The Perfect Stranger (27 page)

Caught up in the unexpected moment of female bonding, and forgetting all about why they’re here, Landry shakes her head with a smile. “Right. My son is the same way. Do you have kids?”

“I had a son.”

Had
means she lost him—and Landry can see it in the sorrow in her dark brown eyes.

Before she can figure out what to say—what else is there, besides
I’m so sorry
?—Addison is back on the line. “I think I found it. Is it written in blue Sharpie on the back of a supermarket receipt?”

“That’s it. Can you read it off for me?”

Addison does, repeating it twice to make sure Landry gets it right as she relays it to Detective Burns, who immediately Googles it.

“Thanks, sweetie. I’ll call back a little later to talk to you and to Tucker, too.”

“Okay. I miss you. I love you.”

“I miss you and love you, too. I’ll be home tomorrow.”

Hanging up, she’s pretty sure she glimpses a fleeting bittersweet expression on Detective Burns’s face, and she wonders again about the child she lost.

But the moment is gone; the detective is frowning at the computer. “That’s the phone number for a sushi place in New York. Unless your daughter got it wrong.”

“She wouldn’t. But I’ll make sure.” She quickly texts Addison, asking her to double-check the number.

The response is, predictably, prompt and efficient. The number was right—as in
wrong
. As in, it looks like Jaycee deliberately withheld her real number.

“I’ll call it”—Detective Burns is already dialing— “just to be sure.”

Landry is sure even before she hears the detective say into the phone, “I’m sorry, I dialed the wrong number,” and hang up.

She looks at Landry. “That was Wasabi Express asking me for my take-out order. Looks like your friend Jaycee had no intention of letting you find her.”

Diagnosis: Trypanophobia

That’s the official name for this crippling lifelong affliction of mine. Trypanophobia, otherwise known as fear of needles.

Not just needles prodding into me, but into anyone at all. I’m ashamed to admit it, but when my kids were little, I used to have my mother—and then, after she passed away, a friend or neighbor—come with me to the pediatrician’s office on days they needed shots or to have blood drawn. I’d sit in the waiting room while someone else held my children’s hands as needles poked into their arms. I’ve always felt guilty about that. But I couldn’t help it.

I have thin veins; it’s never been easy for a nurse or doctor to tap into one without a whole lot of painful poking around. And if my phobia didn’t ease up with pregnancy or motherhood, then it sure as hell didn’t happen after my cancer diagnosis. If anything, it became worse than ever.

That was why I ultimately opted to have a port implanted to deliver chemo medication—not that I could avoid the needles even then. There were plenty of other reasons for doctors and nurses to jab me, sometimes repeatedly, with every office visit.

But I remind myself that the needles I’ve always dreaded have become my lifeline now. And that’s reason enough to put up with them and to wear every bandage that covers a bloody cotton ball like a badge of honor.

—Excerpt from Meredith’s blog,
Pink Stinks

Chapter 12

Crossing the threshold to her Manhattan apartment at one o’clock Sunday morning, Jaycee locks the door behind her and peels off the blond wig at last. She throws it on the nearest surface—a table where she usually tosses what little incoming mail she receives here.

Mostly it’s just catalogues, fliers, takeout menus, and envelopes filled with coupons, addressed to Resident. The real stuff—bills, bank statements, correspondence, most of which is funneled through a mail drop—goes to Cory.

He’s been handling it all for her ever since the old days, when she was being hunted for drastically different reasons.

In some ways there’s quite a contrast in being sought-after because you’re a movie star and being sought-after because you’re a cold-blooded killer.

In other ways there’s no difference at all.

Back then she was often alone, and not by choice. Everyone wanted something from her. Everyone, it seemed, except Cory, and . . .

Her.

She’d thought Olivia was different. That was why she’d let her in. Trusted her, just as she’d trusted Steve all those years ago.

That time, it led to heartbreak. This time, it proved to be a fatal mistake . . .

Fatal for Olivia.

She closes her eyes, trying to forget, listening to the sound of her own breathing, and then . . .

Forty-odd stories below, sirens race down the avenue.

Sirens . . .

There were sirens that night. She’s the one who called 911 when it was over, hands sticky-slick with Olivia’s blood.

She doesn’t remember it, or what she said to the dispatcher.

But everything was admitted as evidence at the trial: the bloody fingerprints on the telephone, even—despite her lawyers’ protests, which were overruled—the recorded conversation that opened with her own voice—robotic, not frantic—reporting, “She’s dead.”

“Who’s dead?” the operator asked.

“Olivia. She’s—my daughter. I killed her.”

By the time the sensational headlines hit the morning papers—
JENNA COE
UR MURDERS TEEN DAUGHTER
—she was under arrest, sitting in jail while Cory, ever the efficient manager, assembled the stellar defense team that would coach her through the trial and eventually get her off the hook.

Reasonable doubt was the key. Her lawyers moved heaven and earth to produce it.

