Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(37)

“It’s mine,” I hear myself say. Immediate. Defensive.

“You ordered it on eBay three years ago. Day it came, you locked yourself in the bedroom with it and cried all day. I asked, I waited, I begged. But you’ve never told me why you need it so badly, what makes it so special. Most of my life I have loved you. And still, there are moments when I’m sure I don’t know you at all.”

“You have secrets, too,” I say, conscious of the worn envelope pressed against the small of my back.

“Silence breeds silence,” my husband says.

“Why do you stay with me? It sounds like I’m nothing but trouble.”

“Because I haven’t given up hope.”

“Hope of what?”

“That someday, I can make you smile again.”

He rolls away from me. I feel his absence more acutely than I would like. The air is cold, the bed empty, and for a second, my hand actually reaches out, as if I would call him back. It comes to me, what I thought the first moment I saw him. He was looking right at me, smiling right at me. And my first impression was I wished he would just go away.

But then, once he left, I wished he’d come back, because no one had ever smiled at me like that before.

I love him. I fear him. I need him. I resent him. I pull him close. I push him away.

And I have a feeling that it has nothing to do with him and everything to do with me.

“You can stay,” Thomas says, rising to his feet. “Rest as long as you’d like. I’ll go down, start dinner. Grilled cheese, tomato soup, sound good?”

I nod, not trusting myself to speak.

“We’ll get through this,” he says. Reassuring me? Reassuring himself? Maybe it’s all the same. My husband leaves the room.

I wait until I hear his footsteps descend all the way down the stairs, followed by an echo from the kitchen below. Then, and only then, do I roll gingerly onto my side and pull the envelope from my back. My fingers are shaking. I set the small parcel on the bed, noting the way the edges are yellow, the paper darkened in places from old stains, perhaps the oil from a workingman’s fingerprints.

He has handled this often over the years. Obviously revisited it again and again.

I find myself hesitating. A turning point. Do I really want to know? Maybe all couples need their secrets. Apparently, I still hoard mine, from a yellow quilt to a stash of scotch.

But I can’t let it go. Having discovered the envelope, I need to know what it contains. So I delicately ease it open, pull out a single item: an old photograph in about as great shape as the envelope.

Faded out, yellow toned, smudged; I still know immediately what I’m looking at. A summer’s day. A ten-year-old girl wearing a familiar floral dress and a small, uncertain smile.

I stifle a gasp. Reflexively clutch the picture.

Vero.

I am holding a photo of Vero.

Which my husband had hidden from me.





Chapter 15




WYATT HATED SECURITY camera footage. On TV crime shows, the quality was always highest resolution. You could blow it up, freeze it frame by frame, zoom in here, zoom out there, read the expiration date on the bread shelved just behind the evil perpetrator.

In reality, gas stations, convenience stores, mom-and-pop shops, were stressed-out businesses with little leftover profit to invest in things like state-of-the-art security systems. They had a tendency to go with the cheapest cameras available, weren’t above purchasing used and/or out-of-date technology and reusing the same discs over and over until the results were filled with ghosts of recordings past.

Wyatt and Kevin had wanted one week’s worth of security footage. The harried clerk informed them he had three days, which was all they kept in rotation. Wyatt and Kevin had hoped for decent-quality images. They got dark, blurry footage of endless cars turning in and out of the gas station. As for cars driving by, the cameras were too far away, while the road lacked adequate lighting. They could track twin beams of approaching headlights sweeping by; that was it.

As Kevin pointed out, at least Nicky’s Audi had xenon headlights, with their particular crystalline-blue beam, meaning the vehicle that swept by at 4:39 A.M. Thursday morning could very well have been Nicole’s car. But could they capture a license plate? No. An image of the driver? Not a chance. A paint color, defining dent, hint of make and model, or anything else that might help them in a court of law? Shit out of luck.

Not like the clerk cared. He’d left them alone in a narrow storage room to sort it all out. From his perspective, security cameras existed to catch the guy who entered the store and placed a gun to his head. Cars idling outside, vehicles passing by on the main road, not his problem.

“Well, at least it tells us what didn’t happen,” Wyatt said at last.

“What didn’t happen?” Kevin asked.

“Nicole Frank didn’t fuel up here. Thomas Frank didn’t stop in for an energy drink to perk him up while preparing to crash his wife’s car. That’s something.”

“And no women, beautiful or otherwise, hung out after one A.M.”

“Meaning if Thomas Frank did have a lover waiting to pick him up, she didn’t wait around here,” Wyatt said.

Kevin agreed. “That certainly narrows things down. I can see why you’re so happy with this case.”

“I like your idea to check his clothes,” Wyatt said after a moment. Because when one door closed, another inevitably opened.