The Perfect Stranger (5 page)

“Sorry,” she tells her father. “It’s just . . . Detective Burns is here, with another detective. They want to talk to you.”

He nods dully. “You can send them in here.”

“You don’t want to . . .” Beck trails off, trying to figure out how to put it delicately.

Pull yourself together
isn’t very delicate; nor is
make yourself presentable
.

If Mom were here, she’d make him shave and change out of the rumpled Miami University Red Hawks T-shirt he’s slept in for the past couple of nights at the hotel—if he’s slept at all.

Mom isn’t here, though.

Mom will never be here again.

Beck still can’t believe that she’s gone.

Years ago, when her mother was first diagnosed with breast cancer, she’d imagined what it would be like to lose her. Even last year, when she had that recurrence, Beck had once again allowed herself to consider that her mother might not be around for years to come. Waiting for test results for days, weeks, she found herself imagining various excruciating scenarios.

But then the tests came back clear, and Mom had beaten the disease again, and the worry faded.

She’d been caught off guard when her father’s cell phone number came up on her caller ID Sunday afternoon. She knew right away something was wrong. He was not the type to call just to chat.

“Beck,” he said, “I’m still in Cleveland and I can’t get ahold of your mother. Do you know where she is?”

“Nope. I talked to her Friday night, and she said she was going to putter around all weekend. She’s probably outside or something.”

“It’s supposed to be pouring there. It has been here, all day.”

“Here, too,” Beck told him, glancing at the rain streaming down the windowpanes.

“I’ve been calling the house and her cell phone since this morning, and texting her, and e-mailing and IMing, too. She hasn’t responded. That’s not like her.”

It wasn’t. Mom may not always answer the house phone, but she’s pretty reliable when it comes to online stuff. Ever since she started her blog, she’s developed quite a reader following and made friends all over the world.

Beck found it ironic that the woman who didn’t know a Web site from a campsite a few years ago now spends many—if not most—of her waking hours on the Internet.

Spends?

Spent.

Mom is gone.

Swallowing hard, she looks at her father and says, “Maybe you should go in there and talk to the detectives. They’re waiting in the living room, and . . .”

And I need to be alone for a second to pull myself together.

“Yeah. Okay.”

She watches him push himself out of the chair and shuffle out into the hall, hunched over as if he’s aged a couple of decades in as many days.

Beck sinks into the seat he vacated and buries her head in her hands, wishing her older brothers were here to help her deal with this.

But they finally returned to their respective homes to sleep last night, after spending both Sunday and Monday nights at the nearby hotel where the family was holed up while the house was off-limits as a crime scene investigation.

The police released it late yesterday.

The last thing any of them wanted to do was walk through the door into the house where Mom had been killed, but they knew they’d have to do it sooner or later. No one could spare the money for more nights in a hotel, and Dad didn’t want to leave town to come stay at one of their houses in the midst of all this.

So they came back here and did their best to clean up the disorder left in the wake of the investigation.

No one had opened the master bedroom door and gone in. A professional cleanup crew had been in there, and the man in charge came to the hotel to assure Dad—delicately—that the room was now “fine.” Dad just looked at him, and shook his head. For all he cared—for all any of them did—that door could stay closed for as long as the house remained in their possession.

Beck and her brothers have privately discussed the situation and agreed that Dad will have to sell it as soon as possible. It’s not what Mom would have wanted, but she had no way of knowing what would happen to her here.

Last night they sat glumly around the kitchen table, trying to make memorial service arrangements while choking down a meal prepared by a well-meaning neighbor. Neal and Teddy took turns taking repeated phone calls from their wives.

“You guys should go home tonight and be with your families,” Beck urged them afterward, as they all did the dishes. “I’ll stay here with Dad.”

She knew it was the right thing to say. Her brothers both have kids, and Teddy’s wife is pregnant. Unemployed, he had a promising job interview lined up for yesterday. Mom would have been so upset that he’d missed it. She worried about all of them, but lately, especially about Teddy, with a baby on the way and no medical benefits.

Beck’s brothers took her up on the offer to go home, promising to be back first thing this morning. Of course, they assumed that her husband, Keith, would remain here with her and Dad.

But he drove back home to Lexington not long after her brothers left, saying he needed to go check on the house, get the mail and papers, and should stop in at the office today to make sure things had been running smoothly in his two-day absence.

He’s on the research faculty at the university. One summer session just ended and the next is about to begin, but things are relatively quiet at this time of year. Beck works on campus herself, as a lab technician.

“You really don’t have go to check in at the office,” she told Keith. “They don’t expect you to do that in the middle of a family crisis. You can call in and check your e-mail from here. And the neighbors can keep grabbing our mail and newspapers and they’ll keep an eye on the house for a few more days.”

“It’s less than a hundred miles away. I’ll be back here tomorrow night.”

“Why leave at all?”

“Because I have to,” Keith said tightly.

“No. Because you
want
to.”

Dad, still sitting at the table with them, barely seemed aware of the discussion, and hopefully didn’t see the look Beck shot Keith when he pushed back his chair and ended the conversation with a curt, “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

“Fine,” she said. “Go.”

She did get up and walk with him to the door, but only because her father might have noticed if she didn’t. The last thing she wants right now is to let him know that her marriage is in serious trouble and has been for months. Grief-stricken and devastated, facing life as a widower, Dad doesn’t need anything else to worry about.

Anyway, who knows? Maybe, when this is all behind them, she and Keith will manage to work things out.

Maybe he’ll have a change of heart or change his ways; or maybe she’s been wrong about him, about what he’s been up to behind her back . . .

But probably not.

Mom always liked to say,
if it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck—

“Ms. Heywood?” Detective Burns, an attractive, middle-aged African-American woman, is standing in the doorway.

