A Stranger in the House Read online

  “Of mine?” Tom can’t imagine who it could be.

  “No, of Karen’s.”

  Tom feels an escalating dread. His heart is beating loudly in his ears. “Did he give a name?”

  “No. He just said he knew her from another life,” Brigid says, emphasizing the words.

  Tom says nothing, startled.

  “I don’t want to freak you out, Tom, and you know how close Karen and I are,” Brigid continues in a concerned voice, “but that’s kind of a strange comment, don’t you think?”

  From another life. “What did he look like?” Tom manages to ask.

  “Medium height and build I think. He was rather nice-looking, dark hair. Well dressed.”

  Dark hair. There’s a long pause, while Tom thinks, his mind racing.

  Brigid finally says, “You know, it’s always seemed odd to me that Karen has never shared much about her past—at least not with me. Maybe she does with you?” When Tom remains silent, she adds cautiously, “I hate to suggest this—I know what you’re going through with the accident and everything—but—”

  “But what?” Tom asks sharply.

  “What if there’s something in her past that she’s hiding from us?”

  Tom wants to hang up, but he can’t move. “What the hell do you mean?”

  “This may sound crazy, but I saw a show on TV a little while ago about people who are running from their pasts. They disappear and take on a new identity. Maybe—maybe that’s what she’s done.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Tom protests.

  “Is it?” Brigid counters. “People do it all the time, apparently. There are people online that can help anyone do it, for a fee.”

  Tom clutches the phone and listens with growing alarm.

  “They get a new ID, then drop out of sight, move somewhere else, start over. Change their appearance. They become perfect citizens. They don’t want to be pulled over, they don’t want to be noticed.”

  Tom remembers, with dawning horror, how law abiding Karen is—or was—until the night of the accident. What if Brigid’s right, and his wife is using a fake identity? Why would she do something like that?

  “Tom? I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s because of that damn TV show! It just crossed my mind, when that man was asking about her. . . .”

  He thought nothing could throw him after the events of the last week, but this . . . the suggestion that his wife may be someone else? It’s more than he can handle.

  “Brigid, I have to go,” Tom says abruptly. He gets up from his chair and starts to pace, trying to process this terrible new possibility. A man with dark hair was at their house that morning, a man who said he knew Karen from another life. What if Brigid is right, and Karen isn’t who she says she is? The police will find out. That terrible photograph—the dead man had dark hair. Tom feels sick to his stomach remembering.

  Maybe he’s just being paranoid.

  Or maybe he’s starting to see things as they really are.

  Chapter Eighteen

  When Tom arrives home that evening he carries within him a bubbling stew of negative feelings—anger, distrust, fear, heartbreak. He knows she can tell that something has changed. But he’s not about to tell her about Brigid’s call.

  “What’s wrong?” Karen says at last, after an almost silent meal.

  “That’s kind of a silly question, given the circumstances,” Tom says coldly. “Maybe I don’t like living with the fear of the police showing up on my doorstep to arrest my wife.” He hadn’t meant to say it. It just slipped out. He watches her face go white. He wants to blame her, tell her that everything is her fault. But instead, he just turns away from her.

  “You haven’t asked about my appointment with the lawyer this morning,” she says, equally chilly. He hasn’t forgotten about it, he just would prefer not to know. “How did it go?” he asks, dreading what she might say.

  “I had to pay him a bigger retainer.”

  Tom gives a bitter laugh. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Would you rather I not have paid him?” she asks sharply.

  How far their marriage has deteriorated in just a week, Tom thinks. He would never have believed it before. Right now he wants to pin her up against the wall and yell at her to stop lying to him and to tell him the truth. But he doesn’t. Instead, he turns away from her and leaves the room.

  He can’t get past the suspicion that she remembers what happened that night. He can’t believe how hurt he is, how manipulated he feels.

  And yet, he’s still in love with her. How much easier all this would be if he wasn’t.

  —

  Brigid sits alone in the dark, her knitting idle in her lap. She hasn’t bothered to turn on the lights. Bob is out at a visitation again tonight. That’s the funeral business for you, lots of euphemisms. She knows other women whose husbands are in business, or the professions, who sometimes accompany their husbands to events—they get a new dress, new shoes—but those are dinners and parties and so on. Not visitations for grieving families, with an open casket at one end of the room, and the overpowering scent and sight of flowers everywhere. No, thank you.

  She’s begun to dislike flowers, especially flower arrangements. Particularly funeral arrangements. She used to like to get flowers from her husband on their anniversary, but after a few years she told Bob to please not bother. This was because she began to suspect him of recycling flowers from the funeral home. She didn’t actually accuse him of it, and she didn’t know for sure. But it seemed like the kind of thing he would do. He’s a bit of a cheapskate with the little things. He hadn’t balked at the cost of the fertility treatments, though.

  What she would have loved was for him to take her away for a few days—to Venice, or Paris, somewhere full of life—away from the funeral business, or whatever it is that keeps him so busy. But he’s always insisted that he couldn’t stay away for that long. So now she gets an uninspired pair of earrings once a year that she has no occasion to wear.

