by Lis Wiehl
“I found a photo on his computer that was downloaded from a phone.” Charlie’s eyes held an expression she couldn’t read. “It’s labeled ‘Betty,’ although it shows both of them.”
Mia suddenly didn’t want to see. Why had she ever agreed to do this?
Charlie turned the computer screen toward her.
It was a photo of Scott and a young woman. She had a heart-shaped face with a pointed chin, high cheekbones, full lips, and a strong nose. Her blond wavy hair fell past her shoulders. She was beautiful. She also couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
Mia was still standing, but she felt as if the floor were falling away beneath her feet.
“So you don’t know her?” Charlie asked.
“No. I’ve never seen her before.”
The expression in Charlie’s eyes? It was pity.
Because Betty had her arm around Scott.
And Scott had his arm around her.
CHAPTER 14
Mia must have known. Or maybe, she thought as she stared at the image of her husband and what was obviously his paramour, she must not have wanted to know.
Charlie watched her with eyes that had seen too much and weren’t surprised by anything.
She covered her face with cold hands. She wanted to run away. She wanted to hide in a dark place. Curl into a ball, tighter and tighter until she simply disappeared.
Sixteen years of marriage, and this? It wasn’t enough that Scott had started drinking again. It wasn’t enough he had secretly gotten them into debt that she would now spend years digging them out of. No, he had found another woman, kissed her, laughed with her, whispered to her, caressed her.
Loved her.
And betrayed Mia. Betrayed their family. Lied to Mia every time he claimed to love her.
She dropped her hands from her burning eyes, her shame turning to anger. She couldn’t be like Brooke, who still believed she disappeared if she covered her eyes.
“How about at the funeral? Did she come?”
She made herself look again. This Betty, this stupid girl, couldn’t be more than ten years older than Gabe. Young. So young it was almost obscene to think of Scott being with her. Mia’s jaw started to hurt, and she realized she was gritting her teeth. Why would a beautiful girl like that want to date a married man who was nearly old enough to be her father? He must have given her things, spent money on her. Maybe that was another reason they were so broke.
The funeral had been a blur. Mia had walked down the church aisle on shaky legs, wondering how she could walk at all. How she could breathe. How time could keep heaving itself forward when her life had been destroyed. The only reason she’d been able to stay upright had been the presence of her children on either side. She and her son had stood with their arms across each other’s backs. Which one of them was supporting the other hadn’t been clear.
“I don’t think I remember seeing her there. But I can’t be sure.”
“Do you remember Betty’s last name?”
Mia smiled mirthlessly. “Oddly enough, I do. It’s Eastman. I grew up on East Main Street, so when Scott told me about hiring her, her name stuck.”
“Puyallup County should talk to her,” Charlie said. “Find out what she knows. Find out if there’s any way she could be involved.”
Mia looked at that face again. Was there something sly and self-satisfied in the set of her lips, in her half-lidded eyes? Or if another man were in this photo, would she be seeing something completely different, something more innocent?
A few years earlier Mia had been hurrying down the staircase when she lost her balance. Rather than falling back and bumping painfully downward, she had tried to keep her feet under her by running down the stairs, her arms outstretched.
She had succeeded. At least for a few steps.
But ultimately she hadn’t been able to keep up. The cast she’d had to wear on her wrist for six weeks had served as a reminder that sometimes it was better to accept the pain immediately rather than try to stave it off. Better a bruised bottom than a broken wrist.
Since Scott had died, every day had been like falling down a staircase. Trying to move her feet fast enough that reality couldn’t catch up with her. No money? Go back to work. Car too expensive? Find someone to take the lease. No father for her children? Try to be both mother and father.
No husband? Don’t stand still long enough to think about it. In the days after Scott’s death, Mia had focused on going through the motions. Her children needed her, and she met their needs as best she could, even if at her center she felt ice cold and empty. She thought that maybe if she went through the motions long enough, she could remember how to live.
