Sara hadn’t registered how late it was until she’d walked out of the building and looked up into the black, moonless sky.
She stood up from the kitchen barstool. The dogs looked up from the couch as she started to pace. Sara felt useless. Tessa was on her way from Grant County with Jeffrey’s files. She’d hit the tail end of rush-hour traffic. There was nothing Sara could do right now but wait. The dogs had been fed and walked. She had straightened up the apartment. She had fixed herself a dinner that she could barely eat. She had turned on the TV, then turned it off. She had done the same with the radio. She was so antsy that her skin itched.
She scooped her phone off the counter. She re-read her last texts to Will: A telephone with a question mark. Then a dinner plate with a question mark. Then a single question mark.
He had not written back.
Sara told herself the obvious—Will had lost track of time, too. They were handling a murder now. Possibly multiple murders. Lena had probably flipped everything upside down the way that Lena always did. Sara shouldn’t read too much into his silence. Nor should she read anything into the fact that Will had obviously turned off his phone. Sara had tapped the Find My app half a dozen times trying to locate him on the map, and each time, all she’d gotten was Lena’s address and the number of minutes, then hours, that had passed since Will had been there.
Sara heard a banging at the door.
“Sissy?” Tessa’s knock sounded more like a kick. “Hurry up.”
Sara found Tessa juggling three file boxes. She’d left shoe scuffs on the bottom of the door.
“Don’t help, I’ve got it.” Tessa dumped everything onto the dining room table. Thankfully, Jeffrey had strapped down the lids. “You wouldn’t believe that traffic. I got a blister on my palm from pounding on the horn. And now I’m dying of thirst.”
Sara gathered from her tone that she didn’t want water. She hesitated before opening the bottom cabinet. Will had a thing about Sara drinking, as if one glass of Merlot was going to turn her into Judy Garland.
“Scotch.” Tessa reached past her and grabbed the bottle. “Pour me a small one, like what you’d give to a baby. I’ve got to drive back tonight. What’s with the paper towel?”
“Don’t ask.” Will dried paper towels to reuse them, because her smart, sexy boyfriend had apparently grown up during the Depression. “Why do you have to drive back tonight?”
“I’ve got a nine a.m. interview with that midwife I told you about. She’s taking on an intern. Fingers crossed it turns out to be me.” Tessa found two glasses in the cabinet. “Lemuel called right when I was hitting downtown. Like I wasn’t murdery enough from traffic.”
Sara poured the drinks. She gave herself a double. Tessa’s husband was still in South Africa with their daughter. “How’s Izzie?”
“Amazing, as always.” Tessa sipped from the glass. “Lem got the divorce papers. He’s taking it better than I thought he would.”
Sara led her back to the table so they could sit down. “Did you want him to take it badly?”
“I’m just tired.” She slumped into a chair beside Sara. “It’s exhausting being married when you don’t want to be married. And he’s such a pompous ass sometimes.”
Sara quietly objected to the sometimes.
“I know you never saw what I saw in him,” Tessa said. “Let’s just say he’s like Taco Bell. You’ve got to pay for the extra meat.”
Sara raised her glass in a toast.
“Where’s Will?”
“Working.” Sara let herself look at the boxes. Jeffrey’s boxes. His familiar script flowed across the labels. She wanted to reach out and touch the words. “Will asked me to marry him.”
Tessa coughed on her drink.
Sara confessed, “Six weeks ago.”
“You’ve talked to me how many times since then?”
Sara talked to her sister at least once a day, sometimes more. But she had never talked about this. “Do you think it didn’t work out with Jeffrey the first time because I didn’t pay enough attention to him?”
“I’m not even sure what that means.”
“It means I was always at Mom and Dad’s, or doing something with you, or—”
“Marriage isn’t rumspringa. You don’t have to leave your family.” She put down her glass and held Sara’s hand. “Sissy, remember I was there? I’m the one who followed his sorry ass around town and broke into his computer and bribed motel clerks because you were going crazy from all of the bullshit lies about how it was just one woman, hardly more than that one time, when we both knew it was more like five women and fifty different times.”
