The Other Mrs.
Page 1
She tried to run, but she can’t escape the other Mrs.
Sadie and Will Foust have only just moved their family from bustling Chicago to small-town Maine when their neighbor Morgan Baines is found dead in her home. The murder rocks their tiny coastal island, but no one is more shaken than Sadie.
But it’s not just Morgan’s death that has Sadie on edge. It’s the eerie and decrepit old home they inherited. It’s Will’s disturbed teenage niece, Imogen, with her threatening presence. And it’s the troubling past that continues to wear at the seams of their family.
As the eyes of suspicion turn toward the new family in town, Sadie is drawn deeper into the mystery of Morgan’s death. But Sadie must be careful, for the more she discovers about Mrs. Baines, the more she begins to realize just how much she has to lose if the truth ever comes to light.
Praise for The Other Mrs.
“Kubica ratchets up tension and intrigue. Seductive, seemingly unknowable, and altogether unpredictable.”
—Karin Slaughter, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Widow
“I tore through the twisty, spine-tinglingly creepy pages. The Other Mrs. is Mary Kubica’s best book yet!”
—Sarah Pekkanen, New York Times bestselling coauthor of An Anonymous Girl
“A labyrinth of deception and family secrets, with an ending that left me thunderstruck.”
—Samantha Downing, bestselling author of My Lovely Wife
“Brilliant! An utterly absorbing tale. Kubica is a master of sleight of hand.”
—Liv Constantine, bestselling author of The Last Mrs. Parrish and The Last Time I Saw You
“Brilliantly propulsive and engrossing.... The Other Mrs. is that rare thing: a thriller with heart.”
—JP Delaney, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Before
“Terrifying. The Other Mrs. is Mary Kubica’s best work yet.”
—Caroline Kepnes, author of You
MARY KUBICA is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of several thrillers, including The Good Girl, which has now sold over one million copies. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in history and American literature from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She lives outside Chicago with her husband and two children, and enjoys photography, gardening and caring for the animals at a local shelter.
MaryKubica.com
Also by Mary Kubica
The Good Girl
Pretty Baby
Don’t You Cry
Every Last Lie
When the Lights Go Out
The Other Mrs.
Mary Kubica
For Michelle and Sara
Contents
SADIE
SADIE
SADIE
CAMILLE
SADIE
CAMILLE
SADIE
SADIE
MOUSE
SADIE
CAMILLE
SADIE
MOUSE
SADIE
CAMILLE
SADIE
SADIE
SADIE
SADIE
MOUSE
SADIE
CAMILLE
SADIE
CAMILLE
SADIE
MOUSE
SADIE
SADIE
MOUSE
SADIE
MOUSE
SADIE
SADIE
SADIE
SADIE
MOUSE
SADIE
MOUSE
SADIE
SADIE
WILL
SADIE
WILL
SADIE
WILL
SADIE
WILL
SADIE
WILL
SADIE
WILL
SADIE
SADIE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SADIE
There’s something off about the house. Something that nags at me, makes me feel uneasy, though I don’t know what it is that makes me feel this way. On the surface, it’s perfectly idyllic, gray with a large covered porch, one that runs the full width of the house. It’s boxy and big, a foursquare farmhouse with windows aligned in rows, symmetrical in a way I find eye-pleasing. The street itself is charming, sloped and tree-covered, each home as lovely and well kept as the next.
On the surface, there’s nothing not to like. But I know better than to take things at face value. It doesn’t help that the day, like the house, is gray. If the sun were out maybe I’d feel differently.
“That one,” I say to Will, pointing at it because it’s identical to the one in the picture that was given to Will from the executor of the estate. He’d flown in last week, to Portland, to take care of the official paperwork. Then he’d flown back, so we could drive here together. He hadn’t had time to see the house then.
Will pauses, bringing the car to rest in the street. He and I lean forward in our seats at exactly the same time, taking it in, as do the boys in the back seat. No one speaks, not at first, not until Tate blurts out that the house is gigantic—transposing his soft and his hard g’s as seven-year-olds have a tendency to do—and Will laughs, overjoyed that someone besides him can see the advantage of our move to Maine.
The house is not gigantic, not really, but in comparison to a 1,200-square-foot condo, it is, especially when it comes with its own yard. Tate has never had his own yard before.
Will gently steps on the gas, easing the car into the driveway. Once in Park, we climb out—some more quickly than others, though the dogs are the quickest of all—stretching our legs, grateful, if for nothing else, to be done with the long drive. The air outside is different than what I’m used to, infused with the scent of damp earth, salty ocean and the woodsy terrain. It smells nothing like home. The street is quiet in a way I don’t like. An eerie quiet, an unsettling quiet, and at once I’m reminded of the notion that there’s safety in numbers. That bad things are less likely to happen among crowds. There’s a misconception that rural living is better, safer than urban living, and yet it’s simply not true. Not when you take into account the disproportionate number of people living in cities, the inadequate health care system in rural parts.
