The Stranger(85)
“You mean, faked being pregnant.”
“Right, whatever.”
Johanna just shook her head and said, “Wow,” again.
“It’s not what you think.”
“No, it’s exactly what I think.”
“The pregnancy startled me, you know? But in a good way. It brought me back. It reminded me of what was important. That’s the other irony here. It worked. Corinne was right to do it.”
“No, Adam, she wasn’t right.”
“It brought me back to reality.”
“No, it didn’t. She manipulated you. You’d probably have gotten back to reality anyway. And if you didn’t, then maybe you weren’t meant to. Sorry, but what Corinne did was bad. Really bad.”
“I think maybe she felt desperate.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
“This is her world. Her family. Her entire life. She fought so hard to build it, and it was being threatened.”
Johanna shook her head. “You didn’t do what she did, Adam. You know that.”
“I’m guilty too.”
“It isn’t about guilt. You had a doubt. You had your head turned. You wondered about the what-if. You’re not the first person to feel these things. You either find your way through it or you don’t. But in the end, Corinne didn’t give you that chance. She chose to trick you and live a lie. I’m not defending or condemning you. Every marriage is its own story. But you didn’t see the light. You had someone shine a flashlight in your eyes.”
“Maybe I needed that.”
Johanna shook her head again. “Not like this. It was wrong. You have to see that.”
He thought about it. “I love Corinne. I don’t think the fake pregnancy really changed anything.”
“But you’ll never know.”
“Not true,” Adam said. “I’ve thought about this a lot.”
“And you’re certain you would have stayed?”
“Yes.”
“For the kids?”
“In part.”
“What else?”
Adam leaned forward and stared at the floor for a moment. It was a blue-and-yellow Oriental carpet he and Corinne had picked in an antiques store in Warwick. They’d gone up on an October day to pick apples, but they ended up just drinking some apple cider and buying McIntoshes and then they headed to an antiques store.
“Because whatever crap Corinne and I put each other through,” he began, “whatever dissatisfaction or disappointments or resentments surface, at the end of the day, I can’t imagine my life without her. I can’t imagine growing old without her. I can’t imagine not being part of her world.”
Johanna rubbed her chin, nodding. “I get that. I do. My husband, Ricky, snores so bad it’s like sleeping with a helicopter. But I feel the same.”
They sat there for a moment, letting the feelings settle.
Then Johanna asked, “Why do you think the stranger told you about the fake pregnancy?”
“No clue.”
“He didn’t extort money?”
“No. He said he was doing it for me. He acted as though he was on a holy crusade. How about your friend Heidi? Did she fake a pregnancy too?”
“No.”
“So I don’t get it. What did the stranger tell her?”
“I don’t know,” Johanna said. “But whatever it was, it got her killed.”
“You have any thoughts?”
“No,” Johanna said, “but now I think I might know someone who does.”
Chapter 45
HE KNOWS
Chris Taylor read the message and wondered yet again how and where this had all gone wrong. The Price job had been for hire. That might have been the mistake, though in most ways, the jobs for hire—and there had been only a handful—were the safest. The payments came from an emotionless third party, a top-level investigation firm. In a sense, it was more on the up-and-up, because there wasn’t—and yes, Chris wasn’t afraid to use the word—blackmail involved.
The normal protocol was simple: You know a terrible secret about a certain person via the web. That person has two options. He or she can pay to have the secret kept or he can choose not to pay and have the secret revealed. Chris felt satisfied either way. The end result was either a profit (the person paid the blackmail) or cathartic (the person came clean). In a sense, they needed people to choose both. They needed the money to keep the operation going. They needed the truth to come out because that was what it was all about, what made their enterprise just and good.
A secret revealed is a secret destroyed.
Perhaps, Chris thought, that was the problem with the for-hire cases. Eduardo had pushed for those. They would, Eduardo claimed, work only with a select group of upscale security companies. There would be safety, ease, and always a profit. The way it worked was also deceptively simple: The firm would put out a name. Eduardo would check through their data banks to see if there was a hit—in this case, there was one for Corinne Price via Fake-A-Pregnancy.com. Then a figure would be paid and the secret revealed.