The Deepest Secret (34 page)

There’s a scratching noise and then a small burst of flame. The rich scent of vanilla rises into the air. She’s lit a candle, which she now puts on the windowsill. “That’s nice, isn’t it? Chases all the scary thoughts away.” She sits down on the hanging swing and pats the seat next to her. “I’ve been feeling blue tonight. I’m glad you’re here.”

She tilts her head back, closes her eyes. The candlelight robes her in warm, soft colors. She’s wearing perfume. Shadow dips into the low neckline of her shirt. He averts his eyes. She pushes her foot along the floor, making the swing sway back and forth. “So tell me,” she says. “What’s making you so sad?”

Everything. “That suspect you were telling me about,” he says, and she opens her eyes, looks at him. “Are they still looking at him?”

“I didn’t say it was a him.”

He can’t swallow.

“I’m sorry, you know,” she says, and he blinks. Her words cut through the air and come to him. “About the other night.”

It feels like a million years ago.

“I’m so glad you come to visit me. You make me feel better, you know that? You make me feel like I’m not alone.” She puts her hand on his thigh. He can’t believe it. He doesn’t dare move. Her touch is so light, but he can feel the heat from her body. “You know what you
are?” He turns to look at her. Her face is close to his. He can see into her eyes, smell her perfume. She leans forward and he holds his breath. She touches her lips to his, and his heart swells. It’s beating so hard he thinks it will leap right out of his chest. “My hero,” she whispers.

I met a girl
, he’d told Yoshi.

EVE

T
he knock, when it comes, is a sturdy
rat-a-tat
that makes her set down her laptop and go immediately to the front door. She peels back the duct tape covering the peephole and sees a black man in a dark suit holding up a badge. She steps back. An innocent person would want to know what’s going on. An innocent person would demand to know. So Eve grasps the doorknob and twists. But she’s forgotten to undo the latch first. She fumbles through the motions, her fingers stiff and unwilling. She sucks in a shaky breath and opens the door.

“Mrs. Lattimore?” he asks pleasantly. “I’m Detective Irwin from the Columbus Division of Police. We’re investigating the death of Amy Nolan. Would you have a few minutes to answer some questions?”

This is the homicide detective. This is the one she needs to be
very careful around. They sit in her living room. He looks around the darkened room, the small globes of light from the lamps, but makes no comment. He opens a notebook and pulls a pen from his pocket. One of those pages will have her name written down on it. There will be comments, maybe questions. This man might have found a loose thread and is here to tug at it and see where it leads. She has to remain calm. If she tells herself she’s innocent, then she’ll sound like it’s true. “Who else lives here with you?” he asks.

“My two children, my husband.” He knows this. He must know this. She concentrates on keeping her expression smooth, her hands and feet still. Can he see her pulse jumping in her throat?

“Are they at home?”

Again, this must all be in that notebook he holds, or in a file on his desk. “My husband works in DC. My daughter’s at school, and my son’s upstairs.”

He nods and she has the ridiculous feeling that she’s passed some sort of test. This is the first time she’s sat down with the police alone. Before, she had been with Charlotte, always with Charlotte. She’s known this time was coming, and now that it’s here, she’s almost relieved. She’s rehearsed these words, whispering them to herself as she lay in bed or stood alone in the predawn kitchen, watching steam rise from her cup.
No, I wasn’t home. Yes, we’re all horrified
. Here’s the hard one, the outright lie:
The last time I saw Amy was at my son’s birthday party
.

“Why don’t we start with where you were Friday night, August 29,” he says.

He knows where she was, or, at least, where she says she was. “I was picking up my husband from the airport.”

“What time did you leave?”

“Just before seven. My husband’s flight arrived at seven-thirty-five, but I wanted to leave a little extra time because of the weather. Oh, and I had to stop for gas.” This sounds innocent, doesn’t it, volunteering all sorts of details in an offhand way? “I went to the
station on Fishinger.” If he asks, she’ll show him the receipt. She’s kept it neatly folded in her wallet, ready to prove she has nothing to hide.
Here’s where I was, going about my usual routine. I’m not a killer. I’m not a monster
. She’s driven by and glanced at the gas station exit. There had been no cameras posted to make a liar of her.

“What route did you take to the airport?”

He listens as she winds her story, telling him she turned right instead of left out of the gas station, going down the ravine road away from where Amy had come running out of the woods. But he can’t know that this detail matters, can he? Every word she says is small and stiff, a soldier of deceit. “Do you know where it happened?” Again, the offbeat casual note. She keeps her face smooth, with just a little normal curiosity on it.

“I’m sorry. I can’t talk about an open investigation.” She feels rebuked. But it had been a normal thing to ask, hadn’t it? “What time did you get home that night?”

Here’s where it gets murky. Here’s where she has to be careful. “Eight-forty. My husband’s flight was delayed.” She had to pull over and wipe the mud from her shoes, comb her hair. She had to run into the airport restroom to wash her face and hands, change into the things she’d grabbed from the donation bag of Melissa’s old clothes. A shirt and shorts, which she later dropped into a dumpster.

“Did you see anything? Someone driving erratically, maybe going too fast, changing lanes?”

“No.” As soon as she says this, she wants to take it back.
Yes
. Yes, there had been a small silver car, appearing and disappearing in the washes of rain in front of her. She’d say she doesn’t know why she hadn’t remembered it before. But, of course, now she can’t.

“Anyone walking along the side of the road?”

“Just Charlotte. We just saw Charlotte.” She’d recognized her instantly, the loping form of her friend, and her heart had seized at the sight.

“That’s when you learned Amy was missing?”

Hot tears spring to her eyes, even after all these days. Charlotte’s frightened face as the rain poured relentlessly all around her.

He looks sympathetic. “So you were gone an hour and forty minutes?”