She initially thought building a self-defense case would be a much safer bet, but they wouldn’t hear of it.

“In a parent’s murder of a child? No jury would buy it. Not with all the evidence against you.”

“But—”

“Look, Jenna, the prosecution is going to bring in a bunch of experts who are going to testify that you’re guilty as hell. And the jury is going to believe them. Unless—
until
—we blast holes into every one of those experts’ testimonies. Got it?”

She did get it—once she realized that her lawyers didn’t actually give a damn whether she was innocent or guilty. She’d hired them to get her acquitted, and they did.

Five years ago she walked out of jail a free woman. She spent the first two years contentedly hidden away at a Caribbean island home owned by her lead attorney. The only people who ever laid eyes on her were the household help, and they either didn’t recognize her or were paid well enough not to care who she was.

But she couldn’t stay there forever. With Cory’s help, she made her way back to New York. But it took months before she even dared emerge from her apartment.

She never would have dreamed she’d eventually agree to take part in Cory’s crazy plan, the one that led her to Meredith and the others . . .

And to being recognized by that detective at the funeral.

She has no doubt that at this very moment the homicide investigators are trying to figure out why Jenna Coeur would have been there.

Sooner or later they’re bound to make the connection, if they haven’t already.

But she sure as hell wasn’t going to stick around Cincinnati worrying about it.

No, much better to stick around here and worry about it, helpless as a bird with clipped wings in a treetop nest.

She opens her eyes and sighs.

The street sirens have faded into the distance.

Just one more week of this
, she promises herself, kicking off her shoes and padding into the bathroom to scrub off her makeup. Next week at this time it will all be over and she can move on at last.

Wide-awake, too disturbed—and too cold—to sleep, Kay lies stiffly in the unfamiliar bed listening to the strange night sounds: thumps and footsteps from the other side of the wall, voices and closing doors in the hall, the on-off clunking and hum of the air-conditioning unit whose temperature she can’t seem to regulate.

If she could only get some rest . . .

Sometimes she lies awake at night worrying that cancer cells are growing again inside her body. Imagining how they will spread and destroy it, section by section, a stealthy predator bent on eventually robbing her of her senses, of her ability to reason, to move, to breathe . . .

Tonight she trades troubling thoughts of disease for speculation about the strange twist in the murder case.

Jenna Coeur . . .

When Detective Burns showed her the photo, she didn’t immediately recognize the woman.

“Should I?” she’d asked.

“Most people do.”

She shook her head. “Who is she?”

The moment Detective Burns said the name, the light dawned.

It would be hard to find a living soul who hadn’t heard of Jenna Coeur. Kay isn’t a movie fan and she doesn’t watch much TV, but you couldn’t really escape her altogether. The famed award-winning method actress was on the cover of every magazine and supermarket tabloid long before her notorious murder trial.

Detective Burns refreshed Kay’s memory a bit, and so did Landry and Elena, after they’d all been interviewed by the detectives—one of the most nerve-racking experiences of Kay’s entire life.

“This is my cell phone number,” Detective Burns said at the end, handing over a card. “If you think of anything else—anything at all—that might help us find out who did this to your friend, promise that you’ll call me right away. Any time of the day or night.”

Kay promised.

When it was over, she felt better that both Landry and Elena confessed that they, too, had been anxious—even more so now that they knew about the Jenna Coeur connection.

By then it was late. No one was in the mood to go out to dinner as they’d planned. The three of them just sprawled together on the bed in Elena’s room, sipping cocktails they mixed from the minibar and discussing the bizarre turn of events.

It was almost like an old-fashioned slumber party. Kay felt closer than ever to her new friends. Only, instead of telling scary, made-up stories, the three of them discussed the terrifying notion that Jaycee—their Jaycee—is really Jenna Coeur.

Detective Burns seems to think so, and both Elena and Landry believe it as well. Kay pretended to agree, because it was easier than arguing with two strong-willed women like that—particularly Elena. But deep down inside she isn’t convinced.

Maybe you just don’t want to be convinced.

Maybe it terrifies you to think that somebody in your little circle is not who she’s pretending to be.

“How much did you share with Jaycee?” the three of them took turns asking each other, worriedly.

They tried to remember how many details they’d revealed. For Kay, not a whole lot. Later, alone in her room, she went back over her e-mails and private messages just to be sure, although . . .

Does it really matter now?

Jaycee—or Jenna—whoever she is . . .

“She’s not going to come after us anyway,” Elena said firmly. “We don’t have to worry.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Landry agreed. “I just wish you hadn’t told her about next weekend.”

“She didn’t even respond. Don’t worry.”

Kay reluctantly suggested they cancel the girls’ getaway plans, but neither of them wanted to.

“We’re doing it, and you’re coming, too, Kay,” Elena said firmly, pulling out her phone. “Here, let’s get online and find you a plane ticket.”

“I don’t know. I’m not crazy about flying. I haven’t even been on a plane in years,” she confessed.

