The Perfect Stranger (33 page)

Kay is quiet by nature but paler than the cloth napkin she’s twisting in her hands, and her pie has gone untouched.

Does she realize it’s a trap?
Elena wonders.
Or is she in on it? Is it a conspiracy?

Playing the role of charming hostess, Landry chatters brightly—too brightly—about the restaurant where she’s made a dinner reservation.

“And I hope y’all like seafood, because—” She breaks off to look out over the water as thunder rumbles in the distance. The sky has gone from milky to ominous black layers mounting along the horizon.

“It’s going to rain,” Kay says unnecessarily.

“It is.” Landry is on her feet. “We should go inside.”

Reluctant to go into the house with them, Elena points to the ceiling overhead, where the fan still rotates in a futile attempt to cool things down. “We won’t get wet here.”

“We will if it rains sideways. It’s blowing in across the water. Let’s go in.”

She doesn’t want to go in, dammit. That’s why they’re out there in the first place. Inside, she can’t escape quickly if she needs to.

But Kay, too, is already standing. “I’m going to lie down for a little while, if no one minds.”

“Are you feeling all right?” Elena asks her, and she shakes her head.

“The trip wore me out. I’m sorry.”

Poor Kay. She’s not here to blindside her. She’s here because she needs their friendship. She has no one else in the world.

Kay starts helping Landry gather up the plates and glasses, but Landry stops her.

“I’ll get that. You can relax in the living room, if you’d like—we have lots of books, if you feel like reading. Or maybe everyone needs a nap. I know y’all were up early.”

“I wouldn’t mind some downtime,” Kay says with a yawn.

“Same here.” Elena stands. “I’m wicked tired.”

Landry’s smile is stiff. “Sweet dreams, then!”

With narrowed eyes, Elena watches her scrape the crumbs off the plates.

Then she follows the others inside and up the stairs.

As Kay closes the bedroom door behind her, she can hear the rain already starting to fall, pattering on the low-pitched roof directly above her head.

Thunder rumbles, this time much closer.

She sits on the edge of the bed, looking around the pretty bedroom—Landry’s daughter’s bedroom.

What would it be like, she wonders, to grow up living in a room like this, with a mom like Landry?

She hopes Addison knows how lucky she is. And Tucker, too—Landry’s son. She hopes they know they’re blessed with everything—the only thing—that really matters.

Not beautiful bedrooms in a lovely house in a charming southern town, but parents who are together, and love them.

Kay was hoping she’d have a chance to meet the kids, but they’re not home this weekend.

“It’s better this way,” Landry said, and Kay has to agree.

It wouldn’t be right, the kids being here. There’s too much tension in the house, and now—

A ringing phone interrupts the thought. Her cell, she realizes. It has to be Detective Burns, returning her call at last.

She checks caller ID and recognizes the 513 area code. Yes, she was right.

But of course she was. Her phone never rings. She doesn’t have a circle of friends and family, not like Meredith. Not like Landry.

There’s no one back in Indianapolis wondering how her Alabama weekend is going.

There will be no one to miss her when she’s gone for good—not there, anyway.

But these women—her online friends—will notice she’s gone. And of course, Meredith’s family will as well, when they receive their unexpected inheritance.

They’re all I have.

But all I ever wanted was a family, and now I finally have it. Someone will care that I lived. Someone will care when I die, like they cared when Meredith did. Someone will cry for me, will remember me.

She presses the Talk button, swallowing a lump in her throat.

“Hello?”

“Kay, this is Detective Burns calling from Cincinnati. I just got a message that you were trying to reach me earlier. You should have called the number I gave you. That’s my direct line. I don’t check this one very—”

“I’m sorry.” She presses a hand to her aching head. “I forgot about that. I’m traveling, and I don’t even know if I have it with me . . .”

“Where are you?”

“Alabama. At Landry Wells’s house. A bunch of us are here for the weekend. The reason I called was because I thought I spotted Jenna Coeur in the airport when I was catching my connecting flight back in Atlanta . . .”

“You thought you spotted her?”

“I was pretty sure, but now . . .”

“Kay,” Detective Burns says, “listen to me. It wasn’t her. You don’t have to worry about her. Not today, anyway.”

Six of One Is Not Always Half a Dozen of the Other

Today is September 22. The date looms large in my brain. It’s the anniversary of my preventative bilateral mastectomy.

Did I change my fate on that day?

I tried to. The decision to have the surgery was mine. The idea . . . mine. It was not the first suggestion of any surgeon, since the only evidence of cancer was small and contained. Lumpectomy was the preferred procedure.

