Not a Happy Family

by Shari Lapena

  After that, he was swamped with shame and loneliness and confusion, convinced for a long while that he would never have a girlfriend. He was humiliated by Tina and by his father, who told everyone in the family what he’d done. He stalked a girl. He freaked her out. She almost called the police. His dad harped on it for months.

  Dan didn’t dare look at Tina after that. He stayed away from her. He stayed away from all girls, terrified of what might happen. He worried that she’d told other girls at school about him, that he was some kind of weirdo. It felt so unfair. And sometimes, late at night, after everyone was asleep, he would have to drive past her house. Sometimes he had to stop and park outside. But the feelings of desire and adoration he’d had for Tina hadn’t survived the rejection and humiliation. He felt a meanness toward her now, and toward everyone involved in his disgrace. It gave him some small feeling of power to sit outside her house like this, without anyone knowing, doing what he was forbidden to do.

  Now, as he drives—a form of self-soothing, really—he finds himself thinking about Audrey. She knows all about what happened with Tina. Audrey thinks he’s strange, because his father blew the whole thing out of proportion, made it out to be something it was not. Since that night she threatened them at Catherine’s house, Dan worried she might say something about it to the detectives, or to the press. He knows she was the anonymous source in that newspaper article. He doesn’t think Tina’s family will come forward and say anything about him. The Metheneys are like the Mertons, rich and very private. You don’t let people know about your personal business. But he wonders what they’re saying about him now around the Metheneys’ dinner table. He was so creepy. I knew there was something off about him. Maybe he killed his parents.

  He tightens his hands on the steering wheel and somehow finds himself outside Audrey’s. The house is completely dark, there are no lights on at all. There is no one here to see him. He parks the car, and watches.

  * * *

  • • •

  audrey has too much on her mind to sleep.

  She gets out of bed and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water. She can trust the tap water. Everything else in the house that was already open or unsealed she’s thrown down the drain. The clock on the kitchen stove tells her it’s 1:22 in the morning. She stands at the sink, letting the water run until it’s cold, and then fills a glass and carries it into the living room. Moonlight spills in through the living-room window and she can see perfectly well. No need to turn on any lights. She walks over to the window and looks out. There’s a car on the street, right in front of her house. A man is sitting in the car, just a shadow in the dark, and he seems to be watching the house. She takes a startled, involuntary step back. She must have spooked him because she sees his face turn away and his arm move to turn on the ignition. He pulls into the street and passes under a streetlight briefly as he speeds away.

  She didn’t get a good look at him. But she recognized the car—it was Lisa’s. It gives her a jolt. She stands at the window, her heart pounding.

  It must have been Dan, sitting outside her house in the middle of the night. Did he poison her? Was he sitting out there trying to get up the nerve to break in and see if she was dead? Well, now he knows.

  Or maybe he’s just up to his old tricks.

  * * *

  • • •

  ellen cutter squirms restlessly in bed. At length she pushes back the covers and goes to the kitchen to make herself a cup of decaf tea. She looks at the clock on the wall. It’s just past three in the morning. It’s so quiet. It reminds her of when she used to get up in the middle of the night to breastfeed her daughter when she was an infant, so long ago. Just the two of them, alone on the sofa in the dark.

  She thinks about her daughter now, how troubled she seems, how stressed and overworked. She wasn’t always like that. Rose had sailed through law school after spending a few years working at different jobs. But now Rose is struggling. If only she could help her.

  She thinks about Audrey’s visit earlier that evening. Her friend is getting a million dollars from her brother in his will. And she’s complaining. She obviously feels she’s owed much more for keeping quiet about what Fred did all those years ago. She feels loyalty should be repaid.

  And this bit about being poisoned. Ellen doesn’t know what to think. She believes Audrey ingested poison. She still looked ill. She’d been in the hospital—although she hadn’t called Ellen while she was there. The detectives had visited her, examined her house as a crime scene. You don’t lie about that. It’s too easy to be caught out. But it does occur to her that Audrey might have poisoned herself. These murders seem to have sent her over the edge. She’s so angry about being cheated out of what she thinks she deserves, so certain that one of the kids is a murderer, that perhaps she’s making things up. . . .

  Ellen remembers the night Audrey first told her that Fred was going to change his will to give her half. She remembers how elated Audrey was, and how secretly jealous she felt.

  She and Audrey pretend they tell each other everything, but it’s not true. Nobody tells anybody everything.

  Ellen has never told Audrey that Rose is her brother’s child. She’s never told anyone but Fred. And now Fred’s other children are each inheriting a fortune. Audrey feels shortchanged, but that’s nothing to what Ellen feels.

  When Ellen couldn’t get pregnant with her husband, she finally gave in to Fred’s advances and slept with him. She got pregnant quite quickly then. Fred had been furious when he found out. But he’d gotten over it when he realized she was never going to tell anyone. Her husband never knew Rose wasn’t his biological daughter.

