Danielle bowed out of bunco with Nina, Grace, and the others. At lunch with the girls she’d made up an excuse about menopause, that her doctor had adjusted her hormones and she wasn’t quite feeling herself.
She listened to the older women talk about their own menopause stories, and the younger women talk about childbirth.
It was exhausting.
But she stayed because she needed information.
For the last six weeks, ever since she’d seen Tony and Lana at the Christmas party and just knew what was happening, Danielle felt off. As if she wasn’t completely in her body. As if everything was happening around her and no one actually saw her. If they did, wouldn’t they see her suffering? Wouldn’t they recognize that they were as much to blame for what had happened … what would happen … as she?
More so. She was a catalyst, nothing more.
Nina would be at bunco. Tony was staying home with Kevin.
“Having a boys’ night watching some action hero movie.”
That was good, right?
Just delaying the inevitable …
Nina didn’t know the truth. Danielle almost told her about Tony and Lana, wondered if that would change anything. She was so … so in love. She was smart, why couldn’t she see it?
Because she wanted it all. Career. Family. Husband. Friends. Everything.
And when she did find out, Kevin would be a pawn in the cat-and-mouse game of divorce. Because Nina and Tony were just as vindictive and angry as any other couple on earth. Friendly divorce? No such thing.
Danielle didn’t trust Tony. After all, he was a cheater. A male whore. Would he bring his mistress over to the house and screw her in his wife’s bed? Probably not … Kevin was eight.
Danielle waited until the bunco game would have started. She’d been to a half dozen over the last few years, she knew they would last until ten, sometimes longer. She drove to the Fieldstone house and parked down the block.
The Fieldstones lived in La Cresenta, in the hills above the 210 freeway. It was an older neighborhood with small, classic homes, many of which had been expanded and fixed up by the owners, increasing the value of the neighborhood. The Fieldstones were no exception. They had the money—Tony was a lawyer, Nina made in the high five figures as the senior legal secretary. They had one child.
There was one major problem with the Fieldstone house—one she hadn’t encountered before, but had been thinking about a lot over the last six weeks.
The bedrooms were upstairs.
She had a couple of ideas, but neither one was ideal.
The first was the fact that Kevin spent a lot of time with his grandmother, and twice in the last six weeks had spent the night at her house. Her one-story house.
But his grandmother had two small dogs who barked whenever a fly sneezed, so that wouldn’t work. And it would defeat the purpose of exposing his parents for the selfish, egotistical, undeserving, marginal humans that they were.
Danielle took a deep breath. Her head ached. She’d been drinking far too much this week, she had to stop. Relax.
But the nightmares will return …
She could suffer the nightmares to enact retribution. It would just be a couple of days, maybe a week. Two.
Sooner. Because Nina and Tony Fieldstone didn’t want to be parents. They would leave, abandon their son.
They all did it. They all left.
The darkness deepened as she watched the house: 7:00 P.M.; 8:00 P.M.
A tap on her window made her jump.
An older man and his wife stood on the sidewalk with their leashed dog.
She turned her ignition half the way and rolled down the window.
“Yes?” she said.
“Is something wrong, ma’am? Car broke down?”
“No. I was just talking on the phone. Sorry.”
The man looked down at her hands. Her phone was in her purse.
“I-I had some bad news. I needed a few minutes to compose myself. I didn’t meant to disturb anyone.”
“You didn’t, but you were here when we left for our walk nearly an hour ago. Just wanted to make sure, can’t be too careful.”
He stepped back from the door. Danielle didn’t want to leave, but now she would have to. She couldn’t afford to draw attention to herself.
She turned on the car and drove off. She glanced in the rearview mirror. The man was still watching her.
Well, shit.
She drove around for quite a while until she ended up in Burbank and saw a sign.
LAST WEEKEND FOR BLOW-OUT DEALS! LAST-YEAR MODELS CHEAP!
It was time to get a new car.
Just in case.
* * *
An hour later, Danielle drove off in a brand-new silver Nissan Ultima. Last year’s model, but with only thirty-seven miles on it. She didn’t care much about cars, but this was a good deal, and she’d kept her four-year-old Honda in pristine condition so got a good trade-in. She hadn’t planned on getting rid of the Honda until she moved again, but it was time.
A sign.
She drove back through the Fieldstones’ neighborhood, but didn’t stop. She didn’t know where the old folks lived, and she couldn’t risk being seen again.
It was late, after ten, but Nina’s SUV wasn’t in the driveway. Tony always parked his sporty car in the garage, but with all their things, the two-car garage only fit one small vehicle. She couldn’t tell if he was still home, but there were no other cars in the driveway or directly in front of the house. They had two babysitters, other than Kevin’s grandmother—one had a small pickup truck, the other lived three blocks away and walked because she didn’t have her license.