Breast Preservation was a term I learned then and heard quite often in those early diagnosis days. As if saving breasts were the point here, the ultimate goal. As if just cutting out the cancer as carefully, neatly, and least intrusively as possible was the mission, and perhaps for some it is. I remember sitting with the first surgeon I consulted, thinking I was missing something because although saving breasts is intrinsically tied to saving a life for some, it wasn’t for me.

Even though my own grandmother had beaten the odds, I had heard plenty of horror stories about women who hadn’t. Women who were declared fine for many years, only to have the cancer come back with a vengeance. So in my mind, as I was told survival rates for those with mastectomy versus lumpectomy were basically the same, I knew I couldn’t do it. I had a husband and children who needed me.

Every person, every diagnosis of breast cancer, is unique. No two circumstances are ever the same and neither are the ways of approaching, dealing, and living with this disease. No one is right or wrong. Each moment is personal, and for me . . . I knew I couldn’t walk away after a lumpectomy and weeks of radiation feeling positive about my outcome, in spite of comparable statistics. I knew I’d question my choice everyday, worry I hadn’t done enough, harbor regret.

Ultimately, I guess it mattered more for the peace of mind it granted me, rather than better odds. I believe I had done all I could to stave off recurrence, knowing full well neither method was guaranteed, but now I wouldn’t second-guess myself, and that . . . was everything.

Did I change my fate that day? Who knows?

Do I miss my old, unaltered, presurgery physical self? Sometimes. But not the tiniest fraction as much as I’d miss seeing my kids from childhood through adulthood to parenthood, or growing old with the man I love. And in the end . . . what is more important than that?

— Excerpt from Landry’s blog,
The Breast Cancer Diaries

Chapter 16

Landry’s cell phone rings as she loads the plates into the dishwasher. Startled, she drops one. It shatters on the stone floor.

“Dammit!” She looks up at the ceiling, wondering if the others heard it and are going to come down to investigate.

Hopefully the rain and thunder masked the sound.

Pulling out her phone, she sees that the caller is Bruce and hurriedly answers it.

“The flight came in,” he reports. “She wasn’t on it.”

“Okay.” Landry paces, keeping an eye on the stairs. There’s been no movement from above.

“I’m going to stay here and wait for the next flight from Atlanta.”

“Okay,” she says again, staring at the sheet of rain beyond the glass.

She’s probably supposed to feel relieved. But it would have been so much simpler—it would be over—if Jenna Coeur had just walked off the damned plane.

Now they’re trapped here in limbo, waiting, waiting . . .

“How about what I told you?” she whispers to Bruce, wandering into the living room with the phone. “About Tony Kerwin?”

“Look, there are definitely drugs, like succinylcholine or potassium chloride, that can simulate a heart attack and would be metabolized in the bloodstream to appear as chemicals that would normally appear in a human body. They wouldn’t show up in an autopsy.”

“So they could have been used on Tony, to make a murder look like accidental death.”

“Theoretically, yes. You’d have to be looking for an injection site on the body in order to catch something like that, and unless the medical examiner had reason to look for it . . .”

“He’d never see it.”

“That’s right. But don’t jump to conclusions, Landry. It wouldn’t be easy for the average person to pull off something like this.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, you can’t use over-the-counter potassium chloride pills from a drugstore. You’d have to have a liquid form and inject it. But again . . .”

“You don’t think that’s what happened.”

“I really don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because there are very few places where those drugs would even be found. Succinylcholine alone—SUX—is used in anesthesiology and it’s used along with liquid potassium chloride for—”

Hearing a creaking on the stairs, Landry freezes, and the rest of Bruce’s sentence is lost on her.

She holds her breath, poised, watching the steps, waiting for whomever it is to descend.

But nobody does.

“Landry?” Bruce is saying. “Are you there?”

“I’ll call you right back,” she blurts, and hangs up, eyes still on the vacant stairway.

Maybe it was her imagination.

Or maybe someone is up there spying, eavesdropping.

Who is it? Kay, or Elena, or . . . someone else?

Walking into the police station, Sheri keeps a tight hold on the guitar pick in her hand. She’d wrapped it in plastic, just in case.

You never know.

There might be fingerprints.

Pen in hand, the desk sergeant looks up from whatever he’s working on. Official business, she hopes. Better not be a goddamned Sudoku puzzle when her husband’s murder remains unsolved . . .

“Can I help you?”

She clears her throat. “I’m Sheri Lorton . . .”

He nods.

“Roger Lorton’s wife.”

