Don sighs, his medicine-stale breath filling the space between them. “If only that were true. I had more than twenty really good years with your mother. But it’s like your father’s come back to spoil the rest. Thank God he didn’t contact us when he came to live here again.”
“Seriously, Don.” She sits up as much as she can. “Are you that selfish? You should’ve told her the truth. The man was a bigamist. Don’t you see your marriage to my mother was illegitimate? If only you’d exposed him, everything would’ve been different. Sure, he would’ve been prosecuted, but it would’ve been finished. Dealt with. Mom would’ve been able to grieve the marriage and known exactly why he left. Then you could’ve built an honest relationship with her. What you did to her was wrong. It’s almost as bad as what he did to her. You’ve been lying to her longer than he did. Now there are people dead because of all the secrets. Our secrets, Don.” She can see he’s suffering, but he’s the one who pressed her to talk. It’s hard to see beyond his perfidy. She feels sorry for her mother. Sorry for herself.
“I can’t go back in time and fix it,” he says. “I told her I gave your father money so he could leave town, and if she decides to leave me, I’ll deserve it.” His words turn insistent. “Listen to me. You were just a kid back then, but you know how your grandparents were. Do you think they would’ve taken you in under the real circumstances? Do you think your mother could’ve handled the shame? The scandal would have undone her. It was bad enough Ike took her away from her friends and family when they married. Why shouldn’t she have had them after he was gone? In a way it was the kindest thing he could have done.” The rain beats harder on the garage roof. “It was a different time.”
Now it’s Kimber’s turn to sigh. “You could at least have let her make the choice. She’s an adult. Not a child. You and my father both treated her like she was a child. And now it’s all going to come out.”
Kimber can see it now—her father’s playfulness, his unwillingness to face reality. Her mother, like the rest of them, was a kind of playmate. What a strange and desperate man her father had been. But maybe Don was wrong. Maybe her father had known Claudia would act like a grown-up. Wouldn’t fall apart. Truly, she hadn’t. The combination of a daughter’s death and a husband’s desertion didn’t drive her mad or ruin her. She kept herself together. Kept her remaining daughter safe.
“The heart wants what the heart wants,” Don says.
“I doubt this situation is what Emily Dickinson had in mind.” Kimber picks up Mr. Tuttle from her lap and gets out of the car.
Her mother sits at the kitchen table, staring out the window at the rain. She turns on hearing Kimber come in from the garage. Her eyes are red, but she stands up and puts on the practiced, calm smile with which she greets everyone, from the bag boy at the grocery store to her priest and, so often, Kimber. The smile falters when she sees Kimber’s battered face. She gasps.
“Thank God you’re alive.” She opens her arms to Kimber, who hesitates for the briefest of seconds, then sets Mr. Tuttle gently on the floor. Her mother remains still, waiting, and Kimber’s own reserve crumbles.
The police leave Kimber alone for the rest of the day, but as soon as she turns her phone back on the next morning, it pings with messages. First the police. Then a reporter from the radio station.
Although she has nothing personal against the reporter, a fifty-something guy named Jim who’s made the rounds of at least five newspapers and radio stations in the area during his career, she tells him she isn’t interested in giving the station any kind of statement, exclusive or otherwise.
Over the next few days, Don and her mother go back and forth with her to the doctor’s office and the police station, helping her navigate appointments and interviews, and keeping the media and the just plain curious at bay. In the evenings, she and her mother talk, and Don stays in his den with Mr. Tuttle safe and relaxed in his lap. For now, Don is quiet, her mother calm. They will work things out—or not—after she goes home. Shaun has made some calls, and her Thursday meeting with the judge has been suspended indefinitely.
On the fourth day, two things happen. When Leeza calls, Kimber answers her phone. While Leeza stops short of offering an apology, she tells Kimber that they believe Helena went back and falsified almost two years’ worth of Kimber’s expense reports, but they haven’t yet figured it all out.
