The Stranger

Chapter 30

Old Man Rinsky said, “The car is a rental.”

They were in the hi-tech breakfast nook. Rinsky was all in beige today-beige corduroys, beige wool shirt, beige vest. Eunice was at the kitchen table, dressed for a garden party, having tea. Her makeup looked as though it’d been applied with a paintball gun. She had said, “Good morning, Norman,” when Adam came in. He had debated correcting her when Rinsky stopped him. “Don’t,” he’d said. “It’s called validation therapy. Let her run with it.”

“Any idea who rented the car on Monday?” Adam asked.

“Got it right here.” Rinsky squinted at the screen. “The name she used was Lauren Barna, but that’s a pseudonym. I did some digging and Barna is actually a woman named Ingrid Prisby. She lives in Austin, Texas.” His reading glasses were on a chain. He let them drop to his chest and turned around. “The name mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“Might take a little while, but I could run a background check on her.”

“That would be helpful.”

“No problem.”

So now what? He couldn’t just fly off to Austin. Should he get the woman’s phone number and call her, and say what exactly? Hi, my name is Adam Price, and you and some guy in a baseball cap told me a secret about my wife…

“Adam?”

He looked up.

Rinsky interlaced his fingers and rested them on his paunch. “You don’t have to tell me what this is about. You know that, right?”

“I do.”

“But just so we’re clear, anything you tell me doesn’t leave this house. You know that too, right?”

“Sorry, but you’re the one with the privilege here,” Adam said, “not me.”

“Yeah, but I’m an old man. I have a bad memory.”

“Oh, I doubt that.”

Rinsky smiled. “Suit yourself.”

“No, no. Actually, if it’s not too much of a burden, I’d really like to get your take on this.”

“I’m all ears.”

Adam wasn’t sure how much of the story he would tell Rinsky, but the old cop was a good listener. Back in the day, he must have done an Oscar-buzzed “good cop” because Adam couldn’t shut himself up. He ended up telling him the entire story, from the moment the stranger walked into that American Legion Hall right up until now.

When Adam finished, the two men sat in silence. Eunice drank her tea.

“Do you think I should tell the police?” Adam asked.

Rinsky frowned. “You were a prosecutor, right?”

“Right.”

“So you know better.”

Adam nodded.

“You’re the husband,” he said as though that explained everything. “You just learned that your wife betrayed you in a pretty horrible way. Now she’s run off. Tell me, Mr. Prosecutor, what would you think?”

“That I did something to her.”

“That’d be number one. Number two would be that your wife-what’s her name again?”

“Corinne.”

“Right, Corinne. Number two would be that Corinne stole this money from that sports league or whatever so she could run away from you. You’d also have to tell that local cop about her faking the pregnancy. He’s married?”

“Yes.”

“So that’ll be blabbed all over town before you know it. Not that that matters in light of the other stuff. But let’s face it. The cops will either think you killed your wife or that she’s a thief.”

Rinsky had confirmed exactly what Adam had already thought.

“So what do I do?”

Rinsky lifted his reading glasses back to his face. “Show me that text your wife sent you before she took off.”

Adam found it. He handed Rinsky the phone and read the message once again over the old man’s shoulder:

MAYBE WE NEED SOME TIME APART. YOU TAKE CARE OF THE KIDS. DON’T TRY TO CONTACT ME. IT WILL BE OKAY.

Then:

JUST GIVE ME A FEW DAYS. PLEASE.

Rinsky read it, shrugged, took off the glasses. “What can you do? Far as you know, your wife needs some time away from you. She asked you not to contact her. So that’s what you’re doing.”

“I can’t sit around and do nothing.”

“No, you can’t. But if the cops ask, well, there’s your answer.”

“Why would the cops ask me that?”

“Got me. Meanwhile, you are doing all you can. You got that license plate number and you came to me. You did right on both counts. Chances are, your Corinne will just come home on her own soon. But either way, you’re right-we need to try to find her first. I’ll try to dig into this Ingrid Prisby. Maybe there’s a clue there.”

“Okay, thanks. I appreciate that.”

“Adam?”

“Yeah?”

“Odds are, your Corinne stole this money. You know that.”

“If she did, she had a reason.”

“Like she needed to run away. Or to pay off this blackmailer.”

“Or something we aren’t thinking of yet.”

“Whatever it is,” Rinsky said, “you don’t want to give the cops anything that can incriminate her.”

“I know.”

“You said she was in Pittsburgh?”

“That’s what we saw on that phone locator, yeah.”

“You know anybody there?”

“No.” He looked over at Eunice. She smiled at him and lifted her tea. A perfectly normal domestic scene to an outside observer, but when you know her condition…

A memory hit Adam.

“What?”

“The morning before she disappeared, I came downstairs. The boys were at the breakfast table, but Corinne was in the backyard talking on her phone. When she saw me, she hung up.”

“Any idea who she called?”

“No, but I can look it up on the web.”

Old Man Rinsky stood up and gestured for Adam to have a seat. Adam took it and brought up the website for Verizon. He typed in the phone number and the password. He knew it by heart, not because he had a great memory, but because for things like this, he and Corinne always used the same approximate password. The word they used was BARISTA, all caps, always. Why? Because they had decided to come up with a password while sitting in a coffee shop and started looking around for a random word and, voilà, there was a barista. The word was perfect because it had absolutely no connection to them. If the password needed to be longer than seven characters, the password was BARISTABARISTA. If the password required numbers, not just letters, it was BARISTA77.

Like that.

Adam got the password right on his second try-BARISTA77.

He clicked on the various links and reached her recent outgoing calls first. He’d hoped that maybe he’d get lucky, that maybe he’d see that she’d called someone a few hours ago or late last night. Nothing doing. In fact, the last call she’d made had been the one he was now searching for-a call made at 7:53 A.M. the morning she ran off.

The call had lasted only three minutes.

She had been outside in the backyard, talking softly, and hung up as he’d approached. He had pushed it, but Corinne had refused to tell him who was on the phone. But now…

Adam’s eyes traveled right to the phone number on the screen. He froze and stared.

“You recognize the number?” Old Man Rinsky asked.

“Yeah, I do.”