Then there was Carver Sweet, a man who had killed his wife and knew where we lived.
I waited until my hands stopped shaking before turning my attention back to the computer. My fingers awkward on the keyboard now, it took a couple of tries to correctly type Sam’s password. He used the same password for all of his social media accounts, for everything really, so it was easy enough to check all the sites he frequented. Or at least the ones I knew about. Then I pulled his laptop from the messenger bag he kept stashed beneath the desk and checked that. I found no surprises. Sam had always been concerned about setting a good example for his students, and he was careful about what he posted.
With Sam gone less than a day, I felt like a voyeur. A stalker. I considered posting a plea for information on my own social media accounts. Have you seen my husband? But such a plea felt premature.
Should I call Sam’s out-of-state relatives? The media? Should I hire a private investigator?
Every option I considered seemed more pointless than the last, primarily because I avoided the more difficult ones.
Sam could be in jail.
He could be in the hospital.
He could be . . .
I shook that last thought off and navigated to a database of local inmates. When that got no hits, I called hospitals, again. Finally, reluctantly, I called the coroner. Waited five minutes while records were checked. But they had not accepted the bodies of any unidentified males.
I moved on to our family’s mobile phone records. I clicked on Sam’s number, looking first at his calls, then his texts. I scrutinized most carefully the calls that were made when I wasn’t home.
I inhaled sharply. Two numbers stood out: One I recognized, one I didn’t.
The number I knew stood out because of the timing. Sam had texted only two numbers since his disappearance: mine and, apparently, Ozzy’s. Sam’s friend had lied to me.
The second number, the one I didn’t recognize, appeared three times on the day of Sam’s disappearance. None of the calls lasted longer than five minutes. One of those came in the morning before, when Sam had excused himself to take that call. Another came only minutes before we spoke that final time.
Someone knocked, loudly, and I tensed. On the doorstep stood Mr. Baldovino, a shovel in one hand and a DVD tucked under his arm. He pulled it out and thrust it at me. “Here,” he said.
When he saw me noticing the shovel, he added, “It’s best to dig it out now since it’s dormant.”
It took me a second to realize he was talking about the Japanese maple I had promised him. I killed any plant I touched, but Sam loved to garden. Out of habit, I almost offered Sam’s help. Then I remembered. I leaned in to the door frame for support.
“Thank you,” I said as I took the DVD.
He grunted. “I don’t like being lied to,” he said. I was about to ask what he meant when he added, “There’s no hanging basket.”
Of course he had watched it.
“So,” he asked, motioning to the DVD. “Who’s the man taking your husband’s car?”
When I closed the door, Mr. Baldovino still stood there, but I didn’t have the energy to answer his question. Alone again, the need for pretense gone, I slipped to the floor before my buckling knees could give way. Sunlight puddled in front of me, but I sat in shadow, the DVD in my hand. I felt as if I had been hollowed then refilled with an oily, sour blackness.
It had been easier to believe in an affair, and that Sam had left voluntarily, and I realized now that was why I hadn’t entirely discounted that theory. Rather, I had clung to it, the idea a raft in a vast and merciless ocean.
I stared at the DVD I held and told myself Mr. Baldovino was elderly, his perpetual squint proof of failing eyesight he was too proud to admit. Surveillance footage could be grainy, or so I had heard. I had never had the need to review any myself. The man my neighbor thought was someone else could indeed be Sam, caught at an angle that made him appear taller or shorter, thicker or thinner, or in some other way unfamiliar.
Even as I placated myself with this, I knew I couldn’t afford to. I needed to let go of the raft and see where this ocean carried me, even if I doubted my capacity to survive it.
The DVD clutched in one white-knuckled hand, I crossed the room to the DVD player. I brushed off the layer of dust—other than home movies, we never used the machine anymore—and slid in the DVD. I sat cross-legged in front of the TV, less than two feet from the screen, the remote cradled in my lap. The player started automatically.
The footage was sharper than I had imagined it would be. Dread carved out a space between my shoulders. The picture was crisp enough that the slim hope I had harbored that Mr. Baldovino hadn’t recognized Sam, even from across the street, disintegrated instantly.
I fast-forwarded the footage to the moments before I had returned home from the clinic. I told myself there might exist a clue visible as Sam and Audrey left the house—perhaps he was carrying a bag, or the mystery woman followed. But in truth, I just needed to see him again.
When I did, my heart broke. The way he moved—hoisting Audrey over his shoulder, his long legs skipping a step on the front porch, placing our daughter on the sidewalk with an exaggerated twirl—was distinctly Sam. Lean, athletic, relaxed. Even now, under these circumstances, my heart raced for reasons other than worry.
I imagined I could hear Audrey giggling and see Sam’s smirk. But I couldn’t. They were shapes and shadows and light and life, and then they were gone.
I skipped backward on the DVD and watched it again. By the third viewing, the pair blurred, fusing into a single entity joined by my unshed tears.
I focused on my breathing as I fast-forwarded past my own arrival home, then my hurried departure later. I had been frantic, but also oblivious, my world still intact.
