Dear Wife(14)

“I’ll have a water,” Ingrid says, and I glare at her over the detective’s head.

“Did either of you call any of your wife’s friends before you called the police?” he says. “Her colleagues?”

I pull three glasses from the cabinet by the sink. “It was the middle of the night. I didn’t want to wake anyone up. And I am certain my wife wouldn’t go to their houses anyway. She’d go to her sister’s.”

“Jeffrey and I don’t agree on much, but he’s right. Sabine and I talk multiple times a day. I know her schedule. She would have come to me, and she would have told me if she was going anywhere else. That’s why this is so urgent.”

The detective looks at her with new interest. Not, I sense, because of her conviction some awful disaster has overcome her sister, but because of her first words. The ones that imply she and I don’t get along.

She rips the top few pages from the notepad and holds them across the table. “The names and numbers of everybody I could think of who might know Sabine’s schedule yesterday. I left messages with everyone I got through to. I also wrote down Sabine’s description, the make and model of her car, her email and cell phone number. If you give me your number, I can text you her picture.”

Detective Durand takes a few seconds to scan the pages, then looks up with a nod. “This is all very helpful, ma’am. A great start.”

His voice is as earnest as his expression, and I get the sudden and sinking feeling that Ingrid is showing me up, making me look unprepared. That I’m uncaring, when I’m anything but. I’m the one who sounded the alarm in the first place. Leave it to Ingrid to make me feel defensive in my own house—which she so kindly pointed out is actually Sabine’s. Leave it to her to make me feel like a bum, a mooch.

It’s always the husband. Especially one like me—sexually frustrated and financially dependent. It wouldn’t take much digging to uncover our marital issues. Ingrid knows. How long until she tells the detective?

I fill the glasses with water from the tap, a sudden surge to seem cooperative. “So what now? What’s next?”

“You mentioned she had a showing. Where was it? What time?”

“I don’t know,” I say, “only that she said she’d be home by nine.”

Ingrid’s eyes hold mine for a second too long. “The showing was at seven thirty.” She turns to the detective. “Sabine is the lead broker at that new development on Linden Street. You know, the one with the stone columns at the entrance and the big, colorful sign. I don’t have the address for the house she was showing, but it was in that development—her boss Lisa can tell you which one. Lisa’s name is at the top of the second page, but you’ll have to track down her number. Unfortunately, I don’t have it.”

I pass out the glasses of water, and the detective doesn’t look at me, but I can sense his judgment. The husband and sister are not friends. The sister is better informed than the husband. Neither reflects well on our marriage.

“When is the last time either of you talked to Sabine?” he says.

“I talked to her twice yesterday morning,” Ingrid says. “The last time was at just before eleven. She was on her way to the office. But Jeffrey spoke to her later in the day, in the afternoon.”

The lie comes back to me in a flash of icy hot. Ingrid, interrupting my jog, asking to speak to Sabine. Me, telling Ingrid I’d spoken to Sabine only an hour earlier so I could get back to my run. If I repeat the lie now, it would take the detective all of two seconds to catch me in it. One look at my call log would prove me wrong.

I sink onto the chair across from Ingrid and shake my head. “No, I didn’t. I said I talked to Sabine yesterday morning, right before I boarded my connection in Atlanta.” I turn to the detective, explaining, “I’ve been in Florida all week, at a sales conference.”

Ingrid’s head whips in my direction, and she glares across the table. “When I called you, at just before five, you said you’d talked to her an hour ago. So around four.”

“You must have misunderstood.”

She presses both hands to the wooden table, and they’re shaking. “I heard you loud and clear, Jeffrey. I asked when did you talk to her last, and you said an hour ago.”

“Do you want to see my call log? I didn’t say that, and I didn’t talk to her.”

The detective raises both brows, taking a long breath through his nose like a parent might, when he’s had it with his two squabbling toddlers. “Okay, okay, let’s just back up here for a second. Am I to understand that neither of you talked to her since yesterday morning, is that correct?”

I nod. “Yes. That’s correct.”

“Apparently so,” Ingrid mumbles.

“And when you talked to her, did she mention anything out of the ordinary? Maybe that her car was acting funny, or that she had an errand to run in another town, anything like that?”

Ingrid and I shake our heads. Finally, something we agree on.

“And this showing last night. Any idea who it was with?”

She waits until I shake my head again, then juts a triumphant chin. “I don’t know his name, but he was from out of town. Some executive who’s just started at the Tyson plant. Sabine had found him temporary housing while he searched for a house—an apartment just off 530, but now his wife was coming to town. This showing was more for her than for him. He already loved the house.”