Third Party Read online

“It’s perfectly fine to take the meds two nights in a row. You have to take care of yourself.”

  “How very Yellow Wallpaper of you.” I smile.

  He kisses my lips. “Can you take my suit to the cleaner’s today? The one I wore to Doug’s wedding?”

  “What? Oh, yeah.”

  “I don’t mean to nag, but it’s been a few weeks now.”

  “No, I know. Sorry I keep forgetting, but it’s just that by the time I remember, I’m already halfway to Evanston to do the shopping, so . . .” My phone chimes with a familiar ringtone. It’s a text from Quinn: FaceTime?

  I reply, Anytime.

  “Maybe try to find a cleaner’s around here.” He winks and points to my phone. “Say hi to our girl for me.”

  He takes a few steps toward the door but then turns back, presses his lips to my forehead once again. “Love you, Kirstie.”

  And then he’s gone, off to help couples at the end of their rope dissolve their marriages. Off to save a child from an abusive parent, or to prove said parent is reformed. Such is life in the realm of family law. Sometimes you’re a hero. Sometimes you’re a slimeball.

  A series of chimes alerts me that Quinn is FaceTiming. Just seeing her name on my screen is enough to make me smile.

  “Quinny!”

  “Hi, Mom.” She’s walking through campus, probably on her way to her first class. Her hair is pin straight and nearly black. Her eyes, a pretty shade of hazel green, practically sparkle when she smiles.

  I never knew I was beautiful until I saw shades of myself in my daughter.

  “You doing okay?” she asks. “You look tired.”

  “I am. And old.”

  “You’re not even forty yet.”

  It’s still surreal that suddenly, I’m knocking on forty’s door. I graduated high school with my son kicking me from the inside, and my children and I passed through all major milestones as a team. Yet as their lives begin, mine feels as if it’s nearly over.

  “Thirty-nine is close enough,” I assure her. “I think I need the works. Botox. Lipo . . .”

  “You don’t need plastic surgery, Mom. Look. Just because Dad’s cousin married some twenty-four-year-old bartender—”

  “You don’t like Donna?”

  “It’s not that I don’t like her. I like her fine. But she’s bailing out of opportunity. She’s taking the easy way out, stealing a married man, then marrying the guy probably because he has money, and quitting her job. It’s just . . . frustrating. How are we, as a gender, supposed to aspire to greatness when all we’re doing is knocking each other down?”

  “I don’t think that’s how it happened. I think Doug and Lena were unhappy for a long time, and he and Donna happened to meet at the right time. She’s a sweetheart.”

  “Regardless, marrying someone so young is ridiculous at Doug’s age. It doesn’t mean Dad’s suddenly going to expect you to look younger, but if he does, it says something about him, not you. And, I’m sorry. Doug’s covering his gray with that awful inky dye—”

  “Ah, yes.” They’ve been graying since they were twenty-one. It’s the only flaw in their perfect family genes, and it landed on my son, too. “Dad has a bottle of the stuff, too, now.”

  “Do not even tell me. And it’s obvious Doug’s had some work done around his eyes. Whatever happened to growing old with grace and distinction? Donna’s just another midlife crisis, like the motorcycle, and I wish you wouldn’t measure your worth against her.”

  “How about against her body?”

  “Mom.”

  “I’m kidding. But Donna’s not the reason I’m feeling this way.” But I’m not sure she isn’t, now that I think about it. Donna represents something I’ll never be again—young and full of promise. Just like the girl at the wedding.

  I need to talk to you, Ian.

  I shudder with the memory of it.

  “Then what is it, Mom?”

  “I look in the mirror, and all I see, despite the constant yoga, despite the organic diet, despite the antiwrinkle skin cream, are sag and laugh lines.”

  “Laugh lines aren’t a sign of age. They’re a sign of happiness.”

