Take Your Breath Away

Twenty-Seven

Andrew

I lay awake much of the night, rolling over and looking at the digital clock on the bedside table: 1:05, then 2:17, then 3:01, and so on until slivers of sunlight started piercing through the blinds. I kept thinking about something Greg had said to me yesterday.

He’d been talking about that time he’d found me drunk, more down and out than I’d ever been before.

“You said, ‘It’s all my fault.’ You said, ‘I fucked up.’ I asked you, I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And you said, ‘Brie.’ But I never told a soul you said that. Never told that detective.”

It’s all my fault.

It was pretty clear what Greg had read into those comments. I had no memory of making them, but then again, there was a lot from that time, and that day in particular, that I don’t remember very well.

I supposed it was possible I might have said those words. But they didn’t have to mean what Greg clearly believed they meant.

I might have tried to make that point with him, but that was when Detective Hardy had pulled up in front of the house. I might have told Greg that, yeah, maybe it was my fault. If Brie vanished because I’d betrayed her, I could have argued, then, yeah, that was on me.

But to interpret what I’d said to him in a drunken stupor as a confession was a leap. As I lay in bed I wondered whether I should phone and tell him that.

Then again, maybe I should call and thank him.

“Never told that detective.”

I was in debt to him for that. For sure, there was only one way Detective Hardy would have read that comment.

Speaking of her, I was also rolling around in my head something she’d said to me after I’d ended my conversation with Greg. Her assertion that I hadn’t done enough nosing about on my own to find Brie, that I never hired some private investigator to accomplish what the police could not, really rankled.

Detective Hardy had no idea how I responded to Brie’s disappearance. I supposed she wanted me to become some sort of amateur detective. The fact was that I was under so much scrutiny at the time, I could hardly go into a Dunkin’ Donuts for a coffee without being watched by the police or some local TV news crew.

Well, if that was Hardy’s expectation of me, maybe it was better late than never. Now that she was looking into the possibility that Brie was alive, I was ready to start asking a few questions on my own, and not just for appearances’ sake. My goal wasn’t to make Detective Hardy proud of me. I wanted to find out what the hell was going on.

But I had to be careful how I went about it.

I had a new life with Jayne. A good life. And now we were going to have a child together. I loved her. Jayne might view any steps I took where Brie was concerned as wanting to get back together with her.

If she was actually alive.

I appreciated her concern. She had to be thinking that if Brie was back, presumably our marriage would still be valid. Brie had not been gone long enough to be declared legally dead and I’d made no petitions to have such a declaration made.

Maybe it was time, discreetly, to go back to where this all began. Make the rounds. Talk to people I believed Detective Hardy should have paid more attention to. I’d often wondered why she hadn’t had the exterminator higher on her list of suspects.

Charlie Underwood.

After all, he was the last person, so far as Hardy knew, to have seen Brie alive (not counting our FaceTime chat on that Saturday evening). He’d been in the house with her. He knew her husband was away for the weekend on a fishing trip. If he’d returned that night, he’d have had every reason to believe Brie would be alone. And, as I had related to Hardy at the time, Brie had found him to be a pretty odd character.

If I’d been Hardy, I’d have been looking at him very closely.

I was up before Jayne. She mumbled into her pillow that she’d had a terrible night of tossing and turning, so I told her to stay in bed and see if she could go back to sleep. I quickly gathered what clothes I needed, slipped out of the room, and closed the door. I showered, shaved, and dressed, and was down in the kitchen by half-past eight.

I was surprised to see Tyler there.

He was sitting at the kitchen table in a pair of boxers. Tyler wasn’t big on bathrobes. He hadn’t made coffee, but there was half a glass of orange juice in front of him and a bowl with the dregs of some soggy cereal. He was looking at his phone when I walked in.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re up early.”

He looked up, shrugged. “I guess.”

“You working today?”

He nodded. “I start at ten.”

“You want a lift or anything?” I asked as I went over to the coffee machine.

“That’s okay.”

I had my back to him, running some water from the tap into the carafe, when he said, “Need to ask you something.”

“Sure.”

“Did you kill your wife?”

I froze a moment before slowly turning around to look at him. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised the secret was out, although I wondered who’d brought Jayne’s brother up to speed. Maybe it had been Jayne herself.

“Your sister talked to you,” I said.

Tyler shook his head. “Nope. I just listened. Yesterday, when that detective was here. And later, when you came home. You can hear everything from my room.” He pointed to the ceiling briefly.

I felt my face flush. The little shit had been eavesdropping.

“Well,” I said. “That’s a good thing to know, if a bit late.”

“So you haven’t answered my question. I don’t think my sister actually asked you flat-out, unless I missed that part.”

I pulled out a chair and sat across from him.

“No,” I said.

Tyler poked his tongue into his cheek as he thought about my answer. “But if you did kill your wife, that’s what you’d say anyway.”

“Then you have to wonder if there’s any point in asking,” I said.

“I read everything about Brie online,” he said. “Six years. Man. That’s a long time to go without the police figuring out what happened.”

“Long time for me, too,” I said.

“I just want what’s best for my sister.”

“Same here.”

“Especially now that you’ve, you know, got her pregnant and everything.”

“I agree.”

“I think becoming an uncle will be kind of cool,” he said.

“I’m looking forward to being a dad.”

“I know I’ve been kind of an asshole at times,” Tyler said, “with puking on your deck and stuff, but I’ve been thinking things have been working out okay here.”

“I think so, too. It’s been a big adjustment for all of us. You know my story, what I went through when I was your age. I’ve been there, having to get used to a new place, and a lot of the time not liking it.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “But now, with what’s happened, it could all go to shit.”

“I’m hoping that won’t be the case,” I said.

“So what if, somehow, it really is her? What if the woman who came to that house is Brie? What then?”

“That seems to be the number-one question. I’m gonna try to be honest with you here, Tyler. I don’t know. This is all uncharted territory. I’m in the woods without a compass. But the last thing in the world I want to do is hurt Jayne. So I’m taking this a day at a time. Maybe this is a whole lot of fuss about nothing. Maybe that was just some woman who went to the wrong house and for whatever reason flipped out. The thing is, I don’t see how it can be Brie. It seems very highly improbable.”

My phone rang.

I pulled it out of my pocket and saw a name I was not expecting, and certainly wouldn’t have been hoping to see.

I tapped the screen and put the phone to my ear.

“Hello, Isabel,” I said, although as soon as I’d said her name I wondered whether it might be Norman using her phone. He had, after all, tried to reach me the night before, and I had declined the call.

But it was definitely Isabel who said, “Andrew.”

“What can I do for you?”

“My mother wants to talk to you about something.”

“About what.”

There was a pause, followed by, “Brie came to visit her this morning.”

Twenty-Eight

When Hannah Brown opened her eyes and rolled over, she was expecting to find her partner next to her. But the covers were pulled back, the other half of the king-sized mattress empty.

They often slept in on Sunday mornings, but evidently not today. Hannah swung her legs down to the floor, tucked her feet into a pair of furry Ugg slippers, and walked down the hall to the bathroom.

No one there.

She went downstairs to the kitchen, and it was there that she found Marissa Hardy, perched on a stool, reading something on an iPad that she’d propped up on a stand.

“It’s Sunday,” Hannah said. “What the hell are you doing up so early?”

“Did you know that Agatha Christie once vanished for ten days?” Hardy said, looking up.

“What?”

“The mystery writer. She went missing for ten days, and finally showed up at a health spa, and she would never say where she’d been or what she’d been doing for that period of time.”

“Oh.”

“Of course, ten days is not six years.”

Hannah blinked a couple of times. “No, it certainly isn’t. It’s shorter.”

“And here’s an interesting one. Guy named Lawrence Joseph Bader, from Akron, Ohio. Sold kitchen supplies or something. Goes on a fishing trip to Lake Erie and disappears. A boating accident, right? But then, eight years later — eight fucking years — he’s found in Omaha, Nebraska, working as a local television announcer or personality or something. And he’s got a different name. They never figured out what actually happened, whether he had amnesia or whether he faked his death. What do you make of that?”

“Have you made coffee?”

“And then there was that Ariel Castro guy, in Cleveland? Who kept three women as prisoners in his house for eleven years. Remember that? Back in 2013?”

“What I was thinking,” Hannah said, “was that we should go out for brunch today. I don’t even care where. Even IHOP. What do you think?”

Hardy looked up from the iPad. “Hmm?”

“You know. Pancakes, sausage, that kind of thing.”

“I guess,” Hardy said, eyes going back down. “Might have to work today.”

“Today’s your day off.”

“I know.” She paused. “I really, really hate being wrong.”

“No kidding.”

“What if I am? What if I’m wrong?”

Hannah went over to the coffee maker, pulled out the empty carafe. “Would it have killed you to start a pot?”

“But he looked good for it, you know? I still think he could be good for it.”

“I think I’m going to make tea for a change.” Hannah put water into a kettle and plugged it into an outlet.

“Where could she have been all this time?” Hardy asked. “If he didn’t actually kill her?”

Hannah tore off a banana from a bunch in a bowl and pulled up a stool on the opposite side of the island from the detective.

