Chapter 14
CORA
I almost wonder if I’m imagining it, but Finn seems so attentive the last couple days. No, I decide. It’s me. I’ve been so busy thinking the worst, I haven’t appreciated him or noticed how hard he tries.
I stand at the stove and stir up a skillet of Hamburger Helper.
Finn is lying on the couch watching the news.
I like the muffled sound of reporters’ voices as it gets dusky outside, and the house smells like browning onions and garlic.
I go to the arched opening to the family room and watch Finn a moment.
I take it all in. Our family, our home. I can free myself of this paranoia and torture I put myself through.
He has done nothing wrong. It’s been me.
And I can just stop. There is an overwhelming relief that rushes over me with this realization.
I go to the fridge and pop the tops off two bottles.
I sit at the end of the couch, handing him his and sipping mine. He looks quite surprised.
“Uh, thanks,” he says. “Everything okay?”
“Cheers.” I clink bottles.
“You’re having a beer?” he asks, looking around like it’s a joke and something else crazy is about to happen.
“Yeah, why not?”
“Because you...hate beer?” he says.
“Well, this one tastes like my Apple Brown Betty,” I say, pleased about the sugary hard cider I found at the market. I’m making an effort, too. “We should watch that movie you’ve been talking about. The Bigfoot thing,” I say.
“The documentary?” he asks, looking paranoid like I’m up to something, which is slightly annoying, I have to admit.
“Yeah, that. I can make popcorn.”
“Okay,” he says and watches me walk back to the kitchen and spoon Hamburger Helper and salad greens onto plates. I look back at him with a questioning expression and he turns away.
When I call Mia for dinner, she slinks into the room in oversize flannel pants and a clashing sweatshirt. It’s like she’s trying to look homeless. She has her earbuds in, and when she sits, she looks down at the plate and rolls her eyes and takes them out.
“Problem?” I say.
“Uh, no, just that I’m vegan, and I don’t know why you keep trying to force me to eat tumors and hormones is all, and how is this carb fest on your Weight Watchers?”
“It’s five points,” I say, defensively. She picks at the salad.
“I hope you taste the animal’s pain when you eat its dead body, because it’s barbaric,” she says.
“Please, we’re eating,” Finn says.
“Oh, my God! That’s literally... Can I please just take a snack to my room?” she asks, grabbing a cereal bar out of the pantry and heading down the hall before waiting for an answer. I have to admit I’m now a bit put off by the ground turkey and push it around my plate.
“I feel like I’m losing her,” I say.
“Nah, she’s just being a teenager,” he says, looking past me to the football-game highlights on the TV across the room.
“She’s been a teenager for a while, and this—” I make a circle gesture with my hand “—like, all of this, is new.”
“I wouldn’t worry, honey. She’s a good kid, just moody.
Kids are moody,” he says, putting his hand on mine, and I feel my heart fill and my head feel floaty and light.
I don’t confide in him that I’m getting legitimately worried about how she’s so withdrawn over the last months and that I think she might be doing drugs.
I want the night to be special, so I change the subject as I clear the plates.
“Are you still doing your golf thing with Lucas this weekend?” I ask, scraping my uneaten turkey and noodles into the disposal.
“Uhh, no, he had to cancel,” he says, cracking another beer and bringing it to the couch. I stop what I’m doing and follow him, wiping my hands on a tea towel.
“Why?” I ask or, rather, demand, considering the way it comes out. He stops midstride and turns to me.
“Wha—He didn’t say. Did you wanna sub in for him, or...?”
“Ha ha,” I say, abandoning my work in the kitchen and sitting next to him on the couch. Not the usual opposite sides, occupied by our phones sort of thing, but close. I pull the fleece blanket off the back of an armchair and cuddle up to him.
“I beat you at putt-putt once, so maybe I could sub in for him,” I joke. “I think he’s weird. For the record.”
“Who?” Finn asks, oblivious.
“Lucas Kinney. Hello.” Just then, there’s a crash.
It sounds like glass shattering, and we both jump to our feet.
There’s someone in the house. I hold my heart, and Finn grabs a baseball bat out of the junk closet next to the kitchen.
He puts his finger to his lips for me to be quiet.
The noise wasn’t from upstairs, but I still fight the urge to run up and check on Mia. It came from the basement maybe, or...
“What are you gonna do with that?” I ask, my hands trembling uncontrollably, my heart pounding, thudding between my ears.
“The gun’s upstairs. Shhh,” he says, and we both stand still, frozen in fear, trying to hear where the noise is coming from. After a couple minutes, we don’t hear anything else.
“Stay there,” he instructs me.
“No way,” I say and follow closely behind him as he clears the house, opening every bedroom and bathroom door with a jerk and then standing back, ready to swing at the intruder. When he swings open the door to the garage, I see the glass. His passenger window has shattered.
“Who’s there?” he yells into the darkness.
“Just lock the garage door and call the police. Don’t...” But he’s already flipping the lights on and examining the damage. I stand in the doorframe as he carefully walks around both of our cars.
“Who’s there?” he shouts again, sounding a bit comical if I’m honest, with his stupid bat. He peers inside where the glass used to be, checking for anyone in the car.
“Finn,” I call, and then he opens the doors of my car with his bat overhead, but there’s nobody there.
“It’s clear,” he says, and I race upstairs just to double-check Mia is okay.
When I see her slouched on a beanbag chair, talking on the phone, I breathe a sigh of relief.
I don’t tell her about the noise; I just slip back downstairs and go into the garage, where Finn is googling spontaneous glass breakage on his phone.
“You think it broke itself?” I ask, my nerves calming a little since we checked every corner and it’s clear.
“Nobody’s here. The garage doors are closed. I don’t know,” he says.
