The Other Widow (6 page)

“I assume you can find your way from here,” he says to Maggie, and then to the receptionist, “Never mind, Lola. I'll take that to Dorreen. I'm headed up her way.”

“Sure,” Maggie says, “I'll be fine. Thanks for giving me your ti—” But Edward turns his back as if she has already gone. He does not shake her hand.

VI

MAGGIE

M
aggie pulls up her coat collar and steps outside to brave the cold, hurries to her car. Snow blurs the harsh, sharp edges of the newly renovated area as she makes her way through it to Back Bay. She slows down at Newbury. Her cell blares out a rap song. It's Hank, standing on Newbury and Berkeley. “Johnson's gone off on his own,” he tells her. “I'm all yours for the next hour.”

She pulls over. Hank opens the passenger side door and slides in quickly, pushes the seat back to accommodate his long legs, his lanky body. He closes the car door behind him, but the cold comes in, drifts up from his clothes. “Hey, Maggie,” he says. He smiles. “Like old times, eh?” He blows on his hands. His hair is grayer than Maggie remembers, a little thinner on top.

“Yeah.” She smiles. “Yeah. Just like.”

“So, here's a copy of that accident report,” Hank says, dropping three stapled sheets of paper on the seat and reaching over to tilt the heater vent straight on him. His face is red. Snow clings to his shoulders and drips onto the front seat.

“Anything?”

He shrugs. “The car slid on black ice, hit a tree at nine twelve
P
.
M
. Likely death on impact from a blow to the head. The airbag on the passenger side opened but not the one on the driver's side. It was a hard hit, but nothing the airbag couldn't have absorbed. It was an Audi. Old, but still an Audi. Not too shabby, right? Wonder why the airbag didn't open.”

“Me, too.” Maggie glances at the stapled papers. “I'll take a look. Where've they got it?”

“O'Brien's in Southie,” Hank says. “Oh. Something else.” He leans back and stretches his legs out under the dash. “There were two Starbucks cups in the front seat, contents splashed across the dash, the airbag, the upholstery. Smelled of coffee and hot chocolate, both.”

“Okay. So there was someone else in the car. Or Lindsay was bringing a cup back to the office. Was there a lid?”

“Nope. No lid. Lotsa blood on the steering wheel, the seat, running down the driver's arm. A few drops in the fabric.”

“Who called it in?”

Hank shrugs. “No telling. A woman, but she didn't give her name. ‘Very upset,' it says in the report. But there were people crawling out of the woodwork by the time we got there, so it could've been anyone.”

Maggie nods. “I'm thinking there might be footage from the shops on Newbury and around the corner. Maybe something from that night. So . . . since you're a cop and I'm not . . .”

“There was mention of a lunch?”

“Right,” she says. “It was a total bribe.”

“Then I'm your man,” Hank says, and they head for the sidewalk in front of a café. “How about we start here?”

Some of the shop owners on Newbury don't have security cameras, and most of the ones that do didn't have them turned on that Friday night. Or they bought a camera and never figured out how to run the thing, or the sister's son's friend meant to come over to set it up and never did. One young guy the next street over says his uncle has a security camera and it was turned on, but the uncle's in Florida and won't be back until sometime next week. The nephew takes both their cards, sticks them behind the register, where, Maggie figures, the uncle will find them months from now and toss them in the trash.

Hank manages to wolf down lunch, two coffees, and a doughnut in various eateries. When his hour is almost up, they hit pay dirt at a clothing store displaying summer clothes—go figure—and two or three nearly naked mannequins in the window, their long legs white against the backdrop of a dark blue curtain. Yes, the owner tells them. Yes, his camera is fully operational. Yes, it was turned on the night of the bad storm. “Just in case,” he says, shaking his head. “When things shut down. That's when the serious crimes occur,” which Maggie doesn't think is actually true, since criminals don't like snowstorms any more than anyone else. Besides, she thinks, this guy's display window wouldn't bring someone in the front door on a good day, let alone through a window with a hammer on a bad one.

“Great,” Hank says. He's got his coat unbuttoned, his hat off. “Mind if I take a look?”

