by Jo Furniss
“Stop. That’s not appropriate behavior between a child and an adult. In fact, I think we should open this door now.” He steps quickly around me, pulls open the waiting room door, and goes outside. Along the corridor, I see Teddy walk up to the nurses’ station, where one of the blue dresses takes his empty coffee cup and fluffs up her white hair.
“My dad’s coming,” I say, and Dr. Khan glances over his shoulder. “Are you going to tell him what just happened?”
The pager goes off again, and Dr. Khan crushes it in his hand. His eyes are soft and hard at the same time, like his wrist, like my insides as I wonder if he will tell Teddy and what Teddy will do if he does. But the doctor shakes his head. “If you need to talk, Josie, about . . . whatever’s troubling you, I can recommend someone. She’s a great therapist, you can tell her anything.”
“What’s going on?” Teddy arrives and stands behind me. His hands land on my shoulders and slide down my bare arms to enclose my wrists. Dr. Khan pushes his own hands deep into his pockets.
“It seems likely the amniocentesis prompted some bleeding—”
“The paternity test?”
“—but it’s stopped now and the baby’s heartbeat is steady. Your wife has been admitted for observation so you can go home and get some sleep. Unless, Josie, you’d prefer to stay with your mother? I could make arrangements—”
“We’re going home,” says Teddy. “We’re on holiday tomorrow.”
“Your wife needs rest, Mr. Bonham. Please be careful.”
Teddy sends me toward the sliding doors with a little push. “If Mrs. Bonham knew how to be careful, Dr. Khan, we wouldn’t be here in the first place, would we?”
Chapter 42
Amanda watched Josie from the doorway of her room. Her wet hair made her seem smaller than usual, and Amanda couldn’t shake the image of the young girl from the blog, trapped between warring parents in the sterile atmosphere of a hospital. Even after her workout, Josie bristled with pent-up energy, rocking side to side on her swivel chair, an espresso cup nesting in her hands.
An overnight bag lay open on the bed. “Why are you packing?” Amanda asked.
“Going to Willow’s for a sleepover.”
“I thought she wasn’t allowed to see you?”
“I don’t think Erin cares anymore.” Josie flickered a hand. “They’re leaving any day now.”
“What about school?”
“Dad says not to bother.” She pushed herself into a full spin, as restless as a toddler. “I’m not going back because of Switzerland.”
“I don’t understand. What about Switzerland?”
“The new school? Zurich?” Josie stopped herself abruptly by catching her feet against the wheels. She opened a drawer, took out a sheaf of papers, and handed the top sheet to Amanda. The heavy paper was embossed with the logo of the Institut Zugerberg: a boarding school for girls in the Swiss tradition. The letter confirmed that Josie had a place to start.
“When did this happen?”
“We talked about it after the suspension. But when the photos were posted online . . . He doesn’t want me going to a school where everyone saw me getting fucked.”
Amanda winced at her bluntness.
Josie shrugged. “He says it’s a better education.”
“The schools in Singapore are excellent.”
“Didn’t he tell you?” Josie’s voice took on a cold edge that Amanda hadn’t heard since she first met Ed. Josie had grounds to be angry, that was certain, but not to take it out on Amanda. She had always dealt with Josie’s hostility by letting her comments slide off like ice cubes and resolved to do the same now.
“Do you want to go to this school, Josie?”
“Dad says he’s in Zurich every few weeks. We can spend weekends together. There’s an airstrip, and he knows someone who knows someone, so I’ll learn to fly.”
“But do you want to go?”
“Not really.” Josie spun her chair again, dark hair snapping around her head. Amanda recalled the beach at Cuti Island and Josie offering to help with a new baby. Was she going along with this plan because she felt she had to make room? Or was she too scared to say no? “You don’t have to go, Josie. I’ll talk to your dad when he gets back from Manila.”
Josie rolled her eyes. “He’s in Burma.”
Amanda looked at the coffee in Josie’s hands and ached for a shot. Something to wake her up. “What about your friends?” Even as she said it, she thought, What friends?