“Bill feels terrible about it. So do I. We hope you’ll come back to work when you’re ready.”
“Everybody cheats a little on their expense reports, Leeza. You even used to joke about it. I don’t even care what Helena did. She’s dead. All I want is a recommendation when I need it. My bet is that Bill’s worried I’ll talk publicly about how easy it was for her to make you all look stupid.”
Leeza bristles. “No one looks stupid here, Kimber. Bill’s not worried about that at all. We’re just trying to do the right thing.”
“I’m not interested. Just send me the rest of my things and have payroll deposit my last check.”
After the call, Kimber feels a strange sense of freedom. She was careless with her reports and had cheated a little out of habit. Certainly not to the extent that Helena had made it look like she had, but enough. It’s a habit she looks forward to breaking.
The second thing that happens is a call from Gabriel’s doctor. Gabriel wants to see her, and the prosecutor has okayed a visit. Does she want to see him?
Chapter Fifty-Five
Kimber hears the front door open and close, and Mr. Tuttle jumps from his bed, barking, to charge down the hall. She freezes. Despite the fear pounding in her chest, she knows, intellectually, that she’s safe. The locks have been changed. Both Kevin and Helena are dead. Gabriel is still in the private hospital. The knives are in their block by the stove, and she takes a quiet step toward them.
“Tell me, seriously, are you really leaving your doors unlocked? Kimber, where are you?” Troy’s voice carries down the hallway, and Kimber, laughing nervously, comes out of the kitchen to meet him. He carries a shopping bag containing cleaning supplies in one hand and a new dust mop, with an enormous orange microfiber head that looks like it could be a doll’s wig, in the other. “The big guy is on a call in the car. He’ll be in with the rest of the stuff in a minute.”
He hands her the mop. “You look a lot better. Did you sleep last night?”
“Yep. Having the workmen here has actually been kind of good. They left cigarette butts in the driveway, but they were always in a good mood and didn’t act like it was weird that there were random holes in the wall. Did you tell the contractor what happened when you gave him my number?”
“My customers are discreet, and the people who work for them are expected to be too.” He walks past her into the kitchen. “Smells good in here. Chili?”
“I made it.”
“Look at you, Suzy Homemaker.”
Kimber makes a face. “It was a recipe. I’m pretty sure I didn’t mistake the celery seed for the pepper flakes. But don’t expect too much.”
“Let’s get to it, then.” He sets the shopping bag on the kitchen table. “I brought rubber gloves for all of us.” Digging into the bag, he pulls out three pairs of long plastic gloves—two bright blue, one pink, all of which have cascades of pink frills on their cuffs.
“Um, those are awfully—”
“Gay? I know. I stitched the ruffles on myself and hot-glued the ribbon. Sometimes Shaun gets all up on his macho horse, and I like to remind him it’s okay to indulge his softer side, you know?” Kimber can tell by the mischief in his eyes that he’s trying to lighten the mood. Her mood can definitely use lightening.
“Do I get the pink ones?”
“I was thinking of making him use them, but it’s your party.”
With the exception of the two damaged stained-glass windows, all the repairs have been made. Even the basement floor, which Kevin had begun busting up in several places, was repaired and painted. The house feels remade. Renewed. Her father had fled to
Florida to start his life over. But she’s staying here.
The three of them spend the next four hours cleaning. There are post-renovation cleaning services she could use, but the workmen left it reasonably tidy and she wants to do the final bit herself to truly reclaim her home. To finally banish every trace of Kevin Merrill.
Kimber takes on the bathrooms and kitchen. Shaun vacuums the furniture and the rugs after sweeping the basement. Troy, because he is tall, volunteers to wipe down the walls, the paneling, and the windows. Troy is Mr. Tuttle’s new favorite, and the little dog trots after him wherever he goes.
