You Don't Own Me Read online

Caroline had tried to reason with him once, reminding him that a seven-year-old girl and nine-year-old boy called this place home. The site did not belong on a list of infamous scenes such as mafia hangouts, the spot where a woman had fallen to her death from the Empire State Building, or the hotel where a punk rock star had murdered his girlfriend.

  The tour guide had responded by reminding the tourists that Caroline was the nanny who called 911 after Martin Bell’s murder, at which point they began asking her for autographs and selfies.

  Now Caroline drew the curtains whenever she spotted the tour. She allowed herself a tiny bit of pleasure that the size of his groups seemed to be dwindling. Once, she had even gone online to a popular tourist website to post a devastating review.

  I am nothing if not loyal to you children, she thought to herself as she looked at Bobby and Mindy disassembling the puzzle, only to start it over.

  She was slicing an apple to pair with string cheese for their afternoon snack when the phone rang.

  Her throat felt hot when the caller identified herself. Caroline had known that she hadn’t heard the last of Laurie Moran.

  “Is this Kendra?” the producer asked.

  “No. Mrs. Bell is at work right now.”

  “I see. I don’t suppose this is Caroline Radcliffe?”

  “It is.”

  “You may not remember me, but we met briefly about four months ago. I came over to the house to meet with Kendra.”

  How could I forget? Caroline thought. Her heart had been racing as she stood at the top of the stairs, eavesdropping when she was supposed to be monitoring Bobby and Mindy as they completed their homework.

  Don’t do it, don’t do it. She had repeated that mantra over and over, her fingers crossed, as if she could send a telepathic message to Kendra in the living room. She had felt such a wave of relief when Kendra gave all her reasons for declining to participate.

  “Of course. Yes, I remember. Is there something I can help you with?” Caroline asked.

  “I’m afraid not. Do you know how I can reach her?”

  “Mrs. Bell can’t be disturbed while she’s working. Even I don’t call unless it’s an emergency.”

  “When do you expect her home then?”

  “She works until five today. But then she’ll want to have supper with the children and spend time with them before bed. She’s very busy. Why don’t you tell me what you need, and I can see if I can help.”

  “No. It’s important that I speak to Kendra directly.”

  The Bells were never going to let this go. Of course they wouldn’t: their son had been murdered. For months, she had heard Kendra fend off their questions. Are they doing the show or not? What’s taking them so long to decide? Buying time over the holidays had been easy enough, but they’d grown increasingly insistent over the past two months. Finally, last week, Kendra had told them—falsely—that the producers had decided the case wasn’t a good fit for their show.

  Now the actual producer was calling again. This wasn’t good.

  “I can take your number and let her know that you called,” Caroline offered.

  When Caroline hung up the phone, she peered out the front window. The tourists were gone. Even so, she kept the curtains drawn, terrified in her heart that she couldn’t keep the outside world from creeping into this house forever.

  Kendra was in such a bad state back then. Pray God, please tell me she didn’t do it.

  6

  The carriage house was precisely as Laurie remembered it from last fall, save for the addition of pale pink peonies blooming from the planter boxes outside the windows.

  Ryan let out a little whistle as they stepped out of the black SUV Uber they had hired for the ride downtown. “Nice house,” he declared. “Their own private garage and everything. If I could swing a sweet place like that, I might actually get the Porsche I’ve always wanted. No point having a dream car when I’m constantly getting dings in my parking garage.”

  Laurie smiled to herself. She made a nice salary that was enough to cover a perfectly suitable two-bedroom apartment for her and Timmy, and Greg’s life insurance had helped her run a New York City household as a single mother. But now that she and Alex were getting married, they’d been talking about finding a place large enough for them to live together. She had a feeling that whatever they chose might qualify as “sweet” by Ryan’s definition.

  The nanny did not hide her disappointment when she answered the door.

  “I told you I would give Mrs. Bell your message,” she said sternly.

