The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(16)

As soon as she walked around back, intending to let herself in with her key, she found the cut window screen and knew something was terribly wrong.

She has very little recollection of the two uniformed cops who showed up. It’s all a blur now, like a nightmare after you wake up in the morning, when the specific details have faded but you still remember the horror, and the gist of what happened.

What happened . . .

What happened was—

After she handed over her set of keys, the police officers went into the house, and she stood there waiting beneath the overhang above the back door as the rain poured down, drowning the newly planted seedlings in the vegetable garden in the yard.

Then the police came back out and they told her—

“Ms. Heywood?”

“Yes.” She blinks, looks up at Detective Burns. “Yes, it’s fine. I’ll . . . I’ll be happy to talk to you. No problem.”

“Thank you.”

Beck gets up and starts to follow the detective into the next room, but the woman holds out her hand like a traffic cop.

“Not yet,” she says. “If you can wait right here while we talk to your father, I’d appreciate it.”

“But—”

Wait a minute. Are the detectives here to talk to them, or interrogate them?

When they showed up today, she assumed it was with an update on the case. They’ve been in close contact ever since Sunday, regularly coming and going from the hotel where the family was staying. They promised to keep them apprised of any developments; to find out who had broken into the house sometime late Saturday night or early Sunday morning and left Mom dead on the floor beside her bed.

Do they have a suspect now?

Or do they think—

The terrible thought fully forms in Beck’s mind. She bites her lip to keep from blurting it out.

“Is there a problem, Ms. Heywood?”

“No. No problem.” She shrinks back. “I’m sorry. I misunderstood. I thought you wanted me to— Never mind. I’ll wait here.”

“Thank you.”

The detective steps out of the den, reaches back and pulls the door closed after her.

Feeling like a caged prisoner, Beck wonders if she should call her brothers—or, perhaps, a lawyer.

She’s watched enough television crime shows to know that homicide investigators always look closely at family members—particularly spouses. Why didn’t she realize sooner that this was going to happen?

Because you’re still in shock, and because it’s ridiculous that anyone would even imagine that Dad might be capable of . . .

She pushes away an unwanted memory.

Ridiculous.

Anyway, Dad was 250 miles away this weekend—they must know he was in Cleveland when it happened.

Or maybe they don’t know. Maybe that’s why they’re here now.

They were here on Sunday, but maybe they arrived on the scene after Dad did.

She thinks back, but the timeline is fuzzy. Her father was on his way back from Cleveland, she remembers, before she even left Lexington. When she called him from her car as she was driving up to Cincinnati, he said he was on the road, too, heading home to check on Mom.

She told him not to bother; that she was already going; that she’d let him know if there was any reason to worry—

But of course there was already reason to worry.

Did she begin to suspect then, as she raced north up Interstate 75, that something was going to be terribly wrong at the house?

The drive, like everything that happened afterward, has become a blur in her mind.

She’d just had yet another fight with Keith. That, she remembers.

He wasn’t thrilled that she was leaving so abruptly in the middle of a Sunday afternoon when they had plans that evening to sit down and go over their finances.

That was what he claimed, anyway, calling it “a meeting.” The year was almost half over, he’d said that morning, and he was concerned about his job stability amid funding cuts to the university. He thought it was time that they made some decisions about their future; about whether they should look into selling the house, moving into a smaller place . . .

Or separate places.

He didn’t come right out and say it, but she knew it was going to come up. It wouldn’t be the first time. But it might have been the first time she might be willing to go along with it. She’d already done her homework, talked to a lawyer.

Her feelings were muddled. One moment she was sure she still loved him, and the next, she wanted him out of her life.

Sunday afternoon, as she threw some things into a bag in case she wound up spending the night in Cincinnati, he followed her around the house asking why she couldn’t have someone else check in on her mother—a neighbor, or one of her brothers.

“Because I can get there quicker than my brothers can, and I can’t reach any of their neighbors,” she lied.

The truth was, she wanted to go.

Not—to her shame, in retrospect—just because she was worried about Mom.

Of course she was, but she really didn’t think, at that point, the situation was going to be dire. She was mainly going because she wanted to get away from Keith for a few hours. She thought the drive might bring some clarity.

“But what about our meeting?” he asked as she picked up her keys and, with the bag over her shoulder, opened the door.