Chapter 32
We are both in shock. Then she takes a step back and I use the opportunity to walk in and close the door behind me.
“Why are you here?” she asks, crossing her arms over her chest like she’s cold, like she wants to cover herself up.
I give her an up-down look. She’s wearing a tight red skirt, a dark-gold silk top with a shoulder strap that falls over her shoulder, no bra, and pink sandals with heels as long as my forearm.
“Why are you here?” I say, taking off my cap and gloves and shoving them in the pocket of my jacket.
She cranes her neck to look out the window. “Where’s Roy?”
“Roy’s not coming.”
“Why not?”
“Am I going crazy here? Are you actually Veronica?”
She hesitates, then raises her arms and lets them drop. “Okay, fine. I’m Veronica.”
A wave of vertigo hits me. “I don’t understand…”
And then, adding to my humiliation, I feel the corners of my mouth turn down.
Because the truth is, I liked Erin. I thought we were going to be friends, notwithstanding the way she handled my revelation earlier.
I’d put that down to shock. But now, I realize, she was hanging on to my every word so she could tell Roy later.
I close my eyes, shake my head. “Okay. Let’s back up. How did you happen to meet me that first time in the bathroom? Did you stalk me? Did you follow me?”
She glances down at her fingernails and pulls at bits of skin. “I recognized you when your car broke down. I was just out on my jog. I was curious. I saw you were upset, and yes, I followed you into the bathroom,” she says with a shrug.
“But…how did you know who I was?”
“I’ve seen photos from your wedding. My friend Meredith posted them all over her Insta stories.”
“Really? Well, that’s funny, because I’ve never seen a single photo of you. There are no photos of you in the house, Erin. None. Zero. What does that say, Erin? Can I keep calling you Erin?”
She looks very nervous. “Yes…”
“Why call yourself Erin anyway?”
She gives a one-shoulder shrug. “It was a nickname when I was a child. My sister used to call me that.”
“That’s nice. My sister used to call me Jo. What about that story you told me about your boyfriend dropping you for a pretty young thing, you having a bad day and all that, was any of that true?”
She’s still staring at her hands.
“Oh, Erin.” I shake my head. “That was about you and Roy, wasn’t it. And I am the pretty young thing.”
“How do you think I felt?” she snaps. “We were all set to get engaged and then you came along.”
“It’s the way of the world, Erin. It’s not my fault if men are hardwired to fall for young, virginal creatures who want nothing more than to wash their underwear and bear their children.”
“Except you tricked him by pretending to be pregnant.”
I raise a finger. “Actually, he was going to dump you anyway. He told me.
She looks at me with disgust. A fat tear pools and falls down her cheek. She wipes it roughly with the back of her hand.
“You have no idea what I did for that man. I deserved so much more,” she says, bitterness making her mouth ugly.
“What did you do for that man?” I ask.
She flips her hand and makes a noise, a kind of bitter, disgusted breath.
“Okay, so wait. Let me get this straight. The engagement ring you were wearing that day… Did Roy give it to you? Because he never told me you were engaged.”
She adjusts her pretty bracelet. “I was actually seeing someone when I met you that day,” she says.
“Ah, yes. I remember. David, wasn’t it?” She looks up in surprise. I jerk my chin at her hand. “I note the ring is no longer on your finger. Did you pawn it?”
She barks a laugh. “Of course not.”
I tilt my head at her. “So you and David parted ways, and now you’re ringing my husband?”
“I’m ‘ringing your husband,’ as you put it, because he is in a very dangerous situation! You’re insane, Jodie, okay? You’re Deborah’s sister and he doesn’t even know? And you think he killed her? Do you know how crazy you sound?”
“You wouldn’t feel that way if you were Deb,” I say, smoothing my hair.
Snippets of conversation float into my mind. The way Erin seemed strangely bitter when asking about Roy, talking about our honeymoon phase. The fact that she knew we’d been married a month, even though I was pretty sure I’d never told her.
“I take it you don’t live on Mulholland Drive?”
