A Stranger in the House

by Shari Lapena

  Karen’s heart tightens. “She did? What did she say? Did she overhear anything?” Karen asks.

  “She must have,” Tom says irritably.

  “But you didn’t ask?”

  “You can ask her tomorrow,” Tom says. “Better that you ask her, anyway.”

  She nods. She looks at her husband and her heart lurches as his eyes slide away. They both need to know what her mind has blocked out.

  “Tom,” she says, hesitantly. “Do you want to drive me down there, to where they found the body?”

  “What, now?” Tom says, caught off guard.

  “Why not?” She remembers how he goaded her, how he accused her of not doing anything to get her memory back. She’s offering to do something about it now. If he only knew how desperate she was to know what happened that night. “Maybe it will help me remember.” She knows the address; she clipped it out of the newspaper.

  “All right,” Tom says, putting down his drink. He picks up his keys on his way out the door and she follows him.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  As they leave their own familiar neighborhood behind and head south, Karen feels more and more uncomfortable. It feels like looking for trouble, driving a Lexus through these decaying streets. See, I’m trying, she wants to say to him, but she doesn’t. She watches out the window at the depressing view, trying to remember, but nothing is coming back to her.

  “I think that’s it,” Tom says, pulling into a strip mall’s empty parking lot and looking across the street at the derelict restaurant that they’ve heard so much about.

  They sit in the darkness, looking at the ugly, boarded-up building. She doesn’t want to get out of the car in this neighborhood. Now she just wants to go home. Nothing looks familiar. She’s never seen this place before. She’s never been here. She starts to tremble.

  “Let’s go take a look, shall we?” Tom says, a little callously.

  She’d never intended to get out of the car. She just meant to see the place from a distance. She shrinks back into her seat. “I don’t want to.”

  He gets out of the car anyway. She has no choice but to follow him. She doesn’t want to sit here alone. She gets out of the car and closes her door angrily. She has to walk quickly to catch up with him as he crosses the street and strides toward the restaurant on the opposite side. She looks around nervously, but there’s no one else in sight. Together they stand in front of the building, saying nothing. She can feel his recrimination in the set of his shoulders, the cold expression on his face. He knows she was here, and he can’t forgive her for it. Without speaking, Tom heads around the side of the building toward the back. She follows him, stumbling a little in the dark because she feels unsteady on her feet. She’s breathing quickly and it’s making her light-headed. She feels a terrible fear. But she recognizes nothing. She remembers nothing.

  At the back, the yellow police tape is mostly still up, but dragging a bit in places, moving in the breeze.

  “Is this helping at all?” Tom asks, turning to her.

  She shakes her head. She knows she looks frightened. “Let’s go back, Tom,” she says.

  He ignores her. “Let’s go in.”

  She hates him for challenging her this way, for not caring how frightened she is. She thinks about turning back and making her own way to the car. If she had her keys with her she’d drive away and leave him here.

  Instead, her anger gives her the courage to go after him under the police tape and up to the back door. He pushes it with one elbow. Surprisingly, it opens. She supposes that the police are done here, and have left things as they found them.

  Tom walks in ahead of her. There’s light coming from the streetlight out front, slanting in through a break in the boarded-up window, enough light to see the interior fairly well. There’s a dark stain on the floor where the body must have been, and a lingering, repellent odor—the smell of a rotting animal. She stops, rigid, staring at the stain. Her hand goes involuntarily to her mouth, as if she might gag. Tom looks back at her.

  “Anything?” he says.

  “I’ve had enough,” she says, and turns and stumbles out of the restaurant. Once outside she bends forward and gulps deep breaths of fresh air. When she lifts her head again, she’s looking at a parking lot a short distance away. Tom comes up beside her, and looks in the same direction.

  “I think that’s where they found the tire tracks. And the gloves,” Tom says, and walks toward the parking lot. She watches him. He turns around after a few paces and says, “Coming?”

  “No. I’m going back to the car.” She starts walking without looking at him. All this has done is frightened her. It hasn’t helped her remember, and her efforts haven’t won her any goodwill or sympathy from Tom either.

  —

  Tom watches Karen head back toward the strip mall. She’s upset with him, but he doesn’t care. It even gives him a nasty sort of satisfaction. After all, this is all her fault. He sees her cross the street and wait beside the car. He has the keys, and she can’t get in.

  He makes a show of looking around the parking lot, wondering where, exactly, her car had been parked. Where the police had found their gloves. He takes his time. But he keeps an eye on her, to make sure she’s all right, standing alone beside an expensive car.

  Finally he returns to her, unlocks the car, and drives them silently home. He reflects that all this little excursion has done is to further show the fault lines in their already fractured relationship.

  When they arrive home, it’s late. Tom tosses his keys on the table inside the door and says, “I’m tired, I think I’ll go up to bed.” He turns away from her and heads upstairs. And with each step he takes, his despair deepens.

  —

  Bob lets himself into the house quietly. He peeks into the living room, where he knows he’ll find Brigid, sitting in the dark. He knows she isn’t waiting up for him. She used to, but she’s not interested in him anymore, all she’s interested in is the damn neighbors.

