“You might think that,” Susan began.
“No, I know. He loved Trina, almost as a daughter. And he loved Dermot.”
“Dermot. My brother?”
“Yes. Simon and I were both seeing him.” Joyce watched the information settle on Susan.
“And your husband was in love with him.” Susan sounded circumspect.
“I believe so, yes.” Joyce shrugged. She’d never expected Dermot to be faithful. He was one of those pretty boys, although his sleek edges were blurring as some of his bad habits caught up with him. Dermot wanted to find a way to be everything to everyone, including himself.
Susan shook her head. “But Simon hurt you, by having his affair. It doesn’t add up. You can’t assume people you know well, even people you love, are who they appear to be.”
“That’s just it.” They had been creeping along the sidewalk, Joyce urging with her own body language to move them towards her Porsche. They were at the car now. The gun throbbed in the back of Joyce’s mind. She needed to get Simon out of this predicament. “Simon doesn’t love me. It’s me who loves him.”
Susan shook her head. “Why love someone who can never love you back?”
Joyce’s eyes locked on Susan’s for a beat. “Get in. I’ll give you a ride back to your car.” Joyce unlocked the doors.
After a moment, Susan climbed in. Joyce started the engine, planning out the route she’d take in her head.
They weren’t going back to the park.
CHAPTER FORTY LAURA
Rosie would stay with Laura at the trailer tonight. After the man left and Laura received Addy’s message about Trina, she called Rosie. Laura didn’t know what else to do, besides sit on the cheap carpeting and weep. Laura wasn’t done with her shift until an hour later, and by the time she arrived at her trailer it was starting to get dark.
Laura glanced around the woods by her home. She couldn’t be certain that the man, or anyone else, hadn’t followed her from the hotel, although she’d driven around in circles for a while just in case any of the headlights behind her were more than people running errands and heading home from work. She put her key in the lock and stepped inside the trailer, which was warm and smelled of stale coffee from this morning. Laura went over to the coffee pot and turned it off. She’d forgotten to flip the switch before she left today, and the coffee had been burning off slowly in the urn. She was lucky the trailer hadn’t caught fire.
A hum in her pocket signaled she was getting a call. Her heart thudded as she reached to answer it, thinking that it couldn’t be more bad news, because almost everyone she loved was already dead.
It was Rosie.
“I’m sorry I’m not there yet. I’m waiting for my cousin to get home from work so I can borrow the car,” she explained.
Laura assured her it was fine. That she was fine.
Although Laura had no way of knowing if that were true.
“Do you want to stay on the phone until I can come over?” Rosie asked.
Laura sat down on the couch. She chose the same spot where Dermot’s sister sat when she delivered her revelations about her brother. Susan was so polished and elegant. Like the ballerinas in the Nutcracker play Laura went to once with her mother at Christmastime. They’d looked like angels, dancing on the stage, and all Laura could think was that she’d never feel or be as pretty as those women.
She’d never said that to her mother. Her mother was the kind of woman who assumed the world knew she was gorgeous, and that everything would always be okay.
“It’ll work out,” she would say to Laura any time she came to her mom with a problem, whether it was a boy pulling her hair in the playground or an F on her math test. It was only now, that Laura’s life was imploding and she was totally, utterly alone—except for Rosie—that she realized her mother’s nonchalance was more carelessness than trust in the goodness of the world. She simply didn’t want to be bothered with her children’s worries, Laura thought now.
“Are you really going to have this baby?” Rosie asked, not waiting for Laura to answer her first question.
“Yes,” was Laura’s automatic reply.
“What are you going to do with a baby?” Rosie wasn’t accusatory. She seemed genuine in her question.
Laura wasn’t sure how to answer her.
Laura leaned back into the cushions of the couch. She felt a deep, dark hole humming inside her, and poor Rosie was going to get sucked into it if she wasn’t careful. “You mean, now that my boyfriend and brother are dead? And the one person who I thought could help was murdered too?” She meant Trina, of course.
Rosie’s voice became urgent. “What do you mean?”
Laura nodded, and then remembered Rosie couldn’t see her over the phone. “Trina’s dead. Addy texted me. She found her in her apartment. Strangled, apparently.”
“Oh my God.”
“I got the message right after I spoke to you. After that man came to the hotel and threatened me.” Laura forgave herself this small lie to Rosie. She didn’t have the energy to tell Rosie earlier when they spoke. She looked out the window and thought she saw a light flicker, somewhere deep in the woods. People knew where she lived.
“Come over now,” Rosie insisted. “You can stay with me. Or we can stay in a hotel.”
“Okay.” Laura wasn’t sure where she’d be safe. She was mainly certain she couldn’t be in this trailer for a second longer. “I’m on my way.”
“I should have told you to come over as soon as you were done with work,” Rosie chided herself.
Laura thought about the coffee pot she’d left on. If she’d gone straight to Rosie’s, her trailer would have surely burned down. No, she was glad she’d come home for the few moments that she had.
But it was time to leave.
She told Rosie she was headed over and ended the call.
Laura went out into the freezing night again, but before she stepped off the makeshift porch a stream of headlights shone from the end of the lane as a car swung onto the drive.
Fear lit up through her spine. She couldn’t go back inside until she knew who was there. The only certainty she had was that it wasn’t Rosie.
Or Dermot. Terry. Trina.
The list was so long.
It was freezing outside. Laura’s feet were shod in sneakers. Her coat was from three Christmases ago, a gift from the foster parents she was living with at the time. It had fur around the hood, but the seams were coming apart and the zipper gapped if you didn’t close it just right.
Laura made a decision. She slipped back into the trailer and grabbed a flashlight. She disappeared into the dark, just as the car pulled up in the drive and two figures in long coats slinked out the doors. It was like Laura had never been there, except for her footprints in the snow.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE SIMON
If you asked him, he couldn’t tell you when it started. Not the feelings—those had been there as long as he could remember. But the actions, that was all a blur in his mind that wouldn’t clarify, no matter how hard he tried to remember. It was after he came out of his depression, his body singing again like it wasn’t trying to just wither and die. He remembered being at the grocery store, and having another man purposefully bump into him in the bread aisle. He was gorgeous, dressed like a summer island in cashmere and chinos, his hair combed just so. The man had beautiful green eyes, and Simon followed him into the back alley behind the store and kissed his perfectly plump lips. It wasn’t the first time. There had been other men, but that was in the fog of alcohol and dark bars he’d stumbled into after a long shift at the hospital. He could barely remember what happened in those places, except for the soreness of his lips and legs the next day.
Simon thought about that man in the grocery store—he didn’t even know his name, and yet his face was indelibly marked in his memory despite everything Simon had done to forget him—as the detectives asked Simon for details about his confession.
But, of course, he couldn’t give them anything. Not that that made him any less guilty.
It was after a question regarding Dermot’s body, asking about where he’d struck Dermot and with what, that Simon knew it wasn’t going to work.
