We Thought We Knew You Read online

  Also By M. William Phelps

  Perfect Poison

  Lethal Guardian

  Every Move You Make

  Sleep in Heavenly Peace

  Murder in the Heartland

  Because You Loved Me

  If Looks Could Kill

  I’ll Be Watching You

  Deadly Secrets

  Cruel Death

  Death Trap

  Kill For Me

  Love Her to Death

  Too Young to Kill

  Never See Them Again

  Kiss of the She-Devil

  Bad Girls

  Obsessed

  The Killing Kind

  She Survived: Melissa (e-book)

  She Survived: Jane (e-book)

  She Survived: Anne (e-book)

  I’d Kill For You

  To Love and To Kill

  One Breath Away

  If You Only Knew

  Don’t Tell a Soul

  Dangerous Ground

  Beautifully Cruel

  Where Monsters Hide

  WE THOUGHT WE KNEW YOU

  M. WILLIAM PHELPS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Epigraph

  PART I - SHE’LL BE THE DEATH OF ME

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  PART II - BLOOD CHOKE

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  PART III - AFFECTIVE BLINDNESS

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  PART IV - TRUE LIES

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Notes

  Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals connected to this story.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2021 by M. William Phelps

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2020943982

  The K logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-2881-4

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: January 2021

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-2882-1 (ebook)

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-2882-3 (ebook)

  For Remington Jade and Kathleen Paige

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  IN THE PAST, I’VE opted to use CAPS to indicate text messages between people. Sometimes I’ve used a different style of font, or bold text to separate texting from actual dialogue. Because texting has become such an inherent, personal part of daily life—and the main source of communicating among most of us—in this book I am including text messages as normal conversational dialogue, mainly because a majority of us text to each other (sadly) more than we actually talk face-to-face. That said, frequently when I include a text conversation in this book, it will be qualified as such—i.e., “she/he texted.”

  Likewise, the use of written messages, such as love letters, or court transcripts and sheriff’s reports, will be treated as quoted conversations when they are referenced in the text. They will only be italicized when presented in full or in an extracted form. These written pieces of dialogue will only be corrected for misspellings, grammatical difficulties, or problematic punctuation. In nearly all instances, they have been maintained to reflect what the participants said, and how they said it.

  The more hidden the venom, the more dangerous it is.

  —Marguerite De Valois

  PART I

  SHE’LL BE THE DEATH OF ME

  1

  BILL YODER DIDN’T NEED an alarm clock. On most days, the sixty-nine-year-old chiropractor was out of bed by 6:30 a.m. After washing up, he found his way to the exercise room inside his upstate New York home. As Bill spent the next hour getting his blood pumping, his sixty-year-old wife, Mary, rushed around the house getting ready for work.

  Keys? Briefcase? Lunch?

  “I generally stayed out of her way,” Bill said.

  After Bill finished his workout routine, a white towel slung over his shoulder, he made his way into the kitchen to rehydrate. At about the same time, Mary was ready to take off for her workday at the chiropractor practice they’d owned and operated for the past thirty years. The office was a fifteen-minute drive from their modest, upper-middle-class home. Bill generally kissed his wife, said good-bye, and told Mary to have a great day.

  After Mary left, Bill had coffee with his usual morning reading. On certain days, he’d head over to the local Panera to write out “some thoughts” or “do some of my reflective reading.” Other days, Bill puttered around the house doing “handyman work Mary needed me to finish.” When he felt inspired, he’d tackle bigger projects in Mary’s prized garden she’d assigned him.

  With so many things going on at the same time, Mary Yoder was one of those people who forever ran a little bit late. She’d be on her way out the door and realize, Oops, I have to do that before I leave. And then off she went to accomplish what she presumed was a five-minute task that actually took twenty.

  Bill would tease her about it.

  “No, no . . . Bill. I used to be like that, but not anymore.”

  The Yoders’ youngest child, and only son, Adam, was the practice’s full-time office manager. Quite punctual, since starting in 2013, Adam was usually at the office by the time Mary arrived, opening the doors and completing a few duties in the quiet desolation of no one else being around. By the end of that year, however, Adam had returned to school and could no longer work full-time. So he asked his parents if his then-girlfriend, twenty-year-old Kaitlyn “Katie” Conley, could split the time with him. Both would work part-time, Adam explained to his parents. They would divide up office manager responsibilities. Rarely work the same hours.

  Into early 2014, as school became more intense, Adam stopped working at the office altogether. He suggested Katie take over full-time office manager responsibilities herself.

