by Jeff Abbott
“My mom…did she ever say anything else that made you think she was having an affair? Or that my dad was?”
Karen let ten seconds tick away. “Our offices are next to each other, and if one of us got really loud the other could hear…It didn’t happen that often, and I think in the moment she had just forgotten.” Karen swallowed, folded her arms over her chest. “I couldn’t hear the first part of the conversation…I was concentrating on creating a slide presentation for a meeting. But then I heard her voice rise. She said, ‘No, I’m not having an affair…no I wouldn’t, you know I wouldn’t…and then you are not going to drag our daughter into this. Fine. I’ll talk to you later, when you’ve calmed down and you know this is ridiculous. I’ll see you there.’”
Mariah listened to the wind rise. She stared at her feet. “You really remember those words.”
“They kind of burned into my head once she vanished.” She cleared her throat. “I knew things were rocky between them…”
“How? How would you know that?”
“Because she told me. About a month earlier. I went through a divorce a year before that. It happens a certain amount in the tech industry, with startups. The company takes over your life.”
“That didn’t happen with my mom.”
“Honey, you were living on campus…you saw your folks every couple of weeks, not all the time. Isn’t that true?”
Mariah nodded after a moment. “But Mom would have told me if they were splitting up.”
“Only when that was a final decision. They may not have gotten there. Or she told him she’d had enough, she was leaving him…” Karen didn’t finish the sentence.
“He didn’t kill her. He couldn’t have.”
“OK, OK,” Karen said. “I’m just telling you what I heard. And what I told the police.”
“You couldn’t have misheard.”
“No, Mariah. I know what was said.” Karen handed her a business card. “If there’s anything more I can do to help you…with anything…please let me know. And think about what I said about the job.”
She thought she would feel a hot bolt of hate for Karen, talking to the police about her father. But Karen had done what anyone would. Anyone. Mariah felt scared. Scared of what she was doing here.
Scared of what might be true.
“I will. Thank you.” But she already knew she’d say no, as nice as it would be to work with Karen and the people at Acrys Networks. She would have no peace until she had answers.
* * *
Mariah got into the car. She tried to imagine her calm, gentle father calling his wife at work and yelling at her about an affair. Calling her office. And then the thought, like a blade through her thoughts: why? Why had he called then? At that time, which was not convenient, when his wife couldn’t talk frankly to him. He must have found something. Learned something. Discovered something on that final day and called her because it could not wait. Why not?
I’ll see you there. The lot? Had Mom agreed to meet Dad at the empty lot? Why talk there when they could talk at home, in relative privacy? Well, Mariah had been home that day, sick, a rotten late flu sweeping across campus, and Mom had told her the night before to come recuperate at home rather than stay alone at her apartment, and she had been bleary with fever and medication that reduced the world to a haze. She didn’t even remember seeing her mother leave that morning; most likely Beth had peeked in on her in her room, saw her sleeping, and let her sleep rather than say that final goodbye. That haunted her…that her mother looked in on her, and left her asleep, because she must have been sure they would have ten thousand tomorrows.
But her parents had fought and argued. The police had asked her if her parents had argued. She told them no, it was a happy marriage, and yes she was busy with school and life but she was very close to both her parents. She would know. There had been rumors that they questioned her father over arguments. He never would discuss the questioning with her, even when she asked.
Why then? Why did he call her then?
She drove home. And stared at the for sale sign when she pulled into the driveway.
25
MARIAH BLINKED.
FOR SALE BY OWNER.
That…that couldn’t be. She was seized with a sudden and strong desire to rip it from the lawn.
She parked and walked into the house.
“Dad?”
He was on his laptop, and he closed it as she approached.
“You can’t sell our house!”
“It’s not really for sale. I got another threat, another strong hint that we should move. So, I’ve decided to make them think we’re moving. I won’t be accepting any offers.”
“You’re playing games with these jerks,” she said.
“I’m going to beat them at their own game,” he said. “I know what I’m doing, so you don’t have to worry.”
“I just…I don’t want to leave Mom’s house. I really, really don’t.” The terror filled her. She had lost Mom. What would she do if she had to leave the house that held so many memories of her? This house had been the only home she’d ever known.
He stood up, closed his arms around her tense form. “I promise you, we’re not selling. But no one can know that now.”
“Another threat. Show it to me?”
“It’s nothing. I’m handling it.”
She stepped away from him. “Dad, I was already upset and this didn’t help.”
“What, sweetheart?”
“Did you really think Mom was having an affair? I mean, you called her and accused her at her office. I want to know why you thought she was seeing someone.”
He let ten seconds tick by, a heavy silence between them. “I had my reasons,” he said.
“Specifics.”
“I was clearly wrong,” he said. “The police looked at that possible aspect of the case and found nothing. She wasn’t seeing anyone.”
“They’re human. They could have missed something. Maybe if she was seeing someone that person killed her.”
