Chapter 8
CHAPTER 8
I slept in too long the next morning. The sun was too high and too bright outside my window for the house to be so quiet. I bolted upright in bed before remembering the children were with my mother. Flopping back down, I buried my face in the pillow, still exhausted after our long drive home from Culpeper last night.
When Vero and I had returned to the house at two thirty in the morning, Cam was already gone. According to my phone, he’d Venmo’d himself money for an Uber just after midnight, and Mrs. Haggerty had been snoring softly in my room when Vero and I had finally crept upstairs to our beds.
Vero’s door was still closed. I slipped quietly past her room and headed downstairs. Mrs. Haggerty didn’t look up from the newspaper she was reading when I came into the kitchen. I hadn’t even realized newspapers were still printed anymore, and I could only assume—since she could no longer drive—that she had walked across the street and taken it off her own front porch.
A glimmer of hope lit inside me as I remembered it was Sunday.
“Good morning,” I said, trying to sound chipper. Mrs. Haggerty returned my greeting with a quiet grunt. “Any word from Brendan? He did say he would pick you up by Sunday. And… well, it’s Sunday,” I reminded her. “Did he mention what time he might be coming?”
“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t heard from him,” she said tersely.
“Not at all?” That didn’t bode well. It was one thing not to return my calls, but entirely another not to call his grandmother.
“Brendan’s got enough to worry about. He doesn’t need to be concerning himself with me.”
“Don’t you want to know when your house will be fixed? I haven’t seen a single contractor come out to take a look.”
“My grandson said that he would handle it, and he will on his own time.” She snapped to the next page of her newspaper, making it clear this conversation was over. Which would have been fine if Brendan’s time wasn’t also cutting into mine.
My phone vibrated and my mother’s name flashed on the screen. My stomach bottomed out and I hurried to answer it. “Hey, Mom. Are the kids okay?”
“Everything is fine. The children are doing great,” she reassured me. “But your father is contemplating duct tape to keep Zach’s pants on.”
I laughed, wondering if that had been his idea or Vero’s. “Thanks for taking them last night. How’s Delia handling everything?” I said in a low voice, carrying my phone into the next room.
“She’s doing better today. I hope it’s okay that I told her a little fib. She asked what would happen to her father, and I didn’t know what to say. I told her he was being suspended and he would only be gone a few days. Your sister says they can’t hold him much longer if they’re not pressing charges. What does Nick think?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him today.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve had a lot going on.”
“Georgia says you two are fighting.”
“Georgia needs to keep her mouth shut.”
My mother sighed. “You can’t let whatever is happening with Steven interfere with your relationship, Finlay. You and Nicholas have a good thing going.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you pushing him away?”
“I’m not pushing him away,” I said bitterly. I was keeping him at arm’s length. That wasn’t the same thing.
“Promise me you’ll call him. If you want me to keep the kids an extra night, I can bring them home tomorrow morning on my way to water aerobics. Delia’s not going to school anyway.”
“No, it’s okay,” I insisted, rubbing my eyes. “Vero and I have everything under control. I’ll come over tonight and get the kids before bedtime. I just have something I need to do first.”
Like figuring out what Penny Dupree was up to.
I squinted through the windshield of my minivan just after sunset. “This is never going to work.” Vero and I had parked nearly a block away from Penny Dupree’s house, and even with the binoculars, I couldn’t see a damn thing through her windows. They were all dark, except for a dimly lit room on the main floor. “She probably isn’t even home. Her car isn’t in the driveway.”
“It’s probably in the garage.” Vero tugged on her wig. Which was actually my wig. Forced to decide between the ash-blond 1970s winged monstrosity she’d worn under her ski mask last night or the tangled blond wig scarf in my office desk drawer, the wig scarf had seemed like the more sensible choice. She smoothed it in place, then pulled down her visor to check her lipstick in the mirror. “How do I look?”
“No wonder I got kicked out of Panera.”
“Hardy-har,” she said, snapping her mirror closed. “It’s either this or Farrah Fawcett.” She slipped on a pair of oversized sunglasses.
“It’s dark outside. How are you going to see anything in those things?”
“Would you rather Penny see my face?”
“Where’s your voice recorder?” I asked.
“In my pocket.”
“Let’s get this over with. What’s the plan?” I asked.
“I’m going to sneak around the back of her house and unlock the back door to the garage.”
“It should probably bother me more that you know how to do that.”
