Текст книги "The Perfect Stranger"

Автор книги: Wendy Corsi Staub

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Sweet Dreams

When I first found my way here, I was exhausted. Not just from the physical and emotional burden of illness, but from sheer lack of sleep. I had always been a person who could climb into bed, close my eyes, fall asleep, and not wake up until morning.

Now I spent night after night lying awake, tossing and turning.

Oh, how I wanted to escape. But there was no escape, not really. Sleep—whenever I finally managed to find it—might have brought a few blessed hours’ respite, but then I’d jerk my eyes open, panicked by the vague sense that something terrible had happened, and the realization—Bam!—that it had. It was the exact opposite of waking from a terrible nightmare to the broad daylight relief that it was just a dream. The nightmare greeted me with the dawn and haunted my every waking moment. In the end, that was worse than not sleeping at all.

It was on one of those sleepless nights that I stumbled across a cancer blog for the first time. And on another, I worked up the nerve to make a comment. Not long after that, I remember, I began to chat privately with some of you, and those sleepless nights became a little less lonely, and less scary.

I remember one online exchange I had with Meredith when she wrote, Some morning—not soon, but someday—you’re going to wake up and not have that awful feeling that something is terribly wrong.

Wake up? I wrote back. You’re implying I’m actually going to sleep again.

You will, Meredith told me. I promise.

She was right.

Eventually, I started sleeping again. Eventually, I started waking up the old way—slowly stirring to consciousness. Eventually, things were back to the way they used to be. Back to normal.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s getting late. I’m going to climb into bed, close my eyes, fall asleep, and not wake up until morning.

—Excerpt from Landry’s blog, The Breast Cancer Diaries

Chapter 11

Back at the hotel, Landry returns to her room under the pretext of freshening up before Detective Burns arrives.

But the moment she closes the door behind her, she dials Rob’s cell phone. He picks up on the first ring: “How was it?”

“The funeral? It was . . . you know. Hard. Sad. Awful.”

“I’m sorry.”

She changes the subject. “Did you find the insurance cards?”

“Yeah, you were right. They were on the bulletin board. I don’t know how I missed them when I looked.”

She closes her eyes for a second, smiling. Then it’s back to the business at hand: “Listen—I just wanted to run something by you quickly.” She tells him about the conversation with the detective at the funeral home, and that the detective asked to meet them there at the hotel to discuss the case further.

“The first thing to remember,” Rob says, “is that this is routine. An interview, not an interrogation. They’re looking for information.”

“I know. It’s not like I’m a suspect.”

“No. I don’t know about your friends, though.”

“They’re not suspects, either.”

“Did the detective tell you that?”

“No, but—”

“Just remember that they’re strangers, Landry. For all we know—”

“Please don’t say it, Rob.”

“I won’t. Just be careful up there, okay? They obviously haven’t made an arrest yet.”

“Right. I’ll be careful.”

“And twenty-four hours from now you’ll be on your way home.”

Home. Where nothing bad can happen to her?

Doesn’t she know better than anyone that staying safely at home doesn’t guarantee that the bad things won’t touch you?

“I should go.”

“Okay. I love you,” Rob tells her. “I know they’re your friends and you want to trust them, but I can’t get past wanting to protect you. You’re the most precious thing in my world.”

She swallows hard, and can’t seem to find her voice.

He’s right to be worried. She’s worried, too. Didn’t she just admit to Elena and Kay that she believes Meredith was killed by someone who read her blog and knew she’d be alone in the house that night?

A lurker, most likely, but . . .

It could have been one of us. That’s what the police are thinking. That’s what Rob is thinking. It could have been someone posing as a blogger, someone we trusted, someone with a screen name . . .

Just because Elena and Kay turned out to be the real deal—and Meredith, too, of course—doesn’t mean the others are. Landry thinks back to all those comments she exchanged with other bloggers; all the private chats and e-mails that let them into her life, into her family’s lives . . .

Not to the extent that Meredith did, and yet . . .

Maybe Elena is right. Maybe it’s time to take a step back from blogging.

“I really wish I could be there with you when you talk to the detective,” Rob tells her.

“Because I need a lawyer present?”

“Just . . . be careful what you say and how you say it.”

“I don’t have anything to hide. You know that. And I want to do whatever I can to help them find Meredith’s killer. We all do.”

“You and the other bloggers? Who are they? Elena and Kay?”

“Right. They’re the only ones who came to Cincinnati.”

“That you know of.”

“Well, I’d know if there were others.”

“How?”

