Just Between Us Read online

  “Oh, I see,” I said, unsure. This wasn’t going at all according to plan. A white cat with black spots poked his head out the door, snaking his way through the woman’s legs. “I thought this was your daughter’s house. Is she by any chance living here? Or could you tell me how to get in touch with her?”

  The woman’s face turned red and for a moment I thought she was furious, but then tears welled in her eyes and she said, “My daughter is dead.”

  Startled, I blurted “She’s dead?” before catching myself and hastily adding, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Who are you?” she said. “What do you want with Janice?”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just—she was once married to Viktor Lysenko, right?”

  “Yes, Viktor was her husband, why are you asking?”

  “I don’t want to bring you more pain, Mrs. Franz, but if you don’t mind my asking—how did Janice die?”

  “What is this about?” The woman’s voice rose. “Why would you come to my house and question me about my precious daughter? Did you know Janice? Is that why you’re asking?”

  “No, I didn’t. I’m sorry, it’s just that I know Viktor.”

  The red on her face deepened and her eyes narrowed. “Did he send you here? He’s hoping I’ll sell up and retire out-of-state.”

  “So you’re still friendly with your former son-in-law?”

  Another snort. “Friendly? If by friendly you mean the court case is over.”

  “Court case?”

  “I’m sure he sent you out here to dig up some reason to make me give up my visitation rights. Well, you can tell him it ain’t gonna happen.”

  “Visitation? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The old woman snorted. “You can tell Viktor I’m not talking to his hussy—if he wants to talk with me, then let him come himself.” She nudged the cat back with her foot and slammed the door.

  Hussy? I was torn between indignation and amusement. As I headed back down the walk, a movement caught the corner of my eye, and I turned to see the old woman yanking aside one of the lace curtains and watching me, another, darker cat cradled in her arms. What if she called Viktor?

  Sarah pulled out as soon as I got in the backseat. “I hope she didn’t see my license plate,” she said as we drove over a hill and the house disappeared from view. I told them what the old woman had said and how she’d reacted when I mentioned Viktor.

  “It’s not like we’re breaking any law,” Sarah said, and she sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “It’s a free country—it’s perfectly legal to ask any question we want.”

  Yes, but legal and explainable could be two very different things. Had I told Janice Franz my last name? I hoped not.

  “Any evidence Viktor abused her daughter?” Alison said as she pulled out her phone to search for the obit.

  “I don’t know, but she really seems to hate her ex-son-in-law.”

  “You said there was a court case?” Sarah said as Alison typed rapidly on her phone, muttering “damn autocorrect.” She looked up as Sarah braked hard at a stop sign. “What were they fighting over?”

  “Visitation,” I said. “Whatever that means.”

  “That can’t be right—visitation’s about kids,” Alison said. “Unless Viktor has another child?”

  “I have no idea, but I’m not going back to ask her. Janice made it pretty clear that she’s done talking.”

  “It could also be about a pet—you’d be surprised what people go to court over,” Sarah said, accelerating again.

  “Do they have any pets?” I asked, trying to recall if I’d ever seen a cat or any other creature at the Lysenko house. It certainly never smelled like Viktor’s ex-mother-in-law’s place.

  Alison stared intently at her phone. “Janice Marie Lysenko? Found it. I can’t believe you didn’t spot this the first time you searched, Sarah.”

  “I guess I don’t have your superior Googling skills,” Sarah said with as much sarcasm as she could layer in her voice.

  Alison ignored her, scrolling through the obit in silence for a moment. “Interesting—there’s no cause of death listed.”

  “Do you think it might have been a suicide?” I said, distressed at the thought. “They usually keep that out of obits.”

  “Or he made it look like a suicide,” Alison said.

  Sarah shot Alison a quick look, but she didn’t refute her. I couldn’t either.

  Alison kept tapping on her phone; I sat forward, trying to watch over the seat as she opened window after window, following links so fast that I couldn’t keep up. “Here we go,” she said, “another obit from the Penn Hills Progress. ‘Died unexpectedly’—well that’s not a lot of help.”

