by Dete Meserve
“We’re all hoping they’ll find him soon,” she says, running her fingers across the Santa on a Surfboard ornament. “Looks like someone collects Santa ornaments.”
I suddenly realize that in the guise of casual banter between women, I’ve actually been letting her interview me. But I’m the one with the questions. “Tell me what evidence the FBI found in my house.”
She lets go of the ornament. “My source says they found the murder weapon on your property. A gun that was registered to Rebecca Stanton. The FBI says Ben used Rebecca’s own gun to kill her.”
A wave of nausea overcomes me. The idea that Ben killed Rebecca is hard enough to grasp, but it’s even more difficult to imagine that he took her gun and used it against her. I grab a bottle of water off the dining table and take a long swig. “What else?” My voice wobbles. “They took evidence out of here twice. What else did they find?”
She hesitates, looks down at her hands. “They found a photo of Rebecca that investigators say was taken from her apartment . . .”
Sweat breaks out on my brow and the nausea rolls in on a huge wave, threatening to overwhelm me. I gulp more water and feel it roil in my stomach. “A photo doesn’t prove anything. Lots of people have photos of other people. It doesn’t mean they murdered them.”
“It proves that he had been in her apartment.” She stops there, but I know what else she’s thinking. It proves there was some kind of relationship between them. Why else does a man hold on to a woman’s photo?
I close my eyes for a moment, gathering my thoughts.
“You okay?”
I turn to face her. “The FBI has a theory that my husband murdered Rebecca. But in science, all knowledge is tentative and provisional. The accepted theory of something is simply the best explanation for it among all available alternatives at the time. We know Ben was angry at Rebecca for breaking the deal, but that doesn’t mean he killed her.”
“Ben’s fingerprints were found at her apartment. And there’s an eyewitness who saw him leaving her apartment that morning. That’s pretty strong evidence.”
My voice is hoarse. “But I know my husband. And he’s not a murderer.”
“I know,” she says quietly. “Everyone I interviewed about Ben says he’s the nicest guy. Clever, creative, generous—everyone likes him. Well, except for the bartender at Paragon. He saw Ben with Rebecca, the night she was murdered. I guess he saw a different side of Ben.”
I lower my hand from my face. I’m sure I must look like a sight to her: dark eyes flashing, pale skin. “What did he see?”
“He says Ben grabbed her arm, shouting something like ‘I’m not letting you out of this deal.’”
I sink into the side chair, my thoughts jumbled. This is what Shane had told me about Ben. What I didn’t want to believe. Confirmation that Ben had threatened Rebecca and had a motive to kill her. I gulp down some more water, waiting for the dizziness to subside.
“Can you tell me how to find the bartender so I can talk to him?”
She flips through her notebook. “His name is JJ Morten. But he’s already been interviewed by police and FBI. What do you think you’re going to find out from him that they couldn’t?”
“They talked to him after they already suspected Ben murdered Rebecca, looking to corroborate what they thought they knew. I’m looking to understand everything that happened that night. Everything.”
A ghost of a smile crosses her lips. “What you’re asking is whether there was something more going on. Something they missed.” She jots a note on a slip of paper and hands it to me. “Here’s his number, but don’t tell him you got it from me.”
DAY SIX
“Give me your hand,” Ben whispered.
I stretched out my hand and he turned it over, palm up.
“Now close your eyes.”
I laughed. Shut my eyes.
“Okay, this is serious business,” he said, but I heard the smile in his voice. “No peeking.” He covered my eyes with his other hand.
He placed something in my palm. Round and wrapped in cellophane.
“Guess?”
I rolled it around in my hand. A lollipop. But that’s not what he was asking me to guess. “Jupiter?”
“Nope. Hotter.”
“Venus!” I shrieked and opened my eyes to see a yellowish-white lollipop decorated to look just like the cloud-covered planet.
