Fool Me Once

by Harlan Coben

  "That was thoughtful. We're as well as can be expected."

  "I'm glad to hear it," Judith said. "I'm also calling to remind you that tomorrow Heather Howell will read Joe's will in Farnwood Library at nine A.M. sharp."

  The rich even name their rooms.

  "I'll be there, thank you."

  "Would you like us to send a car?"

  "No, I'll be okay."

  "Why not bring Lily? We would love to see her."

  "Let's play that by ear, okay?"

  "Of course. I . . . I really miss seeing her. She looks so much like . . . Well, we'll see you tomorrow."

  Judith held back the tears long enough to hang up.

  Maya sat there for a moment. Maybe she would bring Lily. Isabella too. That reminded her that she should check the nanny cam's SD card. Maya hadn't watched it in two days, but then again, so what? She was feeling tired. It could wait for the morning.

  Maya washed up. There was a big chair in the bedroom--Joe's chair--and she sat in it now and opened her book. It was a new Wright brothers biography. She tried to focus, but her mind wouldn't settle.

  Corey Rudzinski was back in the United States. Was that a coincidence?

  "You're going to try to do this on your own, aren't you?"

  She felt the warning signs coming on. Maya closed the book and quickly slipped into bed. She turned off the lights and waited.

  First came the sweats, then the visions--but it was the sounds that always battered her. The sounds. The ceaseless noises, the constant cacophony of the helicopter rotors, the static voices on the radio, the gunfire--and, of course, the human sounds, the laughter, the ridicule, the panic, the screams.

  Maya pulled her pillow tight around her ears, but that just made it worse. All those sounds didn't just surround her. They didn't just echo and reverberate. They tore through her head. They ripped through her brain tissue, shredding her dreams and thoughts and wants like hot shrapnel.

  Maya bit back a scream. Tonight would be bad. She would need help.

  Maya opened the drawer in her night table. She pulled out the bottle and downed two Klonopins.

  The pills didn't stop the sounds, but eventually, after she rode it out a little longer, they muffled the noise enough to let her sleep.

  Chapter 5

  First thought when Maya woke up: Check out the nanny cam video.

  Maya always woke up at exactly 4:58 A.M. Some claimed that she had one of those internal alarm clocks, but if she did, it could only be set for 4:58 A.M. and it couldn't be turned off, even on nights she stayed up late and craved a few extra minutes of sleep, and if she tried to "set" the internal alarm even a few minutes earlier or later, it switched back to the default setting of 4:58 A.M.

  This had started during basic training. Her drill sergeant had a wake-up time of 5:00 A.M., and while most of her fellow recruits would groan or struggle, Maya had already been awake a full two minutes and was ready for the drill sergeant's imminent and rarely pleasant arrival.

  Once Maya had fallen asleep (read: passed out) the night before, she had slept soundly. Oddly enough, whatever demons possessed her, they rarely came out in her sleep--no nightmares, no twisting of the sheets, no waking up in a cold sweat. Maya never remembered her dreams, which could mean that she slept peacefully or that whatever happened in those dreams, her unconscious was merciful enough to let her forget them.

  She grabbed her hair band from the night table and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. Joe had liked the ponytail. "I love your bone structure," he would say. "I want to see as much of your face as possible." He also liked to play with the ponytail and even, on some occasions, gently pull it, but that was another matter altogether.

  Her face flushed at the memory.

  Maya checked her phone for messages. Nothing important. She swung her legs out of bed and padded down the hallway. Lily was still sleeping. No surprise there. In the genetic internal alarm department, Lily was more like her father: Sleep until you absolutely have to rise.

  It was still dark outside. The kitchen smelled of baking, obviously the handiwork of Isabella. Maya didn't cook, bake, or otherwise engage in culinary activities unless forced to. Many of her friends were big-time into cooking, which Maya found amusing, since for generations, and indeed throughout pretty much the entire existence of mankind, cooking was considered a tedious and grueling chore one tried to avoid. In history books, you rarely read about monarchs or lords or anyone the slightest bit elite enjoying spending time in the kitchen. Eating? Sure. Fine dining and wine? Of course. But preparing the meals? That was a menial task given to lowly servants.

