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I nod. I think I nod.
“Mind coming down here for a sec?”
I nod, but I don’t move. It feels like I’ve just been dropped into a bucket of ice. I don’t know how I suddenly know, but I’m positive my husband is going to die. Maybe he’s already dead.
And then I think of how I’d ordered him not to come with me to the benefit. “Why are you punishingme?” Greg had protested. “You’re really going to believe some stupid website?”
“You really think a hacker went to the trouble of making up e-mails inyouraccount?” I snapped. “Just admit it, Greg! Just admit you did a terrible, terrible thing!”
But he wouldn’t. He kept shaking his head.Deny deny deny. I was so humiliated that I threw a shoe at him. A high, spiky-heeled shoe: I flung it right at his head. “What the fuck?” Greg screamed, ducking before the thing clocked his skull.
Those will be the last words he ever says to me:What the fuck?
I rake my hands down my face. I remember, too, the thought that kept drifting into my mind for the past day. In the cheese section, after I read those e-mails. At the benefit, when everyone was staring. And if I’m honest with myself, maybe even before that, too. In Barbados, when Greg refused to go to therapy and acted like an asshole. In Philly, when Patrick and I pressed together in the elevator.It would be so much easier if Greg were just... gone.
I thought it over and over again. It became a fantasy. A best-case scenario. And now, here it is, happening for real. I got my wish.
PART
2
8
WILLA
FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 2017
It’s 6:00A.M.in Pittsburgh when I step out of the airport, but because I’m still on California time, I’m feeling like a skin-snapping, pupils-going-in-two-different-directions swamp creature. A rickety Ford minivan with the logoIRON CITY CHECKERCABSrolls out of the gloom like something in a haunted house ride. The driver, a gap-toothed, yellow-skinned fellow with a Marlboro 100 balanced between two fingers, leers at me out the window. I step back a little, a dangerous whoosh going through me. “Need a ride?” he asks in a kind-enough voice.
I, Willa Manning, can’t get in a car with a smoker. I drink cold-pressed beet juice. I check for parabens on my shampoo label. Climbing into this car is my equivalent of sitting in a bathtub of plutonium. I really should never leave Los Angeles.
Except this guy is the only cab this time of the morning—and for some reason, my Uber app isn’t working. Sighing, I climb in and perch on one of the minivan’s captain’s chairs, trying not to look too closely at the mysterious stains on the upholstery. My eyes water as the cigarette smell wafts out the vents. I can practically feel the cancer cells growing in my lungs. “Colton Street,” I tell the driver as hepulls away from the curb. “One block from Aldrich University.” And then, even though it’s only 21 degrees outside, I roll down the window and stick my head out like a Labrador.
The driver raises a bushy eyebrow. “Aldrich, huh?” He whistles. “You hear about the murder?”
I almost laugh out loud.Um, yes, Marlboro Man. You might say I heard.
“They got any leads on that yet?” the cabbie asks. As if I’m a cop.
I mumble something ambiguous, shut my eyes, and pretend to go to sleep. I still can’t wrap my mind around what’s happening. Yesterday morning, I’d been minding my own business, driving to my job at the West Coast office of “The Source,” a highly respected news site that specializes in deep, intense investigative reporting. I was pissed because there was a mysterious leak in my apartment, but the landlord wasn’t taking my calls about it. And then I’d heard an annoying, nosy-aunt voice in my head saying,If you had a man in your life, Willa,hecould fix the leak instead of you having to bother Mr. Jenkins.
Whowasthis woman in my head? I’d been hearing her voice for months, and she pissed me off.
Then my father called. I don’t often answer calls while I’m driving, but something told me it was important. And he told me, in a panicked, jumbled rush, that my older sister’s husband had been murdered. I should probably come home.
And here we are.
Apparently, Greg was stabbed in his kitchen. Kit came upon him after getting home from a work gala. (Side note: I had a couple of missed calls from Kit at about 5:00P.M.Pacific time. I’d been in an interview with my latest subject, a female arsonist about to get out of prison.) At about 2:00A.M., Greg died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The funeral is set for tomorrow.
My first thought, when my father told me all this:Kit’s now a widow twice over.My second thought:Blue.But then, I’ve been wondering about Blue lately anyway. I pushed him out of my brain fast.
Before getting on the red-eye, I searched to see if the storypopped up on any of the news feeds yet. Yep: “Prominent Surgeon Murdered in Pittsburgh Home—Possible Hack Link.” As I read the story, I felt a little jealous. Not because of its content, but because this is actually the sort of investigative story I like to report on for my job: a tragic murder of a prominent person in society, with an unclear culprit and motive. I like the puzzle of figuring them out. They’re always more complicated than you think, and they often have surprising endings.
The story went on to talk about the Aldrich hack, the database full of e-mails, and how someone had leaked some of Greg’s onto a bunch of social media portals. Seems that Dr. Greg wrote some filthy fantasies about sex on the MRI machine to a woman who wasn’t my sister.Classy.Full disclosure: I never really got why Kit fell for Greg Strasser. He’s good-looking, he’s successful, he has money...hadmoney.Jesus. But he always struck me as... fake. Deceitful. Maybe even predatory. Not that I wished him dead or anything, but...
Changing planes in Chicago, I tried calling Kit. Her mailbox was full. After getting through some work voice mails of my own, I trolled the news again. There’s a new story featuring an interview with a man named Maurice Reardon; he would be the lead detective on Greg’s case. Detective Reardon hinted that Kit might be a person of interest—but that was ridiculous. The chance of my sister murdering someone is about as great as the chance of me ingesting anything colored with blue dye #1 or #2. (Don’t even get me started on what just a few Froot Loops can do to your immune system.) Though here’s an unnerving little blip: I finally got around to listening to my voice mails from yesterday, and one was from Kit. When I played it, I heard fuzzy, blurry sounds, the phone shifting around this way and that. Almost twenty seconds in, I heard Kit’s voice. Ithinkit was Kit’s voice—it sounded slurred, despairing, not like this shiny thing my sister has become. “Should I get revenge?” Her voice echoed. “ShouldI?”
Probably best not to turn over that voice mail to the detectives.
