Chapter 6 #2
“Right in here,” Sticks said, stepping back and allowing Denny to take the lead. The room was small, with no windows, two chairs, and a metal desk between them.
Denny sat down in the nearest chair. The room was cold. The chairs were cold. The room was very bright. He looked up in the corner: camera, green dot. Anna would be proud. Dateline had paid off.
“Water?” Sticks asked.
“I’m good,” Denny said.
Sticks sat in the opposite chair, taking a second to position himself.
“Thanks for, uh, finally coming in,” he said, drawing out the word finally.
He smiled that sort of shit-eating smile again.
Denny had come to the conclusion that he did not like the officer, though maybe this wasn’t the best moment to have an epiphany of this nature.
“Sorry about the wait,” Denny said.
“The reason we wanted to have you in here was that what we originally thought about Mrs. Plummer, well, turns out there are some additional facts,” Sticks said.
“Facts?”
“We have a bit of a situation,” the officer said.
He placed a beefy hand on the metal desk.
He still had his coffee, cardboard cup, large, Dunkin’ Donuts, smelling like artificial vanilla, gripped in the other.
Hard to take a man like that seriously, Denny, who drank only espresso—black, naturally—thought.
Anna had sworn by Dunkin’ Donuts, as many New Englanders did, but he had never himself caved.
Denny chewed the inside of his lip, a habit he took up while nervous. “A situation?”
“The exposure,” Sticks said. “It’s a little more complicated than we originally thought.”
“Wait a second,” Denny said. Plausible, this idea that they were both on the same team, even though, sitting here, they both knew that they were combatants, not friends. “What are you saying here?”
Sticks looked at Denny, tapped an index finger on the table. “I’ll get to the point. This wasn’t an accident.”
“I’m sorry, Officer, I think I’m going to be sick.
” Denny heaved for a moment, and the officer slid a black plastic trash can toward him, but there was nothing in his stomach to release, hadn’t been for days.
His sweat ran cold. Suddenly, it dawned on him: He was here for a murder investigation. What had happened?
What was it that Anna was always saying, on Friday nights, on that stupid velvet couch?
The husband was always the first suspect.
Denny Plummer, called into the police station in Hamilton—now it was clear as day—not to discuss an engagement ring gone missing, or some detail lost in the ephemera of his wife’s cut-short life.
He was, he now realized, a rat trapped in a maze.
He was a suspect. Something had happened that had been unintentional.
His wife had not simply vanished. She had been vanished.
There had been causality. Intent. He was, he now realized, angry.
Not at his wife, but at the so-called situation.
The sick feeling that had emerged the last time he saw Sticks had come back.
He could feel that same shaky feeling, the feeling of being on the verge of fainting.
He could go for that water now, but no one was offering.
“What happened?” he said. He had the sense that his own voice was betraying him.
Anna, had she been here, surely would have coached him on how to tamp down his anger and his depthless sadness, on how to appear normal and functional in the face of such an unimaginable accusation.
True, the officer had not yet said the words, but Denny could feel them lurking, just another series of ghosts.
“Why don’t we start with me asking the questions,” Sticks said, interrupting Denny’s thoughts. “Like, where were you that Wednesday, when your wife went missing?”
Denny raced through the schedule in his mind.
His life now existed on two planes: Before and After.
Before, he had a complete life, a life with a wife, a life with a family.
After, he had a life that was just skeletal remains.
A half-life. Barely a life. What was he doing in those Before Times?
Who could remember that far back? Now he had to try.
Monday: Spanish. Tuesday: Library. Denny could see the schedule in his wife’s messy handwriting.
On Wednesday evenings, the kids had ski lessons at Bradford for two hours, from four to six.
“The school bus brought the kids home a little after three,” he said.
“I remember, Anna told me she was going out with friends and that she wouldn’t be home until late and that I shouldn’t wait up.
” He paused. Thought back. It had gotten late.
That had been normal. Then, it had gotten very late, and it had stopped seeming so normal.
He had called her phone, twice, he thought.