“Jacksonville, Florida.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, it’s a place. Just trying to help. Let’s talk about bacon. A side order, extra-crispy.” She started to peel the banana.

But Hardy wasn’t thinking about food. “He had time, you know. To drive down from the cabin, kill her, get rid of her body, and get back up there. He can’t prove he was there all night. It’s even possible he gave his buddy something to knock him out. But what’s the motive? He’d broken it off with that other woman. He didn’t have any huge insurance policy on her. If he’d killed her in a fit of rage, that could happen, but making the drive down, intending to kill her, that’s premeditation. And for premeditation, you need a motive. There has to be one. I just haven’t figured out what it is yet.”

Hannah broke off an inch of banana and popped it into her mouth. “I like this part.”

Hardy looked up again. “What?”

“It’s like seeing the inside of a computer or something. Watching you talk it through, thinking out loud. It’s interesting to watch.”

The kettle was starting to boil.

“You want some tea?” Hannah asked.

“Nothing for me.”

“Okay, then.” Hannah slid off the stool and opened a cupboard, where she found a box of tea bags.

“It’s usually the husband.”

“Say again?”

“When something happens to a wife, it’s usually the husband.”

Hannah dropped a tea bag into a cup and poured in some water. “But is that how you usually operate? Based on statistics? I thought you went into each case with eyes open, no presuppositions. No tunnel-vision stuff.”

Hardy studied her for a moment, then said, “You mentioned something about bacon.”

“I did.”

“I’ll need a shower.”

“I’ll join you,” Hannah said.

Twenty-Nine

Andrew

Isabel wanted to meet for a coffee first, before taking me to the hospital to see Elizabeth. She suggested the Starbucks on the Boston Post Road, just west of the turnpike. When I got there, she was sitting at one of the outside tables, both hands wrapped around a paper cup as if using it to keep herself warm, even though it was about seventy-five degrees out. There was a second cup on the other side of the table.

“I took a chance on a latte,” she said. “It’s still warm. I just sat down.”

Isabel buying me a coffee had me wondering whether I’d entered the Twilight Zone. I didn’t know whether this was a peace offering or a trap. Maybe she had a sniper positioned somewhere across the road, ready to take me out.

“A latte is fine, thanks,” I said, taking a seat. “How’s Norman?” I decided not to mention that he had tried to call me the night before.

She looked downward. “Oh, you know. Norman’s Norman.”

“So tell me what happened with Elizabeth.”

I had always liked Brie’s mother. A straight shooter, spoke her mind, but at the same time knew when to hold her tongue. She never stuck her nose into other people’s business, kept her opinions about how her children lived their lives to herself. But, not surprisingly, we had become estranged after Brie’s disappearance, which I attributed largely to Isabel persuading her that I was the cause of it.

Isabel’s chin quivered slightly. “She doesn’t have all that much longer. She has cancer. It’s all through her.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. “I didn’t know. I’ve always liked her.”

“She wants to talk to you.”

“Okay.”

Isabel said, “You know about what happened yesterday morning. On Mulberry. Where you used to live.”

Word was getting around, but I wasn’t surprised to learn that she’d very likely been talking to Detective Hardy.

“I know.”

“After we found out about that, Albert and I went there and talked to the people who live in the new house that got built where yours used to be. And to your old neighbor, Max.”

Just to confirm my suspicions, I asked, “I guess it was Detective Hardy who called you.”

“Not exactly. Albert and I called her before we’d talked to Max.”

I was getting confused by the timeline here. “So Max called you? After he’d been in touch with me and Hardy?”

Isabel shook her head quickly. “No, shit, I’m leaving out the most important thing.” She took a moment. “When we were visiting Mom yesterday, from her room, looking down at the parking lot, we thought we saw Brie, or someone who sure looked like her. She waved to us, like she knew who we were.”

It was coming into focus now. Hardy had hinted that this woman who looked like Brie had been seen someplace else.

“I don’t know who or what we saw,” Isabel said. “But then last night — early this morning would be more accurate — Mom saw her again.”

“Okay,” I said slowly.

“She says Brie came to her hospital room. I think she imagined it. The nurses, no one saw anything. It was the middle of the night. Visiting hours had ended at nine. Mom’s on all sorts of medications. I blame myself, well, myself and Albert, for getting her all hyped up. We brought Max in to tell her what he’d seen because, well, you know Mom. She takes some convincing on things. She’s not what you’d call a fan of conspiracy theories. I realize now it was a huge mistake. It put the idea into her head that Brie was... alive... and so then she has this vision in the middle of the night.”

“Sounds like that’s what it was,” I said.

Isabel drank from her cup. A little smidge of foam settled on her upper lip and I licked my own, trying to send her a signal. After a moment, she stuck out her tongue and got rid of it.

“You and I have had a pretty strained relationship since it happened,” she said.

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“I’m not sorry for anything I’ve done. Any actions I took were to get justice for my sister.”

I said nothing.

“But my mother, she thinks some kind of apology is in order. That if who we saw, and who she saw in the night, is really Brie, well, then, you didn’t do what we — well, me for sure — thought you did.”

“I see.”

“Just so you understand, it’s not me who’s apologizing, because I don’t know what the hell is going on. I don’t know, for certain, any more than I did a week ago, about whether my sister is alive. Maybe we just saw someone who looked, at a distance, like Brie, and she waved at us because we were looking at her. I don’t know. But Mom has come to a more definite conclusion.” She took another sip, this time avoiding any foam. “She asked me to get in touch with you, to ask you to come and see her so that she can tell you she’s sorry.”

I thought about what she was asking of me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What?”

“I don’t know whether I should do it. I might be accepting an apology under false pretenses.”

Isabel’s eyes went wide. “Christ, what are you saying? Are you admitting it? Are you confessing to me that you did kill Brie?”

“No, of course not. I’m not confessing to anything. But I don’t know who your mother saw, if she even saw anything. It’d be wrong to let her apologize to me based on a delusion.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Isabel said, looking fed up and frustrated. “Tell me you didn’t do it. Tell me you didn’t kill Brie.”

“I didn’t kill Brie. But I’ve told you that a hundred times since she disappeared and you’ve never believed me before.”

“Christ, just let her apologize for thinking you did do it.”

“Maybe the one who should apologize is you, since you’re the one who made her think that.”

“Look,” Isabel said, composing herself and bringing her voice down. “Albert thinks — we both think — that Mom needs this. Her prognosis is bad. She could go today, tomorrow, maybe a month from now. God, she could pass on before we get to the hospital. She’s got some reason to hope her daughter isn’t dead, and maybe it’s okay if she goes to her grave with that. Even if it turns out not to be the case. And part of that involves making things right with you.”

I drank some more of my latte, finishing it.

“Okay,” I said.

I followed Isabel’s car to the hospital and went up to the room with her. Elizabeth was awake when I walked in.

I hadn’t seen her in person in nearly six years. In the early days of Brie’s disappearance, I’d been in regular contact with Elizabeth and both of Brie’s siblings, comparing notes, sharing what few leads there were, making joint appearances on the local news pleading for information.

But as Detective Hardy narrowed her list of suspects to, well, me, and she let it be known I was her prime suspect, Elizabeth distanced herself from me. She’d take my calls at first, but as Isabel continued her attacks, my mother-in-law stopped having anything to do with me.

I couldn’t really blame her. It’s hard to be nice to your son-in-law when you’ve been brainwashed into believing he killed your daughter.

My memory of her was of a strong, vibrant, independent woman, so it was something of a shock for me to see her today, how the disease had ravaged her. She’d lost probably sixty pounds, and she never had a lot of meat on her to begin with. The skin on her arms looked more like crepe paper, and her cheeks appeared to have melted around the bone. But there was still something very Elizabeth about her, and that was her eyes. She’d always had beautiful blue eyes, and they hadn’t changed. Still that lovely aqua color, piercing and insightful.

She smiled when she saw me, and that brought back memories, too. Her smile, always genuine, radiated affection. Even now.

“Andrew,” she said. “It’s so good to see you.”

I knelt over her as she lay in her bed, and slipped my arms around her frail, emaciated body.

“Elizabeth,” I said. “I’m glad you asked me to come.”

She looked over my shoulder and eyed Isabel. “Thank you, Izzy. You can go now.”

Isabel blinked. “You don’t want me to stay?”

“It’s okay,” Elizabeth said. “Andrew and I have some catching up to do.”

Isabel didn’t look pleased about being dismissed, but after a second or two she turned on her heels and exited the room.

“You think she’s hiding behind the door, listening?” Elizabeth asked, a hint of mischief in her eye.

“You want me to check?”

She nodded. I went to the door, opened it half an inch. Isabel was not there.

“All clear,” I reported.

“Pull up a chair,” Elizabeth said. I did and, leaning in, got as close to her as I could. “You look good,” she said. “Considering everything.”

I smiled. “I suppose.”

“Don’t even bother to tell me the same. I know how I look. I look like shit.”

“You still have that sparkle in your eye.”

“You were always my favorite. I mean, of the ones my children married. Favorite in-law. Oh, I don’t mean to put down Norman and Dierdre, but I always had a soft spot in my heart for you.”

I sighed. “Until.”

Elizabeth’s eyes closed for a moment. “I know. I allowed Izzy to let me believe the worst about you. But now I realize I misjudged you, wronged you.”

