The Stranger Inside

by Laura Benedict

  After drying her hair and dressing in a pair of the linen shorts and a top, she follows the aroma of roast chicken and rosemary to find Diana in the kitchen, gingerly peeling meat from the cooked chicken resting on a cutting board.

  “I thought we’d have homemade chicken soup for dinner,” Diana says over her shoulder. “Kyle’s got a thing tonight, so it will be just you, Hadley, and me. You like my chicken soup, don’t you?” She pries a drumstick and thigh joint from the bird. “If you want, we can ask Gabriel over. Have you talked to him today?” Turning from the counter, she brightens to see how Kimber is dressed. “You found them! I’m so glad she got it right. Are you surprised?”

  “Diana? What did you do? How did it all get here?”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “Definitely surprised. What I don’t understand is how.”

  She rinses her hands quickly at the sink and grabs a paper towel to dry them. “I felt so terrible about you not having your things. It didn’t seem fair. Of course the whole thing is damned unfair. Coffee?”

  “I’ll get it. But how did you get everything so quickly? Have you been shopping in your sleep?”

  “You know I have a hell of a personal shopper, Jeannie, at the store. I called her yesterday afternoon and told her your sizes and your style. I suppose it was presumptuous, but who knows when you’re going to get back into your house?” She leans against the counter, arms folded, and her eyes fill with mischief. “Actually, I wanted to go by your house and get your things myself.”

  “Oh God. You didn’t.” She imagines Diana on her porch, Lance Wilson letting her inside. The door closing behind them. A warm wave of guilt rocks Kimber. If Lance Wilson had hurt Diana, it would’ve been her fault. It was bad enough that she had so much to hide from Diana, that she couldn’t tell her best friend everything.

  “Honey, sit down. Here.” Diana guides her to one of the broad, rush-upholstered stools at the island. “Are you all right? You look like death.”

  Kimber sits. “But you didn’t actually go there, right? Tell me you didn’t go there.”

  Sighing, Diana touches Kimber’s arm. “Would it be so bad? It’s not like I ever did anything to him. I mean, dammit, he has all your things. That’s not right.”

  When Kimber begins to argue, Diana holds up a hand to stop her. “Kyle thought it was a terrible idea too. In fact, he was the one who suggested you and I go shopping, but I know shopping isn’t your favorite thing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Just a minute.” Diana picks up her phone from the island and opens the photos. “This is all that happened. I swear to God on my mother’s pearls.” She holds the phone so Kimber can see the screen. It’s a picture of Lance Wilson, unshaven, standing in the doorway of Kimber’s house. He looks angry.

  “Did you take this? When?”

  “I went by the house. Walked right up to the porch and knocked on the door, and I asked if I could please get some of your things for you. I thought it was a perfectly reasonable request, right?” She shakes her head. “What an ass. He acted like I was crazy or something, when we all know he’s the criminal.”

  “Di, we don’t even know if he is who he says he is. Kyle’s going to be pissed at both of us. Tell me Hadley wasn’t with you.”

  “Oh no. Don’t tell anybody. Especially Kyle. I was trying to help you!” Her eyes are wide, and it’s obvious she wants Kimber to be pleased. In her pale chambray shirt and white skirt, ponytail, simple silver jewelry, and sandals, she’s the picture of summer efficiency and calm. Who knew she had such a stubborn, wild streak? Though what she did seems to strangely fit. She is loyal. Deeply loyal. The realization piles more guilt on Kimber.

  “But what did he say?” She’s talked to him. What if they connect in some way? What if he manages to turn her against me?

  “Well, to be honest, he wasn’t nasty at first,” Diana says. “Then I told him what I wanted. I only got his picture because I pretended I was getting a call and was sending it to voicemail.”

  Kimber’s fear turns into anger. “You’re lucky he didn’t call the police. Or…or he could have let you inside and then killed you or something and buried you in the basement.”

  Diana pales. “He’s weird, but I can’t believe he’s dangerous. Do you think he is?”

  “Oh God. Kyle’s going to kill me,” Kimber says. “Dragging you into this. Could you tell what he was doing when you got there?”

