‘The funeral was a couple of days later. It was ghastly.’ She looks at the twins nodding off in their buggy, and Stephanie follows her gaze. ‘Everyone completely broke down. Patrick’s grief was totally convincing and I even wondered if he had regrets, though he was now free and he’d got away with it.
‘He tried to talk to me at the funeral. I turned my back on him. No one seemed to think that was strange – I was Lindsey’s best friend, and it was his fault she was dead. Everybody was a mess. But I know Greg thought I was behaving badly. He came up to me and told me to get a grip, that everybody was hurting, not just me, and who the hell did I think I was to treat Patrick like shit at his wife’s funeral? Of course, Greg didn’t know anything.’ She pauses. ‘It was the next day that I found out I was pregnant. I was a few days late. I tried to ignore it, but after the funeral I got a pregnancy test from the drugstore where I worked.’ She takes a deep breath, exhales. ‘Of course it was Patrick’s. I wasn’t with anybody else when I was with him.’
‘Where is the child now?’ Stephanie asks.
Erica turns to her. ‘I gave him up for adoption. I never said I kept him.’
Stephanie is silent. Her mind is tumbling over with confusing thoughts, like a dryer full of clothes.
‘Why didn’t you just have an abortion?’
‘Maybe I should have.’ She pauses for a moment and then says, ‘The truth is I knew that if I carried the baby to term there might be some money in it. A private adoption. Yes, I’m greedy. But you know that.’
Stephanie turns away; she can’t bear to look at Erica any longer.
‘He did it deliberately, Stephanie, I know he did,’ Erica says. She seems to consider something and then says, ‘I’ll tell you why I came forward now, after all these years.’
Stephanie turns back and stares at her, waiting. There’s something more. There’s always something more.
‘I’ve been keeping an eye on Patrick all this time. I knew he’d remarried. When I saw that he’d married again, I looked into you.’
‘You looked into me? Why?’
‘Because some men use wives like ATMs,’ Erica says. ‘And I saw that you were going to inherit quite a lot of money.’
‘How did you know that?’ Stephanie asks. She’s wondered about this for a while.
‘Because wills that are probated are public information. I looked into your parents, saw that they’d been wealthy, that they’d died in a car accident. I looked at your parents’ wills. And I saw that they left you a trust, and that you would come into the money when you turned thirty.’ She adds pointedly, ‘Which was only a couple of months ago.’
Stephanie looks back at her, shocked. She had no idea that kind of information was public. She thought nobody knew about her trust but her lawyers – and her husband.
‘Tell me, did Patrick know about that when he married you?’
Stephanie remains silent.
‘You have life insurance, too? Let me guess – something you got when you were pregnant?’
Stephanie doesn’t answer; she doesn’t have to. The coldness in her heart spreads outward to reach all of her extremities. She wonders if Erica already knows her life is insured for a million dollars.
‘So you see,’ Erica says, after a long pause, ‘regardless of what happens, I’ve done you a favour.’
Stephanie slumps in her wicker chair on the porch, shaken. She remembers the fire, the frying pan left on the stove. She still doesn’t remember putting the pan on the stove. Then she pulls herself together and reminds herself who she’s dealing with. ‘Let’s not forget why you’re really doing this,’ Stephanie says coldly. ‘You looked into our financial situation, saw that we had money and tried to blackmail us.’
Erica nods. ‘Yes, well, I never said I was perfect.’
‘I think you should leave.’
‘Fine.’ She stands up. ‘But remember, just because I tried to blackmail you doesn’t make it any less true that Patrick murdered his first wife.’
She looks down at Stephanie, flicks a careless glance at the twins in their buggy, and says, ‘Be careful. After all, if he did it once, he could do it again.’
Stephanie says emphatically, ‘Patrick would never hurt me. Or Jackie or Emmie.’
Erica says, ‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
AS SOON AS Erica is out of sight, Stephanie brings the twins inside and lets herself fall apart. She rocks on the sofa, her face in her hands, sobbing. After a while, she pulls herself together, washes her swollen face and resumes phoning the banks. Her heart almost stops when the woman at Hudson Valley Credit Union – the second to last one on her list – says, ‘No, your husband hasn’t been in to the safety deposit box today.’