  Laurie would have bet money that Caroline had not, in fact, delivered the message yet. She guessed that the woman was in her early to mid sixties, but she wasn’t a youthful kind of sixty. She wore her grayish brown hair in tight pin curls, and hid her large frame beneath an oversized blue housedress. “We’re about to put out supper.”

  The wonderful scent of butter and garlic was wafting from inside. “It smells delicious,” Laurie said. “I don’t want to keep Mrs. Bell long. But, as I said, this is important. I’ve brought my colleague, Ryan Nichols. You might recognize him from our show.”

  Laurie had hoped that the sight of Ryan inside the Bell home might impress Kendra’s obviously protective nanny. Most people became giddy in the presence of anyone who remotely qualified as “famous.” Caroline Radcliffe was clearly not “most people.” She gave Ryan a cold stare, obviously unimpressed.

  “Caroline, is everything all right?” The voice came from the back of the house.

  “Nothing to worry about—”

  Caroline had started to close the door when Laurie spotted Kendra Bell walking toward them. “Kendra, it’s Laurie Moran. Your in-laws came to see me today. There’s clearly been a misunderstanding.”

  Caroline shook her head as Kendra joined her at the front door. “I already told you I’m not interested,” Kendra said.

  “I know,” Laurie said. “And I accepted your decision. But apparently you’ve told Martin’s parents that I was the one to decline his case for our show. I’m perfectly happy to tell them the truth—that you were adamantly opposed months ago—but I thought I owed it to you to give you a chance to explain.”

  Laurie could see the calculations playing out quickly in Kendra’s head. She didn’t want Laurie and Ryan in her living room. But she definitely didn’t want Laurie to go back to Martin’s parents with the truth.

  She opened the door to let them in.

  • • •

  Kendra was still in her uniform from work—dark blue hospital scrubs over a black turtleneck. Her shoulder-length dark brown hair was pulled into a neat ponytail at the nape of her neck. Kendra had been thirty-four years old at the time her husband was murdered, which made her thirty-nine now. Somehow, she seemed older than that, as if she had lived two other lives before this one. Stress lived in the lines on her forehead, and a sadness lurked behind her dark eyes. Even so, she was far more attractive than the disheveled figure that had been portrayed by the media. Laurie wondered if she had looked like that in the years after Greg’s death, before she had finally allowed herself to be happy again.

  Once Laurie had introduced Ryan, Kendra led them to the living room and asked Caroline to finish the dinner preparations in the kitchen. Laurie knew the nanny would be listening in, no matter where she went in the house.

  “Someone’s letting you work as a doctor?” Ryan blurted out.

  Laurie and Ryan had gone over the broad brushstrokes of Martin Bell’s murder during the car ride to the Village, but she had not updated him on the current state of his widow’s life.

  “Most certainly not,” she said defensively, “most likely because people react as you just did. But thank you for remembering that I actually did go to medical school. The news coverage after Martin died—well, I’m sure you’re aware of the tone. They talked about me as if I were some kind of drug addict off the street.”

  Laurie gave Ryan an urgent look. He was supposed to play good cop tonight, and he had not got
ten off to a good start.

  “You met each other when you were in med school, didn’t you?” Ryan asked, his tone softening.

  “Indeed,” Kendra said with a sad smile. “Martin used to love to tell everyone our ‘meet-cute’ story, as he called it.”

  Laurie knew that Kendra loved the story, too, because she’d told it to Laurie the first time they spoke on the phone. Laurie had been the one to suggest that Ryan ask Kendra. She had expected him to introduce the subject more gently.

  “I was in my final year of med school—at Stony Brook University School of Medicine,” Kendra said, “on Long Island. Martin was a guest lecturer in my Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation class. Halfway through his lecture . . . flatline! His PowerPoint slides go totally dead. The famous doctor who was always full of answers on the Today show and Good Morning America was suddenly without words. He and the professor were fumbling with the computer. As Martin told it, he was in a total panic, knowing that he barely had enough time for the rest of his lecture, and that it required complex data that he had summarized in two charts that he desperately needed. According to him—and I seriously doubt this part—I ‘confidently and gracefully’ walked down the middle aisle of the lecture hall, calmly took the slide controller from his hand, and swapped out the batteries with fresh ones. I knew they were stored in the lectern cabinet. Then back to my seat I went. It was nothing, really, but Martin decided right then and there that I was something special.”

