by Dete Meserve
She nods like she understands, but I’m pretty sure she’s not listening. “Have a minute?” She lifts her tone at the end of her sentence to make it sound casual, but the firm set of her jaw makes it clear it’s not.
“Actually, I was about to get going . . .” Unless she has a search warrant, I want nothing to do with Elizabeth and her questions.
“I have some new information to share with you.”
I’m not sure I can handle any more information from the FBI. I close the gate behind her and feel the energy drain out of me. “Come on in.”
She follows me to the seating area on the patio, then waits for me to sit before choosing the chair directly across. She leans forward and pushes aside the arrangement of succulents on the coffee table, as though they might somehow get in the way of our discussion. “When did you ask your husband for a divorce?”
Her question catches me by surprise. “What do you mean?” I ask calmly, but I can’t stop my cheeks from flushing red.
“A few days before his disappearance, your husband told his mother, Catherine Mayfield, that you had asked him for a divorce.”
“What do you—”
“Is it true? Did you ask your husband for a divorce?”
“We discussed our marriage. Divorce was mentioned. But no plans were made.” My voice sounds thin, weak.
Her perfectly tweezed eyebrows arch over blue eyes. “And you didn’t disclose this to anyone before? Not to police. Not to us.”
“This was a private discussion between my husband and me. I don’t imagine Ben thought his mother would tell the FBI about it. It’s not material to what’s going on.”
“Actually, it is. You’re in line to inherit the Mayfield Department Store fortune. Not to mention that you’re the sole beneficiary of Ben’s seven-million-dollar life insurance policy.”
I roll my eyes. “I’ve already been through this with Detective Dawson. Just because I stand to benefit financially from Ben’s death doesn’t mean I’m somehow involved in it.”
“I didn’t say you were involved. Or that Ben is dead.”
It feels like she just slapped me in the face. “Then what are you asking?”
“Is it possible that your boyfriend—Aaron McCarthy—has a role in this?”
“Let’s be clear. He’s not . . . my boyfriend.”
“This is the man you were with in the airport bar the night your husband disappeared?” She glances at some other notes. “The man the bartender said you were kissing long after midnight.”
I shut my eyes. “Aaron is not involved in any of this. That kiss was a one-time thing . . . a mistake.”
“A mistake,” she says quietly, then flips through her notepad. “And yet, the CIT records indicate you met with him just hours after your husband’s disappearance. Just after eleven the next morning.”
My heart thumps loudly in my chest. “You have the CIT access records?”
“I’m not at liberty to say what records we have. But we know you met with him within hours of reporting Ben missing. Why?”
I shift in my seat. “We needed to discuss several things. We’ve just announced a major discovery of a Trojan asteroid in Earth’s orbit—”
“Are you saying that not long after you discovered your husband was missing, you left your home and traveled all the way to CIT in Pasadena in order to discuss . . . an asteroid?”
“Yes. That’s what I’m saying.”
“In person. You couldn’t do that by phone?”
“Right.”
She leans back into the cushions of the couch, studying me. “Why are you protecting him?”
“I’m not protecting anyone. Aaron had nothing to do with Ben’s disappearance.”
“How well do you know Aaron McCarthy?”
“I’ve worked with him for a few years. Two maybe. Why?”
“So you know about his bankruptcy a few years ago?”
I shake my head. “I don’t. And what does it matter? Being bankrupt doesn’t mean you go and murder your colleague’s husband.”
“It matters if your ‘colleague’ would become an extremely wealthy woman when her husband is dead. I understand your stake in the Mayfield Department Store fortune would be valued well into eight figures.”
I’m frustrated and dumbfounded at her line of questioning, but letting her know I’m feeling any of that is a losing battle. “You’re wasting your time looking into a discussion between a husband and wife about their marriage. Or my brief . . . incident with Aaron McCarthy.”
