“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” she said.
“Cut the crap. We know he’s your lover,” Alison said. “What we don’t know is when the two of you came up with the blackmail plan.”
“What are you talking about?” Heather frowned and I was surprised as a look of confusion overtook that Little Miss Innocent expression she’d been giving us. She was a skilled liar, but I searched her face and the confusion seemed real.
“The decision to blackmail us—was it yours or his?” Alison said.
Heather just stared at her.
“Ray Fortini,” Alison said. “He is your lover, isn’t he?”
Now there was a flash of something else—anger? “That’s none of your business.”
“Oh, it’s very much our business,” Alison countered. “Especially since you’ve both been terrorizing us for the last eight weeks.”
“Terrorizing you? What the hell are you talking about?” Heather grabbed a tissue from the box on the rolling stand next to her bed and blew her nose.
“You are the blackmailer, you and your asshole of a boyfriend,” Sarah said.
“Don’t bother denying it,” Alison added. “We’ve been to his apartment, we know everything.” She pulled out her iPhone and opened one of Ray’s videos that she’d copied, wordlessly turning the screen to Heather.
Heather flushed, looking more embarrassed than I’d ever seen her, but she pushed the phone away, sounding defensive. “Fine, I’ve been having an affair with him, but that has nothing to do with the blackmail.”
“We also found the photos on his computer,” Alison said. “Stop lying.”
“What are you talking about? What photos?”
“The photos of us that Ray Fortini took that night. They’re gone now, by the way. I’ve seen to that.”
Heather stared at her for a moment and then she shook her head. “That’s crazy. There’s no way that Ray is the one who took those photos. No way.”
“I should have figured it out,” Alison said. “It had to be someone who recognized us or knew that we were going to be there. Someone who could get our names and addresses. Our phone numbers. You must have been on the phone to him before we got to your house that night, right? You called him after you shot Viktor? What I want to know is when you thought up the whole plan.”
“Jesus Christ, I didn’t think any of it up!” Heather exclaimed. “I paid my five thousand dollars just like you did.” She looked from one to another of us wildly, twitching like a nervous Thoroughbred. “You’ve got to believe me.” She seemed sincere, but she’d lied so often and for so long that I couldn’t tell. “Look,” she said, leaning over the side of the bed and stretching to reach a plastic hospital bag stuffed with her belongings. She jerked it up onto her lap and rooted around in it. “I got the same texts you did.” She found her phone and offered it to Alison, who wouldn’t take it.
“That proves nothing,” Sarah said. “Of course you’d make sure that he sent the same letter and texts to you, so we wouldn’t suspect.”
“No,” Heather insisted, shaking her head. “I didn’t do that, I swear.” She looked from one to another of us and her face was stricken. “I don’t believe it. He’s the one who sent the letter? The photos? It can’t be.”
“Well, it is,” I said. “It’s him.”
At that moment a nurse poked her head around the curtain. “Ladies, I’m going to have to ask you to step out for a minute so I can get her vitals.” We moved out of her way, waiting on the other side of the curtain. An orderly came down the hall pushing a folded wheelchair and stopped by us.
“Knock, knock,” he said before pulling back the curtain. “Ready for your ultrasound?” he said to Heather, in an obscenely cheery voice, as if he were talking about going to a spa. The nurse helped Heather out of bed and I felt another pang of sympathy as I watched her skinny, pale legs wobble as she stood up. They helped her into the chair while we stood around and the nurse placed Heather’s bag of belongings in her lap.
“You ladies will have to go back to the waiting room,” she said. “Your friend will be back soon.”
“Can’t we go with her?” Sarah said as the orderly lifted Heather’s listless feet onto the metal footrests and released the brakes.
The nurse shook her head. “No, I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait out there.” She steered us away while the orderly popped a wheelie to turn back the way he’d come. Heather didn’t look back or say good-bye.
