Just Between Us

by Rebecca Drake

  “I took the final two thousand dollars from the kids’ education fund,” she said as she loaded her contribution into the plastic bag. “I just hope Eric doesn’t look at that account before I have time to replace the money.” She sounded resentful and kept shooting looks at Heather, who volunteered that she’d raised her money by “pawning two bracelets and a ring from Viktor.” If she thought this would make Sarah feel better, it didn’t; she seemed even more annoyed. Later I overheard her whispering to Alison about not owning anything except her house and her car—certainly not any jewelry—worth that kind of money.

  “Did anyone see you?” Alison asked Heather. “What pawnshop did you use?”

  “Don’t worry, I went to one in the city. I looked around—no one was following me.”

  “We didn’t think anyone was following us that night either,” Sarah said darkly. “Maybe the blackmailer was watching you.”

  “Stop it, Sarah,” I said.

  “Well, he might have been,” she said defensively. “How do you know he wasn’t?”

  “How do you know it’s a he?” Alison said. “The blackmailer could be a woman.”

  I thought of Christine Connelly’s odd behavior at the funeral and broke into a sweat. Could my neighbor have followed me that night? Could she be the blackmailer? I thought about telling the others, but just then Alison’s kitchen phone rang, a shrill sound that startled us all, Heather dropping a bundle of money, which spilled across the table.

  “Be careful,” Sarah snapped, slapping her hand over the bills to stop their flight off the tabletop.

  “You be careful,” Heather snapped back.

  “Shh,” I hissed as Alison scrambled to find the phone among a pile of dirty dishes on the counter.

  “Hello?” Her voice was breathless as she answered. “Oh, hi.” She turned back to us and mouthed, “Michael.”

  The rest of us didn’t speak, quietly shuffling the loose bills back into an orderly stack as Alison carried the phone into another room.

  “I need a drink,” Sarah said as soon as she was gone, stalking over to the fridge and taking a bottle of chardonnay from a door shelf as if she lived there. “Anybody else?” She wiggled the bottle in our direction. I shook my head, but Heather said, “Sure, why not.”

  Sarah smiled at that—the first smile I’d seen from her that day—and took some glasses down from a cupboard. “Oh, stop looking so disapproving, Julie,” she said as she handed Heather her drink.

  “We have to pick up the kids in under an hour,” I said, emphasizing the time.

  “It’s just a little wine,” she said, but she left the bottle on the table. “Relax.”

  I didn’t say anything more, shoving stacks of bills into the garbage bag and wishing I’d convinced Brian to leave for Cancún. At that moment, I could have been relaxing on a beautiful beach with a fruity drink of my own, enjoying the warm sun thousands of miles away from all of this.

  Alison came back into the kitchen just as we finished zipping the garbage bag full of money into the duffel. “Sorry about that—I got off as fast as I could.” She noticed the bottle of wine and she raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything, just pointedly moved the bottle to the kitchen counter. She shifted the duffel to the side of the table and passed out printouts of a map, slapping hers down in the center.

  “This is the Sewickley Cemetery,” she said, taking a seat. “Our only insurance is to catch the blackmailer in the act. If we can find out who he or she is, then we can at least keep an eye on them and make sure they don’t go to the police.” The rest of us sat down as well, and watched as she used a highlighter to circle an area on the map. “Here’s where Viktor was buried,” she said, tapping the location. “And here is the site for the drop-off.” She dragged her finger clear across the page to another spot and highlighted it. Had the blackmailer been at Viktor’s funeral? Was that why they suggested the cemetery? Alison circled a third spot. “And here is a place where we can stake out the mausoleum.”

  “Julie can do the drop-off,” Sarah suggested.

  “Why me? I don’t want to do it,” I said, alarmed.

  “Isn’t a client buried there?” Sarah said. “Nobody will think anything of you visiting a friend’s grave.”

  “I can’t do the drop-off alone,” I said. “I’m too nervous. One of you has to come with me.”

