Have You Seen Me?(52)
“Wow. So whose blood is it?”
“I don’t have a clue, but I keep coming back to something Gabby said—that maybe when I was missing, I tried to help a person who’d been injured.” A stray thought crosses my mind as I’m talking. “Wait, what’s your blood type? You aren’t A positive, are you?”
“Gosh, I’m sure I knew at one point, but I can’t recall at the moment.” He smiles ruefully. “But if you’re thinking you might have taken a swing at me and bloodied my nose, that didn’t happen.”
“Of course not, I’m just trying to put all the pieces together. . . . Mulroney also says that video footage he’s secured shows me hanging around the East Village on Wednesday. That’s where that food place actually was. And I apparently looked pretty disheveled.”
He frowns. “Like you’d been injured?”
“No, I guess the same as on Thursday, as if I hadn’t showered.”
“But why the East Village?”
“I don’t know—I can’t remember the last time I was there. Can you?”
“Not really. I mean, we had dinner downtown a month or so ago, but that was the West Village.” He spears a piece of chicken with a fork and chews it absentmindedly. “That all the guy has so far?”
“For now, yes, but more will come in time.”
“Okay, I guess it’s a start.”
“There’s still something else I need to tell you. Not about Mulroney.”
I let it all spill out: my deception years ago, the way it came back to me the other night while sitting alone in our den, and my interview with the police today. Before my eyes, his expression morphs from perplexed to baffled to shocked. Not at all what I was banking on.
“Please, say something, Hugh,” I insist after I’ve finished and he’s sitting there, mouth agape. “You look horrified.”
“Ally, that’s ridiculous. I’m not horrified at all. But it’s a lot to digest.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. But I’ve been nervous about sharing all this with you. And like I said, I wanted to tell you earlier—but you’ve had so much on your plate.”
“You can’t hold things back from me, no matter how much pressure I’m under. I need to know this stuff.”
“You’re right,” I say, feeling a fresh twinge of guilt. “I’ll do better going forward.”
“It didn’t cross your mind that it might be smart to have a lawyer with you today?”
So he’s doubly annoyed. Not only did I neglect to loop him in, but I didn’t bother asking his legal advice.
“I considered it, but I was afraid doing that would make it look like I had a reason to be worried—and Roger agreed.”
“Roger’s a legal expert now?”
“I’m not saying that, but he has good instincts. And in hindsight, I realize that bringing a lawyer would have definitely rubbed this detective the wrong way.”
“So how did she respond to this new piece of information?”
“She said they would share it with the coroner, but she didn’t let on how significant she thought it might be.”
“Was she critical of you?”
“Uh, she didn’t seem to be. She said kids are often too stressed to divulge everything in a situation like that, and they leave stuff out.”
“That makes sense, I guess.”
I start to tell him about the part of the interview that made me so uncomfortable, but I hold back. Despite just having promised to be more forthcoming, I don’t want to dump anything more on Hugh tonight.
“Do . . . do you think my statement is enough, or that I’ll be asked to testify if someone is arrested?”
“You’d definitely be required to testify,” he says bluntly, as if he’s thinking, So now she wants my advice.
He pushes around the last piece of chicken on his plate without bringing it to his mouth. Instinctively I glance at my own plate. I’ve barely touched a morsel, and now the lemon sauce has congealed into an unappetizing, glutinous glob.
“What you told me about finding the kid,” Hugh says. “You only remembered it the other night? Out of the blue?”
“Not out of the blue,” I insist. “It was after I’d come back from coffee with Roger. Something was nagging me, and I finally realized what it was.”
Hugh sets his fork across his plate and swivels until he’s facing me. “Is there any chance you only remembered this detail recently because you might have been in a fugue state back then, after you found the body?”
I shake my head.
“No way. I’m sure Roger would have told me if there’d been anything like that.”
“Okay, I was just wondering . . . in light of everything that’s happened.”
“Trust me, I wasn’t in a fugue state then. I lied—and then I pushed away the memory, but I was all there.” I change the subject abruptly. “Are you finished? I should let you work.”
“Ally, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, turning so he can’t see the disheartened expression on my face. “It’s a relevant question.”
We do a fast cleanup, and afterward I drift into the bedroom with a cup of herbal tea. There, I phone Gabby, realizing she never responded to my message from yesterday. I’d really love to talk to her, but the call once again goes straight to voice mail. It’s so unlike her to be uncommunicative, especially since she’s aware of the mess I’m in. Perhaps she’s caught up in a work-related crisis.