by Shari Lapena
Glenda nods. “Probably not a bad idea.” They sip their coffees. Then Glenda changes the subject. “Are you still going to book club tonight?” she asks.
“Yes. I need to get out,” Olivia says, looking glum. “Don’t tell anybody about this, okay? It’s strictly between us.”
“Of course,” Glenda says. “And honestly? It’s great that you caught it early. Nip it in the bud now. Get the lawyer to scare him shitless. As long as he never does it again, you’re good. No harm done.”
* * *
—
Glenda Newell makes her way back home from the Bean, her mind on what Olivia has just told her. Poor Olivia—Raleigh breaking into houses! Still, it’s a comfort that other families have their problems, too. It does make her feel just a little bit better about her own situation.
She herself is worried sick about Adam—his impulsiveness, his inability to regulate his behavior. She can hardly sleep at night for worrying about her son. And she’s worried that he has the addictive gene. He’s taken to drinking with a shocking enthusiasm. What’s next? The thought of all the drugs out there makes her panic. God only knows what the next few years will bring; the last one has been harrowing enough. Sometimes she doesn’t know if she will survive it.
Keith seems to have his head buried in the sand these days. Either he doesn’t want to face things, or he genuinely sees nothing wrong with binge drinking at sixteen. But then Keith isn’t a worrier. So handsome, with his bluff self-confidence and easy charm—he always thinks things will turn out just fine. He tells her that she worries too much. Maybe he’s right. But she’s a mother. It’s her job to worry.
FIVE
Robert Pierce is leaving for work when he opens the door and sees a tall, dark-haired man in his late thirties and a shorter, mousy-haired woman about ten years younger. Both are well dressed. His first thought is that they are soliciting for something.
Then the man holds up his badge and says, “Good morning. Robert Pierce?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Detective Webb and this is Detective Moen, from Aylesford Police. We’re here to talk to you about your wife.”
He’s never seen these two before. Why are they here now? He hears his heart suddenly drumming in his ears. “Have you found her?” he asks. The words come out sounding choked.
“May we come in, Mr. Pierce?”
He nods and steps back, opening the door wide, and then closes it firmly behind them. Robert leads them into the living room.
“Maybe we should sit down,” Detective Webb suggests, when Robert stands uncertainly in the middle of the living room staring at them.
All at once, Robert finds he needs to sit. He collapses into an armchair; he can feel the blood draining from his head. He stares at the detectives, slightly dizzy. The moment has come. The detectives sit on the sofa, their backs straight, the bay window behind them.
“We found your wife’s car this morning.”
“Her car,” Robert manages to say. “Where?”
“It was in a lake, out near Canning.”
“What do you mean, in a lake? Was she in an accident?” He looks back and forth between them, his mouth dry.
“It was submerged just offshore, in about fifteen feet of water. Her purse and an overnight bag were in the car.” He adds quietly, “A body was found in the trunk.”
Robert slumps back against his chair, as if he’s had the breath knocked out of him. He can feel the two detectives watching him carefully. He looks back at them, afraid to ask. “Is it her?”
“We think so.”
Robert feels himself go pale. He can’t speak. Detective Webb leans forward and Robert notices his eyes for the first time—sharp, intelligent eyes.
“I know this is a shock. But we need you to come down to identify the body.”
Robert nods. He gets up, grabs a jacket, and follows them outside to the street and gets into the back of their car.
The County Medical Examiner’s Office is a new, low brick building. Robert gets out of the car, expecting to be led into a morgue. He imagines a long, cold, sterile room, with shiny, pale tiles and stainless steel, and harsh light, and the smell of death. His head begins to spin, and he knows they are watching him. But instead of a morgue they conduct him to a large, modern waiting room with a glass viewing panel. He stands in front of the glass and watches as the sheet is turned down to reveal the face of the body on the steel gurney.
“Is that your wife?” Webb asks.
He forces himself to look. “Yes,” he says, then closes his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” the detective says. “Let’s get you home.”
Silently, they return to the car. Robert gazes out the window, but he doesn’t see the passing streets; what he sees is his wife’s face, battered, bloated, and tinged with green. He knows what’s going to happen next. They are going to question him.
They arrive at his house. The two detectives get out of the car and accompany him to the door.
Detective Webb says, “I’m sorry, I know this is a difficult time, but we’d like to come in and ask you a few more questions, if that’s all right with you.”
Robert nods and lets them in. They return to the living room they’d been in just a short time before, take the same seats. He swallows and says, “I don’t know anything more than I did when she disappeared a couple of weeks ago. I told the police everything I could then. What have you been doing all this time?” It comes out more confrontationally than it should have. Detective Webb looks back at him without blinking. “You weren’t even looking for her,” Robert says. His voice is bitter. “That’s the impression I got, anyway.”
“It’s a murder investigation now,” the detective says, glancing at his partner. “Obviously there will be an autopsy and we’ll be looking at everything very closely.” He adds, “We need to go back to the beginning.”
