I Know Everything Page 5

  The house was dark but for a lone floor lamp Amanda had left on in the living room the night before. Randall took off his coat and draped it over one of the kitchen chairs, then staggered into the family room and collapsed onto the couch.

  He had gotten her number that night. She waited until the bar was about to close, and when he got up to use the restroom one last time, she placed a business card under his glass. She was gone by the time he came back. They traded phone calls and emails in the months that followed and grew closer despite the distance. By the time she came back West for another round of fundraising, they were friends. By the time she left, they were lovers. After a year together, she convinced him to move to New York, and he convinced her to marry him. He didn’t know how wealthy she was until after they got engaged. It was never about anything other than love for the two of them. They were meant to be together, and now, the love of his life was dead. They hadn’t been given enough time. It simply wasn’t fair.

  Randall sat up and pushed his hair out of his eyes. He snatched the house phone from its docking station on the end table next to the sofa and looked at the screen. Nine voice mails. He hit the command to play them back.

  “Hi, Amanda, it’s Ruth. I left you a message on your cell too. Just wanted to wish you luck tonight. So sorry Bruce and I can’t make it. We’ll have a private celebration at my house soon, I promise. Good luck! I’m so proud of you.”

  “Giirrrrllll, it’s Luis. Why aren’t you picking up your cell? Text me back or something.”

  “Hi, guys, it’s Sebastian. Not sure anyone even checks home voice mail anymore, but I think Amanda’s cell phone is off or something. Wanted to drop a quick message about how lovely tonight’s event was. Amanda, your speech was perfect. Not sure what you were stressing over. It went off without a hitch. Anyway, you did great, and it was nice to see you both.”

  “Hi, it’s Gina. Where are you? We were supposed to have coffee at the café. I’m sitting here alone like an idiot. Sleeping it off? Call me. Oh, and check your cell. I think you have it off.”

  Randall listened to each message, then deleted them. He placed the receiver back on the docking station and thought about the daunting task of calling relatives and friends with the news. Amanda had known so many people. How could he get to them all? He supposed he could handle it strategically and call a handful of people he knew would be willing to spread the word. For reasons even his scientific mind couldn’t figure out, people loved gossiping about tragedy. If he could call the right four or five people, he knew they’d be more than happy to reach out to the rest of Amanda’s network. That would leave her relatives, which would be his responsibility. There was no one alive in his family to call.

  The wind blew several tree branches against the bay window in the family room, causing him to turn toward the noise. As he looked out at his expansive property in the back, he glimpsed a figure standing just inside the stone wall that marked the end of his yard and the beginning of his neighbor’s. The figure was covered in a long black coat, semi-hidden among a cluster of adolescent pines that hadn’t yet reached their full height and girth. He couldn’t see the person’s face—an oversized hood hung over their head. There was no way to know if it was a man or a woman. The only other thing he could see was this person’s breath from beneath the hood clouding in the cold December air.

  He stood up from the couch and walked toward the window. The figure didn’t move. It remained still, as if it were a tree itself, and for a moment he thought that his mind could be playing tricks on him, making him see a person who wasn’t there. But the closer he got to the window, the more apparent it was that there was no mistake. This person was breathing. They had gloved hands, ten fingers. Two feet protruding from beneath the oversized coat. They didn’t move. They simply faced the house and waited. Watching.

  The phone rang, and Randall jumped. He let out a small cry of surprise and spun around, quickly grabbing the receiver off the end table.

  “Hello?”

  “Randall, it’s Gina.”

  “Hi, Gina.”

  “Can I talk to Amanda? I’ve been calling and texting all day, and she’s not calling me back. She was supposed to meet me for coffee this morning and never showed. I’m guessing she’s wiped from last night, but still. Is she there?”

  Randall turned back toward the window. The figure in the oversized coat remained, unmoving.

  Can he see me in here? Is he looking at me?

  “Will you hang on a minute?” Randall asked.

  “Sure.”

  He put the phone down and walked to the patio doors, which led to a sunroom. He opened the doors, crossed the sunroom, and stepped outside onto the deck.

  The figure remained.

  “Can I help you?” Randall called as he leaned over the deck railing. “You there! In the pines. Can I help you with something?”

  Steaming breath. In and out. In and out.

  “You’re on private property. I need you to leave, or I’ll have to call the police. Please.”

  The figure waited for a few more moments, then slowly turned around and walked into the thicker section of pines until Randall could no longer see him. He went back inside the house and grabbed the phone; then he walked into the different rooms, checking the windows around his property. No one was there.

  “Randall?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I’m back.”

  “So can I talk to your wife, please?”

  The request came with such innocence. She wanted to talk to Amanda. He knew as soon as he told her the truth, the cascade of news wouldn’t stop for weeks. Not in a small town like this. Not with the friends Amanda had.

  Tears that had been absent for most of the day suddenly came rushing forward. Randall thought about Ray Charles and that jukebox in San Francisco as he slid down onto the kitchen floor, the phone pressed tightly to his ear.

