The Life She Stole Read online

  The Life She Stole

  a psychological thriller

  S.W. Vaughn

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  Copyright © 2018 by S.W. Vaughn

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

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  More by This Author

  WHAT SHE FORGOT – a standalone psychological thriller

  ** Read on for an exclusive preview of What She Forgot after the story **

  TERMINAL CONSENT – a standalone crime thriller

  P.I. Jude Wyland series (crime thrillers)

  DEADLY MEASURES – a prequel novella

  THE BLACK DIRECTIVE

  House Phoenix series (crime thrillers)

  BREAKING ANGEL | Book 1

  DEVIL RISING | Book 2

  TEMPTING JENNER | Book 3

  SHADOWS FALLING | Book 4

  WICKED ORIGINS | Stories & Novellas

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  About the Author

  More books by S.W. Vaughn

  Preview: WHAT SHE FORGOT

  She turns when I call her name. She’s surprised and a little confused, and there’s a puzzled expression on her face that’s attempting to be pleasant as I walk toward her. She’s trying to remember how she knows me, or maybe if she knows me.

  Well, it has been a long time.

  “Hello,” she says uncertainly when I stop. It’s nearly Labor Day and there aren’t many people in this part of the park, so she’s probably suspicious. And she should be — of me, at least. My purpose here isn’t friendly.

  I don’t say hello back, and she frowns. “Um, I’m sorry, but …”

  Forcing a sudden smile, I give her my name and hold a hand out. “We went to school together,” I say.

  “Oh, that’s right!” Relief spreads across her face as she shakes my hand. I’m glad she’s not a hugger. “Now I remember,” she says. “How have you been?”

  “Fine,” I tell her, “just fine. How about you?”

  She launches into a babbling diatribe about her life, her job, how wonderful everything has been since school. I’m not really listening. It hasn’t been wonderful for me, not at all, and she doesn’t deserve all of this happiness. But that’s okay.

  I’m about to take it all away from her. The only shame is that she’ll never know why. She’s a means to an end. And that end is coming for someone who really deserves it. But things won’t be so easy for the woman who stole my life from me.

  I have much bigger plans for her.

  She’s looking at me, and I realize she must’ve asked me a question. I have no idea what it was. “I’m sorry, what was that last thing?” I say.

  “I said, do you hike?” She points at the boots she was lacing when I called out to her. “I’m about to head up to the Sycamore Cliff. The trail’s pretty mild, and there’s a fantastic view from the top. Did you want to come with me? We can talk about the good old days,” she says with a grin.

  I look from her to the nearby mountain towering above, imagining the rocky cliffs and the sheer drop from the top. Imagining how she’ll look when I push her off, the shock and dismay on her pretty face as she plummets to her death. And I smile.

  “I’d love to,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  1

  Monday

  It’s the first day of kindergarten, and my daughter is so excited I’m afraid she might pop like a soap bubble.

  Alyssa practically vibrates in her booster seat as we pull into the parking lot of Wolfsbrook Elementary. She’s four and small for her age, turning five in October, but she’s not underdeveloped or stunted. Just naturally tiny. My little dark-haired, green-eyed pixie, with her button nose and her smile that lights up a room. She charms everyone she meets, so I’m not worried that she’ll have trouble adjusting to full-time school.

  I’m the one who’s having adjustment issues. Even though I promised myself I wouldn’t cry, my eyes sting a little as I pounce on an empty parking space and turn off the car. This is it. My baby is taking her first step into the long tides of growing up.

  I catch myself envisioning what a wreck I’ll be when she graduates high school and force the thought away. There’s still plenty of time before that.

  And I have other things to cry about today.

  “We’re here!” Alyssa calls out as she unbuckles her seat belt. “Can I open the door by myself, Mommy?”

  I flash a smile over the seat at her. “Yes, but wait until I get to your side of the car, okay?” I say. “There’s a lot of traffic here right now.”

  “Okay. I’ll wait.”

  I disengage the safety locks, grab my purse and get out. I’ve drilled traffic safety into her from basically the day she took her first steps, because she’s so tiny. If she was in the path of a car, any car, the driver would never see her. The thought of it gives me nightmares.

  I’m amazed at the amount of activity here this morning. When Alyssa and I visited the school last week to see her classroom and meet Mrs. Jocasta, her teacher, there were only a handful of cars in the lot and none in the curved drive that runs in front of the building. Now the drive is packed with bumblebee-yellow buses, and the parking lot is crammed full, with spillover onto the shoulder of the main road and the side streets. The first day of school is a madhouse of kids catching up with friends and showing off new clothes and gear, while parents and school staff race to corral the excitement and direct the flow inside.

