The Consequences (14 page)

“I promise,” he said quickly. “In any case, I think you can tell from today that she'll want little enough to do with me.” When he realized that Kathy wasn't going to speak to him again, he turned and left the room, stepped out into the hall, and took the stairs two at a time. When he entered his office, he shut the door. Then he lay back against the door and slowly slid to the floor.

This was a day he would never forget.

Thank God it was almost over.

CHAPTER 25

S
itting at his desk, Robert didn't think the papers looked like they had been disturbed; Kathy had obviously been very careful. He dug down through the pile of mail until he found the speeding ticket. It was a fixed penalty ticket, two points on his license, for driving forty-five miles per hour on a twenty-five mile per hour stretch of road in Jamaica Plain last October 31, at 11:12 p.m.

He remembered the night, clearly remembered seeing the white van parked by the side of the road with its blacked-out back windows as he shot past it. The irony of it was, of course, that he had met with a client in Connecticut, and the plan had been for him to spend the night there and drive back the following morning. However, within about fifteen minutes of starting the meeting, it had become obvious that what Robert had assumed might be a potential client was nothing more than a time-waster. It happened all the time. He had concluded the meeting as quickly as politeness allowed, canceled the dinner reservation, and had driven back to Boston. He was heading home to Brookline when he'd picked up the phone and, on impulse, called Stephanie and asked her if she wanted him to stay the night. She said yes; Stephanie always said yes. So he continued on to her house. Usually, he was so careful with his speed. He was in a business that depended upon a car, and his insurance premium was so high that the last thing he needed were points to drive it even higher. But his excitement to be with Stephanie had edged the speed over the legal limit.

He checked through the rest of the mail in his in-tray, but he could find nothing else incriminating; there was an MBNA bill, but it was for business expenses. He turned the page and frowned. Hmmm, had she seen this page? There were three items that might have given her pause. A purchase from QVC, a bouquet of flowers from ProFlowers.com, and a meal at the French restaurant L'Espalier. He could claim they were business expenses . . . but he doubted Kathy would believe him. Maureen was right: He had been greedy. He should have conducted his affairs—he smiled grimly at the irony—on a cash-only basis. But he never thought he'd be discovered; he never imagined that Kathy would come searching, looking for proof.

How much did she know?

He looked at the bill in his hand. He doubted if she'd seen this; she would undoubtedly have brought it up in conversation. He pulled the second page off the bill and was just about to feed it into the shredder when he realized that the sound might alert Kathy to the fact that he was shredding documents on Christmas Eve. And it wouldn't take a genius to work out what he was doing.

He stood and opened the filing cabinet, then pushed the page to the very back of a folder marked IRS. She'd never find it there, and next time the house was empty, he'd shred it and any other piece of evidence he could find.

How much had she discovered? He fully intended to tell her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth . . . or as much of the truth as he dared tell her. He knew one thing for certain: He could never tell her that he'd asked Stephanie to marry him.

Robert looked around the room, past the printers, faxes, scanners, a large desktop computer, the digital editing suite to the row of filing cabinets that took up the left wall. The files were all work related. There was nothing personal—nothing incriminating—in them.

And the computer?

Robert ran his fingers along the top edge of the screen. There was nothing on this computer. All of the files on the desktop were entirely business related. There were no e-mails, no romantic letters that could link him to Stephanie. Besides, the machine was password protected, and Kathy didn't have the password. When he wanted to send e-mails to Stephanie, he used an online account, or his cell, and when he talked to her using Google Chat, he never kept the IM logs. The laptop was also clean as far as he remembered. He'd check it out later. But it was also password protected.

Robert sat down at his machine and powered it on. Then he entered his password, Poppykoo—the name of his beloved childhood dog. As he did so he realized that the password offered little protection from Kathy—it was something she could easily guess if she thought about it. He really must get around to changing it.

He quickly checked his e-mail. Some spam, an offer from a Nigerian to share fifty-two million dollars with him, offers for Viagra and a Genie Bra, and a couple of e-mails from clients wishing him a Merry Christmas.