  Katie was pretty, in a girl-next-door way. Responsible. Smart. She had a royal look about her, like Kate Middleton: classy and bu
sinesslike, intelligent, sophisticated. She came from a family with deep roots in the Utica community. Many around town seemed to know a Conley. The house where she grew up and lived with her family sat on acres of land. They raised horses and livestock. Most who knew Katie would describe her as soft-spoken and shy, harmless, and wholesome.

  Bill and Mary had gotten to know Katie fairly well as she immersed herself in the daily business of the practice. They liked her. Before that, they knew little about her. Adam had always been a private person, Bill explained, where his personal life was concerned.

  “And he had been, from the time he started having relationships. So we didn’t really know Katie until she came to work for us.”

  By all accounts, when they weren’t fighting, Katie seemed to make Adam happy. There were bumps throughout the relationship, but Adam was unwilling to share exactly what was going on. The Yoders grew to love and trust Katie. However, the idea of Adam and Katie getting married one day was not something Bill and Mary thought much about.

  “Simply because their relationship was too up-and-down at the time,” Bill Yoder explained.

  Still, Bill said, “We were reluctant [to hire her full-time] because we didn’t want to have any relationship issues in the office.”

  A family-run business was difficult enough, even though Bill and Mary had figured it out. According to Bill, “Mary and I loved working together. We were grateful we could do it. There were no husband-and-wife difficulties where running the business was concerned.”

  But Adam had pleaded with his parents. It would be okay, he promised. Katie would focus on work while in the office. Their personal life would be left outside the door.

  “We finally said okay,” Bill remembered.

  With Katie running the office, Adam pulled back even further when sharing anything about his and Katie’s relationship. For good reason.

  “Look,” he told his parents not long after Katie started full-time, “you’ve got this work relationship with her. Our personal stuff should not have anything to do with how she’s treated at the office.”

  Fair point.

  The office hours were 8:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. The office closed between 12:30 and 1:30 p.m. every day for lunch.

  Doors locked. OPEN/CLOSED sign flipped around.

  Bill scaled back his hours as chiropractor almost completely during the summer of 2015, focusing on the books—taxes, accounting, payroll. He worked two days a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and a half-day wherever he could fit it in. He still saw patients, but less as his retirement seemed to be beckoning. Mary covered the other days of the week: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. So dedicated to her work, Mary often drove out to nearby Amish country on certain days after working hours to provide treatment to the Amish. The horse-and-buggy trip into Utica was too far. Likewise, it was too difficult to arrange rides from non-Amish neighbors.

  “And that was Mary,” said a friend and longtime patient. “She drove out to the Amish because they needed care.”

  An accomplished potter and avid gardener, Mary viewed both hobbies as an extension of her life, not something she did to tinker around and pass time. She also became a Shaklee company rep, selling the products out of the office. According to the company, “Shaklee Corporation is an American manufacturer and distributor of natural nutrition supplements, weight-management . . . beauty . . . and household products.”

  Mary kept a “little shop in the back office,” where she sold pottery, health-centered books, and herbal supplies, with lots of Shaklee inventory always on hand. She was passionate about organic products and food. Mary encouraged friends, family, and patients to give themselves the best chance at a healthy lifestyle. Within her own life, a default lunch for Mary on those days she had forgotten to bring one from home was a Shaklee protein shake. She kept a large cannister of Shaklee protein powder in the office refrigerator and mixed a smoothie when a craving hit. The simple recipe she favored never changed: almond milk and Shaklee powder.

  As the summer of 2015 burned hot and humid in Oneida County, New York, Mary and Bill seemed to be on autopilot toward retirement. They were dividing the workweek, with Katie Conley running the office, and son Adam completely out of the picture. The Yoders had started to make plans earlier that year to sell the business and to travel.

  “Life was as perfect as it could be,” Bill said.

  2

  CUTTING THROUGH THE CENTER of New York State, Mohawk Valley has a combined populace of about 650,000. Situated between the Adirondack and Catskill Mountains, its aesthetic wonder is impossible to miss as you trek through the New York State Thruway.

  That summer of 2015, Bill and Mary Yoder were actively looking to sell the practice. Every time the subject came up, however, step-by-step, behind-the-scenes process of the sale seemed daunting and exhausting. A sale would involve two years of bringing someone in—that is, after they found a qualified buyer with whom they were happy. Then they’d have to train the doctor, beyond making sure patients were comfortable with him or her. To Mary and Bill, the patients were their number one priority—people with whom they’d spent their careers building relationships.

