The Perfect Stranger (7 page)

Forced to say yes, she braced herself for him to start asking her out again, but it turned out he was dating someone else by then—or so he claimed. Sidney thought he was just trying to make her jealous, ostensibly playing hard to get.

“Either that,” she said, “or he’s seriously delusional, because I can’t imagine why anyone in her right mind would go out with him.”

“I did.”

“Once. And anyone would, once, because he’s gorgeous.”

The strange thing is, Elena barely notices the
gorgeous
anymore. It’s too hard to see past the
desperate
and the
crazy
.

“What’s up?” Elena asks him now, not in the mood for small talk.

“I got your note about the collection for a retirement gift for Betty Jamison.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“I don’t think it’s fair to ask everyone on the staff to contribute the same amount. Some of us barely know this woman.”

It’s impossible for anyone to be employed at Northmeadow Elementary for any length of time and not have regular contact with Betty Jamison, head secretary in the main office, and the most beloved person on the staff.

But Elena opts not to waste time saying any of that to Tony. “Just donate what you think is fair, then.”

“That’s the trouble. I don’t want to come across as cheap if everyone else is donating more. What I think you might want to do is reword the memo so that . . .”

He drones on.

Elena’s hand clenches around the computer mouse. She looks again at the computer screen, thinks again about Meredith.

Thinks of her lying there, lifeless.

She never knew what hit her.

The line fits, but the voice in Elena’s head isn’t referring to Meredith.

No, she’s remembering what her father said to her uncle after her mother was killed. It happened twenty-five years ago, when she was an eavesdropping seven-year-old, but she remembers the conversation like it was yesterday.

Her father was repeating what the police had told him about the accident. Apparently, the signal at the railroad crossing had failed, so her mother had driven onto the tracks into the path of an oncoming train . . .

“She never knew what hit her. That’s what they told me, Louie . . .”

“You gotta admit, Bobby—it’s not the worst way to go,” her uncle had said.

“What are you talking about?”

“No drawn-out suffering—not like Ma.” The brothers had lost their mother, Elena’s grandmother, not long before that. Cancer.

Of course, cancer. Always cancer . . .

Well, not always.

“Are you saying my wife was
lucky
to be hit by a friggin’
freight
train
?” her father yelled at Uncle Louie.

“No! No, I just mean that if she didn’t know what hit her . . . well, that was a blessing.”

“I lost my wife! My kids lost their mother! You’re saying that’s a
blessing
?”

Pop threw Uncle Louie out of the house, and Elena listened to him sobbing, late into the night. She heard it that night, and every night thereafter, for a long time. Months. Maybe years.

They hardly saw Uncle Louie after that. She and her brother no longer got to visit anyone, not any of the aunts, uncles, or cousins. After spending the first seven years of her life surrounded by a close-knit family, Elena basically spent the rest of her childhood listening to her father cry, or watching him drink himself into a stupor while she took care of the house and her younger brother.

For years she forgot all about the argument she’d overheard between her father and her uncle after her mother’s death.

She’s forgotten a lot of things she’s seen, and heard, and done over the years. She’s always been good at that. If a painful memory tries to work its way into your consciousness, you learn to push it right back out before it can fully form.

But the decades-old family argument she’d overheard came barging into her brain out of the blue on the day she herself was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she was too shell-shocked to defend herself against it.

“I know it’s a shock,” her doctor was saying, “especially at your age.”

Just thirty years old.

Yes, it was a shock.

She never knew what hit her . . .

The phrase landed in her head that day, and try as she might, she’s never quite managed to get it out again.

Maybe because it resonates now. At last, she understands what her uncle was trying to say.

That if you have to die young—or die at all—maybe it’s better that way. Better not to suffer, and linger, and waste away. Better not to fear a looming death for weeks, months. Better for it to be over with in a flash.

“What do you think?” Tony’s voice reaches her, plucking her out of the past and depositing her, with a thud, into the present.

She blinks. “About what?”

“About putting this new policy into place for the next school year? No gifts. None at all. Not even cards. No more passing them around for everyone to sign, no more collecting for people’s wedding showers and baby showers and retirements . . . no more. Done. Finito.”

She stares at him, thinking about cancer. About Meredith. About her mother. About never knowing what hit you . . .

“Otherwise, where does it end, Elena? Elena?” Tony passes a beefy, hairy-knuckled hand in front of her face. “Are you even listening to me?”

“Sorry.”

“Are you okay? I’ve noticed there are a lot of times when you seem like . . . you know, the lights are on but nobody’s home.”

She clenches. “I . . . listen, I need a minute alone right now. And I’m fine. Okay?”

“Did you even hear what I said about the gift for—”

“I heard.”

“Good. Just so we understand each other.”

We will never understand each other,
Elena thinks. Trust me.

Finally, she musters that fake smile. “Absolutely. See you, Tony.”

Alone again in her classroom, she clicks on the
X
in the corner of the newspaper article onscreen, closing it out. Then she starts typing: P-I-N—

Thanks to her regular visits to the address, the full name of Meredith’s blog pops up before she goes any farther: PINK STINKS.

She hits Enter and is transported to the home page.

After reading the post from Meredith’s daughter, she scrolls back up to the top of the page and stares at the photo. In it, Meredith is smiling, looking as though she hasn’t a care in the world.

Her last few posts were about her garden, about cooking healthy meals for just one person with her husband away, about a novel she was reading . . .

Not a hint of dread or sorrow; no clue that these were her last days on earth, no drawn-out good-byes, no pain and suffering.

Yes.

In the end—if there has to be an end—it really is better that way.

Hearing voices in the hall, Elena clicks the mouse again, and the screen goes black as her first-graders bound back into the room.

