by Edwin Hill
They all had to know. Right? They’d seen him talking to Twig. They’d watched as he’d led her off. The police were on their way and had probably already found Gabe with the body.
It was over.
“Where the hell have you been?”
It was Felicia. And with that, the spell broke, and the party seemed to recharge. Felicia closed the door behind him. The string quartet began to play (had they ever stopped?), and conversation around them rose to a dull roar. Sam hadn’t had a chance to fade into the remnants of the crowd, or to add his name to any of the auction items. He hadn’t had a chance to be seen and remembered. But he smiled at Felicia anyway. He’d never been more relieved to see someone in his life. “I got your texts,” he said.
“Yeah? You could have answered them.”
“Didn’t I tell you I was in the bathroom?”
“For an hour? It looks to me like you were outside.”
“Well, in the bathroom, outside, talking to people, and here. This is a party, right?”
“I haven’t seen you.”
“There are a lot of people here. And you’re seeing me now.”
“Don’t ditch me again.”
“Deal,” Sam said. “But I don’t think I was gone for an hour. More like twenty minutes.”
“Okay. Maybe it was twenty minutes. Christ if I know. Every minute at these things is interminable, and I still have to close it down after the rest of you leave. Where’s Wendy anyway?”
“I was just with her,” Sam said. “She’s over there.”
He glanced to where Wendy towered over a small cluster of women. Behind her, he saw Jamie Williams from the VA, standing by himself against a wall, uncomfortable and out of place.
“Have you seen that guy Jamie Williams?” Sam asked. “One of the soldiers we met the other day?”
“Which one?”
“Black guy. Big.”
“The one who looks like a retard?”
“Shut up,” Sam said. “You can really be unpleasant.”
Felicia raised her hands in surrender. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I’m sorry. Yeah, I saw him lurking by himself. He’s around here somewhere. He gives me the creeps.”
“Racist much?”
“Shut up yourself. What happened to your cuff, anyway?”
Sam put his hand in his pocket. Was there anything Felicia didn’t notice? “Wine,” he said. “Speaking of which, let’s get a drink before last call.”
“Now you’re speaking my language,” Felicia said, taking his arm in the same way Twig had as they’d strolled into the Public Garden.
“What’s wrong with you?” Felicia asked. “You should see your face.”
Sam caught himself. He focused on relaxing into a smile. “Sorry,” he said. “I was off somewhere.”
“Don’t take me there anytime soon.”
“Have you ever thought about calling that guy Hero? The one that you liked.”
“Hero? Why would I do that? He was an asshole to me.”
“You still like him,” Sam said, his voice skipping over the words.
“I do not.”
“Give him a chance to make it up to you. People will surprise you.”
“Not in the way you want them to,” Felicia said.
“Hey, you two winos.” Wendy stepped between Sam and Felicia and draped an arm over each of them. She looked as though she’d had plenty to drink herself. “They’re closing up shop. And I’m heading across the courtyard to my place.”
“I’ve been ready to leave since I got here,” Felicia said.
Wendy waved to a group on their way out, tossed back the last of her wine, and then tapped a text into her phone. “You never saw Twig, did you?” she asked Felicia.
Felicia shook her head. “I thought I did,” she said. “But maybe it wasn’t her.”
“She texted a while ago and said she was here.” Wendy shrugged. “She’s a flake. As soon as she volunteered for this, I knew I’d be on my own.”
“Who’s Twig?” Sam asked.
“I told you about her,” Wendy said. “She’s a friend from high school. Laura Ambrose. Her father is Donald Ambrose, the investment guy. She’s loaded.”
“You should talk,” Felicia said.
“Even I think Twig is loaded,” Wendy said.
“Do you have a picture of her?” Sam asked.
“Sure.” Wendy scrolled through the images on her phone and pulled one up of her and Twig in the bleachers at a football game.
“I definitely saw her tonight,” Sam said. “She was talking to Jamie Williams. One of the guys we brought over from the VA.”
