Where We Went Wrong

by Andi Holloway

  Again, I’m looking to assign blame. Rationalizing our decisions is the only way I can accept the consequences.

  “I have to piece this together,” I say. “The past and present, and not only because Matthew’s dead”—it hurts less to say it today than it did a week ago, which is a sign that I’m moving toward acceptance, whether or not I should be—“but because the police think Bert had something to do with it.”

  “I have no reason to be looking into Marjorie’s finances this far after the fact,” Deon says.

  “You are the lead detective in Hannah’s disappearance, looking into a cold case with fresh perspective. No one will question you. But if they do, it’s a pat explanation.”

  Deon isn’t one for promises, but he doesn’t refuse, either. He can’t, not now that I have something to hold over him.

  Mine isn’t a complicated request. All I need is for him to take a look at a few years’ worth of Marjorie’s financials, to see if there’s anything off about them, anything I can use to extort the information you need for your book. Maybe there is a simple explanation, some inheritance or a wealthy suitor no one knows about. Maybe there was money hidden away from her marriage to Peter. Maybe she won the lottery, but the way she’s avoiding me, I’m sure we’re not the only ones hiding something.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  DEON LEAVES TASKED with investigating Marjorie because he needs me to keep quiet. A devoted lover might do so out of loyalty, but those days are behind us. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the police working for me. I shouldn’t relish this control as much as I do, but when do I ever get to be in charge of anything?

  Power drunk, I sit at my computer. All of this talk over who lied about what has enlightened my lame-duck muse, and I don’t intend to waste the inspiration. Writing is visceral and cathartic; a coping mechanism that proves a useful distraction from the gripping insomnia that has my mind working overtime and my body refusing to rest.

  Marjorie hasn’t called. Neither have you, and despite me telling you not to let Tim see your manuscript, I’m afraid he’ll leverage whatever he needs to in order to get an early look. He’ll regret it.

  I lean back from my keyboard and scan the words, which flow from my subconscious onto the page as if they need to be there. Unlike with my previous false starts—novels at various stages of completion, abandoned on my thumb drive—I don’t have a compelling urge to revise, rearrange, and delete entire scenes. The words ring true hours and days after writing them, truer than anything I’ve ever written, and this work-in-progress has become a sort of letter to you, in the event things go badly.

  The working title has changed from Estranged to The Perfect Suspect, and it’s the story of a self-absorbed novelist in the throes of his son’s murder investigation. Life imitates art imitating life.

  Unlike the reconciliation story I had no choice but to scrap, this one lays blame where it should be: on the son. It took me writing this to convince myself that what happened to Matthew isn’t our fault. Had the ill-fated night taken a different turn, one or both of us would be dead. I’ve read about children who murder their parents then party in their family homes with the decomposing corpses. More than once, I’ve imagined myself cold and bled out on the floor of your office while Matthew empties our liquor cabinet then takes some unsuspecting girl to our bed, but those aren’t the kind of thoughts one can verbalize and seem sane.

  You’d never understand how afraid I was for both our sakes, and it seems now that fear wasn’t unfounded. More than sleeping behind locked doors and with one eye open, I had at one point entertained the idea of owning a gun. Me. A gun. Despite my predilection for true-crime, I am and always have been a pacifist.

  I scroll to the end of the latest chapter then reread the final line. In this version, the dramatic tension builds toward the inevitable tragic ending, but I can’t bring myself to write the final scene. Nothing is as simple as being all bad or all good, and that’s not what compelling fiction is, anyway. The murder of this particular character isn’t by design or even by choice. It’s an act of self-preservation that I’m not emotionally prepared to commit to. I save and close the file, needing time to reflect on what it will take to make you see your role in this story that is but isn’t ours. Writing you has given me insight into the lies I’ve bought over the years.

  I forgive you for not telling me about Ella or Matthew, convinced the secrecy came from a place of shame and of personal failure, neither of which you’re good at accepting. You played the injured party, and I needed for that to be true. If it wasn’t, then I was a fool, chasing a man no woman should ever want.

