by David Bell
Her face changed, and changed significantly, when I reached the next part of my story. I told her what she had already figured out—that I’d lied about the basketball game the night I really went to Jennifer’s house. And added insult to injury by lying again when she called me, asking me to come home. I sat across the table from her in our strangely quiet house, the absence of Henry’s banging and chattering more noticeable than ever, and her eyes filled with tears. She fought them off and put on the best face she could, but I stopped, reached across the table, and squeezed her hand, which felt cold.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I feel like an asshole.”
“That’s the correct way to feel,” she said.
“Do you want to stop talking?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. I want to hear the whole thing. I want to know about yesterday and how you got away from this crazy man.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure, Ryan. I’m a big girl, remember? I’ve been through an MBA program and also sixteen hours of labor. I can handle this.”
So I finished the tale. All the way up to and through the stuff in the town house basement out at Hilldale Estates. The firing of the gun, the struggle on the floor. Holding Blake off so he didn’t pound Aaron into oblivion.
“I even punched Blake once,” I said. “When I found out he’d been gaslighting me over the accident. I couldn’t stop myself. I punched him in the face.”
“Good. Was it a hard punch?”
“As hard as I could make it,” I said. “I’m not really an expert on such things.”
“Good. I’d like to do the same thing to him.”
“I get it, but we’re not going to do anything with him anymore. We’re done. I’m done. He leaves a trail of destruction wherever he goes.”
“You’re right.” Her voice sounded distant and low.
I leaned farther across the table, moving my hand from hers to her forearm. “I’m sorry. About all of it. I lied, and I can’t do anything about that except to say I’m sorry.”
Amanda didn’t pull away, but she didn’t reciprocate my affection or contact either. She remained stiff in her chair, her eyes distant and distracted.
“What is it?” I asked.
She took her time, choosing her words carefully. She looked past me, not meeting my eye. “The lying,” she said. “It hurts. It really fucking hurts. How could you just look me in the eye and tell me something that wasn’t true? Even if it was just about a stupid basketball game. But it wasn’t just about a stupid basketball game, was it? It led to all of this. It put us in danger. Both of us. And Henry.”
I felt stung. I deserved it, but her words still stung. “I know.”
“Are you sure there wasn’t anything going on with you and Jennifer?” she asked. “You ended up going to her house, even after you were supposed to be done with her and her little flirtatious advances. And then she just happens to be dating Blake. It all seems so . . . I don’t know. Convenient.”
My face stung, but that time because it felt like it had been slapped. And hard. “Haven’t we settled all of that? You saw everything between the two of us. Hell, you saw whatever you wanted on my phone and computer.”
She kept looking away, but her cheeks flushed. We were a pair of red-faced lovers separated by a table-wide gulf of misunderstanding and suspicion. I pulled my hand back.
“I don’t mind talking about all of this,” I said. “But at some point, I want to move on and forget it.”
“But doesn’t all of this show that when you don’t fully deal with the past, it comes back to bite you in the ass?” She looked at me now. Straight on. “Isn’t that what we’ve been through the last couple of days?”
I couldn’t argue. No way. But the excavation felt like digging up a lost and buried city. How long would it take?
“What do you want me to do?” I asked. “Amanda, I’m facing potential legal jeopardy here. I tampered with evidence. My name is all over the news. I’m going to pay the price. And I know you and Henry will too. Of course I’m sorry for that. More than anything else.”
Amanda looked up at the clock above the sink. “I don’t know what else to say. But I should go get Henry. Mom and Dad have somewhere to be later. I said I’d pick him up. And driving will clear my head a little.”
“Let me go get him.”
“Do you really want to go over there and face the Spanish Inquisition as performed by Bill and Karen? Besides, I could stand to get out of the house. I’ve felt like a prisoner lately. Hell, I was afraid to go anywhere for fear I’d get murdered. It will be nice to go and not worry about that.”
“Okay,” I said. And I knew she was right. The last thing I wanted to do was endure the inevitable barrage of questions about Aaron and Blake and Jennifer that my in-laws would fire my way like a series of missiles. “I understand.”
When she went upstairs to get dressed, I felt lonely and pointless, cut off from everything. Normally I reached for my phone when I felt that way, but the phone and social media landscape offered no escape. I knew everywhere I scrolled or clicked I’d see news and questions about Jennifer and Blake and Aaron.
It seemed to take Amanda longer than normal to get ready, but eventually she came back down, dressed and ready to go. She stood across the room, her keys in her hand, the look on her face tense and guarded. “We can talk about this more,” she said. “I know there’s more to say. I guess I have more to say. And I’m trying not to be unfair and lay everything at your feet.”
“It’s okay. I get it.”
She started to go and then seemed to remember something. She came over and pecked me on the cheek, a gesture that seemed strangely chaste and forced. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Okay. It’s not such a long drive. You’re making it sound like you’re going to be gone for hours.”