  “He had a laptop open on the table in the hall, like he was carrying it around, I guess.”

  Outside the window, the day is achingly bright, but Kimber feels like retreating to the dim safety of the guest room. “I hate that he has access to everything I own. He could steal or throw away anything. It’s bad enough I had to replace everything back in June after my wallet got stolen. What if he takes all my jewelry? Or gets into my bank accounts on my desktop? I don’t even know if insurance would pay on it.”

  “Wait. You don’t have a password on your desktop?”

  “I changed the one on my laptop before I crashed yesterday morning. But who thinks of it on their home desktop? I did change my banking and credit card passwords though.”

  Diana shrugs. “Kyle. Hadley always wants to play on his computer because she thinks it’s better than hers because it’s newer. Of course there’s nothing on there for her. I don’t even have the password to it.”

  There’s a good reason for that. You don’t want to know what’s on there.

  “Look, hon,” Diana continues, “I was trying to help.” She changes the subject. “Did you see Jeannie picked out all new panties?”

  Kimber smiles in spite of herself. “I saw that.”

  There’s a familiar look of delight in Diana’s eyes. “Well, at least if he gets off on the ones in your house, you can just pick them up with tongs or something and put them in the trash.”

  With that bizarre image between them, they both laugh until tears are leaking from Kimber’s eyes.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Despite the plush gray and beige decor of the Lakeside Rehabilitation Campus, the faint odors of urine and disinfectant hit Kimber as the sliding doors close behind her. A tiny elderly receptionist with a lavender rinse on her hair smiles and inclines her birdlike head when Kimber asks her how to get to Corridor Three. “Left after the elevator, and all the way to the end.”

  Kimber turns the corner into the corridor and sees her mother’s stiff, elegant profile halfway down the hall. She’s talking to a nurse who has backed a safe distance away, her posture cowed. Kimber’s mother, Claudia, is a different person from the mother Kimber knew as a child, the woman she was before Ike Hannon abandoned her in her grief after Michelle died. Claudia Hannon had existed in her outgoing husband’s shadow, the perfect stay-at-home mom whose biggest concerns appeared to be making healthy meals and being a hardworking PTA volunteer. If sometimes she had shut herself in her bedroom with a days-long headache or talked quietly but urgently on the phone, young Kimber hadn’t seen anything unusual about it.

  Don Cameron, Kimber’s stepfather, isn’t at all charismatic like her father was and not even close to as handsome. He looks now much as he did when he was her father’s employer: broad shouldered and rather lumbering, his lower body tending to heaviness if he isn’t careful, with a rough thatch of auburn hair and a matching mustache, small brown eyes, but a generous smile and soft, strong hands. Before Kimber’s father had left, Don was Uncle Don, an ex-jock widower who showed up at their house at Christmas in a Santa hat and black fireman’s boots, with a bag full of expensive presents that were always either a little too young or a little too old for Kimber and Michelle. He still has an air of kindness about him that leads people to assume he’s easily duped.

  “She’s killing me. Your mother wants to wear me out,” he says as Kimber follows her mother into his room. “I think she wants to take all our money and move to Palm Beach and find some young stud to rub sunblock all over her.” Don can’t keep the corner
s of his mouth from turning up, belying his complaint.

  “He only took two walks up and down the hallway yesterday, and the doctor says he needs at least three. She was very specific.” Her mother’s pink-lacquered lips are serious. “You know he doesn’t listen to me.” Though all three of them know Don would walk over hot coals to bring her a cup of tea. “It’s good to see you, darling. Aren’t you working today?” She casts a critical eye over Kimber’s shorts and sandals.

  The silent judgment is nothing new or unexpected. Kimber kisses her mother’s cool cheek, resting one hand on her back in a light embrace. Always fashionably thin, she feels thinner every time Kimber touches her, as though she’s slowly shrinking while they’re apart. “Not today. I have some vacation days they want me to take before the end of the year,” she lies. “Just thought I’d see how it’s going. When will they let you out, Don?”

  “Not soon enough for my taste. Nothing but a bunch of old people and cripples in here. I can’t wait to get home.”