  Maya debated scrambling herself some eggs with a side of bacon, but the act of merely pouring milk atop cold cereal called out to her. She sat at the table and tried not to think about the reading of Joe's will that day. She didn't think that there would be any surprises. Maya had signed a prenup (Joe: "It's a family thing--if any of us Burketts don't sign, we get disinherited"), and once Lily was born, Joe had set it up so that, in the event of his death, all his holdings would go into a trust for their daughter. Maya was happy enough with that.

  There was no cold cereal in the cabinet. Dang. Isabella had been complaining about the sugar content in them, but had she gone so far as to toss them? Maya headed to the fridge and then stopped.

  Isabella.

  The nanny cam.

  She had woken up thinking about it, which was odd. Sure, she checked it most days, but not all. It never felt urgent to her. Nothing even the slightest bit questionable ever occurred. Maya normally kept the fast-forward button pressed down. On camera, Isabella was always sunny and happy, which was a bit troubling because that wasn't Isabella's default state. She did light up around Lily, but Isabella had a face like a totem pole. She wasn't big on smiling.

  Yet she always smiled on the nanny cam. She was the perfect nanny all the time, and let's face it, no one is that. No one. We all have our moments, don't we?

  Did Isabella know the nanny cam was there?

  Maya's laptop and the SD card reader Eileen had given her were in her backpack. For a while she had used her military-issue backpack--a beige nylon thing of many pockets--but too many military wannabes ordered the same thing online and something about it felt too showy. Joe had bought her a Kevlar laptop backpack from Tumi. She thought that it was overpriced until she saw what those military wannabes paid for their backpacks online.

  She picked up the picture frame, pressed the button on the side, and took hold of the SD card. Suppose Isabella had figured it out. First off, would that be such a stretch? Not really. If you were at all perceptive--and Isabella was--you might wonder why your employer would suddenly buy a new picture frame. If you were at all perceptive--and again, Isabella was--you might wonder why this new picture frame would show up for the first time on the day after your employer buried her murdered husband.

  Or if you were at all perceptive, you might not. Who knew?

  Maya slid the SD card into the reader and then plugged the reader into the USB port. Why was she feeling anxious about this? If her suspicions were correct, if Isabella had figured out that the new picture frame held more than a potpourri of family photographs, then, of course, all Maya would see would be Isabella on her best behavior. She wouldn't be dumb enough to do something suspicious. The whole idea of a hidden nanny cam was that it was hidden. Once a nanny knew about it, the whole enterprise became at best moot.

  She hit the play button. The video worked on a motion detector, so it started up when Isabella walked by carrying a cup of coffee in, of course, a mug with a protective lid. No chance any hot liquid would spill on a little girl's skin. Isabella picked Lily's stuffed giraffe off the floor and started to walk back to the kitchen and out of the frame.

  "Mommy."

  There was no audio with this camera, so Maya turned away and looked up the stairs at her daughter. The familiar warmth flowed through her. She might be cynical about so much of the parenting process, but that feeling when you
look at your child, when the rest of the world fades away, when everything but that little face becomes just scenery in the deep background--that Maya understood.

  "Hey, precious."

  Maya had read somewhere that the average two-year-old has a vocabulary of about fifty words. That seemed about right. "More" was a big one on the little-kid list. Maya hurried up the stairs and reached over the kid gate and lifted Lily into her arms. Lily clutched one of those indestructible cardboard books in both hands, this one an abridged version of Dr. Seuss's classic One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. Lately she'd been carrying the book around the way some kids carry a teddy bear. A book rather than a stuffed animal--this pleased Maya to no end.

  "You want Mommy to read you the book?"

  Lily nodded.

  Maya brought her downstairs and sat her at the kitchen table. The video was still running. One thing Maya had learned: Little kids love repetition. They didn't want new experiences quite yet. Lily had a whole collection of board books. Maya loved the narrative drive of the P. D. Eastman books like Are You My Mother? or A Fish Out of Water, both featuring scary moments and twist endings. Lily would listen--any book was better than no book--but she always returned to the rhymes and artwork of Dr. Seuss, and really, who could blame her?

