Cul-de-sac Read online

  Cul-de-sac is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Joy Fielding Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Ballantine and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Fielding, Joy, author.

  Title: Cul-de-sac / Joy Fielding.

  Description: New York : Ballantine Books, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020042396 (print) | LCCN 2020042397 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984820259 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781984820266 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Psychological fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR9199.3.F518 C85 2021 (print) | LCC PR9199.3.F518 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020042396

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020042397

  Ebook ISBN 9781984820266

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook

  Title page background art: iStock/MsMoloko

  Cover design: Derek Walls

  Cover image: © phototropic/Getty Images (house), © Deyan Georgiev/Shutterstock (sky)

  ep_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Joy Fielding

  About the Author

  Prologue

  It’s normally such a quiet street. Small, unassuming, solidly middle class. Not the sort of place one usually associates with the shocking events of that hot July night. Ask any of the residents and they will agree that none of their neighbors seemed capable of committing such a cold-blooded, heinous act.

  How could this happen? they will ask when they gather together the next morning, shivering despite the intense heat, shaking their heads in collective wonder and dismay. I’m stunned. I had no idea. I thought it was a car backfiring. Or maybe some leftover firecrackers.

  The street is what they call a cul-de-sac. From the French, the literal translation of which is “bottom of a sack,” itself derived from the Latin culus, meaning “bottom.” It was originally an anatomical term meaning “a vessel or tube with only one opening,” but here in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, as in the rest of North America, it has come to mean a short, dead-end street with a circle for turning around at the end.

  Picture a horseshoe. Now picture five houses, virtual carbon copies of one another—modest, two-story, in delicate shades of pink, yellow, and peach, each with a double-car garage—placed at strategic intervals along that horseshoe, one at its rounded tip, two to each side. A variety of palm trees fill in the spaces between the houses, and the street has no sidewalks, only a raised curb separating the paved road from the small front lawns. The lawns, in turn, are dissected by short, flower-lined walkways ending with two steps before each front door.

  The street is officially, and for no discernable reason, named Carlyle Terrace, and is situated just off Hood Road, a not overly busy thoroughfare that runs east and west between the Florida Turnpike and Military Trail, about a ten-minute drive to the ocean, and a stone’s throw from any number of private, gated, golfing communities that populate the area.

  On the surface, the people who live on this street seem average, even boring: a recently separated single mother and her two children; a doctor and his dentist wife with their two sons; another married couple and their three offspring; a widowed grandmother; a young couple married barely a year. They have the usual array of problems—money concerns, difficult teenagers, petty jealousies, the everyday conflicts of married life. No one would claim it’s all been candlelight and soft music. There has been the occasional raised voice, an argument spilling out of an open window, an unexpected altercation, even the odd slamming door.

  Rumors abound—this one might be having an affair, that one might have a drinking problem, that one thinks she’s too good for the rest of us. Neighbors talk, after all.

  Especially when you give them something to talk about.

  Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Sean Grant, one of the residents of Carlyle Terrace, is fond of quoting, referencing an ancient radio show that his parents used to listen to when they were children. The Shadow knows, he’ll answer in the next breath, finishing the quote with an ominous lowering of his voice.

  There are lots of shadows on this tree-filled cul-de-sac, this horseshoe-shaped dead end that leads exactly nowhere. And shadows make excellent places for secrets—to hide, to grow, to flourish. Until some grow too big, too powerful to contain, and they explode, like a deadly grenade tossed from a careless hand, forever shattering the quiet façade so meticulously presented to the outside world, spraying bone and blood and illusions as far as the eye can see, beyond where the mind can grasp.

  So indeed, one might be forgiven for initially assuming the shots that rang out in the middle of that hot July night came from leftover Independence Day firecrackers or a car backfiring somewhere along the main road, and not from a gun held mere inches from its target’s head.
/>   I can’t believe it. How could this happen? the neighbors will mutter repeatedly. This is normally such a peaceful neighborhood. Such a quiet street.

