Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
Idon't go home.
The driver brings me north through the dark. When we get closer, he asks for an address again. I still can't give him one. I only told him to head toward Bellevue.
I can’t make myself let him drive me home.
Instead I have him drop me at a 24-hour diner in Bellevue, a bright place open at an hour when nothing else is, with menus under laminate and a television bolted up in the corner.
I turned my phone off back in Portland, outside Lena's house. If David could watch the dot, I didn't want to give him anything else to see.
Besides, I didn't know where I was going myself.
The diner smells of old grease, burnt coffee, and the pink soap they mop the floors with.
A trucker works through a plate of eggs at the counter.
A woman in scrubs stares at nothing over a cup gone cold.
I used to wonder why places like this kept their lights on all night.
Who could possibly need them at this hour?
Now I know. It's for people who can't make themselves go home.
As the hours pass, I sit in yesterday's clothes and drink cup after cup of bad coffee to keep myself awake. I try to decide whether to walk into a police station.
I have enough to go to the police. At least I think I do.
I have photographs on my phone of almost a year of cash pulled from an account I wasn't allowed to see. There’s a dead woman in Portland my husband had been paying in secret.
A child she claimed was his. A hospital visit he lied about.
A gun in the house I never knew we owned.
Chris, who stood up at my birthday and accused David in front of the whole club.
I could lay all of it on Rodriguez's desk and let him carry it. Part of me wants to so badly my hands ache with it, because it would mean I don't have to be the only one who knows.
But I don't have proof of a single killing.
I have a gun-owning husband who lied about a woman, and I have fear. Every cop on earth has seen a frightened wife walk in with less and watched it come to nothing.
If I go to Rodriguez now, with this, I’ll be the unstable one again. The woman who walked away from a fatal crash with pieces of her mind gone. The one who can't fully trust her memory, who tracks her husband on an app and sees patterns she can't prove.
I know how I'll sound. I know he'll be kind about not believing me.
And then there's a smaller, worse reason under that one. I make myself look at it.
I want to hear David say it first.
I've been married to this man for two years. If he wanted to hurt me, he would have done so by now. I owe myself the truth.
That's when Chris's face comes up on the television.
The same wrong club photo, tanned and grinning. But the banner under it has changed. The word is one I didn't expect, and it takes me a second to read it right.
FOUND DEAD.
I'm up and at the counter before I know I've moved, asking the kid to turn it up. He does, and the anchor's voice comes down into the diner.
Christopher Brockwell, the man sought in connection with the disappearance of Hunts Point woman Julia Shaw, was found dead this morning of what police are calling an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
His body was found at a motel off the highway.
A firearm was recovered at the scene. Police, the anchor says, are not currently seeking any other suspects in Ms. Shaw's disappearance, and sources indicate investigators increasingly believe Brockwell was responsible.
Responsible. Past tense already. They've closed a door in a sentence.
I stand there while the diner carries on around me, a milk steamer hissing behind the counter, a toddler dropping a spoon.
I wait to feel the relief I've been chasing for a week.
If it was Chris, then the story still makes sense.
A violent man hurt the woman he was already hurting, and David is only a liar.
If it was Chris, I get to keep everything. Right?
The relief doesn't come.
What comes instead is my old instinct, the one that made me good at this before the crash took my memory.
Chris was a lot of things. Loud, cruel, a man who put his hands on a woman and told her she'd imagined it.
But he was in love with himself. He believed, all the way down, that he was the main character.
Men like that don't check into a highway motel and turn a gun on themselves out of guilt.
They lawyer up. They go on television and cry and blame the physician down the road.
He was on the phone to a news station yesterday saying he'd been set up. And this morning he's a closed case with a gun beside him?
I make myself stop. It's the fever again. I know the feeling of it. Sometimes a frightened man runs out of road. Sometimes the simplest thing is the true thing.
But the diner goes unsteady around me all the same, because Chris named my husband on the news. Now Chris is conveniently, tidily dead, and it seems to me, standing under that television, that everyone who threatens David has gone quiet.
I should go to the police.
I know I should.
Even if it makes me look a fool.
But instead, I go home.
David is in the kitchen when I come in, and he already knows.
I can see it the second I'm through the door.
Maybe he saw the dot in Portland before it went dark.
Maybe he only reads it now on my face. Either way, he can see I've come back changed.
He's unshaven. There's a glass by his hand that isn't coffee, and it isn't yet noon.
His whole ruined day is in the set of his shoulders.
"You didn't come home last night," he says. "You didn't answer. You turned your phone off. I've been out of my mind with worry.”
"I went to Portland."
I set my handbag down.
The word does to him what I knew it would. He goes still, the same stillness that gave him away on the sofa the night Lena’s name lit up his phone.
"I met a surgeon named Richard Thomas," I say. My voice is coming from somewhere very level and far away. "And then I went to a little house on the east side to talk to Lena Holloway. Her brother answered the door. Lena's been dead since Tuesday. Murdered."
David sits down. Not gracefully. He goes down into the chair like his legs have quit. He puts one hand over his mouth, and above it his eyes are wet. I can't tell yet what the tears are for.
"Say something," I tell him.
"Lena's dead?"
"You knew her." I stay standing. The island is between us and I keep it there.
"Don't. Don't do the face. I've had the whole drive back to watch you do that face in my head.