Just after our tenth anniversary Ben discovered the “Big Bin of Sweets” at a nearby candy emporium. Every few weeks after that he sifted through the enormous bin searching for Planet Lollipops, clear candy with a heavenly body inside. They’re rare—most times he couldn’t find any despite burrowing through pounds of sweets—but he did it anyway, knowing I loved all the planet flavors, except Mercury, which tastes like burnt cotton candy. Tropical-punch-flavored Venus was my favorite back then and it still is, even though the candy tradition ended a few years ago.
Now, standing in my backyard, an hour before sunrise, the planet Venus shines bright in the sky. This is Venus as Morning Star. The ancient Greeks thought Venus was actually two separate objects, a star they observed at night and called Hesperus—star of the evening—and one they saw rising in the morning that they named Phosphorus, the bringer of light.
Beneath its light with the first sliver of the violet sunrise on the horizon, my own thinking is illuminated. Although I have slept little of the night, I have a clarity that I didn’t have the day before. I have chosen to believe that Ben did not kill Rebecca Stanton. Even though there is rock-solid evidence that he did.
I know I’ve fallen victim to “disconfirmation bias”—when scientists expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk information we find uncomfortable. But I’ve chosen to question every assumption, to test each block of my understanding. Starting with a call to Paragon bartender JJ Morten.
I dial his number. I know it’s nine in the morning in New York, and since JJ is a bartender, I don’t expect him to pick up. I plan to leave a voice-mail message, yet a sleepy voice answers the phone.
“Hello?”
“JJ Morten?” I ask.
He sighs. “Yeah. Who’s this?”
“My name is Sarah Mayfield. My husband is Ben Mayfield. Could I talk with you about what happened at Paragon the night Rebecca Stanton was murdered?”
His tone is gruff. “Yeah, no. It’s early and I—” There’s a long pause on the phone, and for a moment, I think he’s hung up. Then I hear him draw in a deep breath. “Yeah, I don’t—I told everything to FBI and police already.”
“My husband is missing and—”
“I heard.”
“I’m trying to piece together what happened to him.”
“I have no way of knowing if you are who you say you are—”
“I am his wife. If it would help, I’ll send you photos of our wedding. Or snapshots from the last fifteen years of our life together . . .”
Silence on the line.
“Would you answer just one question for me?” I say softly.
“One.” His tone is resigned. I’m wearing him down.
“I’ve been hearing that my husband was drunk and maybe high on drugs, knocking things over, yelling at Rebecca. Is that what you saw that night?”
“Some of that is true.”
“Which part?”
“That’s two questions.”
“Help me out here. Give me thirty more seconds of your time, then I’ll leave you alone.”
He sighs again. “Look, your husband seemed normal enough. Only had two drinks as far I remember, but the rest of what you say is true.”
“What was Ben like when he was with Rebecca?”
“They didn’t come in together,” he said, misunderstanding the question. “Ben and his friend Shane were already at the bar when she showed up wearing a ginormous diamond engagement ring. Like four carats or something. Slaps her hand on the bar with that heavy rock on her finger and tells them she’s getting married.”
“Th
en what?”
“The next thing I know the three of them are shouting. It got so bad the manager had to come out and calm things down.”
Anxiety rises in my throat. Ben was angry after Rebecca announced she was getting married. Maybe this was proof Ben was having an affair with her. Could jealousy and her business betrayal have spurred him to murder her later?
“Why do you think they got so mad?”
He’s silent for a moment. “No idea. But every one of them was mad at the other two.”
Every one of them was mad at the other two. That meant Ben was mad at both Rebecca and Shane.
I imagine Ben that night knowing that the Manhattan restaurant he’d been trying to land had slipped through his fingers. He must have been devastated. Furious at Shane for not saving the deal. Mad enough to murder Rebecca?
I glance at Venus as it fades away in the brightening sky and with it, my hope of gaining any proof that Ben did not murder Rebecca Stanton.
