Nice Girls(64)

Someone was sniffling. The noise seemed to come from the other end of the restroom. It came from the handicapped stall.

“Hello?” I stammered.

Through the faint organ music, I could hear a wet hiccup.

“Hello? Are you okay?” I asked again.

I knocked on the stall door and accidentally pushed it open. Inside, Mrs. Willand was sitting on the ground, her back to the wall. Her legs were splayed out beneath her black dress. Mrs. Willand’s blond bob looked sharp as ever, as if she’d cut it recently.

But the rest of her looked disheveled—eye shadow and lipstick smeared on her face. A single line of mascara fell halfway down one cheek. She was wiping her face with a giant wad of toilet paper.

Her voice was so soft that I had to squat down on the floor to hear her.

“I don’t want to go out there,” murmured Mrs. Willand, her voice wet. She sounded like a pleading child.

“Are you sure?” I whispered back.

Mrs. Willand sighed.

“Can you shut the door, Mary?” she asked. “But don’t go.”

I closed the stall door behind me and joined Mrs. Willand on the floor. We stayed still, listening to the organ music through the walls. Beside me, Mrs. Willand’s sniffling only seemed to grow louder. She yanked out more toilet paper from the roll, burying her face in the giant wad.

“Maybe we should go back,” I said gently. “So you don’t miss anything.”

“What’s there to miss?” she whispered. “I missed everything. Graduation, her wedding . . . her kids.” Mrs. Willand’s voice grew scratchy like sandpaper. “I won’t have any grandchildren, Mary.”

I looked into her watery eyes, unsure of what to say.

“Is there anyone I could get for you, Mrs. Willand? Your husband or a friend—”

“Martin can shove it up his ass,” she croaked.

My jaw dropped.

“Cremation is wrong, Heather. Why would we burn Olivia?!” mimicked Mrs. Willand, a hand scrunched in her lap. “Good God, Martin . . . Unlike him, I actually think about the long term. Why the hell would we bury Olivia? There’s almost nothing to bury.”

I swallowed. There was so little of Olivia left. It seemed like a waste to bury her in a small grave. It seemed so final, as if they had no hopes of finding the rest of her.

“Why am I the bad guy?” muttered Mrs. Willand. She dumped the wad of paper into the toilet. “He’s the one who never thinks ahead. He likes things to be easy and fast. He would’ve been gone by now if it weren’t for Olivia.”

I looked at her, surprised. But Mrs. Willand leaned toward me, her lips in a thin line.

“Martin and I are divorcing.”

The words were stuck in my mouth. The Willands had always been a unit—both blond-headed and wealthy. At a glance, they fit each other like a puzzle. There was an order to them.

But Olivia had sensed it years ago, hadn’t she? The comments she’d made about her mother cheating, the jokes she made about her father’s magazines, the way Olivia preferred to be in the woods away from her parents. She had always known.

And I had seen it myself—the way John Stack had tenderly reached out to Mrs. Willand in times of pain. Her husband never would have done that for her.

Through the wall, I heard a woman’s voice begin to sing. The melody was light and eerie against the organ music.

“Martin and I have been unhappy for a while,” whispered Mrs. Willand. “But we stayed together for Olivia. I’ve seen enough divorces to know what happens to the kids. We made it past Olivia’s high school years. We thought we could keep it going, we just needed to try. But Martin . . .”

“What about him?” I croaked.

“He’s been having an affair,” she sniffed, wiping her nose. “Maybe more, I’m not sure. But the damn credit card bills . . . Martin had all these hotel and restaurant charges on them. None of them could be accounted for. I didn’t ask. I just watched him lie.”

I pictured Mr. Willand at a bar with some model, the two of them giggling over drinks, his stomach bulging over his pants. Meanwhile his wife was at home, hundreds of miles away.

He’d called Dad from Atlanta on a business trip. He might have been lying to him. His daughter was missing, but Mr. Willand had still found time to travel. In a time of grief, he had found solace in someone else. The idea sickened me.

Mrs. Willand yanked out more toilet paper from the roll. It was a long, winding piece that she mashed together in her hands.

“I’m not even upset about it, Mary,” she whispered. “My heart hasn’t been in it for a long time. Martin knows it, too. But the money . . .”

“What money?”

Mrs. Willand shook her head, a drip of snot hanging off her nose.

“I don’t know how it happened. Money was always Martin’s job—he was good at his sales, we were doing fine, Olivia was starting high school. Then one day Martin tells me that the company’s going bankrupt. I wasn’t that mad—these things happen.

“But Martin . . . He’d been subsidizing it with our money. Never told me. And after the bankruptcy, all of these shareholders came out of nowhere, demanding their money. And guess who was stuck paying them back?”

Mrs. Willand was tearing up again, her voice growing watery.