“Odd you should use the word ‘brief’ because it doesn’t appear that way. Apparently the two of you were seen together a couple of times since Ben went missing. Twice at CIT. You can see how that appears.”
I want to tell her that Aaron and I had been meeting to recover the security footage on the DVR but I know that admitting to hiding potential evidence would not go over well. Might even land me in jail. How else to explain why I met with Aaron?
I sit up straight, as though I’m ready for her to leave. I want to take the conversation in a different direction. “I thought you said you had new information to share with me.”
Her face darkens. “I do. We have the results from Rebecca Stanton’s autopsy.” She’s silent for a long moment. “She was pregnant.”
The news hits me hard. Sucks the breath out of me. Elizabeth doesn’t have to say anything more in order for me to fill in the blanks: Maybe Rebecca’s murder wasn’t just about a business deal gone sour. Or an affair. Maybe Ben killed Rebecca because she was pregnant and threatened to tell. To tell me. And if I found out, Ben was worried I would divorce him and walk away with half of his Mayfield Department Store fortune.
I glance up at the pale half-moon, still floating with the sun across the sky and try to calm my nerves.
Things are not always as they appear.
“Mom?” Zack says.
I jolt awake and realize I’d fallen asleep on the couch in front of the Christmas tree after dinner. I’m disoriented and unsure of the time.
Then reality comes in like a roar, stealing my breath. For a few moments of sleep, my body—my brain—had been lulled into forgetting. But now the truth comes rushing back.
Ben is missing.
A wave of deep longing and sadness engulfs me, and I’m powerless to stop it.
Ben is a murder suspect.
I sit straight up.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
I nod, trying to steady my emotions. I feel like I might burst into tears.
“Yes, what’s up?” I say, trying to conceal the sadness in my voice. I’m guessing he’s here to complain about Aunt Rachel. Since he was little, she had a habit of going into his room and organizing the clothes in his drawers and the books on his shelves. It’s a compulsion of hers, and while he welcomed it when he was five, I’m betting that now he doesn’t want his aunt to mess with his stuff.
“I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
I rub my eyes, trying to will my heavy eyelids to remain open. “No, I’m awake. What did you want to tell me?”
He’s halfway out of the living room and stops to look at the Christmas tree. He seems to be weighing some kind of decision. “If I tell you something, you promise you won’t get mad?”
I swallow hard. “It depends on what it is.”
He starts to say something then closes his mouth.
“If I’m mad about what it is, I promise to stay calm about it.” I hold up my hand. “Promise.”
He ambles over to the chair beside the couch and sits down. “I lied about where I was the night Dad . . . went missing.”
A tight knot forms in my stomach. “What do you mean?”
“I know I told you and the police that I went to karate then got home at nine. But the truth is, I skipped karate, my friends came over, and I stayed out with them until about nine thirty.”
“Zack—”
“I know I was grounded. And I was pretty sure you’d bust me. But you weren’t home unt
il really late, either.”
Busted. I try not to look guilty. “What were you doing with your friends?”
He shakes his head. “It’s not what you think. We got something to eat. That’s all.”
I’m relieved even if I’m not sure I believe his story. “I’m far less ‘mad’ about you breaking your grounding than if you were making poor decisions with your friends.”
He’s focused on a spot on the carpet. “That’s not everything. There’s something I didn’t tell you about that night.”
I stare at him, waiting for him to continue. I’m not sure if I should be scared or angry or both.
“I know Dad told me to set the security alarm, and I know I’m supposed to set it when I leave . . . and I did it that night. But when I came back, the alarm was off.”
His eyes are wide, and for a moment he looks like a seven-year-old in a teenage body. “Maybe you didn’t actually set it, but you think you did. That happened to me once,” I say, trying to lighten his mood.
It doesn’t work. “I remember hearing the alarm beep when I left the house. I know I set it.” He draws a panicky breath. “And when I came in that night, I had the feeling . . . well, it felt like someone was in the house.”
