A Dangerous Widow (A Dangerous Series) (5 page)

“Do you want me to discuss your uncle?” she
asked.

For a moment, I felt my whole body go tense,
and then I tried to relax because I didn’t want to tip her off that anything
might have happened to any of my uncles.
 

Even though she clearly knew otherwise.

But what
does
she know…?

“Which uncle?” I asked.
 
“I have several.”

“I’ve already told you that I’m terrible
when it comes to names, but I believe his name was either Will or Bill.
 
I’m thinking Bill.”

No…
I thought.

“Am I right?”

“You are.”

“But before I go on, I need to know whether
you want Laura to hear this…”

“We have no secrets.
 
Of course she can hear it.”

She hesitated before she said, “Your uncle
committed suicide,” she said.
 
“He
shot himself in the head.”

I covered my mouth with my fingers as the
horrific memory of his death crashed through me like a thunderbolt.
 
My eyes welled with tears.
 
I had loved my uncle.
 
His depression had become so
debilitating, and it was clear from the note he left behind that he just wanted
out.
 

“I’m sorry, Kate.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, shaking.

“I don’t either.
 
I wish I knew how I see the things that
I see, but I don’t know.
 
It’s just
how it is.
 
Sometimes it’s a burden,
like it is now.
 
Other times, it’s a
gift, as it was moments ago with Laura when I told her that she should continue
to see Jack, because I think he is the one.
 
This is what I live with on a daily
basis.
 
I apologize for bringing up
your uncle’s death, but I had to go there so you’d know that I’m the real
thing—for better or worse.”

I wiped the tears from my eyes, and took the
tissue Laura offered to me.
 
“Earlier, you said that we needed to get to the bottom of
something.
 
What were you talking
about?”

“I need you to be very strong for me right
now, because I promise you that we will figure this out together—if you
let
me help you, which I want to do.
 
I’ve already committed myself to that.”

“Help me how?
 
And why do I need to be strong?”

“Because this is about your husband,” Rhoda
said.

“Michael?”

“Yes.”

“What about him?”

“Laura, take her hand.”

“Rhoda,” Laura said with a warning tone to
her voice.
 
“Is this really necessary?
 
You’ve upset Kate.
 
I think we’ve gone far enough.”

I saw Rhoda’s eyes flick up to meet
Laura’s.
 
“That’s purely up to
Kate.”

“We’ve gone this far, haven’t we?” I
said.
 
“So, what is it?
 
What’s this about Michael?”

“His death was no accident.”

“Rhoda,” Laura said quickly.
 
“Unless you’re absolutely certain about
what you’re about to say, don’t you dare even go there.”

“But I am certain,” she said.
 
“The energy is that strong.
 
It’s left me rattled ever since Kate
first spoke.”

Overwhelmed, I just looked at Rhoda.
 
“What are you saying?”

“That Michael was murdered.
 
And that what happened to him was
vicious.”

CHAPTER THREE

For a moment, I sat in shock before rage
took hold of me.

“You need to explain yourself now,” I said
to Rhoda.
 
“Right now.
 
That’s a serious fucking
allegation.
 
Explain yourself.”

“Your husband didn’t trip over your dog, as
you and the police were led to believe.”
 

She knows about Bruiser?
 
How?

She closed her eyes.
 
“Right now, I can see your old townhouse
on Park,” she said.
 
“And there’s
the staircase your husband fell down.”
 
She opened her eyes when she said that and corrected herself.
 
“In fact, which he was shoved down.”

“
Shoved
down?”

“Yes.”

“By whom?”

“All I can see is a woman dressed in
black.
 
And she’s wearing a black
ski mask.
 
I know it’s a woman from
her shape.
 
I can see Michael coming
out of his office and moving toward the staircase and she is rushing up behind
him.
 
Shoving him.
 
Murdering him.”

“My God,” Laura said.
 
“Kate, I had no idea that it would come
to this.”

I loved my friend, but I ignored her.
 
Instead, I focused on Rhoda.

“Tell me how anyone could have gotten into
our house?” I said.
 
“We had a
security system in place.
 
It was
the best on the market.”

“The woman in black—she got in with
your cleaning lady, who had the code to your house.
 
What was her name?
 
Linda?”

I felt my heart sink as I said, “Lydia.
 
But she swore to what she saw.
 
I knew that woman for five
years—and while she has since passed, she was nothing if not honest.
 
She loved us.
 
She saw us as her family, as we did
her.
 
