The Kept Woman Page 6

  “Shut up.” Sara’s throat strained around the words. “She went through my things. Our things.”

  Will rubbed his jaw with his fingers. He glanced back at the balcony.

  “You changed the locks on your doors last year.” At least Sara knew this was the truth. He’d given her a new key. She had seen the new dead bolts. “Did you give her a key, too?”

  He shook his head.

  “How long have you known that she’s been breaking into your house?”

  He shrugged.

  “Are you going to answer me?”

  “You told me to shut up.”

  Sara tasted bile in her mouth. She had left her work laptop at Will’s. Her entire life was on that thing—patient files, e-mails, her address book, her calendar, her personal photographs. Had Angie guessed her password? Had she gone through Sara’s overnight bag? Had she worn Sara’s clothes? What else had she stolen?

  “Look,” Will said. “I’m not even sure she was in the house. It’s just that sometimes stuff was moved. Or maybe you moved it. Or I did. Or—”

  “Really? That’s what you thought?” Will was congenitally tidy. He always put everything back in its place, and Sara was careful to do the same when she was in his house. “Why didn’t you change the locks again?”

  “For what? Do you think it’s that easy to stop her? That I can actually control her?” He sounded baffled by the question, and maybe he was, because as stubborn as Will could be, as strong as he was, Angie was always the one who dictated the terms of their relationship. She was like an older sister who wanted to protect him. Like a twisted lover who used sex to control him. Like a hateful wife who didn’t want to be married, but didn’t want to let him go. Angie loved him. She hated him. She needed him. She disappeared, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, months, more than once for a full year. That she always came back had been the only constant in Will’s life for almost three decades.

  Sara asked, “Have you really been looking for her?”

  “I showed you the divorce papers.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  There was a flicker of anger in his eyes. “Yes.”

  “Have you seen her before without telling me?” A bitter panic filled her mouth. “Have you been with her?”

  The anger glowed white-hot, as if she had no right to ask the question. “No, Sara. I haven’t been fucking her behind your back.”

  Was he telling the truth? Could she trust what he was saying? Sara had upended her life for this man. She had silenced her gut instinct. She had compromised her morals. She had taken this job. She had made a complete fool of herself in front of everyone she worked with. Not to mention what her family would think, because there was no way to hide this awfulness from them without turning herself into a bigger liar than Will.

  He asked, “Do you think she’s still alive?”

  “I don’t know.” The truth had the benefit of a cruel uncertainty.

  Will looked at his watch. He was actually timing this, waiting for the second the lift came back up so he could jump on his white horse and save Angie yet again.

  They had looked at open houses yesterday, the day after he’d seen his wife. They were out for a walk, and they had joked that lookie-looing air-conditioned houses was a good excuse to get out of the heat. Unbidden, Sara had found herself thinking about coming down that particular set of stairs to kiss Will hello or planting flowers in that yard while Will cut the grass or standing in that kitchen eating late-night ice cream with Will when what she should’ve really been thinking about was what kind of lock she should put on her fucking bedside drawer.

  “Christ.” Sara covered her face with both hands. She wanted to wash herself with lye.

  “She wouldn’t give up.” Will picked at his eyebrow, a nervous tic Sara had noticed the first time they’d met. “Angie. She wouldn’t give up. Even if she was hurt.”

  Sara didn’t respond, but he was right. Angie was a cockroach. She left disease wherever she went, and nothing could destroy her.

  Will said, “Her car isn’t here. But her key is. But she could have another one. A key.” He dropped his hand. “She was a cop. She was the toughest girl at the home. Tougher than the boys. Tougher than me, sometimes. She knows how to handle herself. She has people, a network, who would help her if she was in trouble. If she was hurt.”

  Every word he said was like a dagger.

  “Right?” Will said. “If anyone could survive this, it’s Angie?”

