The Perfect Stranger (36 page)

Then she unlocks the door and slowly goes down the stairs to greet them, no longer frightened that a murderer lurks somewhere in the house.

Later—much, much later, after the investigators confirmed that Kay’s fatal knife wound did, indeed, appear to be self-inflicted, though further tests are needed to confirm it; after Landry has repeatedly reassured her children, via telephone, that she’s all right; after Rob has boarded a flight home from North Carolina—she sits outside on the back porch with Elena, watching fireflies in the dusk.

There are still several police officers inside the house, wrapping up the investigation. Bruce is there, too. Earlier, Landry heard him and one of the cops discussing last week’s three-game series between the Braves and the Reds.

This is merely a day’s work for them. They’ve seen it all.

But for Landry . . . for Elena . . .

“I keep wondering if Meredith knew what was happening,” Landry says quietly. “If she knew . . . you know.”

“That it was Kay?” Elena shrugs. “I hope she didn’t. I hope she never knew what hit her.”

Landry hopes so, too, and yet . . .

Meredith never got to say good-bye.

That her cancer had progressed and was most likely terminal—news Detective Burns shared over the telephone a little while ago, believing it had contributed to Kay’s twisted motive—is irrelevant.

She should have died on her own terms—not on somebody else’s. Some people fear dying, others fear death . . .

Still others fear nothing more than life itself.

Not me
, Landry thinks.
I’ll take it. Every scary, glorious minute of it.

She looks at her watch. It’s after eight. Rob is landing in about an hour. She didn’t try to talk him out of it when he said he’d be on the next plane home. She told him to hurry.

Landry takes a deep breath, inhaling warm air scented with rain and roses.

Elena slaps her arm. “The mosquitoes are coming out.”

“Yes,” Landry says, “but so are the stars.”

And together, they sit in silence for a while longer, gazing into the darkening sky until the heavens are ablaze with pinpricks of light.

The Day My Life Changed Forever

When the doctor’s receptionist called to say that they had the results, it never dawned on me that it might be bad news.

“Hi, hon,” Janine said—she calls all the patients “hon”—and casually requested that I come by in person this afternoon. She even used just that phrasing, and it was a question, as opposed to a command: “Can you come by the office in person this afternoon?”

Come by.

So breezy. So inconsequential. So . . . so everything this situation was not.

What if I’d told Janine, over the phone, that I was busy this afternoon? Would she have at least hinted that my presence at the office was urgent; that it was, in fact, more than a mere request?

But I wasn’t busy and so there I was, blindsided, numbly staring at the doctor pointing the tip of a ballpoint pen at the left breast on the anatomical diagram.

The doctor kept talking, talking, talking; tapping, tapping, tapping the paper with the pen point to indicate exactly where the cancerous tissue was growing, leaving ominous black ink pockmarks.

I nodded as though I was listening intently, not betraying that every word after “malignancy” has been drowned out by the warning bells clanging in my brain.

I’m going to die, I thought with the absolute certainty of someone trapped on a railroad track, staring helplessly into the glaring roar of an oncoming train. I’m going to be one of those ravaged bald women lying dwarfed in a hospital bed, terrified and exhausted and dying an awful, solitary death . . .

I’d seen that person before, too many times—in the movies, and in real life . . . but I never thought I’d ever actually become that person. Or did I?

Well, yes—you worry, whenever a horrific fate befalls someone else, that it could happen to you. But then you reassure yourself that it won’t, and you push the thought from your head, and you move on.

“Would you like to call someone, Kay?”

Call someone . . .

Would you like to call someone . . .

Unable to process the question, I stared at the doctor.

“A friend, or a family member . . . someone who can come over here and—”

“Oh. No. No, thank you,” I said.

Because back then, in that moment . . .

There was no one. No one at all. No one to call. No friends, no family.

You know what? I thought that was the unluckiest day of my entire life. But really, in the end, it was the luckiest.

Cancer was, ultimately, my greatest gift—because it led me to you, the only friends—the only family—I have ever known.

—Excerpt from Kay’s blog,
I’m A-Okay

Read on for a sneak peek
at the next thrilling novel

THE BLACK WIDOW

by
New York Times
best-selling author

WENDY CORSI STAUB

Prologue

“Some things,” Carmen used to say, “just don’t feel right until after the sun goes down.”

