And having made that decision, he made one more, which was to hop off his bike because he thought he was going to be sick. He wheeled off the road into a small park. Benches, a little creek that ran through the heart of it, even a few swans swimming about.
He let the bike fall to the grass and knelt over, hands on his knees. He didn’t know whether his queasiness was from the bike-riding — he’d had no lunch yet and was feeling woozy — or plain old stress. Tyler felt his stomach roll over a couple of times, but nothing was coming up. He stood, one hand on the back of a nearby bench.
His phone dinged. He took it from his pocket, saw that it was from Mr. Whistler.
Where are you?
What should he say? Quickly he tapped a reply:
Felt sick. Went home.
Hit send.
Seconds later: OK. Take care of yourself.
Now Tyler had a text of his own he wanted to send. He brought up Cam’s number and tapped out with his thumb:
Call me ASAP.
Cam was probably in class, but he’d feel the vibration in his pocket even if his phone was muted. He’d sneak a look, then tell the teacher he had to go to the bathroom.
Sure enough, three minutes later Tyler’s phone rang.
“What’s up?” Cam asked.
As quickly as he could, Tyler laid it out for him. That he’d seen this woman who might be Andrew’s wife. That he followed her home, but she refused to talk to him.
“What should I do?” Tyler said.
“That’s easy,” Cam said. “You go back and bang on that door until she answers and you find out what’s going on. You’ve got a right to know. Don’t be a pussy.”
Well, there you had it.
He ended the call, took another moment to prepare himself mentally for what might be an unpleasant conversation, then hopped on his bike and started pedaling back to that woman’s house. He was worried she might not even be there. She could have put away her groceries and gone out to run another errand or gone to work. Almost forty minutes had passed since he’d left her house.
But as he rounded the corner on Rosemont and headed down her street, he saw that her car was still there. Tyler set his bike on the lawn and went to the side door. There wasn’t a doorbell, so he rapped on it, hard.
“Hey!” he said. “I still want to talk to you!”
No response.
There were two small windows set high on the door and he peered into them, using his left hand as a visor. If he spotted her, he’d bang on the glass. He wasn’t leaving here until he got some answers.
As he was pressed up against the door, his right hand resting on the handle, he decided to give it a try, see if she’d unlocked it after he’d left.
It opened.
Fuck it, he thought. I’m going in.
Gifford Hunt, who lived in the house next door to the woman with the black Volvo, was coming out his front door at twenty-one minutes after one when he heard the shouting.
He’d just hit the remote to pop the trunk of his Buick because he was going to head to the driving range and hit a bucket of balls. Hunt, in his late sixties and retired from his traffic-light maintenance job with the city, kept his golf clubs in the trunk and liked to practice his swing when he wasn’t actually heading out to the course.
The shouting — it sounded like a male, repeating, “Shit! Shit! Oh shit!” several times — was followed seconds later by the sight of a young man, his hands bloodied, running from the house and hopping onto a bicycle.
Hunt watched, briefly stupefied, but then quickly thought to reach for his phone. He managed to capture several images of the man before he reached the end of the street and disappeared.
Now Hunt looked at his neighbor’s house. He crossed the lawn and walked down the side of the house to the door. He opened it and called inside.
“Candace?” he said. “You okay in there?”
Hunt, his hand shaking, pushed the door open farther and stepped tentatively into the house. He went up two steps and into the kitchen.
“Oh, sweet mother of God,” he said.
Forty-Three
Andrew
We’d trekked far enough into the woods that when I looked back, I could no longer see my Explorer or Matt’s Suburban. It wasn’t that they were specks in the distance. We had walked down into a small valley, then up again to the other side, and by that point had lost sight of the road we’d driven in on.
I stayed in the lead, as per Matt’s instructions. He was my guide, from behind.
“That way,” he’d say, and point. “Okay, over a little to the right. That’s it.”
After we’d been walking about five minutes, I spotted a large boulder ahead of us. A huge rock, about the size of a refrigerator, was sitting there amid the trees, as though it had been dropped from space.
“This is the spot,” Matt said. “Right around here. Go stand by the rock.”
I did as I was told, turning around and propping myself up on it. I still had the shovel in my hands. Matt stood about thirty feet away, looking at the ground, then at the rock, then back at the ground, one finger up in the air, as though testing to see which way the wind was blowing. He was six years in the past, trying to remember where, exactly, he’d done it.
He ran one work boot back and forth across the ground, brushing leaves and other debris out of the way.
“Was thinking there might still be a depression or something from the hole,” he said, “but I’m not seeing it. But I’m pretty sure it was right here. About ten paces from the rock, right in line with that birch tree over there.”
He made an X in the leaves with his foot. “Start there,” he said, then backed away to be out of range, should I decide to take a swing at him with the shovel.
I stepped forward, rested the tip of the blade on the ground, got my right foot on top, and pushed down. I turned over one small pile of dirt.
“Why’d you do it?” I asked. “Why Brie? Who are you? How did you know Brie?”
I’d spent the last ten minutes or so wracking my brain, trying to remember where I might have met this man before. Nothing about him was familiar. Nothing jumped out at me. But that didn’t mean Brie couldn’t have known him. Had there been something in Brie’s past, something she’d never told me about, that might have prompted someone — this man — to hunt her down and kill her? Did she have dark secrets she’d kept from me, just as I’d kept some from Jayne?
“Never met her before,” he said. “Didn’t know her.”
When he said that, I wondered whether Matt was some crazy serial killer, picking his victims at random. Maybe he’d seen Brie at the mall, on the street somewhere, and there was something about her, the way she looked, that triggered something in this guy. And he’d decided: She’s next.
“So you just saw her and thought, I’m going to kill her,” I said as I drove the shovel into the ground again. I was starting to make a pile of dirt to the right of the hole.
“You think I’m a psycho?” Matt asked. “That what you’re calling me?”
“I’m looking for a reason.” I continued to dig.
“It’s called working for a living,” he said.
“You were... hired?” I stopped shoveling, shook my head. “Someone paid you to kill my wife?”
Matt made a fist and raised a thumb. “Way to go, Sherlock.”
The enormity — the reality — of what was actually happening here didn’t quite hit me until that moment.