by Cate Holahan
Jenny stood in front of the wall of windows, pixelated by the bright sunlight streaming behind her. “It’s gorgeous out there.” Her backlit form doubled over to untie her sneakers.
Susan pounced on the new topic. “It’s supposed to be one of the best beaches in the Northeast. Not too hot. And not too crowded, since you have to be in one of the houses to gain access.”
Jenny didn’t comment on whether Susan’s research was right. Instead, she finished removing her shoes and headed toward the stairs, her tall, athletic form coming into focus as she strode further into the room. Still, having stared at the bright windows, Susan’s eyes struggled to adjust.
Louis stood from his seat at the breakfast bar and opened his arms. Chivalry withstood a decade-long marriage, Susan supposed, when the wife looked like Jenny. She needed to make more of an effort to spruce up around Nadal.
“Hey, honey,” Louis said. “How was the run?”
Jenny stopped several feet from her husband, at the edge of the staircase. “Good. I’m sweaty though. I should shower.”
“Did you see Ben out there?” The change in Rachel’s relaxed expression told Susan something was wrong. Rachel’s eyebrows had squeezed together, deepening the lines that stamped all women past a certain age. “What happened to your eye?”
Jenny’s fingertips fled to her left cheekbone. “Oh. Is it swelling?”
“It looks bruised.”
Susan strained to see the cause for concern. Jenny’s hand covered nearly the whole left side of her face, and she had dropped her head, too, swinging her hair over her eye like a brunette Jessica Rabbit. “It’s the silliest thing. I was running and—”
“Let me see.” Louis walked over to his wife, partially blocking Susan’s view. He held Jenny’s chin and tilted it upright. She let her hand drop, revealing a shimmery yellow patch on her brown skin that faded into a violet swath.
Instinctively, Susan pivoted to the freezer and withdrew a handful of ice. Raising twin boys had turned her into a triage officer. “Are you okay?” She scanned the kitchen for a paper towel roll. “Did you trip or—”
“That looks like a really bad bite, honey.” Louis released her chin. “Maybe a mosquito or a spider. Your skin is so sensitive.”
Jenny nodded. “I should put some anti-inflammatory ointment on it.”
Rachel took several steps toward Jenny for her own examination. “You wouldn’t think the beach would be so buggy in June. I mean, to get bit on your face? While running?”
“It’s not teeming with insects or anything.” Jen retreated from Rachel, withdrawing into her husband. “I’m sure I just, um—”
“It probably happened earlier and you’re only now having the reaction. Blood flow and heat always makes any skin injury worse.” Louis brushed his wife’s hair from her face. “You should go upstairs, babe. Wash off any irritants that might be exacerbating the reaction. There’s Benadryl in the front pocket of my suitcase. I’ll bring you a cold compress.”
Jenny bolted toward the stairs. A loud crack stopped her as she reached the mezzanine. The front door was opening.
“Hey, everybody. I got dinner.” Ben’s voice reverberated in the hallway.
The sound seemed to hasten Jenny’s sprint to the second floor. Susan winced as she watched her run up the modern staircase, hand barely brushing the thin metal railing affixed to one side. The cement floor would not forgive a fall.
Nadal started toward the front door. “The bags might be heavy.”
Susan remembered the ice freezing her palm. A roll of paper towels peeked from behind the swan-necked kitchen faucet. She peeled off a sheet, dropped in the cubes, and then twisted it into a little pouch. “I know an ice pack would be better.” Susan passed the makeshift satchel to Louis.
“Thanks.” He accepted it with a shake of his head. “Her skin blows up at the slightest thing.”
“She does get a lot of bruises, Louis.” Rachel’s arms folded across her chest. “Perhaps you should look into why.”
Louis started toward the stairs. “Maybe an iron deficiency, or too little vitamin C.”
“Does Jenny need orange juice?” Susan shouted after him. “I can grab some in town.”
“That bug must have been a big sucker. Beneath her left eye is all swollen and black.” Rachel’s mouth drew into a line. She gave Ben a pointed look as he came into the kitchen, communicating in the silent language of long-term partners. Susan couldn’t interpret what had been said, but she knew information had been exchanged.