“I used to be a nervous flier,” Landry said. “Before cancer. But now I always think that if the plane crashes, well . . .” She shrugged. “It’s out of my hands.”

“And there are worse ways to go,” Elena added. “In a plane crash, you’re there one minute, gone the next. It’s not death that scares me. It’s dying.”

Kay told her that she feels exactly the same way.

Then she found herself remembering her mother’s final tortured weeks on this earth—not to mention the agonizing final blog posts from Whoa Nellie and others who had gone down that terminal road. And Meredith’s trepidation as she faced the final stages of her disease.

Meredith was terrified over the prospect of what might lie ahead. She didn’t want to go through that; didn’t want to put her family through it.

I’ve always been the kind of person,
she wrote to Kay,
who likes to get the first flight out the morning a vacation ends. Once I know it’s over and I have to go, I just want to go. Get it over with. It was like that when we left our kids off at college, too. No long, drawn-out good-byes for me. I couldn’t stand it. Years later the kids told me they were surprised I didn’t leave skid marks getting out of there, while all the other parents were lingering. Of course, they didn’t understand that it was because I loved them too much—not that I didn’t love them enough.

Thinking of her own mother, Kay wanted to tell Meredith that she knew all about not loving someone enough, both on the receiving end and on the giving end. But she didn’t say it.

She didn’t like to talk about her mother ever, not even with Meredith.

Despite her earlier exhaustion—when she didn’t know how she was going to keep her eyes open until sundown—Beck has yet to fall asleep. Now the sun is coming up again, casting rosy shadows through the crack in the sunshine-and-sky-colored curtains her mother hung at her bedroom windows the spring before she left for college. Cheerful curtains, Mom called them.

“I feel so bad we couldn’t afford to buy them until now,” she said. “You can take them with you, and the new bedspread, too, for your dorm room when you leave.”

“No,” Beck said. “They belong here, for when I come home.”

Home . . .

She’d never considered the concept before—never realized that
home
was less about the place than it was about people in it. Without Mom here, home has become just a house.

Now just she and her father are left to rattle around in it. Her brothers and their families left even before some of the postfuneral crowd did, but she, of course, is stuck here. She can’t leave Dad alone, and even if someone else were willing to stay with him—

Where would I go?

The house she shares with Keith is no longer home either.

I have no home.

What now?

Dad will sell the house. He’ll need a place to live. So will she. But not here, in Cincinnati. It would be too far a commute to her job in Lexington.

Anyway, there’s nothing really keeping Dad here now that Mom is gone. He doesn’t even have a job.

Maybe he’ll want to make a fresh start someplace new . . .

But . . .

All alone?

Will
he be alone?

Thoughts of what might possibly happen next for him—for all of them—continue to spiral in Beck’s head until at last she gets out of bed, too depleted to lie here for another moment listening to the morning birds and the patio wind chimes tinkling gently below, stirred by a warm morning breeze that tickles the cheerful drapes.

Opening her bedroom door, she half expects to smell coffee brewing and hear pots and pans clattering in the kitchen. Mom always liked to make pancakes for breakfast on Sunday mornings. Even later, especially when the grandkids slept over. She liked to play restaurant with them the way she did with Beck and her brothers when they were little.

They got such a kick out of the way she’d pretend to be a waitress taking their orders, and would dream up all kinds of crazy things—beef-’n’-booger surprise was one of Beck’s brothers’ favorites, and now it’s her nephews’, too.

No matter what the kids would try to order, though, Mom would say, “One stinkerdoodle special, coming right up!”

Then she’d bring them a plate filled with pancakes that had smiley faces made out of chocolate chips or raisins.

On this Sunday morning, there are no pancakes on the griddle and there’s no coffee wafting in the air.

The house creeps with silent shadows as Beck descends to the first floor, on tiptoe in the hope that her father is still asleep on his recliner in the den.

He isn’t, though.

The door is ajar and the lamp is on; when she peeks in to check on him, she sees him sitting at his desk in front of the computer.

“Dad?”

He jumps, cries out.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. What are you doing?”

“Nothing, just . . . nothing.” He pushes his reading glasses up onto his forehead and rubs his eyes.

“Did you sleep at all?” she asks him, and he shakes his head. “I didn’t either. I was going to make some coffee.”

He makes a face. “I drank enough coffee yesterday to kill someone.”

The words hang uncomfortably in the air for a moment.

“So did I,” Beck says, “but I need more anyway, if I’m going to make it through this day.”

“I’d better have some, too. Be there in a few minutes. I just want to finish something.”

He’s back to typing on the keyboard as she leaves the den.

In the kitchen, she starts the coffee, then busies herself reorganizing the kitchen cabinets, moving around all the serving bowls and platters well-meaning neighbors and friends insisted on washing last night before they left. At that point she was so tired of people she’d have been more appreciative if everyone had just cleared out of here and left the mess to her.