  Matthew deserved better.

  Ella and I did, too.

  You sold me a different life from the one we’re living, one of literary collaboration. I fear my novel-in-progress is as close to that as we’ll ever get.

  No work has ever come at a steeper price.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  I STARTLE AWAKE TO the hum of the garage door opener and instinctively check the time. It’s twelve fifteen in the afternoon. I nearly kick my laptop onto the floor in my rush to get up. While I’ve been immersed in The Perfect Suspect, it seems I might have lost an entire twenty-four hours. I confirm with my cell phone that I haven’t. It’s Thursday. You’re not due back until tomorrow, and I wonder what’s changed.

  You throw the bedroom door open and say, “Get dressed.”

  I’m barely on my feet, panicking because you’re never early. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “I said to get dressed.”

  And I heard you, but I need more than clothing. I need a shower, a toothbrush, and at least two aspirin. I need to shave my legs. I need coffee. I can’t just wake and run. You know this.

  “Vern called. We need to be at the station in”—you check your watch—“less than forty-five minutes.”

  Being summoned to the station is an escalation. Like our marriage, this investigation takes into account what each of us knows about the other. We’ve spent years ignoring kept secrets, your other women in particular, but this is different. If Vern finds out about Hannah, or about the gun and Matthew’s willingness to use it in order to stop you from writing this book, you will look guiltier. Even if you claim self-defense, the fact is that Matthew could have ruined a potentially lucrative book deal. No one—not Deon or Ella—has that kind of motive. They haven’t exactly been honest, the two of them, but they’ll alibi one another if it comes to it.

  “Did he say what he wants?” There’s a remote chance that Vern is interacting with us not as suspects but as parents. Maybe he views us as people who should be kept abreast of developments in their son’s murder.

  “He didn’t.” You shake your head. “He just said we had to be there.” Your emphasis is on the word “we.”

  Either neither of us is in trouble, or we both are. “I don’t like this.” You’ve admitted things, and so have Deon and Ella, and it’s getting harder by the revelation to keep details straight. One of these times, I’ll slip and say the exact thing I shouldn’t. “What if Vern brings up the money again?” Neither of us wants to have to admit the truth about Hannah, not before your book goes to press where it will be breaking and lucrative news. “If he finds out what you’re working on, it’ll ruin everything.” And if he brings up the heap of debt, bills months past due, it’ll ruin me.

  You refuse to be swayed. “Then don’t tell him,” you say. “You’re not obligated.” You’re reminding me of spousal privilege, though I already know I don’t have to incriminate you.

  “I don’t want to look complicit, Bert, like I’m helping you cover something up.” This problem of ours has too many moving parts, and with each thing we don’t tell Vern, we risk having to make after-the-fact explanations. You didn’t kill your son, but I need us both to keep from telling Vern anything that makes it look like you did. “It’s not too late to call a lawyer,” I say, which isn’t exactly true. I’d be insane to confess to an attorney the number o
f times I’ve spoken to police unrepresented, and the things either of us have said to appear cooperative. “We can back out. We’ll tell Vern we need time to find someone.”

  “We’ve had plenty of time up until now,” you say. “Vern will know it’s a stall tactic. I said we’ll be there, and we’re going.”

  You’re adamant, but you don’t know Vern as I do. I’ve had three sit-downs with him to your one, and each time I walk away more shaken. Fearful of being followed, and dreading each ring of the phone. Life isn’t fair, Bert. It doesn’t stop hurtling problems at you because your plate is too full or because of some weakened emotional state. You have so much to deal with right now—between Matthew, Hannah, and the book, it’s in your best interest that I protest this. Vern festers. He plants information and asks leading questions, and eventually all you can think about is him. You’ll lose sleep like I have, worrying each is your last day of freedom. You can blame my paranoia, but when it’s you scrambling to make pieces fit, looking to support an alternate narrative, you’ll understand why I’m so set against talking to him.

