Just Between Us

by Rebecca Drake

  “Is it ringing?” I asked, looking from them to Alison and back again. “Maybe it hasn’t rung yet.”

  “It’s ringing,” Alison said. “It’s rung at least four times.”

  “It can’t be,” Julie said. “Neither of them is answering.”

  “Did you hit the right number?” Heather asked. “Maybe you hit another number.”

  “How could I have hit another number? I just pressed the number that shows up on my screen.”

  “Let me see it.” Heather reached over the seat to try to grab the phone, but Alison fended her off. Terry and her husband went inside. We watched their large wooden door close.

  “Maybe she won’t answer the phone in front of her husband,” I said. “Blackmailing is probably her dirty little secret. Maybe we’re not the only targets—what was she doing out that late at night anyway?”

  “We could blackmail her,” Heather said excitedly, but none of us responded.

  After five interminable minutes, Alison finally called the number again. It rang and rang and rang. No voice mail, nothing. “Maybe she’s got her phone on silent,” Julie said, so desperate to believe this that it hurt to hear. “Let’s give it another few minutes.”

  We waited five more, which felt like fifty. There was no answer again. “We can’t just sit here all night,” I said, pissed off. I undid my seat belt and started to open the car door.

  “What are you doing?” Julie hissed, panicked. “You can’t go out there!”

  “You might be too afraid to do anything but sit here, but I’m not,” I said.

  “You’re not sober enough to think straight,” Alison said. “Close the damn door.”

  “Are you calling me a drunk?” I said. “How dare you.”

  “I call them as I see them,” Alison said. “You need to get to an AA meeting.”

  “Take care of your own problems,” I said. “You have plenty of them.”

  “Stop it!” Julie cried. “Just stop it.”

  Heather, the cause of all of this, remained silent, pushed up against her corner of the backseat, just waiting, as always, for things to be resolved. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for you,” I said to her. “You should go get that fucking phone.”

  “No one is going anywhere,” Alison said, but then Julie surprised us all by unbuckling her seat belt.

  “We have to get that phone,” she said. “I’ll pretend I was in the neighborhood looking for houses to list.”

  Before any of us could stop her, Julie got out of the car and crossed the street. We watched as she walked briskly up Terry Holloway’s walk and onto the porch. We could see her at the front door. When the door swung open, Alison inhaled sharply. We didn’t have a clear view and I couldn’t tell who had come to the door and stood talking to Julie.

  “Do you think she’s scared to see Julie?” Heather said.

  Neither Alison nor I answered her; we were too busy staring at the house. There was movement on the porch, and Terry came into view, walking to the top porch step and pointing up the street. Julie was right behind her and it was clear they were having an animated conversation.

  “What the hell?” I said. “Terry looks totally relaxed.”

  “There could be a good reason for that,” Alison said in a quiet voice. “It might not be her number.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “Didn’t you just show us that it’s Kevin Sullivan’s number? And you found this address.”

  “It could be old information—numbers get reused. There’s a way to find out.” She pulled out her phone and started scrolling. “We need someone who’s close with Terry. Do we know anyone from school?”

  She was talking to me, but it was Heather who answered. “Jane. Jane Bartel.” She pulled out her own phone and dialed. “Hi, Jane, it’s Heather Lysenko.” Silence for a moment. “Thank you, I appreciate that. Yes, Daniel’s okay, thank you for asking. Listen, I have a quick question. Do you happen to have the phone number for Terry Holloway? I’m trying to reach her about the—oh, okay. That would be great, thanks so much.” She covered the phone with her hand and whispered, “She’s looking it up.”

  The number wasn’t the one we had. Alison typed the number from Jane directly into her phone as Heather repeated it. Alison put it on speaker and we waited, intently watching Terry, who still stood there on her front porch talking with Julie.

  It rang only three times before we saw Terry pull a phone from the pocket of her slacks, and then we heard a voice that sounded familiar. “Hello?”

  Alison hung up. There was silence in the car. A sense of despair washed over me. It wasn’t Terry Holloway; this whole thing had been a waste of time. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is—this was a phrase my father had loved to repeat, one of many maxims that had made up the majority of his conversational arsenal.

  Less than a minute after we hung up, Julie said her good-byes and crossed back to the car. “It’s not her,” she and Alison said at the same time. The smile Julie had been wearing with Terry was gone; she looked pale and drawn. “What are we going to do?”

  Nobody answered. Alison seemed particularly quiet, probably because she was the one who’d led us on this wild-goose chase. She’d called me a drunk—and so had Heather—but it wasn’t true. I’d had a glass of wine, maybe two, before leaving the house. Just to help take the edge off. I was perfectly lucid and I tried to examine all the different options, ticking them off in my head as we drove in silence back to Heather’s.

  Without telling anyone, I repeatedly dialed the number we’d gotten the text from. I’d hit redial, let it ring seven or eight times, hang up and then call again. If the blackmailer wanted to fuck with us, we would fuck with him. Still, I jumped when a new text bubble showed up on my screen as we pulled up in front of the house: STOP CALLING! Three days. $20K same place or police.

  “He’s texting again,” Heather announced before I could say anything, just as Alison and Julie’s phones also signaled new messages.

