Chapter Thirty-Seven
THIRTY-SEVEN
“I want to sincerely apologize for my stupid actions,” Daniel says, taking another step into my foyer. “I’m an idiot. It’s all my fault and no one else’s. I didn’t know you would get—”
I stumble back into the center of the room, righting myself by grabbing the banister. “You should go, Daniel. You don’t want to miss your flight.”
“I just want to talk,” he says, coming closer. “Just two old friends, old neighbors.”
I glance at the glass storm door. There’s no way I can get by him and out the door. Would anyone see if he hurt me? Would anyone intervene? “That’s right,” I say. “We go back a long way.”
“Van’s a good kid.”
“I know he’s a good kid.” The kitchen is behind me. Could I get there before him? Grab a knife? Unlikely. I eye the staircase.
“She tried to get to me by turning my kid against me. How sick is that?” His face moves so close to mine that I can see a large droplet of sweat on his upper lip, threatening to drip.
I jerk my head back. “Who? You mean Tori Price?”
“She tried to seduce me, and when I rebuffed her, when I said no, she went psycho.” He laughs a little and makes a swirling motion near his temple with his finger. “Nutso. She went after my kid. You’re a mom, Caren. Can you imagine if someone went after your Zach?”
I lean even farther back, as far as my spine will allow me, trying to get away from him. I stretch one foot out behind me searching for the bottom step of the staircase. Maybe I can run up the stairs, lock myself in the kids’ bathroom, call someone.
“She filled his head with crazy ideas! He was refusing to go to college! He said he wanted to be a fisherman! After everything we’ve done, after everything we have sacrificed.
But these kids, our kids, they don’t know, right?
” He stares at me beseechingly, as though he expects me to confirm his doubts about “our kids.”
“They don’t know how easy it is to slip down the ladder,” he continues. “They’re so sure they can only go up, up, up. The sky’s the limit.”
“What do you want from me, Daniel?” I slowly back up another stairstep.
Daniel frowns at me. “Where are you going? Why won’t you listen to me?”
“I’m listening, I am. But you need to catch your flight.”
“You have to drop it, Caren. Drop all the questions. Okay?” He smiles, a sickening grin. “Tell me you’re not going to cause any more problems.”
The storm door opens, and Yumi enters, shutting it behind her. Relief floods me.
“Yumi.” The words come out of my mouth in a burst of breath. “Thank God. Call the police, now.”
But Yumi doesn’t move. Why isn’t she moving? What is going on? “Yumi, please.”
“She won’t listen to me,” Daniel says to her without taking his eyes off me. “I tried talking to her like you said, but I don’t think she’s going to drop it. You said this wouldn’t happen. That she would drop it.”
A strange numbness spreads across my face and neck. That earlier relief is replaced by a sinking feeling in my gut. Yumi and Daniel have been talking about me, planning, conspiring. “What’s happening here? Yumi? Tell me, please.”
“I never meant for you to get hurt,” he says. “You have to believe me.”
I turn and run for it. I almost make it to the top of the stairs when I feel him grab my ankle and pull me. I fall on my face, my chin hitting the floorboard hard, pain cracking through my jaw. He yanks me back down a few stairs as I clutch at the balusters in vain. He’s too strong.
“Caren. Oh, Caren. I didn’t want it to be like this.”
“Don’t hurt her!” Yumi calls. But I can’t tell if it’s the fearful cry of a friend, or the practical advice of an accomplice. I don’t know if Yumi is here to help me or Daniel, and that hurts almost as much as the ache in my jaw.
“Why didn’t you just leave it alone?” Daniel asks. “Because you’re a Karen.” He chuckles at his own joke. “Interfering. Can’t mind your own damn business.”
Through the wooden balusters, I can see Yumi in the foyer looking up at me. Yumi, help me, I open my mouth to yell, but no sound comes out. My head pounds. This can’t be happening.
“Daniel,” Yumi says, her voice robotic and flat. “Remember what we talked about. This isn’t how we decided to fix the problem.”