She waits for recognition.

He waits, utterly clueless.

Okay. He doesn’t know her.

This is a big city. People die—are killed—every day. Cases go unsolved forever.

She shouldn’t take it personally.

But how do you not?

Sheri rests her hands on the desk and leans in. “My husband was murdered last week. Walking our dog. Stabbed in cold blood on the sidewalk. I think I’ve found something that might be relevant to the detectives working on his case.”

He nods, picks up the phone on the desk. “I’ll get someone to help you, Mrs. Lorton. And . . . I’m sorry for your loss.”

Just days ago, shrouded in an opaque veil of anguish, she’d thought it didn’t matter to her—the investigation. Because nothing can bring him back.

Now, though her widowed heart will ache for the rest of her life, she knows that the healing will only begin when the person who stole her husband is found—and punished.

Slow and steady . . .

Slow and steady . . .

That’s the key, though impulse decrees the polar opposite approach.

Hurry!

Do it quickly!

Just get it over with!

No.

No, that would be dangerous. Now is not the time to make a mistake.

Slow . . .

Take out the knife, the one with the tortoiseshell handle.

Think about that long ago day by the pond, when a plain old rock turned out to be a ferocious snapping turtle.

Steady . . .

Open the blade.

Slow . . .

Think about where it has to go.

Steady . . .

Think about cause and effect.

Slow . . .

But it’s time. Now. It’s time.

Steady . . .

Raise the knife . . .

Do it.

Do it!

At last . . . it’s done.

“You really believe that Elena killed Tony?” Bruce asks as Landry clutches the phone to her ear. She’s sitting inside her car in the garage, suffocatingly hot with the doors closed and the windows rolled up. But it’s the only place she could think to continue this conversation without possibly being overheard.

She did briefly consider opening the garage door so she can turn on the engine and the air-conditioning without asphyxiating herself—but her guests would hear the door go up and come to investigate.

She even considered driving away but couldn’t bring herself to leave Kay alone here with a murderer.

Elena.

Elena?

One moment the idea seems preposterous to Landry; the next it makes perfect, chilling sense.

“You said yourself that it’s possible Tony was murdered with poison that made his death look like a heart attack,” she reminds Bruce. “Who else could possibly have had such a strong motive? She wanted him out of her life.”

“There could be other people who felt the same way.”

“Other people who just came from the funeral of a friend whose murder is unsolved?”

“It could be a coincidence.”

“It could be, but . . .”

Landry keeps playing and replaying her last conversation with Elena at the airport on Sunday. She said she couldn’t stand the thought of going back home to face him, and the next day he was dead.

Coincidence?

Really?

“I checked her out,” Bruce tells her, “and there’s nothing in her past to suggest that she’s capable of cold-blooded murder.”

Cold-blooded.

Coldhearted.

Jenna Coeur in the airport . . .

What does that even matter if Elena was the one who killed Meredith?

Anyway, Bruce said Jenna didn’t get off the plane. She
isn’t
here.

Is she really trying to get here?

Was Kay mistaken about seeing her in Atlanta?

Can first grade teacher and party girl Elena really be hiding a sinister self?

Nothing makes sense.

Bruce . . .

How do I even know he’s for real? He was just a stranger on a plane, handing me a business card . . .

He might not be an investigator at all. That could have been a dummy Web site.

Her thoughts are spinning, spinning, spinning . . .

“Does Kay know?” Bruce is asking.

“No.”

“You might want to go tell her what you’re thinking. If you’re right about this, then the two of you need to get out of there before . . .”

Bruce doesn’t finish his sentence.

He doesn’t have to.

Landry disconnects the call, opens the car door and steps out into the garage.

It’s quiet. Deserted . . . or so it seems.

But there are shadowy corners where someone could be concealed, watching her.

Someone . . . even Bruce.

He told her he’s at the airport waiting for Jaycee to get off a plane, but what if he’s making her think he’s her protector when really . . .

The call is coming from inside the house.

The line from an old slasher movie barges into her brain.

Her legs wobble as she starts moving across the floor, expecting someone to jump out at her with every step she takes.

Bruce . . . Elena . . . Jaycee . . . or Jenna . . . whoever the hell killed Meredith.

Heart racing, Elena slips through the back door, crosses the porch where they all ate lunch just a short time ago, and begins running through the yard.

It’s pouring out. Jagged yellow lightning slices the gray-black sky.

Get away, get away . . .

She slips on the wet grass as she runs. She throws her arms in front of her to break the fall and her hands land in the mud at the edge of the garden.

