The Wife Upstairs(68)
“Still didn’t mean I liked it. Bea didn’t like it, either. It’s why she invited Blanche to the lake that weekend. To ‘hash it out.’ I asked Blanche what that meant, and she said they were at … I don’t know. Like a crossroads or something. That she wasn’t sure they could still be friends. And I thought maybe it was about…”
His throat moves, but he doesn’t say anything, and when he reaches up to rub his unshaven jaw, I see his hands are shaking slightly.
“Things had been fucked up for a while,” he finally says. “Between Blanche and Bea, between Bea and Eddie, me and Blanche. It was all just toxic by that point. Which is why I was confused as fuck when Bea called me and asked me to come up.”
My blood turns cold. “What?”
Sighing, Tripp scrubs a hand over his face. “That weekend,” he says, sounding tired. “Bea called me that Friday night, said she thought Blanche needed me. So I got in the car, drove up to the lake, and yes, we all had a lot to drink, but I passed out in the house. I was never on that goddamn boat. I woke up the next morning in the guest bedroom, feeling like someone had jammed a railroad spike through my skull, and neither Bea nor Blanche were there. I assumed they’d taken the boat out early, and I left. Drove back home.”
His voice cracks and he takes a second to clear his throat, rubbing his face again. “I didn’t know. I went home that morning, and I watched fucking golf on TV, and all that time, they were both … they were already dead. They were … rotting in that water…”
There are tears in his eyes now. “It wasn’t until Monday, when she didn’t come home and I couldn’t get her on the phone that I even realized something was wrong.”
His bleary eyes focus on my face, and now there are no smirks, no gross lines. “I swear to you, I had nothing to do with any of it. Yes, I was there, and yes, I should’ve told the cops that immediately, but I was afraid of…” He makes a strained sound that’s too sad to be a laugh. “This. Fuck, I was afraid of this.”
His hands clutch my shoulders, hard enough that I think I’ll have bruises there. “I’m telling you, leave. I didn’t get on that boat, but my fingerprints are on it. I didn’t buy fucking rope and a hammer, but someone using my credit card did.”
There’s so much information coming at me at once that I barely know how to process it all, and I blink, trying to step out of Tripp’s hold, trying to wrap my head around what he’s implying.
“You’re saying someone framed you?”
“I’m saying you still have the chance to walk away from these fuckers.”
He lets me go, stepping back. “I wish to Christ I had.”
* * *
I tear the house apart.
I don’t know what I’m looking for, only that there has to be something, some proof that Eddie did this.
That’s what Tripp was trying to tell me, I know it, and so here I am, opening up closets, yanking out drawers.
Adele rushes around my feet, barking frantically, and there are tears in my eyes as I survey my destruction.
Books off shelves, heedlessly tumbled to the floor. Cushions pulled off the sofa.
I pick up anything heavy, all those tchotchkes from Southern Manors, looking for drops of blood. I go through the pockets of Eddie’s clothes. I push the mattress off our bed.
Something, something, there has to be something, you can’t kill two people and not leave some sign of it, you can’t. There are receipts, he’s hidden a murder weapon, there will be clothes with blood, I will find something.
An hour later—no, two, almost two and a half—I’m sitting on the floor of the coat closet at the front of the house, my head in my hands. Adele has lost interest in me now, and sits in the hall facing me, her snout resting on her paws.
I’ve lost my fucking mind.
The house is a wreck, and I’m too exhausted to even think about putting it back together again.
Tripp is right. I should leave. Get out while I can because even if it wasn’t Eddie, there’s something going on here, something so fucked up that no amount of money can make it worth it.
I’m just getting up from the floor when I see a jacket in the corner of the closet. It must’ve fallen off a hanger while I was in here acting like a madwoman, but I don’t remember seeing it.
I also don’t remember the last time I saw Eddie wear it.
When I pick it up, I notice immediately that it feels a little heavier on one side than the other, and my breath catches in my throat as my fingers close around something in the pocket.
But when I pull it out, it’s just a paperback book.
I imagine him, taking it to read somewhere, maybe at the office, maybe on his lunch break, and shoving it back in a pocket, forgetting about it.
I’ve seen Eddie reading plenty over the past few months, but always some boring military thriller. This is a romance novel, an older one with a pretty lurid cover, which doesn’t strike me as Eddie’s thing.
Maybe it was Bea’s. A favorite read, something he kept close to him.
I open the cover.
It takes me a minute to realize what I’m seeing, the spill of words written over the typed pages confusing and messy to my eyes.
And then I see Blanche scrawled on a page, and feel like my heart stops beating.