One Little Secret (ARC)

by Cate Holahan

  She dumped the lot and then went back for the glasses. Before she reached the table, she was stopped by a sharp pain in her left foot, like she’d stepped on a crab hidden in the grass. Yelping, she hobbled to the bench on her good foot and the side of the injured one.

  “Are you all right?” Louis stood in the water, arms draped over the edge of the pool.

  Susan slumped onto the seat and pulled her right heel over her left knee. In the pool lights, she could just make out the inch-long shard embedded inside. “I think I stepped on Rachel’s broken wine bottle.”

  Louis pulled himself from the pool. In seconds he was kneeling beside her, cupping her heel in his palm. “It’s big, but it doesn’t look too deep.” He gently released her foot and then reached for the whiskey bottle. A shot went into Nadal’s tumbler. He passed her the glass with one hand and grasped the bottle with the other. “Drink that.”

  “What?”

  A searing pain answered her question. Louis knelt by her heel with the whiskey tilted over her foot. “Scottish disinfectant,” he joked. He gestured with his chin. “Really, drink that.”

  Susan threw back the shot as Louis squeezed her heel. With a surgeon’s steadiness, he pinched the glass between his fingers and plucked it from the wound. She felt the pressure release as the shiv came out, followed by a dribble of blood. Louis tilted the bottle over the gash a second time and then reached back into the grass for his discarded shirt. He pressed the fabric against the wound. “It’s not deep. A few minutes of pressure should do it.”

  The shot, mixed with the shock of what had happened, made Susan feel sloshed again. She stammered and slurred a string of thank-yous punctuated with compliments on Louis’s medical ability and excuses as to why she hadn’t seen such a large piece of glass shining in the lawn. “I completely forgot she’d dropped that wine earlier.”

  Louis pressed his hand harder into Susan’s foot. “Well, that’s Rachel for you. She makes a mess and doesn’t care if her friends are hurt in the process. I know you don’t know her well, but you’re going to find that woman cares about one thing—money.”

  Susan nodded her agreement. Perhaps Rachel had made a play for Nadal because she’d heard he would be very wealthy once his company went public. “There’s a special place in hell for people that don’t know the importance of family,” she quipped.

  “Or friends.” Louis grinned up at her, continuing to apply pressure. “I bet she’d sue the homeowner’s insurance on your behalf for hurting yourself on the bottle that she broke, though—as long as she could get her cut. She’d argue that it was the homeowner’s responsibility to provide renters with decanters that wouldn’t break from a fall of four feet. They should have known better than to assume adults would behave responsibly.”

  Susan snorted. “I think the rental agreement included a pledge to behave responsibly.”

  “Oh well. Rachel will have to sue the glass manufacturer, then. Imagine, glass being breakable!”

  Louis laughed, a little too loudly for the lame joke. Susan was tempted to ask why he, too, disliked Rachel. But she feared doing so would only raise the question of why she was so comfortable with making fun of a so-called friend. Drunk or not drunk, she couldn’t get into that without first really having it out with Nadal.

  Susan felt a surge of disgust at how her husband had callously involved Louis in his cover-up, claiming he’d been outside Rachel’s room to ask a question on Louis’s behalf. “Hey, when Nadal was down here, he said he was looking for Rachel to ask a question for you.”

  Louis’s smile faded at the corners. “Oh, he told you about that?”

  “Well, not much. What—”

  Scratching footsteps interrupted her question. Simultaneously, Susan and Louis turned their attention to the beach path. Ben strode toward the house, his back hunched in defeat. No one followed him into the yard.

  “Ben,” Susan called.

  He looked up for a moment, long enough for her to see his shamed expression in the pool lights. Susan scooted back on the bench, concerned that Ben hadn’t seen the reason Louis knelt beside her, grasping her foot. “I cut my—”

  Ben jogged past them into the side yard, toward the cars. Susan looked down at her doctor, seeking direction as to whether they should try to clarify things. Louis slowly withdrew his T-shirt from her heel. “Rachel probably threatened to sue him for emotional damages,” he said, shaking out his shirt. Susan’s blood had left a large dark mark in the center of the light fabric, a bull’s-eye for a marksman.

