Kiss Her Goodbye (28 page)

Your husband can turn into a lying, cheating bastard, that's what.

She slows the car, passing the neighbors' lamplit houses. Smoke wafts from a couple of chimneys, and television screens glow beyond uncurtained windows. Everybody's life seems so cozily complete on this dark November night.

Everybody's but Stella's.

As she presses the automatic garage door opener and waits for the door to rise, she catches a glimpse of something moving in her rearview mirror.

She turns her head just in time to see a tall figure disappear around the corner of the house.

For a moment, Stella is uncertain what to do. Should she get out of the car and go to see who it was?

Or should she go in and make sure Jen and the kids are all right?

Maternal instinct kicks in and she hurriedly puts the car in park, leaving it running in the driveway. As she heads toward the front door, she belatedly realizes she can't unlock it; her keys are in the ignition. She'll have to knock so that Jen can—

Stella stops short, seeing that the front door is standing wide open.

Sick apprehension sweeps over her.

 

 

Standing at the very brink of the American Falls, Kathleen is mesmerized by the torrent of dark water rushing toward the edge.

When she was a little girl, she used to stand in this very spot and imagine what it would be like to go over Niagara Falls. Every so often, somebody would try it in a barrel—or without one. Not long ago, somebody jumped in on the Canadian side, went over, and survived unscathed. But more often than not, a body would be swallowed by the rapids in the gorge below.

Just over fourteen years ago, she again stood in this very spot with that harsh reality in mind, knowing that all she'd have to do was put her leg over the rail and hurtle herself into the water.

It would put a merciful end to everything.

The horrible, aching loss.

The burden of guilt she knew she couldn't carry forever.

But as much as she longed for relief, she just couldn't do it. As painful as her life was, she couldn't bring herself to end it by her own hand. She was Catholic, and when you came right down to it, suicide was out of the question.

She never forgot Father Joseph's long ago sermon on that very topic. According to him, killing yourself meant being condemned to eternity in hell.

So there was nothing for Kathleen to do but muddle on through her living hell, praying for a miracle, for a reason to keep living.

The miracle came through. Or so she naively allowed herself to believe.

And now, here she is, trying to outrun a past that was bound to catch up with her sooner or later.

What made you think you could get away with it forever?

“Kathleen? Are you all right?”

She looks up to see her husband beside her, concern in his blue eyes. The boys are a few yards away, feeding quarters into one of those standing telescope viewers that looks like a cross between an old-fashioned movie robot and a parking meter.

She takes a deep breath. “No, Matt. I'm not okay. There's something I have to tell you.”

With that, the shrill ring of her cell phone pierces the night.

“Mrs. Gattinski, you need to calm down,” the police detective tells her earnestly, facing her across the kitchen table.

“I know . . . I'm trying . . .” She hugs herself, willing the violent tremors to stop, knowing it's useless to try closing her eyes so she won't have to watch the cop dusting her countertops for fingerprints. She's already tried that, and the scene her mind's eye imagines is far more horrific than this. When she closes her eyes, she sees the bloodbath in the hallway, the lifeless corpse lying facedown on the living room floor, blood matting the long blond hair and staining the carpet below.

“Oh, God!” Stella wails, pressing her trembling fingers against her mouth. “Oh, God! Jen!”

“Take it easy, ma'am.” The detective, whose name is Bro-something-or-other, speaks in a businesslike manner, yet his grim expression betrays that he, too, is shaken by the grisly scene in the next room.

She heard him mention to another detective that he has a daughter that age. Jen's age.

“I need to get out of here,” she pleads again. “I need to go back upstairs and see my kids.”

“They're fine, ma'am. I told you, our female officer is with them. She's reading to them. In a little while, we'll take you and the kids to a neighbor or a relative.”

“I need to be with them now. Please.”

“You don't want them to see you in this condition, do you?”

“No, I don't,” she murmurs, remembering the girls' sleepy, startled expressions when she burst frantically into their room earlier. After what she had just seen downstairs, she was overwhelmed with relief to find them safely tucked into their beds. By the time she had gathered them into her arms to attempt to reassure them through her hysteria, sirens were already screaming through the neighborhood.

Within moments, her house was crawling with police officers and paramedics. Yellow crime scene tape has been unfurled; handheld radios squawk endlessly; every inch of the scene is being photographed and measured. The phone has been ringing incessantly; a patrolman is stationed beside it. From what Stella can tell, it's the media every time. Somebody said the street is swarming with reporters as well as all the neighbors; the police have erected a barricade out front.

Through it all, sweet, innocent Erin Hudson lies dead on the floor in the living room, her throat slit from ear to ear.

 

 

Lucy gasps, sitting straight up in bed, her heart pounding.

The room is dark.

It takes her a moment to realize that Henry's side of the bed is empty.

For a moment, she's confused. Is he working nights again?

Then she remembers. He's back on days. He was here, asleep, when she slipped beneath the blankets earlier . . . how much earlier?

She glances at the bedside clock, its digits glowing florescent green in the darkness. To her surprise, it's just past ten o'clock. It feels like the middle of the night.

