Chapter Forty-Nine
THAT EVENING, NADYA comes home to find her laptop is not where she thought she left it. She was sure it was on the floor beside her bed. She checks the living room and the kitchen, but she can’t find it anywhere.
She waits nervously for Peter to get home. He’d said he would be home for supper tonight, before going out again, so she’s making something he likes. She must talk to him. She must know the truth.
Peter arrives home as she’s preparing their meal.
‘I’m making pierogies,’ she says. He merely grunts at her as he sits down, setting her nerves on edge.
But she must not get annoyed or he will get defensive and he will never tell her anything.
She must coax it out of him. They must not argue.
She says, ‘I can’t find my laptop. You haven’t seen it, have you? ’
‘What? No,’ he says. And then he looks sharply at her and gets up out of the kitchen chair. She can hear him thumping up the stairs and going down the hall to his room.
‘Fuck!’ he yells.
Her stomach contracts. She hears him come back down the stairs, and when he appears in the kitchen, his face is enraged.
‘My laptop’s gone too. They must have been stolen.’
Her stomach falls. She drops her wooden spoon in the frying pan and turns off the burner.
‘We’d better see if anything else is missing,’ she says.
But she knows there’s nothing in the house worth stealing.
The television is too old, and they don’t have any other electronics.
She has a few pieces of old jewellery, not worth much, but important to her.
She runs upstairs to her bedroom and opens her jewellery box on her dresser.
Everything is there. She returns downstairs and checks the windows and the front and back doors, but she can’t tell if they’ve been tampered with.
Everything looks normal. She always locks the doors when she leaves for the day. But perhaps Peter was careless.
Peter is still ranting. ‘Fuck! Fuck!’
He is so childish, she thinks, annoyed. Swearing and screaming isn’t going to help. ‘Calm down,’ she says, when they are both back in the kitchen. ‘It’s just a laptop. You can replace it.’
‘No I can’t,’ he says sullenly. ‘Not everything that’s on it.’
Is it the footage from the hidden cameras that he is so worried about? she thinks suddenly. He doesn’t go to school. He doesn’t have a job. Is that why their laptops were stolen? For a moment her courage fails her. ‘I can help you pay for a new one,’ she offers, ‘a better one.’
He looks up at her then. ‘Would you?’
‘Yes.’ She forgets about the pierogies and sits down at the table and looks at him across the tablecloth. ‘Peter, I have to ask you something. And I want you to tell me the truth.’
He looks back at her uneasily.
‘Did you and Konstantin put those cameras in the Westcotts’ house?’
‘No. You already asked me that.’
‘I know you copied my key at the corner store.’ He goes completely still.
‘You got into my phone and looked up the security code, didn’t you?
Was it Konstantin’s idea?’ She sighs. ‘You asked me so many times if I thought they pushed his brother off that boat to get the money. And then you stopped asking me.’
Now he looks guilty as hell. Like he used to as a little boy when she caught him out in something.
When he still doesn’t say anything, she threatens, ‘If you don’t tell me everything, I’ll go to the police and tell them what you and Konstantin have done.’
‘You can’t do that!’ he says finally, clearly alarmed.
‘Then tell me.’
He swallows. ‘I gave Konstantin the key I copied and the security code. He planted the cameras; I wasn’t even there.
’ He shifts uncomfortably. ‘But he lets me watch the camera feeds, and I show him when there’s something good.
And boy are they guilty.’ His words come eagerly now.
‘I’ve seen them talk about it, lots of times.
They talk about how they planned it so perfectly.
How no one was there when they pushed him off the boat and left him there to die, so there’s no evidence, no way they’ll ever get caught.
About how they’re going to get all that money.
They were so pleased with themselves until they found the cameras.
’ He snorts derisively. ‘They’re guilty of murder. They should pay.’
Nadya can hardly take it in. The Westcotts are murderers. So it’s true. She can hardly believe it.
He adds, ‘But we still have eyes on them – there are other cameras they don’t know about.’
‘Is this why your laptop was stolen?’ she asks, appalled.
He shakes his head. ‘There’s nothing from the cameras on there. Besides, nobody knows it’s us. The feed goes to an iPhone of Konstantin’s and he backs it all up.’
She sits back in her chair, stunned. Her employers are murderers. It’s a shock. She hadn’t believed it. For once in her life, she’s speechless.
The next morning, Nadya stares at the Saturday newspaper laid out on the kitchen table. They have released the name of the man killed in the home invasion in Brooklyn Heights. Ben Donleavy. She stops breathing. The man’s wife is Lara Donleavy.
Nadya tries to think while her heart pounds. She knows Lara had keys to the Westcotts’ brownstone, at least she did before they’d discovered the cameras and changed the locks. Nadya had even wondered if Lara, and maybe her husband, were the ones who installed the hidden cameras.
Maybe the Westcotts had wondered the same thing.
Would the Westcotts send someone to the Donleavys’ house, to terrorize them, to kill Ben Donleavy?
Nadya sits at the kitchen table, her heart drumming. She thinks they might. She thinks her employers might be monsters.
On Saturday morning, Ramirez throws on some jeans and a sweater, jacket and shoes, and walks to his favourite diner.
He likes to get a big greasy breakfast on Saturday mornings – to make up for all the meals he misses when he’s working long hours during the week.
He gets a newspaper, takes his time over bacon, eggs, toast, fried potatoes and lots of coffee.
He’s waiting for his breakfast to arrive, paper spread open, and sipping a hot coffee when he sees the story about the home invasion in Brooklyn Heights. They’ve released the name of the man who was killed – Ben Donleavy. Ramirez almost spits out his coffee.
He’s been in that house. He remembers interviewing Ben and Lara there about the Westcotts. What a small world, he thinks.