by Sonja Yoerg
Cash scratches on his pad. “Old friends catching up.”
“Yes.” Jackie takes another drink of water. Her hand shakes, and the glass hits the end table with a thud. The reality that Jeff is dead is sinking in, as is the likelihood that it wasn’t an accident. “Where did you find him?”
Cash and Goodyear exchange glances.
“In the river,” Cash says.
The room is still. Jackie sees Jeff floating facedown, ghostly. Bile rises in her throat.
The front door opens and closes. Cash and Goodyear get to their feet, move toward the hall.
Jackie follows them. “Antonio?”
Antonio startles at the sight of the policemen. “What the—” He spins and lunges at the door, throws it open.
“Stop!” The officer, quick for his size, sprints the few steps to the doorway, makes a grab for the boy.
Antonio ducks and flies outside onto the porch.
“Antonio!” Jackie shouts. “Don’t run! It’s okay!”
Three strides and Officer Goodyear has Antonio by the jacket. The boy flails. “Don’t fight me!” He yanks Antonio closer, grabs his arm. “Simmer down. We just want to talk.”
Cash is there, takes hold of Antonio’s other arm. The men turn him around, move him into the house.
Antonio’s eyes are wild. “What’s going on?”
Cash sighs and shakes his head. “That’s a good question to ask before you run from the police.” He shuts the door behind them.
Jackie’s heart squeezes, and she places her hand on Antonio’s arm. “It’s not about you.” She addresses Cash. “He has ADHD. Thinking first isn’t his strong suit.”
Cash lets go of the boy. “Why don’t you go sit down, Antonio?”
He does as he’s told. On the couch, with his hands between his knees, he looks like a small boy.
She moves to join him, but Goodyear intercepts her. “Dr. Strelitz, can you give us a minute?”
“What? Why?” Now they think Antonio is involved? Or maybe they want to check her story against his. Everything is moving too fast. She can’t keep up and feels unbalanced, like she might knock something over—her life, for example.
Detective Cash says, “We just want to ask Antonio a few questions. It’ll only take a moment.” His tone is level, patient, as if it’s perfectly normal to ask someone to vacate their living room for questioning about a murder.
Murder. A wave of nausea rises in her throat. “I’ll be upstairs,” she manages. She sidles by the men, runs up the stairs, the fact of Jeff’s death catching her by the heels. She rushes into the bathroom, kicking the door closed behind her. She flips up the toilet seat and vomits. Breathing hard, she steadies herself against the cabinet, waiting for another heave. It doesn’t come. She flushes the toilet and splashes cold water on her face. She rinses her mouth, dries her hands and face, and crosses the hall to her bedroom. Voices drift up from below, but she can’t make out the conversation.
She retrieves her phone from her pocket and calls Miles. It goes to voice mail. She texts him, asking him to call. She needs to tell him about Jeff, that Antonio is being questioned, that he himself might be a suspect. That she might be. Oh God.
Someone killed Jeff. The reality of it is settling black and gritty over her skittering thoughts.
After pacing the room a dozen times, she texts Miles again, saying she is sorry. She doesn’t say for what, because she doesn’t know. Sorry for everything. Sorry for her jealousy. Sorry for sparking his. Sorry for not being a better stepmother. Sorry for not running after him when he left. Sorry that her old boyfriend is dead and the police are here and Antonio is being questioned.
Sorry for everything that has not yet happened.
The certainty that the worst is still in front of her, in front of them, strikes fear in her heart.
She calls Miles again. No answer.
“Dr. Strelitz?” The detective is at the bottom of the stairs.
Jackie passes Antonio on his way to his room, touches his arm, searches his face. Nothing remarkable. If anything, he seems bored, but maybe that’s a cover. Antonio walks on and Jackie meets the policemen in the kitchen.
“One more thing before we go,” Cash says. “Do you happen to have the flight info for your husband?”
Miles again. Why Miles? Because a man is the percentage guess? Or do they know something she doesn’t? The thought that Miles might have secrets and darknesses she has no knowledge of floors her. Was her defense of him based on reality, or was it naive?
“Dr. Strelitz.”
