Funeral for a Friend

11

Stride lay in bed with his hands laced behind his head. Cool air blew through the open windows in the small bedroom. He kept the lights off, with only a pale glow in the room from the streetlight outside the cottage. He stared at the rotating ceiling fan above him, not entirely sure if he was awake or asleep. He’d had the nightmare about Andrea and Ned so many times lately that he couldn’t be certain what was real anymore. It made him reluctant to close his eyes.

The door opened with a ghostly creak of the hinges. Serena slipped into the bedroom, and he knew he was still awake. She was quiet as she undressed on the other side of the room. She peeled down her jeans, then pulled her T-shirt over her head, mussing her black hair. Her profile was a silhouette portrait. She grabbed one of his flannel shirts from the closet and slipped it over her shoulders, but she left the buttons undone.

“This thing with Cat scares me,” she murmured, sitting next to him on the bed.

“It scares me, too, but we’ll find whoever is doing this to her.”

“My own experience with stalkers isn’t good. I know how these things can end.”

“I remember, believe me.”

“Is Brayden reliable? Do you trust him?”

“All the reports on him are good. He’s responsible. He promised me he wouldn’t let Cat out of his sight.”

“Okay.” Serena was quiet for a while as she stroked his bare chest with her fingernails. “Confession time.”

“You or me?”

“Me first,” she said. “I know about Andrea and Devin Card and Ned Baer.”

“Serves me right to marry a smart cop,” Stride said. “I was going to tell you tonight. I wasn’t going to keep it a secret.”

“What about Maggie? Are you going to tell her the truth, too?”

“No. I’m sure the investigation will lead her to Andrea on her own. Until then, I don’t want to be the one to expose her. In the end, it’s still her secret, not mine.”

Serena nodded. “Just so you know, Maggie asked me to be a spy. She wanted me to hand off information behind the scenes. To protect you.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I won’t tell her anything,” Serena replied, “unless you end up at risk. Then all bets are off. I won’t let you sacrifice yourself.”

“I’m not at risk.”

“I don’t know, Jonny. Did you hear K-2 brought in Dan Erickson to lead the case?”

“I did. Dan still can’t prove something that never happened.”

“Maybe not, but the circumstantial evidence looks bad,” Serena said. “Let’s not kid ourselves. If the truth about Andrea comes out — and we both know it will — Dan will have a body, a motive, and a lie from the principal suspect, who also happens to be the last person to see the victim alive. Plus, you admitted to Maggie that Steve made a dying declaration that implicates you. Prosecutors have made cases with less. And even if Dan doesn’t go after you with formal charges, the suspicion alone may make it impossible for K-2 to bring you back to the force.”

“All true,” Stride said.

“You don’t even sound like you care.”

“I don’t know how I feel about it,” he admitted.

“Well, I care. I care a lot.”

“Then you and I better figure out what really happened,” Stride said.

“Isn’t that a little hard when we’re both banned from the case?”

“Well, we can’t investigate Ned’s murder directly, but I’m pretty sure that the mystery didn’t start seven years ago. It was thirty years ago. That’s where we go.”

“You mean Andrea’s rape,” Serena murmured.

“Yes.”

“Then I have another confession,” she went on. “I went to see her. Right after you did.”

“She talked to you?”

“Not at first. At first, she just wanted to yell at me. But then she opened up. I think she began to realize that our backgrounds aren’t totally dissimilar. We found some common ground.”

“You and Andrea are nothing alike,” Stride told her.

Serena leaned forward and kissed him, her dark hair falling across his face. “I know you’d like to think so, Jonny, but that’s not entirely true. There’s more of her in me than you might want to admit. We both come from the same place. We were both violated as teens. I didn’t follow the road she did, but believe me, I know that road really well. I’m not going to blame her for how she turned out, because I could have gone there, too.”

Stride knew that Serena was right. He’d seen Andrea’s demons throughout their marriage, and he’d never been able to get around her walls. Eventually, he stopped trying. He’d failed her. It was something he still regretted.