“Then we’re going to steal a move from Penny’s own playbook. I’m going to call her house and tell her I was having an affair with her late husband. I’ll tell her I was the one who made the anonymous call to the podcasters. I’ll say I have information about what really happened to Gilford and I want to go public. Then I’ll tell her to meet me at the playground down the street so we can talk.”
“What if she doesn’t fall for it?”
“She’ll come anyway. Her curiosity will get the best of her. And when she does, she’s sure to trip up and say something to incriminate herself. As soon as she leaves her house, you sneak inside and start snooping.” Vero adjusted her wireless earbuds, making sure they were concealed under the wig scarf she had tied around her head. She tapped the screen of her cell phone. My phone vibrated in my pocket, and I connected the call. Vero’s voice came through my earbuds in stereo as she fidgeted with her settings. “Am I loud enough?”
“Painfully.”
“Great, let’s do this.” She grabbed a set of lockpicks from her purse that probably belonged to Javi. “Get in there fast, look for anything that proves she was lying about Steven, and get out. Let me worry about getting a confession.”
Vero got out of the van and crept off into the shadows. Her breaths were quick in my ears as she disappeared around the side of Penny’s house. “I’m here,” she whispered. “Penny’s watching TV in the living room.”
“Don’t let her see you,” I whispered. Why was I whispering? I was the one sitting in the van.
I heard a soft scrape and some quiet swearing through my earbuds. Then a soft click. “The back door is unlocked,” Vero said. “I’m heading to the park. I’ll make the call to Penny as soon as I get there. Tell me when she’s on her way.”
I tucked my phone into the pocket of my hoodie and slipped out of the van. A cold breeze sliced through my black yoga pants as I followed Vero’s path between the houses. I could just make out the flash of a blond wig as Vero crossed briskly under a streetlight on her way toward the park. Lamplight filtered through the sheer curtains covering the back windows of Penny’s house. I knelt under them, listening. The light of a huge television flickered on the far wall as the deep voice of an anchorman reported the local news.
A cell phone rang somewhere inside. The television went silent, the images still moving on the screen as a figure passed in front of it.
“Hello?” Penny’s voice was muffled, barely audible through the windows. “I’m sorry. Do I know you?” Vero had placed a block on her number so it wouldn’t show up on Penny’s caller ID. I could just make out her uneasy response. “Who is this?” The curtain lifted above me, the light from inside spilling across the lawn. I pressed myself flat against the siding, breath held until the window covering fell closed again.
“Give me one good reason I shouldn’t call the cops,” Penny demanded.
Vero and I had planned for this possibility. An innocent person would be smart to report the call to the police. But Penny was definitely hiding something.
There was a prolonged pause before Penny spoke again. “Where?… I’ll meet you there in five minutes.”
I rose up on my knees and risked another peek through the curtains. The TV screen went dark. I nearly jumped out of my skin as Penny smacked the remote down on the coffee table and stormed to the foyer. She yanked on her boots and wrestled on a long coat, tying the sash tightly around her. The whole house shuddered as she slammed the front door.
I peered around the corner of the house as Penny’s boots ate huge bites of her driveway then headed toward the park.
I dialed Vero. “She’s on her way. I’m going in.”
I opened the back door and crept into Penny’s cavernous garage. My knee smashed into the bumper of her car as I groped around me, afraid to turn on a light. I felt along the wall, searching for the service door. When I finally found it, the doorknob wouldn’t budge. “The interior door is locked.”
“Look for a screwdriver. You can disassemble the knob and just take the whole damn thing off.”
“I can’t do that! What if she comes back and catches me?” Slivers of light leaked around the edges of a small rectangular opening at the bottom of the door. I knelt down and traced the pet door with my hand. It swished open when I pushed against it, and I had a sudden rush of panic as I listened for a dog.
The house was silent.
The faint smell of ammonia wafted somewhere close. I got down on all fours, cat litter pressing into my knees as I put my arm inside the pet door and reached above me for the lock. With a painful twist, I flipped the latch, nearly falling into the house when the door swung open. “I’m in.”
A light was on over the sink in the kitchen. Another in the living room just beyond.
“I think I see Penny,” Vero said in a low voice. “And she does not look happy. Better hurry. I’m not sure how long I can keep her distracted.”
I flapped my hands like a frantic chicken as I tried to figure out where to start. What the hell was I supposed to be looking for?
Penny’s voice was faint through my earbuds. “Who are you and what do you want?”
