And then he told himself, If she can’t love me then, then she doesn’t deserve to love anyone.
He could feel a twitch, a muscle spasm, running through his body, and he had to fight to keep control. He could feel his breathing getting shallow, coming in gasps. For a second, he told himself to remain calm. He pictured Sally. Hope. Scott. And as he did that, he was almost overcome by anger. He could no longer separate the entwined feelings of love and hate. When he managed to calm himself down, he started to move gingerly through the basement, heading toward some rickety old stairs that would carry him up to the living areas. He wasn’t sure what precisely he was searching for, although he knew whatever it was, it was nearly within reach.
He pushed open the door at the top of the stairs and immediately figured he was in a pantry, just off the kitchen. He wanted to douse the flashlight as quickly as possible-even covered in red, the glow was far more likely to attract a curious neighbor’s interest than the overhead light. He spotted a bank of switches on the wall and flicked the first, which lit up the kitchen. Michael O’Connell smiled and switched off the flashlight.
He told himself, Stay away from the windows and start looking. It’s here. Somewhere. What you need to know. I can feel it. I’m coming, Ashley.
He took another step forward before a low, mean growl came from the darkness of a nearby vestibule.
I suppose, like most people, I’ve had my sense of fear mostly defined by Hollywood, which likes to provide a steady diet of aliens, ghosts, vampires, monsters, and serial killers; or those electric, unforeseen moments in life when the other car runs a red light and you pound on the brakes in panic. But real, debilitating fear comes from uncertainty. It gnaws away at one’s defenses, never fading, and never far from the heart. As I sat across from the young woman, I could see every line fear had carved on her face, aging her far too fast, every tic it had delivered, to her hands, which she rubbed nervously, to the corner of her eyelid, which twitched uncontrollably, to the tremors in her voice, clearer than the words she whispered.
“I shouldn’t have agreed to meet with you,” she said.
Sometimes, it’s not so much a fear of dying as it is a fear of going on living.
She wrapped both hands around a cup of hot tea and slowly lifted it to her lips. It was brutally hot outdoors, and everyone else in the mall coffee shop was drinking iced drinks, but she seemed unaware of the heat.
“I appreciate it,” I replied. “I won’t take much of your time. I just want to confirm something.”
“I have to go. I can’t stay. I can’t be seen speaking with you. My sister has the kids, and I can’t leave them with her for too long. We’re moving. Next week, going to…” She stopped, shook her head. “No, I’m not saying where we’re going. You understand, of course?”
She bent forward slightly and I could see a thin, long white scar up near her hairline. “Of course. Let me make this really quick,” I said. “Your husband, he was a police captain, and you hired Matthew Murphy during divorce proceedings, right?”
“Yes. My ex-husband was hiding income and stiffing me and the three kids. I wanted Murphy to find out where he was putting the money. My attorney said Murphy was good at that sort of thing.”
“Your ex, he was a suspect in Murphy’s murder, correct?”
“Yes. State police detectives questioned him several times. They spoke with me, too.”
She shook her head, then added, “I was his alibi.”
“How so?”
“The night Murphy was killed, my ex-husband showed up at my house nice and early. He’d been drinking. He was morose, suicidal. Insisted on coming in, seeing the kids. I couldn’t get him to leave.”
“Didn’t you have a court order?”
“Yes. Keeping him away. One hundred yards at all times. That’s what the judge’s order said. Lot of good that did. He’s six four and two hundred forty pounds and he knows every cop in the Valley. They’re all buddies. What was I supposed to do? Fight him? Call for help? He did what he wanted to do.”
“I’m sorry. The alibi…”
“So, he started drinking. Then he started beating on me. Kept it up for hours. Until he passed out. Woke up in the morning and apologized. Said it would never happen again. And it didn’t, for a whole other week.”
“You told this to the state police detectives?”
“I didn’t want to. I wish I’d had the guts to say to them, ‘Sure, he did it. He told me he did it,’ and maybe get him out of my life that way. But I wasn’t able to.”
I hesitated. “The thing I’m interested in is-”
“I know what you’re interested in.” She reached up and touched her forehead, running her finger along the small ridge of the scar. “When he punched me, his class ring from Fitchburg State-that’s where we met-cut me pretty badly. Gave me this to remember him by. You want to know how he knew about Murphy. Right?”
I nodded.
“He threw it in my face during an argument. Screamed at me, ‘So you figured I wouldn’t find out about the private eye you hired?’ ”
I could see tears in the corners of her eyes.
“He got an anonymous letter. A plain manila envelope. It had a copy of everything Murphy had uncovered about him. All the confidential stuff that was supposed to just go to me and my attorney. Postmarked from some place in Worcester. I don’t even know anybody in that city. So, who would send this to my ex? It cost me two teeth when he knocked them out. It should have cost Murphy his life, if only I’d been lucky enough to have it be my ex-husband who got so enraged that he went after him with a gun instead of someone else. Maybe it did cost Murphy his life. Maybe somebody else got the same envelope. I don’t know. I wanted it to be my ex who did it. It would have made things so much easier.”
She pushed back from the table. “I have to go.” She glanced around nervously, then turned, head down, shoulders scrunched forward. She pushed through the coffee shop doors and raced through the mall, dodging shoppers as if fear itself hovered in some black cloud, right behind her ear, whispering dangers.
I watched her and wondered whether I had just seen what Ashley’s future might have been.
28
Hope was standing on the short redbrick pathway up to their front door when the headlights from Sally’s car swept across the lawn. She waited, a little unsure what to do. Once she would have walked back to Sally’s car to give her an end-of-the-workday hug, but now she was uncertain whether she should even hesitate so they could enter together. She shuffled her feet and stared down the neighborhood into the darkness. It seemed to Hope that the two of them had quietly taken to coming home later and later in the day, so that the silences that awaited them through the evening had less time to weigh on them.