Maybe it would even become living.
One day became another, and each day it was like she had moved further away from Scott. Even if Mia had wanted to go back, she couldn’t. She just kept getting further away, as if she were on an airport’s moving walkway that Scott had failed to step onto. And now finally he was so far back she couldn’t even see him anymore. Some days she couldn’t remember his face without looking at a photograph. Couldn’t hear his voice in her head. Some days she called the house when no one was there just to hear him say her name one more time: “Scott, Mia, Gabe, and Brooke aren’t at home right now . . .”
But now it was clear that the absence she had felt had been a phantom. A ghost of a marriage past. She stared at Scott’s computer screen, at the girl grinning with her face right next to his, while a red-hot flame consumed the empty void at her center. Had Scott been planning on leaving her and the kids, running off with this silly young thing?
He had to have been. Probably leaving all the debt behind for Mia to clean up.
Charlie was watching her. She could see the sympathy in his tired blue eyes. She wanted to rage and moan and scream until her throat was raw. But the kids might hear, and they had already experienced more than enough stress for the day.
But if she didn’t do something, she would burst. Her eyes fell on the vase. It was nothing special, nothing that Gabe had labored over, nothing that she had even remembered until she saw it again in Scott’s office.
She picked it up, raised it high overhead, and threw it down on the floor, intending to smash it to satisfying smithereens. But it was made of some child-friendly clay that dried in the air, not in a kiln. The only noise it made as it fractured into four or five big pieces came from the pens inside as they clattered onto the cement floor.
“You okay?” Charlie said mildly.
“Just mad,” Mia said. “Mad and sad.” She half laughed. “I sound like one of Brooke’s early readers. The cat sat on the mat.”
Charlie gave her a crooked smile. “I’m sorry you feel bad. And that Scott seems to have been a cad.”
“I don’t think it’s ‘seems to.’ ” Mia dropped to her knees and began to clean up the mess she had made. “I think he was. And I just didn’t want to know it.” The last piece she reached for was the bottom section of the vase. When she picked it up, she heard a faint rattle.
She peered inside. Her eyes widened. At the bottom was a small black velvet box.
“What is it?” Charlie asked, but Mia was too engrossed to answer. She hooked it out with a finger, then opened the box. She tugged at the glittering thing inside. Then it fell from her grasp and rolled away.
It was a diamond ring.
CHAPTER 15
As the diamond ring rolled across the floor, Charlie muttered an amazed-sounding expletive. Mia was frozen, but she could feel her eyes getting wider.
“Do you think that’s real?” she finally asked.
“Why would he have hidden it if it wasn’t?”
The ring came to rest under one of the plastic shelves. She knelt down but couldn’t see it. Charlie took a flashlight from the top of the workbench and joined in the hunt.
Mia finally fished it out with one of the pens that had been in the vase. “Is it an engagement ring?” she asked as they both stared at it.
&n
bsp; The ring itself was made of some silvery metal, white gold or platinum. Six prongs held a large round diamond. Rectangular-cut diamonds were set into the band on either side.
Charlie let out a low whistle. “I guess. But I run in circles where nobody could afford to even look at a ring like that.”
Mia was glad she had taken off her rings a few weeks ago, including the one with a tiny chip of a diamond Scott had given her when he proposed.
Her jaw clenched so hard her teeth hurt. If she had wanted proof that Scott was really cheating on her, here it was. In glittering carats.
“I wonder why he hadn’t given it to her yet?” Charlie asked.
Mia unclenched her jaw. “Wouldn’t we have to be divorced first?”
“Not if you think of it as the world’s most expensive promise ring.”
In Mia’s dream she and Scott were hiking along a narrow track winding above a rocky coastline. A hundred feet below them, the ocean crashed over boulders. In real life it had been years since they hiked, but in the dream they were fully outfitted in layers of fleece and Gor-Tex, hiking boots on their feet. Scott was ahead of her, clambering over a large rock that blocked the path. Mia called out for him to be careful.
