by Dete Meserve
“It’s late . . .”
She places her glass on the side table. “Was Ben cheating on you with Rebecca Stanton?”
I draw a deep breath. Rachel never liked Ben. After I married him, she warned me that someone with looks like Ben’s was never going to be faithful. She predicted that his family’s money would either make him lazy and unfaithful or a workaholic and unfaithful. “I honestly don’t know. I should have a theory of some kind, but I don’t.”
“Did you ever have any suspicions? Were there clues that he might be cheating?”
I shake my head. “Marriage is complicated. Especially when you get to the fifteen-year mark. You stop noticing things. You stop noticing the other person. You know it’s an ebb and flow, but a year goes by and you’re unhappy, and then another . . . and the next thing you know, you’ve been unhappy with your marriage a long time. And maybe all along they have been unhappy, too. You just didn’t know it.”
She frowns. “That sounds like you’re letting him off the hook for cheating.”
“I’m just trying to analyze something complicated here . . . and the truth is, I don’t have enough data. I don’t know what Ben was thinking. Or doing.”
She takes a long sip of her wine. “What I don’t know is how you guys stayed married this long in the first place.”
“Rachel, don’t—”
She tosses back the rest of her wine. “I promise this isn’t a rant against Ben. Even if he is a damn cheater. And even if I thought you should never have married him. But the two of you work crazy hours, seven days a week. And then you have Zack . . . and the problems you’ve been having with him. And then you’ve got this ginormous house to take care of.” She waves her arms around. “What’s that chaos theory thing you always talk about?”
“You mean the theory that small changes can have large, unpredictable consequences?”
“That may be how you scientists describe it. But I think of it this way. The more things you’ve got going on, the more likely one of them is going to fail.”
Fail. Heat rushes to my cheeks. That’s not how I’d like to describe my marriage. But suggesting a divorce is saying that your marriage failed, even if it’s a term—and a feeling—I don’t like.
“I heard you tell the FBI agent that you had talked to Ben about a divorce.”
My face flushes. “Were you eavesdropping?”
She lets out a deep sigh. “I didn’t mean to. Honest. I was reading on the balcony when she came over. Is it true?”
“We discussed it, yes.”
“Because you knew he was cheating?”
“No. It’s more complicated than that.”
“But he was. Cheating. It’s the only way any of this makes sense. Why would he go over to Rebecca’s apartment and kill her simply because she backed out of a business deal? Then there’d be no way she could move forward.”
“I’ve thought of that.” I can’t bring myself to tell her that Rebecca Stanton was pregnant. That would just add fuel to her theory—a theory that was making me break out in a cold sweat.
“Which means it had to be a crime of passion. Something was going on between them. Maybe she threatened to tell you about the affair . . .”
Tears sting the corners of my eyes. “This isn’t really the time to—”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make everything worse. But I’m worried, Sarah. I read up about Rebecca Stanton. And her father . . . has a reputation for doing some really violent things.”
“Like what?” I’d been meaning to go online and research Rebecca Stanton and her family, but I hadn’t found time. Clearly Rachel had.
She hesitates. “I read a New York Post article about some of the brutal crimes the Stanton family has been associated with. I’m too spooked to say them out loud. Have you seen what Gary Stanton looks like?”
“What do his looks have to do with anything?”
Her voice shakes. “He has the face of someone who might kill you. Or have you killed.”
“You’re being melodramatic.”
“Don’t dismiss me like that. I’m serious. He served time for drug trafficking and money laundering, and one of his sons is in jail for murdering two guys in Chicago. I can’t stop thinking—what if he wants to get back at Ben for killing his daughter and comes after you and Zack?”
“You watch too many crime TV shows. That stuff doesn’t happen in real life.”
“But it does, Sarah. You don’t know what went down between Ben and Rebecca. You don’t know why he killed her—”
“Ben didn’t kill Rebecca Stanton.” My voice is too loud. Brittle.
She draws a deep breath, softens her voice. “You’re fooling yourself, Sarah. And you know what? If I were you, I’d be in denial, too. But someone saw him leaving her apartment after the murder, and his fingerprints are at the scene. All that’s missing is the murder weapon.”
I draw a deep breath and think about the gun buried beneath the lilac bush. Is it the murder weapon?
“You don’t understand. Ben isn’t capable of killing anyone. That’s not who he is.”
She’s silent for a long moment, picking at the cuticle on her left thumb. “We didn’t think Dad was capable of leaving us and starting a whole new family somewhere else, either. But he did.”
“This isn’t the same . . .”
She looks down at the floor. “Sometimes we really can’t know the people we love.”
Her words are the killing blow. I feel the tears well up and spill over the rims of my eyelids and onto my cheek. The words I want to say are caught in my throat. I want her to go back to being my nosy sister asking prying questions, not treating me like I’m a fragile, broken woman whose husband has cheated on her. Whose husband is a murderer.
Rachel sees my tears. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
I wipe my cheeks. “Ben is not Dad. This is different.”
She crosses the room and envelops me in a hug. “I want to believe that. But you, of all people, know that you can’t ignore facts and proof.”
