by Nic Joseph
I swallowed and tried to push the guilt away as he leaned in for a kiss.
• • •
I couldn’t sleep, and I got up an hour later and walked out into the living room. I checked my phone and saw that I’d missed a call from an unknown number.
I also had a Skype message. I sucked in a breath when I read it.
Mrs. Wileson. It’s Dr. Reveno. Ruby Bryant gave me your phone number and told me about your husband. I’d love to talk with you soon. You can give me a call back here.
I pressed his name immediately to call him back.
I almost cursed out loud when a man answered the phone, his voice low and sleepy.
“Hello?”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. You were asleep.”
There was a pause, and then I heard some shuffling.
“Hello?” he said again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Is this Dr. Reveno?”
There was another pause, and I had to assume he was looking more closely at the screen, because a moment later, he spoke up, his voice a hair clearer. “Yes, it is. Mrs. Wileson?”
“I’m so sorry,” I said again. “The time change didn’t occur to me. I just called you back as soon as I saw your note. It must be, what, 4:00 a.m.?”
“Five,” he said, but there was no annoyance in his voice. “I’m glad you called. Dr. Bryant told me about your husband and his case. Fascinating to hear. Have you heard much about what it is I do and the new procedure that we’re working on out here?”
“Yes, Dr. Bryant told me about it, and I did some research online,” I said, feeling the hope rise in my chest. It was surreal to actually be talking to him after all this time.
And for the surgery to be a real possibility.
“Well, from everything Ruby has told me, it sounds like your husband might be a great candidate. I would need to meet him in person of course, to know for sure, but in the meantime, I could make some assessments based on his charts if he agrees to have them released to me.”
I nodded and then, realizing he couldn’t see me, spoke. “Yes,” I said. “You can email me whatever it is you need him to sign to release them, and I’ll get him to do it. I know he’ll be more than happy to get a review from you.”
“Sure thing,” he said. “I’m happy to do it. And then we’ll need to work on getting you guys out here as soon as possible. I’m really excited about this. It could be a real game changer, not just for you and your husband, but for our field.”
“As soon as possible?”
“Well, I’m sure you’ve read that the surgery needs to take place within the first eighteen months after injury. When did the accident occur?”
“A year ago,” I said, feeling the blood drain from my face. “I must have missed that.”
As I said the words, I felt any traces of the guilt I’d felt earlier disappear.
We were running out of time.
Chapter 14
Claire
The Night in Question
Claire stood outside the second-floor apartment and watched as two men carried the covered body of Beverly Brighton down the stairs.
It was a painful moment, the narrowness of the staircase making it hard for them to turn the corner onto the second-floor landing. There were four other people in the hallway, but they all stopped talking and observed an unplanned moment of silence while the men completed their work.
As she waited, Claire thought about what she’d learned so far. There were a few things that stood out right away.
One, someone had broken the glass at the back of the building to make it look like an intruder had entered the building that way. That was the most concerning piece of evidence she had for one simple reason: the only reason to make it look like someone had broken in was if the person responsible for Beverly’s death had already been inside the building.
That narrowed her suspects down to six people: Meggie Bentley and her boyfriend, Patrick; Emma Bentley; Andrew Brighton, the husband; Joshua Burlap, the store owner; and the artist with the red shoe. They’d all left at different times. Any one of them could have waited in the building and confronted Beverly in the hallway.
But why?
The broken glass also told her that the murder hadn’t been planned; the botched cover-up job would’ve immediately been ruled out if the killer had taken even a moment to think about it. No, it was a messy, last-minute attempt to cover up Beverly’s murder, which only cemented Claire’s suspicion that the crime was closer to home than the killer wanted them to think.
Was it a crime of passion?
An accident?
The interviews she’d conducted so far had been telling as well. Unless she was a great actor, Emma Bentley seemed truly shaken up about her friend’s death. And she’d seemed a bit too eager to name Patrick as a potential suspect; Claire had the sense that the woman wasn’t the biggest fan of her sister’s boyfriend. Meggie Bentley hadn’t done a great job hiding her dislike for the victim, but then again, she hadn’t really been trying to. And then there was Andrew Brighton, who’d apparently spent the last hour hanging over a toilet bowl. Pretty accurate reaction for what he’d been through that night, but was there more to it than that?
The men had successfully navigated Beverly’s body around the last corner and were heading down to the first floor. Claire closed her notebook and moved toward the staircase. As she did, she heard someone call her name.
“Puhl?”
It was Greg, and Claire looked over the bannister to see him peering up at her from the first floor. He waited for the two men to pass him and then jogged quickly up the steps toward her.
“Yes?” Claire said as he reached the landing.
