When She Left: A Thriller, page 18
The casual ease of the assassination, the comfort with arranging such a grotesque display, brought a discomfiting sense to Lucky, something alien, occult.
He wondered if his distress was because the killers were young women, since women were rare in this line of work. Most killers were men, as were most criminals. The notion that women had begun to descend to this base violence was, in some ways, distasteful to Lucky.
Or perhaps he was bothered because the Winterses had assumed he could handle the crime scene, which Lucky had witnessed as he walked through the house.
Which meant he could understand it.
He didn’t like thinking about that.
Lucky had met the twins on his last trip out of the house, lugging a plastic bag of towels and limbs, the sisters waiting by his car. He hadn’t been surprised; for some reason, it was almost as if he’d expected them to show up.
“It was in Annapolis,” Lucky said now. “Your first job.”
“It wasn’t our first.”
“You have a nice house.”
“We love the closets.”
“And the finished basement.”
Lucky knew what they were implying, understood the threat. They’d gone through every inch of his house, were aware of his secrets.
The Rusu twins were better at this than he was, Lucky grudgingly realized. They’d gotten the drop on him, kept him off-balance, were probably weighing his death as they spoke.
The rumor that infatuated most people about the killing of Victor Winters was the idea of a secret vigilante. Privately Lucky had always wondered if that vigilante had been the Rusu twins, one or both of them, dressed in some disguise, perhaps acting on behalf of someone else.
“I’ve always wanted to ask you,” Lucky said in an effort to distract them, but also genuinely curious. “Do you know who murdered Victor Winters?”
For once the twins were silent.
“Some people say it was a vigilante,” he went on. “And if it was, it would have to be someone good, someone who knew how to break into a house belonging to a dangerous person and surprise him.”
“Was it you?” Adriana asked.
“Is that what you’re saying?” Bianca went on.
Lucky was taken aback.
“I thought it was you,” he said.
“Victor gave us our lives,” Bianca replied.
Adriana shook her head as she spoke. “We’d never take his.”
“It wasn’t me,” Lucky said.
“I don’t like the idea of someone out there,” Adriana said. “Someone who, I think . . .”
“Someone better than us,” her sister finished quietly.
A disturbed silence, confidence shaken loose. Lucky didn’t like thinking about that either.
“In your backyard office,” Bianca said, and she cleared her throat, “there’s a loose board in the floor.”
“She’s right,” Adriana replied.
The twins were letting him know they’d gone through his backyard office, searched his entire house, found his weapons. Reasserting themselves.
“This house has all sorts of spots that need to be touched up,” Lucky replied, hinting he had more weapons.
He hoped they couldn’t tell he was exaggerating.
“The truth is,” Adriana said, “we don’t want to stay long.”
“All we really need,” from Bianca, “is an address.”
“Whose?” Lucky asked, although he knew exactly what they wanted. He tried to keep his face blank, unexpressive, despite his worry that he had no weapon nearby. And despite how their shared cadence, like two smiling demons strumming a single harp, plucked his nerves.
“Your old friend. Ruby Smith. We found out Jake is her son.”
Lucky nodded. “Lot of people looking for Ruby right now. I’m one of them.”
Bianca’s hand shifted behind the counter.
“We’d like to find her first,” Adriana said.
“You heard about Seth?” Bianca asked her sister.
“He’s in the hospital.”
“Not expected to recover anytime soon.”
“That means there’s one less person looking.”
“One less chance of someone taking our reward.”
“Less is good.”
The way they passed words back and forth was mesmerizing, drawing him in, sirens luring Lucky’s ship toward submerged stones. Somehow, he had to change course.
“If Jake and Melissa are with Ruby, then Ruby could take them and disappear,” Lucky said. “She already left the Winterses once. She could do it again.”
“True.”
“So?”
“So,” Lucky went on, “the only other hope is that she reaches out to an old friend. And I was one of the oldest friends she had. You need me.”
The twins glanced at each other.
“Do we?”
“I don’t think we do.”
“Ruby’s probably going to contact me,” Lucky bluffed. “When she does, I’ll tell you.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I don’t think he would.”
“We could just torture him.”
“We could torture his family.”
And, in an extraordinary moment of bad timing, that’s when Lucky heard the garage door open.
The sound of the garage door rising echoed through the kitchen.
The Rusu twins watched Lucky calmly, something close to a smile tugging each of their lips.
“Looks like we are going to meet the wife,” Bianca said.
“How do I look?”
“Beautiful. Me?”
“Gorgeous.”
“Weird,” Lucky observed. “But you need to leave. Both of you.”
“Do we?”
“I want to say hi.”
He took a step toward them, and Bianca’s hand rose.
She held a gun.
The door leading from the garage opened.
“I’ll tell you when Ruby contacts me.” He tried to make sure the desperation he felt didn’t creep into his voice. “I promise.”
“Lucky?”
Renee behind him.