  Alison shook her head. “It can’t be more than one of us—the letter was clear.”

  “What about me?” Heather asked. “I’ll do it.”

  “You can’t be there,” Alison said. “What if the police are watching you?”

  “I’d say I was visiting Viktor’s grave.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t want the police anywhere near the blackmailer. And Viktor’s grave isn’t near that mausoleum. You can’t be seen doing anything even remotely suspicious right now.”

  “Then you drop off the money,” I said to Alison. “I’ll wait with Sarah in the car at the stakeout spot.”

  Alison made a sound that was half growl, half sigh. “Fine, I’ll do the drop-off. But don’t get so caught up in conversation that you two forget to look out for the blackmailer.”

  Sarah visibly bristled, but I spoke first to head off her angry response. “Don’t worry—we’ll be watching.”

  In theory, the whole thing sounded smart and doable. And if things had gone according to plan, it might have worked. But life so rarely goes according to plan.

  * * *

  Alison was right—the letter was very clear. One of us had to come alone to the cemetery before ten A.M., drop the bag at the designated mausoleum and leave. Despite the simplicity, I read and reread the directions numerous times the night before and checked and rechecked both locations on the map. Sarah would pick me up in the morning and we’d get to the stakeout spot more than an hour ahead to make sure that we weren’t noticed.

  I’d felt jittery all day, as if I’d had too much caffeine, a wired, high-energy feeling that persisted even after we’d turned off the lights to sleep. While Brian was in the bathroom, I got up and tiptoed downstairs to check the directions in the letter one more time and to look at my copy of the map. Both were hidden inside my purse, which I’d left in my car.

  “What are you doing down here?” Brian’s voice startled me. I dropped my bag and whipped around, slamming the car door closed behind me.

  “Don’t do that! You scared me.”

  “You’re scaring me,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. I just came down to find my phone.” I held it up to show him.

  He looked skeptical, but he didn’t say anything until we were back upstairs in our bedroom. He took a seat next to me on the bed as I was setting my alarm. “Jules, I want to know what’s going on.”

  I looked up at him, but couldn’t quite meet his gaze. “What? Nothing’s going on.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  I flushed and looked away, but he put a gentle hand on my chin and pulled me back, searching my face, staring deeply into my eyes. In that moment I felt desperate to explain it all, to beg him to fix it and make everything go back to the way it had been.

  But I thought of the gun, the gun Brian didn’t even know I’d possessed, and I knew I couldn’t tell him. “It’s nothing,” I said, my gaze darting away from his. “It’s just the stress—the closing I’ve got in Edgeworth this week.”

  He looked unconvinced as he held on to my face. “You’ve never been this stressed about a closing before.”

  “Yes I have—remember the D’Amicos?”

  “That was years ago, when you were first starting out.”

  I pulled at his hand and he let me go. “This is a lot more money.”

  He was silent for a moment and then he said in a low voice, “Are you in trouble?”

  “What? No. Of course not.” As if I were surprised and hadn’t known exactly what he meant the minute he asked. I forced myself to look straight at him, struggling to keep the crawling sensation in my gu
t from appearing on my face.

  “Because if you are, I want to know now, Jules. I don’t want to find out like last time.”

  Memories of that day flooded me, snatches of color and sound, the feel of metal tightening around my wrists, the pattern in the cheap carpet that I’d kept my eyes fixed on as I was led out of the office past all those staring faces. I struggled to push the memories down, the sting of humiliation fresh for a moment before I locked it all away again.

  “It’s not that,” I lied. “I promise.”

  Getting under the covers, I curled up next to him. He’s a proud man, so it took me a minute to realize that he hadn’t just asked because of the past, he was wondering about the future. Specifically, had I met someone else? I leaned in to kiss him, giving him the reassurance he couldn’t ask for, running a hand over his chest and then letting it drop lower.

