The folders are quasi-neatly stacked now, the notebooks buried under paperwork to keep me from reading what’s written on the covers. You’re secretive but careless. You’ve missed one, a record of conversations between you and Marjorie, dated 2005.
“I, uh, what?” You stammer, not even bothering to conjure an excuse. You’re too tired, too stressed to be clever.
I grab the napkin next to your plate, feigning nonchalance. If I corner you too badly you’ll lash out, and I’ll be no closer to the truth than I am right now. I sop up what I can of the spilled coffee and carefully pile pieces of the mug onto your paper plate. Orange oil hits my nose, making me suddenly hungry.
“These files have something to do with Tim?” My eye settles on the notebook you’ve left out away from the others, and you quickly add it to the bottom of the stack.
“What? No? I mean, no.”
Regardless the laws of grammar, a double-no means yes, at least with you.
“Because that’s all behind us, right? Ancient history?”
“Exactly.” You look relieved that not only didn’t you have to come up with an explanation, I made one for you.
“Then why in the hell did Vern ask about her?” This is twice now Vern’s come to me asking about things to do with you, and I hate to tell you this, but I see a pattern. “Last night,” I say before you have a chance to ask when. I wait for you to mention Ansley, and that you don’t, proves Vern is de facto onto something. Either she hasn’t called you, or you refuse to acknowledge that she has. I have to believe the former, because Ansley appears the gloating sort. She’d have told you about me and the police, and you wouldn’t be blindsided now. I never would have pegged her as this manipulative, but it seems I’m a poor judge of character in general.
“What were you doing with Vern?”
“That doesn’t matter,” I say, “as much as him asking about Marjorie.” Whom you somehow know is in Oregon and have sudden renewed interest in. I could assume that your re-reading old notes is in preparation for your eventual follow-up questioning with the police, but I don’t believe for a second there is a detail in those books of yours you haven’t committed to memory. “It’s coincidental, him mentioning her on a night you argue with Tim before exhuming all this old shit. I know you’re up to something, Bert, and I’m sick to death of your trying to hide it.”
“It’s the new book,” you say. “Tim’s pushing me, and I needed inspiration. That’s all.”
That’s not all. I might not be the most attentive wife, but I know when you’re lying. “Your book is based on this case?” I try and hide my disappointment. We can’t both write this story, no matter whether we take different angles. I’ve spent my life comparing our work. I won’t let others do the same.
“Not really. No.”
“Then on Marjorie?” The notebook you left out pertained specifically to her.
“She’s a character—well, inspiring a character.”
“She’s more than a character, Bert. She’s one hell of a coincidence. Marjorie Harman has come up three times in twenty-four hours after not a single mention in years. Vern is determined to connect you two for some reason, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious why.”
“There’s no connection. Marjorie Harman hates me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I CAN’T IMAGINE WHY Marjorie harbors any feelings about you at all, let alone one so extreme. I wait for you to claim to be the bad guy, at least in Marjorie’s opinion, so I can tell you how good you are. Praise the time you put in searching for Hannah. The long nights, the website, the amateur sleuth investigation you launched. But I know how selfish you can be. You don’t do anything for nothing. Maybe Marjorie knows this, too.
“Why would she hate you?” I ask.
You shake your head, disappointed I don’t already know. “Gregory Phillip King.”
Three names, always, for killers.
Only Gregory Phillip King wasn’t a murderer. He was a victim, the man Peter Harman shot a week after Hannah’s disappearance. I haven’t heard his name in over a decade, and your connection to him is entirely lost on me.
“Don’t you remember this?” you ask. “News crews? Police? There was a standoff, for Christ’s sake.”
You convey bits and pieces to jog memories my brain has worked hard to forget. Hannah’s first few weeks missing. Peter’s dramatic decline. Police at the door. Peter, too, for a time. Detectives asking the same questions of Matthew, who claimed he “didn’t know” or “couldn’t remember.” Answers that made even me suspicious he’d been coached. You’d blame the attorneys, but fault lies squarely with you. I don’t recall you asking him to try.
“I remember Peter killed him,” I say. “But I have no idea what that has to do with you.”
“I’m one of the few who knows why.”
I sit, because whatever you’re about to admit doesn’t feel like news I can stay standing to hear. You’ve broken eye contact and rounded your shoulders, and something about the way you say this conveys weight, as though this secret has been holding you down. I wait for you to explain yourself, but you’re having a hard time finding the words. I want to tell you confession is good for the soul or some such thing, but I’m the last person to be doling out that advice.
“King had a past,” you say, and of course you’d open with this. Accountability is important with you, and you need me to know that whatever you’ve done, it’s not nearly as bad as what Gregory Phillip King did first. “Two years before Hannah went missing, King was questioned in the disappearance of an eight-year-old girl from Ohio.”
Eight years old
Female.
Anyone might assume a pattern.
“Was the girl ever found?” Since Hannah never has been, this seems a critical detail.
You shrug, which I find odd.
“Were formal charges ever filed against King?” We know better than most that being questioned doesn’t mean squat.
Another shrug.
“Do you know anything about this Ohio case at all?”
