Reputation

by Sara Shepard

  We’re so different, these Kits. Do we treat our daughters differently, too? Which Kit Manning is it who doesn’t want Willa to talk to Sienna and Aurora—the one who wants to preserve the shred of reputation she has left, or the fiercely protective mother? Maybe I haven’t dwelled on Sienna and Aurora much because I know that if I dig too deeply into what they’re feeling, I might not like what I find.

  What if, deep down, they were furious with Greg for the e-mails? But what does that mean . . . and what did my daughters do with that anger?

  18

  WILLA

  MONDAY, MAY 1, 2017

  After I hang up the phone, I pace the downstairs rooms of my family’s house. I want to respect Kit’s wishes not to interrogate the girls, but leaving them out of this story is like only drawing half a picture. They lived with Greg.

  And it’s Kit’s reluctance to let me talk to the girls that bothers me most. Is there something she isn’t telling me? Does she think Sienna and Aurora are hiding something? Let’s face it: The police can’t figure out anyone who’d want Greg dead, but this is a man who came into the girls’ lives only recently, after they lost a father they loved to death.

  I need to figure it out. I hate the idea of making them uncomfortable. And I don’t believe for a second either of them hurt their stepfather. But I do wonder if they know something they don’t want to tell. Perhaps I need to draw it out of them before someone else does—like an unsympathetic detective, or an impassive, hard-nosed lawyer.

  I climb the creaky stairs to the third floor. The top level holds three more bedrooms, a tiny bathroom, and an oversize closet in which my mother used to store her knitting supplies. The doors to the rooms Sienna and Aurora are staying in are shut tight, which seems symbolic—they’ve closed everyone out. I press my ear to Sienna’s door, but I hear nothing. Same with Aurora’s. My heart is thudding hard, and I don’t know if what I’m doing is right—after all, I’m going against Kit’s strict wishes.

  Still, after a moment I call out, “Girls? It’s Willa. Can we talk for a sec?”

  After a beat, I hear footsteps padding across Sienna’s wood floor, and her door opens a crack. There are circles under Sienna’s eyes. The shirt she is wearing is rumpled and stained. “Hey, Aunt Willa,” she croaks. “Um, I’m kind of not feeling well.”

  “This’ll only take a minute.” I rap on Aurora’s door next. “Honey? Can you come out, too?”

  Aurora’s door creaks open, revealing the tiny bedroom with the slanted roof. I can’t help but smile, poking my head in. “I lived in this room for a few years in high school, once Grandma and Grandpa trusted me in the attic.” I point to the far wall. “That was painted black. And there was a big Nirvana poster on the ceiling. I used to love Kurt Cobain.”

  The corners of Aurora’s mouth curve into a frown. “I was sleeping,” she says moodily.

  “This won’t take long. I just have a couple of questions.”

  When I say questions, Sienna seems to flinch, and Aurora’s arms tighten around her torso. “Sit down, sit down,” I tell them. I gesture to the little love seat my mother placed in the hallway years before.

  “You guys still mad at each other?” I ask.

  Aurora chews on her lip. Sienna spins a silver ring around her finger.

  “You girls need each other. You’re going through a hard time. Don’t forget, your mom and I lost a parent when we were your age, too—and just as abruptly. After all these years, it still hurts.” I feel my throat close. Sienna’s head lifts an inch. It’s not often that I show emotion, and this has gotten her attention.

  The house makes a series of small settling clicks and groans. “You guys have been through so much. It isn’t fair. And I feel like a jerk—I barely got to know Greg. Is it awful to say that I was still kind of stuck on your dad as, like, Kit’s soul mate? I mean, he and Kit were together for so long. I remember them snuggling up on the couch in high school, hogging the TV. But I should have gotten to know Greg better. Your mom talked a little bit about him back when your dad was really sick. Said he was this amazing surgeon. A really good, genuine person. He really dazzled you guys, huh?”

  The girls nod but don’t say anything.