Heart racing, she gets to her feet and starts running again, looking back over her shoulder to make sure no one is coming after her.

Get away, get away . . .

She turns right when she reaches the waterside path, heading north.

There’s no one out here now.

No one behind her. No one to see her stop, at last, to rest for a moment and let the rain wash the mud—and the blood, not her own—from her hands.

Addison’s bedroom door is ajar.

Landry hesitates, wondering if she should push it open and walk right in. Tucker’s closed door is just down the hall; behind it, Elena might be able to hear her if she called out to Kay or knocked.

Then again, the rain is falling hard on the roof, and the thunder might be loud enough to drown out noises from the hall. She waits until the next clap and knocks, calling softly, “Kay? Kay?”

No reply.

She’s probably sleeping. She looked exhausted, poor thing. Exhausted, and sick.

I’ve got to get her out of here.

Under ordinary circumstances Landry wouldn’t dream of walking uninvited into a room occupied by a houseguest. But in this case it’s for Kay’s own good.

She pushes the door open, crosses the threshold . . . and screams.

Kay is lying on the floor in a pool of blood, a knife protruding from her abdomen.

The Los Angeles press conference is airing live on the cable entertainment network.

Sitting in front of the television, waiting for it to start, Crystal is focused on her computer. In the past hour the search engine has exploded with fresh hits in response to the name Jenna Coeur.

In about ten minutes she’s going to be stepping in front of the cameras with Wesley Baumann, the avant-garde movie director.

“This is bound to be the comeback of the decade,” a blond reporter is excitedly telling the television audience. “Maybe even the comeback of the century!”

According to online rumors, Baumann will be announcing that he’s just cast Jenna Coeur in the lead role of his next film.

“The whole world is waiting to get a look at Jenna. She hasn’t been seen in public since she left the courtroom after being acquitted for the murder of the illegitimate teenage daughter she’d given up for adoption when she was just a teen herself.”

The scene cuts from the milling crowd of press and lineup of microphones to a montage of flashback photos and film clips: scenes from Jenna Coeur’s films, the stunning actress on the red carpet and smiling on the arms of A-list actors, then an ambulance pulling away from her Hollywood Hills mansion, the mansion cordoned off by yellow crime scene tape, Jenna Coeur being escorted into and out of the courthouse amid a hail of flashbulbs, driving away in a black limousine, never to be seen again until . . .

Well, not yet. But according to the press, she landed at LAX about an hour ago and is at this moment behind the scenes with Wesley Baumann, getting ready to step into the spotlight again at long last.

Obviously, Kay Collier was wrong about having spotted her in Atlanta.

Maybe she was wrong, too, about having seen her at Meredith’s funeral.

Maybe that was someone else.

Someone who bolted the moment she saw me looking at her?

And what about Jaycee the blogger?

Frustrated, Crystal gets up to pace again, keeping an eye on the television screen.

Maybe Jaycee’s someone else, too. Some ordinary blogger trying to protect her anonymity on the Internet.

Someone who had absolutely nothing to do with Meredith Heywood’s fate at the hands of someone who either loved her—or hated her—enough to kill her.

Which—and who—was it?

“Nine-one-one, what is your—”

“My friend! She’s been stabbed! Please—”

“All right, ma’am, calm down. You say your friend has been stabbed?”

“Yes! Oh, Kay . . . No . . .”

“Is your friend breathing?”

“I think so . . .” Landry reaches out and touches Kay’s neck, feeling for a pulse below her ear. It’s there, but faint.

“Ma’am—”

“She’s breathing,” she tells the operator. “Hurry. Please hurry.”

“They’ve already been dispatched, ma’am. Who stabbed your friend?”

“I don’t know,” she says helplessly, staring down at the tortoiseshell knife handle protruding from Kay’s abdomen. “I honestly don’t.”

As the flamboyant movie director Wesley Baumann, clad in what appears to be a brocade smoking jacket and an ascot, steps up to the televised podium, Crystal shakes her head. Crazy Hollywood people. Can’t the guy just wear a regular old suit and tie like a normal businessman?

“Thank you very much for being here, and good afternoon,” Baumann says to the array of microphones and cameras in an affected accent that’s far closer to Britain than the Bronx, where he was born. “It gives me great pleasure to announce my newest project, which has been many years in the making. Part of the reason for this is that I could envision only one actress in the lead role—but first, I had to track her down, and then, I had to convince her. Neither proved to be an easy task.”

Dramatic pause.

Rolling her eyes, Crystal half expects him to thrust a lit pipe between his lips.