“The building is locked up pretty tight. There are three ways to get into it. The front door, the back door, and up the back staircase, which takes you into the back door of each unit. That backyard has a locked gate, which requires a code to be opened up from the outside.”
“Is there a way to determine if that system was used tonight?”
“Yep. We’ve already reached out to the landlord,” he said. “Oh, and we found the brick that was used to smash the window. It was lying in a puddle of mud, so don’t think we’re going to find any prints on it, but we’ll see.”
“Good.” Claire nodded her head up the stairs. “I’m going to go speak with the husband.”
She walked just as carefully up the stairs as she had the first time. With the body gone, it was easier to see the splotches of blood that had seeped into the carpet and stained the wall near the top of the stairwell. Claire sidestepped each stain and frowned when he saw something on the carpet.
At first, it looked like blood, another one of the deep-red swipes that seemed to be everywhere in the staircase.
But she leaned closer and saw that the color was just a little bit off; the hue was darker and richer than the rest.
“There’s something on the floor here,” Claire said as she stepped into the third-floor apartment.
One of the investigators looked up and nodded before walking over to examine it.
Claire spotted Andrew Brighton right away. He was tall and stocky, with brown hair cut low to hide the fact that it was thinning at the temples. He was sitting by himself as the officers walked around the apartment looking for evidence.
“Mr. Brighton,” she said, and he looked up. “I’m Detective Claire Puhl. I’m wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”
Andrew blinked and stared at her for a few seconds before responding.
“Okay,” he said robotically.
“I’m so incredibly sorry for your loss tonight,” Claire said. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through. I just have a few questions to ask you so that we can do everything we can to figure out what happened to your wife.”
“You want to question me because
you think I might have done it.” He said it matter-of-factly, with little emotion in his voice.
Claire swallowed. People reacted differently to tragedy, and while Andrew’s response wasn’t uncommon, it still made her raise an eyebrow. “I’m just trying to get the most information I can to find out what happened.”
“They’re all treating me like I’m a suspect,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken. “Like I could’ve done…” He trailed off and looked at the open door. After a moment, he swallowed and then looked back at Claire. “Like I could have done this.”
“May I ask what you do for a living, Mr. Brighton?” Claire asked. “I know that Beverly was a lawyer.”
“I’m a gym teacher at North Side College Prep,” he said, looking down at a large class ring on his finger. He spun it around in a circle a few times. “That’s where Bev and I met. High school sweethearts.” He shook his head.
“Can you tell me about what time your wife left Emma Bentley’s dinner party?”
“She left around midnight.”
“And you stayed?”
“Yes,” he said. “I was talking to the kid, Patrick.”
“What time did you come upstairs?” Claire asked.
“Not much longer after she left. Forty-five minutes? An hour? I know I was up here by one.”
“Patrick and Meggie say they were the last ones there. And they left at twelve forty-five.”
He blinked and then shrugged. “So maybe it was less than that. I left right before them.”
“Did you see what time the artist left? Chris?”
He frowned for a moment and then shook his head. “No, but I think it was before me. I went to grab one more beer, and when I came back into the living room, she was already gone.”
“What was your wife doing when you got upstairs?”
“She was in the shower when I got home,” he said. “She had this thing about showering before bed. She always thought it was so gross to get into the bed if you hadn’t showered for the night.”
“What happened after that?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I was lying in the bed while she was in the shower. I remember that. I had a lot to drink tonight, as you may have been told. That’s the thing about living in the same place where your friends live. You tend to overindulge because you know that you don’t have far to get home.”
He swayed a little in the chair, and I realized that he was still recovering from whatever it was he’d had to drink. The news of his wife’s death had obviously been sobering but not nearly enough.
“The responding officer said that he had a hard time waking you up. Did you wake up anytime before he arrived?”
Andrew nodded. “Once. And I’ve been trying to rack my brain about it, but it’s so damned fuzzy.”
“What do you mean?” Claire asked.
“I woke up once because I heard Bev talking out in the living room.”
Claire frowned. “What time was it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and Claire could see the frustration on his face. “I don’t know if it was as I was falling asleep or sometime later. But I heard her talking to someone.”
“Was it a man or a woman?”
“It was a man’s voice,” he said. “I called out, and I think she said it was Emma, but looking back, I don’t think it was.”
“You sure you can’t remember what time it was?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I can’t,” he said, and his voice cracked. “I wish I could, but it’s all so fuzzy. To be honest, there’s a part of me that thinks I could’ve dreamt it.”
Chapter 15
Paula
Two days before
Ryan Hooks, the very famous singer I was desperately trying to blackmail, finally called me at 3:34 a.m. on Thursday.
It took my brain a few minutes to break through the fog of sleep, recognize that the melodious sound filling my head was coming from my cell phone, register that it was from an unknown number, and understand that it might be him.