  When her husband died unexpectedly of a heart attack when Rose wasn’t even a year old, Ellen had gone to Fred and asked for money. She didn’t have to say it; he knew she could prove Rose was his child. He paid her regularly for years. Not a lot, but enough.

  Ellen tries not to think about how Fred cold-bloodedly murdered his own father, but she’s been imagining it in her mind’s eye over and over, ever since Audrey told her. She’d Googled psychopathy and now she knows it’s partly genetic.

  But her Rose isn’t like that. Rose is lovely.

  47

  The following morning, Tuesday, Dan calls his attorney, Richard Klein. “They want to question me again,” he says. “What should I do?” He can hear the anxiety in his own reedy voice.

  “Hang on. Calm down,” Klein says. “What’s happened?”

  “That fucking detective just called and asked me to come down to the station again for more questions. I don’t have to go, do I?”

  “No, you don’t. But maybe you should. I’ll be there with you. We need to find out where they’re going with this. I’ll meet you there in half an hour, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And Dan, I’ll be right beside you. Don’t say anything until I get there. And if I don’t think you should answer a question, I’ll tell you.”

  When Dan arrives at the police station—Lisa stayed home, her face white as he left—he waits inside until his attorney shows up minutes later. Seeing the other man, in his good suit, with his confident manner, reassures Dan a little.

  “Why are they coming after me like this?” he asks his attorney. “This borders on harassment! They don’t have any evidence, do they? They couldn’t have. They’d have to tell you, wouldn’t they?”

  “They’d have to tell me sooner or later. Not yet, though. You’re not under arrest, Dan. So let’s see what they have to say.”

  Once they’re settled in the interview room, the tape running, Reyes begins bluntly. “We have a witness who saw you in your car in Brecken Hill on the night of the murders, at about ten thirty.”

  Dan feels his insides turn to liquid and shoots a frightened look at his lawyer.

  Klein says, “No comment.”

  Reyes leans in closer and looks him in the
eye, and Dan feels faint.

  “Your father sold his business out from under you. You couldn’t find a job. You’d tied up most of your savings—half a million dollars—in an investment in a mortgage on a house in Brecken Hill and couldn’t get the money back when you needed it. You sat outside that house—not far from your parents’ house, by the way—staring at it, night after night,” Reyes says. “The owner of that house saw you there on Easter night. That’s pretty strange behavior, Dan. Did you know you would never see that money again? What were you thinking, Dan? Were you angry? Desperate? You’d been ripped off once too often?”

  Dan feels as if all the blood has drained from his head. “What do you mean I’ll never see that money again? What are you talking about?” he asks, his voice strident.

  “That money is gone, Dan. There is no mortgage on Twenty-Two Brecken Hill Drive. The owner has never heard of you, or your money. It was all a fraud, perpetrated by Rose Cutter, the attorney.” He adds, “But perhaps you already knew that.”

  Dan stares at the detective in shock. No mortgage on . . . that can’t be. He signed the papers. He trusted her. She lied to him. “I didn’t know!” he almost shouts back at the detective who is tormenting him.

  “Did your father refuse to give you the money you badly needed at Easter dinner? You told us you were nowhere near Brecken Hill that night, but we now know that was a lie. You had the disposable suit—”

  “This interview is over,” Klein says, standing up. “Unless you’re going to arrest my client, we’re leaving.”

  “We’re not arresting him—yet,” Reyes says. “One last thing,” he adds, as they turn to go. “Someone tried to poison your aunt Audrey. What do you know about that?”

  “Nothing,” Dan says, and they leave without another word.

  * * *

  • • •

  rose sips her morning coffee, staring out the window of her small kitchen. She hasn’t gone into the office today—what’s the point? The police know about the fraud, and they are going to charge her. There’s no way out of it. She’s going to go to jail, at least for a short time.

  It was never supposed to come to the attention of the police, of anybody. Dan was never going to know. It was to be a victimless crime—he was going to get his money back. But it hasn’t turned out that way. And now they think she’s a criminal, and they’re accusing her of murder.

  Will they find out everything? She feels fear creep along her spine. Because there’s more. She dresses carefully in her best navy suit, a crisp white blouse. She takes care with her makeup. She keeps her back straight and holds her head high as she walks out of the house on her way to see Walter Temple, of the firm Temple Black. She will hold her head high for as long as she possibly can.

  * * *

  • • •

  ted is scrubbing his hands at one of the sinks when his receptionist approaches him and says, “There are two detectives here to see you.”

  He turns to her and says, “What?” His immediate reaction is alarm. He doesn’t want to talk to the detectives here. He doesn’t want to talk to them at all. “I have patients to see. Tell them I can’t talk to them now.”

  She goes away and he finishes scrubbing his hands, his heart beating furiously now. This must be about the earrings. He must support his wife—he has no choice. The thought of lying to the police again makes him nervous. They already know he’s a liar.

  His receptionist reappears, her brow wrinkled. “They insist on seeing you now. They won’t leave.”