“I guess I’ll find out where she went in the morning.” Wendy turned to Felicia. “Get our coats, would you?” she said, with a touch of the imperious in her voice.
Felicia stomped off toward the coat check. As soon as she was out of earshot, Wendy whispered in Sam’s ear. “You’re staying tonight, right?”
Sam glanced to where Felicia waited for their coats. She scowled. A part of him was tempted to leave Gabe to solve their problems himself. It would be better if Sam spent the night with Wendy, wouldn’t it? It would strengthen his alibi, and there was no way anyone could ever connect Gabe to Twig. Still, Gabe needed him. “I have to help out a friend first,” Sam said. “Can I come by in an hour or so?”
“I’ll leave the door unlocked,” Wendy said.
Sam grabbed a beer from the bar. Instead of leaving, he headed across the room. “Having fun tonight?”
Jamie squinted at him. “Loud,” he said in bursts. “Hard for me to talk.”
“You know what?” Sam said. “Thanks for coming, but I hate this party. How’d you get here anyway?”
“Bus,” Jamie said.
“Let’s get out of here. I’ll give you a lift home.”
*
Gabe jumped at the sound of someone tapping on glass, and then rolled down the window. “What took you so long?” he said to Sam. “Get in.”
“This is my friend Jamie,” Sam said, stepping aside. “We’re giving him a ride home.”
Gabe nearly swore when he saw the enormous man standing behind Sam. “What?” he said.
“He lives in Everett. Practically in our backyard. Take the front seat,” Sam said to Jamie. “Your legs are longer.”
Jamie got into the passenger’s side of the car, and Sam climbed in the back and sat on Twig’s body. Gabe gripped the steering wheel with both hands, hardly knowing what to do next. All it would take was a glance into the backseat for this man to start putting some pieces together.
“We bought a new carpet,” Sam said. “I doubt you’d fit back here.”
Gabe shot him a glare and then pulled the car onto Beacon Street and headed toward Cambridge. Again, he kept to the speed limit and stopped at yellow lights. Sam’s friend breathed through his mouth and stared straight ahead. He was tall enough so that his head brushed the top of the car. At the intersection with Massachusetts Avenue, the last of the evening’s bar hoppers surrounded them and tapped on the windows. Gabe could see Sam in the rearview mirror, the confidence he’d brought with him evaporating as he closed his eyes and waited for the crowd to pass. “Get us over the river,” Sam said.
Jamie rolled the window down a crack. “Get the fuck out of our way,” he said to the college kids, who scattered on command. He smiled. “Big and black,” he said. “Nothing wrong with a little power.”
Gabe pulled through the intersection. What would they do once they got out of Boston anyway? And what would they do now that this guy was with them? The rivers and ponds had frozen over. Even the ground was frozen now. Dumpsters were too exposed. They could bring the body deep into one of the state parks close by, cover it with leaves, and hope. That had worked in New Hampshire, till recently, at least.
Gabe pulled through the last light in Boston and onto the Mass Ave Bridge. It wasn’t till he was halfway over the Charles River that he noticed the flashing blue lights ahead of them. Two cruisers blocked
one of the lanes, and cars filtered into the other. An officer in a long parka shined a flashlight through the windows of passing cars and selected certain ones to pull over.
“Everyone’s seat belt on?” Gabe could hear the tremor in his own voice.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Sam said. “We’re all in this now, right, Gabe?”
“Why would I do anything stupid?” Gabe asked, with a glance toward Jamie. “I haven’t had anything to drink tonight.”
For good or for bad, Gabe and Sam had been in this together for years. Besides, Sam was the one who’d invited a black guy into the car, which increased the odds of being pulled over by about a million percent. Yet Gabe wondered what it would be like to be caught. Would confessing bring relief? At least if he confessed, he’d know this couldn’t happen again. He’d probably make these cops’ nights, and give them something to talk about into retirement. Maybe one of them would wind up on the fast track to detective.
