Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1) (31 page)

“He sure is cute, though,” Schwartzman said, reaching up to scratch the small dog behind the ears.

Removing her hand, she balled it into a fist and pushed it into her pocket, feeling the downy fluff of dog fur against her fingers.

As she walked out the front door, she saw Harper catch her eye. But she didn’t stop.

She couldn’t face Harper.

42

Greenville, South Carolina

Schwartzman stood in a cluster of dogwood bushes across the street from the house she had shared with Spencer.

The night was dark, the moon hidden behind storm clouds. Light from the street lamps cast eerie shadows along the street. She had parked at the end of the block. She wore a jacket and thin gloves, not unreasonable for a Southerner when the temperatures dropped and the rains fell. It might have been a little warm for it today, but not enough to arouse too much suspicion. The sack of supplies was tucked in her jacket, pinned down by her left arm. Everything else was in the pocket of her jacket.

She had been over the plan a dozen times in the past hour. Two dozen. Parked in a remote strip mall parking lot, Schwartzman created the evidence. She didn’t let herself consider how quickly the police might dismiss it, wouldn’t allow herself to think about how much better it would be if she had DNA evidence from Frances Pinckney. Used the Saran Wrap from Ava’s room and applied her skin cells to the knee pads. She avoided pressing the tape to the knee pads directly so that there was no transfer of the adhesive residue. Instead she laid the knee pads faceup in a plastic sack and rubbed them with the Saran Wrap, then shook the tape out above them. Even in the dark, Schwartzman could see the bits of skin and dust float down onto the pads. As a final measure, she tucked two of Ava’s long hairs where the Velcro straps were attached to the knee pads. An easy enough place for them to have been caught during the attack.

Next she unrolled the very end of the duct tape and pressed the adhesive side to the inside of the Ziploc bag containing dog fur from Frances Pinckney’s home, the only thing she’d managed to get there. She dropped the roll of tape, the two knee pads, and two pairs of unused latex gloves into the sack and tied it closed.

She patted her pocket. Felt her phone. The phone was set to silent. She had ignored two calls from Harper, four from Hal. She would call as soon as it was over. She knew exactly where everything would go. All she needed was four minutes in the garage. She could probably do it in two. Then there was the matter of getting Spencer to confess. He wanted to. He would love to know how much pain he was responsible for, how much she had suffered. If he wasn’t being recorded and he knew she couldn’t use it to put him away . . . then just maybe she could get him to say the words. She needed to hear them. Her pulse was an even, quick drumbeat.

She felt fear, but beneath it was something else. Something Schwartzman found wholly unexpected. Something lighter and softer. Giddiness, she might call the sensation. A kind of electricity that was different from the fear. On the dark street, across from the home she had once shared with Spencer MacDonald, she was buoyed by possibility.

Hope.

Built just two years before they were married, Spencer had intended the house as a traditional colonial. Directly over the centered front door was a rounded terrace perched atop the second story, which Spencer called his tower.

Ironically, the tower was false, inaccessible from the house except by crawling out one of the small second-story bedroom windows and going across the roof. Something she’d never seen him do. The house had seemed grand when she first moved in, a starry-eyed new bride. Even then, there was something looming and dark about the house, but she’d convinced herself that moving directly from her parents’ exquisite home into one of her own was a badge of honor. The longer she lived there, the smaller and less impressive the house became.

Standing on the street, she couldn’t see the appeal of the house at all. The features were out of proportion—the rounded terrace cartoonishly large while the windows on the upper level were puny against the huge surface areas of plain white siding.

Schwartzman watched the dark house, washed again in the cold fear she’d felt living inside it. Spencer’s anger was woven into the perfectly appointed couches and the carefully set pictures and vases. One incorrectly placed pillow or a picture hung slightly awry was enough to break the thin veneer of his self-control.

This was the house of her nightmares.

Same house. Different woman.

A woman with a way to put him behind bars.

The master bedroom was on the opposite side of the house from the garage. And unless something had changed, the garage wasn’t included in the alarm system. She would go from the garage’s side door, plant the evidence, and then leave again. From there, she would simply ring the front doorbell.

