by Shari Lapena
She grabbed her gardening gloves and went out to the bottom of her front yard to tackle the weeds and keep an eye on the man snooping around the Krupps’ house. When he reappeared in the front, she stood up and watched him. He waved at her in a friendly way and then walked over to talk to her.
“Hi,” he said casually.
“Hello,” Brigid responded stiffly, not about to be won over by a pleasant smile and good looks. She didn’t know who this guy was. Maybe he was an insurance adjustor or something, and had a perfectly acceptable reason for looking around the Krupps’ property. But he didn’t look like an insurance adjustor.
“Do you live here?” he asked, indicating her own house behind her.
“Yes,” she said.
“You must know the people across the street,” he said, tilting his head at the Krupps’ house. She nodded cautiously. “I’m an old friend,” he told her, “of the wife.”
“Oh,” Brigid said, not sure she believed him. “From where?”
He looked at her, all pleasantness fell away, and a mean sort of glint came into his eye. “From another life.” And then he waved at her dismissively and walked briskly away.
The man’s demeanor made her feel uneasy. Once he was gone she returned to the house, thinking about the odd exchange. It made Brigid wonder about Karen. She never seemed to talk about her life before she was with Tom, other than saying that she was from Wisconsin, and that she had no family. And another thing, Karen wasn’t online at all. Nothing came up on her. She wasn’t even on Facebook. Everybody’s on Facebook.
Brigid remembered Karen’s maiden name from when she and Tom were dating. Karen had changed her name to Krupp after the wedding. Brigid got on the computer and Googled Karen Fairfield, but she didn’t get any hits. That wasn’t too surprising. But the more she thought about the man, about his from another life comment, the more curious she became. That was how Brigid got drawn into the Internet sinkhole and started researching how people disappear and turn up in a new life as someone else. It wasn’t long before she began to suspect—to convince herself—that Karen might not be who she said she was. That’s when she called Tom at his office and arranged to meet him that same night. She wanted to tell him about the strange man, and her suspicions about Karen.
But that evening, when Brigid was about to leave to meet Tom at their old spot down by the river, she saw Karen peel out of the house in a desperate hurry. And because of the man’s odd visit earlier in the day, Brigid followed her, instead. Tom could wait.
She saw what she saw. And now, everything is different.
She thinks about what happened with Tom the night before, and a languid warmth begins somewhere low and spreads throughout her body. How she’s missed him! She hadn’t even realized how much, until she kissed him again.
That kiss—sensuous and dark—was fraught with all sorts of delicious undercurrents and memories. His mouth felt and tasted just like she remembered. Pleasure traveled along her body in a current. That kiss left her breathless. They shared a past, and it was all revived in that kiss. When it was over, and he pulled away and looked at her, she could tell that he was as blown away by it as she was.
And then she’d taken him by the hand and led him upstairs to the bedroom, where they made love in Karen and Tom’s bed. The same bed she and Tom used to make love in, before Karen moved in. That interloping bitch.
Brigid thinks about the lewd things she and Tom did together the night before and feels that glow again. She remembers how afterward, a feeling of great power and wickedness had come over her. She propped herself on her elbow, full breasts on display, and looked at Tom lying naked and vulnerable in the bed beside her. She walked her fingers slowly up his leg, and said, “You don’t want me to tell the police what I saw, do you?”
He’d looked at her in fear. “No.”
There’s no mistaking it, she thinks now, the connection they share. Tom loved her once, she’s sure of it, and he will love her again. He will be in her thrall once more, like he was before. Tom knows now what Karen has done, that she’s a murderer, because Brigid was there, and she told him.
Brigid has promised Tom that she isn’t going to say anything to the police.
But Brigid has a plan.
There’s no going back.
It’s all going to be perfect.
—
Tom is shaken to his core by the arraignment. It was a circus in the courtroom, too noisy to hear anything, too much going on, and all of it happening so fast. He’d expected it to be a lot more solemn and easier to follow. Karen went up in front of the bench with Jack Calvin when her name was called. Tom sat in the courtroom, fairly far back, the only place he could get a seat. He could only see Karen from behind. The size of the courtroom and the tumult all around made her seem small and defeated. He had to strain to hear.
It was all over in a couple of minutes, and then she was being escorted out. He stood up. She glanced back at him, frightened, as they led her out of the courtroom. Tom sat back down in his seat, stunned, unsure of what to do. Calvin saw him and approached.
“You might as well go home,” he said. “They’re transporting her to the county jail. You can see her there later today.”
So Tom had gone home. He didn’t know what else to do. Then he’d called in sick indefinitely. He knows that no one is going to believe he’s sick, once the news gets out.
Now, he goes into the bedroom and stares at the rumpled sheets with horror. He should never have slept with Brigid again. How could he have let that happen?
He knows how—he was very lonely, and very drunk, and she was sympathetic. She could also be irresistibly sexy, and they had all that history. But then, afterward, she made it quite clear that sleeping with her had been the price of her silence.
Now he feels sick and scared. What if she’s lying? What if Brigid hadn’t been there at all? Either way, she’s manipulating him to get back into his bed. What if she visits Karen in jail and tells her what he did? If he were to tell Karen that he slept with Brigid to protect her, would she believe him?
