Mother May I(49)

“What did you do?” his wife shrieked, slapping at Marshall. Marshall simply carried her out of the room, back through the doorway, as if she were a child. As they disappeared, she yelled again, “What did you do?”

The very question I was desperate to ask Trey.

I stared at the sad little man, his dismayed mouth, the blue-black circles under his eyes. I didn’t know if he’d really been at his ex-wife’s house or only at the grocery store, but I recognized a person being eaten up by grief.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I knelt by him and began putting his spilled groceries back into the bags.

“Who are you?” he asked, touching his cheek, pushing his glasses up onto his nose. I could see a ring of fine stubble, shining silver on the sides of his shaved head. He was so much older and smaller than he’d looked on Facebook. He was pitiful and bleeding and sitting in eggs. I felt such sorrow for him. Even if he had done something with Spence or Trey, Geoff’s death was a hideous injustice. The mother and her daughter had invented this hell, for all of us. Nothing on earth justified what was happening to Robert either. Nothing. Our little boys were innocent.

It had taken this broken girl literally tearing her husband open to make me see it. In the ruin of Kelly, I saw all the things I did not want to be. Tonight my husband, the man I loved, the father of my children, would be home. I wasn’t going to burn him up alive, no matter what his part in this. I couldn’t blame Trey for what the mother had chosen. I felt myself rewrapping, all the way, around my husband. No conditions, no requirements, and no limits. Me, then him, and then our girls and Robert, whom we must bring back into the safety of the middle. Our bull’s-eye.

“I’m Bree,” I told him, tucking three unbroken eggs back into their carton. “The man with your wife is Marshall, a private detective investigating a case similar to yours. He needs to ask you some questions.”

I helped him stand, though I wasn’t sure he’d understood half of what I’d told him. He seemed bewildered. I carried his grocery bags through and dumped them on the filthy kitchen counter. Kelly was sprawled on the sofa, face blotchy from weeping. Marshall sat up straighter as we entered, but she only glared. Her adrenaline was spent, and gin and Ativan were hard at work in her.

I went to her and took her by the shoulders. I told my new and bedrock truth to her, as she trembled, icy, in my arms. “Nothing your husband did, no matter what, deserves this. That old woman is the one who took them. She took two little boys who never did a damn thing wrong. It’s all on her.”

Her eyes shuddered closed, and she collapsed back against the sofa. Her husband hovered in the doorway, anxious, his pants wet with egg, slow blood in little trickles drying already on his cheek.

“Is she all right?” he asked.

“She took two Ativan and drank two shots of gin since we arrived. I think she had something else before we got here. We should keep an eye on her,” I told him.

He nodded, looking even more exhausted, and I got the sense that this was not the first time he’d seen his wife in this state. He turned to Marshall. “You know something about Geoff?”

The small flare of hope in his voice made me want out of the room. I believed with all my heart that he would recognize Spencer, be able to pinpoint the exact case that had started all this, but I didn’t want to watch as Marshall made him confess. It would be brutal, and I couldn’t bear it. Not knowing what I knew about his son, and with all my protective layers of character peeled off. I should get out of the way and let Marshall, untethered, press the truth out of him. I kept saying too much anyway, just as he’d feared.

I said, “Where do you keep your Band-Aids and Bactine? We need to disinfect those scratches.”

He blinked at me, owlish and confused behind his glasses, then waved me toward a little hallway off the kitchen. “In the laundry room. There’s a first-aid kit in the cabinets above the dryer.”

I hurried away. Behind me I could hear Marshall beginning our cover story. He was saying we had a suspect, but since we felt that my son’s safety depended on not involving the police, we would appreciate discretion. He didn’t say their son’s safety depended on it as well, but it was implied.

Ruthless, I thought, and yet I was so grateful to him. I was a better actor, but here we had no script, no fourth wall, no audience hungry only to be entertained. This was real. I sped up, and his voice faded as the hallway turned.

There were three doors in a horseshoe at the end. Adam Wilkerson hadn’t specified. I opened the one on the right and found a small office. One of the others must be the laundry, but I wanted to give Marshall time. I flipped on the light, revealing deep cranberry paint and walnut furniture that was old and very good. It didn’t go with what I’d seen in the rest of the house. The back wall was lined with shelves of leather-bound law books.

Like Trey, he had an office bar, built in behind the leather sofa. Blanton’s instead of Pappy. I felt a sharp surge of want. My hands were shaking. My whole insides, too. I walked over, reaching for the bottle.

A vertical row of three small photographs ran down the wall between the window and the bar. The center one, a five-by-seven in a pewter frame, caught my eye. My hand froze. The photo had been taken in front of a white house with tall columns. Azaleas framed a long porch with a blue banner festooned with gold Greek letters hanging from the rail.

I knew these columns, this porch. Even the bushes. Trey had a picture of this place in his own office. It was his old frat house.