All the Beautiful Lies(75)

“No, not really,” Harry said, even though his temples still felt pinched by a dull, throbbing pain.

“Not at all?”

“Maybe a slight headache.”

“And how would you characterize the pain of that headache, on a scale of one to ten?”

“A one,” Harry said.

She asked him a few more questions about how he was feeling, then used an instrument with a light to track the movement of his eyes.

“You seem good, Harry,” she said, her fingers gently touching the area around his scalp where he’d received the blow. “I have one more question. Can you tell me the four words I said to you when I first came in here?”

For a brief moment, Harry blanked, but then it came back to him, and he quickly said: “Car, telephone, apple, shoe.”

“Good.” She smiled, then looked at her watch. “I’ll send the nurse ’round with your discharge papers. Who’s taking you home, do you know?”

“My stepmother, I guess.”

“Okay. Sounds good.”

After the doctor left, Harry kept his eyes on the door, waiting either for his discharge or for Alice to return. He was eager to leave, frantic almost, anxious to check in with Caitlin, make sure she was okay. He’d tell her that he felt sure he knew who the man watching her had been. He hadn’t decided yet whether to tell Detective Dixon. What if he was wrong? What would John think then?

He must have dozed off, because he woke to the sound of the nurse’s voice as he came into the room holding a clipboard.

After being discharged by the nurse, Harry dressed in the clothes he’d been wearing the night before, and went to look for Alice. She wasn’t in the waiting room, and a nurse told him she’d gone home to change, and that she’d be back soon. He walked outside to the emergency room entrance and stood under the awning. He tried both Alice’s cell phone and the landline at the house, but she didn’t pick up. He tried Caitlin, as well, and got no answer. He tried to figure out what to do next. It was too far to walk. He could call a cab, he told himself, have it take him back to the house, or he could call Detective Dixon, tell him he needed a ride. Before he decided, a rust-pocked yellow cab pulled up to the curb, and a wiry driver in a jean jacket leapt out to open the door for an obese passenger, a woman carrying her own oxygen tank who needed help getting through the hospital’s sliding doors. When the driver returned, Harry asked him for a ride.

“I have another fare in ten minutes. How far you need to go?”

Harry gave him the address of Grey Lady and the driver agreed.

The car was stuffy, smelling of permanent body odor and the distant memory of cigarette smoke. Harry cracked the window as the driver barreled through the quiet backstreets of Kennewick. The day was overcast but warm. The driver dropped Harry off at the top of the driveway, speeding off as soon as Harry paid. Harry squinted toward the house, wishing he had sunglasses. It was the type of overcast sky that was still bright, a harsh whiteness suffusing everything. He pressed his fingers to his closed eyelids, and bright red spots swam in his vision.

When he felt better, he walked to the front door, checking his jacket pocket, happy to find his keys there. Alice’s car wasn’t in the driveway. It was strange; if she’d been heading back to the hospital, he would’ve passed her in the taxi. Where else could she be? Maybe she’d gone to see John? Clearly, they were much closer than he’d ever realized. He was still shocked by the revelation that John had been Alice’s stepfather.

He entered the house, shouted “Hello” into its interior just to make sure he was alone, then walked to the kitchen, hoping to find coffee. He was desperate for caffeine. There was a quarter of a pot left, and he poured it over ice and took a long, bitter swallow. He thought some more about Alice and John. What if they were still close? What if John had killed Bill and Grace as a favor for Alice, as revenge for their affair? It was ludicrous, but possible. Both Bill and Grace were dead, and the only one with a solid motive to kill them was Alice, the spurned wife. Alice had acted as though John and she weren’t close at all, but what if they were?

Harry remembered a few days earlier when he’d been looking through Alice’s desk and found the old photograph in her passport, a photograph of her and an older man. He put down his coffee and walked to Alice’s office. He found the photograph again in Alice’s desk drawer. A young Alice with an older man, his arm around her. Harry studied the man. It definitely could have been John, even though the man in the photograph had a full head of hair and was clean shaven. But he had the same strong, slim build, the same slope of the shoulders. It was impossible to tell for sure. Harry riffled through the papers in the desk drawer, looking for another photograph. He didn’t find anything, but he did find a Post-it note stuck to the wooden bottom of the drawer. Handwritten on the note was the phrase missmossypants. No caps, words all strung together. It had to be Alice’s password. Harry flipped open the laptop on the desk, and hit the power button, then, while it was booting up, he had another idea. He opened the Phone Finder app on his phone. It allowed you to find out where someone was based on the GPS location of their cell phone, but you needed their password to do it. He punched Alice’s phone number into the app, then entered her password. A map appeared, and an icon of a phone. She was near Kennewick Beach, just off Micmac Road on Scituate Avenue. Harry could picture the address, a three-story condo development, the same one his father had pointed out to him.