Danielle drove around the block once.
She’d been to the house several times for parties and bunco. The master bedroom had been expanded out over the garage and looked over both the front and backyard. Kevin’s bedroom was in the front corner of the house. His bed was under the windows which met in the corner. Impossible to reach from ground level.
She left the neighborhood. There was only one way she could do this. She would have to go in through the front or back door. The Fieldstones had an alarm system, but they only used it when they were out of town.
As if their possessions were more important than their son.
Danielle drove home. She lived in a quaint older house in Glendale with a long narrow driveway that led to the detached garage. She didn’t park in the garage—she used it for other things.
She went inside her house and poured a glass of wine, then stopped herself. She needed to be clear this week. To plan. She put the glass down but didn’t pour it out. She might need just one small glass to go to sleep. To keep the nightmares at bay.
It’ll take the whole bottle. You know that.
She did. But she could control herself. She had to.
She walked to the second bedroom she used as an office. It was functional, with a computer and printer and bookshelf filled with books she hadn’t read.
She hadn’t read a book in a long, long time.
But on the top shelf was a photo album. She took it down, sat at her desk, and opened it.
She ran her fingers over the first photo. Matthew, only hours after he’d been born. So perfect. So sweet.
Danielle couldn’t do this. She flipped to the last page and pulled out the large envelope she kept there. She opened it, dumped out the contents. Keys, mostly. A few photos. Notes. Things she didn’t dare leave behind, just in case.
She grabbed the key chain marked F. Fieldstone. It wasn’t their chain—it wasn’t even their key. She’d made a copy last month when Nina gave her her keys to go to the archive room to retrieve files on a case that was going to appeal.
As if subconsciously Danielle had known this was the only way.
She put everything back in the folder, including the Fieldstone security code, which she had long memorized. She’d watched Nina months ago type it in when they’d gone over to the house to prepare for a partner dinner.
Before Danielle found out the truth about Tony and Lana.
Maybe she’d always known. Maybe she had a sixth sense about cheating husbands.
You didn’t know your own husband was screwing his secretary. So cliché. So disgusting.
Her hand itched to call that bastard and give him a tongue-lashing.
She put the photo album back and walked down the short hall to the kitchen. Drank half the glass of wine. Retrieved her cell phone. Dialed Richard.
He didn’t answer. Was he intentionally avoiding her calls?
“Are you cheating on your wife, Richard? Does she know? Or is she as clueless as I was?”
She went off on him, going from calm to angry, long after the phone beeped to tell her the recording time was up.
She stared at the phone and almost called him back, but something tickled in the back of her mind. Something she didn’t quite remember … but it was there.
Danielle grabbed her new car keys and went back out into the night. It was after eleven. Nina should be home by now. Danielle lived only a few minutes from La Cresenta. She turned down the Fieldstones’ street and slowed when she neared their house.
Nina’s SUV still wasn’t there.
On a whim, because of that tickle in the back of her mind, Danielle drove to Grace’s house. She lived in the Burbank Hills, in a beautiful home bought and paid for by Grace’s wealthy ex-husband. Money obviously didn’t buy happiness since Grace had divorced. Had he cheated on her? Probably, Grace never said. But isn’t that what men did? They wanted to screw anything that moved.
At least, that’s what Danielle’s mom always said, and had been proven right again and again and again.
Nina’s shiny Escalade was in the driveway … but no one else was at Grace’s. Bunco would have long been over … and Nina was the last one here by hours?
The lights were off.
Had she been drinking? Decided not to drive?
Danielle parked on the street and closed her eyes. She was missing something. But her instincts—well-formed instincts from years of research and following cheating husbands—told her to grab her camera.
She quietly exited the car and walked up the steep slope of Grace’s driveway.
She’d been to Grace’s house before. Her daughter had a room upstairs, on the south; Grace’s suite was on the northern ground floor. Spacious, as big as Danielle’s entire house.
Why did she even work when she had made so much money on her divorce?
Danielle shook off the thought. She walked around the side of the house; there was a gate. Dammit.
She tried the latch. It wasn’t locked. She quietly went down the walkway to the back of the house, then stopped.
Two sets of sliding-glass doors opened into the backyard. This was Grace’s bedroom. Danielle had to tread carefully here. She walked to the far corner of the yard, on the other side of the pool, where palm trees grew up against the Verdugo Mountains. They didn’t belong here; they seemed so out of place. She stood against one thick tree, aimed her camera at the bedroom, hidden by the night.
She had bought this camera years ago, but it still had some of the best features on the market. She adjusted the lens for the low-light conditions and zoomed into Grace’s bedroom.
Maybe she wasn’t surprised, but she involuntarily gasped.
Tony was not the only Fieldstone having an affair.