Woman Last Seen(57)
Clements huffs irritably, even though she has been asking herself a variation on that same question. Did either of them know more about her disappearance than they were letting on? Were either of them responsible? If they had discovered her betrayal, there would be motivation. Humiliation, fury and desolation fueled many crimes of passion. Jealousy was a poison.
Both men were insistent that they had no clue that she was betraying them. But that in itself blew Clements’s mind. How was it possible that they had no clue? She thinks perhaps the issue is that healthy, rich, white men are dangerous because they are disinterested in everything other than themselves. Women, people of color, poorer men are still trying to work out the world. They are still asking why it is unfair. What can I do to make it fair? How do I ask for a pay rise? How do I get heard? Or believed? The people still asking themselves these questions observe what is going on around them, because everything around them is a potential threat. Clements has a theory that handsome, rich white men have nothing to work out and so they rarely bother with introspection, let alone inspection. The husbands assumed she was fine: busy, happy, trustworthy. And in this instance the self-absorption of the handsome, rich white man worked in Kylie’s favor.
Until of course it didn’t.
Everyone in the station is playing a waiting game. The air is electric, like it is just before a storm. Despite orders to drop the case, Clements decides to make some more phone calls. She calls Kylie’s mother in Australia, who says she last saw her daughter last year, they had a three-day break in Dubai. Kylie paid for it. “I wanted it to be longer. It was a long way to travel for just a few days,” the mother complained. Clements—who was guilty as charged and did operate on hunches, although not instead of facts but as well as—thought the mother was self-involved, hard work. If Kylie wanted a sanctuary, somewhere to escape to and cut free of the mess she created, Clements doubted her mother would offer that. “You’ll get in touch if you hear from your daughter? It’s important.”
“Of course. Poor Mark. How could she do this to him? And those boys. They’ve always been like grandsons to me. She’s an ungrateful girl.”
Another couple of calls unearth the fact that Kylie did not have a high-powered job as a management consultant. She had done until four years ago, when she resigned. “We were surprised when she resigned, sad, you know. She was really good at her job. Great team member,” explains her old boss.
“Did she give any explanation?”
“She said she wanted to spend more time with her family. Said it was getting too much for her. There is a lot of traveling. Women with families often find it hard to strike the balance.” Clements bites her tongue to avoid asking if men with families also struggled to find the work/life balance. She considers her jab is less likely to score considering Kylie had two lives to balance with work. That sort of ambition is hardly laudable.
Obviously, both the sick mother and the flash job were fictions, created to allow Kylie to move between the two men, the two homes. Clements wonders how she financed it if she wasn’t working. Mark Fletcher had said that there was a salary going into their joint bank account every month. Daan Janssen isn’t stuck for cash, but was Kylie going as far as to allow Janssen to pay for the mortgage with her other husband? Was this what it was all about? Money? That thought turns Clements’s stomach. Weirdly, she sort of admires the woman who independently flouts the rules, flicks the finger to the patriarchy and finds her own path, but if it is just for money it somehow seems more layman, normalized. More criminal. Was she simply exploiting one man to prop up the other? That position was pitiful. Understandable, but lacking the exciting notoriety of rebellion.
Clements and Tanner pore through the bank accounts and phone statements. They discover that Kylie is independently wealthy. Her father had died very close to the time she met Daan Janssen. The father left her a fortune. Clements is immediately intrigued once again. This woman wasn’t doing it for the money. She didn’t need Daan Janssen to prop up the Fletcher household finances. She didn’t need either man at all.
She wanted them.
Clements calls both husbands again to bring them up to date on her findings. Mark Fletcher sounds fraught, broken. Daan Janssen sounds maddened, peeved. They both claim that she hadn’t told them the truth about the timing and circumstances of her father’s death. Mark knew he had died, but had no clue about the inheritance she’d benefited from. “They always had a very difficult relationship. She barely spoke of him. Why would he leave her money? Are you sure?”
Daan thought the father had died many years ago, when Kai was a child. “She didn’t often speak of him. She said she couldn’t remember him. Hardly knew him.”
Kylie Gillingham carried around alone the grief of losing her father, in order to finance her double life. Clements doesn’t know whether to be disgusted by the woman, pity her or what. She marvels at the case. She has seen the weird and wonderful in her line of work—well, mostly weird really—but this! The audacity of the woman was almost admirable; the planning involved certainly was. Clements sometimes struggled to keep her one, relatively straightforward life ticking along—she can’t imagine the logistics involved in being two women.
Clements is aware that she feels something faintly unsavory toward this woman too. Unlike the male officers, it isn’t judgment, it is something she tries to avoid in her life—jealousy. Not full-blown, tie-you-in-knots, green-eyed monster but something akin to what she might feel when she saw a picture in a magazine of a celebrity with a perfect life and a perfect figure, a couple of perfect kids. And Clements would ask herself, why her? Why that woman? Why not me hanging out by a swimming pool?