by Wendy Tyson
They padded along the carpeted hallway together and entered Allison’s office. She closed the door before turning on the light. While her computer took its time booting up, she sat on her chair and stroked Brutus’s head. He stared at her with adoring eyes that made her feel listless. Guilt, she knew, turned everything sour.
Scott Fairweather. Somehow, Scott’s presence in her life had evoked many lies, more than she cared to contemplate. But now that he was dead...did she owe his wife the truth?
What was the truth?
Allison had an affair with Scott during that relationship limbo between her and Jason known as a trial separation. Or at least that’s what Allison told herself. The truth was that she and Jason had just reached an impasse when the affair began. Jason had recently lost his sister. His parents were divorcing, and Allison and Jason’s marriage had quickly and devastatingly unraveled. Allison hadn’t known how to help her husband. He’d been so distant. Irritable. Unreachable.
Scott had been her client. He’d been easy enough to look at. Dark, wiry curls cropped close to a nicely shaped head. Small glasses that gave him an intellectual air. A warm smile. Long, lean body and broad shoulders that resonated strength. But more than that, he’d been a good listener. During that tumultuous time in their lives, Scott had been everything Jason had not: ambitious, attentive, and, most of all, present. He’d made her feel like the only person who mattered. He’d seemed like such a nice guy.
Silly girl, Allison thought now.
Once her computer was ready, Allison opened a search engine and plugged in Scott’s name, not surprised to see that Leah had been telling the truth. She could find few details about Scott’s death other than a date, a location, and the suggestion that his murder had been drug-related. He’d died the day before, in the early morning hours. It was still too soon for an obituary, but an article said he was survived by his wife and infant daughter. A brother lived in North Wales.
North Wales. Allison remembered the small Mexican restaurant off the main street where they’d first kissed. A late night of strategic planning for a sales pitch he had coming up, plus not enough food and too many margaritas, and Allison had leaned across the table and touched her lips to his. His eyes had shown surprise at first before becoming heavy with desire. It’d been a ten minute drive to his townhouse. Ten minutes of tortuous silence weighed down by the hand he kept on her thigh. As though he’d been afraid she would flee.
She hadn’t. Instead, they’d had sex in his bedroom, his living room, the floor of his kitchen. They were all sweat-covered skin and pent-up aggression. It’d been the hottest sex of her life.
Passion mellowed to something tenderer in the weeks that followed. They’d met at his house, her house, hotel rooms in between. She’d thought she was in love. He’d said the same.
Tormented with guilt—after all, in her mind, she was sleeping with a client and cheating on Jason, even if she and her husband were separated—Allison had resigned as his consultant. Two days after the resignation, Leah showed up at Scott’s house during a mid-day tryst. Allison and Scott had been in his dining room, braced against the wall. Leah had worn a gray cashmere sweater that matched the ethereal gray of her eyes. Her hands were clutching the sleeves of her sweater, digging holes the width of her nails. Allison had been too shocked to cover her own nakedness.
Leah had been Scott’s fiancé. They were due to marry in three months. Facts Allison hadn’t known at the time.
Scott apologized to Leah, not Allison. He promised Leah right then and there he would never see Allison again. He called Allison five days later, begging for a lunch meeting. He wanted to explain, he said. He still loved her, he said.
Allison had hung up on him.
To this day, Jason didn’t know.
TWO
Vaughn was still tired. Normally an early-morning run and an hour or two at the boxing gym left him wide awake, ready for the day. But not today. This Monday, his lower back ached and a vague sense of anxiety plagued him, clouding his mind and causing him to drive right past the entrance to his apartment building. He made an illegal u-turn on Meadow and swung into the gated lot, cursing his lack of focus.
