“That’s damning evidence. I trust you contacted the licensing board?”
She scowled at the sarcasm. “I checked, Mrs. Larkin, and it’s true what they said, that some of his female students are getting A’s in his class while failing others.”
As her voice rose, mine quieted. “I assume you checked to see if the same is true of his male students?”
She quirked an eyebrow, her lips thinning even more. “Why would I do that?”
“Being a champion of the truth, I would expect you’d check that out.”
“No.” She was indignant, though not yet certain why.
“Well, did you check to see if the reverse is true—girls failing in his class but excelling in, say, history or math?”
“That’s really not the issue here.”
“I disagree. You’re making the argument that all great artists should be equally talented in other academic areas, so I think considering all the data is exactly the issue.”
Pam crossed her arms, her lips puckering at my challenge. “Regardless, when I learned about Sam’s . . . issue . . . I felt compelled to call it to Mr. Diggs’s attention.”
“I’m sure that was a difficult decision for you.”
She stood taller, trying to intimidate with the three extra inches of height she had on me. “Awfully judgmental for someone who doesn’t know what her own husband is up to.”
Pam was nearly shouting now, my own voice little more than a whisper, but I could tell by her puckered lips that she heard each word when I said, “I’d advise you to stop spreading rumors about my husband.”
Allegations like this could ruin careers, true or not.
She winced. “Or what? You’ll sue me? Try to get me fired? With who as a witness?”
Heat settled into my balled fists, and my cheeks flamed. Still, I kept my voice low. “Witnesses aren’t always a positive.”
She glared but took a step back. “Are you threatening me?”
“Did I threaten you? With what I just said, I had hoped you’d learned how dangerous assumptions can be.”
To steady my breathing, I forced my eyes away, and they landed on her desk. A file, closed, rested on the otherwise uncluttered surface. On the tab of the file, a student’s last name was obscured by a sheet of paper, the type on the paper too tiny to read. But I read the first name on the file’s tab clearly enough.
Hannah.
I left Pam there, glowering after me, my knees unsteady as I walked back to my car. I climbed inside, leaving the door open, and before I could lose my nerve, I ripped open the tan envelope some creep had given my six-year-old daughter.
The envelope contained a single photo. It had been printed on copy paper rather than glossy photo stock, and faint lines marred the image. Nevertheless, there was no misconstruing the activity depicted, or the identity of at least one of the participants.
Two tangled bodies, one of them my husband’s.
The picture showed Sam having sex with another woman.
If she was a woman at all. The female was thin and faced away from the camera. She easily could have been in her teens.
If I’d eaten more than half a sandwich since Sam disappeared, I might have vomited on the asphalt.
I closed my eyes, hard, but the inside of my lids proved an ideal screen. Images unspooled in flashes: two bodies in movement, slow at first, growing more insistent, finally falling away in exhaustion.
My eyes snapped open, but I couldn’t again look at the photo. I turned my head, focusing instead on the fabric of the passenger’s seat. A seam had started to fray, thin worms of thread tangled where the seat butted against the center console. There was also a small chip in the cup holder. I hadn’t noticed these imperfections before. Not that they mattered. The car wasn’t mine.
I turned my attention back to the photo. I pictured Sam and me in similar moments. I remembered the first time, when he had tried so hard to be a gentleman but the tequila had insisted. Then the next morning, when daylight should’ve sobered us, but instead had intoxicated us further. There was that morning we celebrated the close of escrow. The night we popped the air mattress while camping. The afternoon we decided, hey, why not go to Tahoe and get hitched. Then there were the two random workdays we had conceived our children, special only in hindsight.
There were countless such memories, each with a jagged edge designed to wound.
But none of these was recent, and maybe it was this distance that gave the mental images their glow. The closest we had come to creating a new memory was the morning before, when Sam had modeled those ridiculous zombie teeth, and it had almost been like before. But as always, life distracted. Though just a day earlier, I hadn’t realized then how close we were to being broken.
I tried to study the photo, searching for signs that it had been created with photo-editing software. That was Sam’s face, but was that his back? Was that his arm?
After a few seconds, I had to look away. Hands shaking, I folded the envelope and stuffed it into my purse.
I understood why this envelope had been given to Audrey rather than me. Whoever was behind the photo wanted me to know how vulnerable I was, how easily my children could be hurt. The monster had gotten to Audrey. What if, next time, the intent wasn’t just to deliver a threat?
Because that’s clearly what this was. A threat against my family.
What wasn’t as clear was who was in the photo with Sam. Was it this mysterious Hannah? Someone else?
I flipped the photo over. On the back, written in black marker, was a number: 1.
20
The address Sam’s maybe-mistress had given me was a Craftsman downtown with peeling white paint and a meticulously maintained yard.
A brunette with the wide eyes of an anime character answered the door. She wore yoga pants and a sweatshirt, baby blue this time, with her dark hair secured in a ponytail. I would have recognized her even if she hadn’t been dressed almost identically to the way she had been that night on the trail. The bruises, for one thing. The worst of them the purple-black of a ripe avocado, they took up nearly half of her face.