“Mariah, look.” He steadied his voice. “You have to know that I loved your mom more than life itself. I know that’s a cliché; put it on a T-shirt and I’ll wear it. We had a good marriage. But every marriage goes through ups and downs. I don’t think she had an affair.”
What wasn’t he saying? Mariah said, “You think she was considering having an affair?”
“An affair takes some groundwork, if you don’t want to get caught.” He cleared his throat and took a deep breath. “I had one. Two years into our marriage, before you were born.”
The strength faded from her muscles. She sat down in the armchair, quickly. It just wasn’t possible. She opened and closed her mouth, silent. “You didn’t,” she finally said.
“Nothing I say is an excuse. It’s just what happened. Your mom had had a miscarriage. A second one. We were both very depressed. She didn’t want me to touch her. She didn’t want me around.” He cleared his throat again. “I had met a woman who worked at a client company. I didn’t know how to help Beth or how to help myself, and this woman made her interest in me clear.”
Mariah felt unsteady. She knew her father was considered a very handsome man, but it was one thing to say it and another thing to realize some woman who wasn’t her mother had circled them in the wake of a tragedy, making herself available. Or that her father—her father—could have made such a choice in the face of her mother’s pain.
“I knew I shouldn’t, but I did. I didn’t want you to ever know. Beth promised she would never tell.”
“I don’t even know you right now,” Mariah’s voice was brittle.
“I know you don’t,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“How long did it go on?”
“Not even two weeks. I realized…I wasn’t suited for secrecy like that. It made me feel better exactly once, the first time, then an hour later the guilt was crushing me. I didn’t love this woman, and I’d never love this woman.” His voice wavered. “She was not
someone I could have cared for. It was purely physical.”
“Did Mom catch you?” She wasn’t sure she could bear to hear an answer.
“I confessed to her after I’d broken it off. She cried. I cried. She asked me to move out. I did, for about three months. We went to see a therapist. Together, and alone. We worked out our issues. She asked me to move back into the house. We found our love again. And then…we got pregnant with you.”
It was like there was a prequel to her life she never knew.
“So that was why you thought she was capable of having an affair…because you had.”
He bit his lip. “She did not mention the past often. But if she did, she would tell me that I should know how it felt.”
“I cannot believe you did that to her.”
“I’m very sorry I did. She knew how sorry I was. She forgave me.”
She’s not here to say she forgave you, Mariah thought. I don’t know what she thought. I don’t know what your marriage was. Clearly she took you back, but did they ever really love each other again the way they had before? Has my whole life been a carefully scripted play? A lie, designed to shield us all from unpleasantness? Was I the product of make-up sex?
He took a deep breath. “And so my past behavior colored how the police viewed me.”
“How did they even know?” she asked.
“You know she was friends with Dennis Broussard. In high school.”
She felt her stomach twist. “I know he had a crush on her because you told me that.”
“She was suspicious…that I was cheating…and she hired Dennis to follow me. He had left the Austin police force and was working temporarily as a private investigator, and then later he ended up joining the Lakehaven police department and he worked his way up there. But she went to him.” His voice lowered. “He was her friend. A guy who already hated me. It was a risk. Dennis spotted me.”
Her mother had hired a guy who was infatuated with her to prove her husband’s infidelity. Her mind spun. They should have had a reality show. “But you told her before Dennis could?”
“Yes,” he said. “He gave me twenty-four hours to come clean to Beth. Or he would. He thought for her it would be better coming from me. I told him I would. I couldn’t go on this way. He told me he was in love with Beth. He always had been. I knew it. I knew he would be there for her if I wasn’t. I knew I couldn’t lose her.”
She tried to imagine this conversation. Broussard and her father, unwittingly setting the course for the rest of their lives, and hers.
So maybe it wasn’t guilt that drove him to confession. Maybe he knew he was about to be busted and he threw himself on Mom’s mercy before Broussard, who was in love with her, could tell her. That Broussard had given him a chance…was a shock.
“I feel…I feel like I don’t even know you, Dad.” Her fingernails bit into her palms.
“I’m sorry. You weren’t even born yet. I would have never…”
“What, you would have modified your bad behavior if I’d already existed?”
“Yes,” he said evenly. “That’s what many parents do. And if your mother hadn’t forgiven me, there would be no you, Mariah. You and your mom were the greatest gifts I ever got. I would never…have hurt her, even if she was having an affair. Twenty years later is a long time for revenge. I wouldn’t have threatened her, or left her, or…I would have done what she did for me. Forgiven her. But I would have wanted to know.”
“Who do you think she was seeing?” Broussard, she thought. He wasn’t married.
“I just had a general suspicion. I didn’t have a name.”
“Based on what? I want to know what evidence there was that made you doubt Mom this way.”
“She was out late a lot. More than usual. There were phone calls here to the house, where the caller hung up.”
Wouldn’t a boyfriend have called her cell phone? Her mind was racing. She felt feverish.
“Is that it?”
