The Perfect Stranger (34 page)

He refrains, going on to talk a bit about the film, and it turns out to be a biopic about the life of Ingrid Bergman.

Okay, now it makes more sense. Jenna Coeur is a dead ringer for the late Hollywood legend. Casting someone so notorious in such a high profile project is bound to be controversial: added appeal for an unconventional, media-courting director like Baumann.

“The script calls for a versatile actress with the range to depict Bergman from her early years in Stockholm through Hollywood’s golden era to middle age and her valiant seven-year battle with breast cancer.”

Those two words hit Crystal like a punch in the gut.

Coincidence? Or . . .

“And now,” Baumann continues, with a sweeping gesture as he looks stage left, “I’d like to introduce the extraordinarily versatile, extraordinarily lovely . . . Miss Jenna Coeur.”

As she steps up to the podium, her head is bowed. Her shoulders rise with one deep breath, as if to steel her nerves, and then she looks up, directly into the cameras.

It’s her.

Not just Jenna Coeur, but
her
—the woman she saw at Meredith’s funeral.

“Hang on, Kay . . . just hang on . . . help is coming . . .”

Kay can’t see Landry and she can’t answer her but she hears her voice loud and clear.

The hearing is the last sense to go,
she recalls the hospice nurse saying years ago, when Mother lay dying.
Go ahead and talk to her. She’ll hear you.

Perhaps. But Mother was listening to someone else.

You came back for me, Paul! I knew you would. . . . yes, I’m ready. I’m ready. Let’s go.

That was when Kay realized that death would not be the dark, lonely moment she’d feared ever since that long-ago day her doctor’s receptionist, Janine, had called to tell her the test results were back.

Life—it was
life
that had been dark and lonely.

Not death.

When you die, there’s light—bright, beautiful light. Mother talked about that. And there are people there, waiting; people you love, and they’ll never leave you. You’ll never have to say good-bye again.

Kay’s parents found each other again on the other side, this time forever, and Meredith . . .

She knows Meredith’s beloved mother had to be waiting for her when she crossed over.

And now it’s my turn, and Meredith is already there.

She’ll be waiting for me.

She’ll be coming to find me, any second now . . .

“And you’re sure your husband wouldn’t have picked this up somewhere else—” The homicide detective studies the plastic-wrapped guitar pick. “—maybe not from the sidewalk that morning, but the day before? Maybe he bought it, or someone gave it to him, or—”

“No.” Sheri shakes her head firmly. “That’s impossible.”

“Impossible is a strong word, Mrs.—”

“But it is impossible. Trust me.” She’d already told him about Roger’s germaphobia; how he would never in a million years pick up a filthy guitar pick from the sidewalk.

Now she explains, “He would have taken those jeans, clean, out of his drawer that morning. He never wore something two days in a row. That’s just how he was. Everything went into the hamper at night when he took it off.”

Sitting back in his chair, the detective—in his quintessential rumpled shirt—nods thoughtfully.

“I do all the laundry,” she goes on, “and I always check the pockets, so it wasn’t there when I washed the jeans. It got there that morning. Someone else put it there. Not Richard.”

“Okay.” The detective leans forward, looking again at the guitar pick. “I don’t know what this means, but for starters, we’re going to look for prints, and I’m going to see if I can use it to link any other recent murders here in Indianapolis.”

Stumbling along the waterfront path as it winds past the outbuildings of the Grand Hotel property, Elena spots a long wooden fishing pier ahead. Two men are there despite the thunderstorm, standing side by side along the railing holding bamboo rods above the water.

Elena stops running, clutching her side, panting hard.

“Help!” she calls. “Please, please . . . someone is trying to kill me . . .”

They don’t turn their heads toward her, can’t hear her voice above the hard summer rain.

She looks over her shoulder, still expecting to see . . .

Landry, Jenna . . . whoever slaughtered Kay in the picture-perfect teenage girl’s bedroom decorated in seaside colors.

She tries to catch her breath, shouts again, “Help! My friend . . .”

