by David Bell
“What are you hiding, then?” I asked. “You lied to me. You said you hadn’t seen her or talked to her for weeks, but you texted her this morning. Did you lie to me because you really do have something to cover up? Did you hurt her?”
“How do you know I texted her this morning?” he asked.
“Because I took her phone. I was looking for the letters. But her phone was on the floor underneath the bedside table. I just impulsively grabbed it because I thought it could tell me something about what was going on. I was just about to look through it more carefully when you showed up.”
“You have her phone? Here?”
“It’s inside.”
“You idiot. You know they can track that shit. They might be on the way here now.”
“The cops were already here once tonight. Somebody tried to break into the house. Was that you?”
“Why would I try to break into your house? Where is the damn phone?”
“Wait a minute. Why were you there this morning? At Jennifer’s? What did you do there?”
“Get the phone, Ryan.”
“Did something happen? Did you have a fight? Did she try to blackmail you with the letters?”
He lifted his hands to the stars as if he expected God Himself to deliver him from my obstinance and stupidity.
“It wasn’t pretty, okay?” Blake said. “Does it make you happy to know that?”
“Was she alive when you left her?”
“Will you just go get the phone already? That’s kind of more urgent than all of these questions. Okay?”
I stared at him. I tried to read his face. His words. Was he telling the truth?
“Go. Will you?” he said. “Just go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Blake waited outside while I went in and downloaded everything from Jennifer’s phone onto my laptop. While the information transferred, I silently cursed myself for taking the phone out of Jennifer’s house at all, let alone bringing it back to my home. My only hope was that it was so early in the investigation, that Jennifer’s body had been discovered such a short time ago, that the police hadn’t yet started looking for the missing phone. They’d be processing the crime scene and examining the physical evidence there.
For all I knew, they were finding my fingerprints somewhere I forgot I’d touched in the house. But I couldn’t worry about that either.
Blake had called me an idiot. Was he right?
When the information was transferred, I disconnected the phone from my laptop and started back outside. But before I reached the door, Amanda called to me from the top of the stairs.
“Ryan?”
I froze for a second. I slipped Jennifer’s phone back into my pocket and walked over to the bottom of the stairs. Amanda stood at the top, her hair in slight disarray because she’d been asleep. She squinted into the light where I stood.
“What are you doing down there? Are you coming to bed soon?”
“Yeah, soon. I got caught up looking at the Heights Facebook group. Someone else saw someone in their backyard, so I was reading about that.”
“I heard voices. Who were you talking to?”
I couldn’t lie to her again. I couldn’t just stand there in my own house and lie about every damn thing I was doing. I couldn’t do it.
“It’s Blake,” I said. “He came by. Don’t worry. He’s standing outside.”
“What is he here for?”
“He wanted to talk to me about the wedding.”
“This late?”
I shrugged. “You know how he is. Don’t worry. He’s leaving now.”
“Look, I don’t care if he comes in.”
“He’s not coming in. He’s going. Okay? And then I’m coming up to bed.”
“Is he inviting us to the wedding?” she asked. “Find out about that.”
“You’d go to his wedding?”
“You heard what I said earlier about moving on. And Sam . . . you know, I miss her friendship. We were starting to get pretty close. I’m just saying . . . let the past stay in the past, you know?”
“That sounds like a really good idea. Just go back to sleep. I’ll be there soon.”
I went out through the back door and into the yard, where Blake waited. He stood on the patio with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched against the increasing coolness of the night. I handed him the phone.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Throw it in the river. What else can I do?”
“You can’t do that. That’s tampering with evidence. It’s obstruction.”
“As opposed to taking it from the crime scene and bringing it here?”
“I acted impulsively. We’re clearheaded now. We’re thinking.”
“I’m all over this phone, Ryan,” Blake said. “Texts. Pictures. They’ll see everything.”
“Then you’re on her computer too. The cloud.”
He seemed to be listening. For a change. I let him think, even though a million questions remained unanswered.
“Okay,” he said, hefting the phone in his hand. “I’ll toss it in her neighborhood somewhere. The cops will think the killer just dropped it there.”
“Fine, do that. I downloaded everything off it.”
“You did?”
“I did.”
He smiled. “Who died and made you James Bond?”
“Maybe the information can help us figure out what’s happening.”
“Okay. Fine. Good. But I’m going to toss this.”
But before he left, I stopped him.
“Wait. Let me see that.” I took the phone back. I went into the house again and used a kitchen towel to wipe the phone off. Every inch. The screen, the back, and the sides. I found a Ziploc bag and put the phone inside, sealing it shut. When I went back out, Blake was staring up at the stars, lost in thought.
“Here,” I said. “Just open the bag and let the phone fall out. Don’t touch it.”
