—Letter from the Circle of Learning director, Pam, sent home to all parents
“Mommy, you count to ten and I’ll go hide behind the curtains in the dining room. Ready, go!”
Clara stifled a laugh. “Thomas, hide-and-seek only works if you don’t tell me where you’re going to hide. I’ll count and you pick a new place, okay?”
“But the curtains are a great hiding place!”
“But you just told me you’re going to be there. I already know.”
“Okay. Close your eyes—no peeking! I will go hide now—and do not look behind the curtains.” Thomas pointed an ultraserious finger at her, then backed toward the hallway.
Clara shrugged and covered her eyes with her hands. “One,” she began. “Two … Three…” She hoped she wasn’t being loud enough to wake Maddie. Thomas was usually tired out on the afternoons when he’d spent the morning at preschool, but today he’d only stared at her wide-eyed after lunch and story time came and went. “Do you want to skip your nap just this once and play a game?” she’d ventured. He’d be cranky by dinnertime. But she didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts anyway. She’d seen patrol cars come and go from Paul’s house again yesterday afternoon, and the uncertainty about what was happening or not happening was driving her mad.
Plus, she knew it was selfish, but it wasn’t just that she was worried about Kristin. It was that she was starting to miss her.
“Ready or not, here I come!” she called.
Maniacal giggling came from the dining room.
Clara hadn’t needed Detective Bryant’s reminder of what she’d witnessed years ago to be mindfully grateful for what she had. Even at her most exhausted, she relished the off-key notes of Benny singing in the shower, the Muppet-like form of Thomas’s bed head, the new fascination Maddie had with sticking out her tongue and going cross-eyed trying to see it.
The charming inability of her preschooler to grasp the parameters of hide-and-seek.
Loudly humming the Pink Panther theme song, she made her way into the kitchen. She opened a silverware drawer and loudly rustled the forks. “Thomas, are you in here?”
“No!” came a loud whisper. “Mommy. I’m behind the curtains. In the dining room.”
So much for putting on a show. Clara rushed around the farmhouse table and threw the curtains back dramatically. An exposed Thomas dissolved into giggles. “You thought I was in the kitchen! I fooled you! I fooled you!”
“You did,” Clara said, bending to fold him into a hug. “You, my clever boy, are today’s hide-and-seek champion.”
“It’s okay, Mommy,” he said, patting her primly on top of the head. “You’ll win next time.”
“Another day,” she told him solemnly. “It’s time to get Hallie off the bus!” Clara slid the baby monitor into her pocket and Thomas slipped his hand into hers as they headed out and down the front porch stairs.
“Can Abby and Aaron still come to my birthday party?” he asked.
Clara hesitated. They’d simply told Thomas that Kristin and the twins were on a trip and they didn’t know for how long. His birthday was still months off, but she’d observed that parties were the weapons of choice in the precarious social structure of preschoolers. If someone wouldn’t share the fire engine, it wasn’t the “You’re not my friend anymore” pout she used to see from Thomas months ago. Now it was “You’re not invited to my birthday party!”
“I hope so, sweetie.” He’d attended the twins’ party back in May, at Young’s dairy farm, where a whole gaggle of kids—Kristin invited half the school—had climbed giant tractor tires and fed goats and rode the little cow train. Paul had accused Kristin of purposely picking a Saturday he had to work, which of course she had. “What does he care?” she’d muttered to Clara. “This party exceeds his kid tolerance by the small factor of a couple dozen kids.”
Kristin was radiant that afternoon, her loose curls shining in the sunlight beneath a cowboy hat that matched the little woven ones she’d bought as favors for all the kids. Paul was sleeping in the guest room by then, making arrangements to move out, and that day, she looked more than just happy. She looked free.
Thomas broke his grip on Clara’s hand and ran for his tree swing as she headed down the walk. A white van was backing out of Paul’s driveway, and she stopped cold as she caught sight of the name on the side: WALT’S WINDOWS. The doctor stood with his back to her, holding a yellow paper she took to be his invoice, and she reflexively stepped back under the cover of the old oak, where Thomas was situating himself between the ropes. “Mommy, can you give me a push?”
