I was about to drift off when a noise stirred my consciousness. Hushed voices, muffled footsteps on the carpet, the mattress sagging as two people climbed onto the bed.
They made love inches above me. Each soft grunt and quiet sigh carved a new channel of pain through my heart. When they finished, the whispers came, indistinct and muffled, occasionally punctuated by soft laughter. I caught the word “baseball,” and Dickie’s name. I caught my own name once or twice, and the word “baby.” After a few minutes they became bolder, louder and then she admonished, “Shh ... she’ll hear us.”
The voices lowered again, then lengthened into silence, followed by the sound of Dickie snoring. I stared into the empty blackness for a long time, begging God to strike me dead as I contemplated my life with no baby, no husband, no future.
But God didn’t take me.
So I crawled out and returned to the room I share with my husband and sank into our bed, alone.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Kiersten
Kiersten stood frozen in place with the potato masher clutched to her chest.
“This is soawful. . .”
Rosamund transferred a slice of eggplant to a Pyrex baking dish. “It’s like ... a soap opera.”
“Mrs. Claussen used to watchDays of our Livesreligiously,” Piper said. “It reminds me of one of those episodes.”
“Maybe that’s because things like this actually used to happen.” Rosamund dredged another slice of eggplant through the tray of breadcrumbs.
“They did?” Kiersten raised her eyebrows in surprise.
“Think about the world back in 1965, before the internet and cell phones and modern computers,” Rosamund said, pausing her work for a moment. “Long-distance telephone calls cost a fortune. Medical records were kept on paper. If you wanted to find someone, you had to look them up in a printed phone book. And they certainly didn’t have 23andMe or easy access to highly accurate paternity testing like we do now. They didn’t have Find My Friends or Find My Phone or people posting pictureson Instagram every time they traveled. And they didn’t have Google. Without a digital trail, you could hide a lot more than we can hide today.”
Kiersten put down the potato masher. “Assuming they’re hiding something. Maybe Dickie and Dottie simply got divorced. He married Peggy, and Dottie moved to Florida, and they all lived happily ever after ... with different spouses. The end.”
Piper raised an eyebrow. “Or maybe he killed her.”
A heavy silence settled over the kitchen.
“We don’t know them very well, do we?” Kiersten scraped the mashed potatoes into a casserole dish and smoothed the top with a spatula. “I mean, we all hang out with each other ... but the Davis family doesn’t really hang out withus.”
“True.” Rosamund tapped fresh breadcrumbs into a pan. “It’s like when someone is murdered and the reporters show up and interview the neighbors. They always say, ‘We didn’t know them very well.Because they kept to themselves,’” she added in an ominous voice.
“Although Richard and Margaretdidjust have us over for coffee,” Kiersten conceded as she covered the potatoes with tinfoil and put them in the oven to stay warm.
Piper’s eyes went wide. “A coffee visit where wegave themthe first diary. And told them we have two more sitting right here in this house.”
An uneasy feeling swept over Kiersten, raising goose bumps on her arms.
“There’s nothing ... incriminating ... in that first diary,” she said, casting her mind back to the early entries. “Mostly she’s just complaining about Dickie.”
Piper looked down at the diary in her hand, frowning. “But Richard probably doesn’t want it widely known that he was an abusive jerk to his first wife.”
“Or maybe that he evenhada first wife,” Kiersten added.
“I think that all depends onwhat happenedto the first wife,” Rosamund said quietly.
They went silent again.
“Keep reading,” Rosamund ordered.
Chapter Seventy
Dottie