“Yes. And she wasn’t interested in me.” His voice went to an embarrassed whisper. “I mean, physically. She always had been before. I mean, since you were born.”
“Dad.”
“Well, you asked.” He looked miserable.
“So you called her at work? Why then? Why not wait for the privacy of home? What triggered that?”
“Triggered? Nothing. I just…I just couldn’t wait. I wanted answers and I wanted them now.” Her father’s face was a careful study in control.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
He held up a hand. “I’m not an automaton, and neither are you,” he said. “People do things that don’t make sense all the time. You want a tidy explanation for everything. Everything. You…” He stopped, his voice strained. “There are no tidy explanations, sweetheart. I wish I hadn’t made that call. I wish I hadn’t accused her.”
He clutched her hands in his. She could feel the sweat on her palms. Her father’s mouth trembled.
“Mariah. What are you asking me now? Really?”
“I just want to know…” Her voice drifted off. A trunk full of weapons, a determination that led her to confront three strangers yesterday, but here was the truth, and she was scared to death of it. It was like the dream where she had to turn around to see the truth. She started hyperventilating. He eased her down into a chair, helped her calm down, whispering to her that everything would be okay. “Just tell me.” Her hands trembled, but the worst of the panic faded. She could handle the truth now, she was sure of it.
“Are you thinking you’re going to trip me up in a lie?” Craig gave a half-laugh, bitter, incredulous. He spoke with greater confidence. “Mariah. I have told you and the police all this. I went there. I knew that was where she went when she was upset, and if she was there we could talk. But she was gone. Her car was there but she wasn’t. Then I called you. I thought you might have heard from her. You had not. You drove over, remember, although I told you not to because you were on meds and sick?”
Slowly she nodded. “I remember standing in the street. Her car parked there.” But the rest of it…her father’s phone call, Mariah driving to the lot, was a blur, milky, hidden. “We looked for her. On the lot, in the woods.”
“Then we called her office. Then the police. It was too early for them to do anything like file a missing persons report.” The words spilled out of him like a stream. “Even though her car was there. We came home and I put you back to bed and then I called the police again and that time I got ahold of Broussard.”
She closed her eyes. She could remember stumbling around the empty land, calling for her mom, scared that Beth had wandered off or had fallen from one of the limestone cliffs to the unforgiving rocks and trees below, but the memory seemed like a dream, a haze, something too awful to be fully remembered, kept at arm’s length. A fog she couldn’t escape.
Was it all a haze because her father had done the unimaginable, like Broussard said, and she’d seen it?
The silence between them was like a wall; she wanted to turn away from him.
“You’ve never said you didn’t do it,” she said. “I’ve always defended you. Always.”
“You never asked,” he said, as if he thought now she would.
She bit into her lip, pressed fists to her eyes. She tasted her own blood, the barest tingle.
“I shouldn’t have to say I didn’t do it,” he said. “Not to you.” But now he looked at her, he pulled her hands gently away from her face. His face was inches from hers. “I didn’t do it.”
The clock on the wall ticked. They looked at each other. “I’m not sure what else to say,” he said.
“Dad, I love you,” she said. She controlled her voice. “Even if you had hurt her…I know it would have been an accident. I could forgive an accident.”
He stared at her and then he looked away. “I would hope so,” he said. “Are we done here? Have I said what you needed to hear?”
“Please don’t be mean about this,” she said. “Did you ask Acrys
Networks for her emails and texts? Six months after she was gone?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“Because I couldn’t say to you then that I was trying to find out if she was having an affair. You didn’t need to hear anything like that.”
They had been such a team since Mom vanished, but she could feel them fracturing. The silence between them grew. “Maybe I should move out,” she said quietly.
“No!” he said, suddenly, sharply. “I…I don’t want you to move out.”
“Dad…”
“I’m just not ready,” he said. He turned away from her. “I’m sorry. I know I’m constraining your life.”
She wanted to tell him that it was all right. That she didn’t want to move out. Being out of the house held its own terrors. But that day would come, wouldn’t it? She wasn’t going to live at home the whole rest of her life. And if she found out the truth about what happened to her mother, then that would give her the permission to start her own life again.
“You’re not, Dad. I’m sorry I accused you…I just…”
“We’re never going to know what happened, unless something changes dramatically. Unless someone comes forward. Unless her…unless her body is found.”
The hush between them thickened. She didn’t know what to say.
“We just have to stick together,” he said. He closed his hand around hers. “No matter what.”
He had never said such a thing to her before today.
He’s scared, she thought. He’s scared. If he hurt Mom—and she could still hardly imagine it—he has been on borrowed time since that moment. And what if the time was running out?
What would you do if Dad was guilty? What? You have to face that. She pushed the thoughts away. “Swear to me you didn’t hurt her.”
“I didn’t hurt her.”
She closed her hand around his. Karen couldn’t be right. She had to continue with her search. Find the pattern that gave a different answer.
