Dead Before Dark

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Is he going to bring up the lie?

  The phone rings.

  “Do you want me to get it?”

  “No, I will.” Wearily, he picks it up.

  It’s one of the detectives working the case.

  Lucinda sips her own coffee as he talks, knowing the caffeine won’t do a thing to assuage the ache of exhaustion gripping her body.

  When was the last time she got a decent night’s sleep? Not even in Curaçao, on that cloud of a fancy resort hotel bed. Not with Jimmy sharing it.

  Uneasily, she allows herself to consider, once again, Neal’s suspicion that Jimmy could have possibly been behind the scrapbook on her bed. If she were willing to believe that, she would also have to be willing to believe he could have killed Carla Barakat.

  I have no idea who he really is.

  This isn’t the first time she’s realized it, but the truth is more pronounced now that she’s here with Randy.

  Randy—she knows exactly who he is. Knows him inside and out, even after all these years apart. Being with Randy feels natural in a way that nothing else in her life ever has.

  Being with other men, or with her family, or even alone…

  None of that feels right the way this does. Even here, even now, even being with him under the worst of circumstances—she belongs. It feels right.

  Which is wrong. Especially here, especially now.

  But it is what it is.

  And you don’t do guilt, remember?

  They know, Randy realizes, going through the motions yet again with people who have dropped in to pay their respects.

  They all know, except Lucinda.

  He has to tell her.

  He meant to, sooner or later. Maybe this isn’t the ideal time, but, remarkably, she’s here.

  Or maybe not so remarkably.

  “I had a vision that something happened to Carla, so I drove out to check on her when I found out you were out of town,” she explained earlier in her matter-of-fact way, sitting beside him at the kitchen table.

  A vision. Of course.

  “It just came to you out of the blue?”

  She shook her head. Told him about the ring, Carla’s ring, now in the possession of the police as evidence.

  She told him, too, about the strange pieces of paper found at both the murder scene and on Neal’s kitchen table Monday night.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Randy asked her, chilled by the ominous linkage of Lucinda to Carla.

  “I just…I couldn’t. You couldn’t have done anything about it from there anyway. And I could have been wrong.”

  “So you’re the one who found her?”

  “No. I called the police, and they did.”

  He’s glad. He’s glad Lucinda wasn’t the one who walked in on what must have been a bloodbath in the bathroom.

  Lambert told him—when he pressed for details he probably didn’t really want to know—that Carla’s jugular vein was severed, and she’d bled to death.

  He knows Lucinda has seen worse—much worse.

  But her being the one who found Carla would have complicated things even more than they are. Or are about to be, anyway.

  Standing in the kitchen, surrounded by chattering acquaintances and enough Saran-wrapped platters to stock a high school bake sale, Randy longs to pull her aside and tell her the truth.

  But there are too many people around, more pouring in every time the damned doorbell rings, people he didn’t realize even knew Carla and people he can’t believe even care that she’s dead.

  Whether they do or not, all appear genuinely shaken. If nothing else, an air of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God mourning permeates the house where Randy’s wife bled to death.

  He doesn’t want to see her.

  He has to, though. Has to officially identify her down at the morgue and sign the papers so that the death certificate can be issued. Lambert offered to have someone else do it, but Randy said that wouldn’t be right.

  He can do this. It won’t be easy, but he owes her this much.

  For now, though, it’s enough to go numbly through the day, accepting condolences and bundt cakes, and to catch Lucinda’s eye every once in a while, wishing he could be alone with her so that he can tell her the truth at last.

  Sitting in the glider chair in the baby’s room, nursing her little girl, Cam worries.

  Where, where, where is Lucinda?

  Cam could have sworn she’d said last week that she was only going to Curaçao for the weekend, but maybe she extended the trip.

  She must have, because in the last twenty-four hours, Cam has left a couple of messages each on her home and cell phone voice mail, and Lucinda has yet to return the call. She can’t have heard them yet, because Cam was increasingly adamant, when she spoke into the phone, that it was really important to connect.

  What if…

  No. Lucinda is fine. Of course she is.

  Cam stares out the window at the bare-branched trees against an ice-blue winter sky, wishing she knew that for sure.

  But she can’t allow her thoughts to take her to the dark place, can’t allow herself to consider that something might have happened to her friend. Something that has something to do with Ava, and the strange lipstick note she found in the mail.

  Mike, when she reached him yesterday morning, was concerned enough to tell her he’d cut the ski trip short and come home.

  “No!” Cam protested impulsively—though when she called, she supposed, she’d been hoping he’d offer to be on the next plane.

  But if Mike left the trip early, he’d miss out on something he looks forward to all year. Plus, she’d never hear the end of it from her father-in-law.

  Mike’s father isn’t one to withhold a grudge. He still blames Cam for, as he put it, “nearly getting my granddaughter killed.”

  As if only he has Tess’s best interests at heart. As if Cam, or for that matter, Tess, had been incredibly reckless.

  And then, of course, he was mortified by the press coverage, which—as he put it—“drags all the dirty linen out of the closet for the world to see.”

  Dirty linen, meaning Cam’s murdered sister.

