by Shari Lapena
“Don’t talk that way,” Olivia says sharply.
“Why not? It’s true! You should see what was on his computer! I saw his emails—he’s been cheating on Glenda, seeing someone else behind her back. I couldn’t tell you because they’re your friends.”
Olivia feels sickened; she can’t speak.
“When was this?” Paul asks.
“I told you—it was that night they were here for dinner, the night before mom saw the texts on my phone and found out what I was doing,” Raleigh says miserably.
Olivia tries to focus. Keith is cheating on Glenda, and Glenda has no idea. Olivia is certain that Glenda doesn’t know. Now what does she do? Does she tell her? Or leave her in ignorance? Olivia glances at her husband and remembers when Becky came over to tell her her suspicions about Paul. She realizes, her heart sinking, that she’s going to have to tell Glenda.
“Are you sure about this?” Paul asks.
“Of course I’m sure. I saw it with my own eyes. There was no way to misinterpret what he wrote. I even sent some emails back to his girlfriend from his account, and they weren’t very nice.”
Olivia watches her son, feels her jaw drop open.
Raleigh says, “So at least now he probably knows that somebody was in his computer and knows what he’s doing.” He snorts. “I hope he’s been losing sleep over it. Maybe he thinks it was Adam. Why do you think Adam drinks so much? He drinks to forget that his dad is such an asshole.”
“Raleigh,” Paul begins, looking unnerved. “You can’t just mess with people’s lives like that.”
“He’s an asshole. Serves him right.”
Olivia wonders if Glenda ever told Keith that Raleigh was breaking into houses, even though she promised she wouldn’t. Olivia sometimes lets things slip to Paul that she said she wouldn’t share.
“The emails were hidden,” Raleigh continues. “You wouldn’t know they were there unless you were looking, like I was.”
“How did you find them?” Paul asks.
“It’s easy if you know what you’re doing. I can get into a powered-off computer in about three minutes—I just use a USB flash drive to boot up the computer—most computers allow you to boot from a live USB and that way you can get around the internal security. Then with a few commands, I can create a backdoor and I’m in. Once I was in Keith’s computer, I could tell he was trying to hide something because he was deleting his browser history. But he didn’t delete the cookies, so I was able to get the username and password for his hidden email account. And then I could get into his account and see his emails and pretend to be him and send whatever I wanted.”
Olivia doesn’t know whether to be horrified or impressed. “Do you know who the woman was?” she asks.
“No. It was some silly name on the email account. Something made up.”
“Jesus, Raleigh. You shouldn’t have done that,” Paul says.
Raleigh looks at his father as if challenging him somehow and says, “Do you think he could have been seeing the woman who was murdered?”
Olivia watches the two of them, stunned into speechlessness.
“No, of course not!” Paul says. “That’s . . . ridiculous.”
“He knows our cabin,” Raleigh says.
“Are you suggesting that Keith murdered her?” Paul says, clearly horrified at the idea. “Keith can’t possibly be involved with this. He can’t be a murderer. He’s my best friend.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Becky jumps when the door opens and her husband walks in. He’d been too upset to go into the office this morning, and then the detectives had called him to come down to answer more questions. She can see that he is shaken. But he’s home from the police station. He hasn’t been arrested.
“What happened?” she asks.
“They asked me if I’d ever been to the Sharpes’ cabin.” Larry sinks, clearly exhausted, onto the sofa in the living room. “They’re still acting like they think I killed her. Why do they think that, Becky? I had an affair with her, but I swear I didn’t kill her.” He looks up at her, worried.
She sits down beside him. Then, “It’s just us now, Larry. You’ve never been to that cabin, have you?”
“No! Absolutely not. I swear, I don’t know where it is.”
But he’s lied to her before. He could have known about the Sharpes’ cabin somehow.
It’s been on the news this morning, online, that Paul Sharpe has been released without charge. She can’t be the only one who finds that odd. But they obviously don’t think he did it. They must think someone else killed her in his cabin. And they must think it was either Robert Pierce or her husband, Larry.
Back to square one. Which of them did it? She doesn’t know.
* * *
—
Robert Pierce can’t believe it. Yesterday he was in the clear—gave a press conference and celebrated alone with a few beers; today he learns that Paul Sharpe has been released without charge. He reads about it in the news, and then those damn detectives show up on his doorstep around lunchtime.
“Mr. Pierce,” Webb said. “We’d like to have another little chat with you.”
“About what?” Robert said suspiciously.
“About your wife.”
“I thought you caught the guy,” Robert said. “Quick work, by the way. What do you want with me?”
“Well, you see, we had to release him. Not enough evidence.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Robert said, his heart pounding harder. “My wife’s blood on the floor of his cabin isn’t enough for you?”
“Oddly enough, no,” Webb replied. “We’d like you to come down to the station.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
And so here he is, back in this claustrophobic room, but this time he has been read his rights, and the interview is being taped. The detectives have let Sharpe go. They will be after him now, the husband. They always think it’s the husband.
