Dear Wife(33)

“Your plane arrived at the gate at 12:11,” I say without consulting my notes. “By 12:24, everyone but the crew had deplaned.”

“Okay,” he says, thinking. “But I was all the way in the back, so one of the last people off the plane, and then it took forever to get my bag. The Little Rock Airport is notoriously slow. After that I grabbed some lunch.”

“At the airport?”

“No. At a little Italian place near the airport. I don’t remember the name.”

Ingrid makes a sound: convenient.

“What time was this?” I ask.

“I don’t know. After one, for sure. Maybe closer to one thirty.”

“Did you use a card?”

“I paid cash.”

Ingrid gives up all pretense. She blows out a sigh, long and loud, and sits up straight in her chair. She’s ready for me to arrest him, to slap some cuffs on him and cart him downstairs.

“What time did you get back to Pine Bluff?”

He shrugs. “I think it was around four or so.”

“Your neighbor, a Mrs. Ashby, confirms it to be around four ten. She remembers because she was watching a rerun of Ellen, who’d just finished her dance. Mrs. Ashby was in the kitchen during the commercial break, making herself a snack.”

He makes a noise deep in his throat. “More likely pouring herself a drink. Rita Ashby is a nosy old hag whose face is pressed to the kitchen window more often than not. She’s also a drunk. In all those years we’ve lived there, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her sober.” He’s trying to distract me, buy some time. He knows the question coming next.

“Why so late?” When he doesn’t immediately answer, I add, “I mean, by my math, even accounting for the baggage delay and the lunch stop and afternoon traffic, which we all know can be a real bitch, you should have been home by 2:30 p.m. at the latest. How come you were so late? What were you doing for that hour and a half?”

His shrug is trying too hard, as is his tone, too high and much too smooth. “It was a nice day, and I’d spent all week cooped up inside at a conference. Don’t tell my boss, but I really didn’t want to go back to the office. I stopped off at a park along the river to read.”

“Which park?”

“Tar Camp.”

A forested recreation area popular with families and fishermen, about halfway between Little Rock and Pine Bluff. Emma and I used to go camping there, back when we were newlyweds.

I scribble the name on my pad. “How long did you stay?”

“An hour and a half, maybe longer.”

“What were you reading?”

“The CEO of one of our biggest competitors just came out with a book, Stoking the Fire at Work or some such nonsense. My boss is making everyone at the office read it. Honestly, it’s not very good.”

“Did you see anybody there?”

“It’s a public park,” he says, getting defensive. “I saw lots of people.”

“What I meant was, did any of them notice you? A guy in business attire sitting by himself, on a park bench—”

“It was a picnic table. There’s a cluster of them at the edge of the river.” He pauses to glance at Ingrid, whose brows are bunched in a skeptical frown. “And I was in jeans and a polo. Travel attire.”

“Still. A guy all alone at a picnic table, reading a book. I’d imagine you stood out.”

“I’d imagine so, but tell me this, Detective—how am I supposed to find them?”

I dip my head, ceding the point. Not that it helps him any. Even if he had been at Tar Camp, it’s not like any of the people there would remember him, and they certainly wouldn’t have exchanged names and numbers.

But the bigger point is, he’s lying. All the signs are there. The stare down across my desk, the way his breath comes quicker, the microscopic flashes of panic I keep catching on his face. Something about his story is not true.

“Help me out here, Jeffrey. I just want to make sure I’m not missing anything.” I lean toward him, hands folded on top of a sloppy pile of papers. “According to what you just told me, you were alone all afternoon yesterday, either in your car, at an unnamed restaurant or in a public park, from around 12:30 p.m. until a little after four, when the neighbor confirms you pulled into your driveway.”

He nods. “That’s right. Yes.” Add sweating to the list. His face has gone shiny, sprouting a million wet pinpricks.

“And at no point during those three and a half hours, the same hours your wife walked out of the Super1 on East Harding and disappeared, can anyone but you verify your whereabouts.”

He’s silent for long enough I almost feel sorry for him. He sucks a breath, then two more, thirteen brain-numbing seconds, and then the best he can do is: “Pretty much.”

I try to hold my expression tight, but the smile sneaks out anyway.

Gotcha.



BETH

I pull to a stop in the middle of the two-lane drive, double-check the address on the Post-it note Martina handed me earlier this morning and gawk at the building before me.

A church. Martina works at a church. A neo-Gothic monstrosity of beige brick and stained glass, with crimson gables and scalloped finials and lancet arches. In the very center of the main tower, a rose window stares out like the eye of a cyclops. Above it, at the steepest point of the roofline, a wooden cross reaches with long arms into a pale blue sky.