No One Will Miss Her(66)

“Not your first time talking to a police officer today, is it?”

My stomach lurched; the seaweed was threatening to come back up.

“What?” I said.

“The trooper. What, you thought we didn’t know about that? He thought this guy Cleaves might be coming around your place to visit. Guess he was right.”

“I wouldn’t call someone breaking into my house in the middle of the night a visit,” I snapped, and Murray’s eyebrows went up.

“The report said he had a key.”

“He must have stolen it.”

“You didn’t give him one? I heard you were involved.”

“What are you”—I began to say, realizing even as I did that I was taking the bait, that I should shut up, and then the handle on the door turned and both our heads swiveled to see Fuller reentering the room. He had a strange expression on his face and a notepad in his hand. He closed the door and then leaned back against it instead of sitting down.

“Mrs. Richards,” he said. “That was the Maine State Police on the phone.”

I blinked. “Okay,” I said slowly.

“I had hoped to discuss this with you.” He sounded tired. “It’s my understanding that before you shot Dwayne Cleaves, a police officer came to your house looking for him, and that you and Cleaves had been having an affair. Were you planning to share that with us?”

“I thought . . .” I trailed off. Shook my head. Now would have been a good time to start crying again, but my eyes were suddenly, infuriatingly dry. “I don’t remember what I said or didn’t say,” I whimpered. “I’ve been through a lot tonight.”

“Of course,” Fuller said. But as he looked at me, his lips pursed, I thought, Yeah, there it is. I’d seen that expression before. Only a few hours ago, in fact, on the face of Ian Bird. It was the smug irritation of a man who thinks he knows exactly who you are, who’s absolutely sure that he’s the smartest guy in the room. Well, good. I hoped Fuller thought Adrienne was an idiot. The less he thought of her—of me—the less he’d waste his time wondering what I was capable of.

Fuller sighed. “All right, Mrs. Richards. I’m sorry, there’s no easy way to say this. The police in, uh”—he glanced at the pad in his hand—“in Copper Falls have found Dwayne Cleaves’s truck, and some, ah, human remains.”

I allowed my mouth to drop open and thought, Dammit. I’d allowed for this possibility, the slim chance that an insurance adjuster might stumble across the body, but I thought it would take weeks. Plenty of time for Dwayne and I to disappear. I thought I was being so smart: knowing how things worked in Copper Falls, it would never occur to anyone that it might not be Dwayne in the truck. His mother would push to have the body released, so she could bury him in their family plot behind the hilltop church before the first freeze—and the local cops would push along with her, anxious to get the whole sordid mess behind them. There would be a bunch of blather about not dragging things out, so the community could begin to heal. There would certainly be no reason to connect a murder-suicide in rural small-town Maine with the disappearance of a shady billionaire and his wife in a city hundreds of miles away. And with any luck, I thought, that’s where it would end: with Adrienne and Ethan buried in graves with our names on them, and Dwayne and I sitting on a pile of cash in some swamp, eating feral pig jerky and figuring out what came next.

That plan was shot to hell, for a million reasons. But it was lucky for me that it was: this had to be why Ian Bird had left in such a hurry, and why he wasn’t lurking around the house when Dwayne came back in the middle of the night.

Fuller and Murray were both staring at me, and I clutched my hands to my heart, trying to look stricken.

“Human remains?” I said. “Oh God. You mean . . . Ethan? Is it Ethan?”

“We can’t know for sure, ma’am. There was a fire, and the remains . . . well, they may take some time to identify. But under the circumstances, and given what you say Cleaves told you . . .” He paused, nodding, pressing his lips together. “We think it may be your husband, yes.”

I buried my face in my hands. Still no tears. Everything was moving much too fast. I should have left the moment they told me I could; the next-best thing was to go now. Right now.

I dropped my hands and glared at Fuller.

“Did you say I was free to go?”

He looked startled. “Yes, ma’am, but—”

“I can’t do this. It’s too much. I need to sleep, and I need to speak to my attorney before I give you a statement, and I need to go home.”

“Ma’am, if I could just ask you,” Fuller started to say, and finally, finally, my eyes started to leak again. It was because the last thing I’d said was the truth: I did need to go home. Desperately. Only when I said the word “home,” the image that flashed through my mind wasn’t the row house across town where Adrienne Richards lived, or even the dingy little cape where I’d made a life with Dwayne. It was the junkyard, our little trailer standing guard with the heaps rising behind, Pops inside and kicked back in front of the TV. Napping in the ridiculous way he always did in the evenings, with a can of beer in hand and a bowl of peanuts balanced on top of his stomach. A home that didn’t even exist anymore, because I’d burned it to ash.