The Sister-in-Law Read online

  ‘What do you mean by “unique nature of the crime”?’

  ‘Your broken back window was taped shut with only cellophane and right next to the door, which would have been an easy access point for the thief to break in. And yet the thief instead chose to break through a dining room window. It makes you wonder: what type of thief would choose a loud, conspicuous option over a quiet, easy, in-and-out?’

  A surge of panic swelled up my chest, suffocating me. I was caught. ‘Maybe he didn’t see the broken window,’ I said, wondering if my practiced breaths were giving me away.

  ‘You don’t do a job like this without first casing the home, Harper. So it implies one of two things. Either you have an oblivious thief with an unusual thirst to kill, or the whole thing was staged. Considering you have an alibi, and we have no primary suspects with a motive to kill your husband, it leaves us with a lot more questions than answers. However, we have found a new angle.’

  ‘What kind of new angle?’ Dear God, let it not point to me or the suicide.

  ‘We’ve gotten access to Ben’s work files on his personal computer, and we found some interesting … numbers in his accounting. I’m not at liberty to tell you all the details, but it looks like Ben might have been investing clients’ money in a promissory note scam. If he lost a client a lot of money, well, that could make someone angry enough to want him dead.’

  The detective may as well have been speaking Chinese. ‘Promissory note scam? What’s that?’

  ‘Ben’s company was in some financial trouble, so the employees were asking friends and family to buy their debt. It’s called affinity fraud, in which an investor exploits people who trust him. In exchange, each lender was promised a high interest rate yield on their loan. But it turns out all the money lent by these investors disappeared … along with Ben’s CEO, Randolph Whitman.’ Detective Meltzer sighed. ‘Some of these people lost their life savings.’

  ‘Randy is gone?’ I had wondered why he hadn’t attended Ben’s memorial, but it never occurred to me that he’d taken off. I had assumed it was too hard for him to face. The two had been close friends since college and trusted each other with their lives, enough so that they went into business together. We had celebrated holidays and birthdays with Randy. How could he have dragged Ben into something scandalous? ‘I can’t believe that Ben would have scammed people.’ I shook my head vehemently. ‘He was an honest businessman, Detective, and very generous with anyone who asked. Certainly not a thief.’

  I knew my husband. He was honest to a fault. One time he had ordered a camera, the cheapest one that the company offered, and when it arrived in the mail, Ben instantly knew he had gotten the wrong model. It was way nicer than the one he had paid for. Without hesitating, he called the company and offered to return it in exchange for the lesser camera. So Ben sent it back and waited. And waited some more. In the end, we got billed for two cameras but ended up with none when they claimed they had already sent the correct camera.

  ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ I’d told Ben that day.

  ‘And no bad deed goes unseen,’ he’d replied. That experience taught me something important about Ben’s character – that he valued integrity over everything. My husband was not a scam artist. Detective Meltzer had it all wrong.

  ‘No one ever does imagine horrible things about someone they love, Harper. It’s how people like that get away with it. The mirage of good hides the face of evil. I see it all the time.’

  For real villains, sure. Serial killers, yeah. The Ted Bundys and Charles Mansons that no one expected were psychopaths. But not a husband who stopped at the grocery store to pick up flowers, or a father who carried his kids on his shoulders. Ben was good at heart. ‘You don’t know Ben like I do. That’s not who he was.’

  ‘Did you know he held a private bank account under another name?’

  I couldn’t have heard him correctly.

  ‘I’m sorry, what?’

  ‘We think your husband was hiding money in other accounts.’

  I shook my head, sending the words loose in my brain. Hiding money? Other accounts? Did he mean the trust funds for the kids?

  ‘We set up accounts for the kids when they were born. That must be what you found.’

  ‘No, Harper. This isn’t the kids’ accounts.’

  I felt my heart seize a little. Who would he have possibly been sending money to? Maybe I didn’t know Ben at all. My shock must have given me away.

  ‘I can see that’s news to you. I think you need to reconsider what kind of man your husband really was.’

