No One Will Miss Her(73)

“I guess not. Should I?”

I could feel Benny staring at me for several seconds longer. Then he shrugged and put the car in gear.

“Guess not,” he said. “I guess remembering isn’t your job.”



The ride to Kurt Geller’s downtown office took twenty minutes, with another awkward moment at the curb as Benny opened the door and extended a hand to help me out of the back seat. This time, I swallowed the urge to say thanks. I wondered if Geller could get someone else to drive me home, and then wondered if that might be worse; for all I knew, Adrienne might have been shitty to that person, too. Maybe even shittier. My feet were already beginning to hurt again as I clicked through the lobby doors. Someone called Adrienne’s name, and I turned to see a slender woman in a skirt suit, holding a hand up in greeting.

“I’m Ilana, Mr. Geller’s assistant,” she said. “He sent me down to get you.”

“Have we met before?” I asked cautiously, still paranoid from the encounter with Benny, but she only smiled politely.

“I don’t think so. I wasn’t with the firm yet back when your husband . . .” She caught herself and stopped midsentence, frowning sympathetically. “Excuse me, I’m so sorry. This must be very difficult for you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“If you’ll just follow me,” said Ilana, and gestured at the elevator bank. We rode in silence, a long way up. When the doors opened, I followed her again. Past a receptionist who glanced up with recognition in her eyes—I nodded at her; she nodded back—and into the office where Kurt Geller stood behind a desk to shake my hand. I had seen pictures of him, too, but was still thrown by the look of him. In Copper Falls, people were young, middle-aged, or old, and it was never hard to tell who was what; every painful year etched itself onto your face like a claw mark. Geller was like something from another planet; he could have been anywhere from a prematurely gray thirty-five to a well-preserved sixty, agelessly handsome in a way that I had never seen in real life. He nodded at Ilana, who left, shutting the door behind her.

“Please sit,” he said, and I did, collapsing into the nearest chair. I took off the hat and sunglasses, still paranoid, maybe even expecting Geller to point and howl at me like the gangly guy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He did point, but at the empty chair beside me.

“Feel free to set your things there,” he said. His smile stayed in place, but softened. “It’s a pleasure to see you, Adrienne, although of course I’m terribly sorry it’s under these circumstances. I valued my relationship with your husband, and I intend to see to your case personally.” He pressed his lips together. “I understand Ethan may have been . . . found?”

“They said they don’t know for sure yet,” I said. “But Dwayne—the man I shot, who broke into my house—he said—”

“I understand,” Geller said. “I’m terribly sorry. We’ll need to discuss all that, of course, but let’s get the business end out of the way. My pre-trial fee has increased a bit since your husband’s case—”

“The cost doesn’t matter,” I said, and heard Adrienne’s voice coming out of my mouth. She’d said those same words to me any number of times, always with a carelessness that shocked me, it seemed so alien. But Geller just nodded. He scribbled a number on a slip of paper and slid it across the table to me. I counted the zeros, keeping my expression neutral. Pretending I wasn’t shocked at all to learn that the man in front of me cost as much as a three-bedroom house.

“Would you like me to write the check now?” I said.

He waved a hand in the air. “That’s all right. We have a lot of ground to cover. Tell me the whole story about what happened last night.”

And I did. I mean, I told him a story. Not a true one, but a good one. A fairy tale in which the beautiful princess wakes up alone in her castle in the middle of the night, the tip of an intruder’s knife hovering gently at her throat. Only with a crowd-pleasing modern update: in this story, the prince was gone, and the princess had to save herself with some quick thinking and a well-placed bullet.

He said Ethan was dead.

He said he wanted money.

He didn’t know we kept a gun in the safe.

I told the story. I told it well. I told it so well that even I believed me, and why not? This was exactly the kind of game I’d always loved best, that used to occupy me for hours and hours on those dusty summer days in the junkyard. I had always been so good at convincing myself that I was someone and somewhere else—and I had always preferred to do it alone. Other people always ruined it, poking holes in the fantasy until it fell apart. Other people always wanted to tell you why your story was wrong and fake and stupid, and that you were fooling yourself, and that no amount of pretending would ever change who and what you are. A princess? A hero? A happily-ever-after? In your dreams. Maybe after a million dollars of plastic surgery.

Kurt Geller listened while I talked, making notes periodically, mostly nodding along. When I finished, he tapped his pen against the paper where he’d been scribbling.

“When did you buy the gun?” he asked.

I frowned, feeling a flare of resentment at this expensive man, poking a hole in my story. Asking a question I didn’t know the answer to.

“I can’t think,” I said. “We owned it legally. That’s what matters, isn’t it?”