  * * *

  My worries from the night before seemed to have carried real trouble into the next day. Owen and Aubrey dawdled over breakfast and I burned my hand when coffee splashed over the mug I yanked too fast from under the maker. “Poor Mommy,” Aubrey said, offering to kiss it for me.

  “Thank you, but I need you to hurry now and get dressed while I find your rain boots, okay?”

  Of course it was pouring outside, just something else to make the day harder. I dug in the closet for the kids’ rain gear as I heard them squabbling upstairs. “Mommy, Owen stole my car!”

  “It’s not her car, it’s my car—she knows that!”

  “C’mon, you two, we don’t have time. Leave the cars and get down here.” If you think that was effective, then you’ve never had children.

  Only after I’d marched upstairs, physically pulled them apart, and promised that later, after school, I’d use the wisdom of Solomon to determine who the Hot Wheels car belonged to was I able to hustle them downstairs and into rain gear and load both of them and their backpacks into the car.

  I’d just fastened my own seat belt when Owen cried out, “Lunch, Mommy! You forgot my lunch box!”

  “Mine, too, Mommy!” Aubrey would never be excluded from any drama.

  Back into the house to grab the lunch boxes off the kitchen counter, back out to the car, race to the bus stop, keeping an eye out for cops and overzealous neighbors who might report my speeding. I saw Alison’s car ahead of me in the queue, but it was raining too hard for anyone to stand outside. Five minutes, eight minutes. The bus was late this morning. “C’mon, c’mon,” I muttered while the kids speculated about what the driver could be doing. Finally, mercifully, the bus came up the street, and I opened my big golf umbrella and escorted the kids out of the car and onto it.

  Back in the car and a ping from my cell phone—a text from Alison to Sarah and me: Good luck; see you later. Home to shower and change, dressing as if it were any other workday. As I applied makeup I tried to stay positive. The worst would be over in a few hours. We’d pay and this troll would go away, slink back under his or her bridge.

  Sarah showed up on time, which was a relief. I wanted to drive, but she’d insisted, arguing that since my car was partially visible in the blackmailer’s photo it was a bad idea to take it to the cemetery. “Ready to go?” she said, tossing her purse in the back and brushing crumbs off my seat as I got in the minivan. I surreptitiously sniffed, hunting for a whiff of alcohol. Nothing but the unappetizing mixed scents of stale Goldfish crackers and damp gym socks. And breath mints. A wave of mint assaulted me as Sarah turned her head to back down my driveway. What was she trying to cover? I clutched the door handle, nervous as Sarah pulled onto the street, but her driving seemed steady.

  We turned in to the gates of the Sewickley Cemetery just before nine A.M., slowing to a crawl up the narrow, sharply winding road that climbed a steep hillside, eventually reaching the top, where gravestones perched like candles on top of a birthday cake. It looked like a crowded but beautiful final resting spot, although not as much in winter, with the dead yellow grass poking through patches of dingy snow and the black spires of bare trees looking like charred skeletons. Not that I thought much about the landscape in that moment. I was too stressed, checking right and left, while Sarah kept glancing in the rearview mirror. But there was no one out visiting graves this early on a day so rainy and cold.

  I’d last been to a cemetery on Memorial Day, making the annual pilgrimage with my mother to put flowers on the graves of her parents, my gram and pap. “She was never the same without him,” she’d said four years earlier when we’d buried my grandmother next to my grandfather, who’d died over a decade before. “She missed him every day.” She always had pride in her voice, pleased to believe that her parents had been devoted to each other. I wasn’t so sure.

  By the time I really knew my grandparents, they’d settled into the resignation I’ve seen in lots of older, long-married couples—general acceptance of the other with occasional bouts of irritation at foibles that had probably once seemed endearing. My grandmother was quick to laugh, but could be impatient with my grandfather’s sloppy eating habits. My grandfather once spent an entire afternoon patiently helping me learn to ride my bike, only to snap at my grandmother for being ten minutes late with his dinner. I’d never seen either abuse the other, though. If my grandfather had truly mistreated my grandmother, would she have considered leaving him? Most people didn’t in her generation, they just sucked it up and muddled along, convinced by religion or a difficult legal system that they couldn’t break their relationships.

