Harlan Coben - Fool Me Once

“Death follows you, Maya...”

Was a person like this — a person surrounded by death, a person who had fooled even those closest to her into believing that her condition was based, in part, on feeling guilty — someone whose judgment you trusted? Stripping away the excess and the complications: Could such a person be trusted to look at the facts rationally and learn the truth?

Objectively, no.

But then again, screw objectivity, right?

Conclusion: Someone was messing with her big-time.

Judith had been awfully cagey when it came to the whereabouts of Caroline. Maya took out her phone and called her sister-in-law. It went to voicemail. Hardly a surprise. When the message beeped, Maya said, “Caroline, I want to make sure you’re okay. Please call me the moment you get this.”

Eileen was parked in the driveway when Maya got home. Maya pulled the car to a stop. Lily had fallen asleep in the backseat. She got out of the car and started to open her back door when Eileen said, “Let her sleep for a second. We need to talk.”

Maya turned and faced her friend. Eileen had been crying.

“What’s wrong?”

“I may have messed up,” she said. “With that nanny cam.”

Eileen started shaking.

“It’s okay,” Maya said. “Let me get Lily in the house and we can—”

“No,” Eileen said. “We need to talk about it out here.”

Maya looked a question at her.

“It may not be safe to talk inside,” Eileen said, lowering her voice. “Someone might be listening.”

Maya glanced through the car window at Lily. She was still asleep.

“What happened?” Maya asked.

“Robby.” The abusive ex.

“What about him?”

“You wouldn’t tell me what happened with your nanny cam, remember?”

“Right, so?”

“You came to my house. You were angry, upset. You were even suspicious of me. You wanted me to prove that I bought it.”

“I remember,” Maya said. “What does this have to do with Robby?”

“He’s back,” she said with tears starting to pour down. “He’s been watching me.”

“Whoa, slow down, Eileen.”

“I got these by email.” She reached into her purse and shoved a bunch of photographs toward Maya. “They came from an anonymous email address, of course. Untraceable. But I know. It’s Robby.”

Maya started looking through them. The photos had been taken inside Eileen’s house. The first three were in her den. Two had her kids, Kyle and Missy, playing on the couch. The last was just of Eileen, sweaty, a glass of ice water in her hand, wearing a sports bra.

“I’d just come home after working out,” Eileen said in way of explanation. “No one was there. So I took off my shirt and threw it in the downstairs hamper.”

Maya could feel the panic welling inside of her, but she kept her voice even. “The angle,” Maya said, riffling through the photographs of Eileen and her children. “These photos — they were taken by your nanny cams?”

“Yes.”

Maya felt her stomach plummet.

“Look at this last one.”

It was a photograph of Eileen on a couch with a man Maya had never seen. They were kissing.

“That’s Benjamin Barouche. We met on Match.com. It was our third date. I had him back to my place. The kids were upstairs asleep. I didn’t even think twice about it. This afternoon, I get these pictures in my email.”

Why hadn’t Maya thought of this before?

“So someone hacked into—”

“Not someone. Robby. It had to be Robby.”

“Okay, so Robby hacked into your nanny cams?”

Eileen started to cry. “I thought the cams weren’t connected to the web, you know? I mean, they use an SD card. I didn’t realize. It’s not even that uncommon. Hacking into cameras, I mean. People do it with those FaceTime and Skype cameras and... I should have put security measures up. But I didn’t know.” She stopped and wiped the tears from her face.

“I’m so sorry, Maya,” she said.

“It’s okay.”

“I don’t know what happened with your nanny cam,” Eileen said. “And it’s okay if you don’t want to tell me. But I thought that maybe this would explain it. That maybe someone hacked in and could see you and Lily.”

Maya tried to digest this new information. Right now, she couldn’t figure out exactly what this news meant or if it related to her situation. Could someone have made a video of Joe in another place and uploaded it to her nanny cam? And if that was the case, so what? It had still been filmed in that room, still recorded on that couch.

But was she being watched?

“Maya?”

“I didn’t get any emails like this,” Maya said. “No one sent me photographs.”

Eileen looked at her. “What then? What happened with your nanny cam?”

“I saw Joe,” Maya said.

Maya carried Lily upstairs and tucked her into the bed. She debated checking the back of the nanny cam to see if the Wi-Fi was on, but right now, she didn’t want to tip off whoever might be watching her.

Watching her. Wow. Talk about sounding paranoid.

She and Eileen set up the Chinese in the formal dining room, far away from the possibly prying eye of the nanny cam. Maya filled her in on what she’d seen on the nanny cam, on Isabella... and then she stopped with the confessional because she was being stupid.

Fact: Eileen had brought that nanny cam into her house.

Maya tried to let that go, but the suspicion buzzed in her ear. She could quiet it, but it wouldn’t go away, not completely.

“What are you going to do,” Maya asked, “about Robby?”

“I gave copies of the photographs to my attorney. He said without proof there’s nothing I can do. I made sure the Wi-Fi setting was completely off. There’s a company that’s going to come in and make sure my network is secure.”

That sounded like a pretty good plan.

Half an hour later, after she had walked Eileen to her car, Maya called Shane. “I need another favor.”

“You can’t see,” Shane said, “but I’m sighing theatrically.”

“I need someone we trust to come in and sweep my place for bugs.”

She explained about Eileen and the hacked nanny cam.

“Do you know if yours was hacked?” he asked.

“No. Do you have someone who can help me?”

“I do. But I have to be honest. This is all sounding a little...”

“Paranoid?” she finished for him.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Were you the one who called Dr. Wu?”

“Maya?”

“What?”

“You’re not okay.”

She said nothing.

“Maya?”

“I know,” she said.

“Nothing wrong with needing help.”

“I need to get through this first.”

“Get through what exactly?”

“Please, Shane.”

There was a brief pause. Then: “I’m sighing again.”

“Theatrically?”

“Is there any other way? I’ll come by with some guys and sweep your place in the morning.” He cleared his throat. “You armed, Maya?”

“What do you think?”

“Rhetorical question,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Shane ended the call. Maya wasn’t quite ready yet for another horror-filled night of flashbacks. Instead, she turned her attention toward Claire’s trip to Philadelphia.

Lily was still asleep. Maya knew that she should wake her daughter and change her out of the clothes she’d worn all day and give her a bath and put her in clean pajamas. The “good” moms would insist on that, of course, and for a moment, Maya could also see their disapproving gazes. But those other moms weren’t carrying a gun and dealing with murder, were they? They didn’t even get that blood-soaked worlds like hers lived side by side with theirs, neighbor to neighbor; that while they worried about arts and crafts and after-school activities and karate classes and enrichment programs, the family next door was dealing with death and terror.