Page 58 of She Didn't See It Coming
“I don’t know,” Jayne says. “She was exceptionally vague. The timing is bang on, so she could be telling the truth. Or she might be making it all up. Enjoying her fifteen minutes. But I don’t think so.” She sighs. “Check in with the team at the condo—see if they’ve heard of anyone else in the building going somewhere that day with a suitcase. If there’s no one to account for it, Francine Loganmayhave been in the elevator with our killer.”
•••
Derek Gardner iscoldly furious as he drives downtown. He’s agitated, and he doesn’t like the feeling. He’s usually quite cool, unruffled. He likes to be in control. He’s got a problem now, and he’s not sure how to handle it. He wasn’t that worried about Bryden Frost, not really, not till that bitch of a detective had brought up Alice’s mother.
He drives into the downtown core. He wanted to get away from Alice, who’d decided not to go into work after all. He was going to hide out at his office downtown. He’ll have to face everyone there at some point anyway. Better to carry on like business as usual, get in front of things, reassure everyone that they might hear things about him, but it’s all bullshit. He has a business to run. He must hold his nerve till all this blows over.
But his thoughts take him down an uncomfortable path. He has this business because of his wife’s money. The cool, hip offices with the good address, the smart employees, the top-of-the-line equipment—allbought with her inheritance. The high-end clients he got himself, but still. She gave him his start.
Alice loves him, as well as she can love anyone. But can he trust her? He knows what she’s capable of. She killed her own mother in cold blood. And then came home and told him about it, as if she were a cat dropping the gift of a dead mouse at his feet.
He pulls into the underground parking garage beneath his office building. He circles around to his level and finds his own space. There’s someone parked next to it. A car he doesn’t recognize, a black Range Rover. It’s parked too close, so that when he goes to get out of his car, he barely has enough room to open his door to exit his vehicle. It annoys him.Who the hell does this guy think he is?He resists the impulse to smash his own car door into the side of the Range Rover.Fucking asshole.
He squeezes out of his car awkwardly, sucking in his breath. Once he’s out he closes his own door and stares malevolently at the other car. He reaches into his trouser pocket for his keys. He glances around him, but there’s nobody there; he’s quite alone. He knows where the cameras are. Derek takes his keys in his right hand, singles out one, and walks around the back of the Range Rover to the other side of it and digs the point into the Rover’s new paint near the front fender. Then he drags the key with great force along the entire side of the vehicle, leaving a bold, ugly scar across the length of it.
•••
“I spoke to the peoplein charge of the hit-and-run investigation in New Hampshire,” Jayne says to Kilgour in her office later in the afternoon. “They did a shoddy job, if you ask me. There wasn’t much of an investigation. They didn’t find any witnesses.”
“Maybe there weren’t any,” Kilgour points out.
“Well, I suppose. Apparently, it’s a rural area—very little traffic onthat road. But what better place to run over your mother-in-law?” She muses, “There’s a very poor solve rate for hit-and-runs, only about ten percent.” She sighs. “Maybe I should cut them some slack. Anyway,” she continues, “they decided that it was a simple hit-and-run, not a murder.” She sighs heavily. “You saw how I tried to rattle Alice. I practically told her that if she’s lying to give her husband an alibi, and if he killed her mother, and Bryden Frost, she might be next.”
“It didn’t seem to faze her.”
“No, it didn’t. She seems almost as cold-blooded as he is. Maybe they’re meant for each other.”
38
Alice waits for her husband to come back from work. She got a text from him saying that he was at the office. But she has also seen his picture in the news. She’s dismayed that he’s been named a person of interest, that the suggestion of his affair with Bryden is public.
Alice is furious. She even threw an expensive glass against the kitchen wall and watched it shatter. After a while, she cleaned it up. Then she started making a beef bourguignon—chopping up the vegetables with energy. Cooking relaxes her.
It’s his fault this is happening. If he’d stayed away from that woman, if he’d managed tokeep it in his pants, if he’d managed tokeep his promise, they wouldn’t be looking into her mother’s accident. She still thinks of it that way; she always refers to it as her mother’s hit-and-run accident, if anyone should bring it up. She never calls it her mother’s murder.