She held out her hand and I took it, gave it a gentle squeeze. Her fingers felt like twigs cloaked in old linen.

“I’ve seen her,” Elizabeth said. “So I know you never did her any harm.”

“Isabel told me. In the night.” I felt obliged to add, “Isabel thinks you imagined it, and she might be right.”

“I know what I saw.” She returned the squeeze. “I can’t explain it. I don’t know where she’s been, and I don’t know why she’s been in hiding. The whole thing is a huge mystery, but knowing that she’s alive, right now, it’s enough for me. I wasn’t prepared to believe it at first. It was just too fantastical. But now... Anyway, that’s why I’ve brought you here, to tell you I’m sorry. So very, very sorry for doubting you, for thinking you could have done something so horrible.”

Accept her apology, or not? I did some quick ethical calculations, the way a math whiz might solve a complicated equation in his head in seconds.

I said, “All is forgiven.”

She smiled. “Thank you, Andrew. That means more to me than you could know.”

I thought maybe we were done, but when I went to pull my hand away she clung to it.

“Don’t go so soon,” she said. “This is probably the last time I’m ever going to see you. I want to talk.”

“Okay.”

“How are you doing these days?”

I shrugged. “You probably know this, but I changed my last name. I’m Andrew Carville now.”

“Oh, that has a nice ring to it,” Elizabeth said. “You don’t have to tell me why. I can guess. Whatever it cost you to have it done, you should send the bill to Izzy. And what about work?”

“I manage,” I said.

“And... are you... did you...”

“Remarry?” I said. “No. But there is someone. Her name is Jayne, and she’s moved in with me.”

Her face fell. “Oh my. It’s going to be so difficult for her. Having to give you up.”

I said nothing.

“Do you think Jayne — is that what you said her name is?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think Jayne will understand?”

I had no idea how to address that question. Elizabeth wasn’t too far gone to notice my hesitation.

“Andrew, promise me something.”

“What’s that, Elizabeth?”

“You’ll forgive Brie. Whatever the reason was that she left, whatever she’s done all this time, that you will forgive her.”

“Yes, of course.”

“And take her back.”

I forced a smile and gave her hand a squeeze. “How could I not?”

I was glad Isabel was not in the room to hear me make a promise that I had no idea how to keep.

She looked relieved. “Well, that’s good. Now we only have to worry about the IRS wondering why she hasn’t filed a tax return in six years.”

Amazingly, we both had a chuckle over that. But very quickly, her expression grew serious, and she said, “You know, Jackson and I did our best.”

“I’m sure,” I said, not certain where this was going but content to wait.

“My three — Brie and Izzy and Albert — I love them all, you know. But I know none of them has ever been perfect. Made mistakes. Things with Albert and Dierdre aren’t very good these days.”

“I didn’t know that. I always thought they were pretty solid.”

“I suppose they were at one time, but... Anyway, and then there’s Izzy and Norman, that poor man. He must be some kind of saint to put up with her. How did she become so judgmental?” Before I could answer, she offered a theory. “I think she always wanted to make more of herself. You know she had dreams of becoming a lawyer.”

“I know. Thing is, Elizabeth, we’re all wired our own way. You did everything right.”

Elizabeth chortled. “That’s why I always liked you. You’re such a good liar.” She still had not let go of my hand. “Maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe young people today — well, younger, I mean, none of you are kids anymore — maybe they don’t have the same values. They don’t cherish fidelity.”

“I plead guilty,” I said.

“Oh, not just you,” she said. “You know how I know you’re a good man, that you could never have done anything to hurt Brie?”

“How?” I replied slowly.

“Because of the secret you kept. The one you could have revealed, but never did. I don’t think I’d have been able to behave as honorably if I’d been in your position.”

“That’s not quite true,” I said, reasonably sure what she was referring to. “I told Detective Hardy. But she cleared him. It couldn’t have been him. He went to Boston that night. He had an airtight alibi, as they say. Me, not so much.”

“Even so, you could have told others what he’d done. One person in particular.”

“What would have been the point of that? And I’d have had to dishonor Brie to do it. I wasn’t going to do that. None of this matters now, Elizabeth. It’s the distant past.”

“Brie told me. She told me everything.”

I did not know that.

“When?” I asked.

“A month or two before she disappeared. We could always talk, you know.” She took a breath. “Can you hand me that glass of water?” I handed her the glass. Her mouth moistened, she continued. “There Isabel was, making your life hell, and still you held your tongue.”

“Ruining Isabel’s life wouldn’t have done anything to make me look any less culpable.”

“Norman’s never thanked you, has he?” Elizabeth asked. “Never expressed any gratitude that you didn’t tell Isabel that her husband had slept with her own sister.”

“I’ve never sought it,” I said. “He doesn’t owe me a damn thing. It was a long time ago.”

“It’s never too late to offer regrets,” Elizabeth said. “Why do you think I wanted to see you before I’m gone?”

Thirty

More than a few people slept poorly Saturday night to Sunday morning. Matt Beekman was among them.

He didn’t get back to New Haven after his Hartford assignment until three in the morning. There was a note on the kitchen counter from his wife, Tricia, that there was a plate of Chinese food in the fridge. He took it out, reheated it in the microwave, but could only pick at it. He’d lost his appetite on the drive home, thinking about what might have gone wrong six years earlier.

Matt went up to bed, slipping carefully under the covers so as not to wake his wife, and stared at the ceiling until almost five, at which point his mind could dwell no longer on events of the past, and he fell asleep. But he was startled awake by Tricia shortly after seven as she pulled back the covers and put her feet on the floor.

“When’d you get in?” she asked.

“Around three,” he mumbled into the pillow.

“Did you get paid?”

“What?”

“Did you get paid? For the job?”

He sighed. “They pay when the job is done.”

“I thought you got something up front.”

“Well, this time I didn’t. I’ll see them today or tomorrow, settle up.”

“Because I need some money. I thought you’d have some cash. Cheryl needs new runners. I don’t want to put anything more on the Visa.”

Matt grumbled something into his pillow.

“And what was that call about last night?” Tricia asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Was it about another job? They think you’re getting good at this, more work’s going to come your way.”

“An old job,” he said, rolling onto his back, resigned to the idea that he was not going to have a chance to go back to sleep.

“Why would someone call you about an old jo—”

“For fuck’s sake,” he said, sitting up, “I’m barely awake, and you’re like the fucking Gestapo.”

Tricia didn’t even blink. “I want to be at the mall when they open.”

“You do that.”

“You promised the kids McDonald’s today.”

“I gotta go into the shop,” he said, referring to the laundromat. “One of the dryers is acting up, needs a new belt or something.” Matt had someone run the place on the weekends and didn’t usually have to go in.

“So do that after lunch,” Tricia said. “Snooze another hour if you want, but you’re not getting out of this.”

Matt dropped his head back onto the pillow and closed his eyes. He loved this woman, but God, she could be a bitch and a half.

He ended up getting out of bed half an hour later, once Tricia had gone downstairs to the kitchen. Had a long shower, standing there until the hot water ran out, thinking.

Matt and Tricia and their kids, Curtis and Cheryl — one big happy family — were in the mall by eleven, which was when Tricia pulled a fast one on him. She wanted to take Curtis to the music shop. He’d recently shown interest in learning to play the piano, and she wanted to check out one of those little electric ones.

“You take Cheryl to the shoe store and I’ll catch up with you,” she said.

“The fuck do I know about kids’ shoes?”

“Just let her look around. I’ll be there in time to decide.”

Like he couldn’t be trusted. People put their faith in him to go out and kill people, but he couldn’t pick out a pair of shoes for a five-year-old.

Little Cheryl knew her way around a shoe store. Walked straight in, grabbed a pair of white runners with pink stripes off the display, and found a saleswoman without any help from her father.

“Would you have these in my size?” she inquired in her tiny voice.

The saleswoman smiled and said, “Let’s have a look at those feet of yours and see what you need.”

Matt stood near the front of the store and watched the foot traffic go by.

She was buried in dirt, he thought. She was in a fucking grave. But if by some chance she wasn’t dead when I put her there...

And it was true, he hadn’t stuck around. Hadn’t seen the point. Why would he? When the job was done, the job was done, and it made sense to get the hell out of there as fast as he could.

It would have to have been like a scene in a movie. A hand coming up out of the dirt. Then another. Then a frantic scramble to get herself aboveground, get some air.

No no no no no.

And yet, she’d been seen. Supposedly.

He sensed a presence next to him. Someone very small, walking about awkwardly, trying on shoes to see how they felt.

Matt turned and knelt down and said, “How do they fit? Are your toes all squished—”

It was not Cheryl. It was a different girl, probably the same age, about the same size. The little girl looked at him, eyes wide, then turned and ran back to a woman standing by the cash register. Her mother, evidently.

Cheryl was still sitting in a chair, shoeless, legs swinging back and forth while she waited for the saleswoman to bring her something to try on.

And suddenly Matt had a thought.

I got the wrong girl.