  “You know, I wonder what it feels like, as a surgeon, to have a patient not make it.” I try to keep my voice light, contemplative, but my heart is pounding harder than I’d like. “How can they teach you to deal with that in medical school?”

  Aurora frowns. Picks at an imaginary piece of lint on her knee. “There’s no point in being angry at the surgeon. Sometimes things just happen.”

  I’m surprised at how well-adjusted she sounds. I glance at Aurora, and she’s nodding, too. So maybe I was wrong, then. Maybe these girls don’t harbor some sort of deep hatred for Greg for inadvertently killing Martin on the operating table. It makes me feel better.

  But it still doesn’t clear up all my intuition that they’re hiding something. “So are you getting annoying backlash from friends about what you guys are going through now?”

  “A little,” Sienna admits. “People have a lot of questions.”

  I lean forward a little. “I hate to ask this, but did you guys read those e-mails?”

  Sienna’s jaw tightens. Aurora clears her throat. “They were pretty gross,” she says in a loud voice. “Like, way, way more disgusting than I imagined e-mails like that would be. I can’t believe she . . .”

  But she trails off as Sienna gives her a hard, inscrutable look. I don’t understand what’s gone down, but suddenly I’m filled with new questions. She?

  I cock my head. “Do you girls know who Lolita is?”

  Sienna raises her chin. “No, she doesn’t.”

  “Aurora? You can speak for yourself.”

  Aurora stares at her fingers. “No.” But a hot, crawling sensation eases across my chest.

  “Is it a friend of yours?” I deliver the next line very, very carefully, glancing at Sienna. “Like Raina, for instance. She’s gorgeous. And she certainly seemed broken up about Greg’s death.”

  Sienna sniffs. “Raina isn’t Lolita.”

  But she covers her nose when she says this, an obvious tell that she’s lying. I hold her gaze, and she looks away first. “You don’t need to protect her,” I urge. “We need to figure out the truth.”

  “I’m telling the truth.”

  “Okay, then, who is it?”

  “Why would I know?” Sienna slaps her thighs, then stands. “Why are we having this conversation?”

  I glance at Aurora, but she’s staring blankly into her lap. “Okay. Well, whoever Lolita was, the cops will figure it out eventually, if they choose to look,” I say evenly. “There are ways to track the origin of those e-mails. By certain markers in the language. Or by the IP address.”

  “The cops probably looked already,” Sienna says, her eyes shining. “And the IP isn’t going to tell them anything.”

  This is the most effusive Sienna has been my whole visit. There’s even a sudden bloom of pink on her cheeks. “You seem to know a lot about computers,” I say carefully.

  She shrugs. “It’s common knowledge. And I have a friend—he says IPs always just give you generalities about an area an e-mail came from, not the particular user.”

  “That’s true. But sometimes getting a general location is a good clue. Did your friend tell you that?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Her combativeness surprises me. Sienna is typically the one who doesn’t want to make waves. I glance at Aurora, but she’s glaring as though the conversation irritates her.

  I stand, sensing that I’m not going to get anything else from them. “Thanks for talking, girls. If you ever want to open up about Greg—about anything—I’m a sounding board. Seriously.”

  The girls turn in relief, and their separate doors slam mere seconds after I’ve released them. I stand in the si
lent hall once more, the tips of my fingers tingling. I go over what they’ve just told me. Did Sienna just show her hand? Is she trying to push me away from searching the IP because it’ll lead me to Raina? Does this explain why Raina seemed so upset by Greg’s death? What could this say about the murderer?

  I clomp downstairs and find my laptop on the kitchen table. It doesn’t take me long to pull up the hack database and find Greg’s e-mails to Lolita. I grab a pad of paper and write down the e-mail’s IP, a garbled mess of numbers and dots. I tap the next e-mail. It has the same IP—which seems like a good sign. It probably means Lolita—Raina?—wrote to Greg from a home computer instead of a cell phone, which would make it harder to track a location.

  I navigate to an IP lookup database, my heart hammering. If I remember correctly, Raina lives in the dorms—where a lot of other kids live, too, so even if I do get an IP, it won’t be a direct lead to her. Still, it could prove Greg’s mistress was a student.

