Imani ducked when the glass shattered. Later, she would wish that her first reaction had been to run for her kids, that she’d performed some heroic act of maternal self-sacrifice as she’d always imagined she would if her family were threatened. But her instinct had, regrettably, been to hide beneath the table at which she’d previously been sitting.
Her second impulse was to scream for Philip.
He shouted for the kids to get away from their windows while sprinting toward the door. Imani watched through chair legs as he stood guard, his hands in fists and his right foot extended forward.
Outside, a car engine roared. The squeal of tires followed it along with footsteps. The latter noise was the most frightening to Imani. Their assailant was coming, she thought. He would be armed while her husband had only his bare knuckles.
She crawled toward the pushed-out chair that she’d previously occupied. Her phone was atop the table. If she could get to it, Imani thought, then the police would come. Their assailant would be arrested.
“Stay where you are!”
Philip’s instruction rang out as loud as the earlier bang. Imani reacted to his volume in the same way she’d responded to the seeming gunshot, dropping her stomach back down to the floor. “My phone is up there,” she explained. “I—”
“Don’t call the police.”
Imani didn’t understand the negative. Their circumstances were the exact ones for which law enforcement existed. “Cops are armed,” she shouted.
“Exactly.” Philip hissed. “We’re not inviting in a bunch of scared patrolmen with automatic weapons and minimal training who just want to get home to their families after their shift ends. That’s how we get our kids killed.”
The footsteps grew fainter. In the distance, Imani heard a car door slam. Still, she waited for Philip to back into the dining room before emerging from her makeshift bomb shelter.
Imani grabbed her phone as she headed over to the window. She scanned the glass for a circular hole. A large crack ran from the window’s center to its right corner. Hairline fractures extended off a broken line. But there didn’t seem to be a bullet entrance.
“Was it a drive-by shooting?” The question felt foreign to Imani, as if she were speaking in another language. When she told people that she’d grown up in the Bronx, they often pictured her living in an area where drivers rolled their windows up, the kind of place with corner drug dealers and omnipresent housing projects. But Riverdale was not an area that ’90s rappers wrote rhymes about. It had been—and still was—a wealthy suburb on the outskirts of Westchester County populated by affluent professionals and two-parent, office-working households.
Philip ran his thumb over the window crack. “A gun didn’t do this.” He tilted his head to see through an undamaged section of glass. “An idiot threw something at the window.”
The dismissive “idiot” was supposed to make her feel better, Imani figured. But idiots often caused the most damage. “Do you think this has something to do with the Walkers?”
Philip turned from the darkened street. “Why would it have anything to do with the Walkers?”
“I don’t know. Nate is murdered, and Melissa is missing. Ava came home with us. Maybe someone wants to hurt them and thought she was still here. We should call the police. Her grandparents. Maybe—”
Philip shook his head, as if disappointed. “The pandemic has nearly sixteen percent of the city out of work, babe. People are angry. They want someone to blame. They see the lights glowing in one of these houses and think to hell with those rich bastards. You know how it is.”
Imani shook her head. “It has never been like that.”
Philip shrugged. “First time for everything, then.” He started toward the kitchen. “I’ll duct-tape it for the interim. Tomorrow, we can get quotes to replace it and call our homeowner’s insurance.”
Imani felt her adrenaline reduce into annoyance. They’d been attacked. Yet her husband thought the problem could be fixed with duct tape. She followed him toward the kitchen, waving her cell. “We should call the police.”
Philip whirled around, a fighter shaking free of someone on his back. “I said no.” His sudden volume and the redness of his face forced Imani to retreat a step. “Please go check on the kids. They’re still in their rooms wondering what the heck is going on. I’ll be up after I tape this.”
Though Imani wasn’t done with the discussion, guilt over her earlier failure to protect their children made her turn toward the stairs. She climbed to the bedroom floors, calling her kids’ names. “Vivienne? Jay?” She shouted in the direction of their closed bedroom doors. “Everything’s all right. Where are you? It’s okay.”
Vivienne emerged first. “Mom?” Though her brow was knitted, there was a surprising lack of tension in her face. Imani heard the massive bass line of a Travis Scott song. “What’s up?”
“You didn’t hear?”
Vivienne gestured behind her to a speaker. “I was listening to music as I finished my homework.”
Imani opened her mouth to explain and then abruptly closed it. Nate’s death had surely caused her children enough concern for their safety. They didn’t need to know that angry miscreants were running around destroying property. “Nothing,” she said. “The window broke downstairs.”
A creak sounded behind her. Jay’s curly head popped out the door. “That’s what all the shouting was about? I thought you and Dad were just arguing.”
Blood rushed to Imani’s cheeks, heating her face like a blast of hot air from a subway grate. “When do we yell at one another?”
Jay shot his sister a look, as if to ask whether or not he should answer. Imani recalled the prior day’s conversation about Philip’s restaurant. Clearly, they had not been as quiet as she’d believed. “I shouted because I didn’t know what was happening,” Imani said. “Glad to know you’re both okay.”
Her kids exchanged another glance. Imani interpreted this look as pitying. It was the kind of side-eye that she imagined adult children gave one another when they realized a parent was suffering the beginning stages of dementia.
Protesting her sanity would only solidify their opinion, Imani decided. She headed to her room, slumped onto the bed, and opened her phone. The Instagram profile that she’d been perusing before the window broke was still on-screen. In the center was the name MickyKline_Drinks. Below it was the message that she’d started to write.
“Hello Mr. Kline.”
Imani deleted the greeting. Use of honorifics and last names on Instagram would read as a call for charity. You don’t know me, but my daughter is sick… Better to get straight to the point, she thought.
“I’m a friend of Melissa’s and understand that you were also,” she typed. “I’d like to speak with you.”
It read like a Twitter dating request, Imani thought. She needed something more enticing than a simple call for conversation. If the police were correct and this Micky had been sleeping with Melissa, then he wouldn’t want to advertise his cuckolding a dead man. It made him a murder suspect. In fact, for all Imani knew, he was Nate’s killer. He could have become obsessed with Melissa, shot her husband, and kidnapped her.
“The police are already trying to find you,” Imani wrote. “Maybe I can help.”
Or maybe I can rescue my friend and send you to jail, she thought.
She appended her telephone number and email. As her phone sounded with the whoosh of a sent message, her bedroom door opened. Quickly, she exited the application. Philip would not appreciate her messaging handsome, young strangers, let alone people of interest in a murder investigation.
His coloring had returned to normal, though his body language seemed more beaten down. Philip entered with his hands in front of his stomach, knotted into a ball like he’d been praying. The pious posture unnerved her. Philip was not a man to come pleading about anything.
“What’s wrong?”
He rubbed his forehead, working out the words. “I think I have a possible solution to our financial problems. But it will require some flexibility.”
Flexibility was earned through pushing muscles to the point of pain. The last thing Imani wanted was more of that. She put her phone down to give Philip her full attention. “What do you mean?”
“I think—”
The doorbell’s ring cut him off. Imani stared at Philip, wordlessly urging him to resume guard at the entrance. He winced. “I’m sorry, babe. I guess she’s early.”