“Going back to my original line of questioning: are you aware of anyone who might want Mrs. Amb—I’m sorry—Mrs. St. Clair dead?”
“I don’t know,” I reply. “Can’t you just check her phone? Wasn’t it”—I refuse to say found at the crime scene—“at her house or something?”
“You have to understand where I’m coming from on this,” he says. “I know you think it’s my job to come in and give you a hard time.”
He shifted his position and jangled the change in his pocket.
“But we have a woman in our midst who died in a very violent way. I have to explore each and every avenue as if it might be the one. Now, I know you aren’t being cold about Mrs. Ambrose’s—”
“St. Clair.”
“Forgive me,” he said. “I’m a little old fashioned, and maybe I’ve spent too much time in the South for my own good. Either way, I want to make something between us very clear: I’m going to go where the evidence leads me. Am I clear on that point?”
I nod.
“Because the most important thing to me is finding the person who did this. I don’t like this aspect of the job, believe me. But it has to be done, and so that means you have to answer these questions.”
Again, I give him the reaction he requires. In turn, he jangles the change again.
“Good. Now if we can go back to your relationship with...Mrs. St. Clair.”
“I knew Madeline a long time ago, Detective,” I say, “and though she was an angry, vindictive teenager, nothing about her tells me she’d provoke someone into killing her.”
The detective seems to let that sink in. Then, he shifts his footing. He says, “Miss Hanneford, I’ll be frank with you: We don’t have her phone, as yet. We believe it to have been stolen from the scene.”
“That seems odd,” I say honestly.
His smile is more than withering.
“Funny you should say that,” he replies, “because, even though we don’t have the physical device, we are working on gaining access to the phone records. It’s going to take a little while to get the actual texts and whatnot, if we even have to go that far. But the calls and the numbers, we have those.”
“Oh.” It’s all I can say. Something in the pit of my stomach is suddenly very cold.
“These records”—saying the word as if he, himself, is skeptical of what they might portend—“indicate that you, Miss Hanneford, made a phone call the night of her murder.”
“I don’t—”
“And another thing,” he continues, cutting me off. “I find this part very interesting. This call, it connected. Now, you can have someone call up their buddy, and the phone can ring and ring and ring. This one made landfall, and it seems like it was a voicemail message.”
“Oh yeah?” I say, trying to keep my voice under wraps.
“You might, um, have an idea of what you said on the phone that night?”
I struggle for the words. They echo through my head.
I’m not afraid of you.
“Um—”
In fact, you should be afraid of me.
He gives me an even-tempered look that nevertheless tells me that he’s got me. “I’ll help you out here. People, they can get real clumsy, and they can accidentally get somebody on the line. Call it a butt dial. You ever experience that?”
I nod. My explanation—my excuse—is caught somewhere in the back of my mind, and there’s nothing I can do to spit it out.
“Right. Of course. We all have. That what happened the night you called Madeline St. Clair? It was a big misunderstanding. What we might call...a coincidence. Am I on the right track?”
“I, um—”
“You and Mrs. St. Clair, you two had a difficult break in the friendship all those years ago, if I understand the situation correctly. Yes?”
If you call threatening to kill someone on the steps of the courthouse a difficult break, then yes.
“She and I patched things up.”
“Is that what happened the night she appeared on your doorstep?”
“Sort of.”
“And the late-night phone call. That was a further ‘patching up,’ yes? In that message on the phone, that’s what you were saying?”
“Basically.”
In fact, you should be afraid of me.
In my heart of hearts, I know they will find the message, and I will have to explain myself and that making a threat on the phone doesn’t look good, but for now, I need to survive. I can’t tell this man, this cop, that I threatened a dead person on the phone.
“You understand, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here. You can create your own...narrative about that night. Clear up any confusion for me right here, right now.”
“I understand that,” I reply.
“Because the next time we speak, you can expect it will be more formal.”
“Everything happened the way I just told you.”
His smile fades. I’m sure it’s a look he’s given hundreds—maybe thousands—of criminals. He’s peering down the road several moves, predicting how things are going to play out.
And he’s sad about it.
I think he sees me at the end of this situation, waiting in the back of a cruiser as my rights are being read to me. This is his attempt to forgo all of that, in favor of a less predictably depressing outcome. If it were up to him, I wouldn’t be dragged screaming and crying to the cop car.
And with this moment passing, his gaze shifts one last time.
“You keep an eye out for the phone, now, okay?”
He shuffles off, favoring one leg, and it becomes apparent to me then, he’s not just a cop but a war veteran as well. I convince myself to ask him about it the next time we speak.
When I get back home to the rental property, I pace around for a few minutes, trying to discern logic where there is none.
If this is Madeline’s last big fuck you, then it certainly is a good one.
If she somehow knew she was about to be offed and used that opportunity to frame me for it, then bra-fucking-vo. Hats off for her ability to take an unsuspecting victim and put them in the worst possible situation.
