Confessions on the 7:45(64)

He raised his eyebrows at her. When he spoke, his voice was gentle.

“How can you say that? He has hurt someone.”

“Acting violently when drunk is different than—whatever it is you’re implying. Abducting, killing.”

She hated the way she sounded, like an apologist. But it was different, wasn’t it? “It’s like a different profile, right?”

God, she was pathetic. Crowe’s expression reflected a version of herself she didn’t want to acknowledge.

“Violence escalates, Mrs. Murphy,” he said. “In my experience violent men get more and more violent. When life stressors like job loss or problems in the marriage start to ramp up, those dark tendencies rise to the surface.”

Dark tendencies.

Fear, panic constricted her breathing. Everything was slipping from her grasp. She reached for the frayed edges of her life and felt them slip through her fingers.

“She wasn’t sleeping just with Graham,” Selena said. Desperate. She sounded desperate. “What about Erik Tucker? Isn’t he a suspect?”

So much for not throwing people under the bus. He didn’t answer her, just looked down at his notes.

“Do you or your husband have access to any isolated property anywhere—a lake house, a hunting cabin? Anything like that.”

“No.”

Did he, though? His friend Sean had a place somewhere—was it in the Adirondacks? She didn’t know if Graham had access, or how isolated it was. She told him as much; Crowe scribbled in his notebook.

“Why do you want to know that?”

He tilted his head. “Because a woman is missing, Mrs. Murphy. I want to know if there’s someplace he might be keeping her.”

Another blow to the gut. She picked up the ice pack again, but it had grown warm. The pounding in her head was reaching a crescendo. She wished she would just pass out again. Unconsciousness would be a blessed break from this nightmare.

“So, if you knew for a week that Geneva was sleeping with your husband—why didn’t you at least fire her right away?”

Good question. It was an impossible thing to explain to anyone who was living outside of her head. Anyway, she was about to fire Geneva but then she disappeared.

“It’s really hard to find a good nanny,” she said stupidly.

He gave her a look. She slumped back into the couch.

“I don’t know,” she breathed. The truth. “Denial. I just felt numb, unsure of what to do. Graham was unemployed. I needed to work and make sure the kids were taken care of. She was a good nanny; I trusted her with the boys—just not my husband. And, I guess, I was biding my time, deciding what to do next.”

She didn’t expect him to understand. She didn’t even understand herself. She was just chicken; that was the truth of it. She was afraid to blow up her life.

Her phone kept up its manic pinging and ringing.

“When I caught my wife the last time,” he said, “it was almost like I didn’t even care. The trust was already broken, and I wasn’t even sure why we were still married. It was a couple of weeks before I moved out, but in the meantime, we still went through the motions—got movies on Netflix, went out to dinner. We didn’t have any kids, so there wasn’t that complication.”

She nodded. So maybe it wasn’t so hard to understand.

“But I was angry,” he said. “Deep inside, you know. Man, I had some dark thoughts about her, about the guy she was with.”

She could see where he was going with this, stayed quiet. She pushed farther back into the cushions of the couch, just to put some distance between them.

“Did you think about hurting Geneva?” he asked when she didn’t say anything.

Even though she was kind of expecting it, the world still stuttered.

“You’re kidding, right?”

There had been a folder on the coffee table between them. He’d taken the printed pages of texts from it at the beginning of their conversation. Now, he retrieved a slim stack of photos and handed them to her. She flipped through a series of grainy images of her block. A fish-eye lens, obviously captured from personal doorbell cameras from the neighbor’s devices, showed Geneva’s progress from the front door, down the street, to her car.

She looked so small, young like a teenager. Her shoulders were slouched, her face set and sad. There she was in front of the house. Then walking past the neighbor’s place. She reached for her car door, paused and she turned around as if something caught her attention. Most of the images were obscured by shrubs and trees, the cameras really only designed to capture the stoop. The late afternoon light was low.

In the final image, a second figure was captured, coming from up the block along the middle of the street. A black jacket, a baseball cap, jeans, boots. A slow dawning crept on Selena. Though the face was obscured, something about the figure’s carriage was familiar.

No, she thought. Not possible.

“Any idea who that might be?”

She leaned in closer, heart thumping. But the image was so grainy and indistinct, it was hard to identify gender. There were no other images capturing a front view.

She flipped through all the pictures again.

“After that, we don’t have any other photos. They just disappear.”

“Is it—a woman?” asked Selena.