Paper rustled. Ben clenched the sides of the grocery bag as though it threatened to slip from his hands. He called up to Louis on the landing. “What bit her, Louis?”
“I’m an ER surgeon, not an entomologist.” Louis mimicked the cadence of Dr. McCoy as he delivered his one-liner. The quip failed to elicit a chuckle from any of the concerned faces in the room. Louis shrugged like a comedian used to some jokes falling flat and headed toward the bedroom. The door clicked shut behind him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE DAY AFTER
Gabby followed Susan down a thin path carved through the scrub brush. Although the woman led with her right foot, her left sneaker stamped deeper impressions into the sand, emphasizing the limp that Gabby had previously noted. She wondered if the uneven stride was something new, brought on perhaps by a blister from her beach run or some injury sustained after stumbling upon Rachel’s body.
The path opened up onto the side of a well-manicured lawn with a sparkling lap pool. The jewel of the property, however, was truly the house. Rhomboid and rectangular panes of glass made up the entire waterfront wall, providing an unobstructed view of the beach and, Gabby reminded herself, the approaching officers. Thankfully, there didn’t appear to be anyone watching. Through the windows, she could see straight through to the kitchen, as well as the entirety of the second-floor hallway. The interior was sparsely furnished, leaving clean sight lines. There weren’t many places for a grown man to hide other than in the bedrooms.
“Any guns in the house?” Gabby brushed her hand against her hip as though she were adjusting her jacket and not reminding herself of her service weapon.
“No.” Susan’s matter-of-fact denial surprised Gabby. Usually, New York suburbanites reacted to the question as though Gabby had asked if there were starving children handcuffed to the basement radiator. Susan’s eyes went to the black grip poking out of Gabby’s open suit jacket. “Please break the news gently to Ben. Whatever problems he and Rachel had, he can’t have done this.”
Gabby tried to see beneath Susan’s apparent nausea and nerves to whatever emotion fueled her continued defense of Rachel’s spouse. In Gabby’s experience, relationships between heterosexual married couples divided along gender lines, with wives befriending the other women and the husbands making nice with the guys. But the way Susan was acting, it seemed that she cared more about Ben than her dead friend.
“Where is everyone sleeping?” Gabby directed the question at Nadal.
He pointed to a tiny balcony with two Adirondack chairs overlooking their position. “Jenny and Louis have the upstairs bedroom facing the water. Ben is in the downstairs bedroom, off the first-floor hallway.”
Layout provided, Gabby started toward the windowed wall, skirting the lap pool. Before she reached the door, she noticed a red stain on the stone coping. She stopped beside it, then crouched for a better look. The thinness of the crimson smear didn’t look like any blood Gabby had ever seen, but she couldn’t be sure. She scanned the area for more. About a foot from the blemish were several squashed blades of grass, dyed a thick red. She waved DeMarco over. “Tag these,” she mouthed.
DeMarco pulled a pad of Post-its from one of the pouches on his belt and bent beside the two red blotches.
“That’s mine,” Susan said as Gabby crouched down. The woman’s already wan face seemed to turn green. “I was walking around barefoot and cut my heel.”
A foot injury explained the slight limp, Gabby supposed.
Though a kick to the back of the leg during a struggle would excuse it as well. She gestured to the round smart lock atop the back door handle. “What’s the code?”
Susan reached over Gabby’s head to the keypad. As she did, the curly hairs on the nape of Gabby’s neck seemed to coil tighter. Susan was certainly tall enough to overpower a woman Rachel’s size.
“One, four, nine, two.” Susan paused between announcing each digit, like a lotto worker reading off the winning numbers. She expected, Gabby supposed, that someone would be jotting it down. But none of the officers, Gabby included, wanted their hands occupied with a notebook and pen when entering a strange home, one that more than likely housed a murderer.
The door swung back with a whisper, as though nothing stronger than the wind had pushed it open. Gabby’s blunt heels were not as subtle. Sharp claps announced every step as she crossed the concrete floor. Officer Kelly’s footfalls sounded even louder thanks to his regulation boots.