I know that she did.”

“She did, but she still lied about what she
saw that day.”

“Why?”

“Because that woman held a gun to her head
and threatened her.
 
Lydia was given
an ultimatum.
 
She could lie to the
police, or she could tell them the truth.
 
If she did the latter, she was told that she and her family would be
murdered.
 
Lydia believed the
woman—why wouldn’t she?
 
She’d
witness what had happened to Michael.
 
She felt that she had no choice but to lie.
 
She had to protect her husband and
children.”

“Who is this woman?”

“All I can see is her mask.
 
Kate, what you need to know is that
Lydia didn’t mean to betray you.
 
She feared for her life and for her family’s life.
 
She felt that she had no choice but to
lie to the police.
 
And to you.
 
But the grief she felt for having lied
to all of you overwhelmed her until her death.
 
I can tell you that she was so scared,
she felt that she had no choice but to follow through with that woman’s
orders.
 
She was to tell you and the
police that your dog—what was his name?”

“Bruiser.”

“Bruiser,” she said.
 
“A Great Dane, right?”

Incredulously, I said, “Yes…”

“That it was Bruiser who rushed up the
staircase and accidentally slammed against Michael’s legs, thus presumably
creating the ‘accident’ that caused his death.
 
Lydia was convincing when the police
questioned her because she was frightened to her core.
 
The police believed her story.
 
You did, as well.
 
In the end, it was considered nothing
more than a tragic accident.
 
But it
was no accident, Kate.
 
Michael was
murdered.”

Unable to take anymore of this, I stood on
unsteady feet.
 
Laura joined me and
put her hand on my shoulder to steady me.

“I need to go.”

“Before you do,” Rhoda said, “I need you to
listen to me one final time.
 
While
you’re still with me.
 
Are you with
me?”

“I want out.”

“You need to listen to me,” she said
sternly.

And so I looked at her.

“There is a man in this city who can help
you.”

“What man?”

“You were close to him once—in fact,
you dated him for three years.
 
You
went to junior and senior prom with him.
 
He was your first love—and also the man you first made love
with.
 
I’m so worked up right now, I
can’t make out his name.
 
But I can
see him.
 
Dark hair.
 
Blue eyes.
 
Handsome.
 
Well built.
 
You were together from junior year in
high school until freshman year in college.
 
I don’t see any hard feelings
surrounding your breakup, but I do see sadness.
 
And heartbreak.
 
And love.”

“Are you saying that Ben is here?
 
In Manhattan?”

“Ben!” she said.
 
“That’s his name.
 
And he is in Manhattan.
 
He’s become a private investigator since
you last saw him.
 
He’s a former
SEAL.
 
He can help you—I know
that he can.
 
You must seek him
out.
 
Please tell me that you will.”

I didn’t answer.
 
All of this had become too much.
 
I only wanted out.
 

“Kate, you need to know that you can come to
me at any point at no cost—I will help you wherever and however I
can.
 
Things often come to me hours,
days, even weeks after an initial consultation.
 
For that reason alone, please leave me a
number where I can reach you.”

But I didn’t.
 
I was in shock.

Likely sensing this, Rhoda shoved her card
into my hand.
   

“Please come back,” she said.
 
“It’s rare that I see everything all at
once, especially when we haven’t even talked about the weeks and days leading
up to Michael’s death, which could open new doors.
 
New insights.
 
Or not.
 
I never know, but I do know that the
odds are in our favor that it might happen.”

“I need to leave,” I said, feeling sick to
my stomach.

“Reconnect with Ben,” Rhoda said as I walked
toward the exit.
 
“Listen to me on
this, Kate.
 
He’s the key to
resolving this.
 
As are you.”
 

Her voice faded when I pushed through the
front door and shot onto the sidewalk, but I still heard her last words.
 

“And as am I.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“Kate!” Laura called out to me as I walked
down the sidewalk to catch a cab.
 
“Where are you going?
 
I didn’t
have time to text Rob, but he can be here in minutes to pick us up and drive us
home!
 
Please don’t go.
 
I know how upset you must be.
 
You need to be with your best friend
right now.”

I loved Laura, and even though she had just
led me straight into a nightmare, how could I be angry with her?
 
I wasn’t.
 
She never could have known that this
would have happened—all she wanted to do was to have a bit of fun.
 
What happened was horrible, but it
certainly wasn’t her fault.
 
Still,
I wanted to be left alone so that I could try to absorb everything that had
just been said to me.
 