He turned toward his wife, blocking Bianca’s hands from Renee’s view with his body. “Hey.”
Renee curiously peered past him at the two women. “Is Marybeth here?”
“I thought she was with you.”
“After you left, I . . .” Renee looked to the twins again. This time Lucky followed her gaze.
The gun was gone.
“Hello?” Renee asked.
“Lucky’s selling our mother’s home,” Adriana said.
“She died earlier this year,” Bianca added.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Lucky heard the apprehension in his wife’s voice.
“We thought we’d have more time with her,” Adriana said. “But when it happens, it happens faster than you expect.”
“One second, she was there. The next second, gone.”
“We didn’t even get to say goodbye.”
“I’m . . . sorry?” Renee offered again.
A moment passed.
“We’ll be in touch, Lucky,” Adriana said.
Lucky walked the twins to the door.
He kept his eyes focused on them until they drove away. He tried to think of his next move, of what the Rusu twins were going to do and how he could get ahead of them.
He knew the twins were going to try and find Ruby, and, failing that, they would return. But they wouldn’t go after Lucky. Easier to break him if they went after someone else.
Lucky glanced into the living room, at the end table where their family pictures had been moved to make room for the Christmas decorations.
Marybeth’s picture—his daughter in her high school soccer uniform, smiling with one knee balanced on a ball—was gone.
Lucky returned to the kitchen. “Where’s Marybeth?” he asked.
“She left right after you did.” Renee was staring down at her phone. “I told her she’d better not see William, but she probably went right there. Also, those women were weird.”
“We need to find her.”
“I know.”
“Renee, we need to find her now.”
Renee looked up from her phone, puzzled. “Why?”
Lucky paused, like a foot poised before stepping onto some new, uncertain land. “Because the women who were here are going to kill her.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MELISSA
“It’s me,” Melissa said.
She didn’t expect Chris to respond right away, and he didn’t. Melissa pictured him holding the phone away from his face, scowling at the unfamiliar number.
She waited through the silence, the phone pressed tight against her ear. Calling him wasn’t something she’d done lightly; Melissa knew it was likely that there was no reasoning with Chris anymore.
But she was out of options, and her only hope left was that there was still some chance for a connection between the two of them. He’d never hurt her and, as far as Melissa knew, never cheated on her. Everything about Chris had grown corrupt except, seemingly, their relationship.
“Is Jake dead yet?” Chris asked.
No, she realized. There is no chance.
“I heard Seth shot your boyfriend.” Chris went on. “Wish I’d been there to see it.”
She knew what Chris was doing, heard the pain in his voice. The pain he wanted to drag her into.
And even though she knew what he was doing, it worked.
“Jake’s going to live,” Melissa said, her voice hot.
“Should have been you. A bullet right in your face.”
Melissa had never felt hate like she did at this moment. But she knew she had to control her anger, push it down, refuse to let rage get the best of her. This was a sharper pain than she would have expected, injured love, the way you can never shake yourself entirely free from someone you once cared for.
“Let us go,” she said.
A bark of laughter.
“You know what happened at the diner,” Melissa went on. “Innocent people died, and your guy ended up arrested. It’s better for everyone if you just let us go.”
“Chris will burn down the world to find you,” Chris said.
Christ, he’s still doing that third person thing, Melissa thought, but something about Chris seemed different. It took Melissa a moment to realize what it was.
This was how he acted when other men were around.
She had to get him alone. Melissa tried to control her anger, tried to stop this fury from devouring her further. Searched for a way to convince Chris to change his mind, to find something in their relationship—old feelings, innocent memories, heartful love—something to which he clung.
“Chris,” Melissa said. “Please.”
A moment of silence, and then he offered an abrupt, “Hold on.” She heard rustling.
He was walking away from the men.
She wondered where he was, if Chris was in their house, heading down the hall to their bedroom. Or walking into the small backyard, the high fence, the bushes of roses she’d planted. They were likely in their final bloom of the year, curled and blackened red.
She stared out the kitchen window at Dr. Steve’s yard, uncared for and overrun by weeds. Melissa wondered if Dr. Steve spent time in the yard or if it was something he’d inherited when he’d moved in. Sometimes Melissa imagined herself working in a nursery, delicately planting seeds that would bloom into lovely flowers. Lilies with their long petals, stark whites and dramatic reds, straining pistils. Tender, tall yellow daffodils, bashful toward the sun, their long necks bent. Cups of tulips, insistently firm, their heads tightly wound together, as if they only released on their own terms, keeping their beauty to themselves.
It was like the brief fantasy she’d entertained in Wharfside of a quiet country life dominated by routine, the simplicity of happiness.
“Back.”
The little word was a sharp reminder of Chris, how he always returned to a call or text with a quick “Back.”