“I already told you,” Vero answered in a cagey tone.
I opened cabinets and cupboards, moving through the kitchen at a furious pace. I checked the log of incoming and outgoing calls from her house phone. No calls to or from Riley or Max’s phone numbers.
“I don’t know who you think you are, but you definitely aren’t the person who made that anonymous call about my affair.”
“What makes you so sure?” Vero asked as I tossed aside notepads and grocery lists.
“Because no one knew about my relationship with Steven except for Steven and me, and I don’t know you.”
“ You don’t,” Vero said, “but I knew your husband, and he was onto you.”
“If you knew him, prove it.”
“Fine.”
“Are you crazy?” I hissed. “We don’t know anything about Gilford Dupree that wasn’t already in the news!”
Vero spoke slowly, over-enunciating every word. “I will prove it to you by telling you something that was not in the news.”
Oh, god. She was talking to me. I ran through the first floor, my eyes skipping fast over every surface of the house, frantic for any scrap of information about Penny’s husband.
“They have a piano,” I blurted.
“Gilford loved the piano,” Vero repeated.
Penny barked out a laugh. “He hated the piano! He didn’t speak to me for a month after I bought the damn thing. He made me wait until he left the house to practice it.”
“That’s what he told you!” Vero said. “But when we were together, he loved the piano. He loved it so much, he listened to Rachmaninoff in the bedroom !”
The bedroom! I tore up the stairs, checking behind every door, searching for Penny’s room.
“Well?” Penny prodded, clearly growing impatient when Vero was slow to produce another kernel of proof.
I scrambled into the last room at the end of the hall and flipped on the light. A figure leapt off the top of the highboy dresser. It hurled toward my face with a vicious hiss.
I screamed.
Vero screamed.
Penny Dupree’s cat screamed. I grabbed it by the scruff and held it away from me before it could scratch my face off.
“What’s wrong?” Penny sounded shaken.
“Nothing’s wrong! I’m just trying to think! This isn’t easy, you know!”
“They have a cat,” I cried as the tabby’s hind legs spun like tiny circular saws. “It’s orange.” I held it up to check its parts, unsure if it was a boy or a girl. Its collar wasn’t much help. “Its name is Mozart.”
“Not helping,” Vero whispered.
“What?” Penny asked.
“Nothing,” Vero snapped. “I must be suffering from post-traumatic amnesia. Gilbert’s loss devastated me. Remembering him is very painful.”
“Gilford.”
“What about him?”
“My husband’s name was Gilford !”
“Whatever! You know that’s what I meant!”
I ran to the nearest nightstand and dragged it open, hoping if Gilford or Penny had any secrets, they’d be hidden where everyone else kept theirs. A chewed-up ballpoint pen rolled to the front of an empty drawer along with a tiny green capsule. “Mint Tic Tacs! He liked Mint Tic Tacs!” I said, grasping at straws. Vero repeated it as I ran to the closet. Both sides of it were filled with Penny’s clothes. The shelves on top were stacked with popular romance novels. I rifled around behind them, knocking a pile of them to the floor. I scooped up two Colleen Hoovers, a copy of Outlander , and an Emily Henry rom-com and stuffed them back on the shelf beside a tower of shoeboxes. I yelped when the taped-up spine of a tattered Agatha Christie book fell and hit my toe. I pulled down the nearest shoebox and ripped off the lid. A heavy class ring rolled around inside it. I squinted at the inscriptions. “He played tennis at UVA,” I blurted as I searched another box.
Vero repeated me word for word and Penny scoffed. “Anyone could have found that on the internet.”
I ran to the bathroom and flipped on the light, shrieking when I came face-to-face with a foam head on the vanity. I clutched my chest, bracing against the sink as I waited for my pulse to slow.
“It’s just a wig stand,” I told myself. The stray hairs in the basin were short and chestnut colored, a far cry from the blond waves Penny had been wearing the day before.
I took a calming breath and began rummaging through Penny’s makeup drawer. A glossy real estate magazine had been stuffed inside. The magazine was folded open to a photo of a woman. I picked it up, the last of my anxiety giving way to unease as I recognized the face that was staring back at me.
It was Steven’s ex-fiancée.
Theresa Hall posed casually in the living room of one of her pricey real estate listings. Her hair fell in long blond waves over the shoulders of her cashmere sweater, and her French-manicured hands were draped casually over her knees. She wore a pair of formfitting designer jeans that still managed to look dressy, and like everything else about Theresa, her makeup was flawless.