“You’re turning into a pretty good criminal yourself. But I guess you’ve been hiding your role in the accident all these years, so maybe you’re used to the double life.”
“I think we should just call the police. We can tell them everything and be done with it.”
Blake held up the bag and jiggled it. “You’re done now, okay? This is the end of your involvement with this. Just keep your mouth shut and stay out of it from here on out. Okay? They’re going to find out about the guy she just started dating. They’ll lean on him harder than anybody. Hell, maybe he did it.”
“I’m not done. The letters are out there. Whoever has them will know about the accident. So what are you going to do?” I asked. “After you get rid of the phone . . . what are you going to do? You said it yourself. The cops will come calling for you too. They’ll know about you. They’re going to have all kinds of questions.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He waved his hand like it was nothing.
“And you still haven’t told me what happened when you saw her this morning.”
He backed slowly away, disappearing into the darkness of the yard like a ghost. “You heard me,” he said. “Just stay out of it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I tried very hard to do what Blake instructed me to do.
What I wanted to do—live a normal life.
I went all through the house and checked and rechecked every door and window. I wished we had an alarm. Or a giant dog. I wished we lived in a fortress.
I took the bat with me when I went upstairs, and I paused in the doorway to Henry’s room. His night-light burned in the corner, casting his crib in a white glow. I went over and looked down at him, peaceful and calm. Did every parent feel like their heart would burst when they stared at their sleeping child?
Then I went on to our bedroom, placed the
bat next to the bed, and slipped beneath the covers while Amanda slept. Once I was in and settled, she turned to face me.
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“What did he say about the wedding?” she asked, her voice rough from sleep.
“Oh, that. I really don’t think we should go. It’s so sudden.”
She said something I couldn’t understand, her voice muffled by her pillow.
“What did you say?”
She said, “Whatever you want to do. I don’t care. I just don’t want Sam to be disappointed.”
“I think she knows what she’s getting into. Any commitment from Blake is tenuous.”
“And I don’t want you to lose a friendship. . . .”
Her voice trailed off, and soon she was breathing steadily as she slept. Her days with Henry were exhausting, and another one would start soon. The kid refused to let us sleep past six in the morning, which wasn’t far off.
I tried to sleep. I closed my eyes, told myself to clear my mind. But every time I closed them, I saw Jennifer’s face, her unseeing eyes. Her stiff body underneath the piles of clothes.
My hand touching her cool, lifeless skin.
I saw my phone lighting up with that friend request.
Twice.
I couldn’t make any sense of it, but it made me feel cold. And jumpy. Like I lay on a bed of nails.
When I was a kid, trying to sleep alone in my bedroom, my imagination sometimes grabbed ahold of me. If I’d heard of a murder on the news or a plane crash or a disappearance, I’d become convinced that the dead or missing people were under my bed, and I’d lie there in fear of a clawlike hand reaching up to grab me as I slept. Sometimes the fear drove me to tears, or else I’d dash down the hall to my parents’ room and wake them up. My dad might gently guide me back to my room and shine a flashlight under the bed, assuring me nothing was there that could hurt me.
If I proved particularly inconsolable, they’d let me climb into bed with them, and the three of us would sleep that way, allowing me to feel safe.
As an adult, I knew Jennifer’s body wasn’t under the bed. I knew no cold hand would be reaching up to grab me. But I felt the same surging, intense anxiety, the same freezing, gripping fear.
And there was no one to run to. No place I could crawl into and hide like my parents’ bed. I was the adult. I was the one the full weight of everything rested on.
And those letters were out there. The ones that told the truth about the accident and my role in it. A truth only Blake and I knew. But if those letters went out into the world—and I had no idea who currently had them—then that truth would spill over like a clogged toilet, destroying everything. . . .
After an hour of staring in the darkness, certain that Amanda was deeply and fully asleep, I slipped back out of bed. When I stood up, I noticed something unusual. Amanda’s phone sat on her bedside table next to the digital clock and the baby monitor. Amanda almost never kept her phone by the side of the bed. She hated the temptation to look at it during the night, to grab for it first thing in the morning.
I went down the stairs to the office, the floor cold against my bare feet, and opened my laptop, hoping to learn something—anything—from the information on Jennifer’s phone.
I’d experienced some good luck. Not only was Jennifer’s phone easy to access, but she used an iPhone and I had an Apple laptop, which had made it easy for me to back up the information from her phone to my iTunes account.
I’d never done such a thing with anyone else’s phone before. Every device Amanda and I owned was backed up to the cloud, so accessing them was easy. I assumed reading through Jennifer’s data would be the same way. But it wasn’t. The files in the iTunes backup were gibberish, and I couldn’t make any sense of them.
“Crap,” I said out loud.
