Time seems to slow down as my adrenaline speeds up. It’s nearly an hour before she calls, and there are a couple times I almost ruin it all by going up and knocking to make sure she’s okay.
“Goddamn it. You scared me!” I shout, once her face pops up on my phone.
She shushes me immediately. I don’t have time for the details on how it all unfolded, but I see Joe’s body on a leather sofa behind her. His arm hangs limp, knuckles brushing the floor. His mouth hangs open like he’s about to scream, but he’s asleep with his head tilted back on a pillow, and an empty drink sits on a coaster on the coffee table in front of him. She turns the phone so I can see the laptop. She quickly punches in his birth date password, and she’s in. Just like that.
First, she noses around a bit in the files on the desktop. Mostly work stuff. She clicks on something that displays dozens of bondage porn images.
“Oh my God,” she yelps, looking away and clicking blindly to open to a different page.
“Just try Facebook.” I repeat Valerie’s full name and have her scroll through his messenger. It’s evident, as she scrolls down his recent messages, that he’s having multiple intimate conversations with a number of women. She doesn’t seem fazed by this. She’s used to it, I guess. It appears that he’s having a sexual relationship with a dozen women.
When she opens the chat between Valerie and Joe, a long history of communication reveals itself. I tell Lacy to start at the very first date they spoke. It was over two years earlier. He thanks her for accepting his friend request and asks if she remembers him from the Special Olympics Young Athletes event in New Orleans the week before, and he sends her a few photos from the event he thought she’d like to have. There, she is pictured with her wheelchair-bound daughter who proudly holds a basketball in one hand and a medal, hanging from a yellow ribbon around her neck, in the other.
Valerie says that of course she remembers him, and thanks him for the photos and his volunteering with special needs kids.
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter.
“What?” Lacy asks, she doesn’t know what I have just put together. This is what he does. This is why he volunteers, so he can reel them in by playing the selfless humanitarian card. Even Lacy says that’s how he got her interested, the attention he paid to Ronny Lee.
“Nothing, just take photos of all this with your phone.”
She does and as she continues reading down the thread of communication, I see it’s eight months later before they make contact again. Her daughter passed away due to complications from her condition, and he just wanted to “reach out to give his condolences.” It moved slowly, the bond between the two of them. It was weeks before he talked her into meeting him for a drink, and slowly, the relationship became sexual, as evident in the nude photos exchanged.
Lacy takes the screenshots. It’s what I came for, though a sadness starts to well up somewhere deep inside me for Valerie, and even though she is going to great lengths to ruin my life, I feel an overwhelming sense of compassion for her. She was, ultimately, preyed upon herself.
Beyond the computer screen where Lacy has propped the phone for me to see, I have an obscured view of Joe’s outstretched legs on the couch. As Lacy exits all the tabs she’s opened and closes the laptop, I get a better look at him, and suddenly, he moves. He pulls his knees up and lies on his side, and then reaches his hand around near the coffee table as if feeling for something.
“Go! Get out of there. Now!”
Lacy fumbles, trying to grab her things and run out in a panic. Our call cuts out. I watch the stairs on the other side of the glass door in the entryway and wait to see her feet meeting that sixth stair and run out to me. Her footfalls don’t appear. It should only take seconds before I see her materialize from his second-floor apartment, but she’s not there. I can’t call the police. I have to go up there. The gun I kept in my purse to meet Valerie is safe back in its lockbox at home. I hadn’t even thought about needing it. I should have. But we’re not going to shoot a cop. I should have thought of that! Shit!
As I stand outside the building a moment, a tingling whispers through my body, a helpless hollowness keeps me frozen in place. Just before I kick the rolled-up paper out of the way and go in, she is running down the stairs, two at a time, and I turn to run behind her as she whizzes past and we leap into my car and drive away.
“What the hell! What happened?”
“I’m sorry!” she says, an almost-smile on her face, but I’m holding my heart with one hand as I grip the steering wheel with the other, dramatically, waiting for my pulse to slow and my hands to stop shaking.
“God. I thought you were dead!”
“I know, I’m sorry, but he was just turning over. From what you told me about that drug, he wouldn’t even be close to waking up, so I still had to get to the date of the murder and see if they spoke around then.”
“Did they? What did you see?” I ask in disbelief.
She turns her phone to show me the photo of the conversation. That morning at 10:43 a.m., she says, see you tonight, with a kiss emoji. He writes back, is the plan still to meet before, around six? All I can think about as I read this is how the police think the murder took place a couple hours before the anonymous call—my call—at around 9 p.m. that night. Why were they meeting before the charity event if they’d see each other there?
If you’re still sure, she replies. It will only give us an hour or so, and he answers, That’s enough time. See you then.
I release the breath I’ve been holding and shake my head.
“Can you send me all of these?” I ask, and Lacy forwards all of the messages to me as I drive her back to her car. I promise to let her know what comes of it. There must be a way to get it in front of Joe’s superior and frame it in a way that casts undeniable doubt on his character for not disclosing that he’s in a romantic relationship with the victim’s wife. I drive home, almost giddy, armed with this new power, but then when I pull into the drive, I see that Collin is still sitting in the kitchen, his head slumped low. He’s moved to the table, and the whiskey bottle sits half-empty next to him.