They were next.
“Be cool,” Sam said.
Gabe was always the cool one. When it mattered.
He pulled to a stop and rolled the window down halfway. The cop was black. He shone the flashlight in the window, blinding Gabe and then moving on to Jamie. “You’re good,” he said, waving them along.
Gabe glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the cop wave the car behind them to the side of the road. He let out a quiet sigh of relief and hoped that Sam’s luck never ran out. He followed Jamie’s directions and drove the car to a sleepy side street outside of downtown Everett, careful to take roads without any tolls. There, Jamie thanked them for the ride and headed into the ground-floor apartment in a triple-decker. Sam moved into the front seat. They sat quietly till the lights in the apartment went out. “Do you have her bag?” Sam asked.
Gabe reached into the backseat and tossed the bag onto Sam’s lap. Sam took out her phone. “No password,” he said as the phone lit up. “Wendy wants to know what happened to her. Let’s tell her. ‘Couldn’t bring myself to stay tonight,’” he read off the screen as he typed into the phone.
Not thirty seconds later, a text came in from Wendy asking if everything was all right.
“ ‘Met someone’,” Sam read out loud. “‘Like my coffee, black and strong. I’m slumming it in Everett!’ ”
He hit the send button and tucked the phone into Twig’s bag, then Gabe and Sam struggled to lift the body between them, carry it down an icy path along the side of one of the houses to a shed in the backyard. The world here seemed to be asleep, but that didn’t keep a tiny dog from yipping as they passed the ground-floor window. Gabe nearly dropped his end of the body. And then he laughed nervously.
“Steady there,” Sam said, and Gabe could already feel their dynamic shifting again. He did what he was told as they pulled the door to the shed open. Her body slumped facedown on the frozen ground.
“Where are the garden shears?” Sam asked.
Gabe tossed the shears and brick onto the floor too. Sam added the handbag and phone.
In the car, they drove toward Somerville in silence. Tomorrow, Gabe would take the car in to have it detailed, which might look suspicious, but not as suspicious as having one of her blond hairs turn up. And then he’d lay low. He’d been home all night, not the best of alibis, but his phone records at least would support that.
“It was an awesome party tonight,” Sam said, as though none of what had happened actually had. “Anyone you’d want to know was there. Wendy wanted to go to her place, but … well, I had other things to do. Should I go over there now?”
“Do whatever you want,” Gabe said, and later, after Sam had dropped Gabe off and driven back toward Boston with the car, Gabe took two fingers from the plastic bags, one with skin under the nail and one without, and hid them behind the asbestos-covered boiler in the basement of the apartment. In the basement light, he could see she’d painted her nails royal blue. Then he took the rest with him as he hurried through the night to the dog park where he’d seen Hester the other day. He buried the fingers deep among the plastic grocery bags filled with frozen dog shit, where no one would ever look for them.
On his way home, he passed by Hester’s house again and thought about letting himself in, but opted against it. There’d be other times. Besides, he’d pressed his luck enough for one night.
*
The party had closed down, but the door to the guesthouse was unlocked as Wendy had promised. Sam slipped inside, and then up the narrow stairs to Wendy’s bedroom, where he stood in the doorway watching her sleep. She looked peaceful, breathing steadily and softly. Her hair was fanned across her pillow, and for a moment he imagined what it would be like to wake up next to that hair every morning. To find long strands of it in his mouth, in the drain, on his clothes. What was it like to realize someone was never, ever going away?
He undressed and slid into bed beside her, where she woke momentarily and smiled. “You made it,” she mumbled. “I’m glad.”
“I’m glad too,” Sam said.
*
Felicia finally got to her apartment at three a.m. It had taken her that long to close down the party, to send off the last guests, to pay the bartenders, to check off the final items on her list. She stepped out of her heels and slid off her Spanx in favor of flannel pajamas. She found some pad Thai in the refrigerator, which she ate cold, right out of the Styrofoam container, and then poured herself a glass of pinot grigio straight from the box and lined up ten mini cheesecakes on the concrete counter to defrost. In her pink slippers, the radio tuned to Magic 106.7 where Fleetwood Mac played, she spun like Stevie in front of the windows, wine in one hand, noodles dangling from a fork in the other.
