“They’ll understand! Please, Brie, don’t—”
But she backed away and pulled the door open, allowing light from the hall to flood that corner of the room. The sudden brightness blinded Elizabeth and she instinctively closed her eyes for a second, shielded them with her hand.
When she opened them, and took her hand away, the door had closed, and the woman was gone.
Elizabeth twisted around in the bed, looked frantically for the buzzer that would send a message to the nurses’ station that she needed help. She found it, jammed it with her thumb repeatedly until, about thirty seconds later, the door opened and a male nurse ran in.
“Yes, yes, what’s the problem, Mrs. McBain?” he said.
“The woman!” Elizabeth said. “Bring her back! Stop her!”
“Woman? What woman?” he asked.
“My daughter! Tell her to come back!”
Calmly, he said, “Visiting hours were over long ago. It’s the middle of the night.”
“But she was—”
“I’ve been out there the whole time and I didn’t see anyone go by. You must have been having a dream or something. Here, let me get you tucked in.”
“But...”
“Shhh, now, you need to rest,” he said. “Get some sleep before they wake you at the crack of dawn for breakfast.”
The nurse gave her a patronizing smile before departing. “You have a good night, now.”
Sunday
Twenty-Seven
Andrew
I lay awake much of the night, rolling over and looking at the digital clock on the bedside table: 1:05, then 2:17, then 3:01, and so on until slivers of sunlight started piercing through the blinds. I kept thinking about something Greg had said to me yesterday.
He’d been talking about that time he’d found me drunk, more down and out than I’d ever been before.
“You said, ‘It’s all my fault.’ You said, ‘I fucked up.’ I asked you, I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And you said, ‘Brie.’ But I never told a soul you said that. Never told that detective.”
It’s all my fault.
It was pretty clear what Greg had read into those comments. I had no memory of making them, but then again, there was a lot from that time, and that day in particular, that I don’t remember very well.
I supposed it was possible I might have said those words. But they didn’t have to mean what Greg clearly believed they meant.
I might have tried to make that point with him, but that was when Detective Hardy had pulled up in front of the house. I might have told Greg that, yeah, maybe it was my fault. If Brie vanished because I’d betrayed her, I could have argued, then, yeah, that was on me.
But to interpret what I’d said to him in a drunken stupor as a confession was a leap. As I lay in bed I wondered whether I should phone and tell him that.
Then again, maybe I should call and thank him.
“Never told that detective.”
I was in debt to him for that. For sure, there was only one way Detective Hardy would have read that comment.
Speaking of her, I was also rolling around in my head something she’d said to me after I’d ended my conversation with Greg. Her assertion that I hadn’t done enough nosing about on my own to find Brie, that I never hired some private investigator to accomplish what the police could not, really rankled.
Detective Hardy had no idea how I responded to Brie’s disappearance. I supposed she wanted me to become some sort of amateur detective. The fact was that I was under so much scrutiny at the time, I could hardly go into a Dunkin’ Donuts for a coffee without being watched by the police or some local TV news crew.
Well, if that was Hardy’s expectation of me, maybe it was better late than never. Now that she was looking into the possibility that Brie was alive, I was ready to start asking a few questions on my own, and not just for appearances’ sake. My goal wasn’t to make Detective Hardy proud of me. I wanted to find out what the hell was going on.
But I had to be careful how I went about it.
I had a new life with Jayne. A good life. And now we were going to have a child together. I loved her. Jayne might view any steps I took where Brie was concerned as wanting to get back together with her.
If she was actually alive.
I appreciated her concern. She had to be thinking that if Brie was back, presumably our marriage would still be valid. Brie had not been gone long enough to be declared legally dead and I’d made no petitions to have such a declaration made.
Maybe it was time, discreetly, to go back to where this all began. Make the rounds. Talk to people I believed Detective Hardy should have paid more attention to. I’d often wondered why she hadn’t had the exterminator higher on her list of suspects.
Charlie Underwood.
After all, he was the last person, so far as Hardy knew, to have seen Brie alive (not counting our FaceTime chat on that Saturday evening). He’d been in the house with her. He knew her husband was away for the weekend on a fishing trip. If he’d returned that night, he’d have had every reason to believe Brie would be alone. And, as I had related to Hardy at the time, Brie had found him to be a pretty odd character.
If I’d been Hardy, I’d have been looking at him very closely.
I was up before Jayne. She mumbled into her pillow that she’d had a terrible night of tossing and turning, so I told her to stay in bed and see if she could go back to sleep. I quickly gathered what clothes I needed, slipped out of the room, and closed the door. I showered, shaved, and dressed, and was down in the kitchen by half-past eight.
I was surprised to see Tyler there.
He was sitting at the kitchen table in a pair of boxers. Tyler wasn’t big on bathrobes. He hadn’t made coffee, but there was half a glass of orange juice in front of him and a bowl with the dregs of some soggy cereal. He was looking at his phone when I walked in.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re up early.”
He looked up, shrugged. “I guess.”
“You working today?”
He nodded. “I start at ten.”
“You want a lift or anything?” I asked as I went over to the coffee machine.
“That’s okay.”
I had my back to him, running some water from the tap into the carafe, when he said, “Need to ask you something.”
“Sure.”
“Did you kill your wife?”
I froze a moment before slowly turning around to look at him. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised the secret was out, although I wondered who’d brought Jayne’s brother up to speed. Maybe it had been Jayne herself.
“Your sister talked to you,” I said.
Tyler shook his head. “Nope. I just listened. Yesterday, when that detective was here. And later, when you came home. You can hear everything from my room.” He pointed to the ceiling briefly.
I felt my face flush. The little shit had been eavesdropping.
“Well,” I said. “That’s a good thing to know, if a bit late.”
“So you haven’t answered my question. I don’t think my sister actually asked you flat-out, unless I missed that part.”
I pulled out a chair and sat across from him.
“No,” I said.
Tyler poked his tongue into his cheek as he thought about my answer. “But if you did kill your wife, that’s what you’d say anyway.”
“Then you have to wonder if there’s any point in asking,” I said.
“I read everything about Brie online,” he said. “Six years. Man. That’s a long time to go without the police figuring out what happened.”
“Long time for me, too,” I said.
“I just want what’s best for my sister.”