The Vacation

by T. M. Logan

  Jennifer gave Rowan a sympathetic smile and turned back to me.

  “Listen, Kate, I know it was an accident, we all know it was an accident; I just think there are certain things we don’t need to tell the police.”

  “Such as?”

  “Do you really want me to say it?”

  With most of the children gone, that left an even half dozen of us: me, Jennifer, Rowan, Odette, Russ, and Sean. And now all eyes were on me, on the blush rising up in my cheeks. But why not? Why not just put it all out there? It didn’t matter anymore, none of it mattered, not really. The events of the past week were distant and trivial compared to the tragedy of today.

  “If you have to.”

  “Well, like what we discussed at the café yesterday.” She hesitated, then plowed on. “That you thought Izzy was having an affair with Sean.”

  Russ looked up sharply.

  “What?”

  Beside me, Sean put his head in his hands. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “No, no, no.”

  Russ said, “An affair? What the hell?”

  Sean just shook his head.

  “I found messages on his phone the day we got here,” I told Russ. “Saying he couldn’t stop thinking about her and did Kate suspect anything? But I wanted solid proof, so I got into Sean’s phone when he was sleeping, pretended to be him, and asked whoever it was to meet down in the woods. It was Izzy.”

  “Jesus,” Russ said under his breath.

  Rowan said, “Is it true, Sean?”

  He simply shook his head, eyes fixed on the floor.

  Please just tell me. No more deception. No more lies.

  “Tell me, Sean,” I said, pleading with him. “I have to know the truth.”

  “No.” His voice was barely above a whisper.

  “I don’t believe you. Why can’t you even look at me?”

  He lifted his head to face me, his eyes bloodshot and brimming with fresh tears. “I said no. It’s not true.”

  I shook my head. Even now he couldn’t come clean. I wondered what had happened to the man I married, how long ago it had gone wrong between us.

  And look at us now: wronged wife and desperate lover. De facto suspects in the death of our dear friend.

  “It doesn’t matter if you deny it,” I said. “Izzy was about to tell me herself, she asked me for a private talk after dinner tonight. Something personal. She actually started telling me, and then everything went crazy with the fire and—”

  “And now here we are,” Rowan said quietly.

  “I didn’t do anything to Izzy,” Sean blurted suddenly. “I swear. I would never have hurt her.”

  Jennifer gave him a sympathetic smile. “I know that, Sean, we all know that.”

  Do we?

  “I’m so sorry for bringing it up, Kate,” she continued. “I just think it’s better if we don’t mention any of this to the police. It gives you … motive, I guess?”

  “I never hurt her!”

  “I know, but that’s exactly what I mean. If we tell the police about all of this, it will send them on some kind of wild-goose chase that none of us wants. We’d all hate for Izzy’s family to have her name dragged into that kind of tabloid nonsense.”

  “Agreed,” Rowan said.

  I swiped at my tears with the heel of my palm. “I never even saw her down there in the woods when it was all happening.”

  Jennifer patted my knee. “No one did, Kate. It’s not your fault.”

  Odette, still sitting on Rowan’s lap, whispered something to her mother. Rowan frowned.

  “Say that again, darling.”

  Odette shook her head vigorously.

  “Come on, darling. It’s OK, I promise.”

  Odette put her mouth close to her mother’s ear and whispered again, louder this time, but not loud enough for the rest of us to hear.

  “Are you sure, darling?” Rowan said softly. “Super super sure?”

  Odette nodded. Just a tiny movement, almost invisible, a dip of her little chin without breaking eye contact with her mother.

  “What is it?” I said. “Does she want to go down to the games room with the other children?”

  “No,” Rowan said, her face darkening. “She said she—she saw something. When she was hiding in the tree trunk, she saw Izzy at the edge of the bluff. With someone.”

  I flinched as a distant rumble of thunder rolled across the sky.

  “Who?” I said. “Who was she with?”

  Odette looked at us, all of us, her big hazel-green eyes seeming to see us for the first time. Slowly, tentatively, she raised her hand and pointed.

  70

  Odette didn’t blink. She didn’t speak, or cry, or hide her face.

  She just pointed.

  Her finger shaking, her whole hand shaking, her index finger singled out one person sitting on the sofa opposite.

  Jennifer.

  Time seemed to slow down as all eyes in the room turned toward her.

  “What?” Jennifer said, a confused half-smile on her face.

  Finally, Odette found her voice. “They were shouting. Saying mean things to each other. And then the smoke blowed in the way and when it was gone again only Jake and Ethan’s mummy was standing there. The other lady was gone.”

  “That’s not true,” Jennifer said. “I was nowhere near the cliff edge.”

  Rowan turned to her daughter again.

  “Do you think maybe it was another lady that you saw, Odette? Was it someone else’s mummy?”

  Odette shook her head but said nothing.

  “Maybe it was Lucy’s mummy?” She gestured to me.

  “Uh-uh,” Odette said, shaking her head. “The tall blond lady.”

  Jennifer said, “Lucy’s blond, too.”

  “Jake and Ethan’s mummy!” Odette said indignantly.

