“You’re right. I’m sorry. This isn’t the time. It’s just—I’m in shock. I know you are, too.”
They fell silent. Aubrey pulled out of the parking spot. As usual, there was no traffic downtown—there never was, after six thirty or so. The stoplight at the corner of Briggs Street had been turned to blinking yellow, so Aubrey didn’t even have to stop. The right turn onto Faculty Row came up so fast that she nearly missed it.
“I forgot how close to town you live,” she said.
Griff nodded miserably. Aubrey pulled up in front of his house.
“We’re here,” she said.
The lights were off inside the ugly brown house, and it loomed over the street, hulking in the darkness. When Aubrey opened her door, cold air rushed in, pushing out the warm air from the heater. Griff shrank back into his seat.
“Aren’t you coming?” she said.
“That fucking house,” Griff said. “I hate it. I can’t stand the thought of going back in there.”
Aubrey closed her door again and looked at him. “You know, it’s probably not a bad idea for you to stay somewhere else tonight. Not be alone. I can go upstairs and pack a bag for you if you like,” she said.
“The problem is, I have nowhere to go. Can you believe that? I can’t even afford a hotel room. Griffin Rothenberg, golden boy, homeless. That’s a shocker, huh?” he said, with a bitter laugh.
It hurt her heart to see him like this. “You can come home with me, honey,” she said.
“To your house?”
“Yes.”
He looked up, and their eyes met. Griff’s were bloodshot, but blue as ever in the glow of the street light.
“Aubrey, I appreciate the offer. But I couldn’t stand to see your husband.”
The hatred in his voice felt familiar to Aubrey. It took her a second to realize that Griff felt the same way about Ethan as she did herself, and another to understand that must mean Griff knew. Griff knew about Kate and Ethan’s affair. Jenny had admitted she knew, and now Griff. How many others? Was Aubrey the only fool who hadn’t seen what was right before her eyes? She’d hate herself, except she hated Kate and Ethan more.
“You knew,” she said aloud.
He nodded. “You did, too?”
“I figured it out just recently, but I never said anything to anyone. Ethan doesn’t know I know. Did Kate—”
“Please. I can’t talk about her,” he said.
“Of course. I understand, it’s too upsetting, and you need your strength. We’ll save it until after you’ve had a decent night’s sleep. I thought of someplace I can take you that’s quiet and peaceful. My cabin at the lake. The heat’s off but there’s plenty of dry firewood, and a woodstove.”
“Thank you, that sounds good,” he said.
Griff reached out and squeezed her hand, and Aubrey felt a rush of love. You couldn’t really think of this as a bad night, despite Kate dying and all. In the long run, people who did evil got what they deserved, and everything worked out for the best.
23
When Aubrey called to give Jenny the news about Kate late Sunday night, Jenny grilled her for information. Who found the body? What did the police think? When was the funeral? But all Aubrey could talk about was Griff, Griff, Griff, how worried she was about Griff. Who gave a shit about Griff? What about Kate, their friend, who was dead? Jenny hung up and started to cry. She’d loved Kate once. The wild child with the golden hair, full of chaos and laughter. Kate made life exciting, she made things sparkle. It shouldn’t have come to this.
It was late and the boys were in bed. Jenny went looking for Tim, because she needed someone to comfort her. She knew better, but she did it anyway, hoping. He was sitting in the den, half watching the ball game, a surveyor’s report from a jobsite on his knee. She told him Kate’s body had been pulled from the river.
“The river, huh? Poetic justice,” he said, stony-faced. Then he got up and walked away. She heard him in the kitchen, opening the fridge, and popping a beer, and she felt alone with her sorrow.
Jenny went to her room and slammed the door. She got in bed, pulled the blankets up, and started sobbing. After a while, Tim came in. Jenny rolled over and looked at him with wet eyes, but he turned his back and went into the bathroom to get undressed, something he never did. He was making a point: She would suffer this loss by herself. Tim had never liked Kate. No—that wasn’t strong enough. Tim hated Kate. He’d never forgiven her for whatever role he imagined she’d played in Lucas’s death. He was glad Kate was dead, and he wouldn’t pretend otherwise, not even for Jenny’s sake. Which was crazy when you thought about it, because he had no facts to back him up. Tim didn’t remember a single thing that happened that night at the bridge twenty-two years ago. The doctors had been right. His head injury had wiped his memory of that event, and to this day, it hadn’t returned.
