Just Between Us

by Rebecca Drake

  “Did you and your husband ever argue?” the short one says to me, pen twitching in his stubby fingers. He has come alone this morning, perched on a stool at my kitchen island, reminding me of a troll with his round head and wild fringe of graying hair. There’s an oily stain on his cheap tie. I look away from it and up at his broad-featured face. I shrug.

  “Of course. Sometimes. All couples argue sometimes.” I give him a slight smile. “Are you married, Detective Tedesco?”

  He looks discomfited by the question, by this reversing of our positions, but he gives me a sharp nod.

  I nod, too, as if we’re agreeing with each other. “I’m sure we all argue sometimes with the ones we love.”

  “What makes you think you can win?” My hair pulled tight in his fist.

  The detective slaps his notebook on the marble countertop, startling me. “What about?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What did you and your husband argue about?”

  “Oh, nothing important.” I wave my hand to show him it’s trivial. “To tell the truth, Detective, my husband worked too many hours to be home long enough for much of an argument about anything.”

  “You talk only when I say you can talk.” Forcing me down on the bed, pushing my face into the mattress.

  “Did you fight about not having enough time together?”

  “Viktor disliked arguing,” I say, shifting on my stool and hoping the man doesn’t notice. “He thought it was pointless.”

  Daniel runs into the room, a welcome interruption. He woke up with a fever, so I reluctantly let him skip school. Now I’m glad he’s home. “What do you need, sweetie?” I stand up to indicate that I’m busy, that I’ve had enough questions for one day. Tedesco reluctantly stands up, too, flipping his notebook closed and shoving it back in his pocket.

  I’m glad Daniel is young enough to be spared all but the most basic questioning. He rarely saw his father, so it’s not surprising that he barely misses him.

  Viktor’s mother is a different story. Her son is dead and she has moved from sadness to anger. She’s eager to talk to the detectives, to tell them all about me. About my friends. She is watching me; I’m conscious of her gaze following me when she thinks I’m not looking. She can’t know—her son couldn’t have told her. She lurks around the house trying to catch me in conversation, and her sister, Olga, is no better, although I think she’s primarily interested in the insurance payout. The only thing pulling my mother-in-law away from her single-minded focus on me and Daniel is her dog, an elderly poodle named Max, who requires regular walks and chews on the curtains or shits on her cream-colored carpet when he doesn’t get enough attention. I’ve always hated that dog, but now that he’s the only reason I get some time away from Anna, I’ve developed a certain fondness for him. Recently I even bought Anna some dog biscuits she could take to him, hoping that would prompt her to leave right away. She’d eyed the bag and me with her usual sour-faced suspicion. I had to bite my tongue to stop from saying that if I’d wanted to poison her dog I would have done it years ago.

  The grocery store is virtually the only place I can go. The police are watching—I catch myself checking my rearview mirror for unmarked cars the few times I drive anywhere. Alison has warned me that the phones might be bugged, our calls recorded, so I can’t even text to ask how it’s going with the drop-off. I’m as much of a prisoner now as I was before. “You’re not going anywhere. You belong to me.”

  chapter twenty-seven

  ALISON

  It was always so quiet in the house with Michael and the kids gone, but that morning the silence seemed deafening. I tried to do some work online, answering emails, checking to make sure that a project I delivered had been received. The ticking of the clock seemed unnaturally loud. I didn’t want to be late, but if I got to the cemetery too early, I’d have to drive around in circles.

  I’d just taken my coat from the closet when the doorbell rang, a two-note peal that made me jump and seemed to echo in the quiet house. Fingers crossed it wasn’t a neighbor; I really didn’t have time to deal with anything else that morning. I pulled my jacket on and held my purse on my shoulder to make it clear that I didn’t have time for a chat as I opened the door. I peeped through the side window first, startled when I saw a strange man standing on my front steps.

  For a crazy second I thought he might be the blackmailer. I pulled open the door and the man turned—tall, a crew cut. He looked vaguely familiar.

