You Deserve to Know

Chapter 27

27

NOW

After seeing the detective out, Aimee retreats to her kitchen and begins to load the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. She tries to process what Salazar told her. There can be no mistaking his meaning: he thinks that Scott is involved in Anton’s death. And now that Scott is missing, it’s becoming harder for her to maintain her faith in him. She wants to. She wants to give him the benefit of the doubt, to believe everything can be explained away, but it’s nearly impossible to keep her thoughts from racing to the worst possible conclusion.

That Scott has fled.

Jittery and distracted, she goes upstairs to strip the beds. She keeps Tuesday mornings free for laundry and maintenance of her business website—updating seasonal sales, spotlighting different plants each week. This week she’ll put up a picture of a New York ironweed, a native plant with purple flowers that bloom in early fall and can grow as tall as seven feet. She’ll reach out to her dad and see how many ironweeds he has in stock, because if she puts it on her website, people will ask for it. It always works like that—people like to buy plants when they are in bloom.

Life has to go on, even if Scott isn’t here. She can’t just sit here in the house and wait for something to happen. She’s always been a doer. She made it through the grief of losing her mother by throwing herself into activity. She played softball and soccer and worked at her dad’s nursery. Later, in college, whenever she felt the darkness rise in her, she would go to the gym or for a run. She needs to be physically exhausted by the end of the day to be able to sleep. Exercise is her antidepressant and sleep aid rolled into one.

In the boys’ room, she quickly strips the sheets. Finding several socks and shorts on the floor, she tosses them into a laundry basket. As she remakes the beds, she wonders if she should have said something to Salazar about the one hundred thousand dollars. She didn’t want to make it look like Scott took the money and ran—Aimee is sure this can’t be what happened. He was going to tell her everything last night; he was going to explain it all. And she still believes him.

Even if he never came home.

The only possible answer is that he can’t get home. But why that would be eludes her. He could be injured. Perhaps his car crashed and he’s on the side of the road, but that seems far-fetched. They don’t live in a rural area. The road he would have driven on to get to Cathy’s was well-traveled and someone would have spotted his car had it crashed. That leaves the disturbing possibility that someone is keeping him from coming home.

But who? It has to be connected to the money. Maybe Scott had gotten mixed up with the wrong people. She knows how hard it can be to run your own business. Not just from her personal experience, but from watching her dad. There was a late, hard freeze her sophomore year in college, stunting and killing many of the plants the nursery grew. He couldn’t meet buyer expectations and had to take out a second mortgage on the house to keep the business going. He told her all of this years later, when she was going through a rough patch and he offered her a loan. He said that when his business almost failed, he had been tempted to borrow money from moneylenders. People who don’t play around if you can’t pay them back. Don’t ever do that. Come to me. It was the most honest and most vulnerable thing he ever told her.

Noa’s room is more chaotic, even though she’s older and everyone says that girls are neater. Not in Noa’s case. Clothes are strewn everywhere, and Noa has pulled the pillowcase off her pillow and used it to store My Little Pony figurines. As Aimee straightens up, she wonders if Scott might have become mixed up with shady people. Was he paying someone back, someone he had borrowed money from? She knew how much was riding on this software launch. He took a buyout from a biotech company a few years back, and instead of looking for new employment, he put together a team to pursue this dream. Was some of that funding less than legit? No, it’s impossible. She has ridden with Scott when they drove all the way back to the grocery store to pay for the case of La Croix that they had forgotten to pay for. He is honest to a fault, a rule follower.

She’s tucking a fresh sheet into Noa’s mattress when she spots something under the bed. It’s a shoebox, and her stomach clenches at the jangling noise it makes as she drags it out. She pulls off the lid and is saddened but not surprised to see a collection of items she knows don’t belong to Noa.

“Damn.” She picks up a small jade heart, trying to remember where she might have seen it, and she realizes it was in a bowl in Cathy’s kitchen with several other stone hearts. She carries the shoebox into her bedroom. She’ll talk to Noa about it later, try to establish where everything came from and how to get it all back to the rightful owners. Suddenly, exhaustion hits her. She sits on the edge of her bed and bursts into tears. It’s all too much, worrying about Scott, about Noa, trying to keep it together when she has no idea what’s going on. After letting herself really cry for several minutes, she goes into the bathroom to wash her face.

In the mirror she stares at the puffy bags beneath her eyes and scowls. “You can handle this,” she tells herself. She won’t be a victim. She won’t sit around here feeling sorry for herself.

Aimee heads down to the mudroom and digs through the pockets of the jacket she was wearing on Sunday when she fol lowed Scott to the coffee shop. She finds Jon Block’s card and dials his number.

“This is Aimee Stern, Scott Crowder’s wife,” she says when he answers with a gruff hello. “We met at Tatte the other day.”

