“No, it isn’t. You and Ray are both professionals. You don’t miss things like that. I was Phil’s wife for twentytwo years, but that didn’t help. He hid this really well, and the information looked like something else-exactly like something else. That’s the way Phil hid things. But I think the reason we didn’t find it in the house or in the office is that it wasn’t there. I need your help.”
“What kind?”
“I was just at April’s house. She and I talked about things-about Phil, and about his plans. She knew some things I didn’t. She didn’t know all of them at the time, but she’s figured them out since. I realized that was part of my problem. Phil was a secret-keeper. Each person who knew Phil knew a different Phil. It wasn’t that he was lying to everybody. To be honest with you, the only one I’m sure he actually lied to is me.”
“Don’t do this to yourself.”
“I’m not doing anything to myself. I have a problem. There’s a man out there who is willing to murder me. He wants this evidence Phil had against a powerful man, and I still don’t have it.”
“I know. I’ve been trying to help.”
“Phil almost certainly had multiple copies. He probably gave one-or at least a taste of one-to this powerful man. He would have needed to show the man he had something, right?”
“I suppose,” Dewey said. “He would have to show a sample, at least, to get the man scared. And he would have to give him something tangible when he got paid. But he would have to let the man know he had retained something to keep the man from killing him.”
“And somehow that went wrong.”
“Apparently. He got killed. There doesn’t seem to be anything that he left for us-for you, or for me, or for anyone else-to find after he was dead. There should have been something. If not the evidence, at least a letter.”
“I think there was,” said Emily.
“And we missed it, and it got burned up last night?”
“April had it at one time.”
“What? Where?”
“Phil hid the box under her bed for some time while he was collecting the evidence.”
“Why didn’t she tell us she had it?” She could see that Dewey was angry.
“She wasn’t about to tell me my husband hid anything under her bed. At first she didn’t even know what it was. She didn’t figure that out until after Phil was dead, and the man came to my house to get it. By then, she didn’t have it anymore.”
“Well, where is it now?”
“Phil came over to her apartment one day and picked it up. He took it away, and moved it to a place that he knew was safer.”
“What was safer than that?”
Emily spoke quietly and carefully. “Dewey, you said Phil would have known he was doing something dangerous, and that he would have left the evidence for you, for me, or for April to find. But there’s somebody important that you’re leaving out of this. She might be the most important one of all.”
“No,” he said. He was irritated, uncomfortable.
“Yes. She would be the perfect person, the one of us no stranger would know was connected with Phil.”
“She isn’t involved in this. It’s blackmail. It’s dishonest. It’s probably the worst thing he ever did in his life, just a momentary lapse when he was having some midlife crisis-maybe financial trouble. She would never have gotten involved in that, or in anything he did.”
Emily said, “I need to meet her.”
“No.”
“I have to talk to her, Dewey. Phil had the box at April’s because that was safer than our house or the office. But there was somebody much safer than April. The only person who knew about her was his only living son.”
“She doesn’t have it.”
“Let me talk to her. Please. I have a right to know her. And she has a right to know me. If I have to go through all the files in storage to find her name and address, I’ll do it. If I have to, I’ll hire a detective to investigate you.”
Dewey turned away from her and walked to the kitchen. She heard him rustling around out there, putting dishes in the dishwasher, then standing silent for thirty seconds.
Finally he came back into the living room. “I’ll call her.”
30
Lee Anne Burns was beautiful, with smooth caramel skin and light brown eyes flecked with gold. She had to be Emily’s age, but she looked thirty, with long, thin limbs and a graceful neck. Emily fought to keep the jealousy away. She had expected someone else, someone she could pity, but this woman was formidable.
Lee Anne said, “You look at me and you see the other woman, don’t you?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to look at you strangely,” Emily said.
“I’m not the other woman, you are.”
Emily drew in a breath. The words didn’t seem to mean the same thing to the two women. “What do you mean?”
Lee Anne Burns held her eyes on Emily. She hesitated, as though she were deciding how much to say. “He wasn’t married to you when I knew him. He hadn’t met you yet.” This time Emily understood. Lee Anne was revealing a secret that she had kept for a long time, a secret so familiar to her that she was sick of it. And getting sick of it had affected nothing, because she still had been required to live with it and think about it.
“Oh, my God,” Emily said. “I didn’t know. He never said anything, never mentioned…” She knew how much it must hurt Lee Anne to hear that. Lee Anne had known, as she’d known everything, so well that it was probably like being punched over and over on the same spot, so the bruise, and the hurt, never went away.
Lee Anne gave her a look of sympathy. “Don’t feel bad for me. This isn’t news to me, the way it is to you. Didn’t you ever look at Dewey’s personnel file?”
“No. I wasn’t working in the office when Dewey was hired. I went to the office one day on an errand, and there was Dewey. Phil hired a lot of young men who wanted to work with him to get their licenses. I just didn’t have any reason to look.”
“He’s twentyfour.”
“Twentyfour?”
“Born two years before you were married.”
“I didn’t know that Phil was his father. I didn’t suspect until a few days ago. Dewey was the one who came to see me, and saved me from that … the man who broke into my house. And while I was watching him check the doors and windows, it just hit me. He had some of the same mannerisms. I had the feeling I was looking at Phil. It was like a switch turning on. I couldn’t see before, but all of a sudden I could.” There was a silence that made both women uncomfortable. Emily spoke to fill it. “So you were with Phil at least two years before I met him.”
“About three and a half years.” Lee Anne Burns sat primly in her chair for a few breaths. “I should explain something. I know the things that you want me to tell you. And in a way, I think you have a rightor at least a legitimate wish-to know. But at the same time, you don’t. And I’m sitting here thinking that I’m probably about to tell you some things that I’ve never even told Dewey. He has a better claim to a right to know than you do. But maybe he knows everything already, just from having lived with me, and from whatever Phil told him, and from the other ways of knowing that he had. He was always that kind of boy, even when he was little. He seemed to figure out everything by himself, as though he could look at one tiny detail and grow the rest of it in his mind. There have been lots of times when I found out that what I thought he was too young to know he had known for years, or what I thought had been hidden was plain to him.”
“The others all say he has the gift for being a detective,” Emily agreed. “But he also has a gift for secrets. I can’t tell you what he knows because he never told me anything. And I didn’t come here to claim some right to know things. Maybe I already know everything about Phil that I ought to.”