Never Ask Me

by Jeff Abbott

  “Why would that matter?” he asks, and the second he does he knows he’s made a mistake.

  “Just curious,” Ames says.

  He glances between the two of them. It’s not exactly good cop/bad cop. Ponder is in charge. He saw that on the news and Iris said she ran the meeting.

  “Sunday. I went for a run.”

  “Right after the body was discovered?”

  “Well, yes,” he says awkwardly. “But that’s how I deal with stress.”

  “Your friend is found dead by your daughter. Your wife accompanies her to the police station. Your young son is here alone. And you go for a run.”

  “Yes,” Kyle says, putting some firmness into his voice. “Is that a problem?” He senses Iris stepping up behind him, listening. He still can’t look at her, not now. He will crack if he looks at her.

  From a large backpack Ponder holds up an evidence bag…containing the crushed remains of some electronic device. Black, with a silvery-green edging. “Do you recognize this, sir?”

  “It looks like broken electronics.” He keeps his voice amazingly steady. This is worse than the journal.

  “Crushed and pummeled,” Ames says. “It’s a phone.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “In your trash can late last night, sir.”

  “Don’t you need a warrant?” Iris says, but no, they don’t. Not to search his trash.

  “What we got was an anonymous tip that said you might be getting rid of a phone identical to the one found near Danielle’s body. That phone had only one number in its log,” Ponder says. “Is this your phone?”

  “It’s not mine.” Someone else knew he had the phone and someone else knew he might destroy it after Danielle died. His chest feels thick with shock.

  “Is it your son’s? Or your daughter’s? Or your wife’s? Mrs. Pollitt, do you recognize this phone?”

  Kyle knows he should shut up. He should call Kip Evander, a local lawyer he knows well. Kip specializes in personal injury, but he’s done criminal defense a few times, and it would look better to call a lawyer friend than a defense specialist. The thought that the police will think the phone belongs to someone in his family is crushing. “No,” he says. “I mean, yes, I destroyed the phone. But it wasn’t my property.”

  He’s played this wrong. He knows that now. But he has to protect Iris, and in turn, his children. All of them. Sometimes you take the bullet even when it’s not meant for you. Would he be so willing had he not read Danielle’s handwriting on that page?

  “Whose phone was it?” Ponder asks.

  “Honey, I think we should just not say any more until a lawyer is present,” Iris says.

  He wants to turn to Iris and tell her how much he loves her. And that it will be OK. He’ll make it OK.

  The detectives wait to see what he says to her, and when he stays silent, Ponder asks again: “Whose phone, Mr. Pollitt?”

  “Danielle’s,” he says. “She bought it.”

  “Mr. Pollitt, why did you have a phone belonging to Ms. Roberts?” Jamika Ponder asks the question almost mildly.

  “Danielle gave it to me.” He glances over at Iris, who’s now standing protectively next to him. She stares at him. He stares back. It will be all right.

  “Why did you not tell the police about this? Why didn’t you come forward?” Ames asks.

  “Her giving me a phone had nothing to do with what happened.” His mind races. Who could have placed that call?

  “We’d like to make that determination,” Ponder says.

  “Why did you have a phone from Danielle?” Iris asks, and her voice is flat, cold as a stone striking brick.

  Kyle doesn’t answer.

  “Where were you Saturday night, Mr. Pollitt?”

  “Here. Working late in my home office.”

  Ponder glances at Iris. “Is that so, Mrs. Pollitt?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Mrs. Pollitt, you said earlier you went to sleep around midnight. Was Mr. Pollitt in bed by then, too?”

  Ponder can’t miss the look between Iris and Kyle. “No, he wasn’t, but I had set the security alarm already. If he turned it off, it would have beeped, and that always wakes me up. So he was in the house. He couldn’t have left it.”

  “Was he in bed with you when you fell asleep?” Ponder asks again.

