“I don’t understand any of this, how the jacket got to the cabin, the odd things that have happened at the house, the phone calls—” she looked up sharply “—and please don’t tell me again that I’m imagining things because I know what I know, what I heard. Those calls happened.”
“Maybe tomorrow you’ll get some answers.” Kate stirred the milk.
“Nothing I want.” Abby realized now that her hope that Lindsey was alive had begun to loosen. Something warned her. Her instinct knew it wasn’t possible.
“No,” Kate agreed. “Probably not.”
A long note of silence between them filled with the brush of the spoon circling the pan.
Abby hugged herself. “One thing I know for sure, my marriage was in a lot more trouble than I thought.”
“Based on what?” Kate turned from the stove. “What that weirdo Hank says? He’s crazy, Abby. He’s got issues. I mean, really—people faking their deaths? Do you really think Nick would do something like that? When he had Lindsey with him? There’s no way. She’d never go along with it in any case.”
Abby was surprised. “You’re defending him?”
“I might not be Nick’s biggest fan, but I know he loved his children. He wouldn’t hurt them. You don’t think he would, do you?”
“I wouldn’t have. Maybe I wouldn’t now if it weren’t for Lindsey’s call. I’m talking about the one she made from the gas station in Boerne. She sounded scared, even hysterical.”
“I thought you weren’t sure.”
Abby rubbed her eyes. “I’m not. I go back and forth. I drive myself nuts. It’s like this special corner of hell I live in.”
Kate attended to the milk.
“She memorized Nick’s closing argument.”
Kate switched off the burner and looked askance at Abby.
“The one he made at the end of the Helix Belle trial. Hank told me Sondra knew it by heart. Jake and I were in court that day; Nick was fantastic. His argument might well have won the whole thing, but I couldn’t quote a word of it to you now.”
“Abby, honestly, so what? You were there for him. You supported him. You were a good wife.”
She didn’t answer. It wore on her to remember how little she had made of Nick’s performance, his victory. Looking back, all she could see was his vulnerability in the wake of the accusations that had been made against him, and how much he had needed her, and she had turned her back. She’d left him alone. Left him for someone else to find and comfort.
“Come on, Abby. Sondra sounds like she’s as big a lunatic as Hank. She was a stripper, for God’s sake. Would Nick go for someone like that? Besides, he adored you.”
Abby thought of the photographs of Sondra, beautiful and elegant. “Well, she looks a whole lot better than me in a bikini.”
“Oh, Abby.” Kate’s whisper was full of regret.
The scope of the mystery, and her own failure to question any of the troubling signs that had led up to it, was too much to bear. Abby lowered her forehead to her crossed arms. She would never forgive herself if she learned Nick had involved their daughter, if he had taken Lindsey into this mess. But what was the mess? What would Dennis find in that car tomorrow?
Abby felt Kate drop into the chair beside her and scoot close. She felt Kate’s arm come around her and Kate’s cheek against her hair, and they sat together for a while, hip to hip in the dim silence. Because there weren’t words but only presence, only Abby’s fear and her grief and Kate’s love to receive them.
* * *
It was late in the afternoon, and Abby was alone in the great room staring from the window when the phone rang. She heard George pick up in the kitchen. Jake and Hank were in there, too, Abby thought, having a sandwich. Kate was unloading the dishwasher, but that clatter stopped abruptly. Abby rested her forehead against the window. She felt empty of everything, even the sense of waiting. But as moments passed, she became impatient. What were they doing? Abby straightened. Whispering. She could hear them, and she started across the room.
George appeared in the doorway. “It’s Dennis,” he said and held the cordless phone out to Abby, his big, work-roughened hand shaking, his face crumpled with sadness and concern.
She wanted to say something to reassure him, but the most she could manage was to take the phone. “Dennis?” she said.
“Abby, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s my car, you’re sure?”
“It’s a Cherokee, same make and model. The license plates are a match.” He paused, then continued. “Abby, from the clothing and so forth, it appears there was one adult male and one young female inside.”