  He averts his face so she can’t see how rattled he is. “Fine. Send them into my office.”

  He takes a couple of minutes to compose himself and then enters his office briskly, to show that he’s in a hurry and can’t give them much time. Also, he wants to disguise his nervousness. He knows there are sweat stains starting to appear beneath the arms of his blue scrubs. Detectives Reyes and Barr are seated in the two chairs in front of his cluttered desk. “What can I do for you?” Ted asks before he even sits down.

  “We just have a couple more questions,” Reyes says.

  “Sure, but I don’t have a lot of time, so—”

  “As you know, there were some items that went missing from the Mertons’ home the night of the murders. Some of Sheila’s jewelry. We have an inventory. When we searched your house, we found a pair of earrings in your wife’s jewelry box that were part of that inventory.”

  “Oh, yes, I know all about that,” Ted says, trying to sound casual, as he sits down. “Catherine borrowed those earrings from her mother a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Did she tell you that?” Reyes asks. “Or do you actually know it?”

  Ted can feel himself coloring; he can’t think of how to answer.

  Detective Barr says, “It’s simple. Did you see her wearing the earrings before the murders?”

  “Yes, she wore them.”

  “Good. Then you can describe them for us,” Reyes says.

  But he can’t. He stares back at them blankly. Catherine should have told him what the fucking earrings looked like. How stupid. “I can’t remember,” he says finally, feeling himself flush an ugly red. “But I know she borrowed them.”

  “I see,” Reyes says, rising from his chair. “We won’t take up any more of your time.”

  As the two detectives turn to leave, Ted says rather strongly, “Catherine had no reason at all to harm her parents. We’re financially comfortable. Catherine would hate me for saying this, but I’m afraid it’s Dan you should be looking at.”

  Reyes turns back around to face him. “Fred Merton had decided to change his will to give his sister, Audrey, half, substantially cutting into your wife’s inheritance.”

  “Audrey’s saying that,” Ted says, “but no one believes it.”

  “I believe it,” Reyes says. “Fred was dying. Perhaps he said something to your wife. And if Sheila knew what he was going to do, she may have told her—or one of her other children. That’s motive enough for me.” The two detectives exit the office.

  Ted waits until he hears them leave the dental practice and then he gets up from his desk and closes his office door. He wants to slam it, but he restrains himself. He paces the small area of his office, thinking of the smug look on the detective’s face as he was leaving. They don’t believe him about the earrings. They’re acting like they think Catherine killed her parents. It’s insane. It must have been Dan. He’s the one with the most obvious motive. It must have been him. So why are they looking so closely at his wife?

  Ted slumps down in his chair, suddenly exhausted, ignoring the patients he has waiting. He thinks about that night, Easter Sunday, at Catherine’s parents’. Sheila had said she had something to tell them, but they’d been interrupted by Dan’s arrival. Was it about Audrey and the will? But later Catherine had told him it was Jenna’s allowance her mother had wanted to talk to her about—that’s what she told him the next morning. Only then she said her parents were dead when she got there.

  His stomach is churning, and he feels dizzy.

  Now he remembers something else about that night, something he’d forgotten. When he was sitting on the sofa with Jake, and Dan was standing in the corner of the living room, talking to his father, Catherine and her mother had come down the stairs together. He’d barely registered it because he was eavesdropping on Dan and his father. Maybe Sheila told her about Audrey and the will when they were upstairs. Maybe Catherine knew.

  He thinks about how much Catherine wanted that house. How attached she gets to material things. Like houses, and earrings. She left her cell phone at home that night.

  He sits at his desk and tries to pull himself together.

  48

  Rose walks into Temple Black through the heavy glass doors to reception, summoning all the poise she can muster. It’s the kind of law office she has always aspired to work at—one that oozes money, a
nd power, and success. Not like her shitty little storefront, with its “walk-ins welcome” sign. She should have joined a large, prestigious firm like this one, rather than setting out on her own, but the truth is, she didn’t have any offers. Maybe she wouldn’t have gotten herself into trouble if she’d had someone watching over her. They always warn sole practitioners about that. But it’s too late to think these things now.

  As she follows the receptionist down the corridor to Walter Temple’s office, she happens to glance through the glass into one of the boardrooms and recognizes a law school friend, Janet Shewcuk. Janet sees her and quickly turns away.

  Rose has never met Walter Temple. He welcomes her warmly. He must not know yet, she thinks, about what she did with Dan’s money.

  “Ms. Cutter,” he says, “thank you for coming.”

  She gives him a tentative smile. “The police told me yesterday—about the will,” she says, sitting down opposite him, crossing her legs at the ankles.

  The older attorney nods. “It’s good news for you, although I imagine it may be a little upsetting, too.”

  She looks back at him. “So it’s true?”

  “Yes. You have been named as a beneficiary in Fred Merton’s will.” He clears his throat. “I’m not sure if you knew he was your biological father.”