He did not laugh at her observation.
She bought furniture, ordered bed linens, spent so much money online that the credit card companies called to make sure her identity had not been stolen. Everyone else seemed to be getting back to normal, or what Abigail thought of as the “new normal.” Beatrice was back in Italy. Hoyt had returned to his mistress. His wife was safely ensconced in the Puerto Rico house. Abigail was certain there was another mistress in there somewhere. Her father had been talking an awful lot about London lately.
Even the press had finally moved on. People magazine and the television producers had dropped out early on when it was made clear that the Campano family had no desire to share their story with the world. There were the requisite self-proclaimed friends who came out of the woodwork to talk about Emma, and the ex-friends who talked about Abigail and Paul. Worse were the tabloids. They stood on the other side of the gate at the end of the driveway, screaming at anyone who left the house. “Hey, killer!” they would say, spotting Abigail. “Killer, how does it feel to know you murdered someone?”
Abigail would keep her face neutral, her back to the vultures as much as she could, then go into the house and collapse in tears. They called her cold one day, then praised her as a savage mother bear protecting her cubs the next. They asked her what she thought of Evan Bernard, the man who had brought all of this misery to their door.
Every time Bernard opened his mouth, a news team was there, reporting live from the jail where he was being kept. If coverage started to die down, he made statements, gave surprise jailhouse interviews and presented exclusive documents from his troubled past. Then the analysts would have their field day, expert after expert dissecting every nuance of Bernard’s life: where he had gone wrong, how many kids he had helped during his career. Women came forward, so many young women. They all insisted that despite the tape, despite the video evidence, he was innocent. The Evan Bernard they knew was a kind man, a gentle man. Abigail itched to be alone with the bastard, to wrap her hands around his kind and gentle neck and watch the pathetic life drain from his beady black eyes.
Listening to it all was maddening, and Abigail and Paul had gotten into the habit of turning off the news, skipping the talk shows, because they could not contribute anymore to Bernard’s celebrity. They had been doing this anyway whenever Emma walked into the room. The truth was that it had made Abigail feel dirty, as if she were reading her daughter’s diary behind her back. Paul had even canceled his subscription to the morning paper. Dispatch had failed to get the notice. There were so many wet bags of newsprint clumped at the end of the driveway that the woman from the neighborhood association had left a letter in their mailbox.
I regret your misfortunes, but Druid Hills is an historical district, and as such, there are rules.
“An historical district,” Abigail had mimicked, thinking the woman had an historic stick up her ass. She had written a furious letter in response, full of condescension and vitriol. “Do you know what it’s like to know an animal raped your child?” she had demanded. “Do you think I give a rat’s ass about your fucking rules?”
The screed had turned into a journal of sorts, page after page filled with all the horrible things that Abigail had kept choked in the back of her throat. She hadn’t even bothered to read it before tearing it to shreds and burning it in the fireplace.
“Bit warm for a fire,” Paul had said.
“I’m cold,” she had told him, and that was that.
It wasn’t until recently that they could even go to the mailbox without having a reporter document their every step. Even the last, desperate tabloids had moved on when, a few weeks ago, a pregnant woman in Arizona had gone missing and her husband had started to look awfully suspicious. Abigail had secretly watched the television down in the gym, studying pictures of the twenty-six-year-old brunette, thinking, jealously, that Emma was much prettier than the mother-to-be. Then the woman had shown up dead in a vacant lot and she had felt petty and small.
With the reporters gone, they were all alone. There was nothing in their lives to complain about but each other, and that was patently forbidden. Emma had only left the house once a week since they had moved here. Paul literally brought the rest of the world to her doorstep. She was homeschooled. Her yoga instructor came to the house. The hairdresser paid a monthly visit. Occasionally, a girl would show up to do her nails. Kayla Alexander and Adam Humphrey had been Emma’s only close friends, so there were no other teenagers knocking on her door. The only person Paul could not bribe to come see her was her therapist. The woman’s office was less than a mile up the road and Paul drove Emma there every Thursday, sitting outside the door, ready to rush in if she called for him.
Father and daughter were closer than ever now, and Abigail was hard-pressed to think of reasons why he should not give Emma everything she wanted. The irony was that she wanted so little now. She didn’t ask for clothes or money or new gadgets. She just wanted her father by her side.
Paul had started working five days a week rather than his usual six. He ate breakfast with them every morning and supper every evening. There were no business trips or late-night dinners. He had turned into the perfect husband and father, but at what cost? He was not the same anymore. Sometimes Abigail would find him alone in his office or sitting in front of the muted television. The look on his face was painful to see. It was, she knew, the exact look she must have during unguarded moments.