  “We were always too busy to do it,” Bill said regarding a potential sale. They’d routinely begin a conversation about retirement and selling, then table it.

  Elizabeth Kelly had been a Chiropractic Family Care patient since 1998, seeing Mary and Bill three times per week.

  “As my condition became better, I saw them less often,” Elizabeth said. In fact, during the third week of July 2015, Elizabeth was scheduled to see Mary for her one visit that month. On July 20, Elizabeth checked in with office manager Katie Conley around 2:30 p.m.

  “Good afternoon, Elizabeth. Take a seat,” Katie said. “Mary will be with you shortly.”

  A few moments later, Elizabeth was on her way into the back office to one of the patient rooms.

  Not long after Mary walked into the room, Elizabeth noticed immediately, something was wrong. “She didn’t seem to be as exuberant as I would know her to be. She wasn’t as bright.”

  Elizabeth wrote it off as Mary appearing “to have her mind focused someplace else.”

  Was it the potential sale of the practice nagging at Mary? Something she ate? A personal problem?

  As the afternoon progressed, Mary’s demeanor significantly changed. The people who knew her best, along with those patients who had seen Mary for decades, were taken aback by her behavior and temperament.

  “Something is terribly amiss,” Elizabeth Kelly told herself, watching Mary run in and out of the room.

  * * *

  AS A HABIT, MARY and Bill “always kissed each other good-bye” before the start of their day. They had thirty-eight years of marriage behind them, and July 20, 2015, proved no different.

  With split shifts at their business, Chiropractic Family Care, Monday was Bill’s turn to stay at home, run errands, and have the day to himself. After a quick smooch, Bill told his wife, “I’ll see you later.”

  Mary smiled; she had a glow about her that day, Bill recalled. “Mary was the healthiest person I know,” he added.

  She was the most positive, pleasant, and graceful, too. Not much got to Mary, or seemed to bother her.

  This particular Monday was another beautiful summer day in upstate/central New York. It was Mary’s favorite time of year. Leaving the house, Mary had one goal in mind: get to work, finish the day, and get home to garden.

  “Bye, honey,” Mary said.

  “I’ll call you later.”

  The Yoders were in the midst of planning a much-needed, long-awaited vacation to Europe. It was something they had discussed nearly every day throughout June and July. In the four decades of their marriage, Mary and Bill had never taken such an extended trip so far away. Generally, four, maybe five days were the most time they could get away from the practice. There were patients who needed to see them every week.

  This was going to be the “first, in all of ou
r marriage—a long vacation we never had,” Bill said.

  The previous Christmas, Liana Hegde, the couple’s oldest child, had given her parents a cruise.

  “As long as we’re going to take a cruise, why don’t we leave three weeks early and travel around Europe and then finish off with the cruise?” Mary suggested to Bill one day.

  Bill smiled. It was going to be a “full month just with each other.”

  Total relaxation. Completely cut off from the Yoders’ everyday, busy world of running a business, maintaining a home, taking care of family. Just the thought of getting away from the chaos of Adam and Katie’s relationship, and its demise the previous year, was welcoming enough.

  The trip was planned September 5 through October 5. The Yoders had arranged with a chiropractor from nearby Syracuse, New York, a man they both knew and respected, to come into the practice one day a week and handle those patients who could not miss a session.

  Throughout early summer, leading up to July, Mary and Bill logged on to their computers, booked travel, made hotel reservations, and mapped out the trip. It was an exciting time. They’d worked nearly their entire lives for this moment.

  Since Adam’s now–ex-girlfriend, Katie Conley, had taken over as the office manager, he rarely came around the office anymore. Adam was too busy with school and other things, not to mention he and Katie were at odds. Katie seemed to have things in the office under control. Adam and Katie had been together since 2011, on and off. Every so often, a kink in the chain of their relationship presented itself and they’d break up. Contentious as those separations had been, they’d kept most of it private.

  By the summer of 2015, however, Adam wanted nothing more to do with Katie romantically. They’d once talked marriage and children, buying a house together, spending the rest of their lives in love. That was all before the nasty text exchanges and rip-roaring fights between them. Each hurling spiteful and hurtful comments. Law enforcement had been involved once. Another man was involved, too. Maybe more, Adam felt. As far as he saw it, the relationship was behind him. Completely over. There was not a chance Katie was going to win him back this time.