I shook my head in disgust. “You have no idea what I did or didn’t do, no idea of the sleepless nights, no idea how many times I drove the streets at all hours, night and day, and wandered the malls and walked along creeks and searched everywhere I could think of. You have no idea how much I’ve tortured myself over this. I’ve wondered, could she be dead, and if so, how did it happen? Who killed her? But then I’d think, maybe she isn’t dead, maybe there’s hope, but then, if she’s alive, why hasn’t she been in touch? Why did she leave me? Why has she put me through this? What did I do that would make her want to hurt me this much? I mean, which would be worse? To find out she’s dead, or that she’s left me without so much as a goodbye. Answer me that.”
I was out of breath.
The silence between us lasted several seconds.
“Which brings us to today,” the detective said.
“I don’t know what to make of it,” I said, knowing what she had to be referring to.
“I’ve been doing a little digging,” she said. “You know, like, doing my job. The groceries she dropped were from the Stop & Shop in Milford’s east end. You ever shop there?”
“No.”
“Did you and Brie ever shop there?”
“Maybe occasionally.”
“Anyway, talked to the employees there, the folks working the checkouts, and no one remembered seeing her this morning. Of course, it’s pretty busy on a Saturday, and what with all that scanning and beeping, maybe no one noticed her.”
“Can’t you check the credit card receipt?” I asked.
“Saw the receipt from the bags she dropped. She paid cash. And then there’s the matter of the car.”
“It was a Volvo,” I said. “A station wagon.”
She smiled. “You know your cars. A wagon. A 2012 model, we think. Black. With what looked like a dimple in the hood, a little dent. Like if, you know, a baseball landed on it or something.”
I listened.
“The car didn’t look all that dirty, but you know what was? The license plate. Had some muck or something on it. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes plates get dirty.”
“Yeah, but if the rest of the car was more or less clean, why would the plate be the only thing that was dirty? Like this lady, whoever she was, or whoever owned that car if it wasn’t her, didn’t want anyone to make out that plate.”
“Sometimes people do that. To avoid tolls or tickets.”
“True,” she said. “Something deliberate.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“Anyway, the make of the car, the model, its color, and that ding in the hood, that’ll help. We put the word out, folks out on patrol, they see a car like that they can do a check on it.”
“I would imagine there are a lot of black Volvo wagons in this part of Connecticut,” I said.
“Yup, no question. But you never know. We find that car, maybe we find that woman who was driving it.” She gave me a wry smile. “Whoever it happens to be.”
“You don’t think it’s Brie,” I said.
“I like to keep an open mind,” Hardy said. “But if it is, well, that opens up a whole lot of questions.”
“And if it isn’t, I’d say just as many.”
She nodded. “No argument there.” She pondered a moment. “But I ask myself, who would benefit if your wife were to be spotted around town?”
“I would imagine everyone who cares about her,” I said. “And, of course, Brie, because we’d rally around her, help her get through whatever happened.”
“Yes, but who would benefit most?”
I didn’t want to help her with this.
“No?” she said. “I think that would be you. If it began to look as though your wife was still among us, making mysterious cameo appearances here and there—”
“Here and there? Has she been seen someplace else?”
Detective Hardy waved away the question. “Anyway, if there are sightings of her, then you couldn’t very well have killed her, could you?”
“What are you saying? I’ve somehow staged this? Hired some woman to pretend to be Brie?”
“There has to be some explanation.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not it. I mean, why the hell would I do that? And why would I do it now? When Brie’s disappearance, I’m sorry to say, has clearly no longer been a priority for you? When most people, other than me and her family, have pretty much forgotten about her. Why now?”
“Good question,” Hardy said. “Maybe to convince your new girlfriend that you’re not a killer. Maybe she already knows more about your past than she’s let on. Maybe you need to put her mind at ease.”
“It’s been nice talking to you,” I said, and turned to head back to the house.
“One of these days,” she said, turning to walk back to her car.
“What did you say?”
Hardy stopped and turned. “One of these days, I’m going to get you. Maybe you’ve been thinking I’ve given up, but I haven’t. I’m just waiting for the right piece of evidence to come along, the one thing that will nail you to the wall. Maybe this is it. Maybe you’ve overplayed your hand, gotten a little too cocky. I guess we’ll see how this plays out.”
She walked off, got into her car, and drove away.
I didn’t go back into the house. I went into the garage, thinking about Greg’s theory, that the police were running a game on me, that Brie’s reappearance was designed to unnerve me, second-guess myself, go back to where I’d supposedly left Brie’s body.
With the cops following me all the way.
But to listen to Detective Marissa Hardy, I was the one behind this entire charade. I had someone out there pretending to be Brie to persuade Hardy, once and for all, that I had done nothing to harm my wife.
I was more confused now than I’d been all day. I was starting to wonder whether Brie really had returned, and was running a game on all of us.
And maybe that’s why my frustration level soared right up into the red, clouding my eyes with a bloody mist, but not so much that I couldn’t see the hammer atop my worktable. I grabbed it and swung it like a madman, over and over again, into the wood surface, leaving shallow, quarter-sized dents. The table shook so badly that a couple glass jars of nails slipped off the edge and hit the cement floor with a crash, nails and bits of glass scattering all over the place.
I thought I had my life together.
Yeah, well, not so fast, pal.
Twenty-Three
Truth be told, Matt Beekman was already feeling anxious and unsettled about this current assignment before he got the call, out of nowhere, concerning a problem with a previous job.
This latest gig had taken him all the way up to Hartford. Not that he hadn’t gone out of town before. About a year ago, there was a job that took him a few hundred miles away to Buffalo. In fact, that had been the last one he’d done before this. It wasn’t that Matt liked to space them out. It was more that this type of work didn’t come to him as often as he would have liked. He figured he only got the call when the A-list guys were busy. Pissed him off, but what could you do?
So when someone did have work for him, he jumped on it. He could always use the extra cash. Running the laundromat was keeping him and Tricia afloat, barely, but something unexpected was always coming up. Like when their fifteen-year-old fridge conked out last month. Beekman was pretty handy — he did most of the servicing of the washers and dryers at his business — but the old Frigidaire was toast. And Tricia was making noises about the kids needing new shoes. And had he noticed, she’d asked him the other day at breakfast, that their son Curtis’s two front teeth were sticking out, like maybe he was going to have buck teeth? They needed to get him to an orthodontist pronto for a consult.