  “Alison? Alison Riordan?”

  “Yes? Listen, I was just leaving to—” I’m not sure how much I would have revealed if he hadn’t interrupted me.

  “I’m Detective Jeff Kasper.” He flashed a badge. “I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.”

  “Actually, I’m on my way out,” I said. If the detective noticed that my voice sounded squeaky and scared, he didn’t react. The minute he said his name I remembered him from the funeral home. He and his partner had been there the entire time, watching and waiting.

  “This’ll just take a couple of minutes,” he said with a smile, but he didn’t budge from the doorway.

  “Of course, sure. I saw you at the funeral home. Is this something to do with Viktor Lysenko’s death?”

  He took a step forward, giving me an inquiring look, and I realized that he wanted to come inside. I didn’t know how to refuse. “Come on in; I can talk for a minute.” I stepped to the side and he brushed past me, the corner of his jacket moving so that I spotted his holstered gun. Without asking he walked into the living room, looking around with an interest I found nerve-racking. Maybe it was supposed to be. “Have a seat,” I said, picking a newspaper off a chair and straightening the couch cushions to hide my nervousness. “Would you like something to drink?” I asked, the manners my mother had drilled into me kicking in automatically.

  “Sure, got any bottled water?”

  Was this some sort of cop trick? Ask for bottled water so he could take the bottle with him and lift my fingerprints from it? “No, but I can get you tap.”

  “Tap would be fine.”

  Out of sight in the kitchen, I grabbed a glass from the cupboard and hurriedly filled it at the sink. The kitchen clock ticked away; my window of time evaporating. “Here you go,” I said as I came back into the living room, unnerved when I found him standing and looking at the photos hanging in my hall.

  “Is this your family?” he asked, pointing at a photo of the four of us from a few years earlier.

  “Yes. So what can I help you with, Detective?”

  He took the glass from my hand and took a big sip, watching me over the rim, before answering. “You’re a close friend of Heather Lysenko, right?”

  “We’re friends—I don’t know how close.”

  “Been friends for a long time?”

  “Several years.”

  He nodded as if that confirmed something he already knew. “Yeah, well, we’re trying to figure out what happened the night Dr. Lysenko was killed, just putting together a timeline—routine police stuff—and we noticed something.” He paused to put the glass down, searching around for a coaster before I handed one to him and he set it down on the coffee table. At any other time, I might have appreciated this consideration, but not at that moment, not when I was desperate to leave.

  Hands free, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small notebook, flipping through it. “We pulled the phone records for that night, and the thing is we found out that a call was placed from a cell phone registered to Heather Lysenko to your cell phone sometime after one A.M.” He looked up at me, that benign smile still on his face. “Do you remember that call, Mrs. Riordan?”

  “Please, call me Alison.” I stared straight back at him, trying to look impassive. “Of course I remember. Heather has trouble sleeping sometimes and she knows I’m a night owl, so she called to chat.” This was a preposterous lie; I’m a morning person in fact, in bed and fast asleep by ten most nights. I’d hated this when I was young because I c
ould never stay awake at sleepovers and always missed the best gossip, plaintively asking what everyone was giggling about the next morning over Pop-Tarts.

  “Did she talk about her husband?”

  I tried to look as if I were pondering. “I don’t think so—she might have mentioned that he wasn’t home yet. We only talked for five minutes.”

  “Less than five. It was only three minutes and forty-seven seconds.” Detective Kasper glanced down at his notebook for confirmation. “That’s a pretty quick chat. Why so short?”

  A moment’s pause that felt longer as I scrambled to think of an answer. “I’d actually already gone to sleep that night; Heather woke me up. She felt so bad for waking me, that I stayed on for a few minutes to make her feel better and try and help her get to sleep.”

  He scribbled this down in his notebook, before nodding and standing up. “Great, well that’s all the questions I’ve got at this point.”

