Breakup
Pam Oliver wasn’t wrong about the location of Forrest’s Porsche.
He’d parked it out behind the barn where the Department of Public Works stored their snow-removal equipment.
Beside the plows sat a Zamboni donated by a wealthy hockey lover, put into service every winter to clear a patch of ice on the lake for the annual Valentine’s Day festival that featured a fundraising hockey game and an ice fishing derby for the townspeople—the year-rounders.
In summer, nobody paid much attention to the Public Works barn.
It was the perfect spot for a person to leave his car if he didn’t want anyone to notice.
Always thorough in her planning, Regina had reminded me before I set out on my latest reconnaissance mission to watch for poison ivy, which grew like crazy on that side of the lake.
In typical Regina fashion—as the woman who thought of everything—she had presented me with a bottle of Tecnu to slather over my ankles and shins, along with a pair of heavy socks and rubber boots to protect myself.
These made the bike ride over to the Public Works barn a little more challenging, but by this point in the summer, I’d been putting in plenty of time biking up hills—not to mention chasing tennis balls.
I hid Buttercup in some bushes. Then I hiked over to the Barnetts’ place—a far more modest house than the Emersons’, with only a very small strip of water access, which was also overgrown with reeds and some form of algae that had definitely not spread to Wonderland.
Bending low, I made my way to the back of the house, as instructed.
My plan had been to stake out the area closest to the bedroom—for the purpose of recording additional data confirming the sexual nature of Forrest and Brenda’s relationship.
But as I got closer, I saw that the two of them were standing on the lawn.
The way they faced each other, I knew, even before I heard their voices, that this was not another one of their romantic rendezvous.
“I keep calling,” she said. “Why don’t you answer my messages?”
“It’s not fair that I’ve been avoiding you,” Forrest was saying to her. “I’ve been a coward. I should have said this to your face before now.”
“I know it’s hard for you,” she said, reaching to touch his face. “I’ve been trying to be patient.”
He took a step back.
“You got the wrong idea about me, Brenda,” Forrest was saying to her. “We had a great time together for a while there. But I never intended to leave my wife. If I gave you the opposite impression, I owe you an apology.”
“What about all those things you told me?” she said. “The part about how you woke up thinking about me. You couldn’t bear a day apart.”
“Those are the kind of things a person says when they’re carried away,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you to take it all so seriously.”
A look came over her face. How had I ever imagined Brenda was pretty? All of a sudden she looked hideous.
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s over, Brenda. It’s been over since that day on the island. I just didn’t know how to tell you.”
“You . . . you . . . you . . .” Her voice was shrill. Her hands were flailing, coming at him like little birds. Or a flock of bats. “I was going to leave my husband. We were going to have this great life together.”
“You’re an attractive woman,” he told her. “We had a lot of fun together.” Young as I was, I knew he was not helping his case. Nothing Forrest tried saying was making her any less mad.
“Attractive? Attractive?” She was practically spitting.
“Any man would be crazy not to want you. Your husband’s a lucky man.”
“My husband? You think I want to do all the things we’ve been doing . . . with my husband?”
Forrest looked down at his golf shoes. It occurred to me that this wasn’t the first time he’d faced an angry woman in the waning days of a Lake Catherine summer.
“Your marriage isn’t my concern, Brenda. I don’t have a right to offer an opinion on that.”
Now Brenda had placed her hands on his shoulders, but not as a sign of affection this time. She was shaking him.
“We were going to Hawaii!” she screamed. “We were going to live in your house! The only thing that stood in our way was your miserable, scrawny, frigid, depressed, suicidal wife.”
“You don’t understand about Regina . . . ,” he said. I had never heard Forrest sound this way. Pleading. He was practically crying.
Suddenly Brenda’s voice became chillingly calm. “I told you I had that part all figured out,” she said. “I had a plan. She just had to be dead, and everything was going to be perfect.”
She’d said it. Plain and simple. There was no misinterpreting her words.
“I never wanted Regina to die,” Forrest said quietly. “I would never have done anything to hurt my wife. Not in a million years.”
“She’s basically half dead already.” Brenda’s voice had gone to a whole other octave now. I felt like calling out to Forrest, I knew she was a terrible person from the first time I laid eyes on her! But I held my tongue, of course.
“All we had to do was work out the fine points together,” Brenda said.
As she spoke—yelled, actually—she was doing this odd thing.
It was sort of like punching, but because the person doing the punching was Brenda, it came off looking more like tapping.
She did this repeatedly, her palms landing on Forrest’s beautiful golf shirt, which, I happened to know, Regina had purchased for him at a boutique in New York City, back in the days when they took trips.
Still tapping, Brenda went on with her tirade. She had even drafted the suicide note. I detected a note of pride in her voice as she told him this. She had it all set, on her laptop.
“I made the note sound just like Regina,” she told him. Now she started to recite it, almost as if she were auditioning for a role in a movie. Or a soap opera.
“Please forgive me . . . I can’t go on anymore . . . I just want you and the children to be happy . . . I don’t want to be the weight around your neck, holding you back . . . You deserve all you ever dreamed of . . . I’ll love you forever.”
The words Brenda said sounded nothing like Regina Emerson.
They didn’t sound like Brenda Barnett either.
There may have been a little of Dolly Parton in there, performing “I Will Always Love You.” It was almost as if Brenda were on a stage, only instead of belting out a song, she was performing this speech.
“You wanted to murder my wife,” Forrest said. His voice was so quiet, I could just barely hear him. Maybe he wasn’t the brightest person, and maybe her intentions hadn’t completely sunk in until now, but he finally got it. “You thought I’d be your accomplice.”
“Not murder, exactly,” Brenda said. “We were just going to . . . clear the way for the inevitable.”
“I’m ashamed that I ever cared about you,” he said.
For the first time, I could see his face.
He didn’t look, anymore, like the stupid, lovestruck person he’d been for most of the summer.
He looked horrified. He took a step backward, almost as if Brenda’s body—which he had made love to not so long ago—were radioactive.
“You disgust me,” he said. His back was to her. “And I’m disgusted with myself for having anything to do with you.”
“You’re an asshole!” she screamed. “You’re a stupid, pathetic, loser asshole.”
Just for a moment, Forrest turned around to face Brenda for what was surely the last time. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Brenda,” he said to her. “You’re right about that.”
He took a few steps toward the Porsche, then turned back one more time.
“My wife has every right to hate me now,” he said. “If she knew about you and me, she’d have every reason to want me dead. I couldn’t blame her if she did.”
As I’d done on my successful stakeout mission on the island, I waited for Forrest to leave before retrieving my bicycle from its hiding spot in the weeds. I stayed there for several minutes, crouched outside the Barnetts’ back porch while, inside, I heard the sound of Brenda weeping.
When I was sure the coast was clear, I biked back to Wonderland.