  “How do I know you won’t make things worse?” I ask.

  “You’re just going to have to trust me.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  WE’RE SEPARATED THE minute we walk through the precinct door. Vern and a uniformed officer escort us to interrogation rooms at opposite ends of the hallway.

  Vern questions you first, leaving me with my racing thoughts. We have more problems than solutions. Our life has become an unsolvable riddle, this case a minefield, and I’m terrified of what you might be hearing only a few hundred feet away. Each minute drags on longer than the last, and if I hadn’t grabbed my fitness tracker on the way out the door, I would have lost track of the fact I’ve been holed up in this stark white room with nothing but a wall-mounted camera and its accusing blinking red light for over an hour.

  I remind myself there’s nothing I can do from in here, but I can’t convince myself that anything is going to be all right. I try not to fidget. People are watching, and I have nothing to be nervous about. I check the cell phone I’ve been so graciously allowed to keep. We’re not under arrest, after all. We’re here of our own volition. Nothing works. I have between zero and one bar of reception, and seconds after opening the browser, a page still will not load. I can’t help thinking this is by design, and that there’s a jammer blocking outside contact.

  I contemplate walking around, maybe even opening the door and peeking out to see if I can get someone’s—anyone’s—attention, thinking that might speed this along, but every movement is being cataloged, documented, and used to prove Vern’s theory that the killer, statistically, is either family or a friend.

  I endure, needing whomever might be watching to see how patient I am, how relaxed. An hour and forty-five minutes has passed when my patience wears thin. I can’t believe they’ve kept me here this long, or that Vern could possibly fill almost two hours with you. Time moves differently inside my head—both slower and faster—in a way that’s impossible to reconcile.

  The door finally opens just as I’m about to break character, to see if perhaps I’ve been forgotten.

  Vern sets a second Styrofoam cup full of tepid water next to the first I have taken only one sip of. Though clear, the water here tastes like rusty pipes. “I’m sorry for the delay,” he says.

  I nod in acknowledgement, but it’s not okay. Somehow, I think Vern wanted me to wait.

  “Are you finished with Bert?” I imagine you impatiently pacing the lobby, calling attention to yourself because unlike me, you’re unaware of—or unconcerned with—others’ perceptions.

  “Not yet.” Vern takes a seat, and I try to get a read on his neutral demeanor. “I need you to know this conversation is being recorded.”

  He’s all business today. “I figured as much.” I’d have to be blind not to have noticed.

  “Tell me about Matthew’s life insurance policy,” Vern says.

  My throat constricts, and despite the fact that I’m probably going to contract some sort of bacterial illness, I sip the water, choking on this forgotten detail. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  Blame lack of sleep. Blame worry. Blame Vern’s most recent in a long line of cheap suits or the fact that all I want right now is some fresh air and a shower, but the last thing I feel like being is cordial.

  Vern presses his elbows into the table. “Harper, why do you have fifty grand worth of coverage on a twenty-year-old?”

  “Term life,” I say, “and it would’ve been null and void at twenty-one.” Four months after Matthew’s death, that is. I realize too late that this assertion hurts rather than helps our case.

  “Is it normal for parents to insure their children?”

  My suspicion that Vern never procreated is confirmed.

  The reason we have the policy, and I relay this to Vern in the simplest terms, is that we fell prey to a particularly convincing salesman. “Matthew’s was an add-on policy. Cheap, and probably how the insurance company makes extra money off families. We paid something like five dollars per month for fifty thousand dollars coverage that was meant to cover funeral expenses, should something unexpected happen.” I reiterate the salesman’s pitch, at least as I remember it. He was persuasive. I can be, too.

  “But Matthew left your home two years ago,” he says as if this, alone, is a compelling reason we should have cancelled.

  “That doesn’t make him any less Bert’s son.”

