Chapter 54
It’s early afternoon on Sunday when Henry comes face-to-face with the detectives leading the investigation into the husband’s murder. Henry still doesn’t know his name.
The detectives, he finds out, are Nia Scott and Frank Perkins.
Frank’s hair is far sparser than Henry’s, and Henry views this shared bit of misfortune as potentially helpful, that this man might see a bit of himself in Henry.
He offers the detective a sympathetic smile, but still quite small and controlled, given the circumstances, as they settle onto chairs in the living room.
His mother bustles around, offering coffee and tea.
Although the detectives decline, she retrieves a tray with a crystal pitcher of water, four glasses, and a plate of homemade sugar cookies dusted with powdered sugar and places it on the coffee table, as though her girlfriend Carol has come to visit.
Henry wonders whether the detectives notice the disconnect—five people and only four water glasses. He wonders whether they know which person is not meant to have any water. He wonders whether they know it’s him.
She’s still upset with him; they haven’t spoken much, nothing resolved, since the day she accused him of doing it again, her pleading tone: Like the others? Henry.
More likely, the detectives just think the underabundance of glasses is merely an oversight under these upsetting circumstances. Even more likely, they haven’t noticed at all.
“Thank you,” says Detective Perkins, glancing down at his notebook. “Mrs. Lawson.”
“Janet, please,” she says benevolently. “My husband, Bill, and our son. Henry.”
Do they detect the way her eyes dart, the bare absence of pride, the way she wishes he wasn’t here?
“Cara March, from across the street, told me what happened,” his mother says in a whisper. “It’s so awful. Apparently, her husband found…the body.”
“Mmm,” replies one of the detectives, noncommittal, and without opening his or her mouth. Henry isn’t even sure which of them made the sound.
“Did you know your neighbor, Ben Harvey, well?” asks the woman. Detective Scott. She has a gentle tone and sympathetic eyes, wide and brown, but Henry has the sense it’s inflated, the sympathy something she can turn on and off like a faucet.
“Not at all,” Henry’s mom says. “They stayed to themselves, ever since they moved in. I would have brought over a pie or something, you know, but the vibe was a little standoffish.” She lifts her hands, palms facing out.
“Not that I didn’t like them,” she continues hurriedly.
“We just never shared more than brief pleasantries, just waving to them in passing. From a distance.” There’s a tremor in her voice that makes Henry uneasy.
“All right,” says Detective Scott, looking to Henry’s father. “What about you?”
“I never met them,” he says, shrugging.
“Bill still works,” Henry’s mother says, leaning forward to adjust the pitcher slightly. “He commutes into the city, and he’s out of the house a lot.”
The detectives turn to Henry; his mother does, too, expectant. He watches her. The wife. He half expects her to say it.
“I met the wife,” Henry admits. “We’re not friends, certainly. We chatted a couple times in passing. We have similar taste in books. But I never met her husband.”
He doesn’t like to downplay his relationship with Kate, to behave as though it’s nothing, but he understands that’s what he should do.
“When did you meet Kate Harvey?” asks Detective Scott.
“Oh, I’m not sure exactly. A few weeks back, we were outside at the same time, and we greeted each other. We chatted about books a couple of times. As my mother mentioned, the vibe was a little standoffish.”
“Could you explain further what you mean by that?” asks Detective Scott. She seems to be the leader of the pair, although she looks much younger than Perkins. Henry thinks of Lacey, of women and of snakes, and he has the urge to shake Perkins. He wants to warn him. She could ruin your life.
“Just that she wasn’t very friendly. I’m not sure what more I can say.”
There’s much more, actually. There’s Kate’s novel.
He found it on her laptop when he was in her house.
He got past her password easily, and the document was already open.
Those few little words, right there at the beginning: Ours is a tale of murder.
He’d skimmed it, but there wasn’t time to read.
Not then. So he sent it to himself, deleted the sent email, erased the Trash, and then it was his, and it was like he’d never been there.
But later, at home, he read it all, every propulsive and vivid word.
Her autobiography, he thought. At least the start of it.
And it proved he was right. They weren’t happy.
The husband was possessive, controlling.
He recalled following the wife to her doctor’s appointment—perhaps she’d suffered a miscarriage at some point, just like her protagonist. She was looking for a way out.
She wanted her husband dead. All she needed was someone who’d become willing to go just that far, to take care of it for her.
But Henry says none of this to the detectives.
If somehow he becomes a person of interest in the investigation, he may have to so that he can direct the police away from himself: She asked me to read the book for her because I’m such a voracious reader.
She thought I could help her finish it. And don’t you think it’s odd, Detective, that she wrote a novel about a woman who murders her husband, then her husband turns up dead?
She was home at the time, wasn’t she? Who else could it have been? She must have—she wrote his murder.
“That’s fine,” says Perkins, accommodating, “if that’s all you have to share.” He reaches for a cookie, and Henry considers suggesting that his mother’s cookies look much better than they taste.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t be more helpful to you,” his mother says, filling the silence that’s fallen, only Perkins chewing, wiping crumbs from his dress pants.
“Just one more thing before we go,” says Scott. “Could you each tell us where you were last night? From nine until this morning. If you don’t mind.”
“Well, they were watching the game,” Henry’s mother replies. “I was reading.”
Reading. She says it reverentially, as though she were studying a first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses that night, rather than flipping through the worn Colleen Hoover paperback her girlfriend Carol had lent her weeks earlier.
“The game?” asks Scott.
“Orioles,” his father grunts. “They won. Scored a pair in the top of the ninth.”
“Right,” Scott says as though she already knew this.
“So you watched the game, and that wrapped up around what time?” asks Perkins.
“Henry went to bed in the fifth inning,” his mother says quickly.
“I did,” says Henry. “I was too tired to stay up for the end.” He shrugs sheepishly, feeling his mother’s eyes on him. But she says nothing. They’re all pretending that it’s perfectly normal for Henry to sit with his parents on a Saturday evening, to watch part of an Orioles game.
“The game ended around ten forty, I think. Then we went up to bed,” his father says.
“Yes, we always go to bed before eleven,” says his mother.
“And none of you got up again after you went to bed? Did you need a drink, to use the bathroom during the night?” asks Scott. “Maybe you saw or heard something that seemed like nothing at the time?”
They all shake their heads, a dripping silence, and the detectives wait.
“I didn’t get up until I heard all the commotion,” his mother adds, the tiniest of wobbles in her voice. “Which was, you know, the emergency vehicles arriving. But that was midnight. And we had no idea what happened. I didn’t find out until I talked to Cara March this morning.”
The detectives stand. Henry notices Perkins place his cookie, only half eaten, onto a napkin.
They thank the Lawson family and hand out cards, asking them to call if any of them thinks of anything that might be useful.
They’re rushing, and Henry can tell that, for now, he has framed himself as an innocent bystander, miles away from suspect.
The front door closes behind the detectives, and his mother turns to face him.
And there’s fear in her eyes, there’s understanding—that which perhaps only a mother can have—and it doesn’t bother Henry as much as it should.
And he knows he should not be smiling, but he can’t help it.
She did well, his mother. She did exactly what she was supposed to do.