The problem. Am I the problem?
Daniel twists to look down at Yumi. “You got a better idea?”
She raises her right arm, and something that looks like a toy gun, yellow and black, in her outstretched hand. I suck in my breath and close my eyes. All I can do is steady myself for what happens next.
The sound of electric zaps fills the air, and Daniel lets out a guttural howl.
I open my eyes and see wires in the back of Daniel’s leg, emanating from the device that Yumi’s holding.
Daniel releases his hold on me, and I turn in time to see him pivot, screaming as he falls down the stairs, arms stiff by his side.
“Hurry! Get duct tape!” Yumi yells. “Or zip ties.”
I am up and running down the stairs in seconds.
I step over Daniel, who is moaning, and rush into the kitchen, where I find the duct tape in a cabinet, in one of my plastic boxes marked TAPE—right where it should be.
Back in the foyer, Yumi holds his feet together and I tape them.
Then we bring his hands together behind his back, and I tape those too.
Two little metal rods stick out of his back, attached to wires that run from the muzzle of the gun Yumi was holding.
“I didn’t know you owned a Taser.”
Yumi shrugs. “I live alone.”
Only when I am sure Daniel is secured do I call 911.
His moans are so loud that I have to walk outside so the operator can hear me speak.
My heart is racing as I tell her my address and the basic facts of what just happened.
As I speak, the block thrums with the sounds of early-evening suburban life.
A group of kids dragging towels trudge home from the pool while a young couple on bicycles pass by, their son, clearly a beginner, wobbling several yards behind them.
The contrast with what just happened inside my house is surreal.
When I get off the phone, I turn to see that Yumi has joined me outside.
“The police are on their way.”
“Good. He’s not going anywhere for now.”
“What are you doing here?” I ask her. “What did he mean that you said I would drop it?”
Yumi hangs her head. “I need to sit down. Can we sit down?”
We take a few steps back to the front stoop, where we sit down side by side. Yumi pulls her braid over her shoulder and undoes it, letting her long black-and-gray hair loose.
“Yumi, you need to tell me.” My voice is kind but firm. “What did Daniel mean?”
She shrugs. “Shouldn’t we wait for the police? I don’t want to have to tell this story twice.”
“That’s too bad,” I say. “What did he mean? Did you see Van go into Tori Price’s house that night?”
She shakes her head. “No. I did not.”
“Then what?”
“I did hear the shots that night, the night that Autumn was murdered. I went to the window of my porch to see what was going on. But I saw nothing.”
She turns her head away from me and I have to resist the urge to shake her by the shoulders, to scream at her to keep talking.
My phone pings. I debate pulling it out at all, but I want to check and see if it’s Rachel, maybe texting me a heart emoji like she does sometimes after we fight. But it’s a message from Kenya.
That nanny was killed 8/9 last year. Van was with Noah and friends that weekend at our house in Bethany. See pic below—playing poker on the back porch.
I click on the photo she sent—it’s a group of teenagers around a table on a deck, holding beer cans aloft, the flash turning the night sky black.
They’re grinning and some are sticking their tongues out.
High school boys having a good time. Except for one boy.
In the corner, Van sits, arms crossed, a foul look on his face, not facing the camera.
Misery rises off him like steam.
But Kenya is right.
Van was on the Delaware shore, three hours away from Bethesda, exactly when Autumn was killed.
Whoever shot Autumn, it wasn’t Van.
I thrust my phone at Yumi.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“Van wasn’t in town the night Autumn was shot. Yumi, what’s going on?”
After a few moments she gives me a nod. “I was on my porch when I heard the shots. After a while, maybe five or six minutes, I saw someone coming through the backyard. Heading toward the hedge, carrying some stuff.”
“Someone? Who was it?”
