Copycat

by Alex Lake

‘But how? Crushing a few pills in some wine wouldn’t kill me,’ Sarah said. ‘I’d wake up with a very bad headache, but not much more.’

  ‘I know, Sarah,’ Jean said. ‘You think I’m stupid, don’t you? You always have.’ She shook her head. ‘No. The pills were to make sure you were asleep. Then I was going to put you in your car in the garage and turn on the engine. Painless way to go. A coward’s way. Perfect for you.’

  Sarah looked at her hands – the burn from the cigarette was a real mess – trying to let Jean’s words sink in.

  ‘It wouldn’t have worked,’ she said flatly. ‘Ben wouldn’t have believed it.’

  ‘Oh?’ Jean said. ‘You think?’

  ‘Yes. He knows me. He knows I wouldn’t leave him, or the kids.’

  ‘He knows desperate people do desperate things. And, after all the things that have been going on, he thinks you’re desperate.’ She smiled. ‘Not true, of course. But what else would he think? And what he thinks is what matters.’

  Sarah shook her head. It was all so clear now, in hindsight. ‘The police would look into it,’ she said. ‘They’d find your DNA on me, if you carried me downstairs to the car.’

  ‘I was planning for it to be me who found you,’ Jean said. ‘In my grief, I’d drag you from the car and out of the garage. My DNA would have every right to be there. And on the suicide note, which I would find.’

  ‘And they’d check the handwriting,’ Sarah said. ‘They’d find out it was forged.’

  ‘You’re clutching at straws,’ Jean said. ‘They’d only do that if they were suspicious, which they wouldn’t be. They’d hear from me, and Ben, about your recent history of paranoia, depression and – possibly – dissociative fugue. Ben would explain how you’d asked him to leave – presumably so you could kill yourself – and they would close the book. They’d move on. Nice and neat. That’s what they do,’ she said. ‘I know from my own experience. It’s a tried-and-trusted method, Sarah. It worked last time.’

  ‘What do you mean last time?’ Sarah said. ‘You’ve done this before?’

  7

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Jean said. ‘You remember Karen, of course’

  Sarah nodded. Karen, Daniel and Paul’s mum. Karen, who’d disappeared. Karen, who’d left her shoes and coat out by the ocean, with a suicide note.

  A note explaining how she couldn’t take it anymore and she had no options left other than to take her own life. A note like the one Jean had been writing for Sarah.

  And then Jean had married Jack.

  She looked at Jean. ‘Holy shit,’ she said. ‘You did the same to her? You killed her?’

  Jean nodded.

  ‘Oh my God.’ She stared at her friend. ‘How? How did you get her out to the ocean?’

  Jean laughed. It was an odd, girlish giggle that seemed totally incongruous with the situation.

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I put her clothes out there with the suicide note. I actually killed her well before. The night she disappeared, in fact. I left the gap between the disappearance and the note to build suspense.’ She giggled again, then sucked on the cigarette. ‘It was a mistake, though, I killed her too soon. I wish I’d enjoyed her punishment – her suffering – more. It was a missed opportunity. I won’t make the same mistake with you. I’m going to enjoy having you down here before I finally let you die.’

  The words hung in between them, then Jean carried on.

  ‘You want to know how I killed Karen? It was very clever.’

  Sarah was about to say no, she didn’t, but Jean didn’t give her the chance.

  ‘We all went out the night you came home to Barrow,’ she said. Her voice had changed, the tone lowered and bitter. ‘Remember? Anyway, I left early. I had the Farmer’s Market the next day. I was working at the organic farm in Topsham at the time. I needed all the work I could get. I wasn’t a doctor like you, Sarah. I never made it to college. You remember the reason why, don’t you? I hope so.’

  Sarah started to reply but Jean silenced her with a wave.