  I defend you, but the reason I never cancelled the policy is because it got lost in the shuffle, lumped in with a stack of unpaid bills. I wait for Vern to ask why, with so many accounts in arrears, this one took precedence. I’m prepared to admit it’s on automatic draft from our checking account, but he doesn’t mention it. Neither do I.

  “Then it’s a coincidence, your marital financial troubles and this life insurance payout?”

  I don’t mean to, but nervousness takes over and I laugh in Vern’s face. “Who says we have financial troubles?” A few weeks ago, this same man assumed we were loaded. If he’s gone digging since then, I need to know how far.

  “A regularly overdrawn checking account, tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, two months’ worth of overdue mortgage payments, some outstanding unsecured loans, and the money your husband may or may not have been paying to Ansley Davis.” Alleged blackmail, which Vern has to realize isn’t what he thinks or he’d have called it that outright. “There’s store credit and installment loans for your vehicles, too. Most of which are overdue.”

  I don’t need an itemized account of how deep in debt we are, but since Vern’s gone to the trouble of being this thorough, the least I can do is present the flaw in his logic.

  “If you’ve looked into our debt, you know fifty grand isn’t even the tip of the iceberg.” I won’t let Vern shake me with talks of potential financial motive. At least now I know what you’ve been up to. I worried over that for days, just to find out that Vern’s not nearly as good a detective as he thinks he is. The station is intimidating—well-played, Vern—but I have to look at things as they are and not as they’re assumed to be. The life insurance policy is an honest mind slip on my part. If I thought it mattered, I’d have mentioned it by now. On the bright side, Vern’s reminder means we have at least some of the money we need. “Also, the policy is twelve years old.” You’d be the most patient killer on earth if Matthew’s policy meant a thing.

  “Which of you handles the day-to-day household finances?”

  “I do.” Though lately, I don’t so much pay the bills as hide them. “And before you ask, we’re normally fine, but Bert’s late delivering his manuscript.”

  “Right.” Vern smiles. “The new book that is, in fact, months overdue.”

  Preceding Matthew’s death. Irrelevant. I want to march down the hall and punch your face for you admitting this, but all I can do is nod.

  “Sure. More than a few weeks.”

  “But you’re normally
fine?”

  “Right, more often than not.”

  Vern hasn’t only been digging but has dug deep. He opens the dreaded folder of evidence, which to this point has sat closed in front of him, and flips between pages. “Looks to me like things haven’t been right since about six months or so after Matthew left a year and a half ago.”

  Don’t ever let anyone convince you that divorce isn’t punitive. If and when a marriage fails, those involved pay. While it’s easy to blame Ella for the financial beating we’ve endured, the true fault lies with New York State and their stupid fucking law that child support extends to age twenty-one. Faced with these circumstances we—and everyone else financially hijacked for support of a working-age, voting-age, able-to-enlist-in-the-military young adult—will always walk out of the courtroom screwed.

  “Yes, that was the beginning of hard times,” I admit. “How long do you think you’d go before feeling it if someone took four thousand dollars a month out of your paycheck?”

  “I don’t make that kind of money to begin with.” Vern’s initial jealousy returns, and I know that when he finally arrests you it won’t be for entirely impersonal reasons. He wants to take down the one percent and prove himself the better man, but he hasn’t thought this attack of his completely through.

  “Anyway, we were months away from fulfilling that obligation.” The payments would have stopped on Matthew’s twenty-first birthday. No jury would see this circumstantial evidence as damning beyond reasonable doubt. “Financially speaking, things were about to turn around.”

  “And just in time, too, right?” Vern shifts in his chair, pen at the ready. “Would it surprise you to know that when Bert and I talked money, he was completely unaware of there being any trouble, outside of his book deal?”

  “Completely” is probably an overstatement. “I wouldn’t be surprised, no, but I don’t bother Bert with these things. As I said, they’ll iron out. They always do.” A writer’s income fluctuates enough to explain away all of this and make us look more human, maybe sympathetic to a jury. We, the assumed one percent, have known hard times.