by JoAnn Chaney
“I didn’t kill my wife.”
“Then what happened, Mr. Evans?”
“We were asleep. I woke up because Janice was moving around, and it took me a minute to realize that there was someone in the house with us. A man.”
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t know. It was dark, and I never got a chance to get a good look at him.”
“That’s fair. Go on.”
“He had a gun, put it in my face and told me to turn over. He already had Janice tied up, and then he did the same to me.”
“He used rope?”
“Yeah.”
“He must not have tied you up too tightly.”
“Why do you say that?”
“No rope burns on you,” Reid said. One of his red, veiny eyelids trembled in what might have been the start of a wink, then stilled. “Keep going, Mr. Evans.”
“This guy, he was hurting Janice. I didn’t know what was going on, my back was to them, but I could hear she was in pain. While he was busy with her, I managed to get free of the ropes.”
“And you ran?”
“Yeah.”
“How chivalrous of you,” Reid said drily. “And when, exactly, did you get shot?”
“I was trying to get out of the house,” Matt said. “He shot me from behind, but I still managed to get out.”
Reid nodded, made another note on his pad.
“You got out of the house and went looking for help,” the cop said.
“Yes.”
Reid leaned over, put his pen and pad down on the bedside table. Rubbed his eyes for a minute, the way a kid would, with both hands balled into fists and jammed right into the sockets.
“You know, I made a few calls before I came in here,” Reid said once he was done. “Found out that in the event of your wife’s death, you cash in a life insurance policy worth about thirty thousand dollars. It’s not a huge amount, but it’s quite a pretty penny for a jobless college student such as yourself. Especially a young man with no parents to help him with the bills. And no wife, either. Because Janice was supporting you, wasn’t she? Mr. Evans?”
Matt’s throat was clenching and loosening, over and over again. He took a careful sip of water from the plastic cup the nurse had left him. There was a straw sticking out of the top, and his hand was shaking badly enough that it took several tries before he managed to steer it into his mouth. Reid watched with interest. The old codger didn’t miss much, that was for sure.
“What’re you getting at?”
“Tell me what happened to your wife.”
“I just did.”
“No, what you told me was a very sweet, practiced lie,” Reid said. “Quite a few things wrong with it. Inconsistencies, that’s what cops call them. That’s shop talk. Pieces that don’t quite line up right.”
“What do you mean?” There was panic rising in Matt’s throat, thick and choking. Bitter, as if he’d let an aspirin dissolve on his tongue.
“You don’t have any rope burns, even though you say you were tied up and had to struggle free,” Reid said. “And that bullet wound—you say you were shot from behind, while you were trying to get out?”
“Yes,” Matt said softly. Fuck. Fuckity-fuck.
“No, sir, that bullet came from your front side,” Reid said, picking up his notes again and squinting at them. “Docs told me the bullet pierced your front right shoulder and exited cleanly through the back. And whoever pulled that trigger was standing awfully close to you, too. I asked if you might’ve shot yourself, and they didn’t rule it out.”
God.
“That’s not what happened.”
“Then tell me what happened.”
“I did.”
“Well, tell it again,” Reid said. He grimaced, baring all his teeth like a dog. They were fake, Matt thought. Too perfect and white to be real. Dentures. Roebuckers, he’d heard them called before. “And this time, try a little harder.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you could just tell me the truth. Or, if you want to keep lying, at least try to make it believable. And if that’s not possible, at least make it entertaining,” Reid said, uncrossing his legs and crossing them again the other way. Really mashing his bony ass down into his seat, settling in for a good bit. “Let it rip, Mr. Evans. Tell me what happened to your wife that night.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
2018
Did you push your wife off that cliff, Mr. Evans? Did you want to get rid of her, cash out her big life insurance claim, trade her in for a young hottie? Has your wife gotten flabby over the years, has she gotten ugly and nags until you’re ready to either punch her or drink yourself into a stupor? And you’ve done well over the years, haven’t you, Mr. Evans? You’ve made a bit of money, socked away a good-sized nest egg, but it would’ve been gone in a second if you filed for divorce because she would’ve gotten half of everything, so did you decide the better thing to do was give her a hard shove when she was standing on the edge of that cliff, send her tumbling out into the air, ass over kettle, until you heard her hit the water below?
He keeps waiting for someone to ask, but no one has. They’re treating it as an accidental fall, and that’s exactly what he’d hoped for, isn’t it? It’s the best possible outcome, going just to plan, but he’s still worrying. Because you can’t control anything, even if you plan for everything—he’d learned that lesson a long time before, with Janice. So he keeps on waiting for someone to suggest that he pushed Marie, that he’d murdered his wife, but no one has.
Not yet.
“Chances are she’ll still be in the general vicinity of where she fell,” one of the cops said. He unconsciously reached up for his chest pocket, briefly touching the pack of cigarettes there before letting his hand drop. “The river’s swollen, but the current wouldn’t have moved her too far.”