  Her mother tsk-tsks. “No one uses that word anymore. It’s considered rude.”

  Don winks at Kimber. Nothing amuses him more than to shock his straitlaced wife. “My love, would you go to that gulag they call the cafeteria and get me a coffee? And before you yell at me, you know I’m allowed one a day.”

  By way of response, she glances from Don to Kimber but pretends to take his request at face value. “Fine. But it’s sweetener for you. No more sugar.” As she leaves the room, her scarf-pattern silk St. John blouse flutters at the hips of her coordinating ivory jeans. “Don’t believe a thing he tells you. I’ve been as good as gold to him.”

  Don gestures Kimber to the chair beside the bed. The seat is warm with sunlight from the enormous picture window that looks out on a manicured courtyard.

  “So how was your trip to jail?”

  “Does she know?” It’s pointless to ask Don how he knows she was arrested. He has a lot of connected friends, donates a lot of political money, and belongs to several clubs.

  “I figured you would want to tell her yourself. It’s not like I got all the details, so you might want to fill me in. Quick.”

  The first time she was arrested, she’d just turned nineteen, and Don came to get her. Or rather a very angry Claudia, flames practically shooting from her blue eyes, brought him with her to the police station where Kimber was being held for shoplifting a bracelet and a pair of earrings. It was a stupidly predictable thing for Kimber to do: her world had been turned upside down at the age of fourteen, when her sister died and her father disappeared. It wasn’t as though the bracelet and earrings were the first things she’d stolen, but she’d gotten more and more brazen. Careless. The therapist her mother sent her to posited that she probably wanted to be caught.

  She tells Don about Lance Wilson and the house.

  “And you called Gabriel?” Unspoken is the question Why didn’t you call us?

  “I knew Mom would freak out, and you’re not exactly ready to jump into the car. So I dialed Gabriel, and he answered. That’s it.” She shrugs. “Really, it’s going fine. He’s handling it.” Her defensiveness is a reflex. Unlike her mother, Don is still fond of Shaun, but he never warmed to Gabriel.

  For a long time Kimber was angry at Don for pursuing her mother, despite the fact that he let more than a year pass before he officially asked her out. Much later he told her he’d hired several detectives to find her father, without success. They married almost three years later, after her mother divorced her father in absentia and Kimber had started college.

  “Honey, why do you think this man picked your house? It’s unbelievable the police haven’t thrown him out.”

  “Damned if I know. It’s not like I keep anything valuable there. Nothing a stranger would want. Maybe something the previous owners had?” The words come out of her mouth, and they almost feel like she’s suggesting a real possibility. She hates having to lie. She hates that the lie comes so easily.

  “You know who they are?”

  “Were. Jenny next door says they both died in a nursing home.” Suddenly realizing that they are sitting in something a lot like a nursing home, she falls silent, hoping Don doesn’t make the connection.

  Me and my big mouth.

  “Very funny,” he says, but his eyes are laughing.

  “You know what I mean. They were elderly. Probably at least two or three years older than you are,” she teases.

  “You and I both know it probably doesn’t have anything to do with those people.”

  Whatever he’s about to say, she’s certain she doesn’t want to hear it. “Dad didn’t leave much in the house besides furniture. Jenny told me he kept to himself after he got the cancer diagnosis. No one came to see him. I can’t even say I would’ve gone to see him if I’d known he was in town.”

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t have secrets, Kimber. Your dad had a lot to atone for, but he never bothered to do it. Look how much pain he caused you and your mother. I watched you both suffer for a lot of years, and then he had the nerve to come back and not say a word to anyone. Leaving you the house without explanation? That…” He doesn’t finish, but his right hand, resting on the bed, clenches into a fist.

  “Look, I don’t know why he came back. I don’t know what he was doing all those years any more than you do. But I don’t think he would’ve hidden something in the house without telling me somehow. What would it be? Money? And how would this Lance guy know to look for it?” She doesn’t mention the photograph. It’s not fair, but if she told him about it, there would be questions. Many, many questions.

  They sit in awkward silence. He finally asks her where she’s staying and how Gabriel’s proceeding. “Do you have a court date? Or do you think you can get this Lance creature to settle?”

