“But are you a suspect?” she persisted. “Do the police believe your wife has been murdered?”
“There’s no evidence anything’s happened to my wife,” I said.
“Is that because you’ve done a good job getting rid of the body?” she asked.
I tried very hard to stay calm. “I won’t dignify that with a response.”
The second most beautifully coiffed reporter, from the other TV station, asked, “How do you explain the fact that there’s no evidence your wife was even with you at Five Mountains?”
“I’m sure there were a thousand other people at Five Mountains yesterday who might have a hard time proving they were there,” I said. “She was there with me, and then she disappeared.”
“Have you taken a lie detector test?” asked a rumpled reporter I was pretty sure was from Albany.
“No,” I said.
“Did you refuse to take it?”
“No one’s asked me to take one,” I said.
The more beautiful TV reporter jumped in, “Would you take one?”
“I just told you, no one’s asked me—”
“Would you take one if we set it up?” the less beautifully coiffed TV reporter asked.
“I don’t see any reason why I would sit down with you—”
“So you’re refusing, then? You don’t want to take any questions about your wife’s disappearance while hooked up to a polygraph machine?”
“This is ridiculous,” I said. I was losing control of this. I’d been a fool to think I could walk into this and escape unscathed. You think, because you’re a reporter, you know the tricks. Then you find out you’re no smarter than anyone else.
Samantha, sensing what was happening to me, tried to help by breaking in with a soft question: “David,” she said, “can you tell me how you’re bearing up under this? It must be a terrible strain for you and for your son.”
I nodded. “It’s horrible. Not knowing … it’s terrible. I’ve never been through anything like this before. You have no idea until you’re experiencing it yourself.”
“How does it feel,” she continued, “being the subject of a story instead of the one covering it? All of us here, ganging up on you like this, it must seem kind of weird.”
The TV reporters gave Sam a dirty look when she said “ganging up.”
I almost smiled. “It’s okay, I know how it works. Look, I really have to go.”
The reporters opened a path for me as I moved forward. I took Sam by the elbow and brought her along with me, which brought some grumbles from the rest of the pack. What the hell was I doing? Giving her an exclusive?
“Dave, I feel real bad about this,” she said as we went up the stairs to my parents’ front door. “You know I’m just doing—”
“I get it,” I said. Before I could open the door, Mom had swung it open. She’d aged a couple of years since I’d seen her earlier in the day, and she gave Sam a withering look.
“Hi, Mom,” I said. “You remember Sam.” They’d met several times when we were going together.
Mom didn’t return Sam’s nod. She clearly viewed Sam, in her professional role, as the enemy.
“Where’s Ethan?” I asked.
Mom said, “Your father took him out. They went for something to eat and then he was going to take Ethan down by the tracks to see some real trains. I told him I’d call when things quieted down around here.”
That seemed like a pretty good plan to me. I was glad Ethan had been taken away from all this.
I said to Samantha, “Look, thanks for that question out there. It helped smooth things over a bit.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got to do this story but I’m not out to get you.”
“I appreciate that.”
“I mean, I know you would never do anything to Jan.” She studied me. “Right?”
“Jesus, Sam.”
“I really don’t think you would.”
“Thanks for the halfhearted vote of confidence.”
The corners of her mouth turned up. “I have to at least pretend to be objective. But I’m on your side, I swear. But I can’t promise the desk won’t have its way with this story once I turn it in. Which reminds me.” She looked at her watch. It was ten after eight. I knew she had until about nine-thirty to turn in a story and still make the first print edition.
“What did you want to tell me?” she asked. “I mean, if you’re giving me some kind of exclusive, I’ll take it. This is your paper, after all.”
“You need to watch your back,” I said.
“What?”
“I don’t mean you’re in any danger or anything, but you have to be careful. I think Madeline’s monitoring all the email.”
“What?” Sam’s jaw dropped. “The publisher is reading my personal email?”
“If it’s through the paper’s system, yeah, I think so.”
“Holy shit,” she said. “Why? Why do you think that?”
“I received an anonymous email the other day, a woman wanting to talk to me, about the prison proposal, about members of council taking bribes or whatever in exchange for a favorable vote.”
“Okay.”
“It landed in my mailbox, I only had it there for a few minutes before I purged it from the system. But Elmont Sebastian, he knew about it. He knew someone had tried to get in touch with me. I wondered at first whether he got tipped at the other end, from where this woman got in touch with me, but I don’t think so. I think he got the tip from the Standard. And who else but Madeline would have the authority to read everyone’s email?”
“Why would she want to do that?”
“She might not be interested in yours, but she’d have a reason to be interested in mine. The Russell family, they’ve got land they want to sell to Star Spangled Corrections for that prison. It’s not in our own paper’s interest to take a run at them. I think when Madeline saw that email, she let Sebastian know.”