“A woman. It was Jo. She seemed drunk. She stumbled once and fell and picked herself back up.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
“At first, I didn’t connect the two things. I mean, Jo kill someone? I truly didn’t believe she had anything to do with the murder. I swear. But Jo saw me looking down from the porch that night. She looked straight at me. And a few days later she and Daniel came to see me.” Yumi hung her head.
“And said what?”
“That they could get me a job at Crimson Edge. That Jo would negotiate it. A mid-six-figure salary and I would get to work from home. And health insurance. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut.”
“You agreed to stay silent for a job? For money?” I am in shock. I can actually feel my mouth open. I realize I don’t know this woman sitting next to me at all.
“Don’t say it like that. I was desperate,” she says, her voice shaky.
“My editing work had dried up. They basically fired me and then rehired me as a part-time consultant with much lower pay. I was too sick to look for a full-time job. I even looked at going on disability, but it would have been only a few hundred dollars a month. I was going to lose the house, lose everything.”
“I didn’t know that. I mean, I knew your job situation had changed, but I didn’t know all the details. I didn’t know how bad it was.”
“I was ashamed.” She covers her face with her hands.
“I’m fifty. I’m divorced, underemployed.
I have one child who struggled in high school, still struggles if I am being honest. Where did I go wrong?
” She looks up at me, her eyes searching.
“I followed all the rules. I went to college, worked hard, got married. My husband still left me. I was still downsized. And I got sick.”
“You didn’t cause those things to happen,” I say. I feel confused. A mix of sympathy and disgust swirls within me. “You know that.”
“Ryan was going to have to drop out of college. You know his dad refuses to pay a cent? And me? I would be plunged into poverty, real poverty. My medicine alone costs ten thousand dollars for each infusion, and the health insurance I was paying thousands out of pocket for didn’t cover it.
The job at Crimson Edge offered me the kind of security that would make those problems go away.
I could stay in the house, pay for Ryan’s schooling.
Pay for my medication. I couldn’t say no.
” Yumi bursts into tears. “I always hoped the police would figure out what happened to that girl without my having to say anything. I know I’m a coward.
I wanted the job and I wanted her to get caught.
I really thought the police would figure it out. But they never did.”
“Finn figured it out.”
“Finn. I feel so guilty about Finn. I knew he was friends with Autumn before he told us the other day on my porch.”
“You did?”
She nods. “Of course. I feel like I know everything about everyone in this neighborhood. I run the Facebook page, Caren. Half of what people post doesn’t stay up for more than a minute because it’s so crazy and gossipy.
Accusing other moms of pulling strings on sports teams, of dads being lecherous drunks.
It’s insane how hiding behind a keyboard has made it so easy for people to express the worst parts of themselves. ”
“Is that how you knew they were friends? From the Facebook page?”
“No. I saw them together. I’m on the damn porch most of my life.
All I do is look at other people, out there living their lives.
I’d see them walking together sometimes.
And of course I saw Finn put up those posters.
A part of me kept hoping someone else would come forward with information that could solve the crime. ”
“You mean someone besides you.” My tone is sharp.
“Yes,” she says quietly. “Someone besides me. When I saw Finn had started pet-sitting, I told Jo we should hire him. Keep him close. So I paid him to shop at the farmers market for me, and I tried to figure out how much he knew. But he never shared anything until the other day. And it made me realize.” She sniffs and wipes at her nose.
“It made me see how awful what I had done was. I thought I was just protecting Ryan and me, but I was hurting people.”
We see the blue and red flashing lights before we see the police cars themselves. Right behind them is an ambulance with its own flashing lights. They pull up in front of the house as neighbors come out to look, and kids stop to watch.
“We’re the show in Eastbrook tonight,” I say.
Yumi reaches for my hand. “I’m so sorry, Caren. If I could go back, if I could do it again … I did it for Ryan. You’re a mom, you understand—”
“I know,” I say, interrupting her. I don’t want to hear any more. Any more excuses or explanations or justifications. It’s all clicking into place, even though it will take me a while to sort it out. At least now I can begin to try and understand. “I know.”