Chapter Forty-Seven
TED STARES BACK at Min with pure animosity. Perhaps this is it. Is she their blackmailer, then? That is what they came here to find out. They must get her to admit it. ‘What exactly are you suggesting, Min?’ Ted asks. His voice has the ring of cold steel. Jill sits rigid beside him.
‘Do I have to spell it out for you?’ Min says.
‘Why don’t you.’
She leans forward. ‘I think you pushed him off the boat. I think you got out there in the stormy weather and saw an opportunity, and you took it. Because you hated him, and you knew you’d get his money.’
‘That’s not what happened,’ Ted says.
Jill breaks in. ‘Min, how could you even think that?’ she cries. ‘You weren’t there! You don’t know what happened, you didn’t see how we tried to save him, how we circled and circled, looking for him, with the waves so high, when we might have been swept overboard ourselves!’
Min sniffs. ‘So you say. But you’re right, I wasn’t there. No one was there but you two. Which is convenient.’
‘How dare you!’ Jill hisses. ‘You’re just angry that Ted’s getting the money instead of you! You don’t know anything! How can you fling such a baseless accusation at us?’
Ted realizes that Jill is trying to goad Min into an admission.
But Min remains cool. She doesn’t rise to the bait and admit how she knows, that she put the cameras in their house. Instead, she says, ‘I spoke to that special agent, from the Coast Guard. He came here to talk to me. He seems to think it was murder.’
Ted is taken aback. He didn’t know that Ramirez had spoken to Min. ‘When was this?’
She ignores the question. Instead, she says, ‘I know something that you don’t know.’
Ted goes still, waiting. Apprehensive.
She says, ‘Greg was dying. He had pancreatic cancer. He only had months to live.’
The news stuns him. He immediately rejects it. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Believe what you like. He asked me to go to the doctor with him, because he didn’t have anyone else.
He didn’t want to give you the satisfaction.
’ She sits back in her chair. ‘There are medical records. He would have died anyway, leaving you his fortune.’ She gives a small, fixed smile.
‘I sometimes wonder if, after you pushed him off the boat, he had time to think that you’d go down for murder unnecessarily.
He would have liked that. Oh, but that couldn’t happen, because there wouldn’t be any evidence, would there?
’ It’s the way she says it; it makes his blood run cold. She knows.
Ted looks back at her cold eyes. This is not a Min he even recognizes; this is someone else.
She rises from her chair. ‘I think you’d better leave.’
In shocked silence, Ted and Jill follow her to the door. Ted feels hollow inside. If what she said is true, and Greg was dying anyway, it was all for nothing. And all this horror that has followed – it was unnecessary. He’s afraid of what Jill will say as soon as they are out of earshot.
They walk down the corridor in silence and wait for the elevator. Jill just stares straight ahead. He can see the whiteness of her knuckles where she grips the strap of her purse. She waits until they are outside the building, and then she lets him have it.
‘He was dying?’ she hisses into his ear in a low voice. ‘For fuck’s sake, we did it all for nothing?’ They’re out on the sidewalk and no one is nearby to hear them. Now her eyes bore into his and they are beyond angry. They are entirely unforgiving.
‘She must be making that up,’ he protests, keeping his voice down. But he fears it’s true. He feels strangely detached. What a mess he’s made of things.
‘Why would she make it up?’
He focuses back on his enraged wife. ‘To fuck with us. She’s obviously fucking with us!
Everything she said was calculated. Saying she thinks we did it.
Telling us that Ramirez was there. She was playing with us.
She wants to punish us because we’re getting the money, and she isn’t.
’ He pauses, catches his breath. ‘If it’s true Greg was sick, she’s probably kicking herself for divorcing him – if she’d just waited a couple of years, she would have got it all. ’
‘But she thinks we murdered him,’ Jill says. ‘She believes we did. Do you think she planted the cameras?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t know either. But she knows, Ted.’
Nadya is panicking. She’s been panicking all day. Now, she swills the toilet bowl with cleaner in one of her clients’ houses.
On her way to the subway that morning, she’d scrolled the news on her phone and seen the shocking story about a home invasion and death in Brooklyn Heights the night before. She had a number of clients in the Brooklyn Heights area. No names were released.
Wanting more information, she’d stopped in at the corner store before she got to the subway, to pick up a newspaper. The shopkeeper, who knew her, wished her good morning as she paid for the paper. ‘Haven’t seen you in a while,’ he said. ‘Did that key work out all right?’
She froze. Managed to ask, ‘What key?’
‘The key that I copied for your son a while back. It was a bit tricky. Did it work okay?’
She stared at the sign KEYS COPIED HERE, a sickening feeling in her stomach. Then she held up her bulky key chain and said, ‘Which one was it again?’
He took the key chain from her, fingered through them and singled one out. ‘Yeah, this one.’
It was very distinct, the Westcotts’ key, and he clearly had no difficulty recognizing it. Despite her distress, she’d managed to nod, and made her way out the door, the bell tinkling behind her.
Now, she flushes the toilet and bends over the client’s bathtub with cleanser and sponge, her back aching, her mind racing.
Peter had stopped asking her questions about the Westcotts ages ago.
Now it seems obvious why – he’d stopped asking because he’d planted the cameras in their house and was watching them.
Peter took the Westcotts’ key, copied it while she slept.
And she keeps the security codes on her phone, because there are far too many of them, for all the houses she cleans.
She has them in her phone, under names and addresses, for convenience, and the keys are labelled.
Which is stupid of her. So stupid! He must have looked in her phone for the security code.
And then he must have planted those cameras.
Why else would he copy the Westcotts’ key?
He’d denied it when she asked him. He’d lied to her.
She will talk to him again. Peter is always talking about that buddy of his, Konstantin.
Now she wonders if he had something to do with this.
Because they’d wanted to know, hadn’t they, what happened on that boat.
They’d been so interested. And now Peter never mentions it any more, because maybe he already knows that nothing happened on that boat.
That Konstantin who Peter seemed so in thrall to, he was probably behind it. And her son might have been his way in.
It frightens her to think of her son as a potential blackmailer, as ending up in prison, which he surely will some day.