Chapter 33
Izzy’s family had chosen to have a small, family-only funeral shortly after her death, but Sidney’s family waited.
Some people said it was because they refused to bury her until the coroner had returned every last organ and tissue sample.
Or maybe it was only that Geneva had left Pleasant Park for several weeks, perhaps to dry out somewhere and regather her strength.
Either way, the delay and desire for belated resolution resulted in a funeral so large that it was nearly impossible for anyone but family members to gather close enough to hear the priest or speakers who followed.
The cemetery, located just a few blocks from downtown, was bordered by quiet streets on all sides, and every one of those streets was backed up with black town cars restlessly circling until the service ended.
I had walked from home, aware of the parking challenges, and now I remained at the back, head bowed, trickles of sweat running down my spine, my long-sleeved black blouse clinging to my damp back.
I hadn’t known how to dress for a sweltering funeral.
Some people had brought umbrellas for shade rather than rain—a good idea that hadn’t occurred to me as I’d hurried out the apartment door, asking Benjamin for the third time if he wanted to come along. He hadn’t.
I told myself that was okay. You couldn’t force a kid to grieve publicly.
You couldn’t force a kid to grieve privately, for that matter.
Even now, he expressed only anger at the girls, but especially Izzy, and then only tersely, blaming her for falling for a guy like Christopher Weber.
I believed, now, that he missed her. He was just mad at her for being dead.
It was one way to care—being angry. It was better than feeling nothing.
Standing apart from the crowd, so far from the grave site I was nearly backed up against the wall that bordered the cemetery’s western boundary, I thought about Sidney’s interest in psychology and imagined how she might have started talking to Weber at the pool, where he’d briefly worked.
The latest news reports had hypothesized about Weber’s agile deception as the key to attracting two underage girls, but I felt almost certain Sidney was drawn not to any lie but to the truth—that he had a criminal record and a troubling but intellectually interesting diagnosis.
I imagined him striking up a wounded pose, lamenting his inexperience with women, due to the years he’d lost to incarceration.
She might have convinced herself that she could cure him of any residual antisocial tendencies, maybe even keep him from taking the quick on-ramp to incel misogyny.
The last day of her life, when she let him into her house, she must have thought she was helping him, still.
I imagined him arriving with a sob story—that Izzy no longer wanted to see him, which would have made Sidney feel guilty, since she was the one who’d warned Izzy not to become romantically entangled with a psychopath.
Or maybe he fed her an even less factual, self-aggrandizing version—that he was taking Sidney’s advice and no longer seeing Izzy of his own accord.
Maybe they’d pulled out their phones to compare text messages, Sidney sincerely worried about Izzy and Weber only pretending to be, searching together for clues to her silence.
If he was a master manipulator, he could have shown Sidney proof of the breakup texts he’d written—texts Izzy wouldn’t have seen, because she was already dead.
If he’d watched Sidney open her own phone, he would have had the passcode for later, so that he could type the cryptic text to Geneva that others would interpret as a suicide note.
My imagination had gotten away from me, but I kept following it.
I could picture the small-eyed, dark-haired Weber I’d gotten to know from news photos, asking Sidney to go downstairs to the massive Mayfield kitchen and find them something fun to drink.
While she was gone, he could have hurried to Geneva’s master bathroom, to rustle through her drawers and cabinets for pills he could smash up, ready to dribble into the prosecco bottle when Sidney wasn’t looking.
He’d sip his first glass and pressure Sidney to drink all of hers, then accept a second glass from the tainted bottle.
I felt a hard lump in my throat, imagining the bitter taste of that fouled wine, wondering if Sidney objected or went along, trying to spare them both the embarrassment of outright rejection.
Drink with me, and then I’ll leave. Have a second glass and I won’t come closer.
Take your shirt off, and I won’t touch you.
Let me take a photo. Drink again. Don’t reject me.
This is helping. I need this. You promised this. You have to.
His prints would be on everything—the phone, the bottle, the bathroom counter where he smashed the pills—but if the detectives weren’t smart, if they believed the suicide setup, if they’d dealt with precious few murders in this safe, upscale community, then police wouldn’t necessarily dust for prints—not right away.