Tim came back into the bedroom, and got into bed with his phone, scrolling through e-mails, ignoring her. The bulk of his body beside her felt as unyielding as a brick wall. Jenny sat up, reached for the box of Kleenex on her bedside table, and blew her nose. She longed to yell at him, to accuse him of heartlessness, of insensitivity, of being a bad husband. But she couldn’t, because she was the one in the wrong. There was a lie at the center of their marriage, a worm in the apple. And it was her fault. Years ago, when she lied to cover up Kate’s crime, Jenny took sides against Tim and his family. She was only eighteen at the time, and the pressure had been intense. To this day, it gave her the shakes to think about that meeting in her mother’s kitchen with Keniston Eastman and his lawyer. A young girl, naïve, up against the sharks of Wall Street—what was she supposed to do? She might have forgiven herself by now, except it wasn’t just the police she lied to. She lied to her own husband. She was still lying to this day.
But if Jenny was truly honest with herself, she would admit that she hadn’t been naïve, not back then, not ever. She got rewarded for her lie year after year. It’s not like Keniston gave her money—nothing so crass as that. He gave her a job out of college. He gave her sterling references and important contacts. And years later, when she was looking to expand Tim’s small family construction company into something bigger and more lucrative, Keniston gave her access to the people at Carlisle who had the power to award contracts. Jenny handled those bids; Tim didn’t know the details, he didn’t even know the basics. Carlisle’s business took Healy Construction from a mom-and-pop concern into a successful company with nearly a hundred employees. Tim never knew that Keniston Eastman played a key role in that. Tim hated the Eastmans, period. If he’d known of Keniston’s role in the contracts, he would never have accepted the work. So Jenny kept Tim in the dark. But she did it for a good reason. She was trying to build the business—for both of them, for their family, for the boys’ futures.
Jenny was just plain better than Tim at planning ahead, at making things happen. Their relationship had started years earlier when Jenny befriended Tim as he struggled to recover from his head injury, and it still retained a bit of that big sister–little brother flavor. Once Tim got better, and went back to school, Jenny would stop in to Shecky’s a couple of times a week to say hi and check up on him. When Tim turned eighteen, she brought him a pint of Jack Daniel’s with a bow on it (she was twenty-one by then, and legal), and they drove out to Dunbar Meadows on a muggy night to celebrate. They got trashed on a blanket under a big yellow moon to the sound of crickets chirping, and made out like crazy. The next day, they pretended it never happened. He came to her graduation and sat with her family, but after Carlisle, Jenny moved to New York. Tim went off to UNH, and they kept in touch only sporadically.
When her father died unexpectedly, about five years after her college graduation, Jenny came home to help her mother sell the hardware store. It was supposed to be temporary. But one night, bored and casting around for something to do, Jenny dialed Tim’s number for the first time in a long time. Tim was not long out of college then, working for his dad’s constructio
n company as a job foreman, learning the ropes. When Jenny saw him that first night, outside the movie theater on College Street, she actually said “wow” out loud. Maybe it was all that physical labor. He was taller and bigger and tan from the sun. He was handsome. They went to Shecky’s for a burger for old times’ sake, and, sitting opposite Tim in the booth, Jenny realized that she’d never felt as comfortable with any other guy. In that moment, she knew what she wanted, and she wanted Tim Healy. She never stopped to think that there was a lie between them that could never be made right.
Tim switched off his bedside lamp without saying a word. Usually they kissed good night, but not this time.
“Good night,” she said tentatively. But he didn’t reply.