“Sorry. Yes, I think I do.” Jackie pulls up the calendar on her phone. Cash is ready with his notebook. “Alaska 1001, leaving SFO at seven twenty a.m., arriving at National at three thirty p.m.”
“Thanks. If you hear from your husband or find out where he is, I’d appreciate a call.”
“Okay. I want to help if I can.”
“We’ll be in touch if we have more questions.”
She sees them to the door and throws the dead bolt behind them. If only that action could separate her from what she just learned. Her head is pounding, and she leans her forehead against the door and rubs the rock-hard muscles at the back of her neck.
More questions. Like what? She was at home, asleep. Miles was in California, and Antonio was out drinking or in jail or at his friend’s, depending on the time. Jackie feels a surge of sympathy for Antonio for getting dragged into this after what was undoubtedly an upsetting night already. She goes to find him.
When she reaches the kitchen, Antonio is approaching from his room and reads her anxious expression. “It was no big deal. They just asked about last night, what I was doing, what I knew about where everybody was, whether I knew the guy.”
“That makes sense.” She wants to know about his night, about the drinking, being arrested, to see how he’s dealing with it, but doesn’t want to interrogate him. The police took care of that. “You sure you’re okay?”
He nods and reaches into the fridge for a soda. “Want one?”
“No thanks.” She watches him unscrew the cap, take a long drink, Adam’s apple bobbing. The little boy she saw earlier is gone; she wonders if this is how Miles feels constantly.
“They did ask me, though, why after Harlan picked me up from jail, he didn’t just bring me here instead of Larry’s. Since I have a key.”
She fights with everyone in her family, that’s why. She couldn’t get her stepson to stay. The shame of it sickens her. “What did you say? I hope you told them the truth.”
“I told them I had my stuff at Larry’s.”
She nods. He wouldn’t have divulged they’d been fighting about a dealer coming to the house, but he could’ve said they had a fight about something else. He opted for a simpler partial truth. Oh, the practice it takes to become a full-fledged adult.
“I’m sorry the police frightened you when you came home, Antonio.”
He shrugs, takes another drink, then meets her eye. “And I’m sorry about your friend.”
“Thank you. I can’t believe it.”
He leans a hip against the counter. “Were you guys close?”
“Yes,” Jackie says, as she brushes the tears from her cheeks. “Yes, we were.”
CHAPTER 25
Jackie tosses and turns all night, checking her phone between bouts of half sleep to see if Miles has responded. He hasn’t. Before she went to bed she asked Antonio to contact his father. He said he would and promised to let her know if he heard anything. At midnight Jackie texts Harlan in desperation, asking if he’s seen Miles, but that text remains unanswered as well.
At seven in the morning she finally gives up on sleep and goes downstairs in her robe to make coffee. As it brews, she considers a session of rowing to release her nervous energy but wants to be able to answer her phone when Miles finally surfaces. Maybe the police have already located him. The thought of the river triggers the image of Jeff’s body, cold and lifeless, and a wave of sadness hits her. How could he h
ave wound up dead? She’s been turning this question over in her mind all night. If he had a heart attack or an accident, the police would presumably know that already. Why would anyone want to murder him? As the last person known to have seen Jeff, Jackie is more than a little worried that she’s the prime suspect, with no alibi and no defense other than her innocence. Detective Cash focused on Miles as the putative jealous husband, but Jackie can’t see how he could be involved. Miles a murderer? Antonio didn’t seem to be in their sights at all, thank goodness, but there’s no way she could know for sure. One thing she does know is that whatever happened to Jeff wouldn’t be affecting her family if she hadn’t agreed to have dinner with him, and the knowledge weighs on her.
Jackie checks the local news on her phone. Thus far they’ve only reported that a body was found midday yesterday by a kayaker and that the identity of the man and all other specifics are being withheld pending the investigation. Jackie thinks again of his parents and of his ex-wife, suffering now from another untimely loss.
By the time she finishes her coffee, she knows she cannot stay cooped up in the house all day. She pulls up the forecast—a high of fifty-two and clear—and decides to try to eat something and go for a walk. She makes toast, eats one slice, and gives up.
Her phone warbles. Nasira, at 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday? Worry gnaws at Jackie as she accepts the call.