Technically, Beck is Mrs. Drover, not Ms. Heywood, but then . . . maybe not for much longer. Without bothering to correct the detective, she says, “Yes?”

“I just wanted to make sure you stick around. And you said your brothers are on their way back here now?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to need to talk to all of you again, too, after we speak to your father. And the rest of the family as well.”

Something in the woman’s tone makes Beck look more closely at her face. When they first met, on Sunday, she seemed much kinder, more sympathetic—although her memory is admittedly fuzzy.

That was such a terrible, terrifying time.

She was the one who’d called the police.

After talking to her father and then also trying unsuccessfully to reach her mother, she got into her car and drove through the rain up to Cincinnati, arriving at the house in the late afternoon. All was quiet. Mom’s car was in the driveway.

As soon as she walked around back, intending to let herself in with her key, she found the cut window screen and knew something was terribly wrong.

She has very little recollection of the two uniformed cops who showed up. It’s all a blur now, like a nightmare after you wake up in the morning, when the specific details have faded but you still remember the horror, and the gist of what happened.

What happened . . .

What happened was—

After she handed over her set of keys, the police officers went into the house, and she stood there waiting beneath the overhang above the back door as the rain poured down, drowning the newly planted seedlings in the vegetable garden in the yard.

Then the police came back out and they told her—

“Ms. Heywood?”

“Yes.” She blinks, looks up at Detective Burns. “Yes, it’s fine. I’ll . . . I’ll be happy to talk to you. No problem.”

“Thank you.”

Beck gets up and starts to follow the detective into the next room, but the woman holds out her hand like a traffic cop.

“Not yet,” she says. “If you can wait right here while we talk to your father, I’d appreciate it.”

“But—”

Wait a minute. Are the detectives here to
talk
to them, or
interrogate
them?

When they showed up today, she assumed it was with an update on the case. They’ve been in close contact ever since Sunday, regularly coming and going from the hotel where the family was staying. They promised to keep them apprised of any developments; to find out who had broken into the house sometime late Saturday night or early Sunday morning and left Mom dead on the floor beside her bed.

Do they have a suspect now?

Or do they think—

The terrible thought fully forms in Beck’s mind. She bites her lip to keep from blurting it out.

“Is there a problem, Ms. Heywood?”

“No. No problem.” She shrinks back. “I’m sorry. I misunderstood. I thought you wanted me to— Never mind. I’ll wait here.”

“Thank you.”

The detective steps out of the den, reaches back and pulls the door closed after her.

Feeling like a caged prisoner, Beck wonders if she should call her brothers—or, perhaps, a lawyer.

She’s watched enough television crime shows to know that homicide investigators always look closely at family members—particularly spouses. Why didn’t she realize sooner that this was going to happen?

Because you’re still in shock, and because it’s ridiculous that anyone would even imagine that Dad might be capable of . . .

She pushes away an unwanted memory.

Ridiculous
.

Anyway, Dad was 250 miles away this weekend—they must know he was in Cleveland when it happened.

Or maybe they don’t know. Maybe that’s why they’re here now.

They were here on Sunday, but maybe they arrived on the scene after Dad did.

She thinks back, but the timeline is fuzzy. Her father was on his way back from Cleveland, she remembers, before she even left Lexington. When she called him from her car as she was driving up to Cincinnati, he said he was on the road, too, heading home to check on Mom.

She told him not to bother; that she was already going; that she’d let him know if there was any reason to worry—

But of course there was already reason to worry.

Did she begin to suspect then, as she raced north up Interstate 75, that something was going to be terribly wrong at the house?

The drive, like everything that happened afterward, has become a blur in her mind.

She’d just had yet another fight with Keith. That, she remembers.

He wasn’t thrilled that she was leaving so abruptly in the middle of a Sunday afternoon when they had plans that evening to sit down and go over their finances.

That was what he claimed, anyway, calling it “a meeting.” The year was almost half over, he’d said that morning, and he was concerned about his job stability amid funding cuts to the university. He thought it was time that they made some decisions about their future; about whether they should look into selling the house, moving into a smaller place . . .

Or separate places.

He didn’t come right out and say it, but she knew it was going to come up. It wouldn’t be the first time. But it might have been the first time she might be willing to go along with it. She’d already done her homework, talked to a lawyer.

Her feelings were muddled. One moment she was sure she still loved him, and the next, she wanted him out of her life.

Sunday afternoon, as she threw some things into a bag in case she wound up spending the night in Cincinnati, he followed her around the house asking why she couldn’t have someone else check in on her mother—a neighbor, or one of her brothers.

“Because I can get there quicker than my brothers can, and I can’t reach any of their neighbors,” she lied.

The truth was, she wanted to go.

Not—to her shame, in retrospect—just because she was worried about Mom.

Of course she was, but she really didn’t think, at that point, the situation was going to be dire. She was mainly going because she wanted to get away from Keith for a few hours. She thought the drive might bring some clarity.

“But what about our meeting?” he asked as she picked up her keys and, with the bag over her shoulder, opened the door.

“It’ll have to wait till I get back.”

“When will that be?”

She didn’t answer him, just splashed through the driveway puddles to the car and drove away.

The next time they spoke, she was calling him, hysterical, to tell him that her mother had been murdered. To his credit, he made the ninety-minute trip in less than an hour and stayed by her side until last night.

Now he’s home, ostensibly checking on mail and work—but more likely on his mistress.

Meanwhile, the homicide detectives are talking to Dad, and they want to talk to her, and again the unwanted memory is trying to barge in, but she won’t let it; no, she won’t let it, because . . .

Because it means nothing.

Absolutely nothing.