“Because I’m sure they would have mentioned it.”

“Don’t be so sure of anything right now, Landry. Okay? Don’t trust anyone.”

“What about you?” she asks, mostly just teasing. Mostly.

“You can always trust me. I love you.”

“I love you, too, and . . .” She looks at her watch. “I have to go. It’s time to meet the detective.”

It hadn’t occurred to Beck that people—everyone, it seems, with the exception of her own husband—would drift back to the house after the funeral.

Keith is on his way back to Lexington. To be fair, he’d asked her, as they left McGraw’s, if she’d really meant it when she told him he was free to leave.

“Yes, I meant it,” she said, and was surprised to realize that she really did. The marriage might not be over officially—legally, or financially—but emotionally she’s finished. It’s only a matter of time; she knows now that she’ll extract herself as soon as this trauma is behind her.

Mom would have been so upset had she lived to see her daughter’s marriage end in divorce . . .

Or would she? Maybe she’d have been happy to see her find her way out of a bad situation. Maybe she’d have invited her to come live at home while she gets back on her feet . . .

Maybe I can still do that, Beck found herself thinking for a split second before she remembered that home isn’t home anymore. Not without her mother.

The house that was once filled with love and laughter now represents only sorrow. Beck can’t imagine ever laughing again—here, or anywhere else. Can’t imagine ever loving again, ever being married again or having children . . .

“I’m so sorry,” Keith whispered in her ear before he drove off in the wrong direction as Beck climbed into the black limo with her family.

Sorry. So sorry . . .

Sorry for what?

For leaving? For her loss? For his extramarital indiscretions?

She still doesn’t know what he was apologizing about. She supposes she will, soon enough . . . if she even cares to.

Back at the house, she’d had every intention of going straight to her room to have a good cry, alone at last. Instead she’s been on kitchen duty ever since she walked in the door, trailed by half the neighborhood. People are bringing platters of food, and the doorbell keeps ringing with deliveries: flowers and fruit baskets, trays of pastries, hot meals ordered from local restaurants by well-meaning faraway friends and colleagues . . .

“You just go ahead and let us take care of serving and cleaning up,” one of the neighbor ladies told her when they first arrived.

But every few minutes, it seems, someone wants to know how to find the coffee filters, or whether there are more plastic cups, or where the garbage goes.

Or, if she manages to escape the kitchen and start making her way toward the stairs, someone inevitably waylays her to ask about a framed family photo on the wall, or show her some memento of her mother, or to tell her how sorry they all are . . .

Sorry. So sorry . . .

Everyone is sorry—but no one is sorrier than she is. Exhausted, all she can do is move from one task to another, from one well-meaning visitor to another, longing to be left alone.

“You look worn out,” her former first-grade teacher—an old friend of her mother’s—comments, after informing Beck that the powder room under the stairs is running low on toilet paper.

“It’s been a long day.”

“One of the longest days of the year, unfortunately,” the woman mentions before drifting back to the crowded dining room as Beck heads up the steps to grab a spare roll of toilet paper from the hall bathroom.

Glancing out the window on the landing, she sees that the sun is, indeed, still riding high in the sky. It won’t be setting for at least a few more hours. By then, she can’t imagine having the stamina to climb these stairs again and get ready for bed.

Maybe she should just lie down now for a quick nap. No one will miss her if she’s gone for half an hour.

She slips past the bathroom and the closed door to the master bedroom, unable to imagine ever opening it again.

She just can’t stop picturing her mother here alone at night; an intruder in the house; a violent attack . . .

We need to get rid of this house—the sooner, the better.

In her own room, she takes a moment to swap her high-heeled black pumps for a pair of loafers, not caring what they look like with her dress. Her feet ache. Her heart aches.

Oh, Mom . . .

She sinks onto the bedspread she and Mom picked out so long ago in Macy’s—they both fell in love with the splashy pattern.

“The colors remind me of the bright blue sky and yellow sunshine,” Mom said. “It’ll always be a beautiful summer day in here!”

Today doesn’t feel like a beautiful summer day inside or out. Beck massages her forehead with her fingertips and finds herself staring at her laptop on the desk across the room.

Does it hold the key to her mother’s murder? If she could just figure out the password and get into the e-mail account . . .

But what are the odds that she’ll find a clue to the killer’s identity somewhere in the files? Does she actually believe Mom was exchanging e-mails with him in advance? That it was someone Mom knew?

If it was—if it was someone I know, too, like . . . like . . .

She can’t even bring herself to entertain the thought.

