by Kate Moretti
“Am I under arrest? Should I call a lawyer?” Nate asked.
“Do you have a lawyer?” Mackey asked, his voice reedy and nasal.
Nate didn’t answer him; he just slid on his sneakers. The frustration bubbled up into his throat. He had nothing to hide, nothing to fear. He was tired of worrying about everyone, hiding out in the woods, Tripp’s living room. The sooner he got this over with, the better.
“No. I don’t. Am I under arrest?” Nate persisted.
Mackey and Harper exchanged glances. “Not at this time, Mr. Winters.”
• • •
Nate hadn’t yet been inside the Mt. Oanoke police station. He was surprised to see it was much like any other office; it could have been an insurance office, really. The phones ringing, the clickity-clack of typing, the smell of coffee and something sickly sweet. A birthday cake maybe. In the corner, a blue balloon bobbed.
He was led to an interview room, white and smelling of fresh paint, so fresh you could get high off the fumes. The plastic chairs were high-backed and comfortable. Nothing like he would have expected. Except in Mt. Oanoke, is the interview room really used? He imagined the druggies, tweaking and twitching in the holding cell at county. He might have been the first customer of the brand-new room.
Mackey gave him a bottle of water without asking, something Nate took as a good sign. They were being nice and easy.
“Winters, listen. Chances are, this girl ran away, got it? But there are some things we need to figure out.” Harper started, almost right away, without any preamble. Nate wondered if he went home at night and told his wife, I think I might be close to breaking this case wide open. Wide open, I tell you.
“Plus, not for nothing, Winters, but by your own admission you were the last to see her.” Mackey. This guy. A second-string detective in a town that barely needs one.
“Right. By my own admission. I called 911 for God’s sake. I’m not hiding anything, guys. I didn’t sleep with her. I tried to help her. I saw her run into the woods and I called the police.” Nate pulled his face down, tried to make it look sympathetic, but then admonished himself, answer the question you’re asked, you idiot.
Alecia used to tell him that he seemed to spend so much energy pretending to be something, that he’d forgotten how to just be. That’s what he felt like now, like the walls were closing in, and he was both annoyed that he was here, for he knew he truly didn’t do anything, and only a tiny bit fearful of getting into real trouble. Unless he was already in real trouble, but even then it was hard to tell.
“Yep, we got that part, Winters. But here’s a thing.” Mackey pushed the sides of his hair behind his ears, one then the other, with the flat part of his thumb. “Did you go after her?”
“I answered this already,” Nate said, the sweat springing from under his arms. The thing was, he’d already stupidly started this lie. He had to see it through. He’d tell the truth with everything else if he could just get out of this one little thing. It was stupid, the lie was for nothing.
“Humor us, Winters,” Harper said.
“No. I got out of the car, looked over the guardrail, called for Lucia to come back. She didn’t. I waited maybe five minutes and left.”
“You just left her there? Alone in the woods? A girl you claim, in previous interviews, was abused and alone. You just left her there.”
“Guys, listen. I was pretty mad at her. I am pretty mad at her. My life is a mess and it’s largely Lucia’s fault. She’s telling people we had an affair, which isn’t true. I could lose my job, my family, my whole life. So . . . yeah.” Nate nodded, going with the lie. He’d just have to win them over another way, the way he did with everyone else.
Harper nodded, rubbing his palm along his jaw. “This. This actually makes sense to me. I’m not sure I would have chased the bitch, either. What do you think, Mack?”
“So that was, what, elevenish? And you say you drove home before midnight?” Mackey asked, ignoring Harper. Harper rolled his eyes in Nate’s direction.
“Okay, then tell us about the relationship,” Harper said, steamrolling over Mackey.
“There was no relationship.” Nate clenched his hand into a fist and then spread his fingers out, stretching his palms. He was starting to itch, his skin buzzing and tight. “I’m a teacher. I also am closer to my students than most teachers. I’ve been invited over for family dinners more than a handful of times to various kids’ houses. I follow a lot of them on social media and keep track of who’s fighting with whom, who’s sleeping with whom. It makes me a more involved teacher. That’s all. I have, in the past, helped Lucia Hamm. I’ve given her close to $250 to stay at various motels and away from that brother. I’ve let her hang out in my classroom after school. A lot of kids had my cell phone number, for various reasons. She was one of them. But there was no relationship. No sexual relationship at all. None.”
