The Wife Upstairs(76)

“Why aren’t you more freaked out?” I ask her now, and she meets my eyes across the table. She has pretty eyes, big and dark, her lashes thick without mascara.

“Why aren’t you?” she counters. “You just found out the man you love is a murderer and his dead wife is alive. A little screaming and crying wouldn’t be unheard of.”

I don’t answer.

“Do you know what I think?” she continues. “I think there’s a reason Eddie fell for both of us. No”—she holds up a hand, cutting off my attempt to demur—“he genuinely cares for you. He wouldn’t have risked bringing you into his life if he didn’t. But I think we’re a lot alike, Jane.”

“That’s not my real name,” I say, before I can stop myself, and she smiles.

“And Bea isn’t mine.”

“I knew that,” I tell her. “Tripp.”

She rolls her eyes. “Fucking Tripp.”

I almost laugh at that because I know how she feels. But there’s still something so … wrong about all this. She’s too calm, too collected, too in control for a woman who just went through the most harrowing thing I can think of.

Then she leans forward and says, “Eddie said you were nothing like me. I don’t think that’s the case.”

I look at her, sitting there like a queen, lying through her teeth, and I know they’re the only truthful words she’s uttered.





PART XII



BEA





36





He loved you.

I don’t know why hearing those words out of Jane’s mouth hit me like they do. Maybe because Jane, of all people, wouldn’t want that to be true.

But Jane is a good liar.

I can tell, looking at her. I can also tell that she isn’t at all the girl Eddie thought she was. A girl who would smash his face in with a silver pineapple, then sit here with his wife—who she’d been told was dead at the bottom of a lake—drinking wine.

I like this girl, so much that I almost feel sorry for Eddie that he couldn’t see this side of her.

He might have liked it, too.

Or maybe he did. Maybe, as much as he hated to admit it, Eddie knew she was like me.

Knew that it was what had drawn him to her in the first place.

She takes another sip of her wine. She is petite, pale, her hair a color between blond and brown that isn’t particularly flattering, and the clothes she’s wearing look like muted imitations of the other women in this neighborhood. Maybe that was enough to fool Eddie, but he should have looked into her eyes.

Her eyes give it all away.

For example, she’s nodding at me, sitting there calmly, but her eyes are almost fever-bright, and I’m sure she’s not buying my story of what “really happened.” The affair, Eddie killing Blanche, locking me away, framing Tripp. I’d counted on her thinking Eddie is smarter than he is, but that might have been a miscalculation.

In fact, looking at her now, she reminds me of Blanche. After the funeral.




“I’m so glad you’re here.” Bea hugs Blanche tightly, feeling just how thin she is in her black dress. Bea is not wearing black, going instead for the dark plum that will be a signature shade in this year’s autumn line at Southern Manors.

Blanche hugs her back, says how sorry she is over and over again, but as she leaves, Bea thinks she catches something in Blanche’s eyes. She’s not suspicious, not exactly. Blanche would never make that big of a leap. But Bea can tell there’s something about all of this that isn’t sitting quite right for Blanche, even if she’d never say it, never even let herself think it.

Later that night, Bea sits in the wingback chair she’d had shipped from Mama’s house, the only thing she’d wanted out of her godawful childhood home, and finishes off the bottle of wine. It helps her to feel numb and fuzzy, helps to block out the picture of Mama’s face right before she fell.

She had been high, that part was true, completely zonked out on whatever the current flavor of escape was. Klonopin, probably. Bea had watched her make her way down the hall like a woman much older than fifty-three, her footsteps slow and shuffling.

She had told Mama to get rid of that hall runner right there by the stairs, but of course she hadn’t listened. Still, she’d only stumbled rather than fallen outright. She would’ve been fine.

Bea can’t even say for sure why she pushed her. Only that she was there, and Mama tripped, and as she did, Bea’s whole heart seemed to rise up joyfully in her chest, and it had felt like the most natural thing in the world to just reach out and … shove.

Her face didn’t register fear or horror or shock. As always, Mama just looked vaguely confused as she fell.

It occurred to Bea at the funeral that she was lucky. If she’d just broken an ankle or fractured a collarbone, Bea would’ve had a lot of explaining to do. But she hit her head hard at the edge of the filial there at the bottom. Bea had heard the crack, seen the blood.

She didn’t die right away, but when Bea had looked down at her, she’d seen that the injury was severe enough, the blood already pooling around her head.

Still, if she had called 911 right then instead of the next morning, if she’d pretended to hear a thud in the middle of the night rather than waking up to find her mother at the bottom of the stairs, Mama probably would’ve made it. It was the bleeding that did it in the end, after all.