The day my father left, I slammed out the back door and into the woods behind my house. I ran the narrow path through red maple and sycamore then past the pond bursting with tall reeds and cattails. I raced among the grove of sprawling oaks, the wind whipping at my face, my breath coming in shallow waves, trying to make sense of why my father would us leave behind and start a new life with another family in another state.
When I reached the path’s end—the deep woods—I kept running as fast as my bony twelve-year-old legs would carry me. I knew every rise and fall of its hills, even where to find the clean and cold stream that bubbled up amid the spires of white-barked birch trees and fed the pond below. I knew that beyond the knoll topped by towering eastern pine lay pristine Lake 14, reachable only when the pond froze over in winter.
As the woods grew denser and the trees more crowded, I slowed a little. Shafts of sunlight flitted through the trees then burst forth in a clearing, blinding me for a moment. I stopped and caught my breath. Except for the crunch of dry leaves beneath my feet, the woods were silent. I lifted my eyes to the warm sunlight, watched the particles of dust rise up into the light, and felt my future with all its promise of joy and growth, untouched by the loss of my father.
Unsettled by the events of the day, I climbed thick honeysuckle vines up into a tree and nestled my body in the crook of a limb, resting my back against the rough bark. I looked past the wild fern that gathered along the pond’s edge and watched the algae on the surface of the water shift and change—at once mottled with mounds of green then suddenly glassy and clear like a mirror, reflecting the blue skies above. As I sat in the tree, my breath slowing, I felt the vastness of the woods and the universe. I grasped, in a rudimentary way, my very small place in it.
The woods were undergoing constant renewal and change but in a rhythm, in patterns, I could understand—unlike people, who changed their minds on a whim or wanted to start over because they were disappointed with w
here they had ended up in life.
I was hungry to understand everything about the one place that was in balance—perpetual—and spent many hours there that summer, collecting plant specimens and examining pond water samples under a microscope. After my uncle sent me a telescope for my birthday, I would run to a clearing in the woods at twilight to watch the stars, charting the constellations in a spiral notebook. In time, the stars no longer felt distant or obscure. I knew exactly where I was when I looked up at the night sky. In their unveiling and fading, in their movement and life cycles across the heavens, the stars were alive to me. They were my home.
In the daytime, too, I scanned the skies with my telescope.
“The stars don’t shine during the day, silly,” Rachel would say, laughing.
But stars do shine during the day. They’re right there where they’ve always been. We just can’t see them because we are blinded by sunlight.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DAY FIVE
My sister is flirting with an FBI agent in the front garden. She’s playing with the ends of her hair and smiling, the trill of her laughter piercing the early morning quiet.
I’ve just returned home after walking to the coffee shop to get a croissant and a hot tea latte. And a jelly doughnut for Zack, who’s still sleeping. The croissant is still warm in the bag, and I’m eager to sit in the kitchen and enjoy it. It’s the first time in days that I’ve had any kind of appetite.
My sister has good taste. The man is handsome. Sandy brown hair. Fit. He looks like he could play an FBI agent in a movie.
She’s pointing to a glossy red heart-shaped flower with a yellow spike in the center. “It’s called Anthurium. I know it looks like the fake stuff you see in the malls and office buildings, but this is the real deal.”
They make a beautiful picture, standing in bright sunshine in the middle of my front yard, surrounded by a garden in full bloom. A lone butterfly flutters past them.
Rachel doesn’t see me walk up the sidewalk, but her botany student does. He interrupts my sister’s monologue and walks toward me.
“Scott Lautner,” he says. “FBI.” He takes out his badge, but I don’t look at it because agents Samuel Nelson and Elizabeth Elliott step off the porch to greet me.
“Sarah,” Elizabeth says. “Your sister said we could wait on your front porch.”
“That’s as far as I allowed them,” my sister says. I can’t fault her for not thinking to call me immediately when the FBI showed up. She’s been divorced for four years, and the agent’s blue eyes probably made her forget what she was supposed to do.
“Where is Brad, my security guard?” I ask.
“He’s aware that we’re here, and we asked him to wait in his vehicle so as not to interfere with the investigation.” Scott nods to Brad’s white sedan in front of the house.
“Look, before we begin, we want to tell you that we are officially investigating Rebecca Stanton’s father, Gary Stanton, in Ben’s disappearance,” Elizabeth says. “As you may already know, he’s the head of one of New York’s notorious crime families. And if he suspected Ben was responsible for his daughter’s murder . . . that could explain why Ben is missing.”
The implications of what she’s saying are chilling, and I feel myself go cold. But I’m puzzled. The FBI came all the way out here to tell me they’re investigating Rebecca’s father in Ben’s disappearance? They must be softening the blow for something else they want to tell me.
“And the other reason we’re here,” Samuel says, “is that we have a second search warrant.” He hands me the papers, and I glance at them, my vision blurring.
How is this happening again?
I look at my sister, and her smile has disappeared. I can see she feels bad for letting them on the property.
“What’s this about? Didn’t you get everything you needed last time?”
“I understand how disruptive this is,” he says, as though he’s reading from a script.
“My son is sleeping. Can you come back after he wakes up? You can imagine how disturbing this will be for him. Again.”