A loud mechanical click filled the night. The garage door rolled upward. She ducked, crouching behind a cluster of pink summersweet bushes. Spencer’s gold Lexus backed out of the garage. The car turned out of the driveway and passed her on the street.

He was gone. Spencer was gone. That was too easy. She checked her watch. Nine fifteen. Where was he going? She stared down the street after he had disappeared around the corner, half expecting to see the headlights come back. The street remained quiet and dark.

This was so much better, she told herself, stepping out of the bushes and heading toward the house again. She’d wait for him inside. Throw him off guard. Unless it was a trap, somehow he knew she was here. Was it possible? The tissue in her lungs contracted. Breathing became harder. What did it matter?

Either way, you are going in there.

Schwartzman rounded the side of the house and passed the small shed where the garbage cans were housed. Beyond that was what Spencer had always termed the “maid’s entrance,” which was essentially a door into the garage. He refused to enter the house this way, just as he refused to take out the trash or clean. She tested the knob, careful to use her one gloved hand. Locked. She was almost relieved. Finding the door unlocked would have unnerved her, as though he were expecting her. She could always go through the window above the garage workbench, but maybe there was another way.

She crept down along the side of the house and peered into the formal living room, then into what Spencer called the family room, which was a smaller, cozier version of the living room. Nothing had changed. The same goldenrod couches. The same toile throw pillows. On the small table beside the couch was a picture of them on their honeymoon exactly where she’d last seen it.

Instead of an evil force, Spencer seemed pathetic. This grown man stuck in the past, loving a woman who despised him. Wasted years for both of them, and to what end? Where did he possibly imagine this would lead? Or was this his idea of entertainment? The on-again, off-again stalking a way to stay sharp, to avoid being bored by a life of golf and board meetings?

But Spencer was anything but pathetic. She knew it. Frances Pinckney knew it. Ava knew it.

This might have ended years ago. All she would have had to do was reach out to Ava. Ava with her plan. Resources that could have protected Ava, protected Schwartzman.

Remorse seared into anger, and the anger made her relive the memory.

She had just begun to feel the weight of the baby inside her, a small but constant pressure against her bladder. It was a weekend morning; only she and Spencer were in the house. It must have been the hottest part of the summer because the air-conditioning was blasting. She was forever wearing sweaters inside while Spencer complained about the heat and told her she was overreacting.

Still in her pajama bottoms and a tank top, she had come out to the garden to cut flowers for a vase in the living room. She had left the door open. Not all the way open but enough to let out some of Spencer’s precious cold air. When she returned to the house with her flowers, the door was locked. Spencer stood behind the glass, smiling. She waved at him to let her in, but he ignored her.

They stood like that for a few minutes before he walked away. She made her way around the back of the house, tried those doors, then the maid’s entrance, and finally the front door. All locked. She rang the bell, but Spencer didn’t answer.

She had no phone, no car keys, no proper clothes. Determined not to give him the satisfaction of begging, she returned to the garden and settled into the dirt, using her bare fingers to weed around her flowers. But soon she had to use the bathroom. Again she tried the doors, rang the front bell, even checked a couple of the windows along the back of the house. Without success.

In the end, she urinated in the small back patch of their yard and spent the day outside, waiting for Spencer to unlock the door. It was some time after three when he finally did, calling out to her that he had invited her mother to an early dinner. She would be arriving at five thirty, he told Schwartzman, and she should make salmon.

Schwartzman returned to the house, filthy, sunburned, without the flowers she had picked, which had wilted and browned. She showered, went to the store, and fixed salmon for dinner, nodding politely while her mother told her how she ought to be careful about getting so much sun. “It will make you look old before your time.”

“That’s exactly what I told her,” Spencer added, still wearing the morning’s smirk. “She just insisted on spending the day outside. I don’t even think she wore sunscreen.”

And the two of them shook their heads at her, the little one unable to care for herself. Her mother reached across and patted her son-in-law’s hand. “Well, thank goodness she has you, Spencer.”