  Chapter One

  It’s early May, a couple of months before the fatal events of that sultry summer night, and the clock radio in Maggie McKay’s bedroom wakes her up at six a.m., as it has every weekday morning since the school year began. She reaches across the empty half of the king-size bed to the nightstand and silences the cloying strains of “Oh, what a beautiful morning” with a decisive slap of her hand before the refrain can repeat.

  Probably she should move the radio to the nightstand on her side of the bed so she won’t have to stretch so far. At the very least, she should reprogram the alarm to play another tune. She’s come to hate that stupid song. She doesn’t need reminding that Florida is the land of beautiful mornings. She hates it anyway.

  But she doesn’t move the radio and she doesn’t reprogram the tune. And she probably won’t. Because there have been enough changes in her life lately. Too many.

  The music was Craig’s idea. A gentler way to wake them up each morning than the shrill beeping jolting them into consciousness. Her nerves were frayed enough as it was, he reminded her unnecessarily. What she needed, he said, was less stress. What he needed, he didn’t say—maybe wasn’t even aware of at the time—was less Maggie.

  Not that she blamed him for their marriage falling apart, at least not entirely. The move to Palm Beach Gardens had been her idea. A new beginning, she’d told him when she first championed the idea of uprooting their family, abandoning their home, leaving their friends and their careers behind in Los Angeles, and moving across the country. It would be a fresh start. A new beginning. Better for everyone.

  Virtually the same words Craig used when he’d packed up his personal belongings and moved out three months ago. “I’m sorry, Maggie,” he added, managing to look as if he meant it. “I just can’t do it anymore.”

  “Fuck you,” she mutters now, pretty much the first words out of her mouth every morning since he left. “Fucking coward.” She rolls back to her side of the bed, the sheets cool beneath the flimsy cotton of her pajamas, and opens the top drawer of the mirrored nightstand beside the pillow. Her hand feels for the cold, smooth surface of the compact Glock 19, secreted beneath a chiffon swirl of multicolored scarves. The 9mm handgun is by far the most popular handgun in the United States, due to its size and reliability. Or so said the salesman who sold it to her the same afternoon that Craig moved out.

  Craig had been adamant about not having a gun in the house, despite everything that had happened. Despite, God forbid, everything that could happen, and probably would happen the minute they became too complacent, she’d argued to no avail. If you’d really wanted to reduce my stress level, she thinks as she lifts the relatively lightweight gun into her hands, this little guy would have done a much better job of relaxing me than that stupid song from an old Broadway musical.

  But it’s a classic, she can hear him say.

  “Fuck you,” she says in return, refusing to be charmed and returning the gun to the drawer. She swivels out of bed, her bare feet padding across the mock-hardwood floor of the narrow hallway toward the bedrooms of her two children. “Erin,” she calls out, knocking on her daughter’s door before opening it, hearing the teenager moan beneath her mountain of covers. “Time to get up, sweetie.”

  “Go away,” comes the muffled response.

  Maggie backs into the hall, understanding there’s no point arguing. Erin will stay in bed until she can no longer tolerate the sound of her mother’s exhortations and only then will she deign to get up and dressed. She will spend the next twenty to thirty minutes in the bathroom, fixing her hair and makeup. She will refuse to have anything for breakfast. She will decline to engage in anything resembling a conversation with either her mother or younger brother. She will check her phone, toss her hair, and roll her eyes more times than Maggie can count. And after finally climbing into the black SUV beside her mother, she will remember that she has forgotten something of vital importance—occasionally the homework she hasn’t completed, usually the cellphone she left in the powder room while doing a final check of her appearance—thereby delaying them further. She may or may not remember to reset the house alarm, in which case Maggie will have to get out of the car to do it herself. Maggie will then chauffeur the kids to their respective schools, dropping Leo off first, then Erin, who will exit the car without a backward glance just as the bell is sounding.

  “This could all be avoided, you know,” she hears Erin say. “All you have to do is—”

  “You’re not getting your own car.”

  “Why not? Dad could probably get me a good deal….”