Nothing from Stephanie.

Pulling out his phone, he called her cell, but the call went straight to her voice mail. Lowering his voice, he said, “Stephanie, it's me. Please give me a call when you get this. I just want to have a few words about what happened today, about us too. Talk to me. Please.”

Where was she?

He didn't think she'd had any plans for the evening. She'd told him that her friend Izzie was getting engaged, but she'd said it was a private party. He called the house. “Stephanie? It's me. I . . . I just need to talk to you. About today. About us. About the future. I know you're angry, but please call me, let me know you're okay.”

Somewhere at the back of his mind, an alarm bell started ringing. Where was she? Why wasn't she answering? He glanced at his watch. He'd try again in a couple of hours.

CHAPTER 26

R
obert opened the hall door and breathed in the icy night air. It was so cold it burned his nostrils. It had snowed earlier, the merest dusting of flakes, but the sky was now completely clear.

“Are you going out?” Kathy's voice sounded as chilly as the night air, and did he hear the faintest hint of accusation in it . . . or was it just his guilty conscience?

“I just want to bring the car in,” he explained. “I parked it on the street earlier.” The kitchen door closed behind him, and he thought he heard Kathy's voice talking on the phone.

He stopped to look at the pillar on the way out. The edge of the stone cap was missing, and there were flakes of blue metallic paint on the stonework. He grinned; he guessed Julia had caught the back bumper and probably the back door as well. Her little moral outburst had cost her a couple of grand at least. He hit the remote; the Audi's lights flashed, and he climbed in and turned on the engine. Ice crystals had grown like mold along the edges of the windshield, and he leaned forward to stare at them, suddenly a boy again, remembering—with absolute clarity—that first terrible Christmas when his father had left home. He'd spent Christmas Eve sitting at his bedroom window, fully dressed, with a flannel blanket thrown over his shoulders, watching, hoping, praying that his father and brothers would come home for Christmas. They hadn't, and he'd sat through the night, watching the same ice crystals, intricate and delicate, creep across the window until they completely obscured the night.

With the car wheels spinning on the ice, he eased the car into the driveway, turned off the engine, and then sat in silence, listening to the engine tick quietly to itself. He was beginning to realize that nothing was ever going to be the same again.

As he climbed out of the car, he caught the slightest flicker of the bedroom curtain moving, and wondered if Kathy was watching him. Was this how the future was going to be: forever watched and spied on? He experienced a brief snap of anger. Well, that wasn't going to happen. Kathy had every right to be angry with him, but, as she'd admitted herself, she was not entirely blameless. She was talking about changes that she wanted to see. . . . Well, he wanted to see some changes himself.

He popped the trunk and pulled out the large bouquet of flowers. He would hide them in the garage overnight and give them to Kathy in the morning. Perhaps they could start the day off on a good foot instead of with betrayal and suspicion. His gifts for Kathy weren't as thoughtful as the ones he'd picked out for Stephanie, because he'd barely managed to make it into the store before closing. His choices for Christmas presents for his wife had been limited. In addition to the necklace and scarf, he'd gotten her a lavish bouquet called The Martha's Vineyard, which was filled with white roses, fragrant lilacs, and lavender hydrangea. He'd scribbled on the card, one gift certificate for an all-expenses weekend on the Vineyard. He wondered: Would there be a next year?

Shivering in the chill night air, Robert hurried back into the house.

 

This was now the third call, and there was still no answer.

He'd been calling Stephanie every hour on the hour. The calls kept going straight to her answering machine. Where was she?

He was getting worried. Stephanie had always appeared to him as calm and sensible, not given to hysterics or emotional outbursts. She was the senior accounts manager in one of the biggest—if not the biggest—agencies in Boston, handling multimillion-dollar accounts and even bigger egos on a daily basis. She didn't strike him as someone who would do something stupid.

And yet . . .