I know about the affair, David. I know she was an intern, and you buried her career when it got complicated.
You left Oregon and never told me any of it.
Richard Thomas told me. Elaine told me the rest. So don't sit there and be careful with me. For once in your life, be a person who tells the truth.”
And he does. That's the part I'm not ready for. He takes his hand from his mouth and says it, all of it, in a low, toneless rush, like someone finally setting down a weight he's carried for years.
"Yeah, I had an affair with her when I was married to Elaine. It was four years ago. Before I met you. Things between Elaine and me weren't good, and I let that become an excuse. Lena wanted me, and I liked being wanted."
He groans and runs a hand around the back of his head.
"I regret it. I do. It's the worst thing I did, and when it started to come apart, I got scared.
Scared that I was going to lose everything.
So I used my position. I made her the problem.
I made sure she was the one who left. And then two years ago she found me again.
" He turns the glass on the counter and doesn't drink from it.
"She said there was a child. A little girl.
Mine, from back then, that she'd never told me about.
She wanted money. She said if I didn't pay, she'd take it to Helen, to the board, and to you.
All of it. The affair, the child, what I did to her career.
" He looks up. "I paid her. Cash, so there'd be no name at the other end of it.
I kept a separate account in my name, one you'd never see, so the withdrawals would never show up on ours. For almost a year I paid her. I hated her, and I hated myself more. I never once told you, because telling you meant losing you, and you are the one clean thing I have.”
"The cash," I say. "Monthly payments?”
"Yeah. Monthly."
“I saw money come out of our joint account when you were in Portland.”
“Yeah. One time. There was a problem with the other account, and I needed the money that day.”
Well, that explains that.
The floor of my marriage keeps dropping and I keep finding another floor under it.
"That night," I say. "Tell me about the night at the hospital. The night the man from our break-in died in that bed and you were in that building. You told me you were out getting party things, but you went to speak to someone from Portland."
David closes his eyes.
"That was Lena. She called me at seven," he says. "She was threatening me."
"Why, if you were paying her?"
"Because I'd stopped paying her."
I take a step back.
"A week before, I told her she wasn't getting another cent until she gave me a DNA test. Until she proved the child was even mine."
"You never questioned that before?" I ask.
"Of course I did. From the start." His eyebrows go up.
"But she told me that if I pushed for proof, she'd make sure my name was ruined no matter what the test said.
So I paid, and I told myself it was easier.
" He exhales hard. "And then I kept thinking about you.
About us. I wanted a clean slate. That was the whole point of moving here.
To get away from all of it. Oregon. The crash. The memories. What I'd done."
He lets that sit.
"So what happened that night?" I ask.
"She told me to meet her at the hospital with the money, or she'd walk into Helen's office in the morning and end my career.
She knew I wouldn't make a scene there. Not in my own workplace.
" He pinches the bridge of his nose. "So I went.
I badged in and found somewhere quiet. I let her scream at me for the better part of an hour.
Then I gave her the money to make her leave.
Then I sat in my car in the structure a long time, because I couldn't make myself come home and lie to your face again.
That's your three hours, Mallory. It was never a patient.
It was her. I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner. "
And there it is. The whole hospital night turns over between us and lands another way. It had nothing to do with that patient. Every careful, guilty word he gave me was true. It all pointed at a betrayal I could survive, not the murder I'd spent a week building toward.
But that's the thing about his story. It puts him in the building the night a man died. It ties him to a woman who's been dead since Tuesday. It hands me a husband with every reason in the world and no clean hour I can point to and say, there, he couldn't have done it.
"And those men who broke into our house?" I ask.
"I think Lena sent them." He says it fast, desperate to give me something.
"When I stopped paying, when I finally told her to take me to court and called her bluff, I think she got frightened and sent someone to lean on me.
I don't know that. I've thought it through a hundred times.
I don't know anything anymore except what I did, and what I did was lie to you, and I am so sorry. "
"And the others?"
"What others?"
"Somebody hurt them, David. The Ericksons. Lena. Somebody took Julia."
"Not me."
"Where were you on Tuesday?" The question is out before I've decided to ask it. "The day Julia vanished. The day Lena died. Where were you?"
"I was home." He doesn't hesitate, and it almost lands like an answer. Then I watch him understand what I already know. "I was home all day."
“Your phone was home,” I say.
He looks at me, and he doesn’t answer fast enough.
And I understand. After the hospital, he learned. He learned what I could see, what I could prove, what I could ask. So if he needed to disappear after that, he knew what to leave on the counter.
It doesn’t mean he was in Portland. That’s the part I can’t get past. It doesn’t mean he was, but it doesn’t mean he wasn’t. He’s made himself into a man I can’t check.
"That wasn't me." He's on his feet now, and there are tears on his face he doesn't wipe.
His voice cracks all the way open at last. "Mallory.
Look at me. I lied about Lena. I've lied about her for two years.
I'm the worst liar you'll ever stand in a kitchen with, but I'm telling you the truth now with nothing left to protect.
I lied about the money, the hospital, all of it.
But I didn't kill anyone." He puts his hand on his chest like he's holding something in. "You have to believe me."
I stand in that kitchen and look at my husband, ruined and honest for maybe the first time since I've known him. I want to believe him more than I have ever wanted anything.
I just can't.