Josie shrugged again. “Willow will be gone soon. That’s expat life: everybody leaves. This sleepover might be the last time I see her.”
“I’m sorry, Josie. Say goodbye from me.”
“And the others will miss me when I’m gone, right?”
Amanda pictured Amy Winehouse’s frail figure in a doorway. They both stood in silence. The conversation flitted away like a bat.
“Can I keep this?” Amanda said. There was a phone number on the school letter; she would call later, once Switzerland woke up, to check if Josie really had a place. If it was true that Ed planned to send her away. She left the room thinking that if he’d done all this to take Josie to the mountains for long weekends, his reasons could be far from natural. She reached her wall of ginger jars, and instead of comforting her, their prissy arrangement was annoying. How ironic that she collected empty vessels, curated versions of herself: pretty, flimsy, hollow.
It was time to ask Josie about Ed. Straight out. The girl had opened up about school, so maybe she was ready to talk. But how to say it? Just start and see where it goes. She forced herself back toward Josie’s door. Even if Josie denied it or refused to answer, she would be able to read something in her reaction. She had to ask her outright. Now. The door was ajar—
A loud trill rang through the apartment. The iPhone lay dormant in Amanda’s hand, but the trill repeated. Must be the other phone, the house phone. It never rang. Amanda went into the living area and scrabbled around beside the TV for the handset.
“Hello?”
The line was dense with wind noise, as though she’d been pitched into the air along with the signal. Slowly it solidified into a voice: male, accented, Asian.
“Ah . . . Mr. Bonham? Edward Bonham?” Ed-Ward Bon-Ham.
“No, this is his wife. Can I help you?”
“Ma’am, I’m looking for a Mr. Ed-ward Bon-ham?” An American lilt told her the voice was Filipino.
“He’s not here. Can I ask who’s calling?”
“Do you know where I might find him, ma’am?”
“He’s traveling. Is this Bernardo?”
“Bernardo? No, ma’am. I don’t know a Bernardo. Does Mr. Bon-ham have a cell phone number?”
“No.” Amanda winced. No idea why she felt the need to lie, and such a ridiculous lie at that.
“Mr. Bon-ham doesn’t have a cell phone?” A ripple of amusement.
“Yes, I mean, of course he does, but—” The man’s voice was robotic, like he was programmed, and she knew instinctively that he wasn’t someone she could charm. He seemed to reach down the line and catch her around the throat. “What I mean to say is, he’s not available on his mobile now. He’s on a flight. But I can get a message to him if you tell me who’s calling.”
A small sigh, maybe only a shift in the ether. “This is the police, ma’am. In Manila. We would like to speak to Mr. Ed-ward Bon-ham.”
Amanda’s heart trilled like another phone ringing. “What’s it about?”
“I am not at liberty to discuss, ma’am. But if Mr. Bon-ham—”
“Was it another woman?”
The line creaked and groaned with a sound like a weighty person sitting down in a wooden chair. For long seconds, Amanda listened to other noises too, distant voices or scratches of white sound, and wondered if they were interference or whether the policeman had put his hand over the mouthpiece to speak to someone in the background.
“Hello?”
“His number please, ma’am.”
Amanda reeled of
f the number from memory. The officer thanked her, and the line went dead. She placed the handset back in its stand, its charging light turning red.
She went to her laptop. A Google search for “woman, death, Manila” revealed so many hits she knew she had to narrow it down. She strode through to Ed’s bathroom, fishing in the wastebasket for receipts, finding a thick envelope. She pulled the papers out and checked the dates; yes, they were from his trip to Manila earlier this week. The envelope itself was embossed with a logo for the Makati Plaza Hotel. That was all she needed to know. She jogged back to her laptop and put the hotel’s name into an advanced Google search, refining the dates to the past three days. There was one hit on a local news site.
