It struck me then that Nick was as angry about Jill’s death as I was. I had never considered that her death might have affected him so deeply. I thought that he was merely here to support me. But Nick appeared driven by similar demons. He seemed bent on revenge just as much, if not more than I was. Nick made me feel like I was letting him down as much as I had let Jill down. I was torn. That part of me that always followed the rules and stayed within the lines warred with my baser side, that rabid part screaming for revenge.
“I know, Nick. You’re right. It’s just that...what you’re suggesting…it’s dangerous and illegal. Hell, it’s insane. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison because of her.”
Nick stood before me and shook his head, his face twisted in disgust. He was quiet now. His shoulders slumped downward like a defeated boxer who’d just lost to a bad call.
“It never should have come to this. You should have let me help Jill to begin with, and then maybe none of this would have happened. But you were always the straight arrow, weren’t you, Tyler?” He laughed bitterly. “You know what, brother? You have no fucking balls and you can’t say that bitch took them from you, too. You’ve always been that way.”
Deflated, he walked out of the house, quietly closing the door behind him.
Alone now, I sat back in my chair with a full bottle of tequila and drank. With my mobile phone in hand, I played Jill’s last voicemail message on an endless loop, over and over, until I could recite it perfectly, word for word in pitch and tone. I thought about everything Nick had screamed at me, every accusation, about every sordid little plan we had ever dreamed up for Erin. I thought about what Nick had suggested doing for real, selling Erin to Alexi and Dmitri. She’d be gone forever. She’d lose her freedom, her identity, and her humanity as countless strangers raped her into madness. The more I drank, the more reasonable it seemed.
God, I wanted to do it, but how could I live with the decision? Wouldn’t I be compromising my own humanity, as well? Jill would be ashamed and disappointed if she knew what I was thinking. But then again, she was gone. She would never have the opportunity to live out her dreams. She would never see our child born. Everything that ever gave me reason to live had been stripped away, carelessly ground under the heel of a ruthless stranger. My humanity seemed insignificant compared to that.
I was all too aware that life wasn’t free, that it costs us each something, but I had already paid more than my fair share, giving up what gave me incentive to live in the first place. Life had cost me everything. I had nothing left to lose.
So with that, I decided that I could carry the burden of guilt and remorse, but only as long as it was because of Erin, not Jillian. If I had only acted when she’d asked me to, if I had been the man she’d expected me to be, if I had only considered her well-being instead of my own blasted rules, then Jillian would still be alive. We would still be anticipating the birth of our first child. But I had done none of those things. I had failed her. I had failed my child. And now it was time for me to pay the price. It was the least I could do for Jill, for our baby, considering how I’d let them both down.
I rang Nick on his cell. “Do it,” I ordered. “Call Alexi. Tell him I want to meet, and that I’ll deliver the girl to him myself.”
I ended the call and opened another bottle of tequila, taking a long pull directly from the top. I didn’t even feel the burn any more, just the poison as it destroyed what little was left of the man I used to be. I was past numb, a ghost of my former self.
I swilled the liquor around the bottle then took another long drink, draining more than half a pint in two swallows. Jillian once complained that tequila turned me into a mean drunk. If that was the fuel I needed to see the deed done, then so be it.
Chapter Fifteen
Hannah
It was nearly impossible to lay in bed, pretending to be asleep, as my husband, Beckham, climbed in beside me. I was furious with him, but, coward that I was, I was simply too afraid to show it. He hadn’t called me once while he was away on business in Las Vegas. He was still stewing over our last argument, as was I. Our last exchange of words kept replaying over and over in my mind. I squeezed my head between my hands in a fruitless effort to stem the flow. But I still could not keep them at bay.
“Damn it, Hannah,” Beck had yelled. “You know I can’t entertain my clients here, not the same way. It’s too cold and damp. How am I supposed to negotiate million dollar deals if they aren’t happy? They want to be somewhere warm, somewhere sunny. Someplace they can relax and get away from all this godforsaken rain.”
“Well, so would we,” I reminded him. “Conner and I would like to get away from the rain every once in a while, too. When you travel during the weekend, why can’t we go with you?” When he didn’t respond, I answered the question aloud myself. “Because you don’t want us around, do you?” When he didn’t answer again, I walked away and shut myself in our bedroom. Minutes later, the front door slammed shut as he left for the airport. And we hadn’t spoken since.
Honestly, I understood Beck’s occasional trips during the work week, the ones he took solely for business, but I was annoyed when he traveled over the weekends because he did so for his own pleasure, without considering his family. He explained they were for the entertainment of his clients, usually to play golf, something he says they are hard pressed to do in the damp, often sunless Puget Sound area, even in the springtime.
According to Beck, a warm, sunny golf course was the perfect location to leisurely negotiate deals and mediate contracts, while his client was primed with endless amounts of alcohol, hearty expensive food, and the practiced hands of the local spa’s beautiful masseuse. Their usual destinations were Palm Springs, Napa, and occasionally Hawaii, though tonight Beck had returned from Las Vegas. Lying beside him, my nose was assaulted by the mixture of his familiar cologne with the sharp aroma of tequila and women’s perfume, a nauseating brew that repulsed me, though I ached for his embrace or even a simple touch. Rarely did I get either.
