The Neighbor's Secret(60)

“It’s not that we don’t understand your worry,” Priya said. “Fall Fest was very disturbing. But it was also forever ago.”

“When does this end?” Deb pressed. “You’ll get a job at the high school? You’ll go to every party, wait to jump in and body-block Laurel from drinking too much or making out with someone?”

“I’m over Fall Fest,” Annie said. She caught the skeptical glance between the two of them. “Really.”

Deb folded her arms across her chest. “Can I offer some advice? From a mom with a little more, you know, crow’s-feet?”

Annie managed a nod.

“If you’re a safe harbor, your kids will volunteer things. But if you insist on being supercop, they’ll run in the other direction.”

Priya nodded. “That’s so, so true.”

“Since Fall Fest, we’re watching them so carefully,” Deb continued. “We’d have seen any signs of monkey biz.”

“We got you, Annie,” Priya said. With a sweep of her hand, she gestured to the other women. “We all do.”

Annie nodded. “I know.”

Deb’s face softened. “Okay, friend?” She reached out a hand and squeezed Annie’s arm.

“He’s getting away with it!” Janine’s voice was a shriek from across the room.

“Okay,” Annie said.



* * *



“He’s getting away with it,” Janine shouted. Her short blond curls were frizzed with outrage. “It kills me.”

Lena agreed that the Monster Next Door didn’t look innocent. One of his wives had vanished without a trace. Another had died after a fall in the kitchen.

Throughout the book, the obsessed retired detective explained how suspicious it all was: the life-insurance policies bought beforehand, the power-washer rental, the internet searches for dissolving acid, and so on. (There was always an obsessed retired detective in these stories. Thankfully, Lena’s local police force seemed to have a much healthier work/life balance.) “He’s probably eating spaghetti and meatballs right now,” Janine continued, “watching Jeopardy!”

“That’s an oddly specific picture, Janine.”

“I mean he’s just living his life. People like that don’t have a conscience.”

“What do you mean, people like that?” Harriet said.

Lena realized her hands had gripped onto her kneecaps. She relaxed them, folded them neatly in her lap.

“People who think laws don’t apply to them,” Janine said. “Criminals.”

“Some people snap in the moment,” Jen said.

“Not buying it,” Janine said. “There’s a line that decent people don’t cross.”

“Hard disagree,” Jen said. “People are complicated. Morality is relative.”

“I’m not convinced he did it,” Harriet said. “Based on the chart.”

“What chart?”

Harriet held up her legal pad, on which she’d drawn a complex series of boxes. “His actions on the night of the first would-be murder.” With her pen, she pointed between two boxes. “With seven minutes between his convenience-store run and the time of death, I don’t think he could have done it.”

“You made a chart, Harriet?”

“There were so many facts, and I needed to keep them straight. I mapped out the second would-be murder as well.”

Deb balled a fist and held it in front of her mouth, pretended to cough the word obsessive.

“You don’t need that to know whether he did it,” Janine said. “He did. And he got off scot-free.”

Lena had been in her forties—a baby—when the accident happened, but she had acted like her life was over. What second acts might have been possible if she’d had a different mindset? If she hadn’t entombed herself in the silence?

Suddenly breathless and itchy, she walked away from the discussion and over to Deb’s kitchen window. She switched the latch, cranked it open, inhaled the cool air.

“Move over.”

Lena shifted over to make room for Annie, who settled next to her.

“Deb and Priya just told me I’m an awful parent,” she said. “And bad at my job. And they’re one hundred percent right.”

“They don’t really believe that,” Lena said loyally.

“I used to feel balanced,” Annie said. “All I do is worry now, search through Laurel’s pockets. I never find anything, yet I can’t stop. What’s the cure for constant worry?”

“Having fun?”

“Right,” Annie said. “We’re not dead yet. Let’s do something frivolous. Like … we could go to that new wine bar everyone’s talking about?”

“We can do better than that,” Lena said.

“Yeah, that’s lame. We could—I don’t know, there’s that spa in the mountains that everyone talks about? River Rock something?” Annie’s voice was skeptical. “I hate strangers touching me, though.”

“Think bigger,” Lena said.

If you looked at it one way, she was as much of a victim as anyone else. Starting with that last party, Lena’s whole life had been stolen from her, due to events beyond her control.