I hesitate before I quietly open the garage door that leads into the kitchen and put my things down. He lifts his head from his hands, his bloodshot eyes, rinsed with tears, meet mine.
“So where did you really go tonight?”
29
I DON’T TURN THE LIGHT ON. Only a slice of moonlight illuminates the kitchen, faintly.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“It’s like you’ve been lying for so long, you don’t even know how to tell the truth anymore.” He doesn’t look at me when he speaks.
My resentment wrestles with my guilt as I feel the sting of this accusation. It doesn’t matter that he’s right, I still feel irrationally angry that he’s saying this to me.
“I was with Lacy.”
“So, you’re not having another affair, then?” He says it flatly, as if we’ve already argued about the subject for days and he has no fight left.
“What? No! Collin, wha—”
“I want to save you from whatever ridiculous excuse you’re about to make because it’s just embarrassing for both of us.”
At this, I sit. I slink slowly into the chair across the table from him.
“How did you know?” I whisper.
“I’ve known all along.” There is a long silence, then he continues. “The night the kids FaceTimed you and you were late getting home. That’s when I knew.”
“How?” My voice breaks a little and my face reddens with shame.
“We thought we’d surprise you and come up to the bookstore when your group was ending.” He pauses, closes his eyes a moment. “I saw you. In your car, in the parking lot. At first, I almost pulled up next to you so the kids could see if you wanted to come to dinner, see, we were running late and figured your group might be finishing
. But something about the way you looked, so disoriented, told me not to stop, not to let them see.” He looks at the ground while he speaks. What I wouldn’t give if he’d have stopped that night. I would have made an excuse and maybe said the rest of the group had left early. Maybe it would have been the scare I needed—to be so close to being caught that I wouldn’t have done anything wrong.
“Collin, I...”
But he continues, not wanting me to speak yet.
“The kids were glued to their phones, so I followed to see where you were going. I saw you walk into the woods. There’s a path to that rented mansion. It really didn’t take much to find out who lives in the place.” He fills the empty glass in front of him. He doesn’t offer it to me, but I pull it toward me. I hold it, looking down, shamefully, into it. He continues.
“I looked at your phone one night while you were sleeping.” I exhale audibly when I hear this.
“You searched his name a hundred times. You kept his book poorly hidden. You acted like a completely different person, secretive and paranoid. Did you really not notice how strange you came off?” He spits the last part in a loud whisper because he can’t yell—the kids are sleeping—then he stands, abruptly, and twists his body away from me. He leans both arms, elbows locked, against the edge of the counter and hangs his head between them. Saying that I’m sorry feels so far from being enough.
“Why didn’t you say anything before now? You seemed happy, normal. You never acted different...I...”
“One of us had to! I thought it would stop. I gave you the benefit of the doubt because I ruined your life, or so it feels like half the time. You’re the one who didn’t get the career you wanted.”
“That was my choice,” I start to say, but he doesn’t hear me, he’s talking to his hands, shaking his head.
“I feel guilty for all you have to handle with Ben and my mom. What you gave up. I could see where maybe someone like him might be exciting, so I made it my job to love you through it. To trust you to do the right thing and not let it destroy us. But you didn’t stop.”
I walk over to him in the darkness and try to touch his shoulder, but he pulls away from me and moves to the other side of the kitchen island. We stare at one another across it.
“I’m so sorry. I’m...it was such a mistake, and there is nothing I can say to you to justify it. I know you must hate me.”
“Well, maybe you should try.”
“What?”
“Maybe the least you could do is try...to justify it. Explain why you would do this to me—to us.”
Tears flood my eyes, and I know the last thing he wants is to have to comfort me, and the last thing I want is pity, but I can’t control them.
“I was weak and so, so fucking stupid. I don’t know why. I can’t believe it was really me that did it, that allowed it to go so far, and I don’t expect you to ever trust me again. Or forgive me, but I am more sorry than you’ll ever know. And I love you, and it killed me that I knew I was hurting you even though that sounds so selfish and contradictory, I know, but I do love you.” I sob uncontrollably.
He doesn’t move from the other side of the kitchen island. He runs his hands through his hair and blows out the air from his lungs in an exasperated exhale.
“I paid him a visit, out there in his big rented mansion. That stupid son of a bitch, I went out there to talk to him.”
“No,” I whimper, not wanting to know the rest.
“He welcomed me in, knew who I was right away.”
“Collin, no. Why didn’t you confront me? Why did you go to him?”
But he just continues his story.
“He offered me a drink. He has a pretty good collection of scotch on display in the upstairs study, so we went up, civilized, and shared a scotch on the balcony. He told me he was sorry, but that he was in love with you, and he couldn’t promise me to leave you alone if that’s what I was there about. That if you wanted to stop, that would be up to you.”
“When? Collin. What night did you go over there?” The panic is rising, and my breathing is quick and shallow.
