The Perfect Stranger (25 page)

Hearing the elevator bell ring at last, Crystal and Frank look over expectantly. The doors slide open and Landry Wells—aka BamaBelle—steps out.

Standing to greet her, Crystal notes that she’s changed out of her black dress, now wearing a pair of trim off-white linen pants with a sea-foam-colored summer cardigan. Her blond hair is caught in a neat ponytail and she’s got on a fresh coat of pink lipstick that matches her manicure and pedicure polish.

How is it that certain women—often, southern women—always manage to look so pulled together, even under duress?

Crystal—who rarely looks in a mirror after she leaves the bathroom in the morning and would never think to reapply lipstick in the middle of the day—is not one of those women.

“I’m sorry I’m late.” Landry walks quickly toward them, heeled sandals tapping on the tile floor. “I had to call home and check on my husband and kids and it took longer than I thought.”

“Do you know where the others are?” Crystal asks.

“They should be here any second. We all went to our rooms when we got back.”

“Okay. Why don’t you and I go have a quiet talk in the conference room while Detective Schneider waits here for your friends?”

“Sure.”

Crystal escorts Landry down the hall behind the front desk as the clerk pretends not to watch them over the open romance novel in her hands.

With a view of the side parking lot and part of the pool’s chain-link fence, the conference room is a no-frills rectangle that contains little more than a long table with eight chairs and a blue plastic water bottle cooler.

Crystal closes the door behind them. “Have a seat, Ms. Wells. Or do you go by Mrs.?”

“Either, but you can call me Landry.” She perches on the chair nearest the door, giving off the expectant, anxious vibe of a mom sitting in the Little League stands as her child comes up at bat, or in the audience as her kid takes a turn in a spelling bee.

She doesn’t belong here, in the middle of a murder investigation, Crystal finds herself thinking as she takes the adjacent seat at the head of the table. She should be back at home, with her family.

“All right, Landry. Let’s get started.” Crystal sets her bag on the floor, taking out her laptop and a notebook and pen, but leaving the recording equipment inside.

No need to make Landry Wells needlessly skittish. She always records witnesses she has a hunch might later become suspects, but she’s certain that won’t happen in this case. Her Internet search on Landry’s name had resulted—among other things—in a photograph from an Alabama newspaper’s society page. Snapped Saturday night at a charity ball, it depicted an elegantly dressed Landry accompanied by her husband and another couple identified as the husband’s law partner and his wife.

So there we have it—an alibi
, she thought, when she noted the date.

Crystal opens the laptop and it instantly buzzes to life, already bookmarked on Landry’s most recent blog post—written several days ago, presumably before she found out about Meredith.

She flips her notebook to a clean page, picks up a pen, and clears her throat. “I just want to talk to you a little bit about your relationship with Meredith, and about her blog, and yours, and . . . I’d like your take on how the whole thing works.”

“You mean blogging?”

“The dynamic you have with other bloggers, that kind of thing.”

“Oh. Okay. Well . . .” Landry looks as though she has no idea where to begin.

“Why don’t you tell me first what made you decide to write your own blog?”

“Have you read it?”

Crystal nods. She’d first stumbled across it a few days ago, having noticed that someone named BamaBelle commented often on Meredith’s page, and tracing the comments back to the blog. She did the same with a number of others.

Today at the funeral home, after asking the three women about their online identities, she’d finally been able to connect the blog titles and screen names with real women behind them.

Afterward, when she wasn’t fruitlessly searching for a link between Jenna Coeur and Meredith Heywood, she’d spent the better part of the last hour reading—and in some cases, rereading—Landry’s, Kay’s, and Elena’s blogs, noting their interaction with Meredith, each other, and fellow bloggers.

It came as no surprise to her that the attractive, genteel southern stay-at-home-mom was behind the homey, conversational
Breast Cancer Diaries
, or that the reserved midwesterner wrote the staid
I’m
A-Okay
.

The shocker was that the saucy
Boobless Wonder
blog was penned by a first grade teacher. But a few minutes in Elena Ferreira’s presence revealed an engaging, if somewhat frenetic, personality that seems convincingly reminiscent of the voice she uses in her blog.