  ‘We’ll be talking about that later,’ she said. ‘Karen, first. You’ll want to hear this story, Sarah. I liked the farm job. Plenty of fresh air. And the farmer – Ethan – had a fantastic body and used to shower outside. He collected rainwater in a barrel. It was all part of his low-impact lifestyle. Anyway, by climbing on the roof of the barn you could watch him. A perk I enjoyed. And he paid well, too. Plus he gave me food. Eggs, milk, meat. He made sausages. You probably don’t remember, but he was famous for his sausages. I could have as many as I wanted.’ She laughed. ‘I didn’t eat any of the ones around the time Karen disappeared, though.’

  She crouched down and leaned forward, then blew smoke into Sarah’s face. ‘You want to know why I avoided them? Because that was how I got rid of her body.’

  Sarah twisted out of the way. She didn’t want to hear this, didn’t want to have to think about what Jean had done.

  ‘I picked her up when she left the bar,’ Jean said. ‘Just happened to be passing, although really I’d been watching to see when she left. I was lucky she was alone; but if she hadn’t been it wouldn’t have mattered. I’d have got her eventually. I’m very good at waiting, Sarah, as you’re finding out now. I don’t care how long it takes for me to get what I want, so long as I get it. Anyway, I picked her up, told her I had to stop by the farm, and then I killed her.’ Jean laughed.

  ‘You’re sick,’ Sarah whispered. ‘I didn’t realize until now, but there’s something very wrong with you. You’re not well, Jean.’

  ‘Really?’ Jean said. ‘It seems to me like you’re the one in my basement. You might want to think about that when you decide who’s not well. Anyway, I was telling you a story. Let me get back to it; it’s a good one.’

  Jean stood up. She inhaled a lungful of smoke.

  ‘There was another advantage to working at the farm,’ Jean said. ‘If there’s no body, there’s no crime. Just a woman who disappeared. Maybe ran away for good, maybe she needed some time.’ She flicked the cigarette butt at Sarah. It hit her cheek – there was a little sting – and landed on the ground in front of her. ‘But if you kill someone, the corpse can always turn up. A grave can be dug up, a body can wash up on shore. The trick is to really get rid of the body. And the farm was a good place to get rid of a body.’

  ‘Wherever you hid it, it could still be found,’ Sarah said. ‘You’re not as smart as you think.’

  ‘Oh, but I am,’ Jean said. ‘Karen’s body will never be found.’

  ‘You can’t be sure.’

  ‘Really? Let me tell you what I did with it, then you can decide for yourself.’ She folded her arms. ‘The night I killed her – strangled, by the way – Ethan was in Boston visiting his brother. The farm was empty; he’d asked me to grind up some pork for sausages.’ She stared at Sarah. ‘So I threw her in with them. And then, on the next few Saturdays, the good people of Barrow went to the farmers’ market and picked up a couple of Ethan’s famous organic sausages and disposed of the body for me. ‘As for the bones,’ she continued. ‘They went into the organic bonemeal he sold to the gardeners of Barrow. She became fertilizer, which is somehow poetic, don’t you think? She lives on in the trees and flowers. So no, I don’t think her body will be turning up anytime soon.’

  Sarah looked away. A wave of nausea washed over her. She knew Ethan, had bought meat – and sausages – from him. She may have eaten the ones Jean had made the night she killed Karen.

  She retched, then pushed the thought away. It was the least of her worries right now. Right now she was trapped in the basement of her friend. A friend who happened to be totally crazy.

  ‘And then,’ Jean said, ‘I waited a couple weeks before I took her clothes out to the ocean and left them with a suicide note. As you’ve found out, I have a talent for forgery.’

  ‘But why?’ Sarah said. ‘What had she done to you?’

  Jean’s face darkened. ‘She was making him marry her! Can you believe it? She wanted to get marr
ied to Jack and she was forcing him to do it.’

  ‘They had children, Jean. Why wouldn’t they get married?’

  ‘He didn’t want to,’ Jean said. ‘He told me he didn’t want to, but she was threatening to stop him seeing the kids if he didn’t marry her.’

  Sarah raised an eyebrow. ‘Why was he talking to you about that? Were you having an affair with him?’

  ‘Yes!’ Jean said. ‘He loved me. But then he told me it was over. He loved me but we had to end it because of her. And he couldn’t get rid of her because she would have taken his kids. He had no choice. At least, he thought he didn’t.’