Had the woman he was supposed to kill been seen in recent days because he never got her in the first place? It wasn’t like he’d asked to see her driver’s license or fill out a questionnaire when she’d come down to the kitchen early that morning. He went to the address he’d been given and left with the woman who lived there. Wasn’t a whole lot of chitchat. Could there have been someone else there instead? Someone staying over? A house swap? But even if that were the case, where had the woman he’d been paid to get rid of been the last six years?

“Daddy?”

He looked down, and this time it was, indeed, his little girl. “Yeah, sweetheart.”

“Do you like these?”

She held up one foot and then another, displaying a pair of shoes emblazoned with dozens of small, sparkling pink stars.

“Wait for your mother.”

He considered the possibilities. If Brie Mason really was alive, she’d either survived and dug herself out, or he’d killed someone else by mistake. There had to be a way to nail this down. He would need to toss a shovel into the truck and go for a drive.

And take someone along with him. Someone who might be able identify what was in that grave after all these years, if there was even anything there at all.

Maybe the client.

Maybe somebody else.

Matt was feeling something unfamiliar. He was feeling scared. And he would do whatever was necessary to make that feeling go away.

Thirty-One

Andrew

Brie had confessed to me about Norman.

I believed her when she said it had just been one time. I don’t think you can call having sex a single time with someone other than your spouse an affair. A mistake, sure. A betrayal, no doubt about it. An error in judgment, without question. But an affair? I wouldn’t say that. My transgression with Natalie Simmons fell into that category. And it also qualified as a mistake, a betrayal, and an error in judgment.

I would say, however, that to sleep with your brother-in-law, even once, is kind of fucked up.

What Brie did betrayed not only me, but her sister, Isabel, as well. Not that there wasn’t plenty of blame to go around. That son of a bitch Norman was at fault here, too.

I didn’t take it well.

Amazingly, I didn’t have to pry it out of her. But Brie, wracked with guilt, felt the need to unburden herself. Maybe she thought it was going to come out at some point anyway, and wanted to get ahead of it.

“I can only explain it one way,” she said. “Pity.”

“Pity?” I said.

She told me how it happened. Brie, while no accountant, had a head for figures and was a whiz at doing tax returns. She not only did ours, but she volunteered to do them for Albert and Dierdre, and Isabel and Norman. Brie always refused payment, no matter how much they insisted, but she — and by that, I mean we — were rewarded with numerous bottles of very drinkable, if not terribly expensive, wine.

Brie headed over to Isabel and Norman’s one evening to sit down at the kitchen table and, armed with a laptop and the most up-to-date tax software, proceeded to figure out their returns. Isabel was heading out for the evening with the kids to some school function, leaving Brie alone with Norman.

She had several questions for him, and he had gone searching for various forms and receipts that he and Isabel kept in a shoebox, then sat down at the table next to her, trying to find the information she needed.

Norman asked if Brie would like a beer, and she said yes. He decided to have one, too. There were, I guess, a couple more each after that.

At one point, Brie said she needed a break from staring at the computer, and asked Norman something innocent, along the lines of, “So how’s things?”

And Norman said, “How is it you turned out like this?”

“Turned out like what?”

“Nice,” he said.

“I like doing people’s taxes,” she said. “You’re actually doing me a favor. I love this stuff.”

“I don’t mean with the taxes,” Norman said. “I mean, how is it you turned out so nice, and your sister didn’t?”

Norman, I should point out, was a handsome-enough-looking guy, with a dry wit, and in his youth had hoped to be a filmmaker. But real life has a way of crushing creative ambition, and Norman ended up running a Firestone franchise, where the closest he got to being a filmmaker was when he made short video spots for his website advertising a sale on snow tires. When he and Isabel started dating, Brie had told me, she wasn’t quite the person she would later become. Negative, sure, but she had not yet perfected her gold-medal-worthy nitpicking skills.

Thing is, to cut her some slack, Isabel had abandoned her dreams just as Norman had. She had wanted to become a lawyer — she’d always been a fan of legal dramas; as a kid she’d watch old episodes of L.A. Law and Matlock and even the old black-and-white Perry Mason series — but had neither the resources for law school, nor marks high enough to be admitted. In my more generous moments, I felt this had a lot to do with Isabel’s unhappiness. Not that she ever confided in me, confessed her discontent, but I don’t think one could be the way she was without being disappointed with herself. However, her skills at working the system to hound me in the years after Brie’s disappearance were evidence she might have had the chops to pursue a career in the law.

But back to the night in question.

Brie tried, at first, to apologize to Norman for her sister, to argue that ultimately she meant well. That what Norman saw as haranguing was Isabel trying to make their life better.

And that was when Norman revealed perhaps his darkest secret: that when he’d been dating Isabel, it was Brie he felt himself falling in love with. There was a period before I met Brie when she and her sister were living together, sharing an apartment in Bridgeport, and Norman always wanted to pick Isabel up from there, not meet her someplace, because it might allow him, even for a few minutes, to be in Brie’s company.

Isabel, Norman told Brie, was perceptive enough to figure out what he was up to back then, which explained why at every opportunity she told him stories designed to trash Brie’s reputation. That Brie was a slut, that she thought she was better than everybody else, that she only cared about how people looked and not what was inside.

Brie had never heard this before. Maybe it was what tipped her over the edge, learning the terrible things her sister had once said about her. That, and the fact that by this time she knew I’d had — and ended — my brief affair with Natalie.

The way Brie told it, that was when she gave him a hug. It was only meant to be consoling, but turned into something else.

“I can’t explain it,” she told me, weeping. “It just happened.”

She begged me not to do anything to Norman. I don’t think I’d ever given Brie reason to believe I was the type of guy who’d jump in the car, drive over to his place, haul him out on the front lawn, and beat the shit out of him. But then again, we’d never been in a place like this before. And I won’t lie. I did think about it.

But what would beating Norman to a pulp have proved? There was so much guilt to go around.

Still, I had a hard time dealing with it. We didn’t speak for several days, aside from the most basic communications. I slept on the couch, ate meals alone. It was Greg who finally talked some sense into me.

“Stop being an asshole,” he said. “You’re the luckiest guy in the world. Stop this shit. Patch this up. Brie is beautiful and kind and if we pushed the people out of our lives who had made one mistake we’d all be totally fucking alone. If she’s willing to take you back after what you’ve done, you need to let this go.”

Interesting advice, coming from Greg. Brie was not his biggest fan, and he knew it. A few years earlier, when Brie and I were engaged, Greg made a pass at her. She made it very clear to him that she was not interested, and when she told me about it later, I made a mistake that I like to think I wouldn’t make today, if such a thing were to happen with Jayne.

I made excuses for Greg. You know what he’s like, I said. He didn’t mean anything by it. He probably had too much to drink. Maybe he thought you were someone else. It was a party and it was crowded. He’s a friendly guy. Don’t worry about it.

I dismissed Brie’s concerns. I didn’t take them seriously. I failed to appreciate how uncomfortable my friend had made her feel. Maybe now, in the wake of Me Too and a little more self-reflection on the part of the male gender, I would see things differently.

Anyway, back then, I took his advice. I told Brie I wanted to start over. I would move past what she had done if she would move past what I had done. We went to counseling. I pledged to create a more stable life for us, not moving from fixer-upper to fixer-upper.

The odds might have been against us, but we beat them.

Things played out differently at Norman and Isabel’s house. Norman did not confess. Isabel, so far as we knew, remained unaware, and Brie wanted it to remain that way. She made me promise I would never, ever tell Isabel what she had done.

“Even if I were dead,” she’d said at the time.

I promised.

She did not make me promise not to tell the police, however, should the circumstances warrant it. When Detective Hardy pressed me for every possible detail about Brie’s personal life, I disclosed the information about Norman, without suggesting in any way that he might be responsible. And Hardy concluded he wasn’t, given that he was in Boston with Isabel Saturday night and into Sunday, during and after my FaceTime chat with Brie.

Norman had to know that I knew, and anytime we were in the same room, such as a family gathering, I’m sure he saw me as a ticking time bomb. That I would punch his lights out, or, even more frightening, rat him out to Isabel. What she might do to him would be far worse than any punishment I might mete out.

Anyway, I did neither.

Not even when things were at their worst. When Isabel was hounding Detective Hardy to charge me with something, anything, I resisted the urge to retaliate, to tell her that the sister for whom she was seeking justice had betrayed her in the worst way. It would have been so easy to bring her entire world crashing down with the revelation, but I couldn’t do it.

I wouldn’t do it to Brie. I’d made a promise and I intended to keep it. I would not destroy her extended family to score points, even though I was tempted.

I wasn’t the only one to keep the secret. Elizabeth knew, too. I wondered if Norman was aware. I wondered if Elizabeth had quietly taken him aside in recent days and told him he owed me a debt of gratitude. I wondered if that was why Norman had tried to call me the night before.

And going back six years, I wondered whether this had been weighing heavily on Brie that last day I spent with her. The Friday, before driving up to the cabin that evening. Something was troubling her. She was pensive, thinking about something. Didn’t say a word at breakfast. Our mistakes were behind us, but I supposed it was possible she hadn’t stopped turning them over in her mind.

“I can tell you’re thinking about something,” I said. “Talk to me.”

“I’m fine,” she insisted.

