Miracle Creek: A Novel

by Angie Kim

  FACT #1: Before the explosion, Janine somehow found out that Mary, not a hospital intern, was the one sending him notes.

  FACT #2: Janine was at Miracle Submarine thirty minutes before the explosion.

  FACT #3: At that time, Janine was angry, and she confronted Mary and lied to her (saying he had complained about Mary bothering him).

  FACT #4: Janine threw Camel cigarettes, 7-Eleven matches, and a balled-up H-Mart note at Mary. (RELATED FACT #4A: Elizabeth claimed she found Camel cigarettes, 7-Eleven matches, and a balled-up H-Mart note on the same night in the same woods.)

  FACT #5: Janine never told him any of this at any time. She told him, the police, and Abe that she’d been home the entire night of the explosion.

  It was this last fact, her secrets and lies, that got to him most. A full fucking year, and not a word about the cigarettes she’d taken from the safe confines of his car or pockets or wherever she’d found them and practically handed to the murderer. All that time, letting him pretend that this cigarette business was nothing to do with him, pretending that she didn’t know he was pretending. Jesus.

  Fuck the list. Fuck facts. It was time for questions. What did Janine know and not know about him and Mary? How the hell did she find out in the first place, and why didn’t she come to him? Why did she go behind his back and confront a teenage girl, throw shit at her, for God’s sake? And after Mary ran off, did Janine just leave the items for anyone to find? Or did she … could it be like Shannon said, that whoever discarded those items was the murderer, and the “whoever” was his wife? But why? To hurt him? Mary? Both?

  Matt grabbed the soap scrubber. The mosquito bites were driving him crazy—the warm water must’ve thawed them out of dormancy—and every cell in his brain was screaming for something, anything, to rip into the itch and scratch until it bled. He scoured, rough and fast, savoring the relief of the mesh biting into his skin, the sting of the mint soap seeping in.

  “Honey? You in there?” The shower door clunked open.

  “I’m almost done,” he said.

  “It’s Abe. He’s here.” Janine looked panicky, her forehead lined with crinkles zigzagging in different directions. “He says he needs to talk to you right now. He seems upset. I think”—she brought her hand to her mouth and gnawed at her nails—“maybe he found out.”

  “Found out what?” Matt said.

  “You know what.” Janine looked straight into his eyes. “About the cigarettes. About you and Mary.”

  * * *

  JANINE WAS RIGHT. Abe was agitated. He tried to hide it, smiled and shook Matt’s hand (Matt hated handshakes, hated the repulsed-yet-curious look people got before their normal hand touched his deformed one, but it was better than the awkwardness of pretending not to notice someone’s hand thrust your way), but he was twitchy and ominous-sounding, saying he needed to talk to them separately, Matt first. Which probably meant Janine was right about Abe knowing about him and Mary, smoking, the whole bit. What else would’ve prompted Abe’s looking at him that way (or not looking at him, rather)—like a suspect instead of his star witness?

  When they were alone, Abe said, “We tracked down the rep who took the arson call.”

  Matt had to stop himself from letting out an audible sigh; this wasn’t about Mary, after all. The intensity of his relief made Matt realize again how stupid he’d been, doing something that brought so much shame at the slightest prospect of discovery. “Okay, so who was it? Pak?”

  Abe put his hands on his chin, his fingers forming a steeple, and looked at him as if deciding something. “We’ll get to that, but first, I want you to look at this.” He slapped down a document. “This is the bill you got cross-examined about, the one with the arson call. Look at the phone number and time of each call, and tell me if you find calls you don’t recognize.”

  Matt looked through the list. Most were calls to his answering service, the hospital, some to his office, some to Janine’s. One to the fertility clinic, which was unusual—Janine usually dealt with those—but not overly so, as he sometimes called if he was running late. “No. The only call that sticks out is the insurance one.”

  Abe handed him a second document: another bill, this one missing the top portion with the date and phone number. “How about this one?” Abe said. “Anything look out of place?”

