“Cora,” he says.
“It could have been at golf or the bar. Holy shit,” I say again. I get myself another beer and sit nervously, facing him cross-legged on the couch.
“Should we call the police?” I ask.
“Cora. No. Come on. You’re being ridiculous. Look at this list of reasons a window can break on its own,” he says, turning his phone to me. I look at the reasons: installation issues, a crack leading to spontaneous breakage, thermal stress, and a bunch of other things.
“So a freak accident is more likely? Really?” I say.
“More likely than the neighbor being a psychopath, I’d say. Wanna know who’s weird? Brenda Welenski, who already has her Christmas tree up, and it’s October. Why not randomly pick her to be the neighborhood stalker?” he says, and then picks up the remote and begins clicking through channels.
“Whoa. How can you just go back to normal? I think we should call the police.”
“Cor, come on.”
“Then, change the locks. We have to change the locks. We should have when you lost the keys to begin with,” I say, increasingly irritated.
“Fine, I will,” he says.
“Tomorrow,” I insist.
“Okay. Look. Nothing was taken, so I think we should relax,” he says, and I reluctantly agree, but he didn’t see the scary way Lucas looked, and the strange way he’s been behaving when I catch glimpses of him. No, I don’t think I will ignore this.
Finn goes to bed early because he has an early morning, but I stay downstairs, light a fire in the fireplace and wrap myself in a blanket on the couch. I’m feeling creeped out, so I get back up and turn off the living-room light so nobody can see in. I stand at the glass sliding door and think about it supposedly spontaneously shattering in the middle of the night. I look to Paige’s house, and all the windows are dark. I look to Georgia’s and see lights on and movement. Just Lucas sitting at the table in the front room hunched over a pile of papers and his laptop. I wonder what would happen if I went over and knocked—brought a bottle of wine, said I just wanted to visit?
I unplug my iPad from where it sits on the side table and curl back up in my blanket and open Google.
Lucas Kinney, I type. A ton of stuff comes up because of his job. I wouldn’t exactly call him a public figure in this size of town, but there is plenty to see about him on his various promotions, his history as a prosecutor, his profile on LinkedIn, articles he’s written about boring legal stuff. I do learn his middle name from a few of these sites. Cameron. That narrows things down a good bit.
After close to an hour of reading uninteresting bits about him, I decide I’ve earned a handful of BBQ Pringles, so I’m about to close down my iPad and go to bed when I see something. A wedding announcement. Lucas Kinney and Caterina Cattaneo, July 12, 2009. I zoom in on the photo of Lucas, who looks relatively the same, and a small-framed dark-haired woman with huge brown eyes and an expression of elation. Huh. So he was married before.
When I look up Caterina Cattaneo, nothing else comes up except a handful of Facebook profiles. It’s not hard to match her photo to her Facebook profile. When I click on it, it looks like it’s private. Hmm. I wonder ifCaterina Kinneywill produce anything further, so I search the name, then quickly decide to try to narrow it down and typeLucas and Caterina Kinney, and then I see something very unexpected. Her obituary. I feel a hot rush of adrenaline shoot through me as I click on it. It doesn’t say how she died, just information about how she was a beloved daughter and friend, stuff about the service, and that she’s survived by her husband, Lucas Kinney. I click out of it and searchCaterina Kinney death.
I skim unrelated headlines and find an article. She drowned.St. Joseph County Coroner Mike Sanchez said the cause of death is listed as undetermined after an autopsy.Oh, my God. Poor Caterina! My eyes fill, and I think about how young she was. Twenty-four, the article says.
Police were called to the home at about 6:15 p.m. Monday on a report of a possible drowning. Officers found the woman in the backyard pool. Her husband was visibly distressed. There has been no sign of foul play.
His wife died in an undetermined drowning. I want to call Paige immediately. She was there when he came over. She saw his eyes go dark. I can ask her what she uses to spy on the neighbors. Then I stop myself. No, she already thinks I’m crazy for following Finn and finding nothing. I need to do this myself.
I get on Amazon and look up surveillance cameras. Just like that, I have hundreds of options. Night vision and pairs with my phone? Yes, please. Thirty-four dollars. Click. Lucas better watch himself. Cora’s got nothin’ but time on her hands for a charitable cause.
15
GEORGIA
When he lets me out the next morning, the only reason I know I’m free is because I hear the click of the door unlocking. It doesn’t open, just a small click in the quiet darkness. The only time he’s left me down there for more than a day was months ago. It was two days, and I learned later he took Avery to a public day care while he went to work. He doesn’t want to have to do that—he doesn’t want to display any out-of-the-ordinary behavior, so one night is usually it.
When I climb the stairs, I ignore my pain and hunger. In the night I peed in the floor drain by the utility sink and drank water by putting my mouth under the tap so I didn’t give him the satisfaction of running in desperation to the bathroom or for a bottle of water.
When I reach the top of the stairs and go into the kitchen, he’s sitting, one leg crossed over the other, reading the paper and blowing on a travel mug of coffee. I ask where Avery is. He stands up, irritated, like I’m putting him out, and opens the door to the front porch. I walk slowly outside to find her playing happily in her playpen. She loves to be outside. Even in cooler weather, it’s the only thing that keeps me functioning—that small sample of a world outside. So we’re always out here. I go to pick her up, forgetting momentarily about my broken ribs. I wince and rest my hands on my knees for a minute, hunched over, trying hard to breathe through it.
Her playpen has mesh sides with pink plastic anchors; I easily remove the mesh side so it collapses so I can sit next to her and hold her to me.
After I hear Lucas slam the door and watch his car drive off, I remember the gold watch in my shoe. I don’t know where he’s going, since it’s late in the morning on a weekend so not work. I have to be careful, because he could come back anytime, and he’s always watching. Even more carefully after yesterday.
I spent hours last night thinking of where to hide it, and then I recalled a quarter-size tear in the vinyl cushion of one of the porch chairs. I leave the ID where it is, but I slip the small metal watch out of my shoe and into my hand and eye the chair. I don’t look up at the camera. It’s not a time we would take a nap, so I can’t freeze it, and I’m still not sure he didn’t find out about that. It would be like him to wait so he could punish me again. My only choice is to do it anyway and be careful. I sit in the chair. Avery giggles at me in her fuzzy ladybug sweater and matching little hat. I smile back at her and slowly run my hands down the sides of the chair until my fingers find the hole on the right side. It’s smaller than I thought.
With one hand, I tear it a little wider so the watch can fit, then I push the watch inside the cushion bit by tiny bit, moving as little as possible so it will appear as if I’m just sitting, if not a bit nervously, because why wouldn’t I be?