And yet he had to admit that she had been slightly
off
over the past few weeks. He had known she wasn't looking forward to spending Christmas by herself, and they'd come close to an argument on more than one occasion when she'd put pressure on him to leave Kathy and spend the time with her.

Robert rewrote Kathy's gift certificate on a nicer piece of stationery. He absentmindedly started to doodle a caricature on it. He relaxed for a moment, enjoying the simple creative task of drawing, and he filled the card with funny Christmas vignettes of the family. When he first married Kathy, he had very little money to romance her, and he used to leave her cartoons like this all over the house. Why had he stopped doing that? Oddly enough, he never drew for Stephanie. Where was Stephanie? He'd tried to remember last Christmas. Stephanie had been a little down then too. They'd been seeing each other for six months, and it had honestly been the happiest six months of his life. He'd felt young again. Young and alive. He had a young woman who was interested not just in him as a person, but in every aspect of his life, someone he could talk to about the business, someone he could make plans with. And then Christmas had arrived. It was the first big test of their relationship.

Stephanie had wanted him to spend Christmas Eve with her—but he couldn't. She wanted him to come over on Christmas Day, but he couldn't do that either. And it was the same story with New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

He'd spoken to her on several occasions over that week, and he had known how lonely and miserable she was. She promised she was never going to do it again. And yet here she was, a year later, in an even worse position. The future she had been happy to plan was in pieces; the man she'd hoped would move in with her and ultimately marry her had left her, and she was alone again over Christmas. He'd seen the look on her face earlier, a look of heartbreak, of absolute loss. He could only imagine how she was feeling right now: lost, lonely, alone, depressed.

She had to be at home. . . . Where else could she be? But if she were at home, then why didn't she answer the phone? Sly and insidious, the thought that had been lurking at the back of his head all evening finally surfaced. She wouldn't have done anything . . . anything foolish, would she?

CHAPTER 27

Wednesday, 25th December
Christmas Day

 

 

T
he house was still and silent.

The kids had gone to bed, and he'd heard Kathy move around the bedroom—funny, he'd always thought of it as her room, never their bedroom. A deep silence had fallen over the house. The heat had just clicked off, and a chill was beginning to creep into the air.

Robert came out of his study and crept downstairs as softly as he could, moving silently in his socks on the heavy, cream-colored carpet. He checked the front door and slid the security chain across it. He stood in front of the Christmas tree, realizing that he hadn't been part of the decorating. He bought the tree, but Kathy and the kids had done all the work. Brendan's and Theresa's presents were carefully arranged around the tree, and Robert was embarrassed and just a little ashamed that, apart from the books, CDs, and DVDs, he didn't know what Kathy had bought them for their major present.

In the kitchen, he checked the back door before turning off the lights. He stood in the darkened room and allowed his eyes to adjust to the gloom. The kitchen took on a vaguely milky glow, and when he stepped up to the window, he could see that huge, silent flakes of snow were falling, swirling and curling around the backyard, painting one side of the trees in white, while leaving the other side black and shapeless.

It was going to be a white Christmas. He smiled. And then the smile faded. Where was Stephanie?

Standing in the kitchen, he pulled out his cell and hit Redial. Hers had been the only number he'd been calling all evening. As before it went straight to her voice mail, and he hung up without leaving a message. The snow hit the window, stuck briefly, then dissolved into icy tears, and he could see his own image reflected back at him, broken and distorted.

Where was she? He was getting seriously worried.

Maybe she'd drowned her sorrows in a bottle of wine and was even now sleeping it off. It would be totally out of character—he'd seen her tipsy, but never drunk—but today's events were totally out of the ordinary too.

Maybe she'd simply turned her phone off. He shook his head; he'd never known her to turn off her phone. Once she'd even stopped in the middle of sex to take a call from a client.

Was she at home, with her cell by her side, watching his number repeatedly come up on screen and choosing to ignore his calls? He went into the settings and selected “Show Caller ID” and turned it off. Then he called again.

It went straight to her voice mail.

