Chapter 9 #2
When the last car left, she didn’t go up to bed.
She drove to the aquatic center. She had a key.
It was ten o’clock at night and the building was dark and empty, and she turned on one row of lights and put on her old suit and her goggles and she swam.
She swam until her arms shook. She swam until she couldn’t think about the patio door, or the forty minutes, or the way the chairman’s wife had patted her hand.
Then she sat on the edge of the pool in the dark with her feet in the water and texted Jess. Bad day. Some days I want to swim out past the buoys and keep going.
And five minutes later, a picture of her goggles on the wet tile. Did 4,000 yards. Feel better. Going home.
It had never once crossed her mind that the call on the patio was Alexis.
She sat on her bedroom floor now and did the math. January. The board dinner. Before the first message in the thread. Before March. Maybe it wasn’t Alexis. Maybe it was Tokyo, or Luke, or a deal.
It didn’t matter. That was the thing she understood, sitting there. It didn’t matter who was on the phone. She had been alone at that table long before anyone was on the other end of it.
* * *
Agent Kerr called at noon.
“Your husband sent me the email,” Kerr said. “He sent it to me a few minutes after it hit his inbox. I want you to know that, because I’ve been doing this a long time and most husbands would have sat on it for a day.”
Scarlett didn’t say anything.
“This is extortion,” Kerr said. “It’s clumsy, and it’s careful, and it’s still extortion.
Her lawyer should know better, and I’ll be talking to him.
” A pause. “But I’m going to be honest with you, Scarlett, because I’m always going to be honest with you.
Those texts are a problem. If they come in, a defense attorney is going to read them out loud to a jury.
I want to swim out past the buoys and keep going. That’s going to be hard.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I believe you. I have to prove it.” Kerr was quiet a moment. “Here’s what I need from you. Don’t talk to the press. Don’t answer anything from her or her lawyer. And don’t let your husband make any statement to anyone about that night without me in the room. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“How’s he taking it?”
Scarlett looked at the locked door.
“He’s downstairs,” she said.
* * *
At two o’clock there was a soft sound outside her door, and then footsteps going away.
She waited until they were all the way down the stairs. Then she unlocked the door and opened it a crack.
There was a tray on the carpet. A turkey sandwich, cut in triangles, the way she liked and he always said was ridiculous. A bowl of cut-up mango. A tall glass of iced tea with a lemon in it. A folded piece of paper.
She picked up the paper. It was his big slanted handwriting.
You don’t have to eat it. You don’t have to open the door. Ramona’s gone home for the day so nobody will bother you. I told Kerr no statements. I’m not going to answer Luke. I’m not going anywhere. — R
She took the tray inside and locked the door again.
She ate half the sandwich sitting on the floor. She hated that it was exactly right.
* * *
He came up in the late afternoon.
She heard him on the stairs. She heard him stop at the top step, at the line. Then, without being asked, he crossed it. She heard him walk down the hall and stop outside her door.
He didn’t knock. He didn’t try the handle.
He sat down. She heard him sit down on the carpet on the other side of the door, the way he did at night.
For a long time neither of them said anything.
Then his voice came through the wood. Low. Rough. So close that he must have had his head leaning right against the door.
“In January,” he said, “you wanted to leave me.”
Scarlett didn’t answer.
“You were in this house,” he said, “writing to Jess that you wanted to leave.” A long breath. “And I didn’t notice. I didn’t notice one single thing. I was in the next room.”
I was in the next room for two months. He could have knocked.
Her own words, from the stern of the Halcyon. She had never said them to him. He had found them himself.
“I used to think the worst thing I did was the calls,” Ryan said through the door. “Then I thought it was ten minutes. Then the couch. But you were drowning in this house for a year before any of that. And I didn’t see it. Everybody on earth could see it, and I didn’t.”
She pressed her hand flat against the door, on her side, at about the height she thought his head was.
She didn’t open it.
“Go downstairs, Ryan,” she said. “This house is logistics now. That’s all it is. The FBI needs me here, and I’m here. That’s it.”
A long silence.
“Okay,” he said.
She heard him get up. She heard him walk back down the hall. She heard him stop at the top step, and then she heard him go down, one stair at a time, slowly, like an old man.
* * *
The story broke at seven that evening.
Jess sent her the link. Just the link, no words, which was how Scarlett knew it was bad.
It was a gossip site. The big one, the one everybody in Miami pretended not to read. At the top of the page was her pearl-earring picture. Next to it, a blurry photo of the Halcyon’s stern at night, from some old magazine spread. Under both of them, in huge black letters:
MISSING BILLIONAIRE WIFE’S SECRET TEXTS: “SOME DAYS I WANT TO SWIM OUT PAST THE BUOYS AND KEEP GOING”
Under that, a smaller line. Exclusive: sources close to the investigation say Scarlett Walsh sent desperate messages in the months before she went overboard. Was it a cry for help?
Scarlett sat on the floor of her locked bedroom and read her own words in huge black letters, under her own face.
I want to swim out past the buoys and keep going.
There were already four thousand comments.
She did not read them. She turned the cheap phone face down on the carpet, the way Ryan had turned his face down on the kitchen island that morning, and she put her palm flat on top of it, and she sat there in the bright room while the sun went down.
Downstairs, she could hear her husband on the phone. She couldn’t hear the words. She could hear the tone. It was a tone she had heard only a few times in nine years, low and flat and absolutely furious.
Somewhere out there, in a white room, on a white table, Alexis Burke had her phone.
And Scarlett had just locked herself in with the only thing Alexis had left her. Her own words.