The Perfect Stranger (32 page)

The Day My Life Changed Forever

Back when I was an English major in college and planning to become a writer one day, I read a lot of poems. One of my favorites was Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” It begins:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both . . .

I went many years without remembering that poem—decades spent being a wife and mother and day care provider, but not a writer. Not yet. I figured there would be plenty of time to reclaim that childhood dream and make it a reality when I retired, when my children were grown and out of the house . . .

Then came the day I found myself sitting in a doctor’s office as he delivered the bombshell I never expected to hear.

I had breast cancer? Me?

Two roads diverged . . .

The old poem barged back into my brain and hasn’t left since. The road not taken has new meaning when you’re faced with a life-threatening illness and you realize you might never have time to do all the things you once wanted to accomplish.

Chances are, you wouldn’t have done them anyway. Chances are, you stopped wanting to do them years ago. But until you got sick, they were still out there, floating randomly in the realm of possibility. Now they’d been snatched out of reach, but somehow you knew your life had been purposeful and well-lived even if you never become a Pulitzer prize winning author or even a college poetry professor. Just living—that was meaningful enough.

As I sat that day listening to my doctor describe the journey that lay before me and the decisions I would have to make, I wanted nothing more than to backtrack to the happy, simple days I’d left behind. But that, unfortunately, wasn’t one of my choices. Neither was stopping in my tracks and doing nothing at all. There was only one option: choose a path, keep forging ahead, and do my best to never, ever second-guess the road not taken.

—Excerpt from Meredith’s blog,
Pink Stinks

Chapter 15

Landry was planning to serve lunch—tea sandwiches and fruit salad—in the air-conditioned dining room. Behind locked doors.

The others overruled her, though. They’d prefer to be outside—in the “fresh air,” as Kay calls it, apparently having missed the memo that no such thing exists at high noon on a Deep South summer’s day. Not even here on the porch, where the ceiling fan does its best to diffuse the afternoon heat that swaddles like a wet towel, allowing not even a breath of breeze off the water to stir the live oak boughs that shade the yard.

Torpor has fallen over the world beyond the porch railing. In the rose garden, fat bumblebees barely seem capable of moving from blossom to blossom. Out on the water, a mere smattering of this morning’s fishing boats remain and there isn’t a kayaker in sight. It’s too hot for paddling. Or pedaling, though occasionally a pair of flushed-looking tourists will pass on bicycles that seem to move more languidly, even, than the bumblebees.

Sweat rolls down the back of Landry’s neck as she fills tall green glasses of sweet tea and decorates each with a sprig of fresh green mint. She sets the coordinating green pitcher down beside the vase of pale pink roses she carried out on a tray from the kitchen with a stack of china plates, linen place mats, and napkins.

“You don’t have to go to all this fuss,” Elena protested as Landry set the outside table as nicely as she’d have set the one in the dining room.

“I want to. Y’all are my guests.”

The well-bred belle in her won’t forget that, even now.

But that’s fine. All she has to do is get through one moment at a time. Not so difficult, really, now that she knows her kids will be safely out of the house—and harm’s way—for the remainder of the weekend.

That was her first instinct all along. She should have gone with it, instead of having to put a contingency plan into place when she found out that Jenna Coeur might be on her way here.

Her first phone call—after Bruce—was to Everly. She knew her friend would take both kids overnight, no questions asked.

But Everly didn’t pick up at home, and when she answered her cell sounding too groggy for eleven o’clock even on a Saturday morning, Landry belatedly remembered her friend had gone away for Father’s Day weekend, visiting her widowed dad who retired to Hawaii years ago.

“Is everything all right?” she asked Landry, reading the tension in her voice.

“Everything’s fine.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I just needed a quick favor, but it’s not a problem, I can ask someone else.”

Her mother, or Barbie June. Neither fell into the no-questions-asked category, though.

She had lunch with her mother two days ago, feeling as though she’d been neglecting her, and was grateful when Mom mentioned her busy weekend ahead, taking a senior bus trip to Mobile to see the Saturday matinee of a touring musical, with dinner afterward.

Ardelle Quackenbush is the kind of woman who would drop everything in a heartbeat to be there for her family; Landry knows she’d insist on missing the show just to be on standby for teenagers with weekend plans of their own. Nor does she want to inflict upon the kids her mother’s early bedtime and house cluttered with fragile antiques that must not be touched.