We spent way too much time apart to make for a healthy marriage. Even our fifteen-year-old son, Conner, felt the absence of his father, though he tried not to let on just how much it hurt that Beck would rather spend time away. They used to be so close, passing endless hours horsing around with each other, but as of late, Beck was rarely home, and I felt as bad for Conner as I did for myself. We were both lonely for him.
It hadn’t always been so. We were very young when we first started dating and very much in love, but even after ten years of marriage, Beck had continued to call me three or four times a day. And when he came home each night, he kissed me passionately and told me how much he loved me, how much he had missed my face.
While Conner arrived early in our marriage, his birth only intensified our feelings for each other, strengthening the core of our union with the common goal of raising our child. But when the economy had begun its downturn, Beck allowed the financial pressures of his job as an IT consultant to worm its way into our private lives. He worried about sustaining the lifestyle we had become so accustomed to while residing in our well-manicured, upscale community on Seattle’s Eastside.
Sammamish, Washington—or The Plateau, as it was often called—was heavily populated with the families of highly paid executives from Microsoft, Boeing, and Amazon. They settled here because the schools were some of the best in the entire state, while the geography offered unrivaled beauty and spectacular views of the many lakes, volcanic peaks, and even the Seattle skyline with the snow-capped Olympic Mountains nestled majestically across the Sound behind it.
I was so excited about relocating to Seattle’s Eastside from the San Francisco Bay Area. We had made several profitable real estate investments while living in California, which now afforded us prime housing in an affluent area, but with the prosperity came a level of pretentiousness I had not foreseen. While I had made a few friends since moving here five years ago, mostly the parents of Conner’s friends, I discovered
I had little in common with most of the people who lived around me, and didn’t care for them. I found them condescending and arrogant, and their overly-entitled children were spoiled, ungrateful, and often downright mean.
Before long, I grew isolated and lonely. Even Conner was unhappy and had requested a transfer to another high school in the district, but off The Plateau, where he felt the kids were more down to earth and less obsessed with material wealth. Beckham, in his quest to achieve everything that would brand him a success, focused so much on his job that he didn’t notice what was happening between us. He was clueless about my depression, and that in itself made me even more detached and remote.
Beck had changed, too, and rarely ever confided in me. Our sex life was non-existent, though I know my aloofness was partly to blame. And now, I worried that he carried an additional cell phone, one he tried to hide. At first, he attempted to pass the clone off as his regular cell, but I confronted him with my suspicions.
“What’s with the new phone?” I asked when I first made the discovery.
“What new phone would that be, babe?” he said as he texted a message, without even bothering to look up at me
“Um, the one in your hand…dear.”
He snapped me a look like I was mentally unbalanced. “It’s the same phone I’ve always had…babe.”
“No,” I said as I held up his old phone. “This would be the same phone you’ve always had. It’s not broken, and it still has service. See?” I said, speed dialing my own phone.
Flustered when my cell rang out, playing his assigned ringtone, he stammered for an answer. “Oh yeah, that. Well, uh, it’s nothing really. I just forgot to tell you about it. It’s from one of my new clients. He wants unlimited access to me at all times,” he explained, like I was stupid enough to accept his excuse as even remotely plausible.
“And he doesn’t have that with your regular cell?”
“Hannah, I’m not going to argue with a new client and turn down his request. If this is how he wants to do things, then I’m fine with that. And since it’s clients like him who keep a roof over your head, food in your belly, and expensive clothes on your pretty little back,” Beck indicated with a wave of his hand, “well, I would think you would be fine with it, too.”
Angry, he turned away and concentrated on his computer screen. In an effort to avoid yet another fight, something we’d been doing more often of late, I let it go, but I found it suspicious that Beck’s new phone only vibrated in the evenings and then he wouldn’t even answer it. He merely checked the screen to see who was calling. But I could set my watch by the amount of time it took him to find a task that needed his attention within ten minutes of each call. Apparently, he didn’t think I noticed, and I seriously wondered what kind of idiot he took me for.
One evening, Beck carelessly left it on the kitchen counter and walked out of the room. Curious, I scrolled through both the call log and phone book, but there was not one single listing or entry. My nagging worries flamed obsessively at each red flag. Since he dismissed most of my accusations with the notion that I was delusional, I felt the only way to know for sure what was going on with my husband was to hire a private investigator. Avoiding an easily followed trail on my computer, I found Sam Tunney in the Yellow Pages and, after a lengthy phone interview, I hired him.
Sam, a retired Seattle police detective, was a grizzled, older man with heavily calloused hands and white hair, neatly combed back from a coarsely wrinkled forehead. His gray eyes appeared gentle yet keen, missing nothing as they darted around, evaluating every person nearby. His smile was easy though, and I liked him at once. Taking his lengthy list of referrals into consideration, I trusted he would do a good job.
Sam had an easy time digging up dirt on Beck. He followed my husband around for several weeks, documenting where Beck went and with whom he met. He snapped a lot of photographs, telling me they would be the proof I needed should I ever choose to dissolve the marriage. He even dug back into the last year of Beck’s travels and interviewed people at the resorts where he had stayed while away on his many business trips.