  ‘What name was the other account under?’ It had to be the home-wrecking whore. I knew she existed. I’d seen her. That was the only possible explanation; he was funding her lifestyle while banging her.

  ‘Does the name Medea Kent mean anything to you?’

  Medea? What kind of name was that? ‘No, that doesn’t sound familiar.’ From my purse the envelope with my to-do list poked out of the top. I pulled it out, had Detective Meltzer spell her crazy-ass name, and made a mental note to look her up later. ‘How much money is in this secret account?’

  ‘I can’t divulge the specifics yet, since it’s still under investigation. There’s a lot we still have to look into. Once we have a full list of people he stole from, we’ll compile a list of suspects and keep you informed. Until then, just sit tight.’ He rapped his knuckles on the butcher block. ‘We still have a lot of unanswered questions at this point, but we’ll get answers, I promise you.’

  It was the resounding theme of this investigation – unanswered questions. Including the question of what Ben had hidden from me and why. We were never desperate for money, so why would he feel the need to steal from innocent clients? What had he gotten himself involved in? Who was this Medea person? And did it have anything to do with why he took his own life?

  I shoved the one question I truly wanted answered down my throat until it stuck there. It would only paint me in a terrible light. If the investigation didn’t close, would I ever see a dime of the life insurance money? Would access to my bank accounts ever be restored? But the bigger concern was what would happen when they found out what I had done, because I could feel the past clawing its way to the surface. With this investigation getting more complicated – more unique, as Detective Meltzer put it – and drawing more focus on our family’s skeletons, it was only a matter of time before my own secret slipped out and the truth caught up with me.

  Ben’s voice beyond the grave slipped into my brain, quoting his favorite movie of all time. You can’t handle the truth! Maybe Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men was right. I couldn’t handle the truth. It wouldn’t set me free. It would put me behind bars.

  Chapter 6

  Harper

  Detective Meltzer was not yoked to sentimentality. His heart simply beat while mine thrummed with complex feelings. I understood the difference now. For him, death was a mystery to solve, not an experience to suffer through. After the detective left, confirming that he’d find me at Lane’s with any new developments, I felt that raw ache of loneliness all over again, standing at the kitchen sink, listening to the shuffle of my children’s feet above me.

  Like teeth gnawing on my soul, I had lost parts of me piece by piece. At first, it was the joy in small things, like my first cup of coffee each morning. Then it grew into the big things, like not caring when Elise earned straight A’s, or when shy little Jackson made a friend at school. Before I knew it, I had stopped doing more than just existing, every memory and emotion leading back to a time I couldn’t reach. Back when my life was whole.

  ‘Moooom!’ I was convinced Elise’s voice could travel light-years. With her penchant for drama and unnaturally strong vocal cords, she was destined for the theatre. ‘Mom, Jackson’s just sitting there and won’t help!’

  ‘But I’m tired!’ Jackson echoed.

  ‘Can we be done already?’ Elise again.

  I had lost count of her complaints. She didn’t want to move to a new
house. She didn’t want to pack. She didn’t like Candace – and refused to call her Aunt Candace. I couldn’t blame her. I’d dragged them out of the only home they knew; told them to pack up their lives, and gave them no choice in the matter. After six hours of being in our Hendricks Way house, with memories encroaching on us in every room, even I was ready to leave.

  Only two boxes to go and the kitchen would be done. The counter was littered with the contents of the junk drawer, along with silverware and dishes that I needed to find another box for. How had we accumulated so much crap? Upstairs, I heard the bang of toys hitting the floor as the kids – as far as I knew – organized their possessions into three piles: Keep, Throw Away, and Not Sure. I was pretty sure Elise only had one pile: Keep. The girl had inherited Ben’s mom’s hoarding tendencies, God rest her soul.

  ‘Why are you so weird?’ Elise screamed at Jackson from the second-story landing, then plodded down the stairs. ‘Mom, make Jackson answer me!’

  It was time to intervene. ‘Elise, don’t talk to your brother that way. His quiet is just grief. Be a little kinder to him.’ I had lost my cool two hours ago when they were fighting about a stupid toy, the details of which I had drowned out with silent tears as I sealed all our family pictures in boxes.