She correctly guessed that her cousin—also a well-bred belle—would graciously accept overnight guests in a heartbeat despite feeling neglected lately, as long as Landry framed the favor properly: “Sweetie, how would you like to put those two beautiful guest rooms of yours to good use tonight? We have company this weekend and the kids have to give up their beds, and of course they’d much rather sleep at Aunt Barbie June’s than share the pullout here at home.”

Next she texted the kids at work and told them both to call her during their breaks. Neither was thrilled to be shuttled off to Aunt Barbie June’s for the night but they grudgingly agreed.

Now only she is here to face whatever is going to happen next.

Hopefully nothing at all. Bruce is at the airport, waiting for the next flight from Atlanta. Waiting for Jenna Coeur.

If
she’s on it.

Landry passes the platter of sandwiches, the bowl of fruit salad, and keeps the conversation going. She asks Elena about the last few days of school. Wants to—but doesn’t—ask Kay again about the woman she saw in the airport.

Wants to tell her to try calling Detective Burns yet again, even though she’s overheard Elena encouraging Kay to do that as well—twice—since they got back from the airport. The first time, as they headed upstairs to settle into their rooms, Kay replied that she’d wait another half hour before calling again; the second time, as they took their places at the lunch table, Kay told Elena she’d just left another message.

If she hadn’t spoken to Bruce already, Landry thought, she’d probably be leaving messages of her own for Detective Burns.

“Look, it’s not as urgent as you think,” he told her when she brought it up in a whispered phone call from the laundry room before lunch. “There’s not much she can do with the information except follow up on it the way she would any other potential Jenna Coeur sighting. She needs to know, but I can pretty much guarantee you that she’s not going to jump on the next flight to Alabama—especially since you said your friend isn’t even positive it was her.”

He’s right. They’re all preoccupied and jumpy.

“Hang in there. I’m at the airport and I’m not budging until that flight arrives from Atlanta. She won’t get past me. You can all relax.”

“I haven’t told them about you yet.”

“You might want to.”

“I will,” she promised, but has yet to do it. Maybe because a part of her still clings to a shred of suspicion about the others.

She forces herself to nibble a cucumber sandwich and tries to focus on what Elena is saying.

“ . . . and I don’t know, all I could think was, thank God he isn’t here. I’ll never have to see him again. Maybe it makes me an evil person, but . . .” She shrugs, stabs a grape with her fork, and pops it into her mouth.

Tony Kerwin, Landry realizes. That’s what she’s talking about: her relief that she didn’t have to face him at school this week.

It doesn’t make her an evil person.

But then a terrible thought occurs to Landry, and the tiny bite of sandwich lodges in her throat.

What if it hadn’t been a heart attack, after all?

What if Tony Kerwin had been murdered?

Thoughts racing, she excuses herself to go inside and get dessert ready. The others offer to help, but she waves them away. “I’ve got it. Just relax. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She hurries up the stairs, past the closed bedroom doors. She put Elena in Tucker’s room and Kay in Addison’s.

“I thought your kids were going to be home tonight,” Elena protested when she showed them upstairs.

“Change of plans.”

“That’s too bad. I was hoping to meet them.”

What if Elena—and not Jaycee, or Jenna Coeur—is the person she should have been worried about all along?

In the master bedroom, she closes and then—after a moment’s hesitation—locks the door. She grabs her laptop from the desk and sits on the edge of the bed, opening a Google search.

Déjà vu.

She did this when Meredith died, trying to figure out what had happened to her— though not as frantically.

She types
Tony
—then corrects it to
Anthony
—
Kerwin
, taking a guess on the spelling.

She got it right; an obituary pops up.

She scans it.

. . .
died suddenly at his residence on Monday, June 10 . . .

But of course the cause of death isn’t listed. It never is.

If he’d been murdered, though, there would be online newspaper coverage, as there was after Meredith’s death.

There is none for Tony.

Going back to his obituary, she rereads it, then the funeral notice.

In lieu of flowers, the family would appreciate donations in Tony’s memory to the American Heart Association.

That, Landry thinks, would certainly indicate a heart attack.

He died at home. There would have been an autopsy. If it had shown anything unusual, that would have come up by now. Because you can’t disguise murder as a heart attack . . . or can you?

She returns to the search engine.

Two minutes later she has her answer—and the implications rock her to the core.

Beck has gone through every e-mail exchange in her mother’s files, going back a couple of years.

Nothing in her sent or received folders indicate that anyone was out to get her; not a shred of evidence to incriminate anyone.

Least of all her father.

Is that really what you were expecting to find?

There are only a few e-mails between her parents—mostly references to job hunting and household paperwork. But there were plenty of e-mails Mom sent to friends that seem to indicate the marriage was as solid as ever.

