Never Ask Me

by Jeff Abbott

  Now inside the cleft, where he hasn’t looked in years, is a plain brown envelope. His breath catches in his chest.

  He pulls it free. It’s thick, with GRANT written across it in block letters with black ink. He opens the envelope.

  Inside is money. Cash. Crisp twenties. Bound, organized, like it just came from a bank. He counts it, stunned.

  It’s a thousand dollars.

  Left for him in a tree.

  He looks into the envelope again and sees there’s a note inside. He unfolds it and reads it.

  Grant: You have been told a huge lie. I will only tell you the truth. Keep this money hidden and please tell no one about it. It’s a gift from me to you.

  Grant stands up. This is insane. Someone spoofing an email address to lead him to money hidden behind his house. He’s never seen this much cash in his life. And it’s his now. It makes no sense. Why?

  Grant feels like someone is watching him. He stands. He scans the dense growth of oaks and cedar along the creek, the hiking trail. Sees no one, listens to the quiet of the wind in the trees.

  He clutches the envelope close to his chest, feels the weight of the cash.

  Then, on the morning air, he hears the approaching scream of police sirens.

  3

  Iris

  Iris Pollitt sits in her car, in her closed garage, hands on the wheel, thinking: Danielle is dead. Really dead.

  And then she thinks: Good.

  It’s the worst thought she’s ever had, a horror, unworthy, and she shoves the thought away. She wants to cry; she wants to vomit. Instead she takes several deep breaths and starts the car. Music plays, the nineties channel on satellite radio, or the “Mom Channel” as Julia calls it. Britney Spears is singing “…Baby One More Time,” and Iris turns the volume down into silence.

  Now she hears only the sound of her own ragged, gasping breath.

  Go. Go there. Your kid needs you. Mom mode. Now.

  She’s in such shock she’s forgotten to open the garage door, and she jabs the button, thinking herself lucky she didn’t rocket into the closed door. She waits for the door to power up and reverses up the driveway, fast. Going past the kitchen window, she sees Grant staring out in surprise, in curiosity.

  What do you say when you get there? What do you do?

  She should have woken Kyle, made him come with her. She didn’t even think of that. She is moving through this morning as if she is in a dream and she needs to be awake.

  Iris floors the Mercedes GLS. She doesn’t think about Danielle being dead—she can’t. She keeps that terrible thought at bay and instead retreats to thinking about her to-do list, which now won’t get done today: organizing the final fundraiser for the Lakehaven High Music Festival (featuring band, orchestra, and choir); dropping off donated supplies at the fundraiser for a less fortunate school on the other side of Austin (a project of Julia’s, both to do good and to bolster Julia’s résumé for college applications); then a meeting with the choir parents board tomorrow, where she’ll outline the spending for the school musical and the end-of-year senior chorister trip to Houston, where the kids will see a touring Broadway show and have a private session with the show’s understudies to learn about musical theater. It’s a lot; it’s a job where she doesn’t get paid, except that then her kids have better programs and her husband thinks she’s doing something worthwhile and not pining about her vanished career all day.

  Thinking about her day as if it could still be normal doesn’t keep the horror at bay. Tears now in her eyes. Oh, Danielle. Why?

  Danielle is dead.

  And my daughter found her.

  Suddenly, in her mind, an old and precious memory: Danielle surprising her at the front door, with a smile: I got the email. They’ve matched a baby for you. A boy.

  And Iris screaming in joy, and Danielle embracing her.

  She blasts down Winding Creek Trail. Past one neighbor walking a pair of dogs, past a jogger. The houses are morning-quiet. All that quiet, that sense of security, is about to go away for a long time. She feels the world shift. She has to be ready for her family.

  Iris skids to a stop inside the park entrance. Ned kneels by the bench, sobbing, Julia embracing him from behind, still holding her phone. Two men she doesn’t recognize, but both dressed for jogging, are standing near them, watching. One has a phone pressed to his ear, speaking quietly. The other, a tall redhead, just stares, pale and unsure.