The proposal for the space telescope is due into NASA in a few days, and I head to my home office hoping I can focus long enough to analyze a sizable chunk of the data.
If our proposal is chosen, the telescope will scan the entire sky over the course of two years and catalog thousands of possible planets. The main goal is to find rocky planets with solid surfaces—planets that could show signs of life—but, as my own life unravels, I’ve lost touch with the project’s importance.
Still, I force myself to focus on calculating a projection for the number of Earth-sized planets the telescope might discover in its two-year voyage. After several minutes, I have immersed myself so completely in the task that all the morning hours fly by and suddenly it is nearly one o’clock.
I’ve arranged to share my projections later that afternoon with my boss. As I hike across the campus to his office, I spot Aaron heading toward me. He’s wearing glasses today, which have the expected effect of making him look studious but, oddly, more handsome.
“Hey, stranger,” he says, breaking into a smile. He hugs me and we linger too long in the hug. “What brings you here?”
“I’ve completed my projection.” I don’t have to tell him what the projection is for. Aaron wants this space telescope to be approved almost as much as I do and has been working on the programming pipeline for processing massive amounts of data the telescope will collect.
“How’s it looking?” he asks.
I breeze through my analysis. What will become a single chart in the proposal is the result of at least eighty hours of data crunching and forecasting. At first it feels odd to be talking about the work again, but it doesn’t take long for me to settle back into it. And when Aaron nods at the challenges I’ve encountered in interpreting the data, I know he understands.
“Your detectability assumptions make sense to me,” he says, leaving no doubt he appreciates the way I’ve attacked the problem. “Steven will like this.”
“Let’s hope you’re right.”
His blue eyes light up. “I am. Right, that is.”
I meet his gaze, and then my mind flashes to kissing him outside the airport. I clear my throat. “Can I swing by later and get the DVR? If anyone found out you have it—”
“I’ve thought a lot about this, Sarah. I know what we’re doing by hiding the DVR could land us—me—in serious trouble. But if this is the one way I can help you, I’m willing to do it.”
His offer to help brings tears to my eyes, which I quickly whisk away. Many people are there for you when you rise to the top, but few are there for you when you hit rock bottom. “You’ve already done more than you should have for me. I can’t let you keep putting yourself at risk.”
“A friend of mine is sending me a data-recovery utility he just wrote that should unlock a chunk more data on the drive. Let me run that tonight and see what we can recover.”
“You really shouldn’t keep helping me like this.”
Air rushes from my lungs. I try to deny my attraction to him but his warm smile draws me in. “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The story about Ben Mayfield killing Rebecca Stanton hits the national news an hour later. It’s nonstop on every cable news channel, and there are countless posts about it popping up on social media and in my email. The LA Times and the New York Times are reporting it, of course. But there’s a sensational quality to the story that has nearly every major news outlet covering it, too. “Crime of Passion,” the USA Today headline reads.
I switch off the TV and toss my phone in a kitchen drawer, but I can still see the news images flashing in my mind. Rebecca’s tanned face framed by flawless blonde hair. A few shots of Rebecca dancing in a shapely white dress at some club. Another photo of Ben and Rebecca with several sports stars at Paragon.
I look at her and feel plain in comparison. Then feel guilty because I’m actually jealous of a dead woman.
There’s one photo of Ben, dressed in a black tux at the red-carpet grand opening of Aurora, standing next to an actor dressed in an outrageous superhero costume. Ben has one eyebrow cocked and a slight grin on his face, an expression that reads as flat-out adorable.
Even with the sound off, the story made sense: a beautiful woman and her gorgeous boyfriend quarreled about the sale of a trendy restaurant, and in an angry, alcohol-fueled moment, he killed her.
Except he isn’t her boyfriend. He is my husband.