It’s ridiculous, but Madeline is—or at least was—the most vindictive and horrible person I knew. She could’ve changed, but my intense personal study of human behavior contradicts that theory.
In the house, I retrace my steps. There has to be something I missed. It can’t be that out of my reach.
I hurry to the bedroom, lie down. Then, I get back up and sneak down the hallway to the front door, which I open with a nervous flourish.
There exists a moment in which I think Madeline might—just might—be standing on the threshold, waiting for me.
Haha, you crazy bitch, she’d say. Did you think I’d leave you like this?
But she’s not. It’s only the rapidly fading day of a bleak and meritless week.
Still, I don’t give up. I continue the charade until something occurs to me. Something only marginally odd but just enough to make me investigate.
I don’t know how I didn’t notice it before.
I go to the bathroom.
It was the last place Madeline went before she stumbled drunkenly from the house.
The point of contention is the toilet. Not the lid or the bowl or the handle, but the tank itself. Now that I look at it—really look at it—I can see that the lid is ever so slightly ajar.
Like something out of a mob movie.
Sure enough, I find it in the tank, back of the toilet.
The inclination to call the police is quickly squashed beneath the weight of my own curiosity. There’s no way I’m letting this out of my sight until I’ve had a chance to scan the whole goddamned thing.
It’s a treasure trove. The Rosetta Stone of my teenage years. My own personal answer to the riddle of the Sphinx.
It’s Madeline St. Clair’s personal diary.
14
NOW
Some pages have been ripped out—while
others are scribbled black—but the big picture remains intact. At first, I can only survey it from a distance, an archaeologist discovering a lost Dead Sea Scroll, uncovering an as-yet unpublished play of Shakespeare’s.
The scope of this thing is huge. Madeline’s reflective writings date back to high school, back to when she was queen bitch of DDA and the most vicious shark in the pool.
But it’s incomplete.
Even a cursory glance through her journal reveals that Madeline was, at the atomic level, insecure about herself. Otherwise, why would she mark through so much of what she wrote?
It’s obvious she thought she was in trouble. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have stuck an artifact from her life in my toilet.
But now the question remains: Who was stalking her?
I thumb all the way back to a date that matches up with that night.
Dear Me. Tonight I think I did...something.
That’s it. The entirety of a kid’s last hours on Earth boiled down to an oopsie-doopsie in her personal journal.
It would be embarrassing if it weren’t so absolutely fascinating.
I check the date to make sure it all matches up, and when it does, I can’t help but read and re-read the passage, hoping to divine some intended meaning that is clearly not there.
It is a single volume, a Five Star notebook that looks as neat as the day it was purchased. How she could put all of her thoughts down for twenty years and not fill it up is beyond me, but somehow she’s managed. Either she didn’t have that many thoughts, or what interested her about her life was not the day-to-day goings-on, but the things that made other people miserable.
Despite the uneven, sometimes stilted All-work-and-no-play-makes-Jack-a-dull-boy aspects of Madeline’s journal, I do learn a lot about her.
She went through a considerable dark night of the soul following the death of Everett Coughlin. It is evident not necessarily in what she says but what lies in her silences. In the weeks following the incident—her words—she pens only a few staid phrases about it.
Dear Me. It’s done. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m really very sad and full of regret. One day, I hope M.E. understands, but for now, I have to be happy. Have to be.
Eventually, she returns to her vindictive, malicious former self, but this is a break in the narrative that helps humanize Madeline.
She wasn’t all monster.
She just never wanted anyone to see beyond the mask.
I try to tamp down my own feelings—ignore my memories—so that I can try to embrace some kind of redemption on my old frenemy’s behalf.
It’s not there. I try, and maybe that’s what she’s looking for, but I just can’t completely forgive her. Not yet. There’s still something missing, something awful, about here. It just lingers amidst the messy details of her past.
I flip to the back, avoiding the redacted and excised portions, trying to find THE THING she wanted me to see.
If nothing else—if I cannot find the saint in the sinner—perhaps I can at least make things all right in the wake of her death.
It appears to me, as I scan the latter entries in her journal, that she hit a point where she was sick and tired of pretending to be everything and just decided to do what interested her.
And what interested her was fucking her best friends’ husbands and boyfriends.
There are at least a dozen different men mentioned over the span of the last two years of her life, and though not every single one of them was named, it wouldn’t be too difficult to figure them out, if I tried hard enough.
One of them is obvious.
It’s the guy Gillian dated before this new one. This was not some temporary fling or mercurial sex type thing. It was going to be the real deal.
And then Gillian broke it off.
It would explain why Gillian broke it off, but not why she felt the need to keep it from me. Perhaps she has her own motive in all of this.
I am compelled to wonder to myself: Was her admission about speaking to Madeline and Audrey about that night and watching the garage door even true?