My face is rigid with shock. “What do you mean? Did you call the police?”
“I kind of thought I was imagining it at first. Spooking myself out. I mean, I didn’t see anything or hear anything. It was just a feeling. So I went upstairs to my room.” He pushes the hair back from his eyes. “And while I was up there, I heard a . . . shuffling sound downstairs.”
“Where?”
“Back by the kitchen.”
“Maybe from the guest bathroom?”
“Yeah, around there . . .”
“Like someone was shutting the window in there?”
He locks eyes with me. “Maybe like that.”
“Remember when I noticed dirty footprints in the tub? The window latch was open. As if someone had snuck out the bathroom window.”
He puts his hand to his mouth. “Who?”
My mouth is dry. “I’m not sure. Did you call the police when you heard the sound?”
“No, I waited and listened for a long time, and when I didn’t hear anything again, I thought that maybe it was just the cat or something. But now that Dad is missing, I thought . . .” His big eyes are pools of shining hope in the dim light. “Do you think maybe Dad came back and was in the house that night? Maybe that’s why the alarm was off when I came home? Maybe that’s who I heard.”
I don’t want to dash his hopes but I have to. “Not your dad. The shooting happened sometime after nine. Even without traffic, there’s no way he could have made it back here before nine thirty. No way.”
“Maybe he did, Mom. Maybe it’s proof he was here. That he’s alive.”
“If it were your dad, he wouldn’t have been hiding from you.”
I hear the tremor in his voice. “Unless . . . what the FBI thinks he did is true?”
I rest a hand on his shoulder. “It wasn’t your dad, Zack.”
His whisper is full of fear. “Then who was here?”
I don’t have an answer to Zack’s question, but I want to reassure him we’re safe, even though I don’t believe we are. It’s nearly midnight but I make him some popcorn, his favorite snack, and while it’s popping in Ben’s ten-year-old oil popper, I make sure Zack sees me say a hearty goodnight to David, the bodyguard who’s sitting outside our front door, then set the alarm. All of that seems to have a calming effect on him, but the opposite effect on me.
I want to believe Zack’s theory. Even though it’s physically impossible. Believing is far better than thinking about who was hiding in the house the night Zack came home.
Once I get him back to bed, I try to play out Zack’s theory. I trace the steps I imagine Ben would have taken from the front door if he came home. What would he do next?
I head upstairs to our bedroom, then shake my head. If he did come home after the shooting, he would surely have taken the gun out of the drawer. For protection.
Or was that when he deposited the gun? For Zack’s and my safety.
I stop in my office and scan all the surfaces. There’s no sign that he’d been in here.
I pad back downstairs and into the living room. The green and red colors of the Christmas tree lights dance on the walls in the darkened room. I lean on the edge of the couch and gaze at the tree, trying to slow my racing pulse and throttle my thoughts that are spinning out of control.
As much as I want to believe Zack’s theory, I cannot see any evidence that Ben survived the shooting and returned home that night. If he were injured, as police say, surely there’d be signs of blood somewhere, too. That means, someone—not Ben—was in the house when Zack came home that night. As the realization sinks in, I feel my pulse quicken again, and suddenly our quiet, calm home feels eerily unsafe.
Then my eye falls on the present beneath the tree. I hadn’t given it much thought the first time I’d seen it, but now that Ben is missing, could the gift offer any clue to what happened to him? I pick it up and study it. Ben has written my name neatly in black Sharpie, like he always does. But his gifts always appeared on Christmas Eve—not a moment before—wrapped in gorgeous luxe paper and expensive silk ribbons by the store where he’d purchased them. This paper looked like he’d bought it himself at the drug store, and judging from the imperfect tape, he had wrapped it by hand. In the midst of the chaos of the trial and after being poisoned, how—and why—had he made time to buy and wrap a gift for me?
I lift the tape off one end and begin to unwrap it. For a moment, I feel guilty, like when I was six years old and secretly unwrapped part of my Easy-Bake Oven two days before Christmas.
