“Wyatt. We haven’t found him yet. Wyatt was briefly shipped off to a juvenile detention center. It coincides with the time Caroline arrived in Clairmont. The Hazard police are not being too forthcoming with us about why, so I may take a little trip there. The son eventually landed in an expensive boarding school for rich kids. The folks at the school are equally zipped up on the subject. They would only tell us that he graduated as expected, at eighteen. There’s not much of a trail after that.”
“Is he at the top of your suspect list?” I was adding quickly in my head. Caroline’s son would be in his thirties now.
“He’s up there, simply because he is suddenly alive and linked to a previous criminal history. The obvious question is, why would he do anything now, after all the years in between?”
“Maybe he didn’t know where she was.”
“I don’t think so. Caroline didn’t make herself that hard to track backward or forward. Any PI could have done it. We’re having a little trouble with Misty Rich, though. There are 42,000 people in the United States with ‘Rich’ as a last name. The computer spit out ten Misty Riches, all of them over forty and easy to locate. None of them is your Misty. My guess is that ‘Misty’ is a nickname. Billie, who seems to know these things, thinks chances are that her legal name could be ‘Michelle’ or ‘Melissa.’ Billie is also tracking a list of Todd Riches. There are plenty of those, although none who are legally married to anyone named ‘Misty.’ Or ‘Michelle’ or ‘Melissa.’ ” He had emphasized the your Misty part a little too much.
“She and her husband came from California,” I ventured.
He nodded. “I remembered you saying that. No pops there yet, either. Frankly, I wasn’t that interested in Misty until a few hours ago. One of my more ambitious young cops followed Caroline’s financial trail straight to that glass house Misty is living in. It’s owned by a trust in the name of Caroline Warwick. Caroline’s real estate lawyer flips houses for her. Caroline currently owns five homes in a fifty-mile radius. Two of those houses are on the market, two are being updated, and Misty Rich lives in the other one.”
All of this information was making my head throb. Other parts of me already throbbed. The soles of my feet, my neck, the back of my legs all the way up to my butt. And now the suspect was flesh and blood. He had a name. Wyatt.
“Why don’t you just roll up to Misty’s house and ask her to show you a driver’s license? I could ask her, for that matter.”
“No.” Mike’s voice was tight with irritation. “I’m not ready yet.”
“OK, OK. I don’t know if you could trace this, but she was in a car crash when she was twelve. Or that’s what she says. She has scars.” As soon as I said the word, it felt like a betrayal. Mike had moved to the sink and stopped in the middle of rinsing out his beer bottle.
“What kind of scars?”
I spoke reluctantly, wondering why I felt like I’d made some sort of silent pact with her. “A six-inch narrow line on her left forearm. Vertical. Not suicidal. I saw a couple of marks inside her thighs when we sat out by the pool that day. I didn’t get a good look. She seemed embarrassed by them. Some of the gossip… is that she is or was a drug addict. I think that’s jealous crap,” I said firmly.
“How do you know it wasn’t suicidal? People serious about suicide slice vertically along the vein between the wrist and the elbow. It takes about a second on Google to find explicit instructions. The slash-across-the-wrists method is movie folklore.”
I guess it was a positive thing that I didn’t know this.
“What else?” Mike pressed. “Even if it’s little, it could be helpful.”
“She said something about taking classes at USC. But I didn’t get the impression she got a degree from there. Today, for the first time, she mentioned her family. An aunt. No name.”
Mike, familiar with the signs of my nightly meltdown-the higher tone of my voice, fingers stripping through my hair like an angry comb-spoke gently. “Don’t worry about it for now.”
“Are you going back to work?”
“Not tonight. My deputies shoved me out the door. Told me to sleep for six hours or I wasn’t going to be of any use to anybody. What’s this?”
He’d been thumbing through the mail lying on the counter, his usual wind-down for the night. My red notebook was suspended between his thumb and pointer finger.
Something stopped me from telling him. Old habits. The shame I still wore, like a tattoo from a drunken spring break in hell.
“Just notes from a college Shakespeare class. I found it today when we unpacked. I’m thinking of reading a little more Shakespeare now that I’m more equipped to understand it. And since I have time on my hands.”
“Maybe you could write me a sonnet sometime,” he said with a smile. He set the notebook back down. I let out my breath. “Good night. And good morning, too. I’ll be out of here before you’re up.”
He kissed me on the forehead, not the neck, or the lips, or my cheek. This meant two things. He wasn’t mad anymore and no sex tonight. Both good.
As usual, Mike didn’t doubt my words. The guilt in my gut was familiar, but growing less bearable every day.
The newspaper article slipped out of the notebook so silently I only saw it on the linoleum because I bent down to reposition my slipper and found my nineteen-year-old face looking up at me. I had just finished straightening the kitchen and was about to turn off the lights and follow Mike to bed.
That stupid front-page story from the college newspaper. Before starting supper, I had swept it up from the kitchen table and tucked it inside the notebook.
Five little brunettes. The only time my picture made the paper except for our wedding announcement in The Times.
The byline leapt out at me.
Bradley Hellenberger.
The name that ran flush left over the top of the best campus newspaper stories. A titillating and anonymously sourced piece on a student’s affair with a lit professor in line for dean. A first-person exposé after four weeks inside an insidious campus cult.
The murder of a rich college frat boy.
Everybody knew this reporter was going places.
So where did he go?
Did the ripple effects of Pierce’s violence take Bradley Hellenberger down, too?
I never seriously thought about him as anything but a peripheral character, run over by this story along with his editor. But as soon as my eyes hooked on his name, the incident flowed back in slow, chronological pieces.
I shook the notebook over the table, and his business card fell out, the edges soft like a worn blanket. I was surprised it was still there.
I knew for a fact that Bradley Hellenberger was angry. I knew he was ruthless. I knew he felt cheated. I knew he suspected that one of the five of us killed Pierce because he waited for me after my Middle East history final, the class where I learned that sometimes there is way, way too much to forgive.
Bradley fell in line with me as I walked down the steps of the liberal arts building, his business card proffered as his first and last gesture of civility. I was slightly awed for just a second, because he was a campus celebrity of sorts. He wasn’t at all how I imagined he’d look, the big man behind the byline. Short for a guy, not even 5′8″, skinny, nondescript eyes, pinkish skin, a bad haircut, and wire-rimmed glasses. His written words blew like a force of nature but, in person, he appeared to be more of a light breeze.
“I know you’re one of Pierce Martin’s ex-girlfriends. I need to know what happened with the police. They interviewed you and the other girls, right?” He’d stopped me on the last step by holding my arm in a weak pinch, but it hurt. I decided Bradley was less like a breeze and more like a bug.
“Let go of me.” I shrugged him off. I’d been ducking calls from Bradley Hellenberger for days. “I’m not going to tell you anything. You ran our pictures, you unbelievable asshole.” I couldn’t stop staring at his nose. He had the tiniest nostrils I’d ever seen, like a baby’s. I wondered how he could breathe through them when he got a cold.