“If you don’t want me to go away, I’ll cancel. Greg and I can do this another time. He’s going to be hobbling around all over the place, anyway. Might do to wait another week or two when his leg’s totally healed.”

“No, I want you to go,” she said. “You have to go.”

“You trying to get rid of me?” I said. I meant it as a joke, but she took the comment seriously, as though I harbored some suspicions about what plans she might have.

“God, tell me we’re not slipping back,” she said.

“No, no, that’s not what I meant. I was kidding. Seriously.” I took her into my arms. “We are definitely not slipping back.”

She buried her head in my chest. Brie didn’t want me to see her cry. “I want you and Greg to have this weekend,” she said, and sniffed. She wiped her nose against my shirt and I laughed.

“I could get you a tissue,” I offered.

“No need,” Brie said, and did it again.

She pulled away. “Will you call me? Let me know how things are going up there?”

“I don’t imagine there’ll be much to report,” I said. “We’ll fish, we’ll drink, we’ll sleep. Pretty much in that order. And I’ll be back Sunday afternoon. Maybe we should go out.” I grinned. “Maybe that seafood place, because odds are I won’t be eating much of it at the cabin. The lake’s probably fished out.”

“Okay,” she said, and smiled. “That’s what we’ll do.”

We both went to work. Brie had a job doing payroll for several small local businesses, and I was off to give several estimates before taking off for the weekend. The car was already packed, and I’d be on the road before Brie got home Friday afternoon.

We would talk Saturday night, and she would tell me about her adventures with Charlie the exterminator.

But that Friday morning would be the last time I’d hold her in my arms.

Thirty-Two

No one was very excited about a midday Sunday rehearsal, but Albert felt there was no way around it. His play, The Casual Librarian, a comedic farce, was set to open in less than two weeks and they were far from prepared, and as the writer and director, Albert was more responsible than anyone for getting the production ready.

As if he didn’t have enough to worry about. But as he liked to say, to the collective eyeroll of everyone else in the production company, The show must go on. He had asked everyone to arrive by one.

The rehearsal was not being conducted in an actual theater, but in a rented space in an industrial mall in the north end of Milford. It was here where all preparations were made. Not just rehearsals, but set construction and costume design. As opening night approached, the sets would be carefully dismantled and loaded into a cube van, transported to whatever venue they had booked to present their show, and reassembled. There were some proper theater spaces in Milford, and if they were putting on a show that drew a large audience, like the annual Christmas pageant, they’d book one. But productions that didn’t have a guaranteed, built-in audience were presented in a local high school gymnasium or community center.

The Casual Librarian, as it turned out, was one of the latter.

Actors in community theater often weren’t actors at all, at least not professionally. Acting, for these folks, was a hobby, an extracurricular activity. Everyone had nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday gigs, like Dick Guthrie, who worked in the Milford city tax office and was playing the librarian’s son, or Fiona Fitzsimmons, who was a real estate lawyer and was hamming it up as a Miss Marple — like detective. And there was Albert himself, who was the assistant manager at the Devon Savings and Loan office on Broad Street when he wasn’t a playwright and a director.

Not everyone, of course, worked normal hours. Lyall Grove, who was donning heavy makeup to play an aging lothario, worked for Milford’s fire department, and his shifts were all over the place. But he’d traded off with a coworker so he could be off much of Sunday. Constance Sandusky, forty, who was totally getting into the title role as an extremely randy librarian, worked as a 911 operator, and like Lyall, had rotating shifts. She had come off one about twelve hours earlier, and as anyone who worked an emergency hotline knew, Saturday nights were often the craziest. More car accidents, more bar fights, more domestic disturbances. She’d arrived with an extra-large coffee from Dunkin’ and was leaning up against a wall, sipping quietly.

Arriving late was Rona Hindle, just barely out of her teens, bitten by the acting bug in her high school theater arts class. She had a small role as a waitress. She was certain this was her ticket to Broadway, and Albert didn’t have the heart to tell her that was unlikely. Also wandering in twenty minutes after one was Candace DiCarlo, mid-thirties but looked younger, who did work a standard Monday-to-Friday routine at a fitness center in New Haven. She was once a personal trainer, but now worked in the office. In Albert’s play, she had the role of the librarian’s sister, whose attempts to fix up her sibling with the perfect man would lead to a series of comic misunderstandings.

Right now she was doing more yawning than acting and was filling a paper cup with foul-looking brown liquid from an aging coffee canister.

It wasn’t just the actors who were present. Two carpenters who volunteered their time to build the movable sets had arrived and were hammering away at the same time Albert was trying to guide his actors through a critical scene in the second act.

“Guys?” he called out. “Guys? Can you ease up on the hammering? Just for a couple of minutes?”

They both looked at him like he was an idiot. If they couldn’t build the goddamn set, then what the hell were they doing here?

“Okay, everyone,” Albert said. “If we could gather round.”

“Us, too?” one of the carpenters asked.

“No, not you guys,” Albert said.

The half-dozen actors and actresses formed a semicircle around Albert, all standing, arms crossed. Constance took another sip of coffee. Candace yawned. Lyall discreetly tried to reach around and scratch his butt.

“I want to do a read-through of act two before we actually go through the motions. It’s the pacing we need to work on. Some of the lines, they’re not getting the right punch, you know?”

“Is there any way I could get more lines?” asked Rona. “I’ve only got, like, eight.”

Albert sighed. “I’m afraid those are the only lines your character has.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like this is a play by Shakespeare or something where you can’t mess with it. You’re the writer. Couldn’t you come up with more for me to say?”

“I’ll take a look at it, okay?”

“Well, if you’re going to do more lines for her, what about me?” asked Alice. But she was smiling wryly, and Albert was pretty sure she was giving him the gears.

“Why don’t I give everyone twice as many lines and we can have a three-hour play instead of ninety minutes?” Albert said, making a joke to disguise the fact that he was getting pissed off with the lot of them. Wasn’t there a line in an Elmore Leonard novel, something about how movies would be so much easier to make if you could do them without actors?

“Okay,” he said, “let’s do this.”

He directed everyone to a long folding-leg table, the kind one would find at any flea market. Everyone dropped into some cheap plastic chairs and, armed with copies of the script, prepared for the run-through.

Albert, nodding at Constance, said, “Let’s start with your line at the top of page eighteen.”

Constance found the page, cleared her throat, and, raising her chin as if getting ready to belt out a tune, said, “Has anyone seen my garter belt?”

Candace said, “I think I might have seen it in the car.”

“The car? How on earth could—”

A phone began to ring.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Albert said. “Can we all remember to mute our phones, please?”

Everyone pulled out their phones as the ringing continued.

“Not me,” said Dick.

“Not me,” said Rona.

The ringing was coming from somewhere else in the room. “Oh shit,” Albert said. “I think it’s mine.”

He jumped up and walked over to the table where the coffee machine was sitting, spotted his phone, and picked it up.

“Hello?” he said.

“It’s Izzy. You need to get to the hospital as fast as you can.”

Thirty-Three

Andrew

My unexpected meeting with Isabel, and the subsequent visit with Elizabeth, had thrown me off my game somewhat. I’d left the house that morning intending to visit Charlie Underwood, the exterminator who’d answered Brie’s plea for help when she thought our house might have a mouse infestation.

And, in fact, I later learned that it did. In the midst of having to deal with all the fallout from Brie’s disappearance, I began to spot mouse droppings around the house. Under the sink, in the basement where the wall met the floor, even in a kitchen drawer. I had tried to solve the problem on my own, buying traps and commercially available poison, but I wasn’t able to get a handle on the problem.

Finally, I had called Charlie Underwood.

But when he realized I was Brie’s husband, he passed on the job. He would have known, by that time, that I was Hardy’s prime suspect. She would undoubtedly have spoken to him many times in the course of her investigation. Maybe he thought I had some ulterior motive, that I wanted to pump him for details about his meeting with Brie. I supposed it was possible Hardy had warned him I might get in touch.

I just wanted to get rid of the fucking mice.

But now, six years later, I wondered if Charlie’s refusal to return to the house had any further significance. And, since I didn’t know what else to do at this point, he seemed like a good place to start.

His home was a run-down, vinyl-sided, two-story dwelling up Forest Road, before it turns into Burnt Plains Road north of the turnpike. It was set back a good hundred feet from the blacktop, and behind it sat a square, squat structure made of cinder blocks. I pulled into the driveway and parked next to a seriously rusted panel van, some of the rust eating right through the letters of underwood pest control painted on the side. The van was sitting on the rims and clearly hadn’t been driven anywhere for some time. An old, original Beetle — not one of the new, redesigned versions — was parked farther up the drive. Just as rusted out, but on fully inflated tires.

I got out, and as I approached the house noticed that the second-story windows were all boarded up. I climbed the two steps to the porch and knocked on the front door. When no one showed up after twenty seconds, I tried again. Same result.

I walked around the corner of the house and noticed that the door to the cinder-block structure was ajar. As I approached it I started to get a whiff of something that took me back to when I was a little kid, when I visited my uncle’s farm. He kept pigs, and the stench from the indoor pens could literally take your breath away.

The smell got stronger as I reached the door. I rapped on it, but since it was open, I poked my head in at the same time and said, “Mr. Underwood?”

“Back here!” someone shouted, and coughed.

