Chapter Eighteen
With one hand, I do an expensive background search on Brian.
With the other, I carefully extract a rotisserie chicken from the hot shelf, trying not to burn myself in the process.
Then it’s on to loading the cart with dog food, which could easily replace the weight lifting workout I was supposed to do this morning, and then on to the freezer section.
But before I can take a turn for fish sticks, a cart collides with mine.
“Excuse you,” scolds a well-coiffed woman who might be thirty or fifty, depending on when she last had Botox. In my mind, she’s automatically assigned the name Karen, which I feel a little bad about—it’s my mother’s name, too, and she hates the whole Karen thing.
But that’s all I feel. Her penciled-on eyebrow raises up indignantly, like she thinks I’ll jump out of the way, squeaking an apology.
But she doesn’t know I’m not the smiling PTA mom I so carefully disguise myself as.
Add a pinch of my husband is lying and might be cheating on me, and it’s all I can do to offer a small, calculated smile in response.
Inside, the monster perks up, as though she thinks maybe this will get interesting.
But we are in Costco. The most interesting thing here is the free samples, and it’s not the weekend so it doesn’t even have that going for it.
“Yes?” I say flatly.
“You were staring at your phone. Not paying a lick of attention to who’s around you. They should kick out people like you.”
I don’t answer. She continues her barrage of accusations, of judgments, loudly enough that other customers are coming to a stop, staring.
I ignore them until a twentysomething in a ball cap raises his phone to record the whole thing—then I turn down the opposite aisle, walking away, though that doesn’t stop her deluge of complaints.
It’s better I leave—less likely I’ll do something that will make me memorable—and besides, my phone has the completed background check.
I pause in front of boxes of bulk coffee pods to zoom in on the results, stomach swimming.
If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t care.
I’d just kill them, so long as I was convinced they are bad.
But this is Brian. Everything the website shows seems utterly normal—birthday January second, no criminal history, above average credit score.
He was born to Pete and Jane Davis, whom I met—at least, I think I did.
Now, as I’m searching for hints of what’s real, I stall on the convenient timing of their deaths. They dropped dead within a month of each other right before the wedding. At the time, it was tragic.
Now I think it’s oddly coincidental.
I frown, nudge my cart forward, search for the coffee beans I like, and tip a bag into the cart.
Two gallons of whole milk, a container of half-and-half, hazelnut creamer, and sour cream follow.
A lull in fellow shoppers, and I edge to the side again, desperate for answers.
A background check may not be the key to unlocking his secrets, but I don’t know where else to search.
There doesn’t seem to be anything in the house, he has no other family besides his parents, who are long dead, and I’m pretty sure there’s not a second secret hidey-hole in our home.
But someone wants him dead and is willing to pay a lot of money for it—that means something is going on. Something he hasn’t told me about.
I wander through the clothing section, still staring at my phone.
When I glance up, Karen shoots me a death stare from a stack of fluffy pillows.
I can’t help it—I blow her a kiss. What’s she going to do, yell some more?
She gasps, raises a hand to her throat as though I’ve sent a deadly insult her way—if only she knew—and says something to the man standing beside her, who I automatically cast as Chad.
Chad gives me a disapproving frown.
An ad pops up on my screen offering a way to “dig deeper” into Brian’s past. I consider it, then click.
I tap the go button to search for his parents, who—much to my annoyance—really did exist. Skimming the information, it’s clear they really did live, and died too.
As if to verify this fact, I click on one of the many photos the ancestry website offers up: one of Pete’s grave. It links me to a different site:
isn’t new to me. Sometimes, before I had kids, I’d look at the graves of people I’d killed—always from a VPN, of course, because I’m not an idiot, and unlike some psychopaths, I don’t have a secret desire to be caught.
Now that I have something to lose, I’m even more careful.
I wouldn’t dream of searching such things out.
But back then, there was satisfaction in seeing what was effectively a job well-done, a bad person six feet under.
While the website loads, I reach for a jumper in teal blue, something Eliza will just love.
Then I grab a smaller version for Evie because otherwise she’ll be jealous.
It’ll make for a cute photo that will get plenty of likes on Facebook, further casting me as a good mother in the eyes of all who see it.
A second later, my phone pulls up an image of a grassy graveyard. Two headstones side by side. Pete and Jane Davis. Their birth years and death years accurate, mother of and father of one Brian Davis.
So they really lived and died. That, or Brian went to one hell of an extent to make them exist. Then I notice something else in the image. Something small and square and minuscule in comparison to the matching markers representing Pete and Jane.
I squint and bring the phone closer to my face.
It’s a third grave.