They stand, leaning their elbows on the glass counter in front while the store owner pulls up the footage from January 9 on his iPad. There's a lot of snow, so much that nothing else is really visible. Every once in a while, someone scurries down the sidewalk—a vague blob, or, occasionally, two blobs together. Only a small wedge of street is covered by the camera and even this, the owner says, is just a glitch. “The wind,” he tells them. “It knocked the awning, the camera. Everything.”

And then there it is, the Audi, spinning for a second in the milky night. They can't see the tree. They don't see it hit. There is only the absence of motion. Nothing, for a stretched-out second, and then things flying. Like an explosion. Debris fills the screen.

After that, there's nothing but white, and, behind it, the passenger-side door, part of the right front tire, turned outward at an ugly angle. Seconds pass. The storm seems to pick up, so much so they nearly miss the movement of the door. And then it opens slightly and closes, as if it's being pushed hard from the inside, jammed shut from the wreck. Finally, the door flies open and a figure slides out to the ground, makes its way through the debris, a figure with a heavy coat, a covered head, a female, judging by the size. Together the three of them watch a small blurry figure hurry from the wrecked car down the street and quickly out of sight.

This is what Maggie had hoped to find. It's why she's here, although she isn't sure what it all means. Not yet. “Thanks,” she says and the shop owner nods. Hank glances at his watch and then out at the street, where a squad car is just pulling up a few doors down. Maggie reaches over, pats Hank on the arm, and tells him they should get together, Hank and his wife and Maggie. Or a double date, she says, although she hasn't dated anyone for months. The shop owner is still glued to his iPad. He barely knows they're there; his eyes are watery from staring at the screen, from straining to make things out through all the gray and haze.

“Wait,” he says. “You might want to see this,” but Hank's already running out the door. “Let me know,” he calls back, “how it comes out, or if you need me on this.”

Maggie looks at the screen, where a crowd moves through the snow toward the car. The owner rewinds. “Wait,” he says again. “This is weird,” and he hits
PAUSE
and then
PLAY
and Maggie can just barely see the driver's-side door opening as a figure reaches inside and then backs quickly away.

“Damn.”

“I know, right? Thought you might find that interesting,” he says. “After that, there's nothing. At least nothing I could make out. I think the wind knocked the camera totally out of focus. Want me to play it anyway?”

“No,” Maggie says. “That's okay. Listen, thanks. We really appreciate you doing this. Could you possibly—that one shot there. The driver's-side door—could you replay that one more time?”

“Sure thing.” The owner fiddles with his iPad. “Here,” he says.

Maggie squints at the frame.

VII

KAREN

K
aren jumps when her phone rings in her house in Waltham. Despite seeing Alice's name across the tiny screen, she brings the cell up to her ear with trepidation. “I'm leaving in an hour,” she says. “Call you when I get off the train.” She doesn't wait for an answer. She's running late. She's having trouble doing anything these days—sleeping, and getting out of bed, or off the couch—she hasn't been back to work since the day Joe died. Her lovely turn-of-the-century house, spotless until recently, is now a mass of dirty dishes and half-filled teacups, wineglasses caked with film. Grease from fast-food wrappers seeps into antique tables where she's set things and forgotten they were there. Antoine, their Papillon, has gulped them down, adding his eager slobber to the mix.

He'd spoiled the dog. Antoine only ever really liked Joe.

A prescription bottle from CVS sits beside a stack of mixing bowls in a white kitchen cabinet, Xanax, left over from a dental procedure Karen had weeks before.
You'll be needing these
, the dentist told her, but she hadn't. Not then. She's good with pain. Excellent with pain. Tough it out, she always told her sons when they were little, when they whined over minor injuries or tattled on each other. But it's a different kind of pain that lately has her padding to the kitchen in the wee hours, reaching for the pills that lurk behind flowered cups she bought at Anthropologie on a whim, the one on Newbury, the street where Joe died.