  Sara shook her head. She couldn’t have this conversation. “What am I supposed to do here, Will? Reassure you? Comfort you? Tell you it’s okay that you deceived me? That you knew she was violating my privacy—our privacy—but you let it happen anyway?” Sara put her hand over her mouth, because sounding shrill would not get them through this. “I know that part of you will always have feelings for her. She’s been an important part of your life for almost thirty years. I accept that. I understand that you are connected to her because of what you survived, but you and I are together. At least I thought we were. I need you to be honest with me.”

  Will shook his head, as if this was a simple misunderstanding. “I am being honest. She was parked on the street. We didn’t talk. I guess I should’ve told you.”

  Sara bit down hard on the guess.

  Again, he glanced back at the opening where the lift would come. “It’s been longer than five minutes.”

  “Will.” What little remained of her pride drained away. “Please. Just tell me what you want me to do. Please.” Sara grabbed his hand before she could stop herself. She couldn’t stand the feeling that he was slipping away. “Should I give you some time? If that’s what you need, just tell me.”

  He looked down at their hands.

  “Talk to me. Please.”

  His thumb stroked the back of her fingers. Was he trying to think of a way to leave her? Was there more that he hadn’t confessed?

  She felt her heart start to shake in her chest. “If you need to work through this alone, then tell me. I can take it. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

  He kept stroking her hand. Sara remembered the first time Will had touched her like this. They were in the basement of the hospital. The feel of his skin against hers had set off an explosion inside of her body. Her heart had fluttered in her chest the same way it was fluttering now. Except that time, she was filled with hope. Now, she was flooded with dread.

  “Will?”

  He cleared his throat. He tightened his grip on her hand. She held her breath as she waited for his words, wondering if this was the end of their relationship or just another giant mountain they had to scale.

  He said, “Can you pick up Betty?”

  Sara’s brain couldn’t process the request. “What?”

  “She’s at the vet and . . .” He took a stuttered breath. He held on tight to her hand. “I don’t know how late I’ll be. Can you pick her up?”

  Sara felt her mouth open, then close, then open again.

  “They told me she would—” He paused. She saw his Adam’s apple work as he swallowed. “They said to come at five, but maybe you can call to see if you can pick her up earlier, because they said she’d be finished by noon, but the anesthesia—”

  “Yes.” Sara didn’t know what else to do but relent. “I’ll take care of her.”

  He let out a long, slow breath, as if figuring out what to do with Betty was the most difficult part of this conversation. “Thank you.”

  Charlie Reed came up the stairs, his footsteps unnaturally heavy to announce his arrival. He carried two heavy-looking duffel bags, one in each hand.

  He told them, “Stairs are cleared, so no more death-trap elevator.” His mouth went into a tight smile under his handlebar mustache. “Will, Amanda’s waiting in the car.”

  Will’s hand slipped from Sara’s. He took the stairs two at a time, sidestepping Charlie as he made a quick descent.

  Sara stared after him, not sure what had just happened or how she w
as supposed to feel about it. She pressed her hand to her chest to make sure that her heart was still beating. The quick taps were the same as if she’d just run a marathon.

  “Goodness.” Charlie had reached the top of the stairs. He dropped both the duffels. He clasped his hands together as he walked toward Sara. “I’m trying to think about how to make this more uncomfortable. Should I take off my pants? Burst into song?”

  Sara tried to laugh, but it came out sounding more like a cry. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize to me.” Charlie’s smile was genuinely kind. He pulled a bottle of water out of one of the many pockets in his cargo pants. “You need to drink all of this. It’s officially eleventy billion degrees in here.”

  Sara made herself smile because he was trying.

  “Option one,” Charlie began. “Daytime drinking. It has its pros and cons.”

  Sara could only think of the pros. She hadn’t had an alcoholic beverage in over a year. Will hated the taste. “Option two?”

  He indicated the building, which was still an active crime scene.

  “The drinking is tempting,” Sara told him, feeling every single word to her core. “But let’s talk about what we need to do. Harding’s body can be removed. We’ll need at least four people.”