Even though that’s exactly what it was.
Alice had been rather clever about it. Her mother was a slave to routine; it was one of the many things about her that drove Alice crazy. Alice prefers to be spontaneous. But not always. When it came to murdering her mother, she thought about it for a long time and planned it carefully. It was going to be a surprise—to her mother, obviously, but also to Derek.
She did it for him. But if she’s honest, she did it for herself too. She wanted Derek to have the money to start his business with a splash, and she wanted a glamorous home, and nice things, and she didn’t want to wait. And—if she’scompletelyhonest—she wanted Derek to be grateful, and proud of her, and to know what she was capable of. It helped that she really didn’t like her mother, and visiting her on holidays was getting to be tiresome. She wouldn’t have visited at all if it weren’t for the inheritance, but she’d had enough of playing the dutiful daughter. They were always so painful, those duty visits, her mother with her nervous eyes flicking back and forth between her and Derek, as if expecting one of them to demand money, or to suddenly rise up and choke her.
The funny thing is, her mother always seemed to think that Derek was the dangerous one, when really, it was Alice she should have been afraid of.
She knew her mother always walked along that lonely side road at 6:30, after supper, to get her daily exercise. There was never anybody on that road, not that Alice ever saw. Earlier that day, she drove from Albany, through Vermont to New Hampshire, in her husband’s car. It was leased by the company, and it was new, and no one around her mother’s place had seen it before so there was no chance of it being recognized.
She arrived unannounced. Her mother hadn’t seemed particularly happy to see her, Alice thought. She’d wanted to know why she was there without Derek. She’d asked if they’d split up, seeming almost hopeful. It irritated Alice. She didn’t know why her mother was sodown on Derek. He was the best thing that had ever happened to her. But her mother had once told her in private, quite earnestly, that she thought there might be something wrong with him, that he might be a sociopath. Alice had laughed. Well, itwasfunny.
Alice hadn’t stayed long on that last visit. She left sometime before her mother’s daily walk, taking the spare house key, and drove Derek’s newly leased car into a nearby hiding spot she’d scouted out beforehand. An opening into a field shielded by trees. Then she walked the short distance back to her mother’s place and hid behind a shed, waiting for her to leave the house. After she’d gone, Alice put on some gloves, let herself back into the house, and took her mother’s car keys off the kitchen counter. She climbed into her mother’s pickup truck, started the engine, and carefully checking first to see that there was no one around, turned down the road. When she saw her mother walking in the distance, she smiled. When she got close enough, she hit the gas. The truck made a lot of noise when it accelerated so suddenly. Her mother whirled around, recognized her own truck, her own daughter, bearing down on her in the short seconds before she was hit. The look on her face! Then there was a tremendous thud, and she went flying in an arc and landed in the ditch. Alice carried on at a normal speed to the next intersection and turned around. She drove the truck back to her mother’s house, slowing to observe the spot where her mother’s body must be. She parked the truck where she’d found it, checking for damage. It was a large, sturdy truck, a Dodge Ram, and there was only a small dent on the right front. No blood, because her mother was wearing her long, thick coat, as Alice expected. She’d made sure there was no dashcam.
She returned the keys and washed up the coffee mugs they’d used earlier and put them away, still wearing her gloves. She locked the door from the inside and walked back down the lonely road ready to take cover if anyone should come along, but no one did. When shereached the site of the accident, Alice stood on the edge of the ditch and watched her mother. It was dark, and she had to use a flashlight, but even from there she could tell that her mother was clearly dead, her eyes wide open.
Alice returned to the leased car and drove home, arriving at about eleven o’clock.
When she got in, Derek kissed her and asked, “It’s really late. Where have you been? I texted but you didn’t answer.”
She didn’t answer because she’d deliberately left her cell phone at home, in the drawer of her nightstand. “I’ve been to visit my mother,” she answered.
“And how’s your mother?”
