by David Bell
“What did she talk about, then?” Bill asked.
Caleb looked reluctant to speak, but he said, “She talked about Summer.”
“Why?”
Caleb raised his hand, asking Bill to calm down. “You understand I’m betraying confidences here. And Haley didn’t get specific. She just said she was concerned about her friend Summer, who I, of course, knew. She said something was bothering Summer, distracting her, but Haley didn’t know what it was. None of it was specific, and I think Haley was just worried about her friend. I told her she could talk to you or to someone at the school if she thought Summer was in a real crisis, but then Haley walked it back. She said she might be overreacting.”
“Did she think Summer wanted to run away?” Bill asked.
“She didn’t say that specifically, no.”
“And that was it?” Bill asked.
“Before you knew it, they had disappeared,” Caleb said. “And now this.” He made a helpless gesture in the direction of Haley’s room. “I told the police, and now I’m telling you.”
Bill leaned forward, resting his head in his hands. He felt the rough, chapped skin of his palms against his face. “Thank you,” he said, the words muffled.
Caleb nodded, staring at the floor. “I was glad to hear the detective say they were going to talk to Haley again. Next time, maybe, if I have any influence over it, I’m going to make sure only certain people are in the room. Bill, I’m really praying there’s more to the story with Haley.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Bill came home and found Paige sitting at the kitchen table. Her hair was piled on top of her head, and her glasses were down at the end of her nose. She stared at her laptop, a pad of paper and a pencil on the table beside her. When Bill came in, she slid the glasses off and looked up.
“Well? What happened? You’ve been gone for so long, and you didn’t call. I almost went to the hospital.”
Bill told her about barging into the room and seeing Haley’s condition, how wiped out and damaged she looked. As he talked, Paige lifted her hand to her chest. Then he told her about Caleb and the concerns Haley had raised about Summer.
“It matches what Anna, the counselor at school, shared with me,” Bill said. “Something was going on with Summer. Something she didn’t want to tell me. Of course there’s more to the story, but we don’t know that Haley knows anything about it. Or if that part of her brain is even still functioning.”
Bill went to the refrigerator and started poking around, but nothing looked good. The sight of anything—pasta, chicken, beef—made his stomach turn. His pants felt loose, and he guessed he’d lost five pounds or more. He gave up, shutting the refrigerator door louder than he intended.
“Do I get to know where you were in the middle of the night?” Paige asked.
Bill pulled a chair out and sat down across from her. He rested his head in his hands, his exhaustion catching up to him. “It was early in the morning, not the middle of the night. And I can’t just sit here every night and do nothing.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I don’t think I did any good,” he said. He felt uncomfortable in the seat and squirmed around. “I may even have done some harm.”
Paige waited, and when Bill didn’t say more, she slipped her glasses back on. “Well, I’ve been productive even if you weren’t.”
“Doing what?”
She looked at him over the top of the glasses and leveled her index finger at him. “You know, I should have known you were a sentimental fool. Most men like you are.”
“Men like me?”
“Hard and tough on the outside. Like Dad. Remember how he cried when I married Kyle? Out of the blue he’s standing there crying as he gives me away. Could you believe that?”
Bill remembered the moment. He’d never seen his father cry, never seen the old man show much emotion about anything. But when he placed Paige’s hand into Kyle’s in front of all their friends and family on her wedding day, he started sobbing. Not just a little sobbing either, but great heaving sobs that seemed to come from the center of his body, rocking his shoulders and his limbs as the tears fell. Their mom handed him a wad of tissues, and he settled down only as the ceremony went on.
And he never cried again in front of his children, not even when he told them he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
“I never asked him why he was so moved,” Bill said.
“Of course you wouldn’t. I didn’t either. He’s dead, and we never found out what he thought. Isn’t it shitty that we do that? We let people die without knowing what they’re really thinking.”
Bill felt unease creeping up his spine. “What does this have to do with me? It’s not going to be another round of ‘You’re Exactly Like Your Dad,’ is it? Julia played that game with me all the time. I hated it.”
Paige picked up the pencil and started tapping it against the table. “I got the clue when I saw Julia’s clothes back there.” She used the pencil to point toward the master bedroom. “Still.”
Bill rolled his eyes. “I knew that would come up again. Tell Kyle I feel sorry for him.” He stood, pushing the chair back with his knees. “I’m going to take a nap.”
Paige acted like he hadn’t moved, like he wasn’t irritated with the course of the conversation. “When you told me Julia called you twice on the day she died and how much that affected you, it got me thinking. Maybe she left messages, and if she did, wouldn’t my sentimental big brother save them?”
“Enough, Paige.”
