I rolled over onto my side, opened my eyes, and looked at the clock on the bedside table. Nearly eight. Jesus. I almost never slept that late. There was some momentary panic as I thought about being late to an appointment with a potential client, then realized that not only was it Saturday, but that my appointment was on Friday and had already happened.

I turned back over again to see whether Jayne was awake and found her staring at me with one eye, half her head buried into the pillow, her brown hair splayed across it. She flashed half a smile at me.

“Morning, Andrew,” she said with mock formality.

“It’s almost eight,” I said. “How long you been awake?”

“Five minutes, maybe,” she said. “I was watching you. Woke you up with my mind.”

I grinned and slipped one arm around her under the covers and pulled her closer to me. “You have great powers.”

“Indeed,” she said, and gave me a kiss so light it was as if she’d brushed a feather across my lips. “I can read minds, too.”

“Okay,” I said. “What am I thinking?”

I guess she rolled both her eyes, but I only saw one. “Too easy. Give me something hard.”

I smiled. “Amazing. Got it on the first guess.”

It took her a second, and then she grinned. “I was actually going to guess French toast. Your usual Saturday morning demand.”

“Okay, maybe that, too. In a bit.”

Jayne shifted in closer to me, pressing her body up against mine. I caught a glimpse of the open bedroom door.

“Might want to close that,” I said.

She whirled around, saw the door, threw back the covers, and got out of bed. Her oversized T hung down almost to her knees. As she padded toward the door, she stopped halfway, turned, and said, “Did you hear him come in last night?”

I tried to recollect. “No,” I said. The truth was, I didn’t really listen for Tyler Keeling the way she did. He was her brother, after all, not mine, and while that didn’t mean I didn’t care about his welfare, he was biologically more her worry.

“I don’t think I did, either,” Jayne said.

Tyler had texted around ten-thirty, promising his sister he’d be home before eleven, or soon after, that he was just about to leave his friend’s place. Jayne had offered to go pick him up, wherever he was, but he’d said no problem, one of his other buddies, who was old enough to drive and had his mom’s Hyundai, would drop him off. He’d left his bike at home, not wanting to take it out at night in case someone swiped it when he left it outside his friend’s house. Locks weren’t much of a deterrent when the thief was determined enough.

Jayne had texted, OK, and felt she could go to bed, confident that he’d be home soon after she was asleep.

But now, as she stood between the bed and the door, I could see doubt cross her face.

“I’m just gonna check,” she said, and slipped out of the room and down the hall. I sat up in bed and waited. She was back in under ten seconds.

“His bed hasn’t been slept in,” she said.

“Maybe he’s already up.” But even as I said it, I knew how unlikely that was. It was Saturday morning. Tyler would not be up early, and even if he were an early riser, he wasn’t one to make his bed without being reminded.

“I don’t think so,” Jayne said.

“Shit,” I said, and threw back the covers. I was in a pair of boxers, decent enough to mount a search of the house.

I slipped past Jayne in the hallway and shot a look into Tyler’s room myself. The bed was made.

“You don’t believe me?” Jayne said.

I went down the stairs and into the kitchen. No sign of him there, either. No bowl in the sink, no half-eaten banana left on the table. Jayne had her phone in her hand and was getting ready to text him or maybe phone him, when I happened to look out the kitchen’s sliding glass doors that opened on the backyard deck.

“Jayne,” I said.

She was already tapping. “What?”

“Outside.”

She came up alongside me and took in the view. Tyler was sprawled out on one of the recliners, arms circled around himself to keep warm, the blue hoodie not quite up to the job. I noticed what appeared to be a smudge of vomit on his sleeve, an observation that was confirmed by the puddle of puke on the deck about four feet away.

“Jesus,” Jayne said, unlocking the door and sliding it back on its track. She stepped out onto the deck, and I was one step behind her, the planking cold under my feet and damp with dew the morning sun had yet to burn off. I let Jayne take the lead here.

“Tyler,” she said, standing over him. Then, more sharply, “Tyler!”

He stirred slightly and opened one eye. “Oh,” he said. “Hey.”

“When did you come home?” his sister asked.

“Um, not exactly sure,” he said, struggling to sit up.

“Go in and clean yourself up,” she said, waiting as he managed to get to his feet.

As he passed me, I could smell the booze, and the vomit, on him. I held him back gently by the arm and pointed to the mess he’d left on the deck. “Hose is over there, pal.”

“I’m not your pal,” he muttered without looking me in the eye.

I told Jayne I was making a run to Home Depot for some bags of weed and feed. The scraggly front lawn was clearly in need of some springtime TLC.

Once I was behind the wheel of the Explorer I drove out of my Stratford neighborhood, across the bridge that spanned the Housatonic and headed for the east end of Milford, where I used to live, with my wife, Brie. I avoided not just this part of Milford, but all of it, as much as I could. Not so much because familiar sights triggered unpleasant memories. I didn’t need familiar sights for that.

I just didn’t want to run into people I knew.

There was still a risk of that, of course, living in nearby Stratford. But at least the risk was reduced, going to different stores, frequenting different restaurants. Had I never moved, still been a fixture on Mulberry, I’d have had to deal with the inevitable questions and comments, even six years after Brie disappeared.

“Have you heard anything, anything at all?”

“The not-knowing must be the worst of it, right?”

“I can only imagine how much you must need some sense of closure.”

You could guess the questions on the minds of those who chose to say nothing.

“Did you do it?”

“You feel pretty smug, thinking you got away with it?”

Or just:

“Why?”

I’d stayed in the Mulberry house for the better part of a year after it happened, and would have moved away sooner had I been able to sell the house more quickly. But the place was tainted. Prospective buyers, one way or another, had heard the stories about the current owners, or, more accurately, owner. There was no actual evidence anything grisly had actually happened on the property. It wasn’t as if someone had been buried in the basement or tucked a body away in the attic. But that didn’t do much to tamp down some potential purchasers’ anxieties. At least I was allowed to sell it. I’d registered the house in the name of my company. If it had been jointly owned with Brie, and I’d needed her signature to complete any sales deal, the house would still be there, and in all likelihood I’d still be living in it.

The plan had always been to do major renovations on the place, knock out some walls, blow out the attic to make a more usable third floor, redo the kitchen. Maybe live there, maybe sell it. Buying an older house, renovating it while we lived in it, and then selling it, was something we’d done three times before, and Brie was more than fed up with living that way. It was a major source of tension that nearly ruined our marriage. That, and a couple of other things. This house on Mulberry was one we were debating whether to settle in permanently.

The basic structure of the house — the bones, I called it — had been good. There was something to work with there, but everything about the place was out-of-date. It needed to be rewired, the plumbing was a catastrophe waiting to happen. I’d ripped away the drywall on some of the exterior walls and found insulation black with mold. The previous owner had been there for nearly fifty years, since the late seventies, and hadn’t done much beyond replacing the roof shingles. Those avocado appliances in the kitchen were but one item on a very long list of things that had to go. And that pink toilet in the upstairs bathroom?

“Don’t get me started,” Brie used to say.

But once everything went to shit, and my life became a public spectacle, fodder for true crime shows and social media speculation, I needed a fresh start. The house finally sold for about ten percent under what I was asking, and I felt lucky to get that. I found my current residence across the river in Stratford, but I hadn’t actually bought the place. I found it difficult to make decisions that involved permanence, so I was leasing with an option to buy.

I was, for a very long time, a mess. Having your wife disappear, and hearing the whispers behind your back that you’re responsible, will do that to you.

I lost my friends, except for one, and for a long stretch lost work. Nobody was keen to hire the guy who might have killed his wife and gotten rid of her body. I drank. A lot. I found alcohol helpful because when I was sober, I couldn’t sleep. At least drinking would put me out for a while.

If I had any real goal in the first three years or so after Brie vanished, it was to achieve a total state of numbness. I wanted to feel nothing. Happiness and contentment were off the table, but I didn’t want the flip side, either. The booze helped block the depression and the guilt and the grieving.

At least, up to a point.

One day, waking up fully clothed in an empty bathtub with no memory of how I got there, I decided that it was time to make a choice. Kill yourself, or get your shit together. I chose the latter. That one good friend helped me get through it.

And I got better, but I never fully pulled out of that dark place. Not until I met Jayne Keeling one day when her car stalled in the drive-through line at McDonald’s, blocking half a dozen vehicles behind her, including mine. I came to her rescue, got her car moving, and something just clicked between us.

That was when I forced the door shut on all that had happened to me in the preceding six years. I didn’t want Jayne to have even a peek into that room. I was afraid if she knew what I had been through, what some suspected me of having done, she’d walk away. Brie was gone and the world would have to carry on without ever knowing what had happened to her.

And then came the call from Max.

I did not know what to make of it.

“I think it was Brie.”

My wife, missing for six years and presumed, by many, to be dead, had shown up at my old address?

Impossible.

I figured, if I went over there in person, I might be able to extract more detail from him. He’d also said a girl living in the house that had been built on the site of my former home had seen this woman. Maybe I could talk to her, too.

I had the sense that my universe, such as it was, was on the verge of some kind of... unraveling.

There was so much I had not told Jayne.

Max had been expecting me, and was sitting on his porch when I pulled up in front of his house, parking the Explorer at the curb. He came down to greet me, extended a hand.

“Andy,” he said. “Nice... to see you.”

Nice and awkward was more like it. Max and I had been good neighbors to each other, chatting on trash pickup day when we would find ourselves bringing garbage and recycling to the street at the same time. If he needed a special drill attachment, he could borrow one from me. If I ran short of ice on a Saturday night, Max could provide. Brie and I occasionally socialized with him and his wife, Ruth. A backyard barbecue once or twice a year. But we weren’t what you would call close.

Max told me basically the same story he’d related over the phone. The black Volvo pulling into the driveway, the woman getting out and looking at the house, distressed that it was not the one she expected to find. His description of the woman was imprecise. She kind of looked like Brie, but he couldn’t swear to it. The closest he got to her was probably forty feet.

“But who else would be shocked to find the house gone?” he asked. “I heard that the McGuires, who you bought the original house from, have all passed, so, who else would come back here expecting to find a house that got torn down a long time ago?”

I had no idea how to respond to that.

As we stood in his driveway, I looked at the home that now stood where mine had been. It was a dramatic-looking building. Angular, modern, lots of glass. It didn’t fit in with the other, older houses on the street, but the neighborhood was slowly evolving, and in another ten years, as more homes came down and new ones went up, no one would give this place a second look.

I noticed, mounted discreetly under the eaves, a small glass bubble. A security camera with a wide-angle view.

I left Max standing there as I crossed the property line, went up to the front door, and rang the bell. It was one of those camera doorbells you see advertised all the time on television. It had the ability to capture a decent image of someone on the front step, but that camera below the eaves would have a broader field of vision.

The door was opened by a tall, portly man in his forties. I wracked my brain, trying to remember the name of the buyer on the property transaction from several years ago, but it wouldn’t come.

“Yes?” he said.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said. “My name’s Andrew. I used to live here. Well, not in this house. But the house that was torn down to build this one.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “Andrew Mason?”

I didn’t see the point in correcting him. That was my name at the time, and was the name on all the real estate documents. The fact that my name was now Andrew Carville didn’t seem important right now.

“Yes,” I said. “I know I should know your name but I can’t pull it up.”

“Brian,” he said. “Brian Feehan.”

“Right,” I said, now remembering that there were two names on the documents. “And your wife is Sonia.”

“Yes.”

“Your neighbor, Max? He gave me a call a short while ago to tell me about something he witnessed. Here.” I waved my hand toward the driveway. “Something that your, I’m guessing, daughter, something she saw as well?”

Brian slowly nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It was very strange. A woman. She caused quite a scene. There were groceries spilled all over the place. Is that what you’ve come for? Because we did save them. We gathered them up in a bag. It’s in the kitchen.”

“Very kind of you, but no, that’s not what I was wondering about.” I pointed a finger skyward. “You’ve got a security system.”

“Yes.”

“I’m hoping you’d let me have a look at the incident. I’m guessing your system records video, saves it for a period of time. And this would be just a short while ago.”

Brian eyed me warily. “Why’s this a concern of yours?”

“Mr. Feehan, I’m sure you knew what I’d been going through when I sold this property to you. The personal tragedy I was dealing with.”

He nodded. “I... was aware.”

“Of course you were. It’s one of the reasons you were able to get the property for ten percent under what I was asking. It had a history.” I didn’t know, when I sold, that my house would be torn down and replaced with another. I wondered if the house’s notorious past was a factor for the Feehans, or if they’d planned to rip down the house regardless. Had Brie not disappeared, we might very well have taken the same path, and replaced it with something as nice as what the Feehans had built.

I continued: “Without getting into the specifics, Max believes what he saw might have some bearing on my situation. That’s why I’d be grateful if you’d let me see what he saw.”

The look I saw in Brian Feehan’s eyes was one I’d seen before many times in the last six years. What’s your game? he was wondering. What are you hiding? Why should I help someone like you?

“Please,” I said. “It’s probably nothing, but then again, it might be important.”

He studied me for another second, then said, “Wait here.”

He went back into the house and closed the door. He returned a minute later with a touch-screen tablet. He’d already opened an app that accessed his household security system. On the screen were four video boxes, like we were about to have a Zoom chat with a few friends who’d not yet stepped into the frames. In each box was a different view of the property. One showed the backyard, two others offered views down the side of the house, and one was fixed on the driveway and the street beyond.

“I’m scrolling back to early this morning,” he said. “It’s motion-activated, so when something moves into any camera’s field of vision, it begins to record.”

I knew all that.

He had tapped on the tablet to enlarge the feed that scanned the front yard. He dragged his index finger across the bottom of the image, fast-forwarding through the morning. I’d moved to stand next to him so I could watch.

“There,” I said.

The Volvo wagon slowed, turned into the driveway. The car came to a stop, and after a few seconds, the driver’s door opened and a woman got out. Immediately she turned her back to the camera as she went to the rear of the car, and by the time she turned to face the house, she was obscured by the open tailgate.

But then she came out from behind the car and took a few steps toward the house.

And stopped. And dropped her grocery bags.

While there was no audio, she could be seen mouthing some words. At this point, she was looking directly at the camera.

The image, however, was not crisp.

“Can you pause that?” I asked.

Brian did so.

I reached out a hand. “You mind?”

After a moment’s hesitation, he handed the tablet to me. I stared at the screen for a few seconds, then placed my thumb and index finger on the screen to expand the image and enlarge the woman’s face.

It was still a soft image, just bigger. And yet...

“Jesus,” I said under my breath.

I’ll admit, looking at that image of the woman standing in the driveway did give me something of a jolt, prompting me to involuntarily let the son of God’s name slip from my lips.

But the image was by no means conclusive.

Did this woman — this blurry woman, at that — bear a passing resemblance to my wife, Brie? Yes. She was about the right height. She had dark hair and wore it roughly the same way. Above the shoulders, and curled around her face. The way she moved from the driver’s door to the tailgate, I couldn’t really say whether her gait was similar to Brie’s. It was only a few steps. Not enough to really tell.

The clearest shot was when she stood looking directly at the house, when she dropped her groceries, seemingly stunned by what she was looking at.

The house that was supposed to be there was gone.

If Brie were to miraculously return after six years, and if those six years for the rest of us had somehow seemed to be no more than a day to her, well, for sure, stepping out of some kind of time machine, finding your house gone and another one in its place, would certainly throw you for a loop.

But the very idea seemed preposterous.

Impossible.

Whoever this woman who’d shown up here this morning was, it could not be Brie.

How could it be? Unless...

“You done?” asked Brian Feehan, holding out his hand.

“I want to email myself this image.”

Brian seemed to be trying to think of any reason he should say no, and, not coming up with one, slowly said, “Fine, go ahead.”

It took me a second to figure out how to export the photo, but once I had, I typed in my own email address and hit send. A couple of seconds later, I heard the ding of an incoming message in my front pocket.

I gave him back the tablet. “Thanks.”

“Well?” he said. “Who is that?”

“No idea,” I said.

“But you want the picture anyway,” he said.

“Sorry to trouble you.”

As I started heading back to my ride I got out my phone to check that the pic had arrived intact. And it had, from Brian Feehan’s email address. I opened the email, made sure the picture was at least as good as the image from Feehan’s tablet — which was not saying a lot — and then closed it.

And wondered what the hell I should do with it. What I was supposed to feel about it.

Shocked? Bewildered? Hopeful? Worried?

Bewildered, certainly. I hardly knew how else to react to the picture without knowing what it really meant. Was I meant to believe that Brie was back, after six years?

I had questions, but wasn’t sure what they were or to whom they should be directed. But I needed to talk to somebody. I got out my phone, opened my contacts, and scrolled down to the R’s. I tapped on a name, put the phone to my ear, and waited for the pickup.

“Hey,” he said. “What’s happening?”

“Greg,” I said. “It’s me. How’s it going?”

“Been worse. Still buying lottery tickets, though, so I can become a man of leisure. What’s up?”

“Need to talk.”

“Yeah, sure.” His voice went low. “You in a bad place again, man?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“’Cause you sound sober.”

“I am.”

“Good, good, that’s good. I never want to see you like you were that time. So what’s happening?”

“I got something I need to show you. Where are you?”

“You know the old TrumbullGate Mall? The one they mothballed?”

I had to think. Maybe fifteen to twenty minutes north and west of Milford. “Yeah, and I can GPS it if I have to. What are you doing up there?”

“Picking over the bones. One of the owners, an old friend, is letting me go through it, recovering all kinds of stuff I can use before they hold a proper auction. From pipe to shelving to railings and fire extinguishers. All kinds of shit.”

“Since when did you do salvage?”

“It’s a buck. Anyway, I’m here. Come to the south service door. That’s about the only way in. Look for my truck. You might see Julie.”

“Julie?”

“She’s great. You’ll like her. She’s easy to spot. Turquoise hair. She’s kind of edgy.”

“I’ll be there,” I said, and pocketed the phone.

I had my hand on the door when I realized Max was heading toward me.

“Andy, wait up,” he said. “Could you see her on Brian’s security camera? Did you see her?”

“I saw somebody.”

“Was it Brie?” he asked almost breathlessly.

“I don’t know who it was.”

Max bit his lower lip for a second. “I hope I haven’t opened up some can of worms. I know this whole thing, it really put you through the meat grinder. And you need to know, I never believed any of the bad things they said about you. I heard the rumors, saw what they did to you. But I think I know you, the kind of person you are.”

Max paused, as if waiting for me to thank him for not believing I was a murderer. But I said nothing.

“So when I saw what I saw, I was thinking, oh my God, if that really is Brie, I had to let you know. Not just because it’d be amazing news that she was okay, but it would blow away that cloud that’s been hanging over your head all this time.”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” I said. “I’ve learned how to roll with all of it.”

Max nodded his understanding. “Sure, sure, I get that.”

I opened the door and put one leg up, ready to haul myself into the driver’s seat of the Explorer.

“One thing, though,” Max said.

I brought my leg back down and put it on the pavement.

“What’s that, Max?”

“You have to understand, what I did, I was trying to help.”

It was all coming back to me, what I used to find exasperating about Max when I lived next door to him. The man always took a long time to get to the point.

“Spit it out, Max.”

“Okay, well, you weren’t the only person I called.”

I waited.

“I put in a call to Detective Hardy. You remember Detective Hardy?’

I definitely remembered Detective Hardy.

As I drove away from the scene of whatever it was that had happened on the street where Brie and I used to live, I noticed a car coming the other way that was obviously an unmarked police cruiser. You don’t exactly have to be Jack Reacher to spot them. Black or dark gray, unadorned by chrome, the cheapest hubcaps money can buy. You’d think the cops would have figured out by now that even a simple ten-dollar pinstriping kit would make it less obvious who they were.

I initially had an impulse to slide down into the seat, below the window, but that’s not an easy thing to do when you’re behind the wheel. So I sat up straight, back rigid, and tried my best not to turn for a better look at the driver as we slipped past each other. Being a gawker, I figured, would only draw attention to myself.

But I did get enough of a look to satisfy myself it was Detective Marissa Hardy behind the wheel.

Thanks, Max. Thanks a bunch.

She hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen her, which had been maybe a year and a half ago. I saw plenty of her, of course, in the eighteen months or so following Brie’s disappearance, and sporadically after that. An occasional encounter, to let me know she hadn’t forgotten me. She’d probably have visited me more often if I hadn’t hired a lawyer, Nan Sokolow, and threatened Hardy’s department with a harassment suit.

Hardy still had the short, almost buzz-cut salt-and-pepper hair, the oversized black-rimmed glasses. I’d always thought she looked more like a stern women’s prison librarian than a cop, but maybe that’s some unfair typecasting of prison librarians. But Marissa Hardy certainly never endeared herself to me. She was humorless and annoying and, I guess I have to give credit where credit is due, relentless. She was not the kind of person you wanted hounding you if you’d done something wrong.

Now it seemed likely she’d be back in my life again, unless she deemed what Max had to tell her as jumping to conclusions, or considered the surveillance video from the house next door as inconclusive. Except that didn’t strike me how Hardy would react. If she saw the slimmest opportunity to make my life hell again, she’d take it.

I headed north out of town on the Milford Parkway, and when I reached the Merritt Parkway I took the long curving ramp to get onto the westbound lanes. I stayed on the parkway until I got to Trumbull, where I took the White Plains Road exit. I made a few rights and lefts until I reached TrumbullGate Mall. Took no more than fifteen minutes.

It had been a few years since this place had been a shopping destination. The massive lot was empty, save for part of the south end that had been cordoned off and was full of new Hyundais. A local dealership was clearly renting some space to store their stock. Even though Greg had told me to come in through the south end service entrance, I did a loop of the mall just to get the lay of the land.

All the windows, including the grand entry points, were boarded up. Most malls, considering that they looked inward instead of to the outside, which explained why so many of them were so goddamn ugly, didn’t have that many outward facing windows to begin with. The outer perimeter of a mall was usually a maze of cinder-block corridors that allowed stores to bring in merchandise without traipsing it through the main concourse.

I found the south service entrance partially hidden behind a false front that would have allowed tractor trailers to be unloaded without being seen by the public. Tucked in there was an early 2000s Audi A3 in black parked behind Greg’s oversized pickup truck. The cargo bed was loaded with all manner of building materials. Scraps of railing, pipe, several mannequin torsos and limbs, undamaged ceiling panels.

A regular door up on the loading bay was propped open an inch with a chock of wood to keep it from locking. I was reaching for the handle when it opened from the other side.

A woman stepped out and was briefly startled to see me, then smiled broadly.

“You must be Andrew,” she said. “I’m Julie.”

She stuck out a hand. She was almost as Greg had described her on the phone. Short turquoise hair, yes, but also with streaks of black. Petite and instantly cheerful, with a smile that took over half her face.

“Hi,” I said.

“Oh hell,” she said, and threw her arms around me for a quick hug. “Greggy has told me so much about you I feel I know you.”

“Well,” I said, a bit caught off guard, “it’s nice to meet you.”

“I’m just heading off,” she said. “Back in a while with more donuts.”

I didn’t remember Greg being much of a junk food addict. She must have caught my puzzled expression.

“Not for him,” she said. “You’ll see. Just head in and follow the buzzing and hammering. You’ll find him. Gotta run.”

She headed for the Audi as I entered the facility. I found my way through the service area that shoppers never see until I reached a door that took me to the mall proper. There’s something about a now-abandoned but once-public space that raises the goose bumps on one’s arms. The mall consisted of two levels, open through the center so you could look down from the upper concourse to the one below. I’d come in on the lower level, near one of the abandoned anchor stores that at one time had been a thriving Sears, JCPenney, or Kohl’s.

Countless roof panels from the upper shopping level that hung over the first floor had come free and were arranged as though set up for some psychotic hopscotch game. Trees planted in interior gardens that had, at one time, brought a hint of nature to the concourse were now dead and leafless. Tentacles of ivy from those same gardens snaked out beyond their enclosure across the debris-strewn floor like something from an alien movie. Water dripped down from a cracked skylight overhead, no doubt from an overnight shower. An immobile, rusted escalator was just ahead, its rubber handrails missing, several steps absent, making the stairwell look like a gap-toothed, vertical mouth.

I saw no people, but that didn’t mean I was the only living thing here. A squirrel went bounding up the dead escalator. A couple of pigeons flew overhead. A rat was slinking into what used to be, judging by the cracked sign overhead, a Cinnabon.

Over by the entrance to one abandoned store I saw a grungy sleeping bag balled up against the wall. Not surprising that this place might have a few squatters, homeless people using it for shelter until this entire complex came tumbling down.

I was briefly startled by the shadow of something flying over me. I glanced up and saw not a pigeon, but what looked like a hawk, judging by the wingspan. It was a mini-postapocalyptic world in here.

And if it seemed foreboding now, I imagined what it would be like at night. The power would most certainly have been cut off to the facility, and had it not been for that windowed ceiling that ran from one end of the mall to the other, I’d have had a hard time finding my way without a flashlight.