“What about Brian?” she asked. “Maybe Madeline’s got him looking into the emails. She’s in his office all the time.”
I thought about that. “That’s possible. The bottom line is, our publisher can’t be trusted. You just need to know that.”
“I was kind of kidding when I said the desk might have its way with this story, but now I think they really might. Are they going to slant this thing with Jan to make you look even worse? Because you owned that prison story. Once you’re out of the picture, how likely is it someone else is going to take it up?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t tell her the lengths Elmont Sebastian had already gone to stop me. A job offer. Veiled threats against my son. I hadn’t given up on the theory that he had something to do with what had happened to Jan, but I couldn’t put it together in a way that made sense.
“I gotta go,” Sam said. “I’ve got to file this thing.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with Jan’s disappearance,” I said one last time.
She put a hand softly on my chest. “I know. I believe. I’m not going to sell you out with this story.”
She left.
Mom said, “I don’t like her.”
By the time I pulled into the driveway of my own house, it was nine. There were no media types camped out there. They’d all gotten what they needed at my parents’ place and were going to give me some peace, at least for the rest of this evening.
Ethan had fallen asleep on the way home. I carefully lifted him out of his seat and he rested his head on my shoulder as I took him into the house. The moment I came through the door, I was instantly reminded that the house had been searched by the police earlier in the day. Sofa cushions were tossed about, books removed from shelves, carpets pulled back. It didn’t look as though anything was actually damaged, but there was a lot of straightening up to do.
I laid Ethan gently on the couch and covered him with a throw blanket. Then I went upstairs and made some sense of his room. I put the mattress back in place, toys back in bins, clothes back i
n drawers.
It looked bad when I started, but only took fifteen minutes to tidy it up. I went back down, picked him up off the couch, and brought him up to his bed. I placed him on his back and undressed him. I’d have thought pulling a shirt up over his head would have awakened him, but he slept through all the jostling. I found his Wolverine pajamas and got them on him, then slipped him under the covers, tucked them in around him, and kissed him lightly on the forehead.
Without opening his eyes, he whispered sleepily, “Good night, Mommy.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Rolling off her, Dwayne said to Jan, “I always like to start a big day like this with a bang.”
She got out of the motel bed, slipped into the bathroom, and closed the door.
Dwayne, on his back and looking at the ceiling, laced his fingers behind his head and smiled. “This is it, baby. A few hours and we’ll be set. You know what I think we should do later today? We should look at boats. I’ll bet there are all kinds of people selling their boats. Just when everyone else is unloading their goodies because of the recession, we’re going to be doing just fine. We’ll be able to pick up some twenty- or thirty-foot cabin cruiser for a song, not that we couldn’t pay full price if we wanted to. But if this money is going to last us the rest of our lives, we don’t want to be really stupid with it, am I right?”
Jan hadn’t heard anything after “baby.” She had turned on the shower after taking a moment to figure out how the taps worked in this one-star joint, which was about five miles from downtown Boston. Plenty close enough, considering her nervousness about being anywhere around here.
Dwayne threw back the covers and stood naked in the room. He grabbed the remote and turned on the television. He was flipping through the channels at high speed.
“They don’t get any of the good stations here,” he said. “Why do they make you pay extra for the adult stuff? Don’t they already charge enough for the room?”
He landed on a cartoon network that was running an animated Batman episode, got bored with that, and kept on surfing. He’d gone past a news channel and was already onto a stand-up comedy show when he said, “The fuck?” He went back a couple of stations and there was Jan. A photo of her.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Get out here!”
She didn’t hear him from under the shower.
Dwayne banged the door open and shouted, “You’re on the fucking TV!”
He tapped the volume up so high the television cabinet began to vibrate. The anchor was saying, “—yet when invited by the station to take a lie detector test, Mr. Harwood flatly refused. The journalist for the Promise Falls Standard says his wife went missing from the Five Mountains amusement park Saturday, yet police sources have said that no one has actually seen Jan Harwood since late Friday afternoon. And there’s a new development this morning. The body of a coworker of the missing woman was found in the Lake George area, not far from where Jan Harwood and her husband were seen before she went missing. Looks like we’re going to have some sunshine this afternoon in the greater Boston—”
Dwayne killed the TV and went back into the bathroom. He reached through the shower curtain and turned off the water. Jan’s hair was in full lather.
“Dwayne! Shit!”
“Didn’t you hear me?”
“What is it?”
“It was on the news. They were chasing your husband, asking him to take a lie detector test, and they found the body.”
Jan squinted at him through soapy eyes. She was instantly feeling cold as the water dripped from her naked body. She said, “Okay.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Let me finish up in here,” Jan said.
“Want me to get in with you?”
She answered by pulling the curtain shut. She went back to fiddling with the taps. The water blasted out cold at first, and she huddled, as though that would somehow protect her. She swore under her breath, adjusted the knob and then nearly scalded herself. She dialed it back and found the right temperature, then stuck her face into the spray to get the shampoo out of her eyes.