The party had been a success! Twig had bailed. The crabbies hadn’t tasted like cat food. Aaron had probably crawled into bed with Wendy by now, but for some reason Felicia didn’t care anymore. She didn’t care about where he’d come from or who he was. Wendy could have him. She thought about crocuses. In a few months, the snow and cold would be gone, and it would be nearly impossible to imagine the wind against skin or these claustrophobic days. She punched Hero’s number into her phone, and when he answered and said her name (he hadn’t deleted her from his contacts list!) she told him that she loved him. That he was brilliant. A filmmaker extraordinaire. He told her to call in the morning, when she’d sobered up.
Yes, spring would be here soon.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 16
The only investigating Detective Angela White planned to do today was into how long it took to microwave a bag of popcorn. She’d already sent Isaiah off to school, and Cary off to work, and had even made them lunch, a rarity. She hadn’t showered or changed out of her sweatpants, and the chances of either happening weren’t great. The sofa called, the TV called, a mid-morning nap beckoned. So when her phone rang, every bit of her shouted to ignore it.
But it could be Isaiah calling from school. Worse, it could be the principal calling about an accident. Maybe the bus had run off the road, or the school had caught on fire, or …
She snuck a peek at the display, only to see Stan’s number pop up.
Sergeant Stanislaus Pawlikowski. Her friend. Her mentor. Her boss.
“Ain’t nothing gonna get me out of this house today,” she said.
“The chances of this being anything are somewhere between nil and nothing …” he began.
“Dammit, Stan. You know this my day off.”
“I need your help. This could go sideways if the press gets hold of it. I need someone who can handle themselves.”
Angela groaned, but in spite herself, she couldn’t help but be curious. “Spill it.”
“Do you know who Donald Ambrose is?”
She turned the TV off. Now she really was interested. “The venture capital guy?”
“That’s him. He’s loaded, and he’s friends with the mayor. And he thinks his daughter’s missing.”
Which was how, two hours later, after visiting Donald Ambrose
at his office in the Hancock Tower and listening to his concerns, Angela found herself on Louisburg Square, ringing the bell at number thirty-one and flashing her badge to a butler wearing a full-on uniform. “I’m here to see Wendy Richards,” she said.
He stepped aside and let her in. Was she the first black person ever to have crossed this threshold? The house dripped with blue blood, from the dour portraits on the walls to the threadbare carpets that covered the marble floor in the foyer, the kind of blue blood that attended NAACP benefits and kept her kind in Dorchester and Mattapan. But she shoved that thought aside. She shoved all preconceived judgment aside, especially about Wendy Richards. She needed a clear head and a clean slate to talk to these people. She unwound a scarf from her neck. The butler offered to take her coat, and she declined. She also declined coffee. Finally, the butler nodded and led her up a set of marble stairs to an overheated second-floor study, wood-paneled and lined with leather-bound books, a fire roaring in the hearth, a garland of holly hanging from the mantle. “Ms. Richards will be with you in a moment,” the butler said, leaving her on her own.
She repeated the butler’s words under her breath in an English accent, while standing by the doorway and doing her best to keep still. She held her hands behind her back and leaned forward on the toes of her boots. But the room beckoned. She found herself roaming along the perimeter, reading the spines of the books, running a hand over a bear’s head mounted on the wall, looking out the window over the Boston skyline. The windows were old, with the wavy blue panes of glass that dotted the houses on Beacon Hill. Frost had formed on the inside of the glass, and Angela could see her breath when she got too close. The room, like the house, was grim and foreboding, except for the pots of crocuses that covered a mahogany desk. Angela picked up one of the pots and breathed in the fresh scent.