I thought I heard a floorboard squeak overhead. I froze, listening. Was Amanda up with Henry? Had she noticed I was gone?
But no other noises came. So I turned back to the computer, even though I didn’t know what to do. I had a pretty good knowledge of computers and phones, but I wasn’t an IT guy. We had people at work who did those things and solved those problems for us. Sure, I could have gotten in touch with one of them, but it was the middle of the night. And how would I explain to them why I was trying to search through information from a complete stranger’s phone?
I did what anyone would have done. I Googled, searching for an answer. It didn’t take long to learn that software existed—many different kinds of software—that made it much easier to read and search through the information downloaded from a phone. Some of it was used by law enforcement. I picked a program that looked reasonably easy to use and purchased it.
While I waited for it to download, I checked my own social media accounts. Everything people shared suddenly looked strange and alien. Pictures of dogs and kids, pictures of food and clothes. Everyone else had gone about their day, posting the most inconsequential moments of their lives for all the world to see, while I had gone into a house and found the woman who lived there dead on the floor.
But just that day, hours before I ran into Blake at the Pig, I’d done the same thing. I’d taken and posted the photo of Amanda and Henry, sharing it with the world as though I believed everyone wanted and needed to see what my wife and child looked like on an ordinary Thursday. And even after the events of that night, I felt a little rush, seeing so many likes and comments, so much appreciation for how beautiful my family was. Some part of me believed that every interaction increased my value as a human being.
I closed the window.
The software finished downloading, and I was ready to wade through the contents of Jennifer’s phone, knowing I’d start with the messages between her and Blake.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I scrolled past the most recent messages Jennifer and Blake had exchanged, the ones in which he said he was coming over to see her just that morning.
It’s a free country
Had he gone? And if he had, what happened when he showed up?
Jennifer must not have been too worried about him having access to her house since she never changed the code on her door lock. If she’d wanted Blake out of her life, which she apparently hadn’t, that would have been the easiest way. That, and not responding to his messages. But she was also a person who used the same code on her alarm as on her phone. Was she just careless?
The two of them talked via text. A lot. They shared every detail of their lives. What they ate, what they saw, what they read. I felt sorry for archaeologists from the future who would have to wade through billions upon billions of abbreviated messages and photos of people’s tacos. I knew I’d contributed more than my fair share to the avalanche of data with my photos of Henry and Amanda, my pronouncements about beer and music. Were we all just yelling into a void? Was anybody really listening?
Once I’d scrolled back farther, I found an exchange from a month earlier in which Jennifer appeared to be listening very carefully.
Jennifer: Look, I just want you to be honest with me about what’s happening.
Blake: I’m trying to. It’s complicated.
Jennifer: It doesn’t have to be.
Blake: I wish that were so.
I lifted my hand to my forehead. I resisted the urge to bang my head against the top of the desk.
“Blake, you are a most magnificent idiot,” I said to no one.
I went back a few more weeks and saw a very different exchange:
Jennifer: I don’t ever want you to call me again.
Blake: I won’t. Don’t worry about that.
Jennifer: I won’t be your backup plan.
The more I read, the more I felt like a person could get whiplash following their relationship. The rest of the messages between the loving couple were more of the same. Highs and lows. Mundane t
alk and intense professions of love punctuated by the occasional several-week break in which things were completely cool. Only to resume again when one of them reached out to the other, arranging a meeting at Jennifer’s place.
I found it difficult to comprehend how Blake could almost blow the relationship with the person who was supposed to be most important to him.
And then I heard Blake’s voice in my head, cutting through everything like a buzz saw: Who are you to judge someone else for keeping secrets from the person closest to them?
Involuntarily my eyes trailed across the room to the bookshelf against the far wall. It was crammed with novels, textbooks left over from college, some professional journals relevant to both of our careers. But on top sat a framed photograph of Amanda and her sister, Mallory. The two of them were teenagers, hugging each other close. A photo taken six months before Mallory was killed by a drunk driver.
Something acidic rose in the back of my throat, nearly choking me.
I’d done the same thing to another family. Taken their daughter away in an accident. That sick, bile-filled feeling was part of my DNA.
I couldn’t argue with the disembodied voice asking who I was to judge for keeping secrets, so I tuned it out as I had so many other times, and tried to find something else, some other piece of relevant information in Jennifer’s phone. Even though searching through another person’s—a dead person’s—most private messages made me feel like one of the lowest forms of life. I’d been in her bedroom after she died. I’d seen her dead body. Now I was combing through her private messages, things never meant to be seen by anyone but her.
I suddenly remembered Blake mentioning Jennifer having another guy in her life, someone she had started dating recently after she and Blake broke up, someone else who might be a suspect in her death. So I exited the message stream between Blake and Jennifer and tried to find someone else, someone who might have been more than a friend.