  She suddenly looked down at the coffee table as if she were watching some other scene play out in front of her. “Look where it got me,” she said sadly. “No, I’m not a doctor. I finished school, to be sure. And I started my residency—a good one, too. Pediatrics at NYU. But Martin was so eager to start a family, and I was almost thirty. I should have listened to people who told me it would be too much to handle. It felt like such a rush at the time, but now I realize how young I was. Once Bobby was born, I felt so . . . exhausted. All the time. And distracted. It must have been clear at work, because, the next thing I knew, I was being ‘encouraged’ ”—she made air quotes with her fingers—“by the supervising physicians to take what was supposed to be a one-year leave of absence from my residency. And then, before I knew it, I was pregnant again. Once Mindy joined Bobby, Martin decided that the children would be better off if I remained a stay-at-home mother. As my mother-in-law liked to say, ‘One very busy doctor is more than enough for one family.’ ”

  Laurie knew from their previous conversations that Kendra blamed her decision to give up her medical career for her subsequent decline, but none of that would matter unless Kendra changed her mind about working with Under Suspicion.

  Laurie stole a glance at her watch. They’d been there for nearly ten minutes already and hadn’t even gotten to the matter at hand. She could not be late to Alex’s induction.

  “So you’re still working with your friend’s practice?” Laurie asked, rushing the story along.

  “Yes,” Kendra said. “I doubt I’ll ever find anyone willing to take me on as a resident so I can become a practicing physician, but thank God for my one remaining med school friend, Steven Carter. The rest of them act as if I never existed, but he went out on a limb and hired me as a physician’s assistant. It’s good for me to have a job to go to every day. Good for the kids to see me working, too.”

  By the time Martin died, Kendra had been anything but a hard worker. According to Martin, his parents, and even her own friends, Kendra “was never the same” after she gave up any plans of working as a doctor again. What had seemed like a temporary rut as she adjusted to motherhood became a complete personality change, especially after her mother was killed in a car accident when she was driving back to Long Island late one night, after coming into the city to help an overwhelmed Kendra with the babies. Kendra had stopped showing up with her husband on their social and academic scenes. When people did see her, she seemed confused, irritable, and disheveled. There were loud whispers among their friends that Kendra had become a serious alcoholic. “Poor Martin” and “he has to stay for the children” were phrases that often accompanied the tsks that were commonly offered when the subject of Kendra was raised.

  In fact, the night Martin was murdered, the nanny said she had to shake Kendra to wake her from her nap as she desperately called 911 for help.

  “I know you’re eager to get on with dinner,” Laurie said, her own time constraints pulling at her patience. “I’ll be blunt about why we’re here. You told Martin’s parents I was the one who declined your husband’s case. That’s patently false. It makes it look like you have something to hide, Kendra.”

  “I don’t. You know I don’t. I’m just trying to move on with my life. Raise my kids. Go to work. Digging it all up again for the cameras is more than my kids and I can handle. I explained all of this to you.”

  “Then why can’t you tell that to your in-laws?”

  “They’d never understand. They tried for years to have Martin, so he was always their miracle baby, and then he was gone. They have no empathy for me. They look at me and see a murderer. Do you have any idea how horrible that is? My own parents are dead. Martin and his family were the only family I had. And now they hate me. And they’re obsessed with getting custody of my children. It’s relentless.”

  Her shoulders were beginning to shake. She was seconds away from tears. “Please,” she implored, “don’t tell them that I’m the reason you’re not doing the show.”

  Bad cop, Laurie reminded herself. You’re playing the bad cop. And you can’t be late for the most important night of your fiancé’s career.