Jenny’s stomach hurt, and she tossed and turned. For a long time, Tim had been able to put Lucas’s death out of his mind, but with Kate back in Belle River, he couldn’t do it anymore. It ate away at him. That’s why Jenny cared so much about keeping the secret buried. Not because the scandal would rock her political career, or imperil their business, although those things mattered to her a great deal. Her biggest worry was for her marriage. Jenny would love nothing better than to come clean and fix things. But how could she, when she’d been lying to Tim for so many years?
With Kate dead now, the problem should go away. That would be a relief.
24
Owen Rizzo had handled plenty of murder cases, but never one where he knew the victim personally. He hadn’t known Maggie Price long or known her well—known Kate Eastman, that is. But the intense evening they spent together had stayed with him to the point where he wasn’t entirely objective when it came to working her case. It didn’t matter, though. He could recognize and make allowances for his own bias. Owen was a better investigator blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back than any of the men who worked for him. But they might not see it that way, and he didn’t need them questioning his judgment, so he was careful not to let slip that he had a personal interest in the case. Especially given how personal his interest was. In the few short hours they spent together, Kate had gotten under his skin.
His task this Monday morning was to rally his troops, such as they were, and they weren’t much. These guys were better at finding lost dogs than solving crimes. But you went to war with the troops you had, and if the troops were weak, then the commander better be strong. For starters, Owen needed to make them understand that this was indeed a murder case. The forensic evidence left room for doubt—though not really, not if you knew what you were looking for. A woman might fall into a river by accident, or she might decide to end her life and jump of her own accord. Then again, somebody might bludgeon her with a rock and throw her lifeless body into the water. Those three scenarios might produce similar-looking head injuries, so that the local coroner (who, Owen learned to his shock, hadn’t autopsied a single murder victim in his entire career) couldn’t tell the difference. Owen had appropriated money from an overtime fund to pay an independent expert to review Kate’s autopsy report. (That was his prerogative as chief, and he saw no need to run that decision by anyone.) He was expecting a fax any minute that would back up his strong feeling that Kate didn’t kill herself, or carelessly fall into the Belle, but rather that somebody violently ended her life. Like maybe that lying drunkard of a husband of hers, whom Owen had the pleasure of meeting yesterday in the flesh. The guy clearly hadn’t remembered him from that night at the bar, but Owen remembered him all right.
Owen walked into the conference room at nine on the dot on Monday to find his three male officers lounging around shooting the breeze and eating doughnuts from a box that he’d paid for out of his own pocket. (He wasn’t above using food to get their attention.) His lone female detective, Keisha Charles, was out working leads already, as she should be. She was the only one he trusted. But then, he’d hired her himself, so he’d have at least one officer familiar with modern investigative techniques. Keisha was supremely qualified—graduated from Carlisle in criminal justice, aced the state police training, got picked to go to Quantico for extra training with the FBI. She also happened to be the daughter of a fine narcotics detective from the Bronx who, yes, all right, happened to be a good friend of Owen’s. The hire hadn’t sat well with the rest of the department, since it used money that had previously been allocated for a secretarial position. As far as he was concerned, they could type their own damn reports. And if Pam What’s-her-name lost her job—well, no harm, no foul. Rob Womack had gone behind Owen’s back and spoken to the mayor about that decision. When Owen made clear he wouldn’t brook any interference or second-guessing, the mayor wisely solved the problem by hooking Pam up with another position, which actually paid her more. So there was really nothing to complain about, and they should let it go already.
As Owen took the seat at the head of the table, Gene Stevens shoved the Dunkin’ Donuts box across to him.
“Saved you the last cruller at grave risk to my own safety, Chief. You don’t ever want to come between this guy and a doughnut,” Gene said, pointing at Marv Pelletier, who laughed so hard his beer belly jiggled. They were Mutt and Jeff, those two, Marv short and round and Gene tall and spare, and they gloried in the foolish chitchat.
“Look who’s talking. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him, but he ate half the box,” Marv said.
“What’s this about, Chief?” Rob Womack asked. “We heard you caught a floater last night. Is that true?”
“Can we please not refer to her in a disrespectful manner?” Owen said.