Slowly, Beck climbs the stairs to the second floor, thoughts spinning.

The detectives are still down there, now behind closed doors with her oldest brother, Teddy. Her middle brother, Neal, is on his way. Her sisters-in-law are scrambling to find child care because the police want to speak to them again, too.

And Keith—they’ve summoned Keith as well. He couldn’t have been pleased.

Beck hasn’t spoken to him directly, but he texted her to say that he’s on his way back from Lexington to be interviewed again by the police.

Are there new developments?

Are they closing in on a suspect?

Is it . . .

Do they really think it’s one of us?

Or do they just think someone knows something, or might remember something?

They asked so many questions.

Beck was careful to look them in the eye when she answered, not wanting them to suspect that she had anything to hide.

Because, of course, she doesn’t.

None of them do.

Beck’s hand is tight on the banister as she reaches the top of the stairway, greeted there by the closed master bedroom door.

What if the police don’t believe them? What if they have to take lie detector tests or something?

If that happens, she might be so nervous she’ll fail. Not because she’s lying, but because . . .

Well, lying, and not revealing something you know—something no one has asked you about—that’s not the same thing, is it?

Just a little while ago, you thought that it was,
she reminds herself.
When they told you about Mom being sick again.

It was the female detective who brought up her mother’s illness, addressing Beck in a straightforward fashion that made her uncomfortable.

“Can you tell us about your mother’s cancer treatment?”

“She’d had surgery, and then chemo and radiation. She went through that twice,” Beck said, pretty sure they’d gone over this already, “and she’s been back in remission since last year . . .”

At that, Detectives Burns and Schneider exchanged a glance, and that was when Beck realized.

Her first reaction was that Mom had lied.

Now that she’s had some time to digest the information—and to compare it to her own situation, to the fact that she’d neglected to tell the police every single thing she knows about her father . . .

Well, it’s not like I ever came right out and asked Mom if she was sick again.

If I had, and she’d told me she wasn’t—well, that would have been a lie.

But I didn’t ask her that, so she didn’t tell me.

And today . . . the police didn’t ask me certain things, and I didn’t tell them.

That’s not lying.

Protecting, maybe . . . but not lying.

Beck cried when the detectives informed her that her mother’s cancer had come back a few months ago, and spread.

They were uncomfortable relaying that news, she could tell. Dad must have told them that she and her brothers were unaware, but the detectives had apparently decided it was time that they knew the truth.

After they were done questioning her, Beck found her father back in the den, staring into space once again.

“Dad,” she said in a choked voice.

He turned toward her, said nothing. She couldn’t read his expression.

“Mom was sick again?”

Still he didn’t speak, just nodded bleakly.

“So you knew? Why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t she?”

“You know your mother. She didn’t want you to worry.”

Yes. That makes sense.

She wasn’t lying. She was protecting.

“So it was . . . was it terminal?”

Again her father nodded. She saw tears in his eyes.

Maybe the revelation should be, in some bizarre, twisted way, a source of comfort. Mom was spared the dreaded ordeal of an extended terminal illness. That’s the last thing she would have wanted.

And this? Would she have wanted this?

Beck turns away from the closed door and heads on down the hallway to her childhood bedroom, with the cheerful blue and yellow decor she and Mom had chosen together years ago.

She sits on the bed and opens her laptop. Clicking on the recent browsing history, she brings up Mom’s blog site.

The detectives had mentioned that they’d seen the entry Beck posted there last night.

“You had to have the password to do that,” Detective Schneider pointed out. “Did your mother share that kind of information with you?”

“No,” she said. “I just guessed it.”

A few months ago she’d helped Mom change the PIN number for her new ATM card.

“I always use our phone number and my initials or Dad’s whenever I need a password for something,” Mom said.

“Bad idea. Too easy for someone to guess. You should use something else.”

Mom waved her off. She never worried about things like identity theft, or hacking. Until, of course, her personal e-mail account was hacked, not long after the PIN number conversation.

She told Beck about it on the phone, and Beck advised her to close that account, set up a new one, and again encouraged her to make up a unique password no one would guess.

Remembering that incident last night as she tried to figure out the blog account password, she nailed it on the third try. It was her father’s initials followed by the four-digit home phone number in reverse order.

When the detectives asked her for the password, she gave it to them, reminding herself that it isn’t a violation of her mother’s privacy.

This is, after all, a homicide investigation. They’re trying to get a search warrant for the electronic records, but that process takes time.

“Do you know your mother’s password for her most recent e-mail account?” Detective Burns asked. “Or did you try to guess it?”

The answer was no on both counts. But she mentioned that both passwords were most likely saved on Mom’s own laptop and cell phone, which were among the electronics that had been stolen in the robbery.

“Are you sure the passwords were there?”

“I assume they were because my mother mentioned a while back that she was having trouble remembering things, and that it was a good thing she didn’t have to reenter her passwords every time she wanted to check mail or write a blog. She said she always used some combination of initials and the phone number, and I told her she should use a made-up word you wouldn’t find in the dictionary, not a name or initials. Or that if she did use a dictionary word or initials, she should substitute a zero for an O, or a symbol for a letter—the
at
symbol for an
A
, or a dollar sign for an
S.
I also said she should put the phone number in reverse so that it would be harder for someone to guess, and she said—”

Beck had to break off to compose herself before she could go on with the story.

Now, her mother’s wry words echo in her head:
These days, Beck, I’m lucky if I can remember the phone number forward—forget backward. And by the time I’m Gram’s age, I won’t know my own name.

They laughed together, and Mom later mentioned the incident in a funny blog she wrote about getting senile.