  The results appear. I hinge forward, squinting at the screen. In broad font are about ten lines of text, starting with the continental location of the IP and narrowing all the way down to its specific longitude and latitude. My gaze fixes on the line that reads Zip Code. I have to blink a few times before it sinks in. This isn’t Aldrich University’s zip code, though. It’s Blue Hill’s. Ours.

  But that makes no sense. I get that Greg’s e-mails would come from here, probably his own computer in his study—and when I check, the IP is a different blend of numbers, though it still comes up as being a computer in Blue Hill.

  Except Lolita doesn’t seem like someone who lives around here—at least not an adult. Her writing is ebullient but hesitant, submissive and almost filial. It’s the writing of a young person who idolizes an older man. Not in the words Lolita uses—her vocabulary can be impressive, like how, in one of her last e-mails to Greg, she says, The only thing that keeps me going through my quotidian day are my thoughts of you. I’m so, SO sorry. Please don’t shut me out. But she’s needy. Self-conscious. Ashamed. Whoever wrote this knows what she’s doing is wrong.

  Something catches in my mind. I click to the link Sienna sent me on the day of Greg’s funeral. It leads to a Wattpad page listing all the stories Sienna has posted. Last night, I read the first one, a gloomy tale about an aimless girl who works in a diner. I spot it right away—that word again. Quotidian.

  Is it a coincidence?

  A crack opens in my brain. On a hunch, I click back to Wattpad again. Sienna has also misspelled the word lose as loose . . . in the same way Lolita has in an e-mail. Again, this could all be happenstance. Except . . .

  My heart stills. I think over everything the girls said upstairs. On shaking legs, I rise back up and walk to the landing. “Girls?” I call out. “Come down here!”

  I hear the creaks above me. Their steps seem tentative, maybe even afraid. And eventually, when Sienna calls out, “What’s wrong?” I hear the edge in her voice. She doesn’t need to ask—she already knows what I’ve figured out.

  19

  KIT

  MONDAY, MAY 1, 2017

  There are a few reporters hanging out on the circle, waiting for me to return to my father’s house after work. I duck my head and run past all of them, slipping inside the door before they can snap a photo. It’s quiet inside when I step into the foyer, but I can tell the place isn’t empty. There’s kinetic energy within the walls, a vibe that puts me on edge. I drop my keys on the table by the door and slip off my shoes. “Hello?” I call out. No answer. “Hello?” I call again.

  The hair on the back of my neck prickles. A terrifying notion crosses my mind: The killer is back. Maybe he’s lurking around a corner, ready to take me, too.

  When I turn into the kitchen, I stop short, my heart leaping into my throat. Willa sits at the island, her head in her hands. My girls are at the table, staring at me numbly. Sienna’s face is blotchy. Aurora’s skin has gone sickly pale. My gaze swings from Willa to them again, and then it hits me. She talked to them. Unbelievable.

  I drop my purse angrily on the floor. “I asked you for one thing. You can’t even do that for me?”

  Willa holds up her hands. “Wait. I’m sorry. I know you didn’t want to. But . . .” She looks goadingly at Sienna and Aurora. “Tell her what you told me.”

  I glance at my daughters, but it’s as though a curtain has been thrown over my eyes. I don’t want to see them like this—sobbing, secretive, guilty? Maybe I’m not ready for whatever this is. Maybe it’s far worse than petty complaints about me being a shitty mother lately.

  I look angrily at Willa. “I told you not to question them. I told you.”

  “Kit,” Willa pleads. “Just listen. Sienna wrote the e-mails.”

  Time slows down. Sienna’s head is down, so I can see the grease in her scalp. Aurora is chewing on her lips like a feral animal. “Huh?” I splutter.

  “The e-mails to Greg. Sienna is Lolita.”

  It feels like they’ve whipped the big wooden lazy Susan that sits in the center of the table straight at my gut. “You? And . . . Greg?” Horrible images flood my mind.

