Chapter 41
Mallory
Monday Afternoon
Four Days After the Outing
Noreen Parra is framing you for murder.
“Ms. Latham?”
Mallory sits on the couch in her office, trying to act normal despite the policeman across from her (male, late twenties,
underwear-model fit), Officer Middlebury to her right, and her father by her desk. On the cushion beside her, Aubrey’s index
finger digs a trench into her palm. “Yes?” Mallory says.
“I was asking about the timeline?” The policeman flashes a warm hug of a smile. “Starting with the company outing?”
The outing—here. Mallory knows the where and the when. And Ilena had said there were invoices for a raw bar and paddleboard rentals and even
dung cleanup. But she doubts that’s what Mack Weldon is looking for. The underwear brand was Grayson’s favorite, at least
in her world.
“Ooh, the outings!” She summons the stupidity she’s supposedly known for. “We’ve held them all over Cambridge and Boston,
haven’t we, Aubrey? Can’t repeat ever. These young people nowadays expect—”
Officer Middlebury leans forward, and the mirrored sunglasses tucked into the collar of her shirt sway. It’s like she learned how to be a cop from watching too many B movies.
“I was referring to this most recent outing,” Mack Weldon continues in a velvety tone. “What was it?” He starts flipping through
a notebook. “Three days ago?”
“Four,” Officer Middlebury says, the innocuous word coming out as an accusation.
Make that too many good-cop/bad-cop B movies.
Mallory’s father leaves his perch on the edge of the desk and places a hand on Mallory’s shoulder. An emotion not in her lexicon
makes her lift her own hand and rest it atop his.
“I know you’d prefer bourbon,” he says. “Wouldn’t we all? But maybe a water, MallieMoo?” He pats her shoulder. “Apologies,
Mallory.”
“Sure.” The use of the nickname in front of the police makes her feel like a child, and he should know better. But then she
sees Officer Middlebury’s chin tuck, eyes lower to the ground, and she realizes that her father knows exactly what he’s doing.
It’s why he told Mallory to leave their house before the police arrived and to pretend to have no knowledge of what he found
in the basement. To be surprised when the police reveal Grayson is dead. To treat this exactly as it had previously been planned:
as an informational interview about Grayson’s disappearance, scheduled to take place casually, in the office, rather than
at the station. He’s making it harder for the officers to see her as a suspect.
Even though she is. She is, she is, she is.
“Let me.” Her father heads for the wet bar, the one place Mallory suddenly realizes she hasn’t searched for nut crackers.
She bites her lower lip, her usually rapid-fire brain unable to make any choice. This is how Aubrey must feel all the time.
There’s an unexpected peace in it, in giving things over to someone else.
Her father opens the refrigerator door. “It’s the least I can do. I’m here in such an unofficial capacity that I’m actually in the Dunkin’ down the street.”
“Dad joke,” Aubrey whispers, a soft smile on her face.
Mallory feels like she’s just stepped onto a tightrope in a windstorm. She tugs on the sleeve of her blouse. Barely a whisper
of an outline remains of the marks on her forearm, yet even when they’re gone, she’ll still see them.
She accepts the bottle of water from her father, cracks it open, and drinks. (Stalls.)
The sound of tapping draws her attention back to the male officer. He’s holding his notebook above his knee. “Sorry, nervous
habit.” Except he’s not actually nervous. Not at all.
He gives one final tap, and from between the pages, a plastic bag slips out. It lands on the floor in front of Mallory. She
reaches for it, but Officer Middlebury’s quick fingers get there first.
The fuzzy black-and-white cow print. Mallory tries to keep her expression neutral. The shape of Texas. She meets the officer’s eye. That slip wasn’t an accident. This must be the “lead” her father was talking about. A charm
found in Grayson’s penthouse. Too similar to the one found in her parents’ freezer to be a coincidence. Two charms from Noreen’s
key chain that amounted to one thing.
Noreen Parra is framing you for murder.
Is it possible they all actually think that?
Officer Middlebury slides the plastic bag into her shirt pocket, and Mack Weldon nods with feigned gratitude.
“Great.” He plants the notebook on his knee. “Where were we?”
“Outing,” Officer Middlebury grunts, not as an accusation but as a sentencing.
“Of course. The outing. Exactly what time did you first see Mr. Fields?”
Mallory runs her tongue over her lips. Beside her, Aubrey’s about to flay off a layer of skin. And Ilena, where the hell is
Ilena? Christ, she’s not in labor, is she?
The thought pushes Mallory to step up. If there’s even a chance they see her as potentially being framed rather than as a
suspect, she’s leaning all the way in. “I know that,” she pretends to blurt out. “I mean, I know who it belongs to.”
Aubrey can’t stop her small gasp, which fits in perfectly.
“We have to, Aubrey,” Mallory says. “We have to tell them what we know.”
Her father hovers near the kitchenette. The officers can’t see him nodding encouragingly. He violated investigation protocol
by telling her to leave the house after he found the body, the same way he’s interfering now. He’s trying to help her. Because
he must suspect her. He’d be the worst police officer in the world if he didn’t. He’s protecting her by putting himself at
risk.
All she wants is to go home. But the guilt over abandoning this man she barely knows unravels her a bit. She won’t let him
put himself at risk for nothing. “My assistant, Noreen. That was on her key chain.”
“Oh,” Officer Middlebury says, her voice rising, “and is there a reason you’re so intimately familiar with your assistant’s
keys?”