  “You’re not getting your own car.”

  “What’s the point of having my license if you won’t let me drive? Besides, if I have my own car, you won’t have to drive us back and forth to school every day. You could get a job, get a life….”

  “I have a life.”

  “You had a life. You threw it away.”

  “Okay, that’s enough.”

  “I think you enjoy playing martyr….”

  “I said, enough!”

  And enough of that, Maggie decides, banishing the unpleasant thoughts as she enters her son’s room. She touches him gently on the shoulder. “Leo, honey. Time to wake up.”

  The shy eight-year-old flips onto his back and opens the deep blue eyes he inherited from his father. “What day is it?”

  “It’s Wednesday. Why?”

  “So we’re having dinner with Dad?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And he’ll pick us up after school?”

  Maggie nods. “If he’s not there when you get out, you call me immediately.”

  Leo tosses off his Star Wars blanket without further prompting and climbs out of bed, his favorite stuffed Super Mario toy in hand, heading for the bathroom he shares with his sister, experience having taught him that he’d better get in there while he has the chance.

  Maggie returns to her bedroom. She takes a quick shower in the small en suite bathroom, then throws on a T-shirt and a pair of shorts before fluffing out her chin-length, mousy brown hair, hair that used to be lush and shoulder-length. Used to be, she thinks, mindful of all the things she once was: employed, confident, married. “Don’t forget pretty,” she says out loud, staring at the defeated-looking stranger in the full-length mirror on the inside of her closet door. “Who are you?” she whispers. “What have you done with Maggie McKay?”

  “Erin!” she calls as she heads down the stairs, eyes on the alert for anything that looks even vaguely out of place. “Time to get up.” She does a quick check of the downstairs rooms—the combined living-dining room to one side of the stairs, the kitchen, powder room, and den to the other—before turning off the burglar alarm to the right of the front door.

  She knows she’s being silly—Craig would use the word “paranoid,” had, in fact, used it on more than one occasion—that there’s no need to check every room in the house, as she’s done every morning since they moved in eighteen months ago, that no one could circumvent the state-of-the-art alarm system she insisted they install despite its prohibitive cost, and that even if someone did, surely she would hear his footsteps on the stairs, stairs she’s deliberately left uncarpeted for that very reason.

  She opens the front door, her eyes doing a quick pan of the small cul-de-sac as she bends down to retrieve the morning paper. Hers is the house at the street’s rounded tip, a location that gives her a clear view of the two houses on both sides. The yellow school bus is already parked in front of the house to her immediate right, waiting to transport Tyler and Ben Wilson to their tony private school in North Palm Beach. Maggie acknowledges the bus driver’s nod with an uneasy wave of her fingers and a sigh of relief. It’s the same man who’s
been picking them up for the last four months. No reason to panic, as she did after the last driver retired and this much younger one appeared. She’d even called The Benjamin School for confirmation they’d hired someone new, then questioned his references.

  “I’m sorry. Who are you?” the school receptionist asked.

  “You’re being paranoid,” Craig told her.

  “Okay, so I’m paranoid,” Maggie mutters to herself now, retreating into the house. Better paranoid than dead.

  She would have loved to send her children to a private school like the Wilsons, but the price tag was way too high. The Wilsons are high-earning professionals—he, a well-regarded oncologist and she, a dentist—but Maggie no longer has a job, and even though Craig makes good money selling luxury cars, it isn’t nearly enough to cover the cost of two tuitions, especially now that he has two residences to maintain. Whatever savings they once had went toward the move.

  “There’s absolutely nothing the matter with public schools,” she reminds herself, needing the confirmation of hearing her words out loud. She used to teach in one after all.

  Used to, she thinks, setting the kitchen table, a white plastic oval that occupies the center of the small space. She boils an egg for Leo and puts two pieces of raisin bread in the toaster, glancing at the day’s depressing headlines before turning to the puzzle page, the only reason she buys the paper anymore. “Erin!” she yells, and then again, “Erin! You better be up and out of bed.”