  Of course, it would’ve been the same way when I went to school here, but I never noticed the traffic or the adults. I was just another child in the throng.

  So was Rosalie Phillips.

  As I look toward the entrance and the bustle of little people swarming the sidewalks, I actually see her for just an instant as she was in second grade — her dark hair in pigtails, the gap between her front teeth that by high school would be corrected through two embarrassing middle-school years of braces, the sundresses she wore so often, even in winter over a turtleneck and thick tights. We hadn’t been best friends or anything, but she was in my grade and I knew her.

  “Mommy, can I open the door yet?”

  Alyssa’s voice, muffled inside the car, startles me. The vision of little Rosalie fades as I hurry around the back and stand just behind her door. “Okay, baby. Come on out,” I say.

  She pops the handle on the first try and scrambles out, tugging her brand new My Little Pony backpack along with her. Then she shuts the door, threads one arm through the backpack strap, and struggles to get the other one. Soon she’s turning in circles like a dog chasing its tail, trying to catch the elusiv
e second strap with her free hand.

  I hold back a laugh. “Want some help with that, munchkin?”

  “I can do it,” she says with the supreme confidence of the very young. Three more tries, and she finally manages to slip her arm behind the strap, beaming up at me. “See?”

  “Yes, you can,” I say to Little Miss Independent.

  I take her hand, and we start across the parking lot toward the slight, grassy rise that leads to the main drive. A thirty-something woman in a safety-orange vest, holding a red stop sign on a stick, stands on the opposite side of the crosswalk in front of the line of buses. She crosses when she sees us coming and smiles broadly at Alyssa.

  My daughter returns the smile with a thousand extra watts. “Hi! I’m Alyssa Dawn Bauman,” she says. “I go to this school now, like my mommy did.”

  I resist the urge to remind her not to give strangers her full name. People in uniform are the exception, and this crossing guard has a badge.

  “Well, hello there, Alyssa Dawn Bauman,” the crossing guard says. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Ms. Fischer.”

  “Hi, Ms. Fischer!”

  The crossing guard laughs, then grabs the silver whistle hanging from the cord around her neck and holds the stop sign out toward the traffic. As we cross behind her, Alyssa tugs my hand and points at something with her free hand. “Who’s that, Mommy?” she whispers loudly. “Is she famous?”

  I follow her gesture to the waist-high, wrought iron fence that runs from the back wall of the school building across the yard to the end of the main drive. There’s a lone woman standing behind the fence — late twenties like me, rail-thin and dressed in a white silk something that looks like a robe, with strappy black heels and a huge pair of dark sunglasses over full lips painted blood-red. Loosely curled, platinum-blond hair tumbles past her shoulders, and a cigarette smolders in one slender hand.

  She’s just standing there, staring at the children on the sidewalk.

  Something about her sets off a low-grade alarm in my gut. Maybe it’s because she’s wearing a bathrobe and heels in public — odd, to say the least — or because she’s hanging around an elementary school without a child, smoking a cigarette, and she obviously doesn’t work here. This picture doesn’t add up.

  “I don’t think she’s famous, honey,” I say as I hurry Alyssa along. “Come on, let’s go find your teacher.”

  Once we get inside the building, my faint feeling of unease dissolves. Alyssa remembers the way to her classroom faster than I do, and she tugs me excitedly down one hallway after another without pause until we reach the kindergarten wing, where the teachers stand outside their doors to greet the newest students.

  Wolfsbrook, New Hampshire, is a good-sized suburb full of middle- and upper-class money, and the elementary school has four kindergarten rooms, each staffed with a teacher and at least one assistant. This keeps the class sizes under twenty students. And Mrs. Jocasta apparently remembers each one of hers, because she greets my daughter by name when we reach the door.

  “Good morning, Alyssa,” the teacher says brightly. She’s a pretty woman in her early thirties, with thick strawberry-blond hair and a very white smile. “Can you find your name on your cubby and hang up your backpack? If you need help, just ask Mrs. Field.”

  “Good morning, Mrs. Jocasta. I can read my name,” Alyssa says with a proud smile. For a minute I think she’ll dash into the room without a backwards glance, and my heart will break a little, but she turns and throws her arms around my waist. “Bye, Mommy,” she says.

  I squeeze her back and lean down for a kiss. “Bye, munchkin,” I say, my voice just a little bit unsteady. “I’ll be here when you’re done, and you can tell me all about your first day of school. Remember, don’t go outside without me, okay?”

  “I won’t. Love you! Bye!” She breaks off, then turns and waves from the doorway.

  I wave back. “I love you too!”

  With that, she vanishes into the cloud of giggles and chatters and brightly colored everything that is kindergarten.

  “I think Alyssa will be just fine, Mrs. Bauman.”