“Yes.” Her voice wavers with emotion, but he can’t be surprised by that. There is no flicker of suspicion on his face, and she thinks he believes her. She’s tied those loose ends together, kept them from opening and revealing the gap of time where she was alone, down the ravine and crouching by the river.

Her cell phone rings from where it’s plugged into the charger in the kitchen, and she says, “Excuse me.” She needs this moment. She tells herself she has to see if it’s Tyler or Melissa calling. She stands, awkward at leaving a stranger alone in her living room, and when she sees that it’s a call from Nancy, Brittany’s mother, she doesn’t answer. She returns to where Detective Irwin sits, and she has the uncomfortable sensation that he’s studied this room thoroughly in her absence, and memorized its contents. Photographs of the children line the walls, pictures of her and David from happier times. “I work from home.”

He nods. This is also something he already knows. “Would you mind if I ask your son a few questions?”

“Tyler has a rare condition. He can’t be exposed to sunlight.”

“He’s in his room? Could we talk there?”

She looks at this man, with his even features, his closely cropped hair. He seems relaxed, loosely holding his notebook in which he’s been jotting down her responses. He wouldn’t consider Tyler a suspect, would he? Detective Watkins had. “I don’t know what he can tell you.”

“I’d like to go over what he told the other officer, see if he’s remembered anything else. We don’t know what could be important.”

What if she says no? Now that they’re looking for a driver, surely they realize Tyler has nothing to do with this. She glances at the
clock. It’s the end of the school day. Tyler would only miss the last few minutes of math. “All right.” This is what innocent people say. Innocent people want to help.

Tyler’s quick to answer when she calls through the door. “Okay. Hold on.”

“It’ll be a few minutes,” she tells Detective Irwin. On the other side of the door, Tyler’s going through his ritual tapping. It kills her, knowing this.

It’s a small landing and she’s uncomfortable standing so close to this stranger. She doesn’t know where to look, what to do with her hands. It’s a relief when Tyler calls and she can open the door and step quickly through and away. She closes the door behind them.

Tyler comes out to sit down in his desk chair. He’s in oversize jeans, tightly belted around his hips, the hems tattered.
Mom, this is the way all the guys wear them
. She worries about those frayed threads, but his feet are covered by thick cotton socks. His bony elbows poke out from the short sleeves of his white shirt, the collar rumpled. She wants to pat it into place, run her hand down the smooth muscles of his forearm, grab his hand and intertwine her fingers through his. He’s getting so big. She stands close beside him as Detective Irwin pulls over a second chair. “Hi, Tyler,” he says. “I’d like to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind, about the Friday night Amy went missing.”

A quick glance up at Eve. She smiles reassuringly. “Okay,” he says.

“You were home that night?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you remember what time your mom left?”

This is unexpected and it catches her off-guard, an arrow through her throat. She can’t make a sound. Detective Irwin’s checking up on her. He must suspect her, after all.

“Sure,” Tyler replies easily. “It was six-fifty-nine.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yeah. I got to come out seventy-one minutes early that day because of the storm.”

“I see,” he says, and for the first time since he entered her house, Detective Irwin seems nonplussed. She keeps her face neutral. She doesn’t want to see the sympathy on this man’s face.

She waits for Detective Irwin to ask about that—people always want to know how Tyler manages—but instead he asks, “Were you home alone?”

A slight hesitation makes her look at her son more carefully. He’s playing with a pencil, scraping his thumbnail against the paint. One of Melissa’s pencils, colored with pink and purple psychedelic swirls. He’s hiding something, but what?

“No,” he says. “My sister was here.”

“What did you do after your mom left?”

Tyler shrugs. It’s clear he’s uncomfortable.

“Why do you need to know this?” she asks.

“I’m wondering if Tyler looked out the window, maybe saw Amy leave her house,” he explains, and Tyler says, “I already told that other detective I didn’t see her. It was raining too hard to see anything.”

“What did your sister do?”

“She was in her room, mostly.”

“Who answered the phone when Mrs. Nolan called?”

“I did.”

Why is Detective Irwin so interested in this? Charlotte’s already told the police she called and spoke with Tyler. There’s nothing here, but the man seems to be headed somewhere. She puts her hand on her son’s shoulder and he glances up at her, then sets the pencil down and clasps his hands together.

“What did Mrs. Nolan say?”

“She told me she couldn’t find Amy, so I looked around for her.”

“Did your sister help?”

“No.” Tyler’s bouncing his knee up and down. He’s not a fidgety child. Something’s going on here.

“Any of your friends stop by that night?”

“No.”

“What about your sister’s friends?”

“No,” she says, interrupting. “No one came by. My children would have told you if they had.”

The garage door rumbles below. Tyler sits back, and she feels a curious sense of relief. Whatever it was—whatever had been about to happen—is gone.

“That your daughter?” Detective Irwin asks. “I’d like to talk to her if I may.”

It’s all right to let him do that, isn’t it?

Melissa’s in the kitchen, standing in front of the refrigerator. “Mom,” she says, “why’s there a strange car parked outside?”

“Honey,” she says, and Melissa turns and sees Detective Irwin. Her face closes down. Eve wants to tell her not to worry, not to be afraid. “This is Detective Irwin. He’s going around and talking to everyone about Amy.”

“Okay.” She crosses her arms, leans against the counter.

“Hi, Melissa.”

“Hi,” she says guardedly.

“School just started?”

“Uh huh.”

“What year are you?”

“A junior.”

“Looking at colleges yet?”

“Some.”

“My son’s a senior. Thinking about being a Buckeye.”

“That’s nice,” Melissa says politely.

“So,” he says. “I want to talk to you about the Friday night that
Amy went missing. I know you’ve already gone through this with Detective Watkins, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to go over everything again.”