The bishop at Viktor’s funeral was also a heavy breather, the microphone picking up every inhalation during his long sermon. There were sniffling sounds as some people quietly wept, and faint rustling as they searched pockets and purses for tissues.
“Viktor Lysenko was a loving son,” he said, “a devoted husband and father, a gifted healer, one of a select group of men and women in our world who have been entrusted with easing the suffering of those around them.”
I snorted without thinking. Michael gave me a surprised look and a woman in front of me glanced over her shoulder. I quickly pressed a tissue against my nose, pretending to be blowing. Gifted healer. Images flooded me—the bruises, the burns, the shards of glass all over their kitchen floor. I squirmed in my seat as I listened to the accolades, which went on and on. After the bishop, the priest spoke, detailing how charming Viktor had been as a little boy new to this country, and telling a story about how as a teenager he’d helped nurse a stray cat back to life and found his calling. His mother sobbed throughout, falling conspicuously quiet only when the priest turned his attention to Heather, remarking on how Viktor had bloomed again through love after being unexpectedly widowed.
Finally he was done speaking, but the service dragged on and on. After communion, when Lucy stage-whispered “How much longer, Mommy?” just as Matthew started drumming on the pew, I made the snap decision to take both children out.
Nudging Michael, I nodded silently toward the rear of the church before ushering Lucy and Matthew out of the pew and down the side aisle, grateful that we were toward the back and trying to move quietly so we wouldn’t disrupt the end of the service. I’d never seen a church so packed. When my grandmother died, we’d had half as many in the congregation, but that was the difference between dying young and dying in your eighties—there were just more people still around to mourn you. Plus, everyone thought Viktor had been the victim of a violent crime, and that brought out the curiosity seekers and hysterics, people who believed that they were somehow connected to the death of a man they’d never met outside of the local TV or newspapers.
There were dozens of people like that, some clutching bouquets of flowers, others straining to see past the heads and shoulders of those in front of them. As I glanced at the crowd as we left the church, one familiar face jumped out—the short, balding detective. He recognized me as well, I could see it in his eyes, and I looked away, pretending to be absorbed in helping the children, while I fought the urge to run from the building. What was he doing here?
“It’s cold out here, Mommy,” Lucy said in a reproving tone as we stood outside on the church steps and I gulped mouthfuls of crisp air.
“Yes, doesn’t it feel good?”
“No. It’s too cold and I don’t have my mittens.”
“No,” Matthew echoed with a big grin. “I don’t have my mittens.”
“Stop copying me.” Lucy gave him a severe look. “Tell him, Mommy, tell him to stop copying me.”
“Stop copying, Matthew,” I said, digging in my purse in a vain search for ibuprofen to curtail the headache I could feel mounting. “He copies because he admires you, Luce—you should be flattered.”
“No, he does it to bother me,” Lucy said, crossing her arms across her chest, a gesture that Matthew promptly copied, putting paid to my theory. She stamped her foot. “Stop it!”
“Stop it!” Matthew echoed.
“Both of you stop it,” I snapped. “We’re at church, not a playground. You need to be quiet at church.”
As I pulled out my cell phone to text Michael for backup, the doors of the church suddenly opened and music poured out along with a parade of people. I hastily pulled the kids off to one side, all of us watching as the coffin was hoisted onto the shoulders of the pallbearers while Heather followed, tears running unchecked down her face.
Was the detective watching that? I hoped so. You had to be extremely cynical not to be moved by this public display of grief from the slain doctor’s young, beautiful widow. Even I had to swallow against a sudden lump in my throat.
Julie and Brian passed by on the other side of the crowd with their children, and she waved a hand to me in passing, but didn’t stop, heading toward the parking lot with a speed that I envied, especially after we got stuck in the procession, a funeral-home attendant slapping a magnetic flag on our car before we could pull out.
