The Last Widow Read online

  Epigraph

  “We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.”

  – Kurt Vonnegut

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Three

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Karin Slaughter

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  Sunday, July 7, 2019

  Prologue

  Michelle Spivey jogged through the back of the store, frantically scanning each aisle for her daughter, panicked thoughts circling her brain: How did I lose sight of her I am a horrible mother my baby was kidnapped by a pedophile or a human trafficker should I flag store security or call the police or—

  Ashley.

  Michelle stopped so abruptly that her shoe snicked against the floor. She took a sharp breath, trying to force her heart back into a normal rhythm. Her daughter was not being sold into slavery. She was at the make-up counter trying on samples.

  The relief started to dissipate as the panic burned off.

  Her eleven-year-old daughter.

  At the make-up counter.

  After they had told Ashley that she could not under any circumstances wear make-up until her twelfth birthday, and then it would only be blush and lip gloss, no matter what her friends were doing, end of story.

  Michelle pressed her hand to her chest. She slowly walked up the aisle, giving herself time to transition into a reasoned and logical person.

  Ashley’s back was to Michelle as she examined lipstick shades. She twisted the tubes with an expert flick of her wrist because of course when she was with her friends, Ashley tried on all their make-up and they practiced on each other because that was what girls did.

  Some girls, at least. Michelle had never felt that pull toward primping. She could still recall her own mother’s screeching tone when Michelle had refused to shave her legs: You’ll never be able to wear pantyhose!

  Michelle’s response: Thank God!

  That was years ago. Her mother was long gone. Michelle was a grown woman with her own child and like every woman, she had vowed not to make her mother’s mistakes.

  Had she over-corrected?

  Were her general tomboyish tendencies punishing her daughter? Was Ashley really old enough to wear make-up, but because Michelle had no interest in eyeliners and bronzers and whatever else it was that Ashley watched for endless hours on YouTube, she was depriving her daughter of a certain type of girl’s passage into womanhood?

  Michelle had done the research on juvenile milestones. Eleven was an important age, a so-called benchmark year, the point at which children had attained roughly 50 percent of the power. You had to start negotiating rather than simply ordering them around. Which was very well-reasoned in the abstract but in practice was terrifying.

  “Oh!” Ashley saw her mother and frantically jammed the lipstick into the display. “I was—”

  “It’s all right.” Michelle stroked back her daughter’s long hair. So many bottles of shampoo in the shower, and conditioner, and soaps and moisturizers when Michelle’s only beauty routine involved sweat-proof sunscreen.

  “Sorry.” Ashley wiped at the smear of lip gloss on her mouth.

  “It’s pretty,” Michelle tried.

  “Really?” Ashley beamed at her in a way that tugged every string of Michelle’s heart. “Did you see this?” She meant the lip gloss display. “They have one that’s tinted, so it’s supposed to last longer. But this one has cherry flavoring, and Hailey says b—”

  Silently, Michelle filled in the words, boys like it more.

  The assorted Hemsworths on Ashley’s bedroom walls had not gone unnoticed.

  Michelle asked, “Which do you like most?”

  “Well . . .” Ashley shrugged, but there was not much an eleven-year-old did not have an opinion on. “I guess the tinted type lasts longer, right?”

  Michelle offered, “That makes sense.”

  Ashley was still weighing the two items. “The cherry kind of tastes like chemicals? Like, I always chew—I mean, if I wore it, I would probably chew it off because it would irritate me?”

  Michelle nodded, biting back the polemic raging inside her: You are beautiful, you are smart, you are so funny and talented and you should only do things that make you happy because that’s what attracts the worthy boys who think that the happy, secure girls are the interesting ones.

  Instead, she told Ashley, “Pick the one you like and I’ll give you an advance on your allowance.”

  “Mom!” She screamed so loudly that people looked up. The dancing that followed was more Tigger than Shakira. “Are you serious? You guys said—”

  You guys. Michelle gave an inward groan. How to explain this sudden turnabout when they had agreed that Ashley would not wear make-up until she was twelve?

  It’s only lip gloss!

  She’ll be twelve in five months!

  I know we agreed not until her actual birthday but you let her have that iPhone!

  That would be the trick. Turn it around and make it about the iPhone, because Michelle had purely by fate been the one who’d died on that particular hill.

  Michelle told her daughter, “I’ll handle the boss. Just lip gloss, though. Nothing else. Pick the one that makes you happy.”

  And it did make her happy. So happy that Michelle felt herself smiling at the woman in the checkout line, who surely understood that the glittery tube of candy pink Sassafras Yo Ass! was not for the thirty-nine-year-old woman in running shorts with her sweaty hair scooped into a baseball cap.

  “This—” Ashley was so gleeful she could barely speak. “This is so great, Mom. I love you so much, and I’ll be responsible. So responsible.”

  Michelle’s smile must have shown the early stages of rigor mortis as she started to load up their purchases into cloth bags.