The waiting room was blessedly quiet, the screaming child gone, and I wondered where, since we hadn’t passed him or his mother in the ER. We plopped down in chairs in a corner and I considered asking for an ice pack for my throbbing ankle, but decided against it since that would involve talking to the grumpy Penguins fan at the front desk. “At least I don’t have to lie about where we are,” Alison said in a low voice, as she pulled out her phone to text her husband. I dug in my own purse for mine, wondering if Brian had tried to call, but there was only a message from the temp nanny asking when I’d be home. I texted her, explaining the situation, and then there was nothing to do but wait. I stared numbly at the TV where Dateline was playing, covering the case of a man who’d shot his wife so he could be with his lover. A little too close to home. I shifted in my seat, wishing they’d change the channel. Sarah was flipping rapidly through a cooking magazine, pausing on glossy photos of elaborate desserts. Alison was reading something on her phone. I started going through my email.
Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. And forty. “She’s got to be done by now,” Sarah said, tossing her fifth magazine aside. “Let’s go back.”
“That nurse said she’d come and get us.”
“Look, I don’t want to sit here all night.” She got up without waiting for us and headed back toward the doors into the ER.
“We’re just going to be told to wait again,” Alison said, but she got up and followed after her and I did, too. As we passed through the doors, we saw Sarah in conversation with the nurse we’d spoken to before. Sarah looked agitated and I wondered if she was arguing with the woman.
“She’s gone,” Sarah said as we approached, sounding shocked.
“What? How?” For a horrified moment, I thought she meant that Heather had died.
The nurse patted my arm. “I’m sorry, but your friend checked herself out. We wanted to keep her overnight for observation, but she declined.”
“She just left?” Alison said, looking around. “How did she get out of here without us seeing her?”
“She must have gone out another exit,” the nurse said. “I guess she just wanted to be alone. I’m sorry.” She gave us a sympathetic smile before continuing on her way.
We hustled out to the parking lot, looking for Heather as we walked toward Alison’s car. “Where did she go?” I said. “You don’t think the police came back and got her, do you?”
“No,” Alison said. “But how did she leave? She doesn’t have her car.”
“Maybe she called Ray,” Sarah suggested in a dark voice.
We thought about driving back to his apartment to look for her, but I was afraid to go there, not least because we still had his phone. With nowhere else to look, we decided to drive to Heather’s.
It was almost ten by the time we turned in through the stone pillars and made the steep climb toward the dark house at the top. The headlights caught tiny buds forming on the forsythia bushes. I thought of that drive barely two months earlier when I’d raced up this hill in the night, unsure of what I’d find at the top, but knowing it would be bad.
We pulled into the circular driveway, the house still and silent. The light was on over the front door, but no one answered even as Sarah rang the bell again and again. Had Heather gone off with Fortini? Where the hell was she? We decided to wait, Alison moving the car to the side of the farthest bay in the garage, the darkest corner of the drive. It was freezing, gusts of frigid wind shaking the trees, but adrenaline fueled us and we waited next to the car. I kept obsessi
vely checking my phone for the time. Three minutes passed. Five. The sweep of headlights climbing the hill startled us and it occurred to me that it might be Fortini. “What if it’s him? We should get in the car,” I said, reaching for the door handle.
“Just wait,” Alison said, stopping me. We shrank back and watched as an unfamiliar sedan pulled up out front and Heather stepped out of the backseat.
“Thank you,” she said to the driver, the slam of the car door echoing in the night.
We waited until the unseen driver had pulled away and Heather had her key in the lock before we stepped out of the shadows. “Was that an Uber driver or another lover of yours?” Alison said, and Heather leapt, dropping her purse as she whipped around.
“What are you doing here?” she said in a nasty voice, but she looked pale and shaken. She’d changed out of the hospital gown, but in her haste she’d put her sweater on inside out and backward. I could see the seams running along her arms and the tag tickling her neck, but she didn’t seem to notice. There was a large dark stain on her jeans and I realized it was blood and remembered how she’d met us outside wearing bloodstained clothes on that other, awful night.
