Chapter Twenty-Eight
JILL AND TED return home in the afternoon.
The memorial has exhausted them both. Jill notes that Ted seems quiet on the drive home.
His speech had gone very well, she thought; just the right sentiments, just the right amount of pausing to fight tears.
He was very convincing. She’d watched people, their lips quivering in sympathy with his grief.
It’s done. They have to move forward now with their lives.
But the text this morning, and seeing Ramirez, have upset her.
What can Ramirez possibly hope to gain by pestering them?
Does he want to drive them to a confession by persecuting them?
Well, that’s not going to happen. She wonders if Ramirez has been sending the texts.
She removes her heels in the foyer, hangs up her trench coat on the antique coat stand. Then she makes her way to the front room, where she collapses onto the sofa, her head thrown against its back, her stockinged feet up on the coffee table.
Ted follows her in and heads straight for the sideboard. He pours himself a hefty scotch. ‘Want one?’ he asks.
She does. ‘Yes, please.’
He hands her the drink, and she sits up to accept it. He drops down across from her into his leather chair. For a moment they don’t speak. Then Ted says, ‘I’m glad that’s over.’
‘Me too,’ she agrees.
‘I think it went well, all things considered.’
‘Your speech was excellent. Well done, Ted.’
‘You think it seemed sincere enough?’
‘Absolutely. People’s eyes were tearing up in sympathy. I saw them.’
He nods. ‘I’m quite pleased with myself.’
‘No one would ever guess how much you hated him,’ she says.
‘I should get an Oscar.’
She stares into her glass. ‘I’m worried about Ramirez.’
‘Don’t be,’ he says.
It annoys her, how dismissive he is of her concerns. As if he thinks she’s simply being neurotic. ‘How can you be so relaxed about it?’ she snaps. ‘He thinks we murdered Greg.’
‘So what? He can’t prove it.’
‘Maybe he’s the one sending the texts,’ she suggests. She regards Ted as he considers it.
‘It’s possible, I suppose. But why would he?’
‘To freak us out. To be nasty. Who knows?’ She continues, ‘He obviously suspects us.’
Ted says slowly, ‘I think it’s because of how we reacted when he said there were cameras on the boat. I think we gave ourselves away.’
She remembers. She was sitting in the very same spot she’s sitting in now.
She recalls her sudden terror. The recognition of it registering in Ramirez’s sharp eyes, those eyes that miss nothing.
That moment – the feeling of the floor giving way beneath her – will stay with her for ever, as will the panic of every moment up until they learned there were no cameras on the boat after all.
She finds herself staring at Ted. He looks as if he’s wrestling with whether to tell her something. ‘What are you not telling me, Ted?’
He finally says, ‘When I saw him, the day after, when he told me there were no cameras on the boat – he said to me, “I bet that’s a relief.”’
She continues staring at him, completely still. ‘So he knows.’
‘He doesn’t know!’ Ted says. ‘He suspects, that’s all.’
‘Fuck!’ She finishes her drink in one go, puts her empty glass down on the coffee table. ‘I don’t think he’s going to give up.’
‘Jill, he wasn’t there. He didn’t see us push Greg off the boat and leave him there to die. There’s no evidence! You need to stop worrying.’
But she can’t stop worrying. Not with Ramirez snapping at their heels. She stares blindly at the pattern in the wallpaper, grateful for the liquor slowly numbing her mind and body.
Ted says, ‘I spoke to John.’
She abruptly turns her attention from the wallpaper back to her husband. ‘What did he say?’
‘He said he didn’t send the texts.’
‘Do you believe him?’
‘I don’t know.’ He looks uncertain.
‘What are we going to do?’ she whispers. This isn’t how she expected it would be. She wishes that whoever is sending the texts would show themselves, so they would know who they’re dealing with. She doesn’t like having this person lurking like a shadow in the dark.
Ted asks quietly, ‘Do you really think Lara could do something like that?’
She thinks about Lara at the memorial – how she’d watched her and Ramirez.
That bastard had planted the idea of murder in Lara’s mind, so it’s possible that Lara is sending the texts.
But she has been so supportive, so protective.
‘I don’t know,’ she says wearily. It’s awful to think of a friend doing something so vile.
Suddenly she reaches for her purse and pulls out her phone, turns it back on.
It’s been off since Ted turned it off that morning.
‘Don’t,’ Ted says, seeing what she’s doing.
She sees the last text, MURDERERS. And responds: WHO IS THIS?
‘Why did you do that?’ Ted exclaims. ‘We shouldn’t engage! That’s what they want!’
She glares at him defiantly and then looks back at her phone. But long moments pass and there is no answer.
‘We’ll change your number too,’ Ted says, after a while.
She drops the phone onto the sofa beside her.
She’s staring at nothing again, in a sort of light trance.
Her eyes rest on the bookshelf between the two tall windows while her mind catastrophizes.
How did they get here? How did it come to this?
She tries to remember her happiness right after Greg was dead.
Their glee at what they’d done, at all the money coming their way.
It’s not guilt she feels now, but the fear of being found out.
Of going to prison for the rest of her life.
‘We just have to hold our nerve,’ Ted says. ‘If you want, we can go away for a while. Maybe we should.’
But she’s not really listening. She’s staring at the bookshelf, at something glinting at her. She’s transfixed by it. The liquor, after the wine at the memorial, has made her stupid, slow to react. ‘What’s that?’ she says suddenly, coming out of her torpor.
‘What?’ Ted asks. He looks over his shoulder to where she’s staring.
‘That!’ she says, alarmed. She gets up and makes her way around the coffee table to the bookshelf. She peers closely. ‘What the fuck is that?’ she says, pointing right at it. It’s like a tiny glass eye, staring back at her.
Ted has leaped out of his chair and joined her at the bookshelf. He stares at where she’s pointing.
‘Is that a camera?’ she cries, her voice shrill.
He frantically pulls books from the shelf and they both see it. A very small pinhole lens at the end of a flat black wire, attached to some compact electronics.
Someone has been watching them.