“I’m not accusing you of anything. All I want is a name. And the number or address of someone who might be able to tell me what was going on between that woman and my husband.”
“Look, I don’t have the information you want, but even if I did, I couldn’t share it with you. Victims have rights, Christine. So do their families. In other words, there are rules. And if we break those rules, we get in trouble. I’ve put in a whole lot of years here and put up with a whole lot of crap. At this point, all I want is to get out and spend a few years on a little sailboat down in the Keys. I’m not about to stick my neck out, not even for the wife of a friend. I know that sounds harsh, but I have to look out for myself here. Stephen’s death wasn’t a homicide, which means I’m not even the guy you should be talking to. If anything, it’s a missing-persons case, and it’s not even that since no one’s filed an actual complaint on her. Either way, it’s not my purview. Now I need to go do my job. I’ll make sure they send that patrol car around, but I’m sorry, that’s all I can do.”
And just like that Daniel Connelly was gone.
Christine was still leaning against the counter, wondering why she’d just been given the brush-off, when the phone rang. She pounced on it, hoping Connelly had changed his mind. Instead, it was Dorsey and Sons. In the mayhem, she had forgotten that Stephen’s friends and colleagues were at that very moment gathering to pay him tribute—and wondering what had happened to the widow.
As it turned out, she needn’t have worried. Apparently, the barrage of breaking news had whittled the number of mourners to an awkward handful. But then that really wasn’t surprising. Who in their right mind would want to look her in the eye now, let alone gush about what a great guy she’d married?
Using the vaguest language possible, she explained that she had been unavoidably detained and wasn’t likely to get there anytime soon. Mr. Dorsey, presumably one of the sons, was delicacy itself as he inquired about how best to proceed. In the end, she advised him to cancel the service but to go ahead with the cremation, which he had agreed to do in tones that could be described only as painfully polite. He hadn’t come right out and said so, but she was certain he’d seen the photos. Everyone had by now. Apparently the old adage was true—the wife really was the last to know.
Two hours later, Christine caught the sharp whoop-whoop of a police siren out in front of the house. She hurried to the living room window, peering out in time to see a Clear Harbor patrol car inching up the crowded drive, blue lights flashing. The officer stepped out and began waving his arms, gesturing to the NO TRESPASSING signs posted at regular intervals along the fence. There was a brief bit of protest, but eventually the gaggle began filing toward the open gates.
Christine watched as the driveway slowly emptied, and one by one, the news trucks pulled away. When the last truck was gone, she stepped to the control panel in the foyer and closed the front gates, then returned to the window to double-check. She stood there for a time, staring at the empty street, trying to locate something like relief. For the first time in seven days, there was no one camped out in front of the house, no reporters lying in wait.
It took all the energy she could summon to drag herself up to the bedroom and shuck off her funeral clothes. She was thinking about the scarf she had lost somewhere in the driveway when she heard a clatter out on the terrace. Curious, she stepped to the doors and peered past her reflection, stunned to find a reporter pointing a camera at her as she stood there in nothing but a pair of panties.
Too alarmed to scream, she dropped to a crouch, dragging the duvet from the bed and wrapping it around her as she dove for the phone. On realizing he’d been discovered, the intruder abandoned his shot and scrambled for the stairs, stumbling briefly as he hurdled a patio chair, then streaked for the back fence. A moment later, he was gone.
Christine looked at the phone in her hand. Dialing 911 wasn’t going to solve anything. She had managed to scare off one intruder, but there would be more, climbing the fence, peering in her windows, rushing her car the next time she tried to leave the house. They would never leave her alone.
Unless she wasn’t here.
With an almost eerie calm, she stood and went to the closet, pulled on a pair of jeans and a faded Patriots sweatshirt, then dragged her old weekender from the top shelf. She wouldn’t need much: jeans, a few pairs of leggings, a couple of sweaters, her toiletry case from under the bathroom sink. And the contents of the safe.
When her bag was packed, she headed for the study, ignoring the framed photo still lying facedown on the desk as she punched in the safe code, waited for the light on the keypad to go green, then blindly raked the contents into her purse: insurance policies, investment records, passports, birth certificates, and the envelope containing Stephen’s emergency cash—in case of a zombie apocalypse, he had once joked. Leave it to Stephen to think he could buy his way out of the end of world.
She closed the safe and was preparing to leave when she looked down at her left hand, at the ring that symbolized her marriage—a colorless two-carat emerald cut. Nothing but the best for the wife of Stephen Ludlow. It slid easily from her finger; apparently she’d lost weight after a week of subsisting on tea and toast. Her hand felt strangely light, but there was no sense of guilt as she placed the ring on the desk. Stephen had walked away from their marriage some time ago. Now it was her turn.
She held her breath as she peered out the front windows. As far as she could tell, the coast was still clear, no news trucks parked outside the gate, no photographers crouching in the boxwoods. Breath held, she shouldered her bags, stepped out onto the porch, and made a break for the Rover sitting in the middle of the driveway.
Her heart hammered as she scrambled up behind the wheel, locked all four doors, and started the engine. The gates slid soundlessly as she pressed the remote, and then she was through them with nothing but empty road before her.
The exhilaration was almost heady, but unsettling too as the memory of another night—another hastily packed bag, another breathless getaway—came rushing at her. It was hard not to see the irony. At the age of sixteen, she had slipped out of a house in the middle of the night and run for all she was worth. Now, twenty years later, she was running again.
FOUR
Ravenel, South Carolina
January 8, 1994
Christy-Lynn hunches deeper into her jacket as she moves down the puddled sidewalk, kicking herself for not leaving her math and science books in her locker. It’s ridiculously cold, even for January, and an icy rain is falling. She keeps her head down, drawn in like a turtle’s beneath her oversize hood, limiting her field of vision to the three feet of pavement directly in front of her.
Her hands are numb with cold, clenched into fists and thrust deep in her pockets. Her apartment key is there. She turns it over in her fingers, already anticipating the cup of hot chocolate she’ll make when she reaches the apartment—if there’s any left. At this point, she’ll settle for tea. As long as it’s hot.