“I don’t know, but she really seems to hate her ex-son-in-law.”
“You said there was a court case?” Sarah said as Alison typed rapidly on her phone, muttering “damn autocorrect.” She looked up as Sarah braked hard at a stop sign. “What were they fighting over?”
“Visitation,” I said. “Whatever that means.”
“That can’t be right—visitation’s about kids,” Alison said. “Unless Viktor has another child?”
“I have no idea, but I’m not going back to ask her. Janice made it pretty clear that she’s done talking.”
“It could also be about a pet—you’d be surprised what people go to court over,” Sarah said, accelerating again.
“Do they have any pets?” I asked, trying to recall if I’d ever seen a cat or any other creature at the Lysenko house. It certainly never smelled like Viktor’s ex-mother-in-law’s place.
Alison stared intently at her phone. “Janice Marie Lysenko? Found it. I can’t believe you didn’t spot this the first time you searched, Sarah.”
“I guess I don’t have your superior Googling skills,” Sarah said with as much sarcasm as she could layer in her voice.
Alison ignored her, scrolling through the obit in silence for a moment. “Interesting—there’s no cause of death listed.”
“Do you think it might have been a suicide?” I said, distressed at the thought. “They usually keep that out of obits.”
“Or he made it look like a suicide,” Alison said.
Sarah shot Alison a quick look, but she didn’t refute her. I couldn’t either.
Alison kept tapping on her phone; I sat forward, trying to watch over the seat as she opened window after window, following links so fast that I couldn’t keep up. “Here we go,” she said, “another obit from the Penn Hills Progress. ‘Died unexpectedly’—well that’s not a lot of help.”
“It rules out cancer,” Sarah said. “Could be a heart attack, I guess, but usually they’d just say if it was a sudden illness.”
“It doesn’t rule out an accident,” I said. “It definitely could have been a car accident.”
“Or it could have been made to look like an accident—” Alison stopped short.
“What?” I said, but Alison didn’t answer for a moment.
“What is it?” Sarah demanded, looking at her and then the road and back again. I tensed in my seat, just as anxious.
Alison read from her screen: “‘Survivors include her husband, Dr. Viktor Lysenko; mother, Janice Lee Franz; and son, Daniel Michael.’” She swiveled in her seat to look at me and Sarah. “Daniel is from Viktor’s first marriage. He’s Janice’s child, not Heather’s.”
chapter eight
ALISON
The shock of finding out that Daniel was not Heather’s birth child was as great, in many ways, as seeing that vast and lovely kitchen covered in broken glass. Sarah swung the car off the side of the road, screeching to a halt along the berm, before reaching for my phone to confirm for herself.
“You’d never guess,” Julie said hesitantly, the first of us to break the silence. She meant that Daniel looked like Heather’s biological child; they were both blond, for instance, while Viktor had brown hair. I couldn’t believe that we’d known them for more than two years and she’d never mentioned it.
“So I’m guessing that Janice’s mother sued Viktor over getting visitation with her grandson,” Sarah said.
“We need to compare the dates,” I said, nudging Sarah for my phone. “When did Janice die and when did Viktor marry Heather?” I pulled up Heather and Viktor’s wedding announcement and compared it with Janice Franz’s obit. The same, sickening feeling that I’d had two days before in Heather’s kitchen returned. “Eleven months apart,” I said, doing the math. “He buried his first wife and married a second in less than a year.”
The implications of that hung in the air for a moment, heavy and silent, before Sarah abruptly jerked the minivan back onto the road, driving fast while all of us began talking at once, tripping over one another’s sentences. Had Heather known about Janice? She must have, yet she’d never mentioned her or the fact that this was Viktor’s second marriage.
“Do you think Viktor killed Janice?” I finally said.
“Don’t even go there.” Julie sounded shocked.
“Why not?” Sarah said. “It’s the question begging to be asked here, isn’t it?”
Julie didn’t say anything, but I could see her lips purse the way they did when she was upset.
I did another search, but still couldn’t find any more information about Janice’s death. Her employment history popped up—she’d worked in sales for a medical-supply company, which was probably how she’d met Viktor—but there were no articles about fatal accidents and no mention of donations made in her name to organizations for cancer research or other incurable diseases. Viktor’s first wife’s death looked murky, but we had no real evidence.
“We could visit her old company,” Sarah suggested. “Maybe one of her former colleagues knows something.”
Great idea, if only the medical-supply company hadn’t gone out of business. After discovering that, I spent a fruitless fifteen minutes trying to track down somebody—anybody—from the defunct company, without any luck.
“We need to talk to Heather,” I said after exhausting my search efforts. “We need to ask her about Viktor’s first marriage.”
“Oh, God, I don’t want her to think we’re gossiping about her,” Julie said.
“We’re not gossiping, we’re trying to help because we’re concerned,” Sarah said. “There’s a big difference.”
“Fine,” Julie said. “But I don’t want her to know that I’m the one who told you about Viktor’s first marriage.”
“Agreed,” I said quickly, afraid she’d change her mind. “But we need to get her away from Viktor and their house so she can talk freely.”
*
I offered to host a girls’ night in at my house the following weekend. Wine and snacks, perhaps watch a chick flick—this was how we presented it to Heather. Looking back, I think that what we planned was too much like an intervention. I, for one, was so focused on wanting to get Heather away from Viktor that I didn’t stop to think about what kind of support Heather might actually have wanted and needed.
My house was a safe, relatively neutral setting. The coffee shop would have been better in that sense, but it wasn’t private and we needed privacy for this. Michael took Lucy and Matthew to visit his family for the weekend, ostensibly so I could get the peace and quiet necessary to complete a big project that I’d gotten behind on. He’d even taken George, our lovable but noisy and demanding chocolate Lab, so I wouldn’t be distracted. He and the kids, with George, had driven off in the Volvo the afternoon before, loaded down with books and crayons and snacks and a fully charged tablet stocked with cartoons—Michael had made sure of that, panicked at the thought of six hours in a car without any electronics to distract them. It was the first long trip they’d taken without me, and I’d seen the slightly crazed look in Michael’s eyes as he backed down the driveway, the kids waving frantically out the window. A wave of emotion had come over me as I watched the car speed down the street and disappear over the hill. “Wait, come back,” I’d wanted to call after them. “Take me with you.”