“You also can’t blame yourself for how she turned out,” Serena went on, because she knew how to read the emotions on his face. “She was who she was long before you met her. Guess what, you can’t fix everybody.”

“Maybe not, but I did a lot of things wrong.”

“We all do. Welcome to relationships.”

His mind drifted to Cat and the way she’d brought him and Serena back together after his affair with Maggie. “Andrea talked about her and me not having kids. I wonder if that would have changed things.”

“The trouble in your marriage wasn’t about kids. She may have thought that was a magic bullet to make everything better, but you know that’s not true. Her problems went deeper than that.”

“So I take it you believe her about the rape.”

“I believe something terrible happened to her. The details? I have no idea. She admits she was drunk. She admits she passed out. She doesn’t remember where this happened or when it happened. On the other hand, she’s certain it was Devin Card in that bedroom. That wouldn’t be enough in a court of law, but it probably would have been enough to ruin Card politically if she came forward.”

“Ned Baer certainly thought so,” Stride said.

“And Ned found Andrea.”

“Yes, he did, and he was planning to write the story.”

“Do you think Ned told Devin Card that he’d located the woman behind the allegations?” Serena hesitated before saying the next name. “Or if not Card, did he tell Peter Stanhope?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t ask either of them about it back then, because doing that would have risked exposing Andrea. And remember, I really thought Ned drowned at the Deeps. I had no reason to think he’d been murdered. It may have been in the back of my head, but I didn’t want to believe it.”

“Peter Stanhope texted me,” Serena told him. “He wants to meet tomorrow. An off-the-record conversation.”

“You said yes?”

“I want to hear what he has to say.”

“He knows finding Ned’s body will put a focus on Devin. And himself. They’ll both be suspects. Of course, so am I.”

“And Andrea, too.”

“True.”

“We both know she’s capable of losing control,” Serena murmured.

“I know that, but I don’t think she did it.”

Serena stretched out next to him in bed. She put a bare leg over his calf and molded her skin against his body. Her face was inches from his own. “Jonny, what really happened between you and Ned Baer?”

He closed his eyes and remembered that night. He could see it again, vividly, as if no time had passed. The Deeps. The boiling hot evening. Ned on the cliff, his clothes wet from diving.

Stride stared at his wife. “Honestly? I wanted to kill him.”

As Stride crossed the footbridge over the Deeps, the river pounded through the narrows below him, erupting into foam. Its thunder was so loud that he couldn’t hear anything else. The violence of the water fed the violence that pulsed in his chest, and the heat of the evening bathed his body in sweat. He made his way along the wet rocks on the cliff, and his hands clenched into fists as he saw Ned Baer. He’d never met this man, but he already hated him.

The water roared; his mind roared. He had to do something to protect Andrea. To save her. She’d disintegrated in front of him as she confessed the truth. She’d cried that she couldn’t survive the humiliation, the lies, the attacks if her secret was exposed. Tears had poured down her face. She’d screamed and begged: stop him!

Do something. Anything. Whatever it takes.

You’re my husband.

“Don’t fall,” a voice said.

Ned Baer grinned at him as he dried his thinning hair with a towel. His clothes were sopping wet, making him look even skinnier than he was.

“Don’t fall,” Ned said again. “I hear if you drown, they never find your body.”

“You’re right. You shouldn’t be diving here. It’s not safe.”

“Gotta beat the heat somehow,” Ned replied, in a voice that whined like the chirp of a cricket.

“I’ve pulled a lot of people out of the lake who thought that,” Stride replied.

Ned focused on him with beady black eyes that looked too big for his face. “You sound like a cop.”

“I am. You’re Ned Baer, right?”

“Yeah. Who are you? What do you want?”

“My name’s Jonathan Stride.” He paused and then told him, “Andrea is my wife.”

Ned slung the towel around his neck. He knelt down and grabbed a can of beer from a six-pack. One can was already empty and crumpled on the ground. “Really. No shit.”

“I want to talk about the story you’re writing.”

“I don’t think we have much to talk about. Your wife’s the one who says Devin Card raped her when she was a teenager. You know it, I know it. I’m going to print it.”

