My Wife Is Missing(109)

Natalie had only one thought as she fit the key into the keyhole built into locker number 774: please don’t let me find a bloody knife. Natalie heard the click of the lock disengaging. She waited for Tina to show up to do the actual reveal, her hand poised to lift the latch. Tina came up behind Natalie, silent as a cat.

“What locker number is that?” asked Tina, who couldn’t see over Natalie’s shoulder. She sounded perplexed.

Natalie lifted the handle.

“774,” she said.

“774?” Tina repeated slowly. “Are you sure that’s the number?”

“That’s what’s on the key tag,” Natalie answered as she pulled the locker door open.

It was dark inside the locker. Once Natalie’s eyesight adjusted, however, she still couldn’t make sense of the items within. It was hardly what she’d expected to find, as none of the contents appeared to belong to Michael.

On the top shelf was a line of feminine products and women’s deodorant as well as Clinique face powder and hand creams from Aveeno and Burt’s Bees. Hanging on the three-pronged hook was a pink hoodie and a pin-striped suit jacket cut for a female figure. On the floor of the locker stood a gym bag with the words Dynamic Media and their logo stitched on the side. Next to that was a pair of women’s sandals and a folded-up blue towel.

At first Natalie thought she must have opened Audrey’s gym locker, but she recognized the suit jacket as one of Tina’s favorites.

“Well now, I wondered where that jacket had gone to,” Tina said after Natalie removed it from the locker. “I blamed the dry cleaners. Guess I’ll have to apologize.”

Natalie recalled Tina wearing that exact suit on the day she’d had her nightmare at work.

“Tina,” Natalie breathed out, standing frozen in place.

Tina replied with an uncomfortable laugh.

“Yeah, this is pretty screwed up,” Tina said to Natalie’s back. “I really thought that was Michael’s locker key you had with you. I really did.”

Natalie couldn’t move. She stood as still as a stone pillar, gazing into the locker, taking in the items before her, recognizing more of them as Tina’s, while the pieces slowly slid into place.

“I just haven’t been here in a while,” said Tina, sounding as if she was talking to herself, running through a series of events, then finally coming to grips with how this all came to be. “I didn’t even know I’d misplaced my locker key until this very moment. It didn’t even occur to me to ask you what the locker number was before we came here.

“Ah, shit. What a mess, Nat.”

Natalie recalled where she’d found the key: on the floor, under a dresser in Audrey’s bedroom—a hidden place that a missing key might likely turn up. Panic gripped her.

“I mean, I knew Audrey had Michael’s shirt because I put it there, but I didn’t think it was my key you found. Stupid, stupid, mistake.”

“You took Michael’s shirt?”

Tina returned a nod.

“He made it easy, always leaving his bag on the bench when he worked out. Didn’t look after it. Kept an extra shirt in there and so I took it. Audrey told me all about him, you know, after you showed her his picture, how his real name was Joseph Saunders—that people thought he killed her sister, Brianna, but she knew better. Joseph loved Brianna, or at least that’s what Audrey told me. Said he’d never hurt her sister. Never.”

“You knew … you lied to me.”

“I kept the truth from you. That’s not the same thing. And not without reason.”

“What reason could you have for not telling me?”

“A good one, but it doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

“I don’t understand. Why did you put Michael’s shirt in Audrey’s room?”

“Because I figured the police would find it, not you, silly, and they’d come after Michael. They’d put a story together. Something about Michael leaving his shirt there. The shirt would back up your story of Michael and Audrey having an affair and the police would be on his tail. Linking the shirt to Michael was a concern, but with his background, I figured the police were likely to have his DNA in some crime database. If not, I’d drop them an anonymous tip and they could go get samples to make a match. However they got to Michael, there were several possible motives for him to murder Audrey. Maybe she figured out who he really was and threatened to expose him. Or it could have been a crime of passion. It happens with lovers. Whatever the motive, the police would be all over Michael. Then you took the shirt, and I had to improvise.

“When you said you’d found a key, I just assumed it was tucked inside the fabric folds and I didn’t realize it when I put the shirt in the plastic bag.”

“I found the key on the floor, under the dresser,” Natalie breathed out.

“Well, no wonder I couldn’t find it. That was an important detail you didn’t share with me. Guess I shouldn’t have assumed anything.”

“Chris,” Natalie then whispered to herself, thinking of assumptions she had made. “Not Michael Christopher … Christina. Or Tina for short. You. You’re Audrey’s Chris.”

“Yeah,” said Tina, followed by a sigh of regret coupled with a sad little laugh. “That was Audrey being clever. She wasn’t going to tell you about us, not then anyway. We were still planning to stay a secret, and I’m sure she didn’t know Michael’s middle name, so—unlucky coincidence there.”