  “It rules out cancer,” Sarah said. “Could be a heart attack, I guess, but usually they’d just say if it was a sudden illness.”

  “It doesn’t rule out an accident,” I said. “It definitely could have been a car accident.”

  “Or it could have been made to look like an accident—” Alison stopped short.

  “What?” I said, but Alison didn’t answer for a moment.

  “What is it?” Sarah demanded, looking at her and then the road and back again. I tensed in my seat, just as anxious.

  Alison read from her screen: “‘Survivors include her husband, Dr. Viktor Lysenko; mother, Janice Lee Franz; and son, Daniel Michael.’” She swiveled in her seat to look at me and Sarah. “Daniel is from Viktor’s first marriage. He’s Janice’s child, not Heather’s.”

  chapter eight

  ALISON

  The shock of finding out that Daniel was not Heather’s birth child was as great, in many ways, as seeing that vast and lovely kitchen covered in broken glass. Sarah swung the car off the side of the road, screeching to a halt along the berm, before reaching for my phone to confirm for herself.

  “You’d never guess,” Julie said hesitantly, the first of us to break the silence. She meant that Daniel looked like Heather’s biological child; they were both blond, for instance, while Viktor had brown hair. I couldn’t believe that we’d known them for more than two years and she’d never mentioned it.

  “So I’m guessing that Janice’s mother sued Viktor over getting visitation with her grandson,” Sarah said.

  “We need to compare the dates,” I said, nudging Sarah for my phone. “When did Janice die and when did Viktor marry Heather?” I pulled up Heather and Viktor’s wedding announcement and compared it with Janice Franz’s obit. The same, sickening feeling that I’d had two days before in Heather’s kitchen returned. “Eleven months apart,” I said, doing the math. “He buried his first wife and married a second in less than a year.”

  The implications of that hung in the air for a moment, heavy and silent, before Sarah abruptly jerked the minivan back onto the road, driving fast while all of us began talking at once, tripping over one another’s sentences. Had Heather known about Janice? She must have, yet she’d never mentioned her or the fact that this was Viktor’s second marriage.

  “Do you think Viktor killed Janice?” I finally said.

  “Don’t even go there.” Julie sounded shocked.

  “Why not?” Sarah said. “It’s the question begging to be asked here, isn’t it?”

  Julie didn’t say anything, but I could see her lips purse the way they did when she was upset.

  I did another search, but still couldn’t find any more information about Janice’s death. Her employment history popped up—she’d worked in sales for a medical-supply company, which was probably how she’d met Viktor—but there were no articles about fatal accidents and no mention of donations made in her name to organizations for cancer research or other incurable diseases. Viktor’s first wife’s death looked murky, but we had no real evidence.

  “We could visit her old company,” Sarah suggested. “Maybe one of her former colleagues knows something.”

  Great idea, if only the medical-supply company hadn’t gone out of business. Afte
r discovering that, I spent a fruitless fifteen minutes trying to track down somebody—anybody—from the defunct company, without any luck.

  “We need to talk to Heather,” I said after exhausting my search efforts. “We need to ask her about Viktor’s first marriage.”

  “Oh, God, I don’t want her to think we’re gossiping about her,” Julie said.

  “We’re not gossiping, we’re trying to help because we’re concerned,” Sarah said. “There’s a big difference.”

  “Fine,” Julie said. “But I don’t want her to know that I’m the one who told you about Viktor’s first marriage.”

  “Agreed,” I said quickly, afraid she’d change her mind. “But we need to get her away from Viktor and their house so she can talk freely.”

  * * *

  I offered to host a girls’ night in at my house the following weekend. Wine and snacks, perhaps watch a chick flick—this was how we presented it to Heather. Looking back, I think that what we planned was too much like an intervention. I, for one, was so focused on wanting to get Heather away from Viktor that I didn’t stop to think about what kind of support Heather might actually have wanted and needed.