  “Are you okay?” Gina asked.

  “No, you can’t talk to my wife,” Randall heard himself barking through thick sobs. “Not anymore. I’m sorry, Gina. Not ever again.”

  8

  “Mommy!”

  Susan walked through the front door and was instantly attacked by little arms wrapping themselves around her waist. She dropped her bag and ran her fingers through two sets of platinum-blond hair.

  “Hey, guys!”

  The twins, five-year-old Casey and Tim, looked up at her with identical smiles. They both shared her freckled nose and green eyes. Their almost perfectly round heads came from their father.

  “Mommy, we haven’t seen you since forever,” Casey said. “Was work hard?”

  “Yes, honey. Work was hard.”

  “Did you catch the bad people?” Tim asked.

  “I’m trying.” Susan slipped off her coat and hung it on a rack next to the door. “So how was everybody’s day?”

  “Today was good,” Tim said. “I painted you a picture in school. Look!” He scurried down the hall and swiped a large piece of construction paper off the dining room table, returning with it outstretched in his hand as if he were running with a flag.

  Susan took the picture and studied the multicolored lines and circles, trying to figure out what it was before she had to admit she didn’t know what she was looking at.

  “It’s a dinosaur with flowers!”

  “Of course it is. I love it! Thank you.” She looked down at Casey. “What about you, sweetie? What’d you make?”

  Casey played with her bangs, which hung in front of her eyes. “I didn’t have to make a picture. I played puppets instead.”

  “I see.”

  “Tim got paint on his new shirt.”

  “It was an accident!”

  “I told him to play puppets with us, but he wanted to paint, and then he made a mess.”

  “Tattle!”

  Susan ushered them farther into the house. “Don’t be a tattle, honey. I’ll wash the shirt. It’s fine. Go play, and I’ll fix dinner in a minute. Baths tonight.”

  Ca
sey stomped her foot and arched her back to get in proper whining position. “Baths? But I—”

  “No excuses. Baths. Tonight. Go.”

  Casey was about to say something further but instead ended the conversation with a huff. The twins climbed the stairs and ran into the spare fourth bedroom she’d converted into a playroom after her ex, Eric, had moved out. She could hear the pattering of their feet on the carpet, accompanied by the faint sound of conversation.

  Susan’s house was a seventeenth-century colonial that had once been part of a large swath of land in Fishkill but had been subdivided and then subdivided again until it was whittled down to a half-acre lot. The wood planks that spanned the floor were original, as were the exposed beams in the ceiling. The fireplace in the living room had been reconstructed in the 1970s, and the kitchen had been renovated more than a few times over the centuries, but the bones of the old home remained intact, which was one of the things she and Eric had fallen in love with.

  “Mom?”

  “In the kitchen!”

  She’d been officially divorced for a year now, but she and Eric had been separated for almost two. The kids were just reaching the point where they understood their father wasn’t going to ever be living with them again, and they’d finally stopped asking for him each night. They seemed to accept the every-other-weekend plan the judge had set up, and she did what she could to make life as normal for them as possible. If it weren’t for her mother, she didn’t know what she would’ve done for childcare. For one, twins in a day care would be unbelievably expensive. Second, her shifts were always rotating, and when she was on a case, there was no punching a clock. Her work took her wherever the evidence pointed at whatever time it happened to point. Her mother, living only a half hour away, had been a godsend.

  The kitchen smelled of garlic and oregano. Beatrice McVey, wonder woman and mother of the decade, stood over the stove, stirring sauce in a pan. She was short and plump with jet-black dyed hair that she kept longer than most women her age. She was a widow going on ten years now but had handled the loss like most Irish did. She’d cried, celebrated the good times she’d had with her husband, and moved on. She was the toughest and smartest woman Susan knew.

  “Hi, honey,” Beatrice said without turning from the pot. “Wasn’t sure when you’d be home, so I started dinner.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Did you even come home last night?”

  “No, I’m beat.”

  “I didn’t think you did. What’d you catch?”

  “First it was a pursuit that ended up being a kidnapping. I was at the barracks filing on that when we caught a car accident. That’s at least cut and dry. Should be cleared by tomorrow.” She walked over to the sliding door and flipped on the outside light. “How’re the chickens?”

  “I think they’re all in.”

  The lights mounted on the back deck illuminated the yard, and Susan could see the chicken coop Eric had made the last year they were together. He’d been on some kick about organic food and eating things that were all-natural. At the time, he’d had big plans, but chickens were as close as they’d come to being organic farmers. She had six of them and got fresh eggs every morning.

  “You make enough to stay and eat with us?” she asked.

  “Sure. I got nowhere to be tonight.”

  “You can sleep over again if you want. I’m sorry it has to be two nights in a row.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I’m fine. But you must be exhausted. Eat what I got here, and go take a shower. I’ll help with the baths, and then we can all go to bed nice and early.”

  Susan plopped down on a kitchen chair. “Sounds like the best plan I heard all day.”