Maybe she’s better off never uncovering the truth.

What does it even matter now? Mom is gone. Nothing is going to bring her back. The worst has happened; it’s in the past.

“Beck? Beck! Are you in there?” Teddy’s wife, Sue, is knocking on her bedroom door.

She hurriedly wipes tears from her eyes. “Yes, I’m in here.”

Sue opens the door. Roundly pregnant, with Beck’s sleepy-looking nephew Jordan on her hip, she asks, “Are you okay?”

Then, catching a look at Beck’s face, Sue shakes her head and answers her own question. “Of course you’re not okay. Sorry.”

“No, I’m okay. I am. Well . . .”

“You are but you’re not. No one is. I’m sorry to bother you. The minister’s wife is stuck in the powder room without toilet paper, and I can’t find any under the sink in the hall bathroom, so—”

“Are you serious?”

“No, there were just some cleaning supplies, and—”

“No, I mean about Mrs. Alpert stuck without toilet paper?” Beck finds herself grinning through her tears.

“Totally serious. She was calling through the door for help and Jordan heard her. She said there are no tissues in there or anything, so . . .”

“She can’t wipe her keister,” Jordan reports solemnly.

That does it. Beck bursts out laughing. Sue joins in, and so, after a moment, does Jordan.

Beck laughs until her sides ache—a good kind of ache—then heads back downstairs with Sue and Jordan, the e-mail account forgotten for the time being.

Lying on the bed in her hotel room, head propped against the pillows and laptop open on her lap, Kay tries to focus on the screen. She’d been hoping to catch up on some blogs, but her energy is zapped from the drive, the funeral, the anxiety over meeting Landry and Elena . . .

And now a meeting with the detective investigating Meredith’s murder?

It’s all too much. I can’t handle this. I can’t.

She’d give anything if she could throw her belongings back into the seldom-used, slightly musty-smelling suitcase she pulled last night from her mother’s attic; if she could just walk out of this hotel and go home and hide, make it all go away.

But she can’t leave Landry and Elena. They’re her friends—her family—and they need her, just as Meredith needed her. As long as the three of them stick together, everything will be okay.

A tone from her laptop’s speaker indicates that a new e-mail has arrived in her in-box.

She opens it and finds that it’s from Elena—a note to Jaycee, with both Kay and Landry on the cc list.

I’m here in Cincinnati with Landry and Kay. Meredith’s funeral was moving and very much a tearjerker, as I’m sure you would guess. The rest of us need each other now more than ever. We’ve already made plans to get together again for a girls’ weekend at Landry’s house in Alabama next weekend. Is there any way you can join us? Details to follow. I just wanted you to know that we’re thinking of you and wish you were here with us.

Kay nods with approval, glad Elena thought to include Jaycee and extend the invitation despite wrestling with some pretty serious problems of her own. Remembering what she shared about her stalker—Tony—Kay feels worried all over again, and she knows Landry does as well.

I really don’t need this kind of stress in my life. It’s dangerous . . . breast cancer patients who have daily stress have much shorter survival times . . .

What if something happens to Elena now?

What if, one by one . . .

No.

Nothing is going to happen to anyone else. It can’t.

They’re my friends. My family.

At last, after all these years, she finally knows where—and to whom—she belongs. She only prays that cruel fate won’t rip them from her life as it did Meredith.

“They’re late.” Sitting beside Crystal in the hotel lobby, Frank lifts his wrist and taps his Timex.

“One minute late.”

“Late is late.”

Crystal shrugs, considering the possibilities.

That the bloggers might have lied about where they’re staying doesn’t rank very high on the list. Nor does the prospect that they skipped town.

Either of those scenarios would mean that there’s some kind of conspiracy involved here, and Crystal doesn’t buy that for a second.

Far more likely: they lost track of time, or they dozed off, or they’re reluctant to sit down and discuss their friend’s murder . . .

Perhaps all of the above.

“They’ll be here soon, I’m sure,” she tells him.

He shrugs and continues tapping his foot. Patience is not Frank’s strong suit.

Glad the lobby is almost deserted, Crystal keeps an eye on the grouchy-looking, pockmarked teenage boy parked at the computer kiosk, who is oblivious to their presence, and on the desk clerk, who is not. She’s been casting curious glances their way ever since they arrived and arranged with the on-duty manager to conduct their questioning in a conference room down the hall.

They didn’t mention that it involves a homicide. But maybe the desk clerk has put two and two together. It’s a small town, after all; the guests might have asked her for directions to the funeral home earlier.