  My house was a safe, relatively neutral setting. The coffee shop would have been better in that sense, but it wasn’t private and we needed privacy for this. Michael took Lucy and Matthew to visit his family for the weekend, ostensibly so I could get the peace and quiet necessary to complete a big project that I’d gotten behind on. He’d even taken George, our lovable but noisy and demanding chocolate Lab, so I wouldn’t be distracted. He and the kids, with George, had driven off in the Volvo the afternoon before, loaded down with books and crayons and snacks and a fully charged tablet stocked with cartoons—Michael had made sure of that, panicked at the thought of six hours in a car without any electronics to distract them. It was the first long trip they’d taken without me, and I’d seen the slightly crazed look in Michael’s eyes as he backed down the driveway, the kids waving frantically out the window. A wave of emotion had come over me as I watched the car speed down the street and disappear over the hill. “Wait, come back,” I’d wanted to call after them. “Take me with you.”

  The house seemed so quiet, with only the little sounds usually drowned out by the great cacophony that is life with children. Various creaks and groans, the rumble of the furnace coming on, a steadily dripping tap. I sat in my upstairs office trying to concentrate on work—the project was a beast and I really was in danger of missing the deadline—but I couldn’t focus. Instead, I found the numbers for various domestic-violence hotlines and safe houses and made lots of phone calls, looking for help in getting Heather to leave and finding her a place to hide from Viktor. By the end of the afternoon I had over ten pages of notes and numbers, which I compiled into an orderly list to present to Heather.

  “Not right away,” I reassured Julie when she arrived early that evening and balked at the stack of papers. “I’ll wait until later, after we’re done talking.”

  “I just don’t want her to get scared off,” Julie said apologetically. She deposited a bottle of pinot grigio on my counter along with a string bag that held various bundles wrapped in butcher paper. “I’ve brought goodies from that great French store—there’s a soft goat cheese and a smoked Gouda plus these delicious crackers and olives, those delightful little Niçoise ones—I just love those, don’t you?” She prattled on about the food while I uncorked her wine and my own bottle of red and took glasses and plates down from the cupboards.

  We might have been prepping for a party; it certainly would have looked that way to others. Chastened by her concern about the list, I put it out of sight while Julie moved refreshments to the glass-topped coffee table in my living room.

  From the outside, my house looked like the quintessential cottage, a lovely stone-and-siding turn-of-the-last-century two-story with an actual white picket fence around the front yard and a climbing rose growing along it. This was what had attracted us when we’d first visited. Michael and I had ignored the poky rooms and windows so old and thin that the wind that blew through couldn’t be called a draft, but a gale. We’d spent the first year of home ownership, and the better part of our savings, knocking out walls and bringing the electrical up to code and replacing every window and fixture in the house. The inside finally had enough charm to match the outside—an open entertaining space with a wood-burning fireplace and an updated kitchen, and we’d furnished it in comfortable cottage décor, helped along by lots of white paint, spackle, and sales at Pottery Barn. As I liked to tell people, we were lucky that “distressed” was officially a style.

  Julie was plumping the pillows on my worn velvet sofa when Sarah rang the bell. She had the look of someone arriving last-minute to a surprise party, darting glances behind her and pausing to peek out a window as she slipped off her coat. “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Of course Eric didn’t get home until ten minutes ago.”

  “You look like Little Red Riding Hood,” Julie said with a laugh, taking in Sarah’s hooded wool coat and the large-handled wicker basket she’d hauled inside.

  I reached for it and wrenched my shoulder. “What on earth did you bring—this weighs a ton!”

  “Just some bread and olive oil to go with it. Oh, and some wine, too.”

  “Some” bread turned out to be two homemade loaves, and there were three bottles of olive oil that she’d personally infused with different seasonings, plus two bottles of wine. Count on Sarah to make the rest of us look and feel like slackers. “Do you think she personally stomped the grapes?” I whispered to Julie when we were alone for a minute in the kitchen, and she laughed, turning it into a cough as Sarah joined us. I took out bagged salad and a wooden bowl to toss it in, sensitive to her watchful eye. Had Sarah just sniffed at my lame offering?