  Iris shakes her head. She’s staring at Kyle like he’s a stranger. “No, but I just told you he can’t turn off the alarm without waking me.” She seems angry that Ponder isn’t accepting her word for this as a given scientific fact.

  “Did you talk to Danielle that evening, sir?”

  “Briefly. She called me on the phone she’d given me. She was incoherent. She just said she wanted out, but she wouldn’t tell me what that meant.”

  “We’d like to bring you in for further questioning, Mr. Pollitt.”

  “I understand. I’d like an attorney to be present. Iris, will you call Kip and have him meet me down at the police station?”

  “Kyle, Kyle.” Iris shakes her head. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m not saying anything more,” Kyle says. “Do you need to put handcuffs on me?”

  “You’re not under arrest.”

  “Oh. Yes. Of course.” He’s knows better, but right now his brain feels scrambled.

  “Kyle…what the hell is this?” Iris’s voice rises.

  Kyle meets her stare with his own. “You are everything in the world to me. You and the kids. Know that. I want you to call Kip, and I want you to look out for our kids. Everything will be all right.”

  The detectives lead him out the door—it feels like his world has completely dissolved in less than one minute—and Kyle wonders if the life he knew has just vanished forever.

  39

  Julia

  The words Julia doesn’t say to Ned on the drive to school: Well, your drug-ring buddy Marland is blackmailing me into working for him while you skulk off to London and are entirely off the hook, and though you’re my best friend, I’m not going to let you destroy my life.

  But she has to outthink both Ned and Marland. Get that video of her father and Danielle walking toward the park. Get it and destroy it. Without being forced to be Marland’s accomplice and middleman to a bunch of prescription-downing Lakehaven kids who represent a revenue stream for him.

  She has to act like everything is vaguely normal. Which it isn’t.

  “Are you sure you want to go to school?” Julia asks. She’s driving, Ned in the passenger seat.

  “I don’t want to sit at home all day with my father,” he says. He stares out the window. He just seems oblivious to her anger at him.

  “With people at school, it’s hard for Marland to get close to you.”

  Now he looks at her. “Get close to me?”

  “If he wants to threaten you. To keep you quiet. Or hurt you.”

  “What?”

  “He’s a drug dealer and you broke a deal with him,” she says. “In the movies this is where you get your leg broken.”

  “What movie? Plus, this is real life, and a Lakehaven kid getting roughed up would be bad for business.”

  That’s true. He glances away from her.

  “Why did you want me to drive you to a delivery?” she asks. Marland knows she did.

  “I wasn’t just delivering. From one kid I got physics notes, too.”

  “Ned.” The anger in her voice makes him turn toward her. “Was it so I’d like you more? Feel closer to you, like we were partners in crime?”

  “I liked being with you. You liked the danger. Admit it.”

  “You’ve made me an accomplice.”

  “No, I haven’t. You’re fine. Act like you know nothing. And Marland will just have to run it with someone else.”

  His denial is complete. It’s like a door has closed.

  But she has to stay close to him. So she changes the subject.

  “Ned. You need to prepare yourself for the stares, the questions, the hugs o
f support from people who don’t even know you…”

  “I know.” He’s a little short with her. But if she tells him that Marland is blackmailing her, she’ll have to say it’s because of a video with his murdered mother and her father walking off in the darkness together. And she’s afraid Ned will lose it. Either go after her father or go straight to the police.

  And she’s afraid of what the video means. She keeps shoving that awfulness back in the corner of her mind, where it paces and dances and won’t stay still. Get the video, keep her and Ned out of trouble, because if one of them talks they both go down, save Dad. She can do all that. She’s her mother’s daughter.

  Ned and Julia have first period together, Euro history, and the door is decorated with pictures of his mom at school events: supporting Ned in freshman basketball (the one year he played, before he hurt his knee and gave it up), standing with a large group of other moms at a Lakehaven football game, volunteering at a booth at the language festival (Ned was in Spanish club), pictures of her and Ned. Even a picture of her and Ned and Gordon, all smiles, when Gordon visited during the school year and got to see Ned perform with the choir.