“Hello?”
“Jackie, it’s Nasira. I’m sorry to call so early. I hope I’m not disturbing you, especially right before Christmas.”
Christmas. If only decorating a tree and preparing a meal were her biggest problems.
“No, it’s fine. Really. Is everything okay?”
“Sort of? I thought about our conversation, about Harlan, and decided the best course of action was to put some distance between us.”
Jackie is surprised but relieved. If her suspicions about Harlan are correct, he cannot be trusted. She and Nasira have been at odds for a long while, but now it seems both are arriving at the conclusion that their enmity was a mistake, if not a setup. “It can’t hurt, even if you decide later you want to continue.”
“Yeah, that was my reasoning, too. So yesterday around five, I texted him that I was coming over to get a couple things.” She hesitates, and the tension is palpable. “He wanted to know why. I tried to make excuses—I should have planned what to say—but honestly he’d been ignoring me recently, so I thought he wouldn’t care. I could just grab my stuff and go.”
Jackie doesn’t like the sound of this at all. For Nasira to be this frank with her, to trust her with details of her relationship with Harlan, could only mean he had crossed a line. Given the manipulation Jackie suspected him of, Nasira was a vulnerable pawn. “Did he confront you?”
“Not exactly. He answered the door and handed me my stuff. He’d collected everything, which I hadn’t expected. Usually I can mask my emotions, but I guess he could see I was wary of him. He didn’t do or say anything terrible, but, oh my God, Jackie, the way he looked at me.”
Jackie knows what Nasira is about to describe. She feels it blow across her like freezing rain. “I know,” she manages.
“Do you? I can’t stop seeing it, his face, his eyes—”
Jackie is rushing toward the door, furious. She tears off her watch, tosses it.
“—his eyes were completely blank. Like he was dead.”
He calls her name. She turns, sees his face.
Jackie moves to the kitchen window, stares out at the yard to dispel the image. She hasn’t thought about Harlan’s reaction to her leaving for years. Had she suppressed it to make friendship possible? What else has she stuffed into a dark corner to convince herself there need be no hard feelings? Is she still desperately hungry for his approbation?
“Jackie? Are you there?”
“Yes. Sorry. That sounds so frightening.”
“I’m okay now. I might go somewhere, though, for a couple days.”
Jackie remembers Nasira’s parents are not speaking to her. The family probably doesn’t celebrate Christmas, but it’s still a hard time to be alone. “Do you have friends you can stay with?”
“Maybe. It’s awkward on short notice.”
Jackie’s heart goes out to her, and she regrets her role in isolating Nasira via her jealousy and mistrust. “Call me anytime, Nasira.”
“Thanks.” She pauses. “Everything okay with you?”
It’s not a cursory question; she obviously heard the strain in Jackie’s voice. Jackie searches for what to say, where to begin, and gives up. “Sure, I’m fine. Just the usual holiday madness.”
After Jackie ends the call, she wonders what it would be like to be honest with everyone, truly honest.
Probably disastrous—in other words, no different than her current situation.
Upstairs in the walk-in closet, Jackie changes into jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and running shoes. As she layers on a fleece jacket, her gaze snags on Miles’s carry-on bag lying open at the far end of the closet. A navy sport coat and pale-blue scarf are tossed on top, presumably what he was wearing on the trip home. He was probably about to unpack when she came home and interrupted him.
Jackie grabs a hanger and picks up the coat. As she places it on the hanger, she notices a piece of paper in the inside breast pocket and lifts it out. His boarding pass. She finishes hanging the jacket, and takes the boarding pass with her to recycle downstairs on her way out.
In the kitchen, she pulls open the drawer and is about to drop the card inside when she remembers the police asking about Miles’s flight. Does that make the boarding pass evidence?
Jackie holds it in her hand, uncertain, and her attention shifts to the flight information in the upper right corner: SFO —>DCA, and below that, DEPARTING 20 DECEMBER 2018.
That’s not correct, she thinks. Today is the twenty-second, she’s sure, but confirms it on her phone. Miles flew home yesterday, not Thursday.
Or not.