Given that the place was not bustling with shoppers, noises carried, and somewhere on the floor above I could hear the sound of a power drill. I made my way carefully up the escalator, stepping over the gaps, and when I was on the upper level, I paused, waiting for another blast of the drill.

When one didn’t come immediately, I decided to make some noise.

“Greg!” I shouted, my call echoing throughout the abandoned space.

Some ten stores away, a goggled man stepped out of one of the stores, looked in my direction, and waved.

“Down here!” Greg shouted.

It didn’t surprise me that he’d be working on a Saturday. He’d always been something of a workaholic, as well as a hustler.

Greg and I’d had our ups and downs over the years, but we never stopped being friends. I didn’t have anyone from my high-school days that I kept in touch with, having moved from school to school depending on which foster home I was billeted with at the time. But I saved up my money to attend UConn, the University of Connecticut, and it was there I connected with Greg.

Back then he mostly went by the name his parents had given him: Gregoire. He figured college might be a good time to trade on his French name — his mother, from Lyon, had fallen in love with his father, an Albany native, when she’d come to America in her late teens as an exchange student. As a kid, he’d always gone by Greg because his classmates made fun of his real name, mispronouncing it on purpose, calling him “Greg-Wire.” But once he got to UConn, he went back to it, thinking it gave him something of an international flair. “Sounds sexy,” he told me back then.

“Yeah, well, not to me,” I said, and always called him Greg.

We’d met in some engineering classes we shared, and I soon saw in Greg the characteristics I lacked in myself. I was cautious where he was adventurous. I gave careful deliberations to the consequences of my actions while Greg was impulsive. I remember once, signing up for courses, picking ones that would complement my engineering classes. Math, physics, stuff like that. Greg was on the same track as me, but seconds before making his final selections he learned some hot student from Sweden he was desperate to bed was taking a poli-sci class, so he signed up for it. Didn’t give a rat’s ass about politics, but oh, how he wanted to sit next to that girl in the lecture hall. The joke was on him. At the last minute, she dropped the politics course for one in environmental science.

Greg wasn’t just adventurous. I saw him as fearless. He was the one who’d sneak into the college pool after hours for a midnight swim, who’d drive his dad’s car, when he had it for the weekend, at high speed over a small hill in the hopes of catching air, who’d take a running leap off a cliff’s edge into a quarry reservoir, who once kept a VCR that had literally fallen off the back of a truck that had been making a delivery to an electronics store. He had, in a word, balls.

While his impulsive nature ebbed some as he got older, there remained a youthful spirit. And there was also, I believed, beneath the bravado and playfulness, a good soul. Greg had been the one who kept an eye on me after Brie vanished. He was the one who had found me passed out, fully clothed, in that bathtub.

“Man,” he said to me at the time, “you have got to get your shit together. I am not going to let you do this to yourself.”

It was a wonder, in many ways, that we had remained friends.

We had once been business partners. We ran a contracting company together, but in the months before Brie’s disappearance we’d lost out on several jobs that could have turned around our fortunes. We decided, in the wake of those failures, to dissolve the company and go our separate ways.

Greg had kept himself afloat, in the years since, jumping from one contracting gig to another, usually offering discounts to clients who were willing to pay in cash. And if things got slow, he’d try something totally different, like spending a month working on a fishing boat, or joining a road construction crew. (“College prepared me well for flipping a sign from stop to slow,” he told me over a beer one night.)

Greg had the edge over me on impulsiveness, but it was that very trait that sometimes got him in over his head. And I was the one, he was willing to concede, who could think fast enough to rescue him. Like the time, a couple of years out of college, we were bar-hopping in Hartford and Greg, with about ten beers in him, took an unprovoked swing at some guy and knocked him out cold just as a police car was pulling into the parking lot. There wasn’t time to organize an escape, so I took a swing at Greg, bloodied his nose, and told him to drop.

When the cops wandered over and took in the scene, I laid it all out for them. The other guy swung first, broke my buddy’s nose, and Greg had but a second to land a punch of his own.

I got him out of there before the other guy came to. Good thing we’d settled our tab in cash, so there were no credit card receipts for the cops to use to follow up. To this day, Greg’s nose had a slight tilt to it, thanks to me.

Now, as I closed the distance between us, I saw Greg had one of his trademark cigarettes between his lips. As part of his image back in school, he started buying imported French tobacco and rolling paper to make his own smokes. The elaborate ritual of it became part of who he was, and it was a habit he had never lost.

Hanging from his arm was a cordless reciprocating saw, one of those Uzi-looking gadgets with a powerful cutting blade that stuck straight out the end of it like a tiny bayonet that moved back and forth at the speed of light.

“Good to see you, man,” he said, setting down the saw and tossing away that last millimeter of his cigarette so he could throw his arms around me.

“Same,” I said.

Greg looked a little thinner since I’d last seen him a month or two ago. His face and neck — with about two days’ worth of whiskers on them, as always — seemed more drawn, the skin hanging somewhat under his chin. His gray hair was thinner, too, but he was still a handsome guy, even if he did look closer to fifty when I knew he had only just turned forty.

“Sorry you missed Julie,” he said. “She really wanted to meet you.”

“We connected as I was coming in,” I said. “She new on the scene?”

Greg shrugged. “Five, six weeks, I guess. She’s great, heart of gold. She’s working on making me a better person.” He grinned. “Who knew I needed improving?”

“So what the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

“I’m the hyena feeding on the carcass,” he said with no small measure of pride. “They’re going to rip this whole place down soon, and I worked a deal with the company that’s going to do it to have a few days in here to get some very usable shit. There’s hundreds of dying malls across the country. Victims of online shopping, the loss of anchor stores that’ve gone tits up, and then you throw in a fucking pandemic on top of that. Malls can’t cut it.”

I shook my head, marveling that these were this huge structure’s final days. I went over to grasp the railing that overlooked the lower level, taking in the view.

“I wouldn’t lean against that, if I was you,” Greg said. “I’ve already started taking out some of the bolts securing it to the floor. I can repurpose those a hundred ways. On a balcony, around a deck.”

I stepped back. “I saw your truck. Looks like you’ve got a pretty full load already. Mannequins?”

He laughed. “All kinds of places will buy those. Last trip, scored some store signs. Like, a McDonald’s, a Baskin-Robbins. People snap those up, hang them in their rec rooms. You know the huge shed I’ve got behind my place? Gonna cram as much into that as possible.” He was digging into his pocket for papers and a small pouch of tobacco to make himself another cigarette. “How’s things going with Jayne?”

They had met a couple of times since Jayne had moved in with me.

“Good. And we’ve got her brother living with us now. Tyler. Sixteen. His dad passed, and he’s kind of messed up. Adrift, you know? Reminds me of myself at that age, when I was being shunted from home to home.”

I became aware of someone approaching. Thinking Julie had returned, I turned to say hello, but it was a young guy, mid-twenties, shuffling toward us. His clothes were worn and filthy, and he didn’t appear to have shaved in at least a week.

“Hey, Neil,” Greg said. He pointed his thumb into the store he’d stepped out of. “Box of donuts in there. Help yourself, but leave some for the others.”

Neil smiled. “Thanks, man. Sorry to interrupt.” He shuffled on into the store as I gave Greg a questioning look.

In a low voice, he said, “A few homeless living in here till they tear it all down. Me and Julie bring in a few treats for them. Best to have them on your side if you’re gonna be sharing space with them. Give some of them odd jobs, twenty bucks to haul stuff to my truck. So, what’s up?”

I got out my phone and brought up the picture I’d sent myself off Brian’s tablet. I handed it to Greg without comment. He studied the picture, then enlarged it with his thumb and index finger.

“What am I looking at here?” he asked.

“That was taken a couple of hours ago, off a security cam. Where my house used to stand. That’s the driveway.”

“Okay. And?”

I told him what Max had told me. And what the woman in the picture allegedly said. Asking what had happened to her house.

Greg kept staring at the picture. “What are you getting at here? What are you suggesting?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m showing you that and waiting for your reaction.”

He gave the picture another five seconds and then handed the phone back to me. He finished making his cigarette, stuck it between his lips, and lit it with a lighter that he’d tucked into his shirt pocket.

“I don’t know, man. What are you thinking?”

“It’s not a very good picture.”

“Seriously, you know what it is? It’s just some woman took a wrong turn. Got her directions mixed up. Maybe it’s one of those grocery delivery services. Lot more of those since COVID. She made a mistake. Last week I got an Uber Eats at the door that I never ordered. Was for someone else. People are careless.”

“Maybe. Doesn’t explain why she got so spooked she dropped everything and took off.”

Greg took a drag off his cigarette, held the smoke in his lungs for a moment, and then exhaled. I’d snuck plenty of smokes when I was in foster homes, but it hadn’t turned into a lifelong habit. So I was no expert on tobacco, but this brand Greg favored had its own distinctive aroma.

He looked me in the eye.

“Whatever this is, Andy, and honestly, I have no idea what’s going on here, but you can’t let it get your hopes up. That can’t be Brie. I mean, okay, at a glance, whoever that is could pass for her from a distance, but it doesn’t make any sense. What are we supposed to take from this? That she suddenly reappeared as if five years—”

“Six.”

“What?”

“Six. It’s been six years.”

“Jesus, has it really been that long?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, are we supposed to think Brie’s actually okay and that she went through some Star Trek — like space-time continuum and thought it was six years ago and expected to find the house she used to live in?”

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to think.”

At this point, Neil came back out of the shop, chewing on a donut in one hand and carrying a second in his other. He raised it and said to Greg, “This one’s for Karen, okay?”

“No problem,” he said, then turned back to me and whispered, “He’s here with his girlfriend. Can you imagine, living here with someone?”

I shook my head.

“Anyway,” Greg said, “there was one of those stories on the news the other day, about some sick pervert who kept a couple of women prisoner in his house for years, and one of them escaped. Well, I’ll tell you this, she didn’t escape and get herself all dressed up nice and head to the supermarket with her station wagon. I mean, if Brie were back, or had, you know, escaped or something, she’d go to the police.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I mean, come on,” he said. “Look, I know it’s hard to move on, that it’s hard to put this behind you. I was thinking, back when I found you in the tub, passed out, that was kind of a turning point. You pulled yourself together after that, despite the odds. You’ve got this new lady in your life. And you’ve got a new name, which is like starting over, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re bringing in some money? Paying the bills?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like you. A job here, a job there. About to start on finishing off someone’s basement. Did a couple of decks last month. Moderately steady.”

“Good, good, that’s all good. Don’t let whatever’s going on in that picture fuck with your head. You’ve got a good life now.”

“You’re saying I should ignore this. Pretend I never saw it.”

Greg sighed. “If that was Brie, if it really fuckin’ was her somehow, appearing out of thin air, you think the first thing she’d do is go pick up some eggs and some Tater Tots? No. She’d call you. If we’re supposed to believe that’s her in that picture, then what the hell has she been doing for six years? She go to the store and get lost? She been wandering a Walmart since the last time you saw her?”

Greg put a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry, man. That was... insensitive. I know how hard this has been on you. All this time, the not knowing, the wondering. But there’s no rational answer to this. It can’t be her. Can’t be.”

He seemed to be trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince me.

“Did your neighbor — what’s his name?”

“Max.”

“This Max, did he see any camera crews around or anything?”

“Camera crews?”

“Yeah. Maybe it’s one of those crime reenactment shows. You know. ‘Whatever happened to...’ kind of thing. Or some type of stunt.” His face lit up and he snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it.”

“What?”

“So this guy, the one who built that new house on your lot? It’s a nice house, right?”

“Yeah. Very.”

“Yeah, I drove by one day. Very sharp. So, someone out there wants to buy that house. But first they need to freak him out. Like, make him think a spirit that used to live on the property is coming back to haunt him and his family.”

“That’s beyond nuts.”

“They scare the guy into unloading the place at below market value.”

I sighed. “You’re insane.”

He smiled smugly. “Okay, I’m sure your explanation makes more sense.”

“I should go,” I said.

“Let me ask you something, and don’t take offense, okay?” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“What’s got you worried the most? That this lady making an appearance, it’ll get your hopes up and then they’ll get dashed, because it was a trick or a stunt? Or...”

“Or what?”

“Or... that it really is Brie? And if she’s back, it’s gonna turn your world upside down?”

When Jayne came back downstairs, she thought about what Tyler had said, wondered why he’d lied to her.

She knew he’d been places other than Cam’s house. Her little brother wasn’t the only one with some tech skills. Jayne had secretly put an app on his phone that would let her know where he was at any given time, and when she had looked at it earlier this morning she’d noticed he’d been hanging out in a nearby cemetery. Maybe that was where he and Cam had gone to get drunk.

But she’d decided not to call him on it. Once he knew what she’d done, he’d delete the app. The good thing was, unlike most kids his age, Tyler was not all that tech-savvy. It wasn’t that he couldn’t figure stuff out. It simply didn’t interest him that much. Anyway, Jayne tried not to overdo it when it came to snooping on her brother, but she believed it was a prudent move to be aware of his comings and goings.

She sent Andrew a text.

And hit send.

She watched the screen for a few seconds, waiting for the dancing dots that would indicate a reply was in the works.

Nothing.

And then she heard the car pull into the driveway.

Before she opened the door, she peeked outside. There was a black, nondescript sedan sitting there with a woman behind the wheel. Jayne wouldn’t have called herself an expert in these things, but she thought the car was some kind of police vehicle, given how plain it looked.

The woman behind the wheel got out and started walking toward the front door. Stocky, short hair, big glasses. Jayne opened the front door and stepped out.

“Can I help you?” Jayne said.

The woman smiled and said, “Hi. I’m Detective Marissa Hardy. Milford police.”

“Yes?”

Oh God, no. There’s been an accident.

This was why she hadn’t heard from Andrew. Someone running a red light had broadsided him. Something had fallen off a high shelf at Home Depot and crushed him. Maybe some crazy, random event with a shooter. There was always one of those somewhere in America on any given day.

“Is it Andrew?” she said. “Was he in an accident?”

“No, ma’am, not to my knowledge.”

Her second thought was that this had something to do with Tyler. Maybe when he got drunk with his friend last night they’d gotten into something they shouldn’t have. Broken a window, tipped over a mailbox, spray-painted the side of someone’s house.

“How are you today?” Hardy asked.

“Just fine,” she said, coming off the step and getting within whispering range. “Is this about Tyler?”

“Tyler?”

“My brother. He lives with us.”

“No,” the detective said. “I’m looking for Andrew.”

“Andrew?”

“Andrew Mason.”

Jayne blinked. “Who?”

Hardy paused, the corner of her mouth going up a tenth of an inch. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Force of habit. I’d forgotten he goes by Andrew Carville now. Took me a little longer to find this place because of that. Is he here?”

Jayne suddenly felt dizzy.

Andrew Mason?

Andrew had changed his name? He’d never told her anything about that. Who changed their name? Movie stars, maybe. But not regular people.

“What’s your name, ma’am?” Detective Hardy asked.

“Jayne Keeling.”

“You live here?”

“Yes.”

“With Andrew Carville?”

She swallowed. “Yes.”

“And is he here?”

Jayne shook her head slowly, her mouth suddenly very dry.

“Well, that’s too bad, but now that I’m here, I wouldn’t mind talking to you,” the detective said. She smiled innocently. “Maybe we could go inside and talk? Truth is, I could really use a coffee. If that’s not being too huge a bother.”

Jayne looked at the detective as though she were a talking giraffe.

“Coffee,” Jayne said.

“That’d be great,” she said.

Jayne’s phone, still in her hand, buzzed with the sound of an incoming text. She glanced down and saw the message from Andrew.

“Is that him?” Hardy asked.

“Yes. He’s out running some errands. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“That’s okay. We can talk before he gets here.”

Jayne turned and gestured for the detective to follow her into the house. She led her to the kitchen and pointed to a chair. Hardy sat down, placing her own phone facedown on the table.

“Decaf, if you have it,” she said. “But it’s okay if you don’t.”

“I... yes, I have that.”

Jayne opened the cupboard, brought down a tin of coffee, put a filter into the machine. As she spooned in some ground coffee, some of it spilled across the counter.

“Damn it,” she said.

She cleaned up the mess, and as she ran water into the carafe to pour into the coffee machine, she asked, “Why did you ask for Andrew Mason?”

“Are you married to Andrew?” Hardy asked.

“No.”

“But you’ve been together awhile?”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Since the latter part of last year. And I moved in here with him a few months ago.”

“Oh,” Hardy said. “Are you from Stratford?”

“No,” Jayne said. “I moved here a couple of years ago. From Providence.”

“What made you move down to this neck of the woods?”

“I assess properties for insurance companies. The one I worked for in Rhode Island was winding down, the owner retiring, and an insurance firm in Stratford was looking for someone, so I made the move.”

“Just you?”

“I’m not — I wasn’t in a relationship. My family — my father and my brother — were there, but they didn’t move with me, of course.”

“And Tyler is...”

“That’s my brother. He joined me here later. After our father died. You haven’t answered my question.”

“Which one was that?”

The coffee machine was starting to make a gurgling sound.

“Why you called Andrew... Andrew Mason. That’s not his name.”

“That was his name. He had it legally changed four years ago. I can’t say as I blame him, considering.”

“Considering what?” Jayne asked. “A financial failure? A bankruptcy? He had a building company, with someone else, but that got dissolved some time ago. Did it have something to do with that?”

“No,” the detective said. “Since you’re relatively new to the area, I guess you wouldn’t have been exposed much to the news around here six years ago.”

That corner of Hardy’s mouth was still curled up a notch, as though she might actually be enjoying this.

“A splash of milk,” Hardy said.

“I’m sorry?”

“My coffee. That’s how I take it. I figured you’d get around to asking sooner or later.”

Jayne took two mugs down from the cupboard and a carton of milk from the refrigerator. The coffee continued to drip down into the carafe. When there was enough for one serving, Jayne filled one mug, added some milk, and put it on the table in front of Hardy.

“Thank you,” she said.

Jayne said nothing.

“Has Andrew ever mentioned anything to you about his wife?” Hardy asked.

Jayne blinked. “His ex-wife, you mean.”

Hardy shrugged. “Sure.”

“He told me he used to be married. That it didn’t work out. He doesn’t like to talk about her very much and honestly I don’t think it’s any of my business.”

“He tell you her name?”

“Brandy, I think,” she said.

That brought a smile to the detective’s face. She picked up her phone. “Let me show you something.”

She held up the device for Jayne, who took a couple of steps closer. A picture filled the screen. It was a soft image of a woman standing by a black car. It was parked in a driveway, the tailgate in the raised position, and there were what appeared to be a couple of bags of groceries spilled on the driveway.

“Okay,” Jayne said. “Who’s that?”

“That is the question,” the detective said. “The image could be crisper, I know. I got this nifty little app on my phone you can run photos through, the idea being that it sharpens them up some. Admittedly with varying degrees of success. So I used the app on this shot and enlarged it and it’s not a lot better, but there is some improvement. Here, have a look.”

She was about to pass the phone to Jayne when Tyler strolled into the kitchen. He’d pulled some jeans on over his boxers but was naked from the waist up, and shoeless.

“Oh,” he said, seeing Hardy. “I didn’t know someone was here.”

“Hi,” Detective Hardy said, putting the phone down and extending a hand. Tyler took it. “I’m Detective Hardy with the Milford police.”

Tyler looked as though he’d received a minor electrical shock. “Uh, what?”

“The police,” Jayne said. “Detective Hardy just had some questions about a neighborhood thing.”

Tyler saw the detective’s phone and picked it up. “Who’s this?” he asked, looking at the picture.

“That’s why I’m here,” Hardy said. “Wondering the same thing.”

“Nice ride,” Tyler said.

“I’m sorry?” the detective said.

“The Volvo wagon. I like those.”

“Is there something I can do for you, Tyler?” Jayne asked.

“Was just gonna get some breakfast or something.”

“Sleep in, did you?” Hardy asked.

He looked at her, not sure whether to answer. Jayne said, “Could you give us a couple minutes?”

“Fine,” he said, handing the phone back to Hardy and padding out of the room in his bare feet.

“Sorry about that,” Jayne said.

“No problem.” She tried again to hand her phone to Jayne, and this time Jayne took it and looked at the image.

“Why are you showing me this?” she asked.

“Do you recognize her?”

“No.”

Hardy took back the phone. “Okay. Let me ask you this. Where—”

“No,” Jayne said abruptly. “I’m not answering any more questions until you answer mine. Why did Andrew change his name, and why are you asking me about the woman in that picture?”

“Okay,” Detective Hardy said. “Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll fill you in.”

I had to know this day would come.

Now that it seemed to be upon me, I needed time to think. So I drove around town, doing just that.

Thinking.

Honestly, it was amazing things hadn’t started to unravel before now. The fact that Jayne had been with me for this long and still did not know my history was nothing short of a minor miracle. It helped, of course, that she hadn’t lived in this part of Connecticut when it all happened. While Brie’s disappearance occasionally attracted national interest, it was, for the most part, a local story. By the time Jayne had come from Providence to Stratford, next door to Milford where it all happened, my notoriety had diminished.

And I couldn’t have been more grateful.

But I feared this morning’s call from Max — even if it might not, ultimately, turn out to mean anything — was going to have the effect of a concussive blast, knocking us all off our feet in an ever-expanding radius.

If it hadn’t been this latest development, any day the truth could have come out in a thousand other ways. Running into someone at the mall when Jayne was with me. Maybe someone would stop to say hello, offer condolences, ask if I’d ever learned what had happened to Brie, or was it one of those cold cases by now. Or maybe someone would pass by and say nothing at all, but shoot a scornful look my way. A look I’d have to explain to Jayne.

I’d always been mindful of the risks of an awkward encounter in public. So I made a point, whenever we were together, of avoiding Milford. We dined out in Stratford, or places to the west, like Bridgeport or Norwalk or Stamford. We rarely went to the movies. I had a big-screen TV and subscribed to several streaming services. Why go out, I’d say, when we have access to so much entertainment at home?

I was masquerading as a homebody when I was anything but.

When there were errands to run, especially if they took me anywhere near where I used to live, I tended to do them alone. “I’ve got this,” I’d say to Jayne. “I won’t be long.” If I ran into people who knew or recognized me when I was out solo, well, that was fine. I could deal with that. And it wasn’t as though Jayne were waiting around to accompany me. She had her own career, and it kept her busy.

As I drove around town, I went over in my head how I would tell her the things I’d kept from her. And why. The second part was a little easier. I loved her and had worried that telling her everything about myself would scare her off. You don’t bring up in conversation on a first date that your wife is missing and the police consider you a prime suspect.

But I might very well scare Jayne off now.

“It’s time I told you more about myself,” I would say. “It’s true that I was married. But what I failed to tell you is how that marriage ended. Six years ago my wife, Brie, vanished.”

I was trying to picture the look on her face when I told her. And that was only the beginning.

Brie was never found, I would have to tell her. The police, after all this time, still did not know what had happened to her. They’d had to consider whether she had disappeared of her own accord, or if she’d been abducted. Maybe there had been an accident. Brie went for a walk and tumbled down a hill, her body hidden among the foliage.

Some of the theories were more preposterous than others. But one of them had to be true, right?

Jayne would probably ask whether Brie had been depressed. Was there a chance she’d committed suicide? Left the house in the middle of the night, walked to the middle of the Washington Bridge in the west end of town, and jumped into the Housatonic?

I would have to be honest and tell her Brie had not seemed depressed. Not in any clinical kind of way. I would have to tell Jayne that the police had considered that as a possibility, but no body had been found.

I would have to tell her that very quickly the investigation focused on me. That Milford Police Detective Marissa Hardy believed I had killed my wife because I was interested in taking up with a woman named Natalie Simmons. I would tell her it was a brief affair and meant nothing, but that Brie’s sister, Isabel McBain, had been convinced from the very beginning that I’d had a hand in her disappearance, and death.

If Jayne asked why I’d been unfaithful, I would tell her I’d been an idiot. That Brie and I had been going through a bad patch, that we both had made decisions we’d deeply regretted. If Jayne asked whether I knew who Brie had cheated on me with, I would have to say yes, but I would have to add that I had never revealed this person’s identity to anyone except Detective Hardy — after some prodding — and that she had looked into this person and concluded he had nothing to do with Brie’s disappearance.

I would have to tell her Detective Hardy believed I’d used a weekend fishing trip with my friend Greg as a cover story — an alibi — and that in the night I’d actually driven back to Milford, killed Brie and disposed of her body, then returned before dawn and joined Greg for coffee later that morning. She further believed it was possible I’d drugged Greg so that he slept through the night, thereby making it nearly impossible that he’d notice my absence.

I would have to tell her that, while I was never charged in connection with Brie’s disappearance, the media was well aware that I was a suspect. (I blame Hardy for that, she no doubt leaked it in order to put more pressure on me.) For a while there, I had TV news trucks sitting at the end of my drive every morning, trying to get some kind of comment from me.

