Chapter 4
Jack
VANILLA AND brOWN SUGAR. That’s what I remember Nora smelling like when we dated.
And I’m certain I’m remembering correctly, because it’s the very scent I tried so hard to remove from my life after our relationship ended.
I washed every blanket she ever used. I dry cleaned my couch cushions. I even detailed my dang car trying to escape the lingering scent of her presence in my life.
But tonight as we drive back to her office, I find myself desperately wishing she smelled like that familiar—and oh so intoxicating—vanilla and brown sugar combo. Instead the only scent filling the car is my practical, boring, run-of-the-mill Dove shampoo and body wash.
Only wafting off of her hair and body, my shampoo smells anything but boring.
And it’s killing me that I had nothing to do with making her smell like me. She doesn’t smell like me because I’ve been holding her or because, as I’d once thought would be the case, she woke up in bed next to me as my wife. No, she smells like me because she showered in my guest bathroom which is stocked with the same Dove shampoo and body wash that I have in the master bath.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that she’s also wearing one of my sweatshirts. As soon as she got in the shower I threw her bloodstained clothing into the wash, but a cycle of laundry takes a long time. So in the meantime I loaned her one of my sweatshirts and a pair of sweatpants my sister Joy left behind when she came to stay over Christmas.
When we were dating, Nora would perpetually borrow my sweatshirts, and she never returned them. Not that I minded. In fact, I never even asked for them back after I broke up with her.
I wonder what she did with them.
Probably burned them.
Seeing her in one of my sweatshirts again after so many years is messing with my head. My hands flex and unflex on the steering wheel as I fight the instinct to reach over and take her hand. My arms, driven by muscle memory, want nothing more than to stop this car and pull her against me.
But, not only would that be wildly inappropriate given that we're not together anymore, it’s also the last thing she needs after the night she’s had.
My hands flex on the steering wheel for an entirely different reason now as I think about what happened to her. The anger that burns in my chest is like a wildfire that I have no idea how to fight, let alone put out.
“So you said we’re going to stage a murder?” Nora’s soft voice floats across the space between us, yanking me from my inner battles. “Why not just hide the body?”
“Hide the body where, exactly?” Thanks to my pent up rage, the words come out harsher than I’d intended, and Nora flinches.
“I don’t know,” she says defensively. “How about the bottom of the lake?”
“The lake is still mostly frozen,” I reply. “There’s no way we could get out deep enough to actually throw the body somewhere it wouldn’t resurface in two or three days' time.”
She shudders. I get that a lot in my line of work. Murder really gives people the creeps.
“Okay, well, you have lots of land. We could bury the body.”
“No.” I dismiss this, unease churning in my stomach.
“Just no?” she says incredulously. “You’re not even going to entertain the idea that burying the body might be smarter than staging some elaborate murder scene?”
A muscle in my jaw ticks. “Fine,” I bite out, “you want to bury the body on my land? Let’s talk that through. What if I move—is that something I should disclose to the buyer or should I just wait for them to find the body on their own?”
“You? Move?” Nora shakes her head. “C’mon, we both know that’s never going to happen. You love that place.”
A lump forms in my throat, and I focus really hard on the road in front of me, willing my emotions to stay below the surface.
By some miracle she doesn’t notice my agitated state; instead she sighs heavily and says, “But it doesn’t matter because I really can’t ask you to do something like that for me. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ve already made you culpable enough in this murder. Asking you to bury the body on your property is taking things way too far.”
The funny thing is, she’s wrong. I’d bury a hundred bodies in my backyard if it meant protecting her. My hesitation has nothing to do with her asking too much of me.
But I can’t admit that to her.
Nor can I tell her the truth.
So I settle for a grunt.
Classy, I know.
We’ve reached her building now, giving me a convenient excuse to stop this conversation before it gets out of hand and I start saying things I shouldn’t.
“Shoot,” she mutters. I don’t have to ask why. There’s a tow truck in the parking lot and two men are standing outside Nora’s car chatting.
“You called a tow truck?” I cry. “You didn’t tell me that! Nora, if we’re going to do this, you need to—”
“I didn’t call them!” she cuts me off loudly. “I didn’t call them,” she repeats at a normal volume as my gaze swings her way. “I would’ve told you if I did.”
“Then who did?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Maybe Frank. That’s who the tow truck driver is talking to.”
As if they can hear us discussing them, both men look over at us. With a heavy sigh I pull my car the rest of the way up toward them, parking it a couple of spots over.