  “Give that to me. I’ll wash it.”

  He balled it up. “Don’t worry about it. It’s a shirt.” He gestured to her heel. “Bleeding stopped. But you should put a Band-Aid on it.”

  Susan did her best to compensate Louis for the medical care with compliments as she hobbled around the table, collecting glasses. She turned the wine goblets upside down and slid the stems between her fingers, enabling her to carry four in one hand. Louis grabbed the remaining wine glass, promising to return for the scotch tumblers. “You’re injured,” he said sternly as she started to protest. “We can’t have you hoofing around like a pack mule, and I don’t want you to reopen your heel.”

  She took the long way around the pool to get back to the house, avoiding the entire area where Rachel had dropped the bottle. When she approached the edge of the lawn, she turned toward the beach and the jetty. Perhaps Rachel, humiliated by her public argument and unable to reconcile with Ben, had decided to go home. Her spirits lifted at the thought, though only for the moment it took to see Rachel’s outline standing atop the jetty, her kimono waving behind her like a cape. Super bitch, Susan mumbled under her breath.

  Louis stood holding back the door, despite having to wait for Susan’s lame walk around the lawn. She thanked him for the umpteenth time and walked through to the sucking sound of the front door popping open. The hallway was too dark to see who had gone out. Whoever it was, though, closed the door behind him or her with barely a click.

  Susan glanced behind her to see if Louis had registered the noise. He smiled with half his mouth, a kind of smirk that Susan now read as more satisfied than sarcastic. Probably just Ben coming in through the front, she decided, seeking to avoid them all until morning.

  She limped over to the kitchen sink and placed the glasses in a line. Louis added his lot and then headed back to the door for the final collection. Water squealed through the pipes as she turned on the faucet and began rinsing everything with the half-full bottle of Dawn left on the counter. Just as she finished with the last one, Louis returned with the four scotch glasses. He grabbed a paper towel and began drying as she rinsed. A doctor that does the dishes, she thought. She could definitely understand what Jenny had seen in him.

  After everything was dried and put back into the appropriate cabinet, Louis announced that he would head upstairs to shower. Susan thanked him again for fixing her foot and waved good-night, feeling a smidge better that she’d made a friend of one couple during the trip. Rachel and Ben were no longer an option, though she supposed feigning friendliness would be unavoidable. Their boys were very close. She couldn’t ask Jamal to abandon a pal because she found it painful to see the kid’s unscrupulous mother, especially when she’d have to see her over the fence, anyway—all the time.

  The thought sickened Susan. She hobbled over to her purse, left in the kitchen, and withdrew her cell. She hit the email application, scrolling down to a message from Rachel discussing her wish list for the rental. A hot tub, Rachel had said. She’d probably wanted to cozy up to Nadal inside it. Susan hit reply and changed the subject line to the one imprinted in her memory. She typed the five words that she wanted to scream in Rachel’s lying face and hit send.

  The email failed to make her feel much better. There would be no way she and Nadal could stay away from the hussy next door. The only way they’d never see Rachel again was if that bitch disappeared.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE DAY AFTER


  Gabby placed the emptied garbage pail beside her new prime suspect’s elbow. Susan sat behind the table with one arm resting on the surface and the other propped up on the joint, forming a bracket support for her forehead. At the sight of the bin, she lifted her head to face Gabby, displaying the sallow complexion that had prompted the emergency barf bucket. “I don’t think I’ll vomit again,” Susan said, her breathy voice belying the statement. “I got it all out at the beach. I’m just tired.”

  Murdering someone takes a lot of energy, Gabby thought. She pulled out her chair. “I understand Detective DeMarco informed you of your Miranda rights.”

  Susan squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her left temple with the heel of her hand. “I’ve told you both everything I know about last night.”

  “What about Thursday night?”