  Ned stares at the tribute.

  “Are you all right?” Julia asks.

  “No,” he says. “I’m not.” He opens the door and Julia follows him. The other students are quiet, but several come up and embrace him. These aren’t kids Ned is close to, but in Lakehaven, a staggeringly high number of them have known one another since elementary school, and so there is a familiarity, a comfort. Ned doesn’t cry. Julia does.

  And then Mrs. McPherson calls the class to order, tells Ned how sorry she is, if he needs to excuse himself from class, it’s fine, and that they’ll continue with their discussion of the assigned reading. Julia loves Mrs. McPherson. She is her favorite teacher. Mrs. McPherson keeps it a normal class, mostly, and Julia sees the gratitude in Ned’s face. The smile she used to wish she could see. The Ned she thought she knew.

  They don’t have second period together, and they part ways, then reunite for third, which is varsity chorale. They sing after the choir director tells Ned how sorry she is and remembers the times Danielle volunteered to hand out programs before the concerts, or helped with the costumes for the spring musical, or chaperoned the kids during the all-region choir auditions. People don’t much feel like singing after this, but they do, and the choir director sensibly has them focus on the more somber songs for the upcoming spring concert. Julia, with the altos, glances at Ned again and again, surrounded by his fellow tenors, but he doesn’t look her way. He just looks numb now, and she wonders if he wants to go home.

  Fourth period she has AP physics and he has Spanish—and this is finally where some idiot asks her what it was like to find a body and she freezes him with a stare, glad that Ned is not there—and then their lunch period. By the time she’s gone through one of the lines to get a salad and bottled water, he’s sitting at a table, surrounded by Julia’s friends, who texted her after the murder, the same ones who teased her for becoming sweet on Ned, and now they’re butterflying around him like he’s a blooming flower.

  She puts her salad and bottled water down across from him. “Go. Now,” she says, and the girls almost seem ready to argue.

  “Now he’s interesting? Go,” she says again, and that time it’s enough. They wander off.

  “Are you saying your friends didn’t think I was interesting before?” The old smile of the old Ned, back for a moment.

  “I am. Are you tired of people asking you how you are?” She pokes at her salad to spare him the penetrating gaze she wants to give him.

  “A little. I might go home now. My dad cleared it with the school, if I felt overwhelmed. I’m about two-thirds whelmed.” He pauses. “I don’t want to cry in front of everyone.”

  “It’s too soon. You came back too soon.”

  “It’s better here. I can’t stay in that house with my dad. It’s smothering. This is easier, believe it or not. How are your parents?”

  “My…They’re fine. I mean, not fine. They’re coping.”

  She’s looking at her salad and then another wave of sympathizers comes by. There are kids like that, who want to attach themselves to drama. Rumor has already spread that he’s moving soon to London. She thinks: He’s not interesting; he’s a mess. He gave me a key and he smiled at me and he made me think we had something and I’ve got this horrible problem because he’s thrown me to a wolf.

  Ned is polite to the students, who move on after rote expressions of sympathy. He looks down at his plate. He’s barely touched his two slices of pizza.

  Now he looks up at her. “Julia. I think I know who did it.” He says the words like they’re painful.

  She just stares at him. She feels drunk with fear. Then she moves around her salad with her fork, and she says: “Then you have to tell the police.”

  “You’re not going to ask who it is? That’s like the reaction of 99.9 percent of the human race.” His voice is very small.

  “What I care about is you and what you do,” she says. “I don’t want you to do something stupid.” Who, who, who? she thinks. He can’t mean my dad. He can’t. So who could he mean? Marland? If it’s Marland then the guilt has to be crushing Ned. If he never deals the prescription drugs then Marland never enters his and Danielle’s life.

  She can almost see Ned summoning the words. “Look. All I have to do is get him talking on tape…” And then his phone pings, a ringtone she’s never heard before.