“We’ll have boats out once the sun comes up, dragging the water,” the park ranger said, gazing up into the night sky. The sky was clear, but there still weren’t any stars. “We’ll be doing a ground search around the river as well, see if we can get a visual from the shore, but none of that’s any good in the dark. We’ll just have to wait.”
Matt wasn’t sure how to act. Exactly how devastated should a man be after his wife has taken a dive off a cliff? You had to play situations like this just right or end up looking too rehearsed, phony. Fainting would definitely be too dramatic, but what about tears? And if he did cry, how far could he push it before it started to look fake? Was he overthinking the whole thing? This situation—like every situation in life, maybe—was a careful balancing act. Too little grief, acting like a dead fish—that would make him look guilty. Too much, and he’d look guilty. He had to be Goldilocks and get it just right. He tried to remember how he’d acted at Janice’s funeral, but that time was mostly a haze of pain and confusion in his memory and didn’t help now. He’d just have to try his best. Like a kid on Christmas morning who’d already snuck a look at the gifts but still had to act surprised.
He didn’t cry. Didn’t scream or shout or throw himself around—instead, he stayed quiet. He overheard someone say he must be in shock, which was exactly what he’d hoped they’d think. He answered the questions from the local police as simply as he could and listened, kept his eyes open. Watched. He’d learned to watch over the years, especially because he’d worked in sales—you can learn a helluva lot about a person by just watching them. It’s what he’d always told his sales guys—you look for the nonverbal cues. Posture, eye movement, what they do with their hands—those alone will tell if a person is a buyer. These are the tools you need to get a person to close a deal, this is what he would tell his team when they came in for their monthly meetings, when everyone would fly in from all over the country and they’d sit around in a room together and call through the lists of potential leads—dialing for dollars, that’s what they called it. But those calls were really more like spinning a roulette wheel, luck rather than skill that early
in the game, more about willing someone to pick up the line and listen, getting them to agree to a face-to-face meeting because once you got a buyer to meet you in person you’d won half the battle. And once you’re sitting across from that person, he’d tell his team, you’ll be able to tell if they’re really a buyer, or if they’re just sucking your time.
You could watch a person, know how they felt, if they were buying your bullshit or not, but you had to play your part, too. You could have the best sales pitch in the world, but if your eyes were too shifty, if you were nervous, if you breathed too quickly or looked too eager, you might screw it all up.
“We’re all actors on a stage,” he’d tell his sales team. “That’s directly from William F. Shakespeare, so you can take it to the bank.”
“What’s the ‘F’ stand for, boss?”
“It stands for William Fucking Shakespeare, numb-nuts. And I’m saying, if you screw it up with a client, you might as well throw in the towel and move on to the next one. I paid cash for that BMW sitting in the parking garage because I’ve learned how to read people,” Matt told his team during one of their last meetings. “I watch them. I see where they look, how they respond to the things I say. If they scratch their face or rub their nose or stay quiet, you need to take a different tack. Try something else. You’ve gotta sniff out a person’s trigger words, see what’ll catch their attention. Profit, entrepreneur, flexibility. Those are good hooks. If they’re maintaining eye contact, breathing fast, smiling and laughing a lot—reel ’em in.”
So he’d sat in the rangers’ station and answered all the questions the cops leveled at him, and he’d watched. He didn’t get the impression that they suspected him of anything, only that they were going through the motions. Two cops and a park ranger, writing down his responses. Standard procedure. “Accidents happen,” the ranger said, handing him a cup of coffee. “People fall out in the park, more than you’d think. And we’ve had a few people take a topple right off that same cliff. Even had a lady out here last year, a woman writing a piece for a magazine on accidental deaths out here in the park. If that’s not a perfect example of irony, I don’t know what is. It’s a fact of life out here. Dangerous hikes and inexperienced hikers are a bad combo.”
These people didn’t have a clue about how to be sympathetic.
Luckily, he didn’t need any sympathy.
“One of my units will take you back to your cabin tonight,” one of the two cops said. Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, that pretty much summed these guys up. “I know it’ll be tough, but you should try to get some sleep. We’ll be in touch, keep you updated about what we find.”
“I’d like to go out with you in the morning, if that’s all right,” Matt said, and he saw the cops exchange a look. At least neither of them was like ol’ Detective Reid, who’d smelled the guilt on him right away, who’d sat and stared while a cough drop rolled around in his mouth, knocking it against his dentures so it sounded like a stone in a rock tumbler. Matt still had nightmares of that sound, of the clink-clink that had almost driven him crazy. At least these cops weren’t like Reid.
“I don’t think you coming along is the best idea,” one of them said. “You need time to process what’s happened. And if we find something unpleasant—”
If they found Marie’s body, that’s what they meant. If she’d fallen from the cliff and splattered against the rocks instead of washing away in the river and her skull had cracked open like an egg, it would be unpleasant. But it wasn’t as if he hadn’t dealt with unpleasant before.
“I want to be there,” Matt said. “I need to be part of the search for my wife.”
“Why?”
Matt stared at the ranger.
“I’ve been married to Marie for over twenty years,” he said. Swallowed hard, so they could see it. So they’d think he was choking back tears. “I think I should be involved in looking for her.”
