Good Girl Bad (6)
“What about the dog?” Rebecca asks, her voice high. She has one arm wrapped around Gen, and Nate moves forward to give his youngest daughter a hug. He strokes her hair and pulls her head onto his chest, murmuring gentle words to her. Gen starts crying quietly again, but Nate can’t tell if she’s worried about Tabby or if she’s crying for Charlie.
“Yes, the dog is concerning.” The officer consults his notebook, as though that will help him clarify what has happened here, what the solution might be. But he doesn’t add anything else, and Nate grits his teeth.
“What happened last night?” Nate turns to Rebecca, his voice tight. “Did you have a fight? With Tabby? With Leroy? How was she yesterday? Did she seem okay?”
Rebecca’s face closes. “She was fine. Wasn’t she, Gen? Except…” Here she glances at the officers uneasily. “Apparently she quit her job months ago. But she’s been pretending to go every Saturday like usual. Did you know that?” Her tone is accusatory, as though Nate being privy to something she wasn’t privy to was the worst thing about that piece of information. She sounds defensive, and so she should be, thinks Nate. Saturday is Rebecca’s day to look after the kids. What else was she not keeping track of?
Nate shakes his head slowly. “So where was she going?” he asks, his eyes conveying the challenge he would never dare to say aloud: Why weren’t you looking after her properly? Why weren’t you paying more attention?
But the police officer interrupts them. “We’ll be off now. But do keep in touch and get back to us if they haven’t turned up by tomorrow.” He goes to hand Nate a card but Rebecca snatches it out of his hand, her eyes flashing. “Great,” she snaps. “Just great. I’m telling you that things were tense between them.”
This is news to Nate, and he looks up sharply.
“I am one hundred percent sure they wouldn’t go off sightseeing together. And leave their phones and wallets behind. Something is wrong, and isn’t it your job to find out what?”
“Whoa, whoa, back up a minute,” Nate interjects, nodding to the officers who are heading for the door, despite Rebecca’s wrath. He assumes she has discussed this tension with them and their assessment of the situation still stands, so he says, “Thank you, officers. We’ll be in touch.” Then he turns back to Rebecca. “What’s this tension between Leroy and Tab? How long has it been like that? Did something happen?” He knows his suspicions are written all over his face, that Rebecca can see through him, can even probably anticipate the self-satisfied “I told you so” on the tip of his tongue, but he doesn’t want it to be true. He wouldn’t mind being right for once, in this particular relationship, but not about this. Despite his eager jumping on this news, he really does just want to find Tabby and check she’s okay.
That she’s not fooling around with Leroy, who even Nate has to admit is shockingly good-looking.
Sexy. Alluring.
“It’s nothing.” Rebecca stares back at him coldly. “He’s just been really on board with parenting her, and she resists it, you know? Says he’s not her dad. Yada yada yada. Exactly what you’d expect from a sixteen-year-old toward her stepfather setting boundaries.”
Nate studies his ex-wife carefully. There’s something she’s not telling him, but he can’t guess what it is. Is it a subtle dig, that he’s not pulling his weight in the parenting department? That Leroy has had to take up the slack?
“Where is Leroy on Saturdays when Tabby does her vanishing act?” he shoots back, and for a moment he sees a flash of doubt on Rebecca’s face. She composes herself instantly though, looking at him pityingly. “My husband is not looking for any extracurricular entertainment, Nathan,” she says archly. “We are extremely happy. If you want to know so much about what our daughter gets up to, perhaps you should do a little more with her yourself.” And Nate winces, because it’s true, he used to have the girls more, he used to have Tabby on Saturdays in fact, but things had come up, life had gotten in the way, and Tabby wasn’t even home on Saturdays anyway, so what did it matter if they were at Rebecca’s house just one extra day a week? He still had them two days a week, and for most of the holidays.
His thoughts are interrupted though, by a small sob from Genevieve, and Nate realizes with a guilty start that he had forgotten she was even there, listening, and maybe Rebecca was right, maybe he was a shit dad.
Who would focus on making accusations rather than comforting their daughter?
“Hey, hey,” he says, his face softening, and he reaches for Gen again, pulling her small, compact little frame into his arms. “Let’s think about a funeral for Charlie, hey? We’ll have it when Tabby’s back. But we could make some plans, now. Maybe choose a tree to plant?” Nate’s mind is working overtime. He’s never been a fan of dogs, but he knows Genevieve is going to need a lot of support over this.
And also, he wouldn’t mind taking her out of Rebecca’s house and asking a few more questions about what she saw last night.
Not least because he might have been parked outside her house for a good portion of it.
5
Five Months Earlier
When Rebecca gets home from work, Tabby and Freddy are sitting at the kitchen bench, eating pancakes.