She regrets having to waste the twins’ naptime – she should be sleeping herself – but she quickly bundles them up and puts them and the double buggy in the car.
When she arrives at the bank, she wheels the twins up to one of the clerks at the counter. She takes the safety deposit key out of her pocket. ‘I’d like access to my safety deposit box, please,’ she says, showing her the key.
‘Can I see some identification?’ the woman asks.
Stephanie produces her driver’s licence and holds her breath.
‘This way.’
She leads Stephanie down a corridor – fortunately it’s wide enough to accommodate the buggy – and unlocks a barred door that opens into a long, narrow room lined with numbered metal safety deposit boxes. Stephanie leaves the twins in the hall and keeps an eye on them. ‘What’s the number on your key?’ the clerk asks, pulling a card file.
‘Two twenty-four.’
The woman flips through the file and pulls out a card, asking Stephanie to sign. The clerk fingers her way down a row and finds the box. She inserts her key and asks for Stephanie’s key, which she hands over. The clerk withdraws the box from the wall and leads Stephanie to an empty, private room with a table and chair. Stephanie follows her into the room with the buggy.
The clerk puts the box gently on the table. ‘There’s a buzzer there on the wall when you’re finished, and I’ll come back,’ she says.
‘Thank you,’ Stephanie says, waiting until the woman has pulled the door shut behind her. The twins are fast asleep.
She sits down and looks at the box for a moment, filled with trepidation. She can feel her heart pounding. What secrets are contained in it? She takes a deep breath and opens the lid.
The first thing she sees are the insurance papers. She looks them over, but they merely confirm what she already knows. Patrick got a $200,000 payout on the death of his first wife. She lifts the papers aside and reaches in for the next thing. Lindsey’s death certificate, dated January 10, 2009. So far, no surprises. Stephanie swallows and lifts out the next item. It’s a marriage certificate between Patrick Edward Kilgour and Lindsey Paige Windsor, dated August 12, 2008. Something doesn’t feel right. For a moment, Stephanie blinks and can’t put two and two together. She remembers Lindsey was eight months pregnant when she died – the newspaper accounts had confirmed that. Stephanie looks at the marriage certificate again and does the maths. Lindsey must have been three months pregnant when they married in August. Why hadn’t Patrick told her that?
When Patrick arrives home from work, the twins are in the playpen and his wife is lying on the sofa in the living room, her eyes closed.
‘Stephanie?’ he whispers. If she’s asleep he’ll let her rest as long as she wants. But her eyes pop open and she sits up abruptly.
‘When did you get home?’ she asks quickly.
‘Just now,’ he says. ‘Everything all right?’
‘I was asleep. I shouldn’t fall asleep when the babies are awake.’
‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. They’re fine in the playpen – you don’t have to watch them every minute. Our parents didn’t do that, and we survived.’
‘But I didn’t even hear you come in.’ She brushes her hair back from her face.
He notices then that Stephanie seems agitated, even angry. ‘What’s wrong?’
She looks up at him coldly and says, ‘I found a key. Taped to one of the drawers of your filing cabinet.’ She digs into the pocket of her jeans and holds it up.
He feels himself colouring. ‘What were you doing looking in my filing cabinets?’
‘Can you blame me?’ Her voice is sharp.
He realizes that she has a point. ‘No. I guess not.’
‘I found your secret safety deposit box,’ Stephanie says. She’s furious at him and wants to hear his explanation. ‘I went through everything.’
‘Okay,’ Patrick says. ‘I’d forgotten about the safety deposit box. I got it long before I met you.’ He adds, his voice conciliatory, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it, but there’s nothing in there that I don’t want you to see.’
She looks at him in disbelief. ‘Seriously? Then why did you hide the key?’
‘If you remember, I had those filing cabinets before I met you. That key’s been there for years.’
She asks bluntly, ‘Why didn’t you tell me that Lindsey was three months pregnant when you married her?’