He parked, jammed the BMW’s manual transmission into neutral, and sat back against the seat. Problem was, he couldn’t say what, exactly, was bothering him. The last months had been good to him and Jamie. He and Mia were still together, if you could call what they had “together.” His brother was gainfully employed by the police and he’d recently received his certification as an ethical hacker. Jamie even agreed to leave the apartment on occasion for purely social reasons, not seeming to mind as much the machines and contraptions that had to travel with him in the handicapped-equipped van. Actually, if Vaughn was honest with himself—and since the drug deal gone bad more than a decade ago that left his identical twin paralyzed and both of their lives shattered, Vaughn tried real hard to always be honest—Jamie seemed downright happy.
So then what the hell was eating at him?
Even things at First Impressions had calmed down since the Benini crisis. His boss seemed content for the first time since he’d met her. Although she and Jason weren’t officially living together, Jason was there most days—and nights—and Allison was focused on work. Allison’s second how-to book, Underneath It All, the sequel to her bestseller, From the Outside In, was due out in a few months. And they had more clients than they could handle at the moment.
All good stuff.
So why the anxiety? Vaughn shook his head, grabbed his gym bag, and pushed open the car door. He’d learned to trust this sense of restlessness, this heightened intuition, since he was a young kid in juvenile detention, but now maybe he’d crossed some line and was making shit up in his head. Hadn’t the Vaughn men been known to do such things?
His father sure had.
Inside the apartment building, Vaughn jogged the three flights of stairs to his apartment, unlocked the door and headed down the hall to check on Jamie. It was only seven in the morning, and he didn’t want to awaken his brother or Jamie’s nurse, Angela. Jamie had two primary caretakers besides him: Mrs. T, a sweet older woman who cooked for them and shared Jamie’s love of detective novels, and Angela, a younger nurse with a radiant smile and glossy black hair. They both took good care of Jamie. They both slept over whenever it was their shift.
Quietly, Vaughn dropped his duffle bag on his own bed. He passed the closed door to the guest room where Angela would be sleeping and gently pushed open the door to Jamie’s room, expecting to see his brother dozing quietly, the respirator humming like unwanted white noise. Jamie was asleep. But he wasn’t alone. Snuggled next to him, her head on his shoulder, her lithe body wrapped around his brother’s skeletal contours, was Angela. Her eyes were closed, her hair fanned across Jamie’s chest, and her right hand cupped his brother’s shoulder in a gesture much more intimate than that of nurse and patient. They both looked serene.
Heart pounding, Vaughn shut the door. He still didn’t know the root of his anxiety, but now he knew the reason for Jamie’s happiness. His brother was in love.
The Fairweather house was a modern abstraction of the American farmhouse. It was situated on two acres of golf-course emerald lawn and surrounded by no-muss shrubs and strategically placed ornamental grasses. The home’s beige exterior matched the beige exterior of every other house in the neighborhood. A former farm, the development, Lofty Acres, was situated on the highest spot for miles around. Allison had a clear view of a sprawling strip mall in one direction and the Pennsylvania Turnpike in another.
She turned her attention to the house in front of her. The two cars in the driveway, an Escalade and a BMW sedan, said someone was home. The car seat in the Escalade said Leah was likely one of them. Allison took a deep breath. She opened the door to her Volvo and stepped out into the frigid morning air. She’d fought with herself over making this trip, but a bitter mix of curiosity and
guilt convinced her she needed some answers. Had she ever really had closure with Scott? She didn’t think so. Certainly not three weeks ago when she’d seen him downtown. And now this.
Allison paused on the front porch, unable to knock. Maybe it was the wreath of pink and peach dried flowers on the front door. Maybe it was the baby swing tucked next to the white wicker chairs on the small front porch. When she’d known Scott, he’d lived in a townhouse. After that, she’d heard that he and Leah moved to the city, had purchased a half million dollar rehab in a trendy neighborhood. From hipster to suburbanite? The thought made her wonder about the years that had passed. Was she wrong to come here? She felt like she was breaking a unspoken truce. Only she didn’t know whether the truce was with the Fairweathers…or herself.