Gabby expected the noise bouncing between the ceiling beams to call all the house occupants into the main area. Instead, she was greeted with a humid quiet, as if the air were weighed down. Beneath it, she heard the hiss of water rushing through pipes, a steady respiration in the near-silent room.
“He could be washing off evidence.” Gabby couldn’t distinguish whether DeMarco or Kelly had spoken. Their voices were distorted, muffled by her heartbeat and the blood pounding in her head. Ostensibly, she was just notifying the next of kin, she reminded herself. She needed to calm down.
She started toward the first-floor hallway, one of the few areas of the home not illuminated by the sun pouring through the windows. As she walked, she waved for DeMarco to tail her with one hand while signaling Officer Kelly to stay back with the other. Water stopped surging through the pipes. The house seemed to hold its breath as both she and DeMarco hustled toward the closed bedroom door.
“Hello, Nadal? Is that you? Who’s here?” The avalanche of questions tumbled down onto the officers. Gabby spun around to track the motion on the mezzanine. A wiry redhead had stepped into the upstairs hallway. He wore a long-sleeved dress shirt and plaid golf shorts, the picture of a prep-school product on vacation. His sun-reddened complexion paled at the sight of the uniformed officer below.
“What’s going on? Susan? Nadal?” He shouted toward the bedroom door.
“Louis,” Susan shouted up at the second floor. “It’s about Rachel.”
Louis pivoted toward the door he’d exited moments before. “Jenny, the police are here. Come out.”
“The police?” The woman’s voice sounded high and timid.
“If you would come downstairs.” The cathedral ceilings amplified DeMarco’s normal speaking voice. “We would like to speak with you.”
Louis squinted down at them. “What’s this about?”
“We can talk once you’re both downstairs.” DeMarco said. “We—”
A rumbling, like a train rushing down a track, interrupted them. In Gabby’s peripheral vision, a door in the hallway slid open. She whirled toward the motion, her right hand reflexively reaching for her Glock’s grip. A wall of a man ducked under the doorjamb and entered the narrow hallway.
In the dim light, Gabby couldn’t see his face, but she could estimate his size: six foot five or six and around two hundred forty pounds. Loose gym shorts dangled around his knees and a white crew neck clung to the lines of his muscular torso, as if wet. He hadn’t toweled off from his shower.
“Mr. Ben Hansen.” Gabby hoped she got the name right in spite of her nerves. There’d been so many thrown at her in the past twenty minutes. “I’m Detective Watkins, and with me is Detective DeMarco and Officer Kelly. We’d like to talk to you.”
The massive man placed a hand on the wall, steadying himself while effectively blocking her from passing. He stepped in her direction. “What? Wha—What’s going on?”
His words bubbled out like his brain had not yet fully surfaced from a deep sleep. Gabby stepped back and tapped her fingers against the Glock’s handle. “Let’s go into the living room where we can sit down.”
Gabby retreated two steps into the great room. She turned to the side, giving Ben an opportunity to pass, and allowing her and DeMarco to subtly flank their suspect. As he emerged from the hallway into the light, Gabby caught the look of confusion marring his clearly handsome face—a face, she realized, that had recently been in a fight. A red bump bulged from the center of Ben’s thin bottom lip, making him appear to pout. A purple bruise glowed on his forearm, as though it had taken the brunt of a punch.
“What’s this about?” Louis’s question echoed above her. He was demanding to know what the police were doing in “his house.”
“We’ll discuss it down here, sir.” The calm in Gabby’s voice relieved her. She didn’t sound at all like how she felt. “If you would come down.”
Louis stepped toward the staircase. Before he reached the banister, a woman hurried from the open second-floor door. The first thing Gabby noticed was her skin, a bronze with a yellow-brown undertone that hadn’t come from any self-tanning solution. Black people stood out in the Hamptons because there were so few of them, particularly on the South Fork. Since moving for work, Gabby often went days without seeing anyone that resembled her.
