Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The next morning, Chris's face is on the television by the time I come downstairs, but it's the wrong photo.
They've used his country club shot. Chris is tanned and grinning in a collared shirt with the lake behind him.
It looks too good. He's the type who grips your hand too hard and calls you champ.
They picked one that wants you to like him.
There's nothing in it of the real man who put David into the cake table or laid a hand on Julia.
Under his chin, three words sit in clean white letters.
WANTED FOR QUESTIONING.
David is already dressed, standing too close to the screen with a coffee.
He didn't come to bed. He sat up all night with the news, watching what happened become a story. Julia’s house now has the scrubbed-out quiet of a place the police have finally left.
They were on the road a long time yesterday, first at Julia's and then at ours.
A young officer wrote down what I'd found, including the open door and the tap running upstairs. I showed him Julia's video and watched him play it twice.
He asked why I hadn't called when I got it.
I told him the truth. Julia had asked me not to tell anyone.
She was my friend, and I trusted her. I'd seen the bruises before, but she'd said she was handling it.
I thought she was finally ready to leave Chris, that she wanted me there when she did.
I thought giving her one night was what she was asking me to do.
I told it over and over, to him and then to another officer, until the words stopped sounding like mine.
David changes the channel.
The storm is the lead story.
A man in a slicker stands on a Seattle dock somewhere with the rain coming sideways, saying the system has stalled over the Sound and the worst is still to come. Then they cut back to a news anchor and another version of the story about Julia.
They're calling her a Hunts Point woman.
They use a photo from her website. Julia appears in a bright empty room with her arms folded, looking like money with good bones.
Reported missing by a neighbor, the anchor says.
I know which neighbor. I'm that neighbor, the one who called it in.
The anchor says that the woman's partner, Christopher Brockwell, is being sought for questioning.
Then it switches to Detective Rodriguez.
He's at a low podium in front of a county seal. He looks exactly as tired on television as he did in my living room. He asks anyone who has seen Christopher Brockwell to come forward. He doesn’t call Chris a suspect.
He calls him a person of interest. Watching him, I understand what that careful language means.
They're looking for Chris because they think he took her.
He's the abusive boyfriend, the obvious answer.
I want it to be Chris.
If it's Chris, the world stays the size it was a week ago. He's cruel. He's violent. He's been hurting Julia for longer than I wanted to admit, and now he's done the thing everyone should have seen coming.
I cast a glance at David, thinking of my own marriage.
David might be short-tempered, secretive, lying about one bad night, but he’s not capable of this. Of that I’m sure. Or am I?
I realize if it's Chris, I get to keep David.
If it isn't, where does that leave me?
"They'll get him," I say. "He can't have gone far."
David doesn't answer. He's watching the crawl at the bottom of the screen, reading it like a wound.
We keep watching.
The broadcast moves to politics, then a car dealership ad, then a story about a school board meeting I barely hear. David doesn't move from the screen.
He just keeps flicking through the channels, as if one of them might somehow make sense of it all.
Then the banner changes.
brEAKING flashes across the screen. The anchor puts her finger to her ear, the way they do, and says that in the last hour, a man identifying himself as Christopher Brockwell contacted the station by phone.
He denies any wrongdoing or involvement in Julia Shaw's disappearance.
He claims he's being set up. The anchor reads those last two words as if they're in quotation marks.
David goes very still.
“Speaking exclusively to us, Christopher Brockwell says he can prove he had nothing to do with her disappearance,” the anchor says. “And he has named another man he alleges the police should be looking at instead.”
They don't say the name. Not yet. But the anchor says a physician. She says a neighbor. The two words land in our living room like they've been aimed. Beside me, David makes a sound I've never heard him make.
"Damn it," he says softly, as if this is what he's been waiting for. "There it is."
"David?"
He runs a hand over his head. "He's been telling people that I'm sleeping with his girlfriend.
Forty of them heard him say it at your birthday, Mal.
He put his hands on me over it." David turns from the screen at last, and his face has gone a color I don't like. He’s white under the exhaustion, his jaw tight as he forces the words out.
"And now she's gone, and he's the one they want, so of course this would happen. Of course he’d point at me.
It's the only card he's got left, and he's playing it on the local news. "
"You don't know it's you they mean."
"I'm the only physician on this road, Mallory.
" He almost laughs. "I'm the neighbor. Whose birthday was it?
Whose wife found her?" He drags a hand down his face.
"He's naming me to save himself. That's all this is.
A cornered coward reaching for the nearest name, and mine's the one already in everyone's mouth because of him. "
His phone buzzes on the counter. He looks at it and doesn't pick it up. From where I stand, I can see it's the hospital, the main line, the one that only calls him on the days something is on fire.
"You should get that," I say.
He taps accept. He steps out onto the terrace to take it, into the wet, pulling the door most of the way shut behind him.
I watch him through the glass with the rain coming down between us, and I can't hear a word.
All I can do is watch his shoulders change as he places his hand on the railing and leans against it.
When he comes back in, his voice is level in a way that costs him.
"They're convening the board," he says. "Ahead of schedule. Helen thinks I should take a voluntary leave until it’s…
resolved." He sets the phone down. "Someone sent in another anonymous complaint.
And now there's a woman missing off my road and a man on television with my name in his mouth, and the timing of all of it is very, very good. "
"Good for who?" I ask.
"For whoever is behind the complaints."
He looks back at the screen.
"Chris is trying to save himself. I understand that. But the complaints started before any of this."
Then he turns back to me, and for a second his face is almost pleading.
“Look, I know you don’t want to hear it. But you know who put that security system on our house. You know who's been up and down this road for weeks with a reason to watch us, who knows when we're home and when we're not."
“Come on, David."
"I've said his name to you, and you look at me like I'm the one who's sick."
His voice doesn't rise. That's the terrible part.
"I think Henry filed those complaints. I think he's been pulling pieces out of my life since the day he walked up my drive. I can't prove a word of it. And every time I say it out loud, I sound exactly like a guilty man reaching for the nearest name."
The word sits there between us. Guilty.
"But why would he?" I ask.
"I don't know. A fixation with you, maybe. I've seen how he looks at you."
"Me?" I stop. "Now you really are being—”
"Paranoid?" he says, cutting me off.
"That isn't what I was going to say."
"But you were thinking it."
I don't tell him Henry sent me a kind note and stepped out of our lives before any of this happened.
Instead, I look at my husband and do the sum I've been doing for a week, the one I can't stop doing. Chris named David to save himself. That's the simple answer, the clean one.
But there's a harder answer, and it's been in the room since the birthday, since the hospital, since a name on a phone at seven in the evening. Maybe Chris named David because Chris, brutal and stupid and cornered, saw something true. Maybe Chris knew exactly whose name to reach for.
“Listen, David, this isn't about Henry. It's about Chris."
“What? You believe him over me?” He's watching my face do the thing it does, the thing he can't stand. "You think I did this. That I had an affair with Julia and then hurt her to keep her quiet. Right?" He pauses. "Hell, I bet you even think I had something to do with the Ericksons."
I sigh. "I don't think anything," I say, which is a lie, and we both hear it. Outside, the rain beats harder against the glass. On the muted television, Chris keeps grinning out of the wrong photograph, as if he knows something the rest of us don't.