He fiddles with the watch on his wrist. “This is a search outdoors. In the backyard.”
I feel the blood rush to my face. “In the backyard?”
“I’m going to ask you to stay with Agent Elliott while we investigate,” Samuel says, then he and Agent Lautner quickly head up the driveway.
I don’t know how much time goes by while I process what’s happened. I’m shaking inside, and once I realize I don’t have any words to say, I storm onto the porch and sink onto the wooden bench. A moment later, Elizabeth and Rachel catch up. Rachel sits next to me, taking my hand in hers, just like when we were kids.
It doesn’t take the agents long to find the evidence they’re looking for. Within a few minutes, Agent Lautner rushes down the driveway with a black evidence bag.
“We’re finished here,” Samuel says, stepping onto the porch and removing his disposable gloves. He can’t hide his triumphant tone.
The clock inside the house chimes eight notes, indicating the bottom of the hour.
“What do you think they found?” my sister asks.
“I have no idea,” I say with surprising conviction.
I’m distracted by emotion. Everything in the flowerbed has been dug up. The lilac tree is dumped on its side next to a large hole. “You’d think they could’ve at least put the poor shrub back. It’s probably already in shock,” she frets, then heads to the garage. I’m guessing she’ll get a shovel and replant it.
I don’t have to look into the hole to know that they have found the gun. Of that I have no doubt. But I cannot figure who would’ve known the gun was in the yard. Who could’ve told the FBI with enough detail and veracity that they not only secured a search warrant but found the weapon within a few minutes?
Zack comes out in the yard, rubbing his eyes. It’s Sunday and he’s slept late. The cowlick at his hairline is sticking straight up. “What’s going on?”
His eyes are scanning the yard, the lilac bush on its side, and I can see panic rising.
“FBI came here with a search warrant.”
“What for?”
“They didn’t say. Were any of your friends out here in the last few days?”
He looks at me, crosses his arms on his chest. “When?”
“Like anytime since Dad came home from New York.”
“I told you, I had a couple of friends here Tuesday night. The night Dad went missing.”
“Who?”
“Does it matter who?”
“I need to know who was here.”
He stands there a moment, not blinking. “Cole and Bryan.”
My voice is low and steady. “Cole and Bryan.” The friends who’d gotten high and jumped in our pool. “Were you guys—”
“No, Mom. Why don’t you trust me? We just hung around the pool for a few minutes before we went to get something to eat.”
“Did either of them walk around through the garden?”
He looks at me like I might be wearing a tinfoil hat. “No. Do you think one of them had something to do with the FBI coming here?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
Rachel returns with a shovel and a bag of organic compost. Before she puts the lilac back, I glance into the hole and see that it’s empty. The gun is gone.
“We can’t always be sure what people are capable of,” I say.
Years ago when Swiss scientists found the first widely recognized Earth-like planet—what’s called an exoplanet—orbiting a sunlike star, it marked a breakthrough that ended decades of searching. Its discovery was one of the most profound in human history. Before our discovery of this planet we named 51 Pegasi b, scientists had no evidence that planets existed outside of our solar system. Finding it made astronomers question everything we thought we knew about our universe.
All big discoveries lead us to rethink what we know. That’s true here, too. The gun in the backyard. Ben’s
fingerprints at the crime scene. The eyewitness. All these discoveries make me question everything I know about Ben.
In fifteen years of marriage, I never once thought him capable of any criminal act. Certainly not murder. But what are the signs of being a killer?
When Zack was a toddler, I remember waking many times at night to find Ben missing from his side of the bed only to discover him in Zack’s room, awash with moonlight. The two of them would be fast asleep in the rocking chair, Zack snuggled in Ben’s arms, his mess of blond curls sprawled across his dad’s chest. Could such a father be capable of murder?
Ben has changed since then. Since he opened Aurora. He’d become obsessed with the restaurant’s success, working until the late into the night most days. He traveled often, hunting for new restaurants to acquire in New York and Chicago.
At home, he was increasingly distracted by texts, early morning emails, and late-night meetings. At Zack’s birthday dinner, Ben didn’t laugh once when Zack told a goofy story about his Spanish teacher interrogating the entire class about a box of Toblerone chocolates missing from her desk. Instead he kept a sober gaze fixed on his phone, where he was following a crisis unfolding at Aurora.
Still, becoming consumed with success doesn’t mutate you into a murderer, and even with Ben’s slow transformation into someone I barely knew—even with our growing distance from each other—I never saw signs that he might be capable of murder.
But there’s another reason I cannot accept Ben’s involvement in Rebecca Stanton’s murder. It would mean I must also accept the real possibility that Ben himself is dead, the victim of some kind of retaliation.
That’s a discovery I’m just not ready to make.
Channel Eleven’s Kate Bradley is reporting from our parkway again. Live. I have to admit she’s the best in the group of reporters who gather daily on the streets and sidewalks in front of our home. She’s measured when she speaks, not like the breathy reporters from Fox and TMZ, who shout as though every new development is sordid and sensational. I’ve seen her so often reporting on this story that I’m beginning to feel like I know her.