Someone's Listening Read online

  She wrote the book on escaping a predator... Now one is coming for her.

  Faith Finley has it all: she’s a talented psychologist with a flourishing career, a bestselling author and the host of a popular local radio program, Someone’s Listening, with Dr. Faith Finley. She’s married to the perfect man, Liam Finley, a respected food critic.

  Until the night everything goes horribly wrong, and Faith’s life is shattered forever.

  Liam is missing—gone without a trace—and the police are suspicious of everything Faith says. They either think she has something to hide, or that she’s lost her mind.

  And then the notes begin to arrive. Notes that are ripped from Faith’s own book, the one that helps victims leave their abusers. Notes like “Lock your windows. Consider investing in a steel door.”

  As the threats escalate, the mystery behind Liam’s disappearance intensifies. And Faith’s very life will depend on finding answers

  Someone’s Listening

  Seraphina Nova Glass

  For Mark Glass. Always.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  EXCERPT FROM SUCH A GOOD WIFE BY SERAPHINA NOVA GLASS

  PROLOGUE

  When I wake up, it’s black and still; I feel a light, icy snow that floats rather than falls, and I can’t open my eyes. I don’t know where I am, but it’s so quiet, the silence rings in my ears. My fingertips try to grip the ground, but I feel only a sheet of ice beneath me, splintered with bits of imbedded gravel. The air is sharp, and I try to call for him, but I can’t speak. How long have I been here? I drift back out of consciousness. The next time I wake, I hear the crunching of ice under the boots of EMTs who rush around my body. I know where I am. I’m lying in the middle of County Road 6. There has been a crash. There’s a swirling red light, a strobe light in the vast blackness: they tell me not to move.

  “Where’s my husband?” I whimper. They tell me to try not to talk either. “Liam!” I try to yell for him, but it barely escapes my lips; they’re numb, near frozen, and it comes out in a hoarse whisper. How has this happened?

  I think of the party and how I hate driving at night, and how I was careful not to drink too much. I nursed a glass or two, stayed in control. Liam had a lot more. It wasn’t like him to get loaded, and I knew it was his way of getting back at me. He was irritated with me, with the position I’d put him in, even though he had never said it in so many words. I wanted to please him because this whole horrible situation was my fault, and I was sorry.

  When I wake up again I’m in a hospital room, connected to tubes and machines. The IV needle is stuck into a bruised, purple vein in the back of my hand that aches. In the dim light, I sip juice from a tiny plastic cup, and the soft beep of the EKG tries to lull me back to sleep, but I fight it. I want answers. I need to appear stabilized and alert. Another dose of painkiller is released into my IV; the momentary euphoria forces me to heave a sigh. I need to keep my eyes open. I can hear the cops arrive and talk to someone at a desk outside my door. They’ll tell me what happened.

  There’s a nurse who calls me “sweetie” and changes the subject when I ask about the accident. She gives the cops a sideways look when they come in to talk to me, and tells them they only have a few minutes and that I need to rest.

  Detective John Sterling greets me with a soft “Hello, ma’am.” I almost forget about my shattered femur and groan after I move too quickly. Another officer lingers by the door, a tall, stern-looking woman with her light hair pulled into a tight bun at the base of her skull. She tells me I’m lucky to be alive, and if it had dropped below freezing, I wouldn’t have lasted those couple hours before a passing car stopped and called 911. I ask where Liam is, but she just looks to Sterling. Something is terribly wrong.

  “Why won’t anyone tell me what happened to him?” I plead. I watch Detective Sterling as he picks his way through a response.

  “The nurse tells me that you believe he was in the car with you at the time of the accident,” he says. I can hear the condescension in his voice. He’s speaking to me like I’m a child.

  “They said ‘I believe’ he was? That’s not a—That’s a fact. We came from a party—a book signing party. Anyone, anyone can tell you that he was with me. Please. Is he hurt?” I look down at my body for the first time and see the jagged stitches holding together the bruised flesh of my right arm. They look exaggerated, like the kind you might draw on with makeup and glue for a Halloween costume. I close my eyes, holding back nausea. I try to walk through the series of events—trying to piece together what happened and when.

  Liam had been quiet in the car. I knew he’d believed me after the accusations started. I knew he trusted me, but maybe I’d underestimated the seeds of doubt that had been planted in his mind. I tried to lighten the mood when we got in the car by making some joke about the fourteen-dollar domestic beers; he’d given a weak chuckle and rested his head on the passenger window.

  The detective looks at me with something resembling sympathy but closer to pity.

  “Do you recall how much you had to drink last night?” he asks accusingly.

  “What? You think...? No. I drove because he... No! Where is he?” I ask, not recognizing my own voice. It’s haggard and raw.

  “Do you recall taking anything to help you relax? Anything that might impair your driving?”

  “No,” I snap, nearly in tears again.

  “So, you didn’t take any benzodiazepine maybe? Yesterday...at some point?”