Sara remembered the feeling of disconnection between what Jeffrey repeatedly promised her and how he behaved. But for Tessa playing detective, she probably would’ve never learned the truth.
She told her sister, “I know.”
“Jeffrey cheated because all he could think about was what he was missing, not what he had.” She squeezed Sara’s hand. “He changed for you. He worked really hard to be the kind of man you deserved. The first time was hell on earth, but it made the second time that much sweeter.”
Sara nodded, because everything she said was the truth. “When Will asked me, he didn’t really ask me. But in his defense, it was a strange conversation. I started talking about remodeling his house, putting on a second floor.”
“That’s a great idea. You could do everything exactly the way you want.”
“That’s what I told him,” Sara said. “And then Will said, ‘We should get married in a church. It’ll make your mother happy.’”
“What the hell does Mama have to do with it?” Tessa scowled. “Does he want Daddy to play Lohengrin on the piccolo?”
Sara shook her head. “I don’t know what he wants.”
“So, that’s the real problem. You’re not talking to him about something that’s really important. You’re pretending it didn’t happen.”
Sara didn’t know what she was doing anymore. “I don’t want to be the one who has to bring it up. I’m always the one pushing things. I want Will to push back for once. But then I think, maybe he’s changed his mind. Maybe he feels like he dodged a bullet.”
“That’s bullshit. You know how he feels about you.” Tessa finished her drink. “You’re not bringing it up because you don’t want to talk about it. Which is fine. But do him the courtesy of letting him know you’re not ready.”
“I want him to do me the courtesy.”
“Spit in one hand, want in the other. See which fills up the fastest.”
This was why Sara hadn’t brought up the subject before.
“Not that this has anything to do with Will, or how you feel about him, or why you’re not talking to him about getting married, but I can help you sort through Jeffrey’s stuff if you want,” Tessa offered.
“No, go home and get some rest.” Sara finally reached out and touched one of the boxes. She felt a warmth spread through her fingers. “I’m going to be reading all night.”
“Four eyes are faster than two.”
“It’s a lot of jargon, technical stuff.”
“I can read technical stuff.”
Sara caught her sharp tone too late. “Tessie, I know you can—”
“I’m not Amelia Bedelia. I understand jargon. I know basic anatomy. I’ve been reading a lot of blogs on midwifery.”
Sara tried to hide her laughter in a cough.
“Are you laughing at me?”
Sara stifled another laugh.
“Jesus H. Christ.” Tessa pushed her chair back from the table. “I have to listen to this bullshit from Lemuel. I’m not taking it off you.”
“I’m sorry. Tess.” Sara laughed again. “I didn’t—I’m sorry. Please don’t—”
It was too late. Tessa slammed the door behind her.
Another laugh slipped out of Sara’s mouth.
Then she felt the sinking guilt that came from being an inexcusable asshole. She should’ve gotten up and
followed her sister into the hall, but her legs wouldn’t move. She looked back at the boxes. Three in all. Jeffrey had labeled them eight years ago. Before he was back with Sara. Before they had rebuilt their lives together. Before she had watched the life slowly drain from his beautiful eyes.
REBECCA CATERINO BOX ONE OF ONE
LESLIE TRUONG BOX ONE OF ONE
THOMASINA HUMPHREY BOX ONE OF ONE
Sara found a pair of scissors in the kitchen. She carried the bottle of Scotch back to the table. She found the remote and turned on some soft music. She had a legal pad and pen in her briefcase. She sat down at the table. She cut open the first box.
Was there a smell attached to the pages?
Jeffrey had used oatmeal lotion on his hands when he thought no one was looking. He didn’t wear a cologne, but his aftershave had a wonderful, woodsy scent. Sara could remember the rough feel of his skin at night. The soft touch of his fingers tracing slowly down her body. She closed her eyes, trying to summon the deep baritone that had thrilled her, then infuriated her, then made her fall in love with him all over again.