  “Why does it say ‘stop calling’? Maybe it is Terry,” Julie said as we got out of the car. “Maybe she has another phone?”

  I waited until we were inside the house to confess that I’d been making the calls, which earned me a look of disgust from Alison. “Are you trying to get whoever it is to go to the police?”

  “I’m trying to drive them just as crazy as they’re driving us,” I said.

  “We can’t get another twenty thousand,” Heather said. “Not in three days.”

  Nobody contradicted her. Julie dropped onto a chair the minute we entered the kitchen, sitting with her head in her hands, one foot nervously beating a tattoo against the marble tile. Alison picked up the receipts that had been left on the floor and stacked them neatly back on the island, while Heather ignored her, taking cups down from a cupboard.

  Julie’s repeated tapping annoyed me and I stalked over to the window to get away from it, staring out over that vast backyard. The tennis court looked forlorn, nets sagging, and clumps of leftover snow dotting the parched-looking surface.

  The sudden whir of the coffee machine made me jump. Heather filled cups for each of us and brought them to the table, taking a seat across from Julie. I came over to sit down next to them, but Alison stayed where she was, leaning against the island. Usually it was Julie who played peacemaker, but she was still staring down at the table. I cleared my throat. “Come have some coffee,” I said to Alison, but she ignored me.

  “What if we change the meeting place,” she suggested in a musing voice. “We could pick another spot, someplace easier to stake out.”

  “Why would they agree to that?” I said.

  “Because she—or he—is greedy. If they want the money they have to go along with our terms.”

  “We tried catching them last time—it didn’t work.”

  “It didn’t work because our view got blocked. We need to pick a place that’s easier to stake out and harder for them to hide.”

  �
�A house,” Julie said, lifting her head out of her hands. “What if we said we’ll leave the cash at my listing in that new subdivision in Edgeworth? It’s vacant—most of the houses there are vacant.”

  “They won’t agree.”

  “We call this asshole’s bluff,” Alison said. “Either they meet us where we say or they don’t get the cash—it’s that simple.”

  “They’ll go to the police,” Heather said. “You’re going to push them into it.”

  “No, they won’t.” Alison walked over to the table and picked up her mug of coffee. “Think about it. Sarah was right—if they go to the police they’ll be charged with extortion. It doesn’t help them.”

  “They probably wouldn’t charge him,” I said.

  “Do you think he wants to bank on ‘probably’?” Alison said before taking a sip of coffee. Nobody answered, but Julie looked more animated.

  “Okay, yes, it might work,” I conceded. “But what do we do when we catch him?”

  “We take the phone,” Heather said.

  “And we get their address,” Alison said. “We find out where he or she lives and get the computer and any other copies of the photos.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” Julie said. “What makes you think this person will cooperate with that? How are you planning to make them give you anything?”

  Alison was silent for a few seconds, and then said, “We’re going to have to hit him or something.”

  “Too bad we don’t have a gun.” I looked pointedly at Julie.

  “We can find something,” Heather said. “What about a baseball bat?”

  “That would work,” I said. “We just need to knock them out so we can get the phone.”

  “We’re going to crack someone over the head with a baseball bat?” Alison asked. “We could kill them.”

  “Maybe that’s exactly what we should do,” I said quietly.

  Stunned silence greeted this remark. Then Alison said, “That’s crazy.”

  “Is it?” I said. “What else are we going to do? Steal this guy’s phone and computer and somehow he’s just going to go away and not mention that to anyone? How exactly do you think that’s going to work?”

  “You’re right,” Alison said after a long moment, her voice so low I could barely hear it. “As long as he’s alive he’s a liability.”

  chapter thirty-five

  ALISON

  Once when I was talking about the past with my brother, he said that being a police officer had taught him that the line that separates the civil from the uncivil is very fine, and that anyone is capable of anything given the right set of circumstances. I hadn’t believed him. There was a huge difference between the monsters and us, I’d argued. It wasn’t a fine line at all, but a gulf separating the law-abiding from the lawless.

  I hadn’t understood that dozens of smaller choices lead to those big moral decisions, as if each step were a point along an invisible map leading to what only feels upon arrival like a surprise destination. As I stood in my garage, seriously contemplating killing another human being, I finally realized the truth of what my brother had been saying.

  We no longer had a gun, a knife was too risky and messy, and there was no time for poison even if we’d had access to some, which we didn’t. Who had we become, standing around discussing how to kill someone with such dispassion? I wasn’t one of those people, I couldn’t be, yet there I was standing in my garage, holding a baseball bat. It was Michael’s—silver aluminum, graying sports tape wrapped around the grip, scratches and dents from years of play. An intramural team in college, if I remembered correctly. Is that when he’d gotten it? It wasn’t from his Little League days, was it? I’d found the bat stuffed in a bin with other sports equipment. There had been an afternoon sometime last year when he’d hit balls around with Matthew and Lucy in the backyard. I swallowed hard, remembering George barking and chasing after the balls that Michael threw, while Matthew and Lucy laughed as they took turns hefting the bat. They hadn’t pulled it out since. Would any of them notice it was missing?

