Chapter 7 Andrea Kendal
Andrea Kendal
“You know, they act like that boy is a Kendal, but Andrea was a single mom when she met Eric. An NFL player is the real father—that’s what I heard. Knocked her up and paid her off.”
It was traditional, once Eric left for the hospital, for Andrea to head to the park, where Cameron loved the ropes and rock-climbing course.
He was now able to make it to the second level, a height that terrified Andrea, despite the large pool of cushioned cubes below the structure.
While she had spent months recovering from her painful plastic surgery procedures, Cameron had never had more than a skinned knee.
Andrea’s biggest fear each playground session was that he’d break a bone, which wasn’t the worst fear in the world.
She’d certainly grown up with a lot worse.
They were either late this morning, or the group was early.
Andrea checked her watch and confirmed that it was the latter.
The gossip, it seemed, couldn’t wait, not with all the excitement.
As she took the path toward the park, two police vans passed on the main road.
Was it her imagination or did they slow down to study her?
Definitely her imagination. She lifted a hand to wave to them, but the occupants weren’t even looking in her direction, their attention fixed forward, their mouths moving in conversation.
“Mom.” Cameron pulled on her hand. “I’m going to run ahead.”
Andrea released her grip and the four-year-old sprinted forward, his Velcro-fastened sneakers loud on the sidewalk.
Ryder cried out from his place in the stroller and she walked faster, trying to keep up with his brother, who was now careening around the bend in the sidewalk and beelining for the gate to the playground.
Andrea passed a small cluster of nannies first and smiled at the blonde in the pink sweater, whom they’d hired when Ryder was first born.
Andrea had been bedridden for two weeks after the emergency C-section, and Claire had been an enormous help in getting Ryder settled in the nursery and helping Andrea’s nurse with her daily care.
Andrea had been fairly drugged up and struggling to get as much time with Ryder as possible, but she remembered that the girl was studying to be an aesthetician and had a father who worked at an auto plant.
She called out a hello and continued on, curious about the tight cluster of moms by the duck-feeding station at the right side of the playground entrance.
The ring of women was complete, three of their backs to Andrea, and she saw the visual impact that occurred when one of the women at the opposite end of the circle saw her.
It was an immediate explosion of the ring, one where backs straightened, heads whipped toward her, and conversations ceased. She paused, uncertain.
There was a moment of standoff, a line of carbon-copy wives faced off against her.
Five different flavors of the same mold.
The younger women all favored slicked-back ponytails, big sunglasses, and matching skintight athletic-wear sets.
The older women—God, that included her—were in varying shades of neutrals, their hair impossibly full and glossy, lips plumped and the jewelry layered.
Here, at least, Andrea’s excessive plastic surgery was in good company, though the women would never expect how much work she’d really had done.
She stepped forward, ignoring their stares. “Good morning. What’s going on?”
The tall, skinny one, who used to be a professional volleyball player, spoke up. “Well, it’s a body that they’re looking for. A female, from a few years ago.”
A female. More knowing looks, as if it were obvious the body belonged to Eric’s first wife. Andrea flipped up the cap of her protein shake and took a sip, then shrugged. “What do you mean, they’re looking for a body? They think it wandered off?”
A wave of giggles went through the group and they advanced, like velociraptors around their prey, surrounding her. Ryder let out a nervous shriek and she shushed him gently, rocking the stroller in an attempt to calm him from the intrusion.
“No,” Tina Faith said importantly, as if she had all the information, and given that her brother-in-law was the district attorney for San Francisco County, she probably did. “A dog dug up some human remains and carried them home. They’re trying to find the rest of the corpse now.”
Corpse. It was a word that was so out of place in the sunny morning, a butterfly lazily flying by on its way to the bright-orange poppies along the path.
Andrea had seen plenty of dead bodies in her time.
Once, she had come home from a study group and there had been one sitting at their dining room table, his head sideways in a pile of her mother’s meat loaf, his eyes wide open and staring in the direction of their framed family photo.