I miss Hank,
she wrote to Jaycee, one of her blogger friends, just a few days before she died.
I can’t wait until he’s back home and things are back to normal. I hate being alone at night.

I do, too,
Jaycee wrote back.
I wish I had a Hank!

There was another e-mail, further back, sent to a neighbor asking for the recipe for the potato side dish she’d made for a dinner party the night before.
Hank devoured it, in case you didn’t notice,
Mom had written.
I want to make it for dinner some night.

Recipe . . .

That reminds Beck.

One of the bloggers she met at the funeral had mentioned that Mom e-mailed her about the cheesecake Beck had brought over on Mother’s Day.

She doesn’t recall seeing anything about that in the files.

She goes back to May 12, Mother’s Day, and begins working her way forward through the sent mail, looking for the exchange.

That’s strange. It isn’t there.

She checks the received e-mails.

Not there, either.

It’s nothing earth-shattering, and yet . . .

It’s bothering her.

She can’t remember which of the bloggers even said it. So much of last Saturday’s service is a blur. There were so many people . . .

She sighs, rising from the kitchen table.

Maybe the e-mail was there, and she’s so delirious she just missed it. She needs a break, and it’s time to go back to the living room to check on Jordan again. He’s been asleep on the couch for over an hour now. She turned off the television and covered him with a blanket when she first found him like that.

Looking down at her sleeping nephew’s sweet face, she’s swept by an overwhelming sadness.

He may not remember Mom. Beck lost her maternal grandmother when she was his age; she doesn’t remember her at all. Mom used to try to jog her memory, showing her photos of her sitting on her grandmother’s lap as a little girl or holding hands with her at the zoo . . .

“Remember that day?” she’d ask.

Beck wanted to remember so badly . . .

But she just didn’t.

That bothered her mother.

“You loved her so much,” she told Beck, “and she was crazy about you and your brothers.”

Maybe so. But she died, and every trace of her disappeared from Beck’s mind.

That’s going to happen to Jordan, too. Everything Mom did for him, and with him . . .

He’ll only know about it because they’ll tell him stories and show him pictures. He won’t
know
, in his heart. He won’t
remember
.

He opens his eyes abruptly, as if sensing that she’s there. “Hi, Aunt Beck.”

“Hi, sweetie. Did you have a nice nap?”

He nods sleepily. “I dreamed about Grammy.”

“Really? What happened in your dream?”

“She was just laughing and laughing, and Grampy was giving me horsey rides on his back like he used to.”

She smiles, eyes suddenly swimming in tears. “That sounds like a really nice dream.”

“Yeah. It was happy. Do you think Grampy will play horsey again when he gets back?”

“Maybe not today,” she says. “But someday. Someday, I’m betting he will.”

In the past hour the sky above the bay has gone from deep blue to pale blue with patchy clouds to completely overcast. The air hangs heavy with humidity and the incessant rattling hum of locusts in the coastal grasses that sound to Elena like a perpetually shaking tambourine, further rattling her nerves.

Forcing down a final bite of the pecan pie Landry served for dessert, she fights the urge to jump up and excuse herself from the table . . .

Just as Landry did a short time ago, when she left to get the dessert and didn’t come back for so long that Elena finally went into the kitchen to see if she needed help. She wasn’t there, and a pair of pecan pies sat at the ready beside a stack of plates.

What, Elena wondered, was she up to?

It could have been innocent—maybe she was on the phone with her husband, or tending to some household chore . . .

But when Landry reappeared with a dessert tray, she neglected to make eye contact with anyone, and her hands were shaking so badly the stack of plates rattled.

Now Elena sips the sickeningly sweet tea, wishing it were laced with vodka, and wipes her soaked hairline with a napkin. The drenching heat is nearly as oppressive as the paranoia that’s fallen over the group like a storm cloud.

Why aren’t Landry’s kids going to be here tonight, as planned? Does she even have kids? A husband? Or did she stage this picture perfect bayside house right out of
Southern Living
? Is it filled with mere props, everything from the gallery of framed photographs in the dining room to the teenage bedrooms to the sneakers in the mudroom cubbies carefully positioned to make herself appear to be an ordinary mom, when in fact she’s . . .

“I hope y’all are going to have more of this pie, because I’ve got plenty,” she tells them, and Elena wonders if she might even be faking the accent.

Nobody wants more pie.

Or, when she offers, more sweet tea.

Nobody wants anything but to be someplace, anyplace, other than here.