He suddenly had a strong feeling that something was wrong. And he needed to see for himself. He looked up at the kitchen clock. Nearly one. But what was he going to tell Kathy? He couldn't exactly tell her the truth—I've gone to check up on my mistress—especially having just promised to stay away from Stephanie, could he? And yet he couldn't just walk out in the middle of the night. . . .

He suddenly remembered the last time he'd been called away in the middle of the night. Pulling a page from the notepad by the phone, he scribbled, “Office alarm has gone off; gone in to see if there's a problem.” He was about to add “love, Robert,” but didn't. He might be a liar and a cheat, but he wasn't sure he was that much of a hypocrite yet.

The roads were deserted.

Jamaicaway was dusted with a thin layer of white snow, pristine and unmarked ahead of him, only his rapidly-disappearing car tracks behind. Even with the windshield wipers doing double time, all they succeeded in doing was compacting the snow in either corner of the window, and despite the heaters on full blast, frost was forming on the bottom edge of the windshield. He could feel the heavy car shift and slide on the corners and kept dropping his speed until he was doing a little under fifteen miles an hour. Where were the snowplows and the salters? Maybe they didn't work at one fifteen on Christmas morning.

Even though he'd driven this section of road regularly over the last eighteen months, he found that the snow, now falling thick and fast, was removing all his usual landmarks. When it spun and eddied and blew directly toward the car, it gave the disconcerting impression that he was falling into it. And with the side and rear windows completely covered in a thick gray-white coating, his world was reduced to little more than an arc directly in front of his face. He was forced to pull off the road before he reached Jamaica Pond. He hated driving with limited visibility. Forcing open the door, he was shocked by the bitter chill in the air and even more shocked by the amount of snow on the roof of the car, and for the first time he wondered if he was going to make it back home that night. What would Kathy say to that? Using a furled umbrella he scraped the snow off the roof and cleared the back and side windows before climbing back into the car. The back and shoulders of his heavy leather coat were coated in snow, and he could feel wet, icy fingers clinging to the hair at the nape of his neck and beginning to trickle their way down his spine.

Christ, what a mess!

He slowed at the light on Pond Street where a late-night party was going on in one of the huge houses. He could hear the loud music through his windows and saw a group of young men on the upper balcony, smoking cigars. A young woman in a red dress, wearing a reindeer hat, ran out, reached her arms around one of the men, and pulled him back inside. Robert watched as the man flicked his half-lit cigar into a snowy drift below and allowed himself to be pulled into the party. That's what Christmas should be like, Robert decided: young and free, without a worry in the world, full of dreams for the future and Christmases to come. To his right, crouched in the doorway of the boathouse, a shapeless, indeterminate figure in a filthy sleeping bag was huddled out of the icy sleet. As Robert turned left, driving toward his destination, he decided that the latter was probably a closer approximation of what Christmas was: lost innocence and shattered dreams.

Robert lowered his headlights as he turned into the courtyard in front of Stephanie's building. Ice crackled and crunched beneath his wheels, and he swung into the parking space and parked beside her silver BMW. Her car was here, but he wasn't sure if that was a good or a bad sign. If she was going out to a party, she always left the car at home. Turning off the engine, he sat for a moment, composing himself.

Stephanie lived on the upper floor of the restored Victorian, and it was shrouded in darkness, unlike some of the other condos, which had miniature Christmas trees or menorahs in the windows. There was an illuminated Santa in the window box of one of her neighbors, a string of icicles hanging on another. It was close to one thirty, and there was no movement in any of the condos, and the cobbled courtyard was unmarked by tires or footprints. He pulled out his wallet and opened the little zip compartment. Nestled in the back of the pocket was a single unmarked key. Stephanie had given it to him for his birthday last October, just over a year ago. “So you can escape, whenever you need to,” she had explained. “And who knows, maybe I'll even come home one day and find you waiting for me in bed.” That had never happened.

Stepping out of the car, he gently eased the door closed. The last thing he wanted to do now was to slam the door in the small courtyard; he knew from experience that it would echo around the little square and no doubt bring Mrs. Moore, the nosy neighbor, to her window.

