by Lisa Unger
Where was Geneva?
What had Graham done?
How was she going to hold their life together for the boys?
She was shaking from deep in her core. She sat on her free hand, so that Detective Crowe wouldn’t see how scared she was.
Detective Crowe had questions, too. She knew she shouldn’t answer any of them. But here he was. There was something safe and upright about him, in the way he leaned toward her, gaze steady. Something comforting about his presence.
“How long did you know that Geneva Markson and your husband were having an affair?” he asked, voice gentle.
There was no point in lying now. The police apparently knew everything.
On the table in front of her, she stared at a printout of texts between Graham and Geneva. Somehow these had also been leaked to the media. Who would do that?
Graham: I’m still raw from fucking you. Hurts so good.
Geneva: I can still taste you in my mouth.
God. How disgusting. There were two full pages. She’d barely read any of it. But she’d read enough.
“About a week,” she said. She sank back into the plush of the sofa. “I caught them on the nanny cam.”
“So—you lied.” He seemed tired with the knowledge. She was just another liar sitting before him, one of many probably.
“Yes,” she said with a nod.
She almost apologized and then didn’t. Because why should she? Why should her husband have fucked the nanny, and then that woman disappear?
And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, why should Graham and Geneva’s disgusting, raunchy texts—revealed when police accessed Geneva’s phone logs—have been leaked to the media this morning?
And then, after all of that, why should Selena have to apologize for trying to protect her children—her life—from the shameful actions of her husband?
“Why?” asked Detective Crowe. “Why did you lie to me?”
“Hmm,” she said, putting a hand to her chin in mock wondering. “I don’t know. Shame. Fear. A fervent hope that I could hold my life together until this was all revealed to be a silly mistake. Denial, maybe.”
“Okay,” he said, lifting a hand. “I get it. I do.”
He’d come alone, without his partner—who was no doubt interrogating Graham. Will was at the station with them. She’d watched enough police procedure shows to know that this was probably by design. Separate the husband and wife. Catch Selena at home when she was weak and afraid, when the lawyer had bigger fish to fry.
She should have turned him away when he came to the door. That would have been the right and smart thing. I can’t talk to you without my lawyer present, she should have said. But she hadn’t. And now here they sat.
Maybe if she hadn’t been alone reading those texts online, and all the comments about them on Twitter, on Reddit, she wouldn’t have been so desperate for any kind of company. She was actually happy when she saw him standing there on the porch, an honest person looking for answers. Just like Selena.
“Can we agree to move forward with the truth?” he asked.
The truth. What a slippery concept.
“Yes.”
“Did you know about the texts?”
“No.” Heat rose from her neck to her cheeks.
The raunchy, dirty, humiliating missives added a new layer to Geneva’s disappearance. There was some violence to the exchange—threats of bondage, punishment.
I want to spank you till you scream.
I’m going to tie you up and take you from behind.
Really? Not Graham’s thing, Selena wouldn’t have thought. But what did she know? Also leaked: Geneva’s affair with Erik Tucker. There was apparently a text chain associated with that relationship, as well. Equally vile.
On Twitter there was already a trending hashtag: #TheNaughtyNanny.
Selena’s phone was ringing and pinging every few minutes. She kept checking it to make sure it wasn’t her mother or the school. The last text from Beth: I’m coming to your house.
Her house—which she thought was made of bricks, was made of straw.
There were other texts, too, between Graham and someone else. Apparently now they had access to his phone. More nastiness. Words used that Selena had never known to cross her husband’s mind, let alone his lips. Those communications, too, were borderline violent, dark. Even more unsettling:
I know who you are. And I know what you did.
You won’t get away with it. I promise.
She imagined they must have taken Graham’s phone. But she didn’t know. She didn’t know how things like this worked. Would they want her phone? Was she required to give it to them if they didn’t have a warrant?
Detective Crowe nodded toward the printouts on the table between them. Selena felt vulnerable suddenly. She shouldn’t have let him in, should have waited for Will. Another mistake.
“Any idea who this might be?” he asked. “What this person might have seen? What Graham wasn’t going to get away with?”
Amazingly, there was a part of her that still wanted to lie. It was me, she wanted to say. Just a little role-playing game.
Partially to protect her children, by protecting their father.
But mostly to protect herself, or the image of herself that she wanted people to hold. Selena—good mom, happily married, successful career woman. Perfect. Instagrammable. Better than her sister. Better than her friends. But you know, in a humble, generous way.
Humiliation had a taste, a thickness at the back of her throat.
Fear had a sound, a ringing in her ears.
“Mrs. Murphy.”
“I don’t know,” she snapped. “How should I know?”
“Has he cheated before?”
“Yes,” she said. She stared down at her wedding ring, the big diamond, the platinum band.
“More than once?” His voice was gentle.
She ran it down for him. The sexting with his ex-girlfriend, which he said was nothing more. The counseling. Then the incident in Vegas.