“We think you knew your wife was seeing someone else,” Webb begins.
Robert says nothing.
“We know she had a burner phone. We haven’t been able to find it, but we know she had one.”
Robert remains warily silent.
“Do you know where it is?” Webb presses.
Still, he says nothing.
“We know she had one,” Webb continues, “because Larry Harris told us.”
Robert isn’t going to rise to the bait.
Webb gets right in his face and says, “We know you had her burner phone, because Harris told us that you called him from it. On the morning of Friday, September twenty-ninth, the day your wife disappeared.”
Robert shrugs. “That’s not true. You’ve only got his word for it. He was screwing her—he’d say anything.”
“We don’t just have his word for it. We have a witness.”
“What are you talking about?”
“A local boy broke into your house and found the burner phone in your desk drawer after Amanda went missing. But it wasn’t there when we searched the house a few days later. What did you do with the phone, Robert?”
He doesn’t answer. His heart is racing. Instead he says, “What boy?”
But the detective ignores his question. “We know you lied to us. We know you knew she was seeing Larry. Was she seeing Paul Sharpe, too? Did you know about that? How many numbers were in that phone? Was she sleeping with both of them? That must have been hard to take. We know you had the phone, so you must have known she was planning to meet someone that weekend at that cabin. Which one was it? And you went there, and saw them together, and once she was alone, you bashed her head in.”
Robert says nothing, but his heart is pounding.
“Maybe the burner phone is at the bottom of a lake somewhere, like the hammer,” Webb says.
“I want t
o call my attorney,” Robert says.
* * *
—
Olivia,” Paul says to her, in a troubled voice, when they’re going to bed that night, “what if Keith was seeing Amanda?”
She’d been thinking the same thing herself, all day, and all evening. Part of her dismissed the idea as improbable. Surely Keith didn’t really know her. He’d met her at the neighborhood party, like everyone else, but he didn’t work in the same company as Paul and Larry, where she was a regular temp. The chance he was seeing Amanda seems like a stretch. Glenda had never given any hint that she suspected Keith might be having an affair. On the other hand . . . She answers him quietly, “Do you think it’s possible?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think they ever met, other than the party a year ago. He certainly never mentioned her to me. I never thought he was the type to have an affair.”
“They could have met online,” Olivia says. “They could have met anywhere.”
Paul looks back at her, radiating tension. “Olivia, Amanda Pierce was killed in our cabin. I didn’t kill her. But who do we know has been to our cabin?”
And that’s why she’s unsure. Glenda and Keith come to their cabin every summer, for at least a weekend or two. They know the cabin very well. Their fingerprints are everywhere, and perfectly explainable. Keith could have met Amanda there that weekend, and nobody would have known. Because Keith probably would have known that they wouldn’t be using the cabin that weekend.
“But how would he get in?” Olivia asks.
“Keith knows where we hide the spare key,” Paul says.
“He does?”
Paul nods, biting his lip. “I told him once how we drove all the way to the cabin that time and forgot the key, and how after that we hid a spare in the shed under the oilcan.”
They look at each other, an uneasy dread spreading across their faces. Could it have been Keith, Olivia considers, and not Amanda’s husband, or Larry, or Paul, at all?
“What should we do?” Olivia asks.
“We have to tell the police,” Paul says. “Let them look into it. They can seize his computer.”
Can she do that to Glenda? Keith probably wasn’t even seeing Amanda. But he was seeing someone. Olivia looks at her own husband, who must surely still be a suspect, and knows that they must.
“If you go to the police,” she says, “you’ll have to tell them how you know. You’ll have to tell them that Raleigh broke into their house, too—and looked in his computer.”
“I won’t. I won’t tell them how I know.”
“That’s so naive, Paul. If they seize Keith’s computer and find he was seeing Amanda, Keith will be a suspect in a murder investigation. Everything will come out.”
“We’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it,” Paul says bluntly.
As she settles under the covers and tries to sleep, she can’t stop thinking that if Keith did kill Amanda, then he was willing to let his best friend take the fall, and say nothing at all. She feels a deep chill, and she doesn’t know if that chill will ever go away. She pulls the covers more tightly around her and lies in the dark, eyes wide open.
* * *
—
It’s late. Carmine is reading in bed when she hears the knock at the door. How odd. She hears it again. There’s definitely someone there. She gets up and slips on her terry robe, wrapping the tie around her waist as she descends the stairs. When she gets to the bottom, she flicks on the light switch. She peers out the window and then hesitantly opens the door a crack.
“Hi,” she says, smiling uncertainly.
“Sorry to bother you so late, but your lights were still on.”
“No problem. What can I do for you?”
“Can we talk?”
“Okay,” she says. She steps back and opens the door wide. Then she turns her back to her guest, closing the door. Everything changes in a fraction of a second. There’s a sudden movement behind her and then she feels something around her neck pulling tightly. It happens too fast for her to scream. She can’t breathe and the pain in her throat is excruciating. She can feel her eyes bulging, her vision blurring as she tries desperately to grab at the cord around her neck. But her knees are buckling and now she’s being pushed forward, her own weight working against her as she leans into the cord around her neck. She realizes with surprise that she’s dying. No one thinks this is how they’re going to die. And then everything goes black.
