The heater didn’t work, the bedroom window was jammed, and the carpet was an obnoxious shade of teal. The bathroom did have a claw-foot tub, which Trista liked, but the faucet dripped and drove her crazy. If she spent the night, she shut the door to the bathroom; otherwise, she would hear the drip down the hall. When they ate at Owen’s, they used his mother’s dishes, with a yellow floral pattern around the edge.
After a while, Trista was too drunk and tired to continue, so I had a driver at the club take her home. I told her if she wanted to talk more about Owen, I would be happy to listen. It was the truth.
She’d provided me with exactly what I needed for the second letter to Josh.
Seventeen
PLANS HAVE NEVER been my thing. Not even my trip overseas was planned. I got a call from a friend, and a week later I met up with him at the Orlando airport. When I realized I would never be good enough to play tennis professionally, I didn’t have a plan. The day Millicent told me she was pregnant with Rory, I had no plan to raise a child. When she got pregnant with Jenna, I still didn’t have one. Only the secret I have with Millicent makes me plan.
My game is tennis, not chess. I play, and teach, singles tennis, and usually that is all I see: two sides of the net, two opposing forces, one goal. It isn’t complicated. Yet here I am, designing a plan involving multiple people, like I have something to prove.
The current version of my plan involves three people: Owen, Josh, and Annabelle. Millicent makes it four, and I could even include Trista. Or at least the information Trista gave me.
First, I’ll send another letter to Josh. Not only will it include details about Owen’s real life—specifically his mother’s home—but it will also include the date when another woman will disappear.
This is risky, I know. Maybe even unnecessary. But in one fell swoop, it accomplishes our goal. Yes, Owen is back. Yes, he is responsible for Lindsay and for the next one. No guessing games, no back-and-forth between the police and the media, wondering if he is really back or if there is a copycat. The information Trista gave me will prove to them it’s Owen. No one will have a doubt when the next one disappears.
It will be Annabelle Parson, though I don’t include her name.
The downside is that the entire police department will be waiting for a woman to disappear that night, and they will be searching for her as soon as someone reports her missing.
The upside is that Annabelle has very few friends. No one is going to report her missing until she doesn’t show up for work. It would be easy enough to give us a two-day lead.
We’ll still have to figure out how to snatch Annabelle without being seen by anyone, including a camera, on a night when everyone is expecting a woman to disappear. And while the police are looking for Owen, they will completely miss Millicent.
The plan is so simple it could be brilliant.
I go through it again, starting with the letter to Josh and ending with the disappearance of Annabelle. Along the way, I see a hundred holes, loose ends, and potential problems.
This is why I do not plan. It’s exhausting. Which is also why I do it. I try to put the plan together before telling Millicent about it. Even after all these years, I still want to impress her.
And it’s been a while. Impressing Millicent wasn’t easy when she was young. Now, it’s almost impossible.
Our relationship is not one-sided, though. There have been plenty of times she has tried to impress me. Millicent was trying to impress me when she decorated our Christmas tree with the oxygen masks. On our fifth anniversary, she put on the same lingerie she wore on our wedding night. And for our tenth anniversary, she planned a little vacation.
With two kids and a bigger house on our wish list, we had no money for a vacation or even a nice dinner. Millicent found a way.
First, she showed up at the tennis courts. Millicent never comes to the tennis courts. If she comes to the club at all, it’s to swim or have lunch with someone, so when she walked onto the court, I thought something was wrong. My wife just wanted to kidnap me.
Millicent drove us out to the middle of nowhere, stopped, and pointed to the woods.
“Walk,” she said.
I did.
A couple hundred yards from the road, we came to a clearing. A tent was already set up, right next to a stone fire pit. A little picnic table was set with plastic plates, glasses, and thick candles.
Millicent took me camping. She is not the outdoorsy type, but, for one night, she pretended to be.
The bugs were a problem, because she forgot bug spray. The candles were covered, but they kept getting blown out, and she didn’t think to bring extra water for cleaning dishes or brushing teeth. None of that mattered. We sat in front of our fire pit and ate warmed-up soup, drank cheap beer, and had even cheaper sex. We talked about the future, which looked much different than before, because of the kids. Not bad different, just priority different.
We avoided talking about the things we used to want but could no longer have.
Sometime after midnight, we fell asleep. I hadn’t been up that late since Christmas Eve, when we had to stay up to put out Santa’s presents.
The next morning when I stepped out of the tent, Millicent was just standing there, hands clasped over her mouth. Our camp had been ransacked.
Everything was overturned, tossed around, cleaned out. The food had been taken or ripped open, and our extra clothes were strewn across the ground.
“Scavengers,” I said. “Probably raccoons.”
She didn’t answer. She was too pissed off to answer.
Millicent started gathering up what was left of our things.