  “Ignore him,” Mike advised her. “What else can you do? He’s always been a jerk, and he always will be.”

  For Cam—who was always prepared to give Mike, Senior, the benefit of the doubt for her husband’s sake—ignoring the man hasn’t been very challenging. She hasn’t even seen him lately—other than when he and Mike’s mom came to see the baby in the hospital, and a chaotic Christmas dinner in Connecticut.

  As far as she’s concerned, if she doesn’t see them until next Christmas, it’ll be too soon.

  Well, Mike’s father, anyway.

  His mother, she adores. Too bad they’re usually a package deal. Cam has been inviting her mother-in-law down to stay for a week but Mike’s father doesn’t believe in women traveling solo, and claims he doesn’t want to drive on winter roads to get her here.

  No, but he doesn’t mind driving up a winter mountain road in Utah to go skiing.

  Whatever.

  “Daddy’s right,” she tells baby Grace, as she props her against her shoulder to burp her. “Grandpa is a jerk. But don’t tell anyone I told you, okay?”

  She’s always careful never to say a bad word about her father-in-law in front of Tess.

  Or about her own father, for that matter. Ike Neary has his faults, too, of course, brought on by an addictive personality and compounded by all the tragic loss he’s suffered in his life.

  Pop isn’t doing so well lately. He’s been in and out of hospitals since last fall, having been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He has his good days, but there are more bad now. Often, when Cam goes to visit him, he thinks she’s her mother.

  “Brenda,” he’ll say, “where the hell have you been? I’ve been worried sick about you.”

  Once, when Cam came into the room just as he was waking up, he even thought she was Ava.

  Rather, Ava’s ghost
, apparently, meeting him at the pearly gates.

  “You’re alive, Pop,” Cam kept telling him, over and over. “I’m not Ava; I’m Cam.”

  He nodded, finally getting it. “You’re Cam. Did you hear about Ava?”

  “Hear what?”

  “She’s dead.” He wiped tears from his eyes. “Killed herself, poor thing.”

  No, Pop. She didn’t kill herself.

  Somebody killed her.

  And now somebody might be trying to tell me what really happened.

  “It’s really no big deal, Mike,” she told her husband on the phone, nonetheless, about the strange note in the mail.

  “It was a big enough deal to scare you. I’m coming home.”

  “You do, and I’ll be really pissed at you.”

  He laughed.

  “I’m serious, Mike.”

  “That you’ll be really pissed?”

  “That you shouldn’t come home. Listen, this is just another stupid prank thing. Like all those hang ups we got before we changed the phone number, and people who said they were Ava, or calling for Ava…”

  “That’s different. That was kids, playing around.”

  “I’m sure this is, too.” She must have sounded convincing, because he agreed to stay in Utah through the end of the week as planned.

  Then he proceeded to call her every waking hour in the last twenty-four.

  “Just checking in. Everything okay?”

  “Status quo,” she tells him, every time.

  The house is quiet today. Tess is at the mall—with a girlfriend, for a change. Her boyfriend doesn’t have a school break in February, which spares Cam having to wedge some healthy distance between the lovebirds 24/7 this week.

  She stands, pulls the shade, and carries her drowsy baby across the plush white carpet. She lays her in the white cradle and winds the mobile hanging above it. A quartet of characters from the Hundred Acre Wood begin dancing slowly above Grace’s head to tinkling Winnie the Pooh music.

  “Take your nap, Precious.” Cam presses a kiss against her downy hair. “Mama will be back to check on you. But right now I have to check on someone else.”

  She closes the door behind the baby and goes into the master bedroom.

  When Mike moved out last year, she avoided spending time here. She hated seeing the half-empty closet and barren dresser top, hated having the king-sized bed all to herself.

  Now that it’s a happy, cozy room again, she’s glad to retreat here with a book or her journal when the baby naps. She’s even been writing again lately—poetry and short stories, not that any of it’s very good, or that she’s willing to show anyone. Not even Mike, who has been encouraging her to try publishing something.

  Maybe someday.

  She picks up the phone on the bedside table and dials Lucinda’s home number.

  Voice mail again.

  “Lucinda, it’s Cam. Now I don’t just need to talk to you—I’m worried about you. Please call and let me know you’re okay as soon as you get this.”

  “Oh, she’s perfectly okay,” he assures Camden Hastings’s disembodied voice. “She will be for quite some time. But I can’t guarantee anything past…oh, let’s say, June.”

  He laughs aloud.

  Hard.

  It always feels good to laugh. It’s a release.

  Sometimes, in prison, well after lights out, some random thought would amuse him, and he’d let loose with a rip-roaring belly laugh that would echo down the C block in the dead of night.

  The others would stir and start banging on the walls and barred windows of their cells, hollering at him to shut up, and then the guards would show up to investigate, shining lights in his face—which he found even funnier.

  “You know I’ve always loved the spotlight,” he’d say and writhe and clutch his gut as howls exploded from him, laughing until his ribs ached and there was a knot of pain at the back of his throat.

  “What the hell is so funny?” they’d demand—almost suspiciously. Just as his teachers had when he was a kid.

  As if he were hiding something. As if humor were some kind of threat.