“I wanted to meet far away from here. I didn’t want to run into anyone I knew.”
A wave of loneliness crashes through me. “I thought you were my friend.”
She jerks her head. “Don’t be ridiculous. We barely know each other.”
I nod slowly, recognizing the truth of this. I just don’t know what it takes to make a friend, no matter what Deb says. I don’t think I’ll ever figure it out.
“Why isn’t Roy here?” she says.
“He’s not well. He sent me instead.” I put down my car keys and my album on the small table. I’m confused about what to do next. I was all set to meet Veronica and talk some sense into her, woman to woman. But now I’m confronted with Erin instead and it’s thrown me.
We’re standing in the hall which is all stone floors and dark slate walls. I walk through the living area.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she asks.
“I need to sit down. We need to talk,” I say over my shoulder.
It’s an open-plan setup, with the living room flowing into the kitchen and then into the hallway. I have never seen so much granite and marble in my life. I turn to face her. “You don’t like color or soft furnishings?”
She blinks. “This house won a prize. It’s been featured in Architectural Digest.”
I raise an eyebrow, then my glance falls on the open laptop on the kitchen table.
Two Killed in Early Morning House Fire in Yuma
I drag it close to me. “What the hell, Erin?”
Two people were found dead after a house fire broke out early Monday morning in a residential neighborhood on Yuma’s east side, according to the Yuma Fire Department—
She slams the laptop shut.
“What the hell is this?” I blurt.
“That story you told me about your parents, your whole family dying in a house fire. I looked it up.”
“You looked it up? You are fact-checking me now? After you stalked me to a bathroom in a gas station?”
“There have been no reports of anything like this happening in Oklahoma for the last twenty years.”
“And?”
“And you lied, Jodie!”
“Who says I lied? Maybe it’s your research that’s faulty.”
“I happen to know that Deborah grew up in Arizona. In Yuma.”
I swallow a lump in my throat. “So?”
“There was a house fire in Yuma.”
I shrug. “So what? Happens all the time.”
“Six weeks ago, Jodie!” She points at the laptop. “Six weeks ago, a couple in their early sixties died in a house fire!” She crosses her arms over her chest. “I think Roy has a right to know who the hell he’s married to.”
I lean against the sink, cross my arms over my chest, my mouth turned down. “They were not nice people,” I say finally.
She claps a hand over her mouth. “Oh my God.”
I wouldn’t have killed my parents if Deb hadn’t been dead.
She didn’t like them any more than I did, but she would have disapproved.
She always felt a strange sense of misplaced loyalty toward them, simply because they were our parents.
I wasn’t surprised she invited them to her wedding.
She would have invited them to Thanksgiving, had she been alive.
That’s who she was. Pure to a fault. She only saw the best in people, and in the case of my parents, that would have taken some looking.
Anyway. Roy had this weird obsession about wanting to keep in touch with Deb’s family, which I believe was more of a decoy so people wouldn’t suspect him of killing her.
First, he wrote to them to say he was marrying again, because he thought it was proper, like they’d care.
Then he wanted to invite them to the wedding and I managed to convince him otherwise, but I knew I was on borrowed time.
He wanted to give them a little money, for Deb’s sake, like she’d care, and let’s just say that my parents can smell a handout two hundred and eighty-four miles away, which is the precise driving distance between Beverley Hills and Yuma.
Then he started saying he wanted to send them a nice photograph of our wedding--along with a check—when the time came, and at that point I knew I had no choice.
We were only a week away from getting married, and I still had my ugly little walk-up unit, so one day I told him I had a cold (we were spending an awful lot of time together, what with the baby and all) and I bought a bus ticket to Yuma—cash.
When I saw my mother again the day I killed her, she was standing at the door, smoking, her long dirty fingernails yellowed with it. She was wearing a shabby red cardigan with holes at the elbows and dirt on the cuffs, jeans, and gry slippers. Everything about her was brittle and grimy.
“What are you doing here?” My mother snapped. Her hair was grayer, dirtier, greasy strands tucked behind her ears.