Crowe looked at his notes. “A stripper,” he said. “Is that right? There was an assault.”
“Yes.”
“He propositioned a stripper after a lap dance, and when she declined, he assaulted her. A fight ensued between the club bouncers and Graham and his friends,” he said.
“That’s right,” she said stiffly. Only her mother knew about this incident. Maybe her sister knew too. Selena always suspected them of gossiping about her behind her back.
“More counseling after that, I’m guessing,” Detective Crowe said.
When she looked up at him, she expected to see mockery or judgment on his face. But instead she saw kindness, compassion.
“My wife,” he said. “She cheated on me a couple of times before I got the message that she was always going to cheat. That it wasn’t about me but about her.”
He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He nodded. “I am, too.”
Outside, she thought she heard voices, but it went quiet again. Would the media gather? she wondered. Probably. Wasn’t that the way it worked now? A circus of news vans, true crime bloggers posting theories and pictures, endless phone calls, emails.
“It’s obstruction, you know, that you didn’t tell me any of this.”
She was quiet a moment. Then, “I didn’t think it was relevant. Truly.”
He nodded. “I get it. There’s a disconnect between those things and this thing for you. Those things—the texting was virtual, right? The woman in Vegas, almost an abstraction, far from his life with you. You didn’t want to believe that he could have anything to do with Geneva’s disappearance.”
The words hung on the air, ominous. You didn’t want to believe that your husband would hurt a young woman
. Even though you knew he had already hurt another young woman.
“What about your husband’s job?”
There was a dump of dread in her belly.
She knew, didn’t she? On some level, she knew that he hadn’t told her the real reason why he’d lost his job. Jaden, his boss, their friend, hadn’t returned her calls. The last email Selena had received had been friendly, but brief. We miss seeing you! Sorry we’ve been so busy. Maybe we can plan something for the warmer months?
A clear blowoff.
Selena had ignored those instincts, too. She didn’t want to know.
She was just like her mother.
“What about it?” she asked quietly.
“There were allegations from a junior member of his department.”
She shook her head, not trusting her voice.
“You weren’t aware.”
Another shake. She didn’t want to cry. If she started, it was going to get ugly.
“A coworker accused him of making advances, not taking rejection well. She said he became aggressive, threatening.”
Again, the urge to defend. He said, she said. Wasn’t this the minefield of the workplace these days? But no, she wouldn’t do that. Wouldn’t even think it. She wouldn’t be another woman hiding the bad behavior of men.
Who was he? Who was her husband?
She remembered the bruised face of the Vegas stripper—her black eye, swollen purple mouth. A lap dance gone wrong. He wanted more; she declined. So he beat her. That was her husband; there was no disputing it. Even he didn’t try to deny it. She’d flown to Vegas, bailed him out. He got a drunk and disorderly summons, paid a fine, flew home with her the next day.
But Selena still thought about that girl, a young woman he’d hurt because she didn’t give him what he wanted. His infant son and wife asleep across the country, waiting for him.
Who was he? Who was she for staying with him? For burying that incident so deep in her subconscious so that it only surfaced when she was angry, or on sleepless nights when all her worries and fears danced and spun in the dim of her bedroom.
“Has he ever been violent with you?”
“No,” she said quickly. “Never.”
He pointed to her eyebrow, which was bruised from her fall.
“I fainted, hit my head on the way down.”
They locked eyes and his were dark and deep, probing.
“Look,” he said. “If you know more, if you have suspicions about what might have happened to Geneva, now is the time to help her. I know you want to protect your family, but a woman is missing.”
She shook her head. “My husband, he’s been unfaithful. He’s lied to me. And, you know, in the best case, our marriage is probably over. But I don’t believe he’s capable of hurting anyone.”
He raised his eyebrows at her. When he spoke, his voice was gentle.
“How can you say that? He has hurt someone.”
“Acting violently when drunk is different than—whatever it is you’re implying. Abducting, killing.”
She hated the way she sounded, like an apologist. But it was different, wasn’t it? “It’s like a different profile, right?”
God, she was pathetic. Crowe’s expression reflected a version of herself she didn’t want to acknowledge.
“Violence escalates, Mrs. Murphy,” he said. “In my experience violent men get more and more violent. When life stressors like job loss or problems in the marriage start to ramp up, those dark tendencies rise to the surface.”
Dark tendencies.
Fear, panic constricted her breathing. Everything was slipping from her grasp. She reached for the frayed edges of her life and felt them slip through her fingers.
“She wasn’t sleeping just with Graham,” Selena said. Desperate. She sounded desperate. “What about Erik Tucker? Isn’t he a suspect?”
So much for not throwing people under the bus. He didn’t answer her, just looked down at his notes.
“Do you or your husband have access to any isolated property anywhere—a lake house, a hunting cabin? Anything like that.”
“No.”