It feels good to be busy. Just a month earlier, she spent days going in and out of the police station, answering questions, trying not to appear as guilty as she felt. Guilt. What an ugly feeling. She’s tired of bearing it, but at least she confessed to Don. It helps.
Three people are dead, and she feels particularly responsible for Jenny’s death. Gabriel is being investigated, his lawyer, Isobel, fighting his prosecution, because Kimber had been cruel to him first. No. She has to get beyond that thought. Her new therapist is helping her see that Gabriel’s decisions were his own from day one. It isn’t her fault he was unstable. Eventually she needs to go to the hospital and talk to him. Not because he asked her, but because he has the answers she needs.
The official investigation is continuing, but with Kevin and Helena dead, and Gabriel in the hospital, the evidence is difficult to assemble. The damaged orange SUV was found burned and dumped beside the river, south of the city, but it was determined that it was definitely the car that ran Kyle and Hadley off the road. No one will ever know if it was Helena or Kevin behind the wheel, because the police have told her that Kyle didn’t see the other driver.
Diana still won’t answer her messages. So many times over the last few weeks, with the workmen all over the house, she thought about going by Diana’s. They were all home now and mostly recovered. To Kimber’s surprise, Diana has not yet unfriended her on Facebook. She’s probably too busy. But it means that Kimber is able to read her updates on how Hadley and Kyle are doing. When she saw Hadley—her hair short from being shaved for surgery—wearing a new ladybug backpack, and a first day of first grade dress and smile, she cried for ten minutes.
The affair with Kyle seems like a foolish game to her now. Something the person she used to be did to amuse herself. Now she feels embarrassingly human. Vulnerable. She cringes to think how she exploited Diana, and Hadley.
What kind of person am I?
“Kimber.”
She startles, dropping the spray bottle of glass cleaner into the bathroom sink.
“You okay in there? Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
Following the voice, she finds Troy standing at the head of the stairs. “There’s something I want to show you.” His face is streaked with the brown dust that, up until the last hour, was everywhere in the house. There’s dust, too, on his blue rayon work shirt, but his eyes are shining.
Puzzled, she trails after him, expecting to find some new disaster. He stops when they reach the lower landing.
“What do you know about this window?’ He touches the frame around the rectangle of stained glass looking out onto the side yard.
“What’s to know about it? It’s pretty. Arts and Crafts style, like the other ones. Maybe a Frank Lloyd Wright reproduction? I did a little research when I moved in.” Looking through it, she notices for the first time how the middle crape myrtle is perfectly framed in the window’s center.
“Yeah, but look at the light inside it and how delicate the lines are.” Tracing a line with a finger, he stops at a vein of iridescent gold. “It’s different from the others. Has it always been here?”
“I have no idea.”
“I don’t know.” Troy’s brow furrows. “It doesn’t fit, somehow. Did the people who owned the house before your dad have piles of money?”
“I don’t think so. Why? Do you think it’s valuable?” It looks like an ordinary piece of stained glass to her, not so different from the other windows.
“The last two times I saw it, it was in the evening, and it wasn’t like I was being nosy about your stuff. But now…I don’t want to say.” He takes out his phone. “Let me take a picture of it—inside and outside since the sun’s coming through it. We can do some research.”
“Great. Thanks, I guess. But if it’s worth anything, I’ll just worry about it getting broken.”
Troy steps back a bit to get the entire window in the viewfinder of his phone and takes a couple of shots. “Honey, that creeper did a lot of damage in the house, but he didn’t touch this. I’d say there must be some luck attached to it. As long as you don’t get some horrible kids who play baseball moving in next door, once your neighbor’s daughter sells.” He lowers the phone. “I wouldn’t want to live in that house on a bet. So much death and craziness.”
Kimber is about to remind him that Jenny had actually died on the outside stairwell to her basement, but she holds her tongue. It’s something she would like to forget too.
Troy phones the next day, sounding even more effusive than when he was at the house. “I’m certain your dad had the window installed in your house. Kimber, it’s museum quality.”