I would have to tell Jayne that despite the lack of any concrete evidence that I’d done anything wrong, Isabel continued to campaign for my arrest, even though Brie’s mother, Elizabeth, and her brother, Albert, and his wife, Dierdre, seemed willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. But Isabel’s stridency scared the other members of the family, including her own husband, Norman, from ever speaking up on my behalf.

Isabel’s harassment took several forms. She wrote letters to newspapers, filled with wild accusations, about what it was she believed I had done. The papers, thankfully, did not print them because they were deemed libelous, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t do occasional updates headlined “Where Is Brie?” or “Brie’s Fate Still a Mystery.”

Isabel hired a lawyer to sue me in civil court, where the bar is set a little lower than in criminal court when it comes to holding someone, at least financially, responsible. She didn’t win — Nan Sokolow’s firm helped me with that, too — but the legal bills wiped out most of my savings.

Isabel’s quest to get justice for her sister had always struck me as somewhat ironic, given that she’d always seemed to resent Brie and been jealous of her since they were much younger. It was a one-sided rivalry, so far as I could tell. Brie had always been happy for Isabel when something good came her way, but it was rarely the other way around. I believed it went back to their teens. Only a year apart in age, they competed in such fields as parents’ attention, academics, and boys.

Anyway, Isabel’s vindictiveness couldn’t have come at a worse time, considering that my business partnership with Greg was dissolving, and my prospects were not good.

I would have to tell Jayne that things deteriorated to the point that I decided to legally change my last name. At least that way, on paper people did not recognize me. There was no longer a need for an unlisted number. (Still a bit old school, I was and am one of the last people on earth to have a landline.) When anyone did a Google search on my new name, the allegations against me did not come up. I mean, who wanted to hire someone to work on their house who many believed had killed his wife and disposed of the body?

It was a lot to tell.

But I felt I was going to have to spill all of it to Jayne. It was better coming from me than someone else.

She’d have questions, I knew that. I’d have at least one for her, too. And it wasn’t to ask her whether she would forgive me. I couldn’t see any reason why she would, or even should. If the positions were reversed, could I forgive her for keeping something this big a secret?

No, my question for her would be more like, “Do you want to stay here and I’ll move out, or can I help you find a place?”

I would be willing to do either.

Of all the things she might choose to ask me, I imagined the number-one question would be short and to the point.

“Did you kill your wife?”

And I would look her in the eye and I would say, “No, I did not.”

I was imagining that exchange as I sat in a bar, sitting alone in a booth, working on my second or third or fourth Sam Adams. I didn’t remember driving here after seeing Greg and Julie, or even coming inside. I felt as though I had always been here, that this booth was my past, my present, and my future. I existed entirely in this moment in time.

As I sat there, I engaged in one of my nervous habits, which was to tear off bits of a paper napkin, roll them up into balls the size of a pea, then flick them off my upturned thumb with my middle finger. Sometimes the ball would fall off my thumb before I could launch it, other times I could shoot one across the room.

When the waitress, a heavyset woman in her fifties, came over to see whether I wanted another beer, she glanced down at the half dozen paper pellets I’d fired off.

“Nice range,” she said. “Another?”

I was about to say yes, but any more to drink and I wasn’t going to be able to drive myself home. I was probably already in the danger zone.

“No, I’m good,” I said.

The waitress stood there a minute, looking at me.

“You been in here before?” she asked.

“Not sure,” I said, which was true. “Not in a while, anyway.”

“Because you look familiar to me. Pretty sure I’ve seen you somewhere. Although not lately.”

“Maybe I just have that kind of face,” I said.

“What’s your name?”

“Carville,” I said. “Andrew Carville.”

“Oh, okay,” she said, nodding. “I had you pegged as somebody else, but his last name was Mason.”

“Well, there you go,” I said, and slapped some bills on the table as she waltzed away.

I couldn’t put it off any longer. I went out, got in the Explorer, and headed for home.

I was almost there, not even a block away, when I saw that car again, the one I’d seen heading down the street to Max’s house.

Detective Hardy.

Coming from the direction of my place.

I watched her unmarked car disappear in my rearview, then hit the blinker to turn down my street.

When I got to my house, Jayne was sitting on the front step, waiting.

Looked like I wouldn’t have to tell Jayne much of anything, after all. I was guessing the detective had already filled her in.

I pulled into the driveway, killed the engine, opened the door, and got out slowly. I was feeling a little woozy from my visit to the bar, or maybe it was stress that had thrown me off balance. Either way, I was glad I’d made it home without getting stopped.

I had a feeling my luck was about to run out.

Jayne remained sitting on the front step. Didn’t get up. I could see in her face she knew. I walked over slowly, stood a couple of feet away.

“So,” she asked, deadpan, “how’d it go at Home Depot? You get the weed and feed?”

“No.”

“A trip back to the old neighborhood instead?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And then I kind of drove around for a while.” Didn’t mention my trip up to Trumbull to talk to Greg.

Jayne nodded solemnly.

“Detective Hardy was here,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And she filled you in.”

“Yes.”

I drew in a long breath, let it out slowly. “I’m sorry. I’ll pack up my things right now and get out. You can stay here. Whatever you want, that’s what I’ll do. Or I can just leave right now and you can throw my shit out here onto the lawn. I’ll come back later.”

She put one hand down on the cement to help push herself off the step. I extended a hand to help her up but she didn’t take it.

“I have one question,” she said, a slight tremble in her voice.

Here it was, I thought. I was ready with my answer.

No, I did not kill my wife.

“Okay,” I said.

“If it’s her, if she’s back, what happens to us?”

I blinked. Before I could think of what to say, she had a second question.

“Do you still love her?”

I didn’t know how to answer that question any better than the first one.

“Can we go inside and talk?” I asked.

She considered the suggestion, finally nodded, and said, “Okay.”

I followed her into the house.

I have to admit, I hadn’t seen that coming.

If I had, maybe I would have known how to react, could have prepared myself, said something that gave the impression I was thrilled with Jayne’s news. Because when someone tells you she’s pregnant, you want to look delighted. And I’m not saying I wasn’t. I believe, given a moment to get my head around what Jayne had told me, I would have been more than delighted. I would have been downright fucking thrilled. Having a child was not something we’d really talked about, but we would have gotten there eventually, and when that time had come I know I would have been on board with the idea.

But considering the kind of morning it had been — the appearance of that woman, Detective Hardy coming to the house, my relationship with Jayne seemingly on the verge of unraveling as my past came to light — I wasn’t quite in a mood to jump up and down. I should have said something along the lines of, “That’s wonderful!” or, “Oh my God, that’s great!” A simple “Wow!” might have done the trick.

What I said was, “What?”

And I imagine I looked pretty stunned when I said it.

“I’m pregnant,” Jayne said again.

I was frozen for about two seconds, then bolted forward, and, given that she was still in the chair, went down to my knees and put my arms around her for a hug. She returned the embrace, but it didn’t feel as though she was putting as much into it as I was.

I pulled away and said, “When did you find out?”

“Yesterday,” she said. “I’d done the test last weekend, peed on the stick, you know? And it was positive, but I wanted to go to the doctor first, get her two cents’ worth, before I told you. I saw her yesterday.”

“That beer,” I said. “When you came out with those two bottles, yours looked different.”

“Non-alcoholic,” she said. “I picked up a six-pack yesterday, tucked them into the back of the fridge where you wouldn’t find them.” Jayne motioned for me to stand up, which I did, then sat back in the chair across from her. “You didn’t exactly look thrilled a moment ago.”

“You caught me by surprise,” I said. “It’s been a day full of them.” I ran my hand over the top of my head and sighed. “Man. How far along?”

“About seven weeks, the doctor figures,” she said. “I think it happened the weekend we went to Mystic. Couple of days before Tyler joined us.”

My mind immediately went back to that mini-vacation. I behaved like someone released from prison. Jayne was no less insatiable.

I couldn’t help but grin. “Yeah, it could have been then. We were going to do a charter, check out the museum, but I don’t remember our leaving that B&B much.”

“I’d had this plan,” she said. “That we’d go out to dinner tonight, that I would tell you the news, but now...”

“Jayne.”

“This can’t be happening,” she said. “Not now.”

“Wait, what do you mean? You don’t want to have the baby? I thought—”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “This, whatever this is, what’s happened today. That can’t be happening.”

“Jayne, I swear, I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

“What if she’s back?”

“We don’t know that it’s Brie,” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense that it’s Brie.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked. “How do you know it couldn’t be?”

That was the closest she’d come to asking the question. I took a moment to consider my answer.

“Because, if that was Brie, how do we explain it? Where’s she been for six years? Why would she just pop up out of nowhere? I mean, what’s she been doing all this time? If it was really her, why’d she decide that this, of all the times she could have come back, was the right time? Did someone keep her prisoner and she finally escaped? And if that was what happened, why didn’t she go straight to the police? How does she end up showing up at our old house? There’s no rational explanation for it.”

“But it happened.”

“Something happened. Someone showed up at the house.”

“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, it is your wife,” Jayne said. “She... she was abducted by aliens and they just brought her back, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know. But if it is, don’t you want it to be her?”

Jesus, how to answer that.

Slowly, I said, “Yes.”

Jayne’s face looked ready to crumple.

“Yes,” I repeated. “Because if it’s her, it means no harm has come to her. That she’s alive. Who knows, maybe some harm had come to her, but it would mean that whatever it was, she’d survived it. She’d still be with us, and that would be a good thing. Never, not for a minute, have I hoped that she was dead. I admit, plenty of times I wished I knew one way or the other what had happened to her, but that doesn’t mean I actually hoped she was dead. So, yeah, I’d want it to be her.”

Jayne swallowed hard as she listened.

“And, you know, there’s been this cloud hanging over me for a long time. There are people out there who still think I killed my wife. I’m sure this latest development’s ruined Detective Hardy’s day, because I know she’s always thought I did it. She wants to believe I did it. If — and I think it’s a big if — but if this woman is Brie, then there you go. I’m not a murderer.” I managed a weak smile. “It’ll ruin Izzy’s day, too, although that might be offset by getting her sister back.”

I was almost finished.

“But if by some miracle it is Brie, it doesn’t mean it’s the end of us. We’ll find a way through this. We will.”

“It’s like Cast Away,” Jayne said.

“Like what?”

“The movie. With Tom Hanks, and what’s her name, the one from Mad About You. Helen Hunt. The one where his jet crashes on an island and he’s there for, like, I don’t know, a few years, and everyone thinks he’s dead. His only friend in the world is Wilson, a volleyball. And Helen Hunt, eventually she has to get on with her life, and she finds another man and falls in love with him and moves in with him, and then it turns out Tom’s not dead, and he comes back.”

I remembered the movie.

“I’m Helen Hunt,” I said.

That almost made Jayne smile when she nodded. “What’s she supposed to do? She loved Tom, but now she has this new man in her life, and she loves him, too. It’s devastating, for everyone involved. She’s in an impossible situation.”

“But she stays with the new guy,” I said.

“It doesn’t mean it will work out that way with us,” Jayne said. “We’re not in a movie.” She looked into my eyes. “Think back to the last day you saw her.”

“Okay.”

“On that day, before she went missing, did you love her?”

I reached across the table and took her hand in mine. “I love you,” I said.

“But that’s not my question. The last time you saw her, talked to her.” She took a breath. “Slept with her. Did you love her?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So doesn’t it stand to reason that if she walked through that door right now you’d still love her?”

“Jayne, I—”

“I mean, if you suddenly went missing, and six years went by, and you walked in here, I’d still love you, no matter how I’d gone on with my life.”

“These... these questions, I feel like there’s no right way to answer them.”

“I’m the one who’s going to have your baby.”

“I know.”

“You and Brie didn’t have children.”

“We... she said she didn’t want to raise a child if we didn’t have a home. A real home. Not one fixer-upper after another. Something stable. It was one of the issues we were working on.”

“Well, what we have here, I think this is a home, and it looks like I’m going to have a baby in it. That’s why this can’t be happening. I need to know you’re with me. Totally. All these things I learned about you today, they’re... God, they’re pretty fucking unsettling, is what they are. But even though you’ve kept so much from me, I believe, in my heart, that I know you. That I know the kind of man you are. I’m willing... I was going to say forgive. I don’t know that I’m there yet and I don’t know when I will be. But I want to move past this, so long as you’re totally honest with me going forward.”

“I will be,” I said.

“I feel like I’m walking along the edge of a cliff,” she said. “Any second now, I’m going to fall.”

I dragged my chair around the table until it was butted up next to hers, put my arm around her, and held her close.

“I’m telling you, we’re going to be okay.”

“You’re a good man,” she said. “I’m sure of it. I see how you are with Tyler. How patient you are. You’re not pushing things with him. He needs time.”

“I know.”

“He’s never going to see you like you’re his father. But a big brother, maybe. A mentor.”

“I’m giving it my best shot,” I said.

“Tyler’s not perfect.”

“Maybe that’s something he and I have in common.”

“Please tell me this is just a blip. That this, whatever this is, that it’s going to pass.”

“It will,” I assured her, putting my arm around her. I felt her softening in my arms, accepting my comfort.

I added, “Look, if it really was Brie, she’d call me, wouldn’t she? She’d get to a phone and she’d call me and say, hey, guess who’s back in town.”

That was when the phone in my pocket started to ring.

The ringing of my phone had startled both of us, considering I’d just told Jayne that if Brie were still alive, she’d call. We both must have looked as though we’d heard an ominous sound in the basement. I felt my heart skip a beat.

I got out my phone and looked, first, at the screen. Nothing. The caller ID was blocked. Jayne had raised her head, trying to see who the caller was, so I turned the phone so she could see for herself. By this point, it had rung four times.

“Are you going to answer it?” she asked.

I nodded, tapped the screen, and put the phone to my ear.

“Hello?” I said.

Nothing.

“Hello?” I said again.

“Is it her?” Jayne asked. “Is it Brie?”

I wasn’t going to ask that question, but I allowed whoever was on the other end another five seconds to say something, anything. When no one spoke, I finally ended the call.

“Who was it?” Jayne asked.

“Nobody.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, they didn’t say anything. It was probably a nuisance call, like, from a telemarketer or something. Or someone threatening to come arrest me because I haven’t paid my taxes. I hear that half the time, when you answer, these scammers are still busy annoying someone else and never get to you. I’m sure that’s all it was.”

Jayne did not look convinced.

“Honestly,” I said, “I’m sure it was—”

The phone, still in my hand, rang again, causing us both to jump for a second time.

“Jesus,” I said. This time, however, there was a name on the screen. GREG. I answered. “Hey.”

“Hi,” Greg said. “Thought I’d check in, see if you knew anything more than you did a few hours ago.”

“No,” I said, looking at Jayne.

Jayne mouthed the words “Who is it?” and I mouthed my friend’s name.

She whispered back, “What does he want?”

“Hang on,” I said to Greg, then put my hand over the bottom half of the phone. “I went to talk to him. About this morning.”

“You talked to him before you talked to me?” she asked.

“I wanted his take, to—”

“Hello?” Greg said. “You there?”

“Yeah, I’m here,” I said.

Jayne was visibly pissed, no doubt because I had talked to Greg before I’d come clean with her. She pushed back her chair, stood, and walked out of the kitchen.

“Shit,” I said under my breath.

“What?” Greg said.

“Nothing. Just... not a good time.” I heard the front door open and close.

“Sorry, but I had a thought and wanted to pass it along.”

“Fine,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” he said. “Because you’re my friend, no matter what, and I’ve got your back regardless, you know? I mean, I’ve always been straight with you, haven’t I?”

“What are you getting at?”

“I think you need to be careful.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have the cops been around to visit you?”

“That detective, the one that gave me such a hard time back when it happened, came by when I was out. Remember her?”

“Yeah, I remember her. So if she’s coming to see you, have your guard up.”

“I’m not reading you, Greg.”

There was a pause. “It could be a trap.”

“A trap?”

“Yeah.”

I stood and walked out of the kitchen and to the living room window, wondering if Jayne was out front. “What do you mean, a trap?”

“Look, the odds that it was really Brie are like a million-to-one, right? But I’m thinking, you’re supposed to think it’s her.”

“And who would want to make me think that?”

“The police. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you did it. That you did something to Brie.”

“For fuck’s sake, Gre—”

“Hear me out, man. But that’s what this detective has always believed. So, if Brie suddenly shows up, that’s designed to put you on edge. Throw you off your game.”

“Greg, you can’t—”

“I’m almost done. If you’re the killer, suddenly you start doubting yourself. You go check and see if the body is where you left it. Like, say, in some concrete foundation or in the wall of a building. And when you do, bam! Hardy’s waiting for you like Columbo.”

I sighed. “That’s not going to happen.”

“Agreed. But I bet they’re watching you. Probably got a tracker on your car. And they’re clever, letting it be your old neighbor who sees her. Knowing he’ll call you. Maybe he’s even in on it.”

I said nothing.

“You still there?”

“I’m still here.”

“The thing is, Andy, I’ve got your back. Always have, always will. No matter what you’ve done.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

There was silence at the other end.

“Greg?”

“You don’t remember,” he said.

“Don’t remember what?”

“I mean, it’s not a surprise that you wouldn’t. You were so shit-faced at the time.”

I remained at the window, wondering if Jayne was still on the property, or whether she’d gone for a walk.

“What are you talking about?” I was starting to lose patience with my friend.

“That night I came over, found you sitting in the tub, taking a bath in your piss and vomit. The night you finally decided you had to get it together.”

“I haven’t forgotten that.”

“But I guess you forgot what you said to me.”

“What did I say, Greg?”

Another pause. “You said, ‘It’s all my fault.’ You said, ‘I fucked up.’ I asked you, I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And you said, ‘Brie.’ But I never told a soul you said that. Never told that detective.”

An unmarked car came to stop out front of the house. Detective Marissa Hardy had returned.

“I’m gonna have to get back to you, Greg,” I said, and ended the call.

Detective Hardy backed her car up a few feet so that it blocked the end of the driveway. I guess she thought I was going to jump into my Explorer and make a run for it, which seemed kind of ridiculous, given that I’d never tried to escape from her in the past when things were looking pretty goddamn grim.

She got out of the car and smiled. “Caught you this time.”

“Sorry you missed me before,” I said. “But I gather you had lots to talk about with Jayne.”

Hardy closed her door and approached. “We had a good chat.”

“You never get tired of trying to ruin my life. My old one, and now my new one.”

“You make it sound like it’s personal, Mr. Mason. Oh, sorry, Mr. Carville.” She smiled. “It’s hard to get used to that.”

“Am I going to have to change it again?” I asked. “Have you already leaked a few juicy tidbits to the media? Am I going to have CNN on my doorstep by tomorrow?”

Hardy feigned hurt feelings. “I can’t control what the press chooses to cover. It’s a free country, you know.”

“I get this sense you’d like to make it a little less free for me.”

“There are matters still unresolved,” she acknowledged. “Brie’s still missing.”

“And I wish you would find her, or find out what happened to her. There’s nothing I want more in the world than that.”

Hardy nodded slowly. “Of course. I guess that’s why you hired your own private investigator to look for Brie, or started some big media campaign to get the public’s help to find her.”

I had done neither of those things, which of course was her point.

“You have no idea what I did trying to find Brie,” I said. “Maybe it didn’t include hiring my own detective, or mounting some social media blitz, but you know why? Because I was stupid enough, naïve enough, to believe you would do it because that was your job.”

Hardy winced, as though maybe I’d landed a glancing blow.

“It was your job — it’s always been your job — to find Brie, bring some kind of resolution for those who love her. And maybe if you hadn’t zeroed in on me as your number-one suspect from the very first day, you’d have opened your eyes to what else might have happened to her. But no, you make up for your ineptitude by accusing me of not being an amateur detective.”

I shook my head in disgust. “You have no idea what I did or didn’t do, no idea of the sleepless nights, no idea how many times I drove the streets at all hours, night and day, and wandered the malls and walked along creeks and searched everywhere I could think of. You have no idea how much I’ve tortured myself over this. I’ve wondered, could she be dead, and if so, how did it happen? Who killed her? But then I’d think, maybe she isn’t dead, maybe there’s hope, but then, if she’s alive, why hasn’t she been in touch? Why did she leave me? Why has she put me through this? What did I do that would make her want to hurt me this much? I mean, which would be worse? To find out she’s dead, or that she’s left me without so much as a goodbye. Answer me that.”

I was out of breath.

The silence between us lasted several seconds.

“Which brings us to today,” the detective said.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” I said, knowing what she had to be referring to.

“I’ve been doing a little digging,” she said. “You know, like, doing my job. The groceries she dropped were from the Stop & Shop in Milford’s east end. You ever shop there?”

“No.”

“Did you and Brie ever shop there?”

“Maybe occasionally.”

“Anyway, talked to the employees there, the folks working the checkouts, and no one remembered seeing her this morning. Of course, it’s pretty busy on a Saturday, and what with all that scanning and beeping, maybe no one noticed her.”

“Can’t you check the credit card receipt?” I asked.

“Saw the receipt from the bags she dropped. She paid cash. And then there’s the matter of the car.”

“It was a Volvo,” I said. “A station wagon.”

She smiled. “You know your cars. A wagon. A 2012 model, we think. Black. With what looked like a dimple in the hood, a little dent. Like if, you know, a baseball landed on it or something.”

I listened.

“The car didn’t look all that dirty, but you know what was? The license plate. Had some muck or something on it. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes plates get dirty.”

“Yeah, but if the rest of the car was more or less clean, why would the plate be the only thing that was dirty? Like this lady, whoever she was, or whoever owned that car if it wasn’t her, didn’t want anyone to make out that plate.”

“Sometimes people do that. To avoid tolls or tickets.”

“True,” she said. “Something deliberate.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Anyway, the make of the car, the model, its color, and that ding in the hood, that’ll help. We put the word out, folks out on patrol, they see a car like that they can do a check on it.”

“I would imagine there are a lot of black Volvo wagons in this part of Connecticut,” I said.

“Yup, no question. But you never know. We find that car, maybe we find that woman who was driving it.” She gave me a wry smile. “Whoever it happens to be.”

“You don’t think it’s Brie,” I said.

“I like to keep an open mind,” Hardy said. “But if it is, well, that opens up a whole lot of questions.”

“And if it isn’t, I’d say just as many.”

She nodded. “No argument there.” She pondered a moment. “But I ask myself, who would benefit if your wife were to be spotted around town?”

“I would imagine everyone who cares about her,” I said. “And, of course, Brie, because we’d rally around her, help her get through whatever happened.”

“Yes, but who would benefit most?”

I didn’t want to help her with this.

“No?” she said. “I think that would be you. If it began to look as though your wife was still among us, making mysterious cameo appearances here and there—”

“Here and there? Has she been seen someplace else?”

Detective Hardy waved away the question. “Anyway, if there are sightings of her, then you couldn’t very well have killed her, could you?”

“What are you saying? I’ve somehow staged this? Hired some woman to pretend to be Brie?”

“There has to be some explanation.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not it. I mean, why the hell would I do that? And why would I do it now? When Brie’s disappearance, I’m sorry to say, has clearly no longer been a priority for you? When most people, other than me and her family, have pretty much forgotten about her. Why now?”

“Good question,” Hardy said. “Maybe to convince your new girlfriend that you’re not a killer. Maybe she already knows more about your past than she’s let on. Maybe you need to put her mind at ease.”

“It’s been nice talking to you,” I said, and turned to head back to the house.

“One of these days,” she said, turning to walk back to her car.

“What did you say?”

Hardy stopped and turned. “One of these days, I’m going to get you. Maybe you’ve been thinking I’ve given up, but I haven’t. I’m just waiting for the right piece of evidence to come along, the one thing that will nail you to the wall. Maybe this is it. Maybe you’ve overplayed your hand, gotten a little too cocky. I guess we’ll see how this plays out.”

She walked off, got into her car, and drove away.

I didn’t go back into the house. I went into the garage, thinking about Greg’s theory, that the police were running a game on me, that Brie’s reappearance was designed to unnerve me, second-guess myself, go back to where I’d supposedly left Brie’s body.

With the cops following me all the way.

But to listen to Detective Marissa Hardy, I was the one behind this entire charade. I had someone out there pretending to be Brie to persuade Hardy, once and for all, that I had done nothing to harm my wife.

I was more confused now than I’d been all day. I was starting to wonder whether Brie really had returned, and was running a game on all of us.

And maybe that’s why my frustration level soared right up into the red, clouding my eyes with a bloody mist, but not so much that I couldn’t see the hammer atop my worktable. I grabbed it and swung it like a madman, over and over again, into the wood surface, leaving shallow, quarter-sized dents. The table shook so badly that a couple glass jars of nails slipped off the edge and hit the cement floor with a crash, nails and bits of glass scattering all over the place.