“I know it bothered King enough that he admitted everything to a woman a few doors down that he had been dating.”
I have to believe an admission like this came from the same place most do: a fear of being found out. “You talked to this woman, then?” I don’t like where this is headed. Women are a fickle lot. Manipulative, cunning, and spiteful. I know this firsthand.
You shake your head. “Not exactly. She moved about six months earlier, when things went bad between her and King. She told a neighbor, who then told me.”
We both know the legal term for this is hearsay. “What were you doing questioning people about King, Bert?” Your son was under investigation at the time. This wasn’t book-related, and shouldn’t have been of personal interest. You were warned more than once to let the police handle these sorts of things.
“I wasn’t asking about him. I was asking if anyone saw Matthew and Hannah the night they went missing. Where they might have gone to or who they might have been with. These people were only trying to help. They wanted to talk to me.”
Of course they did, with your local celebrity status only beginning to take root. I don’t doubt these folks fancied themselves helpful, or that you, being you, didn’t lead them to believe theirs might be the defining account in your next true-crime story. Who doesn’t love fame? I wonder, though, about your motivation.
“At least three different people put King either in or around the Harmans’ home in the weeks before Hannah vanished,” you say.
Sometimes proximity is enough.
“And you told Deon?”
I need to know you at least tried to validate this he-said, she-said account, because the alternative—that you not only kept this to yourself but used this information somehow to manipulate Peter, who was already distraught over losing his daughter—is too much to handle.
“He wouldn’t listen,” you say. “He had questioned and cleared King then move
d on.”
“But this story about King and this other little girl, it’s been corroborated, right?”
“Even Peter swears he saw King sneaking around!”
You clearly aren’t getting my point. You can’t make unfounded accusations and not expect consequences. “Peter wasn’t in his right mind.” I remind you of the late-night calls, Peter insisting on questioning Matthew, turning up at Matthew’s school and even here. We nearly took out a restraining order against him, and rather than proving Matthew’s innocence, you tried to prove someone else’s guilt. Marjorie is right. You are responsible. “Bert, you let a man be killed execution-style with a shotgun blast to the head based on gossip.”
I don’t know Gregory Phillip King, and I certainly can’t defend him, but it seems he relocated to escape ultimately erroneous suspicion, only to find himself in trouble elsewhere. Might the guy have been a predator? Sure, I’ll buy that because unfortunately for you, allegations don’t often come out of nowhere. The age range fits, and yes, I can see how, given that King’s been called into question twice, in two different locales, it would be easy to avoid giving him a second pass. Still, that you did whatever you must have done to uncover this proves the extent you were willing to go to, the lives you were willing to ruin. For what? Out of your desperation to find Hannah? Based on your obvious remorse, I’d say it’s more likely you needed somewhere to place blame, anywhere other than on Matthew.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
YOU DID A DESPICABLE thing, but if I’m honest, Peter’s pursuit of Matthew may have never stopped otherwise. Gregory Phillip King’s consequences might have been ours, and what would that have meant over the course of a lifetime? What would have changed if we’d lost Matthew sooner? I don’t dare say we might have all been better off.
I consider telling you to try and meet with Peter, if only to relieve your conscience, but there are too many variables with our past and present colliding for me to know if that’s a good idea. Filing for visitation might make things worse, and while you’ve made a confession, it’s not the confession I had hoped for. Twice now, I’ve confronted you, and both times you’ve managed to sidetrack me.
I’m about to tell you this when my cell phone chimes wildly, the panicked sound indicating a message sent with high priority. I check the screen and excuse myself because it’s an e-mail from Deon, one with an attached video file, which incites new dread.
“We’re not done,” I say.
Your predilection is to take off when things get bad, and whatever is on my phone is awful. I know this because Deon has never sent anything with red flag status and because the few accompanying lines of text are overly apologetic.
I close myself in the half bathroom and call up the grainy surveillance video that runs on autoplay. I recognize the Thruway toll booth plaza from trips between here and the city. A car—same make, model, and color as yours—rolls to a stop at an automatic gate that should lift but doesn’t, stalled by some technical glitch that leaves you under a spotlight. Even in low resolution, the driver, visible through the windshield, is unmistakably you. The time and date stamp shows you exiting toward I-87 northbound through the automated lane on the night Matthew was killed.
I dial Deon’s number and pray he picks up. The call doesn’t make it past the second ring.
“Harper, I—please don’t be mad.” Deon sounds uncharacteristically hesitant, as though he might have let my call go to voicemail but knows I wouldn’t stop calling. Neither of us wants that on our phone records right now.
“Where did you get this?”
“That doesn’t matter.” Deon refuses to name his source.
“It matters if it came from Vern.”
“It didn’t, but he’ll find out soon enough.” I don’t know whether to read this as a threat or a statement of eventuality. “Bert was here the night Matthew died. He lied to you, and to Vern, too. Why would he do that?” I hear doubt in his voice—not of your being a liar, which is pretty much public knowledge, but of your innocence.
I’d have thought that years of friendship between the two of you might account for more than this sort of rush to judgment.
