Locust Lane(77)

“It’s not true.”

“Which part?”

“None of it.”

“But your legal troubles are public rec…”

Alice hung up. An objective observer might have told her that was a mistake, but there didn’t happen to be any of those around. Just us chickens, she thought. This made her laugh for a moment.

“Just us chickens,” she said out loud.

She started to cry. Softly, but with conviction. The house phone rang. It was the reporter again, calling for Geoff. Alice listened as the woman’s voice echoed through the vast kitchen. She wasn’t worried; Geoff had gone to the lab. After the beep, Alice erased the message. They wouldn’t have his cell phone. Nobody did. Geoff and his secrets.

How? was all she could think. Somebody must have been tapping Michel’s phone. Something had come up on the computer they’d seized from him. They’d followed him last night. Or her. She thought they’d been so careful, but clearly she was wrong.

She picked up a marble pestle from the counter and threw it as hard as she could across the kitchen. It sailed right through the door into the den, where it harmlessly struck the back of the sectional. She looked around the kitchen. Her eyes came to rest on the Wüsthof carving knives and she contemplated opening a seam in herself from navel to sternum. Probably better to warn Michel about the article. But she couldn’t imagine their conversation. Sorry, hon, I seem to have ruined any chance your son might have of escaping life in the big house. Wanna meet later? Your parking lot or mine? In the end, she sent him nothing. He might as well have one more night of hope. She also considered calling Hannah, but she would already know all about this. Any chance of her opening up to Alice had evaporated.

Instead, she got the vodka from the freezer and went up to her room. She took a long sip. Hello darkness, my new friend. She should just vanish. The prenup was pretty elastic as far as adultery was concerned. Geoff would fight her, but she’d still wind up with a couple mil. Maybe she’d finally give New York a try, now that she’d added the two missing ingredients needed to make it there—material security and moral bankruptcy.

But she wasn’t going anywhere. The idea of abandoning Michel was just too painful to contemplate. Night staggered along. She got through about a third of the bottle as she sat in front of the newspaper’s website, clicking refresh every few seconds. Typical, she thought. Two hundred years since her neighbor Hawthorne died and she still managed to get a scarlet letter pinned on her cardigan. The vodka didn’t put her to sleep; it only transported her to a much more problematic kind of wakefulness. It was two a.m. and then three a.m. She nodded off at one point but that cast her into a sixty-second free fall that ended with her splattering on the asphalt of a parking lot. So much for sleep.

They posted the article at five. “An Untimely Affair: Secret Dalliance Rocks Eden Murder Case.” The photo told the whole story. Michel and Alice up in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. The article started out plainly factual. The suspect’s father was spotted in an intimate situation at a remote location with the stepmother of one of the prosecution’s chief witnesses. The writers then shifted gears to innuendo, suggesting “it remained to be seen” if Alice had been the author of the Twitter thread that had “shaken” the community on Friday. And then there was her past, capped off by Leander and Jill back in the Land of Enchantment. Sounding like victims, as if they hadn’t had the time of their lives out in the pool house, sharing her like a big bag of movie theater popcorn. Celia had her say, sounding mournful and betrayed. Michel couldn’t be reached; his lawyer had no comment. The only small consolation Alice could take was that they hadn’t unearthed Roman, the erotic photographer in South Beach. Yet.

Geoff woke just after six. She heard him in the bathroom and then she heard him in his office. A minute passed and then she heard him leave his office. And then he was standing in the doorway. She rarely saw Geoff angry. It wasn’t a pretty sight. His face would get so pinched that it looked like he’d entered a denser gravitational field.

“You hurt my daughter.”

“It had to be done.”

“It had to be done? Are you for real? You publicly accused her of lying to help Jack.”

“Jack raped Eden Perry and then he went back later and killed her to shut her up.”

“You’re wrong. He was here all night.”

“You couldn’t possibly know that! You were dead to the world. I could have lit your sweatpants on fire and you wouldn’t have known until your legs were extra crispy. You’re lying, Geoff. To me and to the cops. Because Oliver Parrish told you to.”

“Why would I lie for him?”

“Because he knows it was your brain candy the kids took. He knows that if he told the world, you’d be fucked out of a shitload of money.”

“Who told you they were my drugs?”

“Hannah.”

This stopped him in his tracks.

“And you fucked around with the security footage, too. Don’t deny it, Geoff. I saw you doing it. You know I did. I even saw the two of you in his car in the middle of the night.”

He stared at her and she thought she had him. She really did. But then he smiled bitterly and shook his head.

“God. You and your imagination. You got it so wrong.”

“Do I? How so?”