My Wife Is Missing(49)

Confront. Confront. Confront.

But whom could she confront? Michael wasn’t here, or at least his Audi with the dent in the bumper wasn’t.

She went through it again—the “tells” Audrey and Michael had given her.

The gym. Chris. Brown hair. Fit. Trim. Super attractive. Married. Two kids. Nervously drums his fingers. Their strong reactions to the photos. Natalie didn’t need to see Michael’s dented car to know.

It was enough, more than enough to confront someone, and seeing as Michael wasn’t available to be on the receiving end, Natalie settled for person number two on her hit list.

Audrey Adler herself.

The time had come. Enough of this, she told herself.

Inhaling a deep breath to inflate her resolve, Natalie climbed the stairs to the front door. She rang the doorbell, folding her arms across her chest as she waited. She heard no footsteps. Nobody came to the door. She rang the doorbell again, two chimes sounded, hollow to her ears.

But Natalie was set on her mission and decided to turn the knob only to discover the door was unlatched. Before she could process what she was doing, Natalie was giving the door a gentle push to open it wider.

Staying rooted on the front stoop, she called out into a darkened hallway, “Audrey? Are you home? It’s Natalie Hart. We need to talk. Now.”

She slipped an edge of authority into her voice, but there was a hint of uncertainty as well. Something felt off. Emboldened, Natalie opened the door wider to poke her head just beyond the threshold.

I shouldn’t be doing this.

She paused, feeling an unfamiliar beat of fear. Glancing down a darkened hallway, Natalie couldn’t see past a table that held a vase with a few orange flowers in it.

I shouldn’t go in, but I have to.

She took out her phone to check the time. 8:37. She told Scarlett she’d be back by nine thirty at the latest. There was plenty of time to figure out what was going on. A car zoomed by and the word “witness” came to Natalie’s mind.

Witness—because you shouldn’t be here, she told herself.

“I can see your car in the driveway,” Natalie said to no one. “I’d like to speak with you, and you know what it’s about.”

An eerie feeling washed over her. The apartment was as still as could be. Her heart beat erratically. Sweat dappled the nape of her neck. She took a cautious step inside and headed to her right, through a doorway into a living room, which held little more than a couch, love seat, and TV resting on a console table. A lone floor lamp was the same one that backlit those gauzy curtains. She used her phone to take pictures of the room. Right now she was too nervous to search carefully for evidence of Michael’s presence, but perhaps the photos would reveal something of consequence she’d catch later, when she could view them under less precarious conditions.

“Hello,” Natalie cried out again, her voice echoing in the stillness. “Audrey, are you here?”

She had a passing thought that Michael and Audrey had left together in his car, and forgot to shut and lock the door on their way out. An oversight. Great sex could addle the brain, same as lack of sleep.

“Audrey?”

Natalie reentered the foyer, took a few more pictures, before venturing down the unlit hallway farther into the home. All appeared normal, but something felt off. She had an intense feeling, unsettling to say the least, and she couldn’t ignore that type of intuition.

“Hello?”

Natalie’s voice sank into the gloom. She took each step slowly, carefully, pausing to listen. As she proceeded, Natalie noticed a set of framed photos hanging on the walls. All three photographs were of two girls—the older one was somewhere in her late teens, utterly gorgeous, with long strawberry-blond hair and a delicate face. The younger girl, her arms draped around her companion with a smile like the sunrise, was no doubt Audrey Adler in her much younger years.

Who is the older girl? Natalie wondered.

Curious, Natalie used her phone to take a digital picture of the framed photographs. While the photos clearly had nothing to do with Michael, at that moment Natalie wanted to know everything she could about the woman who was more important to her husband than she was.

What other mysteries did the house contain?

Checking a closed door to her right, Natalie poked her head into a small bathroom. She kept the light off, didn’t bother looking around, nothing to see here. She closed that door before making her way deeper into the condo. Another door to her right revealed a bedroom. The duvet was on the floor; the sheets were rumpled. Natalie felt sick to her stomach thinking about what took place on that bed. Too sick to take a picture, so her phone went back into her pocket. She picked up an odd odor, a musty kind of smell, not the scent of sex. It was coming from somewhere else, so she backed out of the bedroom, focused now on a bright glow spilling out from a doorway at the end of the hall.

Natalie swallowed hard as she looked for, and found, the source of that light. Her heart stopped nearly mid-beat at the sight. Audrey Adler was spread out supine on the kitchen floor, floating in a lake of blood. The white blouse she’d worn to work that day was soaked in crimson. The blood appeared to have come from multiple wounds to her abdomen, but the stained blouse made it hard to tell where the bleeding had originated. Shards of a broken green plate littered the floor near Audrey’s inert form.

A low moan like a rattling wind escaped from Natalie’s lips. She stood in the doorway, arms and legs shaking with fright. She’d never seen a dead person before, and really shouldn’t have assumed Audrey was gone, but she knew. Maybe it was the odd angle of her head, or the faraway look in her eyes, or perhaps the stark paleness of her face that told her Audrey Adler had breathed her last breath.