My friend is dead.

I went to tell her that I thought we should get out of that house before something terrible happened, and . . .

And it already had.

I found her, and . . .

And I panicked, and . . .

And I didn’t stop to help; I didn’t even stop to grab my cell phone to call for help.

I just ran. Ran away, ran for my life.

Again she looks over her shoulder.

No one is chasing her.

But I know what I saw. I had her blood on my hands. Dear God . . .

Kay. Poor Kay.

Blinded by the glare of flashbulbs, Jenna is transported back to that day at the courthouse, the day the verdict was read.

“We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty . . .”

Not guilty.

Stunned, she turned to her legal team, certain she must have heard wrong. She hadn’t. Her attorneys had never let on to her that they anticipated any other outcome, but relief was evident in their faces and posture. As for her . . .

Not guilty?

She clearly remembers what happened that night at her mansion in the Hollywood Hills.

Olivia, the daughter she’d given up for adoption, had found her way back into her life—

Just as Steven once had, about seven, maybe eight years after she left Minnesota and transformed herself into Hollywood royalty. Of course, she saw him for what he really was, and had been all along: a dirt bag nobody. The irony: he didn’t even want her back. He wanted money. He’d gotten himself into trouble. Loan sharks, drug dealers . . . something like that.

She didn’t give it to him.

Later, Jenna heard, he’d disappeared.

She didn’t care.

Olivia did.

Olivia had maneuvered her way into her life as a personal assistant, never letting on who she really was.

It wasn’t until later—when Olivia was dead and she was sitting in a jail cell—that Jenna uncovered the whole sad story about what had happened to her daughter back in Minnesota. Olivia had been adopted as an infant by parents who abused her, then bounced from foster home to foster home, fantasizing about her birth parents coming to the rescue. They never did.

She eventually found Steven, not long after Jenna refused to bail him out of trouble. He blamed her for that. And when her newfound father figure vanished, Olivia, too—neglected, mentally ill, delusional Olivia—blamed her. Fantasy festered.

One night, she snapped.

Crept into Jenna’s bedroom with a butcher knife.

It was my life, or hers. I did what I had to do . . . Or did I?

Was there a part of her that knew all along who Olivia really was, and what was coming, and did nothing to deter it? A part of her—a spurned, furious part of her—that wanted to punish Olivia for the sins of her father?

No one will ever know the whole truth.

No one but me. And I’ll never tell.

It doesn’t matter now anyway.

Wesley Baumann touches Jenna’s hand, resting on the podium.

She looks up at him.

He gives a little nod.

She can hear Cory’s voice in her head.
You can do this.

Okay.

Thanks to him—thanks to Wesley—the nightmare is over. Jenna Coeur is coming back at last.

“Thank you.” Her voice seems to echo in hundreds, thousands, of microphones. Flashbulbs are still exploding before her eyes. The room is silent, waiting. Someone coughs.

You can do this.

“Seven years ago last week marked the beginning of a nightmare I never thought would end. What happened that night is a very long and complicated story. Maybe someday I’ll decide to tell it. But right now the only story I’m interested in telling is Ingrid Bergman’s. I’ve been preparing for this role for eighteen months, learning everything I could about this fascinating woman . . . this courageous woman. About the way she lived . . . the way she died.”

A lump rises in her throat. She’s thinking not about Ingrid Bergman, but about Meredith Heywood. And the others.

Eighteen months ago she set out to learn everything she could about breast cancer. She stumbled across a vibrant online community of women who were living with—and dying from—the disease. Ever the method actress, she was drawn into their world, essentially becoming one of them. She celebrated their triumphs, mourned their losses, and took up their battle cry, immersing herself not just in the emotions, but in the politics.

For eighteen months their world was her world.

Now it’s time now for her to move on.

She takes a deep breath. “I’m grateful to Wesley Baumann for giving me this opportunity, and to my manager, Cory, for believing in me, and to the friends who saw me through the last seven years . . . I couldn’t have done it without you.”

