15th Affair (Women's Murder Club #15)(66)

Joe’s key had the number 26 engraved on the shaft. The vault lady put her key into one of the locks and I put my key into the corresponding lock. After the tumblers clicked into place, I slid the long metal box out of the cabinet and took it into the tiny viewing room next to the vault.

I fumbled with the hasp and finally got the box open. I stared in at the contents. There were several unsealed envelopes inside. One of them held our condo lease. I found our marriage license, Julie’s birth certificate, and Joe’s father’s death certificate. Under those envelopes was a long flat candy box with gold edging and a stylized drawing of a bow on top.

As I bridged the lid of the candy box with my fingers, preparing to open it, I reflected on the fact that I was snooping—again, but screw it. I was entitled to whatever truth I could find in this haystack of lies a.k.a. my marriage to Joe.

If there were mementos of Joe’s secret life with Alison Muller, I absolutely needed to know.

I removed the lid. Up came the smell of chocolate and cherries, but Alison Muller wasn’t inside the candy box.

Julie was there. And so was I.

On top, a sprig of Julie’s fine, dark baby hair tied with a slender pink ribbon. There was a photograph a stranger had taken of Joe and me on the ferry to Catalina, both of us grinning, the wake foaming behind us as we stood embracing at the rail. That was the first time we’d told each other, “I love you.”

Under that photo was a copy of the marriage vows we’d exchanged in a gazebo lapped by the ocean in Half Moon Bay, and there was a candid snapshot of Joe and me and Cat and the little girls, all of us laughing and walking barefoot down the beach in our wedding clothes. And there was a printout of an e-mail from me to Joe telling him that I missed him so much, asking, “When are you coming home?”

I was struck by the congruence of having similar thoughts now at this very different place and time in our lives.

My musings were interrupted by the vault lady tapping on the glass, pointing to her watch.

“I’m coming,” I said.

I put everything back in the box and returned it to its sleeve in the cabinet behind the locked doors, and Julie and I left the bank.

“What now?” I said to my precious little girl as we crossed Lake Street toward the Molinari family home.

“What’s going to happen now?”





EPILOGUE





CHAPTER 100


ALISON MULLER KNEW every inch of the cell where she’d been held for a month or more—she wasn’t sure how long. It was impossible to grasp even the difference between day and night in the artificial gray light of this underground box, which had been designed by a crazy person.

The walls leaned in and the ceiling sloped and even the stones in the wall were different shapes, laid without pattern or sense.

She was grateful for the crazy stones because each had a personality. Like the one shaped like a kidney next to her bed. And the one next to it, shaped like Ohio. Looking at the stones gave her a place to put her mind.

There were no fellow prisoners, no exercise yard. She had a narrow bunk, a flush toilet, and a recessed shower head over the toilet that dispensed only cold water.

Her one meal and a change of paper clothes were delivered by her interrogator.

He came to the chair outside her cell at regular intervals to question her. He was very formal. His clothes were neutral and boring, but pressed, and he always wore a tie. Alison didn’t know him and he wouldn’t tell her his name.

“What do people call you?” she would ask. “Just say any name.”

“My name is unimportant.”

She had called him Unimportant for a while, but it was clumsy. So she tried other names: Bert, Voldemort, Condor. But the name that stuck was Secret Agent Man, or Sam.

Sam was middle-aged, paunchy, and humorless but a fine interrogator. He never hurt her physically, but he knew how to get to her, how to worry her and make her desperate for news of her kids.

He also brought incentives with him: a box of food and a clean, blue, one-piece flushable garment.

These items remained under his chair while he tried to break her. Most of the time when he was ready to leave, he slid the parcels under the lowest bar of her cell. Sometimes he took the food and clothes away with him.

Today, as usual, he’d said, “Hello, Ms. Muller. Are you comfortable?”

“Fabulous accommodations, dahling,” she’d said. “If you could have fresh flowers delivered. And a change of linens.”

The interrogator smiled, if you could call the thin stretch of his thin lips a smile. He asked the same questions every day. “Who gave the order to blow up the plane?”

And every time, she said the same thing.

“Like I told you, Secret Agent Man. What I heard is that they were rogue Chinese operatives. I didn’t know them. I don’t know who they were working for. I heard they’re all dead. Now. If you don’t mind telling me, who do I have to blow to get out of this joint?”

“What information have you passed to the Chinese?”

“None. None at all.”

One time, after the questions were done, Secret Agent Man said, “I’ve seen Caroline.”

He pulled his phone out of his shirt pocket and showed her a photo of her daughter coming out of her middle school building. He said, “She has a bruise on her left arm. See there. I think she may be getting into fights. Or maybe Khalid did this to her.”