Tom suddenly rips the sheets off the bed in a rage and throws them in a ball on the floor. He’ll put them in the laundry and wash any trace of Brigid from their bed.
But getting rid of Brigid—that might not be so simple.
—
Jack Calvin takes a quick flight to Las Vegas, Nevada, to visit the counseling center for battered women that Karen used when she was married to Robert Traynor. He’s already checked: it’s still there. And there are people there who remember her. They’re expecting him.
He’s also hired a private investigator in Las Vegas to look into Robert Traynor’s business associates. Maybe something will turn up there, but he’s not particularly hopeful.
He lands and takes a cab into the city. He soon locates the Open Arms Women’s Shelter and Counseling Center. The building is a bit run down, but it’s trying hard to be a happy, warm, and welcoming place. There are children’s paintings up everywhere.
He goes to the information desk. Very soon the director of the facility comes out to meet him and takes him back to her office.
“I’m Theresa Wolcak,” she says, offering him a seat.
“Jack Calvin,” he says. “As I told you on the phone, I represent a woman, now living in New York State, who used to come here for counseling three or four years ago, it would be now. Georgina Traynor.”
She nods. “May I see some identification?”
“Yes, of course.” He reaches for his ID. He also opens his briefcase and hands over a letter that identifies the writer as Georgina Traynor and gives her informed consent to disclose information to her lawyer, Jack Calvin.
She pushes her glasses up higher on her nose and reads it. Then she nods briskly. “Okay. How can I help?”
“My client, Georgina Traynor, has been charged with the murder of he
r husband, Robert Traynor.”
Theresa looks at him and nods tiredly. “And now the law needs her to justify herself.”
“She’s accused of killing a man. They need to see justice done. If what she says is true, I don’t think a jury will have a very difficult time seeing it from her point of view, that she was frightened for her life.”
“The counselor who saw your client most regularly is a woman named Stacy Howell. Let me get her for you.”
Soon Calvin and the counselor are closeted together in a small private office. Stacy, a no-nonsense black woman with a soft voice, brings Georgina Traynor’s file with her and opens up immediately when she’s read the letter.
“I remember her, sure. You would think I wouldn’t because I see so many, all with the same sad story, but I remember her. Georgina isn’t that common a name. And I really liked her. I saw her for at least a year.”
“What was she like?”
“She was like all the other women who come here. Scared shitless. Sorry to be so blunt. But nobody seems to get what these women go through. The man she was married to was a real bastard. She felt trapped. She felt that if she told anyone but us what he did to her, nobody would believe her.”
“So what did you tell her? Did you tell her to leave him?”
“It’s not that simple. We have women living here for their own protection. It’s difficult to get the supports in place. The restraining orders don’t seem to do much good.” She sighs in discouragement. “I told her she had some leverage. He had a good business. I told her that if she wanted to she could leave him and get a restraining order and threaten to make it public. Shaming them sometimes works. But she was too afraid.”
Calvin nods.
“One day she didn’t show up for her appointment. We heard that she’d jumped off the Hoover Dam Bridge. They didn’t recover the body. I read about it in the paper.” She shakes her head sadly, remembering. “I thought for sure that he’d killed her, that he’d tried to make it look like suicide.”
“Did you go to the police?”
“Of course I did. They looked into him, but he had an airtight alibi. He was working, lots of people saw him throughout the day. They dropped it.”
“He didn’t kill her,” Calvin says, indicating the letter.
“No, she got away after all. Good for her.”
“But now she’s facing a murder charge.”
“She killed him?” Stacy says with surprise. She puffs air sharply out her nose. “He had it coming, the son of a bitch.” And then she looks at him in distress and says, “What’s going to happen to her?”
Chapter Thirty-seven
Detective Rasbach is pretty certain that from here on out, the Krupp case is going to be fairly straightforward. It’s like a puzzle, difficult at first, but once you have the outline, all the pieces start slipping neatly into place. It seems quite clear to him that Karen Krupp is a killer. He feels sorry for her, though. In different circumstances, he thinks, it’s unlikely she would ever have killed anyone. If she’d never met Robert Traynor, for instance.
They know now how Traynor tracked her down. They’ve looked at his computer, which they had sent in from Vegas by the Las Vegas police. Traynor had been systematically searching Web sites of accounting and bookkeeping firms all over the U.S. He’d bookmarked a page on the Web site of Simpson & Merritt, Tom Krupp’s employer. And there she was, in the background, at an office Christmas party, standing beside Tom Krupp, who had a profile on the same Web site.
It’s so difficult to truly disappear, Rasbach thinks.
Rasbach wonders why Traynor went to such efforts to find her. He obviously hadn’t been convinced by her suicide, perhaps because her body had never been recovered.
He believes he has a solid case to take to the district attorney. Although the physical evidence is not yet conclusive, the circumstances are compelling. Despite steady door-to-door work on the surrounding businesses and apartments in the area, they have not been able to find any witnesses to the crime.