  “That’s a good one.” How I managed to raise a confident, intelligent, feminist daughter is beyond me, considering I jumped into forever before I even knew who I was. I make my way to the kitchen. “I’m going to write it down.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. I’m writing it down.” When I reach the island, I grab a pen and a pad of paper. While Quinn rambles about the dangers of elective procedures and the message they convey to young girls, I scrawl her wise words across the top of the page. As I’m writing the last word—happiness—I realize I’m writing on a note Ian must have left before he headed to work:

  Don’t forget my suit. Xoxo.

  “Your dad’s dry cleaning.” Something curls in my stomach. Feelings of inadequacy? Stupidity, maybe? I’m glad he left a note. I was about to forget all over again.

  “What about it?”

  “I keep forgetting to take his suit in.”

  “He left you a note.” She rolls her eyes.

  “He also brought me a nice bottle of wine and flowers last night. See?” I turn the camera toward the twenty-four long-stemmed red roses filling a Waterford vase on our island.

  “Does he still leave his empty deodorant can on your vanity when it needs replacing, too?”

  I laugh. “It’s a system. It works.”

  “You know what else works? Saying, hey, hon, I’m out of deodorant. Would you mind grabbing some if you’re going to be out and about? Or better yet, stopping at the Walgreens to get it on your own on your way back from lunch. It’s insulting, the way he stacks his empties for you to deal with.”

  Quinn doesn’t understand that this isn’t a statement about how important Ian thinks I am. It’s a division of tasks. When you spend the latter portion of adolescence as parents, you divide and conquer. What Quinn sees as demeaning, I see as my part in running a successful household. Yes, Ian expects me to do these things for him, but it’s become a way of life. I don’t question it.

  “Mom? Do you feel as if you’ve chosen this life? Or as if it’s just something that happened to you?”

  I stop moving for a moment. It’s not as if I’ve never thought about it before, but to have your nineteen-year-old daughter put the question to you . . . well, it makes you pause.

  When I turned up pregnant at seventeen, my father suggested abortion, then adoption. When I opted for door number three, he kicked me out of the house, and the Holloways took me in.

  So now that I think about things, I suppose I didn’t have many options being a young, uneducated, unemployed mother of two. But I decided to keep Patrick. I decided to raise him. So that’s a choice, and I made it. In many ways, that one profound decision snowballed into a lifetime.

  I glance at Ian’s note. “I’d better put the suit in the car now. Where’s the dress you wore to Doug’s wedding?” I ask. “I’ll take that, too.”

  “It’s in my closet. In the dry-cleaning sleeve I picked it up in a week after I wore it.” She pauses for effect. “See? That’s what responsible people do. They wear clothes, they clean them.”

  “There are worse things than learning to rely on someone.”

  Quinn counters, “There are worse things than learning how to take care of your own burdens. I know you’ll keep doing things for Dad—but you don’t have to. If you died tomorrow, you know, he’d have to figure things out.”

  “What a lovely thought, Quinn. A bit morbid, perhaps, but every day”—I glance at my reflection in the nearest mirror and pull tight the skin above my left eyebrow—“I see the evidence that I’m closer to death.”

  She rolls her eyes. “On that note, I have to go. I have a study group.”

  “Okay. Study hard.”

  “Mom? You don’t need plastic surgery.”

  “Love you.”

  “Kiss, kiss,” she says. “Love, love.”r />
  I hang up and drop the basket of dry cleaning—much more than a suit; I’ve really let it pile up—in front of the door. I won’t be able to forget to take it in if I have to keep walking past it, will I?

  Maybe I should just take it now.

  I grab my keys.

  “One sec.” The girl working at this Laundromat–slash–dry cleaner hybrid on the main drag closest to this rural burg barely awards me a glance when I walk in. She fixes her gaze on the television screen mounted in the lobby. “God, this is just awful.”

  I hoist the overflowing basket of my husband’s clothes to the counter and glance at the morning news. “Usually is,” I say. “That’s why I try not to watch it.”

  “Looks like a spot of something on the collar here,” she says. “Spaghetti sauce?”

  I’m surprised she noticed it, given she can’t tear her attention from the news.