A sound came, a low moan. Abby flattened her hand over her mouth. Her eyes found Jake’s, who along with Hank and Kate had joined George. Kate brought her arm around Jake’s waist. Abby saw his shoulders heave and closed her eyes. Dennis was talking about the remains.
She interrupted him. “I want to see them.”
“You really don’t,” he said gently. “You shouldn’t.”
“There’s nothing to see, is there?”
“No. I’m sorry. It’s a long time now since the flood.”
She returned to the window, bending her head to it. As recently as last week, yesterday, in the minutes before Dennis’s call, she’d had hope, slim as it was. Now she had nothing. Just the endless agony of questions and the more agonizing reality that she would never see Lindsey again. Her beloved daughter, her darling girl, was gone. Abby’s heart shuddered. She clenched her teeth fighting the cry that rose. If she gave in to it now, if she allowed the enormity of her loss to overtake her, it would break her in half.
“The adult in the car is definitely male,” Dennis said, “and there is definitely only the one.”
Abby heard Dennis repeat himself; she registered the note of disbelief in his voice, but she didn’t hold on to it.
“If you need anything,” he went on when Abby didn’t respond, “you or Jake....”
“Thank you,” she managed to say. “We’ll be fine. At least it’s over. At least now we know where they are and we can bring them home.” Abby glanced at Hank.
Dennis explained what the procedure would be from here, and Abby picked out certain words like coroner and morgue. She got the impression there were legal obligations to be fulfilled. He made certain Abby had both his cell phone and office numbers in case she had questions and elicited a promise from her that she would keep in touch. He said, “I’ll let you know when the lab results are ready.”
She thanked him and ended the call quickly, set down the phone and cleared her throat. Composing herself, steeling herself. But Jake looked so beaten, so defeated and sad, it almost undid her. She went to him and held him, murmured things she would never remember, and then Kate came, and George, and the four of them huddled together, but Hank stood apart. Abby felt badly for him. “They didn’t find Sondra,” she told him. “She and Nick weren’t together, after all. We were mistaken.”
Hank didn’t say anything; no one did.
A frisson of unease snaked up her spine. “Oh, my God! Jake, I’m so sorry.” She took his hand. “I should have told you. I was going to, but you were so tired last night and I...When I was at the cabin yesterday, I found your dad’s jacket and I thought maybe he was—”
“I know.”
“What? How?” Abby looked at Kate. “You told him? That’s what all the whispering was in the kitchen, wasn’t it?”
Kate started to answer, but Jake talked over her. “I already knew, Mom. I heard you and Aunt Kate talking last night.”
Abby said she was sorry again, that she hadn’t meant for him to find out that way. “I thought your dad and Sondra were—I was wrong, though.” She laughed and put her fingertips to her mouth. Her relief didn’t feel right. She didn’t feel right. Her knees were weak. She
wanted to sit down, but Jake was watching her with such—was it pity? Fear? Remorse? Something felt so off, so peculiar.
He said, “But if it’s Dad’s jacket—”
“It is.”
“Then how did it get there?”
“He knew Sondra,” Abby said. “She was working for Judge Payne when your dad filed the suit against Helix Belle, so I imagine they knew each other pretty well. He must have loaned it to her. It’s possible, isn’t it? Then I was thinking about when he came out here to Bandera last winter. Sondra might have come with him or met him there. I know Kate says she didn’t see her, but suppose when he mentioned the bit about property, he was referring to Sondra’s cabin? She told Hank she wanted to sell it, and maybe she hired your dad to look into doing that. She thought so much of him.” Abby stopped. She gave her head a slight shake. She wanted this to make sense, to come together, and it wouldn’t.
She glanced at Hank. He looked sick. Beyond hangover sick, she thought. He had wanted closure and didn’t find it. His sister Kim wanted Sondra’s dead body, and she hadn’t gotten what she wanted either. Abby was sorry for them. But they had nothing to do with her. Sondra had nothing to do with her.