“Oh, well, how long could this take?” Michael said with a careless shrug completely at odds with the panicked look on his face. The answer to that was forever, an interminable parade of cars moving at a snail’s pace all the way back to Sewickley and up a sharply winding hill to the cemetery. Michael stayed with the kids in the car while I picked my way along with others across a snow-covered hillside to the grave site. I kept perched on my toes, trying not to let my heels sink into the damp ground, praying fervently for this torture to come to an end. More incense and droning from the priest—it just went on and on. I suppose as a Catholic I should have felt that this was penitential in some way, or as our yoga instructor Shanti might have put it, karmic. I’d caught a glimpse of her in the crowd at the church, looking exotic in a green silk sari, that bloodred bindi a third eye among her crazy blond ringlets.
At last we reached the end, and the coffin was lowered slowly into the ground, at which point Anna Lysenko let out a howl of grief so visceral that it made me shiver. She fell back into the arms of some male relative, almost as if it had been orchestrated, but despite her clear theatrics, tears streamed down my own face. I was a mother, too.
By the time we made it back to the church social hall for the luncheon that followed, the children were snarling at one another and Michael had joined Matthew in complaining about the need to use the bathroom. They disappeared down a hallway while Lucy and I entered a large room with round tables set with white cloths and fake flower arrangements. Along the sides were long buffet tables laden with a strange mixture of American picnic food (potato and macaroni salads and coleslaw, all dripping copious amounts of mayonnaise, plus Jell-O in various Day-Glo colors) and Ukrainian specialties, heavy on meat, cabbage, and potatoes. There was also a separate table piled high with Eastern European pastries, the sight of which made Lucy perk up.
As we joined the buffet line, I realized that I recognized the couple in front of us—neighbors of Heather’s, elderly, old-money WASPs, making their way down the line with the focused interest of anthropologists. The silver-haired man paused before each dish to ask the church ladies serving for the name and ingredients, inquiring, “What is this called again? Ha-lush-ki. And it’s cabbage you say? Why of course I’ll try some—just a small serving.” And his wife, in a tweed suit with her iron-gray bob held back by an Alice band, gave each woman a bright smile reminiscent of a lady of the manor visiting tenant farmers, as she murmured, “How lovely this is, just lovely.”
Michael joined us in the line, holding tight to Matthew, who’d spotted a fountain spewing some cherry-red liquid over on a drinks table. “He tried to dip his hand in it,” my husband complained, giving our son a little shake.
“If you don’t behave you can’t have any cookies,” I said to him and Lucy, resorting to being the sort of parent I’d always promised myself I wouldn’t be.
Sarah passed by the buffet line carrying a full plate and raising an even fuller glass of wine to me. “This makes the whole thing bearable,” she said in a low voice, nodding toward a corner where a man behind a bar was expertly pouring what looked like bourbon. We made it through the food line more or less intact—just a single spilled pierogi quickly squashed under a stranger’s shoe—and wended our way through the crowded room, holding the plates aloft and instructing Lucy and Matthew to stay close so we wouldn’t lose them. When Michael spotted a table with four free seats, we took it, and then he went in search of drinks.
The event had the atmosphere of a wedding, albeit more somber, large numbers of unconnected people coming together to celebrate the life of the man smiling out at the room from
a blown-up headshot mounted on an easel. A special table for Heather and her in-laws was nearby, and she sat there like a bride in black, watching with apparently rapt interest as various people stepped up to the open microphone set up next to the photo to give speeches about her dead husband. It was mostly his colleagues, who told long rambling stories of Viktor’s prowess as a surgeon, using so much technical jargon that only the other medical professionals in the room had a clue as to when we were supposed to laugh or cry.
“To Viktor,” each person would say at the end, holding a glass aloft.
“To Viktor!” everyone in the room would echo, glasses raised. Matthew giggled as he held up his glass of punch, his lips already dyed red like a clown’s. Lucy disappeared from the table only to come back bearing a plate piled high with cookies, nibbling her way through them like a determined mouse, taking a bite from one and then a bite from another, probably to stop her brother from claiming any.