  “No—I—Please.” I choke back tears. “I don’t...” He looks at me pointedly, then scribbles something on his stupid notepad. I didn’t know what to say. Liam must be dead, and they think I’m too fragile to take the news. Why would they ask me this?

  “Ma’am,” he says, standing. He softens his tone. This is it. He’s going to tell me something I’ll never recover from.

  “You were the only one in the car when medics got there,” he says, studying me for my response, waiting to detect a lie that he can use against me later. His patronizing look infuriates me.

  “What?” The blood thumps in my ears. They think I’m crazy; that soft tone isn’t a sympathetic one reserved for delivery of the news that a loved one has died—it’s the careful language chosen when speaking to someone unstable. They think I’m some addict or a drunk. Maybe they think the impact had made me lose the details, but he was there. I swear to God. His cry came too late and there was a crash. It was deafening, and I saw him reach fo r me, his face distorted in terror. He tried to shield me. He was there. He was next to me, screaming my name when we saw the truck headlights appear only feet in front of us—too late.

  ONE

  NOW

  When the clock on the stove hits noon, I pour a tumbler of pinot grigio. I make myself wait until noon so that I know I still have a modicum of control. I pull my robe tight and slip onto the front porch to sit. The sky is dark—a pebble gray—and the air is crisp. Across the street a car pulls into the driveway. Ginny DaLuca has forgotten something, it appears. She opens the car door, and the speakers inside exhale light jazz music as she runs in and then back out of the house quickly, holding her forgotten item. I notice an autumn wreath on her door. It’s barely September, but she can’t help herself. The same bronze and orange wreath of twisted twigs and foliage with a tacky scarecrow face in the middle welcomes her guests, of which I no longer am one. I don’t bother to wave the way I once did because she’d pretend not to see me, or maybe give an uncomfortable smile and nod. I used to be someone who secretly (very secretly) swelled with delight when I saw a row of Christmas decorations pop up next to the back-to-school supplies in late August, but now, this forcing ahead of time is intolerable. If anything, I want to slow it down. Reverse it even.

  The Sunday newspaper, in its plastic sheath, lies at the end of the driveway, half of it immersed in a puddle from last night’s rain. How many times have I said I’d go online and change my subscription to digital only? It’s so wasteful. Liam liked the feel of the paper though. He liked the inky film it left on his hands, the smell of it. He didn’t want to look at his laptop on Sundays. “It’s exactly why we have a big front porch,” he’d say, after promising to recycle the paper. I sip my drink, wishing I would have poured a red—more suited for the weather—and wonder how many newspapers would have to pile up at the end of the drive before one of the neighbors would check to see if I were dead.

  A soft tapping of rain starts up again. The Pattersons give up on raking leaves from their sugar maple that’s shedding early this year. They laugh at their attempt to spend the gloomy Sunday in the yard, and with a shrug of defeat, Al Patterson puts an arm around his wife as she shields her head with her hands and rushes inside. How I long for Liam’s hand on the small of my back for any reason at all. If he were here, he’d comment on how illogical it is for them to rake before all the leaves have fallen for the season. There’s a small window between the end of fall and the first snow, and he’d always plucked out those few days, like feeling the rain coming in one’s bones, and timed it perfectly.

  I rescue the paper from floating down the gutter. It’s bloated with rainwater, but I take it inside and lay out the swollen pages on the kitchen table anyway. I’m relieved not to see my face looking back at me; maybe enough time has passed and they’re finally on to the next life to ravage with speculation and statements of “alleged” involvement. At my desktop, a chat bubble blooms on my screen. It’s Ellie, and although she means well, the sisterly concern she tries to communicate with daily check-ins is becoming exhausting. There are only so many times you can circle the same conversation and get nowhere. She’s sorry for my loss. I know she is. She wants to make sure I’m eating. She encourages me to work.

  Her intentions are golden, but it will take a shift into vodka gimlets before I breach that tired conversation today. I ignore the bubble asking me how the weather is holding up, and I try to do a little work.

  Since taking a leave of absence from my practice, I still communicate with a few patients who didn’t take the news of my time away very well. Paula Day is suffering from stage four breast cancer and no matter my own hardships, I would never abandon my weekly video chat with dear Paula. Eddie Tolson’s panic disorder exploded when I explained I’d be away, so I chat with him now and then. In my private practice, I’ve pretty much kept on anyone who wildly protested my leave, but most of them took my referrals quietly and sympathetically with the promise of my speedy return. I respond to a few emails, but it’s hard not to think of Liam. It’s hard to concentrate on anything else.

  I click on a folder on my desktop titled “Liam.” I’ve kept every email and photo, even the everyday notes he used to leave around the house that I took photos of because I thought they were so sweet. I uploaded them all to the computer over the years: “Sorry I drank all the almond milk, I’ll pick up more tonight,” taped inside the fridge; “Meet me at Luigi’s at 7?” on a stick-it note on my car. It’s silly to keep such mundane remnants, but it was all part of our evolution together.

