“I swore mine on Emily’s.”
She pulls away from the window and levels her eyes at me, her voice low and angry. “Why did you look up Duval’s name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why do you have to keep asking so many questions?”
“Wendy,” I say, “if I didn’t ask questions, the truth would still be the truth.”
She opens her mouth, then closes it again.
“I know it’s hard. . . .”
“I have to think.”
“Okay.” There’s nothing else I can say.
She puts her hand on the door handle again, and this time I release the lock.
“I strangled a woman to death.”
She says it the way you might tell someone you’re going out for groceries, and I don’t say anything in response. I don’t think she wants me to.
“It was about three in the morning. An empty parking lot at a strip mall, a lot like this one. She was in the front seat. I was in the back. She was older than I was. A lot smaller. I used a scarf that turned out to be her own. Stolen off her purse, I think, by another sister. Sent to a PO box down in Larchmont. Anyway . . . Turns out she owned a dry cleaner’s in the strip mall, and she was found in there the next morning. I heard on the news that she hanged herself in her place of business, so, obviously, she got moved after I left.”
Hanged herself. Just like Natalie Duval.
“It’s the worst assignment I’ve ever done. The only thing that got me through it was thinking of Tyler. And how this woman must have killed someone’s child, just like that animal killed him.”
I put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Wendy.”
“Duval could have been an aberration. A onetime thing.”
“Yes. It could have been. But it’s still something that happened.”
She pulls something out of the drugstore bag—a white box with bold red letters on it—and hands it to me. “It’s a burner,” she says. “I bought one for each of us, back when I thought that this was about Kimball and we might need a way to communicate.”
I watch her open the car door. “What do I do with it now?”
“I don’t know.” She doesn’t look at me when she says it. She just leaves my car, gets into her Camry, and drives away.
I open the box, flip on my dome light, and follow the instructions to activate the phone. I’m not sure why I do, why I don’t just throw it out. A tiny speck of hope, I guess. After all, Wendy could have thrown the phone out too.
IT’S A BLEAK, starless night when I get home. I forgot to leave my outside light on when I left the house this morning and it’s now so dark, I have to use the flashlight on my phone to get from the driveway to my front door.
The night smothers me. I walk stiffly, my shoulders nearly touching my ears, that feeling coursing through me, as though there are a million eyes in the trees around my house, shadowy hunched figures lurking in what’s left of my garden, following my every move. It’s paranoia, I know. I also know I’ll be feeling this way for a while. Even if you don’t suffer from anxiety issues, you don’t have a day like I did and emerge from it unscathed.
I’ve just about reached my doorstep when something near me shrieks, something shrill and mechanical.
“Shit.” I whirl around, shining my flashlight into the trees, around my car . . . until I realize that the sound is coming from my bag, and that it’s the burner phone Wendy gave me. I catch my breath enough to answer it. “What’s up?”
“If I were to decide to introduce you to my sister-in-law, Sheila, what would you be able to tell her?”