  The iPhone. She had to make it about the iPhone, because they had agreed about that, too, but then all of Ashley’s friends had shown up at summer camp with one and the No absolutely not had turned into I couldn’t let her be the only kid without one while Michelle was away at a conference.

  Ashley happily scooped up the bags and headed for the exit. Her iPhone was already out. Her thumb slid across the screen as she alerted her friends to the lip gloss, likely predicting that in a week’s time, she’d be sporting blue eyeshadow and doing that curve thing at the edges of her eyes that made girls look like cats.

  Michelle felt herself start to catastrophize.

  Ashley could get conjunctivitis or sties or blepharitis from sharing eye make-up. Herpes simplex virus or hep C from lip gloss and lip liner, not to mention she could scratch her cornea with a mascara wand. Didn’t some lipsticks contain heavy metals and lead? Staph, strep, E. coli. What the hell had Michelle been thinking? She could be poisoning her own daughter. There were hundreds of thousands of proven studies about surface contaminants as opposed to the relative handfuls positing the indirect correlation between brain tumors and cell phones.

  Up ahead, Ashley laughed. Her friends were texting back. She swung the bags wildly as she crossed the parking lot. She was eleven, not twelve, and twelve was still terribly young, wasn’t it? Because make-up sent a signal. It telegraphed an interest in being interested in, which was a horribly non-feminist thing to say but this was the real world and her daughter was still a baby who knew nothing about rebuffing unwanted attention.

  Michelle silently shook her head. Such a slippery slope. From lip gloss to MRSA to Phyllis Schlafly. She had to lock down her wild thoughts so that by the time she got home, she could present a reasoned explanation for buying Ashley make-up when they had made a solemn, parental vow not to.

  As they had with the iPhone.

  She reached into her purse to find her keys. It was dark outside. The overhead lights weren’t enough, or maybe she needed her glasses because she was getting old—was already old enough to have a daughter who wanted to send signals to boys. She could be a grandmother in a few years’ time. The thought made her stomach somersault into a vat of anxiety. Why hadn’t she bought wine?

  She glanced up to make sure Ashley hadn’t bumped into a car or fallen off a cliff while she was texting.

  Michelle felt her mouth drop open.

  A van slid to a stop beside her daughter.

  The side door rolled open.

  A man jumped out.

  Michelle gripped her keys. She bolted into a full-out run, cutting the distance between herself and her daughter.

  She started to scream, but it was too late.

  Ashley had run off, just like they had taught her to do.

  Which was fine, because the man did not want Ashley.

  He wanted Michelle.

  ONE MO
NTH LATER

  Sunday, August 4, 2019

  1

  Sunday, August 4, 1:37 p.m.

  Sara Linton leaned back in her chair, mumbling a soft, “Yes, Mama.” She wondered if there would ever come a point in time when she was too old to be taken over her mother’s knee.

  “Don’t give me that placating tone.” The miasma of Cathy’s anger hung above the kitchen table as she angrily snapped a pile of green beans over a newspaper. “You’re not like your sister. You don’t flit around. There was Steve in high school, then Mason for reasons I still can’t comprehend, then Jeffrey.” She glanced up over her glasses. “If you’ve settled on Will, then settle on him.”

  Sara waited for her Aunt Bella to fill in a few missing men, but Bella just played with the string of pearls around her neck as she sipped her iced tea.

  Cathy continued, “Your father and I have been married for nearly forty years.”

  Sara tried, “I never said—”

  Bella made a sound somewhere between a cough and a cat sneezing.

  Sara didn’t heed the warning. “Mom, Will’s divorce was just finalized. I’m still trying to get a handle on my new job. We’re enjoying our lives. You should be happy for us.”

  Cathy snapped a bean like she was snapping a neck. “It was bad enough that you were seeing him while he was still married.”

  Sara took a deep breath and held it in her lungs.

  She looked at the clock on the stove.

  1:37 p.m.

  It felt like midnight and she hadn’t even had lunch yet.

  She slowly exhaled, concentrating on the wonderful odors filling the kitchen. This was why she had given up her Sunday afternoon: Fried chicken cooling on the counter. Cherry cobbler baking in the oven. Butter melting into the pan of cornbread on the stove. Biscuits, field peas, black-eyed peas, sweet potato soufflé, chocolate cake, pecan pie and ice cream thick enough to break a spoon.

  Six hours a day in the gym for the next week would not undo the damage she was about to do to her body, yet Sara’s only fear was that she’d forget to take home any leftovers.

  Cathy snapped another bean, pulling Sara out of her reverie.

  Ice tinkled in Bella’s glass.

  Sara listened for the lawn mower in the backyard. For reasons she couldn’t comprehend, Will had volunteered to serve as a weekend landscaper to her aunt. The thought of him accidentally overhearing any part of this conversation made her skin vibrate like a tuning fork.

  “Sara.” Cathy took an audible breath before picking up where she’d left off: “You’re practically living with him now. His things are in your closet. His shaving stuff, all his toiletries, are in the bathroom.”