But she didn’t respond to that. She went out the door, and once she left, I started looking for something to distract me in the real world instead of the virtual one.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
The police had seized my computer from Blake at Hilldale Estates, so I couldn’t work. It hadn’t been made clear to me yet exactly why Blake needed the computer. I knew he wanted to access the messages from Jennifer’s phone because he’d tossed the phone away, but I didn’t know why. Without the laptop in the house, and with the inhospitable landscape of social media at that moment, I felt like my right arm had been severed from my body.
In the fifteen minutes after Amanda left the house, I couldn’t count how many times I glanced at my phone, lifting it toward my face, prepared to click on an app, only to realize I needed to heed Amanda’s advice and not look. But then I asked myself a deeper and more profound question, one I’d refused to contemplate before that day: How many times in an hour do I look at my phone? Fifty? One hundred?
How did I get anything accomplished in my life? How did I talk to Amanda or interact with Henry with my face buried in my screens?
I held the phone with a tight grip and resisted the urge to throw it in the trash can in our kitchen. Instead I plugged it in, allowing it to suck up its vital electricity, and wandered out to the living room, where I plopped onto the couch and picked up a novel I’d been attempting to read for the past month.
The house remained quiet. The smell of the coffee and the toast still filled the air. It felt strange to sit down and read with the phone so far away. It took me a few pages to remember what was going on in the story, because it had been days since I’d looked at it. But slowly things came back to me. A teenage boy during the Crusades had been apprenticed to a powerful knight. They prepared to set sail for the Holy Land. The author described the ringing of steel blade against steel blade, the smells of horses and cooking meat. I fell into the story. My mind cleared as I concentrated on one thing at a time and one thing only. I forgot about Blake and
Jennifer and everything else that had happened, so much so that when the doorbell rang, I jumped about a foot off the couch.
Amanda?
But no. She’d come in the back door. And she never forgot her keys. And it was too soon for her to be finished with picking up Henry and talking to her parents. They’d never let her—or their only grandchild—get away so quickly.
I reluctantly set the book aside, using the subscription insert from a magazine as my bookmark, and went to the door. I thought about going to the kitchen and grabbing the baseball bat but decided against it. The boogeyman was gone, secure in the jail downtown, surrounded by cops and lawyers and bars. Aaron made a sad picture in my mind, locked up as he was, his life derailed by that night in college. And now Blake would be up to his neck in it for that night. I looked longingly at the book and the escape it promised to the Middle Ages.
I peeked out the window that afforded me a view of the porch. When I saw who was outside, I wished even more that I could go back to reading. I went over and undid the locks, opening the door to Detective Rountree. My hands shook as I stepped back, an involuntary reflex in the presence of cops, and one intensified by everything Rountree knew about me.
What could she possibly have shown up for?
She nodded to me as she came into the room. She looked around, although I wasn’t sure what she was seeking.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
Rountree stood with her back to me. If she intended to make me more nervous, and I think she did, it worked.
When a sufficient amount of time had passed, she turned and faced me. “Is your wife home, Mr. Francis?”
“No, she isn’t. She went to her parents’ house to pick up our son. Is something wrong?”
I caught a slight whiff of cigarette smoke in the air between us. I’d never noticed it on Rountree before, but maybe the stress of the past day had driven her to steal a few puffs in her car.
“Is she coming back soon?”
I replayed Amanda’s somewhat odd response about how long she’d be gone. But I told myself it was nothing.
“Probably. Can you tell me what this is about? Why are you asking about Amanda?”
Rountree thought about it for a moment, and then nodded to herself as if she’d reached a conclusion inside her head. “I’m trying to tie up some loose ends and questions from our investigation. I thought Amanda might be able to shed some light on a few things.”
“Amanda? Can’t you just ask me?”
“Can you call her and see when she’s heading back?” Rountree asked, her voice casual, making the request seem as simple as asking for a glass of water.
“I can. So you’re not going to tell me what this is about?”
“If you give me her number, I can call her.”
I let out an exasperated sigh. I went out to the kitchen and unplugged my phone from the wall. I saw more texts, more Facebook messages. None of them from Amanda.
I dialed her number, and as it rang, I walked back to the living room. “I’m tired of this cloak-and-dagger stuff. Can’t you just tell us what’s happening?”
Rountree ignored me. She stood in the center of the room with her hands clasped behind her back, tapping her right foot in time to a rhythm only she heard.
The call went to voice mail. I heard Amanda’s peppy greeting asking me to leave a message. Which I did, asking her to call me as soon as she could.
“She’s probably dealing with Henry. Or she’s driving. She never answers when she’s driving. She wouldn’t answer while driving even before we had Henry.”
“Won’t she put it on speaker?”
“She won’t. Not if he’s in the car. She doesn’t want any distractions. You know her sister—”
“I know. Can you try again? Just to be sure.”
Her tone left little choice. And I didn’t think I could refuse a cop. So I tried once more, receiving the same result. Voice mail. I skipped leaving a message.