“We still have some coffee,” I said, holding up a little jar of instant. “We could make some—”
“I don’t think those were raccoons.”
I stared at her as she collected what was left of a backpack. “Then what—”
“People destroyed our camp. Not animals.”
“What makes you say that?”
She pointed to where we had slept. “They didn’t touch the tent.”
“Maybe they just wanted the food. Maybe they didn’t care—”
“Or maybe they were people.”
I stopped arguing. We trudged out of the woods and back to the car.
To this day, if that camping trip comes up, she talks about the horrible people who ransacked our things. I still think it was done by some animal, not people, but I don’t argue. Millicent sees a motive behind everything.
But what I remember most about that trip is different. The important thing was that Millicent planned the trip to impress me.
* * *
• • •
ANNABELLE PARSON HAS never called in sick or late, she has never taken more than two vacation days in a row, and she always fills in when someone is sick. That means she does not have a boyfriend. Anyone who does will occasionally call in late. Couples also take real vacations, especially couples who don’t have kids, and Annabelle doesn’t. To top it all off, like the perfect cherry on a sundae, Annabelle has been named “Meter Maid of the Month” five times and is featured on the county website.
I show all of this to Millicent, who looks through everything and says, “You’re right. She’s perfect.”
“I’m also working on the next letter to Josh, but I’m not going to show you.”
“You’re not?”
“I want it to be a surprise.”
She smiles a little. “I trust you.”
This is the best news I have heard all week.
I start watching Annabelle the way I watched the others. Due diligence and all.
Today I take the train back out to where she works, just to switch things up in case she recognizes my car. It is impossible to follow her when she is working. Annabelle uses a county-issued ATV to drive around, looking for expired meters
and illegal parkers. She stops and starts at random times.
For a while, I sit in a coffee shop on the main thoroughfare. Every twenty to thirty minutes, she passes by to check the meters. While waiting, I draft my next Owen Oliver letter. I work under the assumption that this one will be so convincing it will become public. Josh, and the station he works for, won’t be able to resist.
Just the mention of Owen’s return is getting everyone worked up. Local stations are replaying old news clips, retrospectives, and profiles. Owen has been on the cover of the paper for the past few days. Rory and his friends have already turned Owen’s name into a verb (“I’ll Owen Oliver your ass.”) and the local women’s group is lobbying for Lindsay’s murder to be declared a hate crime.
I try to imagine how it would escalate if the rumor was confirmed. Or even if people thought it was confirmed. That’s all we really need. Belief. If I can make the police believe it, they won’t be looking for anyone but Owen.
Millicent may have started this, but I can bring it home. She will be so impressed.
Eighteen
IF IT HADN’T been for Robin, none of this would have happened. We didn’t look for her; she hadn’t been chosen the way Lindsay was. Robin changed everything by knocking on our door.
It happened on a Tuesday. I had just walked into the house. It was lunchtime, no one was home, and I had a couple of hours before my next lesson. This was almost a year after Holly, and life had returned to normal. Her body was long gone, wasting away in a swamp. Millicent and I did not talk about her. I no longer waited for the police sirens. My heart had stopped thumping every time the phone or doorbell rang. I was not on guard when I opened the door.
The woman on the porch was young, early twenties, wearing tight jeans and a shirt with a ripped neck. Her nails were red, her lipstick was pink, and her long hair was the color of a roasted chestnut.
Behind her, a little red car was parked on the street. The car was an old one, close to a classic but not quite. Minutes before, I had seen it at a stop sign not far from the house. She had honked, but I’d had no idea she was honking at me.
“Can I help you?” I said.
She cocked her head, looking at me sideways, and smiled. “I thought it was you.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re Holly’s friend.”
Her name made me jolt, like I had stuck my finger in a light socket. “Holly?”
“I saw you with her.”
“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
She had not, of course. Now I recognized her.
When the hospital released Holly, one of the doctors helped arrange for her to work at a grocery store. Holly stocked shelves part-time. That’s where I had gone to tell her to stay away from us, where I had confronted her about scaring our family.
I never meant for it to get out of hand.
I went on a Monday morning, when the store was slow and everything was being restocked. Holly was in one of the aisles, filling a shelf with boxes of granola bars, and she was alone. As I walked down the aisle toward her, she turned toward me. Her clear green eyes were startling.
Holly put her hands on her hips and stared at me until I stood right next to her.
“Yes?” she said.
“I don’t think we’ve formally met.” I stuck out my hand and waited for her to shake it. Eventually, she did.
I told her I was sorry we had to meet this way—that in another place, at another time, perhaps we would be like family. But right now, it wasn’t possible, because her behavior was scaring my wife and kids. My kids had never done anything to her. They did not deserve this. “I’m asking you,” I said. “Can you please leave my family alone?”
She laughed at me.