I drank a vodka tonic in record time and headed to the bar in search of some water, literally bumping into Sarah on the way. Or rather she bumped into me, her second (or was it her third?) very full glass of wine sloshing dangerously. “Watch out,” she said with a smile, her speech slurred so that it sounded like, “Wash out.”
“Be careful,” I said in a low voice. “The police are probably here somewhere.”
“Don’t worry—I’m fine,” she said, waving my concern away, but her smile was loopy and her eyes were glassy.
Seeing Sarah like that should have stopped me, but when the bartender asked what I’d like I found myself ordering another vodka tonic instead of water. I drank the second one too fast, also, sucking on the lime-soaked ice and avoiding Michael’s raised eyebrows when I wandered back to our table. On rare occasions I had more than one drink, mostly because I was a lightweight, capable of feeling a pleasant, blurry buzz from a single drink. But if there were ever an occasion to drink heavily, I thought, the funeral of a man you helped kill would be the time. For a moment I thought I’d said that out loud, looking from my glass to Michael’s face too quickly, the room spinning. “That was a joke,” I said.
“What was?” he said, and my vision steadied enough to see that his expression was confused and I hadn’t revealed anything. I shook my head and he laughed. “Good thing I’m the designated driver—I’ll get you some water.”
He wandered off toward the bar, and the children found friends to play with, including Sam and Olivia. “Where’s your mom gone to?” I asked. They pointed vaguely and I craned my head to see, but there were too many people. An older man carrying a plate of food sat down at one of the empty spaces at our table and gave me a polite smile.
“Are you a family member or a friend?” he asked after a minute of silent eating.
“Friend,” I said. “Although I’m better friends with his wife.”
“Ahh, yes, Heather.” He smiled again. He was picking carefully at his plate, cutting a cabbage roll into tidy segments before spearing one with his fork.
“You?” I asked, more to be polite than out of any real interest. “Friend or family?”
“A friend. A colleague, too, actually. I’m a surgeon. Viktor and I worked together.”
“Oh, I see.” That explained the careful operations he was performing on his plate of food. “One of the rare gifted healers.” That came out sounding much more sarcastic than I’d intended—I was as drunk as Sarah. Careful, I thought. Be careful.
He smiled a bit uncertainly and gave a little laugh. “We try.” Another speared bite of cabbage, again chewed carefully and thoughtfully. He was meticulous, like Viktor. Perhaps this was true of all surgeons. I thought of how displeased Viktor would have been by the messy, gaping hole the bullet had left in his skull. All that blood and brain spatter. My stomach suddenly rose and fell, like the tide slapping against a dock, and I swallowed hard, trying to steady myself. The man was looking at me quizzically, his fork poised halfway to his mouth, and I realized he’d said something and I hadn’t answered him.
“Pardon?”
“Isn’t it sad about Daniel—first his mother dies of cancer and now his father. That’s some rotten luck.” He popped the bite in his mouth and then shook his head while chewing.
Something in that story—it wasn’t right. I shook my head, trying to clear it. “You mean Janice?”
He looked surprised. “Yes. Did you know her? A lovely woman—”
“No, no, I didn’t.” I shook my head too hard and my stomach protested again. “But it wasn’t cancer—her death, I mean. She fell.”
He thought about that for a moment, but then shook his head. “No, I’m pretty certain it was cancer.”
Maybe that’s what Viktor had told his colleagues. He certainly wouldn’t want them to know that he’d used his wives as punching bags. Before I could say that, Michael appeared with a glass of water. “Here, drink this while I find the kids. Let’s take off before it’s time for happy hour.”
* * *
“I’m not going into work,” Michael announced as we drove home. “I’ll telecommute for the rest of the day—that was exhausting.”
