CHAPTER 21
My mother had assured me when Steven and I first married that some dishes were impossible to screw up. Theoretically, no one should need a recipe to throw together a decent chicken soup or a simple meat loaf, but certain things about motherhood had always eluded me and cooking had been one of them. Apparently, marriage had been the other.
The pan in the oven was bubbling, browning at the edges. I cracked the oven door and gave it a cautious sniff. I’d found the casserole recipe online—which was more than I could say about my search for Harris’s victims—and the fact that I already had all the ingredients in my kitchen had felt like a small victory.
My search last night hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped. With only first names and physical descriptions to go on, I’d spent hours combing individual profiles, narrowing possibilities. Some, I’d felt certain I’d managed to identify. And after a bit of hunting and pecking through other social media pages, I was able to weed them out as possible culprits. Some had moved. One was in the hospital.Some had posted photos of other family activities or events they’d attended that night. But a handful of names still eluded me. More than a few had deleted their networking profiles from the Facebook group altogether, which had made them impossible to find.
I set the table, put a load of clothes in the wash, made the beds, and scooped a mountain of toys off the living room floor. I’d given Vero the day off for her midterm exams and had spent the day scrubbing cake frosting stains out of the carpet, researching the names of Harris’s possible victims, and catching up on chores.
A car door slammed in the garage. I looked up from the dishwasher as Vero blew into the kitchen, dropped her purse on the counter, and kicked off a pair of black stilettos. I stacked a few clean dishes on my arm and set them on the table, taking in her sharp tailored suit and crisp white collar, her sleek French twist, and her bloodred lipstick. These were not Monday-afternoon-community-college clothes. These were not even Monday-hot-lunch-date clothes. These were high-dollar-accounting-firm-job-interview clothes. And a small part of me worried about where Vero had been all afternoon.
We hadn’t really talked since the day before Delia’s party. I hadn’t even had a chance to ask her about her date. I’d recapped my conversation with Theresa as we’d cleaned up after the party. Then we’d eaten cold pizza for dinner, Vero had studied for her exam, and I had shut myself in my office to write.
“How was your midterm?” I asked, hoping she wasn’t about to give me her notice and tell me she’d found a better job. One that came with health insurance and paid sick days and didn’t involve diapers. Or corpses.
She shrugged, peeling off her sunglasses as she wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?” She cracked open the oven and peered inside.
“Tuna casserole.”
She fanned at the billow of smoke that poured out. “Is it supposed to be black?”
Vero leapt aside as I flung open the oven door and ran to open the windows before the smoke alarms blared to life. I was standing on a kitchen chair, waving a dish towel at the detector on the ceiling, when Vero reached in her purse and slapped a brick of cash on the counter. “I’m not eating that. We’re ordering takeout.”
I dropped the towel, nearly falling off the chair as I gaped at the thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. I scrambled down to shut the windows and snap the curtains closed. “What is that?” I asked, jabbing a finger at the money.
“That,” Vero said, “is thirty-seven thousand and five hundred dollars minus forty percent. You can buy me dinner to thank me.”
“For what?”
“For meeting with Irina Borovkov and collecting half of our money up front.” Every ounce of breath left my lungs. My knees buckled, and I slid down onto the chair I’d been standing on. “Finn? Finlay, what’s wrong?” Vero kicked the leg of my seat, and I swung my gaze up to meet hers.
“Do you haveanyidea who that woman’s husband is?” My voice was eerily quiet, disproportionately small compared to the depth of my panic.
Vero turned her back on me with a dismissive wave. She opened the refrigerator. “Sure. Irina told me all about him. The guy sounds like bad news. I’m pretty sure we can do this with a clean conscience.” Irina, Vero had called her, as if they were already old friends.
“Vero,” I said in a tightly controlled voice. “Andrei Borovkov is an enforcer for the Russian mob. He murders people for a living.He cuts people’s throats. Like those three men they found in that warehouse in Herndon over the summer.”
“Like I said. Bad news. I’m sure there will be plenty of people who…” Vero closed the refrigerator. She turned to face me, knuckles white around her Coke. “Wait. Run that by me again. I might have misheard that last part.”
I buried my head in my hands. “We were supposed to be severing ties, getting rid of every scrap of evidence! Do you have any idea what this means?”
I jumped out of my skin as Vero popped the top on her Coke can. She set the can down hard on the table, snatched up the money, and waved it at me. “It means you can afford a decent divorce lawyer and hold on to your kids. That’s what this means!”
I stared at her, dumbstruck. Last night, I’d told Vero every word Theresa had said, about how they were buying Delia’s affection and I had no money left for an attorney. About how Theresa was going to take my children from me, even though she didn’t want them. All that time, I’d been fussing about Steven and his damn Dreamhouse when I should have been telling Vero what I’d learned about Andrei Borovkov.
“We are not taking this money!” I said, shoving it back at her. We’d paid all my debts. I was finally right-side up. As long as I didn’t do anything stupid, I stood a better chance at holding on to Delia and Zach. “You’re going to call that woman right now and you’re going to tell her it was all a misunderstanding. Then you’re going to give her the money back.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I spent some of it.”
“How much?”
“Forty percent.”
My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth as I did the math in my head. “You spent fifteenthousanddollars in one afternoon?” She nodded, looking contrite as she hunched over her Coke. “On what?”