“You can’t prove it was her,” Stride retorted.

“Oh, I have enough to cover my ass. I can put Card and your wife in the same house at the same party.”

“Along with how many others?”

“Doesn’t matter. I have an anonymous source who saw them go upstairs together. Plus, your wife went to pieces when I confronted her. She said I’d ruin her life by printing her name. That sounds like an admission to me.”

“And it doesn’t matter to you if you ruin someone’s life?”

“That’s what shrinks are for. Look, once she sent the letter, she knew the risks. You go after a public figure, you better have a thick skin. Otherwise, keep your mouth shut.”

Stride felt dizzy in the heat. “Andrea says you broke into our house. If that’s true, I’ll have you arrested.”

Ned laughed. “That’s weak, Stride. You try any bullshit like that and I’ll have your badge.”

“We could sue you.”

“For printing the truth? Yeah, give that a try. That lasts all of five minutes until my lawyer asks your wife under oath if she sent the letter. The fact is, you’re wasting my time here. Hollow threats aren’t going to intimidate me.”

Sweat burned in Stride’s eyes, and he wiped it away. His voice was a low hiss. “If you print this, you’re killing her.”

Ned shrugged. “Fifty thousand.”

“What?”

“Fifty thousand dollars, and I’ll spike the story.”

“You want a bribe? You’re blackmailing me? Are you serious?”

“Hey, you want me to act dumb, that’s not free. Talk it over with your wife. I’ll hold the story for twenty-four hours if you want to think about it.”

“Go to hell.”

“Suit yourself. Then I run the piece.” Ned squatted on the rocks and hunted inside a zippered hip pack. He took out a black digital watch, strapped it to his wrist, and checked the time. “I think we’re done here, Stride. Why don’t you go home and hold your wife’s hand? Seems like she’ll need it.”

Stride felt another wave of violence wash over him like a flood. All of his muscles coiled into knots, ready to spring. It was easy to imagine his hands around this man’s throat. It was easy to feel his slippery finger curling around the trigger of his gun and sending a bullet into this man’s forehead.

No one would know. Ned Baer would simply disappear. The story would go away, and Andrea would keep her secret.

He heard his wife’s voice again: “Save me!”

But he couldn’t do that. There were lines he couldn’t cross. What was going to happen was going to happen, and he had no way to stop it.

Stride didn’t say anything more.

He turned around and left the Deeps, with Ned still on the cliff behind him.

“What did you do next?” Serena asked.

“I drove north. Alone. I’d never felt more powerless in my life. I drove up the lakeshore and sat by the water for hours. I didn’t go back home until after midnight.”

“Was Andrea there?”

“Yes. She was asleep. We didn’t talk. The strange thing is, we never talked about it again. That was our style. By the next morning, it was like nothing had ever happened. Even when Ned disappeared, we pretended the whole thing didn’t exist. She thought I’d killed him, but she never said a word to me about it.”

“How did you find Ned at the Deeps?” Serena asked. “How did you know that’s where he was?”

“I talked to the owner of the motel where he was staying. Ned asked him for directions.”

“Did Andrea know that’s where you were going?”

Stride nodded. “I called her. She was so out of control that night, I wanted to make sure she was still okay. That she hadn’t done anything crazy. I told her that I was going to find Ned at the Deeps and do what I could to stop him from running the article. Except I think she already knew I wouldn’t be able to do a thing.”

“So she could have gone out there herself,” Serena said.

“She could have, but I don’t think she did. She said she called Steve and told him to follow me. That explains how Steve found the body.”

Serena shook her head. She wasn’t going to let Stride be noble, not when his whole future was at stake. “I’m sorry, Jonny, but you don’t know that’s how it happened. You don’t know that at all. Andrea knew where Ned was. She was desperate to stop him. She could have followed you up there and confronted Ned herself after you left. With a gun. And when Ned was dead, that’s when she called Steve to tell him she was afraid of what you were going to do. Because she knew when Steve found the body, he’d protect his best friend.”