“I got out,” I said.
“I see that.” She stood in the doorway leaning on one side, her arm stretched across the doorframe in case I got it into my head to go in.
“I don’t know why nobody contacted me about your release. I thought that’s what they did when a murderer was let out of prison.”
“No, they don’t. And anyway, you’re not a victim.”
She took a drag. “So what do you want?”
“I need a place to sleep tonight.”
“We don’t have room.” She started closing the door on me. I held it open. “I have money.” I pulled out fifty dollars from my back pocket. “Just for one night.”
She snatched it out of my hand so fast it was like watching a magic trick. “It’ll have to be the couch. We’re using your sister’s room for storage.”
“Couch is fine.”
For now, though, the couch still had my dad on it.
He was watching NFL football with a can of Budweiser resting on his stomach. He barely acknowledged me, if you call glancing at the door for a nanosecond an acknowledgment.
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
He upped the volume on his remote.
It was still cold, and they still had the same old crappy gas furnace in the living room.
We watched the game together on the couch.
Then, when they went to bed, I turned the furnace back on, loosened the gas line, fished out of my mother’s cigarette stub from the ashtray and lit it.
Then I dropped it on the carpet and took the ten-thirty bus back to LA.
I don’t say any of this to Erin. That should go without saying.
“I just think there’s something not right about you,” she says.
“You’re the one who’s been lying the whole time about who you are,” I mumble.
She looks around and spots her phone at the far end of the counter. “I’m going to call Roy.”
“Come on, Erin! We’re still talking, aren’t we? Give me a chance! Anyway, I told you, he doesn’t want to talk to you. He won’t pick up.”
But my heart is racing. I gave him plenty of Ambien, but did I give him enough? Would his phone ringing be enough to wake him?
Meanwhile Erin is staring at me, frozen. “Wait. Did you…?”
“Did I what?”
“Did you do something to him?”
“Of course not.”
She studies me. “I’m going to call him,” she says again.
No. I can’t let that happen. I have to stop her.
She’s standing at her enormous kitchen counter, her phone in her shaking hands.
“Put the phone down, Erin.”
She doesn’t put the phone down, but she’s shaking like a leaf. “You killed them, didn’t you. You killed your family.”
I laugh. “What an imagination you have! Of course I didn’t kill them.
I just want to talk, that’s all. I want to make you see sense.
He’s the murderer, Erin. Not me, okay? Don’t look at me like that.
I’m not going to hurt you.” I smile broadly, showing teeth, aiming to lighten the mood, soften the moment, make her understand that there really is no need to call Roy, but it doesn’t seem to work.
She’s shaking so much her neck is beginning to look like flan.
She starts to walk backward, slowly.
“You’re mad,” she says softly.
“Please don’t say that.” I put out my hand. “Give me the phone, Erin. Please.”
She lets out a strangled scream and runs away from me, through the French doors and onto the terrace.
No. No. She cannot call Roy and what if he does hear the phone? What if she wakes him up? What if she leaves a message and he hears it before I have a chance to delete it?
She’s Deborah’s sister! She’s insane!
I have to get that phone away from her.
“Erin?”
I step out through the French doors and onto the terrace.
“Erin?” And for a horrible moment, I think she’s run out to her car and she’s going to see Roy.
I feel a jolt of panic. Would Roy hear the doorbell from the office? He would if she kept her finger on it. And what if he doesn’t wake, and she goes to Meredith’s house?
“Erin?”
Silence. Not even the sound of a car starting. Just night insects and distant traffic.
“Erin, come out of your hiding place and let’s talk.”
Still silence. And it’s dark out here. I walk to the end of the terrace and peer into the darkness. Nothing.
I look around. And that’s when I see it, a sliver of gold silk trembling behind the potted palm.
A whoosh of color. A scream. “HELP ME!”
She runs past me back into the kitchen, but those vertiginous Versace sandals are not made for walking, let alone running, and Erin stumbles like a baby giraffe, her ankles folding sideways, and hits her head on the corner of the granite counter.