“I don’t know.” I could use the excuse you gave me, that you didn’t want me finding out you had been talking with Matthew, but this isn’t going to make Deon any happier with you or any more inclined to help. My mind works to untangle the details the way I think a defense attorney might, to render them less compelling. I do the mental math, calculating the round-trip drive and the places I can prove you’ve been. After a second, I say, “This won’t hold up.” I think for a minute that we’ve been disconnected until I hear Deon breathing. “It doesn’t prove anything.”
“Are you hearing yourself?” I don’t have to see Deon’s expression to know he’s incredulous. He has proved you’re a plausible suspect, and me defending you hits him on both a personal and professional level. You are the bad guy. Deon’s never been opportunistic, but I sense that might have changed. Perhaps the thought of you behind bars has given him hope where there should be none; promised an unlikely future between him and me.
I was afraid this might happen.
“All I’m saying is there’s doubt, right? I’m sure there’s an explanation.” Even if it is blaming me. I’ll admit to being difficult, where Matthew’s concerned, to keep you from handcuffs.
“It won’t hold up?” Deon lobs my words back at me as if I might’ve gone insane, as though hearing them from his mouth might make me realize how crazy I sound. It doesn’t work. I am already finding holes. It’s not like the primary crime scene is the tollbooth. There’s still no DNA, and there won’t be. You didn’t do this.
“This isn’t a trial.” But it will become one, and all of this will come out, and you’ll be mad that I asked for Deon’s help in the first place. “All I’m saying is there is no way Bert could have committed murder, cleaned up some yet-unidentified primary crime scene, dumped Matthew’s body in the park, and made it back to the signing in time.”
“You know how long these things take?”
“Don’t be an ass. The driving alone would’ve been impossible.” When in doubt, deflect. “Besides, there’s something I should’ve told you.” This is not my proudest moment, but I admit to Deon what I haven’t told another soul, that I not only paid for Matthew’s funeral, but for Ella’s compliance in our peacefully attending it as well. It’s a small concession in light of the evidence against you. I still have no explanation for the money or Ansley, but I don’t have to explain everything tonight. I only need to explain you being where you shouldn’t have been at exactly the worst time. “Deon, you should have seen the house.” I tell him about the holes in the walls and Ella suspiciously shutting the door to keep me from seeing inside. “Something definitely went on there, and what if Bert went to help her?” This would be corroborated by calls between you when the police uncover the fact that you’ve talked. “Bert would have lied to keep me from nagging him.” This is a long shot, but hypotheses don’t have to be bulletproof. They only have to be distracting. “What if Ella hurt Matthew? Maybe she didn’t mean to. Maybe there was an accident, and she called Bert?”
Deon doesn’t answer. Whether he’s in shock over Ella as a plausible suspect or appalled that I have the audacity to paint her as such, I’m not sure, but I don’t get a good feeling.
“Say something, would you?”
Deon sighs. “Okay. Don’t make this worse.” He couldn’t possibly be vaguer, but I expect I know what he’s referring to. He’s warning me not to attack Ella’s reputation, and not to be sucked into the trappings of one parent hurtling insults and insinuations at the other because neither side wins. She is, after all, the grieving mother. It doesn’t matter that we raised Matthew without her, because fathers matter less.
“Deon, I know what I saw.”
“You attacking Ella will read like sour grapes. It’ll look retaliatory.”
I scrunch my face in disbelief, because right now I have
bigger worries than wrinkles. “Okay, so first to the police wins? Fuck the truth, and I might as well turn Bert in myself?”
“I’m only trying to help,” Deon says.
I want to believe him, but I’d be a fool if I didn’t acknowledge the personal reasons for which he might want you incarcerated. “Then help, and I don’t mean make Bert look guiltier.”
“That’s not what I was doing. I was trying to prove Bert’s alibi for you. I had his highway pass flagged to show he was, in fact, in Manhattan all night, where he should have been. You want him to be innocent, and for the two of you to keep living this fucked-up lie that’s ruining everyone and everything near it. I want what you want, Harper, and this wasn’t that.” It’s killing Deon, working for me on your behalf, betraying his badge, and supporting our defiled marriage. “I never thought for a minute what I turned up might be evidence against him.”
Deon forces that last bit out, maybe because it’s painful to say. More than likely, it’s because he doesn’t necessarily believe it. He knows you, as well as I do in some regards, and he knows our past. He has seen us through Hannah, through Matthew’s outbursts, and is more aware than most how, on most days, we wanted it all to stop.
“Then consider Ella,” I say. “Until there’s proof otherwise, at least consider that there might be a connection. Look into what happened at her house. Check for police reports or noise complaints. Hell, get her to let you search the place if you can. If there’s nothing there, fine, but don’t rush to judgment. You say you want to help, then help. Do me one last favor.”
“Which is?”
“Give me your word no one else will see this video.”
“Harper, I—”
The next word feels like can’t, and I’m afraid I’m too late. “Has anyone else seen it?”
“No, but—”
“But nothing. No one has to know anything about this. Not yet, and maybe not ever. Not if something terrible happened at Ella’s.”
Where We Went Wrong Page 10