Where We Went Wrong

by Andi Holloway

  Maybe Ella has seen what you have so far failed to acknowledge, recognizing a deeper connection when Deon came to my aid in the church. Maybe he’s said something he shouldn’t have. Maybe she’s an insightful guesser, but I won’t confirm any of this, particularly not if it means she feels vindicated.

  “Is the pistol registered?” I can’t imagine who in their right mind vouched for this unhinged person’s permit, but I need to know who it might trace back to, if it’s found.

  “Inherited.” Unlicensed means likely to translate to criminal possession of a firearm, a possible Class-E felony under New York State law, hence why she enlisted Deon’s help rather than file an official report. It also likely explains why Deon didn’t tell me any of this. I’m practically speechless that Ella has, and any plans I had of turning her in end here. Even if Deon has betrayed me, I am loyal to a fault. “I never did get it back,” she says. “I warned Bert about Matthew, about the threats against him and the gun, and he told me it was handled.” Funny, you said the same thing about her. “I would have shown up on your doorstep if I thought otherwise. I’m sorry I didn’t. I should have suspected what Bert might have been capable of.”

  I don’t believe for a second that Ella cared whether you lived or died, so much as I believe she didn’t want your only son to end up behind bars for killing you. The irony isn’t lost on me that on the night of his murder, Matthew brought a gun to a knife fight.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  IT’S HARD TO ACCEPT that it took Matthew’s death for Ella and me to talk, and more difficult, still, to think what might’ve changed, for him in particular, had we done so sooner. You have been quick to blame your divorce for so many things over the years, but it’s how you handled it that’s rendered it so destructive.

  Walking back into our house, there isn’t a single inch of this place that doesn’t remind me of the distance between us, of lies you’ve told and fights with or over Matthew; places where other women have been in my absence. Where Deon has been in yours.

  Four thousand square feet has never felt so small, and the emotional vacuum is suffocating. Yet, again, I have to confront you.

  I stand in your office doorway, with you sitting at the desk you’ve been recently chained to, and say, “Tell me about Hannah.”

  You continue typing, as though you don’t have to answer a question you won’t acknowledge.

  “Bert, why were you and Matthew fighting over her the night he died?” To pre-empt you telling me you weren’t, I add, “Ella overheard you.” I name-drop my source to prove how far I have gone in order to corner you.

  You spin your office chair around to face me, your expression not one of shock but of resignation. Like this conversation had to happen sooner or later. You know where I’ve been and who I’ve been talking to, and maybe this once are giving me due credit for how good I am at unraveling mysteries.

  “Harper, I—”

  “Explain.” I won’t detail the reasons you should, threaten you with telling Vern, or scold you for your secrecy to this point, but I won’t be cast aside, either. You will answer me, completely and to my satisfaction.

  You turn back to your desk, rooting through the stack of folders and notebooks for an envelope tucked between research materials, near the bottom and so thin I wouldn’t have seen it at a glance. You pry the tabs open, take the bound papers from inside, and hand them to me.

  Several pages of professionally prepared legalese detail the finer points of some contract I know nothing about. I flip to a witnessed and notarized signature page at the back then stop everything, maybe even breathing, for the better part of a few seconds. “You found her?”

  I go back through to make sure I understand exactly what I’m holding. It’s a release pertaining to a book about, of all things, Hannah Harman. It’s not fiction but fact, and the kicker is that, after all these years, she’s alive.

  “Technically, she was never lost.” You sigh, apparently relieved by the admission. “She’s been here the whole time, and this book”—you point to the release—“is what Matthew was so upset over. He didn’t want me writing it.”

  “I don’t understand.” Why have you lied to me or the police, if the answer is this simple?

  “Hannah came to me,” you say. “Before you judge me, know that.” You’re already defensive, which doesn’t bode well. “She wanted her story told. Matthew didn’t. You know how he was: overprotective.”

  It’s not a word I’d have used to describe him, but I’m curious where this is headed. “Of Hannah?” I can’t imagine Matthew wanting anything more than for the world to know he wasn’t a murderer. Hell, if I were him, I’d shout it from the rooftops. Take out newspaper ads. Hire a skywriter.

  “Of Ansley.”

  “What do you mean?” You’re all over the place, making associations my brain isn’t connecting.

  “Ansley Davis is Hannah Harman.”

  “What?”

  “Ansley Davis is Hannah Harman.” You repeat yourself, overly enunciating, but it wasn’t that I didn’t hear you. I just can’t believe the words coming out of your mouth.

  “I was working on a true-crime story about her.” You use the past tense, as if you’ve quit.

  “Was?”

  “I never got the chance to tell him this, but after some things Matthew said about Jacob and what he went through, I decided, instead of finishing Hannah’s story, to turn in another novel I had been working on.”

  No wonder Tim’s mad. Breach of contract makes perfect sense since you tried to swap one project for another, as if these things were interchangeable. Nothing could replace something as salacious as the story of the girl returned from oblivion following the death of the boy who supposedly killed her.

  Bells, alarms, and whistles go off. A tickertape parade in my head celebrates the obvious, and I feel like a moron for waiting this long to confront you. “That’s why you’ve been paying her?” A thousand dollars a time, stipends in exchange for access to information—not sex.