  I run my thumbnail over the spot on the shirt Ian was wearing yesterday. It looks like a teardrop, about half an inch in size. “He brought home a bottle of red wine last night.”

  “Next time, don’t try to lift the stain on your own. It can embed deeper into the fabric.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Someone did.” She points to the faint red ring around the mark. “I’ll work on it for you, but a stain like this . . . I’m not sure I can lift it.”

  “Thanks.”

  She counts the remaining items. “Twelve shirts, nine pairs of pants, one suit jacket. Pick up in two days?”

  “Sure.”

  She’s tapping keys on the computer as I spell our last name, and again, she looks up at the television. “She was just so young. Tragic.”

  Finally, I turn to the television to see what’s going on.

  I gasp.

  It’s her: the girl from Doug’s wedding. The one who touched my husband’s arm.

  My spine softens, and I catch myself against the wall.

  Her name appears on the screen:

  Margaux Claire Stritch.

  I can’t help but cover my mouth in horror. It’s her. And she’s . . . dead?

  Tears well in my eyes.

  She was so young.

  Like Quinn.

  A whole life ahead of her—gone.

  And the things I’d thought about her! Heaven help me, but I’d nastily pondered how much better my life, my marriage, would be without her. I’d wished her out of existence, it seems. I’d wished her gone, practically hoped some evil would befall her, and now . . .

  Now it has.

  She smiles at me from the television screen—happy and bright and absolutely, downright gorgeous.

  I hiccup over a sob.

  “Mrs. Holloway?”

  Just a few weeks ago, she was moving through the wedding crowd, making her way toward Ian, as if desperately wanting to reach him. She couldn’t have hoped to be covert about it—not in a dress like that—but there was a discreetness about it, too. The way she clung to the perimeter of the room until she reached him. A girl like that . . . I’ll bet she commanded every room she entered, just by being in it, and now . . .

  I catch two words, blurted out as if they don’t carry the weight of the world:

  Presumed suicide.

  No.

  The camera zooms in on a female firefighter—the name lettered down the right sleeve of her jacket: BLYTHE—climbing into an ambulance next to a bagged body.

  “Lieutenant,” a reporter on screen asks, “given the victim is the adopted daughter of Alderman Akers, is it possible there’s a link to his sudden leave of absence? Can you confirm you’re now investigating this case as a murder?”

  Murder?

  I freeze.

  “Mrs. Holloway? There’s something in the pocket here.”

  I wipe away a tear and glance over my shoulder at the counter girl.

  She pulls her hand from the inside pocket of the suit jacket Ian wore to the wedding.

  A red thong—silk and lace—dangles from her index finger. She drops it into a plastic bag.

  And slowly, my grief morphs to something akin to anger.

  I see them like a montage of pictures at the end of a movie—Ian and this now-deceased beauty—walking through the reception hall, going somewhere to talk, somewhere private.

  I take the plastic bag, and therefore the red thong, from the dry cleaner’s outstretched hand.

  The red thong . . .

  (Something a twenty-two-year-old might wiggle her way into.)

  . . . pulled from the pocket of my husband’s coat.

  Chapter 3

  JESSICA

  I can’t believe I did this. Again.

  Granted, it was a tough end to a long shift, but I’ve got a good thing going. I don’t need this drama.

  “Where you going, Jessie?” Decker hooks a finger under the side string of the panties I’ve just now put back on and gives me a yank back toward the bed.

  He wraps a strong arm around my waist and pulls me up close to his warm body.

  It feels good to be with him. Familiar. Easy.

  But if the past year or so has proven anything, it’s that there’s no forever here, stuffed into Decker’s one-bedroom hole-in-the-wall.

  The whole place is cramped, but I guess that’s the way he likes it. No room for anyone else. And the view isn’t much to write home about, either. I’m presently looking out a third-floor window, across a filthy gangway, at the drawn shades of another third-floor window.

  The light from the bathroom—I must have forgotten to turn it off—glints off the brass of Decker’s badge, still encased in its sleeve. It’s the reason he is the way he is. Herculean. Determined. Unavailable and preoccupied. Suspicious of everyone and everything. Including me.

