“They’re in the back of my car,” Kayla said. “Along with your pants.”
Val disappeared to dress. Raoul remained in the driveway, but now he was drawing patterns in the dirt with his feet. He kicked up clouds of dust.
“Antoinette is still missing,” Kayla said.
“Yes,” he said.
Kayla and Val moved through the house behind Paul Henry and his partner, whose name Kayla learned was Detective Dean Simpson-an actual detective here on Nantucket!-ogling the mess. They found Antoinette’s checkbook and wallet hidden deep in a pile of clothing that had been dumped out of the drawers onto her bed. The checks were all accounted for on the register and there was cash, $227, in the wallet. Detective Simpson dusted the handles of the dresser drawer for fingerprints. They were all of a sudden in the middle of a crime scene. Kayla tried to remember what Antoinette had been like at the beach. She had been in a good mood, Kayla thought, although maybe a little nervous about her daughter. But then there was the confession she was going to make. What was the confession?
They entered the bathroom. Everything from the medicine cabinet had been thrown onto the floor or into the toilet. “This could have been a person looking for drugs,” the detective declared. He picked up the prescription bottles.
Kayla yanked Val into the kitchen. “All right. Tell me what you think. Did Antoinette come back here and make this mess herself?”
“Why would she do that?” Val asked.
“Maybe she wanted to disappear,” Kayla said. “Maybe she wanted to ditch the daughter.”
“Speaking of the daughter,” Val said. She pointed to a note on the fridge-a cocktail napkin smeared with blue ink: L., Cape Air, noon Sat. “That’s in a matter of hours. We’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.”
“She was going to confess something, Val,” Kayla said. “Maybe she was telling us she was going to disappear.”
Val looked doubtful. “I don’t think so.”
“Why? Do you know what she was going to say?”
“No.”
“What were you two talking about while I was asleep?”
Val fiddled with the refrigerator magnet-from the Islander liquor store-and furrowed her brow. “I can’t remember. I was probably doing most of the talking. I usually do.”
“So she didn’t tell you her secret?”
Val put her hands on Kayla’s shoulders. “No, friend, she didn’t.”
“Well, do you think she-? I mean, we know she tried to kill herself before.”
“That’s true.”
“You think she’s dead, don’t you?”
They heard a voice-clearing from the bathroom and then Paul Henry, “Ladies, would you come in here, please?”
Val raised her eyebrows and mouthed the word ladies. Kayla looked out the front window at Raoul, still in the driveway, systematically smoothing the dirt with the edge of his work boot.
They entered the huge, brightly lit bathroom.
The floor alone, jade green tiles, was worth several thousand dollars, according to Raoul. Paul and the detective had their paws all over Antoinette’s collection of little brown bottles-they were popping the child-proof caps off and shaking a few pills out onto the countertop between the double sinks. The detective wrote the names of the drugs into a little notebook.
Out the window Kayla saw the sky brightening; it was almost half past five. If things had gone as planned, they would be waking up on the beach ready to hit the Downyflake for some chocolate doughnuts before heading home. Raoul would be putting on his boots, sliding his lunch box from the top shelf of the fridge and driving out to the Tings’, who, Jack Montalbano had so pointedly reminded them, were Chinese. But no. No.
“Do either of you know why Ms. Riley had so many prescription drugs?” the detective asked. He pronounced either “eye-ther,” which Kayla found annoying.
“Menstrual cramps,” Val said. “Bad ones.”
Kayla looked away. Migraines, she thought, depression. Was Antoinette’s committing suicide such a far-fetched idea? Kayla remembered back to the first Night Swimmers: / want to be able to kill myself if that’s what I decide.
On the back of the toilet Kayla saw a perfect whelk shell that she and Antoinette had found on Tuckernuck, back when Theo was a little boy. Kayla remembered the afternoon well-they’d borrowed a seventeen-foot Mako from one of Raoul’s workers, and Antoinette had motored them through Madaket Harbor and out past Smith’s Point until they reached the next island over, Tuckernuck, which was still mostly wilderness. Kayla had Theo bundled in an orange life jacket, and she made him sit on the floor of the boat with both arms wrapped around her legs. And then Antoinette lifted him onto the deserted beach and they had a picnic and swam and collected a bucket of perfect shells like this one.
Kayla lifted the whelk shell, disobeying the detective’s orders to not touch anything, but he was engrossed with Antoinette’s Fiorinal and his notebook, and didn’t notice. Underneath the whelk shell Kayla saw a white plastic stick that made her catch her breath. She practically slammed the whelk shell back down.
Val had moved around her to look at the pills with the police. “These are the ones for the cramps,” she was saying. “These blue ones, I’m pretty sure.”
Seven green tiles separated Kayla from Val and the policemen. Val was shielding Kayla from view. Kayla picked up the whelk shell again and slid the plastic stick into the pocket of her sweatpants, completely unobserved.
Detective, ha!
They probably wouldn’t even have known what the stick was, but Kayla, the mother of four children, knew only too well.
A pregnancy test, with two purple stripes showing. Positive.
When they emerged from the house, Raoul was still smoothing the dirt in the driveway. The detective flipped out.
“What are you doing?” he shouted. His voice was sucked into the dark woods surrounding the house. “Have you given any thought to footprints? Tire tracks? You just destroyed evidence!” He threw his hands up in the air and with them, his dinky notebook, which fluttered to the ground like an injured bird.
Raoul looked stunned. And exhausted. “Sorry, man. It was just a nervous thing. You know, something to do while you snooped around.”
“Well, shit,” the detective said. He couldn’t have been older than thirty. He wore wire-framed glasses and had dark hair turning gray around the ears. Funny, Kayla hadn’t really looked at him until then.
Paul Henry retrieved a coil of yellow police tape from the Suburban, and he and the detective wound it around Antoinette’s house, sealing off the doors. They were going to head back to the station to file a report and send the fingerprints and some other samples to a forensics lab on the Cape. The coast guard would do a sweep of the outlying areas in the chopper at seven, and the divers would start their recovery mission. But now it was clear that neither Paul nor the detective thought Antoinette was in the water. They thought something else was going on.
“We’ll have our men check the airport and the Steamship right away, see if they find her leaving the island,” Paul said to Kayla before she left. “Can you get us a photograph of Ms. Riley? I didn’t see any pictures in the house.”
“Antoinette isn’t fond of the camera,” Kayla said. “But I’ll look at home. I think I have one.”
“Thanks,” Paul Henry said. “We’ll call as soon as we get any news.”
Kayla drove home as the sun was coming up. The sky was a band of deep rose along the horizon, then yellow, then dark blue. A V of Canadian geese passed overhead. Val snored softly in the passenger seat. Kayla had insisted that Val ride with her. Besides, Raoul said he wanted to stop by the Hen House, where his crew gathered for breakfast every morning, to let them know he wouldn’t be working today.