He slipped the key into the main door and silently let himself in. He crept to the door on the left, number 8, and turned the key. The moment he opened the door, he knew the condo was empty. It wasn't the cold—the house was surprisingly warm—but it was the ambience. It felt empty.

“Stephanie!” he called from the bottom of the stairs. If she was upstairs, he didn't want to panic her, maybe have her call 911 and have the police show up. He grinned humorlessly; now wouldn't that just be the perfect end to a perfect day? “Stephanie?” He climbed up the stairs and looked into the living room; it was exactly as he had left it several hours ago. The presents were where he had dropped them, the balloon floating close to the ceiling.

Robert looked at the closed doors to the bedroom and bathroom.

He was suddenly conscious that his heart was pounding in his chest. On the one hand he was hoping that the house was empty, because the alternative was almost too horrible to contemplate. What was he going to do if he did discover something?

He took a deep breath. And then he realized that he was also unconsciously sniffing the air, smelling for . . .

The air smelled dry and warm, faintly perfumed by the flowers he had brought earlier and a hint of something mint and floral from the bathroom. He couldn't smell anything else, anything noxious.

What if Stephanie had done something stupid in a fit of depression? Taken too many pills or slit her wrists in the bathtub or thrown one of his ties around the ceiling beam and . . .

Standing outside the bathroom door, he was conscious that his heart was hammering so hard he could feel the shake in his chest, his temples, even in his fingertips.

And what would he do if he found the body? He'd have to report it to the police, and then they'd want to know what he was doing here at one thirty on Christmas morning, and then Kathy would know that he'd gone back to Stephanie's, and then . . .

Jesus, what was he doing here? He'd called Stephanie; she hadn't answered. Why wasn't he satisfied just to leave it at that? Why had he continued to call and work himself up into a state of panic that had driven him out of the house in the middle of the night to check up on a woman who had rejected him only a few hours earlier?

The answer was very simple: He was here because he loved her. He still loved her, despite what had happened.

Pressing his hands flat against the bathroom door, he pushed it open. The bath was empty. Which left the bedroom. He took two quick steps toward the door and pushed it open.

The wave of relief that washed over him was a physical sensation that left him clutching the doorframe for support.

The bed was empty. It also hadn't been slept in, though the cover was rumpled as if Stephanie had sat on it, and it bore the outline of a rectangle. A small suitcase maybe? He pulled open the closet and checked through Stephanie's dresses, skirts, and coats. As far as he could tell everything was there.

But the purse she normally used was missing, as was her cell, though her company laptop was shoved under the bed where it usually lived.

Robert sat on the edge of the bed and looked around the room. He was totally confused now; he wasn't sure whether to be relieved or even more scared. At least he hadn't found a body, but there was no evidence that she'd gone away. Maybe she'd simply gone out to an all-night party and was even now enjoying herself in the arms of a new lover? The pulse of jealousy that rippled through him surprised him with its intensity. But if she'd gone out to a party . . . Robert stood and checked the opposite end of the closet where Stephanie kept her formal dresses. He remembered many happy occasions sitting or lying on the bed, watching her standing in her matching Agent Provocateur lace bra and panties as she riffled through her dresses looking for something suitable to wear. Inevitably, she ended up wearing black. There were four little black dresses, all with different combinations of neck and hemlines, on the hangers, all covered in eco-friendly dry cleaning bags. There didn't seem to be any noticeable gaps on the rail. He pawed through the rest of the dresses; most he recognized and, as far as he could tell, none were missing. Nor were there any spaces in the lines of shoes arranged on their little shelf close to the floor.

So, maybe she hadn't gone to a party. . . .

It looked like she had simply walked out of the house. Where was she? His only hope was that she was with her friend Izzie. If he hadn't heard from her by morning, he'd try to get in touch with Izzie . . . and if Izzie didn't know where her friend was, then he might have to go to the police.