Mother May I(50)

I ripped the photo from the wall, held it in two hands. A row of boys stood on the lawn, young, grinning, arms around one another. New pledges? Adam Wilkerson was on the end. No beard back then, but his hairline had already been receding. He’d tried to hide it with a buzz cut. I recognized the round egg of his head and his small, sharp nose. I leaned in close to peer at his new brothers lined up on the lawn.

No Trey. No Spence either. No one I knew. But all that mattered was that my husband wasn’t there. I was dizzy with relief.

Then I looked past the pledges. To the place where my eyes did not want to go. The porch, where three older boys were grinning. The officers, I thought. Trey had been VP his senior year. Spence had been treasurer. Their faces were smaller than dimes, out of focus, but I knew my husband. I knew the shape of him, the body language. The young man to his right was Spencer Shaw.

This was a Trey I’d only seen in photos, young and cocky. Why was he here, small and blurry, grinning at me from the wall of Adam Wilkerson’s office?

My husband’s eyes were dark dots, unreadable. They held no answers. Meanwhile, up the hall, Marshall was asking Adam Wilkerson all the wrong questions.

This wasn’t about a law case. This was something so much older. This was something personal.





14




Marshall saw it, the moment Adam Wilkerson recognized Spencer and Trey. A micro-tic of the head, too small to be a flinch, but it was the ghost of one. Adam knew exactly who they were. More than that, Adam knew what the three of them had done to jump-start every awful thing that was happening now. Marshall would have bet his house on it.

Still, Adam kept staring at the picture. He pressed his lips together deliberately, then pushed his eyebrows into a puzzled shape. Pure theater.

Marshall was glad to know he could still call bullshit with such inner certainty. Back in his cop days, sitting one-on-one in small gray rooms, Marshall could smell fear and worry and self-justification coming off the guilty. He could almost hear their brains scrabbling against their skulls like little mice, the frantic scritch of claw on bone.

He’d been worried he had lost his knack for sniffing out dishonesty, ever since Bree had snowed him so hard at the party. He thought if she lied to him again, he might catch it, though. Her face and body language sold her words, note perfect, but her old stage charisma leaked when she was lying.

He’d seen it when she was lying to Kelly Wilkerson and also clocked the moment that the leak had closed and she’d become herself again, saying way too much. Onstage she’d always been a little more alive than other people. Last night, in the Orchid Center, he’d assumed she was shining because she was at a party with her husband’s clients. Not to mention he’d been trying not to let his gaze drop to her long, bare legs. Plus, he hadn’t seen her act since high school.

He still remembered, though. She’d played the killer in The Mousetrap. Emily in Our Town. Juliet and Blanche DuBois in weird, truncated high-school adaptations. Most people who’d seen her onstage remembered; they always brought it up at the reunions, how good she’d been in this play or that.

This guy, Adam, he was just a regular liar. Marshall watched him manufacture a shrug.

“Nope. No.” He looked Marshall dead in the eye. “Can’t say either of those faces rings a bell.”

Marshall looked back, long and level. A cop stare, bolstered by cop silence, creating an expectant void.

Adam’s face stayed quizzical. Here, his face said, was a man who wanted badly to be helpful but, regretfully, had nothing.

Such unmitigated bullshit. But subtle. Kelly was buying it. As Marshall had floated Bree’s way-too-close-to-truth story by Adam, a little tension had come into Kelly’s drug-slack spine. A little hope. Her husband’s denial crushed about half of it out of her.

“Show him the other picture. The old lady,” she demanded, slurry and querulous and not ready to give up. “She looked familiar to me. I think I saw her in the Piggly Wiggly. I was feeling the avocados, and I turned around and there she was, bent over the stroller. Geoff was asleep. I thought nothing of it at the time, because who wouldn’t look? He was such a lovely boy.”

Marshall was sure she’d just broken his pressure, but instead it was as if she’d piled more weight on Adam. The mention of a lady sped up Adam’s blinks and paused his breathing. His expression remained polite and helpful, but Marshall got the sense that Adam had an idea of whose face would appear in the next picture. Moreover, he didn’t want to see that face.

Marshall flipped to the grainy photo from Bree’s security camera. Held out the phone.

Sure enough, Adam had a hard time pointing his eyes that way. He glanced nervously at his wife, the ceiling, the window, but finally he had to look.

Micro-surprise, micro-relief. Whatever woman’s face he’d been expecting to see, it wasn’t this one. Interesting.

“I don’t know her.” He really didn’t.

Kelly Wilkerson deflated, listing sideways, her head lolling on the sofa back, as if his words had rendered her unable to hold it upright any longer. “Maybe look again? I really think I saw her. Avocados.”

Her husband patted her leg. “I’m sorry, honey. I don’t know her at all.” Marshall heard a subtle shade of vindication. It was true.

“Maybe you should look at the pictures of the men again,” Marshall said. “They’re both lawyers. Aren’t you a lawyer, too?”