  “That’s my dad,” he says, almost in relief, and picks up the phone. Looks at the screen.

  And she sees something change in his face. Now he looks at her.

  “What…? What is it?” she asks. Dread in her voice.

  “Dad said he saw the two detectives who were at the meeting come to your house and take your dad away in a police car.”

  “That can’t be,” she says.

  “My dad ran over to the driveway and asked if they were arresting your dad and they said no.”

  “They’re just interviewing him, then.”

  “At the station? Why at the station?”

  “Ned…who do you think did this?”

  He looks at her. “What do you know? Why are they talking to your dad?”

  Something must show in her face, some expression, because he stands up quickly, shoving back the chair he was sitting in, and the other students, watching them already, notice.

  “I don’t know, Ned. You just said you think someone else did this. Who?”

  “Why are the cops talking to your dad?” he asks, in a louder voice, and she can see that other students have heard him now. But he doesn’t wait for an answer. He turns and runs from the cafeteria.

  It’s the longest walk of her life, leaving her lunch table, the weight of a hundred stares on her back, and going to find someplace private where she can text her mother.

  40

  Iris

  Kyle has gone with the police. Iris has called Kip Evander and asked him to go to the police station. It’s not an arrest. It’s a questioning. Just questions.

  About secrets her husband has kept from her.

  And her son. This is a house of secrets.

  And if she’s going to save her family, she needs to know them all.

  Iris was in Grant’s room when the police came, kneeling on the floor, looking at neatly bound stacks of cash hidden under the swimsuits he’s grown out of and she meant to donate to a resale shop. Where did this money come from? She could text him, but she doesn’t want to give him hours to formulate a lie. And she can’t bear to tell them, over the phone, that their father is being questioned by the police. Wait for them to get home from school.

  And then here are the police, talking about a phone shared between Kyle and Danielle and an anonymous tip.

  There was a phone and apparently Kyle destroyed it after Danielle was dead.

  She finds it hard to believe they were having an affair. She believes she would know th
e signs. She knows Kyle. And she cannot imagine some odd passion arising between the two of them. It just does not seem likely.

  But do we ever know someone? She shakes the thought away. She watches Kyle leave with the detectives and Gordon hurry over, asking questions, and then she sees Gordon walk back slowly to Danielle’s house after the cars are gone and just stand on the porch. Safest to assume he’ll assume the worst.

  How long will it take the neighborhood to find this out? Someone other than Gordon will have seen Kyle in the police car, even if not in handcuffs. He was taken away, even if not under arrest. This neighborhood is living on the knife’s edge, and someone will talk. Someone will accuse him. And there was a time she would have worried about what that would do to her and the kids, but the brief flare of worry in her chest fades into a smoking ember.

  The Butlers. If someone called in an anonymous tip against her family, it had to be the Butlers. Steve with his bruised knuckles and Carrie with her whispered threats. And now Iris is certain: Carrie Butler has implicated her husband as being the unseen figure walking the streets the night of the murder, the boogeyman to scare Winding Creek.

  They are hiding something. They could have lied about their patched relationship with Danielle. They could have killed her, and they could be framing her husband.

  She walks down to the Butler house. Neither car is in the driveway, but the garage door is closed. They keep to themselves.

  Detectives Ponder and Ames were both at the neighborhood rally. They heard Carrie Butler talk. They know she saw someone. Now this, searching in their trash and finding something unimaginable.

  Why did Kyle have the phone? Were they…?

  Iris cannot imagine them together and then she does, Kyle’s strong back, moving, Danielle’s vapid face contorted in pleasure, writhing under Kyle, squirming under her husband. Sure. It could happen. Kyle’s been off, the accident on the greenbelt—maybe there was no accident. Maybe someone beat him up. But if someone knew about the affair, why not go to the police immediately to say, Hey, take a look at Kyle Pollitt?

  It didn’t happen. It never happened.