  He’s hurting, too. He could still love her, if she could only move on from her grief about their childlessness. It’s torn them apart, and it’s affecting her emotional health. She’s always been the emotional one; he’s always been the steady one, her rock. But now he doesn’t know what to do. He knows how to talk to grieving families, he does it all day long, he’s quite good at it, but he has failed miserably at it at home. He can’t help his wife deal with her feelings of loss, or deal properly with his own.

  “Brigid?” he says softly, seeing the outline of her head dark against the back of the chair. For a moment she is so still that he thinks she might be asleep. He takes a few more steps into the living room. When she speaks, it startles him.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “Shouldn’t you go to bed?” Bob asks, approaching and looking down at her with concern. She doesn’t even raise her eyes to look at him; they are fixed on the house across the street.

  “Those detectives were back tonight, talking to Karen and Tom,” she says.

  Bob doesn’t know what the hell’s going on with Karen and Tom Krupp. She seems to be in some kind of trouble. He doesn’t really know them, but he knows Brigid and Karen are close. “What’s going on, do you think?”

  Brigid shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Has Karen remembered anything yet?”

  “No.” She finally turns to look at him. “I made brownies. Do you want one?”

  —

  Karen watches Tom’s retreating back, her heart sinking with each step he takes away from her.

  Still trembling, she goes into the kitchen and pours herself another shot of whiskey. Then she carries it into the living room and slumps onto the sofa, cradling it in her unsteady hands. She gulps the alcohol and stares at a blank spot on the wall, for how long she has no idea. It’s perfectly quiet. Suddenly she hears the phone ring in the ki
tchen. Her entire body stiffens. The phone stops on the second ring—Tom must have picked it up in the bedroom—but all at once she’s remembering that other phone call. . . .

  She closes her eyes. She’s back in the kitchen, making a salad, slicing a tomato on the cutting board. . . . She expected Tom home soon. She was looking forward to seeing him. When the phone rang, she thought it might be him, saying he was going to be even later than expected. But it wasn’t Tom. It’s coming back to her now, and she concentrates. She wants to know.

  It was a voice she hadn’t heard in almost three years, one she thought she’d never hear again. She’d know that voice anywhere.

  “Hello, Georgina.”

  Her heart began to pound; her mouth went dry. She considered ending the call without uttering a word, but that would be like a young child crouching and closing her eyes tightly thinking no one could see her. She couldn’t hang up the phone; she couldn’t just close her eyes. He’d found her. She already knew he’d found her; he’d been in her house. She’d been waiting, in plain view, trying to pretend this wasn’t going to happen. And now it was.

  She’d fled that life. Begun over as someone else. She’d found unexpected happiness with Tom. And with one phone call, she could feel her new life shattering into a million jagged pieces.

  He gave her the address of an abandoned restaurant in a neighborhood she would never have set foot in otherwise, then Karen hung up the phone. All she could think about was protecting herself, and not letting anyone destroy what she now had with Tom. She saw the pink gloves sitting on the counter and grabbed them. She retrieved her gun from its hiding place in the furnace room—the gun that Tom knew nothing about—putting it with the gloves in a cloth bag. Then she swiped her car keys off the table and flew down the steps, not even thinking about locking the door, or leaving a note for Tom.

  She drove, her hands tight around the steering wheel, staying just within the speed limit, her mind blank.

  For a moment, everything stops. Karen can’t remember what happened next. She takes another gulp of whiskey, tries to relax. And then suddenly she remembers parking the car in that lot. She remembers pulling the gloves out of the cloth bag and slipping them on. They looked absurd. She took the gun out of the bag. She was trembling. She looked around to see if anyone was watching—the place was deserted—and then got out of the car and walked nervously in the dark toward the back of the building, where he’d told her to go. When she got there, the door was already slightly ajar, and she pushed it open with her gloved fingers—but here her memory fails her. She waits, she tries to force it, but nothing will come. She fights tears of frustration. She still doesn’t know what happened inside that restaurant. She doesn’t know how he was killed. She must know what happened! How can she decide what to do if she doesn’t know the truth? But she can see nothing more.

  What she saw tonight with Tom—it’s all terribly familiar to her now. She can’t bear to think about it anymore. She finishes her drink in one big gulp, puts the glass down on the coffee table, and buries her face in her hands.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The next morning, Tom has gone to work, and Karen’s alone in the house. She feels the walls closing in on her. She sits in the kitchen, ignoring the cup of coffee in front of her, her entire body tense.

  She’s terrified that Rasbach will be back; in the meantime, she imagines him scurrying around, digging, finding out things. Finding out things about her. Finding out who the dead man is. Then it’s just a matter of time.

  Karen hasn’t told Tom what she now remembers. She can’t. She has to think, figure out a way through this. But her normally sharp mind, so good at planning, isn’t working so well right now. Perhaps it’s because of the concussion.

  She escaped before—she got away from him, away from Las Vegas, started over.

