Goodnight Beautiful(47)

“Any news?” Annie asks, leading Sheehy into the living room.

“Nothing,” he says. “Strangest thing, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Sheehy says. “Unless your husband switched out his license plate—and why would he?—we’d have had a reading on his car by now.”

“I don’t get it. His car couldn’t have vanished.”

“No, it could not.” Sheehy nods. “You’re right about that.”

“I need a coffee,” she says, drained. “You want one?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

Sheehy follows her into the kitchen, where she pours them each a mug from the carafe sitting on the counter. “Looks like his father,” Sheehy says. He’s at the refrigerator, leaning down for a better look at the article pinned under a magnet.

“Twenty Questions with Sam Statler,” the adorable and ludicrous interview Sam gave the week they moved into the house. The reporter’s phone call woke them up from an afternoon nap, and Annie lay with her head on Sam’s chest as he stroked her hair and answered the woman’s questions, as charming as ever. “The top dessert in Chestnut Hill? I’m pretty sure my mom’s blueberry pie is the top dessert in the whole world.” “What do you mean you never saw West Wing? It’s the best show of all time!”

“You know Sam’s father?” Annie asks, handing Sheehy a mug. Theodore Statler. The absent larger-than-life man Sam rarely spoke about.

“He taught math to both my girls,” Sheehy says. “Before his big adventure down to Baltimore. Got any sugar?”

It’s up on a high shelf in the cabinet; when she turns around, Sheehy is standing at the kitchen table, leafing through the pile of bills. “What are you doing?” she says sharply, crossing the room to snatch them.

“Didn’t mean to pry,” he says.

She shoves the bills into the junk drawer under the coffeepot, not bothering to hide her irritation.

“Mind if I ask if you knew about those bills?” Sheehy gently takes the canister from her hand.

She hesitates and then sinks onto a stool at the kitchen island, too depleted to put up a fight. “No.”

“How much?” Sheehy asks.

“A lot.” She watches him pour a slow stream into his mug. “One hundred and twenty thousand dollars, to be exact.”

Sheehy releases a slow, sputtering breath. “How do you make sense of this?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Isn’t that more your area?”

“Sure is,” he says, taking a sip of coffee. “But I don’t think you’re gonna wanna hear what I think.”

She clenches her jaw. “You think he left.”

“What I think is that financial pressure can be hard on people, men especially.”

“Are you suggesting he drove off a cliff?”

He shrugs. “Or decided life would be easier elsewhere.”

She stands up. “No, Franklin, you’re wrong. He texted me before he left the office to say he was on his way home. He wouldn’t do that if he was planning on heading elsewhere.”

“Any chance I can see the text he sent?” Sheehy asks.

Annie takes her phone from the back pocket of her jeans and hands it to him. He retrieves a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and begins to scroll, reading aloud. “‘Hello Dr. S. It’s me. Charlie.’” Franklin stops. “I don’t get it. Who’s Charlie?”

“Me,” Annie says, immediately exhausted by the idea of having to explain the text exchange to this idiot. “It’s a joke, kind of.”

“Oh, gotcha. Good one. ‘I broke up with Chandler and would like to see you tomorrow.’” He stops again. “Like from Friends? Or is that a joke too?”

“No, they’re made-up people. It’s something we do.”

He returns to the phone. “‘I’ve been thinking about your invitation. I’ll be there.’ This address you wrote down here. Whose address is that?”

“That’s our address.”

“Does Dr. Statler not know where you live?”

“Yes, Franklin, Sam knows where we live.” She snatches her phone back. “I was pretending to be someone else. A patient named Charlie.”

“Let me get this straight,” he says, removing his glasses. “You were texting your husband, pretending to be a man named Charlie, and you were asking him to come over?”

“Not a man, a woman,” Annie says. “We were role-playing. I was a patient named Charlotte. He was my therapist, feeling trapped in his marriage. He was supposed to be blowing off his wife to come to my place.”

“I see.” He turns down his mouth and picks up his coffee. “Seems you two got quite a thing going on.”

She sighs, drained. “I’m telling you, Franklin. Something happened to Sam. I know him. He didn’t leave.”

Sheehy holds her gaze, silent for a few moments. “Let me ask you a question,” he says. “How long did you know your husband before marrying him?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” she asks. Franklin stays silent, eyebrows raised, waiting. “Eight months,” she says.