The Ex(30)

Owen and Jack, mirror images of each other. So alike in appearance, but reversed on closer inspection. A stranger looking at the picture would probably think Owen and I were the couple. He was edgier and more confident than his brother. As far as I could tell, Jack was like his mother, and Owen was like their father. From what I heard, their father was the patriarch who loved his wife and sons, but had a temper, often set off by having to make ends meet as a caretaker for a family as wealthy as Charlotte’s. Their mother learned to tiptoe around her husband’s pride. Like his mom, Jack learned not to make waves. He liked music and books. He was quiet. Owen, though not an angry person like their father, was determined not to be a doormat. Never a pushover, he stood enough ground for both himself and his little brother. He’d been a high school jock and student body president, and seemed perfectly comfortable wielding the authority that came with a badge.

Or maybe that was all a bunch of psychobabble because I had a tendency to trace people’s baggage to their parents.

I forced myself to place the picture at the bottom of the stack and continued shuffling. The images were all old, pre-Buckley, pre-Molly. The newer Harris family photos were somewhere else. These were separate. These were of Charlotte, Owen, Jack’s parents.

I tucked the photos back into the box and removed a white mailing envelope that had been torn open. More photos. I had seen only the first three—all of Jack and me—when the bedroom door opened.

I dropped the envelope into the box, but Buckley had already seen. “Are those the infamous ‘perfect Olivia’ pictures? That was the worst fight my parents ever had.”

“People keep memories from college, Buckley. You’ll see.”

“That’s what Dad said. But it’s not just that he had pictures. He had them all together, like a collection. And they were hidden, or at least that’s how Mom saw it. I could hear everything. I think it’s the only time I remember them really screaming. Mom found them when she was reorganizing the closets, then taped them all over the bedroom so Dad would find them when he got home. Kind of weird to know your mom can be cray-cray jealous, huh? ‘You want a shrine to your perfect Olivia?’” Buckley imitated an outraged voice. “‘Here you go!’ Anyway, he promised to get rid of them. Guess he didn’t. He must’ve hidden them better when Mom was alive.”

“I’m not sure what to say.”

“That woman he saw on the pier—he said she had long dark hair. He was talking about you. That’s why he liked her.”

I looked down at my lap. “Don’t make too much of something so superficial. Everyone has old memories. It was the book that made him remember your mother. He told me how much they loved each other.”

She shrugged. “So does it look like they took anything from here?”

And just like that, we were back to work. I was beginning to envy teenage resilience. “Your dad’s nightstand’s nearly empty. Is that normal?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said a little too quickly. “I don’t look in there.”

I didn’t know much about kids, but I used to be one. “Can you take a quick look and tell me what you think?”

She touched the drawer pull nervously and took a peek. “That seems like what Dad would have,” she said. Yep, she was a normal, snooping kid after all. “The main stuff they took from the office were his computer and his files.”

I looked at the police inventory: “17 file folders containing paper.”

“Can you tell which files?” I asked Buckley.

“About the lawsuit.”

As one of the plaintiffs suing Malcolm Neeley, Jack would likely receive all important filings—the complaint, motions, the dismissal order. Some clients barely paid attention to their own cases. Others kept meticulous copies of every single document. If Jack was thorough and kept each document in a different file folder, I suppose it could add up to seventeen files.

Buckley added, “It would have been easier for them to just take the entire file cabinet.”

“You mean one file drawer, right?”

“No, like the whole cabinet. It was all his research on Neeley—newspaper articles, that kind of stuff.”

“What newspaper articles?”

“You know, about Neeley. Our research and everything—all that stuff we saw on his laptop. The police left the cabinet, but took everything in it.”

I walked to Jack’s office and saw a four-drawer metal file cabinet.

“That was full?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, crammed. I was telling him to buy another one, but there’s no room.”

I had wandered into fuzzy ethical territory by leaving Jack’s laptop at Charlotte’s apartment the previous night. Now it turned out there was no point. The evidence of Jack’s Web-surfing habits was already with the police. Jack—retro Jack, lover of traditional paper—had printed it out, organized it, and kept it in its own metal file cabinet. I knew precisely how it would look to the police.

“I need to get some stuff from my room to take back to Charlotte’s,” Buckley said. “You can go without me.”

“That’s okay. I’ll wait.” Charlotte had texted me ten minutes earlier, asking me to make sure that Buckley got back in the car with Barbie.

While Buckley packed a roller bag she pulled from her closet, I sat on the bed and looked around her room. The decor was tasteful compared to stereotypes about teenage girls. Not a pop of pink in sight. In a line above her headboard hung three framed album covers: Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Abbey Road, and an album by someone called Childish Gambino. Among the books on her shelves were a few trophies and ribbons, soccer and softball from what I could gather. A giant poster of One Direction was the only surprise.