Chapter 6 Katie Morrow #2
“I can ask them.” She turned back to the door, grateful for an answer.
“Don’t,” he interrupted. “Just tell them what I said, and don’t let them touch anything until I get there.”
“Okay, okay.” She ended the call without waiting for him to respond and gave her best smile to the officers. “He said that’s fine, but he wants to be here when you do it. He can be here in, like, twenty minutes.”
“Great.” Antonio held out the clipboard. “If you can sign here, giving your permission for a search and seizure, we’ll be back then.”
A search and seizure. That sounded intense. Katie scrawled her signature on the line. “Everyone’s giving permission for this?”
“Well, the innocent ones.” He smiled at her as if it was a joke, but it didn’t sound like a joke. “Thank you, Mrs. Morrow.” He stepped back but the Terry guy stayed in place, his hands resting on his belt.
“So, you’ve never spoken to or met Willow Morrow?” Terry repeated, as if he hadn’t believed her the first time.
“No?” Katie repeated, but it sounded almost like a question.
She cleared her throat. “Like I said, she had been gone for a couple of years before I met Mark.” She stepped back and wondered if slowly closing the door in his face would be rude.
Probably. Rude and suspicious. She opened it a little bit wider, just to be sure. There. Nothing suspicious here.
“You know, I worked her missing persons case. We swept this whole house and property back then. We didn’t search the pond, though.”
“Well, why would you?” She smiled again, as brightly as an idiot, as if she already knew the details of Willow’s absence.
That’s what Mark called it, an absence. Not a disappearance.
Willow had left him—that was what Mark had told her, and that was the nondramatic truth of the matter.
Willow wanted a divorce, wanted out of their marriage, so she’d signed divorce papers, packed up a bag, and left.
The neighborhood liked to make it sound scandalous, but that was because they were always looking for something to gossip over.
It was Willow’s nail tech who had called the police and asked them to check on her.
Willow had no-showed to their weekly appointment.
Calls to her cell had gone unanswered, so the nail tech called the house and left a few messages.
Mark had finally returned one of her calls and informed her that Willow had left him and he didn’t have any future contact info.
The nail tech hadn’t been happy with that answer, and tried to reach her via social media, but all Willow’s accounts were closed.
Eventually, she had called the cops and they had done a cursory investigation.
Katie hadn’t been here for that, but that was how Mark had described it.
Cursory. A few questions, and then they were satisfied.
Mark had told her the history on their first date, over sushi and edamame.
His explanation had made sense, and Katie dismissed Willow as a non-factor in their future or in any evaluation of Mark as a romantic prospect.
Then Katie had moved into his home, and Willow’s ghost seemed to be everywhere.
She’d heard the whispers at the country club and seen the suspicious looks cast Mark’s way.
Right after Katie had moved in, she’d gone to the next-door neighbor’s home with a loaf of sourdough bread, wanting to introduce herself, and gotten the entire story from Monica, a stick-thin wife who had flung open the door, stared at the plastic-wrapped loaf in Katie’s hands, and shrieked at her that she was off carbs!
Had been for two years! She had then seized the sourdough with both hands and sniffed it as if she were a Dalmatian.
Within two minutes, she’d invited Katie in, had the sourdough cut into quarters, and begun a twenty-minute monologue about Willow and Mark’s relationship and Willow’s disappearance.
“You know,” Monica had said while slathering butter onto one of the wedges of bread. “I called the cops on them once. I heard her scream in the middle of the night.”
“Scream?” Katie had repeated. “Like, she was scared?”
“No.” Monica had stuffed the wedge of bread into her mouth and closed her eyes in bliss, chewing the large bite slowly.
“Not scared,” she’d said through a mouthful of bread.
She finally swallowed and paused. “In pain. She was screaming in pain. Tomas wanted me to mind my own business, but I couldn’t go back to sleep after hearing that.
” She’d lifted one of her bony shoulders in a shrug.
“So I called the police. Just to be safe, you know.” She had leaned forward across the kitchen’s marble island.
“You should have heard the scream, Katie. I mean, anyone would have called the cops. It was terrible.”
Terrible.
Katie had never asked Mark about that night, but now she wondered if either of the cops on her doorstep had responded to Monica’s 9-1-1 call, and if that was the reason for this suspicion.
“If you ever need anything, you have our cards.” The taller one stared in her eyes as if trying to send her a telepathic message. “Anything.”
“I can’t imagine what we’d need,” she said brightly. “Thank you both.”
She tried to shut the door as politely as possible, but it was awkward since he was still stubbornly on the mat, his feet planted like he had something else to say.
She slowly pushed the handle until it clicked into place.
This was why she’d tried to convince Mark to move, for them to start over somewhere fresh, somewhere no one would ever think to ask about her husband’s first marriage.
But he’d refused and now they were here, dealing with this.
Some imaginary excuse to try to search their pond.
We found something. What did that even mean?
What could they have possibly found that would cause them to search the whole neighborhood?
She flipped the dead bolt and passed the phone to the maid. “Please hang that back up.”
She should call Viv, who lived three holes over. Her house backed up to a pond. Katie could ask her if the cops were searching that pond. But what if they weren’t? It’d give Viv a juicy bit of gossip. She’d call every wife in Crestmore. Probably make a post on social media about it.
No. She couldn’t call Viv. Katie headed up the staircase two steps at a time. On their third floor, there was a widow’s walk balcony. From there, she should be able to see whether there was any truth to the detectives’ assertion, or if their property was the only one being searched.