  “I asked for six because of the stairs. ETA is forty minutes out.”

  Sara looked at her watch. Her eyes blurred. She could only guess at the time. “They’ll need a few hours to do the prep. I’ll start the autopsy after lunch.” Betty’s vet would not release her before five, especially to Sara. The man had a chip on his shoulder about not being a people doctor. “I guess the ABO testing is at the top of my list. Do we have Angie’s blood type yet?”

  “Amanda said she’d text it to you as soon as she finds out. Meanwhile, I’ve asked one of the techs to collect samples from the blood. He’ll probably take about half an hour. As you can see, the walls are practically black with graffiti, so I told him to just collect what’s visible and triple check his labels. He’s slow, but thorough.” Charlie paused for a breath. “Until then, you can help me set up the black lights and photograph the luminol reactions, or you can sit in the coolness of the crime scene van and wait for the samples so you can work your magic.”

  Sara longed to be alone in the van, but she said, “I’ll help you.” She took a mouthful of water. Her stomach roiled at the cold liquid. It was the lipstick. She couldn’t get her mind off Angie standing at the mirror in Will’s bathroom, testing Sara’s makeup, taking what she wanted. That’s what Angie Polaski did. She took things that belonged to other people.

  Charlie asked, “You okay?”

  “Absolutely.” Sara carefully screwed the cap back on the water bottle. She asked Charlie, “What else?”

  “We’re still cataloguing evidence. That should take three, maybe four days. Harding’s car has cooled down enough to process, though I doubt we’ll find much. The thing is toast.” He turned around as a tech made his way up the stairs. The young man was dressed in a hoodless Tyvek suit. He wore a hair net, his ponytail sticking out like an arrow at the back of his head. There was an ornate red and blue cross tattooed on the side of his neck. His chin showed a smattering of a goatee and his eyebrow was pierced.

  Charlie provided, “Gary Quintana. He came straight to us from tech school. Super smart, really wants to learn. Don’t let his crazy look fool you. He does foster care for rescue cats. And he’s a vegan.”

  Sara smiled and nodded as if she was actually following what Charlie was saying. She could feel her heart pulsing inside her throat. Her stomach had turned sour. She prayed she would not get sick.

  Charlie clasped together his hands. “So, I’ve got all my fancy camera equipment and lights and—”

  “I’m sorry,” Sara interrupted. She put her hand to her chest again, certain that Charlie could see her heart pounding underneath. “Do you mind if I have a minute?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll start setting up in the first room. Just pop in when you’re ready.”

  Sara could barely choke out a thank-you. She walked across the balcony toward the far set of stairs. She passed the room where Dale Harding had died, feeling like she’d committed the worst kind of sin for letting her life melt down when the man was lying dead. She stopped in front of the rainbow-eyed unicorn at the top of the stairs. Her stomach pitched like a tiny ship in the middle of an ocean. Sara closed her eyes. She waited out the nausea. Then she took out her iPhone because it offered the only socially acceptable excuse to stand silently with her head bent down.

  There was a text from her sister. Tessa was a missionary in South Africa. She’d sent a photo of her daughter building a mud castle with help from some of the local kids.

  Sara pulled up the keyboard. She typed, angie is back, but didn’t send the text. She stared at the words. She deleted the last two and wrote: angie might be dead. Her thumb hovered over “send,” but she couldn’t press it.

  Sara had testified at several murder trials where phone data came into play. She envisioned herself on the witness stand explaining to a jury why her little sister had sent back a smiley face at the news that Will’s wife might be dead. She deleted the unsent text and stared at the photo of her niece until her stomach settled and she didn’t feel like flinging herself down the stairs anymore.

  Sara had never fully understood Will and Angie’s screwed-up relationship. It was something she’d come to accept as one of those things you tolerated when you were in love with someone, like the fact that he refused to eat vegetables or that he was completely blind to the toilet paper roll being empty. Angie was an addiction. She was a disease.

