by Steve Richer
That rush… the thrill of discovery. The excitement at having cracked some near-impossible puzzle.
It didn’t last long.
Within minutes it was replaced by the nauseous horror of what was unreeling before him.
“Holy shit.”
He reached for his cellphone. It was early, but that didn’t matter. He had to tell Alice what he’d found.
The phone rang through to voicemail. He considered leaving a message but didn’t. She’d be in work soon. He would wait until then. Take her somewhere quiet for a coffee and tell her everything.
And in the meantime, he continued to scroll, continued to spawn new tabs with fresh searches, feeling the sense of dread growing steadily with every click.
~ ~ ~ ~
Alice was out early at the income property on Whitetail Lane.
She was standing, holding the look of Franco Vialli and biting back down on the angry retorts that bubbled in her head in response to his, “So? Sue my goddamn ass. Excuse the language, ma’am, but this is a construction site.”
All around, his crew were gathering up their tools, loading supplies back into trucks, dismantling the scaffolding that until this morning had framed the front of the property.
“Wait, what’s happening? On what grounds are you quitting the site and breaking our very tightly worded contract?”
“Failure to pay on schedule. Financial uncertainty. Changing the terms. You want me to go on?”
“Changing the terms? You’re the one who keeps changing the terms.”
“I didn’t put no hole in the roof.”
“But you were fixing it. Until this morning, that is.”
“And now I’m not.”
“Come on, Franco. I thought you were one of the good guys.”
“I am. But I’m no patsy.”
All those retorts rushed to the surface once again, but she clamped down on them. She needed Franco. She was in no place to hire a new contractor now.
“We were only a day late on the last installment. I thought Tom had smoothed that over with you?”
“That what he tell you?”
She wasn’t going to get angry with Tom, even though her first response was to wish she hadn’t left it to him again.
“A day late might not sound much to you,” Franco said. “But everything has a domino effect. You don’t understand how precarious this business is.”
She was in real estate. Of course, she understood the business.
And then she realized. He was just trying to screw them out of more money. He knew she’d struggle to hire someone new to pick this job up at this stage. And with that hole in the roof and winter approaching…
How many times had he done this?
All those times he gave them two quotes. The minimum job, and then the But if it was me quote for doing it properly. Had Franco been playing them from the start?
“How much? How much to get your crew to stay on site and finish this? How much to at least make that hole in the roof secure until we work something else out?”
Franco tried to look offended, but didn’t quite manage.
Just then, her phone buzzed in her purse. She ignored it. She’d check it later. She had more important things to worry about right now.
Franco surprised her then. “It’s not like that,” he said in a softer tone of voice. “This business, a guy needs security. When you start to hear stories…”
“Stories?”
“About clients who aren’t straight up about their financial position.”
Was he accusing her of lying?
“When you hear about clients that don’t have enough to cover their responsibilities, and who might be willing to string things along for as long as possible… And when they start getting late on payments. Well, it’s always the guy at the end of the chain who pays, isn’t it? I’ve been stung too many times before.”
“Who’s been telling you these things? Who’s been lying about us?”
But she knew.
Who else would be spreading lies of the most damaging kind?
There was only one person who fit that bill.
~ ~ ~ ~
Walter waited, but Alice didn’t show at work.
It was hardly a surprise, given the events of yesterday. Everyone had heard Tuckett bawling her out first thing in the morning, after which she’d feigned illness and gone home. And then later, when she’d come in and Tuckett had told her, effectively, that her time here at Pierson Newport was coming to an end…
Who would come to work the day after that?
If she was wise, she’d be searching for another job, but Walter knew she’d be working all hours to finish that pitch and make it good enough to convince Tuckett to keep her on.
When he was certain that she wasn’t going to show, he tried her cellphone again, but nothing. This time he started to leave a message before stopping himself. What if Alice’s voicemail had been compromised somehow?
He was reluctant to try her home landline, or even Tom direct. He didn’t really understand his relationship with Alice’s husband. Superficially they got on, but there were always undercurrents. Since his breakdown last year, Tom seemed far too ready to blame Walter for things.
This was why Walter preferred his interactions with people to be online. As soon as things got complicated in real time, in the real world, he was out of his depth.
Email? That suited Walter’s normal approach. In an email you could write everything down. You could re-read it over and over, fine-tuning it until you were sure it said exactly what you wanted to say. Unlike real life, where you only ever got one clumsy shot.
But email wouldn’t work in this instance, for the same reason he’d cut himself off when he started to leave a message on Alice’s voicemail. What if Libbie read it first?
He knew she was good with computers. She’d fixed Alice’s computer problems and he was pretty sure from what he’d found out that she’d caused them in the first place. If she had somehow secured access to Alice’s email, then that was not the place to lay down everything he had found out.
No, there was only one thing to do.
