Laura Lippman - Hardly Knew Her

“Better be careful,” she teases lightly. “Lillian could be standing in your kitchen, looking right at us.”

“There’s no direct sight line into the dining room. I know because I know where to look to find you. And Lillian’s in Rehoboth with the kids all month. I rented a house and even arranged a spa visit for her, for our twentieth anniversary.”

“You’ve always been so thoughtful that way.” She tries to move her hand away, but Dan won’t let her.

“I thought about plastic surgery. She never mentions it, but it couldn’t hurt. And women do die that way, don’t they? Even if she didn’t die, she would be weak afterward, taking lots of pain meds. Anything could happen.”

“Dan-”

“Accidents happen every day. No one knows that better than an insurance agent. Car accidents, slipping in the bathtub, falling down stairs. Stairs are so dangerous. If people only knew. But you know, don’t you, Meghan? How dangerous stairs can be?”

Meghan has finally extricated her hand, only to have Dan grab her wrist. She decides to stop fighting him, and when he lets go, she flips her hand so the fingers are facing up. She gives his palm a light, tickling touch.

“Money?” she asks.

“You,” he says. “And we have to figure out how to take care of Lillian. I can’t afford a divorce. But then-you couldn’t, either, could you, Meghan?”

“You were watching that day?”

“Actually, I didn’t see what happened. The sight lines again. But I saw you come and go so quickly. Then I came over here to ask Brian if he had a level. I was trying to install one of those closets, from the Container Store. At first I thought only of myself. I didn’t know I was finishing what you had started. Then I thought, I’ll leave the pillow behind, just in case. If it showed up in the police report-and the insurance company would receive all the reports, of course-I would know that Brian fell. If there was no mention of a pillow…well, I would have my answer.”

“It was an accident,” she says.

“Officially, yes.” He caresses her palm. “Smart girl.”

“No, I mean that I didn’t plan it. I came home to have it out with him. He dropped this bomb on me as I was heading out, which was his way of avoiding arguments, and, for once, I wasn’t going to be denied the fight. When I saw him coming up the steps with that box of stuff-I didn’t think. It was an impulse. He tripped on the Crocs.”

“Let me do the thinking for both of us. The important thing is, this is our secret, right? No one else knows?”

Instinct, as swift and certain as the impulse to shove Brian down the stairs, tells her to lie. “I haven’t told anyone. You?”

“No.”

“And you haven’t been reckless enough to write these things down somewhere, to keep a record that someone else might read?”

“No,” he says with a laugh, tapping his head. “It’s all up here.”

She looks around the room, then past it, into the kitchen, at the big windows. She realizes now how often Dan has looked at her through those windows, how her kitchen, a replica of his but in a different color scheme, came to seem better somehow. While Meghan was dreaming of life without a husband, Dan was persuading himself that all he needed was a change of partner, that the thinner, slightly younger woman he saw could make everything right in his life. Okay, then.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she says, pleased to see how he shakes, just a little. She’s in control. For now.

HELOISE IS HEADING HOME from the grocery store when she has to pull over for the cop car, then an ambulance, then another cop car, rushing down Old Orchard. Another car accident, she thinks, but then sees the convoy turn onto her sister’s small street, which has no more than a dozen houses, and it gives her pause. What are the odds? Mathematically, one in twelve. She thinks about the recent glimpses of her nephews and nieces, how sad they all are since their father died. She thinks about Meghan’s mother, who took a halfhearted swipe at her wrists in a desperate attempt to win back Hector Lewis when the birth of Meghan wasn’t enough to bring him home.

A police officer stops her when she tries to enter the house, and it takes enormous self-restraint to remember that he is not a street cop, grabbing the young prostitute she once was. She never feels at ease around cops.

“Ma’am, this is a crime scene-”

“But it’s my sister’s house.”

“Is that Heloise?” It’s Meghan’s voice, croaking from inside the house. “Please, let me see my sister. I want my sister.”

Meghan’s eye is freshly bruised, her lip split. She is wearing a robe and a pair of socks, and presumably nothing else. A female police officer sits with her at the kitchen counter, pushing a cup of tea toward Meghan, who keeps pushing it away.

“Our neighbor,” Meghan tells Heloise. “Dan Simmons. He came over here with some of the paperwork for the trusts I’m putting together for the kids and he raped me. I-all I was trying to do was protect myself. I thought he was going to kill me.”

Paramedics trudge down the stairs, shaking their heads, and now the attendants from the medical examiner’s office march up, followed by detectives with rubber-gloved hands. Heloise wants to follow, but she knows they will think her morbid, unnatural. Still, she wants to know, wants to survey the scene.

Some unnerving inconsistencies start to surface as the policewoman talks to Meghan in her deceptively conversational way. Why is Dan Simmons naked? How did he manage to take his clothes off while keeping Meghan under his control? Did she really keep a loaded gun, unlocked, in her nightstand drawer? With kids in the house? Was she crazy? Heloise wishes her sister would stop talking. But Meghan points to the marks on her face, admits how frightening it has been, living without her husband, admits her ignorance and negligence with the gun but says she believes it is the only thing that prevented Dan from killing her. He choked her when they had sex, see? There are marks on her neck. She was blacking out, she thought she was dying, there was nothing to do but reach into that nightstand table, grab the gun, and blow his brains out. Look-there is brain matter in her hair, a fine spray of blood on her face. She knows she has to go to the hospital and talk to police at greater length-Heloise puts in here that she wants her sister to have a lawyer, a good one. She won’t use her own man, but she’ll ask him for a recommendation.

“Can’t my sister drive me to the hospital for the rape kit? Do I really need to go in the ambulance or a police car?”

Meghan walks stiffly to Heloise’s car, carrying a duffel bag with clothes to change into after the exam.

“So,” Heloise says, letting that one word stand for the two dozen questions she wants to ask.

“I told him I like it rough. It took him a while to warm up-I had to beg him to hit me, bully him, even scratch him a little-but he caught on. And then I told him I wanted to do the autoerotic thing.”

“With Brian’s gun?”

“Oh, no. I had him wait downstairs, told him I wanted to get ready for him. That gave me time to get it out of the lockbox and load it, then put it in the nightstand.”

The hospital is only a mile away now. They will never speak of this again, Heloise knows.

“Are you sure?” she asks. “That he was the one?”

“Yes. And he wanted me to kill his wife, Lillian. Isn’t that awful?”

“Awful,” Heloise agrees.

“I saved her life, if you think about it,” Meghan says. “What a terrible, terrible man.”

“Yes.”

Meghan sits in the little dressing room adjacent to the green room at the Today show, waiting for the makeup and hair people. She had hoped for something a little loftier-Oprah, to be exact-but she supposes Today is the best thing to do if you can’t get Oprah. She did get Oprah, though; Oprah just didn’t get her. She was asked to be one of several women, up to a half dozen, featured under the theme “She Fought Back.” Meghan doesn’t want to be one in a crowd, her story reduced to a mere trend. Besides, there were some indications that Oprah might ask a lot of questions about the gun-why was it so near to hand, in a house with children-and the publicist who has been advising Meghan found the course of the pre-interview worrisome and recommended pulling-out. Today is more interested in Meghan’s decision to speak publicly about being a rape victim, her assertion that women have nothing to fear by coming forward. “There’s not just one way to be a rape victim” is the line the publicist impresses upon her to use in interviews, something he apparently cribbed from an Internet site.