My Wife Is Missing(79)
Michael’s eyes were kind, but in his voice, she heard the distinct undercurrent of another threat.
Get your shit together, or I’ll get the kids away from you.
She could confront him on it, push him for his true intentions, but Natalie didn’t want things to escalate. She returned what she hoped was an appreciative nod.
“Thanks for caring,” she said as sweetly as she could manage. “I’ll think about that getaway … and your other suggestion.”
“Good,” Michael said, as if that had settled matters. “You want help cleaning up?” He gestured to the mess.
“I’ve got it, thanks,” said Natalie.
“Okay, then I’ll get dinner started.”
He planted a quick kiss on her cheek before departing.
After she was sure he was gone, Natalie slumped into her office chair, decompressing. Michael may have left the room, but his words (his implied threat?) lingered.
Natalie set about her cleanup effort thinking, planning what to do next. Sarah had done a deep dive on Michael, but not on Audrey Adler, which made sense. The police were looking into Audrey’s life, and it was more as a favor (or morbid curiosity, as Sarah had put it) that she went looking into Michael’s.
Now, Natalie wondered what an investigation into Audrey might reveal. Was there more to her gruesome murder than a secret love gone sour? Sarah had mentioned investigating all kinds of corporate misdeeds. She hated Michael for his affair, his many betrayals, but it would still be a relief to get proof that the father of her children wasn’t a killer. Perhaps Audrey had gotten herself caught up in something nefarious, which might mean Michael wasn’t responsible for her death.
She suspected this inquiry into Audrey was a waste of time, but what did she have to lose? While she wasn’t a trained investigator like Sarah, and a Google search had revealed nothing of consequence other than what the newspapers had already reported, she did have the pictures she’d taken with her phone inside Audrey’s home. She breezed through the photos of the living room and foyer. Nothing there. But who was the girl in the framed photographs decorating Audrey’s hallway? She was someone important to her, that much was obvious. The papers had made no mention of Audrey’s family, but that girl had to be her sister. Natalie took out her phone and confirmed that the likeness between the pair was too similar to be anything else. Both girls had reddish hair, a similar mouth shape, full lips, a dappling of freckles.
Why was there no mention of a sister, or parents for that matter, in the news reports?
Natalie thought of calling Sarah Fielding for guidance, though she would first attempt this on her own. Could she identify a person using a photograph, a web search for facial recognition? She googled that very subject on her phone and got plenty of hits. One site in particular seemed especially promising—BitEyes advertised itself as a reverse image search. The instructions were simple enough: upload a photo and find where images with that face appeared online.
Creepy, Natalie thought, but she did just that, uploading a cropped image of the girl she presumed to be Audrey’s sister. She knew Audrey, a murder victim, would get plenty of hits.
The reverse image search completed in a matter of seconds, returning a series of images that depicted the mystery girl’s face. She was online. In fact, she was all over the internet, it seemed. But who was she? To get that information, the corresponding URLs for each image returned in the search required Natalie to pony up $19.99 for a one-month subscription, which she had no problem paying.
The problem came moments later when Natalie clicked on the first image in the results. As the webpage loaded, the headline immediately jumped out at her:
FORMER BOYFRIEND CHARGED IN MURDER OF WESTCHESTER’S BRIANNA SYKES
A color photograph below the headline showed a young man dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt, with the words Rye Wrestling stenciled in white. His hands were shackled in front of him and a uniformed officer kept a tight grip on his arm. The young man appeared to be in shock, his eyes blank, staring straight at the camera. There was a second image overlapping that one, a photograph of a girl—the victim, Natalie supposed. She had no doubt this was the girl whose photos hung in Audrey’s hallway.
But the boy. An icy chill came over her as she studied the young man in handcuffs. His face wasn’t just familiar, it was seared into her being. It was older, now weathered from years of toil and struggle, but it was him, she had no doubt about it.
It was her husband, only so much younger.
But the name printed below his picture read: Joseph Jacob Saunders.
CHAPTER 34
NATALIE
It was her first night sleeping—or more accurately, trying to sleep—at the farm.
A symphony of night critters, crickets, and katydids had come out after the rainstorm passed. They called to each other outside Natalie’s bedroom window, making an incessant cacophonous buzzing like the steady rumble of a subway train. Wind rustled the leaves of a giant maple in the yard, and the sound of its branches scraped her ears. Every groan of a pipe or creaking wood plank, the sounds of a house settling for the night, all made it impossible for her to sleep. An antique wall clock ticked off each second she lay awake like a cruel taunt.
Natalie sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. She turned on a bedside lamp. There was a stack of old paperbacks underneath the nightstand—maybe she’d read herself to sleep. Everything suddenly slipped out of focus, and for a moment Natalie felt quite disoriented. Her vision soon cleared, and as she reached for a book, Natalie caught sight of a slim shadow passing in the hallway outside her bedroom door.