The pointed toes of her shoes shifted an inch toward the dust ruffle.
“What do you mean she didn’t go?” Mark asked from the phone speaker. “You said her car left at eight.”
“Her car is gone from the driveway,” the woman said, leaning down slightly to adjust her hem. “Mrs. Gable was leaning on her garden rake when I walked up the side path. She asked me if I was the nurse Laura hired. She told me she saw Laura leave on foot toward the avenue twenty minutes after the car pulled out.”
“Check the desk,” Mark snapped. “The policy release forms are in the bottom divider. Grab the blue folder and leave. Do not stay in that house.”
The woman’s shoes pivoted toward the bureau, her back turning toward the side of the mattress.
My thumb mashed the side button of my phone five times in rapid succession. The screen vibrated once against my palm, launching the emergency SOS beacon to county dispatch.
The woman pulled open the top drawer of Mark’s bureau, rummaging through old socks and handkerchiefs.
“It’s not in the desk,” she said into the phone. “You said you put them where she wouldn’t clean.”
“Look under the floorboard behind the laundry hamper,” Mark said. “Hurry up, Cheryl. If she went to the precinct because of the neighbor—”
“I told you screaming at me on Wednesday was a mistake,” Cheryl replied sharply, yanking the closet door wide. “I had the window cracked for fresh air. Your voice carries when you lose your temper.”
I planted both palms against the underside of the bed’s wooden slats, gathered my knees, and shoved backward with all the force in my legs.
The heavy wooden frame screeched across the oak floorboards. The corner post caught Cheryl across the back of her knees. She shrieked, lost her balance, and crashed onto the carpet, sending her phone skittering into the open closet.
I scrambled out from the exposed side of the bed, scrambled to my feet, and ran for the bedroom doorway.
Cheryl lunged from the carpet, catching the cuff of my jeans with long manicured nails. The fabric tore. I kicked backward, my heel striking her shoulder, and broke her grip.
“Laura!” Mark’s tinny voice yelled from the closet floor. “Cheryl, grab her!”
I tore down the hallway, hit the deadbolt on the front door, and wrenched it open into the noon glare. Across the lawn, Mrs. Gable was watering her rosebushes with a green hose.
“Call nine-one-one!” I yelled, stumbling down the porch stairs.
Mrs. Gable dropped the nozzle. The water pooled into the mulch. Before she could answer, two patrol cruisers from Cherry Hill Police turned the corner with their light bars flashing, tires chirping against the asphalt as they blocked the driveway.
Cheryl burst through the front door behind me, clutching the red handbag to her chest. She stopped dead on the front steps, staring directly into the windshield of the lead squad car.
“Step down with your hands empty!” the driver shouted, unholstering his duty weapon as he cleared his door frame.
Cheryl dropped the red bag onto the welcome mat and raised both hands.
The officers handcuffed her against the porch railing within two minutes. While one patrolman took my statement on Mrs. Gable’s front porch, two others entered my house with service weapons drawn, clearing room by room before bringing out Cheryl’s phone in an evidence sleeve.
The call had disconnected, but the screen showed an active Atlantic City exchange.
At the municipal station on Mercer Street, the detective handling the case showed me the contents of Cheryl’s purse: duplicate keys to my deadbolt, a rental car agreement under the name Cheryl Vance, and a manila folder pulled from behind my bedroom radiator containing duplicate title deeds and forged life insurance settlement receipts.
Mark had never been inside the incinerated sedan pulled off the Atlantic City Expressway two years prior. The dental records used to identify the body had been cross-referenced from a rural clinic where Cheryl worked as an administrative clerk. The seven-hundred-thousand-dollar payout had cleared into an offshore corporate trust six months after the funeral, but Mark had returned to the state to retrieve physical deed transfers and bearer notes he had hidden behind the bedroom walls before the crash.
Cheryl had been staying in the house during my ten-hour shifts to locate the hidden cache, bringing Mark along on speaker calls that repeatedly escalated into shouting matches when she failed to find the documents.
State troopers picked Mark up four hours later at a motel near the marina in Brigantine. He was wearing an unbranded windbreaker, carrying twenty-two thousand dollars in cash, and using an expired driver’s license belonging to his cousin.
I returned home at dusk. The front door stood open to air out the rooms. Mrs. Gable stood at the boundary line, holding a plate covered in foil, but I waved one hand and walked past her into the kitchen.
The cracked blue mug still sat on the metal drying rack beside the sink.
I picked it up, carried it to the trash bin under the counter, and dropped it into the plastic liner.
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