I thought I had my life together.

Yeah, well, not so fast, pal.

I didn’t come up to bed right away.

Jayne and I barely spoke through dinner. Tyler was uncharacteristically agreeable, asking if he could get anybody anything when he got up to refill his glass with water, even clearing the table when we were done.

I almost responded sarcastically, wanting to ask him who he was and what had he done with the real Tyler. But instead, I placed my hand lightly on his back at one point and said, “Thanks, man.”

“No problem,” he said.

The miracles didn’t end there. As we were heading to the living room, Tyler said he was going upstairs to do some homework, some assignment that was due on Monday. This time it was Jayne who thought of making a quip, but she didn’t stop herself.

She looked at me and whispered, “Homework? On a Saturday night?” And then, as Tyler mounted the stairs, she called out, “Who are you?”

But Tyler was taking the steps two at a time and didn’t bother to reply. Jayne quietly told me she believed he was on his best behavior because she’d told him earlier in the day that she was pregnant.

“I don’t expect him to tiptoe around me for long,” she said. “But even a couple of days would be nice.”

We started watching one of the movies from the Bourne trilogy — I don’t even know which one, but they were the kind of movies you could drop into at any point and just let your brain go — but before it finished, Jayne said she was heading up to bed. We hadn’t spoken through the movie, and I knew she was not only trying to get her head around all that she’d learned about me today, she was annoyed I’d spoken to Greg about the supposed reappearance of Brie before I’d talked to her about it.

When I made motions to follow her upstairs, she held up a hand.

“It’s okay, finish the movie.”

I got the message.

Over the next hour, I puttered about, finally finding myself in the kitchen, staring into the fridge at a bottle of red. I wanted to pour myself a large glass, and then another, and another after that, but as much as I needed to deaden my senses, to round the edges of the day, I also needed a good sleep, and alcohol was not the way to go about it.

I finally went upstairs and entered our room quietly, figuring Jayne would be asleep. Her bedside light was off, and she was under the covers. But she was awake, eyes wide open.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” she replied, the light from my side of the bed casting half her face in shadow. “Did I hear you on the phone earlier?”

“Nope,” I said. “Must have been the TV.”

“I thought maybe you were talking to Greg. Because clearly you talk things out with him first.”

“I’m sorry. He’s my friend. We made shitty business partners, but on a personal level, he’s always been there for me.”

I started to unbutton my shirt.

“I’m worried about Tyler,” Jayne said.

Of all the things she might have said, I wasn’t expecting that. “Okay.”

“He lied to me. He and his friend were hanging out in a cemetery last night, and there was a story online about some vandalism there. Graves knocked over.”

I didn’t have to ask her how she knew her brother had been there. She had told me about how she kept tabs on him.

“But tonight at dinner, I thought, maybe he’s trying to turn things around. He’s finally starting to settle in here, willing to give it a chance, but now...”

“What?”

“I asked you if he could come live with us because, first of all, I believed you’d be a good influence on him and that we could provide some stability. But now, well, this feels like a house of cards. Like it’s all going to come crashing down at any moment.”

“Because of me,” I said. “So this is about more than Tyler. It’s about you and Tyler.”

“It’s about all of us. You, me, him, and this baby that’s suddenly complicated everything.”

“It’s not a complication,” I said. “It’s wonderful news.”

“You didn’t look like you thought it was wonderful when I first told you.”

“I was surprised. But I’m not unhappy about it.”

Jayne did not look convinced.

I came around to her side of the bed, perched myself on the edge. I put my hand to her cheek and said, “I love you.”

Jayne said nothing for a few seconds. Then, “What if you have to make a choice? What if you love both of us?”

“Jayne, it’s not... it’s never going to come to that.”

“How can you know?”

I couldn’t come up with a reply.

Jayne said, “There’s no way this ends well, is there? I mean, if it’s Brie, then our life’s in total chaos. If it isn’t her, this detective never stops trying to prove you killed her. Either way, I could end up losing you.”

“No,” I said.

She turned her head away.

“We just have to see what happens,” I said.

“That’s your plan?”

“I don’t know what else to say. We can’t worry about things we’re powerless to change. Our priorities, as of this moment, are to make sure you and this baby you’re carrying are okay. And that we can make things work here for Tyler.”

I leaned in and hugged her. She put her arms around me but didn’t squeeze.

“Maybe I should... maybe this is the wrong time to bring a child...”

“No,” I said. “Don’t think that way.”

I stood, gave her the most comforting smile I could muster, and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. As I stood there, looking into the mirror, I had to concede that maybe Jayne was right.

There’s no way this ends well.

The last thing I did before I turned off the light was mute my phone and plug it into the charging cord I left sitting on the bedside table. A second after I hit the light, my phone lit up silently with an incoming call.

On the screen, the word NORMAN.

I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to talk to less than Isabel’s husband. So I flipped the phone over and got under the covers.

I lay awake much of the night, rolling over and looking at the digital clock on the bedside table: 1:05, then 2:17, then 3:01, and so on until slivers of sunlight started piercing through the blinds. I kept thinking about something Greg had said to me yesterday.

He’d been talking about that time he’d found me drunk, more down and out than I’d ever been before.

“You said, ‘It’s all my fault.’ You said, ‘I fucked up.’ I asked you, I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And you said, ‘Brie.’ But I never told a soul you said that. Never told that detective.”

It’s all my fault.

It was pretty clear what Greg had read into those comments. I had no memory of making them, but then again, there was a lot from that time, and that day in particular, that I don’t remember very well.

I supposed it was possible I might have said those words. But they didn’t have to mean what Greg clearly believed they meant.

I might have tried to make that point with him, but that was when Detective Hardy had pulled up in front of the house. I might have told Greg that, yeah, maybe it was my fault. If Brie vanished because I’d betrayed her, I could have argued, then, yeah, that was on me.

But to interpret what I’d said to him in a drunken stupor as a confession was a leap. As I lay in bed I wondered whether I should phone and tell him that.

Then again, maybe I should call and thank him.

“Never told that detective.”

I was in debt to him for that. For sure, there was only one way Detective Hardy would have read that comment.

Speaking of her, I was also rolling around in my head something she’d said to me after I’d ended my conversation with Greg. Her assertion that I hadn’t done enough nosing about on my own to find Brie, that I never hired some private investigator to accomplish what the police could not, really rankled.

Detective Hardy had no idea how I responded to Brie’s disappearance. I supposed she wanted me to become some sort of amateur detective. The fact was that I was under so much scrutiny at the time, I could hardly go into a Dunkin’ Donuts for a coffee without being watched by the police or some local TV news crew.

Well, if that was Hardy’s expectation of me, maybe it was better late than never. Now that she was looking into the possibility that Brie was alive, I was ready to start asking a few questions on my own, and not just for appearances’ sake. My goal wasn’t to make Detective Hardy proud of me. I wanted to find out what the hell was going on.

But I had to be careful how I went about it.

I had a new life with Jayne. A good life. And now we were going to have a child together. I loved her. Jayne might view any steps I took where Brie was concerned as wanting to get back together with her.

If she was actually alive.

I appreciated her concern. She had to be thinking that if Brie was back, presumably our marriage would still be valid. Brie had not been gone long enough to be declared legally dead and I’d made no petitions to have such a declaration made.

Maybe it was time, discreetly, to go back to where this all began. Make the rounds. Talk to people I believed Detective Hardy should have paid more attention to. I’d often wondered why she hadn’t had the exterminator higher on her list of suspects.

Charlie Underwood.

After all, he was the last person, so far as Hardy knew, to have seen Brie alive (not counting our FaceTime chat on that Saturday evening). He’d been in the house with her. He knew her husband was away for the weekend on a fishing trip. If he’d returned that night, he’d have had every reason to believe Brie would be alone. And, as I had related to Hardy at the time, Brie had found him to be a pretty odd character.

If I’d been Hardy, I’d have been looking at him very closely.

I was up before Jayne. She mumbled into her pillow that she’d had a terrible night of tossing and turning, so I told her to stay in bed and see if she could go back to sleep. I quickly gathered what clothes I needed, slipped out of the room, and closed the door. I showered, shaved, and dressed, and was down in the kitchen by half-past eight.

I was surprised to see Tyler there.

He was sitting at the kitchen table in a pair of boxers. Tyler wasn’t big on bathrobes. He hadn’t made coffee, but there was half a glass of orange juice in front of him and a bowl with the dregs of some soggy cereal. He was looking at his phone when I walked in.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re up early.”

He looked up, shrugged. “I guess.”

“You working today?”

He nodded. “I start at ten.”

“You want a lift or anything?” I asked as I went over to the coffee machine.

“That’s okay.”

I had my back to him, running some water from the tap into the carafe, when he said, “Need to ask you something.”

“Sure.”

“Did you kill your wife?”

I froze a moment before slowly turning around to look at him. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised the secret was out, although I wondered who’d brought Jayne’s brother up to speed. Maybe it had been Jayne herself.

“Your sister talked to you,” I said.

Tyler shook his head. “Nope. I just listened. Yesterday, when that detective was here. And later, when you came home. You can hear everything from my room.” He pointed to the ceiling briefly.

I felt my face flush. The little shit had been eavesdropping.

“Well,” I said. “That’s a good thing to know, if a bit late.”

“So you haven’t answered my question. I don’t think my sister actually asked you flat-out, unless I missed that part.”

I pulled out a chair and sat across from him.

“No,” I said.

Tyler poked his tongue into his cheek as he thought about my answer. “But if you did kill your wife, that’s what you’d say anyway.”

“Then you have to wonder if there’s any point in asking,” I said.

“I read everything about Brie online,” he said. “Six years. Man. That’s a long time to go without the police figuring out what happened.”

“Long time for me, too,” I said.

“I just want what’s best for my sister.”

“Same here.”

“Especially now that you’ve, you know, got her pregnant and everything.”

“I agree.”

“I think becoming an uncle will be kind of cool,” he said.

“I’m looking forward to being a dad.”

“I know I’ve been kind of an asshole at times,” Tyler said, “with puking on your deck and stuff, but I’ve been thinking things have been working out okay here.”

“I think so, too. It’s been a big adjustment for all of us. You know my story, what I went through when I was your age. I’ve been there, having to get used to a new place, and a lot of the time not liking it.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “But now, with what’s happened, it could all go to shit.”

“I’m hoping that won’t be the case,” I said.

“So what if, somehow, it really is her? What if the woman who came to that house is Brie? What then?”

“That seems to be the number-one question. I’m gonna try to be honest with you here, Tyler. I don’t know. This is all uncharted territory. I’m in the woods without a compass. But the last thing in the world I want to do is hurt Jayne. So I’m taking this a day at a time. Maybe this is a whole lot of fuss about nothing. Maybe that was just some woman who went to the wrong house and for whatever reason flipped out. The thing is, I don’t see how it can be Brie. It seems very highly improbable.”

My phone rang.

I pulled it out of my pocket and saw a name I was not expecting, and certainly wouldn’t have been hoping to see.

I tapped the screen and put the phone to my ear.

“Hello, Isabel,” I said, although as soon as I’d said her name I wondered whether it might be Norman using her phone. He had, after all, tried to reach me the night before, and I had declined the call.

But it was definitely Isabel who said, “Andrew.”

“What can I do for you?”

“My mother wants to talk to you about something.”

“About what.”

There was a pause, followed by, “Brie came to visit her this morning.”

Isabel wanted to meet for a coffee first, before taking me to the hospital to see Elizabeth. She suggested the Starbucks on the Boston Post Road, just west of the turnpike. When I got there, she was sitting at one of the outside tables, both hands wrapped around a paper cup as if using it to keep herself warm, even though it was about seventy-five degrees out. There was a second cup on the other side of the table.

“I took a chance on a latte,” she said. “It’s still warm. I just sat down.”

Isabel buying me a coffee had me wondering whether I’d entered the Twilight Zone. I didn’t know whether this was a peace offering or a trap. Maybe she had a sniper positioned somewhere across the road, ready to take me out.

“A latte is fine, thanks,” I said, taking a seat. “How’s Norman?” I decided not to mention that he had tried to call me the night before.

She looked downward. “Oh, you know. Norman’s Norman.”

“So tell me what happened with Elizabeth.”

I had always liked Brie’s mother. A straight shooter, spoke her mind, but at the same time knew when to hold her tongue. She never stuck her nose into other people’s business, kept her opinions about how her children lived their lives to herself. But, not surprisingly, we had become estranged after Brie’s disappearance, which I attributed largely to Isabel persuading her that I was the cause of it.

Isabel’s chin quivered slightly. “She doesn’t have all that much longer. She has cancer. It’s all through her.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. “I didn’t know. I’ve always liked her.”

“She wants to talk to you.”

“Okay.”

Isabel said, “You know about what happened yesterday morning. On Mulberry. Where you used to live.”

Word was getting around, but I wasn’t surprised to learn that she’d very likely been talking to Detective Hardy.

“I know.”

“After we found out about that, Albert and I went there and talked to the people who live in the new house that got built where yours used to be. And to your old neighbor, Max.”

Just to confirm my suspicions, I asked, “I guess it was Detective Hardy who called you.”

“Not exactly. Albert and I called her before we’d talked to Max.”

I was getting confused by the timeline here. “So Max called you? After he’d been in touch with me and Hardy?”

Isabel shook her head quickly. “No, shit, I’m leaving out the most important thing.” She took a moment. “When we were visiting Mom yesterday, from her room, looking down at the parking lot, we thought we saw Brie, or someone who sure looked like her. She waved to us, like she knew who we were.”

It was coming into focus now. Hardy had hinted that this woman who looked like Brie had been seen someplace else.

“I don’t know who or what we saw,” Isabel said. “But then last night — early this morning would be more accurate — Mom saw her again.”

“Okay,” I said slowly.

“She says Brie came to her hospital room. I think she imagined it. The nurses, no one saw anything. It was the middle of the night. Visiting hours had ended at nine. Mom’s on all sorts of medications. I blame myself, well, myself and Albert, for getting her all hyped up. We brought Max in to tell her what he’d seen because, well, you know Mom. She takes some convincing on things. She’s not what you’d call a fan of conspiracy theories. I realize now it was a huge mistake. It put the idea into her head that Brie was... alive... and so then she has this vision in the middle of the night.”

“Sounds like that’s what it was,” I said.

Isabel drank from her cup. A little smidge of foam settled on her upper lip and I licked my own, trying to send her a signal. After a moment, she stuck out her tongue and got rid of it.

“You and I have had a pretty strained relationship since it happened,” she said.

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“I’m not sorry for anything I’ve done. Any actions I took were to get justice for my sister.”

I said nothing.

“But my mother, she thinks some kind of apology is in order. That if who we saw, and who she saw in the night, is really Brie, well, then, you didn’t do what we — well, me for sure — thought you did.”

“I see.”

“Just so you understand, it’s not me who’s apologizing, because I don’t know what the hell is going on. I don’t know, for certain, any more than I did a week ago, about whether my sister is alive. Maybe we just saw someone who looked, at a distance, like Brie, and she waved at us because we were looking at her. I don’t know. But Mom has come to a more definite conclusion.” She took another sip, this time avoiding any foam. “She asked me to get in touch with you, to ask you to come and see her so that she can tell you she’s sorry.”

I thought about what she was asking of me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What?”

“I don’t know whether I should do it. I might be accepting an apology under false pretenses.”

Isabel’s eyes went wide. “Christ, what are you saying? Are you admitting it? Are you confessing to me that you did kill Brie?”

“No, of course not. I’m not confessing to anything. But I don’t know who your mother saw, if she even saw anything. It’d be wrong to let her apologize to me based on a delusion.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Isabel said, looking fed up and frustrated. “Tell me you didn’t do it. Tell me you didn’t kill Brie.”

“I didn’t kill Brie. But I’ve told you that a hundred times since she disappeared and you’ve never believed me before.”

“Christ, just let her apologize for thinking you did do it.”

“Maybe the one who should apologize is you, since you’re the one who made her think that.”

“Look,” Isabel said, composing herself and bringing her voice down. “Albert thinks — we both think — that Mom needs this. Her prognosis is bad. She could go today, tomorrow, maybe a month from now. God, she could pass on before we get to the hospital. She’s got some reason to hope her daughter isn’t dead, and maybe it’s okay if she goes to her grave with that. Even if it turns out not to be the case. And part of that involves making things right with you.”

I drank some more of my latte, finishing it.

“Okay,” I said.

Brie had confessed to me about Norman.

I believed her when she said it had just been one time. I don’t think you can call having sex a single time with someone other than your spouse an affair. A mistake, sure. A betrayal, no doubt about it. An error in judgment, without question. But an affair? I wouldn’t say that. My transgression with Natalie Simmons fell into that category. And it also qualified as a mistake, a betrayal, and an error in judgment.

I would say, however, that to sleep with your brother-in-law, even once, is kind of fucked up.

What Brie did betrayed not only me, but her sister, Isabel, as well. Not that there wasn’t plenty of blame to go around. That son of a bitch Norman was at fault here, too.

I didn’t take it well.

Amazingly, I didn’t have to pry it out of her. But Brie, wracked with guilt, felt the need to unburden herself. Maybe she thought it was going to come out at some point anyway, and wanted to get ahead of it.

“I can only explain it one way,” she said. “Pity.”

“Pity?” I said.

She told me how it happened. Brie, while no accountant, had a head for figures and was a whiz at doing tax returns. She not only did ours, but she volunteered to do them for Albert and Dierdre, and Isabel and Norman. Brie always refused payment, no matter how much they insisted, but she — and by that, I mean we — were rewarded with numerous bottles of very drinkable, if not terribly expensive, wine.

Brie headed over to Isabel and Norman’s one evening to sit down at the kitchen table and, armed with a laptop and the most up-to-date tax software, proceeded to figure out their returns. Isabel was heading out for the evening with the kids to some school function, leaving Brie alone with Norman.

She had several questions for him, and he had gone searching for various forms and receipts that he and Isabel kept in a shoebox, then sat down at the table next to her, trying to find the information she needed.

Norman asked if Brie would like a beer, and she said yes. He decided to have one, too. There were, I guess, a couple more each after that.

At one point, Brie said she needed a break from staring at the computer, and asked Norman something innocent, along the lines of, “So how’s things?”

And Norman said, “How is it you turned out like this?”

“Turned out like what?”

“Nice,” he said.

“I like doing people’s taxes,” she said. “You’re actually doing me a favor. I love this stuff.”

“I don’t mean with the taxes,” Norman said. “I mean, how is it you turned out so nice, and your sister didn’t?”

Norman, I should point out, was a handsome-enough-looking guy, with a dry wit, and in his youth had hoped to be a filmmaker. But real life has a way of crushing creative ambition, and Norman ended up running a Firestone franchise, where the closest he got to being a filmmaker was when he made short video spots for his website advertising a sale on snow tires. When he and Isabel started dating, Brie had told me, she wasn’t quite the person she would later become. Negative, sure, but she had not yet perfected her gold-medal-worthy nitpicking skills.

Thing is, to cut her some slack, Isabel had abandoned her dreams just as Norman had. She had wanted to become a lawyer — she’d always been a fan of legal dramas; as a kid she’d watch old episodes of L.A. Law and Matlock and even the old black-and-white Perry Mason series — but had neither the resources for law school, nor marks high enough to be admitted. In my more generous moments, I felt this had a lot to do with Isabel’s unhappiness. Not that she ever confided in me, confessed her discontent, but I don’t think one could be the way she was without being disappointed with herself. However, her skills at working the system to hound me in the years after Brie’s disappearance were evidence she might have had the chops to pursue a career in the law.

But back to the night in question.

Brie tried, at first, to apologize to Norman for her sister, to argue that ultimately she meant well. That what Norman saw as haranguing was Isabel trying to make their life better.

And that was when Norman revealed perhaps his darkest secret: that when he’d been dating Isabel, it was Brie he felt himself falling in love with. There was a period before I met Brie when she and her sister were living together, sharing an apartment in Bridgeport, and Norman always wanted to pick Isabel up from there, not meet her someplace, because it might allow him, even for a few minutes, to be in Brie’s company.

Isabel, Norman told Brie, was perceptive enough to figure out what he was up to back then, which explained why at every opportunity she told him stories designed to trash Brie’s reputation. That Brie was a slut, that she thought she was better than everybody else, that she only cared about how people looked and not what was inside.

Brie had never heard this before. Maybe it was what tipped her over the edge, learning the terrible things her sister had once said about her. That, and the fact that by this time she knew I’d had — and ended — my brief affair with Natalie.

The way Brie told it, that was when she gave him a hug. It was only meant to be consoling, but turned into something else.

“I can’t explain it,” she told me, weeping. “It just happened.”

She begged me not to do anything to Norman. I don’t think I’d ever given Brie reason to believe I was the type of guy who’d jump in the car, drive over to his place, haul him out on the front lawn, and beat the shit out of him. But then again, we’d never been in a place like this before. And I won’t lie. I did think about it.

But what would beating Norman to a pulp have proved? There was so much guilt to go around.

Still, I had a hard time dealing with it. We didn’t speak for several days, aside from the most basic communications. I slept on the couch, ate meals alone. It was Greg who finally talked some sense into me.

“Stop being an asshole,” he said. “You’re the luckiest guy in the world. Stop this shit. Patch this up. Brie is beautiful and kind and if we pushed the people out of our lives who had made one mistake we’d all be totally fucking alone. If she’s willing to take you back after what you’ve done, you need to let this go.”

Interesting advice, coming from Greg. Brie was not his biggest fan, and he knew it. A few years earlier, when Brie and I were engaged, Greg made a pass at her. She made it very clear to him that she was not interested, and when she told me about it later, I made a mistake that I like to think I wouldn’t make today, if such a thing were to happen with Jayne.

I made excuses for Greg. You know what he’s like, I said. He didn’t mean anything by it. He probably had too much to drink. Maybe he thought you were someone else. It was a party and it was crowded. He’s a friendly guy. Don’t worry about it.

I dismissed Brie’s concerns. I didn’t take them seriously. I failed to appreciate how uncomfortable my friend had made her feel. Maybe now, in the wake of Me Too and a little more self-reflection on the part of the male gender, I would see things differently.

Anyway, back then, I took his advice. I told Brie I wanted to start over. I would move past what she had done if she would move past what I had done. We went to counseling. I pledged to create a more stable life for us, not moving from fixer-upper to fixer-upper.

The odds might have been against us, but we beat them.

Things played out differently at Norman and Isabel’s house. Norman did not confess. Isabel, so far as we knew, remained unaware, and Brie wanted it to remain that way. She made me promise I would never, ever tell Isabel what she had done.

“Even if I were dead,” she’d said at the time.

I promised.

She did not make me promise not to tell the police, however, should the circumstances warrant it. When Detective Hardy pressed me for every possible detail about Brie’s personal life, I disclosed the information about Norman, without suggesting in any way that he might be responsible. And Hardy concluded he wasn’t, given that he was in Boston with Isabel Saturday night and into Sunday, during and after my FaceTime chat with Brie.

Norman had to know that I knew, and anytime we were in the same room, such as a family gathering, I’m sure he saw me as a ticking time bomb. That I would punch his lights out, or, even more frightening, rat him out to Isabel. What she might do to him would be far worse than any punishment I might mete out.

Anyway, I did neither.

Not even when things were at their worst. When Isabel was hounding Detective Hardy to charge me with something, anything, I resisted the urge to retaliate, to tell her that the sister for whom she was seeking justice had betrayed her in the worst way. It would have been so easy to bring her entire world crashing down with the revelation, but I couldn’t do it.

I wouldn’t do it to Brie. I’d made a promise and I intended to keep it. I would not destroy her extended family to score points, even though I was tempted.

I wasn’t the only one to keep the secret. Elizabeth knew, too. I wondered if Norman was aware. I wondered if Elizabeth had quietly taken him aside in recent days and told him he owed me a debt of gratitude. I wondered if that was why Norman had tried to call me the night before.

And going back six years, I wondered whether this had been weighing heavily on Brie that last day I spent with her. The Friday, before driving up to the cabin that evening. Something was troubling her. She was pensive, thinking about something. Didn’t say a word at breakfast. Our mistakes were behind us, but I supposed it was possible she hadn’t stopped turning them over in her mind.

“I can tell you’re thinking about something,” I said. “Talk to me.”

“I’m fine,” she insisted.

“If you don’t want me to go away, I’ll cancel. Greg and I can do this another time. He’s going to be hobbling around all over the place, anyway. Might do to wait another week or two when his leg’s totally healed.”

“No, I want you to go,” she said. “You have to go.”

“You trying to get rid of me?” I said. I meant it as a joke, but she took the comment seriously, as though I harbored some suspicions about what plans she might have.

“God, tell me we’re not slipping back,” she said.

“No, no, that’s not what I meant. I was kidding. Seriously.” I took her into my arms. “We are definitely not slipping back.”