If details from the accident report are painful and maddening—the second Starbucks cup, the spilled hot chocolate—they make her husband no less dead. Nor do they make Karen less alone or empty, and certainly no happier. The insurance payout is apt to be delayed, a claims adjuster told her when she'd called the day before. Standard, she'd said, on a claim this size. And it is large. A million-dollar claim. Karen took it out herself a few weeks before the accident. The business was losing money; Joe was acting crazy, totally obsessed with a tragic house fire—heartbreaking—but in reality it had only the slightest, most tangential connection to his life. And then there were the e-mails, this understudyfork. With all the drama, all the intrigue, who knew what might happen? And then it had! Before the ink was even dry on the insurance policy—just that quickly, Joe was gone.

“We'll have to sort through this a bit,” the adjuster told her, and it is unsettling, but only in a vague, unreal way. Money is the last thing on Karen's mind, and, anyway, she has a little tucked away for the moment. That's all she can handle now. Just this one day, this hour, this smallest, most colorless and unexciting step. Later, when it matters what she eats or what she wears, she'll have Joe's half of the company. Home Runs is her future.

She sets the new alarm in the foyer, this plastic, white-rimmed thing that clashes with both the trim paint and her nature.
You're gone so much
, is what she'd told her husband, lobbying for the damn thing weeks before. She hadn't told him that sometimes when she walked Antoine, or stopped for groceries, she felt a presence, someone there, just out of sight, watching her. She might have. If Joe hadn't died, she might have.

She hurries through the door. The cold hits her as she scans the driveway, the street in front of the house, the droopy naked trees and salt-covered asphalt, the bright red of a neighbor's newly painted door. She hits the button on her key ring and slides into her car, hears the locks click behind her as she starts the engine and fiddles with the radio, glances at the rearview, the side mirrors. The house.

“Breathe,” she mutters, settling on a soothing classical music station. “Just breathe.” Instead of meeting Alice, she should probably be on her way to see a shrink, something she last considered the summer she turned nine and read
The Three Faces of Eve
, plucked from their parents' bookshelf by her older sister Lydia. Eve, with her headaches and three personalities packed inside her nervous southern body, made Karen wonder if there might be a daring alternate inside her, too, waiting to leap out and break all the bottles in her father's gin collection or saunter down to the OK drugstore slathered in Lydia's perfume. Still, aside from that one summer, seeing a shrink never even entered Karen's mind until Joe ended up dead across his steering wheel in Back Bay, leaving her with a boxcar full of sorrow and regret for how things could have turned out and did not, and, worse, this feeling that she's being stalked.

“How are you, sweetie?” Alice stands up to give her a hug.

“I'm okay.” Karen pulls out a high-backed wooden chair, sets down her tea and pastry.

Alice's bookstore is a short walk from the Queen of Cups, where the two friends have been meeting here on Wednesday afternoons for years. If Karen's working at the shop, they close and walk up here together. If she isn't, she comes in on the train. It's tradition. Rain or shine, no matter what, Wednesday afternoons belong to Alice. The little tea shop, filled with an eclectic mix of furniture and teas, has chocolate everything. Éclairs, truffles, cakes to die for. “Listen.” Alice leans across the table. “Why don't you come stay with me for a while? Just until you—”

Karen throws her coat over the back of a funky, bright blue chair and stares at her croissant. Alice has lived with her cats in a tiny place on Beacon Hill ever since her marriage ended years ago, and at this point there is a definite allure—of course, at this point a cardboard box has appeal. “I just might take you up on that,” Karen says. “Thanks. And thanks for all your help with the funeral. With everything. I'll be back to work as soon as I can get myself—”

Alice bites into a chocolate almond scone and waves her hand in the air. “Take as much time as you need. And, Karen. You know I'm always here. You know that. Anything. A place to stay, more hours at the bookstore, a shoulder to— Just let me know.”

Karen nods. “It's all a blur.” She fiddles with her teacup. “Especially the funeral—all those people, Alice! And they all loved Joe. ‘
Your husband was the nicest guy
.' I thought I'd go mad, I heard that so many times at his—at the church. After. You know. After the service.” She picks up her pastry, but then she sets it down again without actually tasting it.