  “No!” Sienna looks horrified. “I . . .” She glances desperately at Willa, and Willa makes an encouraging gesture with her hands for her to continue. “I wrote both sides of the conversation,” she mumbles. “Greg’s . . . and mine. From different computers, so the IP addresses are different . . . but it’s all me.”

  I sink onto a stool. Sienna’s face contorts with shame. I want to go to her, but all I can think of are the words in those e-mails. Greg said such gross things to that woman. I’m supposed to believe Sienna wrote that?

  “Why?” I whisper.

  Sienna’s breathing is choppy. “I-I wanted you to see what he turned into. It’s why I put them in the deleted folder. A-And I was hoping that you’d open up his computer one day and find them in there and it would end things for good. It’s not like I knew the hack was going to break. And even then, I didn’t think someone was going to find the e-mails. But then . . . they did.”

  There’s a sour taste in my mouth. So Sienna had wanted to talk about the e-mails with me before the benefit. Not to process her anger but to confess what she’d done. But I hadn’t let her talk. I’d shut her out, I’d drawn my own, incorrect, conclusions. I condemned Greg, left him alone to be murdered in our kitchen. Did I bring this on myself?

  Something vile occurs to me, and I rush toward her. “What do you mean, you wanted to show me what he’d turned into? Was he hurting you? Or Aurora?” I glance at my other daughter; she has curled into a ball in her chair. Please don’t let it be that.

  Sienna shakes her head. “No. No. I just . . . I knew he was having an affair with someone, and I wanted you to know, too. I broke into his e-mail and looked around for incriminating messages that would prove it to you, but I didn’t find anything. And then I decided to make something up. It’s not a lie, really. I just needed to plant the seed, because you deserve someone better.”

  “Jesus,” I whisper. I’m in such shock I can’t even swallow. “Sienna, you? Really?”

  “I’m sorry!” Sienna covers her face with her hands. “I didn’t know what else to do! I wanted the best for you!”

  “But how do you even know he was having an affair? Do you have proof?”

  “K-Kind of.” She sniffs. “There was this one incident, last winter. After a snowstorm. Greg was at a late surgery. I was up, watching Netflix. Past midnight, I heard the key in the door. Something crashed. I was freaked out that we had a burglar, so I ran to the landing. I saw Greg stumbling around.”

  “Stumbling,” I repeat.

  “He could barely walk.” She twists her mouth. “Definitely drunk.”

  I chew on the inside of my cheek. Greg went out after surgeries, sometimes. He needed to blow off steam. He sometimes went to business dinners, too—with the head of the hospital, or pharma reps, or someti
mes even for media interviews.

  “It’s not a crime to be drunk,” I say.

  “I know, but . . .” Sienna sighs. “He didn’t see me on the stairs. He was really out of it. He went to the kitchen. And that’s when I noticed.” She pauses. “He smelled weird.”

  “Like . . . alcohol?”

  “No. Like . . . like perfume, but not something you wear. Anyway, it made me feel . . . icky. And mad for you, Mom. I wanted to know who he’d been with. So I hid until he went to bed, and then I ran downstairs. Looked at his phone. But I couldn’t figure out his password. I was about to go to bed, but then I saw something on his jacket. There was this really long hair.” She pantomimes peeling it off fabric, holding it by the tip.

  This all seems so unfounded. “The hair could have been from a waitress who’d brushed up against him while delivering his drinks. It could be from a patient. You don’t know.” Sienna shrugs, considering this, but doesn’t look convinced. “Did you ever notice something like that again?” I ask.

  “Just that one time.”

  I glance at Aurora, who hasn’t moved. “Did you know about this?”

  Aurora looks haunted. “About what?”

  “Any of it!”

  Aurora licks her lips. Oh God, I think. She did.

  I slap my arms to my sides. “Were you girls in on it together?”

  “No,” Sienna insists. “Leave Aurora out of it. I told her the day of the funeral. I was dying inside. I had to tell someone. Those e-mails came out in that hack . . . and then Greg was killed. Because of me?”