Mother May I(44)

When we saw Spence socially, it was tied to a client dinner or some other work obligation. Trey sometimes hung out with Spence alone, especially as Spence’s marriages had failed, but he steered clear of Spence’s posse of hard-drinking male friends. That set went off on high-stakes Vegas weekends and booze-fueled hunting trips, and they were not averse to a little coke or speed or Adderall. Almost all of them were divorced. Some more than once, and for the same reasons that had broken up Spencer’s marriages. Trey kept a clean line between himself and all that. I knew this. I had seen it. So it made sense to me that Trey would not be part of Spencer’s darker legal doings either.

As we entered the Wilkersons’ neighborhood, I tried to set all this aside. These thoughts belonged wholly to Bree Cabbat, and I could not be her now. I packed away my daughters, safe with my vigilant mother, and my husband, flying home early for all the wrong reasons. Hardest of all, I tucked Robert, safe and sleeping, into a warm sanctuary at the bottom of my brain. I also tried to forget that Geoff was dead. I would soon be face-to-face with his parents. The character I was playing did not know what had happened to their son.

The rain eased to a drizzle as Marshall’s GPS guided us toward their house. The mother had spoken of the Wilkersons as if they were rich, but I’d taken that with a grain of salt. I knew from when I was little that even the lower rungs of the middle class looked pretty damn rich when you were poor. But this neighborhood was definitely upper-middle-class; gracious old Tudors and Colonials were mixed in with some outsize newer builds, all lining streets that spread out behind a country club, many with views of the golf course.

“How much do community-college professors make?” I asked.

“Not this much,” Marshall said, giving me a one-sided smile.

I knew that the boxy McMansion with its three tiers of symmetrical windows belonged to the Wilkersons before I saw the house number. It was the only home on the street with untrimmed bushes and a ragged lawn. They must have forgotten to schedule their service.

We cruised past. There was an older-model BMW parked in the drive, and the dark sky let us see that there were lights on inside.

“Someone’s home,” I said.

Marshall hadn’t called in advance. Calling would give them two hours to decide if they’d meet with us or what they’d tell us, and he wanted to see their reactions fresh. I’d worried that no one would be home, but if that were the case, Marshall planned to stake out the house while I took a rental car back to Decatur. No matter what, I had to be home before Trey. If he found our house empty, he might panic and call my mother or the police.

Marshall turned the corner before parking his old Taurus. We’d gotten a Lyft back to the Botanical Garden to pick it up. We left it out of sight and headed back down the street to the Wilkerson house; he didn’t want them to see the make and model or, worse, think to write down his plate number.

The drizzle was now a mist. Not enough for umbrellas, just enough to make us hurry.

Marshall still wore his nicest suit, a dark gray with a subtle stripe that he’d had on at the party. I’d pressed it out for him and loaned him a fresh shirt and tie. It was an older shirt, too tight for Trey but still a bit too large for rangy Marshall.

Marshall’s plan was to stay as close to the truth as possible without giving away who we were. My legal situation was too precarious, he felt, to allow us to be honest. He would say he was a freelance PI, no association with the firm. If they didn’t look closely at his license, they might even assume we were from Alabama, too. He’d say we’d come to them because he was working a missing-child case that was similar to their own.

He’d introduce me as his partner, but he’d told me to talk as little as possible, as if I had the dual role of a PI and a stone statue, mute and pale. I’d thrown on a simple blue dress that was more suited to an afternoon fund-raiser, but it was the most businesslike thing in my closet.

As we went up the walk, I was already having a hard time keeping both our missing children fictional. I pinched the soft flesh between my thumb and index finger, hard. I was a person who did not know Geoff’s face or his fate. There was no Robert in this story. I was not a mother.

I set my face to something neutral, then reached out and touched the bell.

Almost at once we heard slapping, angry footsteps, and then the door was jerked open. Kelly Wilkerson, wearing yoga pants covered in cat hair and a tight white T-shirt with food and coffee stains spattered across her breasts, sized us up in a hot, raking glance. Her blond hair hung in dirty hanks around her face.

“You came!” she said. “My husband said you wouldn’t.”

I felt myself spin into flux. She was expecting someone. Strangers. I exchanged a glance with Marshall; neither of us knew who we’d just become, but in that glance I knew we were both willing to be whoever she expected, if it got us in the door.

“May we come in?” Marshall asked in a neutral tone. Not overly friendly, but not coolly professional either.

“Sure.” She opened the door wider, and as the gray daylight hit her face, I felt my heart bottom out. On Facebook she’d looked like a grown-up with her sleek hair and perfect makeup, but her soft jawline and the baby-plump skin around her eyes said she was closer to Anna-Claire’s age than my own, barely legal to drink. Before we could step through, suspicion darkened her face, and she said, “Wait. You’re not reporters, are you? My lawyer says you have to tell me if you are, and we’re not talking to the press.”