And then there was Emma. Often, Abigail would stand in the open doorway of her daughter’s room just to watch her sleep. This was her angel of old. Her face was smooth, the worry lines on her forehead erased. Her mouth was not tense, her eyes not filled with darkness. Then there were times Abigail went into the room and Emma was already awake. She would be sitting in the window seat, staring blankly out the window. She was there in the house, sitting not less than ten feet from where Abigail stood, but it felt as if somehow time had fractured, and Emma was no longer in her room but a million miles away.
For years, Abigail had worried that her daughter would turn out exactly like her mother. Now she worried that she would not turn out at all.
How could this have happened to them? How could they survive? Paul wouldn’t argue about it anymore. He got up and went to work. He drove Emma to her appointment. He made phone calls that kept their lives moving. They had sex more frequently, but it seemed utilitarian more than anything else. When she noticed there was a pattern, that Paul seemed to be interested in her exclusively on Wednesday and Saturday nights, she felt relieved rather than insulted. She wrote X’s in her calendar, marking out the days. It was something to plan for, something that she knew would happen.
Abigail found herself looking for more patterns in her life, more things she could rely on. Because of therapy, Emma was crankier on Thursdays, so Abigail started making pancakes for breakfast. On Fridays, she seemed sad, so movie night was instituted. Tuesdays were the worst. All the bad things had happened on a Tuesday. None of them talked much those days. The house was quiet. The stereo in Emma’s room was not turned on. The television was kept low. The dog no longer barked. The phone seldom rang.
This was the new normal, then—the little tricks they all learned to cope with what had happened to them. Abigail supposed it wasn’t so far removed from how things were before. She met with decorators, she spent money on things for their new home. Paul still had his secrets, though this time there was no other woman involved. Emma was still lying to them about where she went during the day, even though she never left the house. “I’m fine,” she would say, even though just seconds before she had been a million miles away. They would believe her, because the truth hurt more than the lie.
So Abigail went about the process of going about her life. The days were getting shorter now, and she knew that they could not go on like this forever. Eventually, things would have to change, but for now, this new status quo was the only thing that was keeping them all going. She supposed in the end that Adam Humphre
y’s parents were right.
Sometimes, all you could do was pray for the strength to carry on.
For Irwyn and Nita …
for everything …
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Kate Miciak, Kate Elton and Victoria Sanders were their usual intrepid selves while I was working on this novel, and I would like to thank all three ladies for their continued support. Add to that list Irwyn Applebaum, Nita Taublib, Betsy Hulsebosch, Barb Burg, Sharon Propson, Susan Corcoran, Cynthia Lasky, Carolyn Schwartz, Paolo Pepe, Kelly Chian and all of the other champs at Bantam. I feel very fortunate to be working with a group of people who are so dedicated to books.
I feel very lucky to have my friends around me—you know who you are. DT, my hero, I am humbled by your kindness. FM, your pithy observations are a constant source of humor. DM, how far we’ve come together thanks to your gentle heart. And as for you, Mo Hayder, don’t pretend you don’t try to freak me out just as much. I am not the one who clogged up a sewer with a pair of amputated hands.
At any rate—
My daddy brought me chocolate cake one night while I was hard at work on this book, thus confirming my view that he is the best father in the world. As for DA … all the love from my lips …
Undone is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Karin Slaughter
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Delacorte Press,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark
of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is
a trademark of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Slaughter, Karin, 1971–
Undone : a novel/Karin Slaughter.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33866-6
1. Linton, Sara (Fictitious character)—Fiction.
2. Women physicians—Fiction. 3. Atlanta (Ga.)—Fiction.
4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.L275U54 2009
813’.54—dc22
2009013477
www.bantamdell.com
v3.0_r2
Contents
Master - Table of Contents
Undone
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Part 1 - Day One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part 2 - Day Two
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part 3 - Day Three
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Part 4 - Day Four
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Part 5 - Three Days Later
Chapter Twenty-Five
Epilogue
Dedication
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
—
They had been married forty years to the day and Judith still felt like she didn’t know everything about her husband. Forty years of cooking Henry’s dinner, forty years of ironing his shirts, forty years of sleeping in his bed, and he was still a mystery. Maybe that was why she kept doing all these things for him with little or no complaint. There was a lot to be said for a man who, after forty years, still managed to hold your attention.