  ‘So you killed her?’

  ‘I had to. He wanted me to.’

  Sarah doubted it. She was pretty sure Jack had gotten involved with Jean on the side and decided to end it, but to make it easier on Jean had told her he didn’t want to, but what else could he do? He loved his kids, and didn’t want to leave them. It was an old story. He just hadn’t counted on Jean being insane.

  ‘Did you tell him you’d killed her?’ Sarah said.

  Jean shook her head. ‘I wanted him to think it was suicide. So he would hate her. I didn’t want him feeling sympathy for her.’

  ‘And you got him, in the end,’ Sarah said. ‘You got what you wanted. But then he died in a car accident, so you were back to square one.’

  ‘Accident?’ Jean said. ‘There wasn’t any accident. He had to go.’

  Sarah felt the world narrow around her. ‘You killed him, too?’

  ‘I had to.’ Jean gestured to the chains. ‘He found those.’

  Sarah didn’t understand. But then, there was a lot she didn’t understand about this situation. ‘You killed him for that?’ she said. ‘For finding some chains?’

  Jean chuckled. ‘It wasn’t the chains,’ she said. ‘It was the kids. They were in them. It’s how I discipline the little shits.’

  ‘You put your – his – kids in these chains?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jean said. She held her hands up in a gesture of surprise. ‘It’s called discipline, Sarah. You need a sanction if kids are going to do what you say. You always tell me my kids are well behaved. Well, this is the reason why. If you did this, then yours might not be such fucking savages.’

  ‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘No. This is not the way.’

  ‘It is the way,’ Jean said. ‘But Jack agreed with you – he was a fucking pussy – and he was going to call the cops. So he had to go.’

  ‘But he was killed in a car accident,’ Sarah said. ‘How did you—’

  ‘It took some arranging,’ Jean said. ‘But look at your situation, Sarah. I’m good at arranging things. I’m not as stupid as you think.’

  So that was it? Jean was in love – if love was the right word – with Ben, and she was going to kill Sarah to get him, like she had done with Karen? Was she having an affair with Ben? Sarah doubted it, but maybe he had been friendly to her – like giving her the headlamp – and she had interpreted that as something more than it was.

  Either way, Sarah knew what she had to do: she had to convince Jean she could have Ben without killing her. She would say whatever it took – maybe tell her he had told Sarah he loved Jean, or wanted to leave Sarah for her, confess to stopping him – in the same way Karen had to Jack – but now she knew how much he meant to Jean she would let him go. She would agree that he could leave with full access to the kids; she would put no obstacles in his path.

  For the first time since she had been in the basement she felt a flicker of optimism.

  ‘Jean,’ she said, slowly. ‘Is this is all about Ben? You have a new obsession? A new man you want?’

  Jean frowned. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Ben’s merely a side benefit. This is all about you.’

  8

  You can turn off the ringer on a cell phone. Or you can leave it in a different room or your car or work bag, or do some other thing so you don’t hear it when it rings.

  You can’t do those things with a landline. You might be able to turn off the ringer, but if you could then Ben didn’t know how to do it on their phone, and he doubted Sarah did either.

  He was pretty sure Sarah would not have silenced the ringer, so either she was ignoring Ben’s calls – odd, since she wanted to speak to him – or she was out. But there were not many places she would be at seven in the morning.

  And the places she might be were not places that filled Ben with optimism for the future of his marriage, since most of them involved her sleeping in someone else’s house, in which case it was understandable she would not answer her cell phone.

  Presumably she would not want to embarrass or inconvenience whoever she was spending the night with.

  It was a measure of how far things had deteriorated that Ben wasn’t surprised she might at this very moment be having morning sex with someone she’d met on Craigslist. Disturbed, yes; upset, most definitely; but surprised? No, not any more. A year ago – a month ago – he would have found the merest suggestion of such a thing to be totally absurd, out of the bounds of possibility, but he had learned since then that the bounds of possibility were set pretty wide.

  Much wider than he had thought.

  He tried again; still no answer. He put his phone down on the nightstand and held his head in his hands.