Police suspect foul play in death of bar girl
The brief story detailed how a hostess was seen leaving the bar of the Makati Plaza Hotel with a Caucasian man, hours before her body was found in a dumpster behind the building. The woman, eighteen years old, was the daughter of a nightclub singer, which was the main focus of the piece. The police were linking the death to a number of previous assaults near the hotel. Amanda recalled Ed describing his plan for Josie’s birthday when they sat on the deck at Cuti Island: I’ve been practicing a lot recently . . . I’ve tested a few locations.
She double-clicked a grainy photo so that it filled the screen. A pair of stockinged legs sprawled in a spotlight cast by a streetlamp. The photo had a staged quality, like a still from a film noir. But as the image clarified, Amanda felt she was standing there in the alley, inhaling the viscous stink of grease blasting from the kitchen, her eyes adjusting until she made out the figure of a girl, tiny and broken, framed by the light and the aura of her spread-eagled hair. Amanda’s thoughts went to Josie’s photo, the one of her and her mother, their hair tangled in the wind.
Her head spun with vertigo. I have to know if he is doing these things. She could be in space, in a vacuum, unable to get oxygen, literally drowning in nothing. Because she had so much evidence and yet nothing of substance. So many puzzle pieces, but she still couldn’t put Ed in the picture. However hard she looked, she couldn’t make him out. I can’t see it, she thought. I can’t see Ed, my Ed, murdering a woman.
Tears came then, with a gulp like a baby’s first breath. How many other women had deluded themselves? How many wives of serial killers refused to face the truth until it crept up to their doorstep in the form of police officer’s footsteps? She had a simple choice: be an enabler or fight for the truth—whatever the personal cost—like her mother once did. But I have to be sure. I have to see it to believe it. She laid her fingers onto the image of the dead woman on the screen as though feeling for a pulse.
Chapter 43
Out of the corner of her eye, Camille noted that the man sprawled on a barstool—the only other guest in the Raffles Club of Yangon—was subjecting her to a detailed visual analysis. This was exactly why she hated bars, this feeling of being a skinny heifer at a cattle sale, inspected and found wanting. The barman polished coffee cups and watched the scene with interest but no allegiance. Late-morning sunlight gave the street outside the arched doorway the same washed-out tone as the photo of her parents, taken in this very spot fifteen years earlier.
Ed was late; maybe his flight had been delayed? Camille checked her phone before she remembered she had no roaming service. Cell phones weren’t banned in Burma, not anymore. But the Wi-Fi flowed like treacle through a tissue.
A woman entered, a walking posy of flowers, and the man who’d been watching Camille slid to her side, calling to the barman for coffee to go. Camille felt a warm flush of shame. Maybe he had just been wondering why the white woman looked in such a state? She used a napkin to dab the shine off her nose and was just considering lipstick when Ed arrived, eating up the bar in his long stride. His hand wiped his face, like a showman changing his expression from happy to sad. Or sad to happy.
“Morning, Cami.” Ed waved at the barman. “Americano. What would you like?”
She tilted her glass to indicate the iced coffee. “So, have you heard from your contact?”
“Straight to business. He should be here soon. I just hope—” Whatever he hoped for was interrupted by a waiter with a squat glass of water. “I just hope you’re not disappointed.”
“Whatever happens, I appreciate you coming here.”
“Least I could do.”
“Well, it’s not really, is it?” She plucked the straw from her drink and used it to emphasize her point. “The least would have been giving me a phone number scribbled on a piece of paper. Or calling ahead to set up a meeting. But instead you jump on a plane to a dodgy country—”
“Burma’s all right.” He toasted Burma.
“You know what I mean. You don’t have to be here.”
“I do have to be here, as it happens. The people I know don’t talk to strangers.”
“Who are they?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“How do you know them?”
“Previous life. I don’t really want to elaborate any more than I have to.”
“Don’t you think I have a right to know?”
“Not really, no. Unless you’re looking for problems. Are you looking for problems, Camille?”
She held his stare while the waiter placed a coffee between them and scuttled away.
“Ed, look, I don’t want to compromise you. But I do want to find out what happened to my parents. And if I know how they were involved with these people, how you were involved, I’ll be better placed to get the information I need.”