  He never told anyone why he was laughing because most of the time, he really didn’t know, and it really didn’t matter.

  He only knew that it felt good, had always felt good, to let it all out, to purge until he was spent: laughter.

  And sometimes, rage.

  “To hear this message again, press one,” a mechanical voice advises him. “To save it, press two. To erase it, press three.”

  He wipes tears of mirth from his eyes and presses one, just for the fun of it.

  “Lucinda, it’s Cam. Now I don’t just need to talk to you—I’m worried about you. Please call and let me know you’re okay as soon as you get this.”

  He relishes the urgency in her voice, glad to have this opportunity.

  Getting into her PIN-protected voice mail, e-mail, and computer files was tricky, but not impossible for someone like him: schooled in the old C block. He’d emerged with plenty of connections in the outside world, along with fresh knowledge and training in areas that would come in handy in his business, courtesy of the state prison reforms.

  In Lucinda Sloan’s case, all it took was a keyboard sniffer installed on her laptop while she was out one day. The software is readily available for purchase, and cash is not hard to come by when one has no qualms about where and how one obtains it.

  He learned Lucinda’s voice mail access code the old-fashioned way: by observing her from the rooftop next door with a pair of high-powered binoculars.

  People entering PINs in the so-called privacy of their own homes don’t attempt to shield the movements of their fingers from prying eyes the way they do at ATMs. All he’d had to do was watch for her to come home each night, knowing that the first thing she’d do was check her voice mail. It took a few weeks for her to stand with the phone at exactly the right angle in exactly the right spot in front of one of the apartment’s many windows, but he had all the time and patience in the world.

  The whole thing, really, is a waiting game.

  How many nights had he reminded himself of that, watching from his rooftop perch as she slept, bathed in the glow of the bedside lamp?

  Never before had he had such an opportunity, not with the others. No one else slept all night with the light on.

  Had he not known all along of Lucinda Sloan’s weakness—her fear of the dark—he might have interpreted that bedside lamp as a beacon. He might have been tempted—the night he slipped into her apartment through a window to borrow her keys and make a duplicate set—to let her blood ooze across those nice white sheets, right then and there.

  But he knows her secret.

  And of course, he possesses a level of self-control and intelligence unmatched in any other human being he’s ever known.

  Killing her right then and there wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying as what he has planned.

  It’s so nice to have something to look forward to, really.

  And so, he slipped away with her keys, made himself a set, and returned them well before dawn.

  Grinning, he reaches into his pocket, unfolding a well-worn newspaper clipping.

  SEXY SOOTHSAYER SUPERHERO screams the kitschy tabloid headline.

  And there she is, smiling out at him in sepia-tones, aside from the little adjustment he couldn’t help making.

  Photoshop would have been more effective, but this will do.

  “See you soon, Lucinda,” he tells her, admiring the delicate arch of her brow and the sassy gleam in her eye and, above all, the lips he carefully stained red with a whittled nub of lipstick. It refused to stay defined but instead bled across the newsprint, giving her a garish clown’s mouth.

  No matter.

  Soon enough, he’ll have another chance—with the real thing.

  Whistling, he tucks the clipping back into his pocket and picks up his suitcase.

  He has a flight to catch.

  All morning an
d late into the afternoon, as people come and go, Lucinda remains at Randy’s side.

  “I need you,” he said simply when, earlier, the doorbell started ringing incessantly and strangers—to her, anyway—started filling the house and she offered to give him some space. “Please don’t leave me.”

  So she’s still here, trying to stay helpful yet out of the way as the investigators do their thing and friends and neighbors stop by to offer condolences. They stand in little knots in the kitchen and speak in hushed voices, and when they leave, they always say, “If you need anything, Randy, just call.”

  He thanks them, and somehow, he keeps his composure through it all, even when they don’t. It’s obvious he’s built a life here on the island; that he and Carla are—were—a part of the community.

  Lucinda brews endless pots of coffee and keeps a list of who brought what. Randy might want it later, so that he’ll know whom to thank. She figures the names and faces must be a blur for him now.

  A few of the visitors are obviously closer to him than others, some of whom strike Lucinda as ghoulish curiosity seekers. Yet even they seem truly shaken by his loss.

  As the day wears on, though, Lucinda notices that even among the inner circle, there’s an undercurrent of something other than just sympathy.

  Resentment? Nosiness? Whatever it is, it seems to have something to do with her presence.

  Randy introduces her, over and over, as an old friend, yet she senses closer scrutiny than a platonic relationship merits. Particularly from the women: a few who are middle-aged locals, and a couple who are considerably younger and must be friends of Carla’s.

  It’s likely they recognize her from last summer’s media blitz, but as Lucinda finds herself being sized up repeatedly, something tells her there’s more to their interest than that.

  Is it possible that her secret past with Randy is common knowledge here on the island?

  Or is it already public knowledge that she’s the one who called the police before they found Carla’s body?

  Neal is finally about to head back here with the evidence, after spending a few hours overseeing the investigation at Lucinda’s apartment.

  “I want you to be careful there, Cin,” Neal warned from his cell phone when she reached him a little while ago.