An Unwanted Guest

by Shari Lapena

  Riley’s hands are trembling, and she clasps them together. “Last night, when I was falling asleep, I thought I heard a scream, but I ignored it, because I didn’t think it was real. I hear screams in my head every night when I try to go to sleep.” She lowers her voice again to a whisper. “And I hear them every night when I dream.”

  When she stops speaking, the silence is complete, except for the crackling of the fire. Even the wind has died down for the moment.

  Then Lauren says, “I’m so sorry.”

  Henry says nothing.

  Matthew plays nervously with his gun.

  * * *

  • • •

  Beverly shrinks into her blanket, chilled to the bone. She’s sickened by what Riley has said. She watches Gwen rubbing Riley’s back. Riley’s obvious terror is contagious.

  Beverly’s frightened of what’s out there, lurking in the shadows. She doesn’t think the killer is one of these people sitting around the fire. She thinks he’s out there, waiting. She feels like a cornered mouse, eyes bright, chest heaving rapidly with each breath.

  Henry is sitting near the fireplace in the dark. She thinks about their children, Teddy and Kate. How will they cope if their mother and father don’t come home? She just wants to go home with Henry, she tells herself. She wants things to be the way they used to be.

  * * *

  • • •

  David drinks his coffee down to the dregs, even though it’s cold now. He must stay awake. He got very little sleep last night, and now his eyes burn and feel gritty. He surveys his little flock of sheep. For that’s how he thinks of them. They seem like sheep because they are all frightened, and they don’t know what to do.

  Matthew is making him uneasy. He seems a bit agitated. David would like to get the gun away from him, but doesn’t want a confrontation. He can’t predict what Matthew might do.

  He can’t predict what any of them might do. The revelations about Riley make sense. Her history, her experience—they explain her volatile personality, her startled eyes, constantly scanning, her tension, her drinking. He knew she was a journalist, but if she’s been in Afghanistan for the last three or four years, maybe she doesn’t know about him at all. Maybe she was just jealous that he was interested in Gwen rather than her. Maybe Gwen has no idea about his past.

  But Gwen told him there was something she wanted to talk to him about. No doubt it’s his murdered wife. Or—it just occurs to him now—maybe it’s something about her. Maybe she’s involved with someone, and neglected to tell him last night.

  He will have no possibility of any kind of future with Gwen if they don’t make it through the night. He needs to think about the problem right in front of him. To hell with Riley and what she might think she knows.

  David tries to look at the situation analytically, the way he would look at a case. The most likely scenario is that Dana’s fiancé, Matthew, killed her. They’d argued. Perhaps he’d pushed her down the stairs. Perhaps he hadn’t meant to, but once he’d done it, he realized he had to finish her off. Maybe.

  But Candice . . . Maybe she did have something on Matthew or Dana. Or maybe she knew something about Dana’s death—perhaps she’d seen something, heard something. Had she been snooping on Dana and Matt? She knew who they were. She might have been listening outside the door, overheard their argument, and then scuttled out of sight when the door opened and seen—or perhaps heard—Matthew push Dana down the stairs. If so, why didn’t she say anything?

  Maybe she was too afraid to say anything until the police arrived, and was biding her time. Maybe that’s what got her killed.

  If he had to give an opinion, he’s with Henry on this one: he thinks it was probably Matthew. He lied about the argument; he’s the most likely one to have murdered Dana. Candice might have known something, or have had some connection to them in some way. And Matthew may be trying to throw suspicion on James and Bradley, while bolstering the view that there’s someone else out there.

  Or maybe there is someone out there, killing them for sport.

  And if he’s killing them for sport, because he can, because he wants to—none of them is safe.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Saturday, 10:20 p.m.

  Gwen tries to relax into the sofa. She feels relatively safe here, surrounded by the others. She watches Matthew out of one eye. He’s hypervigilant, his eyes constantly scanning the dark void beyond them, as if alert to any threat. But the effect of his attentiveness is not calming at all, but the opposite. She has more confidence in David. His presence makes her feel safe. She pulls the blanket more tightly around her neck and withdraws into herself. She’s relieved that the truth is out about Riley. She hadn’t known about the PTSD, about her being held hostage, but it all makes sense. She thinks it will help Riley for people to understand her, to be supportive. And she will try to be more supportive too.

  Trauma changes people. She should know.

  She broods into the dark.

  If they survive this—of course they will, she tells herself, they are all together now, and nothing is going to split them up—then she has to tell David the truth about herself. But first, she wants to ask him about who he is. She hopes—it’s frightening just how much she hopes—that he’s not the person Riley believes he is. She hopes he’s someone else altogether, that Riley’s confusing him with someone else. But Riley is usually right about things.

  First, they have to get out of here. She closes her eyes briefly and says a little prayer, begging for the police to come.

  Sunday, 12:05 a.m.

  It’s after midnight when things start to unravel. The lobby is quiet, but no one is sleeping.