“Let me do the talking, okay?” I say, and she nods vigorously, green eyes wide. “Hello, there, fellas,” I say as I step out of the car, wincing at my word choice. Fellas? Yikes. What am I, 80? “This is a nice surprise,” I rush on. “Here I thought I’d be changing this tire by myself.” I feel Nora step up behind me.
“This your car?” The tow truck driver asks.
“Nah, this is her car,” Frank answers as he points to Nora.
“Ah.” The driver nods. “You the guy that called me, then?” He peers down at his phone. “A mister Ian Wharfman?”
I hear Nora let out a squeak of surprise.
“Mr. Wharfman called you?” Frank asks the driver.
“That’s the name he gave.” The tow truck driver looks around. “None of you are Ian Wharfman?”
So the jerk called the tow truck for Nora? What a weirdly solicitous thing to do right before trying to assault her. The incongruity of the two actions makes no sense.
“None of us are Ian Wharfman,” I confirm.
He sighs heavily. “Well, he’s not answering his phone. But he told me to take the car anywhere so long as I got it,” he peers at his paper again, reading off it, “the hell off his lot before the morning.” He looks up at us. “Apparently he has some bigwig clients coming in the morning, and he doesn’t want a junker of a car to be the first thing they see. All that’s his words, not mine.”
Ah. Now it all makes sense.
Behind me Nora gasps indignantly. Someone just called her beloved Chevy a junker. Yeah, no way she liked that. What her car lacks in actual value, it makes up for in sentimental value—or so she always used to say. It was her grandfather’s car, and she takes great pride in the fact that she’s kept it running this long.
Not that she’s the one doing the maintenance. No, Nora doesn’t actually know much about cars. But she is religious about taking the car in for every recommended service or maintenance appointment. She’s that way about most of her possessions, though, preferring longevity to constantly replacing things.
Perhaps that’s part of why I took her rejection of my proposal so hard. I thought she’d jump at the chance to make our relationship a permanent fixture in her life, but instead she said she wasn’t looking for that level of commitment.
She could commit herself to a car, sure. But not to me.
I shake these morose thoughts away. Not a good time to be dwelling on the past.
Nah, better to do it while angrily pumping iron in my basement like I usually do.
Nothing gets me to increase my reps quite like thinking about everything that went wrong in my relationship with Nora.
“Yeah, so, I’m thinking I oughta tow your truck, ma’am,” the driver goes on. “That okay?”
“If that’s what Mr. Wharfman wanted you to do, that’s what you should do,” Frank interjects.
“Oh no, it’s not necessary for you to tow it,” I say, because we don’t need even more people getting looped into the situation with Nora’s car. I can put the spare on and then tomorrow, after we’ve managed to pin Ian’s murder on some imaginary villain (or vigilante, the way I see it), I’ll buy a real tire and install it myself. “I’ll put the spare on, and we’ll be on our way.”
“Okay,” he shrugs. “As long as you promise you’ll get it outta here. I don’t want to be dealing with an angry call from this Wharfman guy tomorrow.”
“I can guarantee that you will not be dealing with an angry call from Ian Wharfman tomorrow,” I say, holding up my two fingers in a scout’s honor pose. Behind me I hear Nora start to laugh, then cover it with a cough. Nothing about this situation should be funny—we’re in the middle of a murder coverup for Pete’s sake—and yet, the sound of her half-laugh has me fighting a laugh too. Nothing like being able to guarantee someone won’t do something… because they’re dead.
“I don’t like this,” Frank says as I open Nora’s passenger side door to get the lug wrench tool kit from where it should be behind the seat. “If Mr. Wharfman said to tow the car, I think you should tow the car.”
I’m already heading for the back of the truck, ignoring his protestations. “Nah, don’t worry about it, man,” I say as I lower myself to the ground to retrieve the spare from beneath the truck bed. “I’m going to get this spare tire taken care of.”
Even as I say the words I realize I am wrong. I am not going to be able to put the spare tire on.
Because there is no spare tire on the underside of this truck.
I stifle a groan as I stand back up.
“Problem?” Frank asks.
“Uh, yeah.” My eyes find Nora’s in the darkness. “I guess there’s no spare tire after all.” Her eyes pop wide and her mouth forms an O.
“Okay, well that’s that then,” Frank says with satisfaction. “Tow the car.”
“Yeah, okay,” I say, because arguing further will only seem weird and then later, after Ian is discovered to be dead, potentially suspicious. “Tow it.”
“Alright then,” the driver says with a sigh. “You got a tire place you want me to go to?”