And I need to make sure she’s dead.
The cops looked at each other again, but there still wasn’t suspicion in their eyes. That was fine with him.
“Okay,” one finally said. “We’ll pick you up early to start the hike down to the base of the cliff.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Matt barely slept at all that night, just tossed and turned in the thin cotton sheets of the rental cabin, and when the cops came to pick him up they mentioned how tired he looked. How the bags under his eyes were so dark and the lines in his face were so deep. It hadn’t been grief for Marie that’d kept him up all night, although that’s what the cops thought, or even guilt. No, it was the anticipation. He’d felt the same way he did before a big presentation at work, or just before heading into a dentist’s appointment. It wasn’t exactly an unpleasant feeling, this buildup to the big moment, but a person could live without it.
The car ride into the park was a silent one. Too early for conversation, Matt supposed, or the cops were just being kind. Leaving him alone with his grief. Or maybe he was reading them wrong, and they were suspicious of him. They were letting the quiet drag out so his guilty conscience would catch up to him and he’d start babbling like an idiot.
His hand twitched at that idea, sloshing coffee over the side of the paper cup one of the cops had given him when he’d climbed inside. It splashed onto the leather seat and he mopped it up with his sleeve. The cop in the passenger seat looked around to see what was happening, then turned away when Matt gave him a nod. Did the cop turn just to look, because that was a normal thing to do, or because he thought Matt had shoved his wife off that cliff? Stupid, paranoid thoughts. You could see guilt anywhere if you looked hard enough, and Matt had thought he’d be fine this time, that this would be easier to deal with since he’d been through it before. Same shit, different day. But that wasn’t the case, not at all. It turns out guilt has a way of feeling fresh every damn time.
He hadn’t actually seen Marie fall—he’d closed his eyes when it happened, but it wasn’t as if he could close his ears. She’d screamed, shrieked, and then the sound had stopped so suddenly it might’ve been cut with a knife, and he’d guessed that’s when she’d hit the river. Or a rock. He could imagine her plunging under the surface, her mouth still wide open in a scream, sucking in the water and choking, unable to claw her way to the surface, her blood smoking up the water. Or maybe she was already dead before she went in, her skull fractured or her neck broken. But he had to be sure. He’d crept to the edge of the cliff after her scream, dropping to his hands and knees and crawling for the last foot or so because he didn’t like heights, never had. One good gust of wind could send him right off the edge himself, and where would that leave him? Nowhere except a hundred feet down, drowning in the churning river, as good as dead.
Like Marie?
He didn’t know. He hadn’t been able to see anything once he managed to poke his head over the edge, except for the black river rushing underneath. He’d told the cops that, and it was true. It was too dark by then to see much, especially from so high up, although it was easy to hear the rushing water, the lapping wet sounds it made as it roared underneath. Matt even thought he could feel the spray of it on his cheeks, but once he sat up and passed a hand over his face he realized it was sweat, cold and sickening. He was scared, sitting at the spot where his wife had gone over—the fear he felt then wasn’t caused by the height of the cliff; or the way the sky had gone the murky bluish-black of dusk except for the orange-red splash of color at the horizon; or even the thought of living the rest of his life without Marie. No, this fear was something he’d felt before, it was familiar in a way he didn’t like. It was a fear that crept up his throat, thick and choking, that made him short of breath and dizzy. He’d last felt this fear when he’d stumbled away from the house where he’d lived with Janice, the baking heat of the fire on his back.
What am I going to do now? That’d been his thought back then, and it was the same thing that came into his head as he sat on the cliff. He’d planned this, he’d prepared, and he’d put so much
thought into it, but it didn’t matter. What the fuck am I going to do now? He’d lived his whole life that way, it seemed. Always looking over his shoulder, worrying that his stupid decisions would come back to bite him in the ass, and here he was again. Full circle, back to where he’d started.
“We’re here,” one of the cops said as they pulled over, the nose of the car crowding into a copse of trees. They were at the parking lot at the bottom of the trail, the same spot they’d left the night before. Around and around, his life was full of circles. His stepfather used to say that all the time, and it’d stuck with him. Same shit, different day. His car was still there, locked up tight near the back of the lot, one of the rear tires dipping into a rut in the packed dirt. “We’ll start here and hike down to the cliff base.”
There were others already waiting for them. Another cop, and a few park rangers. Each of them looked at Matt and gave him a tight, quick smile or a nod and then walked on, starting the hike down to the bottom of the cliff. They kept Matt in the center of them as they walked.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
He hadn’t brought enough water, but the others were more prepared. One of the rangers fished a bottle out of her backpack and handed it to him when she noticed he was struggling.
“I didn’t think it’d take this long to get there,” he said. “It only took us about an hour and a half to get to the top.”
They’d been hiking for almost an hour by then, struggling through scraggly undergrowth and over piles of loose gravel and rock, and they didn’t seem any closer to the bottom than where they’d started. The trees were thick enough that the sky only peeked through over their heads occasionally, but it was still warm, even in the shade, even though it was just barely midmorning.