She greeted me by name then introduced herself as Brooklyn Breneman. “I’d shake your hand, but pretty much every part of my right arm is broken or sprained,” she said.
What did I say to that—Sorry? Glad you’re healing? Kinda feel weird about saving the woman who may have been sleeping with my husband? Everything I considered sounded inane, so I settled on a silent nod.
She stepped aside so I could enter. As I passed, I sized her up. Her hair color was right for the photo I’d been given, but I wasn’t yet sure about her build. One thing of which I was certain: the faint smell of hard alcohol.
“I assume you got my number from Sam’s phone?” she asked.
Great conversationalist that I was, I nodded a second time.
She gestured to a chair for me, patches of the beige microfiber worn nearly to white, while she took the couch. She winced as she settled into the cushions, cradling her arm.
“Tea?” she offered. On the table sat a teapot and two cups, one empty. The second was filled with an amber liquid that definitely wasn’t tea.
I declined her offer. She took the filled cup and sipped. “This is my friend’s place,” she said. “I can’t go back to my place until they arrest Carver.”
“He knows where you live?”
“He knows a lot about me. Probably about you too.”
Of course it was true. He had stolen my wallet and van. Still, the way she said it made my flesh crawl.
“What do you mean by that?”
She settled back into the couch and shrugged with one shoulder. “We have a lot to talk about.”
Brooklyn placed a throw pillow on her lap, then her injured arm on top of the pillow. She pulled up the edge of a bandage, and the gesture was so close to Sam’s tending of my scrape the night of the attack that I couldn’t breathe.
While I figured out how my lungs worked, she said, “I gue
ss I should start by thanking you. If you hadn’t been there, I’d be dead.”
I meant to tell her that anyone would’ve done the same, but I was having trouble finding my voice. I had so many questions—how she knew Sam, how Hannah fit into all of this, what she had meant by her comment that Carver probably knew a lot about me. But one question was more urgent than all the others.
“Do you know what happened to Sam?”
When she nodded, her impossibly large eyes widened further. I could see my husband being taken in by those eyes. “I know part of it, at least. But it’s complicated.”
“I can handle complicated.”
Her expression was one of doubt as she again picked up her mug of fake tea. She didn’t drink. I suspected she only wanted to occupy her hands.
When she didn’t immediately start talking, I prodded: “How do you know Sam?”
She stirred the tea with her index finger, then absentmindedly wiped it on her yoga pants. “He was helping me with Hannah.”
There was that name again: Hannah.
“Helping how?”
“Hannah’s—troubled,” she said. “You know, of course, that Sam was suspended a couple of weeks ago?”
Though I did now, thanks to chatty office attendant Pam, it bothered me that this woman had known longer.
When I nodded, she continued, “I’m Hannah’s mentor, through one of those youth programs. Her foster mom is cool, but her biological mom—she’s not a nice person.”
“I don’t need backstory. I need to find my husband.” I might’ve emphasized the last two words more than necessary.
“I don’t know where Sam is. But I know where he was.” She sighed, then drained her mug. “Like I said, it’s complicated.”
“And like I said, I can handle that.”
Brooklyn set her empty mug in her lap. “I could tell you a thousand stories about Hannah, but I’ll just tell you one,” she said.
“I don’t—”
She held up her hand to silence me. I bristled, but I let her talk. “Hannah’s about four years old, and she doesn’t come when her mom calls her for lunch. According to Hannah, her mom hated it when she or her sister hid. So, of course, Hannah expects to be punished, but instead, her mom tells her she’s going to teach her to garden. She hands Hannah a pair of work gloves and a shovel. In their yard, there’s this huge oak tree, more than a hundred feet high, and her mom makes her start digging in a spot underneath. The ground is hard. It would be a challenge for an adult, and Hannah’s a child.
“As she digs, her mom asks her what she wants to grow—peppers? Roses? Snap peas? Goading her. The poor girl’s feet are bloody by this time, because, see, she’s wearing these ballet slippers. Every time Hannah puts weight on the shovel, it slices the bottom of her foot.
“When Hannah finally manages to dig a small hole, and it takes hours, her mom drops this sack on the ground next to her and says something like, ‘I know. How about we plant this?’ That’s how Hannah finds out her dog got hit by a car. It’s also her first real memory.”
The story is horrible, but I’ve come for answers, not stories. Still, I feel a pang of guilt when I ask, “Why is this relevant?”
“Because you should understand what Hannah comes from before making judgments on what she might’ve done to Sam.”
My guilt burned to ash and scattered. “And what was that?”
“Hannah was having problems in Sam’s class. He reached out to me. He was trying to help her, and it worked. Her grades and attitude improved. Then Sam and I—” She didn’t finish the sentence.
“You’re claiming you’re sleeping with my husband.” My voice cold.
“He never hid the fact he was married.”
“Is married,” I corrected.
Her eyes dropped to her lap and the empty cup there.
“He’s attractive, of course, but it was his sense of humor that got me, and his empathy. He’s a great guy.” I bit back a retort about how I knew my husband, thank you, and how “great guys” didn’t cheat.
“Glad you think so.”