It might be him!
I bolted upright, my fingers fumbling over the small, screaming rectangle on my nightstand until I had it firmly gripped in my hands. I flipped the small switch on the side to silence it and rolled over onto my side, my back to Keith. He shifted too, either from the noise or the light, but a second later, I heard his deep, measured breaths as he settled back into sleep.
My chest was tight, and breaths flooded out of my body in ragged, unnaturally loud spurts. I stared at the screen as it lit up the dark room. I was used to getting unknown calls, but never at this time of night—it seemed that the telemarketers knew better than that.
They wouldn’t call this late.
It had to be him.
I took a deep breath and swiped my finger across the screen to answer the call. With shaky hands, I raised the phone to my ear before whispering into it.
“Hello?”
There was silence, the quietest, heaviest silence I’d ever heard in my life, and I felt suddenly panicked at the void on the other end of the line. With all that open space pressed so close to my face, I felt vulnerable, exposed. When I spoke again, my voice sounded hollow and shaky to my own ears.
“Hello? Is someone there?”
Still no response, but I heard something, maybe the rustling of a headset or someone shifting in their seat. It was enough for me to know that there was indeed someone there, quietly listening to my frantic breaths. I opened my mouth wide in an attempt to silence myself.
With the phone still pressed against my ear, I rolled slowly out of bed and tiptoed toward the bedroom door. My legs felt wobbly as I crossed through the threshold and headed out toward the living room. Shelby stirred a little but remained quiet as I sat down on the couch.
And then I waited.
Or rather, we waited.
He was there—I knew it with every single bone in my body—yet neither of us spoke for ten seconds, and then another ten, and another. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to say anything, that he’d called at three thirty in the morning and was just going to sit there in silence, I felt my breathing slow and my nervousness turn to annoyance, then anger. I cleared my throat and finally spoke again, my voice low, calm, and steadier than I expected.
“Ryan, I know you’re there.”
I heard him suck in a deep breath, and then he responded almost immediately.
“Okay.”
That was it. Two syllables, his voice rough, gravelly, defiant. Then there was silence again.
I waited with the phone still pressed against my face, my chest rising and falling with each breath. I ground my jaw stubbornly, determined not to give in again, determined to sit there all damned night if I had to—
“You’re going to have to start,” he said suddenly.
I sat up straighter. It was just six words, but in them, I could feel all the anger and rage I’d seen on his face the night of the concert. I felt my stubbornness slip, if only slightly, as I tried to figure out what exactly it was that needed to be said.
I swallowed. “Okay,” I said quietly. I shifted on the couch, folding my legs beneath me, and stared at a particularly shiny spot on the glass coffee table that was catching the moonlight in just the right way. The absurdity of the moment wasn’t lost on me, but I forced myself to push forward.
“Well, thanks for calling,” I began. “I know this is…crazy, and I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. And I know this isn’t an easy conversation to have, and I just want to say that, for the record, none of this is about judgment for anything that’s going on or, you know, I can’t speak to the, um, relationship that you have with Emma or your wife or anything like that, but it would be completely out of place for me to comment on that. That’s not what this is about—”
“Hey,” he jumped in.
I stopped speaking, grateful for the interruption. “Yes?”
“Let me start, since you’ve obviously never done this before,” he said dryly. “How much do you want?”
I froze, my stomach turning over not so much at the words he was saying but how he said them.
“Sorry?”
“Money. How much do you want?”
“I—”
“Oh, come on, Paula. You have got to do better than this.”
The first time he said my name, he’d been flirting with me, or so it seemed. He’d said it softly, seductively, and I’d played right into it, blushing like a schoolgirl in the front seat of my car.
This time was different. This time, he drew out my name, lingering over the syllables with purpose.
This time, he was sending a message—I know who you are.
“Well?” he asked. “How much?”
“I’ve never done this before.”
“You’ve never done this before?” he asked with an incredulous laugh. That went on for a while, him chuckling loudly, and it was obvious he didn’t actually find anything funny. “What do you think we’re talking about, Paula? Skiing? A threesome? I’m sorry you’ve never done this before, but you really need to catch up quickly. There is, of course, the option of not doing it…”
We sat there silently for a moment, and finally, he spoke again.
“So, how much?”
I cleared my throat. “Well, I was hoping you would tell me how much you’d be willing to give me as a reward. You know, for the phone.”
“Not one cent,” he said. “But then you already know that, right? This is not about the phone. It’s about you keeping your damned mouth shut about what you think you saw the other night, and—”
“I read the text messages,” I blurted. “All of them, or almost all of them.”
“And you had no right to do that,” he hissed. “Those were private conversations between me and Em, and you had no right to read them, but I guess that’s neither here nor there. So how much?”