Nothing unusual jumped out at Crystal in any of the blogs, other than a remarkably casual level of intimacy among a collection of strangers who had ostensibly never met in person. But then, she’s seen that phenomenon within other online communities. When people come together on the Internet, the usual social constraints fall away with the promise of anonymity.

“If you’ve read my blog,” Landry says, “then you know that I was diagnosed with breast cancer. That’s why I blog.”

Crystal shoots straight, as always. “But lots of people have breast cancer and don’t blog. Why do you?”

Perhaps taken aback, Landry tilts her head.

Crystal is about to rephrase the question, but then Landry answers it in a soft voice, as if she’s conveying a secret. Maybe she is.

In a lilting drawl that sometimes takes Crystal a moment to translate, Landry talks about the fear and shock and—more importantly—the loneliness that set in after her diagnosis. She describes the support group she visited early in her treatment, and the horror of coming face-to-face with doomed patients. She smiles faintly when she mentions her first foray onto the Internet in search of information, finding not just that, but also companionship—ultimately, friendship.

“I wasn’t isolated anymore,” she tells Crystal. “I realized these women were talking about things I could relate to. And that maybe I had something to say, too. Something I couldn’t say to the people I saw every day.”

“Because . . .”

“Because they just wouldn’t get it.”

Crystal asks her a few more questions about the evolution of Landry’s own blog before leading into how she got to know Meredith.

“She was kind of like the older sorority sister who takes a new pledge under her wing, you know?”

Crystal nods, though she doesn’t know. Not from experience. But she bets Landry does.

Sure enough, the question is met with a nod and a faint smile. “I was Alpha Gamma Delta at University of Alabama.”

“Roll Tide.”

Landry’s smile widens to a full-blown grin. “That’s right!”

“So Meredith was . . . what, like a big sister? A mentor?”

The smile fades promptly at the mention of the dead woman’s name.

She forgot, for a moment there,
Crystal realizes.
Forgot why we’re here; forgot her friend was murdered.

Now that Landry remembers, renewed sorrow taints her pretty face as she contemplates the question. “Maybe she was more motherly than sisterly . . . is sisterly a word?”

“You’re the writer. You tell me.”

“You know . . . it’s funny, I don’t really consider myself a writer, but . . . I guess that’s what blogging is, right? I kind of like thinking of it that way, and I know Meredith did, too. It’s what she always wanted to be.”

“A writer?” Crystal knows this—some of Meredith’s blog posts referred to the literary road not taken—but she waits for Landry to elaborate.

“We talked a lot, privately, about stuff like that. She said she’d always dreamed of writing a book, and she recently told me she’d been toying with the idea of compiling some of her blogs into a collection and trying to get it published.”

“You talked on the phone?”

“No, usually e-mail.”

“Is that how you all communicate privately?”

“That, or instant-messaging.”

“No phone.”

“Well, I can’t speak for the others—maybe some of them call each other—but we don’t. At least, we didn’t, until this week, after Meredith . . .”

Crystal nods. “And by ‘we,’ you mean . . .”

“The bloggers I’m closest to. There’s a little group of us—Meredith was a part of it.”

“And the other two women who came with you to the funeral?”

“Elena and Kay—yes, them, too.”

“Who else?”

“The others aren’t here. I’ve never met them. And one is—Nellie passed away.”

Crystal raises an eyebrow. Another one? “When? What happened?”

“Oh, it wasn’t . . . she wasn’t . . . killed. It was cancer.”

Right. Of course it was. Crystal even vaguely remembers reading about the death in past entries on several of the blogs, including Meredith’s.

But for a moment there her mind jumped to the possibility of an opportunistic serial killer preying on this vulnerable group of women, perhaps even posing as one of them . . .

Again she thinks of Jenna Coeur.

But she wasn’t a serial killer,
she reminds herself.
She just killed one other person . . .

Just?

Crystal wants to ask Landry if Meredith ever mentioned her, but she’s getting ahead of herself. First things first.

“So there was . . . Nellie, did you say?”

Landry nods. “She was from England. Whoa Nellie was her screen name.”