The images on the DVD continued to buzz by. As I saw myself pull away from the house on the screen, I slowed the playback and leaned in, my eyes intent on the blue Toyota Camry parked on the left side of our driveway.
It happened at 12:36 a.m. The shape popped out of the right side of the TV screen—if another vehicle had transported the interloper, it happened off screen—and moved toward the car. Less than five minutes earlier, I had focused on regulating my breathing, but now it seemed a complicated puzzle to get my lungs to process oxygen at all.
Mr. Baldovino was right. The man on the screen was not Sam. But my suspicions that a stranger could have taken the car were unfounded. Although I had only met him once, the man on the screen was instantly recognizable: huge, still wearing the same clothes he had been the night before, the attacker from the trail slipped into Sam’s car and drove away.
The thief hadn’t needed to break a window or force the lock. All he’d had to do was pull Sam’s keys from his pants pocket.
15
I made a copy of the DVD and put it in my desk drawer. I slipped the original in my purse.
I also printed a still from the recording of the man who had taken Sam’s car. The man I believed to be Carver Sweet. The clearest image was a profile, and robbed of his movement, he could have been anyone—if not for the stubbled chin, dark except where the scar would’ve been.
I folded the paper into a tidy square and slipped it into my purse next to the DVD.
At the police station, the same thin, sharp-nosed officer was stationed at the desk. I asked for Detective Ray Rico.
Like the night we had met, Rico wore a crisp white shirt, but this time instead of bacon, his tie was embellished with tiny hot dogs.
“Back to cured meats, I see.” I handed Rico the DVD.
“This is the closest I get to them these days. Watching my sodium.” He looked down at the DVD. “What’s this?”
“You heard about Sam?”
“I got a copy of the report.”
“Hear anything yet?”
“It’s only been a few hours.” Though true, I caught the hint of frustration in his voice. Even I knew how crucial these early hours were. “Yo
u okay?”
The question surprised me, and it required a longer answer than I had time to give. “That’s footage from a neighbor’s camera. I’m pretty sure Carver Sweet took my husband’s car.”
Rico motioned toward the back of the station, where I guessed his office was, but I shook my head. “I have somewhere to be, but I wanted you to have that.”
Rico’s eyes remained sharp, but they were less forbidding than they had been in that first interview. “You didn’t answer my question.”
What question? My mind stumbled back across our brief conversation, and I fell to it the second he asked again, “You okay?”
I wanted to trust Rico, but I knew the first person the police looked at when a husband went missing was the wife. The air in the station was dry and too warm.
“Only thing that will make me okay is finding Sam and Carver Sweet being arrested.”
“We’ll find them both, Dr. Larkin,” he said. “Torres mentioned you found a wrapper folded into the shape of a dog. The number two written inside.”
“A friend thought it might be an S.”
“Looked like a two to me.” A simple statement, but I could again breathe fully. It was if I had been carrying a heavy piece of furniture, up a staircase, and Rico had suddenly taken hold of one end.
“That night on the trail, you asked if the number three meant anything to me. Did you find something like that?”
Rico stroked his tie, as if his hot dog craving could be satisfied that way. “Not origami, no.” The detective stared in that way he had, his eyes scraping my skin. If I’d had secrets, I would’ve confessed them all. “It was a rock. Painted with the number three.”
“Painted?”
“Acrylic, we think. White paint, gray rock. It’s being analyzed.”
“Where’d you find it?”
“In Carver’s car.”
I bit my tongue with enough force to draw blood.
Carver.
Though irrational, I imagined him here, watching us. Taking pleasure from my frustration. But perhaps he was no longer in Santa Rosa, instead in a moldering basement hundreds of miles away, inflicting horrors on my captive husband.
Unless Sam had left voluntarily. I kept coming back to that.
Either way, without Sam, I felt unmoored, adrift, and swept toward long-ago discarded habits. The old me was the kind of girl you’d love to take to a party. She mixed a killer mojito, knew the answer to every trivia question, and had your back if you picked a fight with your ex’s new girlfriend, even if you were in the wrong.
But Old Cassie could be a bitch to live with. She was surly and held a grudge, and she didn’t always think clearly, especially after too many of those mojitos. I didn’t like having Old Cassie in my head again.
“No news on where Carver might be?” I asked.
“Nothing yet, but we’re looking.”
The silence stretched, and I sensed I’d be getting no more information from Rico. Besides, I needed to get to the grocery store. Just thinking about my next stop stirred my irritation and thus my impatience.
“You’ll reach out if you hear anything?” I asked.
Detective Rico gave a curt nod, then smoothed his hot-dog tie. “Of course,” he said. I was 25 percent sure I believed him.
Ten minutes later, I pulled into the grocery store parking lot. Counting to ten wasn’t cutting it, so before I got out of the car, I counted to one hundred. Even so, my breath was jagged, my cheeks flushed when I closed my car door.
Inside the store, I approached the customer service desk and a blonde whose tag gave her name as Beth R. I asked for the manager.
Beth R. pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose with her middle finger then blushed when she realized how the gesture might be interpreted. She overcompensated with a smile that strained her cheeks. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“Not unless my husband is texting you too.”
The smile slipped into a frown, and her eyebrows shot together. “I’m sorry?”