It was true.

Mixed drinks . . .

Bedtime stories  . . .

Turning on the television  . . .

Putting on pajamas . . .

All much better—more natural—after nightfall, regardless of the hour or season.

There are other things, Alex has since discovered, that can only happen under cover of darkness. Such endeavors are far less appealing than the ones to which Carmen referred. Unfortunately, they’ve become increasingly necessary.

Alex opens the door that leads from the kitchen to the attached garage, aims the key remote at the car and pops the trunk.

It slowly opens wide. The interior bulb sends enough light into the garage so that it’s unnecessary to flip a wall switch and illuminate the overhead bulb.

Not that there are any windows to reveal to the neighbors that someone is up and about at this hour . . .

And not that the crack beneath the closed door is likely wide enough to emit a telltale shaft of light . . .

But still, it’s good to practice discretion. One can’t be too careful.

Alex removes a sturdy shovel from a rack on the side wall. The square metal blade has been scrubbed clean with bleach, not a speck of dirt remaining from the last wee-hour expedition to the remote stretch of woods seventy miles north of this quiet New York City suburb.

Into the trunk goes the shovel, along with a headlamp purchased from an online camping supply store.

Now comes the hard part.

Alex returns to the house with a coil of sturdy rope and a lightweight hand truck stolen a while back from a careless deliveryman who foolishly left it unattended behind the supermarket. It’s come in handy. Alex is strong—but not strong enough to drag around well over a hundred pounds of dead weight.

Well, not dead
yet
.

The figure lying prone on the sofa is passed out cold, courtesy of the white powder poured into a glass of booze-laced soda that sits on the coffee table with an inch or two of liquid left in the bottom.

Alex dumps the contents into the sink, washes it down the drain, and scrubs the glass and the sink with bleach.

Then it’s back to the living room.

“Time for you to go now,” he whispers, rolling the hand truck over to the sofa and unfurling a length of rope. The end whips through the air and topples a framed photo on the end table. It’s an old black and white baby photo of Carmen, a gift from Alex’s mother-in-law the day after their son was born.

“He’s the spitting image of my Carmen as an infant, isn’t he?”

On that day, gazing into the newborn’s face, all patchy skin and squinty eyes from the drops the nurses had put in, Alex couldn’t really see it.

But as the days, then weeks and months, passed, the resemblance became undeniable. Strangers would stop them on the street to exclaim over how much parent and child looked alike. At first it was sweet. But after a while Alex started to feel left out.

“He looks like you, too,” Carmen would claim, but it wasn’t true.

“You’re just trying to make me feel better.”

“No—he has your nose. See?”

“It’s your nose, Carm. It’s your face. Everything about him is you—even his personality.”

The baby had been so easygoing from day one, quick to smile, quick to laugh . . .

Like Carm. Nothing like you.

Alex leaves the photo lying facedown on the table.

Carmen—even baby Carmen—doesn’t need to witness what’s about to happen here.

Five minutes later the car is heading north on the Taconic Parkway, cruise control set at five miles above the posted limit—just fast enough to reach the destination in a little over an hour, but not fast enough to be pulled over for speeding.

Even if that were to happen, nothing would appear out of the ordinary to a curious cop peering into the car. Alex would turn over a spotless driver’s license and explain that the sleeping person slumped in the passenger seat had simply had too much to drink. No crime in that statement, and quite a measure of truth.

Three hours later the first traces of pink dawn are visible through the open window beyond the empty passenger seat as Alex reenters the southbound lanes on the parkway. All four windows are rolled down and the moon roof is open, too, despite the damp chill in the March wind.

The radio is blasting a classic rock station. Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” opens with a powerful electric guitar; eerie, wailing, lyric-free vocals from Robert Plant.

The fresh air and the music make it better somehow. Easier to forget throwing shovels full of dirt over the still unconscious human being lying at the bottom of the trench. Easier not to imagine what it would be like to regain consciousness and find yourself buried alive.

Maybe that won’t happen. Maybe it never has, with any of them. Maybe they just drift from sleep to a painless death, never knowing . . .

But you know that’s not very likely, is it, Alex?

Chances are that it’s a frantic, ugly, horrifying death, clawing helplessly at the weight of dirt and rocks, struggling for air . . .