She buried her head in my chest. Brie didn’t want me to see her cry. “I want you and Greg to have this weekend,” she said, and sniffed. She wiped her nose against my shirt and I laughed.

“I could get you a tissue,” I offered.

“No need,” Brie said, and did it again.

She pulled away. “Will you call me? Let me know how things are going up there?”

“I don’t imagine there’ll be much to report,” I said. “We’ll fish, we’ll drink, we’ll sleep. Pretty much in that order. And I’ll be back Sunday afternoon. Maybe we should go out.” I grinned. “Maybe that seafood place, because odds are I won’t be eating much of it at the cabin. The lake’s probably fished out.”

“Okay,” she said, and smiled. “That’s what we’ll do.”

We both went to work. Brie had a job doing payroll for several small local businesses, and I was off to give several estimates before taking off for the weekend. The car was already packed, and I’d be on the road before Brie got home Friday afternoon.

We would talk Saturday night, and she would tell me about her adventures with Charlie the exterminator.

But that Friday morning would be the last time I’d hold her in my arms.

My unexpected meeting with Isabel, and the subsequent visit with Elizabeth, had thrown me off my game somewhat. I’d left the house that morning intending to visit Charlie Underwood, the exterminator who’d answered Brie’s plea for help when she thought our house might have a mouse infestation.

And, in fact, I later learned that it did. In the midst of having to deal with all the fallout from Brie’s disappearance, I began to spot mouse droppings around the house. Under the sink, in the basement where the wall met the floor, even in a kitchen drawer. I had tried to solve the problem on my own, buying traps and commercially available poison, but I wasn’t able to get a handle on the problem.

Finally, I had called Charlie Underwood.

But when he realized I was Brie’s husband, he passed on the job. He would have known, by that time, that I was Hardy’s prime suspect. She would undoubtedly have spoken to him many times in the course of her investigation. Maybe he thought I had some ulterior motive, that I wanted to pump him for details about his meeting with Brie. I supposed it was possible Hardy had warned him I might get in touch.

I just wanted to get rid of the fucking mice.

But now, six years later, I wondered if Charlie’s refusal to return to the house had any further significance. And, since I didn’t know what else to do at this point, he seemed like a good place to start.

His home was a run-down, vinyl-sided, two-story dwelling up Forest Road, before it turns into Burnt Plains Road north of the turnpike. It was set back a good hundred feet from the blacktop, and behind it sat a square, squat structure made of cinder blocks. I pulled into the driveway and parked next to a seriously rusted panel van, some of the rust eating right through the letters of underwood pest control painted on the side. The van was sitting on the rims and clearly hadn’t been driven anywhere for some time. An old, original Beetle — not one of the new, redesigned versions — was parked farther up the drive. Just as rusted out, but on fully inflated tires.

I got out, and as I approached the house noticed that the second-story windows were all boarded up. I climbed the two steps to the porch and knocked on the front door. When no one showed up after twenty seconds, I tried again. Same result.

I walked around the corner of the house and noticed that the door to the cinder-block structure was ajar. As I approached it I started to get a whiff of something that took me back to when I was a little kid, when I visited my uncle’s farm. He kept pigs, and the stench from the indoor pens could literally take your breath away.

The smell got stronger as I reached the door. I rapped on it, but since it was open, I poked my head in at the same time and said, “Mr. Underwood?”

“Back here!” someone shouted, and coughed.

Breathing through my mouth, I stepped inside. The building, maybe thirty feet square, was filled with makeshift tables constructed of sawhorses and four-by-eight sheets of plywood. The tables filled the room, spaced apart to create several aisles.

And atop every table, cages. Dozens and dozens of cages.

The room was a cacophony of chittering noises, scratching noises, scurrying noises. Each cage contained one or more animals. Rats, mice, squirrels, raccoons.

A possum or two.

As I walked down one aisle, tiny eyes fixed on me. A black squirrel gripped the wire caging of its enclosure, stood on its hind legs, and watched me as I passed. My arrival had created a commotion. Word seemed to be spreading among the creatures. Someone new was here. A stranger. An interloper.

It was a fucking zoo of pests and vermin. And they were living in their own filth.

At the end of the aisle, his back to me, was Charlie Underwood in a pair of blue coveralls. He was stooped over, and as I got closer, he went into a coughing fit. When he was done, he made a retching sound that sounded like someone trying to scoop gravel out of the bottom of a well. Then he spit something onto the floor and I felt my own stomach do a slow roll.

He turned, saw me, and said, “Help you?”

“Mr. Underwood?”

“That’s me.”

“You, uh, did some pest control at my house a few years back.”

“Don’t do that anymore,” he said, then smiled, showing off brown teeth. “Dying,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“Sorry to hear that.”

“You work with poisonous chemicals your whole life, it has a way of catching up with you,” he said, and laughed, triggering another coughing fit.

“I can imagine.” I looked about the room. “What is all this?”

“You’re not one of those fucking inspectors from the city, are you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Because they’d take a dim view of what I’m doing here if they found out,” he said, and coughed again. It echoed all the way down to his shoes. He smiled, waved his hand at the room. “They wouldn’t understand that this is a rescue operation. These are the ones I didn’t have to kill. Saved them all. Some of them, been looking after them for years.”

“These are all... pests you got out of people’s houses?”

He nodded proudly. “Lot of people, they want ’em dead, but if I can get them out alive, I bring ’em here.”

I could think of only one question. “Why?”

He blinked, a little surprised by my question. “Because they’re all God’s creatures, you know. See this rat over here? That’s Susie. Anyway, caught her at a restaurant on the green downtown. I’d tell you which one but then you’d never eat there again and they got good food so I won’t tell you. And that raccoon was living in the attic of a couple in Devon. I accidentally broke his paw getting him out, so I keep him here. Figure he wouldn’t make it out in the wild. His name is Waldo. You say I came to your place?”

“About six years ago.”

“Who are you?”

“Carville. Andrew Carville. But back then, it was Mason.”

He blinked again, taking a second to put it together. It was like watching an old computer start up.

“Son of a bitch,” he said, and coughed again. “You’re the guy. The one who killed his wife.”

“I didn’t kill my wife.”

“Yeah, well, what else would you say? Whaddya want with me?”

I had no answer ready. Now that I was here, I honestly didn’t know. “Going over old ground,” I said. “Still looking for answers. Still looking for Brie.”

“Sure you are,” he said.

“I know it was a long time ago, and that you’ve talked to Detective Hardy probably a dozen times, but is there anything you held back, anything you wish you’d told her?”

He shook his head. “Can’t think of anything. I talked to her a lot.” He grinned. “I was thinking, at one point, that maybe she thought I did it. They even came out here to my place, searched around, looking for anything, but they didn’t find a damn thing. I guess that’s when they started zeroing in on you.” He shook his head and grinned once more. “Guess you beat them on that one.”

“How did Brie seem that day? Was she anxious? Did she seem like she was worried about anything?’

His grin faded. “Well, first of all, when people call me, they’re worried they’ve got mice or rats or God knows what, so it’s fair to say they’re a little on edge. And your wife was like that.”

“You think it could have been something other than mice?”

“All these years later, what makes you ask?”

I didn’t want to get into the events of the last two days. “Just asking, is all.”

“Well, I’ll tell you this much,” he said. “She struck me as a woman who was just waiting for something bad to happen. That’s not something I ever told the police because it was a little too vague.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “I think she was worried about what you were going to do when you got home.”

“She had nothing to worry about from me,” I said.

Another shrug, and then a grin. “Now can I ask you something?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Like I said, I’m dying. I’m wondering if you’d be interested in taking any one of these rescue animals home with you? I need to off-load them as soon as possible.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t help you there.”

Charlie nodded and smiled. “Never hurts to ask.”

Seeing Natalie Simmons in the passenger seat put me into a momentary stupor, but the blast of a car horn woke me from it.

I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw another driver waiting to pull up to the self-serve pump I’d finished using a moment earlier. I keyed the ignition and drove out from under the canopy that hung over the pumps, then brought the car to a stop at the edge of the lot.

“Where’s your car?” I asked.

Natalie pointed to a low-slung Porsche Boxster pulled into a spot out front of the gas station.

“Just whipped in to buy some smokes,” she said. “Keep trying to quit, but hey, we’re all addicted to something and sometimes there’s no point fighting it.”

“Nice ride,” I said, giving a nod toward the car.

“I own the gallery now,” she said, and grinned. “Movin’ up in the world.”

“Congrats.”

“So how’ve you been?” she asked. “I mean, you’re not in jail, so that’s a good thing, right?” Natalie let loose a nervous laugh, like my possibly doing time for killing Brie was a subject of amusement.

“I suppose so,” I said.

Her smile faded. “I kept following the story in the news, you know? Googled it every once in a while and eventually it faded away. They never found her, huh?”

“No,” I said.

She nodded, almost with a sense of admiration, as though whoever might have disposed of Brie had done the job well.

“So many times I thought about calling you, seeing how you were, but then thought, that’d be weird, right? I mean, like I was trying to put a move on you now that your wife was no longer in the picture.”

She shook her head and smiled slyly. “Although, I won’t lie. I was tempted. We had a good thing going. Fun while it lasted, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said.

“But how would that have looked? Not good, right? Especially with the police keeping an eye on you. I’m pretty sure they were keeping an eye on me, too. There were times I’d see some car parked down the street, like someone was watching the place.”

If Detective Hardy had ever been conducting a surveillance on Natalie Simmons, I’d known nothing about it. Natalie was the type who’d see a tail where none existed. She was, to put it kindly, a bit of a flake. Natalie was easy prey for spreaders of conspiracy theories. She’d have been among those who thought COVID was a hoax. Back when I’d been seeing her, she didn’t even have a cell phone, believing they allowed the government to trace everyone’s whereabouts. I had to call the gallery landline if I wanted to get in touch.

But I was also reminded, as Natalie sat there in the front of the Explorer, what had attracted me to her. She was a looker. Well curved in all the right places, long legs, dark hair that fell softly to her shoulders, brown eyes. Some of the same attributes Brie had possessed, I realized at one point.

I met her when I’d been doing some renovation work on the business next door to the gallery. A soon-to-open bagel place. She had popped in during construction, wanting to know when the opening was going to be, and when we got talking, I learned that we had both gone to UConn, even been there at the same time.

“Oh my God,” she’d said. “I remember you.” She’d watched me studying her, waiting to see whether I remembered her, too.

“That one party, you helped me search through that huge pile of coats in the bedroom, trying to find mine, and things kinda happened?”

And then it all came back to me. A one-night thing.

While these thoughts ran through my head, Natalie was still talking.

“...wondered if maybe she could even have left the country, but why would she do that? Or got some new identity, you know? I mean, you have to have been asking yourself these questions for years.”

“Nice to see you, Natalie, but I really have to get going.”

“Oh, sorry,” she said. “When I saw you, I just had to say hello.” She laughed. “God, you must think I’m stalking you or something. I hope you’re doing okay. You with someone now?”

“Yes.”

Natalie nodded approvingly. “That’s good, that’s good. You have to move on, right? But hey, if you’re going by the gallery, stop in, okay? We can catch up.”

I smiled. “Sounds like a plan.”

She flashed me one last smile, opened the passenger door, and got out. She looked back over her shoulder once on the way to her Porsche and gave me a small wave, and a wink.

It was Monday, and we all had places to be.

I’d had two calls the previous week about possible jobs, so I was going to visit the sites today and provide some estimates. Jayne, who’d briefly considered taking a mental health day, and then an actual sick day when she woke up feeling nauseated from the pregnancy, decided in the end that she was going to go into the insurance office.

Tyler, while not exactly cheery, at least did a reasonably good impression of a human being at breakfast. He was dressed as though going for a shift at Whistler’s, in black pants and a white shirt, instead of his usual hoodie and jeans.

“What gives?” Jayne asked.

“Mr. Whistler asked if I could come in today, from like eleven to two, because some people are off sick and stuff. I’ve got no classes then so I said I could whip over and do them.”

Jayne didn’t look convinced, but said, “You sure you’ve got time to get over there and back before your afternoon classes?”

“I’m sure.”

“You want me to take a break and drive you over?” Jayne asked.

“Or I could,” I said.

Tyler had his bike, but school was in Stratford, and Whistler’s was across the bridge in Milford.

“I can do it,” he said. “Unless it rains. If it rains, can I call one of you guys?”

We both nodded.

I was, at some point today, going to try to learn what sort of arrangements were being made for Elizabeth McBain. Would I be welcome at any possible service? If not, should I at least send flowers to the funeral home? I was thinking I’d get back to Diedre later, given that she was the one who’d let me know Elizabeth had died.

Jayne was the first to leave for work. She got in her car at half-past eight, about two minutes before Tyler hopped on his bike and went tearing down the street, headed for school. I was settling in behind the wheel of the Explorer when I noticed, in the mirror, a vehicle stopping at the end of the driveway, blocking my way.

Shit, I figured. Detective Hardy again.

Except it wasn’t, unless Hardy had traded in her unmarked cruiser for a pickup truck. In my oversized door mirror I could see Greg behind the wheel. I was going to get out, but he bailed from his truck first and came up to my door.

I powered down the window.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he said, resting his elbow on the sill, one of his personally rolled French cigarettes dangling between his lips. It was down to about a quarter of an inch and appeared to have gone out.

“Thought I’d swing by on my way to work and apologize for coming by last night,” he said, resting his arms on the door sill, his face partway into my car.

“For what?” I said.

He laughed. “I feel a little foolish, is all. I’d been talking for a while with Julie about whether I should ask you about teaming up again, you know. Finally, she says, I’m sick of hearing about this, why don’t you go and ask him? No way, I says. It’s late. So what, she says, get your ass over there and ask him. So, I did.”

“Sounds like Julie might be the best thing that’s happened to you in a while.”

“Yeah, that’s true. I did kind of put you on the spot.”

“I said I’d think about it. But for what it’s worth, Jayne thinks I should go for it.”

Greg looked impressed. “Well, nice to have her on my side.”

“Look,” I said, “I wanted to talk to you about something you said the other day. About when you came to see me, when I was at my worst. You know.”

“Yeah, what?”

“That part about me saying that it was all my fault. About Brie.”

“Don’t worry, man. I’ve never said a word about it.”

“That’s not — no, that’s not what I mean. I just wanted to say, that doesn’t have to mean what you might have thought.”

Greg shook his head. “You don’t have to explain.”

“No, I think I do. I can believe I might have said something like that. I mean, Brie and I had our troubles, and a lot of them were my fault. I think it’s more likely that’s what I meant.”

Greg nodded confidently. “I hear ya.”

“I’m serious. I think that’s what it was.”

“Then let’s consider it case closed,” Greg said. “We don’t ever have to mention it again.”

He smiled, and the butt that had been dangling from his lower lip dropped into my car, landing somewhere on the floor mat. I don’t think Greg noticed, and I pretended not to.

“Anyway,” he said, “I’m off. Gotta grab some donuts on the way to the mall. Want to keep the squatters on my good side.”

He gave me a thumbs-up, took his elbows off the door, and headed back to his truck.

At least this Matt guy wasn’t one of those assholes who tries to lose you at the same time as he wants you to follow him. I’ve known guys like that. They say, “I’ll lead the way,” then run through yellow lights and get several cars ahead and you have ask yourself, what the hell are they doing?

But Matt took it easy, always glancing in his mirror to make sure he hadn’t lost me. The drive gave me more time, not that I really needed it, to continue mulling over the events of the past couple of days, and further back than that.

About a year after Brie vanished, I received a message from a Milford resident vacationing in Spain who said he was sure he had seen Brie on a street in Madrid. This traveler was a friend of a friend of mine, which was how the message found its way to me. There was no picture, no real details of any kind. I followed the story in the news, his forwarded email read, and when I saw this person I thought it might be her. Just wanted to help.

Yeah, well, thanks for that solid tip. What the fuck was I supposed to do with that?

There was a handful of letters in the mail. One lady wrote to say she had been told by God that Brie was working as a Russian spy for Putin, and had been called back to report on her mission. Clearly, Putin had been hard at work trying to get all of Milford’s darkest and deepest secrets. A detective from Washington State offered his services, saying he had a solid record of tracking down missing persons. An Internet search produced not one story to support his claim.

I’d heard from a psychic, too. Some local woman, said she’d had a vision about what had happened to Brie, and was willing to share it with me for five hundred bucks. I did some checking, learned she had run this kind of game before in Milford, then moved away to San Francisco for a while. I told her if her vision was so convincing, go sell it to Detective Hardy.

It was the last I heard of her.

Maybe the way I so quickly dismissed these so-called offers of assistance comes across as disinterest on my part, or, as Detective Hardy seemed to believe, evidence that I already knew Brie’s fate and therefore couldn’t be bothered to follow up on any of them.

I viewed it differently. I had what I believed was a reasonably efficient bullshit detector.

And, while I had to admit Saturday’s events were not as easy to toss off as those other developments, I was skeptical. I thought back to what Greg had said to me later on Saturday, that he thought Hardy was setting some kind of a trap for me. It seemed like a wild theory at the time, but in the absence of any other explanation, I wondered whether he was on to something.

Before long, I was on Wheelers Farm Road, and Matt had put his left blinker on.

We’d passed a mix of houses, some small but others large, estate-like, most set well back from the tree-lined road. I was figuring it would be one of these, but the lane that Matt turned into led right into the forest, with no structure in sight.

The road in was not paved, but two hard-packed stone tracks with a strip of grass growing between them. Granted, some of the places along this stretch of road were secluded, with lots of trees between home and road. The trees not only offered privacy, but acted as a sound barrier. The lane widened up ahead for a short stretch, enough space for two vehicles to pass, and Matt pulled over as far to the right as he could, then stuck an arm out the window and waved me ahead.

I drove the Explorer alongside his truck, pulled ahead, and stopped. Was I supposed to turn off the engine and get out, or was I about to get more directions? I glanced back and saw Matt was getting out of his vehicle.

It seemed a strange place to stop. We were still swallowed up by trees, and if there was a house nearby, I couldn’t see it.

I put the Explorer in park, undid my seat belt, and opened the door. As I was stepping out, Matt was approaching. He was holding his right arm tight to his side, and I couldn’t see his hand.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“We have to walk in from here,” he said, then pointed with his left hand over my shoulder. “The access is washed out just ahead. That’s another thing I got to get sorted out before I can rent this place out again. You do that kind of work, too, or know anybody who does?”

“No, and yes,” I said.

I turned to see where he was pointing. The road looked okay as far as I could see. He might have mentioned this when we first talked, that this was going to be a job site with access problems. I wasn’t going to be hauling my tools and supplies all the way from here to some house I couldn’t even see. I’d probably need to hire an extra guy just to lug everything around so I wasn’t dead-tired before I’d even started.

I swung around to express my concerns.

“I don’t think—”

That was all I managed to say before Matt whipped up this thing he had been hiding in his right hand. It looked kind of like a gun, but not like any gun I’d ever seen before. And before I could get a closer look he squeezed the trigger and a couple of wires shot out at me and suddenly the most excruciating pain I had ever felt in my entire life was surging through my body, and I hit the ground and I thought, Holy mother of God, I am fucked.

During the time that I was on the ground and incapacitated from the Taser — and I didn’t have to be a weaponry expert to figure out that was what I’d been shot with — Matt rolled me onto my stomach, pulled my arms around behind me, and cinched a set of plastic handcuffs around my wrists.

The Taser shot had paralyzed me for several seconds, maybe as long as a minute, and while my mind was telling my body to fight him off, my limbs were not getting the message. While I lay there, wrists bound, Matt went back to his truck, opened the driver’s door, rummaged around for something, and quickly returned.

This time, in his right hand was a real gun, not a Taser. A Glock, it looked like, although guns were not my area of expertise. Whatever it was, it scared the shit out of me. In his other hand, a roll of duct tape.

He kicked me over onto my back. My bound hands dug into me, but Matt didn’t appear to be concerned about my comfort. He tucked the gun into his belt and stood over me, one leg on either side of my chest. If I’d had control over my limbs I’d have tried to kick him in the balls, but it was not to be.

He ripped off a length of duct tape, then bent over long enough to slap it over my mouth, and stepped away.

“I want you to understand something from the get-go,” he said. “Give me a moment’s trouble and you’re dead. You get that?”

I managed a nod as I shifted to my right side to take the weight off my wrists.

Matt said, “The tape’s temporary. I’m gonna explain some things and I don’t want you interrupting. And don’t think of shouting when it comes off.”

I nodded again.

“Okay,” he said, taking a step back. “Don’t go away.”

As he walked back toward his Suburban, I tried moving my various parts. He hadn’t bound my legs, and when I tried to move them, I was successful, if you can call being able to drag them across the ground like they were logs a success. And I was now able to wiggle my fingers, although for how long was anyone’s guess, given how the plastic cuffs were cutting off the blood flow.

Matt came walking back. He was holding a shovel. He pointed the blade into the ground, rested one foot on it, cupped his hands over the end of the handle, and turned it into a resting place for his chin.

“You’re gonna dig a hole.”

I listened. He stepped around me, leaving the shovel, deep enough in the dirt that it remained standing, and looked at my bound hands.

“You’re clearly a workingman. You got the hands. There’s a lot of digging, and I don’t need you whining about blisters.”

I made some noise behind the tape that sounded something like, “Why me?”

“This whole thing’s kind of a shot in the dark,” Matt said. “Hoping to confirm something for myself, and I might need help with that. That’s where you come in. Even for you, might not be easy, given all the time that’s gone by.”

He paused, gazed out into the woods, appeared thoughtful. “I hope I can find the spot. It was right close to a rock. Long as that rock’s still there, we should be okay.”

Matt turned his attention back to me. “I’ve got a reputation to maintain, you know? Word of mouth is everything, no matter what you do. So I get a call that I botched a job, that concerns me.”

I’m going to die. That’s the only way this ends.

“Get on your stomach and I’ll snip the cuffs off. Don’t try anything funny. You can take the tape off yourself.”

I rolled onto my belly, my head turned so I could catch a glimpse of him standing over me. He reached down and I heard a snip and my wrists fell apart. Matt took a quick step back as I slowly rolled onto my side, then got up onto my knees. I peeled the tape off my mouth, balled it up, and tossed it into the tall grasses by the road.

“Up you get,” he said.

I stood. There was a good ten feet between us. If I tried to rush him, I wouldn’t get halfway there before he pulled the trigger on the Glock. And let’s say I got lucky and he missed. He was still a big guy. Wrestling the weapon away from him would not be easy.

Then I thought, what if I simply turned and ran? A moving target wasn’t that easy to hit, unless Matt was a real sharpshooter. And if I ducked and weaved the whole time, I might have a chance. A slim one, but a chance.

And yet, there was a part of me that wanted to know why I was here.

“Grab the shovel,” Matt said.

I pulled it out of the ground and held it, horizontal, with both hands.

“Don’t hold it like that,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re some fucking gladiator getting ready to take a swing. Hold it with one hand.”

Hanging on to it with one hand, I let the shovel swing earthward. “How’s that?” I asked.

Matt fixed his eyes on me and didn’t say anything. We had a little staring contest for about five seconds before I said, “You killed my wife.”

Matt said, “I thought so.”

I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

He pointed his thumb at the woods. “Let’s go, pardner.”

Tyler didn’t know what to do next. As he rode his bike back in the direction of Whistler’s, he considered his options.

He could do nothing, pretend he never even saw her, say nothing to Jayne or Andrew. But he didn’t think this was the kind of thing he could keep to himself. So maybe he could call that detective. He’d heard her name — Hardy — when he’d listened to Jayne’s conversation with her and, later, with Andrew.

Yeah, he could do that.

But Tyler didn’t much want to talk to the cops. He didn’t actually know if the police were looking for whoever knocked over those gravestones, and slashed those tires, but you didn’t exactly want to walk into a police station when you’d been doing stupid shit like that. What if someone had actually seen them? What if there were descriptions out there of him and Cam?

There. That’s what he’d do. He’d call Cam.

Cam was his only real friend in Stratford or Milford, the only one he could talk to. When they’d been out last night, he’d told him all about what had been going on at his place. The visit from the cop, all the stuff about Andrew’s wife going missing. So Cam knew the backstory. He’d be as good as anybody to talk to about this, even if he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the marquee.

Another thing he knew for sure. He wasn’t going back to Whistler’s to finish his shift, and he was not going back to school.

And having made that decision, he made one more, which was to hop off his bike because he thought he was going to be sick. He wheeled off the road into a small park. Benches, a little creek that ran through the heart of it, even a few swans swimming about.

He let the bike fall to the grass and knelt over, hands on his knees. He didn’t know whether his queasiness was from the bike-riding — he’d had no lunch yet and was feeling woozy — or plain old stress. Tyler felt his stomach roll over a couple of times, but nothing was coming up. He stood, one hand on the back of a nearby bench.

His phone dinged. He took it from his pocket, saw that it was from Mr. Whistler.

What should he say? Quickly he tapped a reply:

Hit send.