Jenny, as the man had called her, appeared to have just woken. Her dark-brown hair was uncombed, half curly with straight pieces falling at the sides. The tee hanging over her leggings looked as though it had been scrunched into a ball. To make up for it, perhaps, she’d thrown a scarf around her neck, as if the red tie somehow made wearing yesterday’s clothing “French” and therefore stylish.
Gabby shifted her attention to Louis. Though he was complying with her demand to descend the stairs, he still exuded arrogance. His head was cocked at a skeptical angle. His lips were pursed in a nervous yet disapproving kiss-off.
“It’s Rachel.” Susan’s voice sounded even higher and thinner that it had moments before, a violin string about to snap. “We found her on the beach.”
Ben squinted at the wall of windows. “Still? She can’t have stayed out all night.”
Though Ben didn’t seem to register Susan’s implication, the couple upstairs clearly understood. Louis’s mouth fell open while Jenny clutched her husband’s arm. “But I saw her from the upstairs balcony last night.” Jenny’s tinny voice trembled. “She was on the jetty.”
“Come down,” DeMarco repeated. “Both of you.”
Louis grasped the railing with his right hand. His left remained in the air as he headed to the first floor, continuing to signal his surrender. Jenny followed him as if on a delay, descending one step to every two taken by her husband. As she reached the middle of the staircase, Gabby saw that the hand gripping the banister was yellowed at the knuckles from the force of her squeezing.
“Rachel?” Ben called up the staircase where Jenny stood, statue-still, several feet from the bottom.
“I saw her from the upstairs balcony last night,” Jenny repeated, her voice stronger. “She was sitting on the jetty, watching the ocean.”
“What time was this?” Gabby asked.
“I … I don’t know. It was night. There were waves. Big swells dashing against the rocks. Could she swim?” Jenny covered her mouth with both hands. “I’m not sure that she could swim.”
Ben’s eyes darted from Jenny to Louis to Jason to Gabby, as though he couldn’t discern friend from foe. “She can swim.” He faced DeMarco. “She must have gone to a hotel. Did you check the local hotels?”
Gabby didn’t know what to make of Ben’s reaction. On one hand, he seemed genuinely distraught and discombobulated. But then, he did have a face for acting.
Gabby cleared her throat. “Your wife is dead, Mr. Hansen.”
Ben raked his fingers from his temples down the sides of his cheeks. He looked at Gabby as if she’d failed to understand some self-evident truth. “No, Susan just said she saw her, and Jenny—”
“We saw her body on the
beach, Ben.” Nadal said. “I’m sorry.”
Ben reached out to grab on to something. He stumbled as his hand clawed air on the staircase’s open side. His mouth fell further open, baring his teeth. “No. No. This isn’t right. It can’t—”
“She was wearing the same swimsuit from last night.” Susan made a hiccupping noise, half gasp, half swallowed tears. “She didn’t respond when we called out to her. Nadal took her pulse.”
Ben yelped like an injured animal. “No. She was right outside. How?”
“We intend to find that out.” Gabby stepped beside Ben, asserting her lead of the investigation. “We’ll need everyone to come down to the station and tell us when they last saw Ms. Klein, and anything else that you can remember from the prior night.”
“But she was just here.” Ben spoke with his hand covering his mouth. “How could—”
“Enough, Ben.” Louis’s pointed at the grieving man’s chest. “You know how Rachel died. We heard her admit she’d been cheating. We saw how upset you were when you came back from talking to her.”
Ben’s mouth hung open, showcasing the scabbing back of his busted lip. His eyes widened like a choking victim.
Louis glared at him. “Just admit it. You went back out to that beach. You went out there, and then you killed her.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE DAY OF
Jenny placed her purse in the pedestal sink, removing the pill bottles and face creams to unearth her cosmetic bag. She withdrew the tattoo concealer, purchased six months earlier to cover a nasty splotch on her shoulder, and then pulled off the top. With the compact in her left hand, she dug in the canvas satchel with her right for the smooth handle of her makeup brush. Finding it, she scraped the bristles across the compact’s creamy surface. The hue on the tip reminded her of the custard pies her grandma used to make. Nothing covered a black eye like yellow.