Or maybe the desk clerk is just being vigilant, as she should in her position.

Hell, if everyone were a little more vigilant—or nosy, as it were—her own job would be much easier.

Hearing the elevator bell ring at last, Crystal and Frank look over expectantly. The doors slide open and Landry Wells—aka BamaBelle—steps out.

Standing to greet her, Crystal notes that she’s changed out of her black dress, now wearing a pair of trim off-white linen pants with a sea-foam-colored summer cardigan. Her blond hair is caught in a neat ponytail and she’s got on a fresh coat of pink lipstick that matches her manicure and pedicure polish.

How is it that certain women—often, southern women—always manage to look so pulled together, even under duress?

Crystal—who rarely looks in a mirror after she leaves the bathroom in the morning and would never think to reapply lipstick in the middle of the day—is not one of those women.

“I’m sorry I’m late.” Landry walks quickly toward them, heeled sandals tapping on the tile floor. “I had to call home and check on my husband and kids and it took longer than I thought.”

“Do you know where the others are?” Crystal asks.

“They should be here any second. We all went to our rooms when we got back.”

“Okay. Why don’t you and I go have a quiet talk in the conference room while Detective Schneider waits here for your friends?”

“Sure.”

Crystal escorts Landry down the hall behind the front desk as the clerk pretends not to watch them over the open romance novel in her hands.

With a view of the side parking lot and part of the pool’s chain-link fence, the conference room is a no-frills rectangle that contains little more than a long table with eight chairs and a blue plastic water bottle cooler.

Crystal closes the door behind them. “Have a seat, Ms. Wells. Or do you go by Mrs.?”

“Either, but you can call me Landry.” She perches on the chair nearest the door, giving off the expectant, anxious vibe of a mom sitting in the Little League stands as her child comes up at bat, or in the audience as her kid takes a turn in a spelling bee.

She doesn’t belong here, in the middle of a murder investigation, Crystal finds herself thinking as she takes the adjacent seat at the head of the table. She should be back at home, with her family.

“All right, Landry. Let’s get started.” Crystal sets her bag on the floor, taking out her laptop and a notebook and pen, but leaving the recording equipment inside.

No need to make Landry Wells needlessly skittish. She always records witnesses she has a hunch might later become suspects, but she’s certain that won’t happen in this case. Her Internet search on Landry’s name had resulted—among other things—in a photograph from an Alabama newspaper’s society page. Snapped Saturday night at a charity ball, it depicted an elegantly dressed Landry accompanied by her husband and another couple identified as the husband’s law partner and his wife.

So there we have it—an alibi, she thought, when she noted the date.

Crystal opens the laptop and it instantly buzzes to life, already bookmarked on Landry’s most recent blog post—written several days ago, presumably before she found out about Meredith.

She flips her notebook to a clean page, picks up a pen, and clears her throat. “I just want to talk to you a little bit about your relationship with Meredith, and about her blog, and yours, and . . . I’d like your take on how the whole thing works.”

“You mean blogging?”

“The dynamic you have with other bloggers, that kind of thing.”

“Oh. Okay. Well . . .” Landry looks as though she has no idea where to begin.

“Why don’t you tell me first what made you decide to write your own blog?”

“Have you read it?”

Crystal nods. She’d first stumbled across it a few days ago, having noticed that someone named BamaBelle commented often on Meredith’s page, and tracing the comments back to the blog. She did the same with a number of others.

Today at the funeral home, after asking the three women about their online identities, she’d finally been able to connect the blog titles and screen names with real women behind them.

Afterward, when she wasn’t fruitlessly searching for a link between Jenna Coeur and Meredith Heywood, she’d spent the better part of the last hour reading—and in some cases, rereading—Landry’s, Kay’s, and Elena’s blogs, noting their interaction with Meredith, each other, and fellow bloggers.

It came as no surprise to her that the attractive, genteel southern stay-at-home-mom was behind the homey, conversational Breast Cancer Diaries, or that the reserved midwesterner wrote the staid I’m A-Okay.

The shocker was that the saucy Boobless Wonder blog was penned by a first grade teacher. But a few minutes in Elena Ferreira’s presence revealed an engaging, if somewhat frenetic, personality that seems convincingly reminiscent of the voice she uses in her blog.

Nothing unusual jumped out at Crystal in any of the blogs, other than a remarkably casual level of intimacy among a collection of strangers who had ostensibly never met in person. But then, she’s seen that phenomenon within other online communities. When people come together on the Internet, the usual social constraints fall away with the promise of anonymity.