  I never wanted to forget, even when he was here, the swoosh at the top of the L in his signature or the inside jokes we exhausted. “Hardy Har” scrolled at the bottom of dozens of these old notes, a secret, stupid one-liner, just between us, which we’d stolen from some long-forgotten TV comedy sketch and made our own language. I cherished each one. All of the photos and instant messages strung together; this was our life. Even our ranting text arguments—I never deleted those from my phone. Now, the pettiness of them fills me with shame.

  I scroll through some of the last photos of him—of us. His work as a food and wine critic meant the lion’s share of our photos were at restaurants. We’re pictured together, with that stagey, for-the-camera pose, sharing a Scotch egg at a gastropub, or taking giant bites of lobster rolls off a pier in Cape Cod. There’s a short video of him explaining why romesco sauce can go on darn near anything. I click to play it even though I’ve watched it countless times. I took the little clip with my phone at an Italian place in New York that I don’t recall the name of, but I remember so clearly the drippy candles and the Dean Martin song playing in the background.

  We’d taken a cab there right from the airport to make our reservation on time, so we were dressed too casually for the place, and we’d had a few Makers Mark and sodas on the plane to celebrate a television spot I’d gotten. It wasn’t like him to drink often and certainly not before he reviewed a restaurant; I guess that’s why I love this clip. Just thirty-two seconds of Liam preaching the utilitarian nature of romesco sauce with a dot of it on his cheek, slightly buzzed.

  My face has become rinsed with tears before I notice, so I close the folder and graduate from wine to vodka and turn a house-flipping show on TV to fill the silence. After a couple of miraculous and seamless home renovations, I pull on a wool coat and start my daily work. I print a hundred more missing persons posters from my office printer and head out. I look at Liam’s face on the poster. It’s a photo we took at Sapori Trattoria last year. My face, along with the veal scaloppini we shared that night, are cropped out. I thought it was the clearest photo of him I could find.

  Today I’ll just go to shops, hang them inside restaurant front windows so the rain doesn’t dissolve him.

  TWO

  THEN

  On a bitter February night, I came home to find Liam in the kitchen in socks and sweats, the table covered with takeout boxes that looked like carefully wrapped gifts. They each held different desserts and dishes from the French restaurant that he’d written a rave review about the week before.

  “Try this.” Liam handed me a glass. I took a sip and handed it back. He looked surprised. “You can’t tell me you don’t like it.”

  “It’s too sweet. Ugh,” I say, rejecting it as he tried handing it back to me.

  “This is a tawny port. Forty years old.”

  “It tastes like a rancid fruit pie.”

  He smiles and pours my glass into his own.

  “More for me,” he says. “So this is a ‘no’ for your book launch party then?”

  “You’re cute.” I smile.

  “I am?”

  “Yes, you’re treating this party like a wedding. Are we going to taste a sampling of cakes next?” I say, picking at boxes on the table.

  “No. But there is a Pots de Creme I figured you’d at least want to try. The owner of Le Bouchon is practically falli ng over himself at the opportunity to host it, so I thought I’d take advantage of that.”

  “Free Pots de Creme. How could I say no to that?” I placed the port he was holding on the counter and wrapped my arms around him, kissing him. “Thank you. For being so supportive.” He kissed me back. I rubbed my hands together, eyes wide. “What flavor?”

  “Mocha.” He opened a box and grabbed two forks. I was so grateful that he was embracing my new book and getting used to my new role in the spotlight. Since my first book (Starting Over: Life After Abuse) had done so well, I was asked to appear on many shows for guest spots until landing a weekly advice slot on a talk radio program: Someone’s Listening, with Dr. Faith Finley.

  It wasn’t fame exactly, but locally I guess you could say it was. It was a bit overwhelming to be recognized here and there, to be invited to bourgeois cocktail parties and black-tie dinners where I would often be asked to speak. Liam was the one who was used to that role—the feared and respected critic whom every chef in town went to great lengths to impress when he sat down at their tables. He supported my success, but I can’t help but feel that he missed the way it was before, when he was the gatekeeper to charity dinners and Bears season tickets and all things social and exciting. I was the quiet academic and he was the charming foodie, revered for his swift and honest opinions on everything from the authenticity of the latest taco truck to James Beard Award–worthy restaurants.

  My colleagues quietly disapproved of my new role when I started the radio spots a few years back. It was the McDonald’s of therapy, after all—a few minutes on the air and I’m wielding life-altering advice? It was hard to tell if their judgment was based on their keen moral compasses or...envy. I shared office space with a few other clinical psychologists and an analyst whom I only saw in passing now and then. The curt nods and smiles I started receiving from Alan and Thomas in place of the once obligatory but genuine small talk we used to engage in told me all I needed to know about their feelings regarding my media presence. I did help people though, no matter what they thought.