  Susan’s eyes snapped open. Gabby pulled her notebook from her jacket pocket and flipped through a couple of pages, pretending to search for something said during another interview. “You sent an email to Rachel shortly before her murder demanding that she stay away from your husband.” Gabby eyed Susan for new fidgets. “They were having an affair.”

  The look on Susan’s face encouraged Gabby to push the garbage pail a centimeter closer. “No.” Susan took a shallow breath. “It was nothing like that.”

  Gabby tilted her head. “Well, it must have been something like that for you to tell a friend to stay away from your husband.”

  Susan dropped her forehead into her hands. The act could be read as exhaustion or regret. Gabby could definitely sympathize with the exhaustion. She could also understand—if not fully empathize with—how the anxious and seemingly sensitive woman in front of her had been thrown into a murderous rage. “I get how you must have felt,” she said to Susan. “I’m married, and I can’t imagine what I’d do if one of my neighbors—a woman I’d considered a friend, no less—went after my husband.” Gabby ducked her head, trying to look Susan in the eye. “I’d do more than tell her to back off in an email, that’s for sure. I’d confront her face-to-face, make sure she knew how serious I was about protecting my family.”

  Susan drove her fingers into her hair, pulling back the pieces that had dried stringy from a hasty rinse, likely in one of the station bathrooms. “I wish I hadn’t sent that stupid message. I was being overly sensitive. Rachel wasn’t after Nadal.”

  “Did she tell you that when you confronted her?”

  Susan dropped her arms and straightened her neck. The eyes that met Gabby’s were hard as marbles. “I didn’t confront her.”

  “Come on, Susan. Do you really think anyone will believe that? She was after your husband.”

  Susan rolled her eyes. “Nope. I had a few scotches with Louis in the backyard. Afterward, I sent that email and then passed out on the couch.”

  “The couch?” Gabby had expected Susan to claim to have slept beside her husband, thereby establishing an alibi. Instead, her suspect had confessed to sleeping alone. Susan had either slipped up, or she’d consciously come clean because she knew Nadal wouldn’t lie for her. Or, perhaps, she suspected that someone—likely Ben—had seen her on the couch. Whatever her reason, though, she’d just admitted to lacking a verifiable alibi for the time of Rachel’s murder.

  Gabby softened her tone, aiming for a kind of sisterly sympathy that might stoke a confession. “I understand that you now think you overreacted. At twelve fifteen AM, though, you thought Rachel was after your husband—a man you’ve been married to for over a decade, right? With whom you have two children. You’d have been understandably upset. I would have been. Any woman would have been. You would have wanted to tell her to back off in person. And I can understand how things would go awry. Rachel was argumentative, clearly. She’d already had a huge public fight with her husband. I can imagine her getting defensive instead of apologizing like a decent person. What did she do on that jetty?” Gabby lowered her voice to a conspiratorial level. “Scream at you? Push you? That’s really how you cut your foot, isn’t it?”

  Susan’s lips were pressed together like a stamp on an ink pad. Gabby read the strained body language as a desperate effort to contain the truth. The confession was at the tip of Susan’s tongue, fighting to be freed.

  “I’d understand if you pushed her into the water. I really would. If it were me, I’d have wanted to knock her off her perch, too.” Gabby searched Susan’s eyes for confirmation but saw only the same flinty stare. “Or maybe, even worse, she shoved you and you pulled her down with you. You had to defend yourself. She’d screwed up her own marriage and now she wanted yours. She was threatening to steal your husband, destroy your family, take your boys’ father …”

  Gabby trailed off, giving Susan a chance to fill in the ellipses. The woman inhaled until her chest threatened to tear her tank top. Gabby suppressed a smile. Here we go.

  “Thank-you for outlining the prosecution’s case against me.” Susan sat back in her chair. The distressed demeanor Gabby had witnessed since that morning vanished. “Now I understand what I’ll be dealing with if this nonsense ever makes it to court, which I very much doubt.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I’m invoking my right to remain silent and my right to an attorney. This interrogation is over, as is my stay here, unless you arrest me. As I believe that is your intention, I request to speak to my husband. Since he is here, as a voluntary witness, I ask that you send him in so that I may inform him of my whereabouts and have him contact an attorney. I’m certain one of my former colleagues at Jungblut, Abramson, and Dershowitz will take the case. No doubt Jungblut herself.”