“If you’ve read my blog,” Landry says, “then you know that I was diagnosed with breast cancer. That’s why I blog.”

Crystal shoots straight, as always. “But lots of people have breast cancer and don’t blog. Why do you?”

Perhaps taken aback, Landry tilts her head.

Crystal is about to rephrase the question, but then Landry answers it in a soft voice, as if she’s conveying a secret. Maybe she is.

In a lilting drawl that sometimes takes Crystal a moment to translate, Landry talks about the fear and shock and—more importantly—the loneliness that set in after her diagnosis. She describes the support group she visited early in her treatment, and the horror of coming face-to-face with doomed patients. She smiles faintly when she mentions her first foray onto the Internet in search of information, finding not just that, but also companionship—ultimately, friendship.

“I wasn’t isolated anymore,” she tells Crystal. “I realized these women were talking about things I could relate to. And that maybe I had something to say, too. Something I couldn’t say to the people I saw every day.”

“Because . . .”

“Because they just wouldn’t get it.”

Crystal asks her a few more questions about the evolution of Landry’s own blog before leading into how she got to know Meredith.

“She was kind of like the older sorority sister who takes a new pledge under her wing, you know?”

Crystal nods, though she doesn’t know. Not from experience. But she bets Landry does.

Sure enough, the question is met with a nod and a faint smile. “I was Alpha Gamma Delta at University of Alabama.”

“Roll Tide.”

Landry’s smile widens to a full-blown grin. “That’s right!”

“So Meredith was . . . what, like a big sister? A mentor?”

The smile fades promptly at the mention of the dead woman’s name.

She forgot, for a moment there, Crystal realizes. Forgot why we’re here; forgot her friend was murdered.

Now that Landry remembers, renewed sorrow taints her pretty face as she contemplates the question. “Maybe she was more motherly than sisterly . . . is sisterly a word?”

“You’re the writer. You tell me.”

“You know . . . it’s funny, I don’t really consider myself a writer, but . . . I guess that’s what blogging is, right? I kind of like thinking of it that way, and I know Meredith did, too. It’s what she always wanted to be.”

“A writer?” Crystal knows this—some of Meredith’s blog posts referred to the literary road not taken—but she waits for Landry to elaborate.

“We talked a lot, privately, about stuff like that. She said she’d always dreamed of writing a book, and she recently told me she’d been toying with the idea of compiling some of her blogs into a collection and trying to get it published.”

“You talked on the phone?”

“No, usually e-mail.”

“Is that how you all communicate privately?”

“That, or instant-messaging.”

“No phone.”

“Well, I can’t speak for the others—maybe some of them call each other—but we don’t. At least, we didn’t, until this week, after Meredith . . .”

Crystal nods. “And by ‘we,’ you mean . . .”

“The bloggers I’m closest to. There’s a little group of us—Meredith was a part of it.”

“And the other two women who came with you to the funeral?”

“Elena and Kay—yes, them, too.”

“Who else?”

“The others aren’t here. I’ve never met them. And one is—Nellie passed away.”

Crystal raises an eyebrow. Another one? “When? What happened?”

“Oh, it wasn’t . . . she wasn’t . . . killed. It was cancer.”

Right. Of course it was. Crystal even vaguely remembers reading about the death in past entries on several of the blogs, including Meredith’s.

But for a moment there her mind jumped to the possibility of an opportunistic serial killer preying on this vulnerable group of women, perhaps even posing as one of them . . .

Again she thinks of Jenna Coeur.

But she wasn’t a serial killer, she reminds herself. She just killed one other person . . .

Just?

Crystal wants to ask Landry if Meredith ever mentioned her, but she’s getting ahead of herself. First things first.

“So there was . . . Nellie, did you say?”

Landry nods. “She was from England. Whoa Nellie was her screen name.”

“Hang on a second.” Crystal turns to the laptop, searches, and finds herself looking at Whoa Nellie’s blog. The photo shows a thin middle-aged woman sporting a crew cut—no postchemo head scarves for Whoa Nellie—and the top entry was written by her husband, reporting her death and linking to her obituary.

Crystal clicks it, reads it silently, then turns back to Landry.

“Okay. So there’s Nellie, Meredith,” she counts off on her fingers, “and then there’s you, and Elena, and Kay . . . Who are the others in your clique?” The word slips out, and Landry reacts with a wrinkled nose.

“Clique? We’re not a clique. That makes it sound like we’re being exclusive.”

“And you’re not?”