Holly laughed until tears sprang from the corners of her eyes, and she laughed some more. The longer it went on, the more humiliated I started to feel. That may have made her laugh harder. I started to understand how she made Millicent feel, and it made me angry.
“You bitch,” I said.
She stopped laughing. Her eyes almost glowed with rage. “Get out.”
“What if I don’t? What if I stay here and make your life miserable?” My voice was much louder than it should have been.
“Get out.”
“Stay away from my family.”
Holly stared at me, still as a statue. She did not budge then, and she never did.
I turned around to leave, feeling a bit helpless. I could not reason with Holly, could not make her understand.
Robin was at the end of the aisle, watching everything.
She also worked at the store. She was wearing the same yellow shirt and green apron. I saw her, walked right past her, and I may have nodded at her. Or maybe I didn’t. But she was there, she had seen me, and now she was standing at my door.
“I’m not wrong,” she said. “You were the one I saw that day.”
I did not pause. “I’m sorry—you’ve got the wrong person.” I shut the door.
She knocked again.
I ignored it.
Robin’s voice came through the door. “You know she’s gone, right? Didn’t even pick up her last check.”
I opened the door. “Look, I’m really sorry about your friend, but I have no idea—”
“I got it, I got it. Wrong guy. Wasn’t you. Now that I know who you are, I’ll just let the police sort it all out.”
She turned around and started to leave.
I did not let her.
No one knew Holly was missing. No one was looking for her, and I didn’t want them to start. Millicent and I were not experts in forensics or DNA or anything of the sort. Anyone who looked too deep was bound to find all our mistakes.
I asked if Robin wanted to come inside and talk. She hesitated at first. She took out her phone and kept it in her hand as she walked into the house. We went to the kitchen. I offered her a drink; she said no. Instead, she grabbed an orange from the table and started peeling it. Without admitting a thing, without even introducing myself, I asked her what happened. She started to talk about the grocery store, about Holly, and about herself.
She gave me a history of how she came to work at the grocery store, when she met Holly, and how they had become friends. I got up from the table and went to the refrigerator to get a soda. While the door was open, I sent a quick text to Millicent. I used the same language she had used when Holly was in the house.
911 Get home NOW
It felt like hours passed before her car pulled up. By then, Robin was asking what we should do to resolve our current situation. She did not want justice for her dear old friend Holly. She wanted money, and lots of it.
“I figure this can be a win-win for both of us,” she said. The front door opened, and Robin’s head spun around. “Who’s that?”
“My wife,” I said.
Millicent appeared in the doorway, breathing hard, like she had been running. She was dressed for work in a skirt, blouse, and heels. Her jacket was open; she hadn’t bothered to button it. She looked from me to Robin and back again.
“This is Robin,” I said. “She used to work with a woman named Holly.”
Millicent raised an eyebrow at Robin, who nodded.
“That’s right. And I saw your husband talking to her. He called her a bitch.”
The eyebrow turned to me.
I said nothing.
Millicent took off her jacket and slung it over a chair. “Robin,” she said, walking into the kitchen, “why don’t you tell me everything that happened?”
Robin smirked at me and started to talk, beginning with when I walked into the grocery store.
Behind me, Millicent was rummaging around in the kitchen. I could not see what she was doing. I heard her heels click against the floor as she came back to us. Robin gave her an odd look but kept ta
lking.
I did not see the waffle iron in Millicent’s hand until I heard the crack of Robin’s skull. She hit the floor with a thud.
Millicent killed Robin the same way I had killed Holly. No hesitation. All instinct.
And it was sexy.
Nineteen
THE CALL COMES as I leave the club, on my way out to check on Annabelle. Millicent is on the phone, telling me our daughter is sick.
“I picked her up from school.”
“Fever?” I ask.
“No. What’s your schedule?”
“I can come home now.”
All thoughts of Annabelle vanish. I turn the car around.
At home, Millicent is pacing around the foyer while talking on the phone. The TV is on in the family room, where Jenna is on the sectional couch, cocooned in blankets, her head resting on a stack of pillows. On the end table, a glass of ginger ale, a stack of plain crackers, and a big bowl just in case.
I sit down on the couch next to her. “Mom says you’re sick.”
She nods. Pouts. “Yeah.”
“Not faking?”
“No.” Jenna smiles a little.
I know she isn’t faking it. Jenna hates being sick.
In kindergarten, she had pneumonia and missed a month of school. She wasn’t sick enough to be in the hospital, but she was sick enough to remember it all. So does Millicent. Sometimes she acts like Jenna is five all over again. It’s a bit much now that Jenna is thirteen, but I don’t argue. I worry about Jenna, too.
“Watch with me.” Jenna points to the TV.
I take off my shoes and put up my feet. We watch a game show, yelling out the answers before they are revealed.
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