I watch Will walk toward the porch steps, the dogs running along beside him, passing him up. He’s not reluctant like me. He struts as much as he walks, anxious to get inside and check things out. I feel resentful because of it, because I didn’t want to come.
At the base of the steps he hesitates, aware only then that I’m not coming. He turns toward me, standing still next to the car, and asks, “Everything all right?” I don’t answer because I’m not sure if everything is all right.
Tate goes dashing after Will, but fourteen-year-old Otto hovers like me, also reluctant. We’ve always been so much alike.
“Sadie,” Will says, modifying his question, asking this time, “are you coming?” He tells me it’s cold out, a fact of which I was unaware because of my focus on other things, like how the trees around the house tower high enough to block the light. And how dangerously slick the steep street must be when it snows. A man stands up at the top of the hill, on his lawn with a rake in hand. He’s stopped raking and stands perched, watching me, I think. I raise a hand and wave, the neighborly thing to do. He doesn’t wave back. He turns away, goes back to raking. My gaze goes back to Will, who says nothing of the man. Surely he saw him as well as I did.
“Come on,” Will says inste
ad. He turns and climbs the steps with Tate beside him. “Let’s go inside,” he decides. At the front door, Will reaches into his pocket and pulls out the house keys. He knocks first, but he doesn’t wait to be let in. As Will unlocks the door and pushes it open, Otto moves away from me, leaving me behind. I go, too, only because I don’t want to be left alone outside.
Inside we discover that the house is old, with things like mahogany paneling, heavy drapery, tin ceilings, brown-and-forest-green walls. It smells musty. It’s dark, dreary.
We crowd together in the entryway and assess the home, a traditional floor plan with the closed-in rooms. The furnishings are formal and unwelcoming.
My attention gets lost on the curved legs of the dining room table. On the tarnished candelabra that sits on top of it. On the yellowing chair pads. I hardly see her standing at the top of the stairs. Were it not for the slightest bit of movement caught out of the corner of my eye, I might never have seen her. But there she stands, a morose figure dressed in black. Black jeans, a black shirt, bare feet. Her hair is black, long with bangs that slant sideways across her face. Her eyes are outlined in a thick slash of black eyeliner. Everything black, aside from the white lettering on her shirt, which reads, I want to die. The septum of her nose is pierced. Her skin, in contrast to everything else, is white, pallid, ghostlike. She’s thin.
Tate sees her, too. At this, he moves from Will to me, hiding behind me, burrowing his face into my backside. It’s not like Tate to be scared. It’s not like me to be scared, and yet I’m well aware that the hairs on the nape of my neck now stand on end.
“Hello,” I say, my voice weak.
Will now sees her, too. His eyes go to her; he says her name. He starts climbing the steps to her, and they creak under his feet, protesting our arrival. “Imogen,” he says with arms wide, expecting, I think, that she’ll fold herself into them and let him hold her. But she doesn’t because she’s sixteen and standing before her is a man she hardly knows. I can’t fault her for this. And yet the brooding, melancholic girl was not what I’d imagined when we discovered we were given guardianship of a child.
Her voice is acidic when she speaks, quiet—she doesn’t ever raise her voice; she doesn’t need to. The muted tone is much more unsettling than if she screamed. “Stay the fuck away from me,” she says coolly.
She glowers down over the stair banister. My hands involuntarily move behind me and to Tate’s ears. Will stops where he is. He lowers his arms. Will has seen her before, just last week when he came and met with the executor of the estate. It was then that he signed the papers and took physical possession of her, though arrangements had been made for her to stay with a friend while Will, the boys and I drove here.
The girl asks, her voice angry, “Why’d you have to come?”
Will tries to tell her—the answer is easy, for were it not for us, she’d likely have entered the foster care system until she turned eighteen, unless she was granted emancipation, which seemed unlikely at her age—but an answer is not what she wants. She turns away from him, disappearing into one of the second-story rooms where we hear her futzing angrily with things. Will makes a move to follow, but I say to him, “Give her time,” and he does.
This girl is not the same as the little girl Will had shown us in the photograph. A happy-go-lucky freckled brunette of about six years old. This girl is different, much changed. The years have not been kind to her. She comes with the house, just another thing that’s been left to us in the will, mixed in with the house and the heirlooms, what assets remain in the bank. She’s sixteen, nearly able to be on her own—a moot point that I tried arguing, for certainly she had a friend or some other acquaintance who could take her in until she turned eighteen—but Will said no. With Alice dead, we were all that remained, her only family, though she and I were meeting just now for the first time. She needs to be with family, Will told me at the time, days ago only, though it feels like weeks. A family who will love and care for her. She’s all alone, Sadie. My maternal instinct had kicked in then, thinking of this orphaned child all alone in the world, with no one but us.
I hadn’t wanted to come. I’d argued that she should come to us. But there was so much more to consider, and so we came anyway, despite my reservations.
I wonder now, and not for the first time this week, what kind of disastrous effect this change will have on our family. It can’t possibly be the fresh start Will so auspiciously believes it to be.