  ‘But Mom, he drew all over my Barbie’s face in permanent marker. I can’t wipe it off.’

  ‘You don’t even play with Barbies anymore, Lise,’ Jackson pleaded his case from halfway up the staircase.

  ‘That doesn’t mean I want them ruined.’

  I couldn’t take it anymore. Constant bickering, endless whining. ‘I’ll get you a new Barbie. Just please, no more fighting.’

  ‘He keeps destroying my stuff, then saying he didn’t do it. What am I supposed to do?’

  Turning to yell up the stairs at my son, I found him at my hip and startled back a step. ‘Hey, buddy, you scared me. You’ve got to stop doing that – sneaking up on people.’

  ‘I’m not sneaking. You just don’t see me. No one does.’

  Oh boy. I couldn’t add therapy to today’s to-do list. I leaned down, nose to nose. ‘Jackson, sweetie, I am trying my best. We’ve all been through a lot, though. How about you go outside and play.’ Then I pointed to Elise. ‘You, keep packing up your room. If you can behave for one more hour I’ll take you both out for ice cream after this.’

  ‘But ice cream makes me sick,’ Jackson whined as Elise stormed up the stairs.

  ‘It doesn’t make you sick,’ I growled. It was always something with him. Ice cream made him sick. Pizza made him sick. Food that most kids loved made Jackson sick. And anything he simply didn’t want to eat made him sick. I’d lost count of how many times I had watched him force himself to throw up from something that made him sick one day, but he was fine eating another day. My mother said it was probably to get attention, but it was irritating navigating his food maze of eats and won’t eats when I had more pressing matters to deal with, like how we were going to pay our mortgage.

  ‘It does so make me sick.’

  ‘Then what would you rather have?’ I huffed.

  ‘A soft pretzel. With cinnamon.’

  ‘A soft pretzel. For real, Jackson? They don’t sell those except for at the mall. Please don’t ask me to take you to the mall after this. I just want to grab something quick on the road and go home.’

  ‘But we are home.’

  Oh, my sweet boy. If only he understood that Daddy was never coming back to us, that we were never coming back to this house … When I looked at their sweet faces, it brought back memories of little arms wrapped around my neck, kissing boo-boos away, nightly giggles during tickle-fights. I wanted to capture the past in a snow globe and live in that moment forever.

  Wasn’t I changing diapers just yesterday? Or laughing at their gummy smiles as I dangled a toy above them? Now I was taking them to therapists and bribing them with ice cream to leave their home. Part of me wanted them to need me forever, but my hugs and kisses no longer solved their problems. Their problems were just too big. They would never love me in the all-consuming way they did when they were small children. But the scarier truth was that I wasn’t sure I could ever love them the way I used to either – with every breath, every heartbeat, a bigness vaster than space. Life had stolen that part of me, the heart of me, when it sent death after me.

  ‘Jackson, we can’t stay here anymore. Mommy needs a fresh start. We all do. So for a little while we’re going to stay with Uncle Lane and rent this house out to a family who needs it.’

  ‘No one needs it more than us.’ Jackson had inherited his father’s persistence. ‘And I don’t want to live at Uncle Lane’s. I don’t like his girlfriend.’

  ‘Wife, honey,’ I corrected. ‘And I don’t like her either, but sometimes we have to put up with people we don’t like.’

  ‘But I don’t want to sleep in bed with Lise,’ he whined. ‘She steals all the covers and kicks me all night.’

  ‘I do not,’ Elise grumbled as she descended the stairs and jabbed him with her elbow in passing.

  ‘Ouch!’ Jackson yelped. ‘Lise hit me!’

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘No it wasn’t.’

  ‘Guys, knock it off!’ I screamed, nearly cracking my voice. I couldn’t take another minute of the fighting, the whining, the snide comments, the demands … I was trying to pack all my memories and dreams after losing my husband and I just needed quiet. One friggin’ moment of quiet. Was that too much to ask?

  ‘Outside, both of you! Now!’