Suddenly Scott slipped. In slow motion he cartwheeled down the steep slope, bouncing off boulders like a rag doll before his body finally hit the water. He sank out of sight. For one moment his head broke through the waves, his arms windmilling, but then he disappeared completely.
The area was deserted, without even a seagull to witness what was happening. Mia didn’t know what to do. She didn’t have a rope. There was no way down, and even if she were able to get there, there wasn’t even a sliver of beach. With a feeling of unspeakable horror, she understood she could not save Scott.
And then the water began to rise.
It was more than just the tide coming in. She realized it was a tsunami, a growing wall of water that quickly swallowed the boulders and then ate up the space that had separated her from the waves. Soon it would pick her up and smash her against the rocks, or push her down, down, down, so deep she would never come up for air.
A small insistent voice slowly roused her.
“I wet the bed, Mommy. And now it’s cold.”
With a groan Mia pushed herself up. Brooke was standing next to the bed, pushing her shoulder with one of her little hands. There was no ocean, no tsunami. Scott was long dead, even if the repercussions of what he had done weren’t.
Mia had had nightmares about the ocean since she had nearly drowned when she was five. She hadn’t learned to swim until Gabe started clamoring to go to the pool. She had found an adult learn-to-swim class, and every Wednesday she forced herself to go. After nearly every lesson she threw up, but she persevered. She still hated it, but she could do it. The irony was that Mia lived in a city defined by water, bordered by Puget Sound on one side and Lake Washington on the other.
Now she shuffled down the hall to the laundry closet. It seemed oddly empty. Shouldn’t there be more sheets and blankets? Were they stuffed in one of the laundry room’s baskets? Or had Brooke built a fort someplace that she hadn’t noticed? But that didn’t explain the shelf that was normally stacked with toilet paper. Half of it was missing.
Was Gabe sneaking out to TP people’s houses? Did kids even do that anymore? And if they did, and he did, how was he getting out without waking her? Her bedroom was on the other end of the hall, but these days it seemed like she slept as lightly as if she’d drunk two cups of coffee before going to bed. Which sometimes she had.
Mia remade Brooke’s bed while Brooke curled up on the carpeted floor. It only took a few minutes, but still her daughter was asleep by the time she finished. She picked her up and laid her down, pulled the quilt over her shoulders. Too tired to carry the soiled sheets down to the basement laundry room, Mia compromised by tossing them down onto the tile floor of the first-floor foyer.
She meant to return to her room, but when she went back to check on Brooke, the temptation proved too much. She curled up beside her on the toddler bed. Brooke was usually a restless sleeper, flinging her arms and legs about as if she were performing jumping jacks in her dreams, but for once she was still. And oh, how Mia missed the warmth and companionship of another body in bed. She curled around her daughter and held her close.
She closed her eyes, but sleep eluded her. The day ran through her head again in a series of frightening images. Young’s contorted face as he ran toward her. The squad cars outside her house. The cops with their guns drawn. Charlie talking about the unexplained injuries to Scott’s head. Betty’s beautiful, complacent face. The glittering diamond ring bouncing across the floor. Scott drowning.
What secrets had he taken to his grave?
And what would happen once she started to uncover them?
CHAPTER 16
TUESDAY
Vin opened the closet door to get his coat. He paid no attention to the figure lying on the floor, jackknifed at the waist, dark hair covering its face. Its right leg stuck out at an odd angle.
He had bought the girl on Craigslist. You could get anything there. Even girls made of plaster, girls who had once been painstakingly dressed in the fashions of the day, posed to entice customers to buy what they wore. Girls who had eventually been discarded to make room for newer, lighter models made of plastic.
Up close, she didn’t look that real, what with the chip missing from the tip of her nose and her oddly pink skin. But if you laid her out at night in front of a car that you had skewed across the road, a car with its hood up and its flashers on, she looked real enough.