  “Oh, honey.” Bella patted Sara’s hand. “Never share a bathroom with a man.”

  Cathy shook her head. “This will kill your father.”

  Eddie wouldn’t die, but he would not be happy in the same way that he was never happy with any of the men who wanted to date his daughters.

  Which was the reason Sara was keeping their relationship to herself.

  At least part of the reason.

  She tried to gain the upper hand, “You know, Mother, you just admitted to snooping around my house. I have a right to privacy.”

  Bella tsked. “Oh, baby, it’s so sweet that you really think that.”

  Sara tried again, “Will and I know what we’re doing. We’re not giddy teenagers passing notes in the hall. We like spending time together. That’s all that matters.”

  Cathy grunted, but Sara was not stupid enough to mistake the ensuing silence for acquiescence.

  Bella said, “Well, I’m the expert here. I’ve been married five times, and—”

  “Six,” Cathy interrupted.

  “Sister, you know that was annulled. What I’m saying is, let the child figure out what she wants on her own.”

  “I’m not telling her what to do. I’m giving her advice. If she’s not serious about Will, then she needs to move on and find a man she’s serious about. She’s too logical for casual relationships.”

  “‘It’s better to be without logic than without feeling.’”

  “I would hardly consider Charlotte Brontë an expert on my daughter’s emotional well-being.”

  Sara rubbed her temples, trying to stave off a headache. Her stomach grumbled but lunch wouldn’t be served until two, which didn’t matter because if she kept having this conversation, one or maybe all three of them were going to die in this kitchen.

  Bella asked, “Sugar, did you see this story?”

  Sara looked up.

  “Don’t you think she killed her wife because she’s having an affair? I mean, one of them is having an affair, so the wife killed the affair-haver.” She winked at Sara. “This was what the conservatives were worried about. Gay marriage has rendered pronouns immaterial.”

  Sara was having a hard time tracking until she realized that Bella was pointing to an article in the newspaper. Michelle Spivey had been abducted from a shopping center parking lot four weeks ago. She was a scientist with the Centers for Disease Control, which meant that the FBI had taken over the investigation. The photo in the paper was from Michelle’s driver’s license. It showed an attractive woman in her late thirties with a spark in her eye that even the crappy camera at the DMV had managed to capture.

  Bella asked, “Have you been following the story?”

  Sara shook her head. Unwanted tears welled into her eyes. Her husband had been killed five years ago. The only thing she could think of that would be worse than losing someone she loved was never knowing whether or not that person was truly gone.

  Bella said, “I’m going with murder for hire. That’s what usually turns out to be the case. The wife traded up for a newer model and had to get rid of the old one.”

  Sara should’ve dropped it because Cathy was clearly getting worked up. But, because Cathy was clearly getting worked up, Sara told Bella, “I dunno. Her daughter was there when it happened. She saw her mother being dragged into a van. It’s probably naive to say this, but I don’t think her other mother would do something like that to their child.”

  “Fred Tokars had his wife shot in front of his kids.”

  “That was for the life insurance, I think? Plus, wasn’t his business shady, and there was some mob connection?”

  “And he was a man. Don’t women tend to kill with their hands?”

  “For the love of God.” Cathy finally broke. “Could we please not talk about murder on the Lord’s day? And Sister, you of all people should not be discussing cheating spouses.”

  Bella rattled the ice in her empty glass. “Wouldn’t a mojito be nice in this heat?”

  Cathy clapped her hands together, finished with the green beans. She told Bella, “You’re not helping.”

  “Oh, Sister, one should never look to Bella for help.”

  Sara waited for Cathy to turn her back before she wiped her eyes. Bella hadn’t missed her sudden tears, which meant that as soon as Sara had left the kitchen, they would both be talking about the fact that she had been on the verge of crying because—why? Sara was at a loss to explain her weepiness. Lately, anything from a sad commercial to a love song on the radio could set her off.

  She picked up the newspaper and pretended to read the story. There were no updates on Michelle’s disappearance. A month was too long. Even her wife had stopped pleading for her safe return and was begging whoever had taken Michelle to please just let them know where they could find the body.

  Sara sniffed. Her nose had started running. Instead of reaching for a paper napkin from the pile, she used the back of her hand.

  She didn’t know Michelle Spivey, but last year she had briefly met her wife, Theresa Lee, at an Emory Medical School alumni mixer. Lee was an orthopedist and professor at Emory. Michelle was an epidemiologist at the CDC. According to the article, the two were married in 2015, which likely meant they’d tied the knot as soon as they were legally able. They had been together for fifteen years before that. Sara assumed that after two decades, they’d figured out the two most common causes of divorce: the acceptable temperature setting for the thermostat and what level of criminal act it was to pretend you didn’t know the dishwasher was ready to be emptied.

  Then again, she was not the marriage expert in the room.

  “Sara?” Cathy had her back to the counter, arms crossed. “I’m just going to be blunt.”