“Mom? I think we probably have to face the facts.” Jake said this tentatively, but then he stepped toward her as if he meant to force the issue.
She twisted away. “I’ll call Nina. She’ll know about Sondra. Nina can look in Nick’s files, find his notes. Under the circumstances, I don’t think confidentiality will apply, but if it does, Dennis can get a court order, don’t you think? Isn’t that how it’s done?” She waved her hand. Abracadabra...
No one answered; no one looked at her. Abby’s stomach knotted.
Hank said he should leave.
Kate offered an invitation to dinner; he turned it down. Abby followed him out of the house, matching his quick, impatient stride. She wanted to let him go, to leave it alone, but she couldn’t. Not until he spoke to her, not until he looked her in her face and admitted he had been wrong about Nick and Sondra. Shouldn’t he do that much after all his accusations and drama? He’d put his hand through a window, for God’s sake, over nothing.
“Hank?” she called after him. “I’m very sorry you don’t know where your wife is, but I can’t help but be relieved that she wasn’t with my husband and daughter.”
He stopped and looked at her, and she saw his pity for her and his contempt. “Sondra was fucking your husband, Abby. I know it in my gut, just like I know they were together when the car crashed. I don’t know why her body wasn’t found with his today. Maybe she was thrown out; maybe some animal got her, but she was damn sure there when they wrecked, I know she was. I know she’s as dead as he is.”
“But why do you want to believe that? You should be thrilled. You could still find her.”
“Not alive. Ask them.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the house. “Ask your son. He knows the truth. They all know. The sheriff, too. The only reason they won’t tell you is because they don’t think you can take it.” Hank went around to the driver’s side of his car and started to get in, then he squinted at her through the metallic glare off the car’s roof. “Take your little theory about the jacket, that crap about how your husband loaned it to Sondra. Sometime last winter, you said, a jacket he didn’t have until Christmas Day, I might add, and then what? You’re the one who swears you saw it in a closet at home in May. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
“No,” Abby said, but she did see, and she clenched her teeth against it. “Nick would not have involved Lindsey—”
Hank stabbed his skull with his index finger. “Think about it. If Sondra wore the jacket to the cabin last winter, how did it get back into your closet where you saw it last summer?”
He waited, but Abby didn’t answer; she wouldn’t. She hated him, the disgust so evident in his eyes, the curl of his lip.
“That coat didn’t get into the cabin on Sondra’s back, Abby. It went in on your husband’s back. He didn’t come out here in April to go camping with your daughter. He came out here to meet my wife and maybe even Sandoval. Hell, they could have all been in that car together. We’ll probably never know.”
Abby shook her head vehemently.
“Fine, don’t believe me. But you might want to go back inside and ask your son about the woman he saw with his dad in February.”
“What woman?”
“The same one your husband was seen with again last April at the gas station in Boerne.”
“There was no woman. Someone—the sheriff would have told me,” Abby said. “You’re crazy.”
“Oh, yes, there was. And just like every other fucking guy in the world, the kid behind the counter couldn’t keep his eyes off her. It was Sondra. He described her to a fucking T. He got a good long look. He told the sheriff he saw her get into your Jeep, Abby, and he never saw her get out.”
“You’re a liar, Hank! I feel sorry for you.” But doubt riddled her words; the bitter taste of it coated the margins of her throat.
He started to get into his car now, and Abby felt a rush of relief. Then he paused as if there was more he wanted to say, but she shook her head, warding him off. Ducking into his car, he drove away.
Dust from his tires drifted in his wake as lightly as feathers. Abby took several steps toward the house, walking blind. It would come together if she looked at it; if she paused for one moment to consider. If she were to turn around now, she would see the facts, the cruel reality lingering in that drift of dust. And now, abruptly, as if it were there, a physical entity that clubbed her from behind, she bent at the waist, braced her hands on her knees. Her breath came in shallow spurts; her heart swelled painfully against her ribs. She thought it might burst. She prayed that it would and kill her. She was a fool, that was the “something more” Hank had wanted to say to her.