  “I can’t not tell them,” Laurie said. “They’re the ones who wrote me that letter about Martin’s case in the first place. I respect your wishes, but I have to respect theirs, too.”

  “They’ll use it against me that I misled them. They’re champing at the bit to get custody of the kids,” she said, lowering her voice. “They have money. And influence. They’ll find a judge who favors them. Please tell me what I can do.”

  “That’s not my call,” Laurie said. “But you went and dragged my name into the deception. I’d be lying to them if I didn’t correct their misunderstanding. I’ll call them in the morning to explain why we’re not moving forward.”

  “Or,” Ryan said, “you could just do the show.”

  Kendra looked at him, blinking.

  “If you do the show,” he explained, “they won’t ever have to know that you misled them. We’ll move forward with production, and that will be that.”

  Kendra looked past him, clearly weighing her options. Then she reluctantly said, “I’ll do it. I told you I have nothing to hide. But I don’t want my kids on camera.”

  “Of course,” Ryan said, placing a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  “Or where I work,” she said. “Steven stuck his neck out hiring me. I don’t want him getting harassing phone calls or worse.”

  They assured her that would not be a problem, but Kendra asked for both promises in writing. Laurie jotted them down on the bottom of their standard participation agreement and gave it to Kendra to sign before she could change her mind.

  “Oh, by the way,” Kendra said, handing back the piece of paper, “I just read about the new federal judge. The news article mentioned that he was recently engaged and gave your name. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” Laurie said, caught off guard by the comment. “I’m actually off to the courthouse right now. He’s getting sworn in tonight.”

  As Laurie hopped into an Uber, she felt a pang of guilt. Maybe Kendra was telling the truth about being worried for the sake of her children’s privacy. But then she reminded herself that Kendra had already proven that she was willing to lie when it served her interests.

  And Kendra wasn’t the only person who had lost a family member. Cynthia and Robert Bell had lost their only son and had pleaded with Laurie to help them get justice for Martin.

  There was only one way for Laurie to hel
p. Find out once and for all who had killed Martin Bell and why.

  7

  Kendra had barely finished turning the lock on the front door when she heard Caroline’s footsteps behind her.

  Oh, how Kendra had resented Caroline’s presence when Martin had hired her. First, it was as if the decision for Kendra to quit her job and become a full-time stay-at-home mother had been made without her participation. It wasn’t even a decision in any meaningful way. It had simply . . . happened. One day, she was leaving her residency with contractions—probably a false alarm, she told herself at the time. Then she was receiving flowers at the maternity ward from her fellow residents. See you in twelve weeks, Mommy! the card had read. She returned as planned, but didn’t even last a month. She told herself that the leave would only be for the rest of the year; she’d return in the fall with the next class of residents. And then she became pregnant with Mindy, and the idea of practicing medicine seemed impossible.

  When Mindy turned eighteen months, she called the residency coordinator and asked about going back. At that point, she thought the grueling hours of a medical resident would be a piece of cake compared to the demands of two young children. But by then, it turned out her medical education was out of date. She’d have to take more classes to re-enter the residency program. And meanwhile, Martin and his parents kept reminding her that Martin the “miracle baby” had been raised by a stay-at-home mother. She hated the way Cynthia would pat Martin on the arm, gaze at him adoringly, and say, “One very busy doctor is more than enough for one family.”

  No wonder you expected me to idolize you, Kendra thought. God knew she had tried her hardest to please him.

  At first, her life with Martin had felt like a fairy tale come true. She had been walking out of the classroom with Steven after Martin’s guest lecture when Martin caught her attention to thank her for fixing his computer glitch. “I think the good doctor’s smitten with you,” Steven had said afterward. She told Steven he had a wild imagination, but she knew he was right. Martin’s words to her had been perfectly appropriate—modest, thankful, professional—but he had spoken them with a sense of wonderment, as if he knew that they were having an encounter that would change both of their lives.