Page 49 of She Didn't See It Coming
He thought no one else knew what went on between him and his wife behind closed doors when he lost his temper. He thought Bryden would have been too embarrassed, too ashamed, to confide in anyone. He thought if she’d confided in anyone it would have been Paige, and she obviously has no idea, or she wouldn’t still like him. But she’d been to her doctor, without telling him. It feels like a betrayal.
It’s confusing, even to him, why Bryden put up with it. Why dowomen allow themselves to be abused? Why are they so accommodating to men’s anger and their need to control? Did she love him that much? She loved him enough to forgive him—or at least he thought so. He doesn’t think he deserved her love. He doesn’t even like himself, not at all. If only she’d been stronger and stood up to him. Told him she wasn’t going to take any of his shit. He wishes that she had. Then maybe things wouldn’t have turned out the way they did. He realizes he’s blaming her for his bad behavior, but still, he thinks, it’s true. If she’d stood up to him, he would have stopped. She made it too easy for him to give in to his darker impulses. But maybe he’s just lying to himself.
One of his earliest memories is of how as a small child, he used to lash out at his mother when he was angry. And she took it. She never hit him back or yelled at him to stop. It infuriated him and confused him, even then, as a part of him wanted her to take control of all his overwhelming, angry feelings. It made him feel even more out of control, and it made him ashamed of himself.
But he grew out of it somehow. The first years of marriage were fine. Until the stress of raising a small child, and the stress of a high-pressure job began to get to him.
And instead of standing up to him, like he needed, like he wanted, Bryden took it, just like his mother had. She suffered in silence. And then she met Derek Gardner and became his lover. What was she thinking? That she would leave him for this other, better man? That she would take Clara with her? From what he understands, this man is already married. And now something else occurs to him: Did she know he was cheating on her? Did she intuit it in some way? She couldn’t have known it was her best friend he was sleeping with, because she wouldn’t have stood for that, would she?
But maybe she did know. Maybe that’s why she told Paige about her lover, hoping it would get back to him, across their pillow. Hadshe been playing some kind of game with him? It would be such a passive-aggressive thing for her to do, to secretly sleep with someone else, he thinks, instead of standing up to him.
He never left any marks. He was careful that way. He was not the kind of man to give his wife a black eye. He couldn’t have anyone asking questions. They were both educated professionals—he was not some lowlife. He thought she’d never been to see a doctor. But she had. And now the detectives know.
He sweats with fear and shame in the dark, soaking his sheets through.
•••
After allthat great sex—kinky lingerie and kinky shoes—Derek is out cold. Alice rises up on one elbow and studies him in the moonlight coming through the bedroom skylight. He’s movie-star handsome. And he smells and feels as good as he looks. She’s rather spoiled by him. She doesn’t think anyone else will ever do. Which is why she doesn’t want to lose him. She slips out of bed. He doesn’t even stir.
She pads in bare feet across the bedroom and down the stairs and then down the hall to the stairs that lead to the basement suite. It’s not a typical basement—it’s huge, and there are large glass doors leading outside, so there’s a lot of light. It looks out onto a large, lush yard. It’s not dark in the daytime, like you’d expect a basement to be. With all the windows and skylights, nothing in this house is dark, except for the inhabitants.
Now she stands in the center of the basement suite and looks outside. There’s moonlight filtering in here too. The blinds are wide open. After a moment, she presses a button and the motorized blinds close. She doesn’t want anyone looking in.
She enters the bedroom and approaches the bed. It looks properly made, but she knows that he would cover his tracks. She pulls back thecoverlet. The bed does not look slept in, or used, at all. After careful examination, she’s satisfied. She remakes the bed and checks the linen cupboard. She supposes he could have washed the sheets and replaced them, but would he go to that much effort? Now she’s starting to think that she’s just paranoid. She enters the en suite bathroom. There’s no need for either of them to use this bathroom, and everything is pristine, the guest soaps still wrapped in their decorative paper.
Back in the main living area, she presses the button for the blinds again, opening them, leaving everything as she found it. On her way upstairs, she begins to think that there’s no way he would have brought another woman here. The neighbors could have seen them. Alice could have come home unexpectedly from work—she keeps her own hours. This other woman might have been wearing perfume. He wouldn’t have risked it. He probably took her to a hotel, like the last one. That detective seemed awfully sure.
Maybe she doesn’t have to do anything, and that Detective Salter will figure it out. If he slept with Bryden Frost, if he killed her, then perhaps she will know soon enough. But perhaps not—because she knows Derek is clever enough to get away with it.
She finds his wallet in his office and starts rooting through it. She pulls out all his credit cards, counts five of them. She doesn’t take care of the finances, he does. He does all the banking, pays all the bills online. How is she to know if he’s using one of these cards for secret trysts? She hasn’t got access to his computer. She has no way of finding out if he’s been paying for hotel rooms unless she asks him and makes him show her all the bills. Is she prepared to do that?
She should have kept a closer eye on him. What kind of mess has he gotten himself into?
33
Friday morning, when Jayne arrives early at the station, she’s approached by an officer. “I’ve been looking into Derek Gardner,” he says. “And I might have found something.”
“What is it?”
“When he started his business, he had a huge infusion of cash.”
“From where?”
“From his wife. She inherited it.”
“Am I missing something?” Jayne asks impatiently.
He speaks more quickly. “She inherited over three million dollars from her mother, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident four years ago. It was never solved.”
Jayne stares at him. She says, “Bring everything you have on it to my desk.” As she walks to her office, she has more energy in her step.
Minutes later she’s reading about Mary Smelt, who was killed on March 27, 2019, outside of Roxbury, New Hampshire. The woman,who was sixty-one years of age at the time, and a widow, had been walking down a lonely country road near her rural home, where she lived alone. She’d been struck by a vehicle that had left the scene. The body was found some time later by a passing motorist who saw her in the ditch. She was probably killed instantly. There were no witnesses. The victim was known to walk regularly along that road in the evenings for exercise. It might have been an accident, Jayne thinks—people often speed, especially on rural roads. It might have been getting dark; there are no streetlights in the country, she could have been hard to see. The driver might have been drinking. But he could not have been unaware that he hit her. And he fled the scene.
Or, Jayne thinks, it might have been deliberate. Someone might have known that she took her evening walk along that road at the same time every night. Jayne reads through everything in the file. The investigation seems to have been cursory. The victim’s only family—the daughter, Alice Gardner, and her husband, Derek Gardner, who lived out of state in New York—were not even formally interviewed.
Jayne looks up from the file and stares at the wall in front of her, her mind whirring. Hit-and-runs are notoriously difficult to solve. If she were going to kill someone, she thinks idly, that’s the method she’d use. Did Derek Gardner kill his mother-in-law for her money? It was awfully convenient. Or maybe he was just lucky, and someone else happened to do it for him.
Jayne asks an officer to find her Alice Gardner’s phone number.
