“Can I have the name of this friend, please?” Hurley asks.
Erik’s cheek muscles twitch and I can tell he’s on the verge of blowing but he manages to contain his ire and provide the name. “Jacob Darner.”
“Continue,” Hurley says once he has the information written down.
Erik sucks in a deep breath and blows it out very slowly before going on. “I left there around six and went home.”
“Alone?” Hurley asks.
“Yes,” Erik snaps. “Alone.”
“And where might home be these days?” Hurley asks, scribbling away in his notebook.
Erik rattles off the address, an apartment on the other side of town.
“Did you go anywhere else?”
“Not until this morning when I went to work,” Erik says tightly, his hands coiled into fists at his side. “Same hours as yesterday.”
“Is there anyone who can verify that you were at home yesterday evening?”
“No.”
“Nobody? No phone calls in or out, no visitors, no deliveries?”
“No,” Erik repeats, his voice even tighter. Then he rises and steps out of the car so abruptly that Hurley and I both take an involuntary step back. “I’m done answering questions until I talk to a lawyer.”
The two men indulge in a ten-second stare-down until Hurley says, “Fine. You’re free to go for now but don’t go far.”
The muscles in Erik’s cheeks twitch violently; his face is suffused with anger and indignation. I can tell he wants to say something more but after a few seconds he simply turns away and heads for his car.
“One other quick question, if you don’t mind?” Hurley yells after him.
Erik pauses but doesn’t look back.
“Do you own a gun?” Hurley asks.
I see the muscles in Erik’s back tighten before he answers. “I’ve got nothing more to say until I talk to a lawyer.” He continues to his car, gets in, starts it up, and peels out.
As we eat his dust, Hurley looks over at me with a thoughtful expression and says, “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Chapter 5
I can hardly bring myself to consider the possibility of Erik doing such a brutal thing to his wife, but I know people often hide their true selves from the rest of us. How much can we really know about any one person? Even those closest to us, the ones we live with and love, are capable of amazing dishonesty and dark, desperate secrets. That’s a lesson I’ve learned the hard way of late, after being on the fool’s end of my husband’s deception and learning that others in the community were not who I thought they were. What terrible secrets might Erik be hiding? What secrets had Shannon been hiding? And had those secrets ultimately led to her demise?
I know the answers lie in the evidence. With my curiosity roused, I follow Hurley back to the house. As he heads for the kitchen again, I take a slight detour and find the room I think is most likely to hold evidence of secrets: Shannon’s bedroom.
The décor is a bit shocking. Either Shannon wasted no time in erasing all evidence of Erik from her life or Erik had quietly tolerated Shannon’s extreme feminine tastes. The bed is neatly made and covered with a white comforter fringed with lacy tatting, echoing the frilly lace trim on the curtains. The walls are rosy pink, a shade that is repeated in the striped cushions of a wicker chair, the accent pillows on the bed, and the giant rose pattern in the rug. I feel like I’m trapped inside a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.
I move to the closet and pull open the bifold doors. Every square inch of the space is filled with clothes, all of them feminine. If Erik ever had a corner to call his own, there is no trace of it left now. Dozens of pairs of shoes are neatly arranged on the floor. I take a moment to envy the variety of styles and imagine what it must be like to be a woman of normal size. I wear a size-twelve shoe and choices are pretty limited when you get into this Sasquatch range, so there’s no Imelda Marcos thing going on in my closet. Plus there’s the whole height thing, which makes me reluctant to wear any kind of heel. I’ve been told I should embrace my height and wear it proudly. But I’m a bit self-conscious thanks to years of being asked how the weather is “up there,” and dodging “green” jokes (as in jolly giants, not environmental issues).
With one last, longing look at the shoes, I shift the focus of my pity party to the upper parts of the closet. Two overhead shelves hold purses, jeans, T-shirts, and a couple of basic granny nightgowns. These I can relate to. But the stuff hanging on the rack is another story.
I finger through the assortment, marveling at the petite styles and fashionable lines. Given that I’m six feet tall and weigh anywhere from one-seventy to none-of-your-freaking business, the clothes in Shannon’s closet are utterly foreign to me. I remember that she had a small side career as a local model and wonder if any of these clothes were acquired as perks of the job.
As I work my way down the rack, I notice all the clothes at the right end are loose-fitting styles in sizes ten and twelve. The ones in the center are size eights and of a more form-fitting style, and to the far left are some sexy sixes. This variety of sizes doesn’t surprise me. I have my own collections, though my sizes tend to range from not-so-fat, to Rubenesque, to Hindenburg. Apparently Shannon has had similar struggles with her weight, though on a much smaller scale . . . in every sense of the word.
I leave the closet and head for the dressers, taking care when I open the drawers in case there might be valuable fingerprint evidence there. One drawer is filled with pieces of sexy lingerie, some with the price tags still attached. No doubt these are for the new boyfriend. I did a similar upgrade myself a few weeks ago. It was easy to embrace the comfort of plain cotton, stretched-out elastic, and flannel granny gowns when I was seven years into my marriage, but now that I’ve been thrust back into the singles market, I need better window dressing.
Next I move to the bedside stands. The one on the right is empty and I guess that’s the side of the bed that used to be Erik’s. The bottom drawer of the stand on the left holds some body lotions and a night mask, but the top drawer is crammed full of letters. A quick sampling shows me that most of them are from Erik and bear postmarks dating back no more than three months ago.
I grab one of the envelopes and carefully remove the letter inside. It’s a single sheet of paper with a tidy scrawl on it, two paragraphs of writing. A quick scan of the contents reveals that Erik was utterly blindsided by Shannon’s request for a separation and still very much in love with her. His note pleads with her to reconsider and not waste all the years they’ve spent together and reminds her of how happy they’d once been. The next to the last sentence reads: “Remember the vows we took ten years ago.” The closing is sweet and desperate in its simplicity, but also chilling given the night’s events: “’Til death do us part. Love, Erik.”
“What are you doing?”
The sound of Hurley’s voice behind me makes me jump. I spin around, knowing I look guilty but trying not to. “I was curious about Shannon’s life and thought I might find something in here that could offer up some clues.”
“And did you?”
“Maybe.” I’m none too eager to show the letter to Hurley, knowing it will only convince him more of Erik’s guilt. But I have no choice so I hand it over. He reads it, looks at the stack still in the drawer, and says, “Interesting. Did you read any of the others?”
I shake my head. He looks at me with his eyes narrowed and I’m expecting him to chastise me for snooping but he surprises me by instead asking, “So what’s your take on Erik? Do you think he did it?”
I want to blurt out an immediate denial but hold it back. “I don’t know,” I say finally, truthfully. “But I’m leaning toward no.”