“A friend of Mommy’s got hurt,” Michael said. “But Mommy’s okay.”
A friend. He hadn’t been a friend at all; he was a monster. I wanted to correct Michael, it was on the tip of my tongue, but I caught myself just in time. I couldn’t say anything negative about Viktor—not now, not ever again.
“Let me finish up in here, you go call Heather,” Michael offered. It was exactly what I’d wanted to do all day, but now I had a legitimate reason to do so. I gave him a grateful smile and carried my cell phone upstairs to the bedroom to talk, ostensibly so I wouldn’t disturb the children.
It was the first time I’d ever been nervous dialing her number. I swallowed hard as it started ringing. Three, six, nine rings and no one had picked up. Maybe she was talking to someone else. I went to push the off button and that’s when I heard her breathy “Hello?”
“Heather? I just heard the news. I’m so sorry.” My voice sounded stilted, false—it was harder sticking to the script we’d all agreed on than I’d thought it would be.
“Hi, Alison. Thank you. Hold on a second.” A muffled sound and I heard her say to someone else, “It’s a friend calling—I’m going to take it upstairs.” Then back to me. “You heard the news? They think it was a carjacking.”
“What on earth happened?” I played along, letting her spin the story we’d created for her to tell the police. How she fell asleep before Viktor came home, just like she did many nights, and how she didn’t realize he hadn’t made it home until the morning. How she’d assumed it had something to do with a patient, but then she’d called the hospital and he wasn’t there either.
“That’s when I started to worry,” she said. I heard the sound of a door closing, and then Heather’s voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s okay, I’m alone now.”
“What’s happening? Are the police there?”
“They’ve gone for now. They might come back tomorrow to give me more details on the investigation. Viktor’s mother is here and his aunt.”
“Oh God. How’s that going?”
“It’s okay; they’re watching Daniel.”
“How was it with the police?”
“They asked a lot of questions. A lot. About Viktor’s schedule, about when he usually got home, about why I didn’t call until the morning.”
“You explained that, right?”
“Yes, of course. I said everything we talked about.”
“It shouldn’t take too long then; this will all be over soon.”
“Yes, soon.” She yawned. “I’m beyond tired. How about you?”
“Going off adrenaline. Did you have to identify the—that is—Viktor?”
“Yes.” I thought I heard a hitch in her voice, but Heather held it together.
“Just hang in there; I know it’s hard. When will they release his body?” My voice dipped on the last words; it felt awful to refer to Viktor that way even though he’d been such a rotten person.
“Not until after the autopsy,” Heather said. I heard a knock and Heather said in a normal voice, “Come in.” In the background I could hear a thickly accented female voice say, “Daniel needs his mother,” before Heather said back into the phone, “Thank you for calling,” and hung up.
The autopsy. I hadn’t thought about that, but of course there would have to be one. I tried to picture Viktor lying on a medical examiner’s table, but all I could visualize was a pale, waxy, male figure, his features blurred so that I couldn’t really see him. Death had reduced him to an object—a body, not a man.
chapter seventeen
JULIE
By the next morning, the news of Viktor’s death was all over town. A mother I barely knew flagged me down in the queue at the bus stop to ask breathlessly if I’d heard. “It’s just terrible,” she said, although her eyes were alight with the excitement of having something this juicy to discuss. “Can you believe it was a carjacking? In Sewickley?” Her tone suggested that things like that were never, ever supposed to happen here. That was for other neighborhoods, not ours. When I broke the news to Brian, he offered to fly home immediately, but I dissuaded him. “It’s just a few days,” I said, as if I wanted him with me, when having him gone actually reduced some of the stress. With him out of town, I could talk freely with my friends without worrying about being overheard.
“Viktor can’t be dead,” he kept repeating in a stunned voice. “I just saw him last month at that dinner—you remember, that cancer fundraiser? I hope they catch the son-of-a-bitch who did this.” I was glad he couldn’t see me blanch.
I made a quick stop at the office to pick up some OPEN HOUSE signs, and one of the other agents saw me from across the room and came scurrying over so fast on her high heels that I was surprised she didn’t twist an ankle. She insisted on repeating every detail from the news coverage of the crime even after I said I’d heard. “You’re friends with his wife, right?” she said. “Have you talked to her?”
“Not yet.” I’d tried to call, but Heather hadn’t answered her phone and I was afraid any voice mail I left would sound fake. A sweet smell of sugar and grease wafted from an open box of doughnuts on the front desk. I grabbed one mindlessly, taking a big bite as if that could quell my fear and frustration.
“I just don’t feel safe anymore,” the agent said, looking nervously around our bland office as if she expected a carjacker to leap out from behind someone’s desk or one of the potted ferns. I didn’t feel safe either, but for entirely different reasons. What I wanted to do was go home, lock the door, and hide until Viktor Lysenko’s death was long forgotten. But I couldn’t do that. I had appointments and I had to keep up the pretense that my only involvement was as someone deeply sorry for my good friend’s tragic loss. As I pulled back into my driveway around lunchtime, I spotted my neighbor, Christine Connelly, shivering outside on her lawn with her little dog. She took a hand out of her parka to wave, and it was too late to pretend I didn’t see her. She’s sixtysomething with grown kids, an irritating woman at the best of times, nosy about my family’s comings and goings, always making cryptic comments that leave me feeling off-balance. The kids love her, though, because she gives out lots of candy at Halloween and her Yorkie is adorable.
“Julie, hi!” she called, tramping across the remnants of snow to my driveway in fur-lined boots as I got out of my car, while Cinnamon trotted more gingerly behind her. “Glad I caught you,” she said, pushing back blowing strands of her salt-and-pepper hair. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Hi Christine, I’m in a hurry today,” I said, glancing at my phone, trying to pretend that I had urgent business to attend to, but she didn’t budge.
“It’ll only take a minute,” she said, and I braced myself to hear about the carjacking for the third time, but she surprised me. “I saw you the other night and I just wanted to make sure that everything’s okay.”
The chill wind felt as if it had gone right through me. “The other night?” I managed to say, my tongue suddenly heavy, my mouth dry.
“Yes, I saw you leaving. After midnight, wasn’t it? I was out with Cinnamon and I saw you pull out and you were going so fast I just knew something had to be wrong.”
For what felt like an endless moment, I just stared at her, before self-preservation kicked in. “Oh, yes, the other night. I had to take Aubrey to the ER—she had a fever.” Borrowing one of Owen’s recent stories about a classmate.
“Oh, my! Is she okay?”
“Yes, she’s fine,” I said. At least that wasn’t a lie. “It spiked really high. Over a hundred and four. I was worried.”
“Of course you were,” Christine said. “What caused it?”
“They don’t know, but they gave her antibiotics.” I bent down to pet Cinnamon, desperate to change the subject. “How is this little sweetie handling the cold?”