, eyes wild and small body trembling.

That was when I noticed just how cold it was in the garage. The rest of us had coats or down vests over sweatpants or pajamas, but Heather didn’t and her feet were bare and almost blue with cold against the concrete floor.

“She’s in shock, I’ll go get her a coat and shoes,” Julie said, starting for the door into the house. I stepped in front of her.

“Wait, this is a crime scene. We can’t touch anything.”

As I said that, Heather started talking, the story spilling out in a monotone. “I was going to leave him. He was supposed to be at the hospital late—an emergency surgery—so I sent Daniel to stay with his grandmother while I packed. But the surgery was canceled and Viktor came home early. When he saw the suitcase he started yelling—he shoved me up against the wall and said the only way I was leaving him was in a body bag.”

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