“Yay! Daddy’s home!” Lucy cheered, and when Matthew echoed her this time she didn’t seem to notice.
“You were well behaved for the most part,” I said, filled with sudden beneficence toward them. It was always like that with parenting; when they were being awful you could barely stand it, but then they acted loving with each other and you were besotted all over again, convinced that your children were angels.
“Can we watch a movie?” Lucy asked.
“Sure, why not,” I said, and both kids cheered again.
“You’re easy,” Michael said with a laugh, and then, in a lower voice, “Maybe I should ask for something?” He gave me a wicked grin and this time I laughed.
“Maybe you should.”
My phone buzzed silently and I saw a text from Julie: Call me!
I smiled, imagining how she’d enjoy hearing me describe the craziness of the church luncheon. The tension I’d felt for the last week had eased significantly, helped along by the liquor. It felt good to be done with the funeral. And so what if the detectives had been there? There had been nothing and no one to suspect; Heather had performed the role of grieving widow perfectly. The rest of us had stayed away from her and one another. The biggest performance of our lives was over and I felt almost giddy.
As we pulled onto our street, I couldn’t help projecting ahead. In a few weeks, we’d be together again at the coffee shop and life would go on, but it would be even better than before because we wouldn’t have to worry about Heather. Maybe she’d sell the house on the hill and buy one down in the village. I thought about asking Julie to keep an eye out.
I was humming as Michael pulled into the driveway, still suffused by the pleasant buzz. “I’ll get the mail,” I offered as he parked the car. “You guys go ahead in with Daddy.”
“Can we have popcorn with our movie?” Lucy asked, ever the bargainer.
“Didn’t you eat enough cookies?” Michael said.
It was a short walk down the driveway and up the sidewalk to the mailbox at the end of the flagstone walkway that led to our house. The sky was deceptively blue, the sun actually warming my hands as I reached to pull down the little arched metal door. Inside the box was a small pile of mail. I pulled it out, flipping absently through it as I started up the walk. The vast majority was always junk mail. We did all of our banking online, and most of my business correspondence was done online, too. It was rare for us to get real paper mail, so I was surprised to see a business envelope addressed to me.
Tucking the rest of the mail under my arm, I tore open the envelope and pulled out the letter. It was a plain sheet of white paper with a single paragraph of black text. The first line stopped me short: I saw you and your friends on Fern Hollow Road.
chapter twenty-three
ALISON
For a moment, I just stood there, staring down at the letter, my skin hot a
nd tingling as if each word were a slap. You thought no one was watching, but I saw you. I know what you did to Dr. Lysenko and I’ve got the photos to prove it. There was a photo at the bottom of the page. I tore my gaze from the text and down to it. A grainy shot, but I knew immediately where it had been taken. I was clearly recognizable, caught in the Mercedes’s headlights with a garbage bag in my hand, and Julie stood behind me, though only half of her face was visible. Heather had her head down and turned slightly away, although someone could pick her out from her height and slimness, but Sarah was in the worst position: The camera had caught her standing in front of Viktor’s car, yanking free of that makeshift plastic suit.
Who had taken this photo? How? Fern Hollow Road had been deserted—we’d looked around, we’d been so careful.
I will go to the police unless you leave $20,000 in cash at the Kershaw mausoleum in the Sewickley Cemetery on Friday, February 24th, by 10:00 A.M.
My phone buzzed in my pocket and I jumped before fumbling for it. Julie texting again: URGENT—CALL ASAP!
She answered on the first ring. “A letter came today,” she said before I could say anything, her voice higher-pitched than normal.
“I got one, too—does it have a photo at the bottom?” I said, trying to quell the panic bubbling up to replace my initial shock.
“Yes, yes, that’s it. But how? We were so careful.” Her voice climbed even higher, edging into hysteria. “No one could have seen us—how could someone have seen us?”
“What about the others?” I interrupted. “Did they get the letter, too?”
Just Between Us Page 17