  This sheet, like the first, listed calls to and from his answering service, the hospital, his office, and Janine’s office. “Nope. Nothing out of place,” Matt said.

  “Not counting the insurance call, is one of these bills more typical of the calls you usually make?”

  Matt looked again. “I guess this second one because I don’t normally call the fertility clinic. But why? What’s this about?”

  Abe touched the two sheets on the table. “These are actually from the same day. This one”—he tapped the second one—“is the record for Janine’s phone, not yours.”

  Matt looked back and forth between the sheets. Something about the way Abe said “not yours”—mysterious, in that gotcha! tone he liked to use in court—told Matt this was an important point, but it was hard to think. What was he missing?

  Abe said, “I understand you have the same flip phone and they got switched once, right around the day of the insurance call, isn’t that right?”

  Was it? That was the problem with reconstructing the past: now, August 21, 2008, was a Very Important Day, the date of The Call, but back then, it had been just another day, filled with the same errands and consultations as any other day. Who could remember if the phone switch—inconvenient, yes, but nothing you recorded for posterity—happened on this date or one of the many days just like it?

  Matt shook his head. “I’ve no idea when that was. But why does that even … Wait, are you saying … you think Janine made that call?”

  Abe didn’t say anything, just kept staring with that stupid give-away-nothing look.

  “Is that what the customer-service guy said?” Matt said. “Tell me. Right now.”

  Abe narrowed his eyes for a moment. “It wasn’t Pak. It was someone with normal English, no accent. For some marketing study they had then, they had to make notes on anything unusual like that.”

  Matt shook his head. “No. There’s no way it’s Janine. She had no reason to call. I mean, why would she do that?”

  “Well, if you’re Shannon Haug, you might say she worked with Pak to get 1.3 million dollars, and she called to make sure the insurance would pay out if they went ahead with their plan to set fire to the barn and blame a third party.”

  Matt looked at Abe’s eyes, unblinking as if Abe didn’t want to miss a microsecond of Matt’s reaction. “And you?” Matt said. “What would you say?”

  Abe’s lips relaxed—into a semi-smile or smirk, Matt couldn’t tell. “Obviously, it depends on what you and Janine have to say. But I’d hope to be able to tell the jury that Shannon is being melodramatic as usual, and this is a simple case of spouses switching phones by mistake one day, and the wife making calls in the normal course of business, one of which just happened to be a call to check on the adequacy of insurance for a business she serves as medical advisor.”

  It scared Matt a little, how these lawyers could take a given set of facts and spin them in opposite directions. Not that it didn’t happen in medicine—two doctors could arrive at diametrically opposed diagnoses for the same symptoms, happened all the time. But doctors were at least trying to get at the truth. Matt got the feeling that Abe cared about the truth only insofar as it was consistent with his theory of the case; otherwise, not so much. Any new evidence that didn’t fit was not cause to reconsider his position, but something to explain away.

  “So,” Abe said, “let me ask you again. Is August 21, 2008, the day when you switched phones by accident? Let me remind you that you yourself said that Janine’s records”—Abe touched the second sheet—“are more representative of the calls you normally make.”

  This question confirmed it. Abe was talking to him not to find t
he truth, but to coach him into corroborating the version of events that would make the Problematic New Evidence go away. It pissed him off, becoming a pawn in Abe’s damage control. But not going along might mean more questions to and about Janine, which he couldn’t let happen. Matt nodded. “I think August 21 is when we switched phones.”

  “And I would imagine that, as the advisor most fluent in English, Janine took care of many business matters, including insurance issues. Is that how you remember it?”

  “Yes,” Matt said. “That’s exactly how I remember it.”

  * * *

  HE STEPPED OUT onto the deck and watched the shadows in the curtains cast by Abe and Janine, sitting across the table like opponents in a chess match. It was raining the way he was feeling—weak and lazy, like the clouds were exhausted from all the thundering and were now slumbering, drooling warm spit once in a while. Matt hated post-storm summer drizzle like this, hated the way his skin turned puffy and sticky. But tonight, it seemed appropriate, the misery. The muggy air heavy in his lungs, weighing him down.