I can’t believe what I see. It’s a polished gray-and-white stone in a silver setting on a chain. A card inside the box indicates that the stone was taken from a four-billion-year-old meteorite discovered in Namibia in 1836, where it likely had fallen in prehistoric times.
A meteorite.
In second grade I’d started collecting pieces of distant asteroids and comets that have fallen to Earth in the form of meteorites. Much of my collection, like a piece of the meteorite that created the Meteor Crater in Arizona, was ordinary. A few were rare, like a fragment of the Allende meteorite, whose mineral-rich inclusions are older than the sun and Earth. But this meteorite was flawless and big, about two inches long and a half inch wide.
In the flat plane of the box, the faceted meteorite is dull, nonreflective. But when I lift it out, it shines with a mysterious, subtly distorted beauty.
I turn the meteorite over and notice that the silver back is engraved: Q’U AWZZG. TWDM, JMVRQ
Is it in code?
I feel the air leave my body.
If Ben is using a Julius Caesar cipher like he used when we were dating and newly married, then all I had to figure out was what the letter shift was. If the shift was three, that meant A would be encoded as C and so on.
I work with lightning speed, remembering the heady feeling of decoding the first message he wrote back in English class. I shift each letter by two then three then four . . . then eight.
And realize what he’s written:
I’M SORRY. LOVE, BENJI
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The words vibrate with double meaning. Is Ben saying he’s sorry for killing Rebecca Stanton?
Or is it a deeper message, unrelated to her. About us?
After Ben and I had been married for a few months, we’d made plans to go out to dinner with friends, only Ben arrived at the restaurant nearly two hours late. The next morning he spelled out the words “I’m sorry” on our dining room table . . . with two dozen red roses. In our first years of marriage, whenever either of us needed to apologize, we’d surprise the other and write the words using whatever we could find: pretzels, rocks, paper clips, sometimes chocolates. Ben was far more creative than I was with apologies. Once he even wrote “I’m sorry” in Kl
ingon.
A wave of sadness washes over me. At least five years had passed since either of us apologized this way. The tradition was long forgotten, replaced with angry texts or more often silence.
And how long had it been since he signed his name “Benji,” a nickname I gave him when we were first dating because it sounded like the name of a cute, freckly five-year-old playing in the mud, when Ben was the polar opposite, a young man who looked like he was completely out of my league with his thick wavy hair, eyes the color of the sky, and a wide, nice-guy smile. As we left our twenties and drifted into our thirties, the cute nickname vanished, but here it is again. In code. Engraved on the back of a meteorite that was nearly as old as our planet.
“Everything okay?” My sister’s voice startles me. “You’re up late.”
She’s standing in the doorway, dressed in red flannel pajama bottoms and a T-shirt and holding a glass of red wine.
“I’m fine,” I say, but my voice is pitched high.
She steps into the room, her eyes on the gift. “What’s that?”
I slide the necklace back into the box. I’m not ready to explain to her what the coded message means. Mostly because I don’t understand it myself. “I’m just . . . trying to take my mind off things.”
“I honestly don’t know how you’re holding it all together,” she says.
I’d already told her what the FBI suspected. I’d left out the parts about the guns and the million dollars in the bank but told her everything the FBI said about Rebecca Stanton, her murder. The color had faded from her already pale cheeks, and she was so rattled, she didn’t move the entire time I spoke. Then she made me repeat every word I’d said.
“I’m not.” I place the gift back under the tree. “Holding it together, that is.”
She sits on the couch, pulls her legs up to her chest, and rests her chin on her knees.
“Can I ask you something?”
Can I ask you something is how Rachel tells you that a whopper of a question is coming. When we were teens, she’d always asked prying questions about things I did with the boys I was dating, whether I’d smoked pot, or if I got drunk at a friend’s party. They were always prefaced with a simple Can I ask you something?