37. Lance
Chapter thirty-seven
Lance
Jonny is at the desk rewriting Henry’s speech for the memorial.
He’s been at it for two hours, crossing things out and starting over, muttering about tone and pacing.
Alice’s words are good, he says, but the structure needs work.
He is polishing a dead woman’s sentences for the man we spent last night deciding had probably killed his wife.
Neither of us has managed to sit still since about eleven o’clock.
Van Hoek has not called.
That is the whole day. That is everything that has happened since we sent her that file at half past midnight: nothing at all, for seventeen hours, while a man in a golf shirt goes about his business four miles away and my partner corrects the punctuation on his speech.
He hasn’t mentioned leaving. Neither have I.
That visa could clear tomorrow or in March, and by rights he should be planning his next destination—Istanbul, or Kathmandu, or wherever the visa runs take him next.
But the spices are back in the cabinet and the Kermit bracelet is on his wrist and last night he let me inside him, and none of that sounds like a man who’s packing.
I’m afraid to ask. I’m afraid the answer will be “yes, I’m going,” and I’ll have to smile and say “of course, I understand,” and mean it, because that’s what a partner does. Not a handler. Not a commanding officer. A partner.
So instead of asking, I get the box down out of the closet.
He’s been through it twice. I have not been through it at all, not properly, because it was never mine to go through.
The sketchbooks are out on the shelf where he can reach them.
Everything else is exactly as he left it.
At the bottom is the address book with the rubber band round it, the one clue we already know about.
“What are you doing?” Jonny asks, looking up.
“I can’t stand just sitting here, waiting. I have to do something and the bad thing about this place is that there’s only so much you can stress clean.”
“Yeah, this place is definitely ready for an inspection.”
“I just keep thinking of what the police will say. You know, that they’ll see something we didn’t and then, just you wait, ‘Enry ‘Iggins, just you wait.”
“What was that?”
“Come on. My Fair Lady?”
“Oh. I never saw it.” He looks back down at the speech. “Wait, what did you call him?”
“Henry Higgins. It’s the character. I was trying to make a joke.”
“No, but you called him ‘Enry. When Alice was dying, I thought she moaned. She said En.”
“Not exactly indictable,” I point out.
“Yes, but if you’re moaning, what sound do you make? Oh, and then oh, fuck.”
“Are we talking about sex-moaning or pain-moaning?”
“Either one.” He wrinkles his brow. “I wish I knew something.”
I take the two pieces of paper out of the back of the address book and lay them on the bed. “Well, maybe you can help me solve this puzzle. Your mother kept a newspaper clipping about your neighbor for ten years. Why?”
“Your mother kept a newspaper clipping about your neighbor for ten years,” I say. “Why?”
“I have no idea. I’ve been asking myself that since Saturday.”
I hold it under the lamp. Suzannah Clemmons, twenty-odd years old, accepting a plaque from a man in a bad suit, and behind her at the edge of the frame is Rex Harlow with a full head of dark hair and no beard.
And then I see it, and I cannot unsee it. I don’t know how I have looked at this photograph three times and missed it.
“He isn’t clapping.”
“What?” Jonny asks, abandoning his speech. He climbs onto the bed and takes the picture.
“Everybody else in this picture has their hands together.” I turn it round so he can see. “Rex has one of his on the small of her back. Just like I do to you.”
“Oooh. Oh, wow.”
“So the former mistress takes a clipping because she recognizes a gesture—”
“—That the current mistress is receiving.” Jonny makes a face. “Ouch. Poor Mom. This isn’t a picture of my neighbor winning an award. It’s a picture of her lover with his new mistress.”
And then, with no warning whatsoever, I am seventeen years old and coming up the driveway at 110 Denning Court with smoke on the ridge and my heart going, and Angela Bishop is standing on her porch with a cigarette and a phone against her ear and her back to me.
I know exactly where you were Thursday. And who with.
Then find more. I’m not the one who has something to lose here.
At the time, I had thought for a second she was accusing me. I remember because I was trying to remember at the time where I had been that Thursday, and who with. Only when she turned did I see she was on the phone.
When I tell him, he goes very still.
“So, she was blackmailing him,” he says.
“She was getting money out of him for you and Elliott, and the lever wasn’t you. The lever was Suzannah.” I make myself keep going. “That’s the twenty thousand dollars. That’s Albatross Press.”
“Can we prove any of that?”
“No. Not one word of it.” I’ve already worked this part out.
“No phone company on earth keeps records ten years back, and nobody had a reason to pull hers at the time, because a woman who dies in a wildfire doesn’t get her call logs subpoenaed.
It’s gone. That conversation exists in exactly one place, and frankly, it’s a ten-year-old memory. It’s not even remotely reliable.”
He looks at the clipping in his hands for a long time.
“And less than an hour later, she was dead,” he says.
“And he never said a word. Not when it happened, not in ten years, not last Monday when you stood in his office and told him my whole family burned to death.” His voice hasn’t changed at all, which is worse.
“He didn’t have to do anything, did he. A fire came over a hill and solved his entire life for him.
