Chapter 46

46

Dan can’t sleep. He tosses and turns until well past midnight. Lisa, beside him, has finally fallen into a deep slumber, exhausted from the emotional strain of the last few days.

He gets quietly out of bed and pulls on socks and underwear, jeans and a sweater. He needs to drive somewhere. Anywhere. It’s a compulsion he has sometimes.

He lets himself out of the house and gets into Lisa’s car. He resents that he no longer has his own car. He’ll buy another one, he decides, when this is all over, something sporty and powerful and impressive. He turns off his cell phone and drives into the dark spring night.

Dan remembers how, when he was seventeen, he developed a crush on a girl at school, Tina Metheney. He was obsessed with her. He followed her around at school, stared at her in class, brushed up against her in the hall. He was just a kid, painfully awkward, and he didn’t know how to deal with his overwhelming feelings of sexual desire. He thought he was in love. She didn’t like it. She told him to leave her alone, to stop looking at her like that. It was more than mere rejection. She left him feeling like he revolted her, that he frightened her.

His father had given him his first car not long before that, and Dan loved to take it out. He would go on long drives in those days to escape from the pressure cooker of the house. It was the closest he could get to freedom. Dan drove past Tina’s place many times, and one day soon after she’d told him to leave her alone, he parked outside her house waiting for her to come home. He wanted to talk to her, to make her understand. But when she saw him there, waiting for her, she wouldn’t speak to him. She went inside the house and told her father, and that night her father had come to the Mertons’ house and complained to Dan’s father. Fred was embarrassed and angry. He hauled Dan into his study and gave him an excruciating dressing-down in front of the other man. Tina’s father said he wouldn’t press charges if he left his daughter alone. Dan sat in a chair staring at the carpet, frightened, bereft, and utterly ashamed. Press charges? For what?

After that, he was swamped with shame and loneliness and confusion, convinced for a long while that he would never have a girlfriend. He was humiliated by Tina and by his father, who told everyone in the family what he’d done. He stalked a girl. He freaked her out. She almost called the police. His dad harped on it for months.

Dan didn’t dare look at Tina after that. He stayed away from her. He stayed away from all girls, terrified of what might happen. He worried that she’d told other girls at school about him, that he was some kind of weirdo. It felt so unfair. And sometimes, late at night, after everyone was asleep, he would have to drive past her house. Sometimes he had to stop and park outside. But the feelings of desire and adoration he’d had for Tina hadn’t survived the rejection and humiliation. He felt a meanness toward her now, and toward everyone involved in his disgrace. It gave him some small feeling of power to sit outside her house like this, without anyone knowing, doing what he was forbidden to do.

Now, as he drives—a form of self-soothing, really—he finds himself thinking about Audrey. She knows all about what happened with Tina. Audrey thinks he’s strange, because his father blew the whole thing out of proportion, made it out to be something it was not. Since that night she threatened them at Catherine’s house, Dan worried she might say something about it to the detectives, or to the press. He knows she was the anonymous source in that newspaper article. He doesn’t think Tina’s family will come forward and say anything about him. The Metheneys are like the Mertons, rich and very private. You don’t let people know about your personal business. But he wonders what they’re saying about him now around the Metheneys’ dinner table. He was so creepy. I knew there was something off about him. Maybe he killed his parents.

He tightens his hands on the steering wheel and somehow finds himself outside Audrey’s. The house is completely dark, there are no lights on at all. There is no one here to see him. He parks the car, and watches.

---

•   •   •audrey has too much on her mind to sleep.

She gets out of bed and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water. She can trust the tap water. Everything else in the house that was already open or unsealed she’s thrown down the drain. The clock on the kitchen stove tells her it’s 1:22 in the morning. She stands at the sink, letting the water run until it’s cold, and then fills a glass and carries it into the living room. Moonlight spills in through the living-room window and she can see perfectly well. No need to turn on any lights. She walks over to the window and looks out. There’s a car on the street, right in front of her house. A man is sitting in the car, just a shadow in the dark, and he seems to be watching the house. She takes a startled, involuntary step back. She must have spooked him because she sees his face turn away and his arm move to turn on the ignition. He pulls into the street and passes under a streetlight briefly as he speeds away.

She didn’t get a good look at him. But she recognized the car—it was Lisa’s. It gives her a jolt. She stands at the window, her heart pounding.

It must have been Dan, sitting outside her house in the middle of the night. Did he poison her? Was he sitting out there trying to get up the nerve to break in and see if she was dead? Well, now he knows.

Or maybe he’s just up to his old tricks.

---

•   •   •ellen cutter squirms restlessly in bed. At length she pushes back the covers and goes to the kitchen to make herself a cup of decaf tea. She looks at the clock on the wall. It’s just past three in the morning. It’s so quiet. It reminds her of when she used to get up in the middle of the night to breastfeed her daughter when she was an infant, so long ago. Just the two of them, alone on the sofa in the dark.

She thinks about her daughter now, how troubled she seems, how stressed and overworked. She wasn’t always like that. Rose had sailed through law school after spending a few years working at different jobs. But now Rose is struggling. If only she could help her.

She thinks about Audrey’s visit earlier that evening. Her friend is getting a million dollars from her brother in his will. And she’s complaining. She obviously feels she’s owed much more for keeping quiet about what Fred did all those years ago. She feels loyalty should be repaid.

And this bit about being poisoned. Ellen doesn’t know what to think. She believes Audrey ingested poison. She still looked ill. She’d been in the hospital—although she hadn’t called Ellen while she was there. The detectives had visited her, examined her house as a crime scene. You don’t lie about that. It’s too easy to be caught out. But it does occur to her that Audrey might have poisoned herself. These murders seem to have sent her over the edge. She’s so angry about being cheated out of what she thinks she deserves, so certain that one of the kids is a murderer, that perhaps she’s making things up. . . .

Ellen remembers the night Audrey first told her that Fred was going to change his will to give her half. She remembers how elated Audrey was, and how secretly jealous she felt.

She and Audrey pretend they tell each other everything, but it’s not true. Nobody tells anybody everything.

Ellen has never told Audrey that Rose is her brother’s child. She’s never told anyone but Fred. And now Fred’s other children are each inheriting a fortune. Audrey feels shortchanged, but that’s nothing to what Ellen feels.

When Ellen couldn’t get pregnant with her husband, she finally gave in to Fred’s advances and slept with him. She got pregnant quite quickly then. Fred had been furious when he found out. But he’d gotten over it when he realized she was never going to tell anyone. Her husband never knew Rose wasn’t his biological daughter.

When her husband died unexpectedly of a heart attack when Rose wasn’t even a year old, Ellen had gone to Fred and asked for money. She didn’t have to say it; he knew she could prove Rose was his child. He paid her regularly for years. Not a lot, but enough.

Ellen tries not to think about how Fred cold-bloodedly murdered his own father, but she’s been imagining it in her mind’s eye over and over, ever since Audrey told her. She’d Googled psychopathy and now she knows it’s partly genetic.

But her Rose isn’t like that. Rose is lovely.