THIRTY-FIVE
Glenda is surprised to find Olivia on her doorstep the next morning.
“What is it?” Glenda asks quickly. “What’s happened?” Olivia always calls first, she doesn’t just show up unannounced like this. She’d texted her yesterday when Paul was released and told her not to come over. Her husband has been released without charge—why does she seem so distraught?
“Are you alone?” Olivia asks nervously.
“Yes, they’ve gone already. Come in,” Glenda says.
“There’s something I have to talk to you about,” Olivia says, not meeting her eye.
Glenda starts to feel apprehensive. “Okay.”
They sit down in the kitchen. “Do you want coffee?” Glenda asks.
“No.”
“Olivia, what is it? You’re freaking me out.”
“The detectives matched Raleigh’s fingerprints to some found in the Pierces’ house,” Olivia says. “He’s been charged with breaking and entering.”
“Oh, no,” Glenda says.
“But that’s not why I’m here,” Olivia says. “Raleigh told us some things yesterday.” She hesitates and then comes out with it. “He told us that he broke into your house. The night you and Keith were over for dinner.”
Glenda is shocked. Her mood changes abruptly. “Why would he do that?” she asks.
“I’m so, so sorry, Glenda.”
Everything about Olivia is begging for forgiveness. She looks abject. But Glenda feels betrayed, violated. She had no idea that Raleigh might have broken into their house. That’s different. All the smooth, glib assurances fall away. Now what she’s thinking is, How dare he? She doesn’t say, Oh, that’s okay, Olivia. I know how upsetting this must be for you. Please don’t worry about it. She doesn’t try to make it better. She doesn’t say anything. She folds her arms in front of her chest, not even aware of how defensive she looks.
“I don’t know why he did it,” Olivia says. “Just teenage stupidity, I guess—you said it yourself. Teenagers do stupid things.”
They’re sitting at the kitchen table, across from one another. It feels awkward, although they’ve sat here together a hundred times. “Okay, thanks for telling me,” Glenda says finally. “I guess there’s no real harm done, is there?” She says it rather grudgingly, and she’s pretty sure Olivia knows how she really feels.
But there’s something in Olivia’s face, and Glenda knows that there’s more coming. What is Olivia afraid to tell her? Because she looks frightened to death. “There’s something else, isn’t there?” Glenda says.
Olivia nods. Her face is pale, her lips are quivering, and she looks so sorry that Glenda almost forgives her in advance. Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad, Glenda thinks.
“You know Raleigh was snooping around on people’s computers,” Olivia begins.
Glenda’s sure there’s nothing on their computers they need to worry about. She and Keith share the same home computer. What is Olivia getting at?
“He found some emails on your computer. . . .”
“What emails?” Glenda asks sharply.
“Emails that show that Keith’s been having an affair.”
Glenda feels like she’s been kicked in the stomach. For a moment she can hardly breathe. “No,” she says. “Raleigh’s lying. There are no such emails. Why would he say such a thing?”
“I don’t think he�
��s lying,” Olivia says carefully.
“You know he’s a liar,” Glenda snaps back. “He told you he was at the movies when he was out breaking into houses. Why do you even believe him?”
“Why would he lie about it?” Olivia says. “He’s not saying it to get himself out of trouble. Why would he make it up?”
“I don’t know,” Glenda says, at a loss. “But I use that computer all the time. And I even admit—I do look through Keith’s emails sometimes. And it’s all work stuff. There’s nothing there to any other woman. If there were, I’d know.”
Olivia looks even more uncomfortable and says, “Raleigh says they were hidden. You have to know what to look for. And Raleigh knows.”
Suddenly Glenda knows it must be true. Hidden files. How could she have been so stupid, so blind? She shakes her head, she can’t even speak. She wants to kill him.
“I’m so sorry, Glenda. But I thought you should know.”
Finally Glenda finds her voice. “Who is it? Is it anyone we know?”
Now Olivia shakes her head. “I don’t know. Raleigh says it was a made-up name.”
“That son of a bitch,” Glenda says.
“Do you think,” Olivia says, venturing cautiously, as if over thin ice, “that he might have been seeing Amanda?”
Glenda turns cold eyes on Olivia. “Amanda. Why would you ask that?”
“I don’t know,” Olivia says quickly. “He probably barely knew her.”
“Then why mention her?”
Olivia shakes her head, backtracking. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have.”
“Maybe you should leave, Olivia,” Glenda says.
“Don’t hate me, Glenda, please,” Olivia begs. “I didn’t want to tell you, but I thought if it was me, I’d want to know.”
Glenda replies acidly, “Or maybe you thought you could shift the attention away from Paul, is that it? One more possible suspect. Are you going to tell the police about this?” She looks at Olivia’s face. “My God, you are going to tell the police!”
Olivia sits in front of her, biting her lips.