She moved to comply, and her eyes flicked toward the corner, where Hallie’s school bus was set to appear any minute. A dark sedan was crawling around the bend. She gave Thomas a firm starter shove and stepped aside—he’d protest if she gave him more than one. As the van pulled away, the sedan swung swiftly into Paul’s driveway, and through the open window she caught sight of a frowning Detective Bryant.
“You replaced the broken window, Dr. Kirkland?” he called out, putting the car into reverse. “Wish you’d checked with us first.” The car backed onto the street, then crawled forward along the curb, headed back the way it came.
Paul’s voice was smooth, calm. “I didn’t realize it warranted checking, Detective. Certainly if you’d instructed me to leave it, I’d have complied.” Clara sucked in a slow breath, feeling the blood drain from her face.
Detective Bryant barked a laugh. “I apologize for getting sloppy with my instructions. I assure you, it won’t happen again.” Without waiting for a response, he accelerated too fast toward the corner, where the van had just disappeared, and whipped past the stop sign without pausing, close on its heels.
An angry horn sounded in the distance, and Paul turned on his heels without a glance in Clara’s direction. She heard his front door slam just as the school bus came into view.
Clara shivered in the warm air. What had she just seen? An innocent misstep? An overreaction? A cover-up?
Beside her, Thomas was pumping his little legs hard now, swinging higher and higher, and he let out a whoop as the bus groaned to a noisy stop at the curb and the doors snapped open.
“Hey, Chief!” Hallie shouted, bounding across the lawn. “The first edition of The Color-Blind Gazette is underway!”
Clara looked once more toward Paul’s house, which remained still. So much had happened this week that she’d completely forgotten Hallie’s idea for the paper. But this was the last thing she wanted to think about right now.
“I’ve decided Monday’s the big day,” Hallie announced. “Sunday’s already covered. But the start of the week, that’s when people will be most receptacle.”
“Receptive,” Clara said automatically.
“See? This is why I need an editorial adviser!”
Thomas dragged his feet in the dirt to slow the swing. “Is it snack time?”
Clara led the kids inside and let Thomas plant himself in front of a cartoon as she doled out tubes of frozen strawberry yogurt. It was nothing. It was probably nothing. Detective Bryant was just trying to keep Paul on his toes, and to dot his i’s and cross his t’s. That didn’t mean he really suspected that the window was evidence of something. Only that he was good at his job.
Or not so good at it. She thought of his own parting words: Getting sloppy … won’t happen again. He’d only been chiding Paul—right?
Hallie hopped onto a counter stool. “I’ve got real front-page breaking news. Like, when people used to yell, ‘Extra, extra, read all about it’? They might start doing that again.”
Clara swallowed a smile and let herself relax a little. She had to admit, the kid had enthusiasm on her side. Maybe Hallie would be a welcome distraction after all. “What’s the scoop?”
“The real inside story behind the police investigation next door!” Hallie squealed.
Clara froze. “Hallie,” she said carefully, “breaking news is something that hasn’t been reported yet. You shoul
d probably—”
“But this hasn’t been reported yet!” She flipped her notebook open on the counter between them. In it was a not-bad pencil sketch of a windowpane with flowers on the sill. Fragments of notes were scribbled in the margins, underlined and circled with question marks that looked like little curly q’s. “Internet search?” “Harassment?” “Not a suspect?”
So much for a welcome distraction.
“What is this?” Clara asked uneasily.
“I was kind of hanging out in Kristin and Paul’s yard yesterday, when the police came back, and—”
“Wait a sec. You were ‘kind of hanging out’ in their yard?”
“Well, yeah. I was on a stakeout.”
“Hallie, reporters don’t go on stakeouts. That’s cops.”
“Whatever. I was just kind of lying low, but then the police showed up. And the window was open. And I got the whole thing on my phone!”