  “She seems quite sure,” Rowan said, “that it was you, Jen.”

  Jennifer threw her hands up.

  “She’s five years old, for Christ’s sake—not exactly the most reliable witness, is she?”

  “She doesn’t lie.”

  “She’s an attention seeker!” Jennifer said, her voice rising. “She’s been doing it all week, only everyone is too polite to point it out!”

  “What?” Rowan’s face was flushed with anger. “Where the hell do you get off, having a pop at my—”

  “She’s acting up again now! Just to get attention!”

  “Rather than being model citizens, like your boys?”

  “How dare you!” Jennifer pointed an accusing finger. “You have literally no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “How dare you criticize my child when your eldest spent last night rolling around in his own vomit!”

  Their raised voices began to overlap in a continuous barrage of accusations and counteraccusations, colliding and clashing and bouncing off the walls.

  “You have no right to bring my boys into it—”

  “You have no right to talk about my daughter—”

  “She’s a spoiled little—”

  Russ joined in, veins standing out in his neck.

  “You’ve got a bloody nerve—”

  “I’ve got a nerve! Says the man whose daughter could have drowned while he was—”

  “That is absolute bull—”

  “And then virtually accused my boys of—”

  “For all we know, your boys could have started the fire in the first—”

  “For all we know, you could have coached Odette to say she saw—”

  “Coached her? Are you out of your—”

  Abruptly, Rowan stopped.

  Odette had her hands tightly over her ears and was crying, silently, fat tears rolling down her freckled cheeks.

  “Shh,” Rowan said, stroking her daughter’s hair with a shaking hand. “It’s OK, baby, I’m sorry, no more shouting. I’m sorry, it’s OK.”

  Silence returned. The shouting had stopped but the tension in the room lingered like a bad smell.

  F
inally, Jennifer held her hands up. “I’m just trying to help Kate and do the right thing for Izzy, that’s all.”

  “We know,” I said. “Everybody’s in shock.”

  “But I have no idea why Odette would think she saw me with Izzy. I was much more worried about getting my boys out of there.”

  It was true that Odette could not be considered a particularly reliable witness. If we were all totally honest with one another for once—and as parents, we had all learned long ago never to be totally honest when it came to talking about one another’s children—she had been acting up since the day we arrived. It was what she did. The fits of temper, the fussiness with food, the bedtime routine, were all ways of getting attention from parents whose focus was more often on their cell phones.

  And yet …

  And yet she had been sure, she had been positive, that she had seen Jennifer at the cliff edge with Izzy. She had been near enough to see, despite the smoke. Near enough to hear the two of them arguing.

  It didn’t fit. It didn’t make sense, didn’t mesh with what I knew.

  Until a few minutes ago, I had been resigned to the fact that I had discovered the sordid, dirty truth at the heart of my marriage, was resigned to the fact that I would not lie to the police, would not withhold evidence, would not go against everything I believed in. Resigned to the fact that my husband—the father of my children, the man I loved with all my heart, the man I had wanted to grow old with—had betrayed me. Resigned to the fact that betrayal had somehow tumbled into murder.

  But Odette’s words didn’t fit.

  And there was something else, something more, just beyond my eyeline. I could sense it was there, but when I tried to look straight at it, it slid out of sight.

  What if I had been looking at everything the wrong way, all this time? A few days ago I had been convinced that Rowan was the guilty party, then Jennifer, and now Izzy. I had been getting it wrong all week. Now my friend was dead—and maybe I was still wrong. What if I had let my emotions get the better of me? What if I hadn’t parked my work brain, as Sean liked to call it, but put it to use here instead?

  I remembered one of the case studies I’d analyzed while I was training, soon after joining the police. A burglary at a house, nothing particularly unusual apart from the large volume of jewelry, cash, and electronics taken by burglars who had not left a single forensic trace. No fingerprints, no footprints, no DNA. It had been a scrupulous job. It had also been totally bogus: the homeowner, a CSI: Miami fan angling for an insurance payout, exposed months later when his pictures of a “stolen” Rolex were found to have been taken after the burglary had supposedly taken place.

  The lesson for us trainees had been: First impressions can be misleading. Look harder. Follow the evidence. The question hung over me: Was I allowing myself to be misled now?

  I thought back to my conversation with Izzy in the dining room, only a couple hours ago. What had she said? What had she actually said?

  This is tough, Kate, but I’ve given it a lot of thought and I know it’s the right thing to do under the circumstances.

  I don’t know how to say this. I’ve agonized over whether to tell you about—

  I didn’t realize on Monday that—

  Didn’t realize what? I had assumed at the time that meant she hadn’t realized I was on to her, that I already knew Sean had betrayed me. But maybe I had jumped to the wrong conclusion.

  Outside, the thunder was getting closer. Something clicked in my head and finally, finally, I thought I might be starting to understand.

  71

  I studied my friends on the sofa opposite. Rowan comforting her daughter, jigging her gently on her knee. Russ, slapping a pack of Marlboros into the palm of his hand, looking as if he’d like to continue the shouting match. Jennifer, close to tears again, spots of color high in her cheeks.

  “Jen,” I said, “why did you send the kids away?”