Breathing through my mouth, I stepped inside. The building, maybe thirty feet square, was filled with makeshift tables constructed of sawhorses and four-by-eight sheets of plywood. The tables filled the room, spaced apart to create several aisles.

And atop every table, cages. Dozens and dozens of cages.

The room was a cacophony of chittering noises, scratching noises, scurrying noises. Each cage contained one or more animals. Rats, mice, squirrels, raccoons.

A possum or two.

As I walked down one aisle, tiny eyes fixed on me. A black squirrel gripped the wire caging of its enclosure, stood on its hind legs, and watched me as I passed. My arrival had created a commotion. Word seemed to be spreading among the creatures. Someone new was here. A stranger. An interloper.

It was a fucking zoo of pests and vermin. And they were living in their own filth.

At the end of the aisle, his back to me, was Charlie Underwood in a pair of blue coveralls. He was stooped over, and as I got closer, he went into a coughing fit. When he was done, he made a retching sound that sounded like someone trying to scoop gravel out of the bottom of a well. Then he spit something onto the floor and I felt my own stomach do a slow roll.

He turned, saw me, and said, “Help you?”

“Mr. Underwood?”

“That’s me.”

“You, uh, did some pest control at my house a few years back.”

“Don’t do that anymore,” he said, then smiled, showing off brown teeth. “Dying,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“Sorry to hear that.”

“You work with poisonous chemicals your whole life, it has a way of catching up with you,” he said, and laughed, triggering another coughing fit.

“I can imagine.” I looked about the room. “What is all this?”

“You’re not one of those fucking inspectors from the city, are you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Because they’d take a dim view of what I’m doing here if they found out,” he said, and coughed again. It echoed all the way down to his shoes. He smiled, waved his hand at the room. “They wouldn’t understand that this is a rescue operation. These are the ones I didn’t have to kill. Saved them all. Some of them, been looking after them for years.”

“These are all... pests you got out of people’s houses?”

He nodded proudly. “Lot of people, they want ’em dead, but if I can get them out alive, I bring ’em here.”

I could think of only one question. “Why?”

He blinked, a little surprised by my question. “Because they’re all God’s creatures, you know. See this rat over here? That’s Susie. Anyway, caught her at a restaurant on the green downtown. I’d tell you which one but then you’d never eat there again and they got good food so I won’t tell you. And that raccoon was living in the attic of a couple in Devon. I accidentally broke his paw getting him out, so I keep him here. Figure he wouldn’t make it out in the wild. His name is Waldo. You say I came to your place?”

“About six years ago.”

“Who are you?”

“Carville. Andrew Carville. But back then, it was Mason.”

He blinked again, taking a second to put it together. It was like watching an old computer start up.

“Son of a bitch,” he said, and coughed again. “You’re the guy. The one who killed his wife.”

“I didn’t kill my wife.”

“Yeah, well, what else would you say? Whaddya want with me?”

I had no answer ready. Now that I was here, I honestly didn’t know. “Going over old ground,” I said. “Still looking for answers. Still looking for Brie.”

“Sure you are,” he said.

“I know it was a long time ago, and that you’ve talked to Detective Hardy probably a dozen times, but is there anything you held back, anything you wish you’d told her?”

He shook his head. “Can’t think of anything. I talked to her a lot.” He grinned. “I was thinking, at one point, that maybe she thought I did it. They even came out here to my place, searched around, looking for anything, but they didn’t find a damn thing. I guess that’s when they started zeroing in on you.” He shook his head and grinned once more. “Guess you beat them on that one.”

“How did Brie seem that day? Was she anxious? Did she seem like she was worried about anything?’

His grin faded. “Well, first of all, when people call me, they’re worried they’ve got mice or rats or God knows what, so it’s fair to say they’re a little on edge. And your wife was like that.”

“You think it could have been something other than mice?”

“All these years later, what makes you ask?”

I didn’t want to get into the events of the last two days. “Just asking, is all.”

“Well, I’ll tell you this much,” he said. “She struck me as a woman who was just waiting for something bad to happen. That’s not something I ever told the police because it was a little too vague.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “I think she was worried about what you were going to do when you got home.”

“She had nothing to worry about from me,” I said.

Another shrug, and then a grin. “Now can I ask you something?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Like I said, I’m dying. I’m wondering if you’d be interested in taking any one of these rescue animals home with you? I need to off-load them as soon as possible.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t help you there.”

Charlie nodded and smiled. “Never hurts to ask.”

On the way back into town, I glanced at the gas gauge and noticed the Explorer was running on fumes. I pulled into a gas station, and used a credit card to get the self-serve pump operating, started to refill the tank. When I was done, I couldn’t get the pump to print out a receipt, so I went into the building and got one from the guy sitting at the cash register.

I didn’t notice, until I was actually back in the Explorer, that there was someone sitting in the passenger seat who hadn’t been there before.

A woman, late thirties. Smiling.

“Surprise,” she said. “I thought that was you.”

“Natalie,” I said. “I’ll be damned.”

Thirty-Four

The four of them were there, at Elizabeth’s bedside.

There was Albert and his wife, Dierdre, who had put aside their differences to be here at this difficult time. Isabel and her husband, Norman, were present, too, the four of them ringed around the bed, the siblings near the head, on either side, and the in-laws by the foot.

Isabel was leaning over, rubbing her hand gently across Elizabeth’s forehead, stroking her almost as if she were a pet in need of comforting.

“I love you, Mom,” she said.

Albert, on the other side, had a tear running down one cheek. He was holding Elizabeth’s hand.

Elizabeth’s eyes were closed, her breathing so shallow as to be almost undetectable.

A woman in a long white hospital jacket entered the room quietly. Isabel was first to notice her and whispered, “The doctor.”

The four moved away from the bed and circled the doctor in the center of the room.

Albert said, “She seemed pretty good yesterday.”

Isabel added, “I saw her for a few minutes this morning and she was alert.”

The doctor nodded sympathetically. “I know. Things can change very quickly. I’ve seen patients rally near the end. Within a day of passing, they’re more alert, more communicative. It’s as though they know what’s coming, and want a chance to say goodbye to everyone.” The doctor smiled sadly.

Isabel dabbed her eye with a tissue.

“I think she feels it’s okay to let go now,” she said. “There was someone she’d been hoping to hear from. She wanted to hear from her so badly I think she imagined that it happened.” She sniffed.

The doctor’s face was questioning, but she simply said, “Anything is possible.”

Norman asked, “You don’t think it’s possible she might still wake up and... tell us things?”

Isabel gave him a look. “Like what?”

“Like anything,” he said. “Like how much she’ll miss us.”

“Like I said, anything is possible,” the doctor repeated.

Dierdre spoke for the first time. “How much time does she have?”

The doctor sighed heavily. “I think coming here now was wise.”

The four of them could think of no further questions. The doctor told them to get in touch if there were any further developments, and quietly left the room.

Isabel and Albert resumed their positions on either side of the bed, while Dierdre said she and Norman were going to get some air. Once they had left the room, Albert whispered to his sister, “What was all that about imagining something?”

“Mom said Brie came to her in the night. She was probably dreaming. We put the idea in her head.”

“You didn’t tell me about that,” Albert said.

“I knew you had rehearsals today. Thought I’d give you a break.”

Albert nodded a thank-you. Elizabeth, her eyes closed, showed no sign that she was aware of their conversation. Still, he whispered. “Maybe Mother hasn’t been the only one seeing things.”

His sister studied him, waiting for him to elaborate.

“When we saw that woman in the parking lot, we were seeing what we wanted to see. In the night, Mom did the same. If that allows her to slip away with some degree of comfort, thinking Brie is alive, I’m okay with that.”

“What about what the neighbor saw?”

“I can’t explain that.”

“So you don’t believe it,” Isabel said.

“Believe what?”

“You don’t believe Brie’s alive.”

Albert quickly glanced at his mother and then back to Isabel, worried that even their whispers might be heard. He motioned for her to follow him into the hallway. Once they were out of the room, he went back to his normal voice.

“Izzy, I’d like to believe,” he said. “But...”

Isabel’s jaw hardened. Her cheeks flushed. “That bastard.”

“What?”

“Andrew.”

“What about him?”

“Mom wanted to see him, to apologize. I brought him here this morning so she could talk to him. He was coy about it with me, saying he couldn’t accept an apology when we didn’t really know what was happening. But he let her do it. I talked to her after. She apologized and he accepted it, the smug bastard.”

“Izzy—”

“No, no, something’s not right here. I eased up on him. I eased up on him too soon.”

“Christ, Izzy, let it go.”

“I’m going back in,” Isabel said, and with that pushed open the door and returned to Elizabeth’s bedside. Albert followed.

As they stood watch over her, Isabel said, “I don’t think she’s breathing.”

Albert leaned over, put his ear to within an inch of his mother’s mouth. “I don’t hear anything. Not feeling anything.”

“Mom?” Isabel said, her voice starting to crack.

Albert glanced at the monitor that hovered over the bedside table, hunted for the line that kept track of heartbeat.

It was flat.

“Mom?” Isabel said again, putting her face close to hers. “Can you hear me?”

Not so much as an eyelid fluttered.