He let the air out of his lungs. That was the first time he’d really said all that to anyone but Alecia. It was the first time anyone had let him get through the whole speech, anyway. Tripp usually cut him off, waving his hand around about propriety, changing the subject to baseball or basketball.
“What about this, though?” Harper asked, casually pushing a printout across the table. Nate glanced at it, his stomach starting to turn.
An email. Meet me at our hotel. I need you.
Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. Yeah, this was real trouble.
“That’s not sexual. I see why you think it is but it’s not. This was the second time I helped her. ‘Our hotel’ meant the place we met before. To me, ‘I need you’ meant ‘I need help.’ ”
“But she didn’t say, ‘I need help.’ She said ‘I need you.’ These are drastically different things, Nate. You do see that, right?”
“Yeah, but all I can tell you is how it seemed to me. At the time.”
“From here, you look pretty stupid to me.” Mackey pulled a toothpick from his shirt pocket and stuck it in his teeth, gnawing it. “Why, though, that’s the thing we can’t figure out. Why would she set you up as you’re claiming here?”
“Because I rejected her.” He paused then, too long. Thinking about the rape, about her accusation, Andrew, his doubt, even though in the darkest parts of his night, it was the most obvious part of this entire debacle. Except he still didn’t know, for sure, what had happened. Was it his place, really, to go making that accusation? He thought of Marnie Evans then. Two days ago she’d called him. Almost whispering, like she was sneaking it. We still want you to help Andrew, Nate. We believe you didn’t do anything to that girl. Her voice hitched, a clucking sound. She came here before, she wasn’t right. Strange girl, you know?
Harper’s grin spread across his face, slowly and disbelieving. “You mean to tell me you think she’s accusing you of having an affair and she’s now missing because you rejected her advances? You turned her down?”
Mackey laughed along with him. “Seriously, son.”
Nate hated both of them, the heat flushing his neck, his cheeks.
Mackey leaned forward. “So what time did you say you got home that night, then? The night she ran into the woods? Monday, May fourth?”
“Twelve. Twelve fifteen at the latest.” As he said this, he could hear the soft click of detonation, almost feel it under his feet like a trip wire.
“So the problem I have, Winters. Nate,” Harper started and scratched the back of his head. “Is someone called your car in. On the side of the road, off Route Six, right where you called it in, flashers on. Your license plate, he was alert enough to write that down considering it was one thirty in the morning.”
Boom. Nate felt the bomb go off in his heart, down his legs. There it was. His lie exposed. He’d been waiting for it, really. He’d been a shitty liar his whole life. A decent bullshitter, sure. There was a thread of truth in bullshit. But the second he told a straight-up lie, he started sweating and counting down the minutes until he was outed.
“Also, see, we fo
und your hat.” Mackey tossed a plastic bag onto the table and there was Nate’s white coach hat, smeared with mud, the one he’d lost down the embankment and all but forgotten about since he hadn’t been coaching. “A bit far into the woods. More than it would have blown off, say, if you’d just leaned over the embankment like you said.”
A one-two punch. Nate swallowed, a thick ball of fear in his throat, his eyes burning.
“So we’ve caught you in at least one lie. We actually have a few more, but we gotta keep some of it to ourselves. That’s how they do it on the tee-vee right now, Barney?” Mackey smirked as he looked over at Harper.
Barney Fife. They were mocking him, his thoughts, his attitude, the way he’d assumed they were bumbling cops from Mayberry. Kept him off his guard, easy and buddylike. They were not his pals.
They knew more about investigating than he did about being investigated, which should have been obvious, but for some reason, it wasn’t.
Nate sat up, pressed his back against the chair, and crossed his ankle over his knee. “I think I want a lawyer.”