Nora gives him the name of the same place we took her car the day we met, when I installed her spare tire on the side of the road. The spare tire she never replaced, apparently, even though she told me she would.
I turn away, needing a minute to get a hold of myself. The building is dark except for a single light in the lobby. A flash of movement in one of the windows of the second floor catches my eye, but when I focus in on the window I see only darkness. Must’ve just been my eyes playing tricks on me. I shake my head and turn back to Nora’s car.
The tow truck driver is busy attaching Nora’s truck while Frank makes a show of overseeing the whole thing.
“Nora,” I bend down to whisper to Nora, “you—”
“Never replaced the spare tire,” she cuts me off. “I know. I’m sorry, okay? I told you I would and I never did. Can you perhaps hold off on the lecture? In case you haven’t noticed, I’m having a really bad night.”
“Uh, I wasn’t going to lecture you about the tire,” I tell her.
“Oh.” She flushes, the color creeping up her neck reminding me of the way I used to make her blush just by catching her eye across a room.
“At least not here,” I amend, tearing my mind out of the abyss of achingly torturous memories it was about to leap into. “I was absolutely going to mention it later.”
“I knew it,” she huffs, crossing her arms over her chest. I see the smile she’s fighting, though. Nora always did amuse herself by predicting my behavior. She was always affectionate in her teasing; but in the months that followed our breakup, I couldn’t help but wonder if she got bored of how, well, boring I am.
Variety is the spice of life, as the saying goes, and I am nothing if not invariable.
Is that why she didn’t want to marry me?
“Yeah, you were right.” I give her the win. “Now what I was actually going to say,” I lower my voice, “is that you should tell me that you’re going to text Ian and let him know your car has been successfully towed.”
“What? Why would I do…” she trails off as understanding dawns. “Oh, right.” She nods. “You mean tell you loudly enough that I can be overheard by Frank and Kenny?”
“Kenny?”
“The tow truck driver,” she explains. “It says it right on his shirt.”
It’s my turn to flush. I should’ve noticed a detail like that. I’m a detective. Being observant is one of my job requirements.
But of course, I was too distracted by Nora and the hero complex I’ve got going on with her.
“Right, Kenny,” I say. “Yeah. Exactly. Loud enough for them to hear.”
I step back, then go over to where Frank is watching the tow truck proceedings.
“Thanks for all of your help with this,” I tell him, adopting a casual pose: hands in my pockets, one hip slightly jutted back, smile pasted on. “It’s nice to know Nora has such supportive coworkers.”
Frank’s gaze swings my way for the briefest of seconds before going back to Kenny. “Who are you again? Her boyfriend or something?”
“Uh,” I begin, but I’m saved from having to answer by Nora’s loud voice as she addresses Kenny.
“Thanks so much, Kenny, for taking care of my car.” She’s going overboard on the loudly thing; speaking to Kenny as if she suspects he’s hard of hearing. She’s never been the coolest under pressure. In the past I’ve found the way she gets easily ruffled adorable. Tonight I’m praying it doesn’t get her arrested for murder. “Hey, babe,” she waves her phone around in my direction, “I’m going to text Mr. Wharfman and let him know Kenny here towed my car.”
Babe? The word sticks in my brain, lodging itself there like an invasive species bent on wreaking havoc on my entire ecosystem.
“Okay.” Somehow I manage to acknowledge her words despite how off-balance I feel. This was a bad idea. Did I really think I could spend time with Nora without getting my heart broken again? That having her near me, reminding me of everything we once shared together, wouldn’t affect me?
I’m such an idiot for getting involved with her again.
Okay, and for the covering-up-a-murder thing.
Also a bad idea.
Also makes me an idiot.
No need to discuss why the former is somehow more of an issue for me. This isn’t a therapy session, so I’m going to leave the psychoanalysis out of it.
“Alright, well, since you’ve got the situation in hand here,” I say to Kenny, “Nora and I are going to be on our way.”
I’m itching to get back home and move Ian Wharfman’s body off my property. It feels a bit like I’ve left a ticking time bomb in my garage.
I’m a detective. Most of my friends are detectives. The image of one of them showing up unexpectedly to my house and finding the body has me practically sprinting back to my car. Out of habit, I grab Nora’s door for her. She pauses between the open door and her seat, her green eyes finding mine in the darkness. “Always the gentleman,” she murmurs, then dips down into her seat.
I’m left standing there, wondering if she meant that as a compliment or a criticism.
I give myself exactly five seconds to contemplate this before shutting the car door behind her and hurrying over to take my place in the driver’s seat.
We drive back to my house in complete silence.