Was this cheating?
Were her memories of Jeffrey betraying Will?
Sara put her head in her hands. She had started to cry. She wiped her eyes. She poured herself a drink. She pulled the first stack of pages out of the box and started to read.
Grant County—Wednesday
10
Jeffrey studied the contents of Rebecca Caterino’s case file. The paperwork on the accident in the woods covered his desk. Witness statements from her dorm mates. Lena and Brad’s reports. Frank’s summary. Jeffrey’s own recollections. Photos from Lena’s BlackBerry. Sara’s notes on the resuscitation. Some scrawled preliminary lines from Dan Brock, who was still officially the coroner on the case, even though a coroner wasn’t needed.
Not yet, at least.
He closed the file and dropped it in the cardboard box behind his desk. The label read GENERAL, but Jeffrey didn’t feel right about filing the girl away. Actually, his didn’t feel right had turned into a straight-up felt wrong.
He wasn’t quite sure what had tipped him over the line. Maybe the fact that the only person who might be able to fill in some details about the accident was currently missing.
Leslie Truong had left the Caterino crime scene around six yesterday morning. The one-and-a-half-mile trek back to campus would’ve taken her twenty, maybe thirty minutes. The rainstorm had rushed in around that same time. Jeffrey told himself that Truong had taken cover under a tree or slipped in the woods. A twisted ankle. A broken bone. That was the only reason she hadn’t made it to the nurse’s office. She was waiting for someone to find her.
Half of his patrol force and several volunteers from the college had spent the night trying to locate the missing woman in the woods. Jeffrey had participated in his share of grueling searches for missing teenagers, but this was different. Truong was an older student, a senior who was close to graduating with a major in chemical polymers. When the woods hadn’t panned out, Jeffrey had driven to her off-campus apartment. Truong’s blue Toyota Prius had been found parked in the lot behind her building. Her purse was locked inside her bedroom. The three students who shared rooms there had no idea where she was. The list of friends that they gave him had all been dead ends.
Truong had taken her phone with her into the woods, the same phone she’d used to call 911 to report finding Caterino. The battery had died, or maybe the phone had gotten wet. No calls could get through. According to Lena’s official report, Truong had been upset about discovering Caterino, but not so much that she’d needed an escort to see the school nurse. Lena had offered to find her a ride. Truong had said she preferred to walk back to campus.
Of course, that was according to Lena.
Jeffrey still had men in the woods, trying to take advantage of the fresh daylight. The biggest obstacle was that they had no idea which path Truong had taken. There were several options winding through the dense forest. And that was making the assumption that Truong followed a path. It was possible she’d run through the tangle of vines and briars because she had just seen a body and she was desperate to reach a safe, familiar setting. He let himself think about her waiting under a tree. It was possible someone was finding her right now.
Or it was possible none of that was true and someone had taken her.
Jeffrey’s thoughts kept swinging along the same pendulum as they had with Rebecca Caterino. Throughout the night, Jeffrey had vacillated on the reason behind Truong’s disappearance. One minute, he was thinking that she was hiding out somewhere after the trauma of finding the body. The next minute, he was thinking that something bad had happened and the girl had been abducted.
He had no idea why a bad thing—any bad thing—would happen to either of them. As with Caterino, Truong was well-liked on campus. Jeffrey had talked to her roommates, her boss at the coffee shop, and her building super, a woman who came across more as a house mother. Bonita Truong, who lived in San Francisco, had not heard from her daughter in days. This was not unusual, a fact that the mother seemed fine with. Jeffrey had to think there were two reasons that a student would go clear across the country to school. Either they were trying to get away from their parents or their parents had raised the kind of kid who spread her wings on her own.
