CHAPTER 53
Jenny was running out of time. She’d left work thirty minutes early, told her boss she had a dentist appointment.
Jenny had seen the commotion on TV. The media’s darling was in jail for going after Dana Kohl. What a joke Lizzy Gardner was turning out to be.
Dana Kohl was harmless.
The private investigator will not give up. You need to listen to me. She’ll come after you next. You must slow down . . . think things through.
Although Jenny had personally never talked to Dana, she knew of her. She knew the Ambassador Club had gotten their claws into her, too. Jenny had always been relieved when they focused their attention on Dana instead of her. She knew that wasn’t right, but it was the truth. It was how she’d felt back then. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t have done in high school to get them to stop. She would have handed over her china doll, both her parents, the entire farm, everything she had if they had told her they would leave her alone.
But that’s not what happened.
And now Jenny was forced to make them all pay.
Today was Aubrey’s day to die.
Aubrey Singleton had recently moved into a brand-new house. Lucky girl.
During high school, Aubrey Singleton always seemed to end up in Jenny’s PE class. Aubrey used to love to take Jenny’s clothes from her locker so that after Jenny showered, she’d have nothing to wear. Aubrey would take all the towels, too, and then invite the boys to come take a peek.
That was how Jenny had learned that even though the boys didn’t want to date her, they sure liked to look at her naked.
Aubrey used to pass Jenny notes, too, sinister notes saying how she fantasized about the two of them being together some day, but then the next note would talk about how she planned to kill her while she slept. Aubrey would draw pictures of a cross with Jenny nailed to it. Blood dripping from her arms and legs.
She was a strange one.
But somehow Aubrey went on to marry a doctor. They had two kids and they lived in one of the nicer areas on the outskirts of Sacramento. The house was brand-new, and, although there were security signs poked into the grass, front and back, the alarms had yet to be turned on. She knew this firsthand. Breaking into someone’s house sounded like a big deal, but if anyone tried it, they would see that it was easy. Most people left a window unlatched or a door unlocked. Walking into someone’s house unnoticed was like taking a stroll through the park. Jenny would talk to kids in the neighborhood, wave at the cars as they passed, make people think she belonged. If they ever did question who she was, she had wigs and glasses and enough makeup to disguise herself. But nobody ever questioned her or stopped her from making her rounds. It was the same everywhere she went.
If you smiled and dressed up, looked as if you belonged, people believed that you did. Confidence. All you needed was a cheerful expression and a little confidence.
After work, five days a week, Aubrey picked up her kids from day care and arrived home at approximately six o’clock.
Jenny looked at her watch. It was only four. She had plenty of time. The last time she’d walked through Aubrey’s house, she’d taken her tube of toothpaste. Today, she planned to replace it. Aubrey and her husband had two separate sinks. Cluttered with lotion and feminine products, her side had been easy to identify. Jenny was certain she’d stolen the right toothpaste.
Aubrey should be dead before morning.
Jenny walked up the driveway, lifted her hand over the side gate, pulled the chain, and let herself through to the side yard. Last time she’d gone through the garage, but today she decided to see if the back door was open.
The French doors came right open. It was as if someone were waiting for her.
No alarm. No problem.
She smelled something cooking in the oven, thought that was odd, and looked around.
She could smell a roast.
Something dropped in the other room. A woman cursed.
Turn around this minute! Come back tomorrow.
Jenny took slow, careful steps out of the kitchen and into the dining room. Not too far from where she stood, Aubrey Singleton was hanging pictures . . . or at least, she was trying to hang pictures. She had a nail in her mouth, a hammer in her right hand, and she used her left hand to blindly reach around behind the little picture, trying to loop the wire or hook around the nail head.
Jenny thought about the toothpaste in her purse. She’d put a lot of work into making it look and smell just right. She’d lied to her boss and had gone to a lot of trouble to get here today. She was about to turn around and walk back the way she’d come when Aubrey dropped the picture. It was a small one and it fell to the couch without so much as a clank.
No harm done.
Except that Aubrey had leaned over to pick it up and was now looking at her with wide-eyed wonder. “Who are you?”
“You know who I am.”
The woman straightened and narrowed her eyes. “Jenny?”
Jenny smiled.
“They warned me that someone might be coming after me. I thought of you, Jenny Pickett. In my mind, you were the only one it could be, but I pushed the warning aside, didn’t even tell my husband, because I didn’t think you had it in you.”
Confident, holding her shoulders high, Jenny walked forward.
Aubrey raised the hammer, but the woman looked as if she weighed about ninety pounds. Her arm wobbled from the weight of it.
Jenny stopped and sighed. “Do you really think I came here to hurt you?”
Aubrey took a backward step and then another. “Why did you come, then?”
“I wanted to talk to you about what you did. I want to know if you feel any remorse.”
“Of course I do. We all do. We were young, Jenny. Each and every one of us would take it all back if we could go back in time.”
“Oh Aubrey.” Jenny put a hand to her heart, as though overcome—and took another step closer. “You have no idea how happy that makes me. I didn’t think any of you cared about what you did to us.”
Aubrey’s shoulders relaxed. “I wish there was something I could do to make up for it.”
“Give me the hammer, Aubrey, so we can sit down and enjoy a cup of tea together. Just knowing you would take it all back if you could is all I needed to hear.”
Aubrey played it out for a few seconds, even made it appear as if she might put the hammer down. Instead, she turned and ran for the front door.
Jenny caught up to her and wrestled the hammer from her hand. Then she swung hard and fast before the bitch could get away.
The look on Aubrey’s face when she fell to the ground said it all: You really came after me. You really got the last word, didn’t you?
“You bet I did,” Jenny said.
Having no desire to hang around, Jenny dropped the hammer inside her bag, used her foot to nudge Aubrey’s arm out of her way, then headed outside, right through the front door. She walked a block, shoulders back, head held high. After another three blocks, she sat on a bench that the community had built for people who wanted to sit and catch their breath, maybe view the beautiful lake-sized pond or feed the ducks.
Slowly, determined not to call attention to herself, she slid off the blood-splattered sweater, one sleeve at a time, leaned over and wiped the streak of blood on her right shoe. She then rolled the sweater up into a nice little ball and slid it into her purse on top of the hammer.
A kid, riding his bike on the walking path, picked up speed as he passed by, didn’t make eye contact, had obviously been told not to talk to strangers.
Ten minutes later, she climbed into her car and drove off.