Harper rubbed at his eyes, the skin around them thin and pink. “Aw, Nate. C’mon now. Don’t get sour on Mack here and lawyer up. We can handle this here, like grown-ups.” He shot Mackey a look and Mackey gave him a grin.
“No, I’m serious. I should have asked for a lawyer a long time ago. You guys aren’t interested in the truth. You just want to close this case so you can get back to chasing heroin dealers and whatever. I’m not saying another word. I want to call a lawyer.” Nate didn’t even know who he’d call. Probably start with Bridget. When this was over, he owed her a case of wine. Dozens of roses. Both.
The conference room door opened and a woman scuttled in, her hands flying. Short, helmutlike brown bob, large glasses.
“Detective Harper, Detective Mackey, can you come here a second?” Her voice was breathless and her gaze shot from Harper to Mackey to Nate in a frenzied circle.
“Sure, Stacey. What’s the problem?”
“The EMTs were just called out to Oanoke Paper. They found Lucia, sir.” Her voice wobbled, tinny and high. “She’s dead.”
CHAPTER 38
Alecia, Thursday, May 14, 2015
Usually the evenings were Alecia’s favorite time of day—after Gabe’s bath, when he was clean, smelling like strawberry shampoo, all the moist boyness washed away, the only time his hands were ever clean, his mouth unsticky. Sometimes, but not always, Gabe would curl up, tucked into the U of her body, his back against her belly and if she angled a little bit sideways, he fit just right like they were jigsaw pieces; it seemed that no matter how much he grew, he always fit there perfectly, his knees to his chest, the two of them hip-to-hip. She could push her whole face into his scalp, past the commercial soap, and smell his real Gabeness, the smell of his skin, a little bit like almonds with a sour touch of onions, but in the most delicious way.
And sometimes during these moments, but not always, she thought about how much she loved her son. He’d hold her face in his hands and kiss her nose, because he saw Nate do that once, and Gabe’s mind latched onto certain things never to be forgotten. She’d giggle softly and do it back, his thinning cheeks between her palms reminding her of his changing body—growing steadily from chubby, tumbling toddler to strong, lean kid. But his movements were still jerky, like a baby or a toddler. Or the tag on his pajamas suddenly, for no reason at all, itched his skin and he’d cry out, his hand slapping at his neck, his back rubbing against the sofa like a cat in heat, and Alecia instantly would be overcome with exhaustion all over again.
Except tonight he did not do these things. Tonight he sat calmly, his heart a slow thump through his back under Alecia’s palm, his head tucked under her chin and when she suggested they watch something else, something besides Mighty Machines—because even now, she couldn’t resist trying to “stretch him”—he nodded carefully, like he knew she needed it. It sort of broke her heart that he did that sometimes, gave in to his mother’s needs, because Alecia knew she should be strong enough to not have needs for Gabe to meet. But if she thought about it too long, her brain swirled around and around, funneling into darkness. She tamped it down, the feeling of inadequacy, and turned on Golden Girls, and Gabe laughed in all the right places—only because of the laugh track, he loved the laugh track—but he kept his hand on her cheek the whole time and she wondered if this was how peaceful heaven was.
Still. With her right hand, she kept checking her phone. Clicking the volume up button, to make sure it was on. Checking the missed calls—she could have missed a notification, of course. She felt like one of Nate’s students with a boy.
How weird that all of this would bring about a renewal. All this heartache, this uncertainty, the past few months, erased as easily as a hand wiped across a fogged window and suddenly, the picture was clear. Last night had done that. For her. For them. That’s what Alecia was thinking about when she first heard something. It could have been a shout, or even a car. The sound was sort of indiscriminate, the kind of sound that later, during an interview, a bystander might say, “Well it could have been a gun,” and everyone watching television would think, how could she not know? It was that kind of sound. Whatever it was must have been alarming, triggering some basic mama-bear instinct, a little buzz in Alecia’s belly that said get up, something is wrong, because otherwise nothing would have disturbed the perfect Alecia-Gabe jigsaw puzzle on the sofa.
