The Perfect Stranger by Wendy Corsi Staub Page B

“She’s the older woman who lives in Ohio,” or “She’s the one who writes the Pink Stinks blog,” he’ll murmur as if he knows who she means, but he won’t. He’ll be sympathetic, though he won’t understand how the loss of a woman she’s never met can hit so hard.
    That’s how he reacted in January, when Nell died.
    She, too, was a blogger. She lived in England.
    “Whoa Nellie died today,” Landry told Rob when he walked in the door that night.
    Concern immediately etched his face. “Who?”
    “My friend Nell. Whoa Nellie. That’s the name of her blog.”
    The concern dissipated and she could see the wheels turning: No one I know. No one in real life.
    Landry can hear him in the kitchen, going through his nightly ritual: electronic beeping as he sets the alarm on the panel beside the door, water running as he washes his hands at the sink, the fridge door opening and closing as he grabs a bottle of water, footsteps creaking the wide old floorboards as he makes his way through the dining room, calling, “Anybody home?”
    “In here.”
    He walks into the living room. Tanned, lean, and handsome, he’s wearing khakis and a golf shirt, carrying his briefcase and a garment bag containing the suit he’d worn to work this morning.
    “What’s going on?” he asks, setting the bags on a chair and walking over to her lamplit reading nook. “Where are the kids?”
    “Tucker’s playing video games at Jake’s. Addie’s at a movie with her friends. She’s going to pick him up at ten and drive him home.”
    “So you’re here all by your lonesome?” He perches on the arm of her chair and kisses the top of her head. “Why are all the shutters closed?”
    She follows his gaze to the wall of windows facing the bay. Ordinarily, they don’t bother to draw the plantation shutters at night. The boardwalk is sparsely traveled after dark, and though anyone out there would ostensibly have a clear view into the house, it’s not, typically, a troubling thought.
    Tonight is not typical.
    “I just . . . I didn’t want to sit here thinking that anyone could see in,” she admits to Rob.
    “You feeling okay?”
    “Not really.”
    Feeling him stiffen, she reads his mind, quickly saying, “No, not that. Physically, I’m fine.”
    “For a second I thought—”
    “I know.” He thought cancer. “It’s just . . . I got some bad news today about one of my online friends.”
    “I’m sorry. What happened?”
    She hesitates, remembering the first time she’d ever introduced him to Meredith—online, of course.
    She remembers how Rob studied the photo of a smiling woman with grayish blond hair and glasses, and read over the brief bio beneath it.
    “How do you know that’s really her?” he asked—of course he did, because as an attorney, he rarely accepts anything at face value.
    “Because this is her Web page.”
    “No, I mean . . . anyone can post any picture online and claim it as their own. For all you know, this Meredith person might actually be a twenty-year-old tattooed jailbird.”
    “She’s not. This is her.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “I do.”
    Meredith’s entries resonated too sharply to be anything but authentic.
    “What happened?” Rob asks again, and he strokes Landry’s hair while she tells him the tragic news, shaking his head and wearing a grave expression.
    “So her husband was away on business when it happened?”
    “Not on business—he was out of town taking care of his mother.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “She told me.”
    “She told you —or she wrote about it online?”
    Realizing where he’s going with this line of questioning, she bristles. “She blogged about it.”
    Rob shakes his head but says nothing.
    He’s always worrying about what the kids are doing online, equating social networking Web sites with letting them walk into a room filled with predators.
    Landry opens her mouth to tell him that Meredith wasn’t murdered because she blogged personal