“She’ll probably be here in five minutes.”
“Do you have your in-laws’ number?”
“Yes, it’s programmed in my phone.”
“Can you try it?” she asked. “Like you said, maybe she’s tied up with the baby. At least if they answer, they can tell you where she is. There. Or on her way back here.”
I felt no desire to argue. The shaky feeling in my hands that started when I opened the door to Rountree grew in intensity, only its source became worry and concern over Amanda. And Henry. What did Rountree know? Why was she so adamant about tracking Amanda down?
“Can you just tell me why you need to know all this?” I asked.
“Like I said—loose ends.”
“How did Amanda become a loose end? She doesn’t know about any of this.”
“Make that call, please.”
So I did. The phone rang for a while, so I turned to Rountree and asked, “Did you look into Dawn Steiner? She could be involved in this too.”
“She’s part of this investigation.”
Before she said more, Karen picked up, her cheerful hello likely loud enough for Rountree to hear.
“Hi, Karen. Look, is Amanda there? Or has she left yet?”
“Amanda?” She repeated the name like she’d never heard it before.
“Yes, is she there? Or is she heading back here?”
“Well, I must have my wires crossed. Or something. Amanda called me about fifteen minutes ago. She said she had something to do, and it might take all afternoon. Ryan, she told me you were going to come over and get Henry and that I shouldn’t call her because she’d be busy.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY
When I hung up with Karen, I made a special point of not looking at Rountree. I knew she knew I’d learned Amanda wasn’t there, and I sensed she was ready to pounce with more questions. So I acted like she wasn’t in the room and dialed Amanda’s number again.
And again, it rang and rang.
I tried two more times with the same result.
“What about Dawn Steiner?” I asked. “Is she here in town?”
“We’re working on accounting for her whereabouts. We have a lot of irons in the fire. But that’s not your concern right now. Let me do my job.”
“I get that. But we know the answer to the big question. It was Aaron who killed Jennifer. He was with her. He has a record.”
I stared at the phone. A useless instrument.
“Mr. Francis?” Rountree said.
“Hold on.”
I texted Amanda, asking her to call me. Then I sent another text, telling her she really needed to call me because the police were in the living room looking for her.
“Mr. Francis? I assume you don’t know where your wife is right now.”
I let my arms drop limply at my sides. The wind disappeared from my sails. “No, I don’t. She’s supposed to be . . .”
“So I gathered. But she told her parents she had somewhere else to go, and you don’t know where that is. Right?”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“Do you track each other on your phones? Do you use a friend finder app or anything like that?”
“No, we’ve never used those.” The next words I said came out with more difficulty. I still wasn’t looking at Rountree. “We trusted each other. We said we wouldn’t even do that to Henry when he was older.”
Rountree took a few steps across the room until she’d moved into my line of sight. She made it impossible for me to pretend she wasn’t there. “Do you want to sit down? Maybe she’ll get your messages and call back. Let’s give her a few minutes.”
It was nice of her to say, and she spoke in soothing tones. But I could hear the undercurrent of doubt in her voice. She didn’t really think Amanda was going to call me back. Not anytime soon.
Rountree took the lead and sat on the co
uch. What else could I do? I followed along and sat on the opposite end. My palms were sweaty, and I wiped the one that wasn’t holding a phone against my pants leg.
“I should offer you something,” I said. “Coffee or water?”
“I’m fine. Do you know why I’m here looking for your wife?”
My mouth felt dry. I wanted water. But I stayed rooted in place on the couch. “No, I don’t. But I assume it has something to do with all of this craziness that’s been going on. Like I told you when you first came in, Amanda didn’t know anything about it. She didn’t know Jennifer or Aaron. She didn’t know I went over to Jennifer’s house. Of anybody remotely tied up in this, she knew the least and did the least. Aaron came over here and threatened her. She could have been hurt.”
Rountree nodded, her face full of sympathy. “I know Amanda isn’t working now, not since she had the baby, right?”
“That’s right.”
“But before that she worked at Global Educational Enterprises. Right?”
“Yes. She wrote grants for them and brought in a lot of money. Once Henry gets a little older, she’s going to go back and consult or freelance. Why does any of this matter?”
“You and Amanda both spend a fair amount of time on social media? You’re both pretty active there?”
The direction of her questions irritated me. “What is this? Some kind of anti–social media screed? I can’t get ahold of my wife, and you have a murder to investigate. In fact, don’t you have Jennifer’s murderer down in the jail? Or maybe it’s one of those other ex-cons who killed her. The ones she helps at work?”
“We have a suspect in jail. But it’s my job to explore all avenues that come up. I can’t have tunnel vision and zero in on one person too early in the investigation.”
“He tried to kill us,” I said. “He wanted to. He fired a gun at us. And Blake . . . he killed somebody with a car.”
“Your friend Blake has asked for a lawyer. And we’re looking into that accident. It’s been a number of years, which makes it tough.”
