Confessions on the 7:45

by Lisa Unger

  “Did he kill my mother?” she asked. “Did you ever suspect anyone else?”

  A breath drawn and released. “What do you think, Pearl?”

  “She had a lot of boyfriends.” Stella was a tease, a user. She hurt people just for fun. Any one of the men in Stella’s life might have turned angry and violent. That’s what men did, wasn’t it, when they didn’t get what they wanted from a woman? Some men.

  “Men that came and went,” he said. “No one who stayed on. No one who really, in his heart of hearts, wanted you.”

  She let that sink in, the truth of it.

  “He took care of me,” she said finally. She didn’t want to think that Pop killed Stella. But probably he did. “He never hurt me. Never—touched me.”

  “It sounds like you loved him.”

  “Maybe I did. In a way.”

  “And Gracie Stevenson.”

  “He loved her, too.”

  She heard him clear his throat again in that way old men always do. There was a woman’s voice in the background. Who is that, Hunt? It’s so early.

  “Her mother was also murdered,” said Ross. His tone was gently leading.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m seeing a pattern here. Aren’t you?”

  She didn’t answer him. Just a few more minutes and she’d end the call and trash the phone.

  “Where is she? Where’s Gracie—or should I call her Geneva?”

  “She’s somewhere safe,” she said, hoping that was true. She was pretty sure they’d never see each other again. “Starting fresh. We’re both done.”

  “With all the games you’ve been playing.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ve been trying to figure the two of you out. How you worked together.”

  “I wouldn’t say we worked together.”

  “No?”

  “She had her things,” said Pearl. “I had mine. We had different styles.”

  This wasn’t the whole truth. Pearl was always the puppeteer, pulling Gracie’s strings, whether she knew it or not.

  “So the Tuckers, that was her thing? Get a job as a nanny, sleep with the husband, then blackmail him to stay quiet.”

  “Something like that,” said Pearl. “I think it was just her twisted way of trying to be a part of a family.” Also not really true. Gracie hated breaking up families. But she was very good at it. The scores were smallish but consistent.

  But it was, in fact, Pearl who brought the Tuckers’ need for a nanny to Gracie’s attention; they were part of Selena’s network of social media friends. And it was Pearl who encouraged Grace to meet Selena in the park, having seen also on social media that Selena was about to go back to work. Then, things just fell together the way they do when you’re in the flow.

  “But Selena, she was your thing, your half sister. You’d been watching her for years, right? Must have been.”

  Yes, that was true.

  Pearl had hovered on the edge of Selena’s life for years—online stalking Selena and her friends, Selena’s sister (Pearl’s other half sister) Marisol, who for some reason interested Pearl less. She watched from afar as Selena got married, had children, bought a new house, built brick-by-brick her Instagram-perfect life.

  Pearl had also watched Graham on social media, though he was far less active and had a smaller network. Occasionally, she followed him. When, a couple of years into their marriage, Pearl realized he was unfaithful, she watched him more closely.

  A strange thing happened. She started to feel sorry for Selena.

  “So what was it? Revenge? Just another way to hurt the father who abandoned you?” asked Hunter. “What was the game with the Murphy family? More money? To destroy their family?”

  The question surprised Pearl, causing her a rare moment of self-reflection.

  What was the reason? Was there just one?

  At first maybe yes, revenge; she was just on a program of causing the most amount of pain.

  There would have been a score most likely—if Selena hadn’t moved the camera and caught Gracie and Graham fucking. If Gracie hadn’t grown a conscience and kept threatening to pull the plug.

  But it was so much more than that. When Pearl realized what Graham was—not just a cheater, but a monster—she wanted him punished. She wanted to liberate Selena, just like so many years ago she had liberated Cora. This was the ultimate long game, one that started over a decade earlier. She’d hovered, waiting for the perfect point of entry. The score? It wasn’t about money. It wasn’t really about revenge. She wasn’t like Pop.

  It was about the truth. The truth like a wildfire that burned everything in its path. One that destroyed but also cleansed. And then from the ash, new life.

  But Pearl didn’t have the patience to explain this to Hunter Ross. She suspected that he was the type of man who only saw things in black-and-white. What she did was wrong. He would never understand that it was right, too.

  “Yes,” she said just to keep it simple. The call was going on too long. “That’s it. Revenge.”

  And maybe deep down, it was that simple. That she didn’t want justice for Jaqueline Carson. Or punishment for Graham, the man who used and killed her. Or to free her half sister from the illusions of her life. That she didn’t care about anyone but herself, about anything but the games she was playing with people’s lives.

  “I’d say you did what you set out to do,” he said. His voice sounded heavy with fatigue.

  “I suppose I did.” She had a hollow feeling in her stomach, a familiar empty sadness. She breathed through it.

  “So what’s next?”

  “I disappear. Like I said, I’m done.”

  “Until?”

  “Until.”

  Another leaden silence where she considered hanging up.

  “So—may I ask the reason for your call?” he said finally.

  Good question, whispered Pop. He was always just over her shoulder. What kind of a game are you running here?