Jeffrey felt strongly that Leslie Truong fell into this latter category. If he had to describe the missing student based on what little information he’d gleaned, he’d say she was level-headed, hard-working and stable. Four to five days a week, she was up at the crack of dawn, walking two miles to the lake to do tai chi. Lena had described her as woo-woo, but she definitely didn’t come across as the type of girl who disappeared into the night. Then again, Truong had never before found what she assumed was a dead body lying in the woods.
What bothered Jeffrey was a stray detail that could mean something or could mean nothing at all. On the phone last night, Bonita Truong had told Jeffrey that her daughter was angry with her roommates. Some of her clothes were missing. Someone had borrowed her favorite headband and hadn’t returned it. Apparently, Leslie used the pink band to pull back her hair as she washed her face every night, which was something that Jeffrey was familiar with from living with Sara. They had often argued about the blue headband she’d left out on the sink basin, an area that offered little space to begin with. Jeffrey had even bought her a basket to store some of her crap in. Sara had ended up using it to hold dog toys.
Jeffrey turned his chair to look out the window. The Z4 wasn’t there to taunt him. His watch read just past six in the morning. The clinic didn’t open until eight. He looked at his calendar. It was the last Wednesday of the month, so Sara wouldn’t be at work anyway. She usually stayed home and plowed through the mountain of paperwork she’d accumulated over the previous month.
He looked at his watch again. Bonita Truong’s plane from San Francisco would be landing in three hours. The drive from Atlanta would take another two. He needed to rotate out some of the searchers so they could get some sleep. The station was empty but for Brad Stephens. The young officer had volunteered to babysit the prisoners in the holding cells. Jeffrey imagined if he went back to holding, he would find Brad asleep, too. So Jeffrey would not go back into holding.
He stood up from his desk and stretched his back. His coffee mug was empty. He walked into the squad room. The lights were still off. He turned them on as he made his way to the kitchen.
Ben Walker, Jeffrey’s predecessor, had kept his office at the rear of the station, just off the interrogation room. His desk had been the size of a commercial refrigerator and the seating in front had been about as comfortable as a Judas Chair. Every morning, Walker had called Frank and Matt into his office, doled out their daily assignments, then told them to shut the door on their way out. That door only opened at noon when Walker went to the diner for lunch and at five when he hit the diner on his way home. When Walker had finally retired, the desk had to be cut into two pieces to get
it through the door. No one could explain how he’d managed to cram it into the room in the first place.
There were a lot of unexplained things where Ben Walker was concerned. The desk alone was an object lesson in how not to be a chief. Jeffrey had spent his first weekend on the job moving his office to the front of the squad room. He’d cut a hole in the wall to make a window so he could see his team and, more importantly, so they could see him. There were blinds on the glass that he seldom closed. The door stayed open unless someone needed privacy. In a town this small, there was a lot of need for privacy.
The phone rang. Jeffrey picked up the receiver on the kitchen wall. “Grant PD.”
“Hey there, buddy,” Nick Shelton said. “I hear you got some trouble brewin’ down there.”
Jeffrey poured some fresh coffee into his mug. “News travels fast.”
“I got me a spy at the Macon Hospital.”
Jeffrey had heard a definite period at the end of that sentence, but he could tell there was more to it than that. “What’s up, Nick?”
“Gerald Caterino.”
“Rebecca Caterino’s father?” Jeffrey had set the alarm on his phone to call the man at 6:30. He could tell by Nick’s tone that he should rethink that plan. “Should I be worried?”
“Yeah, the old boy left a message on the service last night. I picked it up this morning and thought I could run some interference for you.”
“Interference?” Jeffrey asked. “I didn’t realize I needed any.”
“It’s the timing.”
Nick was being careful, but Jeffrey got his meaning. Someone at the hospital had told Gerald Caterino that his daughter was presumed dead when Lena had arrived at the scene. That was the kind of detail that could end up in a lawsuit. “Thanks for the head’s up.”
The Silent Wife: From the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author comes a gripping new crime thriller (Will Trent Series, Book 10) Page 20