But they’d been stinging before this.
She’d found herself—she could hardly believe it when it happened—crying at one point in the night. Dwayne was snoring like a band saw, so there was no risk of waking him.
Not that she was sobbing uncontrollably. She hadn’t been bawling her eyes out or anything undignified like that. But there was this moment when she felt, well, overwhelmed.
A couple of tears got away before she fought them back. You didn’t want to slip out of character.
You didn’t want people thinking you cared.
But as she lay there in bed, she imagined putting her hand on Ethan’s head, feeling the silky strands of his hair on her palm. She imagined the smell of him. The sounds his feet made padding on the floor when he got up in the morning and walked into their bedroom to see if she was awake. The way his fingers picked up Cheerios, how he stuffed them into his mouth, the sounds he made when he chewed. How he sat, cross-legged, in front of the television when he watched Thomas the Tank Engine.
The warmth of his body when he crawled into bed with her.
Think about the money.
She tried to push him out of her thoughts as she lay there in the middle of the night. The way some people might count sheep, she counted diamonds.
But Ethan’s face kept materializing before her eyes.
From the moment she started going out with David, she’d convinced herself it was about the money. This façade, this marriage, this raising a child, it was all part of the job. This was how she was earning her fortune. She just had to do the time, until Dwayne got out, and she’d be out of there. She’d walk away and not look back. And once she’d exchanged the diamonds for cash, she’d be rid of Dwayne, too.
One last costume change.
With any luck, the way she’d left things in Promise Falls, no one would be looking for her. At least not alive. And when they didn’t find her body, the police would figure David had done a very good job of disposing of it. Oh, he’d tell them he had nothing to do with it, that he was an innocent man, but wasn’t that what all guilty men said?
Maybe he’d even, at some point, suspect what it was that had really happened. When and if it finally dawned on him that his wife had set him up, what exactly was he going to do about it from a jail cell? He’d have spent everything he had on lawyers trying to beat the charges. He wasn’t going to have anything left to hire a private detective to track her down.
At least Ethan would be okay. His grandparents would look after him. Don, he was a bit loopy at times, but his heart was in the right place. And while Jan never much cared for the way Arlene looked at her sometimes—it was like she knew Jan was up to something, but she couldn’t figure out what it was—there was no doubt she’d be able to raise that boy. She had a lot of years left in her, and she loved Ethan to death.
Jan struggled to find some comfort in that.
Maybe, once she had her money, once she really knew there was a new life waiting for her, a new life where she could do anything she wanted, she’d be able to forget about the last few years, pretend they never happened, make believe the people she’d known—and the one she had brought into the world—during that time never really existed.
Once she had the money.
The money would change everything.
Money had a way of healing all sorts of wounds, of helping one move on. That’s what she’d always believed.
Dwayne stopped the truck on Beacon Street, just west of Clarendon.
“Here you go,” he said.
Jan looked to her right. They were parked out front of a MassTrust branch sandwiched between a Starbucks and a high-end shoe store.
“This is it?” she said.
“This is it. Your key opens a box right here.”
This had been the way they’d worked it. They’d each picked a safe-deposit box to store their half of the diamonds, kept the location sec
ret, and then swapped keys. That way, they’d need each other when they wanted to cash in.
“Let’s do it,” she said.
They got out of the truck together and walked through the front doors of the bank and went up to a service counter.
Jan said, “We’d like to get into our safe-deposit box.”
“Of course,” said a middle-aged woman. She needed a name, and for Dwayne to sign in a book, and then she led them into a vault where small, rectangular mailboxlike doors lined three walls.
“Here’s yours right here,” the woman said, producing a key and inserting it into a door. Jan took out the key she’d been holding on to for five years, inserted it into the accompanying slot. The door opened and the woman slid out a long black box.
As she tipped it, something inside rattled softly.
“There’s a room right here for your convenience,” she said, opening the door so Dwayne and Jan could enter. She set the box down on a counter and withdrew, closing the door on her way out. The room was about five by five feet, well lit, with a padded office chair in front of the counter.
“This place is even smaller than my cell,” Dwayne said. He hooked his fingers under the front of the box lid and lifted. “Oh boy.”
Inside was a black fabric bag with a drawstring at the end, the kind that might hold a pair of shoes or slippers.
Jan reached and took out the bag, feeling the contents inside first without opening.
“Feels like teeth,” she said nervously.
She loosened the drawstring and tipped the bag over the counter.
The diamonds began spilling out. Much smaller than teeth, but far more glittery. They hit the counter and scattered. Dozens and dozens of them. More than they could count at a glance.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Dwayne said, like he’d never seen these gems before. He picked them up randomly, rolled them around in his palm, held them up to the fluorescent light as though that would tell him anything about their worth.