It's One of Us(52)

Thoroughly freaked out, she bolts for the house.



25


THE HUSBAND

Park drives the city for a while before making up his mind. He can’t help himself. The fear he’s feeling, the sense of dislocation he felt watching Olivia drive away, is making him reckless. He wants to see the kid. He wants to see his daughter.

He has the address on the slip of paper in his wallet, though he doesn’t need to look, he’s already memorized it. He puts it into his phone. Belmont is only ten minutes from his location; he’s there before he’s decided exactly what he is planning to do or say.

He stops down the street from his daughter’s house, and broods. A terrible sense of doom lingers deep in his bones, has since he left the police station. He didn’t like how the cops looked at him, as if he were hiding something. He isn’t—he has nothing to do with Beverly Cooke’s murder—but the very nature of his previous experiences with law enforcement makes him jumpy around all cops. How could it not? When you’ve been a murder suspect, every interaction is tinged with fear. The idea of being incarcerated, of having his life taken from him, even now, fills him with a deep sense of horror. So close. He’d been so close to arrest, to being blamed.

It’s been years since he revisited his emotions from the time when Melanie went missing.

Was murdered.

Was left in a lake near campus.

So similar to Beverly Cooke. Too similar.

But Melanie’s murderer is dead, and Beverly was killed by his son. His son!

They’re exhuming Melanie’s body. She was pregnant. God, to have that revealed all these years later. It isn’t his. There’s no way. Right?

Honestly, he has no idea. He hadn’t lied when he said they’d been on a break. It depended on how far along she was. Two weeks? No chance it was him. Two months? That’s different. And what if they dig up her poor body and rip whatever cells remain of her child from her shriveled womb and test it and it does come back to him? Surely, they won’t really exhume her. Surely, that was just a threat to make him nervous.

He understands enough about how the legal world works, how law enforcement thinks, from his book research. If he were writing a cop in this situation, he’d have him deep into the suspect’s life at this point, digging out everything. Everything. Looking for a fracture line that could be pressured into cracking wide open.

Why is this happening? A wail builds inside him, choked off because it wouldn’t be manly to fall apart. There’s too much at stake. He has to hold it together. For himself. For Olivia.

He doesn’t like the way he feels right now. Defensive. Frightened. Confrontational.

Desperate.

He slams his hands against the steering wheel again, and again. His whole life is coming apart, and he can’t control it. And the manuscripts from his safe are out there in the world somewhere. What happens if they leak? If the police find them before he does, everything comes apart, that’s what.

A car whips around the corner and honks at him, long and angry, pulling him from his reverie. It whizzes by and pulls into the driveway of the charming cottage he’s been scouting.

Her. It’s her.

He watches Scarlett—my daughter—get out of her car and is seized with the sudden urge to speak with her. He pulls his car to the front of her house. She stops on the neat slate sidewalk between the drive and the house, watching him suspiciously.

Beautiful. She is so, so beautiful. Long legs, curly red hair, heart-shaped face, a dimple in her chin—she could be Lindsey at sixteen, though that red hair—my God, she looks like his mother. He is filled with pride, and wonder, and something else, an instantaneous affection. She is his. She belongs to him. He wants to know everything about her. Wants to talk to her all night.

Will it be the same with the others? Will he feel the same sense of pride and possession and infatuation with the boy who thrust them into this mess? Does a parent love their child regardless of the terror they bring, the mistakes they make?

Murdering a woman is not exactly a mistake, though, is it?

Their eyes meet. He wants to get out of the car. He wants to put down the window. Something. Anything.

And realizes, here he is, a man in a car, a stranger to the neighborhood, staring at a young girl. This doesn’t look good. This isn’t the way.

Panic seizes him, and he smashes the gas pedal. The car fishtails away, and in the rearview, he sees his daughter looking after him, then running for the house.

Stupid, man. Really stupid. Now she’ll think you’re a stalker—or worse.

This is all Olivia’s fault. She made him feel small, and he crawled over here to make himself feel better.

Way to go, asshole. It’s always someone else’s fault.

At home, Park stands by the front door, looking out the sidelights toward the street. The lawn needs cutting, he’s suffused with a low-level panicked buzz about the manuscripts that were taken, and he’s embarrassed by his actions in front of Scarlett, but honestly, he’s started debating whether he should pack a bag and disappear. Olivia has tons of clients who have second homes; he’s sure it would take a single call to the right person, and they could be lounging on a beach somewhere, looking at the ocean and trying to make sense of all of this in private.

Running would be stupid, he knows this, but he can’t just sit here and wait for the world to collapse around them. Now that another woman is missing, this is all going to explode.