“Hang on a second.” Crystal turns to the laptop, searches, and finds herself looking at Whoa Nellie’s blog. The photo shows a thin middle-aged woman sporting a crew cut—no postchemo head scarves for Whoa Nellie—and the top entry was written by her husband, reporting her death and linking to her obituary.

Crystal clicks it, reads it silently, then turns back to Landry.

“Okay. So there’s Nellie, Meredith,” she counts off on her fingers, “and then there’s you, and Elena, and Kay . . . Who are the others in your clique?” The word slips out, and Landry reacts with a wrinkled nose.

“Clique? We’re not a clique. That makes it sound like we’re being exclusive.”

“And you’re not?”

“No. We’re just a group of women who gravitated together, like any other friends, except . . .”

Except they all have cancer, and most of them have never met.

Crystal nods. She gets it. “So are there any others in the group, besides the five of you?”

“Just one more.”

Pen poised, Crystal asks, “Who is it?”

“Jaycee. She writes
PC BC.
She lives in New York.”

“Is that with a G or a J?” Crystal asks, once again trying to translate the drawl.

“With a J. You spell it J-A-Y-C-E-E.”

Crystal begins to write it down. Midway, her pen goes still.

Jaycee.

PC . . . BC . . .

J C

Jenna Coeur.

It was probably random; an accident.

But for some reason, Sheri Lorton can’t seem to let it go.

The guitar pick.

Why would Roger have had one in his pocket? He doesn’t—
didn’t
—play.

He’s the last person in the world anyone would ever imagine picking up a guitar.

He’s not—he
wasn’t
—into music at all. He wouldn’t know Jimi Hendrix from Jimmy Page from Jimmy Buffet. Hell, he wouldn’t know any of them from Jimmy Fallon. He didn’t watch television either.

A dedicated academic, all he really cared about was his work—specifically, higher math—and his family. Not in that order.

At first she had been convinced it had gotten mixed in with his belongings by accident.

But the more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed. The bag was sealed, and inventoried, and the guitar pick was listed on the contents log.

She’s considered—and dismissed—the likelihood that Roger might have found it on the sidewalk and picked it up. He’s a germaphobe; he never left home without his hand sanitizer. He scolded her whenever she stumbled across and reached for a faceup penny in a public place.

“But it’s good luck,” she’d tell him, putting it into her pocket.

“Not if you contract a disgusting disease from it.”

“I’ll take my chances. And since you worry about disgusting diseases, you might want to quit smoking.”

But of course, he wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Not even for her.

“It’s my one vice, Sheri.”

“It can kill you. Don’t you want to stick around and grow old with me?”

“I’ll grow old with you. Don’t worry.”

Wandering around the empty house they’d shared, remembering that conversation—rather, those conversations, because they’d had it more than once—she wipes tears from her eyes.

Mingling with her intense grief is a growing sense of uneasiness about the damned guitar pick.

What if it’s a clue?

What if the killer accidentally dropped it . . .

Into Roger’s pocket?

Not very likely, but not impossible.

“Maybe I should tell the police,” she speculates aloud.

Maggie, ever on her heels, seems to agree with a jangling of dog tags. Sheri reaches down to pet the puppy’s head.

“I wish you could talk, Mags. I wish you could tell me who did this to him.”

Maggie wags her tail, but she, too, seems wistful.

Crying again, Sheri goes into the bathroom for tissues. Then Maggie is at the door, needing to be let out into the yard. Then the phone rings: one of Roger’s colleagues checking in to see how she is.

By the time she hangs up, lets the puppy back into the house, and feeds her, Sheri is utterly spent. Maybe even exhausted enough to finally get some sleep.

It’s not time for bed yet, by any stretch of the imagination. The late afternoon sun still beams through the screened windows, and the chirping birds beyond won’t give way to crickets for at least another four or five hours.

But sleep would bring a sorely needed reprieve from this living hell, and so she climbs the stairs to the bedroom.

Closing the windows to quiet the birdsongs and drawing the blinds to block out the sun, Sheri pushes away nagging thoughts of the guitar pick.