  Maya glanced at the computer monitor as the nanny cam video played on. On the screen, Lily and Isabella were both on the couch. Isabella fed Lily one Goldfish cracker at a time, like they were smelts awarded to a performing seal. Taking a cue from the feed, Maya grabbed the Goldfish down from the pantry and spread some out on the table. Lily started to eat them one at a time.

  "You want something else?"

  Lily shook her head and pointed to the book. "Read."

  "Not 'Read.' Say, 'Please, Mommy, will you read . . . '"

  Maya stopped. Enough. She picked up the book, turned to page one, started with the one fish, two fish, turned the page. She was just reaching the fat fish with the yellow hat when something on the computer monitor snagged her gaze.

  Maya stopped reading.

  "More," Lily demanded.

  Maya leaned toward the screen.

  The camera had turned itself on again, but the view was completely blocked. But how . . . ? Maya guessed that she was staring at Isabella's back. Isabella was standing directly in front of the picture frame and that was the reason Maya couldn't see anything.

  No.

  Isabella was too short. Her head might block it. But her back? No way. Plus, Maya could now make out color. Isabella had been wearing a red blouse yesterday. This shirt was green.

  Forest green.

  "Mommy?"

  "One second, honey."

  Whoever it was moved away from the picture frame and out of view. Now Maya could get a look at the couch. Lily sat on it alone. She held that very book in her hands, paging through it on her own, pretending to read it.

  Maya waited.

  From the left--the kitchen--someone stepped into view. Not Isabella.

  It was a man.

  At least it appeared to be a man. He was still standing close to the camera and at an angle that made it impossible to see his face. For a moment Maya figured that it might have been Hector, coming inside for a break maybe, grabbing a glass of water or something, but Hector had been wearing overalls and a sweatshirt. This guy was wearing blue jeans and a green--

  --forest green--

  shirt . . .

  On the screen, Lily looked up from the couch toward the maybe-man. When she smiled widely at him, Maya felt a rock take form in her chest. Lily wasn't good with strangers. So whoever this was, whoever was wearing that familiar forest green shirt . . .

  The man started toward the couch. His back was to the camera now, blocking Maya's view of her daughter. Maya felt panic when her daughter was out of sight, actually leaning to the left and right as though she could see around this man and make sure that her daughter was still there, on the couch, safe with that same Dr. Seuss book. It felt as though her daughter was in danger and that danger would last until, at the very least, Maya could once again see her and keep an eye on her. The danger was, of course, nonsense. Maya knew that. She was watching something that had already happened, not a live feed, and her daughter was sitting next to her, healthy and seemingly happy, or at least she had been happy until her mom had gone silent and started staring at the computer screen.

  "Mommy?"

  "One second, honey, okay?"

  The man in the familiar blue jeans and forest green shirt--that was how he'd always described the shirt, not green or dark green or bright green but forest green--had obviously not harmed or snatched her daughter or anything like that, so the anxiety Maya was now experiencing seemed uncalled for and more than overblown.

  On the screen, the man moved to the side.

  Maya could see Lily again. She figured that the fear would subside now. But that wasn't what happened. The man turned and sat on the couch right next to Lily. He faced the camera and smiled.

  Somehow Maya didn't scream.

  Flex, relax, flex . . .

  Maya, always cool in battle, always managing to find someplace inside of her that made her pulse stay even and kept the adrenaline spikes from paralyzing her, tried to find that place now. The familiar clothes, the blue jeans, and especially the forest green shirt should have set her up for the possibility--and by "possibility," she meant "impossibility"--of what she was now seeing. So she didn't scream out loud. She didn't gasp.

  There was instead a steady spreading across her chest that made it hard to breathe. There was a chilling in her veins. There was a small quiver in her lips.

  There, on the computer monitor, Maya watched Lily crawl onto the lap of her dead husband.

  Chapter 6

  The video didn't last long.

  Lily was barely on "Joe's" lap when he stood with her and carried her out of camera range. The recording stopped thirty seconds later when the motion detector turned the nanny cam off.