Seconds later: OK. Take care of yourself.

Now Tyler had a text of his own he wanted to send. He brought up Cam’s number and tapped out with his thumb:

Cam was probably in class, but he’d feel the vibration in his pocket even if his phone was muted. He’d sneak a look, then tell the teacher he had to go to the bathroom.

Sure enough, three minutes later Tyler’s phone rang.

“What’s up?” Cam asked.

As quickly as he could, Tyler laid it out for him. That he’d seen this woman who might be Andrew’s wife. That he followed her home, but she refused to talk to him.

“What should I do?” Tyler said.

“That’s easy,” Cam said. “You go back and bang on that door until she answers and you find out what’s going on. You’ve got a right to know. Don’t be a pussy.”

Well, there you had it.

He ended the call, took another moment to prepare himself mentally for what might be an unpleasant conversation, then hopped on his bike and started pedaling back to that woman’s house. He was worried she might not even be there. She could have put away her groceries and gone out to run another errand or gone to work. Almost forty minutes had passed since he’d left her house.

But as he rounded the corner on Rosemont and headed down her street, he saw that her car was still there. Tyler set his bike on the lawn and went to the side door. There wasn’t a doorbell, so he rapped on it, hard.

“Hey!” he said. “I still want to talk to you!”

No response.

There were two small windows set high on the door and he peered into them, using his left hand as a visor. If he spotted her, he’d bang on the glass. He wasn’t leaving here until he got some answers.

As he was pressed up against the door, his right hand resting on the handle, he decided to give it a try, see if she’d unlocked it after he’d left.

It opened.

Fuck it, he thought. I’m going in.

We’d trekked far enough into the woods that when I looked back, I could no longer see my Explorer or Matt’s Suburban. It wasn’t that they were specks in the distance. We had walked down into a small valley, then up again to the other side, and by that point had lost sight of the road we’d driven in on.

I stayed in the lead, as per Matt’s instructions. He was my guide, from behind.

“That way,” he’d say, and point. “Okay, over a little to the right. That’s it.”

After we’d been walking about five minutes, I spotted a large boulder ahead of us. A huge rock, about the size of a refrigerator, was sitting there amid the trees, as though it had been dropped from space.

“This is the spot,” Matt said. “Right around here. Go stand by the rock.”

I did as I was told, turning around and propping myself up on it. I still had the shovel in my hands. Matt stood about thirty feet away, looking at the ground, then at the rock, then back at the ground, one finger up in the air, as though testing to see which way the wind was blowing. He was six years in the past, trying to remember where, exactly, he’d done it.

He ran one work boot back and forth across the ground, brushing leaves and other debris out of the way.

“Was thinking there might still be a depression or something from the hole,” he said, “but I’m not seeing it. But I’m pretty sure it was right here. About ten paces from the rock, right in line with that birch tree over there.”

He made an X in the leaves with his foot. “Start there,” he said, then backed away to be out of range, should I decide to take a swing at him with the shovel.

I stepped forward, rested the tip of the blade on the ground, got my right foot on top, and pushed down. I turned over one small pile of dirt.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked. “Why Brie? Who are you? How did you know Brie?”

I’d spent the last ten minutes or so wracking my brain, trying to remember where I might have met this man before. Nothing about him was familiar. Nothing jumped out at me. But that didn’t mean Brie couldn’t have known him. Had there been something in Brie’s past, something she’d never told me about, that might have prompted someone — this man — to hunt her down and kill her? Did she have dark secrets she’d kept from me, just as I’d kept some from Jayne?

“Never met her before,” he said. “Didn’t know her.”

When he said that, I wondered whether Matt was some crazy serial killer, picking his victims at random. Maybe he’d seen Brie at the mall, on the street somewhere, and there was something about her, the way she looked, that triggered something in this guy. And he’d decided: She’s next.

“So you just saw her and thought, I’m going to kill her,” I said as I drove the shovel into the ground again. I was starting to make a pile of dirt to the right of the hole.

“You think I’m a psycho?” Matt asked. “That what you’re calling me?”

“I’m looking for a reason.” I continued to dig.

“It’s called working for a living,” he said.

“You were... hired?” I stopped shoveling, shook my head. “Someone paid you to kill my wife?”

Matt made a fist and raised a thumb. “Way to go, Sherlock.”

The enormity — the reality — of what was actually happening here didn’t quite hit me until that moment.

I was digging up my wife’s grave.

“You buried her here,” I said.

“I buried somebody here,” he said. “Question is, is she still there? If she’s not, that’s a problem. And if it’s not who it was supposed to be, that’s a problem, too.”

This was all starting to feel like a dream, or, more accurately, a nightmare. This could not be happening. I was not here. I was not digging this hole.

“Thought she was dead when I put her in, and even if she wasn’t, the dirt should have smothered her.” Matt seemed to be talking more to himself than to me. “Can’t imagine her digging her way out. Be like some kind of Stephen King movie.” He focused on me. “You one of the ones that spotted her?”

The recent sightings of Brie. He’d clearly been informed.

“No,” I said. “But I heard from others who did.”

Matt’s head drifted slowly from side to side. “Makes no fucking sense.”

What do you know? Something we could agree on.

I had to try and keep my head clear. Inside, I was shaking, and if I hadn’t been holding that shovel, my hands would have been trembling, too. My stomach was rising up into my throat, and it was taking everything I had not to double over and vomit.

“Who hired you to kill my wife?”

Matt shook his head.

But I persisted. “What’d she do? Why would anyone want her dead?”

He continued to shake his head. “Dig.”

I tossed a few more shovelfuls of dirt before pausing to ask, “How far?”

“You should hit something about a foot down.”

“You’re scared she somehow dug her way out,” I said.

Matt bristled at the word. “I’m not fucking scared.”

“Could have fooled me,” I said. “You’re scared she won’t be here. Who told you about the sightings?”

Another head shake.

I tried to recall all the people who had seen the woman who was, or was not, Brie. There was Max, and maybe the people who lived in the new house next to him. There was Albert and Isabel, and her husband Norman. And, finally, Elizabeth.

I forced the shovel down into the dirt, but with less force than I could have. It wasn’t that I was trying to buy time, although that was part of it. I was afraid of what I might hit, and how hard I might hit it. Like driving the shovel blade into what might be left of Brie would somehow do her greater injury.

“Gotta take a piss,” Matt said.

Would this be my chance? Was Matt going to disappear behind a tree long enough to empty his bladder?

Evidently not. He transferred the gun to his left hand, evidently more skilled at pulling down his zipper and digging out his dick with his right. The stream landed about four feet from where I had been digging, his piss soaking into what might be the foot of my wife’s grave.

I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill him more than I’d ever wanted anything in my entire life.

Matt shook, then zipped back up. “Did I ask you to stop?”

“So let’s say we find her remains,” I said. “We’re done? You could have come out here alone and dug her up.”

“I need you to tell me if it’s her.”

I almost laughed. “You can’t be serious.”

“Maybe there’ll be something,” Matt said, still training his gun on me. “Like, maybe she had a filling in one of her teeth. Something like that you’d recognize. She was your wife. Who’d know better than you?”

I had created a hole a foot and a half wide, two feet long, and more than a foot deep. I hadn’t encountered anything but dirt. I took a step back so that Matt could give the hole a cursory inspection.

“Hmm,” he said.

Now my mind was considering the unimaginable: that Brie really had been buried alive, and somehow escaped. But if that was really what had happened, why had she gone into hiding for six years and suddenly reappeared Saturday?

“Hmm,” he said again.

I cleared my throat. “Maybe you got the wrong spot.”

Matt rubbed his chin. He looked to the rock, back to where I’d dug, then back to the rock again.

He pointed at the ground about two feet over from where I’d been digging.

“Try there,” he said.

When my cell phone rang, the sound coming from the front pocket of my jeans, Matt perked up.

“Toss it over,” he said.

I got out the phone, saw that it was Jayne calling, then threw it over to Matt. It landed in the leaves. Matt bent over, grabbed it, then circled around me to reach the huge rock. Holding the phone screen down, he slammed it onto a jagged outcropping of the rock’s surface three times before he was satisfied it was dead. Then he pocketed it.

“Carry on,” he said.

I’d moved to the new dig location, only a couple of steps over from where I’d made the first hole. While my idea to start digging in a new spot had been simply to buy time, Matt was considering the possibility he’d had me start in the wrong place. I was ready to shovel a hole as broad as a tennis court if there was a chance it might give me time to figure out how to keep Matt from killing me.

I dug the blade into the ground and turned over some dirt. If the blade didn’t connect with bone — Jesus, the idea of whose bones it would be made my head swim — once I’d gone down twelve inches, I’d ask Matt whether he wanted to consider a third location.

“Anything?” Matt asked.

“No. You can take over anytime you want.”

Then it was his turn to have a cell phone go off. He took out his phone, glanced at the screen, rejected the call. I stopped and looked at him

“Wife,” he said.

If only he were closer. I’d fling some dirt in his face, try to temporarily blind him. Long enough to either tackle him and try to get the gun from him, or hit him over the head with the blade. Go in sideways, open the son of a bitch’s skull like a melon.

But what I actually did was drive the shovel into the ground for what felt like the thousandth time. “What if—”

I hit something.

A sliver of something gray-white, and what looked like nearly disintegrated fabric, could be seen through the dirt.

Matt took a step forward, still keeping his distance, but close enough to see that maybe I’d found something.

“Now we’re into detail work,” he said. “Hands and knees.”

I crouched down, the forest floor feeling cool on my knees even through my jeans. I began the process of scooping away dirt, a handful at a time, as though I were on some archaeological dig. Slowly, what looked like a rib cage began to materialize.

“I need a minute,” I said, and sat back on my butt.

“Don’t get all fucking weepy on me.”

That wasn’t going to be easy. I was overwhelmed. I’d seen more than a few movies where someone had been forced to dig his own grave, but I couldn’t recall one where a man was expected to dig up his own wife. I put my soil-smeared hands over my eyes and took a few breaths.

“Come on, let’s do this,” Matt said. From where he stood, he tried to get a better look at what I’d uncovered. “This is good. Means she didn’t crawl out or anything like that. Now we just have to make sure I didn’t grab the wrong person.”

“I left my DNA kit in the truck,” I said. “Wait here, I’ll go get it.”

“Funny,” Matt said. “Keep going.”

I resumed digging, shifting my attention to where I figured the head would be. Slowly, I began to uncover what appeared to be a forehead, then eye sockets. Wisps of hair. A head. I was still hoping that maybe, despite the odds, this skull, and the skeleton it was connected to, could not be Brie. That somehow this was someone else, however unlikely that seemed. That maybe that woman who’d mysteriously appeared during the weekend really was my wife.

But then my finger caught on something.

A chain.

As I brushed away more dirt, I uncovered a choker. A necklace that would have held close to someone’s neck. It was silver, made of dozens of small loops of chain, interspersed with several links shaped like the letter G.

Gucci.

The choker I’d bought Brie for her birthday. The one I had seen her wearing when we had our FaceTime chat on that Saturday night six years ago, the night before she disappeared.

I let go of the chain, threw my hands out ahead of me to brace my fall, and collapsed over the grave of my darling Brie.

When Detective Hardy got back into her car she took a moment.

While solving DiCarlo’s murder looked like a slam dunk — Tyler admitted being at the house and there was a witness who saw the bloodied kid leaving the scene — there were still plenty of questions. If DiCarlo was, indeed, the woman captured in the surveillance video, why did she want anyone to think she was Brie Mason returning after a six-year absence?

Why pretend to be Brie?

Was it some sort of cruel trick? To make Brie’s family think that she was still alive? What was to be gained by that? Why raise a family’s hopes that way?

The thought had crossed her mind earlier that Andrew was behind this, that he’d hired someone to pretend to be Brie in the hope that it would persuade Hardy he had never killed her. The trouble with that theory was, why now? Brie’s disappearance was effectively a cold case. While it was always in the back of Hardy’s mind, she hadn’t had a fresh lead to follow in years.

Pretend to be Brie.

What had DiCarlo’s next-door neighbor said? Candace was part of a community theater group. So she’d be a natural at playing a role, assuming an identity.

She got out her notebook to see whether she’d written down the name of the theater group. She had. The Stamford Players.

Then she got out her phone, opened up a browser, and Googled the theater company’s name.

Up came a website for the Stamford Players. They had a new production set to open in a couple of weeks, just like the neighbor had said. Something called The Casual Librarian. There was information about ticket sales, who would be appearing in the production — there was a headshot of Candace DiCarlo — and then information about the play itself, that the playwright and the director were one and the same.

Albert McBain.

“Holy shit,” Hardy said under her breath.

“Well?” Matt said with more than a hint of impatience. “Is it her?”

I needed a minute to pull myself together. I wiped my eyes with the back of my arm to clear away some dirt. My hands were black with moist soil. Slowly, I got to my feet, and used the shovel to help prop me up once I was standing.

Six years of never really knowing. Assuming the worst without confirmation. But here it was. I had no doubt that this was Brie. Admittedly, I was basing my conclusion on the necklace and a few wisps of desiccated fabric that looked like a nightgown she often wore, and someday, maybe, if Detective Hardy were to find Brie’s remains and do a DNA test, we’d have one hundred percent certainty.

But I didn’t need DNA test results. I knew in my heart and in my gut that this was Brie.

I also knew the odds were solidly against Hardy ever having the opportunity to find these bones and conduct any forensic tests. The more likely possibility was that I would be directed to dig a second grave and plant myself in it.

Avoiding that outcome was the current priority. I would have to grieve Brie, confront the trauma of digging up the woman I had loved, at a later date, given the opportunity. So, as I was getting to my feet, I had to consider any possible way to stall, to buy time.

Matt was starting to look annoyed that I hadn’t answered his question. “It’s her, right? You wouldn’t get that broken up over some stranger.”

“No,” I said.

Matt’s mouth opened. “No? What do you mean, no?”

My voice was breaking. I didn’t have to fake that. “It’s not her.”

The lie was, obviously, an impulsive strategy. My hope was that if I could get Matt to believe this was not Brie’s body, he’d have to figure out what his next step might be. And given that I was the one most qualified to identify Brie, maybe he’d need me a while longer to put the pieces of this puzzle together.

Then again, he could shoot me now and be done with it.

His skeptical expression told me he wasn’t entirely persuaded I was telling him the truth. “What are you talking about? You lost it. That was fucking grief.”

Still holding on to the shovel, I shook my head. “Not grief... relief.”

“How the hell can you know it’s not her?”

“You expected me to be able to tell if it was her, but now you’re asking me how I can know that it’s not?”

“Tell me how you know.”

“The necklace,” I said. “Brie didn’t own a necklace like that.” I was taking a chance he wouldn’t recall an item of jewelry Brie’d been wearing that night.

“You sure?”

I just looked at him. He got the message and sighed.

“So who the fuck is it?” he asked.

“I’ve no idea. This is your fuckup, not mine.”

Now Matt, in addition to looking pissed, appeared mystified. “I went to the right house. I know I went to the right house. I’d scoped it all out. There was nobody else there. How do you explain that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Thirty-six Mulberry.”

“Yes.” Curious, that he would remember that detail but not the necklace.

“An old house. Needed work. You were going to update it, fix it up.”

“Yes.”

How did he know that?

He was thinking, trying to remember other details from six years ago. He slowly raised a finger and pointed it at me. “Mice.”

“What?”

“You had a mouse problem, I figured. Flour on the kitchen floor. Waiting till morning to look for tracks.”

I nodded.

“I walked right through it, in the dark. Left shoe prints. First job I ever did where I had to vacuum before I took off.” Matt was thinking so hard I could almost smell wood burning. “You sure about the necklace?” It was clearly a detail he was fuzzy on.

“I’m sure,” I said.

“She have, like, a sister or something? A friend, who slept over? Anything like that?”

Feed him something. Mess with his head.

“A friend,” I said. “Sometimes, when I was out of town, like that night, she’d have someone come stay with her. Made her feel less anxious.” Then, thinking fast, I added, “A friend from her school days. Parents dead, no spouse, no kids. Sort of person, if she went missing, no one would even have noticed.”

Matt was moving his head side to side slowly, not buying it. “No,” he said. “No.” And then, very slowly, a calmness came over him.

“What?” I said, putting both my hands atop the shovel handle and resting my chin on them. “If it’s not her, you’ve still got a problem.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t. It doesn’t matter. The person I took from your house that night is the same person that’s in that grave. Whoever she is, she’s not picking me out of a lineup, not going to say, ‘That’s the guy.’ If your wife’s still out there somewhere, well, yeah, I should have got her, but it’s not like she’s got an ax to grind with me. You get what I’m saying?”

Sadly, I did.

I might have bought myself five minutes here, but this was turning into a no-win situation. Didn’t matter who was in this grave. What mattered was that someone was in it. Matt’s mind was put at ease.

Mine, not so much.

Matt, pointing his gun at me more directly, said, “Guess we’re done here. One thing all this has taught me is, be sure. Leave no room for doubt.” He cracked a smile that gave me a chill.

“Wait,” I said.

“What?”

“You’ve got a problem.”

“I think you’re the one with the problem. But it’ll be over soon.”

“My car.”

Matt blinked a couple of times. “Hmm,” he said once again.

I didn’t know whose land this was, or how Matt had come to choose this part of the woods to bury Brie, but if he drove out of here and left my car behind, it would eventually be found, and the police would eventually find Brie’s remains and, presumably, mine. That discovery might end up leading to Matt. Did he own this property? Did it belong to a friend of his?

“Let me go,” I said.

Flatly, Matt said, “No.”

“I’m serious. You... you’ve given me hope.” Stick with the charade. “I now know there’s a chance my wife’s alive, that the woman who showed up over the weekend, it’s really her. I know you didn’t kill her.” I pointed to the grave. “I don’t know who this is, and I can’t explain how you got the wrong person, but if there’s a chance my wife is out there, I have to find her.”

“No,” he said again.

“Come on,” I said. “Why?”

“Say you find her,” he said. “She tells you why she disappeared. Who would have wanted her dead. Cops find that person, it leads back to me.”

It was hard to argue with his logic. There was still the matter of my SUV, though.

“I’ll figure things out with your car,” he said. “Get a lift back.” Another smile. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

I had no arrows left in my quiver, unless you counted begging.

“Please,” I said.

“Start another hole.”

I moved my hands farther down the shovel handle, eyeing the ground, wishing Matt would take a few steps closer, get within shovel-swinging range. I was going to dig this hole like I was being paid by the fucking hour. I was about to ask him where he wanted me to start when we heard something.

“Hey!” someone called.

I looked beyond Matt, in the direction of where we’d come from, where our two vehicles were.

A man was coming our way.

“Hey!” he called out again. “What’s going on?”

It was Norman.

What happened next happened very, very fast.

The mind can process a lot in half a second. Let’s take the first half of that half-second — a mere quarter of a second.

In that quarter, when I saw that it was Norman approaching Matt and me in the woods as I stood there, shovel in hand over Brie’s grave, I thought: You bastard.

It was Norman who’d hired Matt to kill Brie.

It all made sense. No, wait, let me qualify that. It didn’t make sense that you would kill your sister-in-law because you were afraid your wife was going to find out you had a one-night stand with her. In a sane world, that didn’t make any sense at all. But the thing was, insane things happened in our sane world all the time, and looked at from that perspective, yeah, it all made sense.

Maybe Brie had decided that she would tell her sister, Isabel, how she had betrayed her, even though she’d made me promise never to say a word. Brie was going to confess to her sister she’d had sex with Norman.

Norman knew, and had to stop her. He had her killed not only while I was away fishing with Greg, but while he was in Boston with Isabel. The perfect alibi.

It seemed pretty out-there, I admit. But someone had hired Matt to kill Brie, and Norman now seemed the most likely suspect. How else did one explain Norman’s arrival, at this moment, in these woods? The only explanation I could come up with, in that quarter of a second, was that Norman knew what was out here. Knew that Matt had buried Brie here. Knew that Matt was going to bring me here.

Knew Matt, period.

The possible reappearance of Brie — and I still had no idea what that was about — had unnerved Norman, and he’d clearly been in touch with Matt to ask what the hell might have gone wrong six years back.

All that thinking went into that first quarter-second. The next quarter-second was occupied with a more urgent thought.

This might be your only opportunity.

I guess it was more instinct than thought, because what I did at that moment when Matt turned to see who’d called out didn’t require much in the way of planning. I just acted.

I brought that shovel up level, turned that curved blade, with its pointed tip, into a spear, and charged Matt.

He still had the gun in his hand, but it wasn’t pointed in my direction, and when he heard me coming, closing that eight to ten feet between us, he turned back from looking at Norman to look at me, but not in time to aim.

He’d been standing there with his jacket open, and the only thing between his belly and my shovel was a flannel work shirt. And when the blade reached him, it cut through that shirt like it was made of gossamer.

“Fuck!” Matt screamed, stumbling backward as the blade sliced open his belly, creating a jagged, almost smile-like rip in his flesh.

He tripped over his own feet and hit the ground on his right side, the arm holding the gun slamming on the ground. But Matt managed to hold on to his weapon as he put his other hand to his stomach, blood seeping out between his fingers.

My attention was focused on that gun hand. In another half-second, Matt could have it pointed at me. Which was why I needed to pin that arm to the ground and wrestle it away from him.

The adrenaline was racing through me, and I wasn’t about to temper my responses. Which explains, I suppose, why I came down so hard on Matt’s arm with the shovel blade.

I don’t honestly think it had been my intention to cut off his hand.

But I brought that blade down with enough force, and right on target, that when it connected with Matt’s upturned right wrist it went right through and into the forest floor like a cleaver going through pork tenderloin. He’d already been in the process of aiming the weapon my way, but what came up was a forearm minus a hand. A fountain of blood poured forth.

His hand, still gripping the gun, lay there on the dirt.

The scream that Matt let loose was enough to send birds scattering from the trees.

“Jesus!” shouted Norman, who was still a good sixty feet away.

I then did something that, in retrospect, makes no sense whatsoever. Intending to kick the gun away from Matt’s grasp, I booted it, and the hand looped around it, a good six feet away.

His screams persisted. Blood continued to flow from his stomach and the end of his arm. It was the latter that looked more serious.

I heard another scream, and realized very quickly that it was coming from me. A kind of primal cry, some Neanderthal reaction buried deep within me. A cry of triumph, or release. Or maybe I was just losing my mind.

But I couldn’t afford to lose it for long. I hadn’t forgotten my first thoughts, from only seconds earlier, that Norman was in on this. And if that was true, the threat was not over.

I wanted more than a shovel to deal with Norman. And there was that gun right there on the ground. I tossed the shovel, dropped to my knees, and pried the gun from the fingers of the severed hand, all to a background soundtrack of Matt’s incessant cries of pain. That man was going to die if I didn’t make some effort to save him. A tourniquet on that arm.

But that would have to wait. I had Norman to deal with. I got to my feet and pointed the gun at him.

He stopped dead in his tracks and shouted, “Christ, Andrew, it’s me!”

I must have looked like a crazy person to him. Wide-eyed, covered in dirt and now splattered with blood from Matt, and waving a gun around.

“I know who the fuck you are!” I shouted at my one-time brother-in-law. “Stay right there!”

“What the hell’s going on?” he yelled. “Who’s that—”

“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up!” I shouted.

Matt had stopped screaming long enough to crane his head in my direction and say, “I’m gonna fucking die. Help me.”

“How did you know?” I asked Norman.

“How did I know what?”

“How did you find us? How did you know about this place? You knew he’d brought me here, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know anything about this place,” he said, taking steps in my direction.

“Don’t come any closer, Norman,” I warned, pointing the gun at him.

“Andrew, what is it you think I’ve done?” He took another five steps toward me. “That man, who is he?”

“Like you don’t know,” I said. “Why? Why’d you do it?”

“Why’d I do what?” he asked.

“Why’d you hire him? Why’d you hire him to kill Brie?”

Norman’s shocked look was Oscar-worthy. “What the hell are you talking about? Brie may be back! Isabel’s told you. I know that. We saw her, from the hospital.”

“No,” I said. “She’s right back there, in that grave. Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

A moaning, dying Matt had turned over to see who I was talking to. He mumbled, “Who the fuck is he?”

That threw me. Either they were both very good at playing their roles, or Norman and this man really did not know one another.

“Tell me,” I said. “How’d you know about this place?”

“I told you, I didn’t,” Norman said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you. I tried to call you the other night but you wouldn’t answer. I was driving to your house, saw you drive off, and followed. Then you turned in here and I sat up by the road, waiting for you to come out. It got to be a long time and so I drove in, saw the two cars there. Something about it didn’t look right. I heard some talking in the woods, and started walking this way.”

I blinked several times, trying to get the grit and sweat out of my eyes. What Norman was telling me sounded almost believable.

“You have a phone,” I said.

Norman nodded.