She places the boarding pass on the counter, staring at it, as if it were in her power to make the printing align with the facts, or what she believes are the facts. Her heart rate increases as she realizes that when she spoke on the phone with Miles yesterday morning, he wasn’t in California. He obviously wasn’t at home, either. So where the hell was he—and why did he lie about it? Her sweet, loyal Miles.
The next realization hits her: on Thursday evening when Antonio was arrested, Miles was here, in DC. Her stomach clenches. Miles took the call from his son while he was, in all likelihood, near enough to help Antonio himself. Instead, he relied on Harlan to save Antonio from a night in jail, then berated her mercilessly for having slept through it all. Her Miles, the conniving liar.
Whatever he is hiding, he doesn’t want Antonio to know about it, either.
Maybe this isn’t Miles’s first lie. Maybe when he said he barely knew Nasira, that was a lie, too. Nasira. Jackie decided to take a chance and trust her postdoc, open up to her. If it turns out Miles came back from California to be with Nasira, the bottom will drop out of Jackie’s world. She closes her eyes, tells herself to breathe, to think. Jackie can’t wrap her head around the possibility that her husband had a hand in Jeff’s death; she told the police Miles was innocent. Does she still believe that? She wants to—she loves him—and despite the evidence that Miles has deceived her, she doesn’t know a goddamn thing.
Jackie swipes the boarding pass from the counter, folds it in half, and slides it into her back pocket. She yanks her phone from the charger, grabs her keys and wallet from her bag at the entry, and flies out the door. She needs to figure this out, this unholy mess. All the pieces are almost certainly right in front of her if she can work out how they fit together. She’ll call the police, let them know about the boarding pass, but not right now. For all she knows, they already have the information from the airline. Either way, she needs to walk and she needs to think.
She heads west and south on Thirty-Third, not thinking about where she is going, just brea
thing in the cold air, working her legs to free her mind. It’s early on a holiday weekend. The only people out are a couple of runners and people clutching their bathrobes closed while collecting their newspapers. Jackie wants out of this neighborhood, out of the sight of red bows on streetlights, tasteful twinkling reindeer skeletons, and the couple on the street corner ahead, warming their hands on take-out coffee. She breaks into a jog and turns west onto the university campus, the only sound the jingle of her keys in her jacket pocket.
Jackie arrives at Wolf Hall. Of course her brain would take her here, along the most well-worn trajectory—and where she last saw Jeff. She strides over to the spot where she parked her car, stares at the piece of old and pitted pavement where they stood, where he hugged and kissed her. Jackie brushes the hair from her face and feels a sharp ache in her chest.
Jeff walked there, down that path.
Immediately afterward she saw someone in front of the building. Which means absolutely nothing, since she has no idea who it might have been. A man, she had that impression, larger than average. In other words, no help.
She follows the path Jeff took past the science building and makes her way down to the river, along what feels like the route someone unfamiliar with the area would take. The wind has picked up, and she zips up her jacket. She turns left down Prospect and right down the alley steps to Canal Street. She waits for the walk light and jogs across Canal Street, past the Francis Scott Key Memorial, and down to the towpath. Jackie has a sense now of being pulled along, as if she knows where to go, not by guessing, but because she is being led there.
She arrives at a footbridge over the canal and hesitates. She wouldn’t go out here at night, even as safe as Adams is, but Jeff would’ve. He was the kind of guy who’d go for a run at midnight, figuring he could outrun just about anyone. Jackie crosses the bridge, and the sense of inevitability grows, and with it, her dread.
She walks faster, past a small park with shade trees. An old man sits on a bench with a bulldog at his feet. Up ahead, tucked under the first arch of Key Bridge, is the Potomac boatyard. Jackie breaks into a run, passing a block of abandoned three-story buildings with broken windows. The overpass shadows the path. At the boathouse entrance she pulls up short, sweat trickling down her back, her breath coming in gasps. A set of steps leads to the main dock, where colorful kayaks are stacked on racks. To the left of the steps is the boathouse, flanked by the repair shed. She walks slowly toward the buildings, gravel crunching underfoot, then halts. The alley between them is cordoned off with caution tape. She sucks in a sharp breath.