  It’s not like they can’t afford to travel. Cruikshank Funeral Homes has expanded, and they now have three different funeral homes in upper New York State, and Bob’s busier than ever.

  But she isn’t. She could have worked for Bob in some capacity, but when he suggested it, she said she’d rather stick pins in her eyes. He’d been offended by that.

  The arduous fertility treatments for which she’d quit her managerial job hadn’t worked—and now, except for her knitting blog, her days are rather empty. She has her hopes pinned on adoption. She worries that Bob’s line of work will hurt them in their application, but it’s not as if they live in the funeral home. They’re a normal couple, with a normal home. The business is completely separate. They don’t even talk about it much. He knows she hates to hear about it. What really annoys her is that when they were first married, he was selling insurance, which was completely respectable. But he was entrepreneurial and the opportunity came up. It’s profitable, she can’t deny that. She just wishes Bob was successful at something else.

  She looks intently across the street at number 24, Karen and Tom’s house. She wonders what Tom’s thinking, after her phone call earlier today. Does he believe, as she does, that Karen is hiding something about her past? It has always puzzled her that Karen is so guarded with her, given that Karen tells Brigid that she is her best friend. Brigid’s efforts to draw Karen into greater intimacy have always failed.

  And Tom—each night Brigid sees the light on in his office upstairs at the front of the house. He works too hard, like Bob, but at least when he works nights he works at home. Karen isn’t sitting alone in the house every evening like she is.

  Maybe she should take them over a plate of brownies. As it happens, she’d baked some brownies this afternoon. She doesn’t want to eat them all herself. And it’s not that late. Her mind made up, she runs ups
tairs to change.

  She brushes her shoulder-length brown hair, parted in the middle, puts on some red lipstick, and looks appraisingly in the mirror. She practices her most charming smile—the one that makes her eyes light up—and then grabs the brownies from the kitchen.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Karen’s in the kitchen when she hears the doorbell. She freezes. When it rings again, she still doesn’t move. She can hear Tom stirring upstairs. He’s probably wondering why she’s not getting it.

  When it rings a third time, she reluctantly leaves the kitchen to answer it. Her eyes meet Tom’s as he’s coming down the stairs. He stops halfway down. She can sense the uneasiness radiating off him. She feels an uneasiness of her own as she opens the door.

  It’s Detective Rasbach and his sidekick, the other detective whose name she can’t remember. Her mouth has gone dry. She tells herself to be calm. She reminds herself that she has a lawyer. She remembers his card, in her wallet. She can reach him if she has to.

  Karen wants to slam the door in the detective’s face.

  “May we come in, Mrs. Krupp?” Rasbach asks politely. She sees him flick a glance toward her husband, who’s still standing like a sentry on the stairs.

  She thinks about it. She has only a second or two to make the right decision. Calvin has told her not to talk to the police. But she’s afraid that if she sends them away, they will come back with an arrest warrant. She hears Tom walk down the rest of the stairs and come up behind her.

  “What do you want?” he says to the detective, a little aggressively.

  “I’d rather not do this on the doorstep,” Rasbach answers pleasantly.

  Karen pulls the door open wide and allows the two detectives to enter the house, avoiding Tom’s eye.

  They end up in the living room, like before. “Please, sit down,” Karen says. She steals a glance at Tom now, and is alarmed by what she sees written on his face. He doesn’t know how to dissemble. And right now he looks like he’s expecting his world to end.

  There’s a pregnant silence before anyone speaks. Rasbach takes his time. She can’t let it get to her. She waits him out.

  At last, Rasbach begins. “Have you remembered anything about the evening of your accident?” he asks Karen.

  “No,” she says politely. After a pause, she adds, “Apparently that’s not unusual in these kinds of cases.” And then she thinks that perhaps she shouldn’t have said that. It sounds like she’s read it out of a book.

  “I see,” the detective says mildly. “Can I ask—just out of curiosity—what efforts you’re making to regain your memory?”

  “Pardon me?” Karen says at the unexpected question. She shifts in her seat.

  “It seems to me that if you couldn’t remember what happened that night you’d be making some attempt to do something about it,” Rasbach says.

  “Like what?” she says. She crosses her arms. “I can’t just take a pill and get my memory back.”

  “Are you seeing anyone about it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t think it will help. My memory will come back in its own good time.”

  “That’s what you believe.”

  “That’s what my doctor said.” She knows she sounds defensive. She takes a deep, quiet breath.

  The truth is she hasn’t dared to see a specialist, such as a hypnotist, because she can’t risk anyone else hearing what might have happened that night. She needs to uncover this on her own.

  He changes tack. “We know that you left the house alone the night of the accident. We have witnesses who saw you leave the house.”

  “Okay,” she says. She feels Tom glance sharply at her.

  Rasbach says, “We also know that you received a phone call that night. At eight seventeen P.M.”

  “Did I?” she says.

  “Yes, you did. On your landline. We’ve looked at your phone records,” Rasbach says.

