The Last Housewife (16)

I frowned, stepping into the kitchen. Neither the brushing off nor the large chunks of time away sounded like Laurel, who was a homebody. But when I yanked open the drawers, there was only the bare minimum of cutlery and utensils, a few lonely pieces rattling around.

Linda crossed her arms over her chest. “Then she disappeared again. And that’s how it was from then on. Months and months would go by without seeing her, and then she’d show up, spend the night, and leave again. But the checks kept coming.”

“Wait.” I turned from Laurel’s cupboard, which held only a box of cereal. “Exactly how long did Laurel live here?”

Linda tapped her foot. “I looked this up for the police. Eight years, give or take. Some people would say she made the best kind of tenant. Never here, never a nuisance. But I kind of missed having her around. Like I said, we were friendly in the beginning.”

Eight years? But that meant Laurel had never left New York after we graduated, despite our promises. I’d thought she was heading back to Indiana with her mother, where she was going to figure out if she wanted to get her MFA or find work with a theater group. What made her stay?

“Linda, you said Laurel’s checks kept coming.” Jamie ran a finger over the arm of Laurel’s worn couch. “Is there any way you could share her account information with us? I know it’s a lot to ask, but tracing money can be a good way to understand someone’s life.”

Linda bit her lip. “The cops didn’t ask for that. Are you sure it’s legal?”

Jamie gave a noncommittal shrug, but I could see him discreetly press the stop button on his phone. “Strange the cops didn’t ask for it. I’ll be frank with you, Linda. We don’t think Laurel killed herself. We think someone killed her.”

Linda’s hand flew to her chest, and she pulled her robe tighter. “The police said suicide.” Her eyes dropped to the floor.

I stepped closer. “What is it?”

“It’s just—” She took a deep breath. “Laurel was a nice girl. But she was also a little…off.”

“Off how?” I shot Jamie a look.

Linda walked through the hall into the bedroom, and Jamie and I followed. “Sometimes I’d find her in the backyard, just standing there, staring at nothing.” She pointed through the sliding glass doors at the back of Laurel’s bedroom. They looked out into a small backyard, with a single tree and a tall fence. “When I tried talking to her, she wouldn’t say a word. Didn’t even register my presence. Like she was catatonic or something.”

I stared into the yard. Laurel had done that once before in college, when she was very sad. It had taken a few days to shake her out of it.

“Other times I’d just hear her sobbing.” Linda shifted her gaze to Laurel’s bed. It was a full, not much larger than the twins we’d suffered through in college, and draped with a faded floral comforter. I walked to her bedside table and pulled open the drawer.

“My bedroom is right above,” Linda continued. “And one time she woke me up in the middle of the night crying. The sound just floated through the ceiling.” She pulled her arms tighter over her chest. “She kept going and going through the morning and wouldn’t answer when I knocked on the door, so eventually I left. She was gone when I came back.”

I frowned. Linda was painting a picture of a deeply depressed Laurel. Were Jamie and I wrong? Had she killed herself? I rooted through her bedside drawer, finding a matchbox, a notepad with torn-out pages, and a ballpoint pen with dried ink around the nub.

“She used to have pictures up,” Linda said. “Lots. Friends and family, she said.”

I dug into the drawer and hit something sharp, pulling out an empty silver picture frame. I dug deeper and found the last thing—a worn photograph that looked like it had been bent a thousand times over.

Linda looked over my shoulder. “See! I knew I recognized you.”

It was a picture of Clem, Laurel, and me, from junior year of college, standing in front of Rothschild. Clem wore a Whitney soccer jersey and bright-purple hair—she’d gotten into the habit of dying it a different color every few months. Laurel and I looked like polar opposites, her blond next to my dark, but we wore matching grins.

There’d been someone else standing in front of Rothschild that day. I unfolded the last quarter of the picture and sucked in a breath. Rachel, our fourth roommate, with her arm slung around Laurel’s shoulders. But you couldn’t see Rachel’s face, see how much she and Laurel looked alike, or the flat, dead smile she was giving the camera. Because Laurel had destroyed her with thick slashes of pen, turning her face into a dark, inky miasma.

“Jesus. Who’s that?” Jamie asked.

I handed him the picture. “Rachel Rockwell. She was our roommate junior and senior years.”

He gave me a sharp look. “You had another roommate? You never mentioned her.”

“She was…” I thought back to Linda’s word from earlier. “Off.”

Off was only the tip of the iceberg, but Rachel was a part of the past I refused to revive. Even saying her name out loud felt like invoking a curse, like calling Bloody Mary three times in the mirror. I understood Laurel’s impulse to erase her.

I was saved from explaining when Jamie turned over the picture and stilled. “Look.”