“Call 911,” I said. “Much as I’d like to let this guy die, it might be useful to keep him alive.”

Norman had his phone out, was tapping in the number.

“Get back out to the road, direct them in,” I said.

Norman nodded, turned, and started running back in the direction he’d come from, the phone to his ear.

I knelt down next to Matt.

“You’re losing a lot of blood,” I said. “I don’t know that the paramedics are gonna make it here fast enough. Although, one thing that might help, that would buy you some time, would be a tourniquet.”

Matt, seething between gritted teeth, said, “Yeah, that might.”

“I could take a lace out of my boot,” I said, “and give it to you, but I’m thinking, with one hand, you might have some difficulty applying it yourself. But I could do it for you.”

Blood was soaking into the forest floor.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“A name,” I said. “And an explanation.”

Matt closed his eyes.

I began to unlace my boot. “What do you say? I was thinking there, for a minute, that it was Norman, but now I’m not so sure. You want to clear that up for me?”

Matt swallowed, whispered, “Not Norman.”

I had the bootlace half out of the eyelets. “That’s good to know, I guess. So if it wasn’t Norman, who, then?”

Matt was weighing his options. I didn’t see where he had much to lose here by giving up a name, but everything to gain. He was fucked, plain and simple. He could be fucked and die, or he could be fucked and live.

I almost had the bootlace out. The blood was draining out of Matt like oil from the Exxon Valdez. I didn’t give him much longer without the tourniquet.

“What’s it going to be, Matt?”

He nodded. “Okay,” he said.

Matt gave me a name.

I shuddered. “Now a few details. Convince me.”

Matt gave me a few details. I was convinced, if a little shaken.

I started lacing up my boot.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “You gotta tie it off.”

I continued threading the laces through the eyelets until I had them back in place. I gave them a good tug, then knotted them.

“Wouldn’t want to trip on the way back to my car,” I said.

Hardy exited the room. A uniformed officer was standing there.

“She’s demanding to see you,” he said.

“The sister?”

“That’s right.”

Hardy nodded. “With lawyer in tow, no doubt. Check in on him in there every once in a while. Get him a drink of water or something.”

Hardy found her way to the police station entrance, where Jayne Keeling was sitting alone on a bench, looking at her phone. When she saw Hardy, she tucked the phone into her purse and stood.

“Ms. Keeling,” Hardy said, approaching her.

“How is Tyler?”

“He’s fine.”

“I want you to release him,” Jayne said.

“When I heard you were here I thought you might have brought a lawyer.”

“You can’t hold him. He’s a kid.”

“I’m afraid we can hold him, Ms. Keeling. He’s the prime suspect in a homicide.”

“He didn’t do it,” Jayne said.

“Ms. Keeling, if you love your brother, and it’s obvious to me that you do, the best thing you can do for him is get him legal representation. Like I told you before.”

“You don’t understand,” Jayne said. “That’s not why I’m here.”

“Why are you here, Ms. Keeling?”

“I’m here to confess,” Jayne said. “Tyler didn’t kill that woman. I did.”

I sat there, in the woods, until it was clear Matt was dead, then worked my way back to my car. The keys were in it. As I got in, I tucked Matt’s gun into a pocket in the driver’s door, turned the vehicle around, then drove back out to the main road, where I found Norman leaning up against his silver Nissan. I powered down the window.

“Ambulance should be here any second,” he said.

I nodded, like there was still time. “They better hurry,” I said.

“You’re not leaving?” Norman asked.

“I am.”

“You can’t. You’re going to have to talk to the police about whatever happened back there.”

“They’ve always figured out how to find me,” I said.

“Andrew,” he said, coming close to the driver’s window, “what the hell was that?”

“That man killed Brie. And that was where he buried her. After Saturday’s events, he wanted to be sure she was still where he’d left her. Wanted me along to try and identify her.” Another pause. “It’s her.”

“But then who—”

“I don’t know who it was that you and Isabel and Albert, and my old neighbor, saw on Saturday. I still can’t figure it out.”

“But why... why did that man kill Brie?”

“He was hired to do it,” I told him.

“Jesus,” he said. “By who? Did he say?”

“No,” I lied.

Did I catch something in his eye at that moment? Relief? No, I didn’t think so. Unless Matt had lied to me in his final moments, Norman was in the clear.

Like I said, unless he lied. You reach a point where you don’t believe anything that anyone says.

“So why’d you follow me up here?” I asked. “Why’d you call the other night?”

Norman took a breath. “Because of Elizabeth, in part.”

I waited.

“I had some time alone with her and she wanted to know if I’d ever shown any gratitude for what you did. Or, more like what you didn’t do.”

“I wouldn’t have expected any,” I said. “Your wife’s had you and the whole family convinced I killed Brie.”

He shook his head. “I was never sold on that. I mean, yeah, I wondered, but I felt you were as devastated by her going missing as the rest of us. You were Isabel’s scapegoat. Someone to blame to make herself feel better. Anyway, Elizabeth said I owed you one, for never telling.”

Norman let those last three words hang out there for a moment.

“I did tell,” I said. “I told Detective Hardy. I told her about you and Brie.”

“I know,” he said. “And I don’t fault you for that. And that didn’t do any harm, because Hardy cleared me right away. Me and Isabel were out of town.”

It occurred to me then that being out of town didn’t absolve anyone, considering that Brie’s murder had been contracted out.

Norman was still talking. “The big thing is, you never told Isabel. It would have destroyed her. Given how much energy she put into ruining your life, it’s a wonder you didn’t want to ruin hers. And, by extension, mine.”

“I didn’t do it for you,” I said. “I did it for Brie.”

“Anyway, it seemed like it was better late than never. That I thank you.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“But there’s more, something else that’s been eating me up since she disappeared,” he said. “I saw her that day.”

“What?”

“That Saturday, of the weekend she disappeared, I went to the house.”

I blinked. This was news to me. “When?”

“In the afternoon. There was a van there. A pest control guy. When he left I went to the door and knocked. Wanted to talk to Brie, to tell her again how sorry I was about what we’d allowed to happen. It was such a stupid thing.”

“You spoke to her?”

“For half a minute. She said she didn’t need any more apologies, that there was nothing more to say, and she sent me away. And that was it.” At this point, he bit into his lower lip briefly. “But I can’t help but think, if I’d hung around, maybe I would have seen... maybe I could have done something. But Isabel and I were driving up to Boston later that day, and I... I’ve always wondered if I could have done more...”

I could understand why he might want to beat himself up, but what had happened to Brie occurred hours after he’d come to the house. I’d spoken to her that evening. Matt, before he died, had as much as said he had come in the middle of the night.

I said, “You saved my life, Norman, showing up when you did, so I think you’ve paid your debt, if there’s even a debt to pay.”

“Yeah, well.”

“There’s one thing you can do for me now,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“I need a phone. Matt, that guy, smashed mine pretty good. I got a few calls I need to make.”

Norman got his out of his pocket, but he seemed reluctant to hand it over. “Just a second,” he said, and did a few taps with his thumb. I had a feeling he was deleting something he didn’t want me to see.

Finally, he handed it over. “Get it back to me soon as you can?”

“I will. Is there a code?”

“Twenty nineteen,” he said. “My thumbprint will open it, too, but I’d kind of like to hang on to that.”

His joke made me think of that severed hand in the woods.

The phone was already active when he handed it to me, so I didn’t need to enter the security code. “Thanks for this,” I said, then powered up the window and hit the gas.

My contacts weren’t going to be in Norman’s phone, so I had to actually recall Jayne’s cell phone number and enter it digit by digit. I put the phone to my ear as I aimed the car in the direction of home.

The phone rang twice.

“Hello?’

I would imagine she was puzzled when she saw Norman’s name or number pop up on her screen.

“It’s me,” I said. “It’s Andrew.”

“Oh my God, I’ve been trying to get you for hours!”

I couldn’t recall ever hearing that level of panic in Jayne’s voice before. “I’m sorry, I—”

“Where have you been? Why are you using Norman’s phone? Are you okay?”

There’d be plenty of time later to bring Jayne up to speed on what had happened to me in the last several hours. What I needed to know now was why she’d been so anxious to reach me.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Where are you?”

“Heading into town.”

“Come straight to police headquarters. I’m talking to Detective Hardy right now.”

That was not where I wanted to be. I had something else on my mind. “What’s going on there?”

“They arrested Tyler for murder.”

“They what?”

“They think he killed the woman who came to your old address.”

“What?” I said again. This was turning into a day of nonstop shocking developments. Jayne’s comment contained more information than maybe she realized. So we now knew who was in the picture? And she was dead? And Tyler had killed her?

I supposed what I’d planned to deal with next could wait.

“I’m on my way,” I said.

Jayne appeared within a minute of my text, entering the police station lobby from an adjacent hallway. I could tell she’d been crying, and at the sight of me she ran into my arms and hugged me, but not before taking in my appearance.

She let go of me, gave me a one-second appraisal, and said, “My God, what’s happened to you?”

I glanced down, having almost forgotten what a sight I was. My clothes were covered with grit, my face and hands smudged with soil, dirt under my fingernails. There was probably some blood mixed in with it if you looked hard enough. I had, after all, just killed a man.

“Your story first,” I said. “But let’s get out of here.” It was more than privacy that prompted me to find another place for us to talk. I didn’t want to run the risk of Hardy seeing me like this, and having to explain. It wouldn’t be long before she learned about what had gone down in those woods.

I led Jayne outside the headquarters building, a broad, one-story, drab red-brick structure with a foreboding, massive black entryway. There were no park benches around, so I led her over to my Explorer and got her into the passenger seat. I went around and slipped in behind the wheel, turning the key only so that I could put down the two front windows to let in some air.

“Talk to me,” I said.

She told me about Tyler’s arrest for the murder of a woman named Candace DiCarlo, as well as the pantomime orchestrated by Albert and the dead woman. That left me speechless. Albert’s stupid stunt got a hit man to second-guess himself, and nearly got me killed in the process. I wanted to find him and smash his head up against a tree.

And now Tyler had been ensnared by the entire mess.

“I’m scared to death for him,” Jayne said.

“They’ve got a witness, they know he was there, and there’s blood,” I said. Jayne nodded. “Do you think he did it?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said confidently. “He would never do that to anyone. Except...”

“Except what?”

“There’s something I never told you. About why Tyler’s aunt wouldn’t look after him anymore.” She told me the story. About Tyler’s angry outburst with Clara, that Detective Hardy had found out about it. “I’m sorry I never told you. I should have. You had a right to know.”

I didn’t see where I had anything to complain about, given how much I had kept from Jayne. “It’s okay. But, shit, it makes him look bad where this Candace woman is concerned. And he ran away from the scene?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t call the police?”

“No.”

“Christ, Jayne, forgive me, but it kind of looks like he did it.”

Jayne nodded. “It looks that way, but...” She paused, sniffed. “I tried to confess.”

“What?”

“I told Detective Hardy it was me. I told her I did it. She wouldn’t believe me.” Her voice briefly adopted an almost dreamlike quality. “Maybe I can still convince her.”

“For God’s sake, Jayne,” I said, “there’s got to be a better way to help him than doing something crazy like that.”

“I love him,” she said. “He’s my brother. I was never there for him. It’s time that I was.”

“Listen, Jayne, I have to tell you what happened to me today. Why I’m such a mess.”

She focused on me and said, “Tell me.”

“I know what happened to Brie.”

Her focus became sharper. “Oh my God.”

I related the events of the afternoon. How Brie was murdered by a hit man named Matt, then buried in the woods north of town. How Norman showed up at the right time and that Matt was dead. I didn’t get into the shoelace story, or that I got some significant information out of Matt before he died.

“Dear God, he made you dig up her grave,” Jayne said, looking as though all that had happened, to both of us, in the last few hours was going to cause her to faint. “Andrew, how are you even putting one foot in front of the other? What are you doing sitting in the car talking to me for? You need to go in there and tell all this to Hardy.”

“In time.”

“Now that you know who killed Brie, maybe she can figure out who it was who hired him.”

When I didn’t say anything right away, Jayne whispered, “You know.”

“I know.”

“Tell her. Tell me.”

I shook my head. “I want to be sure. There needs to be a conversation.” It was time for a change of subject. “We need to find a lawyer for Tyler.”

“I don’t... I can’t think of anyone.”

“I hired a woman named Nan Sokolow a few years ago when Hardy was harassing me. See if you can get in touch with her.”

“And what are you going to do?” But she knew. “Don’t do this yourself.”

“I have to.”

“I don’t think... I’m not sure I can drive. I’m a total wreck.”

“I’ll drop you.”

She started looking in her purse for something. Seconds later, I heard the jangling of keys. “I’m not sure I locked my car.”

Jayne was reaching for the door handle when I said, “I’ll do it. Where are you parked?” She pointed to the far end of the lot. “Be right back.”

I jumped out of the Explorer and strode off in the direction of her car. As I got closer, I saw that she’d most likely not only left it unlocked, but the driver’s window was down.

When I got back to my car, Jayne said, “What took so long?” She was correct in thinking that I had been gone longer than it should have taken.

“The windows were down,” I said. “Had to get in and turn the key to get them up. Engine didn’t want to turn over at first.”

“Oh,” she said.

I started the Explorer. We hardly said a word to each other on the way. When we got back to our place and were in the driveway, Jayne said, “You really need to clean yourself up.”

I didn’t want to take the time for that, but she was right. I could take a shower and change into some fresh clothes in ten minutes, I was betting.

I did it in nine.

As I was getting ready to head back out again, Jayne met me at the door. “I’m going to drop Norman’s phone back at his place,” I said. “Can I have your cell?”

I figured, given that we were among the last people on the planet with a landline, she could use that to try and reach Nan Sokolow. Jayne got her phone and handed it over. I didn’t have to ask her for her passcode. We used the same one for both our phones.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said. “We’re going to get through this.”

She put her arms around me again. “Call me with any news.”

“You, too.”

I went to the car and got in. I put both cell phones in the center console — easy enough to tell one from the other. Norman had a drab brown leather cover on his, and Jayne’s encasement was vivid with a floral design. I grabbed it, wanting to double-check that I could, in fact, get into it, and I did.

I must have sat out there for a few minutes, not realizing how much time had gone by, because finally I heard a rapping at my window and found Jayne standing there, staring at me. Through the glass she said, “What’s going on?”

After I’d set down her phone, keyed the ignition, and powered down the window, I said, “I think I’m in a bit of a daze. Overwhelmed. Shell-shocked, maybe.”

“Come inside. I’ll make us some coffee. Or make you something stronger.”

“No, I’ve got to go.”

She stepped away as I backed onto the street, stood and watched as I drove off. In my rearview mirror, I saw her step into the street and wave. I was halfway down the block when Jayne’s phone rang. The caller ID was blocked.

I picked up.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Carville.” I knew the voice.

“Detective Hardy,” I said. “Sorry, you were probably wanting to speak to Jayne.”

“No, in fact I was hoping to reach you. I tried your number and it went straight to voice mail.”

“My phone’s broken,” I said.

“I need to see you right now.”

“Sorry, I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment. What’s this about?”

“I think you know. Your name just popped up on another matter. Something that happened up on Wheelers Farm Road.”

“Figured I might hear from you.”

“There’s a dead man in the woods and an open grave. I’m heading up there shortly. Meet me there.”

“He wasn’t dead when I left him, but he said his name is Matt,” I offered. “He killed Brie. Her remains are in that grave. I think if you do a DNA test on them, that’ll be confirmed. He lured me up there, made me dig her up on the off chance I might be able to say whose bones they were, and then he intended to kill me.”

“But he didn’t.”

“No. I got lucky. Norman — Brie’s brother-in-law — happened to be in the right place at the right time and created enough of a distraction that I came out of it alive.”

“You killed this Matt person.”

“Like I said, he was alive when I left.” I was surprised how easy it was to lie about this. “I’d sent Norman to call for an ambulance. He went up by the road to wave them in. I stayed with Matt a few more minutes, talked some, then made my way back to my car and said goodbye to Norman.”

“Why was Norman there?”

“He wanted to thank me.”

“Thank you?”

“For never telling Isabel what I told you. For not ruining their lives when I had every reason to. You can ask him, if you want. He saw me driving out of town and followed.”

“Meet me there. I’m not going to ask again.”

“That’s good,” I said, “because I’d be getting tired of having to say no. I know who did it, Detective Hardy. I know who hired him to kill my wife.”

“This Matt told you?”

“Yes.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I guess he felt a need to unburden himself,” I said.

“Tell me. I want the name.”

“Soon,” I said. “I’ve got a few questions to ask first.”

“Mr. Carville — Andrew. Please, just meet me at—”

There she was, asking again within seconds of saying she wouldn’t. I ended the call. And then, in case she could use Jayne’s phone to track me, I powered it off.

I imagined she’d be putting out a description of my car. I hoped I could get done everything I wanted to do before I was spotted.

First stop was to drop off Norman’s phone.

I wanted to have a word with Isabel. Who’d been up in Boston, with her husband. Far, far away when Brie was abducted and murdered.

While I’d been intending to make Isabel and Norman’s house my next stop, something new was nagging at me that prompted a detour along the way.

I wanted to take a run by Candace DiCarlo’s house. I wanted to see where it happened. A couple of minutes online, and I’d found the location. There were two police cars at the end of Rosemont, plus a van and a flatbed truck. I couldn’t park near the house. I left my car more than three houses away.

I was doing a lot of thinking as I got out of the Explorer. About who had ordered the hit on Brie, and who might really have killed Candace DiCarlo.

It was all coming together for me. I was pretty sure I knew what had happened, and I believed Jayne when she said that Tyler couldn’t have done it.

An idea came to me. A long shot. Might not amount to anything. Something that, if I was going to try it, I had to make the decision right then and there. It’d either work, or it wouldn’t. Time, and the thoroughness of Detective Hardy, would determine that.

I pulled on a pair of rubber gloves that had been sitting in the center console back from when we were going through the pandemic. I’d always slipped them on when I had to press all those buttons at the self-serve gas bar. They were tucked down there along with a couple of masks and a nearly empty bottle of hand sanitizer that I should have thrown out long ago. I snapped the gloves into place.

Hands in my pockets, I walked up to the house, saw the Volvo wagon in the driveway, and recognized it from the surveillance shots I’d gotten from the man who’d built the house on my old lot. That explained the flatbed truck. They were probably going to take the car away and subject it to a forensic examination.

The closest I could get to it, however, was the end of the driveway, because the property itself was marked off with police tape. The car was maybe ten feet away. A uniformed officer was standing at the end of the drive to make sure I wasn’t going to cross the yellow tape perimeter.

At the side of the house was someone in one of those get-ups you see them wearing in the crime shows. A hazmat suit. Conferring with someone else in the house. That explained the van parked in the street. These were the so-called scene-of-crime tech guys. Even when a case looked like a slam dunk — they already had Tyler in custody — the authorities wanted their case to be airtight. No stone left unturned, and all that.

Confident that Tyler had not killed DiCarlo, I was willing to try something that might steer the investigation away from him. Muddy the waters, as it were.

“Wow, what happened here?” I innocently asked the cop standing guard.

She gave me a friendly smile. “Sorry, sir. I’m not really at liberty to provide any details.”

I looked toward the end of the street. “Do you know if they’re closing off Rosemont completely?”

She followed my gaze as I took my hands out of my pockets. “Don’t know, sir.” She turned her head back to look at me. By then my hands were tucked away again. “I’m going to have to ask you to go back to your vehicle.”

“Sure thing,” I said, nodding respectfully.

I was ready to go, anyway. I’d done what I’d come to do. I returned to my truck and peeled off the rubber gloves.

I told Isabel I wanted to take her for a ride.

“I don’t want to see my sister’s grave,” she said. I had filled her in on most of what had happened to me in the afternoon. “I’m not ready for that. I’m not sure I can handle it.”

“Not there,” I said. “Someplace else.”

She shot me one wary look before we left. “What if this is a trick? What if I end up disappearing just like Brie?”

“Call or text anyone you want,” I said, “and tell them you’re with me. That should offer you some level of protection.”

She agreed to go. Once we were in my car, she had questions.

“If you know who hired this hit man,” Isabel said, “then why haven’t you gone straight to Detective Hardy?”

Both hands on the wheel, I glanced her way and smiled. “She and I have something of a strained relationship, which you should understand better than anyone. Anyway, before she slaps the cuffs on this person, I want a little face-to-face time. And when you’ve heard the truth, maybe you’ll finally be satisfied I didn’t have anything to do with Brie’s disappearance.”

Isabel looked increasingly uncomfortable. She was quiet for a moment, then said, “I’m going to kill Albert.” Her brother had tried to phone her twice in the last twenty minutes, and both times Isabel had declined the call. “What an idiot.”

“I suppose,” I said, trying to give her brother the benefit of the doubt, “that he thought he was doing the right thing.”

“You know what the road to hell is paved with,” she said.

“I do.”

“Even though I did everything I could to get Hardy to go after you,” she said, “I always held out some slim hope, you know? So when I saw that woman from the hospital window, pretending to be Brie, I wanted to believe. Didn’t you?”

I had to think about that. “If there had been a way for Brie to get in touch, to let me know she was okay, she would have done it directly. So I was skeptical. But Albert’s stunt accomplished more than he could have imagined. It might have given some false hope, but it also started off a panic.”

“You know, I was always jealous of her,” Isabel said. “Of Brie.”

I glanced over at her, then eyes back to the road.

“She was always the prettier one, the more popular one. I wanted to be that pretty, that popular. And then she ended up with you, and I guess I became even more envious.”

Wasn’t expecting that.

“Handsome, skilled, decent,” she said. “That’s what you were. And I ended up with Norman.”

“Norman’s okay.”

Isabel looked reflective. “I’ve treated him horribly,” she said.

I didn’t see any point arguing with that.

“Belittled him, mocked him. All I’ve ever wanted was for him to strike back, to stand up to me, to put me in my place. I felt like I was pushing him to be a man, and he just wasn’t up to it. I don’t know why he’s put up with it.”

“Maybe he believes he deserves it,” I said.

Isabel gazed out the window. “Wherever it is we’re going, are we almost there?” she asked.

“Almost,” I said.

I’d been heading north on the Milford Parkway, and when we reached the Merritt Parkway I took the long curving ramp to get onto the westbound lanes. We kept going until we got to Trumbull, where I took the White Plains Road exit. I made a few rights and lefts until we’d reached our destination.

“I remember shopping here once or twice,” Isabel said as we entered the lot of the TrumbullGate Mall. “I didn’t know it had gone under.”

I gave her the two-minute lesson on how TrumbullGate was typical of hundreds of malls across the country. Victims of online shopping, the collapse of anchor stores, and, more recently, the pandemic, which forced millions of people to alter their retail habits.

“The owners tried to make a go of it but they’ve thrown in the towel. Now they’re letting various contractors pick over the remains. The retailers removed all their merchandise years ago, but there’s plenty of other stuff to cannibalize. Shelving, railings, light fixtures, all sorts of stuff.”

The massive lot was empty, save for part of the north end that had been cordoned off and was full of those Hyundais.

“There’s his truck,” I said, pointing to a pickup parked by a false front that hid the loading docks.

I parked the car, grabbed Matt’s gun, which I’d tucked into a compartment in the door, and got out. Awkwardly, I slipped the weapon into the back of my belt, then, like a true gentleman, went around to the other side of the truck to open the door for Isabel.

“What’s with the gun?” Isabel asked, raising a worried eyebrow.

“Never know what you’ll run into in an abandoned mall,” I said, offering a reassuring smile, but Isabel did not look particularly reassured. “It’s okay. I just don’t want to leave this in the truck.”

Then I made a trip over to Greg’s vehicle, found it unlocked, and opened the driver’s door. I leaned in, peered under the seat.

“What are you looking for?” Isabel asked.

“Nothing,” I said, then slammed the door shut. I looked around to see if Greg’s girlfriend Julie’s car was here, and didn’t see it. I was relieved about that.

I pointed to some nearby loading docks.

“This way,” I said. I led her up a set of stairs that went up to the loading area, then found an unlocked door that took us into a cinder-block hallway. We went a short way down it to another door, and when we opened it, we were in the main area of the mall.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met Greg,” she said.

“Oh, he’s quite charming,” I said. “He’s my best friend.”

“Well, isn’t this creepy,” Isabel said.

The abandoned mall was making the same impression on her as it had on me when I’d come in here two days earlier.

She let out a minor shriek when a squirrel ran across her path. A pigeon flew by, but I didn’t see any sign of that hawk this time. And I spotted a couple more sleeping bags than I did my first time here, but no actual homeless people. I figured they went out and about during the daylight hours.

We found more evidence of unauthorized visits. Used condoms, McDonald’s wrappers. I knew from reading online articles that exploring abandoned sites was a popular pastime for some people. But so far, we seemed to have the place to ourselves.

Except for Greg. He was here somewhere.

“Let’s head upstairs,” I said. “That’s where I saw him last.”