As Alecia made her way to the window, the instinct grew stronger, such that she looked back at Gabe, still focused on the television, on Bea Arthur, throwing some barb at Estelle Getty, and the laugh track tripped and Gabe laughed, his wide hand slapping at his legs, his head tilted back, then forward and Alecia fought the urge to take Gabe and flee out the back door. But something flashed in the window and she almost turned to Gabe, almost told him to go to his room because her stomach pulled, a suction right down the center of her body, until she felt lit up from the inside with danger.
At the window, she lifted the curtain. The front walk was covered with people, bright lights, and news vans, their satellites and wires and antennas glinting in what looked, under the whitest spotlights, like daylight. People milling about with cameramen, some talking into square-lensed cameras, some jockeying for a better angle, some just standing stupidly, waiting for something, anything, to happen.
Alecia shut the curtain, sagged against the window, and before she had time to think, reconsider, she flung open the door.
“Get the hell away from my house. You are scaring my son!” she yelled into the chaos, and it was hardly the truth. In fact, her freaking out would scare her son more, considering her son didn’t even know they were there. They rushed to her door, microphones in her face, shouting into her face, and Alecia panicked and slammed the door. They knocked, a louder sound still, and Gabe found his way to the hallway, his eyes wide at the lights through the window, and asked, “Mommy, what’s that?” his finger pointing.
“I have no goddamn clue, Gabe. Go to your room.”
Gabe, understanding only that he was now being punished, started to cry. Alecia, her heart in her throat, turned her phone over to call the police and saw that it was already ringing, but she hadn’t heard it over the whoosh in her ears.
She clicked “accept” without looking at the caller ID, and before she could even say hello, a voice on the other end said, “Hello? Alecia, are you there?”
She nodded and croaked out a yes. Libby Locking.
“Alecia, have you heard? Have the police talked to you?”
Alecia shook her head again, her eyes on Gabe, who was starting to flap his hands and cry, louder and louder, his head ticking to one side, his ear banging off his shoulder (he had, in the past, done that so hard his ear bled). This is what Alecia was thinking about when Libby continued, “Alecia, listen to me. They found Lucia. She’s dead.”
Alecia felt the vague dawning that something bad was happening, but couldn’t work through it all in time be
fore Libby said the next thing.
“I heard they’ve arrested Nate.”
“When?”
“When did it happen? I don’t know. They’re saying she died on Wednesday. Which is weird; where has she been all this time?”
“Wednesday?” Alecia’s lips felt dry. Cracked. Yesterday. “How do they know it was Wednesday?”
“Her body temperature, is what the paper said. They can tell that I guess. Don’t you watch CSI?” She paused, the question rhetorical, and Alecia said nothing, her mind blurry and cottony. Then Libby said, “They’re saying Nate killed her. Everyone is saying that.”
“It wasn’t Nate,” Alecia said, automatically, calculating. “It wasn’t Nate.” Her heart, free-falling with relief. “He was with me. Yesterday. All day.”
One day: a doctor appointment, lunch, a tentative thawing, dinner and a glass of wine. For one day, her anger had melted off, like butter in the sun.
“With you?” Libby’s voice pitched up, a soft cluck on her tongue.
Alecia wondered what would have happened if they hadn’t been together. Would she have believed it wasn’t him?
CHAPTER 39
Bridget, Thursday, May 14, 2015
Call me, now.
The phone rang only a minute after Bridget texted Tripp, like he was waiting for it.
“Lucia’s dead. I’m at the mill.” Bridget’s teeth clattered together, a ringing in her ears. “Can you come get me?”
“Yes, of course. Are Harper and Mackey there?”
“Yes. Ambulances and cops are everywhere. I found her, Tripp.”
“Why did you go there? Alone?”
“I just did, it’s fine. Just come.”
In her hand, the point of the heart broke the skin, the tip tinged with Bridget’s blood. That’s how tightly she’d been holding it.
• • •
Later, after questioning, statements, and interviews, Bridget’s head pounded, her hands shaky, and she needed food.