  It had been bad enough earlier, with what he’d known then: right before the explosion, Janine had been on-site with the murder weapon, fury coursing through her. But add to that Fact #6, courtesy of Abe: she’d called Miracle Submarine’s insurer to ask about arson coverage the week before its destruction by arson. Fuck!

  When he saw the shadowed figures stand and leave, followed by the front door squeaking shut, he thought briefly of running away, how much easier and more pleasant the next several hours would be if he just got in his car and drove around the Beltway a few times, hard rock blaring. Instead, he went into the kitchen, not bothering to take off his shoes as Janine liked, got the Tanqueray from the freezer, and chugged. Fuck the shoes, fuck the cup.

  The icy liquid went straight down, burning his throat and settling into a hot pool in his stomach. It was nearly instantaneous, the way the warmth spread outward toward his limbs, cell by cell—like dominoes, one of those long, complex designs made out of thousands of pieces, falling one by one, but so fast, the last one falling within seconds of the first.

  Matt was bringing the bottle back to his mouth when Janine walked in. “I can’t believe you did that,” she said.

  He slugged the bottle back. His tongue tingled, on the verge of going numb.

  Janine snatched the bottle from him and slammed it down, the clang of glass against the granite counter making him wince. “Abe told me—you said I made that arson call. Why the fuck would you say that, to a prosecutor, of all people? What makes you even think that?”

  Matt thought of protesting, saying he didn’t say that exactly, he merely said that it was likely, but really, what was the point? Why pussyfoot around the periphery when he could go straight for the bull’s-eye? He looked at Janine, breathed in, and said, “I know about the night of the explosion. Your meeting with Mary.”

  It was like flipping through the facial-emotion identification book Elizabeth used to quiz Henry with, one picture per emotion. Shock. Panic. Fear. Curiosity. Relief. All flashing across Janine’s face in quick succession before finally morphing into the last emotion: resignation. She looked away.

  Matt said, “Why did you never tell me? A whole year, and not a fucking word? What were you thinking?”

  Janine’s face changed then. The defensiveness zapped away, instantly replaced by a look so different, she seemed to be another person altogether. Like a bull about to charge, chin down and pupils contracted, all the pent-up indignation in her body boiled down to two pinpoints ready to fire. “You’re lecturing me? Seriously? What about your cigarettes, the matches, the fucking note you wrote to a teenage girl? I didn’t see you coming to me, baring your soul. Who’s the one keeping incriminating secrets here?”

  Janine’s words were like icicles, puncturing the alcohol-infused warmth blanketing him. She was right, of course. Who was he to be self-righteous? He was the one who’d started it all—the hiding, lies, secrets. He felt every muscle deflate and slump, from his brow down to his calves. “You’re right,” he said. “I should’ve told you. Long ago.”

  His quasi-apology seemed to drain Janine’s anger, the furrows in her brow softening at the edges. “So tell me. Everything.”

  It was funny, how he’d been dreading this moment when he’d have to tell her about Mary, and yet, now that it was here, he felt more relieved than anything else. He started with the truth, with being stressed about the whole fertility thing and buying cigarettes on a whim, probably as a sabotage effort. It hurt his position in the argument—in the whole marriage, really—to admit this, but that was the thing about lying: you had to throw in occasional kernels of shameful truths to serve as decoys for the things you really needed to hide. How easy it was, to anchor his lies with these fragments of vulnerable honesty, then twist the details to build a believable story. He said Mary found him smoking by the creek and he let her bum cigarettes even though she was too young (true), that he felt guilty (true, though not about the smoking) and resolved not to do it again (not true), but then she asked him to buy more cigarettes for her and her friends (not true), and she started sending him notes asking to meet her (true) to bring cigarettes (not true), and he ignored all her notes (not true), must have been ten at least (true), until he finally decided that all this had to end (true, although again, not because of the smoking) and sent her that final note saying it had to end and to meet him at 8:15 that night (true).