“I saw the phone plugged into the wall in the study back there. I was wondering what you were doing in there the other day with the laptop when I startled you. Now, look, I know most cell phones save a voice mail for only thirty days, so you had to have some other way to save the messages. But why keep the phone plugged in? Why keep it going? Is it the same reason you kept her clothes? Nostalgia? Romance?” Paige reached over and took out her phone. “I still have the old number in my contacts. I never delete anything.” She pressed a button on the screen, and the faint sound of the phone ringing came from the other room. “You kept the line active. You’re paying to have that phone on for sentimental reasons.”
“Paige. Let it go.”
“Isn’t that expensive?”
“It’s a family plan. Okay?”
Bill turned and started for the bedroom. He knew if he stayed, he’d say or do something he’d regret. He kind of wished they were young enough for him to whack her on the knuckles with a stick all over again.
“It doesn’t matter why you did it. What matters is the account is still active. You said you didn’t know if Adam answered the call that day,” she said, making Bill stop at the end of the hall. He turned back to face her. “But I know. I have the answer right here.”
She spun her laptop around so it faced Bill.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Bill stared at her and the smugly confident grin she wore. She looked like she always did when they were kids and she’d managed to outsmart or prove her older brother wrong on some matter. He wanted to resume walking away but couldn’t.
So Bill started back across the room toward the kitchen table.
“What are you talking about?” he asked as he came closer. He stopped in front of the laptop and stared at the screen. It was a list. Dates and times on one side, locations down the middle. On the right were numbers in a minute-and-second format. “What is this?”
“It’s your cell phone statement for the month Julia died.”
Bill’s eyes darted around the screen, trying to take in the information. “How did you get this on your computer?”
“I called the cell phone company.”
“And?”
She swallowed her words a little. “It took some finagling. Don’t be mad, but I told them I was Julia. I said I’d forgotten my password. All I needed w
as the last four digits of her social, which I found in your office back there. I knew the rest—her birthday and address. I had to talk to a supervisor. Normally it takes longer, but we struck up a rapport. We talked about being the mothers of boys. Anyway, she sent me a PDF.”
Bill straightened up. He took two steps away from the table. “I don’t want to know about this.” He looked out the window in the direction of Adam’s house. It sat quiet and dark, the yard empty. For all he knew, his friend had moved out already, leaving the house behind to be sold by his employer. “Nothing good can come of this.”
“You’ve been beating yourself up over this for a year,” Paige said. “You should know what was going on with Julia when she died.” Paige reached around and tapped the screen. “Look there on the day she died. September nineteenth, in the afternoon. She did make the two phone calls to you. And then the one to Adam. See?”
Bill kept his distance for a moment, but then his curiosity, his intense, burning curiosity—and his guilt—compelled him forward. He leaned down and looked at the screen. It took a moment to find the correct date and time—a date he knew very well—and then he saw the calls. Two short ones in a row to his number.
And then one to Adam’s number.
A longer call. One minute and twenty-seven seconds.
“Okay,” Bill said. “I don’t know what this means.”
“Adam said he didn’t take the call, right? But the call to him lasted almost a minute and a half. The ones to you, in which Julia left messages, lasted about twenty seconds.”
Bill felt something burning in the back of his throat. Bile. The kind of sour taste that emerged just before vomiting. He pulled the chair out and sat back down. “Why are you doing this?” he asked, his voice slightly louder. “So she called Adam, and the call lasted longer. Maybe she didn’t hang up right away. Maybe she fell as the voice mail picked up and so the line stayed engaged longer. It could be anything.”
“I guess,” Paige said. “But maybe not. Likely not. Look, Mr. Rough and Ready might be lying about this. You said yourself that things weren’t great with you and Julia, that you thought she might have been . . . involved in some way with someone else. You said she talked about how dreamy he is. Shouldn’t you know what was really going on with your wife when she died?”
Bill closed his eyes. They were sitting just a few feet away from where Julia had fallen. Like everything with Summer right then—yes, he wanted to know, but he wasn’t sure he could handle it once he did.
He reached out, keeping his temper under control, and closed the lid of the laptop.
“I can’t,” he said.
“I thought about going over there myself, before you came home, but I thought that would be really weird.”
“Forget it, Paige. Just forget it.” He sat at the table, taking care to keep his voice steady and calm. And he did. “And I think it’s best if you just go now.”
Paige looked confused. “Go where?”
“Home,” he said. “It’s time. You’ve been here long enough, and your family needs you. Just go.”
“Bill—”
“You’ve done a lot for me. And I appreciate it. But you’re always digging into things and bringing things up that are better left alone. I just think it’s time for everything to start getting back to normal around here. And I can’t handle any more of your bullshit.”
He stood up, turning his back on his sister as he walked toward the bedroom.
“That’s it, Bill? You’re just going to walk away from me? From knowing the truth about something you care about?”
Bill stopped once again at the entrance to the hallway, but he didn’t bother to turn around. “Thanks, Paige. I mean it. Thanks.”
As he started back toward the bedroom, Paige said, “You’re turning your back on her again, you know. You’re doing it again.”