  “Of course, that’s why I’ve been paying her.” You pull a face. “What did you think?”

  You don’t even want to know, but the relief is overwhelming. Matthew is innocent, and you’re not being blackmailed, and Ansley isn’t an extortionist, and for the first time in weeks I can actually breathe. These answers to Vern’s questions will hold him off. You paid Ansley for a story, and the secrecy is likely a condition of your contract. Your publisher wants to capitalize on the element of surprise, and holy crap! Even the historical payoffs from Marjorie to Claire were legitimate, money for the care of her daughter, though I can’t imagine how, as a marital refugee with a felon for a husband, Marjorie afforded Briarwood.

  I wait for you to call me out on how I learned you’ve been paying Ansley anything, but you don’t, acting as if I might have known about the Key Bank account all along. In your mind, maybe that’s true. I’m afraid what else you’ve convinced yourself of.

  “Bert, this is crazy,” I say, because even as I’m fitting things together I see potential. Promise. We are going to be okay. “All this time she was here, in this house. I mean who would believe that?”

  And people will ask how we didn’t realize this, though the answer is simple. We never knew Hannah. Sure, we saw pictures and missing-person posters, but Hannah was part of Matthew’s life with Ella. Ansley didn’t appear in ours until high school, and a teenage girl looks far different from an eight-year-old.

  “Matthew knew and didn’t say anything?” Not even to clear his name? I respect this as much as I am saddened by it because while I am aware loyalty exists in the world, I rarely see evidence of it, and never to this extent.

  “From the beginning,” you say.

  “Jesus.” I rub my hands over my face, trying to organize the billion emerging questions into some logical order. “How long have you known for?”

  I brace for the answer, so I’m not at all surprised when you say, “Two years.”

  “The exact time
Matthew left us.”

  “Hannah came to me because with Claire sick, she needed the money. Claire was against it, and Matthew said I was being opportunistic.”

  I don’t necessarily disagree. There’s a fine line between an inspired character and an overly inspired one. Matthew was a child when you wrote about him, and that he was your child gave you the impression his life was fair game to capitalize upon. The results were catastrophic, so I can’t blame him for being defensive. “You don’t see how he might have had a point?”

  “Hannah needed help. This wasn’t completely selfish of me.”

  Maybe not, but it wasn’t entirely professional, either. A quick review of the paperwork shows a handful of unusual terms, not the least of which was the regularly scheduled paycheck Hannah had been collecting in the months leading to and after Claire’s eventual death.

  I don’t want to bring up finances, given the other doors the subject opens, but Vern showed me an account with fifty thousand dollars. I can’t begin to guess where it came from, so I ask, “Where did you get the money to pay her?”

  “Tim,” you say. “He extended me a personal loan because he sees the potential.” Because he’s independently wealthy but greedy.

  “He wanted this book written as badly as I wanted to be the one to write it. Worse, maybe.”

  I can’t blame him. Fifteen percent of the royalties on this would be attractive to anyone, though I fear your arrangement with him might be steeper than that. Hannah’s return isn’t only book fodder, but a story ripe for television and film. This could be the biggest break of your career—of our lives—and suddenly you’re much more attractive than the sleaze Ella portrayed. Her words carry less weight. She appears jealous.

  “Then you need to give it to him.” Not just because we’re broke, which you still don’t know, or because you’re being asked to return your advance. I mean those things, but to add a fifty-thousand-dollar repayment of the seed money Tim floated you, even if we returned what’s left in the account, we’re destitute and probably open to a civil suit.

  “Matthew was right,” you say. “I shouldn’t have agreed to this in the first place. I mean, you’ve seen Hannah, right? At the church?”

  I thought she was Ansley at the time, but I saw her. And only in hindsight do the text messages that led me to the Holiday Inn make sense. H. is for Hannah. I’m still not sure what the urgent situation was, though I suspect a pressing financial issue that will be the least of your problems if you back out of this now. “I did, and I can understand why you’d be conflicted, but it’s too late to take the past into consideration. You put in the work, right? The manuscript you were supposed to have delivered exists?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then finish. Whatever you’re worried might happen to Hannah, I’m sure she’s considered it.”

  “You were the reason I went to fiction! You said writing crime made me ‘exploitative.’”

  And morally bankrupt.

  I can be a handful, but I said that before we were tens of thousands of dollars in the hole, and explaining that now makes me the bigger asshole. I’d remind you that your most damaging work, the book that destroyed your relationship with Matthew, is technically fiction, but I’m not sure that helps my case. As much as I’d rather not, I have to go to the one irrefutable fact that puts this project back on the table, the thing with which you cannot argue. “We don’t have the money to pay back the advance,” I say.

  Not the money for Tim, either. We’re in deep.

  Regardless of morality or concern for Hannah’s well-being, the practical matter exists. It’s too late for second-guessing this sold project. You signed a contract, as did Hannah, and all I can be is supportive. I’ll show you the error of your ways and convince you to get back on-track. Our lives, and your freedom, depend on it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “LET ME READ IT.” I hold out my hand for the manuscript that belongs to me as much as to you, assuming that suffering on something’s behalf determines ownership.

