1
Nine Years Ago
Cindy Stride noted the clock on the dashboard of her Subaru Outback. 9:32 p.m.
Eventually, everyone would ask her about that. Jonny would pepper her with questions, not as a husband but as a cop. What time was it? When did you leave the party at the Radisson? The county attorney, Dan Erickson, would interrogate her about it months later on the witness stand. Mrs. Stride, exactly what time was it when you took the defendant back to her house that night?
She didn’t know why she noticed the time, or why she remembered it, but she did. 9:32 p.m. Friday night. January 28.
Cindy glanced at the woman in the passenger seat beside her. Dr. Janine Snow. She couldn’t look at Janine without a twinge of jealousy. If you were a short woman, you wanted to be tall. If you had black hair, you wanted to be blond. If you were a physical therapist, like Cindy, you wanted to be a surgeon.
Janine was all of those things.
‘I’m sorry to make you leave the party early,’ her friend said, with a little hint of her Texas roots in her voice. ‘I’m not feeling well, and I didn’t think I should drive myself.’
Cindy shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it. I wished the chief a happy birthday. I kissed his cheek. My duty was done.’
She squinted through the windshield of her Outback. She hated driving at night, and the hillside trek to Janine’s house made her nervous. Duluth was a city that made no sense in the winter, when ice turned the steep streets into luge tracks. Janine owned a Frank Lloyd Wright-style mansion high above Skyline Parkway, with a million-dollar view and drop-offs that made you hold your breath trying to climb the slick streets to get there. With each switchback over the treetops, the glazed roads felt as if they were a stairway into the clouds.
‘Could you stop?’ Janine asked suddenly.
‘What? Why?’
‘Please. I have to throw up.’
Cindy punched the brakes, and the Outback shimmied. Janine flung open the door and fumbled with the seat belt. Sub-zero air roared into the car, making Cindy shiver. She saw Janine sway on the shoulder, where the frozen ground dipped sharply at her feet.
‘Are you okay? Be careful!’
Janine sank to her knees and vomited the contents of her stomach. She tried to stand, but her heels slipped, and she nearly fell. She clung to the car door as she dragged herself back inside. The smell of puke came with her. Her untucked lavender blouse and her Paige jeans were soiled with dirt, snow, and regurgitated remnants of banquet shrimp. She put her fists on her knees and laid her head back with closed eyes.
‘I am so sorry,’ Janine murmured.
‘It’s okay,’ Cindy replied. ‘These days, it seems like eating anything makes me sick, too.’
The wheels of the Outback churned for traction as Cindy accelerated. She had nightmares sometimes about the Duluth streets, where she kept pushing the gas but could never get up an impossibly steep hill. She peered at the cliffside over the terraced road. Icicles dripped from the rocky ledges, remnants of a brief early-month thaw. Somewhere above her was Janine’s house. The mansion’s frame butted over the hillside, as if floating on air. It was a crazy place to live. She preferred the drafty cottage that she and Jonny owned on the spit of land between Lake Superior and the inner harbor. She liked living at sea level.
Beside her, Janine’s skin was ghostly white. The annoying thing about Janine was that she could be sick and still look good. Her natural blond hair swished about her shoulders like waves of sunshine. It didn’t matter whether her hair was styled or messy; somehow it always looked right. She was the perfect weight and the perfect size, and at thirty-nine years old, she seemed to stay that way effortlessly. She had ice-blue eyes that hardly ever blinked. It was unnerving when those eyes looked at you and made you stutter like a fool, because you were standing in front of someone who was so beautifully put together.
Yes, Cindy was a little jealous of Janine Snow.
‘Where’s your husband?’ Janine asked. ‘I’m surprised he’d miss the chief’s party.’
‘Jonny and Maggie got stuck on top of the Bong Bridge coming back from Superior. A semi overturned on the ice. Shut the whole thing down. It’s a mess.’
Janine gave a thin smile. ‘So is his little Chinese partner still in love with him?’
‘Maggie? Oh, yeah. She is.’
‘Does that worry you? They spend a lot of time together.’
‘No, it doesn’t bother me. Maggie may be in love with him, but Jonny’s in love with me.’
Janine pursed her lips as if she wanted to say something more, but she held her tongue. She wasn’t always blessed with social graces. If anyone else had insinuated a relationship between Jonny and Maggie, Cindy would have cut them off at the knees, but she made allowances for Janine’s prickly side.
They’d been friends for five years, ever since St. Anne’s recruited Janine from Texas to a top spot in cardiac surgery at the downtown hospital. Cindy worked as a physical therapist in an adjacent building, and they’d met at the cafeteria. Janine didn’t make friends easily, particularly with other women, but Cindy took pride in the fact that she herself was impossible to dislike. The two of them soon became close. Or as close as a doctor could be to anyone else.
Janine made no secret of her Texas-sized libido, but she was one of those women who always seemed to have the wrong man in her life. She’d already been divorced twice before relocating to Duluth. One marriage was teen love, naive and doomed. One was mercenary, to pay for medical school. Through both marriages, she’d kept her own name. Snow. And like the snow, she was cold, driven, and blinding.
Two years after arriving at St. Anne’s, Janine married again. This time it was a News-Tribune columnist named Jay Ferris, and the two of them were from Mars and Venus. Jay was black, and Janine was white. He was an Iron Range Democrat, and Janine was a Lone Star Republican. Their differences made the attraction hotter. Janine freely admitted to Cindy that her interest in Jay was rooted more in lust than love, but after the heat between them flamed out, their passion veered to the other extreme. Cindy didn’t need to ask why Jay hadn’t accompanied his wife to the party at the Radisson. Janine and Jay never went anywhere together. Not anymore. Not for months.
Cindy turned toward Janine’s house. The last hill was the steepest of all. There were three houses perched at the summit of a dead end, built to soak up views of the city and the lake. Janine’s house was the most recent, the most modern, and the most expensive. It had flat roofs, heated to melt the snow. The back of the house, built on columns mounted into the hillside, featured a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. The rounded porte cochère extended over the semi-circular driveway like a flying saucer.
Lights were on at the house. Jay Ferris was home. The garage door was open, revealing Jay’s new Hummer and an empty space where Janine usually kept her Mercedes, which she’d left behind in the parking ramp at the Radisson.
Cindy stopped in the driveway. ‘Here you go.’
‘Do you mind coming in with me? I’m pretty unsteady.’
‘Sure.’
Cindy got out. The hilltop wind swirled her long black hair and pinked up her cheeks. She went to the other side of the Outback and helped Janine out of the car. The taller woman put an arm around Cindy’s shoulder to support herself. Janine still walked with a limp after a painful fall on the ice the previous year. Cindy didn’t understand why her friend insisted on wearing heels, but to a Texas blond, leaving her heels at home was like suggesting she go to the party naked.
‘Do you have your key?’ Cindy asked.