Robert nods wearily. “Fine.”
“How long were you and your wife married, Mr. Pierce?”
“Two years, last June.” He notices that the other detective, Moen, is taking notes.
“Were there any problems in your marriage?”
“No. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Had your wife ever been unfaithful to you?”
“No.”
“Had you ever been unfaithful to her?”
“No.”
“Any arguments, any . . . violence or abuse?”
He bristles. “Of course not.”
“Did your wife have any enemies?”
“No, not at all.”
“Anything different about her in the days or even weeks before she went missing? Did she seem preoccupied at all? Did she mention anyone bothering her?”
He shakes his head. “No, not that I noticed. Everything was fine.”
“Any financial problems?”
He shakes his head. “No. We were planning a trip to Europe. Work was good for me. She was a temp, and she liked that, the freedom. Didn’t like being tied down to the same job fifty-two weeks a year.”
“Tell us about that weekend,” the detective says.
Robert looks at both detectives and says, “She’d planned to go away that weekend with a friend of hers, Caroline Lu. They were going into New York City.” He pauses. “That’s what she told me, anyway.”
“Did she do this kind of thing often, go away for the weekend?”
“Sometimes. She liked her little shopping expeditions.”
“How would she make her travel arrangements?”
He lifts his head. “She made her own arrangements. She booked things online, on her laptop, put it on her credit card.”
“You weren’t suspicious when she left?”
“No, not at all. I knew Caroline. I liked her. They’ve done this sort of thing before.” He adds, “I don’t enjoy shopping.”<
br />
“So tell us about Friday morning,” Webb says, “September twenty-ninth.”
“She’d packed her overnight case the night before. I remember she was humming as she went around the bedroom packing her things. I was lying on the bed, watching her. She seemed . . . happy.” He looks earnestly at the two detectives. “We made love that night, everything was fine,” he assures them.
But it wasn’t like that, he remembers, not at all.
“The next morning,” Robert continues, “when she was leaving for work, I kissed her good-bye, told her to have fun. She was going to leave directly from work, leave her car at the station and take the train in. It was her last day of that temp assignment.”
“Where was that?” the detective asks.
“I told the police all this already,” Robert complains. “It was an accounting firm. The information must be in the file.” He feels a flash of irritation.
“Did you talk to her again that day at all?”
“No. I meant to, but I was busy with work. When I got home, I called her cell, but she didn’t answer. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. But she didn’t pick up all weekend—it just went to voice mail. We’re not a clingy couple, calling each other all the time. I thought she was busy, having fun. I didn’t think much of it.”
“When did you start to realize something was wrong?” Webb asks.
“When she didn’t return Sunday night as expected, I started to worry. I’d left messages on her cell, but she hadn’t called me back. I couldn’t remember where they were staying either. That’s when I called Caroline. I thought her husband might know something, if they’d been delayed. But Caroline answered the phone.” He pauses. “And she told me that she’d never had plans with Amanda that weekend, that she hadn’t actually talked to Amanda in a while.” He rubs a hand over his face. “I went to the police station on Monday morning and reported her missing.”
“What kind of work do you do?” Detective Moen asks. It startles him a bit, and he turns his attention to her.
“I’m an attorney.” He adds, “I—I should call the office.”
The detective ignores that. “Can you confirm for us where you were that weekend—from Friday, the twenty-ninth of September, to Monday?” she asks.
“What?”
“Can you confirm—”
“Yes, sure,” he says. “I was at work all day Friday, left about five. I went directly home. I told the police all of this before, when I reported her missing. I stayed in on Friday night. On Saturday, I was home, caught up on some work; Sunday I went golfing with some friends.” He adds, “It must all be in the file.”
“Did your wife have any family, besides you?” Detective Moen asks.
“No. She was an only child, and her parents are both dead.” He pauses. “Maybe I can ask a question.”
“Sure,” Detective Webb says.
“Do you have any idea what might have happened? Who might have done this?”
“Not yet,” the detective says, “but we won’t stop until we find out. Is there anything else that you can tell us?”
“Not that I can think of,” Robert says, his face a careful blank.
“Okay,” Webb says. He adds, as if it’s an afterthought, “We’d like to have a team come in and take a look inside your house, if that’s all right with you.”
Robert says, his voice sharp, “You ignore my concerns for two weeks, now you want to search my house? You can get a warrant.”
“Fine. We’ll do that,” Webb says. Robert stands up and the two detectives get up and leave.
Once he’s watched them drive away, Robert locks the front door and quickly makes his way upstairs to his office. He sits in the chair at the desk and pulls open the bottom drawer. There’s a stack of manila envelopes inside. He knows that beneath those envelopes is his wife’s burner phone, the one the cops don’t know about. He sits for a moment, staring at the envelopes, afraid. He thinks about the letter he got that morning, downstairs in a kitchen drawer. Somebody was in his house. Some teenager was here, snooping through his desk. And he must have seen the phone, because one day when Robert had opened the drawer, the phone had been sitting right on top of those manila envelopes. The shock of it had made him start in his chair. He knew he’d put the phone beneath the envelopes. But now he knows. That kid must have seen the phone, moved it. And now the police are going to search his house. He has to get rid of it.