“In fact there is. I borrowed her car recently.” And now the source of her guilt switches to tossing Noreen under the bus—a
figure of speech that conjures Ethan, and Mallory fights to cover her wince. “Accepted her car, more accurately.”
Officer Middlebury’s eyes flicker to Mack Weldon’s. She breaks character for the barest of seconds, but long enough for Mallory
to see. Officer Middlebury is surprised.
“I’ve been a bit sore.” Mallory straightens her right leg.
“Ooh, yep, still tender. Pickleball’s harder than they say.
” She feels Aubrey’s leg begin to shake and places a hand on it.
“Anyway, I think Noreen was just being overprotective. Wanting me to drive rather than walk. She even offered me a wheelchair the other day, remember, Aubrey?”
The sound of scratching fills the office as Mack Weldon drops his good cop act and takes notes.
Officer Middlebury sets her sunglasses on the coffee table. She braces her elbows on her thighs and leans in so far that Mallory
can smell her perfume. Citrusy, orange, maybe, and the image of Officer Middlebury spritzing the air and darting beneath seems
so absurd that Mallory has to bite the inside of her cheek.
“Let’s take this further,” the male officer says. “Go back to the car. When was—”
A flurry of movement and then a ball of orange fur lands in Mallory’s lap.
“Harley!” Noreen cries as she pushes open the office door. “I’m so sorry, y’all! David Copperfield’s got nothing on this one.”
Mallory laughs politely, Aubrey too, but no one else does—not even her father.
Noreen’s gait slows as she approaches the lounge area. She’s nervous, without even knowing she has every reason to be, thanks
to Mallory’s efforts to divert attention from herself.
Mallory has no other choice. She can’t go to jail—bring Ilena and Aubrey with her. So she’s doing this? Actually doing this
to Noreen? Shit, shit, shit. She needs to stall for real. To decide if she’s actually willing to go this far. Mallory pops up from the sofa, tucking Harley
to her chest. “I’ll just get him settled.”
“Quickly,” Officer Middlebury says. “No holding his paw until he falls asleep, Ms. Latham.”
“Of course.” Mallory’s grip on Harley tightens.
With sure-footed steps to mask her inner trembling, Mallory carries Harley out of the office and falls into Noreen’s desk chair, black and hard, nothing like the custom-designed coral chairs with the AIM logo in their world.
“The door wasn’t fully shut.” Noreen closes it behind her now. “I’m so sorry.”
Spots gather before Mallory’s eyes. Did she hear? No, no, no, no, no. Mallory laughs some weird never-before-uttered hyena laugh, and she knows she’s losing it. Her sanity along with everything
else. “Everyone loves dogs, don’t they?”
Noreen crouches as if to attend to the dog, but instead, she looks straight at Mallory, and this is it, this is the end.
“I couldn’t hear more than muffled words,” Noreen says. “How’s it going? Are you okay? If there’s anything I can do . . .”
Mallory blinks, trying to focus, looking past Noreen to see the crew from The Shandy Shane Show being led by Ella, who keeps tugging at bangs she clearly regrets getting. Ozzie, in the same shirt as the day before, points
his long camera lens at the snack bar and rejuvenation rooms, and Mallory trails her fingers through Harley’s fur.
“Oh my,” Noreen says. “Ms. Latham, I promise I checked y’all’s calendar before confirming the, well . . .” She lowers her
voice. “The officers.”
“No, yes, I’m sure,” Mallory mutters, remembering how her mom had distracted her as she’d been forwarding the producer’s email
to Noreen. Had she never actually hit Send?
Her father pokes his head out of her office. “Breather, I get it. Truly, MallieMoo, it guts me that you have to do this. I’d
do it for you in a heartbeat if I could.”
She wants to thank him, apologize to him, for not being the daughter he thinks he has, and maybe this too is one of those
things that crosses universes—one of them may always be destined to disappoint the other.
“Ms. Latham?” Georgina walks toward Mallory as Ozzie trains his camera on the wall of photographs documenting the history of AIM.
Mallory, Ilena, and Aubrey and those microgreen salads at the start-up program, at the endless string of coffee shops around Boston, at the cramped office space barely half a mile from here that smelled like feet and decomposing rats and faintly of yeast from the home brewery below it that Mallory never once missed before now.
Four years. That’s how long ago it was. Moving into this space was gradual. They had a quarter of a floor, then half, then
the entire thing. And another. The square footage increased along with the number of employees, the original three of them
now more than a hundred. They’d have gotten here without Grayson, Mallory doesn’t doubt that. But not as quickly. The same
goes for this woman in front of her who wants to help, who has no idea that Mallory is in the process of betraying her.
Her father’s solemn eyes reach for Mallory’s. “The loss of Grayson is devastating, I know.”
Georgina stills. “Grayson Fields?”
Mallory has to get out of here. Out of this office, out of this investigation, out of this life.
“The loss of Grayson Fields?” Georgina’s in front of Mallory now, with a clear view through the glass office door. “As in
missing? As in dead?”
The word draws like a magnet, pulling forward Ozzie and Ella and several of the marketing team Mallory’s always threatening
to fire and Heidi Hoffman, who doesn’t even work here. A camera lens wedges itself between Mallory and her father, capturing
Officer Middlebury and Mack Weldon and a terrified Aubrey and a worried Noreen. The camera zooms in, then back out, refocusing
squarely on Mallory. Who runs.