Detective Hardy: Glad you’re on the mend. Do you have any idea where Brie might be? Would she have run away? Disappeared without saying anything to anyone?
Greg: You know, I suppose it could be something like that. That she just needed to get away and think things through. But she’ll probably show up anytime now.
Detective Hardy: If that’s what she did, you’d think she’d have taken her purse and credit cards and her car wouldn’t still be in the driveway.
Greg: Yeah, well, there’s that. But she still might have gone someplace to clear her head.
Detective Hardy: About what? You said two seconds ago you think their marriage is fine.
Greg: I don’t know. Maybe I’m not ready to think something bad has happened to her. I don’t want my mind to go there. I love Brie. She’s terrific. And if something’s happened to her, it’ll destroy Andy.
Detective Hardy: Your cabin, and Mr. Mason’s, are they pretty close together?
Greg: About a minute’s walk. If that.
Detective Hardy: Can you see his place from yours? And vice versa?
Greg: There’s a line of trees between the two cabins. At night you can see some light through the leaves. If it’s the fall, when the leaves are all gone, there’s a pretty clear sightline through, but not now.
Detective Hardy: Did you notice any lights on at Mr. Mason’s through the night?
Greg: I didn’t look.
Detective Hardy: You can make the drive from Milford to Sorrow Bay in, what, ninety minutes or so?
Greg: If there’s no traffic.
Detective Hardy: So, if you’d decided, say, for the sake of argument, at ten that night to drive back, you’d be in Milford by midnight. And if you wanted, you could turn around and come back in time for breakfast.
Greg: Yeah, well, I didn’t do that. I stayed. We went back Sunday, like I said.
Detective Hardy: So let’s talk about Saturday night.
Greg: We had some dinner at my place. I did some burgers on the barbecue. Didn’t catch any fish, so it was a good thing we brought food. Had some drinks. And around nine or so he went back to his place. We were pretty bushed. And my leg was throbbing some. Took some Advils for it.
Detective Hardy: And you saw Mr. Mason in the morning.
Greg: He came over for coffee around nine, ten, I guess it was.
Detective Hardy: You didn’t see Mr. Mason between nine the night before, and the following morning.
Greg: Um, no.
Detective Hardy: Did you hear his car start up after he left?
Greg: No.
Detective Hardy: You’re sure? Nothing at all?
Greg: Well, even if a car did start I’m not sure I’d hear it from my place. And anyway, I slept like I was in a coma. And I hadn’t even had that much to drink. I didn’t even get up in the night to take a piss, which, you know, sometimes I have to do.
Detective Hardy: You normally sleep that soundly?
Greg: Now that you mention it, no, not usually. Maybe it was all the fresh air, being out on the water, the booze, and the painkillers. Or maybe Andy slipped me some knockout drops.
Detective Hardy: Are you suggesting—
Greg: That’s just a joke. Sorry. I guess there’s not much about this that’s funny.
Twelve
Andrew
I had to know this day would come.
Now that it seemed to be upon me, I needed time to think. So I drove around town, doing just that.
Thinking.
Honestly, it was amazing things hadn’t started to unravel before now. The fact that Jayne had been with me for this long and still did not know my history was nothing short of a minor miracle. It helped, of course, that she hadn’t lived in this part of Connecticut when it all happened. While Brie’s disappearance occasionally attracted national interest, it was, for the most part, a local story. By the time Jayne had come from Providence to Stratford, next door to Milford where it all happened, my notoriety had diminished.
And I couldn’t have been more grateful.
But I feared this morning’s call from Max — even if it might not, ultimately, turn out to mean anything — was going to have the effect of a concussive blast, knocking us all off our feet in an ever-expanding radius.
If it hadn’t been this latest development, any day the truth could have come out in a thousand other ways. Running into someone at the mall when Jayne was with me. Maybe someone would stop to say hello, offer condolences, ask if I’d ever learned what had happened to Brie, or was it one of those cold cases by now. Or maybe someone would pass by and say nothing at all, but shoot a scornful look my way. A look I’d have to explain to Jayne.
I’d always been mindful of the risks of an awkward encounter in public. So I made a point, whenever we were together, of avoiding Milford. We dined out in Stratford, or places to the west, like Bridgeport or Norwalk or Stamford. We rarely went to the movies. I had a big-screen TV and subscribed to several streaming services. Why go out, I’d say, when we have access to so much entertainment at home?
I was masquerading as a homebody when I was anything but.
When there were errands to run, especially if they took me anywhere near where I used to live, I tended to do them alone. “I’ve got this,” I’d say to Jayne. “I won’t be long.” If I ran into people who knew or recognized me when I was out solo, well, that was fine. I could deal with that. And it wasn’t as though Jayne were waiting around to accompany me. She had her own career, and it kept her busy.
As I drove around town, I went over in my head how I would tell her the things I’d kept from her. And why. The second part was a little easier. I loved her and had worried that telling her everything about myself would scare her off. You don’t bring up in conversation on a first date that your wife is missing and the police consider you a prime suspect.
But I might very well scare Jayne off now.
“It’s time I told you more about myself,” I would say. “It’s true that I was married. But what I failed to tell you is how that marriage ended. Six years ago my wife, Brie, vanished.”
I was trying to picture the look on her face when I told her. And that was only the beginning.
Brie was never found, I would have to tell her. The police, after all this time, still did not know what had happened to her. They’d had to consider whether she had disappeared of her own accord, or if she’d been abducted. Maybe there had been an accident. Brie went for a walk and tumbled down a hill, her body hidden among the foliage.
Some of the theories were more preposterous than others. But one of them had to be true, right?
Jayne would probably ask whether Brie had been depressed. Was there a chance she’d committed suicide? Left the house in the middle of the night, walked to the middle of the Washington Bridge in the west end of town, and jumped into the Housatonic?
I would have to be honest and tell her Brie had not seemed depressed. Not in any clinical kind of way. I would have to tell Jayne that the police had considered that as a possibility, but no body had been found.
I would have to tell her that very quickly the investigation focused on me. That Milford Police Detective Marissa Hardy believed I had killed my wife because I was interested in taking up with a woman named Natalie Simmons. I would tell her it was a brief affair and meant nothing, but that Brie’s sister, Isabel McBain, had been convinced from the very beginning that I’d had a hand in her disappearance, and death.