Now confident that it wouldn’t be thrown at her, Jane poured a second mug of coffee, brought it to the table, and put it in front of Sara Holdsteck, the fragrant steam rising in serpentine ribbons.
As she refreshed her own mug, she said, “Though you’ve agreed to help me, first there’s more you need to hear.”
“Which must mean…my situation is even worse than I think.”
“Simon never told you he’d been married three times before?”
Sara was surprised for a moment—and then not. “He said he’d sworn to stay a bachelor. But with me, he wanted it to be forever.”
“His third wife said he has a silver tongue.”
“Yeah. And a heart of iron.”
Jane returned the Pyrex pot to the coffeemaker. “He seems to choose his wives for two reasons. First, they resemble one another. Slim brunettes with blue eyes, five feet six, give or take an inch.”
“The other qualification?”
“Money. They inherited it. Or earned it, as in your case and another. Not enormous fortunes, but serious money. Three other wives with four different divorce attorneys. Yet in every case they wanted zip from Simon, while giving him fifty to seventy percent of their assets.”
“After going through one hell or another.”
In her chair again, Jane said, “Pretty much the same hell. People sued them, all kinds of federal agencies suddenly came after them, and at the height of the chaos…ice-cold baths or the equivalent, and a dose of intense humiliation.”
“They all broke like me,” Sara intuited, not as if she thought the weakness of the three previous wives somehow exonerated her, but as if depressed by the news of Simon’s repeated triumphs.
“Count yourself lucky or wise that you gave him what he wanted after a weekend of abuse. Anyway, your only other choice would have been to kill him.”
“I wish I had. But I was a different person then. So timid.”
“Not timid,” Jane said. “Na?ve. His third wife endured eight days. Ice-water baths, brutal sessions in a superheated sauna, sleep deprivation—and then came the vicious gang rapes you escaped, three men at a time and never the same three. She broke. She lives simply now on what he allowed her to keep. She’s become agoraphobic, so afraid of the outside world she never leaves her little bungalow.”
When Sara drank some coffee, the mug rattled against her teeth.
“I don’t know what outrages the other two wives were subjected to,” Jane said. “But even with his first, Simon didn’t need her money. He was already an entrepreneur with a few highly profitable businesses, largely because of his connections with people in positions of power.”
Sara folded her hands around the warm mug and closed her eyes and seemed to be listening to the torrents of rain pummeling the house, but perhaps instead she heard only moments of the past, her ex-husband’s sneering voice. In time she said, “I always knew my money was the least of it. What mattered most to him was my total mortification, my shame, my submission. That’s why I think he let me live. So he can know I’m out here, changed forever and suffering.”
Because Sara was smart enough to understand the implications of two final revelations, Jane gave her facts without interpretation. “Two and a half years after the divorce, his first wife treated herself to a vacation in France, accompanied by her cousin. On their third day in Paris, both women disappeared. Their remains were found two days later, in an abandoned building in an arrondissement where they would never have dared to go, where even police are reluctant to patrol because of the Iranian and Syrian gangs that operate there. They’d been robbed and beaten to death with lengths of iron pipe left at the scene. In the case of his second wife, three years after the divorce, she’d recovered enough confidence to have a boyfriend. They went hiking in Yosemite. At a point where the trail narrowed with a steep drop to one side, maybe one of them slipped over the edge. Maybe the other reached out to halt the companion’s fall and was pulled off balance. However it happened, both ended up dead on the rocks three hundred feet below.”
Sara seemed to want the coffee only for the warmth that the mug imparted to her hands. “So I’ve got six months to a year.”
“Unless I kill him in self-defense or someone else kills him because of the information I’m able to pry out of him.”
“I already agreed to help you.”
“I know,” Jane said. “I’ve told you this only because I want you to get more serious about carrying that concealed pistol, about your security system, about your life and how fragile it remains.”
8
The rising garage sectional like a mausoleum door setting free those who had been thought dead and entombed, the sudden cataracts of rain against the windshield, the wild night of shaken trees and wet whirling leaves and wind-worked forms of mist galloping out of the west…All of it now became a celebration of life.
Behind the wheel of the Hyundai Santa Fe Sport, Sanjay Shukla was intoxicated by their escape but also harrowed by the recent violence. As he accelerated toward the distant gate that would swing open automatically at his approach, he switched on the headlights.
“Lights off!” Tanuja cried with such conviction that he obeyed without question. “They blocked the driveway with their SUV.”
“So we pop the brake, shift it into neutral, push it aside.”
“But there might be a fourth sonofabitch with it.”
“Shit.” Sanjay wished he’d thought to take the poisoned man’s gun instead of his smartphone.
Simultaneously, he and his sister declared, “The horse gate!”
Sanjay swung the Hyundai off the pavement, left onto the front yard, and rollicked across the uneven lawn, which had been an unmown meadow of tall grass in the days when their father had kept horses.
The equine gate on the south side of the property had been a second construction entrance during the building of the house. It was wide enough for a vehicle. A simple hinged section of fencing gave access to a riding trail that wound through the eastern hills.
In the gloom, the great black limbs of the spreading oaks were unmoved by the storm, but the willowy branchlets whipped the night and cast off beetle-shaped leaves that skittered across the windshield and were flung into flight by the wipers.
The land sloped down, and below them, like the sunken ramparts of some lost city, the faint white boardwork of the ranch fencing welled out of the watery darkness.
Sanjay braked, intending to get out and release the gate, but Tanuja threw open her door—“Got it!”—and plunged into the rain.
As Sanjay watched her ghosting through the murk, Tanuja seemed small, childlike, as though the night was shrinking her, his chotti bhenji, his little big sister. Suddenly, he feared losing her for the first time since they’d escaped the clutches of Ashima and Burt Chatterjee to become emancipated minors by order of the court. For the seven years prior to that, they had been two against the world; and so they appeared to be again, inexplicably.
For fraternal twins, they were remarkably alike, slender but athletic, with glossy black hair and eyes darker still. Both were talented guitarists. Both were unbeatable bridge players at fourteen but grew bored with cards at eighteen, when their writing began to consume them. She would marry one day, and perhaps so would he; and while he’d be happy for her, on the day that they parted he would feel as though he’d been cleaved in half.
The gate swung open, and Tanuja returned to the Hyundai. Sanjay drove into the rugged land where the horse trail promised adventure for the equine gentry to which their parents had once belonged. He turned downhill, toward the county road, lights still off, hoping the thousand voices of wind and water would mask their engine noise, in case a guard remained in the SUV at the main gate.
“They were going to inject me. You, too, if they found you.”
“I saw the syringe. But inject with what?” she asked.