The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(76)

Sorry. So sorry . . .

Everyone is sorry—but no one is sorrier than she is. Exhausted, all she can do is move from one task to another, from one well-meaning visitor to another, longing to be left alone.

“You look worn out,” her former first-grade teacher—an old friend of her mother’s—comments, after informing Beck that the powder room under the stairs is running low on toilet paper.

“It’s been a long day.”

“One of the longest days of the year, unfortunately,” the woman mentions before drifting back to the crowded dining room as Beck heads up the steps to grab a spare roll of toilet paper from the hall bathroom.

Glancing out the window on the landing, she sees that the sun is, indeed, still riding high in the sky. It won’t be setting for at least a few more hours. By then, she can’t imagine having the stamina to climb these stairs again and get ready for bed.

Maybe she should just lie down now for a quick nap. No one will miss her if she’s gone for half an hour.

She slips past the bathroom and the closed door to the master bedroom, unable to imagine ever opening it again.

She just can’t stop picturing her mother here alone at night; an intruder in the house; a violent attack . . .

We need to get rid of this house—the sooner, the better.

In her own room, she takes a moment to swap her high-heeled black pumps for a pair of loafers, not caring what they look like with her dress. Her feet ache. Her heart aches.

Oh, Mom . . .

She sinks onto the bedspread she and Mom picked out so long ago in Macy’s—they both fell in love with the splashy pattern.

“The colors remind me of the bright blue sky and yellow sunshine,” Mom said. “It’ll always be a beautiful summer day in here!”

Today doesn’t feel like a beautiful summer day inside or out. Beck massages her forehead with her fingertips and finds herself staring at her laptop on the desk across the room.

Does it hold the key to her mother’s murder? If she could just figure out the password and get into the e-mail account . . .

But what are the odds that she’ll find a clue to the killer’s identity somewhere in the files? Does she actually believe Mom was exchanging e-mails with him in advance? That it was someone Mom knew?

If it was—if it was someone I know, too, like . . . like . . .

She can’t even bring herself to entertain the thought.

Maybe she’s better off never uncovering the truth.

What does it even matter now? Mom is gone. Nothing is going to bring her back. The worst has happened; it’s in the past.

“Beck? Beck! Are you in there?” Teddy’s wife, Sue, is knocking on her bedroom door.

She hurriedly wipes tears from her eyes. “Yes, I’m in here.”

Sue opens the door. Roundly pregnant, with Beck’s sleepy-looking nephew Jordan on her hip, she asks, “Are you okay?”

Then, catching a look at Beck’s face, Sue shakes her head and answers her own question. “Of course you’re not okay. Sorry.”

“No, I’m okay. I am. Well . . .”

“You are but you’re not. No one is. I’m sorry to bother you. The minister’s wife is stuck in the powder room without toilet paper, and I can’t find any under the sink in the hall bathroom, so—”

“Are you serious?”

“No, there were just some cleaning supplies, and—”

“No, I mean about Mrs. Alpert stuck without toilet paper?” Beck finds herself grinning through her tears.

“Totally serious. She was calling through the door for help and Jordan heard her. She said there are no tissues in there or anything, so . . .”

“She can’t wipe her keister,” Jordan reports solemnly.

That does it. Beck bursts out laughing. Sue joins in, and so, after a moment, does Jordan.

Beck laughs until her sides ache—a good kind of ache—then heads back downstairs with Sue and Jordan, the e-mail account forgotten for the time being.

Lying on the bed in her hotel room, head propped against the pillows and laptop open on her lap, Kay tries to focus on the screen. She’d been hoping to catch up on some blogs, but her energy is zapped from the drive, the funeral, the anxiety over meeting Landry and Elena . . .

And now a meeting with the detective investigating Meredith’s murder?

It’s all too much. I can’t handle this. I can’t.

She’d give anything if she could throw her belongings back into the seldom-used, slightly musty-smelling suitcase she pulled last night from her mother’s attic; if she could just walk out of this hotel and go home and hide, make it all go away.

But she can’t leave Landry and Elena. They’re her friends—her family—and they need her, just as Meredith needed her. As long as the three of them stick together, everything will be okay.

A tone from her laptop’s speaker indicates that a new e-mail has arrived in her in-box.

She opens it and finds that it’s from Elena—a note to Jaycee, with both Kay and Landry on the cc list.

I’m here in Cincinnati with Landry and Kay. Meredith’s funeral was moving and very much a tearjerker, as I’m sure you would guess. The rest of us need each other now more than ever. We’ve already made plans to get together again for a girls’ weekend at Landry’s house in Alabama next weekend. Is there any way you can join us? Details to follow. I just wanted you to know that we’re thinking of you and wish you were here with us.