“No. We’re just a group of women who gravitated together, like any other friends, except . . .”

Except they all have cancer, and most of them have never met.

Crystal nods. She gets it. “So are there any others in the group, besides the five of you?”

“Just one more.”

Pen poised, Crystal asks, “Who is it?”

“Jaycee. She writes PC BC. She lives in New York.”

“Is that with a G or a J?” Crystal asks, once again trying to translate the drawl.

“With a J. You spell it J-A-Y-C-E-E.”

Crystal begins to write it down. Midway, her pen goes still.

Jaycee.

PC . . . BC . . .

J C

Jenna Coeur.

It was probably random; an accident.

But for some reason, Sheri Lorton can’t seem to let it go.

The guitar pick.

Why would Roger have had one in his pocket? He doesn’t—didn’t—play.

He’s the last person in the world anyone would ever imagine picking up a guitar.

He’s not—he wasn’t—into music at all. He wouldn’t know Jimi Hendrix from Jimmy Page from Jimmy Buffet. Hell, he wouldn’t know any of them from Jimmy Fallon. He didn’t watch television either.

A dedicated academic, all he really cared about was his work—specifically, higher math—and his family. Not in that order.

At first she had been convinced it had gotten mixed in with his belongings by accident.

But the more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed. The bag was sealed, and inventoried, and the guitar pick was listed on the contents log.

She’s considered—and dismissed—the likelihood that Roger might have found it on the sidewalk and picked it up. He’s a germaphobe; he never left home without his hand sanitizer. He scolded her whenever she stumbled across and reached for a faceup penny in a public place.

“But it’s good luck,” she’d tell him, putting it into her pocket.

“Not if you contract a disgusting disease from it.”

“I’ll take my chances. And since you worry about disgusting diseases, you might want to quit smoking.”

But of course, he wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Not even for her.

“It’s my one vice, Sheri.”

“It can kill you. Don’t you want to stick around and grow old with me?”

“I’ll grow old with you. Don’t worry.”

Wandering around the empty house they’d shared, remembering that conversation—rather, those conversations, because they’d had it more than once—she wipes tears from her eyes.

Mingling with her intense grief is a growing sense of uneasiness about the damned guitar pick.

What if it’s a clue?

What if the killer accidentally dropped it . . .

Into Roger’s pocket?

Not very likely, but not impossible.

“Maybe I should tell the police,” she speculates aloud.

Maggie, ever on her heels, seems to agree with a jangling of dog tags. Sheri reaches down to pet the puppy’s head.

“I wish you could talk, Mags. I wish you could tell me who did this to him.”

Maggie wags her tail, but she, too, seems wistful.

Crying again, Sheri goes into the bathroom for tissues. Then Maggie is at the door, needing to be let out into the yard. Then the phone rings: one of Roger’s colleagues checking in to see how she is.

By the time she hangs up, lets the puppy back into the house, and feeds her, Sheri is utterly spent. Maybe even exhausted enough to finally get some sleep.

It’s not time for bed yet, by any stretch of the imagination. The late afternoon sun still beams through the screened windows, and the chirping birds beyond won’t give way to crickets for at least another four or five hours.

But sleep would bring a sorely needed reprieve from this living hell, and so she climbs the stairs to the bedroom.

Closing the windows to quiet the birdsongs and drawing the blinds to block out the sun, Sheri pushes away nagging thoughts of the guitar pick.

I’ll deal with it later, she tells herself as a mighty yawn escapes her. Or maybe I’ll just forget about it.

What does it matter? Roger is gone. Finding out who killed him won’t bring him back.

She slips into the bed they shared and rolls over onto Roger’s side.

There, on the bedside table, pushed up against the base of the lamp, she sees his silver lighter.

It hadn’t been stolen after all. He must have forgotten it that morning as he tucked the cigarettes and wallet into his pocket.

He must have been frustrated, reaching into his pocket for that first morning cigarette he always enjoyed so thoroughly and realizing he couldn’t even light it.

Landry resists the urge to check her watch, not wanting Detective Burns to get the impression that she’s anxious to leave this conference room—though that is, indeed, the case.

It’s not easy to sit here and reveal personal details to a total stranger . . .

Which is, ironically, precisely why she became involved with the Internet—and, by association, with Meredith and the others—in the first place. Now Detective Burns is pumping her for information not just about herself, but about her fellow bloggers.

Is it because she suspects that one of them killed Meredith?

Do I suspect that, too?

It’s not the first time Landry has speculated about it, but until now she’s been able to talk herself out of it.