The door opened and Dierdre and Norman stepped in. They read the room quickly, seeing how distressed their respective spouses looked.

“Oh, Mother,” Albert said.

As he laid his head on her chest and began to weep, Diedre stepped forward and looked ready to place a hand on his shoulder, but held back.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

Norman didn’t move. He watched from afar as his wife began to sob, and appeared to sigh with relief.

Thirty-Five

Andrew

Seeing Natalie Simmons in the passenger seat put me into a momentary stupor, but the blast of a car horn woke me from it.

I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw another driver waiting to pull up to the self-serve pump I’d finished using a moment earlier. I keyed the ignition and drove out from under the canopy that hung over the pumps, then brought the car to a stop at the edge of the lot.

“Where’s your car?” I asked.

Natalie pointed to a low-slung Porsche Boxster pulled into a spot out front of the gas station.

“Just whipped in to buy some smokes,” she said. “Keep trying to quit, but hey, we’re all addicted to something and sometimes there’s no point fighting it.”

“Nice ride,” I said, giving a nod toward the car.

“I own the gallery now,” she said, and grinned. “Movin’ up in the world.”

“Congrats.”

“So how’ve you been?” she asked. “I mean, you’re not in jail, so that’s a good thing, right?” Natalie let loose a nervous laugh, like my possibly doing time for killing Brie was a subject of amusement.

“I suppose so,” I said.

Her smile faded. “I kept following the story in the news, you know? Googled it every once in a while and eventually it faded away. They never found her, huh?”

“No,” I said.

She nodded, almost with a sense of admiration, as though whoever might have disposed of Brie had done the job well.

“So many times I thought about calling you, seeing how you were, but then thought, that’d be weird, right? I mean, like I was trying to put a move on you now that your wife was no longer in the picture.”

She shook her head and smiled slyly. “Although, I won’t lie. I was tempted. We had a good thing going. Fun while it lasted, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said.

“But how would that have looked? Not good, right? Especially with the police keeping an eye on you. I’m pretty sure they were keeping an eye on me, too. There were times I’d see some car parked down the street, like someone was watching the place.”

If Detective Hardy had ever been conducting a surveillance on Natalie Simmons, I’d known nothing about it. Natalie was the type who’d see a tail where none existed. She was, to put it kindly, a bit of a flake. Natalie was easy prey for spreaders of conspiracy theories. She’d have been among those who thought COVID was a hoax. Back when I’d been seeing her, she didn’t even have a cell phone, believing they allowed the government to trace everyone’s whereabouts. I had to call the gallery landline if I wanted to get in touch.

But I was also reminded, as Natalie sat there in the front of the Explorer, what had attracted me to her. She was a looker. Well curved in all the right places, long legs, dark hair that fell softly to her shoulders, brown eyes. Some of the same attributes Brie had possessed, I realized at one point.

I met her when I’d been doing some renovation work on the business next door to the gallery. A soon-to-open bagel place. She had popped in during construction, wanting to know when the opening was going to be, and when we got talking, I learned that we had both gone to UConn, even been there at the same time.

“Oh my God,” she’d said. “I remember you.” She’d watched me studying her, waiting to see whether I remembered her, too.

“That one party, you helped me search through that huge pile of coats in the bedroom, trying to find mine, and things kinda happened?”

And then it all came back to me. A one-night thing.

While these thoughts ran through my head, Natalie was still talking.

“...wondered if maybe she could even have left the country, but why would she do that? Or got some new identity, you know? I mean, you have to have been asking yourself these questions for years.”

“Nice to see you, Natalie, but I really have to get going.”

“Oh, sorry,” she said. “When I saw you, I just had to say hello.” She laughed. “God, you must think I’m stalking you or something. I hope you’re doing okay. You with someone now?”

“Yes.”

Natalie nodded approvingly. “That’s good, that’s good. You have to move on, right? But hey, if you’re going by the gallery, stop in, okay? We can catch up.”

I smiled. “Sounds like a plan.”

She flashed me one last smile, opened the passenger door, and got out. She looked back over her shoulder once on the way to her Porsche and gave me a small wave, and a wink.

On the way home I found myself replaying what Charlie Underwood had said about Brie, that she had seemed anxious about what would happen when I returned home from my fishing trip. Clearly, he believed I was the source of Brie’s anxiety.

Maybe Underwood was right, that Brie was apprehensive about my return, but not for the reason he assumed. What might have had her concerned? Had something happened between the time I left on Friday and Underwood came to the house on Saturday? Something that she didn’t want to have to tell me about, but knew she would have to eventually?

Could it have had something to do with Norman or Isabel? I’d often wondered whether Brie would ever confront her sister about the things Isabel had said to Norman, years ago. Running down her character. At one point, Isabel was going to come over on the Saturday night while I was away, a “sisters night,” but her plans had changed and she and Norman had gone to Boston. Had Brie been planning to have it out with her? When Isabel canceled, did Brie just pick up the phone and give her a blast?

Unlikely.

If I knew Brie, she’d have felt there was nothing to be gained by stirring up old rivalries, revisiting old grievances. Sometimes you had to move on.

So what else, then?

Something financial? Did Brie know something I didn’t? Were things in even worse shape than I knew them to be? She kept better track of the books than I did. The company was definitely in a precarious state, having lost more than a couple of major bids for work. But I was trying to be optimistic about the future. You win some jobs, you lose some jobs. Our bids had not been competitive, so we were going to have to find ways to cut our costs.

That could be it.

But I never stumbled upon any evidence — bank statements, budget documents — that would support that theory.

Did she resent my going away for the weekend with Greg? No, that couldn’t be it. She’d pushed me to make the trip, urged me to go away with him, which was somewhat out of character. Brie was not Greg’s biggest fan, for reasons I’d mentioned earlier. But she knew he was my closest friend, and understood that hanging out with him for a couple of days would probably reduce my stress level.

So, I had nothing.

If Brie’d had something on her mind that troubled her, I couldn’t guess what it might have been.

That night, we ordered in pizzas. One with the toppings Jayne and I liked, and a second with everything Tyler liked. For a while there, things felt almost normal.

We had dinner together at the kitchen table. There was no talk of the visit the day before from Detective Hardy, no more questions about who I might or might not have murdered. It’s always nice to get through a meal without being quizzed about your possible homicidal background.

I got a call while I was on my second slice. It was Albert’s wife, Dierdre. I’d always had a pretty good relationship with her before Brie’s disappearance, and she’d never quite frozen me out despite Isabel’s efforts. If I ran into her when I was out and about in Milford, she would at least speak to me.

I excused myself from the table and took the call on the back deck. “Hey, Dierdre.”

“I had a feeling no one else might call,” she said, “but we lost Elizabeth today.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Please pass on my condolences to... everyone.”

“I heard that you had been to see her this morning,” she said.

“Yeah. I’m glad I had that chance.”

“Okay, then. You take care.”

It was a short conversation.

By the time I returned to the kitchen, the mood had changed.

“Why not?” Tyler said.

“I just think it’d be better if you stayed in tonight,” Jayne said.

“Why?”

“Well, for one thing, it’s a school night.”

Tyler’s eyes rolled. “Hello? Can you remember all the way back to last night? How I went upstairs and did homework and shit? And you made a crack about whether I’d been taken over by a pod or something?”

“I never said that.”

“You made a crack. You said something.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I’m a prisoner,” Tyler said. “She’s treating me like I’m five.”

“He wants to go out,” Jayne said.

“Out where?” I asked.

“Just out,” Tyler said. “Would you like me to prepare an itinerary? Where I’ll be all night. Like, from eight to eight-fifteen, the 7-Eleven, and from—”

“Stop it,” Jayne said.

“Maybe,” I said, dipping my toe in, “if Tyler promised to be back by ten, because like you said, it is a school night.”

Jayne shot me a look. “This is between me and him.”

“Whoa,” Tyler said. “Better be careful what you say, sis, or he might kill you.”

The room went quiet. Jayne looked as though she’d been slapped across the face. It’s possible I looked the same. Even Tyler appeared surprised by what he’d said, realizing he’d crossed a line.

“Get out,” Jayne said. “Get out of my sight.”

He was happy to oblige. Tyler left the kitchen. Seconds later, the front door slammed.

I didn’t know what to say.

It was Jayne who broke the silence. “So he knows.”

“He was listening in, yesterday. To Hardy, and then us.”

She closed her eyes and slowly lowered her forehead to the table. I rested a hand on her shoulder. She raised her head and asked, “Who called?”

“Brie’s mother’s been in the hospital. One of the family called to tell me she passed away today.”

“Oh,” Jayne said. “Did she think the worst of you, too?”

“She came around to my side at the end.”

“Well, that’s something, I guess.”

There was nothing more to be said about it.

We’d just gone upstairs to our bedroom, a few minutes before ten, when we heard someone enter the house. Tyler was back. Jayne and I glanced at one another, decided it was good news that he had returned at a reasonable hour, and there was no need to make a big deal out of it.

I was starting to unbutton my shirt when the sound of an incoming text came from my phone. It was Greg.

“What is it?” Jayne asked, and I told her.

I tapped back: 2 mins.

“What’s he want?” she asked.

“Why don’t you join me and we’ll find out.”