  When Janine said, “So, the cigarettes I found, those are what you bought that first day?” Matt said yes, yes, of course, he bought just one pack (not true) and—the most and least truthful thing he said—“Anyway, it was just once.” (True that “it” happened only once, a horrifying, humiliating once on Mary’s birthday that started when she stumbled on top of him. Not true with respect to smoking.)

  For a full minute after he finished his story, Janine said nothing. She sat across the table and looked at him without a word, as if trying to read something in his face. He looked back, maintaining eye contact as if daring her not to believe him. Finally, she looked away, then said, “That night before the explosion, when I found her note, why didn’t you tell me then?”

  “You know her. We’re friends with her parents, and you might’ve felt obligated to tell them, and it didn’t seem like that big a deal. Annoying, but…” He shrugged. “How’d you find out? That it wasn’t an intern, I mean.”

  “The next day,” Janine said, “I was walking by your car in the hospital lot, and I saw a note on the seat about meeting at 8:15.” That was bullshit. No way he’d left that note out in the open. He’d bet anything she spent that whole morning combing through his pockets, e-mails, even trash.

  “Given that HBOT ends after 8:00,” she continued, “I figured there’s not many people you could be meeting. Certainly not a hospital intern. So I went through the car and found another one saying something about SAT words. That made it pretty clear who it was.”

  He remembered that note. Mary always left her notes under the wipers, but it was raining, so she’d used the spare key in the magnetic holder under his car and taped the note to the steering wheel. She’d drawn a smiley face, and he’d laughed at her youth, the innocence.

  “So why didn’t you come talk to me about it?” Matt said this gently, careful to make it sound like a question of curiosity, not an accusation.

  “I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t sure what it was all about, so I went out there to see. But the dive was delayed, and she was alone, so I just…” Janine looked at her hands, using a fingertip to trace the lines on her other hand like a fortune-teller. “How did you find out?”

  “I went to talk to her, last night. Abe said something about her testifying, and I hadn’t talked to her in a year, so I figured I should find out what she’s gonna say, you know?”

  Janine nodded slowly, almost imperceptibly, and he thought he saw a sliver of relief when he said he hadn’t talked to Mary all this time. “I thought she didn’t remember anyth
ing,” Janine said. “That’s what Young said.”

  “Maybe not the explosion. But she definitely remembers your”—Matt searched for the right word—“visit that night. She only said something to me about it because she assumed you already told me.” Matt swallowed the next words that were dying to come up his throat, the why-the-hell-didn’t-you-tell-me. He’d learned early on—fights in a marriage were like seesaws. You needed to balance blame carefully. You pile too much blame on one person, let them thunk down to the ground, they’re liable to stand and walk away, send you flying down on your ass.

  Janine chewed the skin around her nails. After a while, she said, “I didn’t see the need. In telling you, I mean. People were dead, you were burned, she was in a coma, and the notes and my talking to her, all that seemed so stupid. Petty. None of it seemed to matter anymore.”

  Except for the fact that you were there, at the crime scene, at the time of the crime, weapon in hand, Matt thought. The police might think that matters a lot.

  As if she knew what he was thinking, how her excuse must sound, Janine said, “When the police started talking about cigarettes, I thought about saying something then, but what could I say? I drove an hour to go ask a teenage girl to stop sending notes to my husband? Oh, and yeah, by the way, before I left, I gave her cigarettes and matches, possibly the same ones that caused the explosion?”

  Gave. Even as he was marveling at how she’d managed to make throwing shit at someone sound like some sort of gift, he realized the bigger significance of Janine’s word choice. Gave implied that the recipient, Mary, took possession of the items in question. “Wait, so after you, um, gave her that stuff, did she maybe drop it and leave it behind with you, or did you leave her with it?” The alcohol was slush in his brain now, making it hard to think, but this seemed important somehow.