“Knowledge is not always power. Sometimes it’s a millstone around your neck.” Over Ed’s shoulder, the barman rattled peanuts into a bowl. Ed turned his chair so he could see the doorway.
“All right then, let me tell you what I know,” she said, “and you can correct me if I’m wrong.”
Ed produced a bottle of pills, unscrewed the cap, and palmed two into his mouth. Camille tried to glimpse the label, but he slipped it back in his pocket. She picked up her drink and sheltered it in her lap. “I assume we’re meeting a government contact from the 1990s. My boss confirmed that you and my parents were in Burma at that time, during the old regime, the military junta. Of course, Burma was closed then and heavily sanctioned by the West, so when my parents got picked up, the British authorities had little or no influence.” She took her straw and jabbed it rapidly between the ice cubes, glancing at Ed’s face as she said, “A tourism business would have been a good cover for spies.”
“Spies?” Ed’s eyes left the door and fixed on her.
“Joshua MacAlpine was watching you. Said your activities were suspicious.”
“You think we were spies?” Ed’s softened tone was too much. His hand rose and fell, as though he wanted to pat her arm but thought better of it. She felt like an angry child tempted to dissolve into the open arms of a forgiving parent.
“Weren’t you?” she whispered.
“I wasn’t a spy, Camille.” Ed downed his coffee and checked his phone. “He should be here by now. Fucking useless Wi-Fi. We need to go to the hotel and find out if he left a message.”
“You don’t think my parents were spies?”
Ed looked over to the bar and made a scribble sign in the air. “I didn’t really know them, not personally. And I never heard anything about espionage. Yes, I want the bill, that’s the universal sign for ‘bring me the bill.’ What do you think I want, your fucking autograph?”
The solid ground under Camille’s feet crumpled and fell away. Josh had all but denied her romantic idea of espionage, but she had clung to the notion, convinced that her simple faith in her parents’ goodness could make it true. She had always thought of herself as a rationalist, but instead she’d proved to be an idealist; like everyone who lives inside an echo chamber, she only listened to what she wanted to hear.
“Are you coming?” Ed swung a rucksack over his shoulder.
Camille teetered on the edge. The rules she had made—never be alo
ne with Ed, stay in public places, don’t take risks—seemed juvenile now. It was time to be a realist.
“If my parents weren’t spies, Ed, why did you meet them in Burma?”
He let out a sharp breath. “I thought we were on the same page here.” He did the face wipe again, but this time sad remained sad. “If you really need to know, Camille, your parents were in the same shitty business as me. Drug trafficking. Me and your parents, we weren’t spies—we were drug mules.”
Chapter 44
The a-scribble-of-a-girl website had become an obsession for Amanda, a compulsive tic. She had read today’s post already—Teddy separating little Josie from her sick mother, just as he now planned to remove her from Singapore—but she couldn’t resist checking her phone again, even while navigating a busy street. Jostled by pedestrians, she squinted at the countdown clock: 00 days, 13 hours, 34 minutes.
Where had the time gone? Only this morning the clock had said three days. How could the timer skip so far ahead?
Thirteen hours.
She felt a tingle of rage in her fingers: What was Josie playing at? Thirteen hours took her to the early hours of tomorrow morning. If Josie was counting down to the anniversary of her mother’s death on November 13, why jump to tomorrow morning? And what would happen to the remaining blog posts? She’d expected five more installments until she knew what happened between Ed and his dead wife. Would she ever find out now?
She caught a glimpse of herself in a shop window. A shapeless dress added a size to her frame, and harsh lipstick added years to her age—a disguise of sorts. For good measure, she had pulled on a baseball cap and sunglasses. Molly’s words rang in her head: You might want to keep a low profile. An understatement. Amanda wanted the ground to swallow her up, but she’d settle for not being recognized by any SOWs on home turf.
This area was her hunting ground, where she had plied her trade: this branch of Starbucks, this cute bakery, this café overlooking the water. She had soiled her own backyard. But now that she had what she’d come for—the only item of value she had left: the engagement ring from the safety-deposit box—she could scuttle home and hide.