  Everybody had a past.

  Sara had been married before. She had been deeply, irrevocably in love with a man with whom she would’ve happily spent the rest of her life. But he had died, and she had forced herself to move on. Eventually. Slowly. She had left the small town where she grew up. Left her family. Left everything she had ever known to move to Atlanta and start over. And then Will had come along.

  Had it been love at first sight? Meeting Will was more like an awakening. At the time, Sara had been a widow for three years. She was working double shifts at Grady Hospital, going home, then going back to work, and that was her life. And then Will had walked into the emergency room. Sara had felt something stir deep inside of her, like a winter flower poking its head out of the snow. He was handsome. He was smart. He was funny. He was also very, very complicated. Will would be the first to admit that he had enough baggage to fill every airplane in the sky. And Angie was only part of it.

  For most of her professional life, Sara had worked as either a pediatrician or a medical examiner. Between the two jobs, she had seen the countless reprehensible ways that people took out their rage on children. Not until Will did she truly understand what happened when these abused kids grew up. Will’s scars were both emotional and physical. He didn’t trust people—at least not enough. Getting him to talk about his feelings was like pulling teeth. Actually, getting him to talk about anything of true importance was like pulling the Titanic through quicksand. With a shoestring.

  They had been together for three months before he would even acknowledge the scars on his body. Almost a year passed before he told Sara some of the causes, but not the details, and certainly not the emotions behind them. She had learned to take his cue and not ask questions. She ran her hands along his back and pretended the perfect, square imprint from a belt buckle was not there. She kissed his mouth and ignored the scar where his lip had been busted into two pieces. She only bought him long-sleeved shirts because she knew that he didn’t want anyone to see where he’d taken a razor to his forearm.

  For Angie.

  He had tried to kill himself for Angie. Not because she rejected him, but because as kids, they were both placed in a foster home with a man who would not keep his hands off Angie. She had cried wolf before. She wasn’t the kind of girl the police listened to. At fourteen, she already had a record. S
o Will had taken a razor blade and cut open his forearm in a six-inch line up from his wrist because he knew that an emergency room visit was the one thing they couldn’t ignore.

  This wasn’t the first or last time he had risked his life for Angie Polaski. It had taken Will years to break the hold she had over him. But was that hold really broken? Was he just understandably upset that someone he’d known for almost the entirety of his life was probably dead?

  Sara could not stop going back to the lipstick. That’s all she could focus on, because the additional violations the lipstick signified were too much to handle. Will knew that Angie was breaking into his house. He could lay down his life for her, but he couldn’t be bothered to protect Sara’s privacy.

  She shook her head. At least she knew where she fell on his list of priorities: right behind Betty.

  Sara put her phone back in her pocket. She unhooked her glasses from her collar. The lenses were smeared. The building was insufferably hot. Everything was covered in sweat. She found a tissue in her pocket and rubbed the lenses with purpose.

  She supposed one good thing about picking up Betty was that Will would eventually have to come by and get her. Which was ludicrous. Why had Sara given him so much power? She was a grown woman. She shouldn’t feel like she was waiting for some boy to check yes or no on a note that she had slipped inside his locker.

  Sara checked the lenses. She squinted at a smudge, about to curse herself for ruining another pair of glasses when she realized the smudge was not on the lens. It was on the unicorn behind it.

  She slid on her glasses. She took a closer look. The unicorn was life-sized, if you could assume a unicorn was the same size as a horse. His head was tilted slightly as he gazed down the stairs. The creature’s rainbow eye was about her shoulder height. Centered on the green and blue stripe in his iris was a hole that was around the size of a dime. Specks of gray concrete were chipped out, which is what she had taken for a smudge on her lens. Sara looked down at the ground. Concrete dust covered cigarette butts and crack pipes. The dust had fallen recently.