Neighborly(80)
“Doug and I just need to get home and get back to normal.”
“The way he and Andie were acting . . . it’s like they’re throwing their affair in your face.”
“They’re friends.”
“But the whole neighborhood—”
“The whole neighborhood could be wrong. I need to get Doug’s side of the story.”
“You mean you haven’t even talked to him yet?” Annoyance crosses her face. As in, she’s annoyed with me, not Doug. I lean in, infusing what I’m about to say with maximum meaning. “I’m your friend, and I’m telling you, you can’t let him treat you like this. You can’t go back to a house where you’re getting threatening letters, where you don’t know what’s going to happen next. You don’t know what someone’s willing to do.”
She looks at me with mistrust, and I realize that I might have made a fatal error. I’ve pitted myself against her husband, leveraging a friendship that she doesn’t remember. She doesn’t know who I really am.
“I’m in a glass house,” she says, “and I shouldn’t throw stones.”
It takes me a few seconds to know that she’s alluding to her and Wyatt, to what I helped orchestrate. That’s part of how she’s going to justify staying with her asshole husband? I can’t even speak. This is all blowing up in my face. Every rotten thing I’ve done has been in vain.
No way. I’m going to finish the job, one way or another.
CHAPTER 31
KAT
DON’T COME BACK.
THIS IS A FRIENDLY WARNING.
The e-mail address is a bunch of numbers at Gmail. Untraceable, to me. But maybe it’s time to get the police involved, instead of just taking the word of a neighbor who might have his own secrets to protect.
That neighbor was the only man I’ve kissed other than my husband in the past eight years. And I can’t even remember it. Not sure if that makes it better or worse.
Is there any way that warning is really friendly?
I glance over at Sadie. She’s in her hospital crib instead of that Plexiglas cube, and her sleep is that of a normal baby. She’s just a few hours from discharge. Whoever wrote this e-mail must know that.
No, it certainly isn’t friendly.
Doug’s not here. He said that since Sadie’s doing better, he needed to go to work today and start catching up. I still haven’t asked him about Andie; it’s just not the time or the place. We should be home for that.
I am afraid to be back in the AV, but I spoke to one of the doctors about the potential poisoning, and it was clear from his reaction that that’s just impossible. So really, it all comes down to a bunch of notes and this e-mail. It’s all the work of a bully, plain and simple. A coward who has never dared show her (or his) face. Meanwhile, I’ve been tearing my hair out, which must be the point. That’s what the bully wants, right?
The vast majority of the AV is filled with good people, and no one is going to run me out of town (especially since I have nowhere to go, not if I want to save my marriage and my family. And I very much do).
The prevailing wisdom is that if you stand up to bullies, they cave. I’ve never tried that. The person who wrote those notes hasn’t heard back from me at all. It’s time to issue a threat of my own. They might think they’ve reduced me to a terrified wreck, but they need to know that I’m more of a cornered animal. A mama bear. I can strike back.
I try to respond to the e-mail, but it bounces back, undeliverable. So I log in to GoodNeighbors and write a friendly warning of my own.
It could just be the realization that my daughter is nearly healthy and I get to take her home; it could be post-stress euphoria. But I feel empowered for the first time in I don’t know how long. I feel like I’m the mother Sadie needs, like we’ve survived the worst and we’re only going to get stronger.
They were just some notes and an e-mail. OK, and some ketamine. But what’s any of that compared to Sadie’s life, which I will protect with my own? I will fight to the death for that little girl over there.
I look at the post with satisfaction, and then I curl up in the recliner, and finally, I sleep.
I awake to Dr. Vreeland, the cold fish who I met yesterday and didn’t much like, though he did serve his purpose. He let me know that the idea of poisoning is nothing more than paranoia.
“Sorry to wake you,” he says without a hint of a smile. But there is something odd in his manner, and it takes me a second to place it. It’s remorse. He rolls a stool over to sit beside me and lowers his voice. “I’m also sorry for how I treated you.”
I blink at him. Am I dreaming this? A doctor actually apologizing?
“I know I was dismissive of your earlier questions. But I’ve been thinking more about you, and about Sadie, and about her unusual presentation. When we spoke, I was in a rush, and I thought you were one of those people who just couldn’t take good news at face value. Sadie is on her way to a full recovery, all the usual tests and cultures came back negative, but you were still so bent on figuring out the cause. It even sounded like you thought someone might have tried to harm her.”
“It crossed my mind, but really, I just don’t like unanswered questions.”
“And honestly, I don’t, either. So I gave her case more thought and more analysis. A lot of Sadie’s symptoms actually correspond to a very rare bacteria called leptospirosis. But leptospirosis has a lot of symptoms, and like I said, it’s rare. So rare that to make an absolute determination, we have to send Sadie’s samples to the CDC in Atlanta. What I can say is that, based on her clinical presentation and by using microscopy to identify the spirochetes in her urine, leptospirosis may have been present.”