Jill comes around the island and reads over his shoulder.
‘This is him,’ Ted says. ‘I recognize him.’
Jill recognizes him too. She studies the photograph intently. Is this the man who’s destroyed their lives? She remembers how he didn’t offer a word at the memorial.
‘He’s a design engineer at a tech company,’ Ted says. They silently read his profile on LinkedIn. ‘Fuck,’ Ted says. ‘He’d probably know how to circumvent our security and plant the cameras.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. With credentials like this he could probably hack in and disarm the security system online somehow, and then just get in through a basement window or something.’
‘It must be them,’ Jill says, convinced now, her heart pounding. ‘God, I’d like to make them pay.’
But it’s going to be her and Ted, paying them. And paying Lara, and maybe John Burnley too. They’ll get the inheritance some time next summer and then they’ll have to start paying all these parasites, and they’ll go through their money in no time. They’ll be broke. Ruined. And there are too many people who think they know what they did.
Jill stares malevolently at the back of her husband’s head. She wishes she’d never agreed to his stupid plan to murder his brother. Greg probably would have been dead soon anyway, and they wouldn’t be living this unbearable nightmare.
She wishes she’d never married Ted. She wishes she’d never met him.
Chapter Forty-Nine
THAT EVENING, NADYAcomes home to find her laptop is not where she thought she left it. She was sure it was on the floor beside her bed. She checks the living room and the kitchen, but she can’t find it anywhere.
She waits nervously for Peter to get home. He’d said he would be home for supper tonight, before going out again, so she’s making something he likes. She must talk to him. She must know the truth.
Peter arrives home as she’s preparing their meal. ‘I’m making pierogies,’ she says. He merely grunts at her as he sits down, setting her nerves on edge. But she must not get annoyed or he will get defensive and he will never tell her anything. She must coax it out of him. They must not argue. She says, ‘I can’t find my laptop. You haven’t seen it, have you?’
‘What? No,’ he says. And then he looks sharply at her and gets up out of the kitchen chair. She can hear him thumping up the stairs and going down the hall to his room.
‘Fuck!’ he yells.
Her stomach contracts. She hears him come back down the stairs, and when he appears in the kitchen, his face is enraged.
‘My laptop’s gone too. They must have been stolen.’
Her stomach falls. She drops her wooden spoon in the frying pan and turns off the burner. ‘We’d better see if anything else is missing,’ she says. But she knows there’s nothing in the house worth stealing. The television is too old, and they don’t have any other electronics. She has a few pieces of old jewellery, not worth much, but important to her. She runs upstairs to her bedroom and opens her jewellery box on her dresser. Everything is there. She returns downstairs and checks the windows and the front and back doors, but she can’t tell if they’ve been tampered with. Everything looks normal. She always locks the doors when she leaves for the day. But perhaps Peter was careless.
Peter is still ranting. ‘Fuck! Fuck!’
He is so childish, she thinks, annoyed. Swearing and screaming isn’t going to help. ‘Calm down,’ she says, when they are both back in the kitchen. ‘It’s just a laptop. You can replace it.’
‘No I can’t,’ he says sullenly. ‘Not everything that’s on it.’
Is it the footage from the hidden cameras that he is so worried about? she thinks suddenly. He doesn’t go to school. He doesn’t have a job. Is that why their laptops were stolen? For a moment her courage fails her. ‘I can help you pay for a new one,’ she offers, ‘a better one.’
He looks up at her then. ‘Would you?’
‘Yes.’ She forgets about the pierogies and sits down at the table and looks at him across the tablecloth. ‘Peter, I have to ask you something. And I want you to tell me the truth.’
He looks back at her uneasily.
‘Did you and Konstantin put those cameras in the Westcotts’ house?’
‘No. You already asked me that.’
‘I know you copied my key at the corner store.’ He goes completely still. ‘You got into my phone and looked up the security code, didn’t you? Was it Konstantin’s idea?’ She sighs. ‘You asked me so many times if I thought they pushed his brother off that boat to get the money. And then you stopped asking me.’
Now he looks guilty as hell. Like he used to as a little boy when she caught him out in something.