  I jump a little when Mrs. Jocasta speaks. I’d almost forgotten she was there, but she’s regarding me with a patient smile — probably the same one she wears for every parent leaving their precious darlings in a classroom for the first time. “It’s Ms. Bauman. Call me Celine, actually,” I say. “And thank you. I know she will be.”

  Mrs. Jocasta doesn’t react to my lack of marital status or ask questions about Alyssa’s father, and I’m grateful for that. He’s a long, complicated story. She just gives me another smile, and says, “Celine, then. I look forward to having her in my class.”

  I make an appropriate response, something along the lines of thank you and goodbye and see you after school. My eyes are misting up, and I have to walk away before I give in to the urge to grab my daughter and take her home, declare that she’s not ready to start school yet when I’m the one who isn’t ready for this.

  Once I get outside and away from the crowds, I’m more or less okay. I notice that the creepy movie-star woman is gone, or at least not at the fence any more, but there’s something else on my mind now — where I have to go next.

  Most of the time I’m grateful that my job is so flexible. I don’t have to be in the office much, and making the adjustments to bring Alyssa to school and pick her up hasn’t been a problem. But right now I almost wish I had a more traditional job, because I might’ve used it as an excuse not to go to the funeral. This isn’t going to be easy.

  I didn’t know her well, but I knew her enough. And now, Rosalie Phillips is never going to see her thirtieth birthday.

  2

  It’s 9:30 when I arrive at the Baker-Lindstrom Funeral Home, the preferred choice of burial services among the wealthier and older families of Wolfsbrook. The rest of us usually opted for the less-stuffy atmosphere of Morris and Sons across town, where the few funerals I’d attended in my life had been held. All except one, but I try not to think about that funeral. The one I almost didn’t make it through.

  This place feels more like a golf course than a funeral home, complete with well-tended grounds and gardens, and a parking lot that’s smooth as black glass. Like the elementary school lot, this one is nearly full. But it’s not only cars gathered outside. There are knots of people in dark, formal dress huddled here and there, holding subdued conversations under the bright September sun.

  Rosalie’s family has opted for a compressed mourning period. One day only, calling hours from nine to eleven, graveside funeral at 11:30. On the surface it looks almost callous, as if they want to get this over with and move on with their lives. But I suspect in this case it’s overwhelming grief and shock, and the need to spend as little time as possible being actively reminded of their tragedy. Not just because she was only twenty-eight, but because of the way she died.

  Four days ago, Rosalie Phillips jumped off the top of a cliff at Juniper State Park and Reservoir, deliberately swan-diving to the end of her life.

  No one knows why she did it. She was happily engaged, at the start of a promising career, and in the middle of planning her parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary. She was healthy and fit, loved the outdoors, and had spent a lot of weekends hiking that park since high school. But even with those slim-to-none chances of an accident, it was clearly a suicide. Because she’d left a note.

  Chills invade my blood as I park my gray Montego next to a bright yellow pickup, and I grip the steering wheel hard as they subside. My own shock at hearing about Rosalie has kept me insulated from deeper emotions, but now I’m starting to feel weak and small. Almost terrified. A girl I knew is lying dead in that building, less than a hundred feet away from me. And she chose to be dead.

  That’s when I realize it’s not just horror and sadness I’m feeling. Most of this brick of emotion that’s lodged in my throat and trying to choke me is guilt. But I have to get through this somehow.

  I have to remember tha
t unlike the one before this, Rosalie’s death isn’t my fault.

  I manage to pull myself together and climb out of the car, scanning the parking lot for a familiar red Fiat. Just as I spot the vehicle three rows away and head toward it, the front door opens and Jill Mazer emerges, wearing a black short-sleeved pantsuit with her usually scattered brown hair tamed into a neat bun.

  I’m so relieved to see her that I almost manage a smile. She hugs me, and the tears I’m trying to hold back come closer than ever to falling. “Thank you so much for coming,” I say. “You didn’t have to, you know.”

  “Of course I did. What are friends for?” Jill squeezes my hand briefly and nods toward the funeral home. “Do you want to go right in, or …?”

  “In a minute,” I say on a shaky breath. I really am grateful that she’s here. She grew up in the city — Oslow, where most of us went to the state university after high school — and she’d only met Rosalie once or twice. But Jill and I clicked instantly during the first semester of sophomore year at college, while we were in English Comp II together, and we’d been best friends ever since. She’d even moved to Wolfsbrook after graduation, and she lived just a few blocks from me and Alyssa.

  With my daughter’s father out of the picture, she’d been a real godsend.

  Jill gives me a sympathetic smile. “You look awful,” she says. “Are you sure you want to do this? Maybe we should go somewhere and get coffee instead.”