Seeing Natalie Simmons in the passenger seat put me into a momentary stupor, but the blast of a car horn woke me from it.
I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw another driver waiting to pull up to the self-serve pump I’d finished using a moment earlier. I keyed the ignition and drove out from under the canopy that hung over the pumps, then brought the car to a stop at the edge of the lot.
“Where’s your car?” I asked.
Natalie pointed to a low-slung Porsche Boxster pulled into a spot out front of the gas station.
“Just whipped in to buy some smokes,” she said. “Keep trying to quit, but hey, we’re all addicted to something and sometimes there’s no point fighting it.”
“Nice ride,” I said, giving a nod toward the car.
“I own the gallery now,” she said, and grinned. “Movin’ up in the world.”
“Congrats.”
“So how’ve you been?” she asked. “I mean, you’re not in jail, so that’s a good thing, right?” Natalie let loose a nervous laugh, like my possibly doing time for killing Brie was a subject of amusement.
“I suppose so,” I said.
Her smile faded. “I kept following the story in the news, you know? Googled it every once in a while and eventually it faded away. They never found her, huh?”
“No,” I said.
She nodded, almost with a sense of admiration, as though whoever might have disposed of Brie had done the job well.
“So many times I thought about calling you, seeing how you were, but then thought, that’d be weird, right? I mean, like I was trying to put a move on you now that your wife was no longer in the picture.”
She shook her head and smiled slyly. “Although, I won’t lie. I was tempted. We had a good thing going. Fun while it lasted, you know?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said.
“But how would that have looked? Not good, right? Especially with the police keeping an eye on you. I’m pretty sure they were keeping an eye on me, too. There were times I’d see some car parked down the street, like someone was watching the place.”
If Detective Hardy had ever been conducting a surveillance on Natalie Simmons, I’d known nothing about it. Natalie was the type who’d see a tail where none existed. She was, to put it kindly, a bit of a flake. Natalie was easy prey for spreaders of conspiracy theories. She’d have been among those who thought COVID was a hoax. Back when I’d been seeing her, she didn’t even have a cell phone, believing they allowed the government to trace everyone’s whereabouts. I had to call the gallery landline if I wanted to get in touch.
But I was also reminded, as Natalie sat there in the front of the Explorer, what had attracted me to her. She was a looker. Well curved in all the right places, long legs, dark hair that fell softly to her shoulders, brown eyes. Some of the same attributes Brie had possessed, I realized at one point.
I met her when I’d been doing some renovation work on the business next door to the gallery. A soon-to-open bagel place. She had popped in during construction, wanting to know when the opening was going to be, and when we got talking, I learned that we had both gone to UConn, even been there at the same time.
“Oh my God,” she’d said. “I remember you.” She’d watched me studying her, waiting to see whether I remembered her, too.
“That one party, you helped me search through that huge pile of coats in the bedroom, trying to find mine, and things kinda happened?”
And then it all came back to me. A one-night thing.
While these thoughts ran through my head, Natalie was still talking.
“...wondered if maybe she could even have left the country, but why would she do that? Or got some new identity, you know? I mean, you have to have been asking yourself these questions for years.”
“Nice to see you, Natalie, but I really have to get going.”
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “When I saw you, I just had to say hello.” She laughed. “God, you must think I’m stalking you or something. I hope you’re doing okay. You with someone now?”
“Yes.”
Natalie nodded approvingly. “That’s good, that’s good. You have to move on, right? But hey, if you’re going by the gallery, stop in, okay? We can catch up.”
I smiled. “Sounds like a plan.”
She flashed me one last smile, opened the passenger door, and got out. She looked back over her shoulder once on the way to her Porsche and gave me a small wave, and a wink.
On the way home I found myself replaying what Charlie Underwood had said about Brie, that she had seemed anxious about what would happen when I returned home from my fishing trip. Clearly, he believed I was the source of Brie’s anxiety.
Maybe Underwood was right, that Brie was apprehensive about my return, but not for the reason he assumed. What might have had her concerned? Had something happened between the time I left on Friday and Underwood came to the house on Saturday? Something that she didn’t want to have to tell me about, but knew she would have to eventually?
Could it have had something to do with Norman or Isabel? I’d often wondered whether Brie would ever confront her sister about the things Isabel had said to Norman, years ago. Running down her character. At one point, Isabel was going to come over on the Saturday night while I was away, a “sisters night,” but her plans had changed and she and Norman had gone to Boston. Had Brie been planning to have it out with her? When Isabel canceled, did Brie just pick up the phone and give her a blast?
Unlikely.
If I knew Brie, she’d have felt there was nothing to be gained by stirring up old rivalries, revisiting old grievances. Sometimes you had to move on.
So what else, then?
Something financial? Did Brie know something I didn’t? Were things in even worse shape than I knew them to be? She kept better track of the books than I did. The company was definitely in a precarious state, having lost more than a couple of major bids for work. But I was trying to be optimistic about the future. You win some jobs, you lose some jobs. Our bids had not been competitive, so we were going to have to find ways to cut our costs.
That could be it.
But I never stumbled upon any evidence — bank statements, budget documents — that would support that theory.
Did she resent my going away for the weekend with Greg? No, that couldn’t be it. She’d pushed me to make the trip, urged me to go away with him, which was somewhat out of character. Brie was not Greg’s biggest fan, for reasons I’d mentioned earlier. But she knew he was my closest friend, and understood that hanging out with him for a couple of days would probably reduce my stress level.
So, I had nothing.
If Brie’d had something on her mind that troubled her, I couldn’t guess what it might have been.
That night, we ordered in pizzas. One with the toppings Jayne and I liked, and a second with everything Tyler liked. For a while there, things felt almost normal.
We had dinner together at the kitchen table. There was no talk of the visit the day before from Detective Hardy, no more questions about who I might or might not have murdered. It’s always nice to get through a meal without being quizzed about your possible homicidal background.
I got a call while I was on my second slice. It was Albert’s wife, Dierdre. I’d always had a pretty good relationship with her before Brie’s disappearance, and she’d never quite frozen me out despite Isabel’s efforts. If I ran into her when I was out and about in Milford, she would at least speak to me.
I excused myself from the table and took the call on the back deck. “Hey, Dierdre.”
“I had a feeling no one else might call,” she said, “but we lost Elizabeth today.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Please pass on my condolences to... everyone.”