“Maybe it was Lucas Kinney,” I say.
“What?” Finn says, sharply.
“You didn’t see the way he looked at me when he picked up his baby. He’s not right.”
“So anything that happens is his fault because you decided you don’t like him. Now he’s a magician?” Finn asks.
“Someone was in here,” I say with certainty, and I feel certain.
There’s something left over in the air—a little trace of electricity when a person has just occupied a space.
Finn shifts back and forth in a mock attempt to look for the phantom intruder.
I point to the narrow window close to the ceiling of the garage. Finn laughs.
“A guy a head taller than me snuck in through that, to do what exactly?” He sits in the driver’s side, avoiding the glass, and looks through the car. “I don’t see anything missing.”
“What if he made himself a key? Oooh, yeah, what if he let himself in just to mess with us—like our sense of safety? Did you ever see that movie, The Strangers? Liv Tyler and that guy from Felicity are in this house, right, and they are tormented by these three creepy people who just show up and scare them...and then they kill them, like for no reason, just because they can—’cause they’re psychopaths.
It could be like that. Who else would do this?
” I ask. He goes back inside, and I follow, closing and locking the garage door behind me.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how many things are wrong with that, but let’s start with How did he get a key?” he says, retrieving his beer from the table on the side of the couch and sitting down.
“You lost your keys a few months ago. Oh, my God! We’re changing the locks. Whoever found your keys, or TOOK your keys, got into the garage. Holy shit.”
“Cora,” he says.
“It could have been at golf or the bar. Holy shit,” I say again. I get myself another beer and sit nervously, facing him cross-legged on the couch.
“Should we call the police?” I ask.
“Cora. No. Come on. You’re being ridiculous. Look at this list of reasons a window can break on its own,” he says, turning his phone to me. I look at the reasons: installation issues, a crack leading to spontaneous breakage, thermal stress, and a bunch of other things.
“So a freak accident is more likely? Really?” I say.
“More likely than the neighbor being a psychopath, I’d say. Wanna know who’s weird? Brenda Welenski, who already has her Christmas tree up, and it’s October. Why not randomly pick her to be the neighborhood stalker?” he says, and then picks up the remote and begins clicking through channels.
“Whoa. How can you just go back to normal? I think we should call the police.”
“Cor, come on.”
“Then, change the locks. We have to change the locks. We should have when you lost the keys to begin with,” I say, increasingly irritated.
“Fine, I will,” he says.
“Tomorrow,” I insist.
“Okay. Look. Nothing was taken, so I think we should relax,” he says, and I reluctantly agree, but he didn’t see the scary way Lucas looked, and the strange way he’s been behaving when I catch glimpses of him. No, I don’t think I will ignore this.
Finn goes to bed early because he has an early morning, but I stay downstairs, light a fire in the fireplace and wrap myself in a blanket on the couch.
I’m feeling creeped out, so I get back up and turn off the living-room light so nobody can see in.
I stand at the glass sliding door and think about it supposedly spontaneously shattering in the middle of the night.
I look to Paige’s house, and all the windows are dark.
I look to Georgia’s and see lights on and movement.
Just Lucas sitting at the table in the front room hunched over a pile of papers and his laptop.
I wonder what would happen if I went over and knocked—brought a bottle of wine, said I just wanted to visit?
I unplug my iPad from where it sits on the side table and curl back up in my blanket and open Google.
Lucas Kinney, I type. A ton of stuff comes up because of his job.
I wouldn’t exactly call him a public figure in this size of town, but there is plenty to see about him on his various promotions, his history as a prosecutor, his profile on LinkedIn, articles he’s written about boring legal stuff.
I do learn his middle name from a few of these sites.
Cameron. That narrows things down a good bit.
After close to an hour of reading uninteresting bits about him, I decide I’ve earned a handful of BBQ Pringles, so I’m about to close down my iPad and go to bed when I see something.
A wedding announcement. Lucas Kinney and Caterina Cattaneo, July 12, 2009.
I zoom in on the photo of Lucas, who looks relatively the same, and a small-framed dark-haired woman with huge brown eyes and an expression of elation. Huh. So he was married before.
When I look up Caterina Cattaneo, nothing else comes up except a handful of Facebook profiles.
It’s not hard to match her photo to her Facebook profile.
When I click on it, it looks like it’s private.
Hmm. I wonder if Caterina Kinney will produce anything further, so I search the name, then quickly decide to try to narrow it down and type Lucas and Caterina Kinney, and then I see something very unexpected.
Her obituary. I feel a hot rush of adrenaline shoot through me as I click on it.
It doesn’t say how she died, just information about how she was a beloved daughter and friend, stuff about the service, and that she’s survived by her husband, Lucas Kinney.
I click out of it and search Caterina Kinney death.
I skim unrelated headlines and find an article. She drowned. St. Joseph County Coroner Mike Sanchez said the cause of death is listed as undetermined after an autopsy. Oh, my God. Poor Caterina! My eyes fill, and I think about how young she was. Twenty-four, the article says.
Police were called to the home at about 6:15 p.m. Monday on a report of a possible drowning. Officers found the woman in the backyard pool. Her husband was visibly distressed. There has been no sign of foul play.
His wife died in an undetermined drowning.
I want to call Paige immediately. She was there when he came over.
She saw his eyes go dark. I can ask her what she uses to spy on the neighbors.
Then I stop myself. No, she already thinks I’m crazy for following Finn and finding nothing. I need to do this myself.
I get on and look up surveillance cameras. Just like that, I have hundreds of options. Night vision and pairs with my phone? Yes, please. Thirty-four dollars. Click. Lucas better watch himself. Cora’s got nothin’ but time on her hands for a charitable cause.