“Let’s go inside,” I said, ignoring the questions and ushering them to the first garage door. Heather had texted me the code for the keypad and I typed it in, mind racing. Was it true about the prenup or had the detective been making things up to goad me? But why would he do that? And why was he asking questions about Heather at all?
I was so jittery that I knocked over some terra-cotta pots stacked inside the garage. One of them cracked wide while another rolled out onto the driveway, and I had to chase after it and put them back into some semblance of order.
Daniel led the way inside, passing the laundry room into the kitchen, tossing his backpack on the tile floor.
“What do you do after school, Daniel?” I said. “Does your mom make you a snack?” It felt strange to be there. I hadn’t been in the house since I’d come to retrieve the blackmail letter and then I’d gotten no farther than the entryway. The night Heather shot Viktor seemed a lifetime ago.
“I make my own snack,” Daniel said with a casualness that clearly impressed Lucy. He climbed on a stepstool to reach a cupboard, getting out a package of cookies, which he brought over to the island to share with Lucy and Matthew. She was equally impressed when Daniel produced his iPad and brought up some Japanese anime for the three of them to watch.
“Your house is fun,” she said, shooting me a look that said I needed to up my game.
I got out some milk and poured them each a glass, noticing the fridge didn’t have much in it beyond some Chinese take-out containers, and there were dirty dishes stacked in the sink. Clearly the household’s exacting standards had died along with Viktor.
My phone pinged with another text from Heather: Be there soon—sorry! A smiling emoticon. While the kids chattered over their snack and video, I walked out of the room and called Sarah. “Did you know that Heather had a prenuptial agreement?”
“Really? I guess it doesn’t surprise me.” She sounded distracted and I could hear children in the background.
“You don’t think it’s odd that she never mentioned it? Especially when we were trying to convince her to leave Viktor?”
“It’s pretty common in a certain income bracket,” she said, adding grimly, “You and I just aren’t in that bracket.”
“No wonder she wouldn’t consider leaving him—she’d get nothing.”
“She might have been able to contest it—maybe used the abuse as leverage—but it doesn’t really matter anymore.”
“Well, the police certainly seem interested.”
“What?” Now I had her attention. “How do you know that? What’s going on?” She listened intently as I described running into Detective Tedesco on Heather’s doorstep, before asking me to repeat what he’d said. “He’s just fishing—if he knew anything they would have made an arrest.”
“They know it wasn’t a carjacking.”
“We don’t know that. And it doesn’t matter. We just have to hold tight and not say anything. You didn’t tell him anything, did you?”
“Of course not.”
“Good. Good, then we’re fine.” One of Sarah’s children started wailing in the background. “Look, I’ve got to go, but whatever you do, don’t tell Heather what he was asking.”
“Why?”
“It’ll just scare her. We don’t want her making any stupid moves. We just have to stay the course.”
She hung up and I paced nervously around the house, unable to sit still. If the police were looking into Heather’s background, what else could they know? We shouldn’t have been talking about it over the phone. Could the police listen in on cell-phone conversations? Could they have planted cameras in the house?
I thought I heard a noise from upstairs and suddenly remembered Viktor’s mother. Could she have arrived while Heather was out and Tedesco didn’t mention it? What if she was upstairs lurking, listening in on my conversation? I hurried up the stairs, unable to stop myself from checking all the rooms. It was quiet on the second floor, my footfalls sinking in the plush carpeting. The bed in the guest room was neatly made and there weren’t any clothes hanging in the closet. Clearly Anna had left. Could she be the reason there had been a prenup? She didn’t seem to trust Heather at all.
I glanced in the master bedroom and saw that the bed was unmade, covers thrown back and rumpled. There were clothes tossed over a chair, as if Heather hadn’t been able to decide on an outfit. Daniel’s room seemed equally untidy, the bed a tangled mess of sheets, LEGOs, and other toys cluttering the floor. What had happened to the cleaners?
There were family photos lining the upstairs hall, and I was surprised to see one of a dark-haired woman holding an infant. She looked vaguely familiar and I suddenly realized it was Janice Lysenko, Viktor’s first wife, with Daniel in her arms. How had Heather felt about having the first wife’s picture on display? It would have bothered me. And there was something odd about the photo. Janice was smiling, but there were dark circles under her eyes and what was it about the hair? I peered at it closely. Could that be a wig? I remembered that colleague of Viktor’s at the post-funeral luncheon. “She died of cancer.” I hadn’t believed him. I’d thought he was just confusing Janice with someone else or that Viktor had told people a lie to cover up the abuse, but not now, not looking at that photo, at the fake hair and that hollowed face. Could it have been true? Had Janice Lysenko died of cancer?
The noise of a car engine startled me and I hurried down the stairs as I heard the faint whir of the garage door opening. Back in the kitchen, the kids had eaten nearly the entire package of cookies. Matthew gave me a slightly guilty look as he swallowed the last of his milk, his mouth ringed with crumbs. His sister and Daniel were staring, glassy-eyed, at the anime playing on his tablet.
The door from the garage opened. “Hello, hello!” Heather rushed in to the kitchen, her arms loaded down with a purse and a shopping bag. “I’m so sorry I’m late.” She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and then dropped a kiss on Daniel’s head. “Oh, I’m glad you found something to eat. This has been such a crazy day.” She placed her bags on the free stool at the island and brushed strands of hair off her face.
She looked effortlessly beautiful as she always did—a leather jacket open over a cream-colored sweater and jeans, diamond studs in her ears, a simple gold bracelet dancing from her thin wrist. “Remind me never to hit Nordstrom and the doctor in the same day again,” she said with a light laugh. “Foot pain followed by pelvic pain.” She unzipped her high-heeled suede ankle boots and wiggled her toes, sighing with relief.
“How are you feeling?” I asked, nodding at her belly, conscious of the kids. At some point she was really going to have to tell Daniel.
“Great, I feel great. Everything’s fine so far.” She patted her still nonexistent stomach and gave me a secret smile.
She seemed so relaxed, and her skin seemed to glow in the afternoon sun streaming through the kitchen window. It felt oddly surreal, as if I’d imagined everything bad that had happened in this kitchen, in that garage. As if I’d conjured up that grinning detective. My gaze fell on the shopping bag. She was shopping at Nordstrom—what if the detective had seen her with the bag? It wasn’t exactly standard grieving widow behavior, and I wondered what Sarah would make of it, when she’d had to sell furniture to raise her $5,000.
“C’mon kids, it’s time to go,” I said, clapping my hands to pry their attention away from the screen.
“Just five minutes,” Lucy pleaded, still staring at the anime. “We’re watching something.”
“Two minutes—we’ve got to get going.”
“Thank you so much for picking up Daniel,” Heather said. “I’m sorry to interrupt your afternoon.”
“I was happy to help out,” I said. “By the way, you had a visitor.”
“Who?”
“Lou Tedesco. That short detective.”
“Oh, Jesus, not him again.” She sounded more annoyed than concerned. “What did he want this time? Did he say?”
“I don’t know.” I hesitated, thinking of Sarah’s warning, but she hadn’t seen how Heather was acting—cheerful and relaxed, going out for a day of shopping as if she hadn’t a care in the world. “He was asking a lot of questions—so be careful.”
“What kind of questions?”