Two Truths and a Lie(42)
The church was packed, of course. Madison’s mother, unable even to hold herself up, was supported on one side by Madison’s father, and on the other by a man who looked enough like the mother—the same ginger hair and pale eyebrows—that he was probably Madison’s uncle. At one point in the service, as the priest was shaking the incense over the coffin, Madison’s mother let out the loudest, most unearthly wail that Sherri had ever heard.
Was Bobby aware of what happened after that? It got so Sherri couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. He was out a lot. That helped. But when he was home, if they passed each other, in the kitchen, in the hallway, she found herself turning at a slight angle so that their arms wouldn’t brush up against each other. Did he notice her doing that? Did he notice how she threw all of her focus into Katie, into making sure she didn’t know anything was wrong? They baked a lot. Sherri encouraged Katie to invite friends to sleep over and in the mornings she made pancakes for all of the girls. But the specter of Madison was there, all the time.
Sherri joined a Facebook page devoted to Madison’s memory. She read every single post and every single comment. She drank up details about Madison like a cactus taking in water in the desert. Madison ran the thousand meters in indoor track and the mile outdoors. She was a counselor in training at a summer camp in New Hampshire, where she specialized in teaching swimming lessons to special needs children.
Sherri found out where Madison’s family lived. She took to driving by the house at all hours, hoping for a glimpse of someone in the Miller family, a small morsel to feed her hunger. The parents, the brothers, Betty the dog. Once she saw a minivan in the driveway. Two boys got out, both in baseball uniforms, with mitts. The younger one was punching his fist again and again into the mitt, to soften it, or out of anger.
What must it be like to be these boys, the brothers of a dead girl? Sherri wondered. To grow up alongside a ghost?
The mother got out several minutes later. She walked slowly to the front door of the house, and Sherri thought about all of the tasks she must have ahead of her: dinner to prepare, the third brother to be collected from wherever he was, Betty the dog to feed and walk, all with the unanswered question of her daughter’s death hanging over her.
How could anyone bear this? How could life go on? But it had to.
For Sherri, life went on, and on, and on. Meals. Katie’s schedule, her dance classes and dentist appointments. Sex. Bobby couldn’t have known how much she dreaded the sex by that point. He probably didn’t know that after every time she scrubbed herself extra hard, until her skin turned pink and raw.
Breakfasts, and dinners, the packing of Katie’s lunch box and the dropping off and picking up of the dry cleaning. On all of these tasks Madison Miller accompanied Sherri, like a pet parrot attached firmly to her shoulder.
To the dark Web she went, again and again, every time she was alone in the house. She found photos of Madison that weren’t on the news. Pictures of her body as it had been found. Her face was swollen, unrecognizable. Sherri only looked at that picture once, and she never let herself do it again, but she also never forgot it.
The charm necklace came up in some of the posts, because Madison had been wearing it when she disappeared, and she wasn’t wearing it when she was found. Sherri saw photos of the necklace online: the ruby, the sixteen, the MRM. Her parents had given it to her for her sixteenth birthday, four months before she disappeared.
When Sherri thought of Madison’s parents choosing that necklace and watching as Madison opened the box it came in, her heart broke in a thousand little pieces.
All this time, Sherri stayed aware of what was in Bobby’s hiding place under the register. The contents changed again and again. Once when it was money Sherri took some and left it in Madison Miller’s mailbox, in a plain white envelope. Would Bobby notice? Would Madison’s parents trace it to Sherri somehow? She hadn’t thought to wear gloves. But she’d never been fingerprinted, so a record of her prints wouldn’t exist. Sherri imagined the Millers using the money to treat the three brothers to something special: a meal out, maybe, or a day at the ballpark.
Did Bobby know that every time he left the house she pulled off the grate with trembling hands, moved the floor tiles, looked to see what was different?
Sometimes there were zip drives. Often there was money in different denominations and currencies. Passports for people she didn’t recognize. And then one day there was a new box, and in that box was a charm necklace with a ruby, a number sixteen, the initials MRM.
Some women complain about their husbands being messy, the socks they leave around, the toothpaste with the cap off, the toilet seat up. Sherri had nothing like that to say about Bobby. He was always fastidious, about his clothes, his things, his business. He never left things lying around. He was so careful. When the housekeeper came, sometimes she’d joke about how there was nothing for her to do. Every now and then Sherri would leave a few dishes in the sink, a wineglass in the living room, so they would look like a normal, careless family, a family with clutter, a family with nothing to hide because it was all laid out in little piles on the kitchen island, on the end tables.
In the end, though, he wasn’t careful enough.
33.
Rebecca
Rebecca was in the kitchen, looking through her favorite food blog, Dinner by Dad, to find something to make that night. It would be fun if Daniel could come over for dinner, she’d enjoy cooking for him, watching him interact with her daughters. Daughter. Alexa was never home for dinner. They were in the kitchen, Morgan sitting at the island and Rebecca leaning against it, eyes on her laptop.