Weber’s cockiness had led him to make bad choices, but the police department’s ineptness had let him get away with those choices, at least for a while.
“Abby?”
I swiped my eye dry and turned in time to see Rita, from Summit.
“Oh, hi,” I said with a shaky smile, accepting her sideways embrace. “Good to see you. It’s been too long.”
“Are you on Team Jack or Team Geneva?”
When I shook my head, confused, she clarified, “Drinks here in town with the mother’s crowd or in Chicago at the dad’s bar?”
“Neither. But I did want to express my condolences, if I can catch Geneva.”
Rita gestured ahead of us, where a fast-moving mob of black surrounded a small blond figure. “Good luck.”
Geneva was almost to a black car parked at the curb when I heard a familiar voice say, “Anything I can do. Anything at all.”
I sidestepped two elderly people in time to see Curtis kissing Geneva on both cheeks while she gripped his hands. “You’ve already done so much. Jack and I failed you.”
“Of course not,” he said.
As her petite head disappeared into his chest, several onlookers discreetly stepped away, realizing this would be more than a quick, obligatory hug.
When they separated, Geneva’s face was slick with tears.
A moment later she was hustled into the car’s back seat by a younger woman.
I’d lost my chance. In any case, I was too surprised to speak.
Curtis had never said anything about knowing the Mayfields.
I was surprised, halfway down the block, when I heard Curtis calling for me to wait up.
“Going home?”
“Yes.”
“Your car—?”
“No, I walked. I knew the parking would be tricky.”
He caught up and gripped my elbow—a touch that gave me an unexpected electrical zing.
“Those shoes can’t be the best for a long walk.”
“They’re all right.”
“Nonsense,” he said, pointing to a bright orange sports car parked on a small paid lot across the street. “My car. I’ll drop you.”
The first surprise, or rather second, coming after the Mayfields revelation, was that Curtis had a flamboyantly decked-out metallic orange Jaguar; his plain white SUV was in the shop, he told me. The next surprise was that he suggested lunch at Ray’s rather than heading directly home.
“Funerals hit me hard,” he said, uncharacteristically frank. “Maybe it’s because I expect the next one to be my father’s.”
“And it’s gotta be harder when you know the family.”
He took my pointed comment in stride. “Now you know. Jack and Geneva were among the last of my client couples. I think my own divorce extinguished my brief zest for marriage counseling, so I returned to my specialty, helping young men.”
More candor. Was this flirtation or simply a softening, now that we were away from his office?
“I remember at the pool, when I first told you I lost two students,” I said. “You gave no hint of knowing either one.”
“How could I?”
True. I didn’t know why I felt like I had some right to understand his connection to the Mayfields. To change the subject, I said, “Benjamin didn’t want to come to the funeral.”
“No point in pushing someone when they’re not ready. Forcing kids to mourn the way we do is just another way to encourage deception.”
We caught a yellow light on Main Street and as Curtis brought the Jag to a smooth stop, I said, “You would have zipped through that if I weren’t in the passenger seat.”
“Absolutely,” he said, with a deep belly laugh. There was the Curtis I hadn’t seen since the pool, or maybe since college. Completely unguarded.
“I hadn’t pegged you as a sports car guy.”
“Bought it seven years ago during my midlife crisis, postdivorce. Typical, right?” He reached across to tap my knee. A second zing. I snuck a sidelong look at his face—the dark eyelashes framing kind eyes that first attracted me, years ago.
“If the worst thing you did was buy a fancy car, I’d say that’s pretty good.”
“You’re assuming the best. That’s generous.
” He glanced over, smiling. “I did some healthy things, like losing the weight. I did some foolish things—indulging appetites long suppressed, one could say—as divorced men sometimes do.” He ran his fingers around the leather-covered steering wheel for a moment, eyes on the road.
“I could have sold it, but the car’s a souvenir in a way.
A way to remember. We all have those less stable times in our lives, but they pass. ”
“Self-compassion is important,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear.
By the time we were seated at Ray’s, Curtis’s warmth had spilled over into uncharacteristic abandon.
Maybe it was the effect of the funeral, as he claimed.
Or maybe the stresses of work and family had pushed him past the point of compartmentalization.
As we sipped our first glasses of red wine, he talked about problems up in Fond du Lac.