Her blue eyes flashed, and at first I thought it was with shame and that an apology would follow. But when she spoke, it was in my husband’s defense, not her own.
“Hannah’s eighteen now, so even if she and Sam slept together, she was an adult at the time,” Brooklyn said. “I think it’s more likely, though, that Hannah knew what was going on between Sam and me and that she was jealous. Two people she cared about were involved in a relationship that didn’t include her. She started spreading rumors that Sam had pressed her for sex in exchange for an A. Those rumors came to the attention of the administration. You know the rest.”
Was that why Sam had kept his suspension from me—because he couldn’t separate that news from an admission that he was having an affair?
“You said you know what happened last night.”
Her face clouded, and she gave a slight nod. “We met a few blocks from your house.”
I instantly thought of our sixteen years in that house, the bedroom we shared, our kids, and felt sick. “You’ve been to our home?”
Brooklyn opened a drawer on the end table and pulled out a small bottle of tequila. She refilled her teacup before placing the bottle on the table. No pretense now.
“The night you and I met, I was leaving your house,” she said. “I had dropped off a bottle of cold medicine. That’s all.”
That may have been all that happened that night, but had there been others? And if I had arrived home earlier, would I have met Brooklyn there instead of on the trail?
As if I had asked the question aloud, she said, “I knew you were working late.”
She didn’t add that Sam had called to tell her this, but I knew. I had memorized the log of calls and texts to Brooklyn’s number. They had spoken twice the night of the attack.
The police’s suspicions of me suddenly didn’t seem so unfounded: the wife is there when her husband’s mistress is attacked, and twenty-four hours later, the husband disappears. In Detective Rico’s place, I would have questions too.
I prodded, “So you arranged to meet Sam in this neighborhood . . .”
“Near this abandoned house,” she said, and my skin prickled. I easily pictured the rotting pumpkin on the stoop and the shattered window. “We were only supposed to be a few minutes.”
“Romantic.”
“It wasn’t like that,” she objected. “We met to talk about Hannah, the allegations she’d made against him, and to come up with a plan. Find a way to salvage Sam’s reputation, while also protecting Hannah. Audrey was with a friend, and Sam and I didn’t want to leave her for too long.”
Each detail was a blow: the clandestine nature of their meeting; Brooklyn’s casual use of “Sam and I” as if they were a couple; her show of concern over my daughter. Audrey was not hers to worry about.
Though I doubted she would answer, I asked anyway, “What’s Hannah’s last name?”
She shook her head firmly. “I’m only telling you as much as I am because you saved my life, and because I want to find Sam as much as you do. But you know I can’t give you her last name.”
“I’ll find out.”
“Maybe, but not from me.” A sad smile played at the corners of her mouth. “You hate me, don’t you?”
“I don’t know you.”
“I’m sleeping with your husband. You know that.”
Brooklyn nursed her tequila and waited for my response. Finally, I said, “Not really.”
“Not really, you don’t hate me? Or you don’t really know that Sam and I are sleeping together?”
“The affair part, but I suppose both are true.” I had spent a lot of time hating as a teen, and I had no more energy for it. What energy I had was focused on a single task: finding my husband. “You said you and Sam met on Halloween. When did you last see him?”
“I’m not sure of the time, but we weren’t together more than a few minutes when I saw Carver. He must’ve be
en tracking my car.”
There was another possibility, one I had considered earlier but that nevertheless shook me now: Carver had been watching Sam.
Brooklyn paused, and maintaining eye contact seemed a great effort. Her voice wavered as she said, “I ran.”
“Did you call the police?”
“As soon as I was a safe distance, of course I did.”
“You didn’t warn Sam?” There was no hiding the edge to my voice.
“Why would I? Carver was after me, not him.” Her tone became dismissive. “I’m still not sure Carver’s the reason Sam disappeared. Sam’s obviously dealing with his own problems.”
The anger swelled suddenly, hot in my chest. It still wasn’t hatred, but it was closer. Before this happened, I would never have left Sam behind, especially without warning him. I would have gone to my death protecting him. If I were being honest, I was pretty sure the same was true now.
“You should’ve warned him.”
Brooklyn refreshed her drink. When she spoke again, she slurred. “I slept with him too. Carver.” Her face flushed, I guessed more from the alcohol than embarrassment. “Just once. It’s not like with—” she choked back my husband’s name. “Anyway, I guess I have a type. Unattainable men. Just didn’t think I’d also pick a homicidal one.”
Then Brooklyn stood, which was a production. When she left the room, the alcohol and her injuries made her steps slow and wobbly. She returned a few minutes later with a small stack of photos. I thought they might be pictures of her with Sam, but then I noticed that two of the photos were starting to yellow around the edges.
“I took these from him.” She offered the photos to me. When I didn’t accept them, she pressed them into my hand. “I knew he’d been in prison for killing a girl, but the way he told it, he was innocent. Plus he was only eighteen or nineteen when it happened, so I let myself believe him.
“Then I saw those.”
The first picture—yellowed, the paper flaking—was of a girl in her teens, head tilted and smile wide. I flipped to the back. A rough hand had scribbled a name on it: Natalie.
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