  The enormity of it all slaps her in the chest, the stomach.

  Iris stumbles out of her SUV, her hand at her mouth in horror, and runs toward them. “Julia!” she screams.

  “Mom!” Julia looks like she’s seen the end of the world. “We found her…we found her on the bench.” Julia doesn’t let go of Ned, her face twisted, tears on her cheeks. “She was sitting here… She’s cold.”

  “Don’t look. Kids, don’t look.” It’s too late for that, but she doesn’t know what else to say. She tries to pull them both away, but only Julia goes. Ned lets out this keening cry and lies down on the ground, his hand clenching his mom’s leg. It breaks Iris’s heart. She kneels, puts her hand on the small of his back because she doesn’t know what else to do.

  “I tried to get him to move,” one of the joggers says quietly. “He won’t go.”

  Iris forces herself to look at Danielle Roberts. The dead woman wears a dark wool coat, jeans, loafers, a dark-gray sweater. Expensive ring on her finger. A massive bruise discolors her throat; blood cakes her mouth, her chin.

  “Iris?” the jogger on the phone calls to her. He knows who she is, of course; she isn’t sure of his name in the charge of emotions. She forces herself to flip through her mental catalog of contacts and remembers him. He’s Rachel Sifowicz’s husband. Matt. They have two kids, a senior in high school who plays football and an eighth-grade girl in band. Rachel had to cut back on volunteering when Matt was briefly unemployed after being laid off. Odd rambling thoughts fighting for footing in the slippery slope of her overwhelmed mind.

  “Matt,” she says. “Call the police.”

  “I did. They’re on their way. I’m on the phone with the emergency operator. They said don’t touch anything.”

  “Did you find her?”

  “The kids did,” he says. “We heard them screaming and ran here. Is she…for sure?”

  Ned found his own mother. Dead. Iris feels faint. She swallows down a tickle of bile. She forces herself to check Danielle’s wrist; she can’t bear to touch that discolored throat. No pulse.

  “Yes,” she says. Mom mode. She has to get into mom mode. For both of them.

  She looks at the other jogger, a brawny redhead. She doesn’t know his name. “Help me with him,” she says, and he nods.

  “Ned,” she whispers. She puts her fingertips on his chin and turns his face toward hers. She has known this boy since he was a toddler. His face is gaunt, his mouth quivering, brown eyes hollow with grief. His breath smells like mouthwash. His dark hair is under a cap. He looks at her like he no longer understands the world.

  “Ned, come away.” She can hear the police sirens approaching; he hears them, too, and he shakes his head. Everything is about to change. He can’t let it, she sees; he cannot accept this new world.

  “Ned,” she repeats. “Ned.”

  He whispers, “Mom can’t be dead. She can’t be.”

  “I know, I know. The police are here. Let them help her.”

  “Why would anyone hurt her?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie. I don’t know. Come with me. Come with us.”

  She sees a shadow start to pass over his face, as if he is asking himself the question and considering the answers, and then he presses his face into Iris’s shoulder. She begins to stand, and he resists, but then the redheaded jogger gently raises the boy to his feet, and Iris guides Ned toward the police car that has just pulled up. The weight of him against her shoulder is the weight of this new, awful reality.

  She hears words being spoken—Matt, remaining
calm; the officer, taking command of the scene; Julia brokenly starting to tell them what happened—but she focuses on Ned, on steering him away from the horror, on holding him up, on comforting him. Another police car arrives.

  Ned shudders under her arm.

  Iris looks back at Danielle, an empty shell on a cold bench.

  She can never tell now.

  Iris hugs the grieving boy closer to her.

  4

  Transcript from Interviews for A Death in Winding Creek by Elena Garcia

  Elena Garcia: How long have you lived in Winding Creek?

  Matt Sifowicz: Nearly seventeen years. We bought early. I mean, some people don’t buy until their kids are school age. And all the prices do here is go up. So we bit the bullet and got in when our son was a baby. Would have cost me an extra forty thousand if we’d waited until he was in kindergarten.

