Chapter 21
I’M STANDING HERE SHAKING. I should have known Ben would be rattled by the idea of someone coming to his house and asking for him. But I had no idea he would go totally ballistic.
“Why the [expletive] did you open the door?” he screams when I tell him about his visitor. He’s just walked in the house. I’m shocked that anyone could go from zero to sixty this quickly. And shocked that anyone could ever live with someone like this.
“I didn’t open it. I—”
“Didn’t anyone ever teach you to never, ever open the door to strangers?” He takes off his jacket and slams it against a chair. The chair tips over. He doesn’t pick it up.
“I had the chain on the whole time,” I say, hoping that will calm him down. It doesn’t.
“What kind of [expletive, expletive] are you? Why would you—”
“The guy said he was a friend of yours,” I say, trying to defuse the situation.
“A friend? A friend? Did he look like he would be a friend of mine? Did he?”
I try to picture the man’s face before I answer. Clearly, I’m not answering fast enough.
“I said, what the [expletive] did he look like?”
“I barely saw him. I—”
“Dark hair? Bald? Fat?”
“Dark bushy hair. Heavyset.”
“How did he sound?”
“Um, I think he had an accent.”
“You think? You think? You spoke to him! You can’t even answer a simple question? Are you dumb or just stupid?”
Direct confrontation. Dominance. Has Ben been studying FBI interrogation techniques or is he just deranged?
“Listen, Mr. Harrison, there’s no reason you should—”
“Don’t you dare tell me what I should or shouldn’t do!” he yells. “Who are you anyway?”
Amber, who’s been upstairs putting Lily down for a nap, walks into the room. Just in time for Ben to spew his venom in her direction.
“Where the hell did you find this idiot woman?” he asks. “Did you vet her at all?” Before Amber can answer, Ben turns back to me. “What did he look like?”
“I told you.”
“Tell me more. Height? Weight?”
If I guess right, do I win a Kewpie doll? (That’s what I want to say. But I don’t.) “Five eight,” I tell him. “One seventy-five.” I’m pulling those numbers out of thin air.
“What was he wearing?”
“Um, a T-shirt?”
“You asking me?”
I’m trying not to lose it. One lit fuse in a room is enough. “A T-shirt!” I say, matching his volume. “Dark! Black! Maybe navy!”
“Did he have sideburns?”
“I didn’t see the side of him. I told you, all I saw was a piece of his face because I had the chain on.”
Now he’s screaming. “You saw him! What are you not telling me? What are you hiding?”
He rushes toward me like a mad dog. Amber jumps between us and pulls him away. Does she think he’s going to hit me? Has he ever done that to her? She’s crying now, and he’s sweating and breathing heavily. I’m hoping this is the end of it.
No such luck. He has more questions. Round two.
“Let’s start from the beginning,” he says. “You saw a car drive up.”
“Not saw. Heard. I heard the gravel in the—”
“And you looked out the window.”
“Yes. Then the doorbell rang.”
“And you opened the door.”
“She looked through the peephole first,” Amber says, remembering what I told her earlier.
“Shut up!” Ben says to her. To me, he says, “You opened the door to a stranger. Then what?”
“How many times does she have to tell you, she didn’t open—”
“And I told you to shut the [expletive] up!” he screams at Amber. I can see veins popping up on his forehead.
“It wasn’t open!” I shout. “I had the chain on!”
“He could have pushed right through that!”
“But he didn’t.”
“And then?”
“And then the dogs showed up and started growling.”
“Huh. The dogs are smarter than you are,” he says. “And then?”
“I told you. He asked where Ben was. Then he said, ‘Tell him a friend stopped by.’”
“Did he think you were my wife?”
(Objection, Your Honor. The defendant can’t presume to know what someone else was thinking.) “I don’t know,” I say.
“And then you watched him walk to his car?”
“Yes.” Knowing his next question, I give him a full description of the car—well, as full as I can, given what I could see.
“But you didn’t see the license.”
“No. I’m nearsighted.”
“You don’t wear distance glasses?”
“I do. But I rarely put them on to answer the door.”
He’s out of questions. Clearly he has wrung everything out of me he can. But he might think of other things to ask later on.
If he does, I want him to read me my Miranda rights first.