“September 20,” he says in a hushed voice, and then sits back at the table and looks at the wall.
“No. Please God. Noooo. That can’t—that’s not possible! You were here. I left his place. I went to cut things off, I swear to God I did, and came home and you were here, playing with Ben. He was crying, I remember. He hit you in the lip and he was saying he was sorry. I remember exactly. You can’t—no.”
“You assumed he was crying and saying he was sorry because he hit my lip by accident and was upset that he hurt me. I let you believe that. The cut was from Luke punching me. Ben was crying about something else. I don’t even remember, he talked back or something and then got punished and whatever...I was there at Luke’s before you. I went straight after work that day.”
“I don’t believe you. There’s no way this is happening. I thought...”
“It was an accident. Whatever you’re thinking right now, it was an accident. I had no weapon. I went over to talk to him. Let him know I knew and to stop seeing you.”
Now his face streams with tears and an agonizing sob escapes his throat, and I’m doubled over in my chair with my head between my knees, bawling, trying to control my breathing, trying not to scream.
“Oh my God,” I cry. I was so sure it was Joe and Val and that we could finally get out from under this and move on with our lives. The call Val got at the motel could have been anyone, not Joe conspiring with her. The woman Lacy saw Joe with certainly could have been any woman in town. I was so certain of Joe’s guilt, I’d strung all of these happenstances together in my mind and created a narrative. I was so sure. It seems impossible that Joe really was just doing his job and following real leads. He’s just having an affair with Val like he is with everyone else in town. They were just meeting before a charity event, probably for dinner, quick sex. My head floats, dizzy and airy, and I’m nearly hyperventilating. Collin tells me the rest through tears and the details ground me again, force me to breathe in and out, controlled, slowly. The kids can’t hear this. We need to be careful.
“After he said that he refused to leave you alone, he said you were actually thinking of going away with him to Italy, that you loved him and he was sorry, but I’d just have to deal with reality. I threw my scotch in his face.” He stands, paces, then leans against the wall and looks at his feet.
“Jesus.” I gaze at the ceiling and breathe in short spurts, in through my nose and out through an exaggerated O shape I make with my mouth. I know the scotch collection he’s referring to, and next to it, the balcony overlooking the pool. It’s impossible to imagine them out there together. They exist in two completely separate worlds in my mind.
“He punched me after I threw the drink and told me to get out. We fought. I swung back, and he lunged at me, so I pushed him.” Collin stops a moment and wipes tears away. “To protect myself. He was coming full force, so I just—I pushed him to get him off me, and he fell backward. He fell over the rail and...” Collin doesn’t finish. I know the rest.
“The dark SUV fleeing the scene was my 4Runner. I’m sure of it.” He slides down the wall and sits on the floor, cradling his head in his hands.
“No one saw it up close,” I point out. I suddenly find my shock and rage turning into protectiveness. I’ve underestimated my husband this whole time, thinking he was naive, in the dark about it all. He was trying to let me handle it myself, and then, when I didn’t, he was trying to protect our family.
“What?” he asks.
“It was an accident.”
“Yes. Yes! It was, I swear,” he says, almost pleadingly.
I screwed up, more than I’d even thought. I put us in this position—he’d never even have had a reason to be at Luke’s house if it weren’t for me—but he did something worse. Accident or not, self-defense or not, h
e covered it up and now there is no going back. We need each other. I sit next to him on the floor. I touch his knee, and he looks at me with a mix of tenderness and surprise as if he never thought I’d touch him again, his sin now worse than mine.
“We can get through this,” I say, touching his face and leaning my forehead into his.
“It was an accident,” he repeats, and the depth of his pain is too vast for me to come near, so I let him cry. We both cry. We stay on the floor for hours, in the dark, finishing the bottle and talking through every option, worst-case scenarios, how to keep the kids safe no matter what.
Then, just before dawn, we fall into bed, drunk and empty, to meet sleep for a few hours before waking up to our new, dismantled lives.
30
HONESTY, FROM HERE on out, we both promise. But I don’t have the heart to tell him about the ring until a little time has passed. Collin stays home from work on the next day, and we try to keep a regular routine for the kids. I plan to take Claire to the park and run some errands, and Collin needs to catch up on paperwork, but instead we go back to bed after the kids leave for school. Sunlight streams through the east-facing window and we hold each other. We don’t talk.
I think about how much DNA Collin must have left. The authorities would have tested the glasses he and Luke were drinking from as well as Luke’s body, and the DNA would be found. But, like me, Collin has never been arrested, that I know of, so there won’t be a match when they run the unknown DNA through the system. Right now Collin isn’t on their radar. I just need to make sure they don’t ask any more questions about me. I still have the dirt on Valerie and Joe. It’s still valuable.
I told Collin about the phone, the blackmail, the money she’s insisting on, and I told the truth about what Lacy and I were doing and what we found. He didn’t ask how I got the money to pay her what I had already. I offered that I sold some old handbags and hadn’t figured out how to get her more money yet. There was too much going on for him to press the subject. I’ll tell him at some point, but not now.
Such a Good Wife Page 23