“How museum quality?” Somehow the news doesn’t surprise her. Right now she feels like nothing could ever surprise her again. Sure, there were times when she had felt similarly, especially when her life was falling apart because of Kevin, Gabriel, and Helena. But this seems different. It’s more like things are falling into place, where they belong. Yet she still can’t think about Michelle or Diana without feeling guilty. That will never change.
She daydreams about running into Diana or going by the house to beg her forgiveness. Maybe not reconciling completely, but at least letting Diana see how truly sorry she is. Except a small part of her understands that it would be the most selfish thing she could do. This is one more thing she’ll have to live with forever.
“The details on the auction site are sketchy. But the window sold to someone in this area soon after your father bought the house. I think he bought it and just had it installed, like it was any old window. How weird is that?”
Kimber climbs to the landing. How did she not notice how special, how different it was, from the very beginning? How long has she been looking at things without really seeing them? Across the driveway, a breeze ruffles the leaves of the crape myrtles.
“So is it worth, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars?” Could a window be worth that much?
Troy makes a disappointed noise. “That’s the weird part. It sold for about twenty thousand. So it’s a treasure, but it doesn’t account for all the missing money.”
“No, it doesn’t, does it?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Part of me feels like I should tell Mr. Threllkill’s family. But what do I say? ‘Hey, my dad bought an expensive window, and I think maybe he bought it with money my brother stole’? I think they’re trying to decide whether to sue me or not. The prosecutor says they’re asking questions about this house, even though there’s paperwork indicating my father used the money from the house he sold in Florida. There’s no proof at all that their money is hidden here, Troy. Or that my father ever had it. Maybe he burned it or gave it all away. Maybe he fed it to alligators in Florida. All I know is he didn’t want my brother getting hold of it again.”
“So you still could lose the house.”
A wave of sadness comes over Kimber. “I sure hope not.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
September 199_
I don’t know where she went. I only talked to her for two minutes,” Kimber said. “She probably went off to get stoned.”
Her mother gasped. “How could you say that?”
Kimber watched the floor so she didn’t have to look at either of her parents, or the policewoman sitting in the chair between the living room windows.
The room was sunny and filled with books on architecture and
art. Also, an antique set of the complete works of Shakespeare her mother had bought her father for his thirty-fifth birthday. In fact, her mother bought nearly all of her father’s books, encouraging him to leave his bookkeeping job and become an art professor or an architect.
“Your father has an artist’s soul,” she often told the girls. But Kimber knew he never read any of them.
“Everybody knew she was a stoner,” Kimber mumbled.
Her father squeezed her shoulder. Usually he was gentle, but this time it hurt. “This isn’t the time for that, Kimber. Please tell us the truth. We need to know.”
Kimber’s mother watched her hungrily. For two days she had wandered between Michelle’s bedroom and her own, pacing, agonized, her face wet with tears. Kimber never imagined her mother could cry so much. She hadn’t yet been able to cry, and it worried her. Would they guess she was guilty?
“You should have told us before. You’ve told us every other thing she did wrong. Why not this?” Her mother’s words were seasoned with accusation.
“I told you she didn’t tell me anything! She was complaining about being hot. She said she’d see me later.” Kimber folded her arms and stared down at the floor, her face reddening. “Leave me alone.”
“This isn’t Kimber’s fault, Claudia.”
“It’s somebody’s fault. Somebody gave her drugs or saw her fall into that ravine. Why would she have gone there by herself? She had so many friends.”
“We think it’s possible Michelle might have been running when she fell or was even running down the hill. Her injuries indicate she was moving quickly.” The policewoman was the same woman who had been there late the night before, when they thought Michelle was just missing. Her younger, male colleague was silent.
“So you think someone was chasing her?” Hearing the edge in her father’s voice, Kimber’s head snapped up.
The Stranger Inside Page 29