  Garcia: People really buy here for the school district.

  Sifowicz: And everything that comes with it. The football team, the music programs, the robotics and business incubator programs, the college placement, the real estate investment…That is what sells Lakehaven.

  Garcia: And low crime. Presumably.

  Sifowicz: You have to realize, we’ve never had a murder in this neighborhood. Tools being stolen from a garage is a rare kind of crime in Winding Creek. Maybe one or two burglaries, or stuff being taken from cars in driveways. The most common is trespassing, people who don’t live in the neighborhood going down to our greenbelt to tube in the creek, drink beer, smoke pot. Sometimes they start campfires, which is a threat to the whole greenbelt and every home in the neighborhood.

  Garcia: So Winding Creek—the actual creek and the surrounding greenbelt—is on private property.

  Sifowicz: Yes, owned collectively by the home owners in the neighborhood. I’m on the HOA board. Four hundred houses. Average sale price now is eight hundred thousand. That’s twice what some people bought theirs for fifteen years ago. This is a good place to be.

  Garcia: How did you feel the Pollitts were viewed here in the neighborhood?

  Sifowicz: Pretty well. They were popular. Iris is kind of a force of nature. Everyone knows her.

  Garcia: What was your first thought when you saw Julia Pollitt and Ned Frimpong in the park?

  Sifowicz: I was jogging with a coworker who also lives here, Steve Butler. I’m VP of sales at a software company and Steve is our VP of product development. It’s easier to stick to the training regimen when you have a partner. Steve suggested a run that morning. We were approaching the park when I heard Julia Pollitt screaming. Steve heard it, too. We looked at each other and ran straight for the park. I thought she was being assaulted. We entered the park and saw them by the bench and saw the body. Ned Frimpong was trying, I think, to resuscitate or embrace his mother, and Julia Pollitt was trying to pull him away from the body. She had her phone out.

  Garcia: She texted her mother instead of calling 911, yes?

  Sifowicz: Yes. I think that might be normal for a panicking teenager. I took care of calling 911 and told her I was.

  Garcia: Did you know Danielle Roberts?

  Sifowicz: Well enough to say hello. My wife knew her better. All the school moms, well, they seem to know each other. If they volunteer a lot.

  Garcia: How so?

  Sifowicz: The moms, and yeah, some of the dads, well, they run the programs. They raise the funds for all the extra things that make our schools special because the state takes a ton of Lakehaven’s property taxes to build and support schools in less fortunate areas. I’m OK with that, by the way. But it is a huge amount of money shifted from Lakehaven schools—last year it was over one hundred million dollars—and parents here have very high expectations. Stratospheric, even.

  Garcia: What with having bought their homes here strictly for the school district.

  Sifowicz: Absolutely! They make sure the teachers have any extra thing they need. Iris is kind of that supermom volunteer who is on every committee. My wife is an insurance agent. She doesn’t have time to volunteer the way Iris does, but I think she was amazed at Iris’s energy. But that’s Iris. Or was.

  Garcia: You were there when Iris Pollitt arrived.

  Sifowicz: Yes, and of course, I didn’t know the truth. None of us did.

  Garcia: The truth?

  Sifowicz: Well, yes, all that’s come out since. So much deception, so many lies. It’s shocking. This is a nice neighborhood.

  5

  Kyle

  “Dad?”

  Kyle Pollitt awakens with a bolt. Sweat on his ribs, feeling fevered. He blinks away the awful image from his dream—blood droplets on an expanse of white—and sees his son, Grant, standing over him, pale. For a second Kyle thinks he’s still in the dream and has said something in his sleep. Something terrible that Grant would never understand. Kyle blinks again and realizes he’s awake.

  It was only a dream.

  “Dad?” Grant repeats.

  “Yes. Hey, buddy. Good morning.” Kyle blinks, wipes a hand across his face.