  “Are you allowed to do that?” Tom asks.

  “Yes, we are,” Rasbach says. “Or we wouldn’t have done it. We got a subpoena.” He turns his attention back to her. “Who do you think might have called you at that time?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “No idea,” Rasbach repeats.

  Tom blurts out, as if he can’t stand the tension any longer, “You obviously know who called her, so why don’t you stop playing games and tell us.”

  Rasbach glances at her husband. “We don’t actually know who called,” he says. “The call was made from a disposable cell phone. We can’t trace that kind of call.” Then Rasbach leans forward in his chair toward her, a little ominously, she thinks. “But I imagine you know that.”

  Karen feels the eyes of the two detectives and her husband on her at this new information. Her heart is beating double time now.

  “That’s a bit out of the ordinary,” Rasbach continues, “don’t you think?”

  She thinks about the card in her wallet. It was a mistake to let them in.

  “Interesting that the call came on the home line, rather than on your cell,” the detective says.

  She stares at him, but says nothing. What can she possibly say?

  “Perhaps the call wasn’t meant for you at all,” Rasbach says.

  This suggestion surprises her.

  Rasbach turns back to Tom, who looks as confused by this as she is.

  “What do you mean?” Tom asks.

  Rasbach says, “I mean maybe the call was meant for you, and she took it instead.”

  “What?” Tom says, obviously taken aback.

  “The call came at eight seventeen—aren’t you usually home by that time?” the detective asks.

  Karen watches Rasbach, relieved to have their focus shift away from her and who called her from that burner phone, if even for a moment. Let them waste their time on Tom, she thinks; they won’t find anything there. She feels herself start to relax, just a little bit. They obviously don’t really know anything. They’re fishing. They’ll be leaving soon, with nothing more than what they came with.

  “Yes, I’m usually home by eight or earlier. But I’ve been very busy at work lately,” Tom says defensively. The detective waits. “What, you think someone called me from an untraceable cell phone?”

  “It’s possible,” Rasbach says.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Tom protests. When Rasbach remains silent, simply watching him with his sharp blue eyes, Tom says, “You think someone called me from an untraceable cell phone, and my wife took the call and ran out of the house? Why would she do that?”

  Karen watches Tom and Rasbach, surprised at where this is going.

  “Yes, why?” Rasbach asks, and waits quietly.

  Tom loses patience. “Detectives, I’m afraid you’re wasting your time. Not to mention ours. Maybe you should go.”

  “Have you got something to hide, Mr. Krupp?” Rasbach asks, as if he already knows the answer.

  Karen swivels her startled eyes to her husband’s face.

  —

  Brigid hesitates on her own doorstep, brownies in hand, when she sees the car on the street in front of the Krupps’ house. She knows that car. Those two detectives are there again.

  Brigid is dying to know what’s going on.

  She decides to slip around to the back of the house and leave the brownies just inside the back door. She doesn’t want to bother anybody. It’s a hot night, and as she hoped, the sliding glass doors are open to let in the breeze. Only the screen door is closed. If she stands very still, in the dark, she may be able to hear what they’re saying in the living room, especially if she quietly opens the door to set the brownies down, maybe just inside on the kitchen table. . . .

  Chapter Twenty

  Tom feels an ugly red flush creep up his neck to his face. He’s angry with the detec
tive, barging into their home with a lot of sly accusations. He doesn’t have to put up with it.

  “No, detective,” Tom says, “I don’t have anything to hide.”

  “If you say so,” Rasbach says after a moment.

  “Why would you even suggest such a thing?” Tom asks, and then immediately wishes he hadn’t.

  Rasbach regards him carefully. “Because we’ve been looking at the timeline for the night of the accident. Your wife had her accident, not far from the scene of the murder, at approximately eight forty-five P.M. You told the 911 operator that night that you drove home from work and arrived home at about nine twenty and found your wife missing, the doors unlocked, and the lights on.”

  “Yes,” Tom says.

  Rasbach pauses for a moment and then says, “We spoke to security at your office and they said you left at eight twenty. It’s only about a fifteen-minute drive from your office to here. So where were you for that hour? That’s a rather critical time in this investigation, from eight twenty to nine twenty or thereabouts.”

  Tom suddenly feels light-headed. Karen looks at him, clearly shocked, and he looks away. He can feel himself sweating, can feel the moisture staining his shirt beneath his sleeves.

  “For that matter,” Rasbach adds, “we only have your word for it that you were home at nine twenty. You didn’t start calling your wife’s friends until”—he looks at his notes—“nine forty, I believe. And then you called 911 shortly after that.” He waits, but Tom says nothing. “So where were you?”

  “I—was driving around,” Tom answers, faltering.

  “You were driving around—for an extra forty-five minutes,” Rasbach says, his eyes like steel. “Why?”

  Tom wants to reach for the other man’s throat. Instead he takes a deep breath and tries to steady himself. “I needed to think, to clear my mind. I’d had a long day.”

  “You didn’t want to get home to your wife?”