Alex reaches over to adjust the volume on the radio, turning it up even higher in an effort to drown out the nagging voice.

Sometimes that works—with the voices.

Other times, they persist, refusing to be ignored.

Not tonight, thank goodness.

The voices give way to the music, and it shifts from Led Zeppelin to the familiar opening guitar lick of an old Guns N’ Roses tune.

Singing along—screaming, shouting along—to the lyrics, Alex rejoices. There is no more fitting song to punctuate this moment.

It’s a sign. It has to be. A sign that everything is going to be okay after all. Someone else will come along. Another chance. Soon enough . . .

“
Oh . . . oh-oh-oh . . . sweet child of mine . . .”

Chapter 1

“No, come on. That one wasn’t good either. You look annoyed.”

“Probably because I
am
annoyed,” Gabriella Duran tells her cousin Maria, watching her check out the photo she’s just taken on her digital camera.

Yes, digital camera.

Gaby had assumed a few snapshots on a cell phone would suffice, and would make this little photo shoot far less conspicuous. But Maria, who took a photography class at the New School not long ago, insisted on using a real camera, the kind that has a giant lens attached. It’s perched on top of a tripod, aiming directly at Gaby.

Which might not be a terrible thing if they were in the privacy of her apartment. But in the middle of jam-packed Central Park at high noon on the sunny Sunday before Memorial Day . . .

Yeah. Definitely a terrible thing.

“Can’t you please just smile for two seconds,” Maria says, “so that I can get a decent shot? Then we can be done.”

Gaby sighs and pastes on a grin.

“You just look like you’re squinting.”

“I
am
squinting.” They’ve been here so long that the sun has changed position, glaring directly into her eyes. “How about if I just turn the other way?” She gestures over her shoulder, preferring to face the clump of trees behind her rather than the parade of New Yorkers jogging, strolling, and rolling past on the adjacent pathway.

“No, I need the light on your face. Here, just take a few steps this way . . . no, not that far, back a little, back . . . back . . . okay, good!”

A pair of long-haired teenagers roll past on skateboards.

“Say cheese!” one of them calls.

Gaby shakes her head at Maria, who is raising the viewfinder to her eye again. “Okay, smile . . .
without
clenching your teeth.”

“Maria, I swear—”

“Remember, Mami—” her cousin cuts in, using the Latina term of endearment, “you’re trying to attract the perfect guy with this picture. Trust me, he’s not going to be interested if you—”

“Okay, first of all, the perfect guy doesn’t exist.”

“Not true.” Maria shakes her head, her dark ringlets bobbing around her shoulders. “He exists. But he doesn’t know
you
exist. Yet. And he won’t unless you let me take a picture that captures the real you.”

The real me . . .

Gaby has no idea who that even is these days, other than knowing that the real Gabriella, who once laughed her way through life, doesn’t seem to remember how to smile anymore.

She hasn’t felt remotely like herself since last summer before she and Ben split up. After five years of marriage—and three years together before that—life without him was frighteningly unfamiliar. Even now, she begins every day with the momentarily frantic feeling that she’s woken up in a strange body in a strange place, having swapped someone else’s life for her own.

Then again, she really hasn’t felt like herself since . . .

No. Don’t go there.

She doesn’t dare let herself think about it even three years later—especially not when she’s supposed to be smiling.

Dr. Ryan—she’s the shrink Gaby has been seeing lately—says it’s okay to distract herself when she feels like she’s about to burst into tears over morbid thoughts of the past.

“Get yourself out of the moment,” the doctor advised. “Read a magazine, go for a run, call a friend—anything that you enjoy.”

She nodded at the advice, rather than admit that there’s very little she enjoys anymore. Even the things that once gave her pleasure have been reduced to mere obligations.

Yet here she is, allowing her cousin to take photos to create a profile on the InTune dating Web site. Even Dr. Ryan thought it might be a good idea—another positive step toward getting over Ben, making a fresh start.

“Gaby, I wish you’d try to relax,” Maria cajoles. “It’s for your own good. Try and have fun with it.”

“Okay, fine. Let’s see how Mr. Perfect likes this.” She sticks her thumbs into her ears and wiggles her fingers, rolls her eyes back and thrusts out her tongue.