  The name of the famous defense attorney was a slap across the face. Thanks to several high-profile celebrity cases, Jungblut was known nationwide, not just for winning cases at trial but for getting charges dismissed before the court even convened. She’d become famous for getting cases thrown out for violations of the right to a speedy trial, insufficient evidence, and questionable handling of evidence.

  Gabby gawked at the former emotional wreck before her. She’d made a grave mistake, she realized. When Detective DeMarco had asked Susan’s profession, she’d said only that she homeschooled her autistic son. Gabby hadn’t given much thought to what the woman had done for a living prior to becoming a stay-at-home mom. If anything, she’d assumed she’d probably been a teacher or a child psychologist. She certainly hadn’t thought lawyer.

  Attorneys couldn’t be handled like average suspects. The typical guilty person could be cowed by a good story or cajoled into a confession simply by an authority figure showing some sympathy for a violent reaction. But lawyers knew that whatever story the police and prosecution crafted—no matter how compelling and logical—was no more than a fairy tale unless backed by facts. Gabby had unwittingly revealed that all she had against Susan was a motive theory, a nasty email, some blood in the backyard, and a lack of an alibi witness. Without a confession, the circumstantial case would barely be sufficient to press charges, let alone win a jury trial—especially if Jungblut was the attorney.

  Gabby slammed the door behind her as she exited the room, furious with herself for misjudging the fellow mom. She stormed past the cubicles and into the corridor, heading to the soft interrogation room where Detective DeMarco was no doubt grilling Nadal about his “relationship with the deceased.”

  Before throwing the door back, she peered through its transom window. Nadal sat on the couch with his hands in his lap while DeMarco glared at him from a corner of the room. Given that Nadal’s wife had been a criminal defense attorney, Gabby suspected he’d demanded a lawyer as soon as DeMarco had finished Mirandizing him.

  Gabby flung open the door. “Interview over?”

  DeMarco shot Nadal a sideways glance. “He exercised his right to silence before saying hello. He’s demanding his attorney.”

  “Well, she’s in Interrogation One,” Gabby quipped.

  DeMarco’s expression cursed for him. “That’s convenient.”

  Nadal didn’t react to the conversation
being conducted in front of him. He sat on the couch like he was waiting outside a hospital room, hands folded, head bowed.

  “If you would come with me,” Gabby said, “your wife would like to speak with you. We intend to arrest her for the murder of Rachel Klein.”

  Nadal shot up. “That’s insane.”

  The uncontrolled emotion evident in the abrupt movement gave Gabby an idea. An incensed non-lawyer might not be careful with his words, particularly if he thought he was defending his wife or his honor. Since he’d asked for a lawyer, Gabby couldn’t ask him any questions related to the case. However, there was no law stating that Gabby couldn’t inform him of his wife’s situation, encouraging him to let slip whatever had led Susan to discover the affair, or mistakenly believe there’d been one.

  “Well, her motive’s not so crazy. She thought you were sleeping with Rachel.” Gabby kept her voice level, as though she had the evidence to back it up. “That would be a lot for any wife to handle, especially given that the other woman had pretended to be her friend, and lived next door.”

  Nadal shook his head like an obstinate child. “Susan knows that’s not true.”

  Gabby smirked. “We have that email, and she’s not denying it.”

  “Because she’s protecting me.” Nadal threw his hands out, too upset to rein in his gestures. “The email wasn’t about an affair.”

  “I don’t believe that.” Gabby raised her voice, turning up the room temperature. “I read it. Anyone that reads it—”

  “It was about work!” Nadal stood like an evangelical preacher appealing to the crowd, both palms out to invoke the Good Lord. “Work. The whole thing was concerning a case. I can show you the damn document.”