I only wish you could know how much you meant to me—or why I left without saying good-bye.

“Kay . . . who did this to you, Kay?”

Landry’s voice, farther away now.

Was it like this for Meredith?
Kay wonders.
Could she hear me moving around her bedroom that night as she lay there on the floor? I should have talked to her. I should have told her why I did what I did. That it was out of love for her. I couldn’t bear the thought of her suffering the way Mother had. I knew she couldn’t bear it either . . .

Sick . . . bald . . . dying . . .

When Meredith told her she was terminally ill, something shifted inside Kay.

All those years at the prison, watching criminals march off to the lethal injection chamber, had taken their toll. Killers who had tortured innocent victims to death were allowed to escape their hellish prison existence by the most merciful means imaginable. They were the ones who deserved to suffer. Not their victims.

Not Meredith.

She knew what she had to do. She had to help her friend escape.

Maybe I had selfish reasons, too. Maybe I couldn’t bear the thought of being the first to go. Maybe I needed Meredith to be there, waiting for me, so that I wouldn’t be alone when the time came.

Was it so wrong, really?

When she first came up with the plan, Kay didn’t think so. It made a bizarre kind of sense, and after all, it was going to happen anyway. She even did some reading about euthanasia.

Mother used to talk about that a lot. Dr. Kevorkian had been tried and convicted around the time her own illness began to progress.

“They do lethal injection executions at the prison where you work,” she’d say. “You can get your hands on those drugs, can’t you?”

“No, Mother,” Kay would tell her. “I can’t.”

Yes, she could.

She did.

She kept the deadly liquid in the drawer of her nightstand, just in case Mother’s pain became unbearable.

Kay found herself imagining the heartfelt deathbed apology her mother would make, for withholding her love all those years.

I do love you, Kay,
Mother would manage to say.
I’ve always loved you, more than anything in the world.

Sick . . . bald . . . dying . . .

And then her mother would beg her to help her, and she would gently inject her with the drugs that would stop her heart and end the suffering at last.

That wasn’t how it happened.

The apology never came, and so . . .

Kay allowed the torture to go on.

She didn’t
cause
it. She wasn’t
evil
.

She just didn’t put a stop to it. She let it happen.

Sick . . . bald . . . dying . . .

Dead.

The potassium chloride and SUX didn’t go to waste, though. Kay planned to use the lethal cocktail on herself someday, when the time was right. She even packed it into her bag the day she drove to Cincinnati for Meredith’s funeral, along with a syringe. Just in case . . .

Most of the time, she was at peace with how she’d helped Meredith, but there were moments—moments when her head ached and her thoughts churned and she wasn’t so sure.

Then last weekend, when she met the others in person—Landry and Elena—she realized she wasn’t alone in this world after all. She needed them, yes—but more importantly, they needed her.

From Cincinnati, she drove to Massachusetts. It wasn’t easy—that long drive on busy highways though the Northeast corridor—but she did it. For Elena.

The way Tony Kerwin was tormenting her . . .

All that stress was toxic. She had to do whatever she could to save Elena from a recurrence.

I’ll do anything for my friends,
she told the woman on the plane this morning, the one with the rosy future. She meant it.

Roger Lorton—she hadn’t done that for her friends, though. She’d done it for herself. That was a bad morning. She’d gone out for an early walk to try to clear her aching head and tangled thoughts, thinking about Meredith, thinking about Mother . . .

When he asked her for a light—and she saw that cigarette—she couldn’t help it. He got too close, and in her mind’s eye he wasn’t a stranger with a cigarette between his lips, he was Mother. She snapped.

Like a turtle.

He was small, much smaller than her. It was easy to overpower him.

She left him with the guitar pick, just as she left Tony Kerwin with the comb and Meredith with the pendant. Good luck tortoiseshell for all, wishing them Godspeed on their final journey.

When remorse struck, later—only occasionally—she reminded herself that it was all for good reason. Even Roger Lorton, a perfect stranger who had nothing to do with anything, really.