  Riley finds the silence unbearable. She needs conversation to keep the terrifying images at bay. She keeps glancing into the dark at the spot where Dana’s body used to be, remembering her awful, lifeless face. Candice, with her scarf wound tightly around her neck. She doesn’t want to think about the killings, or about what might happen to the rest of them. So she thinks about David Paley instead. She becomes fixated on him until it’s like an itch she has to scratch. She can’t stop herself. She leans toward David, who is also wide awake, across from her on the other side of the coffee table, and whispers, “I know who you are.”

  For a moment, she thinks he’s going to ignore her, pretend he didn’t hear. She’s about to repeat herself, more loudly, but then he leans toward her. She can see his face, resolute, in the glow of the oil lamp.

  “What is it that you think you know?” he says back in a low voice. But he’s not whispering.

  Riley feels Gwen tense beside her. Gwen places a restraining hand on her leg, under the blanket, but she disregards it. “I knew I recognized your name, last night, but I couldn’t place it. But I kept thinking about it and then I remembered, this morning.” She’s not whispering anymore. She’s aware of the others—now alert—listening. He stares back at her, waiting for her to say it. So she does. “You’re that attorney who was arrested for murdering his wife.”

  The silence around the fireplace suddenly takes on a different quality; it’s fraught with the shock of the others, hearing this for the first time.

  “Arrested and cleared,” he says crisply.

  “So it is you,” Riley hisses with satisfaction. It feels good to be right. She turns to look at Gwen, wanting to gloat. But Gwen looks back at her with something almost like hatred in her eyes, which throws her for a minute. “I told you!” Riley says to her.

  “The charges were dropped,” David says, more firmly. “I didn’t do it.” He’s looking now at Gwen, to gauge her reaction.

  “Just because the charges were dropped,” Riley says, “doesn’t mean you didn’t do it. It just means they didn’t think they could prove it.” She smirks and adds dismissively, “It’s always the husband.”

  Gwen says, “Shut up.”

  Riley looks at her in su
rprise. “I’m doing you a favor. I told you this guy is bad news.”

  Gwen says, “He says he didn’t do it.”

  “Oh, and you believe him?” Riley says sarcastically.

  Lauren says, looking at David in shock, “Your wife was murdered?”

  “Yes,” David admits. “But not by me.”

  There’s a lengthy, stunned pause as everyone takes this in. Then Ian asks, “Did they get the person who did it?”

  “No.”

  “Hang on,” Henry says, his voice accusing. “Why should we believe you?” He’s raised his voice. “We’re sitting around here waiting for someone else to get killed and we find out that your wife was murdered?”

  “Let’s all calm down,” Ian says. “Why don’t we let him tell his story?”

  “I can tell you the story,” Riley says, without taking her eyes off David. “It was in all the papers. Some of you must have heard about it. Respected New York City defense attorney comes home late one night and finds his wife lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen of their upscale home in an expensive suburb. She’d been beaten to death.” She leans aggressively toward David. “Her head was bashed in and her back was broken, I believe. Have I got it right so far?” she asks him. He doesn’t answer, but stares woodenly back at her.

  Riley continues. “He claimed he came home and found her dead. The trouble was he didn’t call 911 for almost an hour. They didn’t get along. And she was insured for a million dollars. He was arrested almost immediately, but he got a very good lawyer. Because, you see, he knows people.”

  She sits back in satisfaction and looks at everyone else in the room, one by one, except for Gwen—she doesn’t dare look at her. They’ve all been listening attentively to her—and now they all turn and stare at David.

  * * *

  • • •

  Hearing Riley tell it, in her accusing, sneering way, David knows how terrible it sounds. He’s aware of them all staring at him and feels angry that he has to defend himself—again. He is always having to defend himself. At this moment, he hates Riley. Hates her not because she has outed him—he’s used to people recognizing him, after all, whispering about him; his was a very public disgrace—but because of her ugly motives. She wants to prevent Gwen and him from getting closer. He was going to tell Gwen himself. But now she’s heard it the worst possible way.

  What happened to him will never go away. He will always be defending himself. And there will always be people who don’t believe him. He’s learned that people will believe what they want to believe. And it’s truly frightening how easily they’ll believe it.

  He’d come home late from work, like most nights when he was in the middle of a trial. He can hardly remember the details of that trial now—he didn’t finish it in any case; someone else from the firm took it over. His wife’s violent murder had resulted in an investigation, and his arrest; he hadn’t worked for months afterward.

  He remembers coming home that night. The house was mostly dark; there was one light left on over the porch, but inside, the only light was coming from the kitchen, the stove light. They usually left it on all night, as a sort of night-light for the first floor.

  He came in the door quietly, like he always did those days. He didn’t call out, “Barbara, I’m home,” like he used to. The way he did back when she was still happy to see him. He took off his coat and hung it in the hall closet. His first thought was that she’d already gone to bed without him. It was perfectly true that they hadn’t been doing too well together at the time. He couldn’t deny that they’d been having marital problems.

  Just like he couldn’t deny that her life was insured. It didn’t seem to matter that he was financially well off already; they seemed to think that even the financially secure could never be too greedy. It had been a strike against him. He’d been astonished. He was insured for the same amount, but that hadn’t mattered either. They thought a million-dollar life insurance policy was excessive.