  “Closure,” she said. “For you, for me. You’re a rare breed. A good man who doesn’t give up until he finds the truth. One who cares and puts other people first. I like that about you.”

  He issued a little chuckle. “Thank you for saying so.”

  She told him where Pop and Bridget were buried. She’d moved the flag that marked the root cellar to mark the grave. It would be relatively easy to find. Pop, Charles, Bill, Jim, Chris, an abused child, a con, a grifter, a killer—he was a wanted man. Pearl wanted Hunter Ross to catch him, finally. So maybe then they both could rest.

  She didn’t know if anyone was still looking for Bridget, but maybe now she could rest, too.

  There was nothing left to say. He had all the answers she had to give.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Ross. Thanks for never giving up on us.”

  “Goodbye, Pearl.”

  If she had her way, that was the last time anybody would call her that.

  She ended the call, took the SIM card from the phone. In the bathroom, she flushed the card down the toilet, put the broken pieces of the phone in the trash.

  Her flight was boarding. She stood on line and filed in the early group getting on the plane, finally settling into her first-class seat.

  When she stepped off, she’d be someone else. Ben would be waiting for her. A good man, a faithful and loving one. Maybe she could never truly love him, or anyone. But she could try.

  She’d told Ben that, now that her sister had died (overdose, of course—so sad), she wanted to travel, to see the world she had never been able to explore. He agreed. He was ready to take some time off of work, as well. He would leave his practice with his partner for a time. Later, they’d decide what to do, where to settle.

  What a perfect way to start our new life together, he said. A fresh start, a clean slate for both of us.


  Emily’s thoughts exactly.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Selena

  I did you a favor. One day, you’ll see that.

  A month after Pearl set fire to her father’s life, Cora saw the girl hovering again on the sidewalk by the oak where she’d seen her before. This time, instead of hesitating, Cora opened the door and went outside to meet her.

  There was a moving van in the driveway, most of Cora’s possessions and the girls’ in boxes. They were moving out of the big house, into something smaller on the other side of town. Cora let Doug have the house; she couldn’t live in a place that was alive with memories, where the ghosts of every one of her broken dreams was hiding around each corner. Selena and Marisol were both off at school and Cora was alone for the first time in her adult life.

  What do you want, Pearl? Cora asked when the girl approached. She looked older than the last time Cora saw her, more confident and poised, more polished.

  I wanted to say I’m sorry.

  This came as some surprise to Cora. You’re sorry.

  I’m sorry you were hurt.

  Cora didn’t know what to say. She, too, felt like she should apologize. Because Pearl had also been hurt. Cora could see that in her. Unlike Cora, who had absorbed blows, and kept quiet all these years, Pearl had struck out in her anger. She’d aimed at her target and hit a bull’s-eye.

  You got what you wanted, right? said Cora. Whatever your price was, he paid it. Now leave us alone.

  Cora remembered that Pearl looked disappointed. It wasn’t just about that.

  No?

  I did you a favor, she said, cool and pretty, aloof. One day, you’ll see that.

  Now, in her attic office, Selena sought to capture that final encounter between Cora and Pearl on paper. How could Selena describe what that street was like in early fall, her mother’s despair, the beautiful and mysterious Pearl hovering on the street? She remembered how the air always smelled like cut grass, and the blue jays squawked in the trees. She knew what it was like to find yourself face to face with Pearl Behr, who somehow seemed to know more about you than you knew about yourself.

  And you know what, Cora told Selena when they talked about that final encounter, Pearl was right. Ending my life with your father was the best thing that ever happened to me, even though it felt like the worst time of my life. I lost everything, but I found myself. I went to work at the shelter, found Paulo.

  * * *

  Black Butterfly. It was Beth who encouraged her to write the story of Pearl Behr and Grace Stevenson, and how their lives intersected with her own. After two years of research, with the help of Hunter Ross, Selena was nearing the final editorial draft. Beth had brokered a book contract with a major house, and the book was slated to publish next year. What had she been before she met Will, Graham, had children? She was a writer, a dream she let languish and die. Now, through the ashes of her life, she rose.

  Write it, said Beth. When we narrate our experience, we take control of it. And in controlling the story of our past, we can create a better future.

  * * *

  Graham’s trial and conviction for the murder of Jaqueline Carson, his imprisonment, the boys’ therapy, their crushing pain, her own. It had been a long, dark night of the soul where no light was visible at the end of the tunnel. Through it all, she wrote and wrote.

  She kept writing as the truth about her husband—all of it—came out.

  After years of affairs with coworkers, women he’d met in bars, strippers, and a pattern of escalating violence toward women—the girl in Vegas was just the beginning—the night Selena threw Graham out of the house, he’d killed Jaqueline Carson.

  Graham had been harassing Jacqueline via text since she’d gotten him fired from his job. The night Selena hit him with the toy robot, Graham was desperate and enraged, and he’d waited for Jacqueline outside her apartment, forced her inside when she came home, raped and killed her.

  He still claimed he didn’t remember the deed, that he couldn’t remember, either, how he tried to kill Selena, his wife and the mother of his children. He’d wept on the stand. And, truly, Selena could see how his rage turned him into a monster, someone she never met until that final night. When he said that he couldn’t remember, she believed him.