“You what?”
Hallie pulled a turquoise smartphone out of her denim jacket pocket and started swiping at the screen. “I found this amazing voice recorder app. You wouldn’t believe how well it picks stuff up.”
Before Clara could say another word, Hallie tapped the screen, and Detective Bryant’s distant but clear voice filled the room. “We did try those leads—nothing has panned out yet. But we have just a few more questions, if you don’t mind?”
“Of course,” Paul’s voice said. “Anything to help.”
Her mind racing, Clara motioned for Hallie to turn it off. She complied, grinning.
“Hallie, this is illegal. Recording police conversations without anyone’s knowledge—”
“But I was in a public place!”
“Wrong. You were on private property.”
Hallie stuck out her lip in a pout not unlike Maddie’s. “I could’ve been at the edge of your yard, and I would have heard it anyway! No one needs to know where I was.”
Clara shook her head. “No, I’m going to stop you right there. This is wrong. This isn’t how it’s done. Whatever is on that recording, you absolutely cannot use. For anything.”
“I think you might change your mind if you knew what was on it.” Hallie’s voice was a singsong, a taunt. Clara tried to let her brain catch up to her escalating heart rate. Of course she wouldn’t feel differently once she’d heard the recording, but she did desperately want to know what it said. Especially after what she’d just witnessed outside. First the questions about the fire pit, and now the window … What did the police think they were on to?
There was no telling what Hallie had heard or how she had taken it. If it was serious, and from the look on Hallie’s face she certainly seemed to think so, then the girl might need an adult to explain, to sort it out. Clara knew it was irresponsible to do anything other than delete the file, but wasn’t it equally irresponsible not to find out exactly what Hallie had heard, so she could help prevent her from jumping to wrong conclusions, or blowing things out of proportion?
Clara knew too well that witnessing something meant you felt involved, whether you were supposed to have seen it or not.
She knew she was rationalizing, but when Hallie tapped the screen again, she didn’t stop her.
There was a minute of small talk between Detectives Bryant and Marks and Paul, who offered coffee and invited them to sit. The screeching of chairs on the kitchen floor, the clearing of throats.
“So, Doctor—”
“Like I said, please just call me Paul.”
“Paul, we appreciate you letting us take your wife’s phone and the laptop. We were hoping to find some sign of where she’d gone—a route she’d looked up, maybe, or a flight she’d priced, or a hotel, a car rental—”
“And did you?”
“Nothing like that. But we did find a solid two hours of frenzied Internet searching from the very early hours of Sunday morning.”
“What was she searching for?”
Papers rustled as Detective Bryant began to read. “‘Domestic violence support.’ ‘Domestic violence assistance.’ ‘Domestic violence shelter, Dayton.’ ‘Domestic violence safe housing, Dayton.’ ‘Ending an abusive relationship.’ ‘Escaping an abuser.’”
Clara’s hand flew to her mouth before she could stop herself.
“I know, right?” Hallie said quietly, filling the stunned silence that had evidently fallen over Paul’s kitchen at that moment as well. “I had to look it up, but it means—”
Clara raised a finger, and Hallie fell silent.
It was Detective Marks’s voice that chimed in next. “Do you have any idea why she might have been searching for those kinds of resources, Doctor … Paul?”
“I really don’t. It must have been … well, this was after she got home from the girls’ night at our neighbor’s?”
“Correct. Not long after.”
“One of them must be in trouble. She must’ve been trying to see how she could help.”
“That’s one explanation,” Detective Marks said.
“You’re not suggesting I ever laid a finger on her? That’s ridiculous.”
“We’re not suggesting it, no,” Detective Bryant said quickly. “Would you say she knows these neighbor women very well? They’re close friends?”
“She’s closest to Clara Tiffin, next door.” Clara stiffened. “They’re pretty good friends, I guess—I don’t know if I’d say close. The rest, I don’t think she knows them all that well.”
“So it would be very caring of her to stay up until three A.M. frantically searching the Internet out of concern for one of them.”