“Listen,” he says tersely. “Like I told you before, I really shouldn’t be talking to—”

“Wait, don’t hang up. Scott is missing; he didn’t come home last night.” The words come rushing out. “I need your help.”

He exhales loudly. “Fine. I’m only going to be in my office for another twenty minutes. If you make it here in time, great. If not…” He doesn’t finish the sentence.

“I’ll make it.”

Aimee rushes out the door, and as soon as she does, she sees Lisa come out of her house and start walking over. She must have been watching at the window, waiting for Aimee to leave.

“Aimee!” Lisa calls and waves. “Hold on.”

“Not now,” Aimee yells back as she climbs into her truck. She guns it, driving past a stunned Lisa and almost hitting a marked police car that is turning onto their street. She watches in her rearview mirror as it pulls up between her and Gwen’s houses. A lump forms in her throat. What could it be doing there? She wonders if they are coming to her house with news about Scott, or if they are going to Gwen’s. At the next light, she pauses when it turns green, debating whether she should go back to see. Instead, she calls Lisa.

“Hey, sorry I ran off like that,” she says by way of a greeting.

“That’s okay. Is everything all right?”

“Not exactly. Scott didn’t come home last night. He’s missing.”

“Missing? Oh my gosh, Aimee. That’s terrible. Did you check the hospitals?”

“Yes, several times. But I had to run out to meet someone, and as I was leaving I saw a police car pull onto our block. Can you do me a favor and see if they are going to my house? I thought maybe they had some news and were coming to tell me.”

“You got it. I am walking out the door now.” Aimee hears the creak of the door opening and then a screen door slam shut. “Let’s see. Nope, they’re not at your house. There are two officers on Gwen’s front stoop.”

Aimee lets out a deep breath. The worst has not come to pass. No one has come to her house to tell her they’ve found Scott somewhere hurt, or dead.

“What do you think is going on?” Lisa asks.

“I have no idea,” Aimee says as she pulls into a strip mall with a laundromat and a Korean grocer. This is the address of Jon Block’s office, but she doesn’t see anything that looks promising. Aimee takes Lisa off speaker, cuts the engine, and holds the phone to her ear as she gets out. “I have to go, Lisa.”

“Wait, I still want to talk to you about last night,” Lisa says. “I hope you know what Gwen was saying wasn’t true. Sleep with Anton? I mean, you know I would never, ever do anything like that. I’m not that kind of person. You know me, Aimee. I just wouldn’t do that.”

“Of course, right.” But Aimee isn’t paying attention to what Lisa is saying as she walks past the laundromat. She stops in front of a nondescript office. There’s no sign, and when she peers in the darkened window, it looks like an empty waiting room. But this is the right address. “Gotta go. I’ll call later.”

Aimee hangs up and pulls open the glass door, a little bell attached to the top tinkling as she does. The small room is empty except for two plastic chairs and a table with a People magazine on it from 2019 featuring a celebrity she doesn’t recognize. HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE MYSELF , the headline reads. She’s not sure if she should sit and wait or approach the only other door in the room. She looks at her phone. Eleven minutes until Block said he was leaving. She knocks on the door.

“Come in,” someone calls. The door opens into another small room, only this one is crowded with furniture. Block sits behind a desk crowded with piles of paper and two monitors. Several beige metal filing cabinets line the wall, and stacks of bankers’ boxes fill the room.

He looks at his watch. “You have ten minutes.”

“Eleven,” Aimee says. “You have to help me. You have to tell me what’s going on. Why Scott hired you.”

Block scowls. He leans back in his chair, grabbing a neon-pink stress ball and squeezing it over his head. “What did he tell you?”

“He told me that he hired you to help him because he had been scammed. For a lot of money.” She takes a deep breath. “One hundred thousand dollars. At first he told me that it was a business expense, but then he admitted that wasn’t the truth. He was going to come clean last night and explain everything, but he never came home. I’m worried that this is all connected. And now the police are asking me about Anton’s death.”

“Anton?” He frowns.

“Anton Khoury. My neighbor. He was killed last Friday night. Just tell me, is Scott involved in some shady business scheme?”

“No. Not exactly.” His words are deliberate and slow.

Aimee tightens and releases her jaw. She’s dealt with difficult men before. Suppliers who want to stiff her, a crew member who was caught stealing from a job. “My husband’s life may be in danger. And if something happens to him, I’m going to hold you responsible. Now I’m going to ask again, why did Scott hire you?”

Block smirks at her, his nostrils flaring. She can tell he doesn’t like her tone. Aimee holds up her phone. “I’ve got a detective on speed dial. Detective Salazar? I’d rather hear from you what’s going on, but if the only way to get you to tell me is to call the cops, I’ll do it.”

“Fine,” Block says in a tone that tells her things aren’t fine at all. He shoots the pink stress ball toward a small plastic hoop on the wall and misses. “Your husband hired me to find out who was blackmailing him.”