She forced her arm up, her fist to clench. Before she could knock, the front door swung open and she came face-to-face with Leah Fairweather. Or at least a shell of the Leah Fairweather Allison remembered. This Leah had aged. The long white-blond hair was now a yellowed bob that lay in an unwashed circle around her head. Her face, once pretty in a plain, haughty way, was lined. Her features looked pinched and tired. A loose-fitting gray sweater hung limply down sloping, hunched shoulders. The eyes that met Allison’s, once full of intellectual arrogance and unabashed hatred, flashed from surprise to anger to a sad resignation that told Allison coming here had been a mistake. But it was too late to turn away now.
Allison took a reflexive step back, pulling her coat tighter around her torso. She said, “We should talk.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea—”
“About your call the other night, Leah. I’m sorry. About what happened to Scott.”
Leah glanced behind her. She frowned, but opened the door wider so Allison could come inside. “My sister is helping me. The police just left. This is the third time they’ve been here.” She sighed. “Let’s go in the study. We can be alone.”
Leah turned and Allison followed. The house was gloomy, the lights off and window shades drawn. A house in mourning. Aside from the gloom, though, the house was the epitome of the American suburban dream house. New construction, vaulted entryway, hardwood floors, Persian area rugs. Someone—Leah? A decorator?—had once taken care to fill the home with high-end furniture and designer touches, but now the tired edges said no one had cared in quite some time.
A baby cried and Allison saw Leah’s shoulders tense. She didn’t stop, though, and instead opened a set of glass French doors, and then closed them furtively after Allison entered the room.
Unlike the rest of the house, the office was bright and orderly, despite what Allison assumed had been a sweep by the police. Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” played from speakers that sat on a mahogany bookshelf otherwise lined with business treatises. A massive mahogany desk sat against one wall, its top clear of clutter. A leather swivel chair had been tucked under the desk, and two armchairs, their cushions upholstered in navy blue and ecru stripes, a small mahogany coffee table between them, took up the empty wall of the office. It was an interior room with no windows. If there had been a computer on the desk, it was gone now, likely taken by the police. Papers and envelopes sat on a credenza, arranged in tidy piles.
Leah stood by the desk, looking unsure of herself. Finally, she sat in one of the armchairs and offered the other to Allison.
“I shouldn’t have called you.” Leah glanced down at hands clasped firmly together in her lap as though they belonged to someone else. In fact, her whole persona gave the air of someone in a trance-like state. Shock, Allison knew. After four years of graduate school in psychology, she was glad she remembered something. Leah said, “You shouldn’t have come.”
“You sounded so upset, Leah. I wanted to reassure you. And I want to understand what happened, why my name was in Scott’s calendar.”
“Don’t be so naïve, Allison. Isn’t that obvious? He still loved you.” Allison heard the anger nipping at the heels of Leah’s grief. To be deceived by a dead man, when there can no longer be answers? That seemed to Allison the ultimate betrayal. Even if it wasn’t true, Leah believed it was. Sometimes fantasy was more damaging than the truth.
Allison said gently, “Leah, Scott was not in love with me. I have no idea why my name was in his calendar. Truly, I don’t.” When the other woman didn’t respond, Allison asked, “What happened to Scott? The papers made it sound like he was involved in something…illegal.”
Allison waited for a response. She felt uncomfortable in this room. The scent of Scott’s aftershave lingered, the same one he’d worn so long ago. Or maybe she was imagining it. Allison tried to picture him here, working at the austere desk, sorting through these papers, but couldn’t. The room seemed barren: no family photographs, no memorabilia. Another casualty of the police investigation, or did Scott prefer the antiseptic feel of the bare office, clear of sentiment? If so, what did that say about the man he’d become?
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore,” Leah said finally. “Scott was found on a street off Broad, in North Philly. Two gunshot wounds to the head. Money and wallet gone. It was early in the morning.”
“Did anyone see it happen?”
“An older woman out walking her dog claimed she saw a group of kids running down the street sometime after Scott was killed.”
“But she didn’t witness anything more than that?”
Leah shook her head. “Not that I know of.”