“Ruth?” he said into his desk phone, having punched in the number of the office administrator. “It’s Walter. Walter Jones. I’m feeling rough this morning. Too many long days and evenings in the office.” He was always there before everyone and leaving after they’d gone. She’d believe that. “I think I’m going to go home and try to sleep it off.”
He’d go to Alice’s house. She must be there. He’d tell her everything and they’d work out what to do from there.
And he didn’t have any time to spare.
Alice’s life might depend on it…
Chapter 28
Libbie seethed. Last night had been a mistake.
Trying to kiss Tom. Trying to seduce him. She’d gone off-script.
It might have been fun. Not the sex. The aftermath. The opportunities to play on Tom’s inevitable guilt. Telling him she’d fallen in love with him. Setting up ways for Alice to find out. Getting Marissa to turn psycho with adolescent jealousy and indignation.
The possibilities were endless. And delicious.
But it could have gotten out of hand. All that was academic now, anyway.
They knew.
Or at least, while they didn’t know the details, they knew she was playing them. They knew she wasn’t who she claimed, that all she’d told them of her life was fake.
They wanted to get rid of her.
And worse, all this had drawn them closer to each other, not pulled them apart.
It was infuriating.
Frustrating.
It was time to take things up a level.
She waited until they were both out. Alice had gone to the Whitetail Lane site before going to work. Tom was still waiting for a couple of new jobs to come in, so he’d taken the opportunity to go to the mall before heading on to do the weekly grocery shopping.
Listening in via the air du
ct was priceless when it came to planning.
She hoped Alice was having fun at the construction site. The anonymous tip-off to Vialli had been fun. He’d sounded all too ready to jump ship. Late payments, difficult clients. It hadn’t taken much of a push.
Alice might be able to win him over, of course. But even if she did, it would certainly cost her.
Such fun.
That would teach them to think they could get rid of her!
She paused on the porch.
Every time you let yourself into someone else’s house, there was a heart-stopping moment when you had to commit.
You put the stolen key in the door, turn, push inside.
At that point, there’s no disguising that you’re doing something unlawful.
There are no excuses for doing something like that.
No possible justification.
She pushed the door shut behind herself and let a big breath slowly escape from her lungs.
She looked around and spotted the broken summer camp figurine back in place in Tom’s collection. He hadn’t repaired it though. The sliver of exposed orange was almost imperceptible, and could easily have gone unnoticed.
It had been so funny, giving him something so blatant, so thinly disguised. Knowing it would be sitting there, right under their complacent suburban noses.
She headed upstairs.
She didn’t find what she was looking for in the main bathroom, but in the master bathroom she struck gold.
A mirrored cabinet, one shelf loaded with toiletries, the other with medication. Painkillers, antacids, and decongestants, which she ignored. But there: rosiglitazone and acarbose. Diabetes meds and paraphernalia. She’d done her research, knew what to look for.
She took the boxes and put them in the canvas bag she’d thought to bring with her.
In the bedroom, she started by going through the drawers, checking for any other stashes of diabetes medication, but there were none. The mini-fridge in the corner paid dividends once more. Vials of insulin, and other medicines she didn’t recognize.
She removed these, put some in her bag and took the insulin through to the bathroom. Here, she drained the vials and replaced their contents with water from the faucet.
Alice might notice that her supplies were low, but she’d probably just think she’d forgotten to get the prescriptions refilled. She’d been so forgetful lately, hadn’t she?
Downstairs, she searched methodically again. Finding more insulin in the fridge, she repeated the process of replacing the contents with water. She dumped an entire jar of honey into the sink. She found a bag of candy and stole that, too.
There was another medicine cabinet in the downstairs washroom and all the diabetes medications went into Libbie’s bag. She confiscated glucose tablets and instant glucose gel tubes.
Libbie knew she had a short fuse. A violent temper. That was why she’d ended up in that appalling hospital, after all, wasn’t it? That was what she’d spent those ninety days doing. Being coached in anger management, rage control, impulse curtailment.
The most important lesson she’d learned was how to convince them that she was a changed person.
But that short temper was only one side of the coin.
The other side was this. The slow burn.
A burst of anger was deliciously satisfying, there was no denying that. But the joy of a meticulously planned and executed plot was so much more rewarding!
The slow release was so much more satisfying than the instant gratification of an anger spike.
She wondered how Dr. Holt would feel if he knew that was one of her big takeaways from her time in his care?
She went back around the house again for one last patrol.
No more hidden stashes of pills. Nowhere else she might keep insulin, meds, and sugar. She’d have some in her purse, of course, but there was nothing Libbie could do about that.
She went back to the kitchen and tipped the contents of her bag out onto the big table. So many goodies! She swept them back up into the bag. She would dispose of them later.
Time to go.