We came out the front door together and found not just Greg waiting for us, but his turquoise-coiffed girlfriend, Julie. In fact, she was standing ahead of him, Greg half hidden behind her, as though using her as a shield.

Greg, out of respect, stepped out when he saw Jayne. “Hey,” he said.

“Hi, Greg,” she said.

He introduced Julie, who shook Jayne’s hand. “I’ve heard lots about you,” Julie said.

Jayne only smiled, not sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“What’s up?” I asked them.

Julie turned to Greg, priming him. “Go on. Ask him.”

Greg took half a step forward, eyes on his own feet. “We shouldn’t have come. It’s late. This can wait until tomorrow.”

“You’re here now,” I said.

Julie sighed. “He’s too proud to ask,” she said to me. Then, to him, “Spit it out.”

Greg seemed unable to make eye contact. If he owned a brimmed hat, this was where he’d have it in his hands, moving it in a slow circle with his fingers.

“The thing is,” he said slowly, “ever since we stopped working together, things haven’t, well, they could be—”

“He’s lost without you, that’s what he’s wants to say,” Julie said.

“Yeah,” Greg said sheepishly. “In an nutshell, yeah. On my own, I’m always scrambling, you know? Have had some pretty long stretches between jobs. When we were a team, we did pretty good.”

“Except toward the end there,” I reminded him.

“I know, I know, we hit a bad stretch. But the economy was kind of stalled, too, at the time. It was one of those things.”

That wasn’t quite how I remembered it, but I let that go. I said, “I’d have to give it some thought.”

“That’s all we’re asking,” Julie said. “Right, Greg? We can’t ask for any more than that.”

Greg nodded. “Sorry to have disturbed you so late, man. Jayne, nice to see you. Apologies for the interruption.” He turned and headed for the street. Julie’s little Audi, not Greg’s truck, was parked there.

But Julie didn’t follow, and instead closed the distance between us. She kept her voice low.

“He thinks the world of you,” she said. “He really wants to give it another go.”

“Like I said—”

“I know I’m new here, and sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong, but I can see how worn down he is. He tells me you guys, you had a good thing going at one time.”

“We did,” I conceded.

“And it’s not just about him,” Julie said. “He’s worried about you, and all the stuff—”

She looked at Jayne, wondering whether she was about to say too much.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Jayne’s up to speed on things. Guess you are, too.”

“Yeah. He knows you’ve got this cloud hanging over you, and he wants to, I don’t know, make a statement by going back into business with you. That he believes in you even if there are some out there who still don’t.”

Greg, who had gotten behind the wheel of Julie’s car, lightly tapped the horn.

“Have to go,” she said, and ran to the car.

“That was interesting,” Jayne said.

We watched them drive off, then went back into the house.

“What do you think?” Jayne asked as we were getting under the covers.

“I don’t know.”

“You know what I think? You should consider it. With all the shit that’s been happening, maybe it’s a good sign. An opportunity.”

I wasn’t convinced that was how Jayne really felt, but maybe after a long and unsettling weekend she wanted to grab on to anything that might allow us some reason for optimism.

So it was just as well I kept my thoughts to myself. I wasn’t looking forward to Monday morning. I couldn’t think of a single reason to believe we were heading into a good week.

Thirty-Six

The woman behind the wheel of the black Volvo station wagon was driving a circuitous route. A left here, a right there. She could not be sure, but she believed she was being followed. She’d seen enough TV shows to know that when you think someone is following you, you start driving randomly. See whether the vehicle you fear is trailing you makes the same moves.

When she first set out, after the sun had set, she hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. She glanced into the rearview mirror occasionally, the way any careful driver would, and around the second or third time she noticed that the car behind her had a couple of amber fog lamps mounted below the bumper, giving it a distinctive look.

She was heading west on Bridgeport Avenue, past the hospital, when she began to wonder whether the car was actually following her. So she made a quick left down Seemans Lane, gave the Volvo some gas, and checked her mirror again.

Mr. Fog Lamps had made the turn, as well. (She was thinking of him as Mr. Fog Lamps, but she had no idea who was behind the wheel or how many people might be in the car.) She tried to get a look at the car as it was making a turn, see what type of vehicle it was. A sports car, she thought. Low to the ground.

She clipped along Seemans, made another left onto Meadowside, then a quick right onto Surf Avenue, heading south toward the beach house area of South Broadway.

The other car stayed with her.

If the car really was following her, who could it be? She thought immediately that it might be the police. There was every reason to think they’d be looking for her. Her appearances had no doubt caused some consternation and been brought to their attention. But wouldn’t the police just put on their flashing lights, hit the siren, and pull her over? And did the police have sports cars?

The thought of being stopped by the police filled her with dread. But then, if not the police, then who? That possibility made her even more anxious.

She glanced up at the mirror again, just at the moment that the car’s amber fog lights went out. The driver must have cottoned on to the fact that the lights were giving him away. If, in fact, it was the same car.

At East Broadway, she hung a right, zipping past the beach houses. Pretty much all of the ones that had been damaged when Hurricane Sandy came ashore back in 2012 had been replaced or repaired. It was one of her favorite stretches in all of Milford, but not something she could appreciate right now.

When East Broadway came to an end she turned right onto the Silver Sands Parkway, a name that made it sound like a major highway but was actually no more than a two-lane road that wound its way through a tract of land known as the Silver Sands State Park. She followed it all the way out of the park and back up to Meadowside, and when she looked in her mirror again, there was no car there.

Gone.

At first she wondered whether the driver had killed his regular headlights, in addition to the fog lights, so as not to be seen, but no. There was no car behind her.

Her heart was pounding. She made a left, then pulled over to the curb to let her pulse rate return to normal, and put the car into park. Her palms were sweaty on the wheel. She wiped her hands on the tops of jean-clad thighs.

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe no one had been following her, at least not deliberately. It was someone else out for an evening drive and by coincidence were taking the same route as her. The only ones who might reasonably have followed her would be the police, and clearly it wasn’t them.

Get a grip.

She looked at her phone, sitting down in the center console. Should she call and say she’d been delayed? No, if she went straight there now, she’d only be five to ten minutes late. Not a big deal.

She took a deep breath, put the Volvo back into drive, and headed up Avery Avenue, hit Route 1 for a very short distance before turning left on Schoolhouse, by the Ford dealership.

She could see the sign up ahead.

The Motel 6.

She steered the Volvo wagon into the lot and decided, in the event that someone really had been following her, that she should park where the car wasn’t visible from the main road. She drove around to the back of the building and parked beyond the pool, under the cover of some trees.

Another deep breath.

She got out of the car, locked it with the remote, and headed into the building, a bland four-story structure. Her destination was a room on the fourth floor, so she took the lobby elevator up, stepped into the hallway, took a second to figure out which way the room numbers went, and struck off to the left.

When she got to the room she stopped and looked both ways down the hallway, as if checking that no one was watching her. You couldn’t be too careful. The hallway was empty. She was without a key, so she rapped lightly on the door. No more than five seconds went by before it opened.

“Sorry I’m late, I—”

Before she could finish apologizing, the man who’d opened the door had his arms around her and his mouth on hers. She responded in kind, pulling him in close, dropping the purse she had been carrying to the floor as the door swung shut.

They began to undress each other, fumbling with shirt and blouse buttons. They quickly decided it was easier to accomplish this task on their own. The woman stripped down, taking slightly longer than the man, who had kicked off his shoes and whipped off his pants in record time before pulling back the covers and getting into the bed.

But she wasn’t ready to slip between the sheets with him, not just yet.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“What?”

“I think... I could be wrong about this, but I think someone was following me tonight.”

“Following you?” he said.

She nodded.

“Did you get a look at who it was?” he asked.

“No. I thought at first it was the police, because the car had some yellow lights under the bumper. Like fog lamps.”

“I don’t think the police have those.”

“And then he turned the lamps off because he must have known how obvious it made him.”

“Or maybe he turned them off because it’s not foggy.”

“And then the car was gone.” She dropped her head, as if in defeat. “Maybe. I guess I’m feeling a little paranoid.”

“That’s my fault,” he said. “Come here.”

She crawled into the bed. Instead of having sex, they each propped themselves up on an elbow to face each other.

“It was a lot to ask, I realize that,” he said. “But I really believe it was worth it. And it’s not like you did anything illegal. I mean, what would they charge you with? I can’t thank you enough.”

“It’s okay. I liked doing it. I really got into it. And that last performance? I think it went really well.” She grinned. “Academy! Academy!”

But the man wasn’t grinning. He was starting to cry.

“What?” she said. “What’s happened?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Shit, I don’t think I can do this. I really needed to, just to get my mind...”

He got off his elbow and dropped onto his back, stared at the ceiling.

“It’s okay,” she said, laying a hand on his chest. “Talk to me.”

The man swallowed, struggled to compose himself. “It’s over,” he said.

“Oh no,” she said.

“It happened this afternoon.”

“Oh no. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

The man nodded. “I love you,” he said. “I love you so much.”

“I love you, too.”

The woman with the black Volvo station wagon inched closer, hugged him, brought her face up close to his.

“It’s okay to cry,” she said. “Just let it go, Albert. Mommy’s gone. Just let it go.”