  They both jumped in shock or fear … or a little of both. Apparently they knew I meant business as they darted out the back door without another word. I returned to the kitchen to finish cramming whatever I could in the only box I could find.

  The creak of a gate drew my gaze upward to the window facing the inground pool. The wrought-iron fence that surrounded it was overtaken by wisteria where crispy vines clung to it in dead patches. Once upon a time it had been tenderly maintained with gorgeous landscaping and trellises of knockout roses and fuchsia mandevilla. Now, weeds jutted up between fissures in the concrete around the algae-infested pool that resembled a wild habitat. Vacant and neglected, much like my soul.

  A movement caught the corner of my eye. Jackson wandered the perimeter of the pool patio, then paused at the deep end, staring at something in the water below. I imagined all the frogs gliding through the murky water. Jackson had always held a fondness for creepy-crawlers … until recently, when he simply stopped caring. I understood this but, because I was a mother, I didn’t have that same liberty to simply give up. They say kids bounce back, that they’re resilient. Maybe for Elise that was the case, but they’d never met Jackson. No one could anticipate the toll of death on him, how it left him hollow.

  I envied my son for that freedom to empty himself. Though what darkness it would eventually fill him up with instead, I didn’t know. I was too lost in my own grief to pull him out of his.

  I watched as Jackson opened his arms wide, as if catching the breeze and sun that both cooled and warmed the spring air. Maybe some of his childhood innocence had been salvaged after all.

  Glancing down at the sink, my gaze was transfixed at the way the chrome sparkled beneath tiny water droplets clinging to the metal. I felt myself slipping, my sight glazing, my senses numbing, my brain shutting off, Elise’s chatter from the porch slurring into garbled nonsense. I missed Ben. I missed our old life. I couldn’t do it anymore – the single mom thing, figuring it out all on my own. How to pay bills. How to keep moving forward. How to fix Jackson. How to push through my depression. How to float upward instead of sinking under. For a long moment I hung between reality and mental space, until something dragged me out.

  Screaming.

  My name.

  ‘Mom!’ Elise shrieked, her voice distant.

  Blinking away the tears I felt coming, I scanned for her out the window, not seeing her bright pink shirt on the porch. My eyes darted, searching the bac
kyard. I was used to hearing my name called for the slightest offense. Elise calling me to tell me Jackson was staring at her, as if I controlled the boy’s eyeballs. Or Jackson yelling about Elise calling him names, as if I could duct tape her mouth shut. My name got more traction than a Hollywood scandal.

  ‘Mom!’

  Splashing.

  Then the word that always got my immediate attention: ‘Help!’

  Elise’s voice was shrill and panicked, and I followed it toward the edge of the pool where she crouched down on her knees, arms outstretched. Through the floating debris I saw arms flailing at the water’s edge, then sinking into the green waves. A ripple along the surface, a few bubbles, then … nothing. It took only a second … a second too long.

  Jackson.

  My mind sprung to life, urging me to run, to save my son. But my feet … my legs … they wouldn’t move, as if they had been tiled to the floor. My breath caught as a dread surged through me, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. I stood there, my mouth mute and my legs crippled.

  Another splash later, this one bigger, as Elise dove into the water headfirst. I watched it all unfold in my frozen state, a deer in headlights, my fight-or-flight instincts on pause. Adrenaline must have snapped me out of it because suddenly I ran, throwing open the back door, catapulting off the porch and through the gate. By now, Elise held Jackson up against the pool’s edge, pushing him up onto the patio. I grabbed his arms, hauled him up, then pulled Elise up after him. Jackson coughed up water, sucking in breaths as I leaned him forward and patted his back.

  Elise, sobbing on all fours next to me, wiped water off her face.

  ‘Mom, where were you?’

  Where was I indeed? Why didn’t I react?

  ‘I’m so sorry, honey.’ I wrapped my free arm around her, holding a child in each, as if I could keep us together and safe with these arms. If only I was stronger. ‘I didn’t hear you. I’m so so sorry, sweetie.’

  Her tears dripped from her chin, melting into the pool water puddling at her knees.