No One Will Miss Her(19)

“I’m asking because I need an advisor. Someone I can trust,” she said.

“I’m not sure I understand,” Rick replied, cocking his head in a way that suggested he understood her perfectly.

She leaned forward, keeping her eyes locked on his, and said, “I don’t want to be one of those women who gets blindsided by life. One of those women who lets the husband handle everything, assuming she’s safe and taken care of, and then the shit hits the fan, and it turns out she has nothing.”

“I see,” Rick said. “Is there something I should know? To borrow your expression, Adrienne, has the shit hit the fan?”

“No,” she said. Then: “I don’t know. Not yet. Maybe it won’t. But if something happens, if something is coming, I want to be prepared. I want to know where I stand. And ever since the . . . unpleasantness, I feel I’m lacking that information. Ethan doesn’t tell me much. I feel . . . I feel as though I’m not in control. And it feels terrible.”

Rick Politano had thick black eyebrows under a swoop of thick white hair, and as she finished speaking, he knit them together in disapproval.

“I’m surprised to hear that,” he said. “A man who keeps his wife in the dark is walling himself off from a valuable ally, especially—if you don’t mind my saying—if she’s as ambitious and intelligent as you are. I always thought Ethan understood that, but . . . well, who’s to say. Perhaps he didn’t want to trouble you.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But here I am, troubled.”

“Well, we can’t have that,” Rick said, smiling. “So let me assure you, every possible scenario has been considered and planned for. It’s thorough but not complicated. I’m happy to walk you through it.”

“Yes,” she said. “Please do.”





Chapter 8

Lizzie




There’s still so much I haven’t told you. About the life I had with Dwayne, and the life we made together. The baby, so small and so still, in the glimpse I had before they took him away. Dwayne’s accident, and the addiction that followed. The way things soured and festered over the years, the way our happiness rotted from the inside, until it all ended with a bang, literally.

But there will be plenty of time for all that.

It’s time I told you about Adrienne Richards.



Adrienne Richards was not the kind of person who frequented Copper Falls, and Copper Falls was not the kind of place that would’ve appealed to her. The town itself was un-lovely, all those falling-down houses and boarded-up storefronts, dust gathering in the plateglass display windows that lined our little main street. Some of the towns farther south had cute little rows of shops for the summer people and enough seasonal business to sustain them; we only had one, the dairy bar, run by a lemon-faced woman named Maggie whose right forearm was forever bigger than her left from years of working the ice-cream scoop. Besides Strangler’s—and lord help the out-of-towner who tried to set foot in that shithole—there was nothing to attract tourists except the lake itself, which was beautiful but remote. Fifteen miles outside the un-lovely town, down a series of winding gravel roads that were tiresome to drive at the best of times, treacherous at night, and well out of reach of the nearest cell tower, which freaked a lot of city people out. The ones who did come usually wanted the place for a weekend, a week at most, and the only question they ever seemed to ask was whether it had Wi-Fi. (It didn’t.) It’s why I thought Adrienne’s message was a prank at first, some local jackass trying to have a little fun. It was like a parody, the way she pretzeled herself to make clear without saying it outright that she and Ethan were a Big Dang Deal. She wanted to book a full month (“money is no object”), she wanted to confirm that the lake and the house were as isolated as they looked on Google Earth, and she wanted to confirm that our “staff” (I laughed at that one) were discreet, because she and her husband took their privacy very seriously.

Later, I realized why she chose Copper Falls, and my house, when everyone with that kind of money was vacationing in fancy places, the Hamptons or the Cape: she needed to be where they weren’t. She wanted the anonymity of Copper Falls, where nobody was sophisticated or interested enough to know her backstory. She wanted to escape her reputation, if only for the summer.

We had that in common. I think that’s why, eventually, she chose me, too.

For most people in Copper Falls, Adrienne and Ethan were irritating but uninteresting, just another rich couple who weren’t from around here and weren’t to be trusted, but whose money they’d grudgingly accept as long as they insisted on hanging around. The details of their lives, and the extent of their wealth, were irrelevant; when poverty has always been right next door, in your neighbor’s house if not your own, the difference between a millionaire and billionaire is just an abstraction. It’s like trying to calculate the travel distance to Mars, as compared with Jupiter. What’s another hundred light-years, when what really matters is that it’s totally out of reach and you’re never fucking getting there? Even when I realized that the Richardses weren’t just your average upper-middle-class couple, I couldn’t wrap my head around what it meant to have that kind of money.

But the way the world felt about them—that, I understood. When I did an internet search for Adrienne’s name, right after I received her prepayment in full for the month, it was suddenly clear why “discretion” was so important to her. She and her husband were famous for all the wrong reasons.