But Bill just kept on walking.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Bill managed to sleep for two hours that afternoon, and then wished he hadn’t. He’d dreamed of Julia telling him that she and Adam had been having an affair since before she and Bill met. Even in the dream, Bill knew it was impossible for that to be true—he and Julia met before they ever knew Adam—but the pain of her words still pierced him, and he woke up with tears in his eyes.
He splashed water on his face in the bathroom. The house sounded quiet. Just the soft chirping of a few birds outside, and the staccato shots from a staple gun as a neighbor’s new roof was installed.
Bill wandered down the hallway and out to the front of the house. He checked the second bathroom. The vanity was clear, no sign of Paige’s toothbrush and lotions.
In the family room, the afghan she’d curled up with was neatly folded on the couch, the suitcase she’d been living out of gone. So was her car.
Bill felt as empty as a gutted fish. Well, he thought, you drove her away too.
Even before Summer disappeared, he worried about life without her. Would he be one of those lonely old men, the kind who spent his final years shuffling around an empty house, unshaven, smelly? Alone. Kids grew up and moved away. Summer hadn’t shown any interest in staying in Jakesville, not since she was a little girl. She already spoke of college, already wanted to attend in another state. New York. California. And Bill hadn’t felt any desire to meet anyone else or remarry. He hadn’t even thought of going on a date over the past year and a half.
He knew Paige would always be there for him, no matter how many times he literally or metaphorically smacked her with a stick, but she lived far away, with her own life and her own problems.
He walked over to the couch and ran his hand across the afghan Paige had used. The kitchen was clean, the dishes washed and put away.
Bill was alone. And he couldn’t stand it.
He went to the closet, pulling the door open so hard, he stumbled back a little. He ignored—tried to ignore—Summer’s coats, zeroing in on his own. He yanked it off the hanger and pulled it on, the sleeve sticking on his watch, forcing Bill to tug several times before the sleeve slid up his arm.
He searched for his keys. He had no idea where to go or what to do, but he refused to sit still. And wait. And wait.
He found the keys and went to the back door. A face stared back at him. Bill cried out, a high, squeaking sound, and took a step back before he saw who it was. He recognized the sad, slouched posture, the stick-thin frame.
Taylor Kress.
She wore the same clothes as the night before and stood on the porch with her arms folded across her chest, the Bengals sweatshirt pulled tight around her body.
Bill let her in. Taylor smelled even more strongly of cigarette smoke and maybe booze. She looked as fragile and frightened as a child, and Bill wasn’t certain what to do for her.
“I’m on my way out, Taylor,” he said.
“Where are you headed?” she asked, her voice rough and low.
Bill felt compelled to be honest with her. “I don’t know. Looking, I guess. Looking for Summer.” He lifted his hands, the keys jangling. “Just driving around, maybe. She’s out there, and I hate just sitting and waiting.”
Taylor nodded. The lines on her face seemed more pronounced, the burden of years pressing down on her. “It’s a helpless feeling,” she said. Then she added, almost casually, “The cops keep calling me. They need Emily’s dental records, I guess.”
She stood just inside the door with her arms folded, a defensive posture that apparently had nothing to do with the cold outside. Bill reached out, placing his hand on her shoulder and giving it a light squeeze. Taylor nodded some more, her eyes cast at the floor, but she didn’t say anything.
“So why don’t you just give them the records?” Bill asked, having waited as long as he could stand.
Taylor’s chin quivered. “I’m scared. I want to know, but then again . . .”
“You d
on’t.”
“You get it.” She looked up, her eyes full of tears. “I came to town all full of piss and vinegar, ready to find out what happened to Emily. Ready to get after Doug. Now . . .”
“Now what?”
“It’s hard. I was married to him. I loved him. Doug. He cared about Emily. He did.”
“Would you like to come in?” Bill asked. “I have food people have been bringing me. Or coffee.”
“Thank you,” she said.
They walked to the kitchen, and Taylor slumped into a chair at the table. Paige would have known what to do. She would have embraced Taylor Kress, pulled her close, and let the woman cry on her shoulder for as long as she wanted. Bill looked around the kitchen, scrambling in his mind for something that would help.
“What would you like to eat? Macaroni and cheese? Ham? I think eating something can help us feel better.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Coffee?”
Taylor looked around the room, her brown eyes large and slightly protruding. “Do you have something stronger? I could use something stronger.”
Bill went to the cabinet and brought down the bottle of George Dickel and a glass. “Ice?”
Taylor shook her head, so he poured her a shot.
“None for you?” she asked.
“Not right now.”
Taylor shrugged, a gesture that said, Suit yourself. She threw back the shot. She ran her arm across her mouth, using the sleeve of the sweatshirt to absorb the liquid on her lips.
“Is there someone I can call for you, Taylor?” Bill asked. “Do you have any family nearby? A friend?”
“No. I’m going to head home soon. I have a life back there.” Her hand slid over to her glass. She picked it up and looked inside. “Can I get another of these?”