My favorite computer teacher, Mr. Donald, always said when you’ve got a brutal math question, start with defining the problem.
I reminded myself of this as I sat on a park bench watching people stream past. This was by far the most complicated problem I’d ever had to solve. It wasn’t exactly shocking that I felt overwhelmed, but if I was going to get out of this, I had to stop acting like some kind of drama queen and instead tackle this the same way I would a tricky math problem.
I’d picked the wrong person to sit next to on a flight. I wasn’t a psychologist; I had no idea what the fancy term was for her diagnosis. It was enough to know she was clearly bat-shit crazy. She’d killed Connor and now expected me to murder her mother and seemed to have zero idea how insane all of that was.
I went through my options. The most obvious solution was to go to the police, but I still wasn’t convinced that they would believe me, versus thinking I was somehow messed up in Connor’s death. If they poked around into my history, combined with finding out that Miriam had been blackmailing him for being a pig, I was going to look like a suspect. Miriam had been standing far away, but I was close enough to have done something, maybe on behalf of both of us. And unless Nicki confessed, there was nothing to connect her to me or Connor.
Going home seemed to be my best bet. I sent my mom an email asking her to check into tickets. I got a long email back almost immediately that could be summarized as You can come home if you absolutely feel you have to, but I think it would be a mistake. My hands twisted in my lap. I didn’t know how to explain why I needed to come home so badly without disclosing everything. My mom already thought I was a screwup—if she knew the whole story, she’d be disappointed on a whole new level. She’d be thinking about how she’d never gotten herself messed up with a psycho when she was my age and how she knew my frozen zygote siblings likely wouldn’t have done this either. I could already picture the blog titles: What to Do When Your Child Befriends a Killer and When Your Kids Mess Up, It’s Not Your Fault.
I closed my email and toyed with the idea of setting up some kind of sting operation to capture Nicki. I’d arrange to meet her and get her to confess while I recorded the conversation. I played with the record function on my phone. Hmm. It might work. I’d take that to the cops and then they could go after her.
I’d have to lead her into saying something incriminating. She also might guess what I was up to, and if she discovered me recording her, it wasn’t going to go well.
Then the solution popped into my head. It was so simple I didn’t know why I hadn’t seen it before. I laughed out loud and yelled, “Working the damn problem!” An elderly woman passing by gave me a worried look and crossed to the far side of the sidewalk. I didn’t even care. I felt like skipping.
I’d been so worried about how to get Nicki to confess, but I was focused on the wrong thing. My issue wasn’t what she’d already done, or that I had met her at all. My real problem was what she was trying to make me do. All I had to do was refuse.
No. I’m not going to murder your drunk mother. Fuck off.
What could she do if I refused? It’s not as though there was a signed contract. She couldn’t take me to court to force me to kill someone. And as long as I was careful to never be alone with her, she wouldn’t physically attack me. She couldn’t go to the police and say I hadn’t kept my promise—she was guilty of a murder.
Hopefully she’d realize that I wasn’t like her. Maybe she would just go away. Search out a fellow psycho who would do what she wanted. And if she did approach me again, I’d refuse. I couldn’t change what she’d done to Connor, but at least I could keep the situation from getting worse.
I took the steps two at a time up to Metford’s front door, feeling lighter than when I’d walked out hours before. I had just enough time to clean up before meeting Alex. I was hankering for some spring rolls.
I crashed back down to earth as soon as I entered the lobby. Tasha was sitting on the sofa with Alex, their faces both drawn and serious.
Tasha stood when she saw me. “Kim, I’d like to talk to you.”
Alex scurried off to the stairs without looking me in the eye. What had he told her?
Tasha motioned for me to sit across from her in one of the chairs. “You want a cup of tea?”
What was it with the British and their compulsive need to have a cuppa every time something stressful came up? “No thanks.”
Tasha leaned back in her seat, the bangles on her arm clinking as they slid along her wrist. “Anything you want to tell me?”
What Tasha didn’t know was that my mom was a pro at this game. She’d gotten me to confess to a range of things before I’d learned to shut up until I knew exactly what information she already had. I shook my head. We stared silently at each other.
Tasha ran her hands through her hair. “Why didn’t you tell me that you and Connor used to date?”
Alex, how could you? My heart rate tripled. If I had been hooked up to an EKG, it would have been beeping out of control. “It didn’t seem important.”
One of her perfectly tweezed eyebrows arched. “You didn’t think it was important to mention that you’d been in a relationship? Not even when the police were asking about him?”
“We weren’t still dating.”
“All the same, seeing what happened to him, losing someone who was important to you must have been devastating.”
I bit down hard. I had to be careful what I said. “It was, but I didn’t want to talk about it.”
Tasha nodded. “Uh-huh. Alex is worried about you. He says you’ve gotten a little obsessed about Connor’s death . . . about trying to figure out what happened. He thinks you’re convinced it wasn’t an accident.”
Had he told her about Nicki? “I’m not obsessed.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “I feel like you’re accusing me of something.”
She leaned forward. “Listen, I’m on your side here.”
“I don’t have a side,” I insisted. “I’m just upset. Not because we used to date, but because it’s horrible. Maybe I should have said something, but like I said, I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“What about this person who you think sent the article?”
I clenched my teeth. “I don’t know who did it.”
“I have to tell the police about this. I think Alex is right and the article was likely someone’s idea of being helpful, but we need to make sure the authorities have all the information.”
I wanted to beg her not to, but I knew it wouldn’t work. Tasha wasn’t the kind of person to be swayed by some tears. “Okay,” I said. I pushed up from the chair and walked to the main stairs without looking back. I was right—there wasn’t much to talk about where Connor and I were concerned, but it wasn’t going to look like that when the cops started poking around.