Did he, though? His friend Sean had a place somewhere—was it in the Adirondacks? She didn’t know if Graham had access, or how isolated it was. She told him as much; Crowe scribbled in his notebook.
“Why do you want to know that?”
He tilted his head. “Because a woman is missing, Mrs. Murphy. I want to know if there’s someplace he might be keeping her.”
Another blow to the gut. She picked up the ice pack again, but it had grown warm. The pounding in her head was reaching a crescendo. She wished she would just pass out again. Unconsciousness would be a blessed break from this nightmare.
“So, if you knew for a week that Geneva was sleeping with your husband—why didn’t you at least fire her right away?”
Good question. It was an impossible thing to explain to anyone who was living outside of her head. Anyway, she was about to fire Geneva but then she disappeared.
“It’s really hard to find a good nanny,” she said stupidly.
He gave her a look. She slumped back into the couch.
“I don’t know,” she breathed. The truth. “Denial. I just felt numb, unsure of what to do. Graham was unemployed. I needed to work and make sure the kids were taken care of. She was a good nanny; I trusted her with the boys—just not my husband. And, I guess, I was biding my time, deciding what to do next.”
She didn’t expect him to understand. She didn’t even understand herself. She was just chicken; that was the truth of it. She was afraid to blow up her life.
Her phone kept up its manic pinging and ringing.
“When I caught my wife the last time,” he said, “it was almost like I didn’t even care. The trust was already broken, and I wasn’t even sure why we were still married. It was a couple of weeks before I moved out, but in the meantime, we still went through the motions—got movies on Netflix, went out to dinner. We didn’t have any kids, so there wasn’t that complication.”
She nodded. So maybe it wasn’t so hard to understand.
“But I was angry,” he said. “Deep inside, you know. Man, I had some dark thoughts about her, about the guy she was with.”
She could see where he was going with this, stayed quiet. She pushed farther back into the cushions of the couch, just to put some distance between them.
“Did you think about hurting Geneva?” he asked when she didn’t say anything.
Even though she was kind of expecting it, the world still stuttered.
“You’re kidding, right?”
There had been a folder on the coffee table between them. He’d taken the printed pages of texts from it at the beginning of their conversation. Now, he retrieved a slim stack of photos and handed them to her. She flipped through a series of grainy images of her block. A fish-eye lens, obviously captured from personal doorbell cameras from the neighbor’s devices, showed Geneva’s progress from the front door, down the street, to her car.
She looked so small, young like a teenager. Her shoulders were slouched, her face set and sad. There she was in front of the house. Then walking past the neighbor’s place. She reached for her car door, paused and she turned around as if something caught her attention. Most of the images were obscured by shrubs and trees, the cameras really only designed to capture the stoop. The late afternoon light was low.
In the final image, a second figure was captured, coming from up the block along the middle of the street. A black jacket, a baseball cap, jeans, boots. A slow dawning crept on Selena. Though the face was obscured, something about the figure’s carriage was familiar.
No, she thought. Not possible.
“Any idea who that might be?”
She leaned in closer, heart thumping. But the image was so grainy and indistinct, it was ha
rd to identify gender. There were no other images capturing a front view.
She flipped through all the pictures again.
“After that, we don’t have any other photos. They just disappear.”
“Is it—a woman?” asked Selena.
“Small, slim, could be,” he said.
Hands in pockets, an easy approach, casual.
“Awfully laid-back for a kidnapping, right? Not the kind of approach you’d expect.”
“Kidnapping?” he asked, as if surprised.
“Well, that’s the implication, right? That someone took Geneva, has her? You’re asking about isolated properties. She didn’t just run off with some other working mom’s husband?”
“You’re angry,” he said.
She put the pictures down on the coffee table.
There was a woman I met on the train, she almost said. We talked. I told her about my husband, though I’m not even sure why I did. It got weird. She said something that has stayed with me. Didn’t I ever just wish my problems would go away? Then, she texted me. I went to see her—I don’t know why. Maybe because she knew too much about me. She called herself a solution architect.
Could this be her?
But she didn’t say any of that.
Because—it was suspicious, wasn’t it? Wasn’t there a dark undercurrent to each of their encounters—the train, the bar? Wasn’t there some tacit understanding that Selena should say nothing, and if she stayed quiet, then so would Martha? Even though there were no more secrets to keep. The affair, the disappearance, her shattered life would become the main news event of the moment, if it wasn’t already. It would be the number one topic of conversation at school, at the tennis club, on the soccer field. It was one of those stories, salacious and bizarre, that captured the attention. The nanny you let into your home seduces your husband, sets fire to your life. And all because you wanted to work and be a mother.
And if that was Martha on the street with Geneva, then what did that mean?
“Do you recognize that person?” asked Detective Crowe.
She leaned in closer. Really, it could be anyone. A smaller young man, a large teenager. Eliza Tucker was petite, athletic, a runner. She, too, had reason to be enraged. But it was hard to imagine a preppy mom of two confronting Geneva on the street.
