1 Derek Goode rarely had pleasant dreams anymore. Between stress at work, stress at home, and stress about stress, he had been very stressed. His partnership track at the firm had been derailed. Even though his side project had generated much more revenue than he'd expected, now he was worried it would all blow up on him. Molly had been mad at him all summer, but he'd been too afraid to ask why. Henry hadn't made the premier soccer team, and Brett had started to display blatantly effeminate inclinations. For Derek, surprisingly, that had become a source of tremendous pride, though for Molly, unsurprisingly, a source of tremendous anxiety. All things considered, when Derek went to sleep that night, it was understandable that his subconscious would be working overtime. His dream started off in quite a pleasant manner. It was a perfectly crisp summer day. No kids in the house. He wondered if it was even his house, since there were empty glasses left on the kitchen island and one couch pillow seemed slightly askew, which Molly would never allow. He opened the stainless-steel refrigerator to find it completely filled with Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale. He grabbed one, then a second, and strolled into the backyard. Curiously, Molly was digging a hole in the walking garden. More curiously, she was wearing a black string bikini. She hadn't worn a bikini since she'd gotten pregnant with their oldest, Henry. Thirty-eight and after two kids, in a dream or out, she looked great. Runner's body, flat abs, and her breasts were pre-kids. It was his dream, so he rolled with it. Her body glistened with sweat and her lean, tight legs were smeared with topsoil. She looked incredibly sexy. That was the thing about Molly: cold as ice, but hot as hell. Derek shielded his eyes from the strong sun. The light was ridiculously bright. He asked, "What are you doing?" "Digging a hole," she said. "What for?" She didn't respond, but when she thrust the spade into the ground again, Derek clutched at his chest. Molly dug into the ground again and he collapsed to his knees. He tried to get her to stop, but the words came out garbled. She looked at him. She smiled. She went in for a third shovelful. He gasped for breath, but none came. Did people breathe in dreams? Derek wondered. Molly dug the shovel one more time, with greater force. She slowly twisted the shaft so that the blade ground into the dirt with a sickening scrape. To Derek, it felt like her every move was twisting his chest into knots. He thought about the boys and how unfair this would be to them. He wished he could see them again, but the sun was too blinding. "Wow," he muttered. "That light is really bright." And then Derek Goode died. It was 7:20 a.m. when West Windsor Police Department patrol officers Michelle Wu and Niket Patel pulled into the Windsor Ridge complex to address the 911 call. The paramedics had arrived moments before them. Emily and Ethan Phillips were entering the house. The twins had been born and raised in town and had joined the coincidentally named Twin W First Aid Squad while they were in college. There was a third car in the driveway that led to a three-bay garage. Michelle assumed the husband and wife kept their cars inside, and their children weren't old enough to drive. Had Molly Goode called someone before she called the paramedics? More people in the house meant more emotion to deal with, and Officer Wu despised human emotion. "I hope I don't have to string up a perimeter," muttered Niket, a joke between them alluding to the murder of a gas station attendant last year in which he had spectacularly lost a wrestling match with a roll of crime-scene tape. "Pretty sure it'll be natural causes," Michelle replied, to Niket's great relief. They were greeted at the front door by a woman with a Cheshire smile. It looked sincere but also entirely inappropriate for the moment. She had shellacked blond hair, with large, inviting eyes. Michelle was unnerved, less because of the woman's warmth and more because the officer recognized her. But from where? "I'm Crystal Burns," she said. "I'm Molly's best friend. She's upstairs with the paramedics." Officer Wu noted that Molly Goode's two sons were sitting in the kitchen. The younger boy cried as his older brother consoled him. The house was immaculate. Practically sterile. As she mounted the half-turn stairs, Michelle caught a ray of sunshine coming through the foyer window and couldn't see a single particle of dust floating in the air. They stepped past Molly, who stood by the entrance to the master bedroom, tissue in hand but not a tear in her eye. Michelle noted a flash of tentative recognition in Niket's eyes. Molly looked as familiar to the two patrol officers as Crystal had. The paramedics were inspecting Derek Goode's body. He lay in his bed, his hands frozen where he had clutched at his chest. His eyes remained wide open, staring to the ceiling. Heart attack was Michelle's first thought. He wore a faded Creed T-shirt from their 1999 Human Clay tour, which Michelle assumed he would never have worn had he known he'd be dying in it. Plaid boxer shorts and white ankle socks completed the regrettable shroud ensemble. He had been a handsome man, tall with brushed-back brown hair that was graying at the temples. He was in good shape. Both of the Goodes were. Michelle eyed Molly, who wore an Alala Essential long-sleeve workout shirt and Vuori Performance jogging