Sarah snorted. “Where have you been? You left the hospital before we did.”
Heather didn’t respond, but the nervous look on her face answered for her. Alison said, “You went to see him, didn’t you?”
Heather swayed on the steps, and despite everything that had happened, my sympathy kicked in and I ran to catch her before she fell. “You shouldn’t have checked out of the hospital,” I said. “Are you still bleeding?”
Alison supported her on the other side, as Sarah grabbed her purse and opened the door and we half-walked, half-carried Heather into the house. “She needs water,” Alison said, and we took her into the kitchen and sat her down in a chair. I hurriedly filled a glass at the sink as Alison asked, “When was the last time you ate?”
“I don’t know.” Heather’s voice was barely audible, and when I carried the water to her I saw that she’d dropped her head onto her arms. Sarah rummaged through the pantry and passed a box of crackers to Alison.
“Here, eat something,” she said, breaking off a saltine and pressing it, none too gently, to Heather’s lips. She tried to turn her head away, but Alison wouldn’t let her, taking hold of Heather’s neck and attempting to force the food into her mouth. They struggled for a moment, and then Heather gave up, accepting the single cracker, chewing and swallowing as if it were something twice as large that had stuck in her throat. She took the glass with shaking hands and gulped, water splashing down her chin and onto her inside-out sweater. When Alison offered a second cracker, she didn’t protest, just put it in her mouth.
Sarah ate one, too, crunching loudly, and then she walked across to the wine fridge and I wasn’t surprised when she pulled out a bottle. A dark red merlot that seemed too reminiscent of blood as she poured it into glasses for us. My stomach felt uneasy, but I sipped it anyway, tasting that strange mixture of earth and oak and fruit left long on the vine. For a moment it was like it had been before, all of us drinking together in this kitchen where we’d hung out so many times, although Heather didn’t touch her glass. The illusion was shattered when Sarah set the bottle down hard on the island and said, “Did you get the money from Fortini? I want my money back.”
“He wasn’t there,” Heather said in a low voice. “I couldn’t find him.”
“All your bruises were from him, right?” Alison said. “There’s no point in lying anymore, Heather—we all know the truth. Just admit it—Viktor never abused you.”
For a long moment Heather said nothing, but then something changed, and I felt queasy as I watched her wide-eyed expression morph into a look both hard and jaded. “There are different types of abuse,” she said coldly. “Emotional and psychological, not just physical.”
“You shot an innocent man,” Sarah said. The stark truth of that was too much, and I bolted for the sink and retched, my stomach heaving and heaving as if I were expelling every terrible lie that I’d believed. I reached with a shaking hand for the faucet, cupping handfuls of water into my mouth and splashing it over my face.
“Innocent?” Heather spat the word, her voice rising, carrying over the running water. “Viktor wasn’t innocent. Do you have any idea what it’s like to live with someone like him—someone who makes you account for every nickel and dime? Someone who expects you to just be there all the time, to cook and clean and be a perfect, uncomplaining hausfrau for him to fuck the few times of year he feels like it? Nothing here was mine—his house, his son, his possessions, of which I was one. It was like being trapped in a golden prison.”
“And you got us to help you break out,” Alison said.
“Well, it was your idea.” Heather gave a bitter laugh. “I didn’t think this up on my own—it’s all down to you and your assumptions. But of course you would make assumptions, wouldn’t you?”
“Shut up,” Alison said, her voice a warning.
Heather laughed again, a horrible sound. “What, you don’t want them to know that poor little Alison sees abuse everywhere because her daddy killed her mommy?”
chapter forty-one
SARAH
Julie and I looked from Heather to Alison. “Your father killed your mother?” I asked. Alison’s face flushed and her gaze flitted to ours. She opened her mouth as if to refute this crazy statement, but nothing came out. Grabbing her wineglass instead, she took a long swallow. My mind reeled. It would explain a lot of things, like why Alison almost never talked about her parents or her childhood. I just thought she wasn’t close with them, although I knew she was close with her brother. I remembered the topic coming up in conversations over the years, usually around the holidays, when we’d talk about what everyone was doing for Thanksgiving, for instance, but I never stopped to question the fact that she only mentioned her brother or Michael’s family.