  She’d never imagined being a single mom with twins, but that was life, right? Expect the unexpected. She’d envisioned having four children, all two to three years apart, running around the house, laughing, fighting, and sticking up for one another at school and on the playground. She’d been an only child and had never experienced the camaraderie of siblings. She’d dreamed of family game nights and the Adler crew setting out on Halloween in one big mass of costumes and goody bags. She’d envisioned the annual chaos involved in trying to settle everyone down for their Christmas picture, and the satisfaction she’d feel when the card came out perfect. The twins had come first. Two in one shot. They were already halfway there. But then she’d discovered Eric cheating with a coworker who was just out of college and a little too eager to climb the corporate ladder. They’d separated for a while, and then Eric filed for divorce, saying that he’d simply fallen out of love with her and didn’t see any future together. What was she supposed to say to that? Was there an argument to be made? Was she supposed to beg him to stay? Screw that. She got the papers drawn up, took the child support, and told him to shove the alimony up his ass; and here she was, thirty-eight years old, exhausted, and unloved by anyone younger than seventy-two and older than five. This was the unpredictable adventure of life. Her life, at least.

  Susan’s cell phone rang in the bag that was still by the door. She hopped out of her chair and walked down the hall, snatching it before it sounded off for a third time.

  “This is Adler.”

  “Susan, it’s Emily Nestor from the ME’s office.”

  Susan sat on the landing of the stairs. “Hi, Emily. What’s up?”

  “So we’re done with the autopsy on Amanda Brock, and I found some discrepancies that I thought you should be made aware of.”

  “What kind of discrepancies?”

  “I can show you better if you come down to the office tomorrow, but just to give you the gist of what I’m looking at, I found a couple of things that were inconsistent with a car accident.”

  “Like what?”

  “First of all, the victim’s blood had already coagulated prior to the crash and had started to settle.”

  Susan shot up from the step and walked into the living room. “Are you saying she was dead before she ran off the road?”

  “It appears that way,” Nestor replied. “I also found evidence of blunt-force trauma to the back of the victim’s skull. Now I want to be clear that the trauma could’ve happened during the crash itself. Her body took quite a beating rolling down the cliff like that. But this particular wound is a bit inconsistent with the randomness of the other wounds caused by the accident. This one looks like someone was aiming for the base of her skull and was successful. That coupled with the blood, and I’d put time of death an hour to ninety minutes before the crash itself. No other sign of foul play. Tox screen was clean. Looks like she had some champagne, but BAC was well under the limit. No signs of a stroke or heart attack that might’ve caused her to lose control of the car. Other than suicide, I can’t find a reason why she’d just run off the road like that.”

  “We thought about suicide, but how would that explain the blow to the back of the head and the blood coagulating?”

  “It wouldn’t.”

  “So she’s in the car, already dead, and someone ran it off the road to make it look like an accident.”

  “I can’t say for sure, but that looks likely at this point.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Susan hung up the phone and stood quietly in the living room, her mind racing.

  She was dead before the car ran off the road.

  Unpredictable lives. It looked as if everybody had one.

  9

  Randall sat in the empty office, staring at the monitor, watching the session play out on the video. Patient number two—Jason Harris—sat forward in his seat, his fingers nervously pulling at his jeans.

  “How have you been since we last spoke?” Peter asked on the video. “Anything happen this week that you’d like to discuss?”

  “No, not really. Pretty regular week. Starting to get cold, so work is busier. People tend to get to things like new tires or snow tires when they feel the weather turn. This cold blast got a lot of people to the sho
p. I like being busy, though. Makes the day go by faster.”

  “And how’s everything at home?”

  “The same.”

  “How’s your mother?”

  “Useless, as usual. I don’t get how you could live the only life you got waiting hand and foot on someone else, taking all their crap, all their put-downs and complaining, and consider that a life fulfilled. But, hey, that’s her, not me. I think it’s slavery, but she’s not going nowhere. Been putting up with him this long. She’ll keep doing it until one of them dies. She don’t know any other way to live.”

  “Are you talking about your dad?”

  “Who else would I be talking about?”

  “How are things going with him?”

  “He’s still an asshole, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Explain.”

  “So my mom’s been battling this cough for like three weeks. Up all night, coughing all day. I think it’s bronchitis or pneumonia or something like that, but she won’t go to the doctor. Says she can’t afford it. I offered to help pay, but she still refuses to go. Won’t take my money. Instead, she buys this over-the-counter crap that isn’t working. I talk to my dad about it, and he just waves me away like I’m wasting his time. One night the coughing gets so bad he kicks her out of bed and makes her sleep on the couch so he can get his rest for work the next day. He’s a prick like that.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “How do you think? He’s a terrible, selfish man. Just bring her to the doctor, get her the prescription she needs, and he won’t have to deal with the coughing anymore. And she won’t have to suffer through it. But he says it’s too expensive. Maybe if he had a job that paid regular benefits, she could get what she needs.”

  “Have you talked to your father about helping to pay?”