pants. That was almost two hundred bucks' worth of workout clothes just to greet the paramedics. That was on the high end of unnecessary, even by the standards of West Windsor, New Jersey. Molly Goode was pristine. Loose auburn hair, uncolored, bounced in a bob at her shoulder. She still had freckles, which gave her features a youthful glow that contrasted with her stern demeanor. She was five feet seven, thin and taut. It was clear Molly exercised quite a lot. Michelle thought, No hidden bag of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups in this one's night table drawer. "I'm sorry for your loss," Michelle said. Ethan Phillips said, "Patient is nonviable. We have to call the medical examiner." "I didn't hear anything," Molly said. "I woke up at six forty-five to get the kids ready for school and I thought he was still sleeping. I heard his alarm go off from the kitchen at seven. When it didn't stop, I came up to see why and-and he was . . . he was . . ." She hesitated. When Emily Phillips caught Michelle's glance, the paramedic said, "Rigidity has set in. I'd estimate time of death was about"-she looked to her brother-"four hours ago?" "Give or take thirty minutes," her brother confirmed. "Give or take," Emily agreed. The doorbell rang. Crystal's loud voice echoed from the foyer as she let someone in. Michelle peeked out from the bedroom over the foyer railing. Another woman had arrived. Short, thin, with tightly cropped wavy brown hair and a raspy voice. Michelle recognized her, too. And then she remembered where she knew these women from. Shit, she thought. "Molly, Bri is here," Crystal called out, her voice echoing. "Excuse me," said Molly as she went downstairs to greet Brianne Singer. Niket had also come to the same realization as Michelle, saying, "Those three women . . . ?" "Yes," Michelle replied with dread in her voice. The doorbell rang again. With unintentionally synchronized timing, Michelle and Niket turned to look at each other. Incapable of ignoring the bug-eyed fear on the cops' faces, Ethan asked, "What's wrong?" The front door opened to the piercing wails of a crying baby. Lungs capable of rattling the three-thousand-dollar foyer chandelier blasted their noise through the house. " Veshya kee santaan ," Patel cursed in Hindi. They could see her downstairs. Her . Andrea Stern. She held her eleven-month-old baby and a diaper bag with her right arm. Completely indifferent to the child's howling, she hugged Molly with her free arm. Her curly dark hair was shorter and less enraged than the last time Michelle and Niket had seen her. From a circumference standpoint, Andrea had deflated about 85 percent from the size she had been during her pregnancy. Michelle quickly did the math and couldn't reconcile how the woman had given birth to a fifty-pound baby. Andrea whispered something into Molly's ear. Molly nodded. Michelle Wu took a step back as Andrea, still carrying the fleshy foghorn, made her way up the stairs. She entered the bedroom, nodding politely-no, sarcastically-at Wu and Patel. "Officers," Andrea said in a sweet, lilting voice that fought against its native Queens accent. Remaining indifferent to the child's incessant wailing, Andrea stopped just inside the door frame and scanned the room. She absorbed every detail. The position of the covers. Derek's frozen posture. The alarm clock on his side of the bed. The master bathroom door was open, so she could see the double-sink counter, where everything was arranged in a strict, regimented manner. The baby kept crying. Michelle noted it was another girl. That made four girls and one very outnumbered boy. The paramedic siblings looked uncertain as to what was going on. By now, nearly everyone in the sister towns of West Windsor-Plainsboro knew who Andrea Stern was. Besides having solved the murder of Satku Sasmal and having severely damaged the reputations of the West Windsor Police Department and township administration, she also had become a monthlong global viral sensation. A video of her water breaking in the middle of the heavily attended news conference last fall had made the rounds, exploding on Twitter before going through several TikTok variations. It had been entertaining though hollow revenge for those who had blamed Andrea for shattering the illusion of their storybook suburban lives. Andrea was an investigative savant who should have been an FBI profiler but had ended up becoming a baby-making machine. While still in high school, she had solved the case of Emily Browning, missing in South Brunswick for twenty years. In college, Andrea had cracked New York City's notorious Morana serial killer case. She had also gotten pregnant before graduating, which had derailed her goal of working for the FBI. Over the past year, she had become a semi-regular fixture at police headquarters as Detectives Rossi and Garmin had taken to requesting her advice on several cases. Even the mayor, who happened to be Officer Michelle Wu's mother, had asked for Andrea's input on administrative matters a few times. Now, just as she had the first time the officers had met her, Andrea Stern was performing what the media had come to call "panoramic immersion." The small, annoying woman visualized the moment of Derek's death, capturing a mental image of the events as they had unfolded while retaining a photographic memory of the most minute details in the room. The first time Michelle had seen Andrea do this-at the gas station where