Chapter 7 #2
She had put that entry down in four words — mirror turned, Kroger lot — and had spent the drive home telling herself it was kids. But she had stood there for a while before she got in, in the cold, doing what she always did, which was look at the thing and not away from it.
The mirror had been turned in to face the driver's door. Not folded flat, the way a passing car knocks it. Turned on its axis, deliberately, to a specific angle.
She had assumed it was so she would see her own face.
Sitting at her mother's table with the legal pad in front of her, Laura worked out what she had missed.
It was not aimed at where she would stand.
She was five foot ten, and a mirror aimed at where she would stand would have caught her somewhere around the collarbone.
This one sat lower than that — set, as near as she could work it out, at the height of the face of a much shorter man standing exactly where she was about to stand.
He had not turned it so that she would see herself. He had set it at his own height and left it there.
She wrote that on the pad, and then she put the pen down and went and was sick in her mother's bathroom, quietly, and rinsed her mouth and came back and picked the pen up again.
Tammy came at nine in the morning and found her at the table with the pads and a face she did not like.
Laura told her all of it. It took twenty minutes and it was the first time she had said any of it out loud to another human being, and somewhere in the middle of it Tammy sat down hard in a chair without seeming to notice she'd done it.
"Eleven months," Tammy said.
"Yes."
"You have been living with this for eleven months and you never—" She stopped. She put both hands flat on the strawberry cloth. "No. I'm not doing that. That's about me."
"Tammy—"
"I'm not doing it," Tammy said, and her chin was going. "You'll tell me why later and I'll be fine about it. Right now — that boy. The little one with the vest. He came to the funeral."
Laura looked up.
She had forgotten. It went through her like cold water: three years ago, in the churchyard on the far side of town, in the rain, Derek Mills standing at the back in a black coat too big for him, holding an umbrella over Jake's mother.
"He drove Carol," Laura said slowly. "Jake couldn't get out of Denver until the morning of, so Derek drove Carol up. He was in this house. He carried in the ham somebody sent."
Neither of them said anything for a second.
"Okay," Tammy said, standing up. "We're calling the sheriff."
"No."
"Laura Bennett—"
"Listen to me." Laura put her hand on Tammy's wrist. "If I call this in as a name with nothing under it, the whole thing goes to Nashville and it gets managed.
I have watched them manage things for ten years.
It will become a story about a woman having a hard time after her divorce.
And he will be told, and everything on that machine will be gone in an afternoon. "
Tammy's mouth was a line.
"Then what."
"Then I go get the records," Laura said, "before anybody knows I'm looking."
"To the house."
"To the house."
"Where he is."
"Where he is," Laura said.
Tammy sat back down.
"I'll go with you."
"You will not. You'd take about ninety seconds to say something about those pictures and then it's a fight, and I need a clear morning in a closet with a machine and nobody thinking about anything else."
Tammy laughed, wetly, and wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "That's fair. That's completely fair."
Laura called Susan Reeves at noon and told her she needed to be in the Belle Meade house on Saturday, and that she would like Jake not to be there.
Susan, to her credit, did not ask why. She called back forty minutes later.
"He says the house is yours and you don't need his permission to be in it, which is correct.
" A pause. "He also says he'll be there Saturday morning packing the last of the garage, and he can't move it, because the truck's booked and he's had it booked for weeks.
He says he'll stay out of your way entirely and you won't see him.
His exact words were: tell her I'll be in the garage and I'll stay in the garage. "
Laura stood in her clinic with the phone against her ear.
"Fine," she said.
"Laura." Susan's voice changed. "Two hours in a house with him and no witness is precisely the thing I have told you four times not to do."
"I know."
"Then tell me it's about the property."
Laura looked out the front window at Depot Street, at the gray afternoon, at a town where she had spent five months building something that was hers out of a dead storefront.
"It's about the property," she said.
She drove down Saturday morning with the folder on the passenger seat and a fourteen-row legal pad and a knot in her chest that she recognized, distantly, as the feeling of walking back into a room you have already decided to leave.
Ninety minutes west. The trees opened up. The traffic thickened at Lebanon.
And the last thing she thought, coming over the rise where the city puts itself in the windshield all at once, was the thing she had been holding off since two-forty in the morning:
The first entry in the folder was March 14.
Six weeks, he had said, standing in her own kitchen at two in the morning with his hands on the back of a chair. Six weeks back from the tenth of October put the start of it at the end of August.
Five months. Whatever this was, it had been going on for five months before Ashley Reed ever got into a room with her husband — and nobody had been looking at her because of the affair.
Somebody had been looking at her first.
And then, arriving sideways the way the true things always did, the fourth photograph.
She had not gone and looked at it since October. She had not needed to. It turned up behind her eyes at bad hours anyway, and she had built a whole procedure for not thinking about it, and the procedure worked about half the time.
But she had spent the last two days doing one thing and one thing only, which was taking a set of events and asking what it would cost to believe they were an accident. That habit does not switch off because you have closed the legal pad.
Three people had been surprised on that sidewalk. A photographer trades in surprise; it is the entire product. Jake had been surprised and it was all over him — the whole torso coming round from the hips, the face open, half a second from understanding.
And the woman had put her chin up and looked into the lens.
The traffic slowed and stopped somewhere around Donelson, and Laura sat in it with both hands on the wheel and did not turn the radio on.
Nobody is that composed by accident.
She put it away. She was not ready for it and she knew she was not ready for it, and it was not a fact yet, and the folder was for facts.
But at the light on Harding she picked the pen up off the legal pad on the passenger seat and wrote one line across the top of a clean page, and underlined it twice, and then the light changed.
Who told them where he would be?