“Maybe she was looking on behalf of someone else she knows. Someone at work, or the school … Maybe she couldn’t sleep. Maybe she got the idea to write a novel about a domestic violence survivor. How should I know? We’ve been separated for months.”
“Does your wife aspire to write fiction?”
“You tell me. You seem to know more about her than I do.”
“Well, her computer history is wiped mostly clean, which seems a bit odd.” Detective Bryant coughed. “Antioch was nice enough to let us have access to her work machine, and interestingly, it looks like most of her personal activity was done there. Personal emails, online shopping, the occasional guest blog post for the school … Can you think of a reason for that?”
“She was bored at work?”
“That’s one explanation,” Detective Marks repeated.
“Back when you were living here, did you do a lot of checking up on your wife’s Internet usage? Look at the history, see where she’d been, anything like that?”
“I might have happened to see it sometimes, but I wouldn’t say I checked up on her.”
“Well, even now that you’re separated, you do text her an awful lot. Texts that some might classify as checking up on someone.”
“Checking in, maybe. We’re still married. We have kids together.”
“An outsider might observe that you text her much more than she texts you.”
“I … my work schedule is irregular, and when I’m at the hospital, I usually can’t talk. It cuts down on phone tag if I take the lead on communications.”
“The sheer volume of texts, some people might find it overwhelming. Oppressive, even.”
Paul said nothing.
“Do you still love your wife?”
His sigh was audible. “Our marriage is over.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“If you want to know the truth,” he said, his voice turning cold, “I’m not sure I ever really did. I felt sorry for her. She’d been widowed young, and there she was, saddled with twin babies, totally overwhelmed, and … I guess I thought I could ride in on my horse and help the damsel in distress. Sweep her off her feet. Be that guy.”
“Do you think your wife thought of herself as saddled with the twins?” Detective Marks cut in. Clara couldn’t help but admire the way she was interjecting doubts with casual precision. Suddenly, her relative silence during Clara’s own intervi
ew didn’t seem like a bad thing.
“My word, not hers.”
“So you felt saddled by them.”
Frustration was almost audible in the beat that followed. “It was the wrong word, okay? My point is, I think I got caught up in playing Prince Charming. But it wasn’t a fairy tale. It was a mistake. I was sort of taken in by her, I guess.”
“And when you realized it was a mistake, that’s when you decided to separate?” Detective Bryant again.
“You know how relationships are. They don’t just end one day. Things kind of accumulate.”
“Did it make you angry, the realization that she had ‘taken you in’?”
“Angry? At myself, maybe. Not at her—not then, anyway. Do you think it was fair, her keeping all that money in separate savings, untouched—for the kids, she said—while I spent all mine sustaining our lifestyle—the mortgage, the memberships, those astronomical day care bills? If that was your wife, you wouldn’t feel a little taken advantage of?”
“Well, if we’re being fair, Kristin did work too, though her salary was smaller than yours,” Detective Marks said.
Yes, Clara had definitely misjudged her.
“We’ve already gone over this.” Detective Bryant’s voice had taken on an air of calm and patience, as if he hoped it might permeate the room. “We have your statement on the life insurance as a possible motive, and we’re looking into it.”
Paul coughed. “Am I a suspect or something? Do you have reason to think something happened to Kristin and the kids?”
“No reason. Of course, we also have no forensics—”
“I told you, I just don’t feel right about letting you tear the place apart. I think of it as her house now.”
“Even though your name is the only one on the mortgage? Even though you’ve basically moved back in?”
“I’m just waiting for them to come back! Where else would I wait? I don’t know what to do with myself!” There was a loud noise, the sound of maybe his hands slapping down onto the wooden kitchen table, and Clara and Hallie both jumped.
“Understandable.” Detective Bryant’s voice was calmer than ever. “And we are just trying to make some sense of this Internet search. Also understandable, I’m sure you’d agree, given the fact that it’s the last thing she did before she disappeared.”
Not That I Could Tell: A Novel Page 8
