“Very surprising,” Rachel said.
Liesl giggled, rubbed her hands together, and made an eeeee! noise that could have shattered glass. Rachel thanked her babysitter, gave her an extra ten dollars, then marched straight into Eric’s room. She wrapped her arms around her son, startling him. He tried to shake her off, but given that they both knew she was the stronger of the two, he simply let her finish.
“You done?” he said.
“Yes,” Rachel replied. “Sometimes moms just need a hug.”
“Well, you got one. Now let me study.”
Rachel kissed him on the cheek before he could shoo her away and then went into Megan’s room.
Her gorgeous daughter was asleep. A pile of pages lay scattered on the floor—more of her Sadie Scout story. Rachel moved a tangle of hair away from Megan’s mouth and gently placed her hand on her daughter’s chest, feeling it rise and fall with each breath.
When Eric was born, he’d spent sixty-four days in the NICU before the doctors permitted him to go home. For six weeks he required a gastronomy tube, which fed directly into his stomach through his abdominal wall until he was strong enough to feed. The scar was still visible on Eric’s stomach. Faint, but a reminder to Rachel how delicate he once was. When they brought him home, Rachel sat by his crib every night for six months just to make sure he was breathing. She would place a small makeup mirror in front of his nose and hold her breath, waiting for it to fog.
Megan was easy. She was born two days past her due date, at a whopping nine pounds, seven ounces. She was the picture of health from day one.
A perfect daughter. A perfect son. A happy marriage. Their family was complete.
And just six months later, it all came crashing down. Four perfect lives shattered in a single unforgiving moment.
There were monsters out there. That lesson had been forced upon Rachel. It had also made her learn the hardest, most valuable lesson there was in life.
You’re on your own.
And now, right here in Ashby, this sleepy little city, another monster had arisen. Constance Wright was dead. Rachel didn’t know why. Not yet.
After Constance Wright had come to her home, Rachel had learned everything she could about the Wright family. They had been Ashby royalty, their names practically synonymous with the town. Once.
For years, the name Wright was plastered on schools, libraries, and hospital wings. But then those respectable establishments all washed their hands of the Wrights, scrubbed the name from their walls and plaques. They kept the money the family had donated, of course.
Constance’s grandfather, Eugene Wright, was born in Ashby and founded the Wright Development Corp., which developed middle-class housing projects all across the Midwest. Constance’s father, Cameron, leveraged the money Eugene made on Wall Street, buying him powerful connections in government and finance. They were on their way to becoming the Kennedys of the Midwest.
Constance graduated from Harvard with a degree in political science and then went to Yale Law before returning to her family’s home in Ashby and winning a seat on the city council at just twenty-nine. Four years later she was mayor, bolstered by a $4 million campaign funded in large part by her family’s associates in construction. Louis Magursky of Magursky Construction spent half a million alone to blanket the airwaves with attack ads on the sitting mayor, poor Randall McGovern, a sixty-eight-year-old with thinning hair and the charisma of a comb, who was no match for Constance’s work ethic, enthusiasm, humor, and deep pockets.
Constance was young. Smart. Attractive. Idealistic. Funny. Passionate. Genuine. And was poised for greatness.
Mayor Wright. Governor Wright. Senator Wright. And beyond. Ashby was the perfect place for Constance to cut her political teeth. After all, it wasn’t long ago that the mayor of a small city in Alaska came within a hair of the White House.
But during Constance’s second term in office and about a year before Constance’s visit to Rachel’s home, the ACLU sued Wright Development Corp. Six black employees claimed Eugene Wright had regularly used racist language in their presence, and soon after that seven women came forward with claims of sexual misconduct. There were tapes. And Eugene Wright was ruined.
The suit was settled out of court for millions, Eugene Wright suffered a stroke, and the company was sold for pennies on the dollar to a development firm that absorbed the company’s assets and scrapped its name.
Soon after, Cameron Wright was arrested in the South Bronx in the bed of an underage prostitute. Constance’s mother, Candice, went to clean him out in the divorce only to find that Wright Development Corp. was in debt eight figures to dozens of vendors. Magursky Construction was in the hole for $6 million alone. Zwinter Electric, $3 million. Creditors picked apart what was left like vultures on a fresh carcass.
Cameron Wright hanged himself in prison. Candice Wright died in a car accident a year later. Cable news hosts tossed around conspiracy theories about their deaths.
Before the scandals, Constance Wright’s approval rating was floating in the high sixties. But the muck from her family’s scandals began to spatter. And then it got worse.
Early in her second term, Wright’s husband, Nicholas Drummond, accused her of infidelity. The Ashby Bulletin printed lewd texts, photos, and emails she’d apparently sent to a twenty-two-year-old staffer named Sam Wickersham. Wright furiously denied the affair but couldn’t explain the abundance of communication. She claimed she was being framed. She had very few defenders. Rachel followed it in the news—from a distance.
Wickersham also claimed he witnessed Wright drunk during government meetings, and when a reporter from the Bulletin found an empty bottle of Jim Beam in her wastebasket, the picture of the offending bottle was splashed above the fold with the headline “Constance-ly Sauced?” Wright denied the drinking accusations, but by then it didn’t matter.
Her political career came crashing down, and her marriage exploded in a matter of weeks.
Drummond cleaned Wright out in the divorce and soon after remarried a young woman named Isabelle Robles, who came with a trust fund that would have made Scrooge McDuck jealous. Constance Wright disappeared from public life. She was occasionally spotted pushing a shopping cart at the grocery store or sitting alone with a pack of Twizzlers at a movie. But the Constance Wright who was poised for greatness ceased to exist.
Constance was strong and smart, born with contacts and power and money, all the advantages she could ever need. She had everything. And none of it saved her reputation, or her life.
When Rachel moved to Ashby, Constance Wright had shown her kindness. And then her life was torn apart while Rachel sat back and watched. She’d believed Constance but had stayed quiet. But she was tired of monsters roaming the countryside unchecked.
She was going to make sure somebody paid for Constance’s murder.
CHAPTER 10
The news of Constance Wright’s death hit Ashby like a bomb, and the aftershock rumbled far and wide.
The front page of the Ashby Bulletin ran the headline FAREWELL MS. MAYOR. The Chicago Tribune’s website read DEATH OF A DYNASTY. Notable cable channels sent crews to cover the police press conference. Rumors had begun to spread that Constance Wright’s death was being treated as a homicide. Along with the winter wind came whispers of suspects and conspiracies. Constance Wright’s previous transgressions were forgotten and forgiven while the city mourned. At least for one day.