  Heather wasn’t part of that generation, but she hadn’t left either, or at least not at first. As Sarah drove past the road that led to the mausoleum, I wished that Viktor hadn’t come home early that day, or that Heather had just had the courage to leave him months ago. If she’d only gotten out of there sooner, none of us would be in this situation.

  I gave myself a mental shake to focus on the here and now. Only a few more hours and we’d be done with this. We just had to pay the money and it would be all over.

  Sarah parked in the spot that Alison had identified, down a road that ran perpendicular to the one with the mausoleum. The view was partially obstructed by pine trees; those hadn’t been reflected on the map. “This is going to strain my neck,” I said, craning to see past the feathery boughs.

  “Don’t bother—the road dead-ends up there,” Sarah said. “We’ll see them coming and going.”

  When the rain slowed to a mist, Sarah stopped running the windshield wipers and turned off the car. “We don’t want to call attention to ourselves,” she said, but it got cold quickly without the engine on to run the heater. I burrowed into my down coat and pulled the hood up. Sarah kept popping her mouth above the top of her fully zipped jacket to take sips from a purple travel mug.

  “Is that coffee?”

  “Yep.”

  She didn’t offer me a sip. Was it spiked? I wouldn’t ask. No need to provoke an argument, but maybe I’d insist on driving home. I hadn’t thought to bring coffee—or booze—but I took small sips from my water bottle and tried to avoid glancing at my phone. It’s amazing how dependent on these things we’ve become. No need for boredom when you’ve got an electronic device to distract you, except we weren’t allowed to be distracted.

  “Do you think whoever it is will notice us sitting here?” Sarah said nervously. “What if they’re here right now, watching us?”

  I craned my neck to look all around, but the place was deserted. We had only the dead for company.

  Time really does slow to a crawl when you’re watching it—9:10, 9:20, 9:30. There was no sign of the blackmailer or Alison.

  “Where is she?” I asked, yanking off my hood and looking around again, trying to see the roads above and below us.

  Sarah took another swallow from her purple mug. “She’ll be here.”

  The letter had said ten A.M. What if the blackmailer showed up and the money wasn’t there?

  When it was 9:50 I pulled out my phone and called. It rang and rang before going to voice mail.
“She’s not answering.” I hung up and dialed again.

  “She’s probably driving,” Sarah said, but she pulled out her own phone, checking for messages.

  “It’s almost ten,” I said when it bounced to voice mail the second time. “Where on earth are you?”

  The next five minutes felt like fifty. Sarah called, as if Alison would have been more likely to pick up for her. Voice mail again.

  “What are we going to do?” I said, tapping the dashboard. “We can’t just sit here.”

  “Well, we can’t just leave.”

  “Something must have happened. What if she had an accident? Oh my God—if she had an accident they could find the money.”

  At that moment my phone pinged, interrupting my panic with a text from Alison: The police were at my house.

  chapter twenty-six

  HEATHER

  Viktor is dead. I say that to myself multiple times a day. Viktor is dead and I don’t have to worry about him anymore. He can’t catch me off guard. I don’t have to watch out for his approach or race home to be on time to serve his dinner. I don’t have to hide. I should feel free in a way that I haven’t in years.

  At night I spread out in the bed I shared with him, the bed where I’d done my best to avoid having sex with him, luxuriating in the fact that I no longer have to pretend to be asleep. That threat that hung over my life is gone. When I do sleep, it’s more deeply than I have in years.

  Of course, the reality is that I am not really free, not now. The blackmail letter has seen to that. What are we going to do if they decide $20,000 isn’t enough? And the detectives have been sniffing around. I can sense their presence before they ring the bell, the way a cat is alert to that faint rustle in the weeds before she spots a rodent. I let them into the house every time and try to remain calm in the face of their roundabout questions. They don’t fool me—I know what they want.