  When you repeatedly see the ugly side of humanity, day in and day out, it’s bound to change you. After a decade on the force, Decker has hardened. He expects the worst out of every man—and woman—he meets.

  But he’s a damn good cop. Damn good in bed. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean he’s a good choice. Life with Decker would be wrought with perpetual moodiness and contemplation, and chock-full of constant interruptions and Gotta go, babe.

  But we understand each other. I’ve done my fair share of leaving in the middle of birthday parties and uttering my own I gotta go, babes. When I’m on call, I’m on call. Burning buildings don’t wait until your nephew blows out the candles on his cake.

  I understand Decker’s commitment to the job, and he understands mine, but that doesn’t mean our lives could meld, even if we wanted them to. I think about things sometimes, revisit the last incident that effectively terminated our official relationship, and I still wonder if maybe I overreacted.

  Dinner plans. Eight o’clock. Meet at the restaurant.

  He didn’t show.

  He didn’t call.

  He didn’t answer when I called him.

  I didn’t see him or hear from him for days, and I found myself scanning articles for news of a dead Chicago detective and checking up on him at the station—like a neurotic mother.

  When he finally resurfaced, he offered no explanation, no apology. He simply said it was part of the job and suggested I was too angry, too upset, too fragile to handle a relationship with him.

  I was pissed.

  Fragile women don’t do what I do on a day-to-day basis.

  So I suggested maybe he was too immature for a grown-up relationship with anyone. You can imagine how well that went over.

  We stopped making plans to see each other after that.

  Didn’t stop sleeping together, but that’s another story.

  I dodged a bullet when we broke up. I don’t know why I’m tempted to reload the gun every time I see him.

  “Still getting to you?” His breath ruffles my hair, and his biceps flex when he pulls me just a tad closer.

  “Yeah.” The scent of the loft revisits me now—human excrement and rot—and a shiver runs up my spine. I fear I’ll see her every time I close my eyes.


  Her red toenails and lips. The red nightie. The overturned chair beneath her hanging body.

  I much prefer sprinting into burning buildings to calls like the last. Such a personal thing, what I did at the residence of Margaux Claire Stritch. I feel forever connected to her, yet she never knew I existed. Funny that she will always be a part of my life, but I was never even a blip on her radar.

  I wonder how she gathered the nerve to strap that rope around her neck and step off that chair. Did she change her mind a moment after it was too late?

  What drives someone to take such drastic measures?

  “Listen to me.” Decker presses a kiss to the top of my head. “We were involved first. Doesn’t that make me an exception to the rule?”

  It takes a minute for me to shift gears to Decker’s train of thought. He assumes what’s getting to me is my bad decision du jour—i.e., my slipping between the sheets with him again—and the effect it might have on a relationship I’ve recently kick-started. And maybe that’s part of it, but . . .

  “So you’ve gone out with him a few times.” Decker drops a smooth, wet kiss onto my inner wrist. “There’s no talk of being exclusive with him, right? You’re fair game.”

  “It’s not that, exactly.”

  “We’re just blowing off steam, you and me,” he says. “After that suicide . . . we deserve it. Brutal call, wasn’t it? Brutal scene.” He licks his lips and stares at the ceiling, and I know he’s revisiting the call in his mind. “But if that was a suicide, I’m Gandhi.”

  “You’re not Gandhi.”

  “I could be Gandhi.”

  “Gandhi wouldn’t be doing what we do.”

  “No one knows that for sure. I suspect he kept a few surprises under those robes.”

  “I should tell Jack about us,” I say. “I’m going to. It’s only fair.” What I mean is that I won’t. But I should.

  “What’s fair? You’ve only gone out with the guy a couple times.”

  “I just . . . I like him, I guess.” Which is exactly why Jack should never know about Decker and me. “I should tell him.”

  “He’s too square, too proper for you.”

  “Mind your own business, Lieutenant.”

  “Lieutenant?”

  I raise a brow.