Two mistresses and one illegitimate kid, all eliminated at once. It would have been like Christmas.”
“No,” I say. “He didn’t have to do anything.”
I pick up the other scrap. A class schedule, Fairhaven University, almost thirty years ago, one line scored through with a ballpoint so hard it’s torn the paper.
An economics section, Tuesdays and Thursdays.
“There’s no Harlow on it,” I say. “Instructor of record is a Professor J. Gibson. So why keep this? What was it supposed to prove? Were they classmates?”
“Can you look up this Gibson guy?” Jonny suggests.
It takes four minutes on my phone. Gibson died that February—cardiac arrest, shoveling his own driveway, sixty-three years old—and there’s a paragraph in the archive of the Fairhaven Bee, the University newspaper, that’s mostly about how much the department will miss him, with one line near the bottom saying his remaining courses would be taken over by a graduate assistant named Rex Harlow.
“Well, there’s that smoking gun,” Jonny grumbles. “The one we didn’t need.”
I look at the screen. Men in their sixties die shoveling snow in this state every single February.
It is the most ordinary death there is. And at that time, Rex Harlow had no motive that I know of to make sure the man died.
I put the phone face down, because I have got enough on my plate without going out looking for a fourth one.
“Okay,” Jonny says. “So my father is a piece of work. We knew that on Saturday.” He hands the clipping back to me. “What’s actually bothering you?”
And this is where I have to say the thing I have been carrying around since about two this afternoon.
“Alice,” I say. “I think Henry killed her.”
He blinks at me. “Lance, we did this last night. How could he have even known where she would be?”
“Well, she was there normally. I saw her.”
“But he had no way of knowing I would be there.” His face clouds.
“Actually, that’s wrong. I was at the Phoenix Society meeting, and when Alice said she wanted to talk to me, I said yes.
I asked for Tuesday morning because on Monday I had to see about the tickets and then go to a doctor’s appointment with my aunt.
If he heard that, he had two days to work out where I’d be. ”
I let the air out of my lungs. “So many ifs. I don’t like them.”
“Me neither. Any lawyer worth his salt will tear them apart. But you said you knew killers. You said you would be able to spot one and Henry…” He shrugs.
“I know what I said, Jonny.” It comes out harder than I mean it to, and I make myself slow down.
“And I have spent all afternoon thinking about the fact that I have been wrong about exactly that, once already, this month. I told you Nash was loud. I told you Nash breaks things where you can watch him do it. And then he taped a photograph to our door in the middle of the night and walked away without a sound.”
He’s quiet.
“I’ve been in rooms with men who’ve killed people,” I say.
“And I stood there and told the man I love that I can tell which ones by looking at them. But the truth is, maybe I don’t know.
It’s one of them. Or it’s neither of them and some stranger came down that boardwalk with a rock, and I don’t believe that for a second. ”
Jonny puts the clipping down on the bed between us, and then he does something I don’t expect.
He laughs—one short unhappy breath of it—and drags his hands down his face.
“Tomorrow morning,” he says, “I’m standing up under a tent in front of four hundred people to read out that woman’s speech and they’ll both be there. ”
I hadn’t got that far, and the floor goes out from under me when he says it. Of course they’ll both be there. Henry runs the society. Rex is an officer of the university. This is a big deal for the entire country club set.
“You don’t have to do it,” I say. “I’ll call Margaret right now. You’ve had a rough month, nobody on God’s earth would think twice—”
“Lance.”
He waits until I stop.
“Alice wrote that speech,” he says. “She was going to stand up and read it herself and she never got to, because she went down to a boathouse at seven in the morning to tell me who my father was.” He crawls off the bed. “So somebody’s reading it. I think at the very least that it should be me.”
There is a version of me—and he is not very far under the surface, and he was in charge of my entire life eight days ago—who says absolutely not, takes the car keys, makes a phone call, and handles it.
I put my hands in my pockets instead.
“Okay,” I grind out the word, because if I’m going to be agreeing to this, then he needs to know it was under extreme duress. “Then I’ll be sitting where I can see you.”
He looks up and smiles fondly at me. “That,” he says, “is allowed.” He pauses. “In fact, I absolutely will not be separated from you, Lance Broussard.”
“Keep saying that and you’ll get lucky,” I murmur.
Later, when the light has gone and he has finally stopped writing, I lie awake with him asleep against my shoulder and think about Angela Bishop.
I’ve judged her for a decade. I’ve called her abusive, controlling, suffocating. I said it to his face in a classroom with a police officer down the hall and nearly lost him over it, and I was right, and being right is not the same as being kind.
But I watched a video last night. I watched a seventeen-year-old square his shoulders and swallow whatever he was feeling for the greater good.
Parker’s kindness didn’t happen despite Angela.
It happened inside her house, in her crucible, under her rules.
The patience, the gentleness, the way he can read a room and know exactly what a person needs before they know it themselves—all of it was forged in the years she spent using him up.
She didn’t mean to give him any of that. She meant to keep him.