It was obvious why Heather wanted to hire cleaners. The disarray had grown since the last time I was there, the pile of dishes higher in the kitchen sink and a faint but unappetizing smell of days-old fried food. A layer of dust was visible on the mahogany furniture in the living room, and the carpets were in need of vacuuming. I passed Viktor’s study and peered inside. In all my visits to this house, I’d never been in that room before. It looked like a display in a furniture store, everything pristine and untouched. A large leather swivel chair sat behind an ornately carved dark wooden desk with a glossy sheen. There were floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves, complete with a library ladder. Each rung held a faint sprinkling of dust and there were deep grooves beneath the bottom legs as if the ladder had never been moved. Perhaps it hadn’t. Most of the books were fakes, I realized as I studied them more closely, whole sets of cardboard covered in cheap leather and gilt. There were a few real books, mostly medical textbooks, but otherwise the room looked straight out of a Hollywood film. I could picture the script scene description: “The library of a wealthy man.”
I scoured Viktor’s desk in vain, searching for confirmation of what I’d noticed at the hospital, on the calendar. It had finally become clear to me the night before as I lay in bed, long after Michael had fallen asleep, pondering those blue lines that had marked Viktor’s work schedule. I just needed to confirm what I’d realized, but for that I needed his own record keeping. He’d probably kept his schedule on his computer and that had been taken by the police, which made all of us extremely nervous. There was nothing in the desk drawers, just a stack of neatly arranged blank paper, pens and paper clips, a box of staples and a roll of breath mints. I found a single folder that had info relevant to utility bills—all of them in Viktor’s name. The bottom drawer of the desk was locked. I tried to pick it with a paper clip without success.
I climbed the stairs to the second floor, passing the photos of the dead, Viktor and Janice Lysenko, both of them smiling. Some of Viktor’s belongings had to be here; surely Heather hadn’t cleared everything out, not when the police were actively investigating.
The master bedroom closet still held his clothes. I brushed my hand over a long row of expensive suits before pulling open a stack of drawers on his side. Sweaters that seemed to be arranged by color. Underwear and socks. There was a collection of cuff links in the top drawer, little black-and-gold footballs, burnished gold disks, miniature Ukrainian flags, and a set to honor his career—gold buttons embossed with a pair of snakes curving around a winged staff. Sitting next to them was a small, neat stack of receipts.
Time was passing; I heard a clock chiming the hour as I flipped through the receipts, one after the other, but they were all recent, the top one dated one night before his death. I searched the rest of the drawer. Some loose coins and—mixed in with them, so I almost missed it—a small brass key.
I ran back downstairs to Viktor’s office, dropping to the floor next to his desk and trying the key in the locked drawer. It opened, the drawer sliding back soundlessly to reveal hanging files with financial and medical information. Of course they were well organized—I wondered if Viktor had ever been sloppy. I pulled out the file marked TAXES and found multiple manila envelopes inside, one marked DEDUCTIONS and another BUSINESS TRAVEL. I opened the latter over the desktop and several neatly clipped bundles of receipts plopped onto the leather blotter.
I sorted through each stack, searching for the time and date stamp on every receipt. It felt like it took forever, but it couldn’t really have been more than five minutes before I finally found what I’d been looking for. There, at the bottom of one stack, were several receipts from Asheville, North Carolina, dated from October 22, 23, and 24. There was a Starbucks receipt from North Carolina dated October 23. I was shaking as I pulled out my phone to text Sarah and Julie.
*
They showed up together, both of them arriving in Julie’s car, and I could tell why when I smelled the alcohol on Sarah’s breath as she approached the front door where I stood waiting. She sounded surprisingly lucid, if peevish, as she demanded, “Where’s Heather?”
“Come inside,” I said, ignoring her question. “Hurry up.” Julie seemed positively spooked, looking all around before she brushed past me to get inside. I locked the door behind them.