SADIE
Seven Weeks Later...
The siren woke us at some point in the middle of the night. I heard the scream of it. I saw the dazzling lights that streamed in the bedroom window as Will grabbed his glasses from the bedside table and sat up abruptly in bed, adjusting them on the bridge of his nose.
“What’s that?” he asked, holding his breath, disoriented and confused, and I told him it was a siren. We sat hushed for a minute, listening as the wail drifted farther away, quieting down but never going completely silent. We could hear it still, stopped somewhere just down the street from our home.
“What do you think happened?” Will asked, and I thought only of the elderly couple on the block, the man who pushed his wife in a wheelchair up and down the street, though he could barely walk. They were both white-haired, wrinkled, his back curved like the hunchback of Notre Dame. He always looked tired to me, like maybe she was the one who should be doing the pushing. It didn’t help that our street was steep, a decline to the ocean below.
“The Nilssons,” Will and I said at the same time, and if there was a lack of empathy in our voices it’s because this is what is expected of older people. They get injured, sick; they die.
“What time is it?” I asked Will, but by then he’d returned his glasses to the bedside table and said to me, “I don’t know,” as he pressed in closely and folded an arm around my waistline, and I felt the subconscious pull of my body from his.
We fell back asleep that way, forgetting altogether about the siren that had snatched us from our dreams.
* * *
In the morning I shower and get dressed, still tired from a fitful night. The boys are in the kitchen, eating breakfast. I hear the commotion downstairs as I step uneasily from the bedroom, a stranger in the home because of Imogen. Because Imogen has a way of making us feel unwelcome, even after all this time.
I start to make my way down the hall. Imogen’s door is open a crack. She’s inside, which strikes me as odd because her door is never open when she’s inside. She doesn’t know that it’s open, that I’m in the hallway watching her. Her back is to me and she’s leaned into a mirror, tracing the lines of black eyeliner above her eyes.
I peer through the crevice and into Imogen’s room. The walls are dark, tacked with images of artists and bands who look very much like her, with the long black hair and the black eyes, dressed in all black. A black gauzy thing hangs above her bed, a canopy of sorts. The bed is unmade, a dark gray pintuck duvet lying on the floor. The blackout curtains are pulled taut, keeping the light out. I think of vampires.
Imogen finishes with the eyeliner. She snaps the cap on it, turns too fast and sees me before I have a chance to retreat. “What the fuck do you want?” she asks, the anger and the vulgarity of her question taking my breath away, though I don’t know why. It’s not as if it’s the first time she’s spoken to me this way. You’d think I might be used to it by now. Imogen scuttles so quickly to the door that at first I think she’s going to hit me, which she hasn’t ever done, but the speed of her movement and the look on her face make me think she might. I involuntarily flinch, moving backward, and instead, she slams the door shut on me. I’m grateful for this, for getting the door slammed in my face as opposed to getting hit. The door misses my nose by an inch.
My heart thumps inside my chest. I stand in the hallway, breathless. I clear my voice, try to recover from the shock of it. I step closer, rap my knuckles on the wood and say, “I’
m leaving for the ferry in a few minutes. If you want a ride,” knowing she won’t accept my offer. My voice is tumultuous in a way that I despise. Imogen doesn’t answer.
I turn and follow the scent of breakfast downstairs. Will is by the stove when I come down. He stands, flipping pancakes in an apron, while singing one of those songs from the jaunty CDs Tate likes to listen to, something far too merry for seven fifteen in the morning.
He stops when he sees me. “You okay?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say, voice strained.
The dogs circle Will’s feet, hoping he’ll drop something. They’re big dogs and the kitchen is small. There isn’t enough room for four of us in here, let alone six. I call to the dogs and, when they come, send them into the backyard to play.
Will smiles at me when I return and offers me a plate. I opt only for coffee, telling Otto to hurry up and finish. He sits at the kitchen table, hunched over his pancakes, shoulders slumped forward to make himself appear small. His lack of confidence worries me, though I tell myself that this is normal for fourteen. Every child goes through this, but I wonder if they do.
Imogen stomps through the kitchen. There are tears up the thighs and in the knees of her black jeans. Her boots are black leather combat boots, with nearly a two-inch heel. Even without the boots, she’s taller than me. Raven skulls dangle from her ears. Her shirt reads, Normal people suck. Tate, at the table, tries to sound it out, as he does all of Imogen’s graphic T-shirts. He’s a good reader, but she doesn’t stand still long enough for him to get a look at it. Imogen reaches for a cabinet pull. She yanks open the door, scanning the inside of the cabinet before slamming it shut.
“What are you looking for?” Will asks, always eager to please, but Imogen finds it then in the form of a Kit Kat bar, which she tears open and bites into.
“I made breakfast,” Will says, but Imogen, blue eyes drifting past Otto and Tate at the kitchen table, seeing the third, vacant place setting set for her, says only, “Good for you.”