Before She Knew Him(14)
At the end of the day, Matthew sat in his Fiat in the school’s parking lot. He blamed Richard for the way he’d looked at his student and for the thoughts that went through his head. He should never have had him over last night. Just because he was his brother didn’t mean they needed to spend time together. They had zero in common.
Trying to calm down, he thought about what he might cook for dinner that night, and he decided he’d drive over to the fish market and buy a nice piece of center-cut cod, then he’d go to the grocery store and pick up Ritz crackers for the topping. It was his favorite way to cook fish, but Mira was not a fan, preferring salmon with a spicy Asian glaze.
He started his car, just as Michelle Brine was hustling across the asphalt toward her own car. She heard the Fiat’s engine catch and turned her head, smiled at Matthew, and came over.
He rolled down the window.
“I wanted to thank you,” she said. “Yesterday, I actually gave a full class lecture on the basics of the Constitution. I thought they’d go to sleep, but I think it was okay. I had them do their mock Constitution today, and it went great. They seemed really into it.”
“I’m glad.”
“And I used your tip to get Ben Gimbel to shut up, and it actually worked.”
“Which tip?”
“He was talking, and instead of telling him to be quiet, I just stopped talking myself and stared at him. The rest of the class got on his case. It was something else.” A warm gust of wind blew some of Michelle’s long hair in through the car window. She gathered it up and refastened it at the back of her head.
“What about Scott?”
“Oh, God. It’s been nonstop. I accused him of hiding his phone from me, so he gave me his new code and said he only changed it because he saw some suspicious-looking kids”—she made quotation mark signs with her hands—“watching him punch in his code at the coffee shop. And then he handed me the phone and told me to check out anything I wanted to check out, but this was twenty-four hours after his gig, so he could have deleted anything he wanted to.”
“Do you actually think he’s cheating on you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.” Matthew watched tears well up in her eyes.
“If he is, he doesn’t deserve you.”
“I know, I know. Look, I don’t want to . . . You should probably get going.”
“It’s okay. Mira’s out of town again. Just me for the week.”
“Oh.” Michelle’s face flushed slightly. Matthew sometimes wondered if Michelle was secretly in love with him.
“I should get going anyway,” he said. “Dinner to cook, lessons to plan, TV to binge-watch.”
Michelle laughed, started to ask him what television shows he was watching, then stopped herself and backed away. “Michelle, stop blabbing,” she said, still laughing. “Have a nice night, Matthew. Thanks again.”
Driving home, the sun low in the sky, Matthew was, at least, relieved to be thinking about something other than his neighbor Hen and the way she’d looked when she’d seen the fencing trophy. Now he was thinking about Michelle’s boyfriend, Scott, and how it was pretty clear that he really was cheating on Michelle. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, he told himself. You don’t change the passcode on your phone without having a reason. Matthew had never actually met Scott, but he’d seen pictures of him on Michelle’s Facebook page. He was pale, with a sharp, bladelike nose and a full reddish beard. Unless Matthew remembered wrong, in one picture he’d seen Scott was wearing a T-shirt advertising his own band, the C-Beams. How hard would it be to confirm that Scott was a cheater? Then how hard would it be to liberate Michelle from the creep? The very thought excited Matthew. He could feel the adrenaline in his system, and he began to tap out the drumbeat from the radio on his steering wheel. He’d been living in the past for too long now, and it was time to create a new memory. Scott might be a worthwhile candidate.
Back at home, he made himself dinner, stupidly leaving the fish under the broiler for a little too long so that the Ritz cracker topping blackened a little. It still tasted good, though, and instead of eating in front of the television, he ate in his study, watching videos posted on the C-Beams’ website. Their events page said that they were playing on Thursday night at the Owl’s Head Tavern, practically walking distance from his house, and Matthew told himself that if he could ascertain that Michelle wasn’t going to be there, he’d go by himself, get a look at Scott, see what he could see.
Chapter 7
It was late afternoon, the worst time of the day for Hen, her creative low point when her energy flagged and she didn’t know what to do with herself. It was too early to start thinking about dinner, and if she read, she’d fall asleep, and if she slept too long, she’d feel irritated and spacey for the rest of the evening. Today, however, she was pacing, trying to figure out what to do about her neighbor. One thing she could do would be to just call the Cambridge police and tell them what she had seen. It would sound crazy, but what if Matthew Dolamore had already been a suspect? What if her sighting of the fencing trophy would push them toward a deeper investigation, would allow them to get a search warrant? Who knew, maybe there was physical evidence at the scene of the crime—maybe even DNA—and that would convict him.