  We waited to reply to the blackmailer’s text until Julie made sure that there were no showings scheduled for her listing at the vacant house in the new subdivision. Sarah composed a message that we thought struck the right balance between informing our blackmailer that this was where he or she could get the money and nowhere else, while managing not to push them into calling the police. To our surprise, they agreed to the house drop-off after we rejected a single threatening text demanding that we meet at the cemetery again.

  Unlike the last time, we didn’t spend the few days we had searching for money. We weren’t planning to deliver anything remotely close to the $20,000 the blackmailer had pocketed before. We gathered together approximately $300 in twenties, tens, and ones, and wrapped it around bricks of paper money that we took from some kids’ games. It looked real if you didn’t examine it too closely. We were determined that whoever the blackmailer turned out to be, he or she wouldn’t be pocketing any more of our money. Once we had the bills stuffed in another cheap duffel bag, we were ready to go.

  The plan was simple. While we drove to the subdivision, Heather would head to the police station with her lawyer to ask for an update on the investigation. I was nervous about Heather going to the police, afraid that she might screw up and accidentally reveal something. I knew that if that happened she’d throw us under the bus to save herself, but we needed her to distract the detectives, so we had no choice but to trust her. At least she had a believable motive; the insurance company wouldn’t pay out until the investigation was done and “favorably resolved.”

  “I think she should give us some of that settlement,” Sarah suggested as we drove to the drop spot ahead of Julie. We’d stuck with the same basic plan, except this time Julie would carry the money to the house at the agreed-upon time, while Sarah and I would already be there, in position.

  “If she ever gets that payout,” I said, turning fast onto Backbone Road and keeping up my speed while watching out for police. The irony of the street name wasn’t lost on me. It was a Tuesday, early afternoon. We’d wanted to meet earlier, but the blackmailer had balked at the time. We’d made that one concession; we hadn’t really had a choice if we wanted them to show up at the house.

  “Look, no drinking tomorrow, okay?” I’d told Sarah the night before. “We need to be alert.”

  “If you mention AA again I’m not going with you,” Sarah said, obviously still offended. “I am not an alcoholic.”

  It was tempting to argue with that, but we needed to work together, so I didn’t respond. My comments must have shamed her, because I didn’t smell alcohol when she got in the car, although I couldn’t tell if that gleam in her eyes was from excitement or the bottle. She seemed clear enough, talking about how she thought we deserved to be paid for being sucked in by Heather’s “neediness.”

  “You seem more concerned about the money than whether or not Heather lied to us,” I finally said. This was something I was still unsure about, the terrible certainty I’d felt when I’d found those receipts wavering in the face of her teary denials. I knew Julie didn’t believe our friend had lied. She’d been cool to me since I’d pretended to hit Heather, but Sarah had never shared Julie’s blind optimism.

  “Look, she might have lied about Viktor’s first wife, but those receipts don’t prove anything,” Sarah said. “Do you really think Heather trashed her own kitchen? Are you one hundred percent certain that you got the dates right?” Seeing my momentary hesitation, she quickly said, “I didn’t think so.”

  I wondered if she was really dismissing the facts or dismissing me because of my comments about her drinking. “Well, I don’t give a damn about being paid back, I just don’t want to go to prison,” I said, which essentially shut down the conversation. I’d found an extra-long yoga bag to hide the bat in, though it was narrow enough to look like a rifle case, which wasn’t exactly less noticeable. Sliding the bat into the backseat felt surreal, as if
I were playing some enforcer in a Mafia movie. We’d agreed that I would wield the weapon because it made the most sense. I was taller than both Julie and Sarah, so I could be more of a physical threat, but that didn’t mean I wanted to do it. I’d taken a few practice swings in the garage, but when I imagined hitting somebody, all I could hear was that distinctive crack that a bat makes when it connects solidly with a ball.

  The new subdivision was on the border of Edgeworth and Leetsdale, on a hilly piece of scrub property that no one had thought worth developing until recently. Low stone walls marked the entrance, and an overproduced brass sign announced in cursive that we’d arrived at Paradise Hills, a name that struck me as more appropriate for a cemetery.

  “Paradise, huh?” Sarah said with a snicker as we drove up past barren lots with dead weeds poking through remnants of snow, and cookie-cutter houses sitting on small plots of land. The asphalt road through the development was slick in spots with gray slush. FOR SALE signs stood in front of some of the finished homes, but few of the yards were more than frozen mud pits, with barely any grass, even frozen winter yellow grass, visible.

  As planned, we circled the subdivision several times, on the lookout for other people and cars, for anything odd. Just like the last time, we’d arrived over an hour ahead of schedule. If we saw anyone, we could masquerade as prospective home buyers, but as we drove up and down the streets it looked like we were the only people there.

  “What if he’s watching us right now?” Sarah said as she parked in front of a small cluster of semifinished homes. Their backyards abutted the yards of the houses on the next street, one of which was the house where Julie would arrive soon to drop off the money. She’d chosen that house because that street dead-ended, so the blackmailer would have to go back out the same way he came, and in some vehicle, we assumed, because unlike the cemetery, there was nothing right over the hill to reach on foot.