After compiling a detailed report, Sam called me in for a meeting to discuss what he had found. We met at a small restaurant on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill where he primed my nerves with an ample amount of white wine. With more than half a bottle beneath my belt, Sam spread dozens of photographs out on the table before me. As my eyes briefly scanned the images, I felt a lump settle in the pit of my stomach.
“Mrs. Maguire, it looks like your husband’s had quite a few flings with women he’s met at the resorts where he stays. This one here,” Sam said as he slid several black and white photographs over the smooth table, “is a young bartender in Hawaii. Her name is Leila. She’s kinda quiet. Keeps to herself mostly. But this one,” another set of pictures slipped before me, “well she’s a blackjack dealer in Vegas, and a mighty wild one, too, if I do say so myself. Her name is Julie. There’s also Carla and Adrienne, both in Palm Springs.” Two more photos were laid out for my perusal.
Except for the bartender in Hawaii, all the women shared a similar appearance: in their late twenties or early thirties and trim with fair skin and various shades of red hair. The lump in my stomach degraded into bile and moved up into my throat. I placed my hand over my mouth, worried I might be sick right there.
“But those relationships have cooled down quite a bit,” Sam informed me. With a deft hand, he stacked up the pictures and moved them aside. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a separate file folder. It was filled with more pictures. “Now this one here, she’s the gal your husband is seeing right now and has been for quite a spell.”
He fanned the photographs along the table. Some were black and white, but most were color. I reached out and lightly touched my fingers along the images.
“Who is she?” I asked, my voice quivering as the tears threatened to spill down my hot cheeks. Duly humiliated, my face flamed with embarrassment.
“That one there’s named Erin, Erin Anderson. She works at a golf resort down in the Napa Valley. A real high-end, swanky spa kinda deal, you know. Mostly rich folk.”
“Napa? But a lot of these pictures weren’t even taken in Napa. I recognize this place,” I said as I pulled out one snapshot. “That’s Pier 39 in San Francisco. And this one here,” I singled out another. “Look at the sign. They’re at Heavenly Valley. Were they skiing?”
Sam bobbed his head. “Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid they were.”
My mouth sagged open. We lived twenty minutes from the slopes at Snoqualmie Pass, but Beck had never once taken us up skiing, though Conner and I had asked numerous times. I threw the picture back down and poked through the others. Some were taken on the golf course, others at the beach. Every shot showed them living it up playfully, their arms often locked around each other. They were all taken from a distance which made it difficult to see the woman’s features clearly. My fingers trembled at my lips as I scanned all the images.
Sam pulled out a few more color photographs. They were close-up shots of Beck and Erin Anderson. I gasped at the new pictures lying on the table. Staring back at me was my husband with a look of love and adoration for the girl next to him, a girl who, strangely enough, looked remarkably like me. I singled out one of the photos and brought it closer to inspect. I rubbed away the tears that blurred my vision and studied the face on the paper.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, slowly running my finger along her profile.
Erin and I both had long, dark auburn hair, similarly textured with a natural glossy wave. Our eyes were both green, though different shades, but they were shaped roughly the same, as were our faces, both triangular with a sharp jaw and delicately pointed chin. Her mouth was different though. Her upper lip was considerably thinner while her bottom lip pouted unnaturally. Collagen injections would be my guess. And though she was slightly slimmer and somewhat more athletic in form, we were of comparable height and weight. Only one thing made us different: this girl
was considerably younger, by at least ten years. This, in itself, was what upset me most, for I believed Beck had found a replacement for me, a new and improved model. Beck looked sincerely happy and in love.
Nausea rolled up from my stomach and made my head spin. In my hand was evidence of another life that Beck was leading, an affirmation that my life, as I had always known it, was about to change forever. I gathered up all the pictures and threw them into the folder. I grabbed my bag and pushed the straps over my shoulder with trembling ice-cold fingers then held out my hand.
“Thank you, Sam.”
He shook it, looking at me with pity. “Mrs. Maguire, I’m real sorry—”
“No, no, Sam. It’s okay. Really. I had a feeling this was going on. That’s why I hired you.” I gave him a brittle smile and pulled my hand away. “I have to go. You know…Conner, my son…he’s…you know…I’m sorry. I really must go. Send me your bill when you’re ready.”
I escaped to my car where I cried for forty minutes. I kept glancing over at the folder lying on the seat next to me. My God, I was such a fool. I realized too late the mistakes I’d made with Beck, and that I had let him slip through my fingers out of negligence. Before all this, I never once suspected that he looked elsewhere for what he lacked at home, mostly because I had never thought of doing so myself. I felt as though the earth beneath me had evaporated, leaving me nothing on which to steady myself. My identity was obliterated into a million pieces and blown away. After all, who was I if not Mrs. Beckham Maguire?
My head was swimming. I could no longer just sit there with the evidence of Beck’s infidelity beside me. I needed to figure out my next move. I wanted to have everything in place and planned out before he left me. I would need my own bank accounts and credit cards in my name only.
The Mistaken Page 11