  ‘Hey, Dad. Morning.’ Miles sat up in bed. ‘What are we doing today?’

  Ben smiled at his son.

  ‘Going home,’ he said.

  ‘Is everything OK, sir?’

  The clerk wore a concerned expression. Evidently Ben’s desire to check out a day early and immediately after breakfast was a red flag indicating some kind of customer dissatisfaction. He looked Ben directly in the eye.

  ‘Was there a problem with the room?’

  Ben shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Something came up. A personal matter.’

  ‘Are you sure, sir?’

  Kim wriggled in his arms.

  ‘Put me down,’ she said.

  Ben didn’t want to; he knew that as soon as her feet touched the floor she’d disappear. ‘In a minute,’ he said.

  ‘Now, Daddy. Put me down.’

  Ben looked at the clerk. ‘Really, everything was fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay and then we can go.’ He reached for his wallet; as he did, Kim took advantage of the loosening of his grip to twist and dive at the floor. He grabbed her.

  ‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Be still for a second.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ the clerk said. ‘We have your card on file. I can use it to check out?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ben nodded. ‘Yes, please.’

  In the car, Faye refused to buckle up.

  ‘I want to go to the aquarium,’ she said. ‘You promised we could go there.’

  ‘I know,’ Ben said. ‘And we will, soon. But today we have to go home.’

  ‘Why?’ Miles said. ‘Why did we come all this way just to go back first thing in the morning?’

  ‘Because we did,’ Ben said. ‘OK?’

  Before he had become a parent Ben had promised himself he would not fob off his kids’ questions with answers like Because I say so or Life’s not fair, get used to it or Because we did. His parents had done it to him, and so he’d decided to be the kind of parent who explained the reasons why patiently; by doing so he’d end up with reasonable kids who asked thoughtful questions and accepted his thoughtful responses.

  Which was not how it turned out. He had not accounted for the fact that kids did not ask questions because they wanted an answer, they asked them because they wanted a thing – candy, video games, trips to the aquarium – and when you told them they couldn’t have it, however thoughtful the reasons, they would simply ask why over and over until you gave in or said Because I said so. And then after a while, you stopped bothering with the thoughtful explanations and went straight to Because I said so.

  He had not wanted to end up there, but there he was. Exactly like his own mum and dad.

  His mum who was dying.

  Which made thi
s all the harder. He needed to be able to spend time back home, but how could he, when his wife was falling apart in front of his eyes? How could he leave the kids with her? It was the worst possible timing, and in his darker moments he wondered whether it was deliberate on Sarah’s part.

  He hoped not. That really would be the final nail in the coffin of their relationship.

  And the coffin was already pretty full of nails.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Who wants ice cream when we get home? And pizza for lunch?’

  ‘Me!’ Faye said, a response which was echoed by Miles and Kim.

  ‘Then buckle up and be quiet,’ he said. ‘Or it’s broccoli and dry toast. OK?’

  9

  This is all about you.

  Sarah had straightened up, sat upright, as the hope she had figured a way out of this grew.

  Now she slumped. The hope was gone.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘How is this about me?’

  Jean looked at her, eyes narrow, lips pressed thin. ‘The very fact you have to ask,’ she said, each word spoken slowly, hard and precise, ‘is exactly why this is about you.’

  It was obvious from both what Jean was saying and her expression – a mixture of anger, disdain and sheer hatred – that, as far as she was concerned, Sarah deserved this extreme form of punishment.

  The problem for Sarah was in working out what it could have been. They were friends. They’d had the odd argument over the years, but nothing big enough to warrant this. It would have to be huge, yet Sarah had no idea what it could have been.

  ‘Look at you,’ Jean said. ‘You’re blind. Blind to who you are and what you’ve done. You can’t imagine why anyone would hate you enough to want to destroy you.’

  ‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘I can’t. And even if I could, nothing would justify what you’re doing.’

  ‘What about an eye for an eye, Sarah? What about that?’

  ‘What about it?’ Sarah said. ‘Are you talking about revenge? I don’t think it’s ever helped anyone, ever. There’s a saying, Jean: “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” No one wins.’