Sunburned and exhausted, Schwartzman felt overwhelming shame. Shame for leaving the door open, for getting herself locked out, for believing that his cruelty was her own fault.

That evening, after her mother was gone and Spencer had left the table and the dishes for her to clean up and settled into the den for his news program, she’d taken a spare house key outside and found a narrow slot between the cement foundation and the door frame at the maid’s entrance.

Now, her pulse speeding, she crouched down in that same spot. She walked her gloved fingers along the base of the door’s threshold, ignoring the bits of leaves and debris. She imagined spiders—brown recluses and black widows. She continued along the trim until she touched the hard edge of something metal.
The key.
She used the rental car key to pry it free and stood, cupping it in her hand.

She wiggled the key into the lock on the garage door and tested it. It caught. Nothing happened. It was rusted. Too old. He’d changed the locks. She tried again. And again. Bit her lip hard. Squeezed her eyes closed. “Come on.” Used two hands to force it.

At last the key turned, and she pushed the door open a couple of inches. Froze. Waited. For alarms, noises. Nothing. Fear mixed with anticipation. She removed the key and returned it to its hiding spot, stepped inside, and closed the garage door behind her. She was in.

The motion sensor light on the garage door opener was still on, the space lit by the single bulb. She crossed to the large trash can and, with her hand tucked into her jacket, opened the lid. It was nearly full. The police would have to come tonight. She lay the top open against the garage door and pulled out two large kitchen-size trash bags. Beneath them were a handful of flattened cardboard boxes. She pushed the boxes aside and set the Home Depot sack on top of another white trash bag below. A length of rope on Spencer’s workbench caught her eye. She added the rope to the sack and set the boxes flat again on top, then returned the last two trash bags to the can. She closed the top, looked around that she hadn’t missed anything. It was done, the trap set.

Should she wait for him to return? She would have to. She needed to confront him, to convince him to tell her. She had to hear the truth from him.

The police would find the evidence. He was guilty. She wanted to hear it from him.

For Ava. For Frances Pinckney and Sarah Feld.

For herself.

The cold metal taste of fear filled her mouth. Ran down her throat.

What if the evidence wasn’t enough? She didn’t have anything from Frances Pinckney other than a little dog hair. What if the police didn’t believe her?

She had to try.

Schwartzman put her hand on the door between the house and the garage and twisted the knob slowly. The alarm system made a double beeping sound and went quiet. He hadn’t set it, which meant he wasn’t going to be out long.

Or he knew you were coming.

It doesn’t matter,
she told herself.

Stepping slowly into the darkened hallway, she shivered in the cool air. Smelled lemon and lavender. She had forgotten how much Spencer loved lemon. How refreshing to think that some memories did fade.

As always, the house smelled clean. Beneath the clean smell, she detected the scent of moisture. Mold. Rooms closed up too much for too long. The stale mustiness she associated with air-conditioning after so many years of living without it.

In the darkness, she studied the sounds of the house. The air conditioner whirred noisily, and something else, water and glass maybe. The dishwasher? Nothing human. Spencer was gone, but for how long? She moved quickly through the hallway and paused at his office. The door was cracked open, and the memory of Ava’s garage came back. She pressed her hand against the outside of her jacket, feeling the texture of the necklaces through the wool. His study. That was where he would keep souvenirs; she was certain.

She stopped, listened again. Not another sound. She nudged the study door open with her foot, kept her back to the wall as she rounded the doorjamb and entered the room. Silent. Empty.
Spencer isn’t here.
You watched him leave.

But she knew better than to trust the obvious.

She crossed the room to the glass cabinet where Spencer kept his prized collections. A couple dozen pens—Montblanc, most of them, although there were Montegrappa and Waterman, as well. The collection hadn’t changed much since they were married. With her to hunt, maybe collecting pens had lost its appeal.

On the shelf below the pens were about six or seven boxes. Wood, hand-carved, and made from exotic species. African teak and Brazilian rosewood. His favorite had always been the one in the back corner. Its surface was beautiful, the way the wood grain rolled across the top surface like rippling water.