She sinks back against the pillow as the nightmare comes back to her in bits and pieces that make no sense. She was running from something—that much, she recalls. But it wasn't Henry. It was somebody else, somebody whose face she couldn't seem to glimpse. All she could see was the pair of gnarled, outstretched hands. Claws, really. Claws with ten sharpened blades on the tips, like something out of a slasher film.

She kept running until she found herself trapped in a blind alley, the claws coming closer and closer. Just as they were about to grasp her, she woke up.

Lucy closes her eyes, pressing her hand against the front buttons of her flannel nightgown. She can feel her heart throbbing beneath her fingers.

The nightmare was terrifyingly real.

Who was chasing her?

She scans the images in her brain, searching for a clue, wondering why it seems so important to figure it out.

After all, it was just a dream.

For a few minutes, Lucy struggles to piece it back together.

Finally, she gives up and reaches toward her bedside table. Opening a drawer, she feels around inside for her rosary beads.

Clutching them against her breast, she settles back and begins to pray, just as Father Joseph taught her.

 

 

“Did you reach Jen's parents?” Stella asks the detective, who nods somberly.

“They weren't at home, but we got a hold of them on the cell phone number you gave us.”

Yes. Kathleen Carmody's cell phone. Stella can't believe that she even had the presence of mind to track down the number. It was still tucked in the drawer by the phone, scrawled on a piece of notebook paper in Jen's loopy teen girl handwriting. When she saw it, she burst into hysterical tears . . . again.

But the emotion comes and goes in sporadic fits. In moments like this, when she's feeling numb, she can almost think clearly. She can almost string rational thoughts together, in her mind and aloud.

Almost.

“Did you . . . you didn't . . . did you tell them?” she asks the detective.

“We only told them there had been an accident, and their daughter's been injured. They're on their way to the station house.”

Stella buries her head in her hands, a fresh flood of tears overtaking her. She can't bear the thought of the anguish that awaits the Carmodys.

Moaning Jen's name, she pictures the girl's beautiful face, pictures her lying facedown in her own blood. When Stella was led past her the second time, they were bagging her hands to preserve forensic evidence. Stella could see Jen's grotesquely blue clenched fingers through the plastic; could see her pink fingernail polish.

Stella thinks of her own daughters safe and sound upstairs, and she thanks God again that they were spared.

Then she finds herself thinking of Kathleen Carmody. She wants to believe that somehow, Kathleen is different. That somehow, she loves her daughter less than Stella loves Michaela and Mackenzie. She needs to believe that, needs to create a separation in her mind between her profound maternal love for her daughters and Kathleen's love for Jen, because the alternative is unthinkable.

Stella realizes the detective is patting her awkwardly on the shoulder.

“Mrs. Gattinski? Are you all right?”

She nods mutely, afraid to speak. If she speaks she will fall apart again.

“I just need a few minutes to ask you some questions, Mrs. Gattinski. Okay?”

She nods again. She knows he needs to question her and that he will also need to question the girls at some point. He promised that can wait, and that she can be there. He promised they'll be as gentle as possible with them.

He's been gentle with Stella, too, so far, asking her to describe exactly what she found when she came home. But there's nothing she can tell him that can possibly shed any light on Jen's murder.

“Where did you say you were this evening, Mrs. Gattinski?”

Actually, she didn't. She sidestepped the question when he initially asked it, and longs to sidestep it now.

If she tells him that she was where she was supposed to be—chaperoning a school dance—he'll check it out and find out she's lying. Then she'll become a suspect.

If she tells him she was out looking for her husband, whom she suspects of having an affair, Kurt will become a suspect.

Oh, who is Stella kidding? He's probably already a suspect, and so is she.

“Mrs. Gattinski?”

“I was . . . I was . . . I was supposed to be chaperoning a school dance . . .”

“Supposed to be?”

“Yes, but when I got there, I couldn't go in.”

For whatever reason, Stella needs to protect her husband. He might be capable of some despicable acts, but murder is not among them.

“Why couldn't you go in, Mrs. Gattinski?”

“I've been sick all week . . .” Okay, good. That can be proven. She was sick at school, and then she took several days off. She even called the doctor. “And when I got to the school tonight, I was still feeling ill. I sat in my car for a while in the parking lot thinking I might feel better, but then I finally gave up and came home.”

“Did you speak to anybody at the school?”

“No.”

“Did anybody see you when you were there in your car?”

Oh, God. She should never have lied. What was she thinking?

“I . . . I don't know. Maybe.”

It's too late to change her story now. It's too late to tell him the truth . . . isn't it?

She has an alibi, damn it. The hostess at the restaurant could vouch for her whereabouts.

But what about Kurt's whereabouts? What if he doesn't have an alibi? They'll think he killed Jen.

He might be a lying, cheating, sleazy bastard, but he's the father of Stella's children. She can't let him become a murder suspect.

“And your husband, Mrs. Gattinski? Where is he?”

She closes her eyes. Forces them open again, along her mouth, uncertain what she's going to say.

Then, before she can speak, from somewhere outside the house there's a sudden flurry of activity.

Stella looks toward the window, and so does the detective. Through the sliding glass doors that face the deck, they can see more and more searchlights arcing over the yard. Voices call out to each other, and dogs are barking.