  I stood up, too, feeling more than a little flustered, which was probably the point, so I did my best to hide it. “Have you found the guy who shot Dr. Lysenko?” I asked as we headed toward the door.

  “We’ve got some leads,” he said, “the investigation’s ongoing.” Was it my imagination or had he stared right at me on those last words?

  “It’s a terrible thing—I never thought something like this would happen in Sewickley.”

  Why had I said that? I could have bitten my tongue immediately after. I expected him to make a general comment about crime happening anywhere, but instead Kasper said, “Yes, it is pretty unusual.”

  I waited to leave until he’d pulled away from the curb in an unmarked Ford Taurus. It was five until ten; I had two missed calls from Julie and one from Sarah and I had at least a ten-minute drive to the drop-off point. I shot them a quick text before pulling out of the garage. Even if I raced the whole way, I was going to be late, and I didn’t dare speed; I was terrified that the detective or his partner was secretly watching me. Had they been watching all of us all along? What if the blackmail letter was a setup and the cops were waiting to trap us at the drop-off?

  Sarah shot down that idea when I called. “There’s no way. Think about it—if they sent the blackmail letter, then they have photos of us from that night. If they have photos of that night, then they wouldn’t need to set us up—we’d already be under arrest.”

  “You’re right, that’s right,” I said, but I couldn’t shake the paranoia that had me checking all the mirrors in my car every five seconds. “What if we’re too late—what if this person goes to the cops because I’m not there on time?”

  “They’re not going to do that. He—or she—is not a Good Samaritan—they’re an extortionist. That greedy asshole will make another attempt to get their hands on the cash before they even think about calling the cops.”

  It made sense, but I couldn’t shake a growing feeling that things were hurtling out of control. What had seemed like a good decision in the middle of the night looked like a horrible decision in the light of day, and I wished there were some magic morning-after do-over pill that could reverse everything. If only I’d insisted that Heather call the cops that night, then we wouldn’t have been out on Fern Hollow Road to be seen by the blackmailer, and we wouldn’t be risking our futures trying to drop off $20,000 to a total stranger.

  At least I thought it was a stranger. What if it was someone we knew? What if that’s why he or she had stopped on the road that night, because they’d recognized Julie’s car, or Viktor’s, and had been planning to offer help? That could explain how they knew our identities, because I was sure, so very sure, that no one had followed us back to Heather’s after we’d dropped off the body.

  “Where are you now?” Sarah interrupted my mental spiral.

  “At the clock tower. Where are you?”

  “In position, where we’ve been for over an hour,” Sarah said in a withering voice that made me think how much I would have hated appearing against her in court. Of course they were there; I knew that.

  “They’ve pulled Heather’s phone records—why would they do that if they think it’s a carjacking?”

  Sarah didn’t have a smart answer for that. She paused for a moment before saying, “It’s routine—they always have to look at the spouse in a suspicious death. It means nothing.” Even she didn’t sound convinced.

  As I drove slowly through the cemetery, I wished, more than anything else, to be back in time, back before that phone call in the middle of the night, back before we’d made the decision that had brought us to this point.

  I drove along the road in search of the Kershaw mausoleum, pausing to look at the printout of the map. Behind me a funeral procession was wending its way up to the cemetery chapel, a modern building with lots of windows that seemed out of place among all the old tombstones. The road continued over a hill and the cars dropped out of sight.

  The mausoleum was all the way at the back of the cemetery, down a little road flanked by pine trees. “Okay, I’m here,” I said to Sarah and Julie as I pulled off on the side.

  “We can see you,” Sarah said, but I couldn’t spot them. I glanced around before grabbing the duffel from the backseat and stepping out of the car. There was no other vehicle or person in sight, but I had that neck-crawling sensation of being watched.