  “No.” You slip the contract and signed legal release back inside the manila folder and bury it beneath the stack of other, less-important papers.

  I’m not sure who you’re hiding them from at this point. “Didn’t you hear what I said? We can’t return the advance.”

  “I don’t care.” You’ve made up your mind, which is a difficult thing to change. Impossible, almost, because among your myriad unpleasant personality traits, stubbornness stands out as a front-runner.

  “I’m not asking you to turn the book in yet, only to let me take a pass at it.” I’ll be the first reader I have always been, and will make this great book even better. I’ll get it fit to print.

  “It’s not ready,” you say. “There are holes.”

  Plot holes, I can work with. An incomplete manuscript, I cannot. “We’ll make it ready.” Not all your work has to be ruinous, and if you had listened to me sooner none of it would have been.

  “I told Tim I wouldn’t.”

  You’ve told Tim a lot of things over the years that have turned out not to be true. “Tell him you’ve changed your mind. You owe him tens of thousands of dollars we don’t have, and I hate to remind you of this, but we might be in the market for a criminal defense attorney. Those aren’t cheap.”

  “We’re not lawyering up.”

  You think hiring a lawyer makes you look guilty rather than smart, and the minute those cuffs close around your wrists, assuming they do, I’m making the call you have so far refused to make. “We’re not getting out of this heap of debt, either. What do you owe? A hundred thousand to the publisher? Fifty to Tim?”

  You shake your head. “Two for the advance, and fifty plus interest.”

  “Two-fifty.” I feel sick. It doesn’t seem possible that this much money has gone into and back out of our accounts, nor that we can ever pay it back. Not with you refusing to write. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Bert.” Plus legal fees. “Call Tim,” I insist. “Tell him you’re sorry, that you were wrong, and that I’m helping you. We’ll get this manuscript in shape, and the publisher won’t have to shell out to sue you. Everyone wins.”

  “We’re past that point.”

  “Your son was murdered, for Christ’s sake. If that doesn’t evoke sympathy and understanding, I don’t know what will.”

  “That’s low, even for you.”

  Be that as it may, Matthew’s death changed more than the illusion of freedom I had taken for granted to that point. It forced me to take a hard look at our lives, your career and mine, and see where things went so far off-track. “All I’m saying is that this isn’t beyond negotiation at this point. It’s not too late, and we need this. Hannah needs this.” 20/20, Investigation Discovery, and Dateline will be falling over themselves for exclusives. “How long do you think she can hold onto her home, now that you’ve stopped paying her?” While Claire isn’t Hannah’s biological mother, their connection is undeniable and convincing enough that I never doubted them for a minute. I think of the tended gardens, how obviously important they are to Hannah, and am saddened at the thought of a for sale sign in her yard.

  You steal a glance at that photo of Matthew and me on the scrambler in better days.

  “Matthew was wrong,” I say. “And if you’re not doing this for us or her, do it for him, for everyone who thought an eight-year-old boy killed and dumped his best friend’s body where it would never be found. Hannah’s return exonerates him, Bert. Don’t we owe him that?”

  I don’t believe we owe him a thing, even now, but I know what you need to hear. You’ve always loved Matthew more than you let on and me probably less so.

  “Okay,” you say.

  I’m not sure what you’re giving in to, the manuscript review and markup or the bigger picture: you turning the finished product in. “Okay?” No matter how compelling an argument I’ve presented, I can’t believe you’ve agreed.

  “Okay, let’s finish this. We’ll decide what to do wi
th it after it’s done.”

  You hand me a thumb drive, upon which sits a file simply called H.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  SIX HOURS. THAT’S HOW long it takes me to read your manuscript. I form an opinion of it in fewer than ten minutes and unfortunately the impression sticks.

  By the third chapter, I’m wondering if your decision to quit this project has something to do with the fact that the story, which by all rights should be unputdownable, reads as uninspired and incomplete of facts. It sounds like a regurgitation of every news story that came before it, only Hannah’s alive in the end.

  You claimed gaps in the information, but I couldn’t have imagined how many. I hand you back the thumb drive, and you stare at it with your head down. You know. Of course, you do. Deep down, authors realize when what they’ve written has merit or not.

  I lean against the desk, crossing my arms with a sigh. How do I tell you what an awful job you’ve done with a brilliant premise? We’ve been here before, me criticizing your work and encouraging revision, but never to this extent. You take my disapproval only slightly better than you take Tim’s, which is to say you’ll only accept it after a measure of anger has been expressed and a long silence has passed. After you’ve shut me out completely.

  “There are holes.” I start with a shortcoming to which you’ve already admitted, easing into the news that this isn’t the only problem but one of several.

  “I did say that.”

  “I assumed you meant details Hannah couldn’t and maybe shouldn’t have known about because of her age. What you’ve written reads like she knows almost nothing.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t. That isn’t my fault.” You mimic my cross-armed position. You’re raising your defenses, and I’d back off under other circumstances, but now more than ever I need to be clear. You must understand how far off-track you are.

  “I’m not placing blame. I’m trying to help. Let me see your notes.”