  But there was video of Graham struggling to put a rolled up rug into his SUV outside Jacqueline’s apartment, captured by a security camera. Later, a picture of him passing through a toll booth on the way to dispose of the body. Finally, a photo of Graham throwing what turned out to be his bloody clothes in a dumpster, apparently taken by Pearl, who was following him.

  It still wasn’t clear to Selena how much Pearl had seen—that night or other nights. Why, if she’d followed Graham and knew he was waiting for Jaqueline outside her apartment, she did nothing to stop it.

  But this was something that had come up in therapy. Her doctor had said: “You cannot explain or come to understand the actions of deranged people. You can only accept what has happened and try to move forward, grateful that you have survived them.”

  And if not for Cora, Paulo, and Marisol, Beth and Will, as well as the resilient strength of her children, she wouldn’t have. And for all her failings, without Pearl, Selena might not have survived Graham.

  But she was still writing, still trying to understand, piecing together what she learned from the trial, from the stories of the women who came forward to testify against Graham. She would keep writing until she had told the whole story, the whole truth and all its many facets.

  The clock read nearly two, just another hour before she had to pick up the boys from their new school, a tiny private place where they were coddled and sheltered from the ugliness in their world. She answered their questions the best she could, brought to therapy what she couldn’t, promised herself she’d always be honest with them, no matter how much it hurt.

  Oliver and Stephen talked to Graham every Sunday. Weirdly, it had taken on a kind of normalcy—they talked to him about school, their friends, soccer. He moderated their arguments, praised them, soothed them when they begged him to come home. Selena had not brought them to see him, though they’d asked. Neither she nor Graham wanted that, not yet. When they were older. Maybe. Selena didn’t think about Graham. Didn’t talk to him. He was more dead to her than if he had died.

  Sometimes she dreamed about him, as he loomed over her, crushing her throat and taking the air from her lungs.

  The house she’d found for herself and the boys was isolated on five acres of property, not too far from Cora and Paulo, who helped her in every way possible, and closer to her sister’s house. Their relationship had grown stronger, her sister helping with the kids, Selena doing the same for her. As a result, Oliver and Stephen were closer to their cousins. Family gatherings were more peaceful. No more secrets. No more lies.

  Selena had severed ties with her father. She had no room in her life for someone who’d invited so much darkness into his family.

  Their other house languished on the market for a time—no one wanted to live where a killer had lived. But people had short memories, and a few months after Graham’s conviction, the story seemed to fade from the public consciousness. The house sold for a bit less than market value. But it was worth it to move on from a place where, as her mother put it, the ghosts of broken dreams lived around every corner.

  The house they lived in now, an 1880 farmhouse in an upstate New York town called The Hollows, was a project. It needed work, and it occupied much of Selena’s time and attention when she wasn’t writing or caring for the boys. Which is exactly why she bought it. The last thing she needed was free time.

  Outside, she heard tires crunching on the drive. She saved her work and headed downstairs in time to watch Will come through the front door, holding a large bouquet of tiger lilies, her favorite.

  He’d recused himself as Graham’s lawyer to become hers after t
he attack. Another lawyer defended Graham when he went to trial.

  Now, Selena and Will were—friends. She knew he wanted more. He knew she was nowhere near ready. She needed space to find herself. Finally.

  “What’s this?” she asked, taking the flowers. She gave him a squeeze and a kiss on the cheek.

  “It’s—you know,” he started. “Just something to brighten the day.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “You’re good to me, Will.”

  It was Friday. Will came over most Friday afternoons to play with the boys in the yard, then for pizza and movies. Sometimes, Marisol and her kids joined, as well. It was something they’d set up to create a sense of normalcy for Oliver and Stephen—and it seemed to work. Their therapist said that she was doing all the right things, that the boys were dealing with things in a healthy, normal way. Only time would tell.

  But did Oliver seem more sullen and dark? Was the pitch of Stephen’s tantrums more desperate? Would any of them ever be whole again? Would the darkness from their father, from her own father, infect them? Was it wound into their DNA?

  These were the things that kept her up at night, worrying about the contagion of secrets and lies, dark impulses, violent tendencies.

  At the kitchen table, she and Will chatted a while—about her book, about a case he was working on, what movies they should watch tonight. When he offered to pick up the kids so that she could get a workout, she agreed. The boys were always happy to see Will; he filled a space that was empty in each of them now. And she was grateful for his friendship, to all of them. A good man, if flawed in some ways, if not a perfect match for Selena, an honest and respectful one. Paulo, too, was a strong and positive influence. Her boys had men to look to, role models of the kind of quiet strength that comes from integrity and a heart that can love women well.

  When he left, she went upstairs and put on her running shoes, her workout clothes. Then she hit the rural road that led away from the house. The air was warm, and the sky clear. It took her a while to find her stride after sitting at her computer all day. But the music pumping in her headphones—Nirvana today, Kurt Cobain’s ghostly voice raw and wild—brought her energy up. She’d gone a mile when her phone pinged. She slowed to check it, in case Will had run into issues at the school.