We went to the escalator. I went first, testing to make sure the steps, while not moving, were at least secure. They seemed structurally sound, so I motioned for Isabel to follow me, pointing out the steps that were missing. I offered a hand since there was no rubber handrail to grab on to, and she took it with what seemed some reluctance.

When we got to the upper level I raised a finger, signaling Isabel to be quiet while I listened for sounds of work. Power tools, hammering. There was mostly silence.

One thing was different from last time. More of the railings that were designed to keep customers from plunging to the first level were missing.

“Last time I was here,” I said, pointing, “he was working in that end.”

Our steps, and our occasional words to each other, echoed throughout the empty space. We’d only taken a few steps when I heard an industrial grinding or cutting sound. Short, repetitive bursts. Too noisy for a cordless drill. Probably that reciprocating saw I’d seen Greg wielding the last time I was here.

I pointed, and we started walking in the direction of the sound.

We’d gone about a hundred feet, sidestepping trash, a rusted-out bicycle with one wheel, a couple of shopping carts, and a leaning, bird-shit-stained statue of P. T. Barnum, the long-dead founder of the Barnum & Bailey Circus. He was, according to the plaque that was hanging to the base by a single screw, a native of Connecticut. Right now he looked more like the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein.

We stopped in front of what was once a dollar store, faded banners advertising 50 percent off! and all sales final! dangling from the ceiling. Inside, hacking away at some wood shelves, was my longtime buddy Greg Raymus.

He had on a pair of plastic goggles, but no helmet. Greg had always shunned extra steps to protect himself. There was an inch-long cigarette pinched between his lips.

He did like to smoke them down to nothing.

He must have sensed us standing there in the concourse watching him, because he took his finger off the saw’s trigger, set it down, swept the goggles from his eyes, and looked in our direction.

“Hey!” he said, and laughed nervously. “Wasn’t expecting to see you. At least, not till later.”

He tossed the goggles and strolled out into the concourse, still holding the saw, pointing it toward the floor. It hung from his arm like some bizarre weapon designed to kill aliens. He took the inch of cigarette from between his lips and tossed it.

“Greg,” I said evenly. “Thought I’d just drop by.”

He looked at Isabel and said, “Have we met?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“This is Isabel,” I said. “Brie’s sister.”

Greg put on a concerned face. “It’s nice to meet you,” he said solemnly. “I really liked Brie.”

I could sense Isabel’s tenseness. She’d figured it out. Why I had brought her here, why we were talking to Greg. She was owed this. Her campaign to get justice for Brie had been genuine and heartfelt. The only problem was that it had been misdirected.

The true target was standing here in front of her.

“Where’s Julie?” I asked, feeling the gun at my back, under my jacket.

“She was here a bit ago,” he said. “Been gone most of the day. Just dropped off some donuts. Want one?”

“No, thanks,” I replied. Casually, I said, “Matt’s dead.”

Greg blinked three times. “I’m sorry, what?”

“He died a few hours ago,” I told him. “In the woods, where he’d buried Brie.”

Greg laughed nervously. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Matt who? What woods?”

“You called him,” I said. “When you thought Brie might have returned. Wondered whether he’d actually done what you’d hired him to do. Freaked him out, too. So he took me along, had me dig her up just to be sure.”

“Honestly, Andy, nothing that you’re saying makes any sense to me.”

“But you can rest easy,” I said. “He did what you paid him to do. That Brie who showed up this week was a fake. But I’m guessing you know that by now, too.”

“What?”

“Did you see her by chance, too? Just like Tyler did? Followed her back to her place and killed her before you realized you had the wrong person?”

“Okay, now I’m really confused.”

I had no doubt that he was. At least about the most recent accusation.

“It’s only been a little while since I found out it was you who wanted Brie killed, so I haven’t had long to try to figure out why, but I’ve got a couple of ideas,” I said. “I’m guessing it had something to do with the business. Something Brie found out.”

Greg said nothing, but his silence spoke volumes.

“You son of a bitch,” Isabel said.

Greg licked his lips. “Look, Andy—”

“What always seemed weird, but I never really thought about until today, was how Brie encouraged me to take that fishing trip with you. She wanted me to spend time with you. That wasn’t like her, you know? Because she was never your biggest fan. I remember her asking me what we’d talked about, when I chatted with her on the Saturday night. Like she was waiting for some specific topic of conversation to come up.”

Greg’s eyes were darting about, as though looking for an escape route.

“Remember that time when you kind of made a pass at her? Had a bit to drink, acted stupid. Brie told me about it, and I took your side.” I shook my head regretfully. “I made Brie feel like it was her fault. Not that she’d brought it on, but that she was making too big a deal about it. I think, after that, Brie felt there wasn’t anything to be gained by pointing out your transgressions. I wouldn’t take them seriously.”

I took a breath. “What I’m thinking is, maybe you did something else, something bad, certainly worse than patting Brie’s backside. But instead of her telling me, she twisted your arm and told you to confess. And that if you didn’t, she’d have no choice but to tell me herself.”

Greg appeared to shrink before my eyes. His head dropped, his shoulders slumped. He kicked at a piece of debris with his boot.

“They were going to kill me,” he said, barely loud enough for me to hear.

And to his obvious surprise, I said, “The bikers.”

“What?”

“Matt told me a few things at the end. You ripped off some bikers.”

Greg appeared to deflate. I didn’t know everything, but I clearly knew more than Greg would have guessed.

“You know I was never one to say no to something that fell off the back of a truck,” he said. “If something found its way into my hands, hey, I was happy to take it. Remember that VCR I scored back in the day?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a habit I should have given up. Remember when I broke my leg? Said I’d jumped from some scaffolding?”

I nodded.

“That’s not exactly what happened. You know Beaver Meadow Road?”

“Vaguely.”

“South of Middletown? Nice stretch of road through the Cockaponset State Forest, east of Route 9, on the way to the Connecticut River. Remember that old MG I used to have? The convertible? Got it for a song because it wasn’t in the best of shape? And didn’t keep it long because I couldn’t afford the repairs?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I was taking it for a spin up that way. On my own, riding along behind this biker guy. A Harley, handlebars up in the stratosphere. A fucking deer runs into the road and he swerves and wipes out. I pull over, you know, see if he’s okay, and he’s out cold. So I put in a call, 911. Didn’t give my name, just told them where to send an ambulance.”

I wanted him to move it along, but I’d waited six years to hear this. I guessed I could wait a little longer.

“Anyway, I finish making the call and I notice this satchel the guy’d been carrying. It’s kind of opened some, and there’s some cash that’s spilled out. A lot of cash. I mean, like a hundred grand in cash, although I didn’t know it was that much until later, when I counted it.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“The guy’s still unconscious, the ambulance hasn’t arrived yet. And there hasn’t been another car along that stretch for a while, but you never know when one’s gonna show up. So I had a decision to make, right?” He paused. “I made the wrong one.”

“Did the guy live?” I asked.

“Yeah, he made it. I guess he’d made some kind of drug delivery and was coming back with the cash when he wiped out. He’d been ripped off but it wasn’t like he was going to tell the cops. But he and his buddies figured it had to be whoever made the 911 call.”

“You didn’t leave your name, but there was a record of your number.”

Another nod. “I don’t know how they got it, but they did. And once they had the number they were able to track me down. Paid me a little visit. I hadn’t spent much of the money, just a few hundred. Gave it back, but my apology didn’t cut it.”

“That’s when they broke your leg.”

“Yeah. Held me down, went at it with a sledgehammer.”

Isabel winced, but there was no sympathy in her eyes.

“They weren’t done. They said, you rip us off, you pay us back double. They wanted another hundred grand. Or the next time, we hammer your skull, they said.”

“You could have gone to the police.”

Greg rolled his eyes. “Yeah, tell them I ripped off some bikers, could you help me out? And if they had someone inside who could trace my call to 911, maybe they had someone inside who’d tell them I’d tattled.”

“The hundred grand,” I said slowly. “Let me guess. This is around the time we started losing all those jobs.”

Greg grimaced. “This is hard to talk about.”

I waited, feeling the gun at my back like it was a huge stone in my shoe.

Greg moved the reciprocating saw from one hand to the other. It had to be getting heavy. “Believe me when I tell you I never wanted to do this. I felt sick about it, still do. It was a shitty thing to do. At the time, I didn’t see any way out, you know?” He paused, then said, “I sold us out.”

“How?”

“I went to our competitors. Leaked our bids, allowing them to undercut us, even offer more for less.”

“And they paid you off,” I said.

He nodded. “They were big projects. It was worth it to them, slipping me twenty or thirty thousand to get those jobs. They’d recover it all on the back end. I fucked us over on enough bids to get almost all of it, then sold the MG to get the rest. I got the hundred grand I needed to keep the bikers from bashing my head in.”

“You destroyed our company. All that we’d worked for.”

He broke eye contact with me, and when he did I took a second to adjust the gun at my back so it wasn’t digging in quite so uncomfortably. Greg might have missed it, but Isabel didn’t.

I couldn’t believe he’d done this to us, sabotaged our entire enterprise, and yet I knew there was an even greater betrayal to be told about.

“You could have come to me,” I said. “Told me the trouble you were in. Figured a way out of it. You didn’t have to sell us out.”

“And what would you have done?” he said. “Were you going to pull a hundred thousand bucks out of your ass? Huh?”

I shook my head sadly and said, “Why don’t you get to the part where Brie found out.”

Greg said, “You remember there was a while there when Brie was helping us out in the office.”

I remembered. It wasn’t the fanciest headquarters. It was an office trailer, white metal, a few windows, a basic bathroom, with all the architectural charm of a kid’s playhouse made out of a refrigerator’s cardboard delivery carton. We had leased it and set it up on a vacant lot in Milford’s west end, hoping one day to construct something more permanent. We were really busy, putting together all those bids for several jobs — the ones I now knew we’d lost because of Greg — and Brie, who was good with numbers and putting together proposals, had come in for a week or two to get us organized.

“Go on,” I said.

“We were both out at a site when a call came into the office, from one of our competitors. Dumbass called the office instead of my cell. Brie took the call. Recognized the name on the caller ID as the company we most wanted — well, that you most wanted — to beat for the Wilkins job, that auto repair shop we were going to build. Brie asked if she could take a message and the guy, flustered, hung up, but not before he’d said the meeting was all set.”

“She knew something was up,” I said. “We’d already lost the Frampton job.”

Greg nodded. “Yeah, the condo thing.” He shook his head. “Brie figured something was up, followed me. Saw me meet with the guy, saw him pass me an envelope. She, uh, she confronted me about it later. Said she wouldn’t tell you, that I had to man up, tell you myself. And if I didn’t, she would.”

“The fishing trip,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“But you had no plans to confess.”

“I... I couldn’t. And hear me out, okay? I was... I was thinking of you.”

“Really.”

“If I’d confessed, you being kind of a Boy Scout and all, you’d insist on going to the police. The whole thing would unravel. They’d have killed you, too. I couldn’t let that happen. That’s why I’m telling you all this, so that maybe you’ll understand. I did something awful, but at least they didn’t kill you.”

My cheeks felt hot. It felt as though my eyes were filling with blood, that I was looking at Greg through a red filter.

Just shoot the fucker now.

No, I couldn’t do that. Not yet, anyway.

“I explained the situation to them. They recommended someone, this Matt guy.”

“He did it while we were at the cabins,” I said. “You knew it would happen. You had her killed, and then let the world think I’d done it.”

“Yeah, but you were alive,” Greg said.

“And when that fake Brie showed up this week, it freaked you out.”

Greg nodded. “I called him, asked him if somehow he’d fucked it up.” He looked at me pleadingly. “Would you at least give me a head start?” he asked.

“No.”

“I know you’re going to turn me in. I get that. Even an hour. Give me a chance to pack a bag, you know. Say goodbye to Julie. I know you won’t believe this, but it’s been eating me up for years.” He paused. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

I had no reply for that. But I had one last question. “Tell me about Candace Di—”

Before I could get out my question, Isabel let out a cry. The homeless man who’d made an appearance my last time here was making his way toward us, and his entrance into the scene had startled not just Isabel, but all three of us.

“Hey,” he said, looking at Greg.

Greg glanced nervously at him. “Not now, Neil,” he said.

But Neil kept coming. “I saw your girl come in with a Dunkin’s box.” Neil, for the first time, focused on Isabel and me. “Some kind of meetin’ going on?”

Greg raised the saw as if it were an actual weapon, using his other hand to steady it. He gave the trigger a quick squeeze. The sound it made was as intimidating as the blade that jutted back and forth at high speed.

“Fuck, fine!” Neil said, backing away.

Greg squeezed the trigger again, holding it this time, and lunged toward me. That high-speed blade, designed to cut through just about anything, would do some serious damage if it reached me. I quickly sidestepped, reaching for the gun at my back at the same time.

But I fumbled it.

The gun clattered to the floor.

“Shit!” said Neil.

Greg wasn’t sure whether to go after the gun or keep coming after me with the saw. He settled on the latter, squeezing the trigger in short, menacing bursts.

There was the sound of a shot, like a cannon going off in the mall’s cavernous concourse, the echo bouncing off the walls and the shattered glass ceiling.

Isabel had grabbed the gun and fired it wildly, effectively getting Greg’s attention, but missing him by a mile.

“Stop it!” she screamed. “Put it down!”

She pulled the trigger again, the recoil throwing her arms upward. Greg tossed the saw and started running in the direction of the closest deactivated escalator.

He wasn’t the only one running for his life. Neil, who clearly had no idea who the good guys and the bad guys were here, had figured the only thing to do was get the fuck out of there.

Isabel looked like she wanted to get off another shot, but Greg and Neil were on intersecting flight paths, and she clearly didn’t want to take out the homeless guy, although with her aim I had a sense we were all safe except maybe for some pigeons roosting up near the overhead windows.

Greg was still headed for the dead escalator, but Neil had some other destination in mind, and ended up sideswiping Greg, who lost his balance and began to stagger toward the railing. He reached out for it to stop his fall, but instantly realized his mistake.

The bolts that held the railing to the floor were either shot or not there at all, and the railing gave way like it was made of nothing stronger than toothpicks.

Greg went over the edge and disappeared, his lungs bellowing out a loud, “Fuuuck!” as he went down.

Isabel screamed.

I was running.

I reached the escalator and descended the steps two at a time, careful to navigate the gaps where steps had been removed, and hit the lower level, my heart pounding. I had to backtrack past a few empty storefronts until I reached Greg, on his back, one leg twisted around so impossibly that it was almost up to his ear.

“Greg,” I said, getting down on my knees.

He turned his head a fraction of an inch to look at me, tried to move his lips.

Isabel made it halfway down the escalator, then stopped and watched.

“Greg,” I said again. “Hang in there. Just for another minute. We’re not done. I’ve got one more thing to ask you about, and it’s really, really fucking important.”

I asked him my question and put an ear close to his lips to hear what he had to say.

Detective Hardy: Thanks for coming in again, Mr. Carville.

Andrew: No problem.

Detective Hardy: I spoke to Isabel earlier and thought I’d bring you in and get you up to speed on a couple of things. How’s Tyler doing?

Andrew: Glad to be home. It’s going to take him a while to get over the things that happened, but I think he’s going to be okay. He still has his job at Whistler’s, so he’s pretty happy about that.

Detective Hardy: And Jayne?

Andrew: This has been pretty hard on all of us, but she’s coming along. She’s expecting, you know.

Detective Hardy: I know. Please pass on my best wishes.

Andrew: I will.

Detective Hardy: I spoke to Isabel again about what went down in that abandoned mall.

Andrew: It wasn’t her fault, what happened to Greg.

Detective Hardy: I agree.

Andrew: That’s good.

Detective Hardy: I’d say if it’s anyone’s fault, it’s yours. You should never have confronted Mr. Raymus alone. He might still be around today to stand trial for what he did if you hadn’t done that.

Andrew: I... I’m not going to argue the point.

Detective Hardy: I wanted to get her take on the last few words you had with Mr. Raymus. I wanted to see how they matched up with what you told me in our earlier interview. That he as much as confessed to the murder of Candace DiCarlo.

Andrew: And?

Detective Hardy: They did.

Andrew: I had a lot more questions for him. But he died before I could get to them. Like how he got on to that woman. I’m guessing it was by chance, the way Tyler happened to see her when he was packing her groceries. In some ways, Milford’s not that big of a place. You’re always running into someone you know or recognize.

Detective Hardy: Albert says she thought she was being followed the night before. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. But if she was, maybe that was Mr. Raymus. Although his girlfriend, Julie, says she was with him that entire evening. But back to what happened at the mall. It’s a wonder the fall didn’t kill him instantly.

Andrew: It didn’t take long. I never really found out whether he killed Candace because he thought she was Brie, or what, but...

Detective Hardy: There’s some things we’ll never know. But we know enough to close the file on this. While there weren’t any witnesses to his arrival at Ms. DiCarlo’s house — pretty much everyone who lived on that street was at work, with the exception of Ms. DiCarlo’s retired neighbor — we’ve been able to tie him to the scene.

Andrew: You have?

Detective Hardy: I can’t really get into all that right now, but we’re satisfied. Let’s leave it at that.

Andrew: Okay.

Detective Hardy: So, I wish you all the best. I hope, should our paths ever cross again, it’s under very different circumstances.

Andrew: Agreed.

We gave returning to a normal life our best shot.

Jayne went back to her job, Tyler still had his, and I went back to seeing those people who were hoping to hire me that I never got to that day Matt took me into the woods and made me dig up Brie.

Each of us had something to get over. Tyler’s wrongful arrest and the memory of discovering that poor dead woman didn’t appear to be having any long-term traumatic effects, but Jayne and I were both worried about what might be going on under the surface. In many ways, he seemed like a different kid. He wasn’t getting into any more trouble, and had ended his friendship with Cam. He’d also picked up a second part-time job. Well, not a paying gig. He went to the people who maintain the nearby cemetery and said he wanted to do some volunteer work. Cutting grass, weeding, that kind of thing. Didn’t want any money for it.

Jayne didn’t want to smother him with concern the way his aunt had done after their father’s death, but she suggested he might want to talk to a counselor about what he went through, and he seemed open to the idea.

And Jayne’s pregnancy was going well. She was ever so slightly starting to show. No bleeding, and no morning sickness, at least so far. She’d been to see the doctor, who was pleased with her progress. An ultrasound was conducted, and I was in the room as the doctor rubbed that gadget across Jayne’s jellied abdomen and we looked at the blurry image on the screen of the baby that would one day join our household. The doctor wasn’t quite sure about the sex, and that was okay with us. We were happy to be surprised when the big day came.

And I’m coming to terms with Brie’s death. After six years, I know what happened. I can now, officially, mourn her passing.

So that’s the good news.

Jayne hadn’t been sleeping well. At first I thought it was the pregnancy, but it was clearly more than that. It was stress, and trauma. She was, of course, relieved that Tyler’d been released, that no charges had been filed. We even had a little celebration one night. Ordered in pizza, got a cake. But her mood darkened as the days passed. She tossed and turned in the night. I’d try to engage her in conversation and she’d say nothing, as though she hadn’t even heard me.

The truth was, I knew what had to be on her mind, but I didn’t want to press her. But when she spent time standing at the front window, as though expecting someone to arrive, I had a pretty good idea what she was thinking.

She was waiting for Detective Hardy.

Tyler had noticed that something was off with her, too. He went up to her a couple of days ago, put his arms around her as she watched the street.

“It’s not going to happen,” he told her. “They’re not coming back to get me.”

One night, after we had both gone to bed and the lights were off, I could sense that she was awake. I rolled over, saw her lying on her back, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. I had a feeling that she was finally ready to talk about it.

“I know you’re lying,” she said.

“Shh,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I know that everything you told Detective Hardy was bullshit.”

“Not everything,” I told her.

“I know Greg never confessed to you before he died.”

“Everything he told Isabel and me turned out to be true,” I said.

“Not that stuff. I’m talking about his so-called Candace DiCarlo confession.”

Of course she knew it was bullshit. She knew it was bullshit because she had killed Candace DiCarlo. Her rush to confess to Hardy, to spare her brother, had been genuine. Hardy, confident that Tyler was the killer, wouldn’t listen to a word she had to say.

But I knew, very soon, that Jayne’s admission was the real deal.

I knew, or at least strongly suspected, as much when I got to the police station and went to lock up her car before driving her home. When I opened the door I saw the blood on the brake pedal and the accelerator. There was even a little on the steering wheel. I found a rag tucked down between the seats and did my best to wipe it all away, and took the rag with me.

Later, when I left the house to head to Isabel’s, I had borrowed Jayne’s phone so that I could return Norman’s. But there was actually something I wanted to check.

The app that Jayne used to track Tyler worked both ways. It recorded Jayne’s location history, and a quick review of the app revealed Jayne had been to the DiCarlo house between the time Tyler first arrived and the time he went back. She’d probably been worried about him, had been checking to make sure he was really at Whistler’s and wasn’t just skipping school to get into mischief.

When she discovered he’d fled work and ridden his bike across town, she must have wondered where he’d gone.

So she decided to find out for herself.

And met Candace DiCarlo.

I’d thought that maybe, just maybe, there was a way to save her from this. I already knew by that time that Greg had hired a hit man to kill Brie. Was there a way to pin DiCarlo’s murder on him, too? Or at least cast enough suspicion his way to have Tyler freed?

So I went to the crime scene that day.

Before I got out of my truck I donned those gloves and picked up the cigarette butt Greg had let fall down by my feet when he talked to me through the driver’s-door window that morning when he came by the house to see me.

I distracted that cop who was guarding the scene long enough to flick that butt — rich with Greg’s DNA — off the bottom of my thumb with my middle finger onto the driveway by the Volvo wagon. My nervous habit finally had a practical application. I prayed that the guys in the hazmat suits would find it.

Evidently, they did.

When Isabel and I arrived at the deserted mall, I tucked that bloody rag — loaded with, presumably, DiCarlo’s DNA — under the seat of Greg’s pickup truck.

I knew what Hardy was referring to when she said they had been able to connect my former best friend to the scene.

Sometimes, long shots pay off. There were a hundred ways it could have gone wrong, but we’d won the lottery. The thing was, when I left those woods with Matt’s gun, I had in my head that I would kill Greg. As the afternoon progressed, and it became clear to me what had happened with Candace DiCarlo, a plan began to take shape that would make it even more important that Greg died. I would concoct a confession from him that he’d never be able to retract. If I ended up getting charged and going to jail, so be it. At least I’d have been able to save Jayne and Tyler.

And Greg did die. It just didn’t happen the way I thought it would.

Jayne would know my story to Hardy was a total fabrication, but I was naïve enough to think maybe she’d see that things had worked out in the best possible way. That she’d relax, move on.

And so there she was, standing at the window every day, waiting for Detective Hardy to come and take her away.

In bed, staring at the ceiling, she whispered, “You made it up. Everything you told Hardy about what Greg supposedly said to you, you invented it.”

I whispered, “Hardy’s happy. She’s satisfied. Isabel backed up my story. It worked. It’s over. Case closed.”

“Not for me. I have to live with this. I tried to do the right thing. I told her I’d done it. She didn’t believe me, but she’d believe me now.”

“You can’t tell her. Not now. If you did, you could go to prison. For making up that confession, I could go to prison, too. And for planting evidence.” I explained to her what I had done with the cigarette butt and the bloody rag. “And what about Tyler? And our child?”

Jayne thought about that. Weighing everything.

Her voice breaking, she said, “I didn’t mean for it to happen. She came to the door, didn’t know who I was, and I... I forced my way in. It was... I want to say it was an accident, but I pushed her. I thought — I believed when I got there that it really was Brie, with some new identity, and I told her I knew who she was and she was not going to ruin our lives, that she had to leave us the fuck alone, and—”

“Stop,” I said, encircling her with my arms. She was shaking. “I don’t need to know.”

“And she started screaming at me to get out of her house, that I had no idea what I was talking about, and she came at me, and I shoved her back, even harder, and she hit her head on the counter, and then—”

I kept holding on to her, hoping that if I did it tightly enough she would stop trembling.

“I couldn’t believe she was dead. I tried to wake her up, and then... then I guess I just panicked and I got out of there, and I had no idea Tyler was going to go back there, that someone would see him, but no one ever saw me, and—”

“Shh, shh,” I said, and, slowly, her trembling eased and she turned and put her arms around me.

I wasn’t going to judge her. I’d killed one man and watched him die. And I had been prepared to kill another.

But just as Tyler had been given a second chance when he came to live with us, this was our second chance.

We had to accept the things that we had done, accept that there was no way we could undo them, and accept that any attempts to set things right would only bring about greater heartache.

This was as good as it was going to get.

“We’re going to be okay,” I whispered into her ear. “Everything’s going to be fine. We’re going to have a baby.”

Jayne looked at me, and, even in the midnight light, I could make out a tear running down her cheek. I wiped it away with my thumb.