  She told him that she was going sightseeing that day, to the Hoover Dam, just outside of Vegas. The night before, she picked up the secondhand car she’d bought with cash a few weeks earlier. She’d arranged to leave it with the dealer until she needed it. She’d used her new ID—obtained through someone she hired online—to register the vehicle. Then she drove it out to the dam and left it in the parking lot below the Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge. She called a cab using a prepaid cell she’d bought at a drug store with cash, and had the driver take her back to the Strip and drop her at the Bellagio. She also paid him cash. She took another cab home, and got there before he returned. She knew he was going to be out late. She could barely sleep that night—she was too nervous, worried about what might go wrong.

  Very early the next morning, she drove back out there, taking U.S. 93 South from Las Vegas, tense behind the wheel, and parked her car in the same lot below the Bypass Bridge. When she saw her getaway car at the other end of the parking lot, waiting for her, it suddenly felt real for the first time. She left her wallet with all her ID in the glove compartment. Then she went to the bridge. There were a few people around, enough to be sure that she was seen. She stood at the guardrail and looked down. It was about a 900-foot drop to the Colorado River below. She felt dizzy at the view. Jumping or falling would mean certain death. She took out her cell phone and snapped a picture. Then she sent the picture, along with a text, to him. You can’t hurt me anymore. This is it. And it’s on you. Once the message was sent, she flung the cell phone off the bridge.

  After that she had to act quickly. She left the bridge, went down to the parking area, and stepped into one of the portable toilets when nobody was looking. Inside she quickly stripped off everything but her bra and panties. She had a sundress in her pack, which she slipped over her head, then put on the sandals with heels she’d also brought. She bundled her shorts, T-shirt, sneakers, and baseball cap into her pack, then let her hair down and put on big sunglasses. She pulled out a small compact and applied lipstick. Except for the pack she was carrying, she looked completely different.

  Farther down the parking lot her secondhand car was waiting, with her expensive new ID as Karen Fairfield in the glove compartment. She had on her whatever cash she’d managed to save. She walked across the lot to her getaway car, the sundress swirling around her bare legs, feeling like she could almost fly.

  She got in the car, put the windows down, and started driving. And with every mile, she started to breathe a little easier.

  —

  “I saw you coming up the walk,” Brigid says, opening her door. “Come on in.”

  Brigid’s obviously happy to see her, and for a moment everything seems like it used to. Karen wishes she could confide in Brigid about the mess she’s in. How much easier this would be if she could share her burden with someone else, but she must keep her secret, even from her closest friend. And her husband. Because she doesn’t know what she might have done the night of the accident.

  The two of them head automatically to the kitchen at the back, out of habit.

  “I was just putting on a pot of coffee. Do you want some? It’s decaf.”

  “Sure.” Karen sits down in the seat she usually takes at Brigid’s kitchen table, and watches her as she prepares the coffee.

  “How are you feeling?” Brigid asks, glancing at her over her shoulder.

  “Better,” Karen says.

  “You look good, considering,” Brigid says.

  Karen smiles ruefully. It feels good to pretend, even briefly, that life is what it used to be. She touches her face gingerly. The swelling has gone and the bruises have faded and yellowed.

  “I don’t mean to pry, at all”—Brigid looks back at Karen over her shoulder again—“but if you want to talk about it, I’m here. Or if you don’t want to, we don’t have to. I’ll understand.”

  Karen can tell that Brigid is dying to talk about it. “It’s just that—it’s the strangest thing—I don’t remember anything about that night,” Karen lies, “from the time I was making supper till I woke up in the hospital, so
I don’t have much to say.”

  “That must be so weird,” Brigid says sympathetically, coming back to the table with two cups of coffee. She puts out milk and sugar and sits down across from Karen. “I’ve seen the detectives going in and out of your place. They were here, too, asking questions.”

  “They came here?” Karen says, feigning surprise. “Why would they come here? What did they ask you?”

  “They wanted to know if I’d seen you leaving that night, before your accident, whether there was someone with you, that kind of thing.”

  “Oh.” Karen nods. That made sense. They know that she left the house alone, in a hurry, after getting that call at 8:17 P.M. Karen wishes she knew exactly what else the detectives know, or suspect.

  “I told them I didn’t see anything. I wasn’t home.”

  Karen takes a sip of her coffee. “Thanks for the brownies, by the way,” she says. “They were delicious, as always.”

  “Oh, you’re welcome. I couldn’t eat them all myself, anyway.”

  “You must have dropped them off when the police were over,” Karen says.

  Brigid nods. “I didn’t want to bother you,” she says, “so I thought it would be better just to drop them off.”

  For the first time it occurs to Karen to wonder why Brigid didn’t leave them on the porch, which is the custom around here. That’s what neighbors do, if someone’s sick, or has a baby, or there’s been a death in the family. They leave a plate of something outside the front door. Never the back.

  “Why didn’t you just leave them on the porch?”

  Brigid hesitates. “I didn’t want to interrupt. I thought if I went to the front, you might hear me and come to the door.”

  “You must’ve overheard some things, when you were in the kitchen,” Karen suggests.

  “No, I didn’t hear anything,” Brigid says. “I just dropped them and left.” She leans toward Karen, concern on her face. “But I know detectives don’t usually investigate car accidents. What’s really going on, Karen?”