I always
thought best when I was alone.

So, I put my best face forward.

“I need to be by myself,” I said as I turned
and placed my hands on her shoulders.
 
“Trust me—right now, it’s what’s best for me.
 
I’m going to take a cab home and think
about what Rhoda said.
 
And then
I’ll decide how best to go from here.”

“Who is Ben?” she asked.

“He was a lifetime ago.”

Once, we were deeply in
love.
 
We were together from junior
year in high school until freshman year in college.
 
It was when we went to separate colleges
in different states that both of us decided to break off our relationship
because we didn’t know how we could sustain it with so many miles between
us.
 
There was never any animosity
between us.
 
If anything, when we
broke up, there was just grief and sadness because we’d broken each other’s
hearts.
 
And now, somehow, he’s a
P.I. in Manhattan?
 
And I’m supposed
to get in touch with him because ‘he’s the key to ending this’?
 
What am I to make of any of this?
 
How can it be that Michael was
murdered—
if
he was murdered?
 
Lydia was there.
 
I saw the
truth in her eyes, for God’s sake.
 
I had believed her!

Feeling sick to my stomach, I looked at
Laura.
 
“I need to go.
 
So, give me a kiss.
 
I’m not angry with you.
 
But you need to understand that I’m
barely holding it together right now.
 
I’m on the verge of losing it, so I need to get out of here and get
home.
 
OK?”

“I know how you are,” she said.
 
“You always tough out the worst of life
on your own.
 
It’s who you are.
 
If you want to catch a cab, I
understand—but you must know that I’m here for you.
 
And that you can call on me at any
hour.
 
Do you hear me, Kate—at
any hour.
 
I’ll leave my cell at my
bedside.”

As more and more of what Rhoda had said
started to sink into me, my heart became closer to being smashed to bits.
 
I told Laura that I’d call her
soon.
 
And then, with tears flooding
my eyes, I turned around and moved away from her.
 
I moved through the crowds on the
sidewalk and took to the street in an effort to find a cab that would take me
home so I could sit by myself—and rethink events I literally thought had
been buried five years ago.

*
 
*
 
*

Despite having had a martini at lunch, when
I returned home and shut the door behind me, I went straight for the kitchen, and
poured myself a glass of Sauvignon Blanc.
 
Then, I slipped out of my heels and moved into the living room.
 

I sat down on one of the white, quilted
sofas, took a sip of the wine, and put the glass down on the side table to my
right.

And then I just drifted back into time.

Most of what had happened to Michael was
still as fresh as if it had happened yesterday—coming home to find him at
the foot of our stairs, the familiar shape of his body lying still beneath the
white sheet, and the way his eyes had been open and staring into nothingness
when I knelt down to give him a final kiss goodbye.

Other memories were just as
bright—there was Lydia, for instance, who had been hysterical throughout
all of it.
 
Lydia, who was the only
one besides Michael and me who had the codes to access our townhouse.

I remembered questioning her myself.
 
And even though I knew that every one of
us has within us the capacity to deliver a believable lie, I felt that if Lydia
had been lying to me that day, then she should have had roses thrown at her
feet for the performance she’d delivered.
 
Because she had been that real.
 
That raw, horrified, shocked, and convincing.

Would the Lydia I remembered ever have lied
to me without good reason?
 
No.
 
I’d never believe that.
 
So, if any of this was true, someone
must have threatened her to do it.
 
But who?
 
Who was this
mysterious woman in black?
 
And
where did all of this—this idea that Michael might have been murdered—leave
me now?
 
Why would anyone want
Michael dead?
 
People loved
him.
 
Many revered him.
 
It made no sense to me.

Until, after a few moments of consideration,
it did.

I leaned my head back against the sofa as
echoes from the past called out to me.
 
Reluctantly, I reached back out to them.

The day before my husband died, he’d turned
down an offer to sell his company to a group of investors that had included two
of his closest friends—Mark Dodd and Tom Smart.
 
Could they have been involved in his
death?
 
Since they had been so close
to Michael for so long—since their college years—it didn’t seem
possible to me.
 
Even though they’d
dropped Michael as a friend the moment he backed out of the deal, for the life
of me, I couldn’t believe that they’d have anything to do with his death.
 

But then I remembered.

There was Michael’s upcoming hostile
takeover of MicroCom, which was in process while he was alive and was only two
weeks away from completion when he died.
 
Was someone at MicroCom at the root of this—if any of this even
was true?
 