  “What?”

  “Ten minutes ago. You sent the other four kids downstairs to the games room.”

  She shrugged, distracted.

  “I thought there were things they probably shouldn’t hear.” She threw a pointed look at Rowan. “And I’m mighty glad I did, now.”

  “Anything else?”

  “It’s so tough for teenagers to process grief. It’s a new experience for them, I didn’t want them getting any more upset than they already are. They’re devastated, trying to deal with what’s happened. And…” She hesitated. “I guess I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

  “I get all that, and I appreciate it.” It was my turn to hesitate. “But what was the other reason?”

  “Other reason for what?”

  “Separating the kids from this conversation.”

  “Not sure I follow you.”

  “What I mean is, what has all of this got to do with the kids?”

  She shrugged.

  “Nothing. Apart from them being here this week, with all of us.”

  Cogs were turning in my brain. My daughter’s tears. A conversation on the beach. A tribute page on Facebook. Ethan sprawled in the grass, staring up at the night sky. Jake so drunk he couldn’t stand. Izzy bringing him back from the gorge.

  Every time we stopped for him to be sick, he wanted to have a chat, she had said.

  About what?

  All kinds of stuff.

  “I was wondering,” I said, “what Jake told Izzy last night. When he was drunk?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Really? No idea at all?”

  It was almost imperceptible. Almost invisible, but not quite: a slight twitch of the muscle under her eye.

  “You saw how bad he was,” she said. “Absolutely blasted, he was almost incoherent most of the time.”

  “He was ‘looking for oblivion,’ according to his brother. Why would he be doing that?”

  “They’re teenage boys. They’re testing boundaries, looking for new experiences.”

  I changed tack.

  “Do the boys know someone called Alex Bayley?”

  I thought I caught a flash of something crossing her face, just for a split second. Then it was gone. My judgment had been so wide of the mark this week that I almost dismissed it.

  “No,” she said. “I mean, I don’t think so. Did he go to their school?”

  Something about that didn’t quite ring true, either, but I let it go for now.

  “How about the fire?” I continued. “Why today? How did it start?”

  She held her hands up in exasperation. “We’ve been through that already. What is this, twenty questions?”

  “Because one fire could conceivably have been an accident. But it looked to me like the fire had been started in two different places, and I started out thinking that Jake and Ethan had—”

  Jennifer stood up, eyes brimming with tears.

  “Enough! How long have we been friends? I can’t believe all of you think it’s OK to attack my children like this. Again. It’s just so hurtful and horrible, I can’t believe what I’m hearing. We’re all devastated and heartbroken about what happened to Izzy, me just as much as you.”

  I raised my hands in a calming gesture.

  “Let me finish, Jen. I was thinking that two boys meant two fires. But what if it wasn’t that—what if it meant something different?”

  “Like what?” Russ asked.

  “Two fires to make sure it caught. To make sure it got going, make sure there was lots of smoke. To make sure it couldn’t be put out straightaway.”

  “What would be the point of that?”

  “To cause a distraction,” I said. “A diversion.”

  “An actual smoke screen,” he said.

  “Exactly.” I turned to his wife. “Do you remember, Rowan, when we first saw the smoke and the three of us were running down through the vineyard? Me, you, and Izzy?”

  “I remember being terrified.”

  “But do you remember the last thing Izzy said to us, as we ran into the woods?”


  Her expression changed, eyes flicking to Jennifer and then back to me.

  “She said she was going to find Jen, help her round up the boys.”

  “Yes. That’s what I remember, too.”

  The silence stretched out for a long moment.

  “So?” Jennifer said. “So what?”

  “Izzy went looking for you,” I said. “To help you. And she did find you, because Odette saw you together a few minutes later.”

  Jennifer was moving toward the door.

  “You know what? I don’t have to listen to this, it’s ridiculous!” Her voice was shaking with anger. “My friend is dead because of a terrible, horrible accident but all you want to do is find someone to blame. Well, how about you look a little closer to home for that, Kate? How about you look at your role in all of this? You’re the one who stalked your own husband for a week, you’re the one who figured out he was fucking one of your best friends, you’re the one who confronted her. Why don’t you tell the police all that, see how it goes for you?”

  “Yes,” I said, a strange calmness coming over me for the first time in days. “That’s exactly what I think we should do. I think we should tell the police everything.”

  She shot me a look of disbelief, mixed with pity.

  “Good luck with that, honey.”

  With that, she stormed off, calling to Jake and Ethan to go to their rooms and start packing.

  To my surprise, Sean jumped up and followed her out.

  Rowan handed Odette to her husband and came to sit next to me.

  “Are you OK, Kate?”

  “No. You?”

  “Not really.” She squeezed my hand. For the first time I could remember, she seemed to struggle to find the right words. “Do you really think she did it?”

  I shrugged.

  “Honestly? I don’t know. But that’s for the police to decide, not us.”

  “But what do we do now?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “If she’s capable of something like that, who knows what she might do next?”

  I didn’t have an answer for her. We had sailed off the edge of the known world into uncharted waters, and there was no map to take us home. There was only one thing left to do: keep on going.