Real enough to make a man’s heart stutter in his chest when he rounded a corner and saw her lying there. Especially if his drink had been spiked.
Real enough to make him jerk his car to the right to avoid running her over.
Real enough to make him plow into a line of trees.
Real enough to kill him. With a little help from Vin.
CHAPTER 17
Where was she? Mia’s eyes flew open. Her panicked breathing echoed in her ears. Her heart was beating like a windup toy. She scrambled back until her shoulder blades were against the wall, her teeth bared, ready to fight.
Then she blinked, finally absorbing where she was. She wasn’t on the floor of the courtroom with a razor blade at her throat. She wasn’t fighting off Scott’s killer or saving Gabe from an armed intruder or trying to rescue Scott from the waves. She was in Brooke’s toddler bed. From the wall, stenciled images of bunnies and puppies smiled down at her. Brooke was still asleep, the deep sleep that only a small child was capable of, one undisturbed by Mia’s panic.
It was early in the morning, early enough that the sky outside Brooke’s window was still dark.
With a groan Mia got to her feet. Her back ached as if she had slept like a contortionist. The bathroom mirror revealed scattered bruises on her neck and torso, from both Bernard Young and the men who had tried to save her from him. A few were shaped like fingerprints, and one faint mark on her throat was the half-moon shape of a fingernail. Mia shivered as she thought of how close she had come to dying.
Last night Charlie had given her copies of the accident report and the external examination report, but she hadn’t looked at them yet. She didn’t have the emotional strength. Today Charlie planned to ask Puyallup County to reopen the investigation into Scott’s accident. And when the detectives came to talk to her, she would show them everything they had found. Even the photo of Betty. Even the diamond ring.
She stayed in the shower for a long time, trying to wash off the residue of her dreams, the memories of yesterday. Twenty-four hours ago she would have said she had known Scott, had known even his flaws. Now she wondered how much one person could ever know another.
Downstairs she put Brooke’s sheets in the wash. It was still early, so she didn’t need to get the kids up yet. Weekday mornings were usually a stressful blur. If she wasn’t careful, all her kids’ memories would be of her barki
ng at them to get up, hurry up, clean up.
In this new reality Mia was always running late, catching up, taking shortcuts, forgetting something, making do. Juggling a half dozen cases, worrying about Gabe and Brooke, trying to put more or less healthy meals on the table, overseeing homework, doing laundry. Keeping to a budget while she slowly repaid the debts. Every night she fell into bed thinking of all the things she hadn’t accomplished during the day.
Now she checked the flour canister. The envelope she had put the ring box in was still buried in the bottom, a temporary hiding place until she could figure out what to do next.
For right now, she decided that next meant making pancakes.
Fifteen minutes later Gabe shambled into the kitchen, alternating yawns with sniffs of the air. “Pancakes? Is it somebody’s birthday?” Since she had gone back to work, breakfast meant cold cereal for the kids. Mia was lucky if she remembered to grab a granola bar to eat in the car.
“No. I just felt like making them.” She sprinkled chocolate chips over the batter she had just poured on the griddle.
Deftly avoiding a swat from her spatula, Gabe grabbed the top pancake off the finished stack. “I’m sorry I went inside yesterday after the alarm went off,” he said with a full mouth. “That was kind of stupid.”
It was a rare apology.
“We’re just lucky it all turned out okay. Next time, though—well, I hope there isn’t a next time—but if there is, and you feel like something’s not right, stop. And then talk to an adult about it. Me, Charlie, or at least one of the neighbors . . . even if you think you can handle it by yourself.”
“I wish Dad were still alive.” Gabe reached for another pancake, and this time she didn’t try to stop him.
“You and me both, buddy.” Although if Scott were to appear before her now, her first instinct would be to slap him. The second? That . . . she still wasn’t sure of.
Gabe cut his eyes sideways at her and then away. “What were you and Charlie really doing downstairs last night?”