  He’d sat down in the living room, exhausted. Trials wore him out. He’d sat there for some time, thinking about how things had gone in court that day, how they might go tomorrow, and then about his life, how hard things were with Barbara. He was too depleted even to get up and go into the kitchen to pour himself a drink. Which, as things turned out, was very bad for him. But eventually he got up and made his way through the dark living room and dining room to the kitchen. It was only when he was almost there that the little hairs on the back of his neck began to stir. He still doesn’t know why. He suspects that he could smell the blood—on some level, even though he was not consciously aware of it. Then he made it to the kitchen door and saw her—

  She was crumpled on the kitchen floor in her nightgown. It looked as if she’d been struck down while making herself a cup of herbal tea. There was a cup on the counter, an opened package of tea beside it. But she was on the floor, soaked in her own blood. She’d been bludgeoned to death. Her head smashed in, her face beaten to a pulp. One arm was splayed beneath her, obviously broken.

  Through his paralyzing horror, one of his first thoughts was to wonder if she’d suffered. Whether the first blow had caught her by surprise, and whether it had killed her. But he knew Barbara, and he suspected she fought back tooth and nail. There was blood everywhere. Of course she’d fought back. Barbara had never been meek. Her arm had indeed been broken. And it turns out—they told him later—that her back had been broken as well. She had been kicked viciously after death. That’s another thing that made them suspect him—it looked like a crime of passion. But perhaps it was just made to look that way. That’s what David thought at the time. Someone had tried to set him up.

  He finally speaks. “Most of what you say is true. I was working late that night. When I got home, the house was dark. I assumed Barbara, my wife, had already gone to bed.” He takes a deep breath, exhales. “We hadn’t been getting along; we’d talked about separating. It wasn’t a secret. She’d told some of her friends, I’d told a friend or two at work. It’s also true,” he says, looking directly at Riley, “that she had a life insurance policy for a million dollars. As did I. We’d both had those policies for many years, from early in our marriage.”

  He looks around the group, his eyes resting finally on Gwen. He tries to read her expression, but he can’t; it’s too dark. She is leaning back against the sofa across from him, in shadow. “I didn’t kill her. She was already dead when I got there. I found her lying on the kitchen floor, covered in blood.” He hesitates. “I switched on the overhead light. It was—the most horrible moment of my life.” He pauses for a moment, to recover himself. “I thought she’d been stabbed repeatedly, there was so much blood. But there was no knife there. She was so badly beaten—” He covers his face with his hands.

  Slowly, he brings his hands down again and continues speaking. “I called 911 immediately. I said that I’d come home from work and found her. My mistake was that in that 911 call, I didn’t mention that I’d been sitting alone in the living room for almost an hour before I found her. I didn’t think to mention it. I was very distressed—I wasn’t thinking clearly. And then my next-door neighbor told the police that he had noted the time that I drove in the driveway and parked the car. He’d seen the lights, and knew the exact time. Then, when they asked me about the discrepancy between the time I got home and the time of the 911 call, I immediately told them the truth, but they were suspicious. They arrested me. After all,”—he gives Riley a bitter look—“I was the husband. People knew our marriage was in trouble. Then somebody made a big deal about the insurance policy.”

  He takes a deep breath and exhales. “It was a living hell. An unbelievable nightmare. My wife had been murdered and I was arrested for it—put in jail, denied bail—and I hadn’t done it.”

  There’s a long silence while everyone tries to digest what they’ve just heard.

  “But they dropped the charges,” Gwen says, her v
oice low.

  He looks back at her. She’s leaned forward a bit. “Yes. They didn’t have any evidence against me. They assumed I had a motive, but there wasn’t one scrap of physical evidence to pin the crime on me. If I’d done it, I would have had blood on me, on my clothes. They tried to figure out how I could have killed her and cleaned myself up and destroyed any evidence in that hour. But they didn’t have anything. They didn’t even have the murder weapon.

  “The most damning thing was that I didn’t have an alibi. I was sitting alone for that hour, in my own living room. They determined that the time of death must have been very close to around the time I arrived home. I must have missed whoever did it by a few minutes. The investigating officers asked the neighbor if he’d seen anything, but he’d been out at his bridge game up until just before he saw me arrive, so he was no help. And the neighbor on the other side of us was out of town, and the ones across the street go to bed early. No one saw anything.” He looks intently at the small group seated around him, listening with wide eyes. “Anyone could have parked on the street and walked up to the front door—or snuck in the back. Nothing was stolen. There was no sign of forced entry, but Barbara might have let someone in if she knew him. She wasn’t afraid of anyone. Maybe she was having an affair. I don’t know. I never suspected such a thing. They didn’t find anything like that.”

  David shakes his head slowly. “Someone obviously wanted her dead—or was setting me up,” he says. “I’d like nothing more than to find out who.” He frowns deeply. “They had to drop the charges. But this—stigma—has become part of my life. I wish I could say I’ve gotten used to it, but I haven’t. I don’t think I ever will.”

  He looks at each of them in turn. “I can’t make any of you believe me. I’ve told the truth, but I’ve found that people believe what they want to believe. I can’t help that.”