“Hilarious! I love it!” Maria snaps away.

“Hey! I was just kidding around.”

“I know, but this will show him that you have a light side. We can do the sexy shots later.”

“Sexy shots?”
she echoes, already shaking her head.

“Hey, why don’t you romp around on the grass?”

“Romp around on the—”

“You know, maybe do a cartwheel or something.”

“A
cartwheel
? Are you insane? Or do you just want people to think that I am?”

“Just do something that shows that you have a lighthearted, fun side. Go!” Maria points her left index finger at Gaby, her right poised on the shutter. “Come on. It’s for Mr. Perfect.”

Gaby shakes her head.

She thought she had already found Mr. Perfect, a long time ago.

She was wrong.

She also thought she could live with that. Live alone. Forever.

But then—in a weak, lonely moment, after too many happy hour cocktails on Cinco de Mayo—she allowed Maria to convince her that online dating is the answer to all her problems.

“Everyone does it,” Maria told her.

“Not everyone.”

“I do.”

“You’re not everyone.”

“But everyone else does, too. Excuse me,” Maria called to a pretty waitress scurrying past their outdoor table with bowls of tortilla chips and guacamole. “Can I ask you a quick question?”

“Sure, what’s up?” The waitress paused, looking pleased at the momentary reprieve from running around in the heat. Hands full, she blew her bangs away from her sweaty forehead.

“Have you ever been on an Internet dating site?”

“It’s how I met my fiancé.”

“Really?”

“Really. Look.” Balancing her tray with her right hand, she waved the diamond ring on her left. “We’re getting married next month.”

“That’s great. Congratulations. That’s all I wanted to know. Oh, and we’ll take another round when you have a chance.” The waitress walked on, and Maria looked smugly at Gaby. “See that? You can’t argue with an engagement ring.”

Ordinarily, Gaby might have. But Maria—and the tequila, and the thought of another solitary weekend in her tiny studio apartment—had finally worn her down.

She shrugged. “Oh, why not? I’ll give it a try.”

That was three weeks ago.

She’d talked herself out of the idea in the cold, cruel light of day on May sixth, but Maria threatened to create a profile for her anyway. And Gaby knew she was quite capable of following through.

Born just a week earlier, her cousin has always done her best to bulldoze Gaby like a bossy big sister.

“
Ella es cabeza dura
, that one,” their Puerto Rican maternal grandmother used to say about Maria—meaning, she’s hard-headed. “Don’t let her push you around, Gabriella.”

Most of the time, Gaby didn’t. Still doesn’t.

But right now . . .

Resigned to the fact that she’s going to find herself with an online profile one way or another, she manages to muster a halfhearted smile for Maria’s camera.

But the carefree girl she once was—the girl who might actually have turned cartwheels across the grass in Central Park—had died long ago, along with her marriage and her only child.

Having completely forgotten about the long holiday weekend, Alex is alarmed by the sight of a police road block on Main Street on Monday morning.

They know. They know, and they’re looking for me.

There’s nothing to do but stop and dutifully roll down the window as the cop beside the blue barricade comes walking toward the car.

“Good morning, officer.”

“ ’Morning. You’ll have to turn around and detour back up Cherry Street to get to the other side of town. Memorial Day parade is about to start.”

Memorial Day parade!

It’s Memorial Day!

Thank God, thank God, it’s just a parade, and not . . .

Come on, of course it’s not about you. They can’t possibly know about you. You’ve been so careful . . .

“All right, officer. Thank you. Have a great day!”

Was the last part overkill? Alex wonders, carefully making a K-turn and making sure to use directional signals. Was it a blatant red flag to the cop?

Nah. People always tell each other to have a great day.

Even if he were to be summoned back—and for what?—there’s nothing in the car that would alert the cop that anything is amiss. Even if the officer were to examine the contents of the plastic drugstore shopping bag on the passenger seat, there still wouldn’t be any reason for suspicion. Of course not.

And of course it was his imagination that the clerk back at the store had raised her eyebrow when she rang up the purchases: Advil, Band-Aids, a magazine, a pack of gum—decoy items, all, meant to distract attention from the main objective: an over-the-counter pregnancy test.

“Find everything?” the clerk had asked—routine question, yet Alex worried for a moment that it was a precursor to something more probing, less discreet.