I call Steven Webster to share the news with him, and for the first time his voice sounds clipped. And nervous. “Let me talk to the higher-ups and figure out next steps.” His words catch me off guard. Does “next steps” mean they might select someone less complicated to lead the space telescope project? It won’t be difficult to find plenty of astronomers whose husbands aren’t murder suspects or entangled in a sensational news story.
The doorbell pulls me out of my thoughts, but I don’t answer it. I’m guessing it’s one of the increasing number of reporters who are camped on the parkway, hoping for an interview. They’d become bolder, and a few had made it past Brad to my doorstep before he escorted them off the property. Rachel is also keeping watch through the front window.
“It’s getting crazy out there,” she sings under her breath, then heads to the front door to peek through the peephole.
I hear shouting outside and a voice I recognize as Brad’s. “Okay to open up.”
Rachel opens the door, and Shane is standing next to Brad on the doorstep.
“Lot of people trying to get to your front door today,” Brad says. “But I knew you’d want me to let this guy through.”
“Thanks, Brad.”
Shane’s dressed casually today—blue jeans and a checkered blue shirt—and carrying a large shopping bag.
He wraps me in a warm hug. “I tried calling—”
“Tossed my phone in the drawer.”
“Can’t blame you.” He has a worried look on his face, and he’s more pale than usual.
“The news I’ve been hearing about Ben is . . . forget that. What can I do?”
“Not much,” I say. “Unless you have a way to wake me up from this nightmare.”
He follows me into the living room. Rachel pads behind him and switches on the Christmas tree lights, filling the gloomy room with warmth.
“I brought some cookies for you and Zack,” he says, lifting a box out of his paper bag. “Well, mostly for Zack.”
“He’ll like that,” I say, accepting the gift.
Rachel takes the cookie box from me and heads to the kitchen to stow it alongside at least a dozen cakes and baked goods lining the kitchen counter. I think we almost have enough to open a bakery.
“This has been in the works for a while, but I’ve just made partner—chief investment officer—at the firm. Which means that Diane finally gets her wish and we’re moving to London. We’ll both be working on the same continent for a change.”
“That’s wonderful,” I say, but my tone is flat.
“Look, with ev
erything that’s happened, I’m not here to celebrate . . .”
I wave my hand at him as though it’s not an issue. But I’m having a hard time connecting with his happiness, or anything happy. Right now it feels like all the happiness and joy has been doled out to everyone else, and none of it has been left for me or Zack.
“Diane found us a great flat in London. You’ll have to come visit.” His face is glowing. “But I feel like I’m deserting you when you need us most. Before we take off in a few days, I want to figure out what I can do to help you and Zack.”
He’s talking about our family as though Ben is dead. And everything points to the fact that he is. But I still can’t form a plan around a life like that, even though I had discussed divorce a little over a week ago. What does a life without Ben look like? Feel like. I can’t imagine my future. I hope I’ll get to go back to work on the new space telescope, of course. But even that’s not certain. Zack will finish another three years of high school and head off to college. But suddenly there’s a black hole where there once was a family.
His voice softens. “I’ve heard they’re calling off the search for Ben.”
I nod. Detective Dawson had told me about the sheriff’s decision to end the search, and it had been all over the news today. Hundreds of trained rescuers and volunteers had searched for miles in the scorching heat of Joshua Tree and had not turned up anything to indicate Ben might still be alive.
I’m tired of answering questions. Not even sure I can process the answers anymore. But I have my own questions. “Did Rebecca and Ben have more than just a business relationship?”
He hesitates, looks at his hands. “I don’t know why you’re—”
“You have to tell me, Shane.”
He looks up, a sober expression on his face. “Look, I don’t know for sure, Sarah. There were . . . sparks between them. But I don’t know anything more than that.”
“Even if it’s true that they were having an affair, I can’t yet accept that he killed her. I know there is evidence. The murder weapon found in our backyard. An eyewitness who saw Ben leave her apartment in the morning. Fingerprints. There’s even a motive with the business deal gone sour. But I can’t accept what’s been clearly laid out in front of me.”