Never, in her upbringing, had the word corpse been used.
From the splash pool, a kid started screaming, and the group turned to see whose child it was, their attention momentarily off Andrea.
She understood why they assumed the body was Roxanne.
If it was a female from this neighborhood, and from a few years back, that left only two possibilities: Willow Morrow or Roxanne.
The group of women twisted back to face her, and the same suspicious condescension was on all of their faces—as if Andrea were married to a monster, one who would have killed his first wife and then buried her somewhere in their neighborhood.
“You know, we’re here for you.” The newest arrival to the group, a giant-breasted yoga instructor with fake eyelashes, touched Andrea’s arm, and she somehow managed not to flinch at the contact.
“I appreciate that, but I’m fine. It’s probably Willow Morrow. Has anyone reached out to Mark’s new wife? Her name’s Katie, right?”
Their gazes darted away, and you could taste their pity on the air.
“Well, we haven’t done anything yet,” someone said.
Nothing except gossip about Eric. Hell, they should know better.
They’d trusted him with their bodies, their surgeries, their children—yet believed him capable of murder?
Look at Mark Morrow if you wanted a killer.
The sports agent had rubbed Andrea wrong from the first moment they met.
All white teeth and designer clothes, he always parked his sports car along the curb at the country club, and had a habit of winking at Andrea, as if they shared some secret.
Maybe she should reach out to Katie herself and offer some support. The blonde had to be freaking out. If not now, she would be once the body was identified as Willow.
Andrea glanced at her watch. “We’ve got to run.
Cameron has a swimming lesson at eleven.
” She called out for the boy, who was climbing up the rope ladder, a big smile on his face.
The news hadn’t yet infected the children.
Two boys ran around the climbing rock, screaming.
Unlike her and Eric, the Morrows didn’t have any children.
Thank God. She couldn’t imagine trying to hide that news, that subsequent investigation, from Cameron and Ryder.
Katie and Mark would be able to handle it on their own, though their marriage probably wouldn’t survive the event.
Brittny, who never missed a chance to mention her husband, stepped forward, her threaded eyebrows pinched together in faux concern. “If you need an attorney, Tom would be happy to—”
“We won’t,” Andrea snapped, then forced a smile. It didn’t matter what the women thought. In a day or so, the cops would identify the body, and given that it wasn’t Roxanne’s, everything would go back to normal. One odd bubble, popped.
But the suspicion still hurt. While husbands were always the first suspect in a wife’s abduction, it was unfathomable to Andrea that anyone who knew Eric would suspect that he would do anything to Roxanne. The man was a saint.
As a doctor, he was a god, with more successful surgeries than any other cardiac surgeon in the county.
As a father, everyone praised him for welcoming Cameron in as his own and mastering diapers and bottle-feeding and bedtime regimens.
And as a husband, he was doting, caring, and an excellent provider. Perfect, if you could overlook the fact that he was still in love with his first wife.
Her phone rang, a chime of bells, from inside the pocket of her cashmere jacket, and she fumbled for it, getting the device out just in time. It was Eric, and she looked for Cameron, verifying his location before wheeling Ryder’s stroller away from the group. “Hey.”
“They found the remains of a body somewhere on the golf course,” Eric said, and she could hear the chaotic sounds of the hospital in the background.
“Yes, that’s what I just heard. I have the kids down at the playground. All the wives are talking about it. They think—well, you know the gossip. There’s a lot of insinuation that it’s Roxanne.”
“Yeah, that was my first concern,” he said flatly. “We have to be very careful how we handle this, to avoid raising red flags.”
“I told the wives it was probably Willow.”
He sighed. “Try not to talk to anyone else. Let’s think through this. As much as I hate to say it, it may be an opportunity.”
In what twisted world would a dead body be an opportunity?
But he was right. As much as she wanted to defend him to the hilt, that wasn’t the smart play here.
“Oh.” She inhaled. “I’ll head home now. Just—be careful.”
It was a waste of a warning. Eric was, above all other things, always careful.