The Better Liar(80)

“In a minute,” she said. “First, Clery.”

There was barely any light coming in through the blinds. There wouldn’t be until noon. Mary’s face blurred in front of me in the half dark, her features seeming to shape-shift.

“He’s a pawnshop owner,” I whispered.

She smiled and patted me on the leg. “What else is he?”

I swallowed. “He does things. For money.”

“You have to be more specific.” She leaned back on her palms.

“He kills people.”

“Right.” Mary observed me in silence for a second. “I thought at first maybe you’d hired him to kill Dave. But I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

I felt the idea like a blow to the chest. “No! No, I’d never— I love Dave.”

“You do, don’t you? It took me a while to figure that out. You love him so much.”

“Yeah.” My mouth was dry.

“He’s a good man. I tried real hard to find something on him, some reason you might want him dead. For a while I thought he was cheating on you.”

“He…” I didn’t finish.

“Oh, so you thought so too?” Mary nodded. “He sure did talk to Elaine a lot. And sent her quite a bit of money. Was that what made you think so?”

“Not just that.” I bit my lip.

    “Well, it turned out that wasn’t it.” She smiled. “Elaine’s his dealer.”

She phrased this carefully and with a kind of glee; I recognized that she thought it was some sort of bomb. But—“Dave doesn’t do any drugs,” I told her.

“Dave might as well not do any drugs.” Mary snorted. “He smokes weed around the back of the house when you’re in bed sometimes. And he buys it for his dad’s back pain and his sister, who’s too square to know any drug dealers.”

“No…” I thought of Cadence saying Dad needs a Dave visit, and Teri’s quelling look. They knew.

“He’s terrified you’ll find out about his little vice,” Mary said, “on account of how your sister is a junkie. He begged me not to tell you.”

I’d told him on our first date that I didn’t tolerate drugs; that I’d never marry anybody who did. He’d promised to give it up. For me.

“He loves her,” I said. “He lied to me, to go over there.”

“To buy weed,” Mary said. “He loves you.”

“She’s better than me,” I said, my voice cracking.

She laced her fingers together. “Well. After talking to Clery, talking to you…the picture’s really coming together.”

My mouth fell open.

She grinned. “Nice to have a, uh, what did you call it? A little married police officer friend? She took me down to county. Frank and I had a good chat while she got herself some coffee.”

“You spoke to him?”

She rolled her eyes. “The fact that he talked to me at all is proof that you should have picked someone else. Even if he’s the only dude who whacks people professionally in all of New Mexico, I mean, drive to Vegas. It’s not that far and at least those guys’ll go away for ten years before they say shit to a stranger. But I promised him a favor, and suddenly he was a big ol’ chatterbox. Can you believe it?”

I didn’t move.

Mary pushed her hair over one shoulder. “Anyway, you already know what he said. It wasn’t Dave you wanted dead, was it?”

    “No,” I said quietly.

“No,” she repeated. “It was you.”

There it was. I felt the truth bore down on me.

“You didn’t hire him to do anyone else. You hired him to do you.”

I couldn’t meet her eyes.

“So I thought about that for a while. It didn’t sit right with me at first. You have this husband you’re so in love with that you won’t even leave him when you think he’s cheating on you. You have a baby. You have that beautiful house. Neither of you were fired; in fact, you both have cushy office jobs where you get to use your master’s degrees every single day. Was it that you were just so depressed that Daddy died that you wanted to follow him out? I batted that one around, but it didn’t really stick for me. But clearly something was rotten, because you were desperate to shed the coil. I thought, what could it be? And then I realized—it wasn’t Daddy. It was Mommy, wasn’t it?”

“No,” I said again. “It has nothing to do with her—I just wanted—”

“Nah,” she said. “I think it does. I think you’re just like her. How did she wind up in those hospitals over and over again? It wasn’t just because she was depressed.”

I couldn’t speak.

“She tried to kill herself too,” Mary said. “She tried more than once.”

“I’m not like her,” I bit out.

Mary giggled and sent up a cloud of dust as she clutched the bookshelf again for support. “You’re right! I mean, that’s the part that gets me the most. You hired a professional wetworker to leave you alone.”

“What?”

“Well, he wasn’t supposed to really kill you, right? He was supposed to smack you around, get a few blood spatters on the Honda, and take it for a joyride. Ditch it in one of the arroyos, am I right? Carjacking gone wrong. And then you’re free to start your new life.” She paused. “You wanted your husband to be in love with Elaine. You thought Eli would have a new mommy built right in. You thought you’d be Yvonne.” Mary tilted her head. “Clery said all that cost you forty thousand dollars in cash. Must have taken you all year to get that much cash out of your accounts slowly enough that Dave wouldn’t notice. No wonder you were so pissed when Clery got sent to prison.”