  “Heather should be here soon,” she said, pouring herself a large glass of wine from the bottle of cabernet I’d opened.

  Julie poured herself a glass. “Brian is going to feed the kids, because they were playing when I left. What’s that saying—never disturb a sleeping child? I’ll amend that to never disturb a contently playing child.” She laughed nervously, fidgeting with the gold bar pendant hanging around her neck.

  The doorbell rang and we all flinched. I was tossing dressing on the salad, so Julie offered to get the door. I heard the sound of the floorboards in the hall creaking, and then we could hear Julie greeting Heather: “Come in! Come in! It’s so great to see you!” Her usual enthusiasm, but I heard a nervousness that seemed to crackle like static in the air. There were the sounds of the coat closet opening, hangers tinkling, and chitchat about Daniel. Then they both appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Heather’s here,” Julie said unnecessarily, in a voice that sounded even higher and brighter than usual.

  “Hi,” Heather said with a smile, depositing a box of chocolate truffles on the counter and looking at Sarah and then me. “Can I help with anything?”

  “No, we’re all set.” There was a slight tremor in my hand as I reached for a wineglass. I did my best to steady it and my voice, fixing my expression in a smile. “Red or white?” I said, indicating the bottles.

  “White. I thought I’d be the first,” Heather said, “but I can see that I’m actually the last—did I get the time wrong?”

  “Oh, I just got here early because I came straight from the store,” Julie said, busying herself with finding bowls for the salad.

  With a brittle laugh, Sarah said, “I had to escape my children.” She reached for the bottle of wine and poured herself another glass. I had a fleeting thought about what my husband’s reaction would be at not finding any of his favorite red left when he came home.

  I put the bread and oil on a tray and Heather offered to carry it, holding it steadily and walking gracefully, her nonexistent hips swaying slightly as she walked into the living room. We followed her with the rest of the food, like ladies-in-waiting, agitated and heavy-footed and altogether less graceful.

  We to
ok seats around the fireplace, the log fire warming the room and creating a coziness belied by the purpose of the evening. But where to start? What had seemed like a good idea ahead of time now felt daunting. She’d gotten so upset the last time we’d tried this conversation.

  We avoided the topic by passing around the food, and then passing around compliments about the food, all of it stiff and polite and unlike any other get-together. But it was easier than bringing it up. For a moment I thought that maybe Julie was right and we should just pretend that we hadn’t seen anything. Let it go. Don’t ask. This was someone else’s marriage and we were about to cut it open and examine its contents, and how was that an okay thing to do?

  It was only when I saw Sarah and then Julie giving me pointed glances that I finally turned the conversation. “Did you get your kitchen back in order?” I asked Heather, trying to sound casual, but my hands felt suddenly clammy and I had to work to look directly at her.

  She was eating a piece of bread with small, mouse-like nibbles and she’d barely touched her wine. I knew she was one of those women who chewed each bite of food dozens of times in order not to overeat. A leftover from her modeling days, when gaining weight meant losing work. She paused, holding the bread near her lips. “Yes, it’s fine.”

  “Is Viktor okay?” It was a stupid question and it came out squeaky, because I couldn’t think of another way to ask.

  Heather swallowed hard—I could see the movement in her slender throat—and she let the hand holding the bread drop to her lap. It took her a moment to answer, but when she did, all she said was, “He’s fine,” her voice so quiet that we could barely hear her.

  Even less sure than I’d been when I started, I said, “I didn’t realize, that is, Julie said that Viktor was married before.”

  Heather’s head shot up at that and Julie positively gaped at me. “What are you doing?” she demanded, and then said rapidly to Heather, “I didn’t know you hadn’t told anyone else—I thought it was common knowledge.”