Sent her a few texts. “We went to Bradford. Ski lessons. I made dinner for the kids. After I put the kids to bed and I got into bed myself and texted her and when she didn’t write back, I thought something might be wrong. That’s when I texted Di.”
“Who is Di now?” Sticks asked.
“Anna’s best friend since childhood. They had gone out together. Or I thought they had.” Out with friends. That was what Anna had said. But which friends? Denny had thought instantly of Di, but Di hadn’t seen her that night, she said.
“And Di—is this Diane Maguire?”
“The same.”
“She hadn’t seen her?”
“No.”
“And you don’t know who was out with her?”
“I . . . No, I don’t.”
“You don’t know who your wife’s other friends are, Mr. Plummer?” Sticks looked at him with concern.
“She’s usually with Di. Di was also worried, and she was trying to help me find out who else had seen her.”
Sticks stopped, shook his head, and took a few notes.
“Those skiing lessons are, what, two hours?” he asked, redirecting.
“Yes, plus it takes about a half hour to get there and back,” Denny said.
A half hour. What could he have done in that time?
How much time had he wasted, not knowing, not acting, not thinking?
Sticks, with his questions, barking up the wrong tree, but Denny could not stop his own thoughts from their downward trajectory: What if it was his fault?
What if he had driven around the haul-out?
What if he had found her? What if he could have stopped it?
“Know how long it takes to get to the canoe haul-out from Bradford?”
But how could he have known where to look for her? How could anyone have known?
“I honestly don’t,” Denny said.
Who had hurt his wife? Didn’t he have the right to know?
Sticks leaned back and seemed to consider this. The coffee had created an unfortunate-looking ring on the metal table, sticky. “It takes, oh, I’d say, twenty minutes. Faster than that if you can drive pretty good.”
“Before we go any further,” Denny said, “do I need to get a lawyer?”
That gave Sticks pause. “I find,” he said, “that the only people who ask for lawyers are the ones who are guilty of something.”
Denny felt that wave of nausea again. He also knew that wasn’t true.
People got lawyers to protect themselves.
But here he was, stuck between a rock and a hard place.
He wanted to be indispensable to the police, mostly because he wanted to know more about what had happened to his wife.
He also wanted to loosen whatever tension had suddenly emerged in this bright, windowless room, where he was being treated not as a grieving husband but instead as a homicide suspect.
That tone, anyway. It sent Denny into a tailspin.
Few things could make him react—it was a common grievance of Anna’s that Denny was too slow to anger, even when he should feel something—but the implication that he was somehow responsible brought the blood to the tips of his fingers, up to his throat.
He could feel it rising like bile. Maybe that was the intention, he thought, to rile him up, to get him to scream.
Well, Sticks was going to get exactly what he wanted, then.
“I’ll tell you what you need to know, but I also need to know what happened to my wife!
” Denny said, slamming a hand down on the table.
Sticks looked momentarily startled before twisting his mouth into a grin, and Denny realized that this had been the point, to provoke a reaction, to prove that he was capable of violence.
“Can we go back to where we were, then, Mr. Plummer?”
“Yes, sure, ask me what you’d like to ask, but I’d also like to ask some questions myself,” he said.
“We’ll see where we get,” Sticks said, making no promises. “You’ve lived here how long? I mean, probably long enough to know how long it takes to get to the haul-out, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Plummer?”
“I know how to get to the haul-out. I don’t know it well,” Denny said.
There was, Denny knew, a practical problem with Sticks’s theory.
Even on a good night in January, slick roads eased with salt, Denny would have had to be a mastermind to have figured out a way to drop off two kids at Bradford, get to the canoe haul-out and, what—kill his wife in under an hour, all to make it back in time for pickup?
“You know how to get there, though.”
“I know I didn’t kill my wife. I know you still haven’t told me what happened to her.”
“Your wife. She was . . . well . . . we thought it was the elements.” Sticks was more serious now.
Maybe even a little kind. He looked Denny straight in the eye.
He was searching—for humanity, or for clues, or maybe just for whatever it is that two people search for when the only thing they have in common is a dead person.
“We’re trying to establish where you were.
We’re trying to establish who might want to do something to a person like your wife.
Following up on leads. Tying up loose ends. ”