  It was a short, uphill walk across bumpy ground to the mausoleum, which looked like a miniature stone house, with a peaked roof above the inscribed name and a pair of scrolled copper gates that had gone green with age. Who was Randall Kershaw? Someone who’d clearly had enough money for this monument of a final resting place. Was there anyone left alive to remember him? I looked around surreptitiously, wondering whether the blackmailer had already come and gone, before quickly placing the bag against a back corner of the mausoleum, just as the letter had instructed.

  I walked hurriedly back to my car, glancing back only once. The duffel bag was still sitting there. Some movement caught my attention and I turned in that direction, pulse jumping as I thought I spotted a figure darting behind a tree, but it was just a shadow.

  We’d agreed that I had to be seen driving away, because the blackmailer was undoubtedly watching the drop-off site. As I came over the hill, the service in the modern chapel had ended and mourners crowded the road. In keeping with the day I’d been having, a woman I knew crossed right in front of my car. She was the mother of one of Lucy’s friends. When she spotted me, her eyes went wide with recognition and she waved before saying something to her husband, who also turned to look at me, before she waved again.

  I waved back; what else could I do? Would they remember seeing me there if someone asked? The whole day had gone like that, just one mishap after another. As I drove out of the cemetery, I saw four ravens perched on top of a cross held by a downcast stone angel. It felt like an omen.

  chapter twenty-eight

  SARAH

  We’d been sitting there for almost two hours and my legs were starting to cramp, but we couldn’t get out and walk around or the blackmailer might spot us. What if we had to use the bathroom? Of course, the minute I had that thought all I could think about was needing to pee.

  “I shouldn’t have had so much coffee.” I squirmed in my seat.

  “Yes, better to skip all diuretics.” Julie looked pointedly at my travel mug. As much as I loved Julie, she could be really annoying. It was the little things she said and did, things you wouldn’t notice under normal circumstances, but in a high-pressure situation they seemed omnipresent. Like the fidgeting—I knew she was high-energy, but she couldn’t seem to sit still, fiddling with the radio knobs, with the coins in my car’s center console, with her earrings. “Where are they?” she said for the umpteenth time. She’d moved on to tapping on the dashboard, drumming so hard on the plastic that I’d thought she’d snap off an index finger.

  I ignored her, doing another circuit with my gaze—ahead at the mausoleum, up the hill to the right, down the hill to the left, and behind us. Alison’s car was lo
ng gone, but still no sign of the blackmailer. She’d mentioned the funeral procession, so I wasn’t surprised to spot a handful of mourners in the rearview mirror, carefully picking their way down a snowy hillside in the distance. Dressed in black and other dark colors, they were too far away for us to identify, which meant they wouldn’t be able to identify us either, or the minivan. In any case, they were too busy to do more than glance in our direction if they looked at all.

  “Maybe he’s been scared off by them,” I said, pointing over my shoulder at the mourners.

  Julie shifted in her seat to see them. “I hope not,” she said, before turning her attention back to the mausoleum. The duffel bag was tucked against the stone, but we could still see it. The wind played with the thin straps, lifting one like a black ribbon.

  The rumble of an engine made us both sit up. A big yellow backhoe came around the hillside, huge tires crunching down the road, a man in a sheepskin jacket sitting behind the steering wheel stationed high up in the cab.

  “I’m guessing that’s the gravedigger,” Julie said. “It’s sure a lot less romantic than two guys with shovels.” The backhoe came slowly down the road before stopping adjacent to the road we were watching, the massive machine groaning and sighing, like a dinosaur settling in to rest.

  “What the hell,” I said. “He’s blocking our view.”

  The mausoleum was now hidden by the backhoe; we could only see a corner of the stone building. For a second I wondered if the driver could be the blackmailer, but he didn’t get out of the cab, just lit up a cigarette and sat back, apparently waiting until the hillside service behind us finished to take a left down the road where we were parked.

  “C’mon, move it,” Julie muttered, stretching her neck to try to see past the machine. “Should we get out and look?”

  “No, the backhoe driver will see us, if not the blackmailer,” I said. “He didn’t stop the machine, he’s just paused. He’s got to move soon.”