“What the hell are we doing here?” Sarah demanded. “The police could be watching, you know.”
I led the way into the kitchen, where I’d laid out the receipts along the smooth white marble island. “What’s wrong?” Julie asked, scanning the room. “Where’s Heather?”
“She’s picking up Daniel,” I said. “I needed to show you these.” I held out the receipts.
Julie peered at them before passing them to Sarah. “What is this? I don’t understand.”
“I went to the hospital the other day,” I said, and recounted my conversation with the personal assistant and what I’d learned about Janice Lysenko’s cause of death.
“Cancer?” Julie said. She looked confused. “I thought she fell down a flight of stairs—didn’t Heather tell us that’s how she died? Viktor pushed her—I mean, Heather might not have said that, but we all thought it, right?”
“Heather led us to believe that,” I said. “She led us to believe a lot of things.”
“I don’t understand—what does that have to do with these?” Sarah said, waving the receipts.
“Look at the dates,” I said.
She pulled them too close to her face and then back a bit as if she were having trouble focusing. “October twenty-second, twenty-third, twenty-fourth. So what?”
“Do you remember what happened on October twenty-third?”
“I don’t know,” Julie said, looking confused as she took the receipts back from Sarah and studied them again. “It was around the time of the fall play—but wasn’t that on the twenty-seventh?”
“October twenty-third was the day Viktor trashed this kitchen,” I said. “Remember? Only he couldn’t have trashed it because he wasn’t here. He was in Asheville, North Carolina, at a medical conference.”
Sarah stared at me, then down at the receipts. “Wait, that’s not—I mean, how can that be—” She struggled to form a coherent sentence.
“I don’t think that was the same date,” Julie said. “It must have been the week before.”
“It wasn’t. I checked against my own calendar. We had a playdate at Heather’s house that afternoon, remember?”
“This has got to be some sort of mistake,” Julie said, shaking her head. “Maybe the receipts are wrong, or maybe Viktor trashed the kitchen before he left on the trip?”
I shook my head. “There are other receipts—look at the dates, he was gone for days.”
“I don’t understand,” Sarah said. “If he didn’t do it, then who the hell did?”
Before I could say anything, we heard the garage door whirring open, and a minute later Heather appeared in the kitchen doorway. “What are you doing here?” she said, clearly surprised to see me, not to mention Julie and Sarah. She wore that same beautiful leather jacket over a loose blouse, with full makeup, and hair that looked professionally blown-out. Hardly the image of the tired, stressed-out, pregnant mom she’d sounded like on the phone.
Sarah spoke first, looking past Heather. “Where’s Daniel?”
“He’s at his grandmother’s.”
“I thought you were picking him up,” I said. “Or was that a lie, too?”
“What are you talking about?” Heather said, looking from one to the other of us.
Julie’s voice was hurt. “Why did you lie to us?”
“I didn’t lie,” Heather said. “He wanted to spend the night there so I let—”
“Viktor’s first wife died from cancer?” Sarah interrupted her, speaking loudly.
Heather’s gaze jumped to her, but she didn’t otherwise react. “So?”
“So you told us that she died from a fall.”
“Is that what this is about?” Heather sounded annoyed. “That I forgot to tell you that Janice had cancer?”
“You forgot?” Sarah scoffed. “How do you forget something like cancer?”
Before Heather could answer, if she was going to answer, Julie picked up the receipts and rushed to her side. “But Viktor trashed your kitchen that time, right? Look at these receipts—Alison says they prove that he wasn’t here that day.”
Heather made no move to take them, not reacting at all as she glanced at them. “I don’t remember when it was,” she said in a calm voice, “but you’ve obviously confused the date.”
“No, I haven’t,” I said.
“I’m sure that’s it,” Julie said. “I’m sure you’ll remember if you just check the dates.” She pushed the receipts into Heather’s hand, but her fingers wouldn’t close around them and the slips of paper fluttered like snowflakes to the floor.