Page 31 of Dear Wife

I scribble the name on my pad. “How long did you stay?”

“An hour and a half, maybe longer.”

“What were you reading?”

“The CEO of one of our biggest competitors just came out with a book,Stoking the Fire at Workor some such nonsense. My boss is making everyone at the office read it. Honestly, it’s not very good.”

“Did you see anybody there?”

“It’s a public park,” he says, getting defensive. “I saw lots of people.”

“What I meant was, did any of them notice you? A guy in business attire sitting by himself, on a park bench—”

“It was a picnic table. There’s a cluster of them at the edge of the river.” He pauses to glance at Ingrid, whose brows are bunched in a skeptical frown. “And I was in jeans and a polo. Travel attire.”

“Still. A guy all alone at a picnic table, reading a book. I’d imagine you stood out.”

“I’d imagine so, but tell me this, Detective—how am I supposed to find them?”

I dip my head, ceding the point. Not that it helps him any. Even if he had been at Tar Camp, it’s not like any of the people there would remember him, and they certainly wouldn’t have exchanged names and numbers.

But the bigger point is, he’s lying. All the signs are there. The stare down across my desk, the way his breath comes quicker, the microscopic flashes of panic I keep catching on his face. Something about his story is not true.

“Help me out here, Jeffrey. I just want to make sure I’m not missing anything.” I lean toward him, hands folded on top of a sloppy pile of papers. “According to what you just told me, you were alone all afternoon yesterday, either in your car, at an unnamed restaurant or in a public park, from around 12:30 p.m. until a little after four, when the neighbor confirms you pulled into your driveway.”

He nods. “That’s right. Yes.” Add sweating to the list. His face has gone shiny, sprouting a million wet pinpricks.

“And at no point during those three and a half hours, the same hours your wife walked out of the Super1 on East Harding and disappeared, can anyone but you verify your whereabouts.”

He’s silent for long enough I almost feel sorry for him. He sucks a breath, then two more, thirteen brain-numbing seconds, and then the best he can do is: “Pretty much.”

I try to hold my expression tight, but the smile sneaks out anyway.

Gotcha.

BETH

I pull to a stop in the middle of the two-lane drive, double-check the address on the Post-it note Martina handed me earlier this morning and gawk at the building before me.

A church. Martina works at a church. A neo-Gothic monstrosity of beige brick and stained glass, with crimson gables and scalloped finials and lancet arches. In the very center of the main tower, a rose window stares out like the eye of a cyclops. Above it, at the steepest point of the roofline, a wooden cross reaches with long arms into a pale blue sky.

The Church of Christ’s Twelve Apostles.

Oh hell no.

My hand clenches around the gearshift, jiggling it into Reverse. The Church and I aren’t exactly on the best of terms, not since I went to the leader of mine for guidance and he refused to unshackle me from a monster.

“It’s perfectly normal to argue,” Father Ian had told me. “All couples do. But the successful couples learn to forgive. They put the resentment behind them and move on.”

I nodded my head in pious agreement. “I understand that, Father, but he...hurts me.”

“Hurts you how?”

For a second or two, I considered pulling up my shirt and showing him my cracked ribs. In the end, I settled on, “With his hands.”

“Closed or open?”

“I’m sorry?”

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