Killing Michael would
have put an end to the takeover, and in fact it had.
 
With Michael’s death, StoneTech became
mine, and I dropped the takeover because I didn’t want to deal with anything
other than my own grief at that point.
 
So MicroCom emerged intact and unscathed because of my decision.

I took another sip of wine and searched my
memory for who led MicroCom, but I came up blank.
 
In the crushing haze of grief and loss
that was my life at that time, all I remembered was cancelling the takeover.
 
At that point, I’m not sure that I even
knew the players who were involved.
 
I was too distraught.

Not that the names of those people can’t be
uncovered…

Which brought me to Ben Cade, the first love
of my life—a man who, in the sixteen years since I’d last seen him, apparently
had gone on to become a Navy SEAL, and who now was a private investigator
living in Manhattan.
 
Who had Ben
become after all this time?
 
Time
changes all of us.
 
So, what of
Ben?
 
How had it changed him?
 
If he was the man I remembered him to
be, he was honest, good, and trustworthy, and he likely still had a fire in his
gut that rivaled even mine.
  

And now, he might be coming back into my
life—
if
I take Rhoda’s advice.

But how couldn’t I take her advice,
particularly after all that had happened today?
 
That’s what haunted me.
 
That’s what made me reach again for my
wine.
 
She’d seen too much of my
life for any of this to be a fluke.
 
She knew that I’d been born prematurely.
 
She knew that my Uncle Bill had taken
his own life.
 
And then she’d
dropped the real bomb and told me that Michael had been murdered.
 
As much as I didn’t want to believe
that, how could I ignore it?
 
How
could I just dismiss it?
 
If that
was the case, I owed it to Michael to find out if he was in fact murdered.
 
And if he was?

I’d bring his killer to their knees.

*
 
*
 
*

An hour or so later, after finishing my wine
and thinking long and hard about the road that was ahead of me, I went to my
laptop, looked up Ben Cade’s business in New York, and found his telephone
number on his website.
 
Curious to
know what he looked like all these years later, I searched his site for a
picture, but there were no photos of him to be found—likely due to his
own need for privacy.

After taking a deep breath, I picked up my
cell and dialed his number.
 
It was
only a moment before a familiar yet deeper voice answered.

“This is Ben Cade.”

“And this is Kate Stone,” I said.

For a moment, nothing was said as a ribbon
of silence stretched between us.
 
Since Michael had been so high profile in New York, at some point, Ben
must have read or heard that I’d married him.
 
And that my last name was Stone.

“Kate?” he said.

“It’s me.”

When I said that, the thundering quiet that
came after it was as tangible as it was unnerving.

“I—why are you calling?” he asked.

I wanted to cry as I said, “Because I think
that my husband might have been murdered.”

“Murdered?”

“Yes.”

“Where did this come from?”

“Trust me, you don’t even want to know.”

“Kate, I remember reading four or five years
ago that he died of some sort of freak accident.
 
News of his death was everywhere.”

And you didn’t reach out to me?

But that was an unfair reaction, wasn’t
it?
 
Why should he have?
 
At that point, we hadn’t seen each other
in eleven years.
 
We hadn’t even
spoken to each other.

He’s probably married now and has his own
family.
 
The fact that he didn’t
call when Michael died doesn’t mean that he lacks empathy.
 
It likely just came down to the fact
that we are worlds away from the couple that we used to be.
 
And so be it.

“I think it would be best if I just came to
see you,” I said.
 
“Can that
happen?
 
If it’s too awkward for
you, I understand.
 
If that’s the
case, perhaps you can give me a referral.
 
But I—”

“It’s not awkward.
 
And you don’t need a referral.
 
Do you know where my office is?”

“I’m looking at your website now.
 
I see the address.”

“How soon can you be here?”

To see you again?
 
How about next year?
 
Or the year after that?
 
I’m so not ready for this, Ben.
 
I can’t tell you…

And then it came to me that I had a chance
to vet Rhoda even further.

“Ben, this is a random question—but
are you a former SEAL?”

He hesitated before he said, “I am—why
do you ask?”

So, all of this must be true.
 
She’s gotten too much of my life right…

“It doesn’t matter.
 
Do you have time to see me today?” I
asked.

“Actually, today has turned out to be a free
day.
 
Cancellations—that sort
of thing.
 
You can come here if
you’d like.”

“I never expected this to happen, Ben.
 
I never wanted to involve you.
 
I didn’t even know that you were in
Manhattan.”