Chris sounded different now, and Melissa knew it was because he was alone. She was certain that ever since she’d left, Chris had spent all his time in the company of men. He hated being alone, which, at first, she’d found sweet, his desire to be with her. It wasn’t possessive or overbearing, just an eagerness to share experiences, the way new relationships happily occupy the entirety of each partner’s time.
But Melissa noticed after months had passed that there was something desperate to it. Once she took a trip to Florida to visit a cousin from Panama who had moved to Orlando, stayed for a week to help her get settled and adjusted to American life. Chris was miserable during the week, calling Melissa constantly, sometimes just sitting on the phone in silence. Especially when he detected her joy, the way she and her cousin couldn’t stop laughing, how her cousin spoke in rapid Spanish, and Melissa was getting better at replying.
She’d wondered if his behavior had been motivated by some aggrieved sense of ownership or jealousy . . . or if Chris was just a deeply lonely man.
“You’re not going to let us go, are you?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I’m sorry about everything happening the way it did. But I don’t want anyone to get hurt anymore.”
Chris made a weird sound, a mix of a laugh’s surprise and the sarcasm of a snort.
“Sure. No one should get hurt.”
“I’m serious.”
“You have to be hiding out somewhere,” Chris said, pondering out loud. “Seth said he put a bullet right in him, just before Ruby hit him with her car. You’re not in a hospital. So where are you?”
His thought process made Melissa uneasy, worried he’d actually be able to reason out where they were hiding. She tried another tactic.
“I’m really sorry for leaving the way I did. It’s just that last year, we were so different. And apart. I thought you . . . I thought you could tell.”
“I thought you were happy.”
“Happy? I was terrified! You’d changed so much.”
“You’re the one who changed. Left me for some photographer.”
“I—”
“You broke my heart.” Chris was whispering, either because he was trying to control his emotions or because he didn’t want to be overheard. “Was Jake the first? Were there others?”
“There was never anyone else.”
The words sounded as if she had never loved anyone but Jake. Melissa didn’t know what to say to correct that and wasn’t sure if she should.
“What does he . . .” Chris stopped speaking, his voice tight when he resumed. “What do you like about him?”
“I don’t want to talk about him. I want to talk about us.”
The latter sentence felt too intimate, as if there was still an us to return to.
“Maybe we were apart this last year,” Chris went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “Maybe I was becoming someone you weren’t sure about. Maybe you were scared. I get that.”
She waited for him to continue.
“But I was scared too. Why do you think I stayed away from my family back when we were first together? Why do you think it took me so long to join up with them?”
“I know.”
“I needed you. Knowing you were there for me, knowing I had you in my life . . . my family was one side, but it couldn’t be my only side. Do you understand that? I needed you, Mel.”
“That part’s still there,” Melissa said. She stared at Dr. Steve’s dead garden outside under the sinking sun. His home was so isolated, only one other house on the road, far in the distance, unseeable through the trees.
“I was so lonely back then, except for you.” Chris’s voice was filling with reproach. “And I knew there was distance between us. I knew we needed to circle back. And I wanted to, but then he was in my house. He was with you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And now you call Chris and ask him to forgive you?”
Melissa looked at the dead garden.
“There’s no saving you,” Chris told her.
She hung up.
A hand on her shoulder.
Melissa turned, too shocked to make a sound, half expecting to see Chris behind her.
But it was Eric, a messenger bag slung over his shoulder. Ruby was behind him, standing in the kitchen doorway.
“How’s Jake?” Eric asked, his voice breaking. Melissa saw his tears, felt them against her shoulder as she held him, as Eric apologized for what had happened to Jake and her, desperately apologized. Melissa held him and gazed at Ruby, trying to decipher the stoic, stony expression on the other woman’s face. It was like peering into deep shadows, and wondering what was about to emerge.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LUCKY
“What do you mean,” Renee asked Lucky, “those women are going to kill Marybeth?”
Lucky and his wife stared at each other.
“Follow me.” Lucky briskly walked out of the kitchen.
“Lucky?” Renee asked. But she followed him.
Lucky had a thousand thoughts swirling through his mind, like a pile of windblown leaves, but there was one he couldn’t escape:
This was the end.
Everything was over. Every secret would be spilled, every element of his life changed. Everything he’d struggled to maintain would shatter.
But he felt happy. Euphoric, even.
“In a way,” Lucky said as he and Renee hurried up the stairs from the living room and toward their bedroom, “this is a good thing.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
The Rusu twins had left the hatch to the attic open, the retractable stairway unfolded. Lucky knew why. They wanted to complicate matters, hoped Renee would see the open stairs, discover his secrets.
And that was fine. It was time. He felt a wonderful sense of relief at the thought of unburdening himself. Lucky was reminded of a conversation years ago with a neighbor who had been recently laid off from his longtime job, and that man’s strange sense of peace when he’d shared this news with Lucky and Renee. They’d assumed, discussing it later, that he’d been deep in denial.
But no, Lucky thought now. It was relief. Leaving a bad situation is always a good thing, regardless of the next uncertain step.