That was when she heard the noise. Nothing obvious. Just a kind of thump and dragging sound. It might have been something shifting in the wind. Or it might have been someone outside, bumping into something, or stumbling and righting themselves in the gravel.
She went carefully through the house to the foyer. Paused.
There had been no more sounds.
She peered through the frosted glass of the side window. No sign of either car.
Tom was being boringly domestic today, but right now Alice was either still having a nightmare encounter with Franco Vialli at Whitetail Lane, or she’d gone on to Pierson Newport where she’d no doubt be having an equally nightmarish time, now that everything had gone so badly wrong for her.
That made Libbie feel good.
That made her feel very good indeed.
The sound she’d heard must have been the wind knocking something over. A neighbor.
She opened the door and Walter Jones was standing there.
Guilty, surprised, he took an involuntary step back, raising his arms defensively as if he thought she was going to attack him.
“Oh! Walter, isn’t it? We met at Pierson Newport when I came to pick up Alice for lunch that time. Can I help you?”
Be confident. Occupy the space as if you own it, as if you’re meant to be there.
“This is Alice’s place,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
She dangled the key. “They gave me this,” she told him. “I check the mail for them and help them out around the place. We’ve become the best of friends.”
She smiled, taking pleasure in the look of confusion that washed over his features.
He didn’t believe her. It was a most unlikely claim for why she might have a key.
But like any decent, upstanding member of the community, even now Walter Jones desperately wanted to believe her.
Because to do otherwise would be to accept there was evil in the world. In his world.
“Alice never mentioned that.”
“She’d have told you?” Libbie kept the innocent lightness in her tone, knowing it would throw him. “She tells you everything then? She told me you two were close.”
“I… I mean no. I mean.” He stopped, licked his lips, started again. “I saw what you were doing. I saw what you have in that bag.”
So he’d managed to summon the courage to confront her, but he was stalling already. Libbie stayed silent, still smiling. Let him grind to a halt.
Finally, she said, “Libbie’s meds, you mean?”
He was trying to read her expression. Trying to understand. He clearly hadn’t expected a confession of sorts.
“The meds, yes,” he said.
Libbie waited. She kind of respected the fact he’d had the balls to challenge her, but really… He was out of his league. Poor thing.
“You can’t take her meds. She needs them.”
“That’s why I have them. She’s been so forgetful lately. You must have noticed. She asked me to do an audit and make sure she had the right ones. There are so many. I’m just taking them down to my apartment so I can Google them all.”
For a moment, she thought she’d convinced him. But then…
“Is that why you were pouring insulin down the sink?”
He’d seen.
Damn it. How long had he been here?
She carried on smiling innocently. She’d run out of answers, but that didn’t mean she had to let him know he had her.
And behind the smile her mind raced.
“They were past their expiration date. I was doing as she asked.”
She stepped out onto the porch, pulling the door behind her.
Stepped past him, down into the yard.
“I’m calling the cops,” he told her. “Right now. What you’re doing… it’s not far short of murder. It is murder!”
She carried on walking away, as if s
he didn’t care.
From the corner of her eye, she saw that he had his cellphone out, was waving it in the air as if to convince her he was going to use it.
Finally, she paused, twisting to face him. “You could,” she said. “Or we could clear this whole thing up.” She put a hand to the side of her mouth and called, “Tom? Are you down there? Do you have a minute? Walter’s here.”
Walter was studying her carefully.
“Tom’s down in the tool shed,” she said. “He’ll confirm what I told you. I don’t know what you think you saw, but it really is all entirely innocent.” She called again, “Tom?”
She turned and continued around the corner of the house.
Walter followed, just as she knew he would. He might not believe Tom was there, but he’d want to be sure. And he didn’t want to let her get out of his sight, either.
She’d hit a dog once. With a baseball bat. The thing had annoyed her, yapping all the time. Just wouldn’t shut up. That was why she’d ended up in the secure hospital. One fit of rage and the bad luck that it had been in the view of a security camera.
It had been satisfying, though. Such a release! Such a rush of adrenaline and endorphins.
The judge hadn’t been impressed when she’d asked if she could keep a copy of the security camera footage of the incident.
That was another thing Dr. Holt had helped her with. Inappropriate humor.
Another thing she’d learned to hide.
But if braining that damned dog with a baseball bat had been satisfying, this was something else entirely.
Her move was smooth, as if choreographed. A slight pause, a shimmy, a sidestep, and Walter had caught up and was level with her without even realizing it.
A swing of the foot, a hand in the back, just before that little stone step down onto the path to the apartment.
The extra drop of that step confused him. He put a foot out to catch himself but it came down in midair rather than on solid ground and he kept tipping forward with his own momentum.
He grunted. Twisted to gawk at her in surprise as he kept falling.
Even then, he would have been okay. A few bumps and bruises, no more.
So, to be sure, Libbie dived after him. She smashed into his back and followed him down.