My gaze slid back to the counter. An open box of false French nail tips rested beside a bottle of eyelash glue. I picked up a tube of shimmery pink lip gloss. It was the same shade Theresa was wearing in the magazine.
The shock I felt at seeing Penny in person earlier that day suddenly made sense.
“She was wearing a wig,” I whispered.
I ran back to her closet. The turtlenecks and generic-brand slacks hanging inside it were nothing like the designer jeans and loose-fitting sweater she’d been wearing when she’d greeted Nick and me at the door earlier that day. Except for Penny’s age, everything down to the shade of her lipstick had reminded me of Theresa, as if Penny’s entire appearance had been curated to make her affair with Steven more believable.
“A what?” Vero cleared her throat to get my attention.
“She’s wearing a blond wig!” I shouted.
Vero chuckled darkly. “I may not remember much about Gilford,” she said to Penny, “but I do know something about you. You’re not really a blonde!”
Penny gasped. “Neither are you!”
“What are you doing? That’s my hair! Ow !” Vero cried.
“I knew you were lying!” Penny shouted. “You’re not fooling anyone. I know exactly who you are. You’re one of those true-crime people. I already told your little friends, I’m not interested in being interviewed for your stupid podcast! Leave me alone. If I see you again, I’ll report you to the cops.”
I didn’t wait for Vero to tell me Penny was on her way home. I dropped the magazine in the drawer, sprinted down the stairs, and bolted out the back door.
An hour later, Vero and I sat in the back of my van in the Dairy Queen parking lot, drowning our feelings of failure in two extra-large Oreo Blizzards and a double order of chili fries. We had listened to the recording of Vero’s conversation with Penny three times and come to the painful conclusion that we had gleaned absolutely nothing useful from it.
“I don’t get it,” Vero said, propping her feet on the armrest in front of her between bites of her ice cream. “Why would Penny try to make herself look like Theresa?”
“Because Steven clearly has a type. His last two girlfriends both fit a very specific mold. Bree and Theresa were both very attractive, well-groomed blondes. They both wore their hair long, they liked designer clothes, and they both wore lots of makeup.”
“How’d he wind up with you?”
“Not helping.”
“I’m just saying, your argument doesn’t hold up. You don’t fit that description at all and he married you.”
“Maybe so, but he left me because he was planning to marry someone else. If Max’s hunch was right and Penny was the anonymous caller who told the police she was having an affair with Steven, then painting herself to look like a woman he’d be tempted to cheat with would make her bullshit story more believable.”
Vero’s feet dropped to the floor. She turned to me, dumbfounded. “You still don’t think he actually slept with her.”
“No, I don’t,” I said firmly.
Chocolate stuck in the corners of her open mouth as she threw a balled-up napkin at me. “After all the times that man has hurt you, why do you insist on coming to his rescue? You don’t have to believe in someone after they’ve lied to you, Finn. Why do you keep pretending he’s redeemable?”
“Because if I can’t find a reason to believe him, what hope do I have that Nick will do the same for me?” I threw my french fry back in the bag, my appetite lost. “I’ve lied to him, Vero. Over and over. How does that make me any better than Steven?”
Vero slumped back in her seat, thoughtful as she scraped the last of her ice cream from her cup. “Let’s assume you’re right and Penny’s framing Steven for Gilford’s murder—why? Who is she protecting?”
“Maybe she’s protecting herself.”
“You think Penny murdered her own husband?”
“Why else would she go to so much trouble to point the finger at someone else?”
Vero dumped her empty cup in the bag. “Maybe you should talk to Nick about this.”
“And say what? I kidnapped two college students and broke into a woman’s house? I can’t go to Nick with this. Not until we have actual proof that Penny lied about Steven.” All the evidence we had managed to gather so far was hearsay or circumstantial. Between Max’s uncertain hunch that the anonymous caller had been Penny, a wig stand, some press-on nails, and a photo in a magazine, all we could conclude was that Penny was up to something. And we couldn’t even prove that much.
“What now?” Vero asked.
I checked my phone. No missed calls. No texts. Nick and I hadn’t talked since I’d left him standing in front of Penny’s house yesterday. I hated that his silence since had felt worse than fighting. At least when we argued, I knew where we stood.
I climbed into the front seat and started the engine. “Let’s go to my parents’ house and pick up the kids. We’ll take them home and get them ready for bed. Once they’re down for the night, there’s something I need to do.”