Judith rolled down the car window, letting in some of the cool spring air. Downtown Atlanta was only thirty minutes away, but out here in Conyers, you could still find areas of undeveloped land, even some small farms. It was a quiet place, and Atlanta was just far enough away so that she could appreciate the peace. Still, Judith sighed as she caught a quick glimpse of the city’s skyscrapers on the distant horizon, thinking, Home.
She was surprised at the thought, that Atlanta was now a place she considered her home. Her life until recently had been suburban, even rural. She preferred the open spaces to the concrete sidewalks of the city, even while she admitted that it was nice living in so central a location that you could walk to the corner store or a little café if the mood struck you.
Days would pass without her even having to get into a car—the type of life she would have never dreamed of ten years ago. She could tell Henry felt the same. His shoulders bunched up around his ears with tight resolve as he navigated the Buick down a narrow country road. After decades of driving just about every highway and interstate in the country, he instinctively knew all the back routes, the doglegs and shortcuts.
Judith trusted him to get them home safely. She sat back in her seat, staring out the window, blurring her eyes so that the trees bordering the road seemed more like a thick forest. She made the trip to Conyers at least once a week, and every time she felt like she saw something new—a small house she’d never noticed, a bridge she’d bumped over many times but never paid attention to. Life was like that. You didn’t realize what was passing you by until you slowed down a little bit to get a better look.
They’d just come from an anniversary party in their honor, thrown together by their son. Well, more likely thrown together by Tom’s wife, who managed his life like an executive assistant, housekeeper, babysitter, cook and—presumably—concubine all rolled up into one. Tom had been a joyful surprise, his birth an event doctors had said would never come about. Judith had loved every part of him on first sight, accepted him as a gift that she would cherish with every bone in her body. She had done everything for him, and now that Tom was in his thirties, he still seemed to need an awful lot of taking care of. Perhaps Judith had been too conventional a wife, too subservient a mother, so that her son had grown into the sort of man who needed—expected—a wife to do everything for him.
Judith certainly had not enslaved herself to Henry. They had married in 1969, a time when women could actually have interests other than cooking the perfect pot roast and discovering the best method to get stains out of the carpet. From the start, Judith had been determined to make her life as interesting as possible. She’d been a room mother at Tom’s school. She’d volunteered at the local homeless shelter and helped start a recycling group in the neighborhood. When Tom was older, Judith took a job doing light bookkeeping for a local business and joined a running team through the church to train for marathons. This active lifestyle stood in stark contrast to that of Judith’s own mother, a woman who toward the end of her life was so ravaged from raising nine children, so drained from the constant physical demands of being a farmer’s wife, that some days she was too depressed to even speak.
Though, Judith had to admit, she had herself been a somewhat typical woman in those early years. Embarrassingly, she was one of those girls who had gone to college specifically to find a husband. She had grown up near Scranton, Pennsylvania, in a town so small it didn’t merit a dot on the map. The only men available to her were farmers, and they were hardly interested in Judith. Judith could not blame them. The mirror told no lies. She was a bit too plump, a bit too bucktoothed, and a bit too much of everything else, to be the sort of woman Scranton men took for a wife. And then there was her father, a stern disciplinarian whom no sane man would seek out for a father-in-law, at least not in exchange for a bucktoothed, pear-shaped girl who had no natural talent for farming.
The tr
uth was that Judith had always been the odd one in the family, the one who didn’t quite fit in. She read too much. She hated farmwork. Even as a young girl, she was not drawn to animals and did not want to be responsible for their care and feeding. None of her sisters and brothers had been sent away for higher education. There were two brothers who had dropped out of ninth grade, and an older sister who had married rather quickly and given birth to her first child seven months later. Not that anyone bothered to do the math. Enveloped in a constant state of denial, her mother had remarked to her dying day that her first grandchild had always been big-boned, even as an infant. Thankfully, Judith’s father had seen the writing on the wall so far as his middle girl was concerned. There would be no marriage of convenience with any of the local boys, not least of all because none of them found her remotely convenient. Bible college, he decided, was not just Judith’s last—but her only—chance.
At the age of six, Judith had been struck in the eye by a flying piece of debris as she chased after the tractor. From that moment on, she’d always worn glasses. People assumed she was cerebral because of the glasses, when in fact the opposite was true. Yes, she loved to read, but her tastes ran more toward trashy dime novel than literary. Still, the egghead label had stuck. What was it they used to say? “Men don’t make passes at women who wear glasses.” So, it was surprising—no, more like shocking—when on Judith’s first day of college in her first class, the teaching assistant had winked at her.
The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 80