Satku had been killed-had unnerved her. This time, the officer was thankful as Andrea snapped out of it quickly and looked at her baby with a bemused, gentle smile. "Hey, JoJo," she cooed. "You smell like fifty pounds of shit in a five-pound bag." She spun the crying baby onto the bed right next to Derek's body. She slung the diaper bag so that it practically landed on the supine corpse. She removed the baby's diaper, which smelled like a Taco Bell had relieved its bowels in the middle of another Taco Bell. She removed wipes and a fresh diaper. Then, as if by prestidigitation, she cleaned and changed the baby with such speed that Michelle needed a slow-motion replay to confirm it had actually happened. "That was a super-stinky poop," Andrea baby-talked. The baby stopped crying. Stern slid her arm through the diaper bag strap and, in a pirouetting motion, scooped up the baby with the same arm. JoJo giggled. Michelle guessed that by the fifth child, spastic grace just became muscle memory. Andrea looked at Wu and Patel. "Has anyone been in the bedroom since you arrived?" They shook their heads in unison. "Did you touch anything on either of their nightstands or in the bathroom?" They shook their heads again. "Did you call the medical examiner?" They nodded. She smiled at the cops. "Look how much better you guys are getting at this." 2 Twelve minutes later, the Mercer County medical examiner's van arrived. Two men from the coroner's office spoke briefly with Molly. Pretending to be engaged with Brianne and Crystal in an effort to keep Henry and Brett distracted, Andrea had one eye on Molly the entire time. Andrea could tell that not a tear had been shed, but that was to be expected. Molly was rigidly, almost pathologically in control of everything in her life, especially her emotions. Andrea noted a small sore on her friend's lip, which hadn't been there when she'd last seen her, the previous week. Had Molly bitten her lip? A concession to the anxiety she must be internalizing? Andrea had been friends with the other members of the club she secretly called the Cellulitists for about three years. She still thought it was very pithy to combine the word cellulite with elitists to come up with her private hashtag. She wasn't sure how to properly pronounce the composite word and rarely said it aloud. They had all met because their lives overlapped due to their children's school or recreational activities. None of the three women were the types Andrea normally would have befriended; then again, she had never really befriended any types throughout her entire life. Crystal Burns was the gossip of the group, perpetually working her phone like an old line operator from a 1920s movie. She lived by the adage that knowledge is power, but in her case, it was the power to validate her self-worth. She was indescribably insecure, but also incredibly competent. Wanting to know something about everything meant she rarely knew much about anything, so the gossip too often amounted to ephemeral suburban hot air. And yet Crystal was also genuinely warm and caring, and would do anything for anyone anytime they needed it. Andrea sometimes suspected that she was kind for selfish reasons, but the fact remained that Crystal was the glue that held the group together. Brianne Singer was the closest thing Andrea had to a real friend among the group. She was an interesting contradiction: feisty but timid, nurturing but selfish. Brianne was smart, but she was intellectually lazy, mostly as a result of all the years spent being intellectually lazy. She was selectively fierce and passionate about certain topics, but rarely informed enough to hold her own in an argument. And then there was Molly Goode. The woman all other women were jealous of. Always put together, but never in a way that flaunted it. Molly was in better shape than you and better dressed than you, her hair was better than yours and so were her manners. Even her grace in knowing she was better than you was better than the grace you tried to show in knowing she was better than you. This morning, on what Andrea had to assume was one of the worst mornings of Molly Goode's life, she looked as upset by her husband's death as she might have been by running late for a class at Yoga Soul. The doorbell rang again. Molly greeted Detectives Vince Rossi and Charlie Garmin. They saw Andrea over Molly's shoulder and nodded politely. With Garmin supervising, the M.E. bagged Derek's body upstairs. Rossi walked over to Andrea. She didn't need eyes in the back of her head to know her friends were all watching the exchange. Her relationship with the Cellulitists, never warm and fuzzy to begin with, had become more distant since the revelation of her notorious past. Friends, apparently, aren't supposed to keep it a secret that they have a Wikipedia page under their maiden name. But at least that cat was now out of the bag, since someone had edited her entry and added her married name. "Please don't tell me you have a theory?" Rossi smiled grimly. She smiled. "Not yet." Andrea knew that Rossi liked her, but he was also wary of her, as any cop a few years short of their full pension would be. She looked at the glimmer of tension behind his eyes. Andrea could practically read his mind, wondering if even she could find a way to turn a heart attack into a murder investigation. Excerpted from The Self-Made Widow by Fabian Nicieza All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