“The manager, please.” As an afterthought, I forced a smile of my own. She scurried away as if I’d kicked her.
Beth R. returned a moment later with the store manager, whose attempt at a grin faltered when he saw me. Apparently, all three of us were terrible at faking it.
“Hey, Ozzy,” I said, my voice full of false cheer. “I figured you’d be working today.”
Ozzy reached for my elbow, likely intending to steer me to a more private spot, but dropped his hand before he made contact.
He looked uncomfortable in his button-up shirt and tie, his usual curls restrained by hair gel. One lock had exerted its independence, corkscrewing onto his left cheek.
“It’s . . . uh . . . great to see you again, Cassie.” His Austin drawl betrayed his nerves.
“I don’t think you mean that, but that’s fine. Right now, I’m not really glad to see you either.”
Beth R. had returned to her spot behind the customer service desk a few feet away. She pretended to straighten something below the counter even as she leaned in to better hear our conversation.
Ozzy noticed and gestured toward an office behind the counter. “Do you want to talk somewhere quiet?”
“Oh, I’m good. So, I was going over Sam’s phone records, and I noticed you guys have been texting.”
“Come on, Cassie.” His drawl grew more pronounced as he glanced again toward the office.
“Which is weird, because when I came over last night, you said you hadn’t heard from him. That was before you said if you did hear from him, you’d let me know.”
Beth R. dropped the pretense, staring openly now. Another worker who had been passing stopped in his tracks, listening too.
Ozzy brushed aside an errant curl, his dark eyes pleading. I sighed and headed toward the office.
He closed the door behind us. “Thanks for that. The employees sometimes—”
I cut him off. “Why did you lie to me?”
“Sam’s my friend, Cassie.”
“I’m your friend.”
“You know it’s not the same.”
“You didn’t have to tell me everything, but you should have told me something. If not for me, then for the kids.”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked away.
“After we spoke, Sam texted me too.” I held out my phone, the same way I had with Officer Torres. “But here’s the thing—I don’t think it was Sam. And if it wasn’t, then Sam probably wasn’t the person texting you either.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“True.” I took the picture of Carver Sweet from my purse and placed it faceup on his desk. “But there’s this. Two nights ago, I witnessed this man assaulting a woman. Last night, while I was on your doorstep, the same man took Sam’s car from our driveway. He had Sam’s keys. Why wouldn’t he have his phone too?”
Ozzy still couldn’t meet my eyes. “Sam texted you he wasn’t alone. Maybe he knows this guy. Besides, it’s not a very good picture.”
“Look, Ozzy, I don’t care if Sam’s having an affair.” My voice was tight. Of course I cared if my husband was sleeping with someone else. It just wasn’t my main concern at that moment. “I need to know that my husband, the father of my children, isn’t lying unidentified in a ditch on some rural road.”
Ozzy sank into a chair behind the small, laminate-topped desk. When he spoke, his accent was thick. “He’s having an affair.”
My chest hitched, but I forced myself to say: “Tell me.”
“I don’t think—”
“Tell me.”
He pulled a water bottle from one of the drawers and took a long drink, probably wishing it were a beer. If it had been, I might have asked for a drink myself.
“When did it start?”
Ozzy shifted in his seat and took another swallow before responding. When he did, he avoided eye contact, staring instead at the bottle he cupped in his hands. Curls fell in his face, a curtain to hide behind.
<
br /> “I’m not sure.”
“A month? Longer?”
He shrugged as he picked at the bottle’s label, flicking the pasty flakes that stuck to his fingertips. “I don’t know.”
“What did he say in the texts?”
“Nothing much.” He twirled the bottle so the water sloshed in circles.
“Has he ever mentioned that he planned to leave?”
When Ozzy didn’t answer, heat flared in my cheeks, and I couldn’t stop my hand from snaking out and grabbing the bottle. I threw it across the room. What water remained splashed on the wall against which it landed.
Ozzy jerked in the chair, and he stared. “Sam didn’t tell me he was cheating on you, not right away,” he said. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt at the neck. “I went to the high school about a month ago to see if Sam wanted to grab coffee during his free period, and I saw them walking together. He told me she was a parent of one of his kids, and of course, I believed him. I mean, come on, this is Sam, right? He’s always been crazy about you. And as crazy as he is about you, he’s doubly that for those kids. He’s the kind of guy who shows the rest of us that marriage doesn’t have to suck.”
“Not sucking. That’s always been our goal.”
Ozzy took a second water bottle from the drawer. He took a drink and grinned at me as he replaced the cap. He tilted his head toward where the first now empty bottle rested on the floor. “Didn’t know you have a temper.”
He hadn’t known me back then. “No one’s threatened my family before.”
“Right.” He pushed the bottle to the side and folded his hands in his lap. No distractions. “I saw her again last week in his car.”
“What were they doing?”
“Nothing like that. It just looked . . . suspicious. Then when he was at my house a few days ago, he left the room to take a call. He’s my friend, I’m not going to judge, but like you said, you two have kids together. I didn’t want to see him throwing everything away, you know? So I called him on it. He denied it, told me he was trying to help a student of his. Hannah.”
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