She thought of the looks she’d been getting from Jake and from Kate and George; she thought of their odd silences and the ways she had been manipulated, even patronized. They had treated her as if she were incompetent and weak. She straightened, eyeing the house. Her brain felt on fire. She was hardly aware of climbing the stairs, flinging open the kitchen door hard enough that it bounced off the wall. The three of them, Kate, George and Jake, broke apart from where they’d been gathered at the window as if they could somehow make it appear they hadn’t been watching her every move. “You knew,” she said.
No one answered. Seconds passed. They might have been frozen.
Finally, Jake said in a low voice, “I didn’t want to tell you, Mom. I didn’t want you to be hurt anymore.”
“You saw them in February? Where?” Abby’s throat was so tightened by grief, by her fury and disbelief, that she scarcely knew how the words could pass.
“At his office.” The words tumbled out of Jake. “You know how much Dad liked it when I went there. It always put him in a good mood.”
“You needed money.”
“Yeah, and I figured if I asked him for it there, he wouldn’t yell at me like he did at home.”
“So?”
“So I’m in the parking garage going to the elevator and I see them in Dad’s Beamer and they’re like—” Jake reddened “—all over each other.”
“Did they see you?”
“I didn’t think so, but then Dad came after me and caught me on the road. He tried to play it off that it was all her. He said she was, like, obsessed with him. He said he was only trying to reason with her. It was shit. He was lying.” Jake’s voice broke.
“You lied to me! I asked you and you lied. How could you?”
“I knew it would kill you, Mom, but you can’t let it. Okay? You can’t let him win.”
She didn’t answer.
“I told you to go home, to leave it alone.” He was accusing her now. “Why didn’t you?”
/> “Because I have to know the truth.” Abby looked at Kate. “You saw them together, too, and you told George, but not me.” She laughed. “It’s true what they say about wives being the last to know.”
Jake’s eyes shone with tears. “I thought you had it figured out, Mom, I really did when I heard you found his jacket.”
“Obviously, I’m an idiot. I didn’t want to believe it, to think he could do that to me, to us.” Abby bit her lips. She was sorry for Jake. Sorry for them both, but she was too angry to comfort him. “You should have told me, Jake. And you—” Abby raised her finger at Kate “—you knew last winter. How could you? But then why should I wonder? You’ve done it to me before.”
“That’s enough, Abby.” George said it gently, but clearly he meant it. He went to his wife’s side.
Jake took Abby’s arm. He wanted her to stop, but he didn’t understand. He didn’t know the history she and Kate shared. She shook free of him and confronted Kate. George put out his hand. Abby ignored it. “Has it occurred to you that if you’d had the courtesy to tell me you saw Nick with that woman last December, I could have done something about it?”
“I didn’t—”
“That was such a sweet story you told me, that he was looking at land for us. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if you knew the whole time what he was up to, that he was helping Sondra sell that cabin. I’m sure it’s worth a fortune, more than enough to finance their getaway.” Abby’s laugh was harsh. “Too bad for them Mother Nature had other plans.”
“Oh, Abby, don’t you think you’re way out on a limb—”
“No! The gas station attendant saw them together. Hank said he identified her.”
“That’s an overstatement, Abby,” George said. He added something about Lindsey, the bit about how Nick wouldn’t have taken her. He said, “Don’t you remember? The kid described Lindsey to Dennis, too, but he couldn’t say that he saw her with Nick.”
Abby heard George. She registered the rationality of his argument, but she was too seized by the fruit of her bitter imaginings to grasp that he was offering her another alternative, a different outcome, worse or better, from the one she was bent on believing, which was that Kate had betrayed her, and she, Abby, had allowed it to happen—again. “You did this,” she told Kate. “If you had only picked up the phone and called me, if you had told me you saw Nick with another woman, I would never have let Lindsey go with him. My daughter would be home now and safe—”
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