  “Something bad is happening. Julia went somewhere with Ned and then Mom ran out of here and told me to stay here and there’s tons of police sirens in the neighborhood.”

  “OK. OK.” Kyle gets out of bed, wearing only his boxers, and pulls on exercise pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt with Lakehaven Track printed across the front—Julia runs cross-country. He picks up his phone and texts Iris: YOU OK?

  No answer.

  They look at each other, hearing another set of sirens approaching in the distance.

  “You stay here,” Kyle says.

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so.” Kyle steps into sandals, the closest shoes at hand, although it’s cold outside, and searches for his car keys.

  Grant watches him gather his stuff. He sees his father’s hands tremble, slightly, as he stuffs keys and wallet into his gray pants.

  “Dad?”

  “I’ll text you in a few minutes.” Kyle finds his car keys and hurries out. He drives his BMW toward the sounds of the sirens. He sees people, neighbors, walking along Winding Creek Trail, toward the sirens.

  Toward the park.

  Fresh sweat breaks out on his ribs, his palms. He feels sick.

  He arrives. There are multiple police cars: Lakehaven and, just arriving, Travis County Sheriff’s Office. An ambulance. Lights flashing on all of them. A crowd starting to form. Near one of the cars he sees his wife and his daughter. Unhurt, but in the middle of it all. He swallows past the thickness in his throat.

  The police officers are setting up a perimeter and they keep him back. He calls to Iris; she hurries over to him, holding Julia tightly.

  “It’s Danielle Roberts,” Iris says. “She’s dead.”

  “What? How?”

  “I don’t know how she died. Julia and Ned found her.” Iris’s gaze is steady on him.

  The words nearly stagger him. Kyle tries not to show it, and so he folds his arms around his wife and his daughter. Kyle’s tall, and over their heads he sees Danielle’s body sprawled on a park bench. Officers are starting to process the scene. He stares at her. And then he sees it, below her feet, under the bench, near her shoe, because one of the deputies has started taking pictures and aims her camera right at…

  A cell phone. Lying on the ground, under the bench.

  Phones have records in them. Of calls made and calls received.

  He tightens his hugs on his family.

  What has he done? Panic roars in his chest, like a clawing, living beast.

  This isn’t happening, he thinks.

  “Dad, I can’t breathe,” Julia says into his shoulder.

  He releases her instantly, instead putting a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

  “The police want Julia to give a statement. At the station, away from all this,” Iris says.

  “All right,” he says.

  “I’ll take her. You stay with Grant.”

  “All right.” He most decidedly doe
s not want to go to the police station. “Who did this?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not like we have muggers hanging out in that park.” Iris’s voice is shaking, her lip trembling.

  “It has to be random,” he says. “Everyone loved Danielle. Where is Ned?” he asks.

  “With the police. They’re talking to him. Trying to establish her movements.”

  Movements. What a clinical word, he thinks. Her movements. Where she was, who she talked to. Who she saw. Tracking her phone. He feels cold terror inch up his spine. I want out. I want out. Words, echoing in his head.

  “I’ll go with Julia. You’ve had a shock,” he says. Knowing full well what Iris’s answer will be.

  “No. I’ll go. I was here.” And there he hears it, the barest bit of accusation that she had to come and comfort their traumatized daughter while he lounged in bed.

  “All right. Whatever you think best.”

  And then Julia starts crying. Really crying. Brokenhearted crying.

  “We’ll tell them you’ll talk to them later,” Iris says, embracing her.

  “No, no,” Julia said. “Whoever did this has to be caught. I want to help the police.”

  Kyle can see Iris is in full mom mode. Protective, determined. Is he in dad mode yet? He is so shaken right now. “We’ll both go.”

  “Is Grant home alone?” Iris asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, go home. Whoever did this could have fled into the greenbelt, been hiding…” Iris says, and she’s off, theories pouring out of her. “I mean, he could try to break into a house to hide.”

  “Grant is fine.”