  That was it.

  The next time the cam was activated, Isabella and Lily entered from the kitchen and started to play, just as they had many times before. Maya fast-forwarded it ahead, but the rest of the day was pretty much the same as every other. Isabella and Lily. No dead husbands or anyone else.

  She rewound and played the video a second time, then a third.

  "Book!"

  It was Lily, who was growing impatient. Maya turned to her daughter and wondered how to ask this. "Honey," she said slowly, "did you see Daddy?"

  "Daddy?"

  "Yes, Lily. Did you see Daddy?"

  Lily looked suddenly sad. "Where Daddy?"

  Maya didn't want to upset her daughter, but then again, this was a pretty huge turn of events. How to play this? Maya saw no way around it. She put the video on one more time and showed it to Lily. Lily watched, entranced. When Joe came on, she squealed with delight: "Daddy!"

  "Yes," Maya said, pushing the pang away at her child's enthusiasm. "Did you see Daddy?"

  She pointed to the screen. "Daddy!"

  "Yes, that's Daddy. Was he here yesterday?"

  Lily just stared at her.

  "Yesterday," Maya said. She got up and moved to the couch. She sat in the exact same spot "Joe"--she could only think of his name with air quotes--had. "Was Daddy here yesterday?"

  Lily wasn't getting it. Maya tried to stay upbeat, tried to make it more like a game or something happy rather than desperate, but either her body language was wrong or her little girl was more intuitive than Maya imagined.

  "Mommy, stop."

  You're upsetting her.

  Maya plastered a big phony smile on her face and swooped up her daughter. She brought Lily upstairs, giggling and dancing the whole way, until Lily's face seemed to clear of the downstairs' unpleasantness. She placed her on the bed and flipped on the television. Nick Jr. was playing Bubble Guppies, one of Lily's favorites, and yes, Maya had sworn not to use the television as a babysitter--all parents swear this and fail--but maybe
it would be okay as a baby distractor for a few minutes.

  Maya hurried over to Joe's closet and hesitated at the door. She had not so much as opened it since his death. It was too soon. But now, of course, there was no time for that kind of thing. With Lily's eyes glued to the screen, Maya opened the closet door and turned on the light.

  Joe loved clothes, and he took good care of them the same way that, well, Maya took care of her guns. His suits were hung neatly with each hanger exactly three inches from the next. His dress shirts were laid out by their colors. The pants always had those hangers that pinched the cuffs and hung straight down, never the kind that would fold over and maybe cause a crease.

  Joe liked to shop for himself. He almost always detested whatever Maya tried to gift him in terms of clothing. There had been one exception--a forest green "brush twill" button-down shirt she'd ordered from a company called Moods of Norway. That shirt, unless her eyes were lying to her, which seemed a pretty strong possibility, was the one "Joe" had been wearing in that video. She knew exactly where he kept it.

  And it wasn't there.

  Again no scream, no gasp. But now she knew for certain.

  Someone had been in the house. Someone had gone through Joe's closet.

  *

  Ten minutes later, Maya watched the one person who could provide immediate answers arrive.

  Isabella.

  Isabella had been here yesterday, purportedly watching Lily, and so, at least in theory, she should have noticed anything unusual like, say, Maya's dead husband rummaging through his closet or playing with her daughter.

  From the bedroom window, Maya watched Isabella heading up the walk. She tried to assess the approaching nanny as she might any enemy. She didn't appear armed with anything other than her handbag, though that could certainly contain a weapon. She held on to the handbag tightly, as though she feared someone might try to snatch it, but that was how Isabella always held it. Isabella was not a particularly warm person, except, of course, where it mattered most. With Lily. She had loved Joe, the way loyal employees love a benefactor, and only tolerated Maya as an interloper. You see this sometimes in loyal employees. They are more protective and snootier toward outsiders than their wealthy employers.

  Did Isabella look a little warier than usual today?

  Hard to say. Isabella always looked wary, what with the shifting eyes, the fixed expression, the closed body language. But was there more of it today, or was that Maya's imagination, already on overdrive, clouding her judgment?