Rasbach recalls his unproductive interview with Karen Krupp. She’s clearly terrified. He feels sorry for Tom Krupp, too. He doesn’t feel the least bit sorry for Robert Traynor.
Detective Jennings knocks on the open door and enters Rasbach’s office. He’s holding a paper bag with wrapped sandwiches in it. He offers one to Rasbach and sits down. “Someone called in a tip in the Krupp case,” he says.
“A tip,” Rasbach says wryly. He glances down at the newspaper open on his desk.
A local housewife, Karen Krupp, has been arrested for the murder of a previously unidentified man in an abandoned restaurant on Hoffman Street. That man has now been identified as Robert Traynor, of Las Vegas, Nevada. No other details are known at this time.
Karen and Tom Krupp aren’t talking to the press, and the police made only a very basic statement after the arrest, giving the names of the people involved. No details. But it’s not every day that an attractive, respectable suburban housewife is charged with murder. The press is going to be all over this. Nobody knows yet that Karen Krupp used to be someone else, that she faked her death, or that she’d previously been married to the victim.
“Yeah, I know,” Detective Jennings says, following Rasbach’s gaze to the newspaper. “Lots of crazies out there. The calls will probably start to come flooding in.”
“What did he say?”
“It was a she.”
“Did she leave a name?”
“Nope.”
“They never do,” Rasbach says.
Jennings finishes chewing a big bite of his sandwich and swallows. “She said we should search the Krupp property for the murder weapon.”
Rasbach raises his eyebrows, waves his sandwich in the air. “Karen Krupp shoots the guy, panics, and flees. The gun wasn’t on the scene, and it wasn’t in the car. So where’s the gun? It would be nice if we had the gun, and if we could prove that it was the gun that killed him, and if we could connect that same gun to Karen Krupp. But if she still had the gun with her when she left the scene, she either stashed it somewhere nearby—not likely as she seems to have been in a full-blown panic, and we would have found it—or she threw it out the car window. And then, after getting out of the hospital, she went back to pick it up, or find it, and put it back in her house somewhere. I don’t know, like maybe in her underwear drawer.” He starts unwrapping his sandwich. “An incredibly stupid thing to do. And she’s not stupid.”
“Yeah, not likely.”
“I don’t think we’re going to need any tips from the public to solve this one,” Rasbach says, and takes a bite of tuna salad on whole wheat.
—
Later that afternoon, Tom goes to visit Karen at the county jail.
He stands by his car in the parking lot for a minute, staring queasily at the big, hulking brick building. He doesn’t want to go in there. But he thinks of Karen and screws up his courage. If she can survive in there, he can at least put on a brave front when he visits.
He makes his way through the front doors of the prison, past the guards to the security desk. He must get used to all these barriers—doors and guards and procedures and searches—to get to talk to his wife. He wonders how she’s doing. Will she be holding up well, or is she going to be a mess? When he asks her, will she tell him the truth, or will she try to protect him and tell him that she’s managing just fine?
Finally he gets to see her, in a large room full of tables. He spots her at one and takes the seat across from her, under the watchful eyes of the guards at the front of the room. There are other visits going on around them, at other tables, but if they keep their voices low, they have enough privacy to talk.
“Karen—” he says, his voice breaking at the sight of her. Instantly his eyes sting with tears. He brushes them away, tries to smile through them.
Tears spill down her face. “Tom!”
She swallows. “I’m so glad you came. I thought you might not.”
“Of course I came! I will always come see you, whenever I can, Karen, I promise,” Tom says desperately. “Until we get you out of here.” He’s overwhelmed with guilt and shame for what he’s done with Brigid, while Karen was in jail.
“I’m scared, Tom,” she says. She looks as if she hasn’t slept at all. Her hair is unwashed. She seems to notice the way he’s looking at her and says, “I can’t take a shower in here whenever I want, you know.”
“Is there anything I can do?” he asks hopelessly. He feels utterly powerless. “Can I bring you anything?”
“I don’t think you’re allowed to.”
This almost makes him break down. He has to stifle a sob. He’s always loved to bring her surprises—chocolates, flowers. He can’t bear to think of her spartan future in here; she’s always loved her little luxuries. She’s not suited to prison. As if anyone is. “I’ll find out, okay?”
She tilts her head at him. “Hey, cheer up. I’m going to get out of here. My lawyer says so.”
Tom doubts that Calvin would have made any such assurances to her, but he pretends that they all believe that she’ll be out soon. They just have to hang tough. But there’s something he has to tell her. “Karen,” he says cautiously, his voice very low. “I was talking to Brigid last night.”
“Brigid?” Karen repeats, surprised.
He hopes she doesn’t notice the slight flush that he can feel coloring his face. His guilt. He glances down at the table for a moment, avoiding her eyes, then looks up again. “Yes. She came over to talk to you. She didn’t know that you’d been arrested.”
“Okay—”
“But she told me something.”
“What?” Karen says, her voice also low, but now wary.
“She said that the night of your accident, she saw you go out the front door.” He looks right into his wife’s lovely, lying eyes. He keeps his voice very quiet. “She told me she followed you that night.”
Karen becomes suddenly alert. “What?”