He has a small window of time before they come back with a warrant. But how much time? He reaches beneath the envelopes for the cell phone, suddenly afraid that it won’t be there at all. But he can feel its smooth surface in his hand and he pulls it out. He stares down at it, this phone that has caused him such pain.
He closes the drawer and shoves the phone in his pocket. He looks out the window; the street below is empty. When the news breaks that his wife’s body has been found, there will be reporters on his doorstep; he’ll never be able to get away then. He must act quickly. He changes into jeans and a T-shirt, hurries downstairs, grabs a jacket and his keys by the front door, and stops suddenly, just short of opening the door. What if someone sees him? And later the detectives find out that he rushed out of the house right after they left?
He stands still for a minute, thinking. They’ll search the house. He can’t hide the phone in the house. What options does he have? He walks to the back and looks out the door from the kitchen to the backyard. It’s a very private yard. Maybe he can bury the phone in the back flower garden. Surely they won’t dig up the garden. They already have the body.
He spies Amanda’s gardening set on the patio, puts on her gardening gloves, and grabs a trowel. He walks to the flowerbeds at the back of the garden. He looks around—the only house that can see into his yard is Becky’s, and he doesn’t see her, watching at the windows, or from the back door. He bends down and quickly digs a small, narrow hole, about ten inches deep, underneath a shrub. He wipes the cell phone down with his T-shirt, just in case, thinking that if they do find it, he can tell them she must have put it there—Amanda did all the gardening. Then he pushes the phone deep into the hole and covers it up again. You can’t even tell the earth had been disturbed when he’s done. He returns the gardening tools to their place and goes back inside.
Problem solved.
SIX
Raleigh slouches in English class. The teacher is droning on and on, but Raleigh can only focus on the mess he’s in.
It had started quite innocently last spring, sometime in May. He’d left his backpack at his friend Zack’s house after school. It had an assignment in it that was due the next day. Raleigh texted Zack that he needed to come get it. Zack texted that they were all out and wouldn’t be back until late. Frustrated, he cycled over to Zack’s house. He wasn’t even sure why. He knew nobody was home. He didn’t have a key. When Raleigh got there, he went around the back and looked in the basement window. His backpack was on the floor by the couch where he’d left it, ignored, while he and Zack played video games. Just for something to do, he tried the window. To his surprise, it opened easily. He checked the opening. He was tall and skinny—he knew he could get through it no problem—and his backpack was right fucking there. Raleigh looked around to see if anyone was watching, but to be honest, he wasn’t too worried; if anyone saw him, he could explain. And then he went in through the window.
That’s when things got a little strange. Because he didn’t just grab his backpack, heave it out the window, and climb out after it. He knows he should have. And now, he wishes that he had. Instead, he stood in the basement listening to the silence. The house felt different without anyone else in it—full of possibilities. A little shiver of excitement ran up and down his spine. The empty house was his for the moment. A strange feeling came over him, and he knew he wasn’t going to turn around and go right back out the window.
He went directly upstairs to see if t
here was an office—the most likely place to find a computer. He passed by Zack’s room and glanced in. He saw Zack’s recent chemistry test flung down on his desk, and the mark was 10 percent lower than he’d claimed. Raleigh wondered what else Zack had lied about. Then he made his way to the office and set about trying to hack into Zack’s dad’s computer. He didn’t get in, but the challenge of it gave him a curious thrill.
When Zack asked him about the backpack the next day, Raleigh sheepishly admitted he’d snuck in the window to grab it—he hoped that was okay. Zack had obviously thought nothing of it.
The next time, a few weeks later, Raleigh was more nervous. He could hardly believe he was there, planning to do it again. He stood in the dark in the backyard of one of his classmates, Ben. He knew they were away for the weekend. He didn’t see any obvious security system.
He found a basement window unlocked on the side of the house. It was still the kind of neighborhood where lots of people didn’t necessarily lock everything up tight, whether they were home or not. Raleigh had no trouble getting in. Once inside, in the dark, his heartbeat began to settle down. He couldn’t exactly turn the lights on. What if they’d told the neighbors they were going to be away, too? But fortunately, the moon was bright that night, and after his eyes adjusted, he could find his way around all right. He took care not to walk in front of the windows—and then went upstairs to the bedrooms. He found a laptop at a desk in the master bedroom. This time he was prepared. He used his USB boot stick and got in quite easily, snooped around the computer, and then left the house, going out the same way he got in.
If he hadn’t gotten such a charge out of the hacking, he wouldn’t have kept doing it. But after that house, there had been others. He became pretty good at getting into people’s computers. He saw their private information, but he never took anything or changed anything. He never did any harm. He never left any sign that he’d been there.