I felt a stab of guilt. She was my close friend and yet I’d never asked anything about her past, at least nothing beyond what she’d wanted to tell us. If it was true, if her father had killed her mother, then no wonder she didn’t want to talk about it. Was her father still alive? Was he in prison? I suddenly recalled being at her house one afternoon and seeing an envelope poking out of a pile of mail tossed on her kitchen counter, a dark line of text stamped across the bottom proclaiming PENNSYLVANIA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. And I’d said with a laugh, “What’s this? Do you have a prison pen pal?”
“No, never,” she’d said with a shudder, quickly scooping up the mail and sticking it in a drawer while asking what I’d like to drink. Out of sight and out of mind. And I’d let it go. I hadn’t asked any more questions because it was clear that she didn’t want to talk about it. Sometimes we’re too polite.
A phone rang, a sharp trill breaking the tense silence. “Whose phone is that?” I asked. The ringtone wasn’t familiar, but we did that thing you do automatically when you hear ringing, everybody pulling out their phones to check. Or at least three of us did. Heather just sat frozen in her seat. Alison pulled out Ray Fortini’s phone, but it wasn’t his either. The ringing continued. I followed the sound to Heather’s purse, which I’d dropped in the kitchen doorway as we came inside. I pulled out her iPhone, but I knew her ringtone and hers wasn’t the one ringing. The sound continued and I dug in her bag, pushing past a hairbrush and makeup, breath mints and an unopened pack of cigarettes.
“You have a second phone?” I said, pulling out another iPhone just as it stopped ringing. It looked virtually identical to the first one. I dropped it next to hers on the kitchen table. The look on Heather’s face said it all. We knew who the caller had been.
“He gave it to me—I didn’t want it,” Heather said, pleading. “Viktor was getting suspicious and then the police were snooping around—I couldn’t talk to Ray on my phone.”
“Do you still expect us to believe that you had nothing to do with the blackmail?” Alison said.
“I
didn’t know about the blackmail, I didn’t. Look, check it if you don’t believe me. There’s nothing on it about the blackmail, I swear!” She picked up the phone, but as she glanced at the screen something seemed to occur to her, her face lightening as she thrust the phone at Alison, just like she had at the hospital. “He can’t be the blackmailer—look, this proves it! Ray called me from his phone. That’s his number. So that phone you have can’t be his!”
And just like at the hospital, Alison made no move to take it. “All that proves is that your lover also had a second phone.”
Heather opened her mouth to argue with that, but I stopped her before she could begin. “He had this phone,” I said, picking it off the island and waving it at her. “I stole this phone from him at The Crooked Halo tonight.”
Heather seemed to deflate at that, both her face and her arm falling, the phone dropping from her hand to clatter against the table.
Julie said, “So you’ve had this phone since before you killed your husband?”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re right—we don’t,” Alison said, “but we’re starting to get the full picture. You called Ray Fortini the night you shot Viktor, right?”
Heather’s perfect chin jutted out defensively. “What difference does that make?”
“That’s how he knew where to find us,” Alison said, looking at me and Julie. “She told him where we were going to leave Viktor’s car.”
“I didn’t! I had nothing to do with it. Okay, I called him, but I was panicking. I didn’t tell him anything except that I’d shot Viktor.”
“Which he needed to know, right, because that was all a part of your plan.”
“I’ve already told you—there was no plan.” Heather stood up, clearly agitated.
It was Alison’s turn to laugh. “You’re not seriously going to try and tell us that you didn’t plan to kill Viktor, are you?”
Just Between Us Page 34