“Sorry,” Womack said, his jaw setting. “A her, you say? So it’s a girl, then?”
“A woman. Yes.”
“We don’t get too many females jumping,” Gene said.
“Who says she jumped?” Owen said.
All three of them looked at him with surprised expressions.
“Come on, get real, Chief,” Womack said.
There they went, leaping to conclusions already. When Owen originally pondered this move, he’d worried that he or the kids wouldn’t like the town, or that he’d find the job boring. None of that turned out to be true. Instead the problem was the friction between him and the men—only the men; Keisha was great—under his command. He simply couldn’t get them to conform to his standards for what good police work looked like. Of his four full-time, non-traffic-patrol officers, Marv Pelletier and Gene Stevens were the biggest pains in his butt. They spent their time carping about how the former chief ran things better and how the town and the department were going to hell. Worst of all, they were competent with paperwork but lax with actually getting their butts on the streets, which meant they were either lazy, or cowards. Fortunately they were both near retirement age. This guy Rob presented the opposite problem. Rob was young and ambitious, a musclehead type with a starched uniform and a spic-and-span cruiser who’d been passed over for the chief’s job when they hired Owen. He was borderline insubordinate, and regularly told Owen how they did things around here rather than doing what he was told. None of this was a great setup for working an important case, a case Owen cared about more perhaps than any other in his career.
“She jumped, Chief, I guarantee it,” Rob said. “The kids love to jump off the old railroad bridge. They do it on a dare, and they don’t always come back up.”
“Not too many girls do it, though,” Gene said. “Girls are too smart for that shit.”
“Local girl, or Carlisle?” Marv asked.
“She wasn’t a girl.” Owen flipped open the case file. “Victim is Katherine Elizabeth Eastman, aged forty, Nineteen Dunsmore Street—”
“Faculty Row,” Marv and Gene said simultaneously.
“What?” Owen asked.
“Nobody calls it Dunsmore Street, it’s Faculty Row,” Marv said. “Used to be, the college actually owned the houses and they’d give ’em to the profs as part of their compensation package. Now they’re all private, but they’re still orange on the inside. Orange being the Carlisle color, see?”
“Yes, I know that, Marv,” Owen said.
“So what’s her Carlisle connection?” Rob asked.
“I don’t know that she has one,” Owen said.
Owen hadn’t forgotten Kate telling him in the bar on that rainy night how she’d disappointed her father by not graduating from Carlisle. But if he repeated that, his officers would know he’d met her.
“No Carlisle connection?” Marv said.
“Who knows?” Owen replied. “That’s not the question that should leap to mind when you respond to the scene of a death.”
“Around here, it should be,” Marv said. “Nineteen Dunsmore. Keniston Eastman owns that place, if I’m not mistaken. The Eastmans are a big Carlisle family, Chief, one of the biggest. You got your Eastman Commons. Your Eastman Field House. The Eastman Wing at the hospital. You don’t want to mess with that family without talking to the general counsel’s office first.”
“General counsel of what?”
Marv and Gene looked at each other like, Who the hell is this guy?
“Of the college,” Marv said. “You know if we ever arrest a Carlisle kid, we give the GC a heads-up as a courtesy, right?”
“Chief Dudley mentioned that. I couldn’t believe it was true.”
“Oh, it’s true. I know you got your pride, Chief, but trust me. It’s not worth pissing off the college just to mark your territory. If you’re telling me you pulled a Carlisle kid from the river, that’s huge. You’d better call the mayor, too. She doesn’t like to get blindsided.”
Owen made a dismissive gesture. He would call the mayor in his own good time.
“Wait a minute, Kate Eastman,” Rob Womack said, and slapped the table.
Owen turned to Rob. “You know her?”
“Kate Eastman was the girl who was with Lucas Arsenault the night he died, am I right?” Rob said.
“With who?” Owen said.
“Local kid,” Marv said. “Jumped off the bridge in the off season, as I recall, just like this female jumper you got here. It was a big to-do when he died. Nobody wanted to believe a local boy would be that stupid.”
It's Always the Husband Page 21
