Matt was starting to look annoyed that I hadn’t answered his question. “It’s her, right? You wouldn’t get that broken up over some stranger.”
“No,” I said.
Matt’s mouth opened. “No? What do you mean, no?”
My voice was breaking. I didn’t have to fake that. “It’s not her.”
The lie was, obviously, an impulsive strategy. My hope was that if I could get Matt to believe this was not Brie’s body, he’d have to figure out what his next step might be. And given that I was the one most qualified to identify Brie, maybe he’d need me a while longer to put the pieces of this puzzle together.
Then again, he could shoot me now and be done with it.
His skeptical expression told me he wasn’t entirely persuaded I was telling him the truth. “What are you talking about? You lost it. That was fucking grief.”
Still holding on to the shovel, I shook my head. “Not grief... relief.”
“How the hell can you know it’s not her?”
“You expected me to be able to tell if it was her, but now you’re asking me how I can know that it’s not?”
“Tell me how you know.”
“The necklace,” I said. “Brie didn’t own a necklace like that.” I was taking a chance he wouldn’t recall an item of jewelry Brie’d been wearing that night.
“You sure?”
I just looked at him. He got the message and sighed.
“So who the fuck is it?” he asked.
“I’ve no idea. This is your fuckup, not mine.”
Now Matt, in addition to looking pissed, appeared mystified. “I went to the right house. I know I went to the right house. I’d scoped it all out. There was nobody else there. How do you explain that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Thirty-six Mulberry.”
“Yes.” Curious, that he would remember that detail but not the necklace.
“An old house. Needed work. You were going to update it, fix it up.”
“Yes.”
How did he know that?
He was thinking, trying to remember other details from six years ago. He slowly raised a finger and pointed it at me. “Mice.”
“What?”
“You had a mouse problem, I figured. Flour on the kitchen floor. Waiting till morning to look for tracks.”
I nodded.
“I walked right through it, in the dark. Left shoe prints. First job I ever did where I had to vacuum before I took off.” Matt was thinking so hard I could almost smell wood burning. “You sure about the necklace?” It was clearly a detail he was fuzzy on.
“I’m sure,” I said.
“She have, like, a sister or something? A friend, who slept over? Anything like that?”
Feed him something. Mess with his head.
“A friend,” I said. “Sometimes, when I was out of town, like that night, she’d have someone come stay with her. Made her feel less anxious.” Then, thinking fast, I added, “A friend from her school days. Parents dead, no spouse, no kids. Sort of person, if she went missing, no one would even have noticed.”
Matt was moving his head side to side slowly, not buying it. “No,” he said. “No.” And then, very slowly, a calmness came over him.
“What?” I said, putting both my hands atop the shovel handle and resting my chin on them. “If it’s not her, you’ve still got a problem.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t. It doesn’t matter. The person I took from your house that night is the same person that’s in that grave. Whoever she is, she’s not picking me out of a lineup, not going to say, ‘That’s the guy.’ If your wife’s still out there somewhere, well, yeah, I should have got her, but it’s not like she’s got an ax to grind with me. You get what I’m saying?”
Sadly, I did.
I might have bought myself five minutes here, but this was turning into a no-win situation. Didn’t matter who was in this grave. What mattered was that someone was in it. Matt’s mind was put at ease.
Mine, not so much.
Matt, pointing his gun at me more directly, said, “Guess we’re done here. One thing all this has taught me is, be sure. Leave no room for doubt.” He cracked a smile that gave me a chill.
“Wait,” I said.
“What?”
“You’ve got a problem.”
“I think you’re the one with the problem. But it’ll be over soon.”
“My car.”
Matt blinked a couple of times. “Hmm,” he said once again.
I didn’t know whose land this was, or how Matt had come to choose this part of the woods to bury Brie, but if he drove out of here and left my car behind, it would eventually be found, and the police would eventually find Brie’s remains and, presumably, mine. That discovery might end up leading to Matt. Did he own this property? Did it belong to a friend of his?
“Let me go,” I said.
Flatly, Matt said, “No.”
“I’m serious. You... you’ve given me hope.” Stick with the charade. “I now know there’s a chance my wife’s alive, that the woman who showed up over the weekend, it’s really her. I know you didn’t kill her.” I pointed to the grave. “I don’t know who this is, and I can’t explain how you got the wrong person, but if there’s a chance my wife is out there, I have to find her.”
“No,” he said again.
“Come on,” I said. “Why?”
“Say you find her,” he said. “She tells you why she disappeared. Who would have wanted her dead. Cops find that person, it leads back to me.”
It was hard to argue with his logic. There was still the matter of my SUV, though.
“I’ll figure things out with your car,” he said. “Get a lift back.” Another smile. “Don’t trouble yourself.”
I had no arrows left in my quiver, unless you counted begging.
“Please,” I said.
“Start another hole.”
I moved my hands farther down the shovel handle, eyeing the ground, wishing Matt would take a few steps closer, get within shovel-swinging range. I was going to dig this hole like I was being paid by the fucking hour. I was about to ask him where he wanted me to start when we heard something.
“Hey!” someone called.
I looked beyond Matt, in the direction of where we’d come from, where our two vehicles were.
A man was coming our way.
“Hey!” he called out again. “What’s going on?”
It was Norman.
What happened next happened very, very fast.
Forty-Nine
Albert McBain was sitting in his small office at the Devon Savings and Loan on Broad Street where he was assistant manager, staring at some mortgage documents on his computer screen. He had two clients whose house deals were closing in the next couple of days, and if these docs weren’t pushed through, the deals could fall apart.
But this was his only reason for coming into the office, and he didn’t plan to be here for more than an hour. His boss and the branch manager, Ms. McGillivray, had told him to take the entire week off, considering that his mother, Elizabeth, had passed away the day before. And he fully intended to do that. There was much to be done, with help from his sister Isabel. A service to be planned, extended family to notify, an appointment with the estate lawyer, and then the unpleasant business of clearing out her apartment would have to be tackled.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Stamford Players’ latest production was due to open in a couple of weeks. The previous day’s rehearsal had been cut short when Albert got the call from the hospital that his mother was close to the end. Was it realistic for Albert to think that, with all that was going on, he could really pull the play together in time? Should the opening be delayed? But tickets had already been sold. Okay, not exactly thousands of them, but at least a hundred or so. Would people demand refunds, or would they be okay with hanging on to their tickets for a later date?