Just as I find some relevant passages in the notebook, my entire train of thought is sidelined by the zzz-zzz of my phone on the kitchen island.
I don’t even have a chance to speak.
“Oh, my God, have the cops talked to you?”
It’s Audrey, and she sounds frantic.
She never was able to handle stress.
“The lead detective thinks I killed her, but other than that, I think I’m doing okay.”
I can’t quite finish the thought, and Audrey apparently can’t either, because the very slight hiss of the signal between us is all that exists for a few moments.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m sitting outside in my car. I need to see you.”
I already hear the slamming of a car door, and I shut the journal and slide it under the couch before Audrey appears on the front stoop.
She hugs me like a sister. Like real family. Her tears stain my cheek.
When she pulls away, she looks like a human natural disaster. A state of emergency.
She loved Madeline St. Clair like I’ve never loved anybody, except maybe my dad, and he’s also dead and gone. Maybe I’ll love someone like that in the future.
“Who did this?” I ask.
“I think all of Nashville killed her,” she says, “but who pulled the trigger, who choked the life out of her—that I don’t know.”
Already turning her into a martyr. No matter the fight they had, Audrey will always be her lap dog. Obsequious to the bitter end.
“But somebody did pull the trigger,” I said. “Somebody did strangle her.”
“They’ve taken Colton into custody,” Audrey says, collapsing onto the couch. She’s more drunk than I think.
“What?”
“It just happened,” she says. “It’s all over the news. He turned himself in. As fate would have it, he was in the midst of a pretty raunchy weekend with McKinley Nelson.”
“She of the Nelson healthcare fortunes?”
“The same exact one,” Audrey replies. “He’s going to have a pretty tough road ahead, trying to prove he...didn’t do it. I mean, what with his dick being stuck in every available orifice in Music City and whatnot.”
“Did he do it, though? Do you think?”
“They had a monstrous relationship,” she says. “He was always cheating—”
“And so was she, from what I heard.”
“Yes, that too. Isn’t it always the husband?”
“Or the jealous lover.”
“Jealous lovers,” I correct. “Usually. But when has anything normal ever happened to Madeline St. Clair? I wouldn’t be surprised if it were a cult or some religious conspiracy. Simple jealousy isn’t enough to bring Madeline St. Clair down.”
And there’s the old anger seeping through, I think.
Changing the subject, I say, “It’s not Colton. It’s not him.”
“Because his family has a shit-ton of money? Come on, M.E.”
It’s true, though. Colton Ambrose is a name. If it were him, it would be the biggest murder since Janet March’s disappearance in the 90s.
Colton’s father runs one of the biggest brokerage firms in the city, and his mother is a professional socialite. Her name is on the invitation for any notable ball in Nashville, and the Belle Meade Country Club is like a second home.
Then, Audrey says, “They always talk to the husband first. It’s, like, one of the rules of the game. It’s always the husband. Don’t you watch Oxygen?”
“So you do think it’s him.”
“I’m not saying that,” she replies. “It doesn’t seem like him to shoot and strangle someone. I mean, with the millions he stands to inherit, he would hire someone.”
“Which could happen. This was a cold crime. I mean, the sheer, I dunno, brutality of it all makes it seem like more than just jealous rage.”
Audrey shakes her head. “Colton’s dad is dying.”
&n
bsp; “What?”
“He just got diagnosed with some heinous form of brain cancer, the same kind that killed John McCain. He doesn’t have very long to live.”
I’m confused. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“It just seems like a weird time for Colton to savagely murder his wife.”
“When people get that angry—”
“Yes, but he knew she was fucking other people,” she says. “If that drove him over the edge, then he’d have killed her a long time ago.”
“I guess that’s true,” I reply. “Unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless it’s someone that just got under his skin.”
“Maybe,” she replies. “But then we’d have to dig through all the names in Madeline St. Clair’s nightstand, and that’s not a task I feel like I’m up to.”
We sit in silence for a minute, both contemplating the circumstances which have brought us here, when finally she says it.
“There’s one thing we’re walking around, and I can’t tell if it’s on purpose or not,” she says. “I mean, I don’t necessarily want to go there, but maybe we should.”
“You think it has to do with the Suicide Blondes.”
She nods. A single, quick gesture, but one whose implications I dread.
“I’ve tried to come up with any and every excuse for why it wouldn’t be about Everett Coughlin’s death—”
“I don’t think it has to do with Everett Coughlin at all,” I interrupt. “If it is indeed related to the Suicide Blondes, it has everything to do with us. Someone wants to punish us for what we did.”
She thinks about it. “Maybe we deserve it.”
“At least someone seems to think that.”
“Sometimes, honestly, I think that,” she replies.
I nod, looking down. “She came to see me. Madeline, I mean. She was drunk, but there was something weird about our whole conversation. Like she wanted to tell me something.”
There’s a moment where I almost disclose the existence of the notebook, but something prevents me.
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