Allison wondered whether the older woman would talk, even if she had seen it happen. Witnesses to murder didn’t always fare well, especially if it had been a drug-related murder. Or if a gang was involved. “Who found him, Leah?”
Leah twisted the sleeves of her sweater around her fingers. “Teenagers. A group of them.”
“How old?”
Leah looked up. “The cops didn’t say. Does it matter?”
“I don’t know,” Allison said. But she thought it did. Older teenagers made it seem more likely that they were the perpetrators rather than a random group of passersby.
Leah looked toward the desk. Her hands were now fully entwined in the gray wool of her sweater, and her fingertips kneaded the inside of the cloth. “Scott ran every day. Avoided red meat. Flossed.” She shook her head, and a tear escaped. She untangled her hands long enough to wipe it away. “Why would he want drugs? Why?”
Allison didn’t know why. The Scott she knew had been fit and athletic, a six-foot-four bastion of clean living. Could the stress of his job, or something in his personal life, have pushed him to recklessness? She reminded herself that he’d lied to her and cheated on his fiancé. Risk-taking behaviors. If his desire for risk had grown, she supposed anything was possible.
“Can I see the appointment book, Leah?”
“The police have it.”
Allison thought. “Is it possible he had an appointment with another Allison?”
“Hardly.” Abruptly, Leah stood and left the room. She came back a minute later with a sheaf of papers in her hand. She flipped through them, and then pulled one out and handed it to Allison.
It was a photocopy of Scott’s daily calendar. Indeed, the words “Allison Campbell” had been scribbled in the margin in Scott’s tight, slanted printing.
Allison shook her head. “I swear to you, Leah. We had nothing arranged for Saturday night. For any night.”
But Leah refused to back down. “Then why are you in his appointment book?”
Allison didn’t know why, and she said as much. She thought of her chance meeting with Scott a few weeks before. The way he looked at her. They’d both been at Thirtieth Street Station, downtown. She’d been in line to board an Amtrak train to New York City. He’d been rushing through the concourse, toward her. He’d mouthed something she didn’t understand. Still hurt, still angry, and wondering what those feelings meant all these years later, Allison had descended the steps to the waiting Ace
la. Security had blocked Scott’s path. At the time, Allison assumed it was a chance encounter, that he’d seen her across the great hall. Had it been more than that? Had Scott Fairweather been trying to tell her something?
Suddenly the Vivaldi was too much.
Allison was rising to leave when the French doors opened and another woman walked in. She was the spitting image of Leah that day Leah had stormed into Scott’s townhouse and found Allison and Scott in the dining room. A younger, prettier, fresher version of the widow standing before her now. It was déjà vu. Allison’s stomach tightened.
“Someone wants Mommy.”
Someone was the infant in this other woman’s arms. Chubby. Tow-headed. Adorable. The little girl stared wide-eyed at Allison.
The woman said, “I’m Leah’s sister, Heather. And you are?”
But Allison was no longer listening. Vivaldi’s violins rang out, a melody echoed by the deeper tones of cellos. Allison’s chest felt heavy. To Leah, she muttered, “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
Leah opened her mouth to speak, but Allison didn’t wait to hear what she had to say. She left that house quickly, more confused now than she’d been when she arrived.
Vaughn showered quickly, changed and drove to First Impressions. By the time he arrived at the office, he saw Allison’s Volvo in the parking lot, next to a pearl white Cadillac Seville. He recognized that car. Midge Majors.
Inside, he walked past the client room, trying hard not to listen to Midge’s high-pitched voice going on about something and pulled on the door to his office, leaving it open just a crack. There was a stack of mail on his desk and he began sorting through it, filing away bills, fan letters and the occasional circular. He came to a 6” x 9” brown envelope clasped shut and then taped. Someone had typed “Allison Campbell” in black blocky letters across the front. The envelope was smudged and dirty, with two square indentations, as though it had been rescued from beneath a heavy chair or caught in a door. Probably some hand-delivered fan mail. Vaughn figured the cleaning crew had left it on his desk. But where had they found it?