  A proposed settlement would raise even more uncomfortable questions.

  “Why in the world would I settle? He’s a criminal.” Anger flares inside her. She’s about to lose her shit in the room of a man who’d recently suffered complications from double hernia surgery. She clamps her jaw shut, resisting making a scene. I’m not that girl anymore.

  Don takes her hand, squeezing it. “Easy, honey. Gabriel’s a good lawyer.”

  Yes, she knows it’s true, even if Don doesn’t really believe it. “I want him out of my house. That’s all I want.”

  “Why don’t you let me tell your mother about this?”

  Her mother appears in the doorway, holding a paper cup of coffee with a sleeve and a lid. “What should you tell me that Kimber can’t?”

  What has she heard? No matter what the trouble, she’d assume Kimber was at fault. This time she’ll be right.

  Her mother never came right out and said she blamed Kimber for Michelle’s death or Ike’s leaving. But the emotional distance between them is vast. It was as though she knew somehow that Kimber had ruined their lives. Kimber never told her what she and Michelle had learned about their father’s cheating. Surely her mother had suspected something—even if she couldn’t acknowledge it.

  Don pats the blanket beside him. Her mother looks skeptical, and Kimber thinks for a moment that she won’t sit, but she finally does. Don takes a sip of the coffee, and she takes the cup back to hold it for him.

  “Well?” She looks at Kimber expectantly. Her makeup is muted, giving her a look of easygoing calm. But Kimber knows what she’s thinking. Oh, Kimber, what have you done now?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Kimber goes to the bank to retrieve the deed to her house from her safe-deposit box and tucks it into an envelope with her receipts from the retreat. On arriving at Gabriel’s apartment building, she’s relieved to find one of the precious few parking places out front empty and nips the Mini right into it. Once inside the building, she takes the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. Entering the code she remembers into the keypad beside his door, she waits for the beep that tells her it’s unlocked. Nothing. The realization that he’s changed the code is oddly painful, and she flushes
with embarrassment. Why did she even think surprising him would be a good idea?

  I must be losing my mind.

  She hurries back to the elevator, hoping no one is watching her through their peepholes. It’s Wednesday, and on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays Gabriel runs in the park at lunch, eats, and takes a quick shower before returning to his office. Her watch reads three minutes to noon, and she’s certain he’ll finish his run between noon and ten after. Gabriel is a creature of habit, maybe even a tad OCD. Along with his alarming intensity about their relationship, it’s one of the things that made her reject the idea of being with him forever. She reaches the lobby less than a minute before he comes in from the street.

  “What are you doing here?” He’s soaked with sweat from his run. His unseasonable long-sleeved shirt covers his arm, which was badly injured when he drove his Honda into a wall in a downtown garage. She still hasn’t seen the arm bared, and in her imagination it’s mangled and covered with smooth pink scar tissue. “Is everything all right? I was going to call this afternoon to tell you I haven’t heard anything from the judge’s office. We should have a court date very soon.”

  She doesn’t have a ready answer yet wants to do something—anything—to jump-start getting Lance Wilson out of her house. Going to work is off the table. Leeza even emailed to remind her to stay off her social media accounts. How thin and pathetic her life feels now, without her house, without her job.

  “I have the deed and receipts you told me to get. Can I come up?” Kimber can’t see his eyes behind his Oakleys, but there’s a pause before he agrees.

  Why can’t I stay away? This isn’t good for either of us.

  After his shower, Gabriel puts together a shrimp, avocado, and kale salad with tiny tomatoes and a yogurt dressing. The slivers of raw sheep’s milk cheese he sprinkles over it smell of walnuts and earth. There are fragile almond crackers too, the kind she learned to love when they were together but always forgets to buy. For such a slender man, Gabriel has large hands. Yet he handles the knife deftly, carving the cheese and tomatoes with precision. When she once asked him how he became such an amazing cook—knowing what herbs to use, how to clarify butter and perfectly roast vegetables and pair wines—he said that he’d had experienced teachers, and then changed the subject. Had all his teachers been women or had it been just one woman? He never told her.