But of course that was pure paranoia. No clerk would ever question a total stranger about something so personal.

No clerk had any way of knowing that a random customer—paying with cash—had purchased the same test countless times before all over the tristate area.

You have nothing at all to worry about. Just get home and take care of business.

Alex keeps the odometer precisely at the speed limit all the way up Cherry Street, past familiar rows of old maples framing well-kept suburban houses. All is quiet this morning. The neighborhood is populated by young families and well within walking distance of Main Street. The stroller-and-leash brigade most likely headed out early to claim prime spots along the parade route.

Noticing the flags flying from poles and porches, Alex makes a mental note to put up a flag, too, back home. There’s one somewhere in the basement.

The basement . . .

Ten years ago, when the Realtor showed him and Carmen the house, the basement was a major selling point.

“The family that lived here in the sixties added over seven hundred square feet of living space when they turned this into a rec room,” she said, flicking a light switch and leading the way downstairs into a large open area.

Once, years earlier, Alex had forgotten to roll up the car windows at night. It rained, and the carpet and upholstery got wet. Forever after that, the interior was permeated by a strong mildew odor. The basement smelled the same way.

The walls were paneled in brown wood and the floors covered in green indoor-outdoor carpeting that gave way to linoleum in one corner where an old olive-green washer and dryer sat alongside a slop sink. There were windows scattered high on three walls. On the fourth there was just a door.

The Realtor had opened it, and an even stronger dank smell greeted their nostrils. “Wait until you see this,” she said, as if she were about to reveal something utterly dazzling: a stocked wine cellar or fully equipped home gym . . .

“What is it?” Carmen asked, nose wrinkled, peering into the dank—apparently vacant—interior.

“It’s a bomb shelter!”

Alex and Carmen had exchanged a glance.

“The house was built back in the Cold War era. People were afraid Russia was going to drop a nuclear bomb.”

Alex had seen the black and yellow Fallout Shelter signs on sturdy public buildings all over the city, but . . .
“Here?”

The Realtor shrugged. “New York was considered a major target, and we’re right in the suburbs. The assumption was that the radiation contamination would spread if the city were hit. People wanted to protect their families. Back in the day, this room was filled with canned goods, bottled water, lamps, cots, a space heater, even a toilet.”

“That explains the smell,” Carmen murmured.

“It’s a piece of history,” the Realtor crowed. “Isn’t it fabulous?”

Fabulous wasn’t quite the right word. Not back then.

Not now, either.

Alex never imagined, when they bought the house, that the underground bunker would ever be used for anything more than extra storage . . . and perhaps a conversation piece.

But then, there were a lot of things he had never imagined back then.

Online, you can be anyone you want to be.

That’s the beauty of these Internet dating sites. You can call yourself by another name, make up an exciting background and glamorous career, even use a photo-shopped head shot—within reason, of course. You don’t go and shave fifty pounds off your body or twenty-five years off your age, and you don’t claim to be a celebrity or a billionaire, because those are things you obviously can’t pull off once you meet someone in person.

But early on, when you’re trying to bait the trap, so to speak, you really have to offer something that will tempt anyone who comes across your profile.

The picture he just uploaded to his new page on the InTune Web site hasn’t been digitally altered, but it is a few years old. In it, he’s wearing a red sweater. He read someplace that a splash of red attracts the opposite sex when it comes to online photos.

The snapshot was taken a couple of Christmases ago. He was thinner and more handsome then, still hitting the gym every day and getting a good night’s sleep every night, back before all the trouble started. He had more hair and fewer wrinkles—issues that can be easily remedied with the right imaging software.

Expensive
software—which he can no longer afford, thanks to
her
.

And thanks to her, he didn’t even consider taking new pictures for his new online dating profile. When he looks in the mirror lately, he doesn’t like what he sees. When he looks at old pictures, he does. Case closed.

He leans back in his chair and surveys his latest profile.

Any eligible female who stumbles across Nick Butler’s tall, dark, and handsome picture will most likely click through to read his questionnaire.

First, she’ll check out his age, thirty-one; his location, Upper West Side; his occupation, architect.

She’ll see that he’s never been married and has no children. That will most likely be met with approval because, really, who wants that kind of baggage?